Flávio Bolsonaro defied the polls by finishing ahead of Lula, forcing an October 25 runoff as conservative candidates captured major victories across Brazil and strengthened their position in the nation’s Senate.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Flávio Bolsonaro led Lula 47.24% to 44.91% with 99% of reporting completed Sunday night.

The presidential contest will proceed to an October 25 runoff after Flávio fell below the 50% needed for an outright victory.

Conservative candidates scored major victories across São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina.

Michelle Bolsonaro won a Senate seat, while the Liberal Party appeared positioned to hold the Senate’s largest bloc.

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Brazil’s presidential election produced the kind of surprise that sends pollsters scrambling and conservatives cheering. For the year leading into the vote, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had led the polls, even as his advantage narrowed in recent months.

Those polls missed the mark. With 99% of reporting completed around 8 p.m. Eastern Time on Sunday, Flávio Bolsonaro stood on top with 47.24% of the vote, compared with Lula’s 44.91%.

The margin was close, but the outcome was far better for Flávio than polling had suggested. Early in the night, he appeared to have a chance to capture the presidency without going through another round of voting.

Flávio held something like 51% of the vote at that stage. A candidate needs 50% to win without a runoff, but the more conservative states reported their results faster, and his share eventually declined.

The presidential contest will therefore proceed to a runoff on October 25. The result still left Flávio looking very likely to win and raised the prospect of Brazil turning right, as numerous other Central and South American countries have done in recent years.

Such a shift would carry political and economic consequences across the region. Donald Trump and Marco Rubio would gain a new ally who would likely join the Shield of the Americas and assist the fight against cartels and other criminal organizations plaguing the Americas.

Brazil also has the largest economy in Latin America, making the result a potentially significant economic victory. A Flávio win would further isolate the remaining socialist governments in the region, including the government of Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, while likely increasing pressure on Cuba and Nicaragua.

Argentine President Javier Milei celebrated Sunday night with a caption translated from Spanish: “FREEDOM ADVANCES IN BRAZIL. Congratulations, dear friend @FlavioBolsonaro, on this historic election against the communist Lula. The American continent belongs to citizens who want to live in freedom. I hope that soon we can start working together so that Argentina and Brazil continue to be great trading, cultural, and political partners. The opportunities for our nations, working together, are infinite. LONG LIVE FREEDOM, DAMN IT…!!”

Neither Trump nor Rubio had publicly addressed the result by Sunday night. Several Republican members of Congress had already praised the news, however, including Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez of Florida and Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio.

The presidential race was only one piece of Brazil’s sweeping election night. Voters were also choosing all 27 governors, the entire Chamber of Deputies with its 513 seats, 54 of the Senate’s 81 seats, and state legislatures.

Results beyond the presidential contest offered additional encouragement for Brazil’s right. Lula’s side lost in the three states that typically decide Brazilian elections, adding to the evening’s broader conservative success.

São Paulo, Brazil’s largest state, reelected Tarcísio de Freitas as governor with about 63% of the vote. De Freitas previously served as infrastructure minister under former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Minas Gerais, the second-largest state, elected Bolsonaro ally Cleitinho Azevedo with about 55%. Sérgio Moro, the judge who once sent Lula to prison, won Paraná while running on Bolsonaro’s party line.

A former army officer allied with Bolsonaro won Rio Grande do Sul with about 58% of the vote. Santa Catarina also reelected its governor from Bolsonaro’s party with about 68%.

Former first lady Michelle Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s wife, won a Senate seat in the capital, Brasília, during her first run for office. Two more of Jair Bolsonaro’s sons and his brother also won elections, while the Liberal Party appeared positioned to hold Anything could still happen before the October 25 runoff, but conservative excitement was already unmistakable. Brazil’s voters delivered a far stronger showing for the right than expected, bringing another Latin American rejection of socialism tantalizingly close.

RVM News

Former-banker-turned-tiny-French-President Emmanuel Macron blasted what he called “American free speech” while speaking to reporters last week. Defending the European Union’s robust censorship policies, le petit fromage insisted that Europe’s speech-policing Digital Services Act should censor information that governments consider false “much more extensively, much faster, and much more forcefully.”

Macron then did his Orwellian best to condemn free speech as oppression and praise censorship as liberation: “So-called American ‘free speech’—at least as it exists today and has been promoted by some people—is the opposite of free speech.” The terribly disliked French leader continued, “My freedom cannot mean that I am free to…insult you or vandalize the public square that belongs to everyone. Yet that is some people’s idea of ‘free speech.’”

Then the little mouse of a man roared, “Until we hold those who disseminate content on social media accountable, we will not be able to regulate it.” Furthermore, if “someone writes something” that is “false,” then that person should be “held accountable.” Tough talk from an insecure man afraid of words.

What is going on in Europe? Why is the whole continent so scared of public debate and dissent? If the political Establishment is unable to defend its ideas and policies without censoring the opposition, then its ideas and policies are absolute rubbish! The people who have willed their way to power across Europe apparently believe that they cannot win an argument unless they are the only ones permitted to speak!

That’s a bit like a puny pugilist demanding that referees tie another boxer’s hands behind his back before declaring himself world heavyweight champion!

Personally, I think mini-mouse Macron is just tired of people pointing out that he married his grandmother (or his grandfather, as the case might be). We used to teach our children, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Now Western leaders are so terrified of words that they’d rather imprison everyone with an opinion than learn to take a joke or hear a contrary point of view.

Here’s the truth that Macron and his fellow Euro-weenie censors refuse to understand: Free speech is free only when a speaker can say something offensive or controversial without fear of the State’s wrath.

The most hate-filled among them accuse me of being a fake scientist and/or fake Christian. Their minds simply cannot comprehend the possibility that science and Christianity are entirely, comfortably compatible.

In science-speak, these skeptics have a “classical” worldview. It’s a perception of reality that is purely logical, material, and mechanistic — very much like Newton’s classical physics.

For these classicists, a body is just flesh and blood, a mind is just the product of the brain’s electrical activity, and the entire universe is just one big, awesome accident of nature. It’s a blinkered perspective that led the late Stephen Hawking to say: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no Heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

When I was a young atheist, I shared this machine-like view of reality. But I was quickly disabused of it when I started studying quantum physics.

Quantum physics turns logic on its head. Suddenly and enigmatically, the solid, material world becomes a ghostly cloud of probabilities, supernatural behavior becomes natural, and complete opposites become unified realities.

It’s precisely that utterly illogical strangeness that seized my attention when I read the New Testament for the first time. I could scarcely believe it! This alleged, Iron-Age Jesus of Nazareth spoke like a modern-day quantum physicist.

Unlike the instructions on how to live from any other sacred figure I’d ever read (by then, I had immersed myself in all the major religions), Jesus’s teachings turned logic on its head. During His Sermon on the Mount, for example, he admonished the crowd to love their enemies, that in order to live they first must die, that the first among them were, in fact, the last, and on and on.

This quantum-like language is what made me rise to the bait. It’s what caused me to further investigate Christianity with an open, analytical mind.

In the end, several decades later, more than just quantum physics convicted me that Jesus was the real deal. A critical, unblinking exploration of the Bible, an intellectually candid appraisal of what modern science was discovering about the universe and our species, and a series of stunning personal experiences left no serious doubt in my once-classicist mind that the biblical God was, indeed, the creator of the universe I was devoted to studying.

Quantum superposition

Skeptics routinely mock Christians for believing glaring contradictions such as: A.) God is both universal and personal and B.) Jesus is both fully man and fully God. These beliefs don’t make sense. They protest.

They’re right. These beliefs don’t make any sense, but neither do the truths of quantum physics. As the late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once confessed: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

According to quantum physics, for example, light is both fully solid as a rock and fully supple as a ripple of water, which is as nonsensical as saying something is both fully black and fully white. Scientists call this illogical — but, as it happens, far from absurd — chimeric entity a “photon.”

“We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” Albert Einstein once admitted. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.”

Like quantum physics, Christianity has the same kind of “difficulty.” For starters, the Old Testament depicts God as having two opposing natures: universal and personal.

In Genesis 1, the universal God — the Creator of the universe — is called “Elohim” (אֱלֹהִים). In Genesis 2, the personal God — the one who walks and talks intimately with Adam and Eve — is called “YHWH” (יהוה), a four-letter, vowelless name that scholars call The Tetragrammaton.

The New Testament, too, has the same “difficulty.” Jesus is depicted as having two conflicting natures. On the one hand He’s fully human, as demonstrated when he weeps (John 11:35), sweats blood (Luke 22:44), and dies on the cross (John 19:30). On the other hand, He’s fully God — as when He transforms water into wine (John 2:1–11), heals the leper (Mark 1:40–42), forgives the paralytic’s sins (Mark 2:5–12), and is explicitly equated with YHWH (John 8:58, Romans 10:13, and elsewhere).

Quantum physics resolves all these apparent “difficulties” by explaining that a single entity can have multiple identities. This profound truth is represented as a mathematical “superposition” of different possible states.

This explains how Schrodinger’s famous cat can be dead and alive at the same time; how light can be both fully solid and fully supple; how God can be both fully universal (Elohim) and fully personal (YHWH); and how Jesus can be both fully human and fully God.

And while we’re on the subject, quantum superposition also offers us a modern scientific explanation for how the one, true God can be both fully one and fully three — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Where would I be now if I hadn’t been a scientific geek when I first broke open the Bible? I’ll never know, but one fact is undeniable — because of quantum physics and Jesus, I renounced my classical worldview, ditched my atheism, and ultimately became the seemingly impossible creature I am today: a man who is fully a scientist and fully Christian.

“One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (John 9:25 NIV).

Michael Guillén, PhD, taught physics at Harvard and for fourteen years was the Emmy-winning Science Editor at ABC News. Go to www.michaelguillen.com for information about his new movie, The Invisible Everywhere, and upcoming novel, Picture-Perfect Christmas.

Skeptics question my honesty when I say I’m both a scientist and a Christian. They refuse to take seriously someone who believes in quantum physics and calls Jesus his Lord and Savior.

The most hate-filled among them accuse me of being a fake scientist and/or fake Christian. Their minds simply cannot comprehend the possibility that science and Christianity are entirely, comfortably compatible.

In science-speak, these skeptics have a “classical” worldview. It’s a perception of reality that is purely logical, material, and mechanistic — very much like Newton’s classical physics.

For these classicists, a body is just flesh and blood, a mind is just the product of the brain’s electrical activity, and the entire universe is just one big, awesome accident of nature. It’s a blinkered perspective that led the late Stephen Hawking to say: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no Heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

When I was a young atheist, I shared this machine-like view of reality. But I was quickly disabused of it when I started studying quantum physics.

Quantum physics turns logic on its head. Suddenly and enigmatically, the solid, material world becomes a ghostly cloud of probabilities, supernatural behavior becomes natural, and complete opposites become unified realities.

It’s precisely that utterly illogical strangeness that seized my attention when I read the New Testament for the first time. I could scarcely believe it! This alleged, Iron-Age Jesus of Nazareth spoke like a modern-day quantum physicist.

Unlike the instructions on how to live from any other sacred figure I’d ever read (by then, I had immersed myself in all the major religions), Jesus’s teachings turned logic on its head. During His Sermon on the Mount, for example, he admonished the crowd to love their enemies, that in order to live they first must die, that the first among them were, in fact, the last, and on and on.

This quantum-like language is what made me rise to the bait. It’s what caused me to further investigate Christianity with an open, analytical mind.

In the end, several decades later, more than just quantum physics convicted me that Jesus was the real deal. A critical, unblinking exploration of the Bible, an intellectually candid appraisal of what modern science was discovering about the universe and our species, and a series of stunning personal experiences left no serious doubt in my once-classicist mind that the biblical God was, indeed, the creator of the universe I was devoted to studying.

Quantum superposition

Skeptics routinely mock Christians for believing glaring contradictions such as: A.) God is both universal and personal and B.) Jesus is both fully man and fully God. These beliefs don’t make sense. They protest.

They’re right. These beliefs don’t make any sense, but neither do the truths of quantum physics. As the late physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman once confessed: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

According to quantum physics, for example, light is both fully solid as a rock and fully supple as a ripple of water, which is as nonsensical as saying something is both fully black and fully white. Scientists call this illogical — but, as it happens, far from absurd — chimeric entity a “photon.”

“We are faced with a new kind of difficulty,” Albert Einstein once admitted. “We have two contradictory pictures of reality; separately neither of them fully explains the phenomena of light, but together they do.”

Like quantum physics, Christianity has the same kind of “difficulty.” For starters, the Old Testament depicts God as having two opposing natures: universal and personal.

In Genesis 1, the universal God — the Creator of the universe — is called “Elohim” (אֱלֹהִים). In Genesis 2, the personal God — the one who walks and talks intimately with Adam and Eve — is called “YHWH” (יהוה), a four-letter, vowelless name that scholars call The Tetragrammaton.

The New Testament, too, has the same “difficulty.” Jesus is depicted as having two conflicting natures. On the one hand He’s fully human, as demonstrated when he weeps (John 11:35), sweats blood (Luke 22:44), and dies on the cross (John 19:30). On the other hand, He’s fully God — as when He transforms water into wine (John 2:1–11), heals the leper (Mark 1:40–42), forgives the paralytic’s sins (Mark 2:5–12), and is explicitly equated with YHWH (John 8:58, Romans 10:13, and elsewhere).

Quantum physics resolves all these apparent “difficulties” by explaining that a single entity can have multiple identities. This profound truth is represented as a mathematical “superposition” of different possible states.

This explains how Schrodinger’s famous cat can be dead and alive at the same time; how light can be both fully solid and fully supple; how God can be both fully universal (Elohim) and fully personal (YHWH); and how Jesus can be both fully human and fully God.

And while we’re on the subject, quantum superposition also offers us a modern scientific explanation for how the one, true God can be both fully one and fully three — God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Where would I be now if I hadn’t been a scientific geek when I first broke open the Bible? I’ll never know, but one fact is undeniable — because of quantum physics and Jesus, I renounced my classical worldview, ditched my atheism, and ultimately became the seemingly impossible creature I am today: a man who is fully a scientist and fully Christian.

“One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!” (John 9:25 NIV).

Michael Guillén, PhD, taught physics at Harvard and for fourteen years was the Emmy-winning Science Editor at ABC News. Go to www.michaelguillen.com for information about his new movie, The Invisible Everywhere, and upcoming novel, Picture-Perfect Christmas.

Rejoining would be a disaster. We’re ready to stop him, with your help.

Andy Burnham wants to talk about rejoining the European Union. After 11 weeks in the job he’s given up on his devolution agenda and landed back in the Left-wing safe space of centralising power again in Brussels.

His cynical political calculation is obvious, especially after the raid on pensions he signalled at the Labour conference last week. He’s trading older, white working class voters for younger, city-dwelling left-wing activist-types.

He desperately wants to beat Zack Polanski and his Green Party in the Holborn by-election this week, and carry that momentum through to a general election which I believe he’ll have to call early next year.

Why else would his Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband and his Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood have caved in to the ‘free Palestine’ mob in the past week, especially straight after the RAF Fairford incident?

It is pure political posturing from a man who who just three months ago told Makerfield voters he would not “re-run” Brexit arguments.

Well, as someone who spent two decades in the European Parliament, no one knows this issue like I do. And if Burnham now wants to re-hash the big issues of sovereignty, independence, and EU contributions, I say bring it on.

Rejoining the European project would cost Britain anywhere up to £40 billion a year when you consider the new proposed EU budgets and projected inflation between now and 2028. Think about that. When we voted to leave in 2016, we were paying £19 billion, and we had a rebate!

But there’d be no rebate this time. Only more free movement of people, more demands for Britain to throw in our defensive lot for a Europe-wide military project, and it is highly likely they’d demand we join the Euro, too. Even just implementing that would cost up to £60 billion. There’s no way this country could afford to pay such a price. We just don’t have the money.

Even if we did, if Burnham took us crawling back to Brussels the EU would use every bit of leverage to force us to fund their increasingly unstable economies.

Reentering the Single Market would mean accepting EU diktats that strangle small businesses and crush domestic innovation. We would likely immediately lose the right to set our own tax rates, control our own energy policies, or sign any more trade deals.

Nigel Farage

The people who gave us $6 per gallon diesel now want to be elected because diesel is punishingly expensive.

Luis Gonzalez | October 4, 2026

So here we are, with diesel at $6 a gallon.

Listening to the political conversation, you could easily come away thinking this all started when Iran went to war. In fact, it didn’t. Iran supplied the shock, but we had already built the vulnerability, which is a key distinction.

Yes, the war in the Middle East has disrupted oil flows and tightened global supplies. The Energy Information Administration says that tight global distillate supplies and elevated crude prices are pushing diesel prices higher. U.S. distillate inventories have fallen below their five-year range, while the loss of significant refining and petroleum-product supplies worldwide has tightened the market.

However, while that explains why diesel prices are so high right now, it doesn’t explain how we became so vulnerable to price shocks.

The reality is that America still produces enormous quantities of crude oil. The trouble is that crude oil is not diesel. Before it reaches the tank of the truck delivering your groceries, somebody has to transport it, refine it, and distribute it—and that brings us to the question nobody seems especially interested in asking:

What happened to the refineries?

The newest major U.S. refinery came online in 1977.

There is a technical footnote here. A 45,000-barrel-per-day refinery in Galveston began operating in 2022. Forty-five thousand barrels a day. In the world of American refining, that is practically a microbrewery.

The newest refinery with significant downstream capacity, then, is Marathon’s Garyville, Louisiana, refinery, which began operating in 1977. It has since been expanded to roughly 617,000 barrels per day.

That is one heck of a long stretch between major new refineries.

For decades, we made the fossil-fuel business increasingly difficult, expensive, and politically uncertain. Different presidents pursued different policies, but the general direction was the same: away from fossil fuels. It’s been exceptionally bad in those Democrat-run states, which expressly announced their desire to decrease fossil fuel production. California, for example, had 38 operating refineries in 1982; as of this year, it has only 12, a 68% reduction in capacity.

That is one heck of a long stretch between major new refineries.

For decades, we made the fossil-fuel business increasingly difficult, expensive, and politically uncertain. Different presidents pursued different policies, but the general direction was the same: away from fossil fuels. It’s been exceptionally bad in those Democrat-run states, which expressly announced their desire to decrease fossil fuel production. California, for example, had 38 operating refineries in 1982; as of this year, it has only 12, a 68% reduction in capacity.

However, unlike California, a government does not have to announce, “Shut it down.” There are quieter ways to accomplish much the same thing. Make the business harder and more expensive through regulation. Make construction of a new refinery so uncertain, and potentially so unprofitable, that sinking billions of dollars into the industry’s future starts looking like a bad bet.

And of course, investors notice these things changes and react accordingly.

They notice when politicians describe an industry as yesterday’s technology. They notice when regulations increase costs, when permitting becomes a years-long obstacle course, and when a multibillion-dollar refinery has to be evaluated against the possibility that the political environment will turn against it before the investment has paid for itself.

At some point, a perfectly sensible question arises: Why build another refinery?

But before asking why nobody is building new refineries, take a look at what happened to the ones we already had. They’re a loud warning to investors about what will happen to their money.

In 2025, LyondellBasell ended refining operations at its Houston refinery, which had a capacity of about 264,000 barrels per day. Phillips 66 shut its Los Angeles refinery, another 139,000 barrels per day. Valero’s 145,000-barrel-per-day Benicia refinery followed.

No slogan is necessary here. The arithmetic speaks quite nicely for itself.

The EIA says U.S. operable refining capacity fell by more than 250,000 barrels per day between January 2025 and January 2026, with two fewer operable refineries.

Iran did not shut down Houston, Los Angeles, or Benicia. Iran did not decide America should not build another major refinery.

And Iran did not spend decades telling investors that fossil fuels were an industry on its way out. We did that.

Now we are surprised that the cushion is gone. However, this is exactly what happens when an industry becomes less attractive to investors. Eventually, the investors behave accordingly. 

Bill Clinton brought a new generation of environmental and fuel regulations. Barack Obama imposed additional regulatory pressure, although American oil production nonetheless rose dramatically during his presidency. Joe Biden openly discussed transitioning away from the oil industry and paused new federal oil and gas leasing while his administration reviewed the federal program.

We saw different presidents with different policies, but the investment signal was clear enough. And, logically enough, investors listen. So, now we have a geopolitical crisis, and everybody has suddenly rediscovered the importance of energy security.

The White House currently describes domestic petroleum production, refining, and logistics capacity as essential to national defense. Its April determination cited constrained financing, long lead times, permitting and infrastructure bottlenecks, and supply-chain limitations as obstacles to expanding that capacity.

Good. Because that is the problem. But recognizing the problem today does not erase the road we traveled to get here.

Trump is president during this crisis, so he owns the response. But voters must remember he didn’t create the decades of accumulated refining constraints that existed before he entered the White House, although you wouldn’t know it from the political sales pitch from the same people who spent years pushing America toward reduced dependence on fossil fuels.

The people who gave us six-dollar-a-gallon diesel now want to be elected because diesel is six dollars a gallon. The architects of the vulnerability are campaigning on its consequences.

Diesel moves trucks. It powers tractors and construction equipment. It moves freight, supports manufacturing, and provides backup power. When diesel becomes more expensive, those additional costs eventually filter into almost everything those machines touch.

So this is about more than diesel. It’s about the cost of pretending infrastructure doesn’t matter until the day you desperately need it. 

You cannot spend decades discouraging an industry from expanding and then profess astonishment when it stops expanding. You cannot tell investors that an industry is disappearing and then complain when they stop building the infrastructure that industry needs. And you cannot shrink the cushion for years and then blame the next geopolitical crisis because the cushion is gone.

Before accepting the next political sales pitch about who can fix the six-dollar diesel problem, perhaps we ought to look at the whole receipt.

The people who gave us $6 per gallon diesel now want to be elected because diesel is $6 per gallon. There is something almost impressive about that chutzpah.

Iran supplied the shock, but we built the vulnerability, and it has far-reaching consequences. Diesel moves trucks, powers tractors and construction equipment, moves freight, supports manufacturing, and provides backup power. When diesel gets more expensive, the added cost works its way into almost everything those machines touch, usually sooner than people expect.

You cannot spend decades discouraging an industry from expanding and then be genuinely surprised when it does not expand very much. You cannot keep telling investors that an industry is on its way out and then complain when they decide not to put billions of dollars into new infrastructure for it. And if you spend years reducing the cushion, well, the next geopolitical crisis is going to hurt more than it otherwise would have.

American Thinker

To judge from many of the comments on this site, a substantial number of readers have difficulty understanding the sophisticated modes of thinking of the New York progressive. Looking at New York’s official progressive orthodoxy in action, these readers often see illogic and inconsistencies that seem to make no sense at all. And yet, despite the apparent internal contradictions, the New York progressives themselves generally achieve near or even complete unanimity as to many of the important policies that they seek to implement. How does this work?

We need to take a deeper look. So I thought for today it would be useful to examine some recent policies touted by the progressive crowd, to see what insights we can glean about exactly how they think about the world.

As a starting example, there is the proposal of our boy Mayor Zohran Mamdani to solve the problem of “affordability” of groceries by opening five large City-owned stores to sell groceries more cheaply. I wrote about this proposal in my post of September 2, titled “Here’s An Idea To Get 30% Cheaper Groceries In New York Without Taxpayer Subsidies: Allow Walmart!” The post reported on a big City announcement on July 28 of a plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to open the new stores, with the announcement specifically claiming that a “core basket of everyday groceries” would be “30 percent cheaper” at the City-owned stores. And yet, the post reported, the same progressive crowd had been fighting — successfully! — for decades to keep Walmart out of New York City. And meanwhile a big Consumer Reports study from February 2026 had found grocery prices at Walmart to average about 30% less than prices at some other large chains with big market shares in the City.

Are the opposition to Walmart and the simultaneous support for subsidized City-owned stores just completely inconsistent? Or is there a deeper logic that we are missing?

Consider now the next pair of seemingly inconsistent policies. On the one hand, there is a major push in New York State to reduce the use of energy from the burning of fossil fuels, and instead to force the use of electricity for these purposes. And, by a “push” toward electrification, I mean a series of statutory and regulatory provisions to make electrification mandatory in various big sectors, and thus drive up the demand for electricity by some very large amount.

By far the two largest electrification mandates come from: (1) a regulation mandating that large and increasing percentages of vehicles sold in New York become fully electric, and (2) a New York City statute, known as Local Law 97, mandating electric heat for all large buildings beginning in 2030. The electric vehicle mandate is found in the so-called “Advanced Clean Cars II” rule, which is 6 N.Y.C.R.R. Part 218. It mandates that 35% of all automobile sales in 2026 be EVS, with the percentages increasing each year until reaching 100% in 2035.

By the way, EV sales in New York State are nowhere near the 35% mandated for this year. Here we are in October, and sales of EVs are running around 8-10% of the market. But don’t worry, the Department of Environmental Conservation has announced a two-year “enforcement pause” of the regulation, to give the automobile industry time to catch up. When that “enforcement pause” expires in 2028, the required percentage of sales that must be EVs will supposedly be 51%.

According to an analysis by Modo Energy of NYISO data, building and vehicle electrification are projected to add some 92 TWh of demand for electricity in New York by 2050. This would be in addition to current annual demand of about 140 TWh, or about a 66% increase over current demand.

But there is also another potential driver of increased electricity demand in New York, which NYISO and Modo Energy call “large loads.” Mainly, this would be new data centers. The Modo Energy analysis projects them to add some 10.8 TWh of annual demand to the State grid by 2030, after which building and vehicle “electrification become the dominant growth driver.” So the projected additional demand from these “large loads” is a small fraction of the projected additions from building and vehicle electrification.

And what is New York policy as to these large loads? Simple: Governor Hochul has just put a moratorium on building any more of them. Here is Governor Hochul’s July 14 release announcing the moratorium on what she calls “new hyperscale data centers.” The first reason given for the moratorium is to “protect ratepayers.” Protection of ratepayers is obviously necessary because the large increase in electricity demand from these “hyperscale data centers” is very likely to drive up the cost of electricity.

So building and vehicle electrification are mandatory, while new “hyperscale data centers” are forbidden, at least for now. But won’t the much large increase in demand from the building and vehicle electrification drive up the cost of electricity far more? Our Governor has so far not offered an answer to that question.

And then there is seeming inconsistency number three. Back on June 25, a City body called the Rent Guidelines Board, at the behest of Mayor Mamdani, imposed a one-year rent freeze on the entire stock of rent-regulated apartments in New York City, approximately 1 million units. That means that the landlord of any such unit where the lease is up in the next year must offer the tenant a renewal lease at no rent increase.

Now, just a couple of days ago on September 30, our Mayor announced that the City Housing Authority, known as NYCHA, had closed on a financing deal to renovate one of the City’s dozens of housing projects, known as Nostrand Houses. The financing amounts to some $607 million, and will fully renovate the 1,148 units in the complex. Wait a minute, that’s almost $530,000 per unit! After which the residents will still be living in one of those hideous brick high-rise “projects.” Zillow reports that the median price of a single family house in the U.S. as of August 31 was $388,697. So why not buy each of the NYCHA tenants at Nostrand Houses a nice median-priced house in some reasonably-priced market, and tear down the Nostrand Houses and start over? Because that’s not how we do it in New York.

The City press release does not disclose the interest rate to be paid on the $607 million financing. But assuming they could get the money at 5%, and that there are no cost overruns, and that the tenants paid the cost of the financing, this financing would add some $2203 per month to the rent for each tenant. Current average monthly rents for NYCHA are about $600.

I’ll suggest a few principles of progressive thought that can reconcile these seemingly irreconcilable circumstances:

– The world is divided into the oppressors on one side, and the oppressed and their champions on the other. Whatever oppressors do is bad, and whatever the oppressed and their champions do is virtuous. Walmart is obviously an oppressor. Mamdani is a champion of the oppressed. Data center developers and utilities are oppressors. Promoters of “climate” legislation and green energy are champions of the oppressed. Private landlords are oppressors. NYCHA is a champion of the oppressed. Are you starting to see how this works?

– And then of course there is the principle that taxpayer funds are infinite and can be spent freely without any need to pay attention to costs or tradeoffs.

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Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

An online quiz suggests that constant concern about fire or burglary in your home or about catching a disease could be signs of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Though some attention to detail is perfectly reasonable and even necessary to avoid misfortune, the quiz also includes questions about ritualized washing and repetition of routine actions like turning off lights, locking doors, etc. — things that might not be quite so reasonable.

So, where does attention to detail leave off, and OCD begin? Is it obsessive to regularly wash your hands so you won’t get sick? Is it obsessive to check your email every hour? Is it compulsive to stand staring at your toilet while waiting for it to fill? Do you worry about the oven being on — every time you leave home? Let’s face it: All of us have our little tics and fixations. Whether it involves our personal space or our workplace, we usually feel most comfortable when things are “in order.”

The need for tidiness and organization is often a need for control, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. Those of you who read this column regularly know that I equate control with confidence and self-responsibility. Without it, the path leading to our goals and happiness can be blocked by unnecessary obstacles.

Over the years, I’ve seen many people whose need for control has become an impediment to the basic routines of everyday life. Their compulsions and phobias are sometimes so devastating that they can’t even leave the house, much less drive, shop or interact socially.

The Obsessive Compulsive Foundation (www.ocfoundation.org) defines OCD as a neurobiological (physical) problem, as opposed to a psychological (mental) one. But they also acknowledge that no genetic or other link to physiology has yet been established. Whatever the cause, all obsessions involve out-of-control thoughts or impulses to do certain things over and over again. Compulsions are the actions that OCD people take in order to reduce their anxiety over these thoughts and impulses. The actions don’t make sense, and the person with OCD fully understands this, yet he or she feels compelled to perform them anyway.

You don’t have OCD simply because you wash your hands more than average or take extra care to make sure the table is set properly for guests. OCD is a time-eater. Repetitive rituals reinforce the obsessive thoughts; the obsessive thoughts generate more ritualistic behaviors, giving rise to a vicious psychological cycle. A person without OCD might check the lock a second time after leaving the house, and at that point the anxiety is largely over. Conversely, a person with OCD checks the lock — over and over — but the anxiety doesn’t go away. He or she might spend an hour in the bathroom washing and rewashing. Years ago I worked with a woman who had to be admitted to the hospital because she had literally washed the skin off her hands and arms. She knew what she was doing, but she did it anyway.

It’s important to understand that there is no literal cure for OCD by taking medication or going to therapy. However, therapy can be crucial for helping to manage the problem. With persistence, the intrusive thoughts and impulsive actions can go into remission for periods of time. However, even people who feel they are cured will sometimes experience some reawakening of their symptoms during times of severe stress. Research suggests that some antidepressant medications can help by controlling the neurotransmitter known as serotonin, but research has also shown that just controlling serotonin is not enough. Behavioral and cognitive strategies, with guidance from a skilled psychotherapist, can go a long way toward bringing relief.

One of life’s challenges is to take risks, and we need to be aware of what’s happening around us in order to ensure our safety. But this awareness cannot be allowed to run amok. So we keep life interesting and tread a middle ground between risk and safety; all the while keeping a watchful eye on our behaviors and our psychological health.

Michael J. Hurd, Life’s a Beach

Please remember something: Elections are a consequence, not a cause.

Radicalized Democrat totalitarians cannot destroy a free people without their consent.

The basic questions here: Do people want to be free, or not? Do they want to live, or not?

The Democrats are now so explicit about their desire to wreck everything we have that giving them an electoral victory is a collective act of suicide.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

For nearly two decades, Lesney Products ruled the world’s pockets and playrooms. Born in a bombed-out London pub garage after the war, this British firm turned die-cast metal into pure childhood gold, selling hundreds of millions of tiny cars under the Matchbox name and building a monopoly so complete that “Matchbox” became the generic word for toy car itself, the way “Hoover” meant vacuum cleaner. Their factories in Hackney and Kentish Town ran round the clock, their sales curves only pointed skyward, and their executives believed, with total conviction, that no one could ever touch them.

Then in 1968 an American toy giant called Mattel launched something called Hot Wheels, and Lesney’s leadership looked at the garish candy paint jobs and laughed them off as cheap gimmicks unworthy of a serious British toymaker. It was the single costliest laugh in toy industry history. Because while Lesney was admiring its own paint quality, Mattel had engineered thin, low friction wire axles that let their cars scream down plastic tracks at speeds Matchbox toys could never dream of, while Lesney’s thick, slow axles left their beloved die-cast cars barely able to roll across a carpet. Kids didn’t care about authenticity or detail. They cared about speed, and speed was the one thing Matchbox refused to give them.

What followed was not a slow fade but a rapid unraveling, as market share evaporated seemingly overnight, debts piled up faster than any recovery plan could address, and a company that once defined an entire toy category collapsed into bankruptcy within a decade of that fateful boardroom laugh. This is the story of how one arrogant miscalculation about a piece of bent wire ended a British manufacturing empire, and what the fall of Matchbox reveals about the brutal cost of underestimating your competition.

Lost Industries

Feelings are valued, they’re celebrated, more than rational thought is. People with deeply emotional political feelings are certain they have winning arguments. Let’s engage them.

You hate Trump so, so much? Well, that settles it.

And you feel that criminals shouldn’t languish behind bars, even after committing two or however many crimes? Oh, your feelings reflect true justice.

In your heart, you believe that about 15 million people (twice the population of New Jersey) living in the U.S. illegally deserve sanctuaries from immigration enforcement, ones defended by street protestors. . . and they should be given benefits not available to American citizens . . . and their criminal history shouldn’t be held against them? Golly, your kind heart has won the day!

A political approach based on feelings tends to be antithetical to one based on thought. Everywhere from New York dinner parties to Minneapolis streets to California faculty lounges, the feelings approach wages a weepy war to redefine American government.

They’re demanding more now: more apologies, more influence, more guaranteed income. They feel the need for nothing less than a new type of government.

You might have heard of one episode in the founding of American government. It occurred in a brief 1787 exchange between Philadelphian Elizabeth Powel, then the country’s most politically influential woman, and Benjamin Franklin, a Pennsylvania delegate to the Constitutional Convention. Powel asked Franklin whether the delegates to the convention were giving the country a monarchy or a republic. Franklin’s cautionary reply became famous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

In today’s terms, Franklin’s “keep it” bequest could be deemed at-risk. The feelings crowd is now pushing for a socialist republic, which of course would soon become all socialist, no republic. Through angry performances on streets and campuses, they’re campaigning for reverting the American republic that has survived for 239 years to a Russian model that collapsed after just 74 years.

“Progressives” call this progress.

Democrats, Democratic Socialists, and closet Marxists love the feelings-vs-thoughts debate because their partner media always declare the feelings are winning it. Those of us on the other side can only use reasoned thought and language to fight the battle. And while doing so, we’re characterized as coldly intellectual or just plain mean.

Here’s a realistic way to understand this battle. Forget party labels; it’s actually about capitalism versus socialism. Though socialism is fatally flawed and a serial historical disaster, it can never be killed. It’s the Freddy Krueger of utopian dreamers.

Have you ever tried to defend capitalism, especially to a Felicia Feelings-type leftist? Capitalism is actually a tough case to make to meager intellects, especially in an era when critical reading is overwhelmed by critical TV viewing.

Leftists have come to see capitalism as a relic of the nineteenth century, a scheme still run by an evil consortium. The well-read few among them attribute capitalism’s creation to ruthless corporate barons like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and some railroad tycoons. The larger number whose reading list leans toward holiday fables think of capitalism as the product of America’s Ebeneezer Scrooges.

And they maintain a rosy view of socialism by ignoring twentieth century history. Pay no attention to those socialist regimes behind the curtain, Dorothy!

The regimes are all failures. The big one, the failed empire, was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Western Hemisphere model is Fidel’s socialist revolution in Cuba, still working on making that revolution airtight and still delaying the free elections he promised in 1960.

Then there was Venezuela. Pity the voters who in 1999 thought Hugo Chavez’ socialist “economic justice” would enrich them. In 2016, they began seeking protein justice by stealing zoo animals. Buen provencho!

The efficient complex of capitalism is today represented in simple images, the establishment favorite being greedy, scowling businessmen. How many TV programs and movies have you seen that portray business characters favorably? Villainous business storylines outnumber pro-business storylines by at least four-to-one. though the margin seems larger than that, especially in big productions.

Greedy corporate executives and sinister investors provide archetypal fiends. They’re popular villains among the audience of arrested-development adults who find heroes in comic book figures. A capitalist monster movie won an Academy Award for Michael Douglas for his portrayal of Wall Street baddie Gordon Gekko.

You’d think that a big-budget movie would be made about globe-conquering currency manipulator George Soros, “the man who broke the Bank of England.” In character and behavior, he resembles a villain in a James Bond movie. He could be Dr. No No-Bail.

But leftist media mostly ignore Soros or cast him as just a kindly billionaire who taps into his fortune to elect Democrat prosecutors and judges with a compassionate style of law enforcement. That prosecution laxity is approved by city voters who’ve never been mugged.

And how have deep-feeling politicians been evaluated by the deep-feelings media? Special care had to be taken with one political lifer.

That doddering fellow was shown poignant appreciation by the newspaper of record. Endorsing Joe Biden in the 2020 election, The New York Times cooed “time and loss have softened his edges.” It observed that Biden “speaks the language of suffering and compassion with a raw intimacy, making deep emotional connections across lines of race and class.” Columnist Jamelle Bouie remarked that the Democrats’ convention framed Biden as a leader “who seeks to provide and protect, while also showing empathy.”

After Joe’s election, the Times hailed Biden’s victory with “the people have chosen empathy.”

Can you hear the soundtrack behind the Times’ screenplay there? It’s a thousand surging strings, a Barry Manilow symphony.

As the Biden basement era progressed and America’s population boomed through its southern border, empathy remained a major priority. CNN described Biden as a leader who is “all empathy, wearing his heart on his sleeve.” As the network’s viewership kept declining, the remaining couch dwellers heard the president reassuringly described as the “comforter-in-chief.”

Do you need a hankie? Maybe an airsickness bag? Let’s move on with feeling to his hyper-emotive would-be successor.

Following her democratic anointing, Kamala’s presidential campaign focused significantly on the subject of “joy,” proposing increases in national joyfulness, and being championed by Joy Reid (the most hatred-oriented comedian ever).

And Kamala’s speeches featured one memorable statement of her belief in several joyous variations. Here’s a montage of her most famous statement.

And recall Kamala’s VP running mate Tim Walz — quickly, before he disappears into a think tank that discourages thinking. (He’s still somehow the Governor of Minnesota.) Walz entered 2024 presidential campaign rallies waving his hands like a giddy cheerleader. Equally disturbing, he was apparently managing his state’s 10-figure — possibly 11-figure — fraud by immigrant Somali entrepreneurs the same way: by happily waving his hands.

Walz at a 2024 Vice-Presidential debate: “Donald Trump makes the people I care about afraid.” Now, that is emotion-only politics. The relevant point isn’t just what saps in Minnesota feel; it’s what Governor Walz feels about their feelings.

A triumphantly successful politician can even feel deeply about the hard facts of economics. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had those feelings of empathy for ordinary Americans (folks unable to make $130 million in stock market gains as she and her husband / stock partner had by legislation-driven whiplashes in the stock market).

Pelosi emphasized the breadth of her ordinary-Americans empathy in a 2009 Capitol Hill press conference, tugging heartstrings and challenging census accounts by emoting, “Every month that we do not have an economic recovery package, five hundred million Americans will lose their jobs.”

The deep feelings of The New York Times, Biden, Harris, Walz, Pelosi and fellow compassion machines continue being exercised in the service of causes once called “liberal” (though censoriously illiberal), now called “democratic socialist” (though the Marxists in that closet can hardly wait to come out), and on the currently hip trajectory (soon to be revealed as the reanimation of Lenin’s corpse).

Capitalism isn’t supported by pseudonyms. It doesn’t have the nitwit optimism of socialist promises. No, capitalism has just waged a quiet, incredibly successful global crusade against poverty for over two centuries. You can try your best to present evidence of this improvement in human society to a campus mob or an elegant garden party, but you should temper your expectations.

Tell them anyway: Capitalism has been the economic system eradicating poverty worldwide. It doesn’t reinforce poverty as socialism/ communism does. Capitalism inherently functions to encourage the virtues of human character, rather than magnifying human weaknesses commune-style. (Just ask a former member of a commune or kibbutz.) Capitalism is the political philosophy of a healthy, productive society, contrasting dramatically to socialism’s lament of losers.

Socialists are unable to understand how humanely capitalism works. They’re too busy explaining how their system has never been tried properly and ignoring that it’s enforced by dimwitted bureaucrats. And ignoring California.

The United States nears this year’s midterm elections with the very real possibility that these closet Marxists calling themselves Democratic Socialists will win a national foothold from which to destroy the republic. The bad news is that their deep-feeling broadcasts might defeat the rare national product of healthy traditional values and education. The good news is that people with those values and education can still fight back, and a poorly educated generation might learn worldly reality.

David Bittinger, John Kass News