God does not give us the power to destroy the earth!

So, it is that time of year again when the climate alarmist brigade begins to ramp up its claims of impending doom, before going into a big, well funded meeting with all the usual suspects.  These meetings of the UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change are big events that have a carbon footprint that dwarfs those of small countries.  They eat the finest cheeses, drink the best wines, and generally live very high on the hog.  No doubt celebrities will fly in on their private jets to rub shoulders with the leftist delegates to the Convention while staying in five star luxury at the hotels.  All very chic.

This year, however, the IPCC report is being credibly challenged by a group of scientists who will be releasing their report, "Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels" in Katowice, Poland the week of December 4, 2018. But you should read all about it from John Dale Dunn and Joseph Bast at the American Thinker entitled The IPCC is still wrong on climate change. Scientists prove it. Go read the whole thing.

 Like Mr. Dunn, I am not a scientist myself. I am a civil engineer, who like Mr. Dunn took chemistry, physics, geology and a bit of biology in the course of getting my degree. In the course of my work since, I have developed an excellent internal "B.S." meter.  My BS meter pegged out the first time I heard about what was then called "Global Warming" and the fact that man was causing it.  I knew from my geology days that the earth had been though hot spells as well as deeply cold periods.  The deeply cold periods were known as "ice ages."  For civilizational survival, an impending ice age scares me more that the idea that it might get a little bit warmer.

Frankly, I grow weary of debunking the theory that there is anything man can do to either make it warmer or colder.  Believing this nonsense is akin to the  superstition that by dancing around a "powerful shaman" can make it rain.  But as we read in Matthew 5:45, the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.  It may seem unfair until one realizes that we have all fallen short of God's expectation, so why should he favor on over another?

I realize that many no longer believe in God, and that many have been taught to believe that the earth is a fragile thing that man can easily upset.  Indeed, I saw a movie recently in which the premise was that we had run out of the resources to grow food and therefore had to leave the earth.  Yet the truth is that all the resources that ever existed here are still here.  They may be in landfills but they are still here and can still be used. God does not give us the power to destroy the earth.  Believe it or not, that is a scientific fact.

Judge Kavanaugh Confirmed

According to Townhall.com Judge Kavanaugh has been confirmed to be the next Justice of the Supreme Court.

While I am conservative, strangely enough I did not want Brett Kavanaugh on the court because he is "conservative," but because I expect he will decide cases based on an originalist interpretation of the Constitution.  Had leftists not created the idea of a "living Constitution" that changed meanings every time a leftist fad popped up, we would not have needed to have this fight.

Interestingly, the Constitution has been amended 27 times.  It is not impossible, merely difficult.  The amendment process was designed to be difficult to ensure that it was not amended lightly, or because a mob has temporarily overwhelmed the majority before it has had time to make up its mind.  An originalist believes that if we want to change the Constitution, it should be amended rather than have some Justice peer between the lines at the emanations of the penumbras, perhaps had consulted the entrails of goats, and come up with a amendment by interpretation.

It will be interesting to see how Kavanagh changes the Court. 

Speaking of needing consequences...

This from David Codrea over at the War on Guns blog:


US Guns to Mexico Report Feels Like 'Deja vu All Over Again' 

When will the "authorities" take action on this?

Consequences

I have on occasion noted that if there are no consequences for breaking laws, there really is no reason for having them.  In the case of gun laws, for example, it is illegal for a felon to have in his possession, a gun.  But relatively few people are prosecuted for it (though Sessions notes that Federal prosecutions are up.) Attorney General Sessions "gets it" that crimes must be punished, if the law is to have its intended effect of regulating behavior.

Interestingly, according to an article by Wayne LaPierre in the September 2018 issue of the American Rifleman, the New York Times apparently had an article lamenting Sessions' efforts because these might be too successful, thus eliminating the argument for more gun laws (!).  The NYT publishes behind a pay wall, and in any case, I don't intend to send anyone their way.  You are on your own with this one.

Today at Townhall.com we learn that Allies of Christine Blasey Ford put the screws to long time friend to change her statement. This is witness tampering, a crime. It should be punished. Similarly, Senator Dianne Feinstein should be investigated and if found to have leaked Ford's letter, should be punished as well by whatever means the Senate has to punish members. No one is above the law, or should be.

For further reading, go to the American Thinker for an article entitled How To Prevent Another Kavanaugh Circus by Ted Noel.  Ted lays out a number of steps Republicans can take to rein in the Democrats.  Since most of the activity of Dems is illegal, it only requires a prosecutor with a spine to carry it out.  Oh, and perhaps the prosecutor may need body guards.  After all, prosecuting these people will not be unlike prosecuting the mafia.

The Daily Caller Exposes the Problems With the Left

The Daily Caller featured a post about a Facebook vice president supported Judge Kavanaugh during his hearings with the Senate Judiciary Committee.  The post can be found here. According to the post:

Facebook employees are reportedly in the middle of a week-long meltdown after vice president for global policy Joel Kaplan sat behind Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh during Kavanaugh’s Sept. 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Hundreds of Facebook employees expressed their displeasure with Kaplan since Kavanaugh’s testimony, according to reports in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, citing sources familiar with the matter.

“His seat choice was intentional, knowing full well that journalists would identify every public figure appearing behind Kavanaugh. He knew that this would cause outrage internally, but he knew that he couldn’t get fired for it,” one Facebook program manager wrote about Kavanaugh, according to TheNYT.

There is the problem with Leftist ideology, right there. The late Mike Vanderboegh called the various ideologies on the Left "Collectivist." This fits with Jonah Goldberg's definition of Fascism, an ideology on the Left:

“We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.”

Here we see the notion, which is expressed everywhere among the young these days, that one can not have a different opinion and still be allowed into decent society. This is collectivist thinking, and it is fundamentally anti-liberal, and intolerant.  We used to value independent thought and action.  Now, not so much.

More Cultural Marxism, This Time on Guns

In all the fuss over the Kavanaugh appointment, I have overlooked a number of very bad laws that states like California, Maryland, and even Florida have enacted called "Red Flag Laws."  Red Flag Laws allow the government, in the form of the police and the courts, to take your weapons from you on the flimsiest of excuses, or even no excuse at all.  You do not have to be credibly charged or convicted of anything. Due process is out the window here. 

As a thought experiment, suppose the local paper printed up the names and addresses of all the concealed carriers in their coverage area.  Someone in the same neighborhood as you, that you don't know and with whom you have had no interaction notices your name and address.  That person happens to be a hoplophobe who is immediately offended that someone in his neighborhood carries a gun.  So your "neighbor" gins up a case where you have acted suspiciously and files a complaint against you.  Next thing you know, the police are knocking on your door and asking for your weapon.

This is the type of scenario that David Harsanyi is writing about at Townall.com today in an article entitled  Democrat's New Laws Are Also An Attack on Due Process

The notion that certain Americans are pre-emptively guilty of wrongdoing, whether there's any corroborating evidence to back up an accusation or not, isn't reserved for conservatives who happen to be in contention for a Supreme Court seat. In the hierarchy of progressive values, due process is a bottom dweller.

...snip...

Another area of American life where we continue to see egregious attacks on the presumption of innocence is gun ownership. You might remember that a couple of years ago, Democrats engaged in a much-covered congressional "sit-in" to support legislation that would have stripped Americans on secret government watchlists -- hundreds of thousands of people who had never been accused, much less convicted, of any crime -- of their constitutional right to bear arms.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, in fact, proposed legislation that would have restricted not only American citizens on faulty watchlists but anyone who had been on any watchlist at any time during the previous five years and anyone who had traveled to select Middle Eastern countries. Apparently, Democrats believe limiting the number of refugees from Syria is unconstitutional but explicitly restricting the constitutional rights of Syrian immigrants here legally is just fine.

Most of these laws were passed in the wake of the shootings at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School. None are based on anything that would actually work to stop such crimes. Indeed, the government had all the laws it needed before the shooting to stop it, if the people who run the government at all levels would have done their jobs. Instead, they passed on doing their jobs in favor of doing...who knows? Interestingly, the laws that obtained before did not require a suspension of the Constitution. They just required that people do the right thing.

Huh!

All it takes in many states is for a family member, neighbor or co-worker to accuse you of a pre-crime. One of Maryland's many new laws (signed by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan) allows the police to confiscate weapons for up to a year -- or until the next person accuses you of a crime you are only yet to commit.

There is risible evidence that these new regulations will stop mass shootings or lower gun crime. But as William Rosen, deputy legal director for Everytown for Gun Safety, explains, "red flag laws" are needed to "step into that gap." What gap? You know, the pesky space between protecting the ideal of presuming innocence and completely ignoring it when you feel like it.

Go read the whole thing. Vote accordingly.

My Righteous Anger

Yesterday, as I was driving and explaining what has been happening to Judge Kavanaugh to someone who is what Rush has described as an "uninformed voter," I found myself having to constantly put down anger to sound sane.  Today, Derek Hunter captures exactly how I felt over character assassination that has taken place by people whose past and present behavior leaves them little room to criticize.  Hunter's piece can be found at Townhall.com under the title The Righteous Rage of the Right.

Hunter writes:

Now, after witnessing how disgusting the political left have become in their attempted character assassination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, I would crawl over flaming broken glass into a salt and lemon juice pit to vote against every Democrat I can. And I’m not alone.

I don’t know if Democrats realize what they’ve done, what they’ve awoken in their crusade against Kavanaugh, but I can assure you that conservatives are awake now, ready and enthusiastic to register their disgust at the ballot box. Even never-Trump Republicans have come home, outraged over what our politics have devolved into in the name of “progress.”

Only Democrat voters can change this situation. They can vote the bastards out of office, and do as we have done to find worthy candidates of the old style like Zel Miller and Sam Nunn. In the meantime, I will not vote for another Democrat, and I hold anyone who claims to be a registered Democrat suspect until proven otherwise. The late Robert Bork, Justice Clarence Thomas, and now Judge Kavanaugh, not to mention the other people whose lives have been ruined despite being able representatives of the people have disgusted me since Dan Quayle was run out of office for misspelling the word "potato." Who knew that one of the qualifications for the job of representative, senator, and Vice President was to have first been a spelling bee champion. Does this mean that Joe "Gaffe Machine" Biden was unqualified to be Vice President, and surely to run for President? How about Maxine "Worlds Smartest Woman" Waters? Has she been a spelling be champion?

I suspect the Left will not like the new rules, but they are the only ones who can change them back.