Monday, May 1, 2017

Climate-Change Activists Are the Real Science Deniers

 016 ; Photographed by Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7, October 11-22, 1968          Digital c-print; 24.5"x24.5"; edition 50      Transparency NASA; digital image ©1999 Michael Light:

National Review  "The epithet “climate denier,” intended to invoke Holocaust denial, has always been tasteless and inapt. Climate change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the accuracy and predictive power of a scientific model like questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. But climate activists delighted in defining their opposition this way, with help from prominent figures such as Barack Obama, who in 2014 used Twitter to condemn “climate change deniers” and promote a website, run by Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America), that featured large black-and-white pictures of then–House speaker John Boehner and Senator Marco Rubio atop a green “Climate Change Deniers” banner. “On climate,” asked the site’s headline, “whose side are you on?”
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"For a while, this seemed to work. Framing the climate debate as one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akin to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything. To the casual observer, even the most egregious exaggeration about climate science could seem reasonable compared with its outright rejection. Thus, Obama’s assertion in his 2015 State of the Union address that “no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change” became widely accepted. When Senator Bernie Sanders warned during a presidential debate that “the scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change . . . the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he was not laughed off the stage.  (California's drought is forever!)

"Often, the politicians and pundits targeted with the “denier” label did deserve blame. Ignoring the best available scientific research — an obvious starting point in any other policy debate — was irresponsible or dishonest. Their arguments rarely emerged from any valuable scientific insight, but usually from a fear that acknowledging the scientific basis of climate change would mean accepting radical and costly responses. This was doubly counterproductive: Not only did it grant by default a mainstream foothold to outlandishly overblown climate fears, but also it sidelined and undermined more important and compelling policy-based objections to the activist agenda." . . .

People's Climate March: A Demonstration Of First World Madness

CAREER OVER: Kaepernick ANGRY That Nobody Wants Him. . .

"What's your response?"
Freedom Daily   "Last year San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously knelt and sat during the national anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans in the United States. But people were not pleased with his actions and protested him and his team in return. Now the NFL is protesting him in the best possible way.


"Kaepernick is now a free agent looking for a new team after the 49ers dropped him. It is the first time in his career this has happened to him. An AFC manager said his free agent status is the result of several things,
  • His low performance level compared to before
  • Fear of backlash from fan base for bringing him on
  • Owners and teams hatred of him
  • "The AFC manager who remains anonymous told reporters the following,
    They [the NFL owners] want nothing to do with him. They won’t move on. They think showing no interest is a form of punishment. I think some teams also want to use Kaepernick as a cautionary tale to stop other players in the future from doing what he did.”
    "When people asked Kaepernick why he was refusing to participate in the national anthem he just repeated the narrative garbage from the Black Lives Matter movement citing discrimination. He even shared sympathizing memes on social media of Fidel Castro, the well-known Cuban communist, dictator."
    What about the guy - Eric Reid - who knelt beside him? Reid said he won't do that any more.

The Taliban-like attack on New Orleans's history

"The attack on New Orleans's historic monuments is an omen of worse to come.  History itself tells us this, just as surely as it tells us the story of the Confederates.  It is hoped that the fight-back will grow."

Monica Showalter   "Totalitarians always seek to erase history.
The sad preamble to the horror of 9/11 was in the Taliban's brazen destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, a magnificent old relief sculpture that stood as testimony to Afghanistan's rich and many-layered history as a crossroads of civilization.  To know of that history was anathema to the Taliban, which wanted absolute power over the lives of the Afghanis they terrorized.  Allowing the Buddhas to stand could only allow Afghanis to take strength from their past.
"The same dynamic was also seen in 1917, when the Bolshevik atheists destroyed most of Russia's abundant churches and synagogues, literally grinding their relics into the mud and leaving hollowed out dead shells to spiritually devastate the devout public.  Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote at length about this effort to deracinate Russia from its past to create a spiritual "exhaustion" or wasteland.
"We see the same dynamic now with the left's movement to wholesale destruction of Confederate monuments in New Orleans.  The Washington Post has an interesting, fairly reported article on an old Confederate group's effort to stop this postmodern move from the radical left.  Like the Confederacy itself, it's probably a lost cause, but it's heartening to see some fight-back, because the Confederacy deserves to be known and understood objectively, meaning neither romanticized nor demonized.  Wiping out the evidence of its existence deracinates New Orleans from its history and makes it just another generic U.S. city with nothing to speak for it other than crime and the other failures of Democratic one-party rule." . . .
. . . "My other thought is this: if the left succeeds in destroying Confederate monuments, who do you think is going to be next?  It's California's mission heritage.  California's fascinating history began with the work of selfless Franciscan friars who sought to save the souls of Indians as their religious mission by setting up missions whose cities now bear their lives.  But they also sought to save Indians' lives.  Spanish troops were slaughtering native Americans across two continents on the grounds that they found them "useless."  It happened in Argentina; it happened a lot of places.  The Franciscans of California, by teaching the Indians skills, destroyed the Spanish justification for massacring the Indians.  It's significant to me that real descendants of California's Indian tribes understand this and know this history in all its good and bad aspects objectively, while left-wing activists – who seek to erase this California history as well as its beautiful architectural legacy – completely ignore it." . . ."

Colleges Try to Get Rid of Inconvenient Professors

The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal



"College officials have cultivated a nice image for themselves—scholarly people who care deeply about providing the best possible education for their students. The reality, however, is often very different. They can be petty, self-serving, and ideological, sometimes sacrificing educational quality in favor of other objectives.
"Occasionally, faculty members become inconvenient to the leadership and must be eliminated. Two recent cases show college leadership at its worst.
"Consider Professor Dennis Gouws of Springfield College in Massachusetts. Peter Wood explains in this Federalist article that on March 27, Springfield’s dean of arts and sciences, Anne Herzog, sent Professor Gouws a letter informing him that he had been placed on “Official Warning Status.” That sounds ominous—what had he done?
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Cartoon added by TD
"His story begins in 2005, when Gouws was asked by the Springfield English department to teach a course entitled “Men in Literature.” It turned out to be a rather popular course and Gouws, who holds tenure, taught it eight times between 2005 and 2015. But in 2015 a student lodged a complaint against the course with school leaders. It wasn’t that Professor Gouws had mistreated her, but simply that the course content, focused only on men, bothered her.
"In a sensible era, officials would have said, “Well, then take something else if you’re offended,” but “progressive” academics seem incapable of insisting on common sense from students these days, especially if they’re in one of our supposedly oppressed groups. At Springfield, the result of the student’s gripe was to trigger what Wood terms “a feminist jihad” against a veteran, highly capable faculty member." . . .