Sunday, August 21, 2016

'No Borders' hypocrisy

Victor Davis Hanson, Imagine No Border:
... Among elites, borderlessness has taken its place among the politically correct positions of our age
... the Left continues to cherish the vision of a borderless world as morally superior, a triumph over artificially imposed difference.
... Yet the truth is that borders do not create difference—they reflect it. Elites’ continued attempts to erase borders are both futile and destructive.
Few escape petty hypocrisy when preaching the universal gospel of borderlessness
Barack Obama has caricatured the building of a wall on the U.S. southern border as nonsensical, as if borders are discriminatory and walls never work. ... the [well armed] Secret Service is currently adding five feet to the White House fence—presumably on the retrograde logic that what is inside the White House grounds is different from what is outside. 
In 2011, open-borders advocate Antonio Villaraigosa became the first mayor in Los Angeles history to build a wall around the official mayoral residence. 
“You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world,” Secretary of State John Kerry recently enthused to the graduating class at Northeastern University ... moved his 76-foot luxury yacht from Boston Harbor across the state border to Rhode Island in order to avoid $500,000 in sales taxes and assorted state and local taxes. 
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg offers another case study. The multibillionaire advocates for a fluid southern border and lax immigration enforcement, but he has also stealthily spent $30 million to buy up four homes surrounding his Palo Alto estate. They form a sort of no-man’s-land defense outside his own Maginot Line fence

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Global cooling ahead? "Some climate scientists" are unhappy with research that suggests so.

Anthony Watts (via GWPF) :
... Recent research by Professor Valentina Zharkova (Northumbria University) and colleagues ... suggests that the next three solar cycles will see solar activity reduce significantly into the middle of the century, producing conditions similar to those last seen in the 1600s – during the Maunder Minimum. This may have implications for temperatures here on Earth. Future solar cycles will serve as a test of the astrophysicists’ work, but some climate scientists have not welcomed the research and even tried to suppress the new findings.  ...
It's predictable but still interesting how "some climate scientists" react to research producing results that don't fit their ideological narrative.  These people are not scientists, they are the opposite and should be named and shamed. 


Thursday, August 4, 2016

Liberal economist: "Conservatives are stupid and selfish"

According to a column in Tuesday’s National Post by Stephen Gordon (“Conservatives need to learn”), conservatives with both the upper-case and lower-case “C” are guilty of failing to regenerate themselves intellectually by thinking more like their opponents.  
... according to Gordon, the benighted right is, in particular, failing to grasp the benefits of “carbon pricing.” But surely Gordon, a professor of economics, knows the difference between a market price and a tax. Has he forgotten that it was a conservative, Preston Manning, who promoted the Big Lie of not calling a carbon tax a tax? ...