BBC Scare Quotes for Climate 'Scepticism'

It’s truly amazing, when you think about it, that after all the scare stories and media advocacy that the BBC would find itself reporting the results of a public opinion poll on global warming:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

What is more, the public is not at all sure that the motives of the climate change advocates are as pure and the driven snow.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

Maybe someone found out that global warming advocate Al Gore is set to make a fortune from carbon offset trading.

The BBC’s article really is a gem of a piece.  Here are some more quotes. 

[The polling firm’s] head of environmental research, Phil Downing, said the research showed there was "still a lot to do" in encouraging "low-carbon lifestyles".
People had been influenced by counter-arguments, he said.

Er, isn’t the polling firm that did the study supposed to kinda take a hands-off attitude towards the encouragement of public opinion?  Or does the modern polling firm first whip up public opinion and then sample it.

And isn’t the whole point of a political conversation the full and free ventilation of arguments pro and anti?

So let’s pull the vice-president of the Royal Society, Sir David Read, into the argument.  The Royal Society is Britain’s academy of eminent scientists.  Said he:

People should not be misled by those that exploit the complexity of the issue, seeking to distort the science and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of climate change.

Couldn’t agree more, old chap.  I am sure that you have never been guilty of that.  Then he goes on.

The science very clearly points towards the need for us all - nations, businesses and individuals - to do as much as possible, as soon as possible, to avoid the worst consequences of a changing climate.

Sorry, old chap.  The science doesn’t point to anything of the kind.  The science just says that since about 1850 there has been a moderate increase in global temperature and that there is a good chance that the increase is due to “anthropogenic forcing,” in short, due to man.  Speculative science has a lot of theories about what might happen if the warming continues.  I think it is fair to say that the quality of this science is rather less solid than the rather clear evidence of moderate warming.

The science says nothing about what we should do about it.

The Broken Society in Germany

Yes, yes.  For decades we have been worrying about little girls in school.  Feminist organizations have been gussying up studies showing how girls are hopelessly shortchanged by just about everything. 

Now the real results are coming in, according to The Economist.

In eastern Germany, that would presumably be Brandenburg and Pomerania, the girls have left to go west, and they have left the boys behind.  Why is that?  Because the girls do better in school. 

Girls are more studious than boys, so they get better qualified and migrate west to find both partners and jobs. The boys lack role models at home, where fathers are often unemployed, and at school, where teachers are mostly female. Young men now account for 65% of German high-school dropouts.

Well, now.  That’s interesting, isn’t it?

And it illustrates one of the basic facts of life.  Women will do what they are told.  If you tell them to pay attention to kinder, kirche, küche, they will beaver away in the home.  If you tell them to get an education and get a job, off they will go and dutifully do it. 

Men are different.  Men don’t like to do what they are told.  The big problem always is how to socialize men so that they contribute to society instead of hanging around in gangs, robbing and raping and killing.

For the last generation or so, ever since the well-born Simone de Beauvoir complained that women were The Second Sex, we have been acting as though women were the problem, not men.

We will pay dearly for this mistake.

Correction.  All humans will pay dearly for this liberal mistake.

A Father Speaks

In these diverse postmodern days what should a father do?  The father of teenaged girls, that is.

Doug Giles has some ideas.  You see, he doesn’t get with the “hip and groovy dad” bit that lacks a strong “opinion regarding their [daughters’ dating life.”  No sirree.  Says he:

Yes, seeing that I’m still the Alpha dog of the Giles castle, that I still pay the bills, buy the SUVs, pay for College and secure their condos, then by God, I’m still makin’ the rules.

How about ten rules about all this, or as we say in judgmental America, Commandments, for young swains to observe when they are swaining around the house?

1. Know what?  I don’t like having you around.
2. You’d better have a life.  Ideally you should be pursuing a “noble goal at Mach2 with your hair on fire.”
3. No touching my daughter.  Certainly not in my house.
4. You will “look me in the eye, shake my hand like a man and turn off your cell phone.”
5. You are the boy; I am the man.
6. “Our family is old school.”
7. You can earn my favor with gifts: cigars, for instance.
8. Forget the dirty jokes.
9. You will keep your word—even in small things.
10. Three things: “Look good,” “read” so that you can converse intelligently, and “serve... round the house, in our community, in our nation and with our wonderful world.”

Really, what’s not to like?

Steyn on Immigration and the "Pork-filled Rooms"

How does he do it?  We are talking about Mark Steyn, of course.  His post-immigration-bill article fairly gushes with Steynisms, as in:

• [T]he people... declared their independence from the United States Senate... "No legislation without explanation."
• [Cooking] up the "comprehensive" immigration bill’s "grand bargain" behind the scenes in the pork-filled rooms[.]
• Sen. Trenthorn Lotthorn, Lottissippi Republican[.]
• Gulfport is a port in the Gulf emirate whose grateful people Sultan Trent has ruled o’er lo these many years.
• ["]I’m not proposing an electrified goat fence," the Lottly Goatherd added.

But, characteristically for Mark Steyn, there is a serious point beneath and the fun and frolic.  A serious discussion of the issues. “Time and again, the remote insulated emirs were offered the opportunity to rise above their condescension and declined to do so.”  But the fact is they have nothing to be condescending about.

There are immigration laws on the books right now, and they are flouted with impunity by "sanctuary cities," states and the federal government itself. The political class tells us a nation on permanent "orange alert" at ports of entry can’t enforce its borders, and a broken immigration bureaucracy that can’t process existing levels of applicants can reliably handle another 20 million.

Tell you what, Senators.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings on why the law isn’t being enforced?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on oversight hearings about why it is so important to have orange alerts in the airports while keeping the borders wide open?  That’s your job.  Why don’t you get down to work on the failure of the immigration bureaucracy to process the existing levels of applicants and develop an assessment of the utter chaos that is likely to ensue if it tries to handle another 20 million?  That’s your job. 

Yes.  Work is hard.  That’s why you get paid to do it.

"The Way to Stop Discrimination"

It’s located right at the end of Chief Justice John Roberts decision in the case of Parents Concerned with Community Schools vs. Seattle School District (pdf).  You know what I am talking about.

We are talking about John Roberts’ deliberate sound bite neatly inserted into the pages and pages of close legal reasoning.  You know how it goes already.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

My, that’s a concept that we could use around here.  It is a sound bite that we should all hope will echo down the decades ahead.

But I wanted to get the context.  Where did Chief Justice Roberts put the sentence that he knew would be extracted and would be the symbol for the Parents vs. Seattle decision?  The sentence is located right at the end of “Opinion of ROBERTS, C.J.,” right before he writes:

The judgments of the Courts of Appeals for the Sixth and Ninth Circuits are reversed, and the cases are remanded for further proceedings.
It is so ordered.

Good idea, eh? Reversing opinions from both the Sixth Circuit and the Ninth Circuit Court of Lefties in gross as you might say.

And it is also right before “Opinion by THOMAS, J.”  Justice Clarence Thomas begins his concurring opinion with the words:

Today, the Court holds that state entities may not experiment with race-based means to achieve ends they deem socially desirable. I wholly concur in THE CHIEF JUSTICE’s opinion.

Well, now, that’s a thought.  It recalls the moment in the old Beyond the Fringe sketch where Jonathan Miller talks about Prime Minister Harold Macmillan pressing the nuclear button “or not, as the mood takes him.”  That’s the kind of government liberals like.  It’s the kind of government that can do anything that seems socially desirable.

The only reason, Justice Thomas writes, that he is writing a concurring opinion is “to address several of the contentions in JUSTICE BREYER’s dissent.” As well he might.

But here is Justice Roberts’ sound bite in context:

[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,” Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300—301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis.  The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Of course. That is the essential link. Chief Justice Roberts is directly linking his opinion with the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education case of 1954.

That was when you could get the Supreme Court to vote 9-0 against racism.  Today you can only get a 5-4 vote to stop discrimination on the basis of race. 

That, I suppose, is progress.

"An Incredible Week"

Let’s just pause for a moment, because for conservatives this week has been Mae-Westian, as in “fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”  It’s been up and down all week.

Some people are getting triumphal, as in Mark Tapscott’s:

First, there was the success of the Right side of the Blogosphere in stopping the attempted revival of the Bush/Kennedy/McCain immigration reform bill in the Senate.

I think that we need to temper the enthusiasm.  The Washington Times’s  Stephen Dinan has it about right.  It was going to be “a defining moment for the old guard.”

Instead, the young guns &mdash, a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It was the young guns, assisted by the firepower of the conservative New Media, that got the job done. But we can agree with Mark Tapscott to this extent:

Nobody can legitimately doubt now that conservative New Media has genuine political power to shape American public policy.

But let us not get above ourselves.  The New Media is a blunt instrument, like a great army.  The key is to appoint generals who can use the army to fight a great battle and win. 

That is what politicians are for.  When they are not deep in the trough giving out pork to their clients.

After this week, politicians all over America will be getting the message on immigration.

Here is the defining issue for me from Stephen Dinan:

"Those of us who have been on the campaign trail in the last couple of years have had to talk about immigration reform and we’ve campaigned — [Sen. David] Vitter made campaign promises, I made campaign promises — we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship," said Sen. Jim DeMint, South Carolina Republican.

That checks with the results of the cloture vote taken on Thursday, reported here.  The biggest group of Democrats who voted to kill the bill were in Class I, elected to the Senate last November.

No doubt they, like Jim DeMint, were out on the campaign trail talking about immigration reform and making promises.  So they have a pretty good idea about the sentiments out there on immigration.

And I’ll bet that you’d find that about 80 percent of the American people would agree with the notion that “we should not reward those who came here illegally with a path to citizenship.”

And then there was the Supreme Court’s decision on race and schools.  What a concept from Chief Justice Roberts:

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race[.]

Do tell.

Dems Who Voted Against Cloture

The Senate immigration bill didn’t just fail by a whisker.  The vote for cloture on S.1639 went down 46-53. Check the U.S. Senate website.

What’s interesting is the 16 Democrats who voted with the 53 of Senators, Democrat and Republican, to deny cloture.  Let us get this clear. There were 16 Democrats and 37 Republicans who voted against the comprehensive immigration bill brought to the Senate by President Bush, Senator Kennedy, and Senator McCain. Here is the list of the Democratic Senators voting against cloture. Alongside each senator is their class and the most recent year that they faced or will face the voters:

Senator Class Closest election Baucus (D-MT) II 2008 Bayh (D-IN) III 2010 Bingaman (D-NM) I 2006 Brown (D-OH) I 2006 Byrd (D-WV) I 2006 Dorgan (D-ND) III 2010 Harkin (D-IA) II 2008 Landrieu (D-LA) II 2008 McCaskill (D-MO) I 2006 Nelson (D-NE) I 2006 Pryor (D-AR) III 2010 Rockefeller (D-WV) II 2008 Sanders (I-VT) III 2010 Stabenow (D-MI) I 2006 Tester (D-MT) I 2006 Webb (D-VA) I 2006

Notice anything?  The biggest group of senators was recently elected in 2006.  What’s to bet that they said they would stand strong on protecting the border, and they don’t want to be on the wrong side of that promise.

The next biggest group is up for reelection in 2008.  What’s to bet that they want to be on the right side of the voters next year.

The smallest group is up for reelection in 2010.  They are the folks who are the least concerned with what the voters think right now.

This immigration thing isn’t all that hard.

1. Enforce the law
2. Build the fence
3. Clear the backlogs
4. Process the legal immigrants
5. Then... amnesty the illegals

What’s not to like about that?