Free Republic

As mentioned in Part I of this series, I don’t have a firm view on whether there was or was not a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy. However, if there was such a conspiracy, then clearly that is something that would be significant, and that all Americans would have a big interest in knowing about. The reason a conspiracy would be so significant is that its very existence would imply that its members foresaw important consequences from the assassination. If the assassination was just the work of a lone gunman, presumably Oswald, then there need be nothing more...

A few days ago, pursuant to an order from President Trump, the National Archives finally released some 76,000 pages of documents that were previously withheld as classified from what they call their President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection. Many voices — not the least of them Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the current Secretary of Health and Human Services and nephew of the slain President — have been calling for the release of these documents for years, even decades. Surely today, more than 60 years after the event, the secrets that justified withholding these documents from the public for decades...

“Conspiracy theory” — the label evokes connotations of something so preposterous that it couldn’t possibly be true. With an obvious simple explanation for some incident easily at hand, generally involving a single perpetrator or a natural cause, the alternative “conspiracy theory” posits that a large group of people plotted to bring the incident about. The very size of the posited group alone makes the conspiracy theory seem unlikely, because such a large group could never hope to keep the secret. And then, in the classic conspiracy theory, the large group of conspirators consists mostly or entirely of agents of the...

In yesterday’s post, reviewing a Washington Post op-ed by Ruth Marcus that called efforts by the duly-elected President to direct the bureaucracy to implement his policies a “power grab” and an “onslaught against the government itself,” I described the piece as reflecting “kindergarten-level constitutional analysis.” After all, my 6 year old first-grader grandson is fully capable of reading the first sentence of Article II of the Constitution (“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”) and figuring out that this guy is given the sole and full power to direct the executive branch...

Back in July, I had a two posts (here and here) comparing the then candidates for President, Biden and Trump, on the issue of who is the greater “threat to democracy.” The posts reviewed actions of each candidate that may be viewed as such threats. For Trump, those things included J6, plus seeking legal advice and then bringing litigation as to what he claimed was fraudulent conduct in the 2020 election; for Biden, the things included having the prosecutors bring phony criminal charges against political adversaries, engaging in a systematic effort with social media platforms to suppress the opposition’s speech,...

In my self-designated role critiquing various schemes for total transformation of the world energy system, I get to review large amounts of poor, shoddy, and incompetent work. When people get into advocating for this “energy transition,” the stars regularly align to bring forth the most extreme levels of ineptitude. Start with the fact that the “smartest” people are filled with arrogance and hubris, but are not actually very smart. Add that many innumerate Politics and English majors have flooded into a field that cries out for engineering calculations. Add too that groupthink and orthodoxy enforcement prevent anyone from pointing out...

In December 2016, Donald Trump had just been elected President. He had been widely accused of calling the climate scare a “hoax.” In a post titled “The Impending Collapse Of The Global Warming Scare,” I went out on a limb predicting that the change of administration could bring about a the rapid demise of the climate scare. The post reported the then-increasing focus of the environmental movement on the climate issue, and ended with this prediction: The environmental movement has climbed itself way out onto the global warming limb. Now the Trump administration is about to start sawing off the...

Consider Manhattan Contrarian as your go-to source for the latest on New York’s progress toward green energy utopia. Can you remember all the way back to December 19, 2022? That’s the day that New York’s Climate Action Council officially adopted its “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emissions electricity system by 2040. The biggest part of the grand plan consists of some 9,000 MW (nameplate capacity) of offshore wind turbines to be built by 2035. As of the time of...

Among the trendy Left, and particularly on elite academic campuses, hatred of Israel, and by association of all Jews, has long been on the ascendant. The Anti-Defamation League traces the origins of the “Boycott, Divest, Sanctions” movement against Israel to the early 2000s. By the time we get to the most recent ten years, every elite academic institution has multiple student groups and scores of faculty members advocating for delegitimizing Israel as oppressors of the Palestinians, or even as an “apartheid state.” And thus the current wave of atrocities perpetrated by Hamas against Israel has brought out statements of support...

Offshore wind turbines — those are the magical solution to all our energy problems. The wind is clean and free. And way out in the ocean — where you can barely even see the towers — the wind blows steadily almost all the time. Just put up a few turbines to catch the breezes, and those evil fossil fuels will quickly be banished. Anyway, that has been the talk for at least three decades. After 30 years of talk, the number of actual functioning wind turbines out in the Atlantic Ocean off the U.S. coast is now exactly seven: five...

If you wonder why people in New York City seem to have a terribly warped view of reality, look no farther than the New York Times. The Times is where all the seemingly well-educated and sophisticated upper income New Yorkers get their “news.” Consider, for example, the question of education funding for PreK-12 schools. If you know anything about that subject, even if you don’t know any details, you know that the New York City public schools are far and away the most lavishly funded in the country. How they can spend so much money and fail to achieve even...

The following post was written jointly by Jane Menton and Francis Menton: In New York, politicians are selling the public a narrative that electricity is going to be the solution to climate change. We will eliminate all CO2 emissions by banning gasoline-powered cars, banning natural gas infrastructure, banning gas heat in buildings, and banning gas for cooking. All of these are to be replaced with supposedly “green,” emissions-free, alternatives – which in practice consist of only one thing, electricity. We’ve been told that this is how we are going to protect the planet for future generations. But there is nothing...

It’s been a persistent drumbeat for many years: Fossil fuels are obsolete, and the facilities that produce them, along with any further facilities that might be built for that purpose, will shortly become worthless. These facilities will be “stranded assets.” And any energy company stupid enough to make further investment in fossil fuel extraction or use will inevitably suffer a total loss. Do you believe that prediction? Those making it are among the aggressive promoters of an energy transition to supposedly superior sources like the wind and sun. The prediction has been widely used in the attempt to bludgeon energy...

Today the Manhattan Contrarian formally calls upon the states of California and New York: Whatever you do, do not back down from your crash program of green energy schemes! The full text of the Manhattan Contrarian official announcement follows: California and New York: It is critical to mankind that you pursue the full extent of your green energy schemes to conclusion as soon as possible and at all costs. If you really believe, as you proclaim, that all-renewable energy is a moral necessity to save the planet from the existential crisis of climate change; if you really believe that energy...

Are the “smart” people really very smart? That is, do the people who score at the top on standardized tests and then turn up at the fancy universities actually have a superior level of reasoning and rationality that they can apply to solving the problems of the world? Or are they instead just trapped in the same sorts of groupthink and mass irrationality as everyone else? Well, let’s consider the latest information coming out of Harvard University. Harvard — you can’t get any “smarter” than that. This is America’s premier institution of higher learning. You don’t get to go there...