Mark Steyn's interview with Jordan Peterson

Free speech under assault:



Conclusion: It's time to dismantle the university humanities departments and fire their professors.  They are destroying Western civilization.  The billion$ saved can be productively reassigned to  STEM subjects.

Michael Mann at the U.S. House Climate Science Hearing

At the House Climate Science Hearing earlier this week what most clearly stood out was  Dr. Michael Mann's hypocrisy and nastiness:

From a subsequent WUWT post:

"I can now understand why Dr. Mann is not liked, and globally not liked at that."

From Mark Steyn:  "A Disgrace To The Profession" and a whole lot more.

Climate scientist Judith Curry calls it quits

Anthony Watts: "Yesterday, I was saddened to learn that Dr. Judith Curry had resigned her position at Georgia Tech..."

Curry: “... the deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists… I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science. ... ” 

“... How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide.”

Mark Steyn comments on the abuse Curry endured from the disgraceful Michael E. Mann (among others): 

I despise Michael Mann for many reasons, not least for the damage his peculiar insecurities have done to honest inquiry and scientific integrity. But his disgusting treatment of Dr Curry ranks high on my list. And, however long it takes, I will ensure that her prediction from 2012 comes true.

PC tyranny

Mark Steyn:

... There are more and more areas of debate in which the authorities take the view that "there is only one correct answer". A free people should be free to argue, whether they take the right side or the wrong side of the question. But, as I always say (he says wearily), when you're arguing that only one side is allowed to have a side, you're on the wrong side.

Laws are for the little people

Mark Steyn:

... As I've said for years - on radio, TV and in print - for me the overriding issue in American politics is the corruption. In the Obama era, we have seen the remorseless merging of the party and the state - in the IRS, in the Justice Department and elsewhere. Whatever one feels about, say, Scandinavia, they at least come to their statism and socialism more or less honestly. Not so the United States. ...  

... The left is serious about power, and they don't waste time. The idea that the most personally corrupt candidate in modern American history will govern as some sort of benign moderate centrist placeholder until the wankers who thought Jeb Bush was a superstar shoo-in come up with their next inspiration is utterly preposterous.

Not-so-settled climate science

Judith Curry:



Curry's testimony before the Senate Climate Inquiry:



Mark Steyn's statement to the Senate Climate Inquiry.

Update: For the record -
              - here is the full Senate hearing, and
              - here are Mark Steyn's impressions of the proceedings (he wasn't impressed).

Barbarians at the gates

... except "there are no gates".  Mark Steyn:

... When the Allahu Akbar boys opened fire, Paris was talking about the climate-change conference due to start later this month, when the world's leaders will fly in to "solve" a "problem" that doesn't exist rather than to address the one that does. But don't worry: we already have a hashtag (#PrayForParis) and doubtless there'll be another candlelight vigil of weepy tilty-headed wankers. Because as long as we all advertise how sad and sorrowful we are, who needs to do anything?

With his usual killer comedy timing, the "leader of the free world" told George Stephanopoulos on "Good Morning, America" this very morning that he'd "contained" ISIS and that they're not "gaining strength". A few hours later, a cell whose members claim to have been recruited by ISIS slaughtered over 150 people in the heart of Paris ...

What's the happy ending here? Because if M Hollande isn't prepared to end mass Muslim immigration to France and Europe, then his "pitiless war" isn't serious. And, if they're still willing to tolerate Mutti Merkel's mad plan to reverse Germany's demographic death spiral through fast-track Islamization, then Europeans aren't serious. In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

So screw the candlelight vigil.

A conversation with Mark Steyn

Somehow I missed this video conversation with Mark Steyn at UC Berkeley where he was the 2007 Nimitz Lecturer.  It gives some great insights into what makes him tick:

Iranian nuke deal: Obama's Chamberlain moment?

Not quite says Mark Steyn: the comparison "... is rather unfair to Neville Chamberlain"



See also: Barack Obama,  Mark Levin,   Dick Cheney,   George Jonas,   Jonathan Kay,   Bibi Netanyahu, and Ezra Levant

Time for science to recover its integrity and "climb off the hockey stick"

I missed this when it played last month.  Mark Steyn's hilariously dead serious keynote speech to the International Conference on Climate Change in Washington, DC:



[via]

How "Dominion Day" was dumped by the Liberals ... and a salute to the Conservatives

From a previous post:
Some history on how "Dominion Day" was dumped in favour of the meaningless "Canada Day":

... In hindsight, it was a case of identity theft, an act of historical vandalism. A quarter-century ago, 13 members of Parliament hastily -- some say indecently -- renamed the country's national birthday in a swift bit of legislative sleight-of-hand.

At 4 o'clock on Friday, July 9, 1982, the House of Commons was almost empty. The 13 parliamentarians taking up space in the 282-seat chamber ... The whole process took five minutes. ... a private member's bill from Hal Herbert, the Liberal MP from Vaudreuil ...

And here are Mark Steyn's 2015 reflections on the subject:

... let me salute Canada's Conservative government for taking a tonally mature and historically honest approach to this country's nationhood. 

... the usual [Liberal] guff about "what a young nation we are".  We're not. We're one of the oldest continuous constitutional orders on earth, and there was always something queasily totalitarian about Liberal propagandists' insistence that Canada didn't exist until M Trudeau moved into Sussex Drive.

... Mr Harper does not share that view. ... Canada's citizenship ministry even hands out copies of Magna Carta to new arrivals - which in this 800th anniversary year is even more heartening. So I'm glad we're reconnecting with the half-a-millennium of history the Trudeaupians tried to bury.

... I shall always be grateful to Mr Harper's ministry for giving us a decade-long respite from all that Trudeaupian eternal-youth gibberish.

Who "created" ISIS? The Republican candidates' dumb "debate"

Mark Steyn with Hugh Hewitt:

...  Hugh was interested in various Republican candidates sniping at each other over which American president is responsible for "creating" ISIS: Was it Obama? Was it Bush? I responded:

... MS: ... in keeping Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership holed up in Abbottabad and various other places, what emerged free from al Qaeda control was next generation al Qaeda. And there will eventually be a next generation ISIS that will even be more barbaric and evil  ... even if we did nothing, even if we just behaved like Sweden, it would still be there. And to blame it on Obama or Bush or Coolidge or Chester Arthur is completely a waste of time.

... HH: [Sayyid] Qutb [Muslim Brotherhood leader and inspiration for al Qaeda] was radicalized by his time in America ... I'm not declaiming against Western culture. It simply is, if you're going to be provoked by people's lifestyles that are different than yours, you're going to be at war with the West regardless of whether or not we do anything with you.

... even when we weren't decadent, Qutb and his pals thought we were - and hated us anyway. I think the Rand Paul view - that Bush interventionism is responsible for the metastasizing of ISIS - will gain some traction with Republican voters ...

And aren't liberals perpetually blaming America and the West for provoking Islamist terror? You'd think they might stop and consider that for Qutb, al Qaeda and now ISIS it's Western "decadence" that inspires their hate - and the biggest world-wide purveyor of Western, especially American, cultural imagery is uber-liberal Hollywood with its non-stop, big-screen caricatures of American crime, sex, violence and "capitalist greed". Hollywood didn't "create" ISIS but it's sure doing more than its share to keeping the hate going.  And it's these same liberals who have the chutzpa to rant against Pamella Geller, accusing her of provoking Muslims with her relatively miniscule anti-Islamist campaigns.

George Jonas on Alan Borovoy

George Jonas: When my old leftist friend, Alan Borovoy, saw the light

A few days ago I reminisced about an old friend in this space, the founder and General Counsel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, A. Alan Borovoy, who passed away last weekend.

... I noted that he and I agreed on almost nothing, except the importance of liberty.

... Central to our debates were Canada’s human rights commissions: The laws and institutions Borovoy and like-minded civil libertarians, mostly leftwing activists, created, or at least played a major role in creating, ... Alan and his friends couldn’t imagine how civil liberties had anything to fear from laws and organizations they themselves, champions of civil liberties, were bringing to life.

... In the 1980s, with civil liberties already halfway down the throat of the voracious state, Alan was still dismissing the slippery slope as a shopworn myth. It took him another decade and a half to change his mind.

... By 1998 he did. “Ever since the government embarked on a course of trying to outlaw expressions of hatred, it’s shown that there is a slippery slope. One thing has led to another,” he said in relation to a proposed “hate speech” legislation in British Columbia. ..

... once he saw the light, Alan didn’t pull his punches. He was as outspoken in defending freedom against his own creation, the human rights bureaucracy, as he had been defending it against its traditional enemies. 

Hysterical, fascistic liberal hypocrisy at work

Ezra Levant's excellent summation of the situation surrounding the Indiana religious freedom law:


See also:
Rich Lowry: "... a perfect storm of hysteria and legal ignorance"
and
Jonah Goldberg: "... Indiana’s Law Is Not the Return of Jim Crow"

Plus: a compendium of hypotheticals [via] including,

"Do we respect a gay baker’s right to choose not to bake a cake for the Westboro Baptist Church with icing that reads God Hates Fags?"

How Obama dishonored the latest American victim of the Islamic State

Mark Steyn - A Death in Syria

... I would like also to note another example of presidential brazenness this week - Barack Obama's reaction to the latest beheading of a US citizen by the head hackers of the Islamic State. Peter Kassig's death video was not as the others ...

... In his response to the beheading of Peter Kassig, Obama chose to turn a man who may have died heroically into just another Muslim victim:

Abdul-Rahman was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity... ISIL's actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.

 "Abdul-Rahman"? Why, yes. Mr Kassig supposedly converted to Islam while imprisoned by the Islamic State. That's to say, his submission to Islam was at the point of a sword.

... In the same video in which "Jihadi John" appears with Mr Kassig's head, the Islamic State are seen decapitating 13 fellow Muslims from the Syrian army. If you're a Muslim, you get the group beheading with the crowd-scene extras. If you're an American or Briton, you get the star role, the solo act. The Islamic State knew which group Peter Kassig belonged to even if the President didn't.

Trying to understand the liberal mindset

Ezra Levant explores "Why liberals downplay terrorism":

... Their first reflex is to deny that it’s terrorism at all ...
... The next liberal reflex is to deny that an attacker is Muslim.
... The third liberal reflex is to say a terrorist attack was just the act of a madman.
... The fourth liberal line of defence is to say the attacker is a lone wolf.

... That’s the liberal spin playbook: deny it’s terrorism, deny it’s Muslim, call it insanity, and finally call it a rogue act.

... But why? Why do liberals go to such lengths to revise the motives of terrorists, who are quite clear about their goals?  ... Why do liberals try to revise history, and whitewash the war against us?

Because ...

... liberals have abolished the ideas of good and evil as too judgmental. Terrorists? No, our enemies are actually victims themselves, you see. We are privileged. Society is to blame.

...Liberals cannot understand so much hate against us. So liberals sympathize. Liberals help find the answer. They join in. To justify the hate. 

In today's Van Sun there were more than a half dozen letters illustrating the liberal mindset.

And here's a doozy - a recent National Post article began with "It's been a tough week for Canadian Muslims" [h/t Blazing Cat Fur] [As an aside - the article referred to a mosque in Cold Lake that had been vandalized, to which my reaction was: "Cold Lake has a mosque?"]

Update (from the comments): Mark Steyn back in 2010 on "Crying Lone Wolf" and more recently with Breitbart on the same theme.

Violent chaos in Ottawa follows Islamist attack in Quebec

Just two days after the deadly Islamist jihadi attack in Quebec comes a deadly attack in Ottawa.  It's yet to be determined who the shooter(s) are.  My bet is, of course, on the Islamists.  Standing by for more news (and more pacifist left/lib and "moderate" Muslim excuse making).

This horrible news is getting wall to wall coverage, even in the USA.

Update - Mark Steyn opines:

Steyn and Levant

Global warming - "a textbook case of pseudo-science"

Every unusual weather event, a hot summer, a miserably cold winter - all are taken as proof of the theory of catastrophic man-made global warming.  Everything confirms it, there is no counter evidence -  Freezing is the new Warming:

... What interests me is how global warming is degrading, in plain sight, into a textbook case of pseudoscience—all while remaining an unassailable article of belief among those who think of themselves as pro-science.

One of the famous characteristics of pseudo-science is that it is "unfalsifiable." That is, the theory is constructed in such a way that there is no evidence that could possibly refute it. ...

[via Mark Steyn]

Update: A couple of links from Springer in the comments:

Science paper doubts IPCC, so whole journal gets terminated!

Is a mini ice age on the way?

It's too easy for thin-skinned hypocrites to sue for "defamation"

Mark Steyn reviews the defamation lawsuits brought against him (by Michael Mann) and Ezra Levant (by a touchy Muslim lawyer):

... the urge to litigate disagreement is never far from the surface in contemporary discourse. So both Ezra Levant and I find ourselves back in court yet again. 

... In that sense, Dr. Mann is, indeed, a fraud. It is a fascinating legal question whether a man guilty of serial misrepresentation can, in fact, be defamed. But it’s not that fascinating, and certainly not worth the court’s time and seven-figure legal bills. 

...  it’s a pretty basic free speech case. Dr. Mann, whatever his other gifts, is an inveterate name-caller.  

... In court, our notably unimpressive judge Natalia Combs-Greene declared, even before we got anywhere near the trial, that she was with Dr. Mann: “The court agrees with the arguments advanced by Plaintiffs. To place Plaintiff’s name in the same sentence with Sandusky (a convicted pedophile) is clearly outrageous.” 

... Mann is entitled to insult me ... and anyone else who has the temerity not to prostrate themselves before him. It is remarkable that an American jurist is too obtuse to grasp this 

... Mr Awan said something that was not so and was exposed in court for so doing, and in a free society Ezra ought to be well within his rights to characterize such a person as he pleases. 

... What else? Awan complains that Levant called him an anti-Semite. Big deal. Awan called Levant a racist. He’s called me and my book racist, Islamophobic, virulent and hateful. Likewise: big deal. 

...  If you’re going to be a partisan warrior in the public arena you need, as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle likes to put it, “insensitivity training.” Miss Shaidle also argues that the matter of honour was better handled before the libel laws replaced dueling. When a fake Nobel laureate and a frontman for a terrorism-sympathizer are suing for their “reputation,” I’m inclined to agree. If Dr. Mann’s up for it, how about hockey sticks at dawn?

However you cut it, being sued in a real court is far better than being persecuted by a kangaroo "human rights" tribunal.  But either way it's expensive and, with clueless and/or ideological judges and juries, risky for defendants. The bar seems to be set way too low for getting these anti-free-speech and hurt-feelings lawsuits into court in the first place.