Tag Archives: Global Warming

News

Is Newt Gingrich conservative or liberal?

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From the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

White House hopeful Newt Gingrich called the House Republican plan for Medicare “right-wing social engineering,” injecting a discordant GOP voice into the party’s efforts to reshape both entitlements and the broader budget debate.

In the same interview on Sunday, Mr. Gingrich backed a requirement that all Americans buy health insurance, complicating a Republican line of attack on President Barack Obama’s health law.

The former House speaker’s decision to stick with his previous support for an individual mandate comes days after former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney defended the health revamp he championed as governor, which includes a mandate.

The moves suggest the Republican primary contest, which will include both men, could feature a robust debate on health care, with GOP candidates challenging the Democratic law while defending their own variations.

Consider this article from the conservative National Review. (H/T Michelle Malkin)

Excerpt:

Newt Gingrich’s appearance on “Meet the Press” today could leave some wondering which party’s nomination he is running for. The former speaker had some harsh words for Paul Ryan’s (and by extension, nearly every House Republican’s) plan to reform Medicare, calling it “radical.”

“I don’t think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering,” he said when asked about Ryan’s plan to transition to a “premium support” model for Medicare. “I don’t think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.”

As far as an alternative, Gingrich trotted out the same appeal employed by Obama/Reid/Pelosi — for a “national conversation” on how to “improve” Medicare, and promised to eliminate ‘waste, fraud and abuse,’ etc.

More from the leftist New York Times.

Excerpt:

For Ms. Clinton, standing side by side with her husband’s onetime nemesis gives her the chance to burnish her credentials among the moderates she has been courting during her time in the Senate.

But in comments this week, she portrayed the rapprochement as one born of shared policy interests, not calculated politics.

“I know it’s a bit of an odd-fellow, or odd-woman, mix,” she said. “But the speaker and I have been talking about health care and national security now for several years, and I find that he and I have a lot in common in the way we see the problem.”

For his part, Mr. Gingrich, who helped lead the impeachment fight against President Bill Clinton, called Mrs. Clinton “very practical” and “very smart and very hard working,” adding, “I have been very struck working with her.”

Maybe he is actually running to win the Democrat nomination this time.

Commentary

Should adherence to intelligent design be grounds for not hiring a professor?

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From Michael Egnor at Evolution News.

Excerpt:

Commenting on proposed state laws to protect scientists from discrimination, University of Chicago biology professor Jerry Coyne sums up the Darwinist approach to academic freedom:

“… I abhor discrimination against hiring simply because of someone’s religion, but adherence to ID (which, after all, claims to be a nonreligious theory) should be absolute grounds for not hiring a science professor.” (emphasis mine)

Actually, Coyne has no problem with discrimination against a scientist because of religious belief. Coyne took strong exception to NIH director Francis Collins’ public discussion of his Christian beliefs:

Collins gets away with this kind of stuff [i.e. publicly stating that science is compatible with belief in God] only because, in America, Christianity is a socially sanctioned superstition. He’s the chief government scientist, but he won’t stop conflating science and faith. He had his chance, and he blew it. He should step down.

[…]Coyne has failed to provide a shred of evidence that adherence to ID is associated in any way with bad science. How many of the scientists who have signed the Discovery Institute’s “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” — all of whom, according to Coyne, should be unemployable in science — practice bad science in any measurable way? Where is Coyne’s objective evidence that these scientists who support ID are substandard scientists, let alone so substandard that not a single one of them should be employed in science?

Yet Coyne insists that scientists — not just evolutionary biologists but any scientists — be banned from employment merely for affirming the evidence for design in nature.

Coyne provides no evidence that adherence to ID is associated with substandard science. He makes no argument at all for discriminating against scientists who recognize design in nature. He merely asserts that such scientists (mostly scientists who don’t share his atheist metaphysics) must not be allowed to work as scientists.

For Coyne, and for his atheist comrades who exert disproportionate influence in the scientific profession, actual evidence of scientific skill or accomplishment are of less importance in hiring a scientist than whether the scientist passes the materialist/atheist litmus test. An atheist who is an utterly undistinguished biologist can gain international renown as a defender of science, whereas a superbly accomplished astrophysicist is denied employment because he has expressed doubts about the adequacy of Darwinism to explain all aspects of living things and has expressed a willngness to take ID seriously.

Jerry Coyne’s inquisition is a small part of a fervent crusade on the part of (mostly atheist) scientists to eliminate scientists who acknowledge design in nature from the scientific profession. But most of this science is paid for by taxpayers, who ultimately decide whether or not such discrimination is acceptable in science.

Coyne’s explicit metaphysical litmus test is clear evidence that we need legislation to protect academic freedom for scientists.

This is another case where the close-minded inquisitors can be promoted higher in the academy based on their ideological purity, while the really brilliant scientists are burned at the stake as heretics.

News

What are the economic effects of the green environmentalist agenda?

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From Investors Business Daily.

Excerpt:

Some day, environmental radicals will be held accountable for crimes against the ecosystem — the human ecosystem.

Back in 2007, they convinced federal Judge Oliver Wanger to rule that the Endangered Species Act gave the federal government the right to cut water to thousands of farmers in California’s Central Valley to protect a 3-inch baitfish called the delta smelt.

That ruling turned many of the Valley’s prized vineyards and almond groves into wastelands. Jobs were lost, family farms were shut, fields went fallow and food prices rose.

But there’s been just one problem with this overreaching of the law: Cutting off water didn’t save the smelt.

A draft of a new study from the Delta Stewardship Council shows the water cutoffs had no effect on the smelt. The smelt remains endangered even as farmers have been punished with a policy that cut off as much as 90% of their water.

“Environmentalists claimed the sky was falling in Delta, and the only way to save smelt was to flush more fresh water to the ocean,” said Andrew House, spokesman for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif. “So they embarked upon a narrow path of diverting water from (San Joaquin Valley) farmers by using science to confirm their predetermined assessment of what was going on.”

But it didn’t work. Similar evidence is now coming out from the Pacific Northwest stating that shutting down the logging industry never did save the spotted owl.

In both cases, the science was highly speculative and new predatory species seem to be more likely causes. But that never stopped cocky environmentalists from saying they had all the answers — and all the power.

“Our farmers went through two years of supply cuts to have . .. better information and science, ” said Steve Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition, commenting on the report.

Wade noted that the water shut-off has been particularly hard on family farms, many of which have gone under as a result of the policies. He said their farms have been bought out by big agribusinesses, ironic given environmentalists’ hatred of that.

Unemployment reached 40% in some areas as a result of the cutoff, and even cities like Fresno (with an unemployment rate above 16%) ended up losing 25% of their water, too.

Food lines appeared in the world’s most fertile agricultural valley, with farmworkers accepting bags of carrots grown in China, a sorry emblem of man-made famine.

House notes that not only did the water shut-off wreak havoc on Central Valley farms, its smelt-saving basis — which Judge Wanger later called “sloppy science” — managed to endanger the smelt even more by not addressing the real reason for the creature’s demise.

“They wasted so much time focusing on a phantom problem, they haven’t examined what the real problems are. Now you have the Delta Stewardship Council saying” the species may not be saved, House said.

This was never about science anyway. “It was … about re-engineering the development of California, particularly the San Joaquin Valley,” said House. “They don’t think the west side should be farmed at all, they want it removed from production, gone to a natural state, re-engineered as a socialist Utopia.”

Real people’s lives were ruined by this green alarmism. And it’s happening everywhere. People losing their jobs, paying more for electricity, food riots and even people dying from malaria in the third world because of DDT bans.