Sense And Nonsense In Dealing With Russia

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With the Mueller Report now out, and having concluded that nothing remotely akin to “collusion” between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia could be found, you would think that every prominent Democrat would only want to change the subject as quickly as possible. But weirdly, the Trump/Russia obsession persists even in the face of the Mueller Report.

Many examples could be cited, but one of the weirdest is the op-ed by Hillary Clinton published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, headlined “Mueller documented a serious crime against all Americans. Here’s how to respond.” The gist is that Trump is somehow allowing Russian President Putin to continue to attack our country, and probably to steal the upcoming 2020 election. Excerpts:

[T]he president of the United States has proved himself unwilling to defend our nation from a clear and present danger. . . . This is . . . an administration that refuses to take even the most minimal, common-sense steps to prevent future attacks and counter ongoing threats to our nation. . . . [U]nless he’s held accountable, the president may show even more disregard for the laws of the land and the obligations of his office. He will likely redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda . . . .

“Redouble his efforts to advance Putin’s agenda”? It’s hard even to conceive of the level of nonsense to which this woman has descended — along with many of her Democratic colleagues who are advocating the same or similar themes.

If you try taking a look at the big picture with regard to Russia, it will take you only a moment or two to figure out that far and away the most important thing to Russia for advancing its interests in the world is high prices for oil and gas. . . .

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Get Ready For The Democratic "Pragmatists"

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Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed with the headline “Are All Democrats Socialist? Don’t Believe the Hype.” The authors are Gregg Hurwitz and Jordan Peterson. I hadn’t previously heard of Hurwitz (he is identified as the author of a series of “thriller novels”); but Peterson is the guy who has shot to great fame in recent years as a YouTube star who advocates for leading a life of personal responsibility and hard work as the route to success. From what I had previously seen of Peterson, I had been quite impressed. With this op-ed, he just sank about 7 notches out of 10 in my estimation.

The central assertion of the op-ed is that the “social media warriors” and explicit advocates of socialism, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, who might seem to be the current stars of the Democratic Party, are not actually “representative” of its views. Rather, we should look to the views of those Democrats, here characterized as “quieter pragmatists,” who won the Congressional seats gained by the party in the last election. Among the 2020 candidates for President, our authors state that “voters would do well” to look to the “passionate moderate voices” ascending in the party. Like who? They name two: Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Are any of the Democratic candidates, and most particularly Buttigieg and Klobuchar, fairly characterized as “pragmatists” or “moderates”? . . .

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Mayor de Blasio Sets Out To Accelerate New York City's Decline

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When Bill de Blasio took office as the new Mayor of New York City back in 2014, many on the right looked at his policy prescriptions and predicted the rapid reversal of the City’s economic revival, potentially followed by rapid economic collapse. But not me! As I had originally written in this post of April 16, 2013, the consequence of bad — even disastrous — economic policy is not immediate economic collapse, but rather what I called “gradual relative decline.” That post looked particularly at Venezuela, then 15 years into the rule of Hugo Chavez, and far into the process of adopting over-the-top socialist policies that a Comsymp NYC Mayor could only dream about — everything from nationalization of most of the economy, to doubling the size of the state sector, to government deficit of 15% of GDP, and so forth. And yet, in its official (fraudulent) statistics, Venezuela was still showing economic growth, just not as fast as the growth in countries that allowed private enterprise to flourish.

But could de Blasio, through the magic of destructive progressive policies, actually turn New York City around from the strong growth that it was experiencing when he took office, and bring back the decline of the 1960s through 1993? . . .

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Let's Investigate For "Obstruction Of Justice" Every Prosecutor Who Has Ever Declined A Prosecution

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Now that the 488 page Mueller Report is out, and we are informed that the whole “Russian collusion” story was a hoax from the get go, you may have the feeling that, at least, Mueller and his people had a basic clue as to what they were doing. If so, then you clearly haven’t yet looked at the 182 page Volume II. This is the part of the Report that supposedly addresses “obstruction of justice” by the President. The conclusion of Volume II is that, “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach [the] judgment [that the President did not commit obstruction.]”

Let’s see. The President never fired Mueller or any of his people, or restricted the scope of their investigation, even though he had the constitutional authority to do so. The President never instructed Mueller who should or should not be charged, or for what crimes, even though he had the constitutional authority to do so. The President never claimed either attorney-client or executive privilege. The President produced over a million pages of documents. So what exactly is there about “obstruction” that supports writing this 182 pages of blather?

It’s simple. In the alternative universe that these people inhabit, it can be “obstruction of justice” if an elected official takes a constitutionally authorized action, in particular the exercise of what is known as “prosecutorial discretion,” while thinking the wrong thoughts. . . .

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The Soho Forum Global Warming Debate, And The Impact Of Scientific Arguments

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As you may have noticed from the announcement that appeared for the past week or so on my sidebar, the Soho Forum held a debate Monday night on the issue of Global Warming. The official resolution for the debate was Resolved: There is little or no rigorous evidence that rising concentrations of carbon dioxide are causing dangerous global warming and threatening life on the planet. The debaters were Craig Idso for the affirmative, and Jeffrey Bennett for the negative.

For those who haven’t heard of it, the Soho Forum sponsors debates, roughly monthly, on current policy issues. The venue is usually the Subculture Theater, at 45 Bleecker Street in Manhattan. The Forum’s Director is long-time Barron’s senior editor Gene Epstein, and the Chief Operating Officer is my daughter Jane. Other recent Soho Forum debate topics have included things like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the causes of the 2008-09 financial crisis.

Holding a debate on the issue of global warming or “climate change” — and particularly one focused on the scientific question of whether empirical evidence supports or refutes the hypothesis of potential dangerous warming — is often difficult. Contrary to what you might think, the problem is not that it is hard to find scientifically-literate advocates for the skeptic position. Actually, there are plenty of those. Rather, the problem generally is that adherents to the alarmist cause refuse to debate anyone who disagrees with their position, often denigrating their adversaries as “climate deniers.” So Gene Epstein deserves credit for locating Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Bennett also deserves credit for being willing to put his position to the test.

On the other hand, the whole endeavor gave some real perspective on the practical limits of the human mind, or at least the large majority of even very intelligent human minds, to grapple with the basics of scientific reasoning and the scientific method. At its most fundamental, the scientific method is just an exercise in rigorous logic. . . .

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What Will It Take To End Anti-Greenhouse Gas Insanity?

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It was nearly six years ago, in one of the very early posts on this blog, that I wrote as to the global warming scam, “[E]ven as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again.” At the time, world temperatures had failed to rise in accordance with alarmist predictions for about 15 years running, and I still had the naive idea that the politics of this issue ultimately would follow the scientific method; in other words, that the hypothesis of catastrophic human-caused warming would inevitably be forced to face the test of empirical evidence. Over time, empirical evidence would accumulate. As it became more and more clear that the evidence failed to support the hypothesis, the whole thing would gradually fade away. But up to that point, as I reported in that April 2013 post, what was happening was closer to the opposite. Extremely weak or completely negative empirical evidence for the hypothesis only made the advocates more and more extreme in their demands for immediate transformation of the world economy to “save the planet.”

The intervening six years have seen the ongoing accumulation of considerably more evidence, essentially all of it negative to the catastrophic global warming hypothesis, but my faith that actual evidence could resolve the issue has been almost completely shattered. Massive alterations have been made to the world thermometer temperature records by US and UK bureaucrats — almost entirely to reduce early-year temperatures and thereby create an apparent warming trend far greater than exists in the raw data. I have covered this issue extensively in a now-twenty-two part series “The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time.” Meanwhile, every hurricane, tornado, drought, flood, or other damaging act of nature is presented by the progressive press as evidence of human-caused “climate change” — even as the actual occurrences of such events have been definitively shown to have no increasing trend over time. Actual evidence gets massively altered, buried and/or ignored.

And now here we are in 2019, and the demands of the anti-greenhouse gas activists have only become more shrill and strident. Exhibit A is the so-called Green New Deal, a call to end most or all GHG emissions by 2030 at a cost of maybe 100 trillion dollars or so. And we are treated to claims by seemingly serious elected officials that the world will end in 12 years if we do not follow these prescriptions. If mere adverse empirical evidence cannot end this insanity, what can? . . .

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