This is amusing.
Charles Radley subscribed me to the Space-Based Solar Power Facebook group some time ago (not at my request, but there’s not enough traffic on it that I really care). Apparently, like his climate “scientist” heroes, he will brook no dissent from the creed — he seems to have banned me. Here are the screen shots of the exchange, in case he decides to delete my posts as well.
These are all interesting stories, but articles like this contribute to public confusion about what is science and what is not. Curiosity landing on Mars was a great technological achievement, but it wasn’t science, though it may (in fact will, and already has) produce some. Even less science are the Dragon flights to the ISS — again, this is about engineering, not science. And ending invasive research on chimps is a moral breakthrough, perhaps, but it’s not science. In some sense, in fact, it’s anti-science, if one removes ethics from the definition of science.
It looks as though the White House wants to pick a fight for the sake of picking a fight:
On the Democratic side there is no reason at all other than pressure from the White House to support Hagel. In fact political opponents, especially in 2014 Senate races in swing and red states, will be happy to use any support for Hagel as fodder. Democrats’ other agenda items (e.g., gun control) and their fight to prevent entitlement reform will get sidetracked, at least for some time, to engage in a high-visibility fight none of them want.
On the other hand, Hagel’s nomination is energizing pro-Israel conservatives (which are an overwhelming percentage of conservatives).
…it is clear that there is no voice of restraint or common sense in the White House that could restrain the president from an inexplicably dumb political misstep. As the rest of the grown-ups depart the stage (Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner), the president will be surrounded by fewer people willing to give him honest advice and more enablers with extreme political views and rotten judgment. In other words, Hagel is a symptom of the unchecked arrogance of the president as he enters his second term.
Mickey Kaus can’t figure it out, either:
Can’t Obama find a
“anti-Israel”… Likud-skeptical figure who didn’t flamboyantly and self-righteously get wrong the most important military decision since the original 2003 Iraq invasion (which Hagel, by the way, voted to authorize)? Sure, Hillary and Kerry opposed the surge too. But not everyone did–not even everyone who opposed the war. Gen. Anthony Zinni, for example, isn’t someone likely to please Bill Kristol and AIPAC–but after opposing Bush’s invasion he had the balls to say that a surge was worth trying.Have Hagel – or John Kerry – shown that kind of ability to transcend their own media images and biases? The journalist Elizabeth Drew asked for a phrase to describe the troika of Hagel, Kerry and Biden, a phrase better than “the three amigos.” How about “Three guys who voted for the Iraq War when that was the safe thing to do, flipped when everyone around them flipped and then were wrong about the surge”?
If you thought there was buyers’ remorse last year, wait until the next four.
…has Indian women getting guns for protection.
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away:
Gun laws in India are very strict, but when a common citizen applies for a license, he is almost treated like a criminal… If you are a farmer living on an isolated farm or a woman in Delhi who is at risk … do you have to prove a specific threat? This is absurd. So you have to be raped, looted or killed to be given a license?
When will the UN take up self defense as a fundamental universal human right? I won’t hold my breath.
…and only the US has decreased its carbon emissions over the past half decade. And without cap’n’tax or mandates, and despite efforts by the Left to curtail the boom.
A response:
…there always have been American Tories—people who chafe at restraints on central power and would prefer a British-style government. In recent years, as political “progressives” have gradually lost the scholarly battle over constitutional interpretation, some have stopped pretending the Constitution means whatever they want it to, and have begun to trash the document itself.
But the source of the claim is more shocking, because it comes from one who has taught constitutional law for 40 years. And who should know better.
Did the Constitution cause our present “fiscal chaos?” Quite the contrary. The crisis has arisen not because we followed the Constitution, but because we have allowed federal officials to ignore it. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court announced that it would stop enforcing the Constitution’s limits on federal spending programs. Without meaningful spending restraint, Congress became an auction house where lobbyists could acquire new money streams for almost anything—a redundant health care program; a subsidy for an uneconomic product; or a modern art museum in Indiana.
It is hard to believe there would be a fiscal crisis today if federal spending had remained within the Constitution’s generous but limited boundaries.
…Although it is true, as Professor Seidman states, that politicians have violated the Constitution, it is rarely true that we have been better off for it. The breaches have included incarceration of innocent citizens during World War II, ill-advised attempts to micro-manage the economy through monetary and regulatory policy, and unrestricted spending. We have lived to rue them all.
The thought of limited government is anathema to would-be tyrants. Read the whole thing, which demolishes the ad hominem arguments put forth by those who want to ignore our founding document.
Just a note to his defenders: Being a Vietnam vet, even a decorated one, is neither a necessary or sufficient condition to be Secretary of Defense.
[Late afternoon update]
In response to Chris Gerrib’s question in comments, here’s why he would be a bad SecDef (not to mention difficult to confirm):
…isn’t Hagel’s statement a direct attack on the motives and honesty of those senators who supported the war—including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry? Indeed, what does it say about Chuck Hagel, who voted to authorize the war in October 2002? He knew it was a war for oil, didn’t say so at the time, but voted for it anyway? And then, a few years later, at the height of the fighting by American soldiers in Iraq, he proclaims with false braggadocio the alleged truth that it’s all just a war for oil?
Is President Obama really going to nominate this man as secretary of defense?
He’s done worse. And will.
It turns out that fracking is perfectly safe, and the New York state government tried to hide the evidence:
Greens are quick to defend their climate change position with scientific evidence and have positioned themselves as a movement wedded to science. But it is becoming increasingly apparent that evidence is a flag of convenience for a movement that is rooted in emotion and passion far more than it likes to admit.
Because it doesn’t like to admit it at all, even though it’s mostly that.
We knew (at least those of us not idiots) that it was criminally insane from an economic standpoint, but it also turns out that it was an environmental disaster.
Well, they’re getting it good and hard.