President Obama picked a fine time to announce that the war on terror is winding down and that Al Qaida is on the run. The Benghazi attack last September should have destroyed that argument as a campaign theme; but it didn't, since a video-maker was falsely but successfully blamed for provoking the attack. (The official script eventually was changed, but, bizarrely, Nakoula Baseley Nakoula, the hapless video-maker, is still in jail.) Now Mr. Obama is making the claim again, just after a likely confederate of the Tsarnaevs dies in a confrontation with the FBI in Orlando and two self-proclaimed Islamists murder and butcher a British soldier on the street in London.

Speaking yesterday, the President announced a cutback in the use of drones and a renewed intention to close Guantanamo prison, asserting that such moves are justified in part because of the decline of Al Qaida. We're effectively back to the campaign theme of 2012: "GM is alive and Bin Laden is dead."

War on terror? Says the Commander-in-Chief: "This war must end. That is what history advises. That is what democracy demands."

Continue reading "Goodbye al Qaida: Hello, Islamist "Loners"" »

The Honorable Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is getting a lot of well-deserved criticism for stating that natural disasters such as the tornado that devastated Moore, Oklahoma this week are the products of climate change (nee, "global warming") and, therefore, somehow the responsibility of climate change doubters. Moreover, since many Republicans are among those questioning the assertions of global warming and especially the idea that people mainly cause it, he said, they ultimately are responsible for forcing the rest of the country--including his state--to help pay the costs of disaster relief.

This kind of thing would be the stuff of satire if it were not taking advantage of the recent tornado deaths and destruction in Oklahoma.

Discovery fellows Steve Meyer (author of the forthcoming, Darwin's Doubt) and Jay Richards were on the Michael Medved show today to talk about a variety of similar claims fraudulently made in the name of science.

Misperceiving patterns and lessons from random information is a form of psychiatric disease called "apophenia," a delusional condition the sufferer confuses with reality. The political and metaphorical version of it is conspiracy theory, or, in this case, an attempt to claim for climate change what even scientists (including those who fully accept the idea that the Earth is warming and that people are responsible for it) don't claim; namely, that specific severe weather can be attributed to climate change.

Moreover, even if you did hold weather is a reflection of climate change, you would have to deal with the statistics that until this week's tornados, the past year has been notable for a relative paucity of tornados. In the same way, Hurricane Sandy last year was terrible in its destruction in the populous Northeast, but otherwise not an example of a trend in hurricanes.

The Medved program did a good job dispatching the Sheldon Whitehouse case of political aprophenia. The trouble is, the disease is contagious, as comments from Sen. Barbara Boxer show.

Continue reading "Contagious Apophenia in the Senate" »

Georgia Tech, in concert with AT&T and a company called Udacity, is offering a master's degree online in computer science for only $7,000. If you actually go to Georgia Tech's campus and get your master's, the fare is $40,000.

This is the next wave of revolution in higher education. The halls of ivy have priced themselves out of the reach of the middle class, and even the upper middle class. Giving more "scholarships" is a way for the most-endowed schools to handle sticker shock, but that usually does not meet the needs of people who just don't want to pay so much for what increasingly is irrelevant, ideologically driven schooling.

Continue reading ""Heck of a Wreck" in Higher Ed" »

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey will be in Washington, D.C. tomorrow to meet with President Obama, the main topic being the future of Syria, Turkey's embattled neighbor. In that connection, the President should ask him again about the continuing failure of the Turkish government to allow freedom of worship for Christians in Turkey itself. In particular, the Turks should be asked to allow the ">reopening of the Eastern Orthodox Halki Seminary.

Continue reading "U.S. Should Quiz Turkish P.M. on Churches" »

A stunning provincial election surprise in British Columbia Tuesday returns the more free enterprise Liberal Party to power with a larger majority over the left wing New Democrats (NDP). The NDP was expected to win--it was up eight to nine points in pre-election surveys--because of supposed voter opposition to gas and oil pipelines to connect Alberta's energy fields to ocean shipment points in B.C. The NDP had pledged to stop the pipelines.

The Liberals will exact environmental protections, but they support the pipeline expansions, especially the controversial Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline to ship Alberta tar sands crude oil through Burnaby, B.C. With the oil pipeline and the Enbridge Northern Gateway gas pipeline expansion both likely to get a go-ahead in B.C., Canada's leverage in persuading the Obama Administration to approve the Keystone XL pipeline through the central U.S. probably is increased.

Had the New Democrats, who oppose the B.C. pipelines, won yesterday, the national Canadian government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper would have lost a psychological advantage on the energy issue, as well as a practical alternative to Keystone. Now Mr. Harper can advise the Americans, either allow Keystone to go through or we will send our added energy supplies to China.

The pipeline controversy was expected to hurt the incumbent government of British Columbian Premier Christy Clark. Instead Liberal Party strategists think it helped. British Columbians apparently were satisfied that the gas pipeline and the extension of an oil pipeline would not hurt the environment and would boost the province's economic future. This sentiment was plainly missed by pollsters going into the election.

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1) Reduce the size of government.
2) Reduce tax rates.
3) Clarify criteria necessary for attaining non-profit (tax free) status.
4) Prosecute those who leaked IRS data to political opponents.

Maybe start with 4).

It seemed strange at the time, and it continues to seem strange: the radical Left in Europe (and the U.S.) and the Islamists fundamentalists in Iran were in effective alliance at the time of the Iranian revolution. The ramifications are felt today, for sure.

Nir Boms and Shayan Arya have a useful, if not exhaustive, analysis.

Continue reading "Strange Alliance of Islamists and Left" »

A Saudi Arabian has been detained as he entered the US at Detroit carrying a pressure cooker in his luggage.

The Tsarnaev brothers' weapon of choice, the pressure cooker apparently can be converted to a bomb following directions online, courtesy of al Qaida.

Will we soon have pressure to ban pressure cookers? Well, some Miami-Dade County students have a petition for just that cause. Williams-Sonoma already has taken pressure cookers off their store shelves. Can Crate&Barrel be far behind?

Continue reading "Pressure Cooker Whistle Blows" »

The recent local election successes of the UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) have shaken everybody up, even the Labour Party. Regarding the EU Prime Minister Cameron wants to mend it rather than end it, and President Obama has given him his blessing. Cameron also is proposing a free trade zone with the U.S. and Britain, which has long made sense. But it is hard to see how that works--unless one of two things happens. 1) Britain exits the Eurozone, or 2) part of "fixing" the EU is to abandon much of the regulatory regime and to make freer trade among free market/democratic countries a stronger standard going forward. The "fix", in that case, means an end to the EU as we know it and a new free trade zone that includes Europe and North America.

Continue reading "More Calls for Reshape or End of EU" »

The way to trouble the pro-life advocate is to ask what he or she would do in the case of "rape or incest". That question tripped up at least two U.S. Senate candidates last fall and led to their defeats.

In a similar fashion, pro-choice advocates have a terrible problem with a question about late-term abortions. That difficulty has become especially acute now that the Gosnell trial has revealed the existence of after-birth abortions, an idea that literally was only the stuff of satirical invention a couple of decades ago. But in 1997 "ethicist" Steven Pinker of Harvard more or less defended the practice in an article in the New York Times. That helped break the taboo among some, though hardly all, progressives.

Regarding Gosnell, it is said that the disgusting conditions of his clinic, the insensitive, even cruel treatment of women there and the readiness to "snip" the spinal cords of babies born alive after an abortion attempt shows the need for better facilities under nicer conditions.

Continue reading "A Hard Choice for the Pro-Choice" »