January 12, 2020

What A "Moderate" Democratic Candidate Looks Like: Mike Bloomberg?

January 12, 2020/ Francis Menton

A new (January 10) Des Moines Register poll shows Bernie Sanders starting to pull away from the field at 20%, with Elizabeth Warren second (17%), and Pete Buttagieg suddenly down 9 points to 16%. Is the Democratic nomination battle really going to come down to just crazy versus crazier?
But, you say, there’s Joe Biden. He’s stuck at 15% in the Register poll, although perhaps will do better in subsequent states like South Carolina. But is he really a moderate? Among other things, Biden has endorsed the total socialist restructuring of the U.S. economy known as the Green New Deal; the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of blue collar jobs for the green dream; and the jailing of fossil fuel executives. Not a lot of moderation there.
So today, let’s take a look at Mike Bloomberg. . . .

January 08, 2020

Climate Change Advocacy: Application Of Science, Or Religious Cult?

January 08, 2020/ Francis Menton

Each day you listen to unceasing climate change advocacy, always claiming the mantle of “science.” But you can’t help noticing the steady drumbeat of the standard narratives used by religious cults.
The end of days is nigh. You have grievously sinned. Your sin is taking you down the road to damnation. Yet salvation is at hand. But only if you and all humanity immediately repent and follow the gospel of your new climate change priests. If not, the apocalypse of judgment day shall soon be upon you.
Of course these narratives pervade the rhetoric of the fanatics seeking to be messianic leaders of the climate movement, from the Greta Thunbergs to the Al Gores. But over in the more sober organs of elite thought leadership, surely the climate advocacy must be based on actual science. Right?
If you are struggling with that question, perhaps you should take a look at some of the recent coverage of the wildfires in Australia that has appeared in our elite media, the gist of which is that Australia’s wildfires are the punishment for its grievous sins of failure to follow the true climate change gospel. . . .

January 05, 2020

January 05, 2020/ Francis Menton

As you probably know, over the course of several weeks in December Iranian proxies known as the Kataib Hezbollah carried out multiple attacks against military installations in Iraq.
On January 3, the U.S. military, under orders from President Trump, conducted a retaliatory strike that killed the leader of Iran’s so-called Quds Forces, Qasem Soleimani. Subsequently, Iran has threatened further rounds of retaliation against the U.S., although those have not occurred as of this writing.
Before getting too caught up in the tensions of the current moment, perhaps we should step back and look at how things have been going lately for Iran. The answer is, not very well.
This is one of those things that you can figure out if you look around enough, but rarely is the information compiled in one place. So I’ll do it for you. As I have remarked before, the U.S. has been incredibly blessed over the years by the rank incompetence of its geopolitical adversaries. . . .

January 03, 2020

January 03, 2020/ Francis Menton

On December 30, the Census Bureau issued its latest population numbers, going up through July 2019. Here is a link to the press release; and here is a link to various charts and graphs of statistics.
The long-time official spin on U.S. population changes has been that people are leaving the cold North and East in favor of the warmer South and West. Hey, people like warmer weather!
But while there may be something to that, a closer look supports a strong inference that what people really like is lower taxes, even if accompanied by a lower level of government spending and services. In other words, the news is not good for “blue model” governance.
Some ten states are estimated to have lost population in the year from July 2018 to July 2019; they are Alaska, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, Vermont and West Virginia. Many of those declines are small, and perhaps based on special circumstances (e.g., the decline of Alaska’s North Slope oil fields).
But two states stand out for remarkably large losses. The leader is my own New York, with a loss of about 77,000 residents — 0.39% of population in one year. . . .

December 31, 2019

December 31, 2019/ Francis Menton

Woodrow Wilson was the President who began the transformation of the U.S. federal government into a collection of huge bureaucracies staffed by supposedly neutral and apolitical “experts” who could run things so much better than we ordinary humans could. A hundred plus years into this, we now have dozens of massive bureaucracies staffed by these so-called “experts.”
President Trump appears to have a somewhat different view. The New York Times of December 28 has a piece by Brad Plumer and Coral Davenport that addresses how one particular group of these so-called “experts” — scientific ones — is faring under Trump. The headline is “Science Under Attack: How Trump Is Sidelining Researchers and Their Work.”
But do supposed “experts” like scientists or economists in and out of the government really have a clue what they are doing? Or are they just ordinary humans who use the cover of credentials and position to see how much power they can seize unto themselves at everyone else’s expense? Let’s consider some examples that come up here at the end of 2019. I have three good ones for today. . . .

December 29, 2019

December 29, 2019/ Francis Menton

Let’s face it: As much as we here in New York would like to think of ourselves as the true vanguard of woke progressivism, California has long since seized that honor from us.
Surely, then, California has done away with racism by now.
If you think that, then you must have missed the big piece in the December 23 print edition of the New York Times, with the headline “Black, Homeless and Burdened by L.A.’s Legacy of Racism.” This multi-page spread tells the tale of one Timothy Wynn, a black Los Angeles resident.
Overwhelmingly, according to this article, the main factor in Mr. Wynn’s downfall was racism.
To read this story, California has not just failed to do away with racism. Even as California loudly proclaims to the world its woke progressive virtue, it has, instead, turned into a hotbed — some might even say a “cesspit” — of racism. . . .