Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Michelle’s tweet for the Nigerian girls gets the Mark Steyn treatment.
It is hard not to have total contempt for a political culture that thinks the picture above (Michelle is holding a sign that says; Bring Back Our Girls.) is a useful contribution to rescuing 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by jihadist savages in Nigeria. Yet some pajama boy at the White House evidently felt getting the First Lady to pose with this week’s Hashtag of Western Impotence would reflect well upon the Administration. The horrible thing is they may be right: Michelle showed she cared – on social media! – and that’s all that matters, isn’t it?
Just as the last floppo hashtag, #WeStandWithUkraine, didn’t actually involve standing with Ukraine, so #BringBackOurGirls doesn’t require bringing back our girls. There are only a half-dozen special forces around the planet capable of doing that without getting most or all of the hostages killed: the British, the French, the Americans, Israelis, Germans, Aussies, maybe a couple of others. So, unless something of that nature is being lined up, those schoolgirls are headed into slavery, and the wretched pleading passivity of Mrs Obama’s hashtag is just a form of moral preening.
But then what isn’t? The blogger Daniel Payne wrote this week that “modern liberalism, at its core, is an ideology of talking, not doing“. He was musing on a press release for some or other “Day of Action” that is, as usual, a day of inaction:
Diverse grassroots groups are organizing and participating in events such as walks, rallies and concerts and calling on government to reduce climate pollution, transition off fossil fuels and commit to a clean energy future.
It’s that easy! You go to a concert and someone “calls on government” to do something, and the world gets fixed.
Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Time to have a look at the recent climate foolishness. David Harsanyi is first.
… Have you noticed that we’re always at the cusp of a cataclysm, yet the deadline to act always moves to a politically convenient not-too-distant future? I guess when the time to act runs out – it will at some point, right? — we can begin thinking about defunding all these panels and reinvesting in something more productive: like figuring out how we can adapt to the future.
For now, though, the congressionally mandated report claims we’re no longer merely dealing with impending disaster. The United States, it asserts, has already incurred billions of dollars in damages from severe weather-related disruptions due to climate change. The political hope is that some of this ugly weather will generate more urgency to do something. President Obama will use the report to bolster his case for unilaterally enacting carbon dioxide regulations, neglecting, one imagines, to mention that while there is consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change, there isn’t much agreement on whether severe weather has actually gotten worse over the past years, or, if it has, that climate change is the cause.
Nevertheless.
“We’re committed to moving forward with those rules,” John Podesta said in a bit of an anti-democratic rant the other day. “We’re committed to maintaining the authority and the president’s authority to ensure that the Clean Air Act is fully implemented.” Don’t worry, though. Podesta says this is “actionable science” so separation of powers and consent of the governed and other trifling concerns are no longer applicable. …
Salena Zito writes on a Georgia congressional candidate who might know what the country is thinking.
… One thing Dutton already has won is the sentiment of a country dumbfounded that President Barack Obama last week defined climate change as the most pressing issue facing the country. Obama did so as part of a huge public relations campaign — yes, campaign — that included asking people to pressure Washington to act on the issue.
Not jobs. Not the economy. Not rebuilding our aging infrastructure. Not gang violence, or education.
Climate change.
And he and his party ridiculed anyone who disagrees.
A couple of things about all of this smack the sensibilities of regular folks.
First, most people know Earth’s climate always has changed; everyone knows about this little thing called the Ice Age. What most people don’t care for is the issue being used politically to slice and dice the country, the same way the minimum wage, gender, race, immigration and religion have been used by this administration.
This is why folks do not look toward Washington, D.C., to solve problems anymore. This is why young people — the Millennials — are so turned off by the brands of both political parties, a one-time advantage that Democrats have completely squandered.
And this is why we have wave-election cycles. …
Editors of the Boston Herald have thoughts.
The Obama administration is trying to scare us with totally unverifiable projections of a disastrous global warming. We trust that most people are not going to fall for this outrageous scare-mongering.
The ballyhooed third National Climate Assessment, released last Wednesday by several agencies, alleges first, the world has warmed over the last century and second, it’s going to get much worse.
This is supposed to convince us of the wisdom of President Obama’s plans to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief gas said to be warming the planet. …
Frank Beckmann of the Detroit News writes on the president’s climate obsession.
The Obama administration’s war on affordable energy ramped up a major notch this week with release of the government’s latest guess about future weather events, something it calls the “National Climate Assessment.”
The administration, anxious to continue taxpayer-provided subsidies to politically-favored green energy firms that return the favor with campaign contributions to Democrats, claims it used the expertise of hundreds of “experts” to come up with the findings.
A cursory glance of the participants shows no participation by climate realists but leading report authors from environmental political action groups like Second Nature, The Nature Conservancy, Planet Forward, and the misnamed Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that is not made up of scientists at all and which also advocates for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament.
The government’s report is full of alarms claiming America is already experiencing the effects of “climate disruption” — the newest name created by this crowd of hucksters — in the form of records for higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising seas, droughts, floods and melting polar ice.
In each case, their claims are disputed by observable facts and the historical record, a willful flaw for this bunch of amnesia victims. …
The Wall Street Journal reviews a book on a real weather event. It caused a year without summer. T. Jefferson was afraid his poor crops would cause him to lose Monticello.
… Tambora’s was an almighty explosion. Four thousand feet were instantly lopped off the volcano’s summit and thrust high into the stratosphere by the blast: Few eruptions in recorded history have been so massive. Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore, was on scene as governor of Java and, well aware that what he experienced was powerful juju indeed, commissioned the collection of eyewitness reports. Mr. Wood makes a very good case in his persuasively entertaining book that what Raffles noted during that East Indian spring was indeed a volcano like no other in modern human history.
Not that his book is by any means the first to remind us of the broad outlines of the story. That 1816 came to be known as “the year without summer.” That the terrible post-eruption weather in Switzerland prompted Mary Shelley to write “Frankenstein” and Byron to compose gloomier-than-usual poetry. That during the two following years of lowering gloom, mid-latitude snows, failed crops and general distemper, there were all kinds of economic disasters in America, in India, in Ireland, in China. Mr. Wood is not the only one to claim that these can be put down to the trillions of tons of sun-shrouding Tamboran dust hurled into the air on that moonless April Tuesday two centuries ago.
If not the first, Mr. Wood’s book is by far the best on the subject, and the most comprehensive. What Mr. Wood has achieved in “Tambora” is to uncover, collect and collate a great deal of new scientific evidence to bolster his case. He is, incidentally, the English professor of most students’ dreams—a man with a powerful environmental bent who is totally up-to-date and who reads far beyond his remit. From his studies and attention to the work of chemists and zoologists and epidemiologists and historians (combined with adventurous travels to the region, including a risky trek up to the Tambora crater edge), he has built with this slim book a far more plausible case for cause and effect than has ever been made before.
Purple rainfall in Kunming, ruining western China’s 1818 broad-bean crop? Tambora’s fault. A typhus epidemic in County Cork, adding to the miseries of an Ireland swamped in rain and blighted potatoes? Chalk it up to the mighty eruption far off in the East. Thomas Jefferson fretting over the future of his beloved Monticello? His crops were failing precisely because of the sulfurous aerosols from Sumbawa Island and the icy weather they brought. Just about everything presented in these pages fits together like a gigantic intercontinental jigsaw puzzle, with the grand image emerging just as the final piece is slipped onto the board: Tambora. …