Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.
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Townhall: Questions After a Massacre
The Isla Vista massacre on May 23 was followed by bad reporting and worse punditry. So, in my Townhall column this weekend, I ask a few questions.
Please click on over, then come back here for more food for thought. In particular:
The bad police work prior to the murder spree elicited an interesting article in the Washington Post.
The folks at Pajamas Media decry all the bad punditry (I agree, I’m with ’em) but seem to believe that the cause of the spree murderer was “mental illness,” which I’m not at all sure is correct, or gets us anywhere near we want to be:
The idea, floated by Tammy Bruce, that parents of adults who seem to be going off their rockers should have the authority to place those offspring into “some kind of psychiatric hold for some period of time” might be initially attractive to frightened parents, but seems built for horrendous consequences.
Of course, the commentator off-set made the perhaps most cogent point: an armed citizenry is better than anything else. It’s the lack of any expected defense that allowed this latest murderer to feel safe in proceeding to kill as many as he could. He admitted this in his manifesto. He selected targets on the basis of expected lack of defensive weaponry.
For a different form of punditry — indeed, for a truly detailed analysis of the “psycho killer” — see this long presentation by Stefan Molyneux:
I’m still watching this. Halfway through.
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Video: Frontline’s “The Tank Man”
This week marks the 25th Anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. On June 4, 1989, Chinese soldiers armed with tanks and automatic weapons forcibly cleared Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government reported that 218 civilians, 10 soldiers and 13 police officers were killed along with 7,000 wounded. Other estimates went as high as 6,000 dead and 30,000 wounded. A People’s Liberation Army defector noted that a document circulated to PLA officers put the death toll at 3,700.
Touched off by the April 15 death of Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer who had been removed as General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party three years earlier, students began to assemble in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. They stayed for seven weeks, occupying Tiananmen Square, growing in number and joined by thousands of working people. They protested government oppression and demanded, among other things, a free press.
On the day after the bloody massacre cleared the square, and with the military seemingly in full control, an unknown man was caught on film standing in front of a line of tanks, briefly blocking their advance. He became an international symbol for individual freedom.
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 1
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 2
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 3
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 4
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 5
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 6
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 7
- Frontline Documentary: “The Tank Man” Part 8
- The entire PBS Video (ironically w/ commercials)
- The Tank Man – Frontline
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Jeremy Bentham
Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.
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Virginia’s New Boss
Virginia’s previous governor, Bob McDonnell, faces a federal prosecution, along with his wife, Maureen, for “illegally accepting gifts, luxury vacations and large loans from a wealthy Richmond area businessman who sought special treatment from state government.”
With that high-profile scandal unfolding, legislators came to the capitol this year ready to enact reforms. One bill sought to prevent corruption by banning campaign contributions and/or gifts to the governor of more than $50 from any entity seeking a grant from the Governor’s Opportunity Fund.
That fund, with a current balance of $35 million, is designed to promote economic growth by allowing the governor to personally dole out cash or loans to assist various commercial enterprises that “maintain or create jobs in the state.”
Not hard to imagine how such a fund could be used, in reality, to reward only those who reward the governor . . . or his campaign. And so, even in a session marked by major partisan warfare including an ongoing budget stalemate, every legislator in the state House and Senate, whether Republican or Democrat, came together to vote in the affirmative for the bill.
Unanimous.
Last week, Terry McAuliffe, the new governor and old Clinton confidante, vetoed this reform. Before killing it, McAuliffe offered a lame excuse about keeping the applicants to his slush fund confidential. So much for his big talk about transparency.
With the legislation now dead, let’s try an even better idea. End the Governor’s Opportunity Fund. Zero it out. No governor should have a slush fund to shower millions of dollars on crony companies. No such program should exist.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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May 30, Goddess of Democracy and Freedom
On May 30, 1989, student demonstrators unveil a 33-foot high “Goddess of Democracy and Freedom” statue in Tiananmen Square.
Also on this day: Joan of Arc was executed — for heresy, and after much debate about her cross-dressing — by immolation in 1431; Christopher “Kit” Marlowe, poet and playwright, died under mysterious circumstances in 1593; Voltaire died in 1778, and his friends secretly buried him — against Catholic Church policy — in the abbey of Scellières in Champagne (his body was later disinterred and buried in Paris by the order of the National Assembly of France).
Can we agree to tolerate disagreement?
Swedish climatologist Lennart Bengtsson’s “defection” from an alleged climatological consensus has been greeted with hysteria from some colleagues. His sin was joining the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which challenges the received wisdom.
The alleged scientific consensus is that mankind, in its industrial phase, is not only a cause but the pivotal cause of recent global warming/“climate change.” Also that our carbonic effusions are triggering not mild, normal, nothing-to-panic-about global climate variation but imminently catastrophic variation.
Is it okay to dispute these and related hypotheses?
Debate about complex scientific contentions isn’t a bad thing. New knowledge is gained both by positive investigation and by correcting errors and misinterpretations. One does not abet scientific inquiry by treating any challenges to a favored explanation as per se illicit, regardless of evidence or argument.
But Bengtsson reports that he has been subjected to enormous pressure “from all over the world that has become virtually unbearable to me . . . I see therefore no other way out . . . than resigning from GWPF. I had not been expecting such an enormous world-wide pressure . . . from a community that I have been close to all my active life.”
What’s the message? “Regardless of your reasons or credentials, don’t dare deviate from our ‘consensus,’ at least not publicly — or else we’ll make your life very very hard.” Whatever the motives and goals here, they have nothing to do with either the methodological or the social requirements of science.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Dr. Judith Curry
My main conclusion from reading the [National Climate Assessment] report is this: the phrase ‘climate change’ is now officially meaningless. The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change.
Knowledge is the conformity of the object and the intellect.
It’s like jumping from ice floe to ice floe while being shot at. Great if you can reach the next slab of ice while the shooters pause to reload. But then what?
Having been caught targeting right-leaning applicants for tax-exempt status, the IRS decided to clear up the “ambiguity” in rules for tax-exempt organizations that had “led” to this “confusion.” The solution, they decided, should be to make it impossible for a tax-exempt organization that ever mentions political candidates or elections to avoid getting into trouble with the IRS.
No. What Americans needed post-scandal is what we have needed all along: more restrictions on the government, not on our freedom to speak out.
Persons of all political stripes saw the danger in the Draconian new rules IRS was proposing, resulting in an unprecedented 150,000 public comments — mostly negative. So the IRS is backing down for now . . . but says it will try again.
Not everyone is happy about the reprieve.
“This delay is deeply disappointing and a real setback for democracy[!!] and faith in government[!!!],” says Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer. “The only hope we have is when the IRS goes back, they don’t succumb to any form of political pressure and enact a very tough rule that will equally curtail liberal and conservative groups.”
“Only hope” for what? Equal-opportunity repression?
It bodes ill that any major political figure could be so open about wishing to stomp on our freedom of speech.
The battle for our basic rights is far from over.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.