…when all the thanks are made and all the contributions measured, there still remain the ﬁnal artiﬁcers of victory, the men who, in the King’s words “man the ships, storm the beaches and ﬁll the skies.” Although the ﬁrst advances have been secured with surprisingly little loss of life, the hardest ﬁghting lies ahead. In the weeks to come, thousands of men will lay down their lives or suffer disablement, will endure pain and hardship and strain, will throw everything they have into the balance of victory without particularly asking why or counting the cost. For them at the moment there is not very much that the people who stay behind can do. They can keep vigil, as the King has asked. They can face anxiety steadfastly. They can accept the losses when they come; but the real effort of gratitude will only be needed later on, when the men come home. They will not have been given victory, they will have toiled and sweated for it, all the way from Alamein to Bizerta, from Sicily to Rome, in the jungles of Burma, on the landing beaches in France. They have been the active agents of every military success. It is their courage and initiative and adaptability and common sense that have completed the historic reversal of the last four years. It will not be enough for their elders to give them “food, work and homes”—the essentials of a decent post-war society. They must be allowed their place in that society, they must be given scope and opportunity and responsibility to run it themselves.

Fortunately, they were.

Business, Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary

The Climate Cult

June 6, 2014 Rand Simberg 8 Comments

Thoughts from Steve Hayward on the latest propaganda failure:

The temperature plateau and the persistent limitations and errors of the computer models strongly suggest the kind of “anomalies” that Thomas Kuhn famously explained should constitute a crisis for dominant scientific theories. What’s more, several papers recently published in the peer-reviewed literature conclude climate sensitivity is much lower than previously thought, making the problem of climate change much less likely to be catastrophic and more likely to be easily managed. But with the notable exceptions of the Economist and straight-shooting New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin, these heterodox findings, which have steadily eroded the catastrophic climate change narrative, have received almost no media attention.

Despite all this, there has been not even the hint of a second thought from the climateers, nor any reflection that their opinions or strategies could bear some modification. The environmental community is so deeply invested in looming catastrophe that it’s difficult to envision a scientific result that would alter their cult-like bearing. Rather than reflect, they deflect, blaming the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, and Republican “climate deniers” for their lack of political progress. Yet organized opposition to climate change fanaticism is tiny compared with the swollen staffs and huge marketing budgets of the major environmental organizations, not to mention the government agencies around the world that have thrown in with them on the issue. The main energy trade associations seldom speak up about climate science controversies. The major conservative think tanks have no climate change programs to speak of. The Cato Institute devotes just two people to the issue. The main opposition to climate fanaticism is confined to the Heartland Institute, the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a scattering of relentless bloggers who have acquired surprisingly large readerships. That’s it. These are boutique operations next to the environmental establishment: The total budgets for all of these efforts would probably not add up to a month’s spending by just the Sierra Club. And yet we are to believe that this comparatively small effort has kept the climate change agenda at bay. It certainly keeps climateers in an uproar.

Well, someone has to do it.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary