Free Speech, Draw the Line

Anyone half-awake to American life in recent years knows there is a large effort under way to banish that bedrock principle of protection for words that offend. Free-speech traditions are under pressure on campuses, in high schools, in the media, in the streets and in sports.

That the court’s liberal justices— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan —joined the majority suggests these four see what is going on, that letting the ability to speak one’s mind slip away under this silencing weight will damage all Americans.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/saving-chief-wahoo-1498084781

Hard to believe that anyone things the government should be involved in this stuff.  

Missed this one from 3 years ago ...

There are many, ahem, bombshells in this one.  I remember being there in 2006 and the guys I worked with said, "nope, we were looking for nukes and their precursors, didn't find any."
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390517/bush-didnt-lie-deroy-murdock

Nye's Ill Logic

In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man." At that point, there were maybe a billion humans on Earth, so we might forgive him for worrying. In 1800, the life expectancy of the average British citizen -- Britain then being the leading light of the world -- was 39 years. Most humans lived in pitiless poverty that is increasingly rare in most parts of the contemporary world.

Now, had Nye been around in the early 19th century, he'd almost surely have been smearing anyone skeptical of the miasma theory of disease. The problem is he lacks imagination; he's unable to understand that science is here to help humanity adapt and overcome, not constrict it. Anyway, 7-plus billion people later, extreme poverty was projected to fall below 10 percent for the first time ever in 2015. Most of those gains have been made in the midst of the world's largest population explosion.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2017/04/28/bill_nyes_view_of_humanity_is_repulsive_133738.html

There's a lot of bad science out there - people like to imply that everyone doing science is doing it well, and that is just not so.  People also like to pretend that science provides answers on complex questions that cannot be subjected to randomized trials, and that is also not so.

It is easy to believe that we're constructing a food system that delivers so much bad food with such a complex system of production and delivery that we have to run out one day.  Perhaps we will.  Killing people to prevent that ... ridiculous.

Pretending that our socialized nations could survive population decline is also ridiculous, and when the enlightened ones quit having kids they'll find that like the Shakers, their values rapidly decline in significance. Good luck with that meek idea to "not have a kid so you can save the world" idea.  The fertile will inherit the earth.

Converting to Freedom?

To switch from music to economics might sound like moving from the sublime to the dismal. Yet as paradoxical as it seems, economics is what enabled me finally to deliver something like Bach’s answer about my own work. As a Catholic dedicated to the welfare of those at the periphery of society, I am an expert witness to the fact that there has never been a better system than free enterprise for empowering real people to pull themselves out of poverty. There has never been a better system to allow people to unlock the unique sense of dignity that comes with earning their own way, deploying their talents to serve their community, colleagues or customers, and taking home justifiable pride in—and rewards for—their efforts. And there is no reason, if we are serious about our Christian apostolate, that free enterprise should become an idol in itself, impoverish anyone or capture our souls.
http://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2017/02/06/confessions-catholic-convert-capitalism

It's a Big Old Crazy Entitlement Spending World

From 1975 to 2015, social spending by federal and state governments quadrupled in constant dollars, to more than $1 trillion. America now spends enough to give every person in poverty more than $20,000 per year. And yet lamentations for a collapsing safety net are rising in both volume and pitch.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439796/medicaid-spending-problems-abound-reform-vehemently-resisted?target=topic&tid=2430

Some perspective: We’re spending more than seven times as much on improper, illegal federal payments as we do on NASA. We’re spending nearly 20 times as much on improper, illegal federal payments as we do on the National Science Foundation. We could build 13 Ford-class aircraft carriers every year for what we are spending on improper and illegal payments driven by Obamacare. We’re spending twice as much on improper and illegal payments as it would cost to pay all the tuition costs of every American college student. (Not that having Uncle Stupid do that is a good idea.) If improper and illegal federal payments were an economy of their own, that economy would be bigger than Hungary’s and and more than twice the size of Guatemala’s.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439919/medicaid-fraud-staggering-cost-140-billion

Good for the Obama Goose?

But more to the point, it was McCain up to his old tricks: Ingratiating himself to the anti-Trump press by playing its champion, in a bid to be the media's darling.

What stands out here is the hypocrisy of his claims. He's suddenly concerned about press freedoms and dictators?

Where was McCain when President Obama was systematically violating press freedoms every which way to Tuesday?

Seven examples of Obama's attacks on a free press spring to mind and not one of them drew any significant criticism from McCain.

Where was McCain when Fox News correspondent James Rosen was illegally followed around by Obama's Department of Justice in 2013 over a story he published on North Korean activities? It was a clear-cut example of reporters just doing their jobs, even as someone in government was leaking the story, but Team Obama went after Rosen with the Espionage Act.



Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/where_was_mccain_when_obama_attacked_the_free_press.html#ixzz4ZM8VaIr0
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Thoughts on AGW

The planet is getting warmer, human activity is a main factor, and the consequences will be catastrophic. It is here that the claims cease being mostly scientific in nature and begin to become political and economic questions. Unsurprisingly, it is here that the emotional tenor of the debate starts to become shrill, with visions of maritime nations lost, New York City under water, and the like. In truth, the IPPC predicts a warming, over the next century, of 1–3.5 degrees Celsius. Much of that warming, IPPC concludes, will take place at the poles; it will not be evenly distributed around the globe, and the organization writes that “on regional scales, confidence in future climate projections remains low. . . . The degree to which regional climate variability will change also remains uncertain.”

In economic terms, which Jim Manzi has considered extensively, the damage is equivalent to 1–2 percent of global GDP — a century from now. Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn concludes that the damage is more like 0.08–0.24 percent of global GDP — again, 100 years from now, when global GDP is expected to be many times larger than it is now. Real damage, to be sure, but something less than Armageddon. 
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/228756/what-think-about-global-warming-kevin-d-williamson

This is an old piece, but still sums up the situation.  They can't prove, but they have a strongly held belief that, human action is a cause of warming.  The warming of late is so small it is within the rather large margin of error in measurements.  There are several issues with the accuracy of the data - adjustments and assumptions made by the government keepers of the data sets often seeming like these are intentionally hidden.

The killer of any real AGW action though is - why bother?  How do we know what would happen if things warmed?  Who would it hurt, who would it help?  Never mind the matter who what would or could be done to mitigate human contributions to warming, who would enforce it, and why on earth would non-wealthy nations support these efforts?

Calm down, be ready if warming happens, be rich enough to adapt, focus on economic growth around the world to have options to help humankind in the event AGW real, causes big problems, and needs a world leader to intervention.