Turning science into a narrative: For decades, the Left has been attempting to equate its political goals with Science Itself

Although Robert Tracinski is, and has been, a Carl Sagan fan "from way back", he cannot avert his eyes from How Carl Sagan Ruined Science.

 … we’ve had nearly forty years to assess the long-term impact and see how Sagan unwittingly contributed to a trend that has served to muddle public understanding of science.

 … that’s the problem. The “March for Science” is an attempt to equate the political goals of the left with Science Itself, claiming the intellectual and moral authority of science for the left’s agenda.

 … Science has its own unique language and methods: the language of mathematics and a method of systematic observation and experimentation. The reason science tends to be opaque to the public is because it ultimately requires that they understand its language and learn to use its methods. But how do you communicate the history and meaning of science to those who don’t yet speak its language? You turn science into something they can understand. You make into a narrative, a story.

In Sagan’s case, he mostly turned it into a story about brave and honest scientific pioneers fighting against the forces of superstition and obscurantism. He made it into a narrative of good guys versus bad guys, of the forces of light and progress against closed-minded reactionaries. This was sometimes oversimplified, but it wasn’t entirely wrong; the religious authorities who persecuted Galileo definitely weren’t the good guys. But Sagan fell into the temptation to make this narrative about science fit just a little too closely with the agenda of conventional late-20th-century liberalism, so he used “Cosmos” as a platform for the Cold-War-era moral equivalence of the “anti-nuclear” movement and for homilies about environmentalism.

“Cosmos” is an interesting intellectual time capsule, because it was broadcast just at the point when predictions of global environmental catastrophe were tipping between global cooling and global warming. So he presented the two as equally likely scenarios that required further study (and, of course, massive government funding). But this is the point at which he dropped his guard, forgot his own admonitions about following the evidence wherever it leads, and indulged the conceit that science would just happen to line up neatly with his own political preferences. Because what he didn’t do was to entertain the possibility that human being aren’t destroying the planet and we aren’t cruising toward planetary catastrophe. He literally does not even consider this null hypothesis as a possibility.

It was a glaring hole in scientific objectivity, but it set the path for the popularizers of science who would follow in his footsteps. He had fixed the narrative in place, and they followed it.

… If you don’t really need science and all you need is the narrative, then what you get is our own era’s official replacement for Carl Sagan: Neil deGrasse Tyson. As the decades pass by, Sagan’s imitators become less thoughtful and more propagandistic, less interested in conveying the actual scientific method and more concerned with just telling the public what to think. It’s also about making those who accept the approved “pro-science” political agenda feel that they are superior to all of those ignorant, knuckle-dragging bigots who disagree with them. It equates science, not just with the politics of the left, but with the left’s attitude of smug condescension. That’s how you get Tyson’s fake-but-accurate narratives or the meme-swapping superficiality of the IFL Science crowd.

That’s also how we get things like the March for Science, in which it is naturally assumed that defending science dovetails perfectly with the left’s “resistance” against the current administration and every part of its agenda. It reduces science to a narrow political pose and blinds people to its big questions and radically different method of inquiry.

Democrats only believe that inappropriate Holocaust references are bad when it comes out of a Republican mouth

Sean Spicer the President’s press secretary … made inappropriate Holocaust statements twice during the same press briefing … neither [of which] was made out of maliciousness

writes Jeff Dunetz.

Both were atrocious. … Almost immediately Sean Spicer realized what he said, issued an apology, and went on more than one news network making televised apologies,

“I was obviously trying to make a point about the heinous acts that Assad had made against his own people last week, using chemical weapons and gas. Frankly, I mistakenly made an inappropriate and insensitive reference to the Holocaust, for which there is no comparison. And for that I apologize. It was a mistake to do that.”

He made a mistake, but he didn’t obfuscate, instead owned up to it and apologized. However, the apology didn’t matter– throughout that day and the next one also, the pile-on continued despite the fact they’ve always ignored inappropriate holocaust references by Democratic Party politicians and their colleagues in the mainstream media.

Despite his many mea culpas Eric Wemple of the Washington Post blasted Sean Spicer in his column today;

“it’s not all just a verbal tic. The halting, hard-to-follow speech patterns reflect an unflattering truth about the top spokesperson at the White House: He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. A press secretary needs to have command of a vast topical landscape. Spicer has mastered bluster, and not much else.”

Yet in the month of September when his own paper ran two different opinion pieces inappropriately comparing then-candidate Trump to Hitler, Wemple was silent.  I suppose Wemple only believes that inappropriate Holocaust references are bad when it comes out of a Republican mouth.

Wemple and the other media liberals weren’t only silent when the Washington Post made stupid Holocaust references, they ignored Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, the Huffington Post, Comedian Louis C.K, and Rachel Maddow. They also ignored when Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown compared Republican governors John Kasich, Scott Walker and Chris Christie to the Nazis. Even the Holocaust Center in Washington was so very quick to blast Sean Spicer but they never complained when President Carter rejected a Presbyterian Christian  for a position on the board of the Holocaust Memorial because the guy’s name was too Jewish.
 
Where were Democrats like  Donald Payne Jr. (D-NJ) and David Cicilline (D-RI) both of whom who called for Spicer to be fired,  when Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC)  compared conservative bloggers (like me) to Hitler? The celebrities like Barbara Streisand or Debra Messing who think they know better than those of us who have to struggle for a living and called for Spicer to be fired–why  were they silent when Hillary Clinton said Republicans who wanted want the law enforced, and illegal immigrants deported, wanted to “round them up” and “put them in box cars?”

Why aren’t any of the members of the media bashing Nancy Pelosi for calling Sean Spicer to be fired, when she twice supported Barack Obama, the most anti-Semitic president since Franklyn Roosevelt refused to allow Jews fleeing Hitler into the country, not because he saw them as a threat, but because he believed America already had enough Jews.

And there is never an outcry that Al Sharpton, advisor to Obama, and MSNBC host, only has to burp to get front page coverage in the MSM despite the fact that he led two anti-Semitic pogroms in NYC, one in Crown Heights, the other in front of Freddy’s Fashion Mart in Harlem.

There are hundreds of other examples but the point is there was not one iota of criticism about the examples above. None of it excuses what Sean Spicer said yesterday, and my liberal friends will say the case of Spicer is much different– I agree. You see, not once in the cases above, did the person or media involved apologize.  But Sean Spicer immediately “manned up’ acknowledged his mistake and said he was sorry.

The Serial Comma: That Much Power It Does Not Have

From the New Yorker…

Understanding climate means understanding maths, physics, and statistics: Those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people

Who’s The Denier Now?

asks National Review's Oren Cass.

The epithet “climate denier,” intended to invoke Holocaust denial, has always been tasteless and inapt. Climate change is not like the Holocaust, nor is questioning the
accuracy and predictive power of a scientific model like questioning the historical fact of a genocide that murdered 6 million Jews. But climate activists delighted in defining their opposition this way, with help from prominent figures such as Barack Obama, who in 2014 used Twitter to condemn “climate change deniers” and promote a website, run by Organizing for Action (formerly Obama for America), that featured large black-and-white pictures of then–House speaker John Boehner and Senator Marco Rubio atop a green “Climate Change Deniers” banner. “On climate,” asked the site’s headline, “whose side are you on?”

For a while, this seemed to work. Framing the climate debate as one between noble keepers of the scientific flame and people akin to Nazis gave the former group license to say almost anything. To the casual observer, even the most egregious exaggeration about climate science could seem reasonable compared with its outright rejection. Thus, Obama’s assertion in his 2015 State of the Union address that “no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change” became widely accepted. When Senator Bernie Sanders warned during a presidential debate that “the scientific community is telling us that if we do not address the global crisis of climate change . . . the planet that we’re going to be leaving our kids and our grandchildren may well not be habitable,” he was not laughed off the stage. …

Related: Unexpected! The Puzzling Reason Why So Many People
Remain Skeptical of Global Warming and Climate Change

While Jonah Goldberg points out that liberals

claim that their opinions are facts and anyone who disagrees isn’t merely voicing a bad opinion but it somehow living in alternative reality or “denying” science,

a post entitled The Holocaust, Climate Science, and Proof, over at The Science of Doom (Evaluating and Explaining Climate Science), concludes with these words:

I can’t find words to describe how I feel about the apologists for the Nazi regime, and those who deny that the holocaust took place. The evidence for the genocide is overwhelming and everyone can understand it.

On the other hand, those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people. Everyone knows what this word means. It means people who are apologists for those evil jackbooted thugs who carried the swastika and cheered as they sent six million people to their execution.

By comparison, understanding climate means understanding maths, physics and statistics. This is hard, very hard. It’s time consuming, requires some training (although people can be self-taught), actually requires academic access to be able to follow the thread of an argument through papers over a few decades – and lots and lots of dedication.

The worst you could say is people who don’t accept ‘consensus climate science’ are likely finding basic – or advanced – thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, heat transfer and statistics a little difficult and might have misunderstood, or missed, a step somewhere.

The best you could say is with such a complex subject straddling so many different disciplines, they might be entitled to have a point.

If you have no soul and no empathy for the suffering of millions under the Third Reich, keep calling people who don’t accept consensus climate science ‘deniers’.

Otherwise, just stop.

Unexpected! The Puzzling Reason Why So Many People Remain Skeptical of Global Warming and Climate Change

As Spring came to Europe not so many weeks ago, the sunny weather in Paris turned chilly again while Denmark got another snowfall.

Meanwhile, in North America, it was even worse (even better?). A huge snow storm hammered the East Coast (no, not only that part of the continent) and led to the cancellation of more than 4,000 flights while a Newfoundland town (cheers to Lorraine) was buried under an unprecedented 8 feet (240 cm, video and photos at link) of snow — all of which may have helped to prod Michael Mann to adjust his climate turning point to 2020.

A common (a deliberate?) misconception on the left is that rightists are dogmatic extremists who fly in the face of reality by cherry-picking their date to advance false and, indeed, deceitful and harmful narratives.

(Related: Secret Science Vs. the Devil's Work: According to environmentalists, if members of the EPA can’t hide their data and refuse to show their calculations they’ll be “crippled”)

But ain't it true that conservatives are anything but activists, let alone extremists? They are simply regular folks who don't want to pressure any of their neighbors into doing anything but simply want to be left alone and who, on the contrary, keep their eyes, their ears, and indeed their brains, open?

Some cases in point:

• I'm so old, I can remember that in 2000, the New York Times and the Independent wondered whether snowfalls were now nothing but a thing of the past (see also the Washington Post), while Le Monde predicted in 2016 that soon cinema will be the only thing left to perpetuate the memory of snow.

• I'm so old, I can remember when, year after year after year, Britain's winters have proved to be among the coldest in a century.

• I'm so old, I can remember that in 2008 Al Gore predicted that the Earth's ice caps would have melted by 2013 (don't the poles, four years later, still seem to be around (while the polar bear population seems to be thriving)?).

• I'm so old, I can remember that in 2009, NASA's climate change guru, Jim Hansen, said that Obama had only four years to save the earth

• I'm so old, I can remember that in 2007, United Nations scientists and other climatistas warned that "There could be as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more"

• I'm so old, I can remember (actually, I can't, but let's not ruin a perfectly good meme) that in 1989 the United Nations issued the first of these 10-year-or-so global warming tipping points.

• Finally, I'm so old, I can remember that climate change used to be called global warming and that, during the movement's first days, what the drama queens were worrying about was global cooling, with the very first Earth Day in 1970, devoted to… the coming… ice age!

Related: 13 Most Ridiculous Predictions Made on Earth Day, 1970 and
18 spectacularly wrong predictions made around the time of first Earth Day
in 1970, expect more this year (via Sarah Hoyt and Ed Driscoll, who asks:
How can you continually believe the world is coming to end for a half century?)

As for the rising sea levels that we keep being warned about, I addressed that in a post last year:

think of New York City, of Miami, of Galveston, of San Francisco, of Tokyo, of Sydney, of Goa, of Alexandria, of Saint Tropez, of Copenhagen.

Correct me if I am wrong, but [in the past 5 weeks, in the past 5 months,] in the past 5 years, in the past 50 years, even offhand in the past 500 years (?), has the sea level in any of those places risen by even one inch, by even one centimeter?

Stories of California's unending drought, along with the above examples, may help explain distrust of the government and the establishment of such theories as Betteridge's Law of Headlines along with the reason why conservatives — again: no activists, they — are wont to pen columns with titles such as 5 Reasons It's Dumb To Panic Over Global Warming.

Let Larry Kummer have the last word:

Remember all those predictions of a “permanent drought” in California? Those were examples of why three decades of climate alarmism has not convinced the American people to take severe measures to fight anthropogenic climate change: alarmists exaggerate the science, and are proven wrong — repeatedly. 

Update: Understanding climate means understanding maths, physics, and statistics:
Those who ascribe the word ‘denier’ to people not in agreement with consensus
climate science are trivializing the suffering and deaths of millions of people

Secret Science Vs. the Devil's Work: According to environmentalists, if members of the EPA can’t hide their data and refuse to show their calculations they’ll be “crippled”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) may soon be required by federal law to base its policies on actual science

writes Benny Huang on the Constitution website

—and of course environmentalists are livid about it. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) reintroduced a bill known as the Secret Science Reform Act that would prohibit the EPA from “proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments based on science that is not transparent or reproducible.” The bill was originally introduced in 2014 though it did not clear all congressional hurdles. Barack Obama—our most super-sciencey president ever—vowed to veto it if ever reached his desk.

I’ve honestly tried to understand what kind of objection any sane human being could possibly have to this bill and I think I’ve discovered what it is. Are you ready? If the EPA has to be transparent it can’t operate. That’s it.

Don’t believe me? Here’s the opening sentence from an oppositional op-ed by Dianna Wray of Houston Press: “A lot Republicans hate the Environmental Protection Agency, but have left it to San Antonio Republican Representative Lamar Smith to come up with a bill that, if passed, could actually stop the agency from doing just about anything.”

Oh, I see—if it weren’t for secret science, the EPA wouldn’t have any science at all. According to Wray, if they can’t hide their data and refuse to show their calculations they’ll be “crippled.” There’s just one problem with this idea—secret science is a contradiction in terms. Science isn’t science if its results can’t be held up for inspection, judged worthy or unworthy, and accepted, refined, or rejected. If a theory is too delicate to withstand the heat and pressure of scrutiny, it doesn’t deserve anyone’s acceptance.

Legally speaking, the word “science” was defined in McLean v. Arkansas (1982), a famous court case that exiled creation science from public schools. Judge William Overton found that creation science was not science at all because it failed a five-prong test. According to his decision genuine science must:
1)    be guided by natural law;
2)    be explanatory by reference to natural law;
3)    be testable against the empirical world;
4)    have conclusions that are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and

5)    be falsifiable.

Anything that fails even one of these prongs cannot rightly be called science. That’s a high standard. Some might call it too high, though that would depend on whose theory is being put to the test. Nonetheless, the McLean test has value. Ideas that don’t live up it cannot legitimately be called scientific. Whether they’re true or not is another question entirely.

The McLean test is so valuable in fact that I see no reason why it shouldn’t be applied at all levels of government and to all ideas deemed scientific. After all, if a particular idea is considered junk science in the classroom, what good is it for policy-making?

Requiring the EPA and the rest of the federal government to adhere to the McLean test would yield some interesting results. For example, would the theory of global warming be able to pass the McLean test? Not by a long shot.

Global warming fails at least the third, fourth, and fifth prongs. It fails the third because its data sets are closely guarded secrets and it appears to have absolutely no predicative capability. It fails the fourth because “the science is settled”—that is, it is beyond discussion. It fails the fifth because it cannot be proven wrong—everything proves global warming, including cold snaps and blizzards.

And when you get down to it, global warming is what this whole EPA controversy is really about. Though the EPA deals in other realms as well—water pollutants, etc—global warming is really the environmental movement’s touchstone. Within that movement there seems to be a certain uneasiness that their theory might crumble like a house of cards if it weren’t constantly shielded from scrutiny. Though fanatically dedicated to the idea that man-made carbon emissions are causing the earth to warm, these true believers evince a telltale insecurity that it might not be true after all.

One such true believer is Dr. Phil Jones, formerly of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) in England. He’s an all-around hack who does his work under cover of darkness then just expects everyone to accept his findings as unvarnished truth. For a period of years Jones was engaged in an ongoing feud with two Canadians named Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick who offered to check the calculations behind the now disgraced “hockey stick” graph that purported to show a rapid spike in global temperatures during the 20^th Century. Jones did everything in his power to resist McIntyre’s and McKitrick’s requests for data.  “[McIntyre and McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years,” wrote Jones in a 2005 email to a friend. “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

That would be a crime of course, but that’s how far Jones was willing to go to keep his data secret. And when I say “his data” I don’t mean to imply that they’re his personal property. Actually, British and American taxpayers paid for them but we aren’t allowed to see them because Jones worries what those evil science-haters might do with them—such as proving him wrong, for example.

This seems to be a pattern with Jones and some of his colleagues. When Jones was asked by science researcher Warwick Hughes to provide his data, Jones refused, claiming that some of the data were deemed confidential by their source, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Why temperature data should be locked up like the recipe for Coca-Cola is truly baffling but apparently that’s just how pervasive secret science has become. Hughes then inquired directly with the WMO and was given the cold shoulder, after which he returned to Jones. Jones curtly replied to Hughes’s request: “Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it[?]” (Emphasis added.)

Hearing those words from the mouth a scientist makes me wonder if science is dead. If all Hughes was trying to do was to “find something wrong” with Jones’s pet theory, he was in fact doing Jones a favor. And it is Jones’s pet theory. His comment about having “25 or so years invested” gives us a clue as to his prejudices. His life’s work is at stake here. Though science demands that he try to disprove his own theory, and invite others to try their hand as well, he just can’t bring himself to do it. He’s “invested” too much to allow that to happen.
 
Now I’m sure that Jones would say that he doesn’t want to allow people of bad faith to take a whack at his theory. For example, Steve McIntyre is—gasp!—a mining consultant. Surely he has an agenda.

Sure, he probably does. But even if his “agenda” is to debunk the theory, that’s actually an essential part of the scientific process. Dr. Jones doesn’t see it that way of course because his own agenda—protecting the theory at all costs—clouds his judgement. Jones sees McIntyre, McKitrick et al as people who are doing the devil’s work when they try poke holes in his theory. He doesn’t want to allow them the opportunity to do so. In such cases he considers it permissible to operate in secret and treat skeptical review—an essential ingredient of science—like heresy. Isn’t that the way science is supposed to work?

Actually, no. The demands that science makes upon a theory are not waived just because a scientist suspects that those who disagree with him have ill motives. That’s a horrible precedent. It can only lead to a situation in which only people who already subscribe to the theory are allowed to test it. This necessarily corrupts the peer-review process, transforming it into buddy-review—a very poor substitute indeed.

I should stress here there was once a time when I too believed in the theory of global warming, though only because I was not aware of the controversy. Even at this late stage in the game I could still be sold on it, but it will require evidence—plus a satisfactory explanation for why the scientific process was betrayed in the first place. I’m not taking this theory on faith, and that is exactly what defenders of secret science demand.

Related: Unexpected! The Puzzling Reason Why So Many People Remain Skeptical of Global Warming and Climate Change

VIPs From All Over the Spectrum at CPAC

Among the uncountable VIPs at CPAC — besides top CPAC heavyweights Donald Trump and Mike Pence —
were such people as Joe the Plumber, Ted Cruz, John Bolton, Robert Davi, and Beth Chapman and Dog the Bounty Hunter, as well as, last but not least, William Temple.

Patriots at CPAC, in Their Patriotic Attire

Patriotic attire at CPAC, mainly in the form of Stars and Stripes shirts (Raymond Cleaveland on the left) and hats, not to mention boxer shorts and even underpants, were everywhere to be seen at the CPAC venue.

But surely a special tip of the hat must go out to the Esquires William Temple and George Washington.

The ONLY time the Democrats get worked up by the Russians is when they come to think the Russians may have cost them an election

He may not get much respect from Dalrock, but the Word Warrior (aka Barry Jacobsen) made good sense a couple of weeks ago.

Remember the Russian Reset? Or Obama leaning in close to the Russian Prime Minister and assuring him (message to be conveyed to his boss, “Vladimir”) that he (Obama) would have much more “flexibility” to make concessions once the election was over??

No administration has been cozier or more accommodating to America’s enemies (not just Russia, a rival; but Iran, a true deadly enemy) than Obama’s and the Democrats supporting him.

Thus the irony: the ONLY time the Democrats get worked up by the Russians is when they come to think the Russians may have cost them an election! Enslaving all of Eastern Europe? No big deal. Overrunning Afghanistan? Ok, we will boycott the Olympics; but not to worry. Setting up puppet client states throughout Latin America, on our very doorstep? Hey, we do the same thing to them, so what’s the big concern?

All my life the Dems have down-played the threat from Russia (then the Soviet Union). Till they lost the one thing that REALLY MATTERS to our Democrat friends: power. Losing the election and the power of governance hits them where it hurts. Who cares about a bunch of smelly Eastern Europeans (or Cubans, for that matter; still enslaved to a communist regime imposed with Russian support)? But elections matter!

[In March 2012] while President Obama was taking part in a global nuclear security summit in South Korea, he was caught on tape asking for Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for "space." 

"This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility," 

Obama implored. Obama assured the departing Russian President he will have the "flexibility" required to deal with missile defense issues after the 2012 presidential election.

Syria and the Arab League

The Arab League, and their (lack of) reaction to the trials and tribulations of Bashar al-Assad, as seen by Le Monde's Plantu in November 2011 (thank you, Barack Obama, for letting the Syrian leader off the hook)

Feminists have managed to create an employment atmosphere where men walk around on pins and needles wondering when something they say might be taken out of context or when a woman might decide to ruin a man’s career with a false accusation

FEMINISTS WAGE WAR ON MEN, THEN BLAME MEN FOR RESULTS 

writes Glenn Reynolds in reaction to Vice President Mike Pence's much-mocked decision in Washington never to dine with a woman alone unless she is his wife.

So you drastically expand the definition of “sexual harassment,” and then promote an ethic that says that all accusations must be believed, and then you’re shocked that workplace men don’t want to hang out with women?
How stupid are you?

This brings to mind a two-year-old Elizabeth Price Foley post on Instapundit quoting the New York Post's Naomi Schaefer Riley:

According to a National Journal survey, a lot of politicians are worried about the consequences of being alone with female staffers. An article on the Web site last week revealed:

“Several female aides . . . have been barred from staffing their male bosses at evening events, driving alone with their congressman or senator, or even sitting down one-on-one in his office for fear that others would get the wrong impression.”

Well, that’s one explanation.

 … More likely the congressmen, like the professors I’ve spoken to, don’t want to leave themselves open to claims of sexual harassment and the lawsuits that might result.

Feminists have managed to create an employment atmosphere where men walk around on pins and needles wondering when something they say might be taken out of context or when a woman might decide to ruin a man’s career with a false accusation.

Surely there are plenty of male bosses guilty of boorish behavior. But there are also plenty of women who believe that a sexist joke or even a compliment on one’s outfit is enough to create a “hostile work environment.”

And so rather than engaging in a “he-said, she-said” deposition, many bosses would rather make sure they have witnesses to every interaction.

 … There’s no doubt treating male and female employees differently is illegal, and a case could probably be made that these male bosses are discriminating.

But most politicians would rather be accused of avoiding one-on-one meetings with a female employee than of some kind of harassment.

Those “fences” have been built by the legal environment we live in. Once again, feminists have managed to turn women into helpless victims.

 … Women may be held back in their careers as a result of this nonsense. The chickens, as they say, have come home to roost.

Update: thanks for the Instalanche from Glenn Reynolds, who quotes this nugget:

1. Greatly expand definition of sexual harassment.
2. Make any accusation of sexual harassment career-ending.
3. Proclaim that women should always be believed when they accuse a man.
4. Complain that men won’t have 1-on-1 meetings with women.
This article reinforces the old stereotype that women aren’t logical…

Doesn’t the Left have an adversarial relationship with big business? No. That’s just what they tell people.

Apparently the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) now issues ultimatums to state governments

notes a bemused Benny Huang on the Constitution.com website.

Yep, that’s a thing now.

On the first anniversary of North Carolina’s HB2 law, the NCAA warned North Carolina that it has until April 18th to revise or repeal its statute or face not hosting any NCAA events through 2022. The controversial law preempts any municipality in the state from enacting intrusive, immoral, and unconstitutional private sector non-discrimination laws if they pertain to such fluid and socially constructed concepts as “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” The bill does not prescribe who may use which bathroom, as has often been erroneously reported, except in state-owned facilities. In state buildings, the rule is pretty simple: men use the men’s room and women use the women’s room. In private businesses the owner decides if he wants to allow confused people to use the restroom of the opposite sex. It also prohibits localities from forcing their citizens to be bondage servants in other people’s weddings which is already their right (though often violated) under the US Constitution’s first and thirteenth amendments.

How this law can possibly be controversial is beyond me. But it is.

North Carolina has hung tough for a year, defying all manner of corporate bullying. Industry titans such as Apple and General Electric have declared their unwillingness to invest in North Carolina as long as the law remains in place. Paypal nixed plans to expand an operations center in the state. The NBA moved its 2017 All-Star Game from Charlotte to New Orleans.

Every effort has been made to force North Carolinians to cry “uncle!” but to their credit they haven’t done it yet. Stay strong, Tarheels.

This kind of corporate bullying campaign might seem unusual to anyone who takes liberals at their word. Doesn’t the Left have an adversarial relationship with big business? No. That’s just what they tell people.
 
Liberal Democrats have been using anti-corporate rhetoric to make their appeal to voters for a long time. Their approach is probably a vestige of America’s industrial past when a clear political demarcation line separated labor from management. Working men were Democrats and their bosses were Republicans. Anything associated with the boss and his political party was tainted. The word “corporate” came to be used as a pejorative and largely retains that connotation in left-wing circles today.

But their rhetoric has not kept pace with reality. Today’s Left has cozied up to the moneyed interests they used to despise because those interests are now on board with their agenda. Last month, at the DNC’s 2017 Winter Meeting in Atlanta, party officials voted to accept corporate donations. Bob Mulholland, a California-based party advisor and spokesman of considerable clout, even justified the move by citing—you guessed it!—North Carolina’s HB2 law. Said Mulholland:

“All those corporations in North Carolina, who stood up for the Democratic Party platform against the law there to try to outlaw or discriminate against transgender [people], why should the Democratic Party say now, ‘Hey, great what you did, but we’re not gonna take your contributions?’”

Because you’ve got principles, sir. Because money always comes with strings attached. Because corporations poison “our democracy” and drown out the people’s authentic voice. Or at least that was the case before big business started supporting your party and its positions. My how things have changed.

Senator Bernie Sanders is a good example of someone who still likes to pretend to be the people’s champion doing battle with evil corporations. Disdain for big business was the cornerstone of his 2016 presidential campaign and it seemed to sell well enough within the Democratic rank and file to make him a real contender for the party’s nomination. This rape-fantasizing, Castro-lionizing former sojourner at a Stalinist kibbutz let it be known that America is not for sale—or at least it shouldn’t be. The positions page of his website proclaimed: “Returning to a government of, by, and for the people – not the billionaires and giant corporations – will not be easy.” On the campaign trail he hammered home a message so basic that no one in the audience could have failed to grasp it—namely, that he would banish corporations and their ill-gotten influence from the halls of governance.

But 2016 tested Sanders’s sincerity and it was found wanting. Besides being the year that he nearly upset Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, it was also the year that North Carolina came under relentless assault from PepsiCo, Deutsche Bank, and Facebook among others. Sanders spent the first six months of 2016 on the campaign trail decrying corporate influence in politics but somehow failed to highlight the business community’s ostracizing of North Carolina as an example. He even issued a statement condemning the law but not the moneyed interests lined up against it.

What gives, Bernie? If North Carolinians want the law but huge out-of-state corporations do not, who should have their way?

This wasn’t just some agribusiness lobbyist taking legislators out to dinner in hopes of persuading them to vote for a farm bill, this was real arm-twisting. Ten million North Carolinians, some of whom supported the law and some of whom didn’t, were being forced to pay a stiff penalty that often included the loss of their livelihoods, all because their duly enacted laws didn’t stack up to Deutsche Bank’s (et al’s) “values.”

Sanders proved that he doesn’t really care about the corporate hijacking of our political process as long as the corporations’ agendas coincides with his own—which happens to be the case more often than he would like to admit. This was just the most recent instance in which Sanders remained quiet while big business thrashed a state government into compliance. He could have spoken out against similar corporate pressure tactics when they were brought to bear on Arkansas and Indiana for daring to consider much needed religious freedom laws—but he didn’t. He could have stepped up to defend Arizona when it came under corporate attack for its attempt to regain control of the illegal immigration crisis or when the NFL yanked the Super Bowl for not celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday as a state holiday—but he didn’t.

Over and over again, big business has employed an effective offensive strategy that involves isolating and punishing states as a warning to other states. If liberals were sincerely opposed to corporate hegemony they would be willing to unite with their opponents behind a defensive strategy that would effectively counter corporate shaming. That strategy is called solidarity. It would mean states rallying to each other’s defense, something like the NATO mutual defense treaty—an attack on one is an attack on all. If North Carolina is shunned for its bathroom privacy law, other states should pass similar laws so that the first state can’t be so easily singled out for abuse.
 
The NBA is a good example. If it wants to pull its All Star Game from Charlotte, that’s fine—but they shouldn’t be allowed to just move it to New Orleans. Louisiana should show some solidarity with North Carolina and adopt similar legislation. Every state should follow suit until the NBA is left hosting their All Star Game in Guam.

 … Liberals don’t really want big business to stand on the sidelines. What they want is for companies to bring their considerable influence to the political process on their side. If they can’t do that, they should just shut up.

An upsurge in entrepreneurial ambition in France

[Incredibly, the] most striking case of fresh growth is in Paris. Mention of France has long elicited sighs from venture capitalists. Its rigid labour laws and hefty taxes on wealth and on stock options have meant that Silicon Valley has more than its fair share of entrepreneurial French immigrants.  

Thus writes The Economist, that, in spite of France's "rigid labour laws and hefty taxes on wealth and on stock options," we are seeing how

The rise of “deep-tech” is boosting Paris’s startup scene (The capital now leads Europe for the number of venture-capital funding rounds).

That leads to the following reaction:

Home of the entrepreneur

Your article on French entrepreneurs (“Less misérable”, February 25th) suggests that France has become Europe’s most active destination for venture capital thanks to changes in French mentality, the rise of “deep-tech” startups and private initiatives. All your arguments are true but there is one other crucial point: public policies over the past 20 years should also be credited for this success. The French administration has created a tax haven for innovative tech companies. I am an entrepreneur and founder of a firm employing 50 people. The combined assistance of a tax credit for research, the improved status for startups and a state-backed interest-free loan helped us grow. In our first five years we gave nothing back to the state, though that assistance has now been largely returned.

The Economist often criticises the inefficiency of the French state, but on this topic it should delve deeper.

GILLES TOULEMONDE
Chief executive
Inova Lyon 

The Overton Window: How the Left turns the unthinkable into the uncontroversial

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is prepared to go to the mat to prevent the construction of a wall on our southern border

writes Benny Huang on Front Page.

The senator from New York is threatening to use all available options, including a government shut-down, to forestall three key provisions in the new budget: a deportation force, a border wall, and the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Well, it’s good to know where Schumer draws his line in the sand. Anything that impedes the endless flow of undocumented Democrats he considers to be an act of war.

But I’m old enough to remember when Chuck Schumer supported at least one of these budget items. In 2006, he and 25 other Democratic senators voted for the Secure Fence Act which would have built a double-layered fence on the US-Mexico border. The bill passed, by the way, and President Bush signed it into law. It wasn’t a close vote because it wasn’t particularly controversial.

Now I’m sure that a persnickety liberal like Chuck Schumer would split hairs on this one. He voted for a fence, not a wall! That argument is a non-starter. Walls and fences are both barriers intended to keep people out so let’s not pretend that the difference between then and now is the type of barrier. What’s changed is that Chuck Schumer now supports endless and unlimited immigration with no distinction made between those who enter the county legally and those who don’t. He has likely learned that his party’s best interests are best served by diluting the voice of their actual constituents.

There is perhaps no better example than Chuck Schumer of how much this country has changed since the Bush years. Positions once held by a proud New York liberal are now considered reactionary. What happened? In short, the Overton Window has moved quickly and decisively leftward.

The Overton Window? What’s that? 

Glad you asked. I’m not talking about Glenn Beck’s boring novel but rather about its namesake: the handy mental model formulated by political scientist Joseph P. Overton. His window represents the breadth of ideas that the public considers acceptable discourse superimposed over a spectrum ranging from far left to far right. At both ends of the spectrum lurk ideas that are literally “unthinkable.” As we inch closer to the Overton Window we find ideas that are merely “radical.” The first category contained within the Overton Window is “acceptable,” followed by “sensible,” then “popular,” and finally “policy.”

The goal of most progressive strategists has been to move that window so that previously unthinkable ideas become conceivable and eventually uncontroversial. People who don’t adopt the newly mainstreamed idea quickly enough are usually shamed into silence. If they refuse to keep quiet they are shunned by polite society and often lose their livelihoods because their old ideas have been pushed into “radical” and “unthinkable” territory. 


This is perhaps one reason the Left so despises the slippery slope argument—except when they employ it against their adversaries, of course. They want people to concentrate only on the issue as they narrowly define it without considering the principles at stake or the long-term ramifications. Who could have imagined, for example, that a little sensitivity toward racial issues would eventually lead to the stifling environment we find on college campuses today, in which it’s now considered a microaggression to say something as harmless as “I just believe the most qualified person should get the job”? That’s against the rules at the University of California, the largest university system in the country and a state school with an obligation to protects students’ free speech. Certainly no one foresaw this in the 1960s. We just thought we were telling racists—genuine racists—to shut up. What’s the next forbidden phrase? The Left doesn’t want you to ask. If people knew where this crazy train is going they’d demand to be let off.

But we should ask. What radical ideas will the Left be pushing in ten years? What unthinkable ideas will they champion in twenty? You can bet that they won’t admit to any of them now because the time isn’t right. That’s how this game is played.

For another example of the sliding Overton Window, consider Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, both Democrats who sought the presidential nomination of their party, one successfully and the other unsuccessfully. When conservatives called Obama a socialist throughout his presidency, the Left balked. “Don’t be ridiculous!” they said. “He’s no socialist.” This protégé of the radical anti-American CPUSA member Frank Marshall Davis, who openly bragged of hanging out with the Marxist professors on his college campus, who praised a Soviet-backed communist terrorist like Nelson Mandela, was absolutely the furthest thing from a socialist a person could possibly be—or so we were told.

But then along came Bernie Sanders who didn’t even bother to hide his socialism. Of course, he made the highly dubious claim that he preferred the Danish variety of socialism to the Latin American brand he championed earlier in his political career, but at least he was honest enough to use the “S” word. And suddenly there really was nothing wrong with being a socialist. Who knew that after eight years of fervently denying Obama’s socialism—as if it were a bad thing—that the party’s next rising star would be a self-described socialist?

Sanders might even have won the nomination of the Democratic Party if Hillary Clinton hadn’t stacked the deck against him. His loss can be attributed to a number of factors but an aversion to socialism among Democratic voters isn’t one of them. Six in ten Democratic primary voters think socialism “has a positive impact” on society. That’s because the Democratic Party is really just America’s socialist party by another name.

The Left has been particularly successful in radically shifting the frame of acceptable discourse for three reasons. First, they have the media on their side to give them top cover. Second, they are masters of emotion-laden propaganda. And third, they recognize golden opportunities when they see them.

When Barack Obama came to power he recognized that an unpopular war and an economic collapse had left the American people stumbling and woozy. It was an opportune moment to remake society. “You never let a serious crisis go to waste,” said Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. “And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

Emanuel’s maxim has been the Left’s unarticulated strategy for a long time. They recognize that in times of national tumult the electorate often grants to progressives plenty of latitude to enact their policy wish lists. Obama benefited from one of these moments when he entered the White House in 2009 with a cooperative Democratic Congress to work with. The road was wide open and Obama went pedal to the metal into territory that most Americans would have considered too far afield just a few years before.  

Few presidents have changed the nation as fundamentally as Barack Obama—and not in a good way. Within his first two years he had made the ideas of Saul Alinsky look all-American. I would argue that only Franklin Roosevelt spearheaded a more complete American transformation and he had twelve years to do it. Now there was a man who knew how to move the Overton Window. FDR’s New Deal was considered radical when he proposed it and would have been unthinkable a generation before.

But there was still work to be done. Thirty years later, President Lyndon Johnson exploited America’s national grief over the Kennedy Assassination to push through the atrocious Great Society agenda. President Carter pushed the window further to the left in those disorienting days after Watergate and the Vietnam War. 

We conservatives never really push it back, often because we’re afraid we’ll be accused of “turning back the clock.” We need to get over our fear of moving the Overton Window in the other direction for a change. With both houses of Congress and the White House now in conservative hands, there is no excuse not to reverse most of the horrid policies of the Obama years. While they’re at it, they ought to reverse the policies of the Carter, Johnson, and Roosevelt years too. 

CPAC Mentioned in MSM Weekly Regarding Article on How Free speech Has Been Claimed by Conservatives

Free speech, once a central value of liberalism, has been claimed by conservatives 

writes The Economist.

Charles Murray … was left to worry about academic freedom and to note that many of his assailants resembled figures from “a film of brownshirt rallies”. Middlebury’s agitators might ask themselves how a man whose work they decry as racist acquired the right to compare them to fascists. Students everywhere should wonder how free speech, a central liberal value, is instead becoming the banner of conservatives.

This prompting the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to be mentioned in a subsequent issue of The London weekly:

All-a-muddle at Middlebury

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2013, Charles Murray recommended, to the disappointment of his conservative colleagues, that Republicans should accept the legalisation of gay marriage and abortion. Charges of racism regarding his book, “The Bell Curve”, are still a matter of debate. Undaunted by these facts, students at Mr Murray’s lecture at Middlebury College harangued him by accusing him of being homophobic and sexist as well as racist (“Blue on blue”, March 11th). No need to bother with specifics when a stereotype is handy. It is an article of liberal faith that racism, sexism and homophobia are comorbidities. That is all the impassioned objectors need to know.

MARGARET MCGIRR
Greenwich, Connecticut

Le candidat Fillon serait-il aussi haï que Trump, pareillement écouté et espionné illégalement par le président en exercice, et maltraité par les médias ?

Un point de vue pour le moins intéressant…

LE VISAGE HAINEUX DE LA GAUCHE 

par Evelyne JOSLAIN

(Article non-édité pour Les 4 Vérités du 29 mars 2017)

Il est clair que David Pujadas n'a pas inventé la poudre mais il ne semble pas méchant.

L'aréopage choisi pour questionner (ou plutôt soumettre à la question!) le candidat Fillon, le 23 mars sur France 2, laisse donc à penser que le décideur de ce tri n'est pas Pujadas mais un de ses maîtres dans les réseaux télévisuels, tous si évidemment en symbiose avec leurs homologues des deux côtés de l'Atlantique.

Alors que la religion d'amour et de paix vient de se manifester de nouveau et qu'on nous rappelle à cette occasion que ce qui s'est passé à Londres n'est que "partie intégrante de la vie de toute grande métropole" (dit Sadiq Khan, le si bien nommé maire de Londres) et que "le danger qui menace l'Europe est plus que jamais l'extrémisme violent de droite" (Julian King, UE), pour les gens de cette mentalité, Fillon ne vaut pas mieux que Trump, et il est moins bien vu que Marine le Pen. Songez qu'il veut non seulement un frein à l'immigration mais "encore plus de cadeaux fiscaux aux classes fortunées" (sic)! Il faut entendre et l'argument et le faux sens.

Quid de l'extrémisme violent de gauche? On le voit se manifester politiquement, médiatiquement et physiquement aux Etats-Unis contre Trump et il pointe son vilain museau contre le très modéré conservateur-libéral Fillon, sans que l'ardeur climato-européiste-anti-US affichée par celui-ci ne suffise à le sauver. C'est aussi la preuve que Fillon est celui qui dérange le plus, car le plus loin de la gauche...

Les Français, abrutis par 40 ans de socialisme soutenu, ont oublié le prix de la liberté et sont en pleine confusion quant aux droits fondamentaux que même les plus sanguinaires des révolutionnaires avaient établis. De 1789-94, il leur reste le goût du sang, l'envie et la haine, en tout cas pour une moitié d'entre eux, au moins dans leur inconscient, voire dans leur ADN désormais, et de plus en plus dans leur attitude

Le premier interrogateur était François Langlet, économiste marxiste, ne sachant donc poser que des questions ineptes. Par exemple: Un président Fillon permettrait-il au bétonneur Lafarge d'aller construire le mur de Trump? Et Fillon de répondre "qu'il était contre ce mur" bien sûr, correction politique oblige, mais réticent à ou incapable de répondre correctement que, dans une économie libre, une entreprise peut accepter sans l'aval du chef de l'Etat un chantier à l'étranger et que, pour commencer, Lafarge ne sera jamais sollicité, Trump n'employant que des entreprises et des matériaux américains.

Puis il y eu divers segments de la société appelés à interroger Fillon, une chômeuse longue durée, des syndicalistes, "une professeure" mélanchonniste, uniquement des gens de gauche, pas déplaisants en eux-mêmes mais contribuant à une hostilité palpable.

Le dernier à questionner n'était autre que le maire d'Hénin Beaumont, agressif et sans humour, pas le plus brillant représentant du FN ce Steve Briois, et lui aussi voix de la gauche anti- libérale-anti-capitaliste.

Mais ce qui aura marqué l'émission, débordé Pujadas et profondément choqué le public, ce sont les attaques en règle de deux gauchistes enragées: Christine Angot, mouvance Hollande, radio-active, la haine aux lèvres, venue non pour dialoguer mais pour accuser, aboyer et condamner, et Aurélie Filippetti, admiratrice de Hamon, presqu'aussi mal élevée, agressive et mauvaise, toutes deux accaparant la parole, haussant le ton, le regard assassin, acculant Fillon à la défense, afin de ne pas lui laisser une chance d'expliciter ses vues pour la France et de le déstabiliser. Bien qu'il se targue de représenter la droite "et le centre" et se classe prudemment dans le camp hostile à la vraie droite style Trump, le candidat Fillon est aussi haï que Trump, pareillement écouté et espionné illégalement par le président en exercice, et maltraité par les médias.

Alors, malgré tout ce qui nous afflige chez Fillon (son aveuglement sur l'UE, l'entourage dont il se contente encore), admirons qu'il soit tout de même parvenu sur ce plateau à placer quelques bribes de son programme, qu'il ait parfois répondu du tac au tac à ces deux vipères et surtout qu'il ait réussi à garder jusqu'au bout un calme imperturbable.

Quelqu'un de moins rodé à l'art martial qu'est la politique aurait sorti ces harpies de là par les cheveux.

Il faudra donc voter pour lui, au moins pour sauver les meubles et gagner un peu de temps__le temps que Ted Malloch impulse une secousse dans l'Union Européenne et dans le zèle européiste de Fillon .

 Et ne serait-ce que pour faire ravaler un peu son fiel et son "incivilité" à la gauche!

Donald Trump as a Vicious Uncle Sam in a Danish Cartoon

"I Want You to Stay the F*** Out of Here" is how a Danish cartoonist sees "Trumpism" in the daily Politiken, a month or so before an "Asian" man tried killing dozens of people in front of the British Parliament in London, all the while while police forces all over Western Europe have been uncovering terrorist plan after terrorist plan.

Al Qaeda Is Recruiting

Le Monde's Serguei on the ISIS spider and its how it nets recruits in its (on the) web…

When Trump-Resister Nancy Pelosi Showered Stalinists with Praise

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has been the loudest voice against the administration of Donald Trump. The “deflector in chief,” as she calls the president, has “done nothing,” and in a March 5 CNN interview Pelosi doubled down on the Democrats’ default conspiracy theory.

“What do the Russians have on Donald Trump?” she said.  “That’s the truth we want to know.”

Thus does Lloyd Billingsley open his article at Front Page Mag (merci à Évelyne Joslain).

As Pelosi mounts this surge, the old-line establishment media have shown little if any interest in Pelosi’s own background, particularly as it relates to Russia, the USSR, and the American labor movement.

“Harry Bridges was arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century,” Pelosi wrote in the Congressional Record in 2001, on the 100th anniversary of Bridges birth. Bridges was “beloved by the workers of this nation, and recognized as one of the most important labor leaders in the world” and his International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen's Union was “the most progressive union of the time.”

At the time Pelosi’s tribute drew little if any news coverage, but in 2007, when she was calling for unconditional withdrawal from Iraq, it came to the attention of Joshua Muravchik. Then with the American Enterprise Institute, he had been a speaker at the Second Thoughts Conference David Horowitz and Peter Collier staged in 1987. As a former chairman of the Young People’s Socialist League, Muravchik knew his onions on Harry Bridges.

“Pelosi’s Favorite Stalinist,” ran the headline on his June 25, 2007 piece in the Weekly Standard. True to form, Harry Bridges was “an Australian immigrant and devoted Communist” both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations tried to deport because he had lied about his Communist affiliation in his immigration papers.

“So loyal was Bridges to Moscow that during the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, he opposed the (1940) reelection of labor hero FDR, because Roosevelt was aligning the United States with Britain against Germany, and the ILWU printed antiwar pamphlets proclaiming ‘The Yanks Are NOT Coming.’ As soon as Hitler’s forces invaded the Soviet Union, Bridges did a 180-degree about-face on the war.”
 
Bridges and his union “took transparently pro-Communist stances” while denying Communist affiliation. “Only after the fall of the USSR, and the opening of Soviet archives,” Muravchik wrote, “did the truth emerge that Bridges had been not merely in the party but a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA, a position for which the documents show he was directly approved by the Kremlin.”

A full nine years after this revelation, Pelosi delivered her worshipful tribute to the Stalinist labor boss. As Muravchik noted, she visited ILWU headquarters and praised “another prominent Bay Area Stalin fan, Vivian Hallinan, whose husband was Bridges’ lawyer and the 1952 candidate for president of the Communist-front Progressive party.” In Pelosi’s view, “Vivian was devoted intellectually and passionately to many causes, well before they became popularly embraced.”

 … Pelosi’s praise of Bridges, Muravchik wrote, was not to say that Pelosi was ever a Communist. It did show “Pelosi’s wretched record in judging who are history’s good guys and who are its bad.” And as she ran off to meet the likes of Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad, “we should be mindful that some of what she knows about political values was learned at the feet of people who believed fervently that the great enemy of mankind was none other than America itself.”
 
That’s what the leaders of Iran believe but Nancy Pelosi is a strong supporter of the Iran deal that many believe will speed Islamic regime’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. In similar style, when the 44th president caved to Russian complaints and canceled missile defense in Europe, Pelosi called it a “brilliant” move.
 
Likewise, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s famous re-set gave the Russians virtually everything they wanted, including the most highly intrusive inspection program the United States had ever accepted. “We want to ensure that every question that the Russian military or Russian government asks is answered,” Clinton said after meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov.

Read the whole thing™.

The Best British Political Insults, From Churchill to Corbyn

From Churchill to Corbyn: the best British political insults is a Daily Telegraph piece featuring such VIPs as Winston Churchill, Maggie Thatcher, Tony Blair, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and Jeremy Corbyn.