George Rebane

‘Does Environmentalism Cause Amnesia?’ asks WSJ's Bret Stephens in a short piece reprising climate change worries that go back over two centuries.  The latest effluent scheduled to be pumped out by the IPCC is that the world will again face falling crop yields and hunger.  What has been happening is exactly the opposite.  Based on my own experience and observations, the answer to Stephens’ question is that environmentalism is one of these pseudo-scientific, feel good pursuits that attract people with poor study habits who are a combination of pre-amnesic, information stunted, and intellectually lazy (and/or lame).  Their ability to think clearly is inversely proportional to the size of the consensual groups in which they find themselves.

The new Common Core curriculum, rapidly becoming endemic across the land, is guaranteed to produce millions more of such high intellects if we sample some math questions it poses to first graders (here).  It is not clear which foreign enemy bent on America's destruction was able to gain entry into the development of this new national government schools curriculum, but that such penetration was successfully effected can no longer be in doubt.  Mind boggling!

SCOTUS has federalism in the dock this week.  Big important case on states’ rights that has evolved from chemicals ineffectively used in a love triangle attack.  Recall that federalism is ‘a political system in which several states or regions defer some powers, e.g. in foreign affairs, to a central government while retaining a limited measure of self-government.’  Our Constitution is all about defining the boundary between these powers, and was written to specifically limit the powers of central government and prevent it from encroaching on states’ rights.  However, with the rise of collectivism in America during the last century, this battle has now come to involve treaties in which America participates, or may do so in the future.  Can such treaties transcend the constitutional powers of our own federal government to dictate what states can and cannot do?  Very important stuff astutely ignored by the liberal lamestream.  (more here)

Finally, in the current and glorious advent of the perniciously titled Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare, a correspondent draws a telling parallel that undoubtedly explains the law’s travails, both ongoing and yet to come.  He recalls that the former House speaker’s embarrassing prescience likened the new national healthcare law to a stool sample, thereby correctly identifying its now obvious prime ingredient, when she advised one and all that "We have to pass it, to find out what’s in it."

[6nov13 update]  Bill de Blasio will be NYC's new mayor.  He won by playing the race card with the city's ignorant through repeating the lie that the city's tremendously successful 'stop, question, frisk' policy discriminated against the blacks.  The truth is exactly the opposite (here and here) but not accessible to NYC's informationally light.  Since baseline mortality and morbidity rates are a matter of record, we will see how the lamestream reports and credits those stats after SQF is halted by de Blasio.  The bet by everyone from the city's white demogauges to its black leaders (a la Sharpton) is that black-on-black deaths neither count nor matter in the greater scheme of divvying power and money when Tammany reestablishes historical cronyism.