Category Archives: History

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

John Kerry And Climate Change

February 20, 2014 Rand Simberg 2 Comments

While none of these inconsistencies refutes the fundamental concern about greenhouse-gas-enhanced climate change, it is disturbing that “consensus science” will not acknowledge that such discrepancies are major problems. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s beginning, that largely self-selected panel of scientists has embraced the notion that consensus on climate change is the necessary path to taking action and reducing man-made carbon emissions around the world. The consensus community uses this to push the view that “the science is settled” and hold up skeptics to ridicule, as John Kerry did on Sunday.

We are reminded of the dangers of consensus science in the past. For example, in the 18th century, more British sailors died of scurvy than died in battle. In this disease, brought on by a lack of vitamin C, the body loses its ability to manufacture collagen, and gums and other tissues bleed and disintegrate. These deaths were especially tragic because many sea captains and some ships’ doctors knew, based on observations early in the century, that fresh vegetables and citrus cured scurvy.

Nonetheless, the British Admiralty’s onshore Sick and Health Board of scientists and physicians (somewhat akin to the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) dismissed this evidence for more than 50 years because it did not fit their consensus theory that putrefaction (or internal decay) caused scurvy, which they felt could be cured by fresh air, exercise and laxatives.

“Consensus” science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

Idiots. Murderous idiots in the name of an ideology.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary’s Past

February 18, 2014 Rand Simberg 4 Comments

Of course it’s relevant. Democrats who say that the voters won’t be interested in it are just expressing a desperate hope. They got away with that “it’s old news” nonsense in the nineties, but it’s not the nineties any more. Hillary enabled Bill’s sexual predation and corruption and participated in it, including targeting inconvenient women who were his victims. Speaking of which, three cheers for Kathleen Willey for not letting the Clintons’ thugs intimidate her.

Hillary should, finally, be held accountable, even if all that means is that she doesn’t get to rule over us.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Byron York has it right:

Of course Clinton’s recent experiences are relevant to a presidential run. But so are her actions in the 90s, the 80s and even the 70s. It’s not ancient history; it reveals something about who Clinton was and still is. And re-examining her past is entirely consistent with practices in recent campaigns.

In the 2012 presidential race, for example, many in the press were very interested in business deals Mitt Romney made in the 1980s. In the 2004 race, many journalists were even more interested in what George W. Bush did with the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, as well as what John Kerry did in Vietnam that same year. And in 2000, a lot of journalists invested a lot of time trying to find proof that Bush had used cocaine three decades earlier.

So by the standards set in coverage of other candidates, Clinton’s past is not too far past.

That’s especially true because there will be millions of young voters in 2016 who know little about the Clinton White House. Americans who had not even been born when Bill Clinton first took the oath of office in 1993 will be eligible to vote two years from now. They need to know that Hillary Clinton has been more than Secretary of State.

Yes. There is a new generation that needs to learn just what kind of people these people are.

[Another update]

More from Wes Pruden:

The “bimbo eruptions” that Bill and Hillary thought were well behind them are coming back with a vengeance, and it’s only 2014. Bimbos have been a menace to ambitious men since Eve treated Adam to his first apple tart, Delilah gave Samson his first haircut, and Anthony Weiner tweeted his first crotch shot to the bimbos of the cyberworld.

The invention of politics raised the ante. The cultivation of the libido at taxpayer expense, together with the explosion of media, makes official indiscretion unsustainable.

The fact that Bubba’s bimbos were leftovers from an earlier century means that the recollection of them won’t be old news to the millions of voters who grew up after the Clintons left the White House. Fourteen years and two presidents later, a lot has been swallowed by the memory hole.

Bubba’s bimbos and Hillary’s enabling and manipulation of scandal will be new and titillating stuff. Sex sells, even the creepy sex attributed to old fogies over 30. The modern American culture is built on the cultivation of sexual titillation.

Yup.

And Monica was the least of Bill’s predatory conquests, because unlike Juanita Broaddrick, whom he forcibly raped, Paula Jones, whom he had delivered to his hotel room by an armed police officer, and Kathleen Willey, whom he assaulted in the White House after she came seeking a job, she threw herself at him.