Canada Charges Comedian with Not Being Funny

The Canadian Human Rights Commission hits a

new low by investigating a stand-up comic who heckled hecklers.

Obama, the Closer

An eloquent clean cut black man is the perfect front man for the radical Left.

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Is Barack the one we have been waiting for? Or is it the other way around? Are we the people we have been waiting for? Barack Obama is giving voice and space to an awakening beyond his wildest expectations, a social force that may lead him far beyond his modest policy agenda.

— Tom Hayden, endorsing the Obama Movement

For a Boomer like me, following the threads of the Obama movement is like a flashback from a bad 60s drug trip — an old, unwelcome nightmare.

Whether it’s Billy Ayers or Bernadine Dohrn, Tom Hayden or Jane Fonda, or any of the other lesser-knowns, 60s Marxist radicals are lining up behind Obama.

Obama’s young worshippers think they see something altogether new, a unique persona, seemingly magically transported to this moment in history to help them finally be the ones to net the elusive butterfly of socialism’s never-realized promise.

The kids think they see something new. But do they?

Sixties’ radicals see their as yet unfulfilled yearning for socialist utopia in a well-groomed, glittery, establishment-approved package.

The college kids today, flocking to Obama rallies, don’t look much like we did, with our tie-dyed shirts and frayed bellbottoms, our waist-length hair or wild Afros. And they seem to see Obama as the antithesis of 60s’ madness, with a been-there-done-that-want-something-new kind of thirst, a quest for which youth has always been known.

Obama is clean-cut. He talks unity, not subversion. He promises equal outcomes without resorting to violence to get them. He endorses marriage and fidelity for himself, without condeming other lifestyle choices. He speaks in highbrow English, rather than the 60s revolutionary slogans:

Kill the Pigs
Smash Monogamy
Violence is as American as cherry pie
If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down

Obama’s followers make high-tech videos, mindlessly chanting, “Yes, we can” instead of making bombs to blow up government buildings, or holding up armored trucks and killing police officers.

This new generation seems to have the opportunity to do now with mere votes what their predecessors tried and failed to do through violence. We can finally seal the deal on the real revolution — democratically. Obama, the Closer, is at hand.

Evidenced by his list of supporters, from Ayers Dohrn, Hayden and Fonda, to the New Black Panthers, the New SDS, the New Winter Soldiers, et al., the radical Left has anointed Obama as the One. Every aging, anti-war, anti-capitalist group and their new offshoots are flocking around Obama like moths to a flame.

He is the One they’ve been waiting for. Biding their time during the dark, dreary days of Reagan, throughout the self-absorbed Boomer years, into the Yuppie sellout decade, and on through the compromising Clinton years, they’ve waited and planned and hoped.

To these rabid Marxist radicals, Obama is the One, because he’s probably their last chance to see socialism triumph on our own soil. They have grasped the reality of their own mortality.

And this could be very bad news for America. Who, in his right mind, really wants anything these radicals were peddling?

The Revolutionary (and Generational) Vanguard
An odd fact often gets lost in 60s mythology: the key Marxist radicals of those days were not themselves Baby Boomers.

Billy Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, of Weatherman infamy, were both born during WWII, barely missing the Boomer cut-off of 1946. Tom Hayden of the Chicago Seven, later a far-left California politician who was married briefly to Hanoi Jane Fonda, was born in 1939. Every single one of the Chicago Seven, in fact, known for their Days of Rage at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968, were pre-Boomers.

The leaders of all the Marxist student groups of the 60s were either Red Diaper Babies or upper-crust white kids born during or shortly before WWII. For them, the time was ripe for revolution in America, brought on by the convergence of post-war prosperity (they were spoiled rotten), a new war on foreign soil (Vietnam) and forced conscription (the draft). And the white radicals were able to latch on to MLK’s nonviolent successes in the civil rights movement, as opportunistic hangers-on.

In truth, the genuine Marxist revolutionaries of that era mightily disdain the Boomers for our mostly short-lived flirtation with their ways, means, and mantras. They thought that we were the ones they had been waiting for; but we copped out.

In fact, we grew up — and remembered how great America is. They still haven’t. And they hate us for it.



Boomer Hillary
Even though both Bill and Hillary Clinton were radicals of a sort — protesting against the Vietnam War (Bill was a draft dodger), and supporting far-left causes at the time (the Black Panthers, SDS, George McGovern, etc.) — neither of them is technically of the same generation as the real radical leaders, the ones who are now flocking to Obama. Hillary and Bill are both Boomers, as is George W. Bush.

Although Hillary calls herself a modern “Progressive,” and continues to have close alliances with many former radicals, the true Marxists prefer Obama. They are the authentic “Progressives,” progressing the Marxist cause in America, without regard for the will of the citizenry.

Hillary is, undoubtedly, of the same mindset, but she has lived at least nine political lives, and more clearly understands the folly of seeking ideological perfection without regard to practical results over the long term. She also has, as we have seen over and over again, a personal survival instinct so strong that it keeps her from falling on her (and our) sword for the revolution.

The authentic do-or-die-trying arch-radicals see Hillary as a pragmatic compromiser, like Bill. The pair are not nearly as committed to the Revolution as they have become to Clinton power, the Clinton legacy, and the Clinton bank accounts. These Marxist revolutionaries reject politicians who stand up for America against foreign enemies; Hillary’s threats against Iran are the equivalent of blasphemy to them. Anything pragmatic is blashemy to them.

Obama’s appeasement seems a perfect fit with their own worldwide-revolutionary instincts.

These Marxist rabble-rousers, who refuse to grow up, or die, have long considered nearly all of us real Boomers to be sellouts. While most of the pre-Boomers remained Yippie revolutionaries, most Boomers became Yuppies instead. Or far, far worse, Republicans.

Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, both Chicago Seven defendants, were co-founders of the Yippies, the socialist Youth International Party, most known for its anti-establishment street theater and other public antics, as well as their symbolic flag: a bright-red star on a black field, with a dark-green marijuana leaf superimposed.

When Rubin went to work for corporate America in the mid-80s, he debated Hoffman on the merits of his decision to sell out to the man, and distilled the difference between Yippies and Yuppies thus: “if the acronym IRA makes you think of the Irish Republican Army, you're a yippie. But if you think that IRA stands for Individual Retirement Account, then you're a yuppie.”

In radical Marxist eyes, Hillary and Bill Clinton are definitely Yuppies. And to these folks, revolution is a religion like Islam. There are no honorable conversions. Period.

Judged politically mainstream sell-outs, the Clintons are now unacceptable standard-bearers of the Marxist revolution — an important behind-the-scenes factor in the Democrat primary race that the mainstream liberal media is loath to admit. Bill and Hillary may still have many of the same old radical goals, but any compromise with reality is too much for the pre-Boomer radicals to stomach.

Who’s afraid of washed-up SIXTIES’ radicals?
A couple of reminders on the political creed of Bernadine Dohrn — former Weatherman underground leader, now married to Billy Ayers, and very chummy with Barack Obama — seem in order here.

The best thing that we can be doing for ourselves, as well as for the Panthers and the Revolutionary Black Liberation Struggle, is to build a f**king white revolutionary movement.

— Bernadine Dohrn, May 21, 1970

That Barack Obama’s meteoric rise in American politics should have Chicago as its political home base was perhaps not quite as fortuitous and coincidental as it once appeared.

-

Read page 3, here.

Hugh Hewitt show, February 13th, 2008.  The whole show

dedicated to A.Q. Khan and nuclear terrorism:

Hour 1:  Hugh begins a special three hour edition talking with authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, who have written a book called The Nuclear Jihadist, about A.Q. Khan, and how we could have stopped him.  MP3, 34 minutes, here.

Hour 2:  Hugh continues his three hour conversation with The Nuclear Jihadist authors Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins as they continue to tell the story of A. Q. Khan. MP3, 34 minutes, here.

Hour 3:  Hugh concludes his three hour conversation with Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, co-authors of The Nuclear Jihadist, the story of A. Q. Khan, and how we could have stopped him earlier.  MP3, 34 minutes, here.

December 17, 2007

All Mixed-up over Iran

by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

Last week's U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) states, with "high confidence," that Iran quit trying to get a nuclear bomb in late 2003. That's exactly the opposite of what the NIE reported just two years ago, when it claimed Iran's ruling mullahs were still developing nuclear weapons.

The reaction here at home to the new NIE was a good deal clearer than the often mealy-mouthed wording of the report. By an overwhelming margin, according to a Rasmussen poll conducted after the new NIE report's findings were made public, Americans don't buy that Iran has quit trying to go nuclear.

They may be wiser than the intelligence minds who put together the new NIE. After all, oil-rich Iran continues to enrich uranium even though it doesn't need new sources of energy. This enriched uranium can be used as terrorist dirty bombs or diverted to nuclear weapons rather quickly.

So isn't it a lose/lose situation if Iran still could be working toward being able to develop a bomb while our own intelligence services have now assured the world that that's not the case?

Yes — but the full answer is more complex, because the world itself has changed since the 2005 NIE even more than the unreliable opinions of our intelligence services have.

Two years ago, the growing furor over the Iraqi war had created the conventional wisdom that Iran had come out the real "winner." Tehran's archenemy, Saddam Hussein, had been removed. And Iran was able to tie down the U.S. in Iraq through its Shiite terrorist proxies.

Meanwhile, with the U.S. busy in Iraq and the West split (former allies like France and Germany damned almost everything the U.S. did in the Middle East), Iran's ruling mullahs got a pass to cause more trouble in Gaza and Lebanon with subsidies to Hezbollah and Hamas.

But that was then.

With Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election as president of Iran in August 2005, the United States was given a public relations bonanza. We no longer had to warn the world that the largely silent mullahs in Iran were unstable and dangerous. Loud-mouthed Ahmadinejad did all that and more for us.

When he bragged that a mesmerized U.N. audience couldn't blink when he spoke, or that Israel should disappear from the map, the rest of the world on its own concluded that he was either outright crazy or scary — or both.

There are now pro-American governments in France and Germany. Both are terrified about Iran. That's understandable since both — unlike us — could soon very well be in range of Iran's newest North Korean-made missiles.

Meanwhile, Iran's other interests in the Middle East have taken a hit. Hezbollah is still clearing out the mess from the 2006 Lebanon war; that will cost its Iranian patron billions in war reconstruction aid. Israel has proved that it can take out Syrian weapons facilities with ease; its recent raid of a suspected nuclear plant won the quiet applause of almost everyone in the Middle East.

Iraq is quieting down. The country's Shiite majority in the democratic government is increasingly acting a little more like nationalists than lackeys of Iran.

And the entire Sunni Arab Middle East is lining up against Iran, scared stiff that its traditional rival may still go nuclear and shake them down for either tribute or cuts in oil production.

Internally, Iran gets worse each year. It spent billions on subsidies for terrorists and a pricey nuclear bomb plant that its people will now hear was shut down. And Iranians still can't figure out why gas is rationed when the country's oil earns $90 a barrel. If the government can't keep the public happy at record oil prices, what would it do should the market soften?

As the increasingly isolated Iranian economy tanks and the country becomes an international embarrassment, demonstrations against the government continue. At one last week at the University of Tehran, a sign blared out "Live free or die" — the motto of New Hampshire.

What are we to make of this mixed-up picture of Iran and its nuclear program?

With the new intelligence assessment, our allies got, and did not get, their wishes. There will probably be no American pre-emption against Iranian nuclear sites and, unfortunately, less American strong-arming for more sanctions on an Iran that seems to have been already reeling under the pressure.

But there will also be for our allies the growing nightmare that a sneaky Iran could now think it is free to race to the nuclear finish line — something that will endanger them far more than us.

December 07, 2007, 0:00 a.m.

Huck’s Unholy Dance

Mormonism should be a total irrelevancy in any political campaign. It is not.

By Charles Krauthammer

When Mitt Romney’s father ran for the presidency 40 years ago, his Mormonism was not an issue. When Mo Udall was a major challenger for the Democratic nomination in 1976, his religion was so irrelevant that today most people don’t even remember that Udall was a Mormon.

Five members of the Senate are Mormon. Are there any intimations that the Mormonism of Harry Reid, Orrin Hatch, Gordon Smith, Michael Crapo, or Robert Bennett corrupts, distorts or in any way diminishes their ability to perform their constitutional duties?

Mormonism should be a total irrelevancy in any political campaign. It is not. Which is why Mitt Romney had to deliver his JFK “religion speech” this week. He didn’t want to. But he figured that he had to. Why? Because he’s being overtaken in Iowa. Why Iowa? Because about 40 percent of the Republican caucus voters in 2000 were self-described “Christian conservatives” — twice the number of those in New Hampshire, for example — and, for many of them, Mormonism is a Christian heresy.

That didn’t seem to matter for much of this year when Romney had a commanding lead and his religion seemed a manageable political problem — until Mike Huckabee came along and caught up to Romney in the Iowa polls.

The appealing aspects of Huckabee’s politics and persona account for much of this. But part of his rise in Iowa is attributable to something rather less appealing: playing the religion card. The other major candidates — John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson — either never figured out how to use it or had the decency to refuse to deploy it.

Huckabee has exploited Romney’s Mormonism with an egregious subtlety. Huckabee is running a very effective ad in Iowa about religion. “Faith doesn’t just influence me,” he says on camera, “it really defines me.” The ad then hails him as a “Christian leader.”

Forget the implications of the idea that being a “Christian leader” is some special qualification for the presidency of a country whose Constitution (Article VI) explicitly rejects any religious test for office. Just imagine that Huckabee were running one-on-one in Iowa against Joe Lieberman. (It’s a thought experiment. Stay with me.) If he had run the same ad in those circumstances, it would have raised an outcry. The subtext — who’s the Christian in this race? — would have been too obvious to ignore, the appeal to bigotry too clear.

Well, Huckabee is running against Romney (the other GOP candidates are non-factors in Iowa) and he knows that many Christian conservatives, particularly those who have an affinity with Huckabee’s highly paraded evangelical Christianity, consider Romney’s faith a decidedly non-Christian cult.

Huckabee has been asked about this view that Mormonism is a cult. He dodges and dances. “If I’m invited to be the president of a theological school, that’ll be a perfectly appropriate question,” he says, “but to be the president of the United States, I don’t know that that’s going to be the most important issue that I’ll be facing when I’m sworn in.”

Hmmm. So it is an issue, Huckabee avers. But not a very important one. And he’s not going to pronounce upon it. Nice straddle, leaving the question unanswered and still open — the kind of maneuver one comes to expect from slick former governors of Arkansas lusting for the presidency.

And by Huckabee’s own logic, since he is not running for head of a theological college, what is he doing proclaiming himself a “Christian leader” in an ad promoting himself for president? Answer: Having the issue every which way. Seeming to take the high road of tolerance by refusing to declare Mormonism a cult, indeed declaring himself above the issue — yet clearly playing to that prejudice by leaving the question ambiguous, while making sure everyone knows that he, for one, is a “Christian leader.”

The God of the Founders, the God on the coinage, the God for whom Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving Day is the ineffable, ecumenical, nonsectarian Providence of the American civil religion whose relation to this blessed land is without appeal to any particular testament or ritual. Every mention of God in every inaugural address in American history refers to the deity in this kind of all-embracing, universal, nondenominational way. (The one exception: William Henry Harrison. He caught cold delivering that inaugural address. Thirty-one days later, he was dead. Draw your own conclusion.) I suspect that neither Jefferson’s Providence nor Washington’s Great Author nor Lincoln’s Almighty would look kindly on the exploitation of religious differences for political gain. It is un-American. It is unfortunate that Romney has had to justify himself in response.

November 12, 2007, 4:00 a.m.

The Bear Was a Goat
 

Remembering Guy R. “Bear” Barattieri.

By James S. Robbins

As with many West Point goats, Bear was a fun loving, charismatic, and resourceful cadet who would rather find ways to have adventures than to study. Classmate Dana Rucinski said he was “one of the most cheerful, friendly, positive people at school. You couldn't help but smile when talking to Bear, and nothing ever seemed to get him down — no matter what his academic worry of the week!” His grades kept him out of sports for his firstie (senior) year, but he hung on and graduated on time, albeit at the foot of his class. As is traditional, he received the loudest applause, and was given a dollar by each of the other 961 graduating members of the Class of ‘92. Some of his rugby pals had plans to help Bear spend his windfall that summer at Ft. Benning when they went for the Infantry Officers Basic Course, but by the time he showed up the money was long gone.

Bear served first as an infantry officer, then became a Green Beret with the First Special Forces Group out of Ft. Lewis, Washington. He deployed to the Balkans and served with distinction, winning the respect of all who came into contact with him. Bear left the Army as a Captain in August 2000 to join the Seattle police department. He was much more serious about law-enforcement training than he had been about West Point and became president of his police academy class. But Bear kept a hand in the military as a Major in the 1st battalion, 19th Special Forces Group of the Washington State National Guard. Bear’s unit was activated following the 9/11 attacks, and in 2002 he found himself in Kuwait preparing for the eventual attack on Iraq. Bear fought bravely in OIF. His team was attached to the 101st Airborne Division and led the way on the advance towards Baghdad in March 2003. Bear was credited with capturing three of the Iraqi leaders featured on the famous “deck of cards,” and was recognized with a Bronze Star citation.

Bear made several trips to Iraq, both with the special forces and working for private security firms. At one time he provided security for the FOX News Baghdad bureau. Bureau Chief John Fiegener recalled, “Bear arrived on his first assignment to head up our security team in Baghdad. We all knew right away that Bear was the man. You just knew no one would mess with us because Bear would make sure of it.” When car bombs went off outside the bureau, Bear coordinated the response and kept the situation under control. Producer Gordon Robison said, “Throughout it all [Bear] remained calm. When it was over he was confident and smiling, and that attitude helped the rest of us to understand that we, too, were going to make it through.”

Bear married his wife Laurel in Washington in 2005, and in July the following year they welcomed their daughter Odessa to the world. But Bear was not yet through with the war and he returned to Iraq in late September 2006.

On October 4, 2006, Bear was part of a three-vehicle convoy supplying security near Forward Operating Base Falcon. He was riding in the back of the second vehicle, an armored Ford F-350, driven by Kurdish peshmerga fighters. The group they were escorting was visiting a nearby power plant. On the way to the site the streets had been lined with Iraqi police, but the egress route was empty. The security guard sitting next to Bear radioed, “Streets are clear. That’s kind of odd isn’t it?”

Three seconds later an IED ripped through their vehicle. The Kurds in the front were killed instantly, the driver’s body left burning and the passenger’s having disintegrated. The man next to Bear was severely wounded, and in and out of consciousness. Bear had lost both legs below the knee.

The two other vehicles in the convoy stopped to render assistance. Small arms fire erupted immediately after the explosion, from both sides of the street and the nearby rooftops. All the attackers wore Iraqi police uniforms. The security detail returned fire while others helped the wounded men. Tourniquets were applied to Bear’s legs to keep him from bleeding to death. It took ten minutes working under fire to free the two passengers.

The two surviving vehicles sped from the area and a running firefight ensued. The tail gunner of the trailing vehicle fired at anyone he saw wearing an Iraqi police uniform. The convoy drove to the International Zone, about 13 kilometers distant, and went directly to the combat support hospital. Bear’s partner was declared DOA. Bear was taken immediately into surgery where he was stabilized, and moved into surgical ICU. There, a short time later, he died.

The news of Bear’s death was devastating to all who knew him. The National Guard Association of Washington established a “Bear Fund” for contributions to help support his young wife and their new baby and his stepdaughter Rees. Scores of family, friends, and coworkers attended his funeral. Yet through the sorrow, all the tributes to Bear reflect his own joy of living. Those who knew him cannot help but celebrate him for the spirit and sense of life he brought to everything he did. His high-school classmate C. E. Pope said “he was an American hero in every sense of the word. He was one of the most down to earth, giving individuals I ever knew, he had a love for his family that was enormous, and he wore his belief in this country on his chest like a badge of honor.” Fellow West Pointer and friend Christopher F. Carr, said that “Guy had an amazing capacity to live life to the fullest and a strong desire to dedicate his life to protecting all that he held dear.” And his sisters Gina, Becky, and Nicole said, “We know our brother died so that others could live. He died for what he believed in. And lets just say heaven has its hands full now.”

— James S. Robbins is the director of the Intelligence Center at Trinity Washington University , senior fellow for national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, and author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.

— James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point. Robbins is also an NRO contributor.

Clyburn was right

The Surge is working. Democrats panic

The No. 3 Democrat in the House, James Clyburn of South Carolina, let the cat out of the bag this summer when he said if the Surge works, that would be “a real big problem for us.”

The Surge is working. Violent deaths have dropped in Iraq by 70% since the Surge began. The latest Reuters poll shows the Democratic Congress’s job approval is at 11%.

11%.

That means 8 out of 9 Americans don’t approve. The Democratic Congress has turned off 267 million people.

That is because it has done nothing but investigate inside-the-beltway nonsense and debate the Iraq war. Threatening to cut off funding for the troops is not cool, no matter how unpopular the war is.

The Hill reported Speaker Nancy Pelosi will try to put a smiley face on congressional incompetence by going on a PR tour in November.

The Hill quoted the No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer of Maryland: “We’re concerned obviously that the accomplishments of both the House and Senate are overshadowed by failure to change direction in Iraq. We’re hoping in the next three or four months to make it clear what has been done and make it clear we are upset that more has not been accomplished because of the president’s refusal to change direction.”

What accomplishments? Name them. In a letter to colleagues, Pelosi asked them to talk up those “accomplishments” — a hike in the minimum wage that affects 1% of all workers and more student loans — so colleges can jack up tuition even higher.

Pelosi’s credibility, however, is not very high. The Politico reported top aides to Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn called a mandatory meeting for top Democratic staffers Monday to announce “a major member-driven message campaign” that leaders hope to sustain through the end of the year.

Politico quoted a senior Democratic leadership aide, who said, “The best people to deliver this message are individual members.”

I smell panic.

If those rookie Democratic congressmen want to get re-elected, I suggest they buck Pelosi, Hoyer and Clyburn and join Republicans whenever possible. The FISA act — the real accomplishment of this Congress (courtesy of Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and Republican House Leader John Boehner) — came because 41 Blue Dog Democrats in the House supported it.

Ed Patru, communications director for the House Republican Conference, told Politico: “The public knows full well Democrat leaders haven’t delivered, not because rank-and-file isn’t doing enough to broadcast cadaverous talking points. They should be plotting leadership coups, not having pizza parties. This is not the kind of change the freshmen thought they were getting, and it’s certainly not the kind of change the country expected.”

Democrats underestimated the strength of our military and the resolve of our commander-in-chief. Democrats bet on defeat. Senate Plurality Leader Harry Reid declared the war lost in April.

Now, 6 months later, Osama bin Laden is admitting defeat in Iraq as he scrambles to make himself relevant again.

Sort of like the Democratic Congress.

The Hill story is here. The Politico story is here. Blog reaction is here.

BE NOT AFRAID

Global Warming Delusions
 

The popular imagination has been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

BY DANIEL B. BOTKIN
Sunday, October 21, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life--ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming--a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age--saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.

The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food--an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.

 You might think I must be one of those know-nothing naysayers who believes global warming is a liberal plot. On the contrary, I am a biologist and ecologist who has worked on global warming, and been concerned about its effects, since 1968. I've developed the computer model of forest growth that has been used widely to forecast possible effects of global warming on life--I've used the model for that purpose myself, and to forecast likely effects on specific endangered species.

I'm not a naysayer. I'm a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds," the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. "Wolves deceive their prey, don't they?" one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed the computer programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with available computers and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal of computer modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts of computer models have become our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.

A recent article in the well-respected journal American Scientist explained why the glacier on Mt. Kilimanjaro could not be melting from global warming. Simply from an intellectual point of view it was fascinating--especially the author's Sherlock Holmes approach to figuring out what was causing the glacier to melt. That it couldn't be global warming directly (i.e., the result of air around the glacier warming) was made clear by the fact that the air temperature at the altitude of the glacier is below freezing. This means that only direct radiant heat from sunlight could be warming and melting the glacier. The author also studied the shape of the glacier and deduced that its melting pattern was consistent with radiant heat but not air temperature. Although acknowledged by many scientists, the paper is scorned by the true believers in global warming.

We are told that the melting of the arctic ice will be a disaster. But during the famous medieval warming period--A.D. 750 to 1230 or so--the Vikings found the warmer northern climate to their advantage. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie addressed this in his book "Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate Since the Year 1000," perhaps the greatest book about climate change before the onset of modern concerns with global warming. He wrote that Erik the Red "took advantage of a sea relatively free of ice to sail due west from Iceland to reach Greenland. . . . Two and a half centuries later, at the height of the climatic and demographic fortunes of the northern settlers, a bishopric of Greenland was founded at Gardar in 1126."

Ladurie pointed out that "it is reasonable to think of the Vikings as unconsciously taking advantage of this [referring to the warming of the Middle Ages] to colonize the most northern and inclement of their conquests, Iceland and Greenland." Good thing that Erik the Red didn't have Al Gore or his climatologists as his advisers.

 Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.

We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes--wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.

For example, right now the clearest threat to many species is habitat destruction. Take the orangutans, for instance, one of those charismatic species that people are often fascinated by and concerned about. They are endangered because of deforestation. In our fear of global warming, it would be sad if we fail to find funds to purchase those forests before they are destroyed, and thus let this species go extinct.

At the heart of the matter is how much faith we decide to put in science--even how much faith scientists put in science. Our times have benefited from clear-thinking, science-based rationality. I hope this prevails as we try to deal with our changing climate.

Mr. Botkin, president of the Center for the Study of the Environment and professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of "Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century" (Replica Books, 2001).

Where do they get these people?

The federal deficit just hit its lowest level since 2002 and September unemployment was 4.7 percent -- very good news for Americans. Yet British newspaper readers might suppose it was all gloom and doom, that is, if they read the Guardian:

America, in short, is in a deep funk. Far from feeling hopeful, it appears fearful of the outside world and despondent about its own future. Not only do most believe tomorrow will be worse than today, they also feel that there is little that can be done about it.

Perhaps the clueless Brit confuses our citizens' negative opinion of the government in Washington with being "despondent" about America itself. But that's the beauty of limited government: People can be quite happy in their own lives while simultaneously believing their government is corrupt and incompetent.

Just in case any Brits are reading this: Things are jolly well splendid over here, lads. Don't let that bloke from the Guardian tell you otherwise.

And by the way, the unemployment rate in the UK is 5.4 percent -- if Americans are "despondent," does this mean Brits are pathologically depressed?

-- Robert Stacy McCain, assistant national editor, The Washington Times

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Is academia serious about diversity?