December 28, 2023

Millions Of People Of Color Endure Grueling Thousand Mile Trek In Effort To Enter Systemically Racist White Supremacist Hellhole

December 28, 2023/ Francis Menton

The United States: As you know, it is a systemically racist, white supremacist hellhole. It is filled with structures and barriers intended to oppress people of color and make them suffer. Or at least, you know those things if you read the usual sources from left-wing institutions and journalists. I’ll give you several examples in a moment.
But then, how to explain the undeniable fact that millions of people of color are enduring almost unimaginable hardships every day in the effort to reach and then gain entry to this hellhole.
The most recent example is on the front page of today’s New York Times. The headline is “Blinken Seeks Mexico’s Help To Slow Surge”; but the accompanying photo — occupying most of the front page above the fold — is particularly revealing. A caravan of thousands of people is shown surging forward toward the U.S. border, with nearly every single visible face having a noticeably dark complexion.

December 24, 2023

Claudine Gay Update -- Now It's Allegations Of Data Falsification

December 24, 2023/ Francis Menton

It was less than three weeks ago, December 5, when the name of Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, suddenly burst into the news. That was the day that she, along with the Presidents of Penn and MIT, testified before Congress — and could not give a clear answer as to whether it was against the policy at their schools to call for the genocide of Jews. All three women attempted to use the occasion to paint themselves as defenders of free speech, particularly important in such extreme cases.
Manhattan Contrarian readers already knew that Ms. Gay was the opposite of a defender of free speech. In a post on December 16, 2022 with the title “Goodnight, Poor Harvard!” — written on the occasion of the announcement that Ms. Gay would become the next President of Harvard — I reviewed her record on the subject.
My conclusion, based on multiple examples mostly from the work of independent journalist Christopher Brunet, was that Ms. Gay was “the enforcer-in-chief of wokist orthodoxy at Harvard.”
In the few short weeks since December 5, the news as to Ms. Gay has gotten worse and worse, seemingly by the day.

December 23, 2023

December 23, 2023/ Francis Menton

“Homelessness” is one of my favorite topics because it provides an endless supply of examples of clear, dramatic, and immediate failure of the government programs supposedly intended to assist the poor and vulnerable.
All of the big progressive cities follow some version of the same policies, which in summary amount to spending more and more money to provide “housing first” as the obvious solution to homelessness. All of these cities have rapidly stepped up spending over the past decade on promises to the voters to solve the homelessness problem with more subsidized housing; and all of them have then seen homelessness rise relentlessly along with the spending.
It’s almost impossible to believe that nobody can learn from this experience.
For today I’ll provide the latest update from Los Angeles, as well as look at how a very similar approach has worked out in the smaller (but equally progressive) city of Madison, Wisconsin.

December 20, 2023

December 20, 2023/ Francis Menton

In a post last week I marveled at the sudden discovery by the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT of the importance of freedom of speech when it involves demonstrators favoring elimination of Israel and slaughter of Jews. Yet somehow, at the same institutions, comparable principles just don’t seem to apply in the case of basic dissent from leftist political orthodoxy.
When the official party line gets questioned, all the elite universities have multiple tactics to diminish and banish the deviators, whether that be by demanding loyalty oaths (e.g., “diversity statements”) in hiring or admissions, holding mandatory “diversity” or “sensitivity” training sessions, disinviting speakers, conducting pretextual investigations of dissenters, funding the favored and denying tenure to the disfavored, and many other such methods.
So how bad is it out there on elite campuses, really?

December 17, 2023

December 17, 2023/ Francis Menton

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott.
In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?
Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

December 14, 2023

December 14, 2023/ Francis Menton

It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.).
As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.