Observations From the Back Row: 7-26-11

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“De Omnibus Dubitandum”

Everything we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on in reality!
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This is a tendency or disposition that bespeaks the resurgence of an environmental romanticism wedded to motives rather than consequences, unachievable ideals rather than practical values. It consists largely of the cryogenized remnants of an antique crusade for unperturbed happiness and tranquility, actuated by a child-like desire for transcendence that is the curse of liberal political civilization, and that, in various spiritual and revolutionary forms, has caused untold harm and suffering in the past. Paraphrased quote by David Solway

Today's Talent - Leona Mitchell - O mio Babbino Caro

The Over-Regulated Family
Forget the crude scribblings of San Francisco anti-circumcision comic Monster Mohel, which missed its original publication date in Berlin by only seven decades, and think about the underlying idea behind the campaign instead. That direct democracy doesn’t mean running the government, it means telling other people how to live their lives. It’s not enough that you can choose how to raise your children, you have to be able to make other families raise them the same way.....

Studies of America show a country where marriage has become a class issue. In a country that is taxed to death, wealth has become a better predictor of marriage than love. Men and women with college degrees are sixteen percent more likely to marry than those without. The African-American family is vanishing, but the white working class family is in deep trouble too.

The American working class family was built on an industrial and manufacturing infrastructure that has been destroyed by regulators in the name of environmental and social justice. And the same activists who so intuitively understood that if you destroy wetlands, the spotted toad cannot survive, refuse to see that when you destroy the main source of working class jobs and raise the regulatory barriers to running a small business, you also destroy the ecosystem on which the working class family depends.

I’m a little late with this one but it deserves wider prominence

Dam Idiots Caught Using Junk Science on Klamath River
by Brian Sussman
In the name of saving salmon, radical environmentalists in Northern California have concocted a $1.4 billion plan to destroy four hydroelectric dams and dramatically restrict water to hundreds of thousands of acres of prime farmland. However, an independent panel of scientists hired by the federal government to review the proposal has determined the primary goal of the deconstruction project is based on junk science…..As usual, the environmentalists were caught ginning up their case to destroy the dams using phony data. In this case they concocted an imperfect computer-generated model to cast the dams as evil salmon-killers.

Everyone will believe if you just scream loud enough to drown out the truthSteve Jones tells the BBC: don’t give ‘denialists’ so much air-time
In his report for the BBC Trust, Steve Jones actually attacks the BBC for having too little global-warming bias. (Christopher Booker, TDT)

This is why they want to stop skeptics speaking – Monckton swings 9%
Christopher Monckton had no slides, no graphs, and only part of one hour, and was faced with tough questions from seasoned journalists, 100 stacked seats of activists who hate him, and yet in that time 9% of the people who saw the debate and thought we needed to act on CO2, changed their mind.

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax -

Of cabbages and kings,

And why the sea is boiling hot,

And whether pigs have wings."

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