Other People Say Smart Stuff, Too - Part XXXVII

This certainly explains a lot:

"It is not enough for the insecure left to deem a position wrong; if it’s merely wrong, it needs to be argued about, and it can’t survive that. It must instead be morally abhorrent, so that the zealot reacts to the toxin of questioning much like a jogger coming across a decomposing body on the side of the road — it must be internalized that the correct response to such a horror is to retch, and faint, and call the authorities post-haste.

This is how the leftist faith protects itself from the infection of doubt. (Meanwhile, of course, patting itself on the back for being so open-minded…)" - John Hawkins

Many Uncertainties

"Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown" was the headline for a recent Reuters story. It turns out that almost none of the climate scientists predicted the lack of warming that has occurred in recent years.

Climate science has something in common with horoscopes and fortune tellers. Confidence in their predictions is higher when the results are either so vague, or so far in the future, that accuracy can't be measured. For example, we had predictions of arctic ice melting, raising the sea level by anywhere from three to twenty feet, flooding coastlines and destroying cities. When this didn't happen, predictions got fuzzy. It turns out that "global warming" can manifest itself by extremely hot weather, or by extremely cold weather. Extreme precipitation or extreme drought. More violent hurricanes, or fewer violent hurricanes. Climate scientists making predictions covered all their bases. Except now they're struggling to come up with an explanation for the lack of global warming. And, the article says, "some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties." 

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg.  

"My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years, said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

The Liberal Mantra

The Liberal Mantra.

Can I choose a large drink? No, it is not good for you
Can I choose an incandescent bulb? No, it is not good for the environment
Can I choose low cost coal? No, it is not good for the planet
Can I choose to honor God? No, that's offensive 
Can I choose to eat fast food? No, it is unhealthy
Can I choose to own a gun? No, think of the children.
What can I choose? An abortion

(Hat tip to Human Events commenter TripleA60.)

Well, here's a good sign

Joe Klein, the not-Conservative political columnist for Time magazine recently wrote a column entitled "Obamacare Incompetence." Some quotes: "We are now seeing weekly examples of this Administration’s inability to govern....the notion of activist government will be in peril—despite the demographics flowing the Democrats’ way—if institutions like the VA and Obamacare don’t deliver the goods." 

And I think we'll all agree that there's little chance of that. It's a shame we're only getting these stories after last November's elections.