Jay Richards, I am glad to report, is now back at Discovery Institute full-time, having left a few years ago to work at Acton Institute on issues of entrepreneurship and free markets (among other things, he helped produce the films The Call of the Entrepreneur and The Birth of Freedom, and the book, Money, Greed and God), to start a blog for AEI's The American and to edit several manuscripts for Heritage Foundation. It is a fine mix of talents Jay has assembled in his career. A Phd from Princeton, he has expertise in theology, science, economics and culture, all very helpful for the mission of Discovery Institute. (In his earlier Discovery stage, among other things, he co-authored the book and film, The Privileged Planet, with Guillermo Gonzalez.)

Now comes a very useful new book, Indivisible, that Jay edited for Heritage Foundation on the natural linkage of social issues and economic issues. We are hearing a lot lately about how the subjects should be separated, supposedly because social issues damage conservative candidates for office. But that, I would suggest, derives mainly from the success of the left in misrepresenting and then stigmatizing conservative positions on social issues. As Scott Brown showed in Massachusetts, however, conservative candidates can surmount the criticism.

In the battle over health care, similarly, there is no doubt that the opposition by Catholic bishops and other Christian groups to abortion provisions in the Senate bill helped kill the whole thing. The bishops weren't demanding that no one with government provided insurance coverage be allowed to have an abortion, but only that such procedures not be financed by taxpayers. Yet this principled and prudent distinction had the effect of providing tremendous assistance for economic conservatives' objections to the health care bill on myriad other grounds.

Continue reading " Economic Conservatism and Social Conservatism are "Indivisible" " »

Suddenly, it is Paul Ryan season in Washington, D.C. The six-term Wisconsin congressmen is still young, but until now mainly has been a wonks' favorite rather than a media darling--one of the few folks on the Hill who knows big subjects in depth. He is, for example, the House's leading minority spokesman on the budget. That kind of subject usually makes people yawn.

But now, in a matter of days, Congressman Ryan is all over the news, even attracting the attention of the President. George Will is hailing him as a future national leader. Russ Douthat touts him. Ezra Klein, Washington Post wonk-on-the-left, admires his seriousness and originality. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has gone from curious to enthralled.

Continue reading "The Most Interesting Congressman Emerges" »

What has the Columbia Journalism Review learned from the campaign it waged with Chris Mooney (see immediately previous post) to disallow scientific evidence against massive man-caused global warming? What have "media experts" at Harvard and MIT learned from the efforts to disallow the critics from being heard?

Why, at a seminar last week on "Scientists, Skeptics and the Media" they learned that media must be even more ardent in support of the alarmist viewpoint. No one seems to have considered the possibility that the skeptics might have a case deserving of coverage.

Mooney is a sometime Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Philip J. Hilts, professor of "science journalism" and the current head of the Knight program (presumably funded with money from the Knight newspaper chain's charitable arm), covers the seminar for the CJR.

"Like doctors gathered around the operating table in mid-surgery, a group of media experts at Harvard yesterday offered their diagnoses of the ailing body of journalism. The symptom: a surprising decline in public belief that climate change is real or important."

The journalist-doctors go on to offer one idea after another on how to convince the public that its growing skepticism is a mistake. Only a small group in the population are true skeptics, after all. And the way to restore a proper sense of alarm among the others might be to tie climate change to people's personal health concerns....Etc.

A comment on the CJR blog by "JLD" makes the pertinent response:

"I have to say it takes a great deal of chutzpah – or perhaps cluelessness – to examine the drop in public trust in climate science without once mentioning Climategate or the very real scandals that are now plaguing this 'settled science.'

"But being a recent graduate of the Kennedy School I would expect nothing less than a complete whitewash of anything that offends liberal sensibilities. By all means keep 'fighting back' against the 'denialists' – it might feel good, but it won’t convince anyone outside of Harvard Square."

Defenders of the myth of "consensus science", such as Chris Mooney, have attempted to minimize each new revelation of incompetence and bias in climate change pronouncements. But today, the London Telegraph exposes yet another parade of errors in the IPCC report of 2007 upon which so many scare stories have relied. Skeptics of the alarmist view on global warming have been held to punctilious footnoting and have been tormented over "peer-review", which is hard to acquire in such drum-beating advocacy journals as Nature or Science. But, meanwhile the IPCC has used unsubstantiated alarmist statements from graduate student dissertations, the opinions expressed in activist group newsletters and faulty computer models to reach many of its conclusions.

English and Canadian papers are doing a better job of covering this scandal than are their American cousins. Bloggers, as the Spectator"s Matt Ridley observes, have pushed the British press to do its duty. They have been less successful in the United States. That is especially unfortunate in that many billions of dollars of U.S. government research money have been committed to projects that rely on official assumptions of human-induced global warming. That doesn't even touch the money that alarmists would like the government to spend to save the planet--at the expense of the private economy and ordinary taxpayers.

Why aren't these matters under official U.S. investigation? Probably because the media here are still cowed by the public relations activities of the climate change alarmists, skillfully advanced by Fenton Communications and its deep-pocket clients. Another problem is that Congress and other authorities lack the independent professional expertise to do a proper investigation. Regardless, they had better find the people to do the job. The issue isn't going away.

A few years ago Mooney and his associates, with the help of such professional organs as the Columbia Journalism Review, successfully lobbied editorial boards and science writers not to publish the views of skeptics of such "settled science" issues as the ability of neo-Darwinism to explain evolution, the necessity of using embryonic stem cells to conduct medical research and, of course, radical, human-caused climate change and the economic "reforms" required to reverse it. To give the skeptics on such issues space to express their objections in their own words, he told credulous media, was equivalent to listening seriously to flat-earth proponents.

On case after case, Mooney and Co. have been shown to be wrong. Too bad it takes scandals to show how wrong and why. The explanations come in two words: ideology and money.

It is impossible to keep track of the new information showing that what one wag calls the "grantrepreneurs" of science have finally coming under mainstream scrutiny in the global warming scandals. A good summary piece by Margaret Wente is found in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

The cover-ups have been successful in some cases, but not entirely. What is stunning is the failure of the "consensus science" scolds to defend the situation. They are reduced, it seems, to repeating the old mantras that everyone knows, there is "overwhelming evidence," etc. What they do not do is debate

Meanwhile, public belief in the Al Gore scenarios has waned, too, and the whole issue is coming off the public agenda. A Yale/George Mason University survey on the topic of public concern is mostly significant for the trend it shows--which is downward.

Meanwhile, if you are on the East Coast today, buried under the second record-breaking snowstorm in six weeks, you probably are not taking global warming at all seriously. But if you are in British Columbia, where snow is being trucked to the Olympic Games, it is a very present disaster.

That is too bad, in a way, since pollution and energy dependence are still important and valid concerns.

George Gilder's op-ed article, "Why Antagonize China?" appears in tomorrow's Wall Street Journal. There is much to criticize China for, but the Obama Administration seems to have made finding fault with the Chinese a strange pre-occupation. This is not the way to get ahead. As Gilder asks, "How many enemies do we need?" in a world where we are challenged by implacable foes such as al Qaeda, not to mention Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

Technology is an especially crucial arena for careful interaction with China. Notes our colleague Bret Swanson,

"From 2000 to 2009, the number of Internet users in China rose from 23 million to 338 million. http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/cn.htm

China passed 700 million mobile phone users in fall 2009.

China and Taiwan together produce about 650+ million of the global annual total of 1.2 billion mobile phones. Still trying to pin down exact numbers. (China ~550 million; Taiwan ~100 million; Korea probably another 300 million)."

"As China becomes a larger portion of the global Internet community," Swanson continues, "it would be wise to keep them within the fold of global standards and (American private-sector led) governance (ICANN, etc). Pushing them away could lead to unpredictable fragmentation of the universal Net fabric. Not to mention possible disruptions to physical supply chains and knowledge flows in this seamless tech market.

"It is true China has stepped up enforcement of its previously ineffective 'Great Firewall' and blocked Twitter and Facebook on several occasions over the last year. China this winter also restricted new registrations of domain names to registered companies, blocking many individuals from acquiring new domains. But the overwhelming evidence suggests the Internet in China still mostly thrives."

Nir Booms of Cyberdissidents and Shayan Arya, Seattle-based Iranian-American activist, describe the increasing use of kidnapping and hostage taking to intimidate foes of the theocratic regime in Iran. Hostage taking is a barbaric practice to which the Iranians have added modern police state methods.

From Nir Booms' blog site is the article reprinted from The Washington Times.

If there is any cheer in the article it is the description of 21st century ways that have developed to resist the dictators.

"Distressing" is not an adequate word to describe a study by Cambridge University neuroscientist Adrian M. Owen that proves that many people in supposedly vegetative states actually are quite aware of what is happening around them and have opinions and views about it all. There may be thousands of such people in the U.S. alone.

The implications are hard to bear and yet demand action. Can you imagine anything much worse than being completely unable to communicate with others and yet affected by them? Anyone who has suffered an injury that impairs even a small function knows how frustrating that can be. But this is almost like being buried alive. With this difference: the patient is aware of people's conversations and can, at least in his mind, respond. But no one in the presence of such a person--until now--has found a way to "listen" and therefore to converse.

This study adds force to the anti-euthanasia arguments made in cases like that of Terri Schiavo. It also calls in the name of human compassion for greater efforts to engage such conscious minds encased in unresponsive bodies and to give their lives some scope for vigorous interaction. It also calls for greater scientific and technological efforts to break the physical chains binding such people.

A colleague of Dr. Owens sees a number of immediate practical uses of the new way of communicating with conscious, but immobilized persons. “This technique could be used to address important clinical questions. For example, patients who are aware, but cannot move or speak, could be asked if they are feeling any pain, allowing doctors to decide when painkillers should be administered."

But another urgent need is to find ways to communicate more directly than is possible now. In their study, the Cambridge team used MRI technology, which is expensive and obviously hard to arrange on any regular basis.

Remember the folks who told you that Darwin's theory is really "fact" and that only cranks disagree? And the folks who promised that dire, man made global warming had been demonstrated objectively and beyond question--enough to justify massive economic dislocations? Well, it increasingly seems that the uniquely promising field of embryonic stem cell research offers another case of warped and hyped "consensus science".

A hundred years ago consensus science proclaimed the merits--and advanced the the political program--of eugenics.

In the past decade, the moral objections to embryonic stem cell research almost seemed to make the project more, not less, appealing to certain science bodies, journals and bureaucrats. In California, the state sold the public on a gauzy multi-billion dollar vision of miracle cures that supposedly were just around the corner. The warning signs about the California Prop. 71 embryonic stem cell program were virtually ignored by the mainstream media. Our Discovery senior fellow and co-director of Human Rights and Bioethics, Wesley J. Smith, was unusual if not unique in his coverage of the issue. Now he and other skeptics are vindicated. California is broke and plainly has wasted billions on a quixotic errand for political correctness. The real progress with stem cells comes, happily, in less controversial--and less well funded areas.

In every case of dogmatic certainty in science's recent past, the blinders on the science establishment (including especially federal funders) are political and ideological. In real science, as I keep saying, you have free and accurately reported studies and reports. In politicized science, ideology determines what and who gets funded, and even how results are covered.

Meantime, the space program is being gutted. Space exploration is not p.c. any more.

When Clarence Thomas was considered for confirmation as a Justice of the Supreme Court, the late-Senator Edward Kennedy referred to him as an "extremist" because of his support for "natural law." Thomas, of course, won the war, since he subsequently was confirmed by the Senate, but Kennedy scored points with the press. At the time, Thomas was hardly in a position to debate with him on the subject.

Of course, the framers of the U.S. Constitution were natural law men themselves. And it was Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, who penned the immortal line that "men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Of course, we all know what an "extremist" Jefferson was.

Now we have a broad, beautiful book, The Line Through the Heart, by J. Budziszewski that examines "Natural Law as Fact, Theory and Sign of Contradiction." Budziszewski is a professor of philosophy and government at the University of Texas, a contributor to First Things and a senior fellow of Discovery Institute.

His book is reviewed by John Grondelski in the January 17 issue of the National Catholic Register. (Unfortunately, one must be a subscriber to read it online.)

Writes Grondelski, "Budziszewski adresses personhood and the law, capital punishment, constitutional jurisprudence and the religious 'toleration' as a slogan to push religion out of public life."

There are several threads that link the works of most Discovery fellows and one of them surely is the topic of what it means to be human. Another is the topic of the ideals that made Western civilization exceptional. Both are joined, effectively, in The Line Through the Heart.