…this is now. And what a difference a year…or…something…makes. A compare and contrast of the New York Times’ ever-flexible standards of what we need to know:
“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.”–New York Times, on the Climategate emails, Nov. 20, 2009
“The articles published today and in coming days are based on thousands of United States embassy cables, the daily reports from the field intended for the eyes of senior policy makers in Washington. . . . The Times believes that the documents serve an important public interest, illuminating the goals, successes, compromises and frustrations of American diplomacy in a way that other accounts cannot match.”–New York Times, on the WikiLeaks documents
These are our principles, and if you don’t like them, we have others.
…stinks up the room in Cancun. Which makes the economy-killing legislation passed by the morons in California (including moron-in-chief Schwarzenegger) even more pointless.
[Update a few minutes later]
An excerpt:
Our genius environmentalists came up with the idea that in order to make the treaty more palatable to US public opinion and therefore to the Senate, the US would assume an open-ended and eternal obligation to pay tens of billions of dollars a year to various developing world governments, however corrupt, incompetent, dictatorial and unfriendly these might be. Iran, Cuba, and North Korea would get money just like Yemen, Syria and Sudan. In exchange, these countries along with India and China would accept restrictions on their carbon output that are significantly less drastic than those to be imposed on the US.
Who could possibly object to a smart plan like this? What US Senator wouldn’t love to defend a vote to force taxpayers to subsidize Iran while giving China permanent business advantages over the US? Surely Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh would find nothing to attack here. Getting two thirds of the Senate to ratify a no-brainer like this would be a cakewalk.
This is the fruit of the gigantic brains of the Great Gurus of Green. This is the bright shining idea at the core of the UN process: that US opposition to Kyoto could be overcome by requiring the US to pay tens of billions of dollars in Green Danegeld to the third world every year. And the people who thought of this had Big Degrees from Name Schools! We know, because they keep telling us, that they are smarter than the rest of us and they understand complex systems better than we do. These are the geniuses to whom we are to entrust ever greater control over ever larger swathes of the global economy because, after all, they see so clearly and so far.
Lake Tahoe’s surface temperature is rising faster than the air temperature. I haven’t read the underlying paper to understand their postulated mechanism, but if the study is valid, it seems to me that an increase in insolation is a more plausible mechanism than AGW. I also think that the concern about the increase creating a dead zone is overhyped.
Watermelons: green on the outside, red on the inside. This is the theme of my forthcoming book on the controlling, poisonously misanthropic and aggressively socialistic instincts of the modern environmental movement. So how very generous that two of that movement’s leading lights should have chosen the anniversary of Climategate to prove my point entirely.
I think he’s right. This nonsense is politically dead in the US.
…by the left. When they accuse Republicans of this, it’s just one more case of projection. And if you consider economics a science, dismal or otherwise, their bellicosity knows no bounds.