Red And Green

Sherwood Boehlert, a former House Republican and chair of the Science Committee, deplores the current Republican party line on global warming:

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn't help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities.

...

Why do so many Republican senators and representatives think they are right and the world's top scientific academies and scientists are wrong? I would like to be able to chalk it up to lack of information or misinformation.

I can understand arguments over proposed policy approaches to climate change. I served in Congress for 24 years. I know these are legitimate areas for debate. What I find incomprehensible is the dogged determination by some to discredit distinguished scientists and their findings.

I doubt it is misinformation.  I think the statists who were always looking for new excuses to expand the role of government hijacked the environmental movement a long time ago.  Unfortunately that doesn't change the science. 

Republicans ought to focus on opposing daft policy measures, which is easy enough to do (E.g., Kyoto, which excluded India and China, never made sense.)

Comments

[pagar]

?????? I can't find any story on the internet about Todd Palin being in Lisbon.
Where did that come from?

[BobDenver]

You have to read all the posts to get the jokes.

[BobDenver]

See Maybee's post at 2:26.

[Porchlight]

Being hot, a great songwriter, and compelling singer didn't hurt either.

She's definitely good-looking. Compelling singer/great songwriter - not in my world, but YMMV obviously. She may have had a bigger following than Dylan before their relationship, but her star faded as his rose. That's why his name is far more likely to come up in articles about her than vice versa.

That yodeling cat Joni Mitchell can take a leap off a high fence. She makes my ears hurt (except "Coyote" from The Last Waltz which I love).

But regarding her criticism of Dylan, I do think the very early Dylan is almost embarrassingly derivative. His adulation of Guthrie was a preview of how college kids would ape him years later. There were more original voices in folk in those early years. However, Dylan blew them all out of the water soon enough.

[pagar]

I saw Maybee's 2:26 post.

Guess I missed the ? in JiB 2:37. I thought someone had finally started sending people who knew how to solve problems; instead of sending people who create problems.

[rse]

Dr J-

That's why I raise this stuff. It's so absurd to the practitioner and it is everywhere now in the funding priorities.

I am currently reading Christopher Horner's The Power Grab now that I have come to the point of acknowledging that these bad education ideas are not being adopted because "they" do not know better. Individual teachers and principals may not but plenty do.

Individual academic excellence fosters independence of the state and the community and that's not acceptable. I had an inkling that animosity was the only explanation that made sense of the repeated (over decades) refusal to implement effective practices to teach reading and then writing and now math and science.

So I backtracked for the why and have been shocked at what both Marx and John Dewey had to say about the anathema they saw in an individual pursuing intellectual excellence.

I mentioned yesterday that I was looking for signs that these re-emphasis on student centered, activity learning in the late 1980s is a backdoor means of creating a socialist citizen who will then vote in the rest. So far that hypothesis is picking up more and more support. Scary.

Part of the hypothesis is that this is being pushed to keep students ignorant and subordinate as they later become voters. We know these methods do not work with novice learners and we know why. All ignored.

International organizations especially the UN are now pushing these instructional methods in aid grants.

How fascinating is it that they emphasize in Muslim countries that these techniques are especially effective in girls schools?

[Zombie Stalker]

I didn't make it all the way through the MERS article. Not sure I agree with the statement that the chain of title is broken with MERS. Owner remains the owner, neither the lender of the moment or MERS ever has title. There is a lien & there is a record of that lien. There could be priority issues based on the timing of transfers & recording other liens, though. But then, I once knew something about a Collateral Chattel Mortgage.

There is definitely a problem with transfer now as there's a question about who actually holds the mortgage, but title is clear.

Am i missing something?

[Dave (in MA)]

Just last night Lileks asked me why Jomer's didn't post on his site. I told him I would pass the word.

I leave comments on his Bleat every once in a while, often to point out bad links, etc. Since they usually go uncorrected I figured he doesn't read his own comment section.

[narciso]

This piece, seems to have been appropriate for Halloween, in the LUN

[Melinda Romanoff]

ZS-

Title is Not clear, in my eyes. Pagar's link's admission erupts every single MBS' pass through status, that being the New York Trust law that the IRS, and others, use as guidance to "pass through" the distinction of Interest and Principal, where only interest is taxable.

With this, BOTH are taxable, which would be the return of your own money, and subject to back taxes, all the way back to 1995.

It's been discussed at length, here, in recent months.

[Pofarmer]

There is definitely a problem with transfer now as there's a question about who actually holds the mortgage, but title is clear.

Am i missing something?

The most important thing, IMHO, is that you could easily have a mortgage in more than one MBS. That, i think, would be fraud.

[Neo]

"First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

"It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."

He [Al Gore] explained his own support for the original programme on his presidential ambitions.

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

[sbw]

Al "Emily Litella" Gore: Never mind.

[Clarice]

Taranto BOTW reflecting on the IG report that the Administration twisted the scientific reports on the BP spill to justify the ban on deep oil drilling :

"When those on the "progressive" left speak, as Obama did, of science's "rightful place," they mean as a source of authority for their policy preferences. The actual methods of science are as alien to them as the workings of a free economy."

***As for fat ass Gore, nice that his misrepresentations about ethanol helped him make a lot of money. Maybe he can give it to the poor to help defray their higher food costs because we are burning their food instead of like you know actual fuel stocks..

[Lizette]

"How do you feel the Wegman Report reflects on global warming 'skeptics'?"i think the way they are still using this four years later says something, both about their honesty, and about the persistence of attractive ideas regularly re-enforced...

Super Probiotic

[Lizette]

"How do you feel the Wegman Report reflects on global warming 'skeptics'?"i think the way they are still using this four years later says something, both about their honesty, and about the persistence of attractive ideas regularly re-enforced.

Super Probiotic

[Melinda Romanoff]

yogurt.