Sultan Knish: The United States has 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, 39,000 in Japan, 34,805 in Germany, 23,000 in South Korea, and around 5,200 in Iraq. Our military protects the borders of countless nations.
Except our own.
In 1919, we had 18,500 soldiers on the border. “Twice a day every foot of the border line is patrolled by cavalrymen and infantrymen,” the New York Times noted.
Friday, April 20, 2018
Monday, April 16, 2018
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Thursday, April 12, 2018
Oil & Gas Journal - April 9, 2018 Cover
Oil & Gas Journal - April 9, 2018 Cover: Climate witch hunts
Loss by ExxonMobil of a challenge to climate witch hunts in New York and Massachusetts should focus attention on merits of the investigation. If gullible news media stay true to form, though, they’ll mistake a judge’s ruling for science.
US District Judge Valerie Caproni of Manhattan denied ExxonMobil’s attempt to block investigations by the states’ attorneys-general on the basis of motive. The oil company said Eric Schneiderman of New York an Maura Healey of Massachusetts have acted politically since 2015 by investigating it for fraud. The AGs say they suspect ExxonMobil of misleading the public and investors about climate change and the probable effects on its business, asserting the company knew more about the subject than it disclosed. In its court challenge, ExxonMobil said political motivation was evident in meetings the AGs had with environmental groups and a press-conference declaration by Schneiderman that opponents of former President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda were “morally vacant.”
PREEMPTIVE SYLLOGISM
Somehow, Caproni didn’t see politics in any of that and scolded ExxonMobil for “running roughshod over the adage that the best defense is a good offense.” Yet the same can be said about all of climate politics.
Since it began in the late 1980s, the political response to global warming has been driven by a preemptive syllogism: Globally averaged temperature has mostly increased since about 1850. Over the same period, growth in combustion of fossil fuels has increased the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a trace gas known to augment warming. Therefore, fossil fuels should be regulated out of the energy mix.
The conclusion implies suspension of market economics, fuel choice subject to politics, rising energy costs, and compromised freedom. It is, because of climatological complexity, scientifically doubtful. Yet it defines a political movement. Even worse, extremists driving the political agenda have succeeded in characterizing questions about their logical foundation as unrighteous and unworthy of attention. Schneiderman provides a glittering example with his moralizing about anyone challenging Obama’s fealty to climate activism.
How might ExxonMobil—and oil-company defendants in a San Francisco lawsuit alleging offenses similar to those Schneiderman and Healey want to probe—have avoided legal hazard? There seems to be only one option that would have satisfied the liberal attorneys-general and plaintiffs in California v. Chevron. The companies should have accepted speculative, worst-case scenarios about global warming, planned to withdraw from the oil and gas business, and warned shareholders accordingly or become guilty of fraud. The expectation is ludicrous, of course. Yet it’s now a central thrust of the all-or-nothing politics of climate.
Motivating the attorneys-general probe is the suspicion that ExxonMobil knew something about climate change that it should have disclosed but did not. But what, exactly? ExxonMobil and other oil companies examining climate change must have grappled with diffuse views about the subject. Scientists everywhere differ about the human contribution to observed warming, the chances that warming will become calamitous, and the ability of policy responses to meaningfully influence temperature. That was the case when oil companies began examining climate change. It remains the case now. Assertions to the contrary, so frequently made and obligingly reported, are demonstrably false.
RETROSPECTIVE JEOPARDY
Indeed, because worst-case climate projections probably overstate the threat, extreme and costly response might not be necessary. Saying this does not, as activists insist, reflect denial of warming or of the need for precaution. It does imply the need to seek answers to vital questions able to steer responses clear of inaction, at one extreme, and energy martial law, at the other. But to Schneiderman, Healey, and plaintiffs in the California case, merely expressing questions that might undermine radicalism subjects an individual or company to retrospective jeopardy. Their premise is intellectually dishonest and democratically repugnant.
What’s more, their dalliance with authoritarianism weakens a climate agenda already discrediting itself with exaggeration, dogmatism, and intolerance. Eventually, economics will force the political discussion to accommodate compromise—if undemocratic ventures of fanaticism don’t kill the movement first.
How is it that Countries Die??? | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
How is it that Countries Die??? | Joel D. Hirst's Blog: How is it that Countries�Die???
I believe there are answers that appear in the founding principles and documents penned by America’s Founding Fathers at its inception, who laid a great foundation for this country to build upon. And certainly that Foundation is being tested now in many ways never before imagined in this country as well.
Allow me to quote a few statements made by our Founding Fathers that I believe are universal to all governance:
“It is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.
[W]e have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. . . . Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If “Thou shalt not covet,” and “Thou shalt not steal,” were not commandments of Heaven, they must
be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.”
be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.”
(Source: John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 1776 and 1798.)
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of man and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connexions with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked, Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice?
And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government. Who, that is a sincere friend to it, can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric?
(Source: George Washington, Address of George Washington, 1st President of the United States . . . Preparatory to His Declination (Baltimore: George and Henry S. Keatinge), pp. 22-23. In his Farewell Address to the United States in 1796.
How is it that Countries Die??? | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
How is it that Countries Die??? | Joel D. Hirst's Blog: How is it that Countries�Die???
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Monday, April 09, 2018
American Digest - WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary....
American Digest - WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary....: Nor is China unified. It has a written system of several thousand characters that takes seven years of elementary education to learn, working four hours a day with an ink brush, ink pot, and paper. Learning these characters well enough to read a school textbook or a newspaper is how the Chinese are socialized. The current generation is the first where the majority of Chinese understand the common language, due to the centralization of the state and the mass media. But the Chinese still speak very different languages. Cantonese and Mandarin are as different as Finnish and French. In Hong Kong, you’ll see two Chinese screaming at each other in broken English because one speaks Mandarin and the other speaks Cantonese and they don’t have a word in common
Sunday, April 08, 2018
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