The sun continues to attract more attention as the primary suspect in the earth’s current warming. Steven Milloy highlights several recent scholarly studies that point to sun spot activity — not human malfeasance — as the dominant contributor to climate change.
In fact, the evidence further supports the scenario of a looming period of global cooling.
As you can see from this graph of solar activity since the mid-18th century, low sunspot activity matches up nicely with well-known Little Ice Age climatic events like George Washington’s Christmas-night 1776 crossing of the ice-strewn Delaware River and Napoleon Bonaparte’s retreat from Moscow in the horrifically-cold winter of 1812-1813. . . .
If sunspot activity continues to be so markedly low, then we should prepare for the possibility of a significant global cooling trend that could reduce agricultural yields and bring on the sort of food shortages that occurred during the Little Ice Age.
There was a news report recently about a woman in Great Britain who had an abortion and was sterilized in order to spare the planet the burden of supporting any more evil humans. Unlike the rest of us who are selfishly making babies and despoiling the globe, she rests easy at night, knowing that her carbon footprint treads softly on the earth.
The couples who choose abortion and sterilization may not save the planet, but they’re saving the gene pool a mess o’ trouble by purging their own from the mix. The Darwin Awards folks, who honor those who improve the species by accidentally removing themselves from it, will have to create a new category:
People Too Narcissistic To Procreate.
This one isn’t hard to figure out. Let this woman’s “unselfish” act become the norm for a couple of generations, and what will happen to the human race? These people have made Planet Earth their god, and are willing to sacrifice the entire race on the altar of environmental consciousness.
The Society is comprised of conservative and libertarian legal scholars who encourage open and free discussion on legal issues pressing the nation — a refreshing alternative that drives leftists nuts. As Jeff Jacoby comments in an excellent overview of the Society and its work,
At a time when so much of what passes for public discourse is poisonous and extreme, the Federalist Society’s commitment to fostering dialogue and intellectual diversity is a priceless resource.
“The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,” Oliver Wendell Holmes observed. “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” Perhaps the reason so many liberals persist in bad-mouthing the Federalist Society is that they fear Holmes was right.
Rosslyn Smith notes some peculiar inconsistencies in the global environmental movement that undermines its noble intentions.
The environmentalist movement has been given an aura of glamour that is not supported by the record. It is a movement where political posturing counts more than accomplishment.
A recent AP report reveals growing evidence that non-traditional family arrangements are significantly more likely to be harmful to children.
Many scholars and front-line caseworkers who monitor America’s families see the abusive-boyfriend syndrome as part of a worrisome trend. These experts and observers note an ever-increasing share of America’s children grow up in homes without both biological parents, and say the risk of child abuse is markedly higher in the non-traditional family structures.
“This is the dark underbelly of cohabitation,” said Brad Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia. “Cohabitation has become quite common, and most people think, ‘What’s the harm?’ The harm is we’re increasing a pattern of relationships that’s not good for children.
If empirical evidence strongly suggests that traditional two-parent families are best for kids, then why are some still so determined to defend non-traditional arrangements as acceptable alternatives? Because it’s not about the evidence; it’s about the twisted concept of “freedom” that our culture is determined to defend at all costs.
The traditional family arrangement is best for kids for the same reason that a regular maintenance routine is best for cars — that’s the way they were designed. When we start taking shortcuts and making exceptions, we risk creating problems.
Want to know what Hillary’s nationalized healthcare would look like once implemented? Then read a Canadian mother’s personal experience with her nation’s health care system:
I am the mother of a child with asthma. When my son had difficulty breathing randomly through the winter, I sought treatment. First I made an appointment with my doctor (2 week waiting time) so I could obtain a referral to a specialist. (In Canada you cannot just go to a specialist, you must get a referral from the gatekeepers: family doctors. Oh, and about 5 million Canadians don’t have one of those.) It took about six weeks for the specialist to get back to me with how long I’d have to wait for my son’s appointment: 12 months. Did I mention that periodically he couldn’t breathe?
Her experience is not an abberration. That’s the norm in a system where nobody pays but everybody gets coverage. The quality of service goes down for everyone.
Socialist Canadian health care is wonderful if you are an emergency case. If you can wait, trust me, you will.
Modern journalists point to a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson to uphold their self-importance. But according to Steve Boriss, the mainstream press has completely missed the point of Jeffersonian journalism in three critical areas.
His conclusion:
Clearly, when Jefferson said he would prefer “newspapers without a government” to “government without newspapers,” he did not imagine a journalism that was favorably disposed to government and that presented only one view. No doubt, he would have preferred “bloggers without a government” even more.
Science has long known that the best all-around source of energy is hydrogen. It produces great amounts of energy, produces only pure water as waste, and is abundant. But extracting hydrogen via electrolysis requires as much energy from traditional sources (i.e., fossil fuels) as it creates.
Now, at long last, researchers have discovered a novel new way to create hydrogen.
Perhaps the solution to mankind’s energy woes and our salvation from dwindling fossil fuel supplies will come in the form of the oldest living organisms on earth — bacteria.
Read the whole article for the fascinating details.
John Stossel takes a closer look at the events leading up to the first Thanksgiving, and highlights a little detail of history that I was not aware of. I doubt most Americans in this “gimme” age know about it either.
When the Pilgrims first settled the Plymouth colony, they organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share everything equally, work and produce.
They nearly all starved.
Why? When people can get the same return with a small amount of effort as with a large amount, most people will make little effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. Some ate rats, dogs, horses and cats. This went on for two years.
It wasn’t until the leadership changed their economic model from socialism to private farming that the colony suddenly found prosperity. It was the bounty of the first harvest under this new system that the Pilgrims celebrated in that original Thanksgiving.
Stossel draws the obvious lesson:
What private property does — as the Pilgrims discovered — is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there’s a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
Secure property rights are the key. When producers know that their future products are safe from confiscation, they will take risks and invest. But when they fear they will be deprived of the fruits of their labor, they will do as little as possible.
That’s the lost lesson of Thanksgiving.
It’s a lesson that Americans today need to learn all over again, as we flirt with the idea of turning more and more of our output and welfare over to a nanny government that promises everything.
Kathleen Parker recently interviewed President Bush aboard Air Force One. The conversation focused on Bush’s perception of his legacy, and how that perception has influenced his decisions. Excerpts:
Bush . . . says he’s trying to make the next president’s job easier by making the tough decisions now. “That’s why it’s very important for me to remind the American people that we’ve got to support these military commanders, support their decisions. … I think anybody who’s president will understand the strategic consequences of failure in Iraq.”
He also said that anyone who believes we’re not in a war against extremists and radicals will “learn differently when they get in there and hear the intelligence I hear.” . . .
“It’s real important for the president to not be making moves based upon political calendars,” he told me. “I really view this as a first chapter of a long struggle — not the only chapter, not the last chapter, but the first chapter.
“And I’ve told our people, we’re going to write it … so that the next president will have an easier task of dealing with the threats.
Bush’s war performance has not been perfect, but he stands head and shoulders above the rest of the politicians who are cravenly seeking his job. Someday, after all the shrill criticism dies down and historians have a chance to sift through the details of this era, I suspect Bush’s role in history will be viewed in a far more positive light.
Hillary Clinton’s claim to being the most experienced candidate in the field is wearing pretty thin, even among diehard Democratic operatives. Maureen Dowd takes the mask off, and exposes the real Hillary experience:
Her Democratic rivals had meekly gone along, accepting her self-portrait as a former co-president who gets to take credit for everything important Bill Clinton did in the ’90s. But she was not elected or appointed to a position that needed Senate confirmation. And the part of the Clinton administration that worked best — the economy, stupid — was run by Robert Rubin. Hillary did not show good judgment in her areas of influence — the legal fiefdom, health care and running oppo-campaigns against Bill’s galpals.
The more people get to know the real Hillary, the less they like her. According to Dowd,
The Clinton campaign in Iowa is in a panic. Obama has been closing the gap with women and her ginning up of gender has lost her male votes.
When things get desperate, Hillary has a reputation for getting nasty. Look for a bombshell sometime in the next few weeks leading up to Iowa.
The U.N. just announced that its earlier estimates of AIDS victims worldwide was significantly over-stated. The estimate has been revised downward from 39.5 million to 33.2 million. This bolsters the case of James Chin, former WHO official and author of the book, The AIDS Pandemic: The Collision of Epidemiology with Political Correctness, who argues that the AIDS crisis is less about science and more about political advocacy–and the funding that comes with it.
Maggie Gallagher draws the obvious lesson from this development for the U.N.’s current pronouncements on a looming global warming catastrophe.
As far as I can tell, the United Nations is like just about any other large bureaucratic institution — a mixed body of people and ideals that does some good and is at least as susceptible to corruption as any other human thing. But in Europe, faith in the United Nations is reaching biblical proportions.
Which is why when the U.N. secretary-general reaches for the language of science to establish an absolute truth (global warming is a human-caused catastrophe) grounded in an obvious falsehood (“we all agree”), I find it creepy.
The statements have the form of scientific assertions, but they are clothed in a spirit of dogmatic certainty that is alien to the culture of scientific endeavor. A climate science that cannot predict the weather a month from now may have strong evidence that global warming exists, is human caused and will be a catastrophe, but it cannot possibly have yet produced a proof about which “all agree.”
I repeat: The current global warming hysteria will someday be taught in universities as a good example of how not to do science.
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the – - – - - Party?”
Joseph McCarthy made that question famous a half-century ago, in his eagerness to root out Communists in Hollywood.
Today, the tables have been turned 180 degrees, and it is Republicans in Hollywood who are being outed, shunned, and blacklisted. The question is the same, only the Party affiliation is different.
The vicious approach of the left, one that stifles speech while pretending to endorse the very freedoms they crush if they can’t get everyone to goose-step with them, keeps those celebrities who don’t politically agree with them quiet for fear of their careers being stifled, if not altogether ruined. It’s a photo negative of the anti-communist blacklisting of the fifties.
However, as Pilgrim notes, there may be hope — the steady stream of anti-war movies that the Hollywood lefties have been churning out lately have all flopped badly. Maybe this will embolden the few conservatives to step forward and produce movies that better resonate with the spirit of the American populace.
Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently link to contrarian articles on the global warming debate, if only to remind everyone that there is still a debate going on.
There is an excellent clearinghouse of information on climate change that should be on your must-read list: ICECAP — the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project.
ICECAP acknowledges a dynamic climate, and a human role in climate change, but also disseminates evidence that natural cycles in the sun and oceans play a role, too.
We worry the sole focus on greenhouse gases and the unwise reliance on imperfect climate models while ignoring real data may leave civilization unprepared for a sudden climate shift that history tells us will occur again, very possibly soon. . . .
ICECAP is not funded by large corporations that might benefit from the status quo but by private investors who believe in the need for free exchange of ideas on this and other important issues of the day. Our working group is comprised of members from all ends of the political spectrum. This is not about politics but about science.
That can’t be said regarding the IPCC, whose members are largely appointed by governments, and have a vested interest in the outcome of the debate.
Be sure to check out their compendium of FAQs and Myths concerning global warming.
The rovers Opportunity and Spirit were designed to function for only 90 days when they landed on Mars four years ago. They are still creaking along, but just barely. Engineers are using the space age version of baling wire and bubble gum to keep the little rovers functioning.
Both rovers have at least one defective wheel, which limits their maneuverability. Scientists have Spirit moving in reverse, dragging its useless wheel behind it. Both have problems with their robotic arms, and the two grinding tools still work only because of software patches and shortcuts implemented by the creative teams who maintain them.
I fully appreciate what the NASA scientists are having to do to keep their babies going. Over the years, I’ve had to perform similar gymnastics to keep my old cars running. Just a few more miles, a few more . . . . .
Kathleen Parker offers yet another endorsement of Miriam Grossman’s campaign to expose the health risks of the current hook-up culture on college campuses. The empirical evidence for the physical and emotional damage of hooking up, especially in young women, is so overwhelming that there must be some reason university health professionals are pretending it doesn’t exist.
Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality. . . .
Because sex ed is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That’s a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.
Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging “safe sex” to a more realistic “safer sex,” any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. . . .
Parker notes that young coeds are beginning to wake up to the hoax, and are longing for the quaint old days of dating and developing emotional trust with a potential mate — without sex.
WSJ’s Daniel Henniger looks back at 1968, and argues that our current civic and political divide can be traced to the the tumultuous events of that year.
I turned 17 in 1968, and the turmoil I saw in the news every day left a deep impression on me. Even now, my deep conservative convictions remain galvanized by the outrageous behavior of those who sought to defame my country then — and are still carrying on that campaign today.
So, yeah, I suppose he’s right: today’s divisions really can be traced to the events of that year.
David Broder points to two icebergs that threaten to sink the Democratic Party’s presidential hopes next year.
The first is obvious to everyone: illegal immigration — or rather, the Party’s failure to address it.
The second is an elephant in the room that few have dared to openly talk about yet, but could have a disastrous impact on a Hillary candidacy. . . . . .
Sixty-five years ago the pilot of a P-38 Lightning ran out of fuel and ditched the fighter plane in the shallow surf off the coast of Wales. The pilot walked away from the plane, and so did the U.S. government. The plane was gradually covered by the shifting sands until it was buried, forgotten to history.
Last summer, a family vacationing on the beach stumbled upon the remains of the plane, re-emerging after its long burial. British military historians are now working to extract the plane and place it in a museum.
Iran is pushing a plan to build an “Islamic car,” complete with a compass that points to Mecca, and special compartments to hold the Koran and prayer scarves. The car will likely be built in Malaysia.
No word yet on whether the car will come with the suicide bomber option, pre-wired for easy detonation and maximum explosive effect.
Oh, and the new car is warrantied for 24 months, 24,000 miles, or 24 infidel deaths, whichever comes first.
Ed Morrissey has an excellent round-up of commentary on the Hillary meltdown. First, the botched immigration answer in the Philly debate; then the fake college student townhall question; now the shameless threat to Wolf Blitzer on how he ought to moderate the next debate.
A better question is why the campaign feels the need to exercise such tight control over Hillary Clinton. Is she such a bad candidate on the stump that they have to fake questions and attempt to intimidate and vilify national news reporters in order to keep people from discovering it?
Apparently they think so. And if they think she’s that bad, imagine how bad she really is.
No, it’s not “the campaign” exercising such tight control. It’s the candidate herself. Hillary’s whole political life has been one long exercise in self-centered domination of others.
If people think she’s a control freak now, wait till she’s sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.
Hillary seems to have acolytes rather than friends — hardly a reassuring trait for a potential president whose paranoia has already been called Nixonian. Isolated monarchs never hear the bad news until the people riot and the lynch mob is at the door.
UPDATE: I’m not the only one calling Hillary a control freak. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman uses the term as well:
Heading into yet another TV debate, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton faces a potent enemy—not onstage, but in her own mind. She has a lifelong obsession with seeking out, and trying to control, unruly events and people. She often fails, and harms herself trying. If she doesn’t ease up, she risks losing the race. Brainy women don’t frighten voters; control freaks do.
Tibbets was the pilot of Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Columnist Bob Greene knew Tibbets, and writes about Tibbets’ life after The Bomb.
It was reported that he claimed never to have lost a night’s sleep after the mission, and some saw this as a show of indifference. It was the opposite. He slept well, he told me, because “we stopped the killing.” He was at peace, he said, because “I know how many people got to live full lives because of what we did.”
Hans Labohm — a member of the IPCC, by the way — details the growing number of global warming skeptics in Europe who are challenging the prevailing, politically-driven tide of global warming hysteria.
Of special interest is the current state of Russian climatology:
Russian climatologists . . . simply state that a new little ice age is imminent. Not so long ago it was astronomer Khabibullo Abdusamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, who declared that the Earth will experience a ‘mini Ice Age’ in the middle of this century, caused by low solar activity. Now it is the climatologist Olech Sorochtin, member of the Russian Academy of Physical Science, who joins him. His message was prominently disseminated by the Russian press agency Novosti, which in the period of the Cold War was generally considered to be a mouthpiece of the Kremlin. (http://de.rian.ru/analysis/20071009/83073114.html). Therefore, it is perhaps not too far-fetched to speculate that this might be a warning signal that the Russians will drop out of Kyoto when its first phase expires in 2012.
The tide is turning. In the not-too-distant future, Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize will be seen for the phony political payoff that it was.
Remember the hilarious performance of Miss Teen South Carolina at the pageant a few months back?
An enterprising blogger had a little fun splicing scenes from that incident with Hillary’s attempt to answer the immigration question last week. What a hoot!
Come to think of it, one blogger commenting on the Miss S.C. incident actually anticipated Hillary’s fumble: “She Answered That Like a Dem in a Presidential Debate”.
Maybe there are some details here that I don’t know about, but this incident really takes the cake. In Mascoutah, Illinois:
Megan Coulter, an eighth-grade student at Mascoutah Middle School, was hugging her friends goodbye after school Friday when vice principal, Randy Blakely, saw her and told her she would receive two after-school detentions.
Blakely had previously warned Coulter that she was in violation of the school’s policy on public displays of affection after she was seen hugging a student at a football game.
The school’s policy says that “displays of affection should not occur on the campus at any time.” . . .
Mascoutah Superintendent Sam McGowen said today that the district’s policy helps prevent misunderstandings and unwelcome expressions of affection.
Zero tolerance policies have become all the rage in school districts, who use them to deal with contraband weapons, drugs, and — as in Mascoutah — displays of affection. But while they remove the responsibility for educators to actually think about anything, they end up backfiring, punishing kids for the most innocent childish behaviors and creating a firestorm of ill-will.
Charles Sykes documents a number of such cases of zero tolerance run amok, and concludes with this thought:
“Nature,” as H.L. Mencken once observed, “abhors a moron.” The same obviously cannot be said of school boards, who often hire them as principals.
And all this time, I thought conservatives were intolerant control freaks.
Earlier we quoted Krauthammer on the likelihood of a genuine co-Presidency if Hillary is elected President. There is real concern over which Clinton would be wielding power.
That confusion is already manifesting itself in the campaign. Hillary’s Democratic primary opponents are criticizing Bill for his defense of his wife’s performance in last week’s debate. An AP report gives the details:
Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called the Clintons’ response to the debate “outrageous.”
“To have the former president come out and suggest this is a form of swift boating … is way over the top in my view,” Dodd said in a telephone interview.
A senior adviser to Sen. Clinton’s campaign, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said the former president’s remarks were not part of campaign strategy and in fact were considered counterproductive by the her advisers.
But Bill Clinton is a powerful advocate in the Democratic primary, and he is returning to the all-important first-voting state of Iowa Thursday to campaign on his wife’s behalf. Roughly half of respondents to recent polls say they approve of him, and even more say looking back they approve of how he ran the White House.
Now, tell me again — which Clinton is running for President?? I’m confused.
One of my favorite WWII movies is The Great Escape, depicting the true story of an elaborate escape of American and British prisoners from a German POW camp. The prisoners dug a long tunnel out of their prison, devising a number of ingenious methods to get rid of the dirt they dug out.
Less well known to history is an almost identical escape of German prisoners from an American POW camp, just outside Phoenix, Arizona. Ronald H. Bailey tells the story of how the German prisoners used many of the same tricks as their Allied counterparts to spring 25 of their number to freedom. Of course, even in December and January, the Arizona desert can be quite unforgiving, so the escapees didn’t get far. Many of them voluntarily turned themselves in after a few days.
In the end, all the escaped prisoners landed back in the camp, sentenced to several weeks on a bread and water diet. They were luckier than the Allied escapees, many of whom were shot.
Paleontologist and climate scientist Bob Carter recently gave a lecture at the Annual Conference of the Australian Environmental Foundation in Melbourne. With a deft blend of charts, data, and humor, the good professor demolished the basic premises of Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” In fact, he makes a pretty good case that, if anything, we need to be preparing for the consequences of an approaching global cooling. His lecture is posted in four parts (see links at the bottom of the article).
The more of this sort of thing I see, the greater is my hope that true science may yet get a grip on the hysteria and return to a more moderate treatment of the subject. This is too serious an issue to let politicians and celebrities set the agenda.
Jason Witten (Dallas Cowboys) is the tight end on my fantasy football team. So naturally, I paid close attention to his performance in last night’s game against the Philadelphia Eagles. This play demonstrates why he is one of my favorites. (Look closely at the Eagle who finally tackles him. You can see him hold back just a little, not knowing how to tackle a guy who’s not wearing a helmet.)
This is smash-mouth football.
UPDATE: The original link was removed, so I replaced it with another.
This quote has made the rounds on the internet during the last year or so. (The quote is authentic, although the date usually attributed to it [1907] is wrong. He wrote these words a short time before he died in 1919.)
In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American…
There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.
I wonder how many of our current crop of presidential candidates would endorse this statement?
