We need some government, obviously, but at this point in American history, in order to save our nation, we need to get the state as much as possible out of our lives, to cut its functions with a meat cleaver to release our better impulses, to have the renewal of Spring. Deep down even some modern liberals realize this. (Bill Clinton famously said the era of big government is over before running the other way as if in fear of his own honesty.)
In this coming crucial year, those of us who feel the overweening state is the problem must reach out our hands to our fellow citizens as never before. My sense is that many of them are ready to hear our message. (The fiasco of Obamacare has been a gift in that regard.) And if we don’t reach out our hands, there will be no American Spring. Things will only get worse. (The horrific attempt of the FCC to monitor newsrooms is a harbinger of totalitarian things to come.)
I am one of those eternal optimists who think we are on the brink of this American Spring. Another, whether he knows it or not, is ironically Joe Trippi, once the campaign manager for Howard Dean, a statist of the first order. (See Trippi’s interview with Reason magazine in which he foresees a libertarian-oriented president in the near future.) Possible allies can be found in more quarters than we know.
This is more “Irish Democracy,” passive resistance to government overreach. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant is demanding that the state use background-check records to prosecute those who haven’t registered, but the state doesn’t have the resources and it’s doubtful juries would convict ordinary, law-abiding people for failure to file some paperwork.
…he scientific consensus on whether saturated fats are bad for us is changing. Now researchers are stressing that saturated fats like coconut oil actually lower bad cholesterol in our bodies.
With this:
If you consider popcorn something to douse with “butter-flavored topping” and shovel in your mouth at the multiplex, then keep it on the “bad” list. A study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest has concluded that movie theater popcorn—a medium tub, mind you—has 1,200 calories and 60 grams of the worst kind of saturated fat.
So what is the “worst kind of saturated fat”? I see nothing wrong with butter on popcorn (and to the degree there is, it’s the popcorn, not the butter).
She also reinforces the myth that “low calories” = “healthy.”
Labbé emphasizes that the nonsense computer science papers all appeared in subscription offerings. In his view, there is little evidence that open-access publishers — which charge fees to publish manuscripts — necessarily have less stringent peer review than subscription publishers.
This sort of thing is why I pay no attention to warm mongers who tell me to publish in a peer reviewed journal. Peer review, to the degree that it’s done with any rigor at all, turned out to be “pal review” in climate science, as revealed by the CRU emails.
Why we lost it, and why we’re continuing to lose it, despite many trillions of dollars. The only way to win the war on poverty is to end the war on the market and economy.
As the economy has deteriorated, the government has resorted to dubious stopgaps such as price controls. The price controls have produced more shortages, leading to more stopgaps … and more political repression to control complaints about the shortages and stopgaps. People made much of the fact that Chavez won elections — but less of the fact that he won them in the context of government policies that required television stations to broadcast hours of his speeches every week. And that he silenced stations that opposed him.
This has only continued to get worse under President Nicolas Maduro. Having shrunk the space for legitimate opposition so far, its only outlet seems to be the streets.
They’re streets that the murderous Maduro should be dragged through. But the White House, and much of the media, remains silent.
The name “climate parasites” performs two jobs with exactly two words. It derails completely the enemy’s position that our side consists of people who are totally ignorant of climate science, or choose to ignore it. We acknowledge without hesitation that climate change is a proven fact of nature. The name also, however, marginalizes the other side by putting its members into the same category as indulgence sellers and rainmakers: opportunistic frauds who preyed on superstition and natural disasters respectively to separate honest people from their money.
Which is exactly what’s been happening, with Al Gore as king of the con artists.
[Via Judith Curry, who has additional interesting links on the collapse of the “consensus,” which was never anything but the fallacious band-wagon psychology.]