Can it outlast the Swartz case?
It should. As he points out, it’s not like it’s anything new. It’s all part of the growth of Leviathan and a tyrannical state, and it needs to be trimmed way back.
Also, be sure to read Radley Balko’s piece on abuse of federal power.
…in space. I’d say we raise angora bunnies, and everyone wears sweaters, except I hate sweaters.
OK, I decided that I had to take action to prevent this environmental holocaust. So head on over and sign my petition. I know they’re microfauna, not mega, and not all that charismatic, but they’re all God’s creatures. Let’s see if we can break a hundred thousand.
[Update a while later]
A comment over at Free Republic: “Just another case of Brazilian deforestation causing another extinction of a species.”
[Afternoon update]
An email from Jim Bennett: “If you declared Sandra Fluke’s nether parts to be a navigable waterway they would come under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers, who would then have the power to forbid the clear-cutting of habitat.”
Apparently all the dehairification down there is making crabs an endangered species. Is the EPA and PETA going to get on the case? I mean, if they can declare a mud puddle on a farmer’s road a wetland and prevent him from filling it, why can’t they force all those college students to grow their hair back and create habitat?
A bipartisan effort to rein in out-of-control federal prosecutors? As Lessig says, it would be a small step, but an important one.
The Constitution. Even the gun grabber’s own ignorant words tell the tale of how stupid their hoped-for prohibition is: they call them “military-style” weapons. In other words, it has nothing to do with function, but is about fashion. And such a ban is unconstitutional, because as many have pointed out, it was exactly militarily useful weapons that the Founders wanted to protect.
[Update a couple minutes later]
When only the police are armed, or they outgun the citizenry, it’s called a “police state.” Which is what leftist regimes always turn into, because it’s their goal.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s another casualty of the war on guns: the truth. The kind of CDC “research” that Obama wants to see is almost invariably fraudulent anti-gun propaganda. Guns are not a disease.
It’s not a pretty picture:
…as part of a plan to reduce the state prison population, nearly 4,000 criminals who would once have been sent to state prison have been put in the custody of San Bernardino County law enforcement authorities. Some have been released, putting more low-level criminals back on the streets of San Bernardino, Chief Hardy said, and adding to the challenges already faced by the police.
“All of our crime is up, and the city has a very high crime rate per capita anyway,” Chief Handy said. “I can’t police the city with much less than this. We’re dangerously close as it is.”
As lawyers wrangle in court over San Bernardino’s plan to cut $26 million from its budget and defer some of its pension payments, city officials say there is little more they can do to turn back the rising tide of violence.
No, but there is something that Sacramento could do, but won’t. It could roll back California’s draconian gun laws that have made places like San Berdoo (and Watts and Willowbrook, and other places) into the Wild West, except that no one is armed except the criminals.
OK, so a weight-loss surgeon says that Chipotle is the healthiest fast food?
Weiner said that he eats at the Chipotle if he must have fast food. He cited the chain’s vegetable ingredients and vegetarian and vegan options.
Two questions: 1) what does vegetarian, and particularly vegan food have to do with weight loss and 2) Why would we expect someone who makes a living reducing weight via surgery to have any idea of what good nutrition for weight loss is?
On a related topic, the search “Dr. Oz quack” yields a couple hundred thousand results. A theory that is reinforced by the large amount of email spam I get featuring his name in the subject.
Matt Ridley responds:
I discovered something my informants had failed to disclose – that even fast rising levels of carbon dioxide could not on their own generate “several degrees” of warming in a century: for that to happen requires amplification by water vapour. All the models assumed this amplification, but the evidence for it began to look more and more threadbare. So by 1993, six years after the piece just quoted, I no longer thought that 2-10 feet of sea level rise was likely and I no longer thought that several degrees of warming were likely. Instead, I wrote – in a single throwaway sentence in a long piece about eco-scares generally – that
“Global warming, too, has shot its bolt, now that the scientific consensus has settled down on about a degree of temperature increase over a century-that is, little more than has taken place in the past century.”
This was published in a book the Economist put out each year called (in this case) “The world in 1994”. The main prediction of the essay, by the way, was that genetic engineering was the next big eco-scare. I was right, if a few years early, and I did not spot that tomatoes, rather than dolphins, would be the species that touched the heart strings and purse strings of the green movement. I’ll append the essay at the end of this blog post for those that are interested.
I am even prouder of that sentence. At the time such a “lukewarm” view was unfashionable among activists, though not yet among scientists – and you were allowed to say things like that without being treated like a holocaust denier. But it’s not far from what I think now. Since the modal climate sensitivity in all the best studies is now settling down at a bit over 1.5 degC, and since the effect of aerosols, black carbon, ocean heat uptake etc are now all better understood and provide fewer and fewer excuses for high sensitivity models to disagree with data, for me to have come up with “about a degree” two whole decades ago, in a single sentence in an essay on other topics, seems quite surprising. Climate change was not my main interest then: I was writing a book about the evolution of sex having left the Economist to be my own boss.
Indeed, if you take a look at the graph below, you will see that over 34 years, there has been about 0.36 degrees of warming on a rolling average using data from five different sources: or on track for 1.08degC in a century, give or take. About a degree?
…Now look, fellers, you do this kind of thing for a living. I’m just a self-employed writer with no back-up team, no government grants, no taxpayer salary, no computer simulations, and absolutely no pretensions to being Nostradamus about anything. But it strikes me I did a far better job of predicting the climate back in 1993 than any of you! How could that be?
Anyway, the whole episode was depressing in two ways.
First, it’s a little sad that a lecturer in computer graphics took the trouble to look up a sentence a freelance journalist wrote 20 years ago in a piece about something else and falsely claimed it was already “wrong” when it isn’t, and would hardly matter if it was. Does he not have anything better to do?
Second, it’s also a little sad to read just how little has changed in the climate debate since then. If I could travel back in time and tell my 34-year-old self in 1993 that I would be roughly right to take a “lukewarm” view about global warming, but that in the meantime the world would ignore me and would instead spend hundreds of billions of dollars on ways to prevent the poor getting rich with cheap electricity, on destroying rain forests to grow biofuels, on spoiling landscapes with windmills to provide less than half a percent of the world’s energy, and on annual conferences for tens of thousands of pampered activists, then surely my younger self would gape in disbelief.
Well, in order to get a government salary, you have to come up with the politically correct, if scientifically incorrect answer, as (e.g.) Jim Hansen does. Speaking of which, even he’s starting to climb down from his more extravagant hysteria.