The Washington Post‘s Anne Applebaum identifies a real, and deep, problem in America.
Cato’s Jim Dorn responds, in the Financial Times, to Michael Spence.
David Beito is reading Neoconservatism: An Obituary.
Bill Shughart identifies yet another victim of Potomac Fever: Christina Romer.
U.S. News & World Report‘s Mort Zuckerman has harsh words for Pres. Obama’s economic policies. (HT Lyle Albaugh)
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“Bart Hinkle rightly objects to a politically motivated attack on climate science”
Reading the article it didn't appear to me that the attack was on climate science as much as one “scientist's” interpretation of that science and a possible misuse of public funds to promote that interpretation.
“The weak reasoning of the brief makes it clear — for the few who still harbored doubts — that the attorney general is as much concerned with the politics of climate change as he is with the truth about Mann's research.”
It seems to me that a use of funds to promote a political agenda, such as the AGW crowd and supporters have engaged in, would be a fraud perpetrated on the public. It is one thing to properly use the funds secured for research to do that research and publish the results, and perhaps even to advocate for one's interpretation of the results; but, to carry that beyond and to join in conducting a political campaign to impose one's interpretation is using the funds in an inappropriate manner. And, there is no denying that this is exactly what has happened with the AGW koolaid drinkers.
I haven't read the brief prepared and filed by the Virginia AG, and with that in mind I won't comment on what his intentions are or how the brief is worded, and I won't accept Bart Hinkle's presentation of it because I sense a bias in that presentation.
“Mann's defenders correctly point out that his current employer, Penn State, launched an inquiry into his work after the Climategate story broke last fall — and that it cleared him of all wrongdoing. What's more, other investigations of ostensibly shoddy or scurrilous work by the U.N.'s IPCC, the University of East Anglia, et al. have largely exonerated them as well.”
I had intended to address that issue as well.
Whether the evidence warranted exoneration is also a very subjective thing and depends greatly on who is doing the investigation and what their core beliefs and agenda is.
There are many in England and here in the USA that doubt the impartiality of the investigation into University of Angia and disagree not only with the conclusions but with the casual dismissal of the charges of collusion to hide contra-evidence while smearing and isolating those skeptics that dared questions.
Why am I skeptical of the exoneration? Because I saw the same thing in the so-called impartial investigation into the FBI actions at Ruby Ridge and the BATF/FBI actions at Mt. Carmel, Waco, Texas. Those investigations were clearly undertaken to prove a position not to determine all the facts.
Why would any sane person expect different from any “official” investigation especially conducted by government officials?
When people I know assert that there was no wrong-doing because these panels exonerated Jones and Mann et al. I always ask them the same question: “Say Goldman Sachs was accused of some wrong-doing, and they investigated themselves. Say the investigation exonerated Goldman Sachs. Would you believe the investigation's findings?” Of course, everyone says “no.” I then say “How is this different?” Because it is not, most of them just walk away grumbling.
I thought Anne Applebaum's article was pretty interesting. While I travel outside the country on occasion, I've never stayed long enough to notice the things she mentions. Does anyone with a similar living arrangement have any thoughts?
Sir,
Your comment spurred me to read her article to see what she was talking about.
I spent a lot of time overseas with my only contact with the USA my communications and the USAF Times as news. But, that alone is not the source of my reply. The true source of my reply is living, trained observation, and analytic thinking. Those three things produce the understanding that I will try to be brief in stating.
First and foremost either Ms. Applebaum is either a very skilled socialist operative whose agenda is perpetrating the socialist narrative, or else she is a very typical pond scum intellect. In short she seems to be made of the same stuff as muirduck, or as others call him muiridiot, muirmoron.
One thing I would observe as a traveler of old and some more recent, is she makes her erroneous contrasts between the USA and Europe based on what she does not notice in Europe but does in the USA. Socialism is still new enough and incomplete enough here in the USA that upheaval and protest accompanies the acceptance. They frequently go hand in hand. In Europe most nations have been socialist for so long that Ms. Applebuam doesn't notice the evidence. Take transportation, in most nations the passenger rail runs night and day either half hourly or hourly during off-peak times, and most of the time it runs with virtually empty cars. Those cars are subsidized by enormous non-rider taxes, but it has been going on for so long that no one in those countries even bothers to complain any more.
Unions are so strong in Europe that strikes are complete and crippling in nations like France and England. The government subsidy is so pervasive that no one even notices, much less a light weight like Ms. Applebaum.
The USA is still trying to come to grips with what people like Ms. Applebaum and her fellow socialist koolaid drinkers have brought that we see contradictory and hypocritical actions and speech all around us.
Her article, while being correct in many ways, fails to address the whys of the things she sees are so. This is typical of most of the looney left. The looney left has worked diligently for some 100 plus years now to create the conditions Ms. Applebaum cites in her article, those conditions did not happen through natural evolution.
It is my observation that the game the looney left plays is to screw things up and then complain loudly about things being screwed up, while using the MSM and tons of money to convince the sheeple that it was conservatism and capitalism that caused the problem.
You can see that tactic in miniature in focusing on the looney left attack on the republicans as being the “party of no”, since the democrats took the house and senate, an attack that has continued and intensified when Obama was electyed president. The label “party of no” is a derogatory label and the MSM picked it up in their sycophantic support of all things leftist. Yet, no sane person wants to see the looney left as represented by the democrat party shove this nation into to full-blown socialism, which is exactly what all the programs the republicans are saying no to, are designed to do.
Back to Ms. Applebaum, her article is so full of holes it is just another looney left propaganda piece designed to contribute to the general confusion that most sheeple feel.
I suggest you read through her article again with my critique in mind and on each claim she makes, stop and try to think of why that would be so today, when this nation up until the influx of European style socialists and communists in the early 1900s, was resolutely conservative and rapidly becoming the economic powerhouse of the world. In spite of the looney left it still became the economic powerhouse, but what could we have become without the anchor of socialism dragging us down.
In closing, think of this: Prior to the industrial revolution and the influx of European immigrants, no one in America thought it was the government's place and responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and care for us. There were a huge number of Chinese in the mid-1800s, for instance, who were allowed to immigrate to provide labor in the west, and they didn't being that socialist crap with them.
Muirduck meet Ms Applebaum, Ms. Applebaum meet muirduck.
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