Saturday roundup

For the first several years after identity politics had ruined the humanities in our universities, it was still possible to point to the sciences and say, "At least there's one area on campus in which the pursuit of objective truth is still sacrosanct."

Not anymore. Some major journals that focus on physics, chemistry and biology, as well as schools themselves are going in for "other ways of knowing":

A popular idea here is that different groups have different “ways of knowing,” different modes of sense-making, and even different epistemic paradigms. To insist on the exclusionary standard of “Western rationality” would therefore amount to suppressing black, Indigenous, or even female knowledges. And, since knowledge and power are said to form an indissociable nexus, the insistence on universal scientific standards is, by this logic, connected to the perpetuation of (male) white supremacy.

The way to remedy this injustice, some therefore argue, is to explicitly politicize science so as to reveal it as a culturally biased enterprise. In Canada, where I live, this political project is often referred to as the “decolonization of the university,” and operates under the institutional umbrella of EDI (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion). Though it sometimes couches itself in utilitarian or incremental terms (a demand for, say, better, more effective teaching methods that serve to develop the potential of all groups), the most far-reaching EDI initiatives effectively subordinate science to political activism and even mystical obscurantism.

In its most elaborate form, EDI subjects science to the same treatment as has already been meted out to the Western literary canon: a relentless deconstructionwhereby each axiom, value, and commitment is presented as infected by cultural imperialism. This method of criticism has led, for example, to such oddities as feminist philosopher of science Sandra Harding’s suggestion that Newton’s laws might be accurately referred to as “Newton’s rape manual.” These critiques were once confined to social commentary that was distinct from the actual work of scientists. As I’ve learned first-hand, that may be changing.

Andrew T. Walker has a piece at Christianity Today entitled "Bostock Is As Bad As You Think." He says that to think that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act will protect faith-based institutions from the encroachment of tyranny is dangerous wishful thinking:

On Thursday, Senate Democrats attempted a voice vote to pass the Equality Act, legislation profoundly hostile to religious liberty. To do this by “unanimous consent” only signals that Democrats, with the wind at their backs, have little desire to defend religious freedom and are advancing a take-no-prisoners approach in their culture war victory.

In a move that demonstrates just how cowed Republicans are in wanting to spend any political capital on defending religious liberty, only three Republican Senators rose to challenge it: Senators Josh Hawley, Jim Lankford, and Mike Lee. Were it not for these three Senators, the Equality Act would surely become law. Even still, given Monday’s ruling, it seems that the spirit of the Equality Act has indeed become law, and all that awaits are its future entailments elsewhere in federal law.

A lesser-known feature of the Equality Act undermines the argument that RFRA will sufficiently protect religious dissenters. To understand why the Religious Freedom Restoration Act is not the permanent salve some declare it to be, consider that a provision of the Equality Act aims at specifically undoing RFRA of its provisions where they come in conflict with sexual orientation and gender identity. The firewall heralded as the last preserve of religious liberty is already on the chopping block.

Toxic legislation with little resistance is not a good sign for religious liberty’s future. And yet, here we are.

The Left's desire to stomp God-based living into oblivion has been made quite explicit:

In 2016, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet infamously compared those with traditional views about sex and gender to racists and Nazis. He was more than honest about what victors in the culture war ought to do: Give them no quarter. Writes Tushnet,

For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.

“No normative pull at all.” What does that mean? It means the Judeo-Christian understanding of sexuality and gender are not remotely persuasive or deserving of protection. It means to leave no room for it to flower or grow, especially if it is a hindrance to social justice. This hypothesis is what a lot of us have been saying for some time: Nothing within the internal logic of progressivism explains why there should be robust protections for those holding beliefs deemed harmful to society.

Are we really to believe that cultural elites so brazenly contemptuous of historic Christian belief will have the magnanimity to leave cultural and public space for those who they liken to racists to continue in their bigotry? We can hope, but I am not optimistic.

The unredacted version of Bolton's book makes clear just how unfit to be president Donald Trump is:

Vanity Fair has seen unredacted pages from the book and it’s clear why the White House tried to keep Trump’s words secret: they are deeply embarrassing and illustrate Trump’s naked politicization of America’s foreign policy.

According to an unredacted passage shown to Vanity Fair by a source, Trump’s ask is even more crudely shocking when you read Trump’s specific language. “Make sure I win,” Trump allegedly told Xi during a dinner at the G20 conference in Osaka, Japan last summer. “I will probably win anyway, so don’t hurt my farms.… Buy a lot of soybeans and wheat and make sure we win.”

The Very Stable Genius is solely driven by self-glorification:

Bolton writes that Trump told Xi on a phone call ahead of their G20 meeting: “I miss you,” and then said, “this is totally up to you, but the most popular thing I’ve ever been involved with is making a deal with China.… Making a deal with China would be a very popular thing for me.’”

The you-don't-have-to-dismantle-our-departments-we're-bailing trend in the law enforcement field is present in DC:

Nearly three-fourths of Washington's Metropolitan Police Department said in a poll that they are considering leaving the force amid a police reform bill recently passed by the D.C. Council. 

The proposal would require law enforcement body camera footage to be released to the public more quickly following a police-related shooting and would restrict when officers can use lethal force. It also would prohibit the department from purchasing military-style equipment from the federal government. 

Local lawmakers stopped an attempt by one council member at large who proposed to limit the size of the force and cap it at 3,500 from its current size of 3,863. However, several hundred on the force revealed to the D.C. Police Union, which represents 3,600 Washington officers, detectives, and sergeants, that they are looking to leave anyway. 

According to the survey of 600 local law enforcement members, of the 71% considering leaving, 25% may retire earlier than planned, 35% are seeking jobs at other law enforcement agencies, and 39% are considering leaving law enforcement altogether.

For the first time in more than eight years, Iran is obstructing inspections of its nuclear facilities.  

What these snot-nosed little urchins who confront government officials about the global climate need to be told

As LITD has discussed before, there's some anecdotal evidence out there that a trend is emerging by which school children confront legislators and basically extort them over the subject of the global climate. We all know about the gaggle of them that confronted Senator Feinstein in her office with the not-so-veiled message that they'd brand her as indifferent to this "crisis" in the public's mind if she didn't immediately get on board with their demands. And a couple of days earlier, I saw the same thing played out on the local level, with kids confronting the city council.

In that case, they cited the usual litany of fires, droughts, floods and hurricanes.

Okay, kiddies, here's what you need to know before you do any further spouting off:

Temperatures have risen by tenths or hundredths of a degree in recent years – less than the margin of error, and most of the “highest temperatures on record” have been in urban areas, where local manmade heat skews the data. We’re also experiencing record cold and snow in numerous locations.
The average prediction by 102 climate models is now a full degree Fahrenheit abovewhat satellites are measuring. Michael Mann’s climate model could concoct hockey sticks from telephone numbers and other random numbers. Are we supposed to trust these models on critical energy policy?

Violent tornadoes (F3 to F5) averaged 56 per year from 1950 to 1985. But from 1986 to 2018 only 34 per year touched down in the USA on average – and for the first time ever not one did in 2018. The March 3 Alabama tornado was tragic, and the 2-mile-wide 2013 Oklahoma City monster lasted 40 minutes. But the 1925 Tri-State Twister was a mile wide, traveled a record 220 miles, lasted a record 3.5 hours, and killed a record 695 people.

Hurricanes becoming more frequent and intense? From 1920 through 1940, ten Category 3-5 hurricanes made US landfall; from 1960 through 1980, eleven; 1980 through 2000, ten; 2001 through 2018, nine. There is no trend. Moreover, Harvey and Irma in 2017 were the first category 3-5 hurricanes to make U.S. landfall in a record twelve years. The previous record was nine years, set in the Civil War era.

A warmer Arctic? The Washington Post did report that “the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer, and in some places seals are finding the water too hot.” But that was in 1922!
Polar bear populations are the highest on record: between 24,500 and 28,500 or more of them!
Oceans cannot become “more acidic,” because they are not and have never been acidic. Earth’s oceans are slightly alkaline. That slight alkalinity has decreased slightly (from 8.2 on the pH scale to 8.1) over the past few decades. But they are not getting acidic … and won’t anytime soon.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is the miracle molecule without which most life on Earth would cease to exist. In fact, the more CO2 in the air, the faster and better crop, forest and grassland plants grow – and the better they can withstand droughts, diseases, and damage from insects and viruses.

In fact, a slightly warmer planet with more atmospheric CO2 would be tremendously beneficial for plants, wildlife and humanity. A colder planet with less carbon dioxide would greatly reduce arable land extent, growing seasons, wildlife habitats, crop production and our ability to feed humanity. 

And today's Exhibit A of an utterly worthless Republican:

Millions of Americans are exasperated and angry about Republicans like Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois, who recently whined that it’s “just not worth the fight anymore” to battle climate alarmism – and protect our nation’s and our children’s future. These elected officials badly need spinal implants. Or they should resign and turn their seats over to someone who will fight for us.

"Just not worth the fight anymore." How do you sleep at night, Representative Shimkus? If Western civilization does indeed crumble, the likes of you will be culpable.

If one has even a subatomic particle of integrity, one never gives up on insisting that the truth get an airing in the public square.

 

Thursday roundup

Everything Robert Reich says or writes is, without exception, completely idiotic, but he has outdone himself with his latest proposal:

Robert Reich isn’t merely a former cabinet secretary, he’s a Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law grad . . . You need some mighty elite education to produce something this embarrassing.

The only response to an unconstitutional presidency is to annul it. Annulment would repeal all of an unconstitutional president’s appointments and executive actions, and would eliminate the official record of the presidency.

Annulment would recognize that all such appointments, actions and records were made without constitutional authority…

After all, the Supreme Court declares legislation that doesn’t comport with the Constitution null and void, as if it had never been passed.

It would logically follow that the Court could declare all legislation and executive actions of a presidency unauthorized by the Constitution to be null and void, as if Trump had never been elected.

What does “eliminate the official record of the presidency” mean? In the presidential portrait gallery, there’ll just be a big question mark in a frame where number 45 should be?

Thinking about the chaos that would result if the courts suddenly nullified 18 months’ worth of executive branch action across all arms of the government makes me crave sedatives. The immigration tangle alone would be a mess of historic proportions. If only to avoid the bureaucratic red-tape apocalypse, SCOTUS would never go along with Reich’s suggestion. Plus, how could one hope to show that collusion was a but-for cause of Trump’s victory? Absent the Kremlin fiddling with vote totals, which no one has claimed, the counterargument will always be offered that collusion was essentially harmless error — an impeachable offense, sure, but by no means evidence in itself that Trump wouldn’t have won anyway without Putin’s help.

My recent posts about McCain have generated some spirited back-and-forth, and in the days since his passing, I've thought a great deal about just how much weight his basic and undeniable patriotism should be given vis-a-vis the hard-to-forgive moves - voting against "A"CA skinny repeal comes to mind - which is one way his pettiness and vindictiveness (granted, not uncommon traits in the world of politics) manifested itself. But this business of deciding before he passed who would and would not be welcome at his funeral, and putting his 2008 running mate Sarah Palin in the latter group stains his legacy not a week out from his death.  Especially juxtaposed against the fact that the Most Equal Comrade is going to deliver a eulogy.

LITD likes this: A trend is afoot whereby restaurants are starting to ban diners' use of cell phones at their tables.

What is the best way to proceed on this? Victor Davis Hanson at NRO says the VSG administration should declassify any and all documents pertaining to the Mueller probe.  On the other hand, Lee Smith at Real Clear Investigations sees reasons why the VSG continues to opt to not do so.

LITD and other outlets have had some titters over this year's Burning Man and how it's become stratified, ranging from the scroungy hippies to high-livin' types who have lobster flown in, and how rules of conduct for the Orgy Dome have become a point of focus. A piece in the SF Gate today looks over the gathering's entire history and makes clear that, from the outset, it's been a prime example of how bored and worn-out the counterculture - which some time ago really became the culture - is, and how full of themselves those who've been perpetuating it for the last 50-plus years are.

Michael R. Strain of the American Enterprise Institute gives a big thumbs down to Marco Rubio's idea of funding paid family leave by letting people take some of their Social Security build-up early.

Identity-politics jackboots never let an opportunity to baselessly accuse someone of racism, and they got right to work when Florida Pub gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis said this:

Florida elections are always competitive, and this is a guy who, although he’s much too liberal for Florida, I think he’s got huge problems with how he’s governed Tallahassee, he is an articulate spokesman for those far-left views, and he’s a charismatic candidate. I watched those Democrat debates, and none of that is my cup of tea, but he performed better than those other people there. So we’ve got to work hard to make sure that we continue Florida going in a good direction, let’s build off the success we’ve had on Governor Scott, the last thing we need to do is to monkey this up by trying to embrace a socialist agenda with huge tax increases and bankrupting the state. That’s not going to work.

You know exactly what word they pounced on, don't you? Of course, all normal people are going to roll their eyes at the ridiculousness of the attempt to impart a sinister motive, and so you'd think that the Dem candidate, Andrew Gillum - he of the proposal to raise the corporate tax rate to 40 percent - would have just quietly moved on to something substantive, but, no, he got in on the grandstanding.

And the kicking-around of the idea that perhaps DeSantis should have paused and searched for a term less susceptible to controversy makes me want to puke. That's rank capitulation to the jackboots.

I'd rather see more of the attitude of this guy at Facebook:

"We are a political monoculture that's intolerant of different views," Brian Amerige, a senior Facebook engineer, wrote in a post entitled "We Have a Problem with Political Diversity." The New York Times first obtained and reported on the post.

"We claim to welcome all perspectives, but are quick to attack — often in mobs — anyone who presents a view that appears to be in opposition to left-leaning ideology," Amerige charged. "We throw labels that end in *obe and *ist at each other, attacking each other's character rather than their ideas."

"We do this so consistently that employees are afraid to say anything when they disagree with what's around them politically," the engineer explained. "HR has told me that this is not a rare concern, and I've personally gotten over a hundred messages to that effect." On political issues like "'social justice,' immigration, 'diversity', and 'equality,'" Amerige warned, employees "can either keep quiet or sacrifice your reputation and career."

The engineer also noted events that demonstrated these fears are justified. "We tear down posters welcoming Trump supporters," he admitted. "We regularly propose removing [Peter] Thiel from our board because he supported Trump. We're quick to suggest firing people who turn out to be misunderstood, and even quicker to conclude our colleagues are bigots."

Amerige warned that Facebook has "made 'All Lives Matter' a fireable offense." He noted the "witch hunt" against Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, who was pressured to leave Facebook when news spread he had donated to an organization that spread memes against Hillary Clinton online. "We ask HR to investigate those who dare to criticize Islam's human rights record for creating a 'non inclusive environment.' And they called me a transphobe when I called out our corporate art for being politically radical," Amerige noted.

A former A&R person for Atlantic Records has written a memoir that gives a sordid account of Ahmet Ertegun's behavior that is, shall we say, unflattering.

Watching porn in the office, using dildos as decor, and executives bragging about the size of their manhood: This was the record industry before the age of MeToo. 

Dorothy Carvello, the first female A&R executive for Atlantic Records - the label responsible for bringing us musical legends such as Ray Charles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Aretha Franklin - was 24 years old when she landed a job as a secretary for founder Ahmet Ertegun.

The music mogul had a nightly routine which consisted of downing 14 vodka tonics, four lines of cocaine, two joints, and plenty of women.

And every morning, it was Carvello's job to clean the drugs and vomit off his clothes and track down at which clubs he had left his credit cards.  

Once again, we see that a singularly visionary shaper of American culture had flaws commensurate with his greatness. Another post about human sexuality and human nobility may be brewing.

The older I get - and I mean with each passing day - and the more I witness the exposure of great artists' dark sides (and Ertegun while certainly a businessman, was also an artist), cultures of animal-level hedonism within heretofore respected institutions of entertainment, journalism and even Christianity, and the pettiness and turf protection that so thoroughly permeates our government, the more I see that there is no substitute for turning ourselves toward - and turning ourselves over to - Lord Jesus:

. . . genuine Christianity thrives under hardship. This does not mean that we should welcome persecution and the erosion of religious liberty but rather that if they do come, we’ll be alright. 

Don’t be afraid. Don’t allow the politics of fear to control and consume you. 

Do you remember in the last presidential election when President Trump kept claiming that the system is rigged? He was right but in a completely different way than he was intending. 

If you are a Christian, the entire system of the universe if rigged in your favor. No matter who gets elected or what rights are recognized or taken away, everything ultimately works together for your good and God’s glory (Romans 8:18-39). 

So the next time you step into the booth, don’t vote scared. 

Vote like the citizen of another, better, eternally good kingdom. 

You have a living hope. 

No one can take it away.

A Brown University professor of behavioral and social sciences published an article in a respected journal presenting the findings of her study of rapid-onset gender dysphoria - in other words, the phenomenon of momentum gathering in the number of kids wanting to claim they resent the DNA they were born with, because it's this decade's cool thing to do - and, once the school realized what she quite objectively presented, it removed the article from news distribution.

If there's a climate consensus, it just might be the opposite of the one claimed by the jackboots

Check this out:

The authors of the survey report, however, note that the overwhelming majority of scientists fall within four other models, each of which is skeptical of alarmist global warming claims.

The survey finds that 24 percent of the scientist respondents fit the “Nature Is Overwhelming” model. "In their diagnostic framing, they believe that changes to the climate are natural, normal cycles of the Earth.” Moreover, “they strongly disagree that climate change poses any significant public risk and see no impact on their personal lives.”

Another group of scientists fit the “Fatalists” model. These scientists, comprising 17 percent of the respondents, “diagnose climate change as both human- and naturally caused. ‘Fatalists’ consider climate change to be a smaller public risk with little impact on their personal life. They are skeptical that the scientific debate is settled regarding the IPCC modeling.” These scientists are likely to ask, “How can anyone take action if research is biased?”

 H/T: Allen West

It's fine to frack

When it came to the EPA vs. The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality as to which agency had the more rigorous report on the foul-smelling water near Pavillion, Wyoming, the state-level body delivered the goods:

In some of the biggest news which will not come as “news” to anyone who follows the industry, the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality concluded a two year study this week into reports of ground water contamination in Pavillion, Wyoming. There had been reports of “foul smelling water” in two test wells drilled by the EPA near one of the many drilling sites in the gas field half a decade ago. The initial EPA report which was ready to blame fracking for the contamination immediately came under heavy criticism in the scientific community and was never released. Still the Wyoming DEQ went ahead with this extensive investigation. Their conclusion? There was no contamination of the ground water from the drilling sites and the EPA most likely caused the problem themselves. (Associated Press)

A final state report released Thursday on foul-smelling well water in Wyoming contradicts an EPA report from five years ago that ignited a national backlash when it suggested hydraulic fracturing was the cause of the contamination.

Bacteria were more likely to blame for the problem in Pavillion than the oil and gas drilling process known as fracking, officials with the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality said after a two-year study that was hailed by fracking advocates.

“Today’s announcement from the Wyoming DEQ doesn’t just close the case on Pavillion, it’s a knockout blow for activists who have tried to use Pavillion as a key talking point for their ban-fracking agenda,” said Randy Hildreth, Colorado director of Energy in Depth, an advocacy arm of the Independent Petroleum Association of America.

The AP story really doesn’t go into the level of detail we need to fully grasp what a debacle this is for the EPA. To get those sorts of facts you’ll want to see the analysis – complete with photos – over at Energy Indepth. Since the contaminants found in the test wells didn’t match anything going into the ground at the fracking site, the DEQ finally sent a camera down into the wells. What do you suppose they found? First of all, the EPA well was drilled in a defective fashion. The artificial materials in the well almost certainly came from the drilling process when the EPA dug the wells.

Second, the junk they allowed in there clogged the screens down at the base of the well. This allowed stagnant, standing water to build up at the bottom and it became infested with bacteria and biological agents. (As happens with any stagnant pools of water.) The bacterial infestation was what was causing the smell. The origin of the problem the EPA has been complaining about since 2011 was almost certainly caused by… you guessed it… the EPA. Randy Hildreth at Energy Indepth explains why this should close the books on these claims by anti-fracking activists once and for all.

The report is a devastating blow for the national environmental activist campaign against fracking, which has made Pavillion a key talking point in its effort to shut down oil and gas development across the country. For years, anti-fracking activists have misrepresented and exaggerated the EPA’s initial conclusions to support their calls for a nationwide fracking ban. They have also ignored serious criticisms of the EPA’s work by state environmental regulators and even other federal agencies, namely the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Land Management, in their desperate attempt to build a case for banning fracking.

Those criticisms from state and federal officials have focused on a pair of water-quality monitoring wells, drilled by the EPA, which were poorly constructed and likely introduced the very contaminants that some have tried to blame on fracking. Eventually, under the weight of these criticisms, the EPA backed down. The agency never submitted its draft report, released in late 2011, for peer review and handed the Pavillion case back to state regulators.

The actual results of the EPA monitoring well study (once you subtract out the bacteria introduced by their own mistake) were the same as other tests done across the country. In Pennsylvania the energy companies engaged in fracking there allowed the state DEQ to inject special chemical markers into their drilling fluid and then monitor test wells nearby for a period of years. Those special markers don’t occur in nature, so if they showed up in the drinking water we’d know where they came from.

Not one single well ever tested positive for the markers over the entire period of study.

Human advancement 1, planned decline 0.

The arrogance of the presumption that empiricism is the end-all and be-all of societal organization

G. Shane Morris at The Federalist nails the heart of why Neil DeGrasse Tyson's tweet "Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence" is so objectionable:

The idea that religious people approach the world with dogmatic blinders while secular scientists approach it with a stiff upper lip and brave objectivity is laughable, but it isn’t new. The republic of reason Tyson thinks will logic away the world’s problems has been tried before. It was called the French Revolution, and it caused a lot of people to lose their heads—literally and figuratively. (Tyson should get a pass on this, since he’s already shown his grasp on history is tenuous, at best).

Man has been trying to achieve Rationalia for centuries—millennia, even. All the way back to the Tower of Babel, we thought our intelligence and ingenuity would redeem us, and we were wrong. Rationalia and its one-sentence constitution are, to quote Jeff Goldblum’s character from one of the way-too-many Jurassic Park sequels, “the worst idea in a long, sad history of bad ideas.”

But Rationalia is also the heart and soul of the progressive project for this country. Left-wing technocrats like Tyson advocate ceding control of our lives to an elite corps of experts every time they beat the consensus drum on climate change, or equate abortion-on-demand with “science.”

Rationalia and the rationale behind it are precisely the reason progressives today are so comically intolerant of anyone to the right of Lindsey Graham. If you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t have a worldview—that your beliefs are all self-evident, objective facts of reality—then anyone who disagrees with you must be, as Richard Dawkins so charmingly put it, “ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked).”

Morris goes on to cite some recent looks at how the whole notion of peer review is in shambles. Science, like any endeavor undertaken by fallen human beings, is vulnerable to  corruption.

That's why humility, a character trait at the core of Judaism and Christianity, is something the DeGrasse Tyson types of this world could use a bit of.

Sunday morning roundup

David Harsanyi at The Federalist on the garbage that passes for science education in government schools:

Have you experienced a school “science week” lately? You should.

The chances that you’ll find a student whose goal is to one day extract fossil fuels more effectively or use genetically modified crops—or any real innovation, for that matter—to help the fortunes of billions of impoverished humans around the world is around zero. Most students will mimic what they hear, and claim to want to turn pond scum or discarded plastic bottles into eco-fuel. They get an A for caring.

Many kids confuse science with environmental activism. Who can blame them? Science isn’t only the systematic study of structure and behavior in physical and natural world through observation and experimentation, but a moral elixir.

“Science” means “panic over climate change.” “Innovation” means pretending to deal with it. And so “science week” at your local public school is probably more like “green week”—which, in turn, is just part of green year. Because every day is Earth Day.

In many states science standards are plummeting, though the prevalence of green education programs is rising. Perhaps this is not coincidental. Children seem exceptionally concerned about overpopulation and a variation in the climate, which they are told portends dystopia despite all evidence to the contrary. “Science” means creating apprehension about human progress.

How many teachers do you think point out on Earth Day that human existence—despite our generally indifference to climate change—has quantifiably improved in almost every area? Do they know the world is effectively “drowning in oil”? How many kids understand that air and water are all cleaner today than they were when their teachers were kids?

How many comprehend that climate change is a mildly negative externality of the greatest poverty-killing project ever devised by man? Has anyone asked these kids if they believe a billion people should be deprived of basic modern necessities and be forced to continue live in destitution? How many teachers explain to their students that if innovators of the past had agonized over “environmental friendliness,” we’d be living in mud houses and most of us would be dead at the hands of untreated infections?

And, in the course of an article the main point of which is the complex and multilayered relationships among and between post-America and the major players of the Asian continent, Kevin Williamson at NRO pens today's how-do-we-go-about-hog-tying-Laura-Ingraham-and-making-her-read-this-aloud-on-her-show paragraph:

 . . . the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade-liberalization pact that Mrs. Clinton has been walking sideways away from for months. TPP is a proposal that is good and necessary in its generalities, worrisome and sometimes unpersuasive in its particulars, and currently caught between a Democratic electorate that hates free trade per se and a Republican electorate that is one-third composed of people who hate free trade per se and otherwise dominated by those who believe, not without some reason, that President Obama would not put forth such an agreement without a rascally purpose, occult though it may be. This leaves the United States in the very difficult position of needing to make the case for free trade abroad when it is a minority taste at home.

Kimberly Ross at Red State marvelously articulates the reason why real conservatives will remain #NeverTrump no matter what happens between now and the end of time:

 . . . let’s just say for now that Trump would beat Hillary. Congratulations, the Republican party has taken back the White House. But at what cost? It would be nothing but a Pyrrhic victory. Do we really want to set back conservatism? Trump has shown himself to be weak and substance-free on issues foreign, domestic, and social. It’s difficult to keep up with how often his so-called “policy stances” change. He is widely supported by those who are fueled by nothing but racist tendencies, as I’ve seen firsthand. He couldn’t care less about basic tenets of conservatism, like being 100% pro-life. And to top it off, he’s an immature individual who seems to be doing all this for fun, not to actually improve America, and certainly not promote conservative values.

Prince had been an opioid addict for his entire career:

Prince's former drug dealer has revealed the full extent of the late-star's secret drug addiction - telling how the superstar was hooked on powerful opiates for over 25 years.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Online, the performer's long-time dealer - who asked to be named only as Doctor D - revealed the singer would spend up to $40,000 a time on six-month supplies of Dilaudid pills and Fentanyl patches - both highly addictive opioid pain killers.

Prince, who was found dead on Thursday at his home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was secretly cremated in an intimate ceremony at a nondescript funeral home in Minneapolis shortly after an autopsy was completed on Friday, Radar reports.

Prince's sister Tyka Nelson and another family member reportedly spent a few minutes saying goodbye at the First Memorial Waterston Chapel before the musician was cremated.

His death came just days after sources claimed he overdosed on the opiate Percocet.

Doctor D said the musician, who he described as 'majorly addicted', regularly bought drugs from him between 1984 and 2008. 

The dealer, often to the stars, said Prince suffered crippling stage fright and could not get on stage and perform without the drugs - but had a phobia of doctors so could not obtain a prescription legally.

Tragically, Doctor D suggests it could have been a physician that unknowingly contributed to Prince's death - by prescribing strong pain killers to the singer for his hip condition without knowing the extent of his secret opiate addiction.

He said: 'I first met Prince in 1984 while he was filming the movie Purple Rain and he was already majorly addicted to opiates - I didn't hook him on drugs he was already a really heavy user.'In the beginning he would buy speed as well as Dilaudid.'I would sell him black beauties which were a black pill and cross tops which were also speed pills.'He would use that as a counter balance to get back up again from taking opiates.'That lasted for a couple of years then he would just buy Dilaudid, which is a heroin based opiate. It is highly addictive.'As far as I knew he never took heroin - as that would leave you out of it for days whereas Dilaudid gives you an energy buzz as well as making you feel relaxed - so he preferred it.

And for two pull-no-punches takes on the Most Equal Comrade's edict to the UK that it must stay in the EU in order to get special-relationship-level trade benefits from post-America, check out Charles Moore at The Telegraph and  Peter Hitchens at the Daily Mail, who is so honked off that he has decided there never was a special relationship.

The difference between normal-people scientific inquiry and government imposition of an ideologically driven narrative

Oh, sheesh. Now it turns out that incandescent bulbs are more energy efficient.

Researchers at the MIT are publicizing that they have fixed the incandescent lightbulb with a brilliant improvement. They have wrapped the interior filament in a crystal glass that both bounces light and contains heat. It recycles energy in a way that addresses the main complaint against Edison’s bulb: It burns far too much energy for the light that it produces.

Why is this interesting? About a decade ago, governments around the world developed a fetish for banning incandescents (through an efficiency rule) and replacing them with expensive LED technology and florescent bulbs. It happened in Europe first but eventually came to the United States. The last American factory to produce them closed in 2010, and they are ever harder to find in even the big-box hardware stores. (As with all such bans, there are exceptions for elites who desire specialty bulbs.)

The change has been seriously annoying for many consumers. It has even given rise to hoarding and gray markets (in Germany, such bulbs were repackaged as “heat balls”). It has produced something of a political backlash, too.

On a personal note, my own dear mother replaced all her incandescents with fluorescents several years ago. I was sitting in her house feeling vaguely irritated by the searing lights in the room — cold and dreary — and had to turn them off. Sitting in the dimly lit room, my thought was: this is what the government has done to us. A great invention from the dawn of modernity is being driven out of use. Do I have to bring my own candles next holiday season?

Why should governments be in the position of deciding what technologies can and cannot be used, as if consumers are too stupid to make such decisions for themselves? Who is to decide what is efficient, and what the proper trade off should be between the energy expended and the light produced?

Maybe some people don’t mind the “inefficiency” of incandescent bulbs relative to the warm and wonderful light they produce. Entrepreneurs need to be able to discern and serve their needs.

If I had a nickel for every time the damn federal government has stuck its nose into areas of life that are none of its f---in' business . . .

The advanced rot of the post-American university - today's edition

The identity-politics / environmentalism jackboots have truly lost their minds:

The following is not an example of academic hijinks, but a serious academic attempt to feminize glaciers.

I bet you didn't know that glaciers were sexist. Well, maybe they're not. But they definitely lack the feminist touch as it relates to "epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge." Or...whatever.

Yes, it's gender theory meets climate change in a clash of two of the titanic irrelevancies of the age. And the results are as banal as you would expect them to be. The paper was vomited forth by a group of University of Oregon historians -- obviously the perfect candidates to write a paper on climate change. And they spared no liberal shibboleth in the making of this mish mash of hash.

Hit and Run:

The recently published, utterly incomprehensible paper was co-authored by a team of historians at the University of Oregon, and funded via a grant from the National Science Foundation. I hope American taxpayers feel like they got their money's worth. From the abstract:

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

You are probably wondering whether I am trolling you. You might be checking the date to make sure this isn't an April Fool's joke. Surely a satirist who set out to write a deliberate parody of left-wing papers using the jargon of the earnest social justice warrior could not have done a better job than a paper on "just and equitable human-ice interactions."

But the paper is real—very real. The University of Oregon, in fact, put out a glowing press release touting its existence.

I'm deeply embarrassed for my species.

Numbers keep coming in; the MSM keeps ignoring them

Who are you going to trust to give you the straight skinny on the climate? Why can't you get this information from the "objective news" sources?

In Germany, a retired geologist and data computation expert named Friederich Karl Ewert recently decided to follow the lead of Heller, Homewood, D'Aleo, et al., and try his hand at comparing archived raw temperature data from many weather stations to currently-reported temperatures from NASA.  Here is the result, reported on November 20 at No Tricks Zone:

From the publicly available data, Ewert made an unbelievable discovery: Between the years 2010 and 2012 the data measured since 1881 were altered so that they showed a significant warming, especially after 1950. […] A comparison of the data from 2010 with the data of 2012 shows that NASA-GISS had altered its own datasets so that especially after WWII a clear warming appears – although it never existed.    

Surprise!  It's "unbelievable."  Actually not, if you've been following this issue at all.  According to my Google search here, the Ewert study has been reported at Breitbart, CNS, No Tricks Zone, Not a Lot of People Know That, Weasel Zippers, Hockey Schtick, Free Republic, The Federalist Papers,  and many others -- all of them conservative-oriented sources.  But somehow no mention at literally any so-called "mainstream" source: New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, etc., etc., etc.  If anybody can find a mention in any mainstream source, I'll be interested to know.  Have the facts really become this partisan?

What Winston Churchill had to say about the truth putting on its pants comes to mind here.

The relentless march of the jackboots - today's edition

The post under this one concerns itself with the Freedom-Haters upending two major American universities over identity politics. There was no specific charge in the cases of University of Missouri Tim Wolfe, or Yale administrator and lecturer Erika Christakis. Screaming mobs were able to turn them into villains merely for declining to get on board with their completely fabricated agenda.

The Freedom-Haters are now using the same ploy with regard to the environment:

Scurry on board the Exxon prosecution express. Lest they be left behind and called “deniers,” Bernie Sanders,Martin O’Malley, the attorney general of New York and Al Gore this week all demanded criminal investigation of Exxon Mobil as a result of recent media “exposés.” 

Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire on Thursday agreed, saying, “There’s a lot of evidence that they misled people.”

Not one of these worthies likely examined the evidence, which tells a story quite different from the claim that Exxon somehow concealed its understanding of the climate debate. But the hurdle rate for “investigative” journalism has apparently become low. The allegedly damning documents that the Los Angeles Times and the website Inside Climate News (ICN) claim to have unearthed were published by Exxon itself, in peer-reviewed journals, on its website, and in archives created by Exxon for public use.

Technically, the reporters wallow in the equivocation fallacy. Uncertainty about whether X=2 is not the same as uncertainty about whether 2+2=4. Acknowledging and even studying man’s impact on the climate, as Exxon has done and continues to do, is not tantamount to endorsing a green policy agenda of highly questionable value.

And that’s the real problem. Read closely and the accusation isn’t really that Exxon misled the public by emphasizing the uncertainties of climate science, which are real. It’s that Exxon refused to sign up for a vision of climate doom that would justify large and immediate costs to reduce fossil fuel use. 

The irony is that, in keeping with the general trend of corporations acquiescing to the  left, energy companies have already established a track record of puking all over themselves to show that they buy into the climate-change fiction, yet it hasn't led to any massive change in national or even world behavior:

But wait, hasn’t this experiment been run? In the early 2000s, BP CEO John Browne began sounding a climate alarm. Ron Oxburgh,the chairman of Shell, gave a speech warning of planetary doom. In 2007, Alcoa, GE, Duke Energy, Ford, DuPont and others endorsed a U.S. cap-and-trade bill. Yet all this failed to move the ball in two successive congresses because Senate Democrats (the second time joined by President Obama) didn’t want to be blamed for jacking up gasoline prices.
The same experiment has also been run globally. Out of 196 countries, 196 have concluded that there is no way, with current technology, to take a big enough whack out of carbon-dioxide emissions at a cost their societies would be prepared to bear.

Exxon has even supported a damn carbon tax for the last six years!

But the goose-steppers are determined to make a criminal enterprise of it.

These goons hate human advancement.

And nothing is stopping them from halting it.

 

 

They stop at nothing

Among the other deranged fictions - such as "gender fluidity" - that the overlords foist upon us is human-caused "climate change."

And the overlords miss no opportunity to insert it into every facet of life.  Witness this maneuver:

Americans trust their doctors, so the White House wants these medical professionals to be a mouthpiece for President Obama’s global warming agenda.

“We also need doctors, nurses and citizens, like all of you”President Obama said in a taped speech presented to medical professionals gathered at the White House, “to get to work to raise awareness and organize folks for real change.”

The Obama administration has been hard at work trying to draw a link between global warming and public health issues. The summit included the U.S. Surgeon General, top administration officials, and public health experts from around the country telling doctors, nurses and other conference goers how to talk about global warming with their patients.

The central message: doctors should warn their patients that global warming could make their health worse.

“I know we have people all around the country, in all of the regions, who are also listening to this conversation, and like all of you in the room, I hope will go out and continue to talk and educate,” echoed Nicole Lurie, assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Health Department.

“We need to engage medical students themselves,” said Vice Admiral Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, “to demand the curriculum change” to prepare them for a warmer future.

Speakers at the White House summit didn’t just tell doctors to go out and raise awareness about global warming, but to also promote the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

“We need people, proponents, to talk about it. Make sure that the public is informed,” said Texas Democratic Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson. “Stand behind the EPA, because they’re attacked every day, all day by many committees.”

Rep. Johnson is referring to EPA rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants — a regulation that has come under fire from Republicans and industries for threatening to raise energy prices and cause job losses.

We get no relief from this totalitarian nightmare, not even in our doctors' offices.