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Roger Simon calls attention to The Economist having second thoughts about globalony. Now it will take 50 years for the left, and the idiots in DC to get the message. Of course, for them it was only cover to increase the power of the state.
No subject has convinced me more that modern liberalism is the most primitive religious faith on the planet (possibly excepting Wahhabism) than man-made global warming, aka climate change.
So it was with some amusement that I read the other day that most august of publications The Economist was having second thoughts:
IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.”
The publication elucidates in an extended article from the same edition:
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
Am I wrong or was the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming based on a correlation between greenhouse-gas emissions and rising temperatures? Oh, well, maybe Al Gore will explain it to me. (I’m sure his knowledge base has improved since his unfortunate ‘D’ in college geology. After all, he’s a “climate sensitive” guy.)
I especially hope he will since those pesky Russians are predicting something far worse — a new Ice Age: …
Max Boot examines the circumstances surrounding the loss of four great generals.
The quasi-official ideology of the U.S. armed forces holds that generals are virtually interchangeable, that individual personalities don’t matter much, that ordinary grunts are in any case more important than their leaders, and that what really counts are larger systems that make a complex bureaucracy function. There is some truth to all of this. But for all of the bureaucratic heft of the services and the heroism of ordinary soldiers, it is hard to imagine the Civil War having been won without Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan—or World War II without Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley, Arnold, LeMay, Nimitz, Halsey, and all the other senior generals and admirals.
Likewise it is hard to imagine the War on Terror having been waged without four-star commanders such as David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis. They are among the most illustrious generals produced by the last decade of fighting. They are the stars of their generation. From Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond, they emerged from anonymity to orchestrate campaigns that, after initial setbacks, have given the United States a chance to salvage a decent outcome from protracted counterinsurgencies; they have also literally rewritten the book on how to wage modern war successfully. Yet aside from the similarities in the challenges they faced and the skills they displayed in rising to the task, these men share another, more troubling resemblance: They are either gone from the military or (in the case of Mattis) about to go as of this writing. And for the most part they are leaving under unhappy circumstances. A strong case can be made that all were shabbily treated to one extent or another. Petraeus was hounded out of the CIA and McChrystal out of high command in Afghanistan under a cloud of scandal; Allen saw his reputation unfairly marred by scandal before deciding to call it quits; and Mattis is said to have been pushed out early after clashes with the White House. Certainly none of them was afforded the respect and honors that successful officers at the pinnacle of their career ought to expect—in part to drive younger officers to follow their example and seize the day when their time comes. The treatment of these four remarkable generals at the hands of President Obama and his aides, whatever the merits of each individual case, is likely to rankle within the armed forces and leave those forces less prepared for future challenges.
Of the four, Petraeus was first among equals, the dominant general of his generation. …
… Mattis, indeed, developed a Patton-like reputation for outspokenness with comments such as the one he made at a San Diego conference in 2005: “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”
Mattis’s political incorrectness was thought to bar further promotion. And yet in 2007 he was promoted to four-star rank and appointed to head the now defunct Joint Forces Command. Then in 2010, he was appointed Petraeus’s successor at Centcom. In this post he made few public ripples but worked intently behind the scenes to support the war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and to prepare for the possibility of conflict with Iran. He was due to retire from Centcom in March, after just two and a half years. Veteran military correspondent Tom Ricks has reported that Mattis was being forced out early because he displeased some in the Obama administration with his blunt questioning about the lack of preparation for war with Tehran.
Mackubin Thomas Owens, a retired Marine who is now a professor at the NavalWarCollege, recently wrote: “By pushing Gen. Mattis overboard, the administration sent a message that it doesn’t want smart, independent-minded generals who speak candidly to their civilian leaders.” Whatever the truth of that allegation (which has been hotly disputed by administration spokesmen), it is a shame that the nation will lose Mattis’s services—as it has already lost those of Petraeus, McChrystal, and Allen. Mattis is only 62, but he has announced that he will retire to farming in Washington state, where he grew up.
Petraeus, McChrystal, Allen, and Mattis would be the first to deny that they are irreplaceable—the graveyards, they would no doubt remind us, are said to be full of irreplaceable men. And clearly there are a number of capable officers who will strive to fill their combat boots. Some heroes of the last decade of war—including General Ray Odierno, General Martin Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), Admiral William McRaven (McChrystal’s successor at JSOC and the man who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid), and Major General H.R. McMaster (a noted military intellectual and counterinsurgency commander)—remain in uniform.
But the experience and savvy of the four will be hard to replace. Certainly they deserve more public appreciation than they have gotten so far and, at the very least, an honored role in helping to teach a new generation of soldiers and Marines how to operate at the pinnacle of command. We do not have such a surplus of brilliant commanders that we can afford to wave away those like Petraeus and McChrystal and Allen and Mattis, who have demonstrated a mastery of the modern battlefield. We can only hope that President Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the loss of their institutional knowledge, their leadership abilities, and their complex understanding of a dangerous world does not prove to be a tragedy for the nation.
John Merline in IBD highlights a George Mason study showing how free people vote with their feet.
Americans are migrating from less-free liberal states to more-free conservative states, where they are doing better economically, according to a new study published Thursday by GeorgeMasonUniversity’s MercatusCenter.
The “Freedom in the 50 States” study measured economic and personal freedom using a wide range of criteria, including tax rates, government spending and debt, regulatory burdens, and state laws covering land use, union organizing, gun control, education choice and more.
It found that the freest states tended to be conservative “red” states, while the least free were liberal “blue” states.
The freest state overall, the researchers concluded, was North Dakota, followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire and Oklahoma. The least free state by far was New York, followed by California, New Jersey, Hawaii and Rhode Island.
The study also compared its measures of economic and personal freedom to population shifts and income growth, and found that freer states tend to do better on both scores than those less free.
For example, it found a strong correlation between a state’s freedom ranking and migration, which means that Americans are gravitating toward states that have less-intrusive governments.