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David Harsanyi writes on Bill Nye, fake scientist.

Bill Nye has some detestable ideas about humanity. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Many environmental doomsdayers share his totalitarian impulses (Nye has toyed with the idea of criminalizing speech he dislikes) and soft spot for eugenics.

In his Netflix series, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” the former children’s television host supplies viewers with various trendy notions to adorn his ideological positions with the sheen of science. In the final episode, Nye and his guests contemplate a thorny “scientific” question: How the state can stop people from having “extra children.”

Nye: So, should we have policies that penalize people for having extra kids in the developed world?
Travis Rieder: I do think that we should at least consider it.
Nye: Well, ‘at least consider it’ is like ‘Do it.’
Rieder: One of the things that we could do that’s kind of least policy-ish is we could encourage our culture and our norms to change, right?

All of this was pretty familiar to me, and not only because the panel sounded like a ChiCom planning meeting. The Nye segment, it turns out, was just a repetition of a 2016 NPR article on overpopulation featuring Rieder that I’d once written about. …

Bret Stephens has left the WSJ and joined the NY Times. The last time that was done it was David Brooks. And boy did he go native! He used to write good stuff and we used to put it in Pickings. Now, he has become NY Times unreadable. We will hope the same thing does not happen to Stephens whose unrelenting dislike and dismissal of President Trump was said to lead to the change. Apparently the Journal wishes to cover Trump with less disdain than their initial coverage displayed. Bret Stephens’ first column morphed from the certainties of the Hillary campaign to the certainties of the climate scolds.

… “Mook and his ‘Moneyball’ approach to politics rankled the old order of political operatives and consultants because it made some of their work obsolete,” Allen and Parnes write about the campaign’s final days. “The memo that one Hillary adviser had sent months earlier warning that they should add three or four points to Trump’s poll position was a distant memory.”

There’s a lesson here. We live in a world in which data convey authority. But authority has a way of descending to certitude, and certitude begets hubris. From Robert McNamara to Lehman Brothers to Stronger Together, cautionary tales abound.

We ought to know this by now, but we don’t. Instead, we respond to the inherent uncertainties of data by adding more data without revisiting our assumptions, creating an impression of certainty that can be lulling, misleading and often dangerous. Ask Clinton.

With me so far? Good. Let’s turn to climate change.

Last October, the PewResearchCenterpublished a survey on the politics of climate change. Among its findings: Just 36 percent of Americans care “a great deal” about the subject. Despite 30 years of efforts by scientists, politicians and activists to raise the alarm, nearly two-thirds of Americans are either indifferent to or only somewhat bothered by the prospect of planetary calamity.

Why? The science is settled. The threat is clear. Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument? 

Well, not entirely. As Andrew Revkin wrote last year about his storied career as an environmental reporter at The Times, “I saw a widening gap between what scientists had been learning about global warming and what advocates were claiming as they pushed ever harder to pass climate legislation.” The science was generally scrupulous. The boosters who claimed its authority weren’t. …

The first Stephens column has created a sh-tstorm at the Times. NeoNeocon posts.

… Which brings us to an article Bret Stephens wrote in his new venue, the NY Times. It was really a rather modest suggestion that people listen to both sides of the issue—not so much on AGW (which he himself seems to believe is true) as on whether we know enough to accurately predict the future of AGW and/or to fix the problems it may cause.

The Twitter storm this caused has been virulent. But if AGW (and intervention to halt or slow its effects) is your religion, then someone like Stephens becomes the AGW devil. Then this sort of response seems perfectly reasonable (if crass):

“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.

“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.

“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.

Not only has Stephens been excoriated, but that last sentiment—that he shouldn’t be at the Times—has drawn enough support to be expressed in a petition, that now has about 27,000 supporters, asking that he be fired. …

… Adriana Heguy, a genomics scientist and professor of pathology at NYU, urged her colleagues to scrap their subscriptions, as well.

“Composing my letter to the editor today and canceling @nytimes,” she tweeted. “‘Balance’ means a VALID alternative opinion, not pseudoscience. I’m so sad.”

And Ed Driscoll spotted this at ‘fake news’ Rolling Stone.

… Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone: “literally go f*** yourself, new york times. go, eat, dog, d*cks.” (Note: This is from someone at a magazine proven to have published a spectacularly false story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. — Ed. …

 

 

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While the country is filled with high fives from the right and the left for Trump’s attack on Syria, some of our favorites are suggesting notes of caution. Here’s Craig Pirrong, The Streetwise Professor.

President Trump ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian air base that was allegedly the launching point of a sarin attack on a town in the Idlib  Governate. My initial take is like Tim Newman’s: although the inhumanity in Syria beggars description, getting involved there is foolish and will not end well.

The Syrian conflict is terrible, but Syria makes the snake pit in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom look hospitable. …

… To put it slightly differently. Good intentions mean nothing. Results and consequences do. I am at a loss to think of any policy with results and consequences that accord with good intentions. Indeed, it almost inevitable that any major military intervention would not save Syrian lives but would cost American ones.

Truth be told, given the devastation wreaked on children, women, and men in Syria by bombs, shells, small arms and even throat-slashing blades, chemical weapons do not represent a quantum shift in the horribleness of the Syrian war. Dead is dead, and periodic use of chemical weapons does not materially affect the amount of dying that is going on. Assad–and the Islamists he is fighting–have killed and maimed far more innocent civilians with conventional weapons than with chemical ones.  The use of chemical weapons does not represent a fundamental shift in the nature of the war, which was already a total war waged without restraint against civilians by all sides (would that there were only two sides in Syria). …

And the Professor followed with another post.

The Syria story has many threads. I’ll address a few of them here.

First, to follow on Ex-Regulator’s comment: Trump’s initial public justification for the strike–the humanitarian impulse stirred by pictures of dying children–is deeply troubling. Sentimentality is a poor basis for policy. In particular, it has no limiting principle. If you take a tragic view of humanity–if you view mankind as fallen and flawed–you know that there is a virtually unending supply of sad, heartbreaking, stories. So how does a president choose which appeal to answer? And how do people know which appeals he will answer? Truth is, we have no idea. The line will be arbitrary, which leads to unpredictable, inconsistent policy. …

… Occam’s Razor would say that Trump’s attack completely undercuts the narrative that he is Putin’s bitch. But Occam’s Razor is an alien concept in the fever swamps of the left. The certifiably insane (Louise Mensch) and the hyper partisan but supposedly sane (Lawrence O’Donnell, Chris Matthews) certain have never shaved with it. They are claiming that this proves Trump is Putin’s bitch! The “reasoning”? He is doing it because the most likely interpretation is that it shows that Trump isn’t Putin’s bitch, so that means that he is! Or something.

In other words, this lot interprets everything that Trump does as evidence of his collusion with the Russians. This means that the hypothesis that he is in collusion with Putin is unfalsifiable, and hence is junk reasoning. It should therefore be rejected, as should anything that those who espouse this theory say.

Lastly, the attack is a complete embarrassment to the Obama administration, which preened and bragged that it had rid the Assad regime of chemical weapons. …

A more hopeful note comes from Scott Adams, of the Dilbert Blog.

1. President Trump just solved for the allegation that he is Putin’s puppet. He doesn’t look like Putin’s puppet today. And that was Trump’s biggest problem, which made it America’s problem too. No one wants a president who is under a cloud of suspicion about Russian influence.

2. President Trump solved (partly) the allegation that he is incompetent. You can hate this military action, but even Trump’s critics will call it measured and rational. Like it or not, President Trump’s credibility is likely to rise because of this, if not his popularity. Successful military action does that for presidents.

3. President Trump just set the table for his conversations with China about North Korea. Does China doubt Trump will take care of the problem in China’s own backyard if they don’t take care of it themselves? That negotiation just got easier.

4. Iran might be feeling a bit more flexible when it’s time to talk about their nuclear program. …

And from Andrew Malcolm who liked the missile strike.

President Donald Trump’s sudden missile strike against a Syrian airfield in retaliation for a gas attack on civilians will not change one thing about that sad land’s bloody civil war.

It will, however, alter the strategic calculus in many places within but also far beyond the troubled Middle East. Politically, the missiles also likely blasted any attempted allegations that Trump is a Putin patsy. Watch upcoming job approval polls for the popular verdict.

The 58 $1 million Tomahawk missiles (one fell into the sea) took out Syrian air force planes, reinforced hangars, fuel storage tanks and ammunition dumps. The intended message to Bashar Assad was, you can no longer use chemical weapons with impunity.

As columnist Charles Krauthammer aptly put it, following eight years of relative apathy and inaction after worse war crimes, the message from the new American president was not that there’s a new sheriff in town, but that there IS a sheriff in town. …

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Hillsdale College’s Imprimis has a great issue this month on “how to think about Putin.” It is a transcript of a talk by Christopher Caldwell at the College’s Leadership Seminar held in Phoenix two months ago. 

… Let me stress at the outset that this is not going to be a talk about what to think about Putin, which is something you are all capable of making up your minds on, but rather how to think about him. And on this, there is one basic truth to remember, although it is often forgotten. Our globalist leaders may have deprecated sovereignty since the end of the Cold War, but that does not mean it has ceased for an instant to be the primary subject of politics. … 

While Caldwell doesn’t address this directly, his efforts contain a realization of the problems of geography that have dogged Russia throughout its history. To wit, this is a country which is situated on the Great Northern European Plain which stretches from the Atlantic to the Ural Mountains and which has provided the country with no natural barriers that could constitute a defensive position. 

… if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that. In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country. …

Wikipedia lists 156 wars that have involved Russia since the fledgling KievianState began to take shape in 830. That means every seven and a half years during the history of Russia there has been some type of armed conflict; mostly with immediate neighbors. There were 21 wars with Turkey or Byzantium, ten with Sweden, seventeen with Poland, and so on. Is it any wonder Russians value a strong central state? 

Our political and philosophical forbearers had different concerns because they inhabited more secure lands with effective barriers against invasion. Great Britain was safe enough to have given much more thought to controlling a strong central state. So the Magna Carta, placing limits on the power of the rulers was created in England. It is impossible to imagine such a document making an appearance in Russia which faced existential threats every decade.

… Putin did not come out of nowhere. Russian people not only tolerate him, they revere him. You can get a better idea of why he has ruled for 17 years if you remember that, within a few years of Communism’s fall, average life expectancy in Russia had fallen below that of Bangladesh. That is an ignominy that falls on Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s reckless opportunism made him an indispensable foe of Communism in the late 1980s. But it made him an inadequate founding father for a modern state. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose writings about Communism give him some claim to be considered the greatest man of the twentieth century, believed the post-Communist leaders had made the country even worse. In the year 2000 Solzhenitsyn wrote: “As a result of the Yeltsin era, all the fundamental sectors of our political, economic, cultural, and moral life have been destroyed or looted. Will we continue looting and destroying Russia until nothing is left?” That was the year Putin came to power. He was the answer to Solzhenitsyn’s question.

There are two things Putin did that cemented the loyalty of Solzhenitsyn and other Russians—he restrained the billionaires who were looting the country, and he restored Russia’s standing abroad. Let us take them in turn. …

When last we posted, we closed with an article on the great tragedy that took place in 100 years ago in Russian when the fledgling democratic government was overthrown by Lenin and his bloodthirsty leftists. The circumstances of Lenin arriving in St’ Petersburg one month after the czar abdicated are the subject of a book reviewed by The WSJ. 

Of all the weapons deployed in World War I, among the most lethal may have been a train that left Zurich on April 9, 1917. Thirty-two of its passengers—a ragbag of revolutionaries and their family members—were on their way to Russia. At their head was Vladimir Lenin. The czar had just been overthrown, and a new democracy was struggling to be born. But the change in government was less of a revolution than Lenin had in mind. He had been in exile for years, most recently in Switzerland. To put things right, he had to return home.

Switzerland and Russia are not exactly neighbors. Much of the territory lying between them was controlled by states with which Russia was at war, states that wouldn’t be expected to offer free passage to someone who was not only an enemy national but also an individual dedicated to the destruction of their own social systems.

Lenin, however, had cut a deal with the kaiser’s Germany. In “Lenin on the Train,” Catherine Merridale, a distinguished historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, describes Lenin’s journey, the reasons it came about and the events it set in motion. Berlin had realized, she tells us, that supporting foreign insurgents could help destabilize Germany’s enemies from within. With democratic Russia set on continuing the war Lenin opposed, it seemed sensible to transport the veteran revolutionary like (in Winston Churchill’s words) a “plague bacillus” in a “sealed truck” and release him to infect his fragile homeland. And so on that April day began a ride across Europe that led, within months, to catastrophe and, over time, to the loss of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, of lives. …

Rounding out today’s post on Russian subjects, Craig Pirrong reacts to the Susan Rice news of the past few days.

Some 200 theaters around the world are screening 1984 to warn about the dark descending night of fascism under Donald Trump. The timing of this could not be more ironic, given that all the news of late makes it abundantly clear that the former administration, not the current one, deserves to be known as Big Brother.

In particular, after a steady trickle of news about surveillance and unmasking of Trump campaign and transition personnel by the US intelligence community, yesterday the story broke that ex-National Security Advisor and noted f-bomber* Susan Rice–yes, that paragon of honesty, Madam Benghazi Talking Points–had requested the unmasking of numerous Trump personnel picked up in reports of surveillance on foreigners (incidentally, of course! Trust them on this!).

Last month, Ms. Rice played dumb (not a stretch!) by claiming that she had no idea what Devin Nunes was on about. Yesterday, Susie F was unavailable for comment, although one of the Obama creatures working for CNN (but I repeat myself) tweeted: “Just in: ‘The idea that Ambassador Rice improperly sought the identities of Americans is false.’ – person close to Rice tells me.”

Note the presence of the weasel modifier “improperly.” Not a categorical denial of unmasking. I therefore consider this an admission that unmasking did occur. …

Nice group of cartoons today.