Gorsuch Is A Home Run

If Democrats are looking for a point of vulnerability in either Gorsuch’s integrity or impartiality, they won’t find it. He is basically a Boy Scout. He’s a faithful husband, a good father, a caring neighbor, a generous friend, a man of probity who holds himself to the highest ethical standards. Oh, and he will bring religious diversity to a Court that is entirely Catholic and Jewish: He’s an Episcopalian.

Gorsuch will be a hard man to depict as a ferocious partisan or an ideological judge, which isn’t to say he won’t be described this way by ideologically partisan critics for whom the prospect of a conservative intellectual giant on the Supreme Court is anything but welcome. As Gorsuch himself has frequently observed, including in a widely noted tribute to Scalia, good judges sometimes have to vote or rule in ways they do not like — because that is what the law requires.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/01/ignore-the-attacks-on-neil-gorsuch-hes-an-intellectual-giant-and-a-good-man/?utm_term=.882f42809c67

Obamacare Be Gone

They will also deal with the difficult political task of reforming a massive expansion of Medicaid (the vast majority of Obamacare’s “newly insured” are actually new welfare recipients). They will have to answer Kristof’s claims that “millions of Americans will lose insurance, and thousands more will die unnecessarily each year because of lack of care.” Republicans will have to convince voters that opening up affordable and competitive markets without coercion is preferable to preserving unsustainable state-run programs that grow in perpetuity.
http://thefederalist.com/2017/01/06/gop-does-have-a-plan-to-replace-obamacare-thats-what-scares-democrats/

300 Hacked Emails, That Will Leave a Mark

Then, last Sunday evening, during the NFL playoff game between the New York Giants and the Green Bay Packers, the FBI posted on its website more than 300 emails that Clinton had sent to an unnamed colleague not in the government -- no doubt her adviser Sid Blumenthal -- that had fallen into the hands of foreign powers. It turns out -- and the Sunday night release proves this -- that Blumenthal was hacked by intelligence agents from at least three foreign governments and that they obtained the emails Clinton had sent to him that contained state secrets. Sources believe that the hostile hackers were the Russians and the Chinese and the friendly hackers were the Israelis.
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/12/andrew-napolitano-why-criminal-investigation-hillary-clinton-is-back-to-front-and-center.html?intcmp=ob_article_sidebar_video&intcmp=obnetwork

Energy Poverty Worse than Climate Change

As with so many things, we the well off think of great ideas that crush the poor.

http://reason.com/archives/2016/11/25/energy-poverty-is-much-worse-for-the-poo

Precision in Language

Everyone knows that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but somehow people seem to forget. Endogeneity is a word that can help you remember. Something is endogenous when you don’t know whether it’s a cause or an effect (or both). For example, lots of people note that people who go to college tend to make more money. But how much of this is because college boosts earning power, and how much is because smarter, harder-working, better-connected people tend to go to college in the first place? It’s endogenous. The media is full of stories about how which kind of people stay married, or what diet is associated with better health. Whenever you see these stories, you should ask “What about endogeneity?”
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-05/5-economics-terms-we-all-should-use

If things are getting hotter and carbon levels in the atmosphere are rising, does that mean carbon is causing the temperature changes?  Or are warmer oceans off gassing more carbon dioxide?  Hmmm....

A Jewel

"Start with the EPA.  To the extent that the global warming movement has anything to do with "science," EPA is supposedly where that science is vetted and approved on behalf of the public before being turned into policy.  In fact, under Obama, EPA's principal role on the "science" has been to prevent and stifle any debate or challenge to global warming orthodoxy.  For example, when a major new Research Report came out back in Septemberclaiming to completely invalidate all of the bases on which EPA claims that CO2 is a danger to human health and welfare, and thus to undermine EPA's authority to regulate the gas under the Clean Air Act, EPA simply failed to respond.  In the same vein, essentially all prominent global warming alarmists refuse to debate anyone who challenges any aspect of their orthodoxy.  Well, that has worked as long as they and their allies have controlled all of the agencies and all of the money.  Now, it will suddenly be put up or shut up.  And in case you might think that the science on this issue is "settled," so no problem, you might enjoy this recent round-up at Climate Depot from some of the actual top scientists.  
http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/12/13/some-predictions-for-the-future-in-the-climate-game

Time for the emperor's clothes to come off so to speak.

Solid Reality

In a 1946 essay, George Orwell wrote that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” It’s not just that we’re easily misled. It’s that, by “impudently twisting the facts,” we can convince ourselves of “things which we know to be untrue.” A whole society, he wrote, can deceive itself “for an indefinite time,” and the only check on that mass delusion is that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.” Science is one source of that solid reality. The Trump Administration seems determined to keep it at bay, and the consequences for society and the environment will be profound.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/donald-trumps-war-on-science

I hate to even give this bit of tripe any attention, but I love the quote above - the sword cuts both ways.

The author goes on to say that it has been warmer every year since 2013 or so, but of course ignore that there's no way to know why that may be happening (or that the amounts are so small they are within the margin of error).

One should never deny objective reality, nor should one dismiss those things elevated to the point of theory by the scientific method.  Interestingly, folks like to pretend that AGW is both of those, when it is neither.  AGW cannot be tested by controlled experimentation in a lab, therefore, only an accurate model or models can prove that it is more than a conjecture.  The models today are not even close to accurate.

There's no denying these models, because they prove nothing, over and above that we don't yet know about why the climate changes.  It could, for example, be due to the sun, bad measurements, or the fact that things have been warming since the 1850s.

Science tells us not to trust scientists.  We don't have to deny a lack of scientific proof with regard to AGW, since it simply does not exist.