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61

Limits on Your Health, Not on Government

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With Rhode Island’s own Democrat congressional delegation, particularly Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, signing on for Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’s single-payer, Medicare-for-all health care plan, Betsy McCaughey’s recent New York Post article is worth a read for its turning of the tables.

Details on how Sanders’s plan would actually work, notably with regard to paying for it, are sparse, but McCaughey teases out some implications of concern.  For one thing, according to McCaughey, private health care would be made illegal.  Everything would have to go through the government system.  Consideration of UHIP and DCYF in Rhode Island and the Veterans Health Administration nationally (to pick just three examples) make that prospect terrifying.

Perhaps even more significant, though, is this:

BernieCare guarantees you hospital care, doctors’ visits, dental and vision care, mental health and even long-term care, all courtesy of Uncle Sam. Amazing, right? But read the fine print. You’ll get care only if it’s “medically necessary” and “appropriate.” Government bureaucrats will decide, and they’ll be under pressure to cut spending.

That’s because Sanders’ bill imposes an annual hard-and-fast dollar limit on how much health care the country can consume. He makes it sound simple — Uncle Sam will negotiate lower prices with drug companies. Voilà. But driving a hard bargain with drug makers won’t make a dent in costs. Prescription drugs comprise only 10 percent of the nation’s health expenditures.

Consider this “hard-and-fast dollar limit” in the context of another national controversy over the debt ceiling and debate of the Senate GOP’s latest health care proposal, which would limit the expansion of government spending on health care, a prospect that Democrats and the media elite (not just news, by the way) are endeavoring to tar as inhumane.  How can it be cruel to limit government spending on health care, but just dandy to ration health care generally?

The quick (if specious) answer may be that government spending accrues to the vulnerable and disadvantaged, but that argument dissipates if the wealthy are barred from supplementing their own care.  Single-payer simply becomes the government providing care for services that and to people whom it considers worthy.

62

Gorbea’s Inappropriate Press Release

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Politics in America have taken on a strange tone in recent years, amped up by the election of Donald Trump as president.  This is particularly notable in discussions of election integrity, both in the notion that Russians interfered in our national election and in different views on the significance of voter fraud.

Today, Rhode Islander Ken Block presented findings of his voter roll review to the president’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.*  Among other things, in that presentation, Block highlights that “30.7% of 2016 votes in Rhode Island were cast by voters with no identifying information in voter registration database.”  He doesn’t allege that those voters are doing anything wrong, but does insist, “It is vitally important to know how many voters in each state cannot be identified by their data.”

In a press release that is clearly more of a political document than an informative one, Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea mischaracterizes this presentation in a strange way:

Today the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity met in New Hampshire. Part of their presentation included the erroneous claim that 30 percent of Rhode Island voters in 2016 are somehow illegitimate or not verified. …

In short, these voters are your friends, your family, and your neighbors. If you registered to vote in Rhode Island before 2002, these voters likely include you. Allowing unsubstantiated claims to influence our public policy can lead to real consequences and the exclusion of legitimate voters.

Gorbea is speaking out about claims that nobody is making and, in doing so, sidesteps the important question of whether Block’s findings are correct and a legitimate cause of concern.  Note, for illustration, that apart from mischaracterizing his claims, she unprofessionally declines to name Ken Block, attributing his statements to the commission, and attempts to make voters take this as an attack on them.

Obviously, folks are behaving with political motivation on both sides of these matters, but more and more, I find myself wishing that everybody involved, especially officials elected to do a job representing all of us, would let some opportunities for political jabs pass by in order to provide the public with a fair and reasonable understanding of what is actually going on.

* Memo to the editors of the Providence Journal: That is actually the proper name of the commission, as formed by the President of the United States.  Putting quotation marks around the whole title or (especially) just the “election integrity” part is unnecessary grammatically and inappropriate as journalistic practice, illustrating yet again your newspaper’s bias.

66

We Won’t Always Have Paris, Thank Goodness

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In light of Dan Yorke’s surprising incredulity that Mike Stenhouse would be satisfied with President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accords, I was happy to come across Roger Kimball’s shared glee over the withdrawal and the ensuing lunacy from the Left:

Hysteria on the Left was universal. But as many cooler-headed commentators observed, one of the really amusing things is that the Paris Accord means exactly nothing. Since it requires nothing of its signatories, it will yield nothing from them. As an editorial in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, “amid the outrage, the aggrieved still haven’t gotten around to resolving the central Paris contradiction, which is that it promises to be Earth-saving but fails on its own terms. It is a pledge of phony progress.”

Kimball offers two things that Paris does do, though.  First is offering people an opportunity for cheap-to-them virtue signaling.

The second reason for the hysteria follows from the one serious effect of the climate accord. It has nothing to do with saving the environment. Every candid observer understands that the real end of the accord is not helping “the environment” but handicapping the developed countries. At its core, the accord is intended as a mechanism to redistribute wealth by hampering countries like the United States from exploiting its energy resources and growing its economy. Hamstring the United States, but let countries like China and India—industrial strength polluters, both—do whatever they want.

Like many international agreements, the unspoken subtext of the Paris Climate Accord is “hamper America. Grab as much of its wealth as you can. Say it’s in the name of ‘fairness.’”

The irony is that the Left is throwing around terms like “traitorous” and “betrayal,” which makes me think of Indiana Jones.  Kimball quotes left-wing billionaire political activist Tom Steyer on the first term; I’ve noted our own Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s using the second, conspicuously just a few days after the mega-donor’s statement.  And yet, they’re using those words to describe an action that, from the perspective of many conservatives, puts working Americans’ interests first.

That’s a strange sort of betrayal, if your loyalty is to Americans.

70

Rich Senators Target Poor Children’s Scholarships

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Yes, of course we should be interested in having government-driven programs be free of waste, fraud, and abuse, but this sure does seem like a political attack on a policy that helps disadvantaged students escape failing government schools and secure real opportunities through private schools.  According to Emma Brown, in the Washington Post, three Democrat Senators are asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate states’ tax-credit scholarships, which allow businesses to donate money for scholarships in exchange for some percentage back as a tax credit.

Naturally, Rhode Island’s upper crust U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is one of the three signatories.  The emphasis of the letter on whether such programs “pose a risk of waste, fraud, abuse, misconduct, or mismanagement” indicates that the objective is to attack the programs, not simply to learn from them.  Note, especially, that the letter doesn’t ask the GAO to look into the positive results of the programs.

One wonders where Whitehouse sent his own children to school.

Meanwhile, in Rhode Island, Republican state representative Robert Lancia (Cranston) has submitted legislation that would increase the cap on Rhode Island’s tax credit scholarship program and implement a feature that would allow it to grow according to demand.  His bill (for which I offered feedback based on a review of other such programs) would also make scholarships more predictable, by prioritizing continued funding of scholarships for students already receiving them.

71

Weird Absence in the Notes

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An obvious point is oddly missing from Ted Nesi’s Notes item on the possible Republican campaign of Robert Flanders for U.S. Senate:

His announcement that he’s exploring a 2018 U.S. Senate run against Sheldon Whitehouse, first reported by the indefatigable Kathy Gregg, had the Rhode Island political class chattering all week. Flanders told me he isn’t doing interviews yet, but suggested in a statement he’d be “a senator that works with Republicans, Democrats, and independents to promote practical solutions.” The former judge is no fool, so he knows the tough odds he’d face – the last time a Republican not named Chafee won a Rhode Island U.S. Senate race was 1930. Flanders would have a number of advantages, including his intellect and a robust Rolodex to tap for donations, which is why some local Republicans are enthusiastic about his chances. He also has some disadvantages: the deep pension cuts he approved as Central Falls’ receiver are ripe for negative TV ads, and President Trump’s unpopularity could allow Whitehouse to effectively rerun his 2006 campaign, which was technically against Linc Chafee but really against George W. Bush. Flanders says he’ll make a final decision “over the next several months.”

Know what I mean?  Maybe this, from an item farther down in Nesi’s column, will help:

Two Rhode Islanders who did not visit Trump, however, are Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse – both men skipped a White House dinner for senators the president held on Tuesday night.

Sure, Trump is unpopular in Rhode Island (particularly in those circles with which journalists have the most interaction), but even people who don’t like the president, if they’re just a little pragmatic, can see the advantage of having at least one of our four federal legislators be from the party that controls the White House and both chambers of Congress.  The question, then, is whether the Republicans, pragmatic Democrats, and friends of Flanders can outnumber those who like the fact that Whitehouse repeatedly stands out as an especially radical and aggressive voice in the party out of power.

72

Breaking – Former RI Supreme Court Justice Flanders Exploring Run for US Senate

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Well, things just heated up in Rhode Island’s 2018 race for US Senate. Kathy Gregg has the scoop in the Providence Journal.

Robert G. Flanders, a former Rhode Island Supreme Court justice, respected Providence trial lawyer and onetime Brown University football star, has taken the first step toward a potential GOP run for the U.S. Senate against two-term Democratic incumbent Sheldon Whitehouse.

This is somewhat out of the blue: rumors where that Justice Flanders was considering, at the urging of RIGOP Chair Brandon Bell, a run for Governor. Justice Flanders isn’t technically announcing his candidacy, as Gregg notes, but rather, he

plans to create an “exploratory committee” to determine whether he will be able to muster the money and support he would need for a potential GOP primary fight and, ultimately, a 2018 run against Whitehouse.

He is certainly clear as to why he sees the need to run, however, as he indicates to Gregg in a statement that includes a nice little zing at the incumbent.

“With the unease and hyper-partisan political environment in Washington,” Flanders said, Rhode Island needs a U.S. senator who “will work across the aisle to unlock innovation and job growth, provide a system of high quality and affordable health care, reform unfair and anti-competitive tax policies, lift regulatory burdens off the backs of small business, promote better education and enhance our security by restoring global confidence in America.”

“In short, we need a climate change in Washington,” he said in a play-on-words on Whitehouse’s signature issue.

If his candidacy is a go, he will first face off in a primary against State Representative Robert A. Nardolillo III (R-Coventry).

73

Corporate Personhood and Three Steps to No Rights

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Brad Smith recently took up an important point in the Providence Journal, responding to Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who is seeking to “strip rights from corporate entities,” in Smith’s words.  He cites the 1819 Supreme Court case, Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward:

A corporation, the court noted, “is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” But that didn’t mean that people gave up their rights when they formed a corporation. Rather, the decision emphasized that when people join together to accomplish things, they usually need some form of organization, and shouldn’t have to sacrifice their rights just because they organize.

This is one of those recurring discussions that are frustrating because they’re mainly semantic, and one feels as if normal people sitting down to fairly explain to each other what they mean will agree and move on.  The danger is that the semantics could allow radicals like Whitehouse to push the law a few steps to totalitarian control.

Step 1 is to force people to organize for any sort of public activity by offering either competitive enticements (from tax benefits to liability protections) or regulations restricting activities if people do not organize.  We’re already pretty far along this path.

Step 2 is declare that those organizations that people have formed don’t have rights.  Another way of putting that, as Smith explains, is to say that people lose their individual rights when they organize as corporations… which they were more or less forced to do in order to accomplish their goals.

Step 3 will be to force people to do what government insiders want by imposing requirements on the rights-less corporations.

74

Pundits Looking for Elusive Footing of Normalcy

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Like everybody else who follows policy and politics, I’m still trying to figure out how to interpret the Trump administration.  I have to say, though, that I think a lot of established pundits on my side of the ideological field are getting something very wrong.  Here’s Jonah Goldberg, for example, writing about Trump’s executive order related to refugees:

If Trump had given agency professionals 30 days to review his order on refugees, he could have avoided the confusion at airports, not to mention the media hysteria and the protests. And if his communications team had been given time, they could have preempted some of the wild claims made by Democratic detractors.

I don’t believe this is accurate. If word of the deliberation had leaked — or if the policy had been discussed openly — we’d have had the same reaction, but without its being rooted to an actual order.  Opponents would have been able to warn of even more extreme possibilities, and moderation in the course of developing the policy would have been presented as hiding true, evil intentions, rather than error.

Then there’s John Podhoretz, talking during a Commentary podcast on Ricochet.  He warns that President Trump’s style and speed is galvanizing the Left, worrying, for instance, that no Democrats will be able to vote for Trump nominees, and the president won’t be able to peel Congressional Democrats away from their party for his policy initiatives.

Democrats may take that approach, but I’m not so sure it’s something that should frighten Republicans.  From where I stand in Rhode Island, waching the Far Left push the U.S. Senate’s most outrageous lefty, Sheldon Whitehouse, to be even more unreasonable, I don’t see how this can possibly be a majority-winner, especially this far out from an election

It seems like even conservative pundits want normality to apply in some way, but Obama, his party, and the news media have proven that the state of affairs we used to see as normality was just an illusion that served progressives’ ends.

75

The Mainstream’s Narrow View of Science and of Harm

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Climate alarmism seems to raise more questions than it answers, and here’s one: If we should charge traditional energy companies for global harm, what other industries (e.g., Hollywood) do demonstrable harm and ought to be taxed accordingly?

77

The Left’s Intimidation Game

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As usual, the content on this Prager University video — featuring Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel — won’t be new to readers of the Ocean State Current, but it’s well done and worth the reminder:

Progressives are in the intimidation game for the long haul; indeed, Strassel points out that Southern Democrats used the tactics progressives now focus on conservatives (or any non-progressives) to suppress blacks.  The strategies are:

  1. Harass, as with the IRS targeting Tea Party groups
  2. Investigate & prosecute, as with Wisconsin prosecutors raiding the homes of conservatives, or our own U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s attempts to criminalize opposing views and activities
  3. Blackmail, for which Strassel provides the example of threats made against corporate sponsors of ALEC
  4. Expose, by which progressive seek access to lists of donors and other supporters in order to apply the first three techniques

On the last count, Democrat Tiverton/Portsmouth Representative John “Jay” Edwards had a coup this latest legislative session with his legislation to harass with regulations any citizen who attempts to have a public say on any local ballot question and to open such local activists and their supporters to harassment by vicious groups like Tiverton 1st, which not only succeeded in making public office seem like a costly volunteerism, but also in driving some of its opponents clear out of the town and the state.

79

Providence Journal Gives Up on Objectivity

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I’ve long harbored the hope that journalists with integrity at the Providence Journal were quietly embarrassed by their paper’s dabbling in PolitiFact.  In the past, I charted PolitiFact’s bias, and I even wrote a parody song about it.  In PolitiFact, the mainstream media has the perfect representation of the pretense of objectivity being used as a partisan political weapon.

With its coverage of this year’s partisan conventions, the Projo appeared to have committed the entire paper to the PolitiFact aesthetic.  With today’s front page, it appears to have taken up its method, too:

projo-trumptruth-081116

The “news” of this story is that Donald Trump, (sadly) the Republican nominee for president, is habitually dishonest.  Disliking Trump, myself, I’m not inclined to object to such investigation, but I still find it shocking to see it as such a prominent report in the Providence Journal, partly because it is inconceivable that the paper would give similar treatment to the similarly dishonest Hillary Clinton.

In fact, take the analysis a bit farther and open the paper to its “Campaign 2016” coverage.  The headlines are:

Pay special attention to the bullet in the middle, because it may indicate why the editors felt it necessary to land so hard on Trump’s honesty today.  The “lack of filter” story is used as an envelope around an inset about the latest Clinton-related revelations, which I mentioned this morning, and that story is couched in terms of “Trump pounces.”

A search of the last fifteen days of the Providence Journal turns up no other news reports including the words “Clinton Foundation email.”  In other words, for the paper’s only reporting of emails that raise ethical questions about the Democrat nominee for president, it minimized the find (excluding, notably, the Obama Justice Department’s killing of FBI requests to investigate the foundation further), presented it in terms of Trump’s response, surrounded by a story about Trump’s wild speaking habits, next to a story about a U.S. senator calling him a kook, within an issue fronted with bold declarations of Trump’s habitual lies.

This is a newspaper attempting to affect the outcome of an election along predictable party lines, pure and simple.  Few remain so naive as to believe in mainstream objectivity in the post-Bush era, and I personally think we need less regulation of speech, not more.  Nonetheless, while this may do little more than show my age, I’m still shocked by the tabloid-esque brazenness.

80

Stop Expecting Corrupt Government to Prosecute Corruption

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Not to be contrarian or anything, but really, what more of relevance did we expect to learn about the 38 Studios debacle?  The whole thing is outrageous from ignominius start to Friday news dump end, but State Police Colonel Steven O’Donnell has a point when he says, “A bad deal does not always equate to an indictment.”  Neither does corrupt government.

Look, 38 Studios is the brand of Rhode Island’s deepest corruption for a reason.  The General Assembly and the governor slipped through a big-money program with the promise of creating jobs, and a quasi-public agency put taxpayers on the line for a private company’s failure.  Partly because the politicians and bureaucrats involved have our electoral system locked up with a mix of handouts, demagoguery, insider advantages, and (some of us suspect) not a little outright cheating, there were no real consequences.  Moreover, the very same system that created the opportunity for corruption and failure in the first place is now the central economic development plan of our state.

It’s no good sitting around hoping that the corrupt will slip up and break the law so that the legal system can do what voters refuse to do.  We’ve seen all the way up to the White House that America’s legal system doesn’t do that anymore.  (A tweet that flitted across my screen this morning suggested that “the law is no longer working to protect us from the corrupt, but to protect the corrupt from us.)

More importantly, though, much of what we consider to be corruption is legal in Rhode Island, and that’s not necessarily wrong.  Expand the scope of activities that are illegal — to include bad decisions or working with people you know, for example — and you’ll find it becoming a weapon used by the corrupt against those who are not corrupt.  Look to Sheldon Whitehouse and various attorneys general for evidence or consider that, while the 38 Studios process may have been entirely legal, it is now illegal for people to spend almost any money advocating on local ballot questions without registering with the government.

The obvious solution is this:  Get off the sidelines.  Maybe run for office.  If that’s more effort than you can reasonably muster, then resolve to support those who will shake up the system, both in office and in organizations that strive to keep the pressure on politicians and government.  Perhaps reevaluate how much weight to give to different political issues (corruption and good government should maybe outweigh social issues in your decision-making for a decade or so).

That’s where change has to occur.  Otherwise, each investigation, indictment, and prosecution is just a bucket of water as we attempt to bail out a submarine a mile below the surface. The fact that these suggestions are nothing new doesn’t make them less true.

81

When Government Secretly Coordinate, That’s a Conspiracy

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There’s a certain irony, here.  Rhode Island’s far-left Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is leading the charge to criminalize research and expression of views that don’t fit his extreme ideological and political view and a gang of thuggish attorney generals have been coordinating legal attacks on fossil-fuel companies and conservative think tanks on the claim that they’re engaged in an anti-environmentalist conspiracy, and yet the attorneys general are hiding their coordination from the public.

A press release from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (for which I work) notes its participation in an effort to ensure a little bit of transparency into this actual conspiracy:

The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity (Center) announced that it assisted a national nonprofit organization in a lawsuit, filed today, demanding that the Rhode Island Office of the Attorney General (OAG) release documents they have refused to make public. The legal complaint calls for the release of documents related to AG’s United for Clean Power, a group comprised of politically-motivated AGs from about a dozen states, including Rhode Island, who have secretly teamed up with anti-fossil fuel activists to investigate dozens of organizations that have exercised their free speech by challenging the global warming policy agenda. …

In a series of April emails obtained by E & E Legal, the RI OAG consented to sign-on to an “agreement” among the larger AG cabal that is colluding to investigate if RICO statutes may have been violated. However, the Rhode Island AG now refuses to make public the group’s ‘Secrecy Pact’ documents related to that taxpayer funded activity.

That is, the attorney general will not release the terms of his office’s agreement or even the text of the documents pledging to keep that agreement hidden.

82

Is Climate Change Persecution Fading Already?

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With one of our U.S. Senators’, Mr. Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat, naturally), being a key figure in the fascist effort to pursue legal persecution of people who have a contrary opinion to him on the politically charged issue of global climate change, Rhode Islanders might be interested to hear that some of his allies are backing away from his level of aggression, as the Wall Street Journal notes (text here):

Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker recently withdrew his subpoena of Exxon Mobil. He was a leader among the 17 AGs charging that the oil giant defrauded shareholders by hiding the truth about global warming. That’s hard to prove when the company’s climate-change research was published in peer-reviewed journals.

Mr. Walker also targeted some 90 think tanks and other groups in an attempt to punish climate dissent. These groups and others, including these columns, pushed back on First Amendment grounds, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute counter-sued Mr. Walker and demanded sanctions. He pulled his subpoena against CEI last month.

The real shame, and the real warning sign, is that those AGs, and fellow travelers like Whitehouse, weren’t instantly lambasted by people across America’s political spectrum for even initiating such patently offensive-to-freedom steps .

83

The Left Doesn’t Believe in Agreeing to Disagree

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It seems that no school is too small to draw the attention of the conformity police in the new American progressive totalitarianism, as Holly Scheer highlights on The Federalist:

… The Obama administration is investigating a school in Wisconsin for sending home letters telling parents and students that they expect students to live within Christian values while at school. This is a private Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod school that serves a tiny group of students—from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade they have 147 students and 10 teachers.

In February the school instituted some new policies that sparked a complaint from the Freedom From Religion Foundation. These policies include having parents provide a birth certificate (with the child’s sex on it) and signing a handbook that gives the school the right to discipline students for exhibiting sinful behavior.

Christians thought they could carve out enclaves for their beliefs if they gave up the tax dollars that they’ve already paid for public school and paid again for private school.  Now, progressives claim Christians can avoid persecution if they just give up their right to equal access to government funds for educational services.

We know that to be a temporary position, though, allowing the Left to keep its mask on for just a while longer, because we’ve already seen Christian bakers persecuted for declining to participate in same-sex wedding ceremonies.  The clear reality is that if you go out in public — if you do anything that can have any effect on other people in any way (see Senator Whitehouse’s desired climate change inquisition) — progressives believe government should force you to conform to their worldview.

Whatever these people believe in, it isn’t freedom.  They are the heirs to the ideological oppressors against whom our history lessons were supposed to inoculate us.  They’ve just created a new church for themselves, and it will be all the more difficult to correct for the fact that it’s Godless.

84

Journalist Itching for Some Climate Change Action in Wickford

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This Alex Kuffner article on flooding in Wickford is highly misleading — so misleading, in fact, that the online editor gave it the completely unsubstantiated (i.e., false) headline, “Tidal flooding in North Kingstown’s Wickford is result of rising seas.”  Here’s the text that one has to read carefully in order to correctly understand what the journalist is claiming:

For a glimpse of a future of higher seas, Rhode Islanders have to look no further than Wickford village during a king tide. …

These types of minor floods were once treated as nothing more than isolated events during king tides, which occur once or twice a year when the alignments of the sun, earth and moon maximize the gravitational pull on the oceans. But now climate scientists and coastal planners see so-called “nuisance flooding” as a harbinger of what’s to come as the seas continue to rise.

The article provides no indication that these king tides have become more frequent or intense, which it surely would if it were possible to make such a claim.  In other words, the message of this front-page article in the state’s major daily newspaper is: “We should all be afraid that this perfectly ordinary occurrence is an example of something that might happen more often in the future.”

This isn’t news; it’s propaganda.  The fact is that tide measurements in Newport show no increase at all over the last 20 years and a decrease so far this decade.  Maybe that’s a pause before rising tides begin again or maybe not.  Whatever the case, it would be reasonable to suggest that those reading Kuffner’s article are apt to come away with precisely the opposite conclusion from the truth, using recent numbers.

85

6% and Flawed Models: Why We’re Skeptical of AGW

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A second day, a second applause-worthy editorial by the Providence Journal yesterday. They politely call out Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who

… asked [US] Attorney General Loretta Lynch whether the Justice Department had considered pursuing fraud charges against those who have, in his view, misled people about climate change. ….

This is troubling: a U.S. senator and attorney general, both sworn to uphold the Constitution, mulling legal action against American citizens and companies for the “crime” of challenging a scientific theory.

The ProJo correctly points out that

… it is vitally important that America not discard its essential values of freedom.

With Earth Day coming up this Friday, it’s important to note the two simple facts that make so many of us skeptical of the theory of anthropogenic global warming. 1.) Man only generates 6% of all greenhouse gases. 2.) The heart of the case for AGW, the climate models, are flawed (see here and here, and lots of other places).

Accordingly, the proposal by Senator Whitehouse and others to silence by prosecutorial bullying those who question AGW not only violates, as the ProJo points out, free speech, one of America’s essential values, but also comes across as someone who … well, doesn’t want to hear why he may be wrong about something he believes in. It’s fine to disregard facts and evidence that contradict your belief in something. It crosses the line to narrow-minded despotism, however, to propose the use of the considerable powers of government to punish people or companies attempting to present such facts and evidence.

86

On Climate, It’s the Government That’s Acting Conspiratorially

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Ted Nesi’s Saturday roundup column gives Rich Davidson, the spokesman for far-left-radical Democrat U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, room to offer some spin related to the senator’s push to make a crime of disagreeing with him on climate change:

Simply denying climate change isn’t what Senator Whitehouse believes could violate federal law. Like courts found with tobacco companies, it can be a violation of the federal civil RICO statute when companies engage in an enterprise designed to mislead the public about the dangers of their products. The senator’s questions to the attorney general were to learn whether the Department of Justice is doing its due diligence to investigate whether fossil fuel special interests are leading a coordinated fraudulent effort to deceive the American people.

Two observations.  First, the entire effort, including Whitehouse’s public pronouncements and especially the hearing with the attorney general, is an excellent example of how government can make the process the punishment and use broad threats to chill speech and activity.  What company or organization wants federal law enforcement agencies rifling through its files or telling the public that it’s under investigation for potentially criminal activity?  This sort of “due diligence” is thug government.

Second, it doesn’t get nearly as much press coverage as it should — particularly when the media presents Whitehouse’s tyrannical overtures as just a bit of he-said-she-said politicking (at worst) — but in this entire controversy, it’s the government that looks like a more likely candidate for RICO investigations.  Consider, for example, the relatively minor matter of an Obama administration video promoting propaganda about how “climate change” is producing polar vortexes (i.e., how global warming makes winter colder).  When the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) requested through official channels that the video be corrected and then requested documents substantiating the refusal of that request, the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) engaged in a time-and-money wasting exercise to keep its documents secret, lying about the nature of the video.

Now, one could interpret the White House’s actions as evidence that it wants to hide its efforts to deceive the public, or one could interpret them as a bid by an over-sized organization that overspends its revenue by hundreds of billions of dollars every year to drain scarce resources among its ideological opponents.  Either way, Sheldon Whitehouse comes out looking objectively worse as a representative of the people of Rhode Island.

If only there were some way the news media could provide residents with an accurate picture of their junior senator and the schemes of which he’s a part…

87

The Newport Shore and Demonstrable Environmentalist Untruths

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Strange as it may sound, I’m wary of proclamations by climate change alarmists for many of the same reasons I’m wary of Donald Trump.  Although it would be beyond the layperson’s capacity to investigate every claim and prove its falsity, a limited collection of exaggerations and outright untruths gives reason to suspect that a sort of sine function applies — that the ratio of truth to untruth will remain generally the same no matter how large the claim.

On the climate change front, I have in mind this AP article by Seth Borenstein, with local flavor added by Providence Journal reporter Alex Kuffner:

In Rhode Island, according to measurements taken at the tide gauge in Newport, sea levels have risen 10 inches since 1929. And the rate of increase is picking up, said Grover Fugate, executive director of the state Coastal Resources Management Council. Waters are expected to rise another foot in the next 20 years. And by 2100, the levels could be seven feet higher, according to new estimates adopted by the CRMC last month to account for the latest data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

I’ve taken this particular data point up before, and the bottom line is that, whatever one can say about the Newport sea level over the past century, it simply isn’t credible to claim the “rate of increase is picking up.”  If we take Borenstein’s mention of 1993, for example, and apply it just to Newport, with the assumption that its rate of increase will continue for a century, we’d have a large increase, yes.  But if we were to start the measurement in 1998, one could just as easily claim that the sea levels will drop dramatically over one hundred years.  The latest one-fifth of the last century has been relatively stagnant, which is not a synonym for “accelerating.”

The assumption that one could find similar flaws in the global data receives some justification in the degree to which the advocates quoted in the article extend their claims.  The article provides no evidence beyond mere coincidence for the repeated insistence that rising seas are being caused by the use of fossil fuels.  Yet that insistence is not once qualified with doubt, and we’re supposed to trust this subgroup of scientists, filtering information through this medium of information, to tell the “detective story” of sea levels throughout human history?

 

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UPDATED: About That Global Warming Consensus

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Obviously, a survey does not an argument make, but this is an interesting tidbit that one might expect to be getting more attention if the news media were truly on a politically neutral search for truth and compelling stories [see update for an important note]:

Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

The survey results show geoscientists (also known as earth scientists) and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists. Two recent surveys of meteorologists (summarized here and here) revealed similar skepticism of alarmist global warming claims.

I’ve wondered if such things as the rush to a non-binding agreement in Paris and Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s enthusiasm for prosecuting political opponents indicate that those who wish to use “climate change” as justification for sweeping away freedom see their window closing.  Perhaps in part because real and immediate threats are arising for contrast (such as terrorism and the rising wave of refugee invaders throughout Europe), the spell whereby environmentalists have silenced skeptics appears to be wearing off.

UPDATE (1/3/16 12:38 p.m.)

A reader points out that the first link above points to an article from 2013, which I’d missed.  Obviously, that removes the oddity of the news media’s not following the story now (although not back then).  However, the chronology actually contributes to the possibility that the alarmists have been making a push because they sense the window closing.

89

Climate Change by Anecdote and Science

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Just up on the Providence Journal Web page is a new part of “a special report on Confronting Climate Change in Southern New England.”  The story is about steps that some local businesses are taking in response to recent extreme weather events, and it’s generally interesting, as a tale of local life, but the larger purpose of reporter Patrick Anderson, one suspects, is to have some anecdotal spikes with which to garland a more-political narrative, as follows:

The resilience of businesses along Rhode Island’s southern shore after Sandy mirrors the approach much of New England has taken to severe weather and the persistent, advance of the ocean — linked to climate change.

The actual business owners seem to be deciding things more as a matter of interest, investment, and risk, but (scary music) we all know that climate change is coming!  One wonders how much Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s political rhetoric inspired the story.  The odd thing is that it’s actually a simple matter to look into how much the ocean has risen in the area.  Of course, the answer “not much at all in the past two decades” would complicate the narrative.

As a fan of complicated narratives, though, I thought I’d throw in E. Calvin Beisner’s thoughts on a recent U.S. Senate hearing about climate science.  Beisner’s basic conclusions are that the science isn’t settled and that there’s reason to doubt alarmist claims, not the least because of government influence:

Christy, Curry, and Happer also testified that government funding of climate research biases subjects chosen for research (e.g., lots of focus on human causes of climate change and little on natural causes), and Steyn joined them in testifying that threats (by Rep. Raul Grijalva [D-AZ] and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI]) to investigate and prosecute skeptical scientists under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law had a “chilling effect,” undermining both First Amendment freedoms of speech and press and the free inquiry essential to scientific progress.

They recommended instead that the federal government should fund competing research teams in climate just as it has done on other issues. When the two teams critique each other’s work, both improve.

Of course, then the debate would have to be covered, rather than reported as if it were over.

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