George Rebane
The AGW hysteria has become very hard to maintain in circles that still participate in scientific debate and within the public forum that follows such debate. The hysteria is unaffected by such debate within the community of grant-funded scientists and their political sponsors (wherein the 'debate is over'), and of course their double dummy lemmings (aka constituents) who swallow it all lock, stock, and barrel.
In yesterday’s (28jun16) WSJ, editorial board member Holman Jenkins Jr writes an incisive summary of the current state of the AGW fraud – ‘Climate Denial Finally Pays Off’ – and how AGW's entanglement of lies, innuendos, and just plain errors are causing it to finally begin unraveling among the community of nations. Substituting dodgy computer modeling for non-existent science to argue catastrophic man-made global warming, prompts even the UN’s IPCC to ask, “Are climate models getting any better, and how would we know?” (report here)
Meanwhile, it continues evident, as in these pages, many other online outlets, and the lamestream, that AGW’s true believers are beyond all reason, much as their forebears were during the Renaissance when settled (i.e. consensus) science taught that the world was flat and at the center of the universe. Then men risked their livelihoods and lives to disabuse Man of such nonsense. Today the situation is little changed save for the newly fashioned sacred cow.
Were true believers to possess adequate intellectual capacity, they themselves would ask why politically steered climate science is the only such endeavor in which additional study fails to reduce retrodiction (estimating the past) and prediction errors, but actually finds them increasing under more open inquiry. Such 'progress' doesn’t happened in real scientific endeavors – honest theories start with larger error bounds that then get reduced as the theories are refined and experiments conducted within open scientific scrutiny and debate.
Switching gears to a SCOTUS that promises to get scarier by the case, I ran into the prevailing opinion in their 4apr16 Voting Rights 8-0 ruling. There the court “in Evenwel v. Abbott lets states continue to apportion legislative seats according to total population rather than limiting representation to citizens or voters.” Writing for the court, Justice Ginsburg opined, “Representatives serve all residents, not just those eligible or registered to vote.” (more here)
This is most strange since members of Congress, elected by our franchised citizenry, are emplaced to “serve” that citizenry and its broader interests. Our federal government 'serves' non-citizen residents, especially our illegal aliens, through its various bureaus including ICE and Border Patrol which operate under laws made by Congress. Bringing in the notion of their also ‘representing’ the countervailing interests of resident non-citizens is a perversion of the Constitution. What I found most remarkable was that the four so-called conservative justices went along with this argument that allows our ‘living Constitution’ Left to gerrymander their liberal population centers into additional districts for Democrats. Or as Micklethwaite (q.v.) points out, these gerrymandered districts are America’s answer to Great Britain’s rotten boroughs of the 18th and 19th centuries, and function similarly to keep their rotten incumbents in office.
[1jul16 update] “The disunited state of America” is described by author Todd Buchholz in his just published The Price of Prosperity where the case is made that “nations are just as likely to unravel after periods of prosperity as after periods of depression” for all the reasons RR readers have debated in these pages over the years. Buchholz reports on the “entropic forces” that are tearing America apart – falling birthrates, globalized trade, rising debt, an eroding work ethic, and "the challenge of patriotism in a multicultural country." WSJ’s former editor George Melloan writes a succinct summary (here) of Bucholz’s essay that prescribes the re-establishment of patriotism and a common culture in our schools and immigrants as the antidote for halting progress toward what we also know as the Great Divide.
The message will have a hard row to hoe with our globalist progressives and their millions of low-information minions. These people remain blind to the blatantly obvious stirrings of a divided America. And when they do encounter fellow countrymen who sense, suffer, and report on the country’s divisions and Leviathan’s growing overreach, they respond with a politically hyper-correct defense right out of the manuals of the brown shirts and Red Guards of yore – you are a disloyal person ignorant of the blessings which government bestows on the people, you are an enemy of democracy and your voice should be silenced. And today much work is being done both publicly and behind the scenes to enable and enhance such silencing which these elite cadres look forward to implementing within our corrupt judicial system using the full powers of the nation’s constabulary.
The country has become so disjoint that the socialists in charge are even alienating their more devout leftwing compatriots who now view them as the globalist enemies of the American worker. It is already hard to count the number of splintered minorities that today make up the visibly disunited state of America.
