Via Theo.

Before killing himself, the deranged 25-year-old son of an Algerian immigrant shot to death 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989 as a gesture of personal revenge upon Feminism, which he blamed for ruining his life.

Canadian authorities might have deported all anti-feminist Muslims likely to produce defective offspring, but instead they blamed guns, passing Bill C-68 in 1995, which created a Canadian Firearms Registry.

Registering every firearm in Canada was marketed as a measure that would prevent crime, but in reality criminals don’t register guns and the ownership and specific identity of the weapon used in crimes is very rarely a meaningful issue.

Legislation creating the Firearm Registry was passed on the basis of estimates that promised that licensing fees would take care of nearly all its costs.

In reality, the gun registry cost $2.7 billion, 1350x the original estimate.

Why Projects Fail:

It was originally expected that the project needed only $2 million of investments while registration fees would cover the rest. In 1995, the Department of Justice reported to Parliament that the system would cost $119 million to implement, and that the income generated from licensing fees would be $117 million. This gave a net cost of $2 million.

At the time of the 2002 audit, the revised estimates from the Department of Justice revealed that the cost of the program would be more than $1 billion by 2004/05 and that the income from license fees in the same period would be $140 million. The annual operating costs of the program are reported to be $15 – $80 million.

Last Wednesday, the Canadian Parliament voted to end the Registry of long arms. $2.7 billion later, it was concluded that the Registry had never resulted in the solution of a single murder.

K.C. Johnson, at Minding the Campus, devastatingly criticized the New York Times story.

When Times readers learned from Richard Perez-Pena that “a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault,” how many of them realized that Yale was actually using an “expansive definition” of this otherwise commonly-understood term? How many readers further realized that Yale had designed the procedure about which Perez-Pena wrote so as to give Witt’s accuser “control over the process,” including limited or no investigation? And how many readers could have dreamed that the procedures guiding the allegation against Witt have produced the extraordinary claim that sexual assault is far, far more common on this Ivy League campus than in the fourth most dangerous city in the country? And since the Times went to print without ever speaking to Witt or (it seems) anyone sympathetic to him in the Athletic Department, didn’t the paper at the very least have an obligation to provide the context that would explain the highly unusual procedures and definitions that Yale features?

Patrick Witt’s response to the Times’ story.
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Kathleen Parker, in the Washington Post, put the New York Times’s reporting standards on trial.

A  New York Times story on Friday… essentially indicted and convicted a 22-year-old star football player on an alleged sexual assault charge by an anonymous accuser. ...

[W]ith throat-clearing authority, the story begins with the young man’s name — Patrick J. Witt, Yale University’s former quarterback — and his announcement last fall that he was withdrawing his Rhodes scholarship application so that he could play against Harvard. The game was scheduled the same day as the scholarship interview.

Next we are told that he actually had withdrawn his application for the scholarship after the Rhodes Trust had learned “through unofficial channels that a fellow student had accused Witt of sexual assault.” And there goes the gavel. Case closed.

But in fact, no one seems to know much of anything, and no one in an official capacity is talking. The only people advancing this devastating and sordid tale are “a half-dozen [anonymous] people with knowledge of all or part of the story.” All or part? Which part? As in, “Heard any good gossip lately?”

A statement Friday afternoon on Witt’s behalf denied any connection between his withdrawal from the Rhodes application process and the alleged assault. Moreover, when Witt requested a formal inquiry into the allegations, he says, the university declined. “No formal complaint was filed, no written statement was taken from anyone involved, and his request . . . for a formal inquiry was denied because, he was told, there was nothing to defend against,” according to the statement.

The Times apparently didn’t know these facts, but shouldn’t it have known them before publishing the story? It’s not until the 11th paragraph that readers even learn about the half-dozen anonymous sources. Not until the 14th paragraph does the Times tell us that “many aspects of the situation remain unknown, including some details of the allegation against Witt; how he responded; how it was resolved; and whether Yale officials who handle Rhodes applications — including Richard C. Levin, the university’s president, who signed Witt’s endorsement letter — knew of the complaint.”

Translation: We don’t know anything, but we’re smearing this guy anyway. ...

By anyone’s understanding of fairness, Witt has been unjustly condemned by nameless accusers and a complicit press.

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Reuters pointed out that the Times’ own commenters overwhelmingly condemned the newspaper’s decision to print that story.

The Times has already published a follow-up story that noted “diverging stories,” but only after comments and writers began questioning the Times’ editors and the paper’s editorial process.

The simplest summation of that criticism came from a commenter named ‘mystery shopper’ who posted that running the story was “a horrible editorial decision. Ethics classes in schools of journalism around the country will use this story as an example of an ill-advised story.”

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Instapundit readers also reacted:

Reader John Lucas writes: “A red light violator facing a $50 fine gets more due process than a student at Yale (or most other universities) now.”

Reader Dave Ivers writes: “I’ve wondered what would happen if every male athlete at Yale looked around a classroom and noticed a young woman looking at them and than filed an ‘informal’ complaint. Under the Yale rules that ‘looking’ at well-built athletes could be a sexual crime. Since the athletes don’t know for sure, shouldn’t they file to protect themselves and then get victim status?”

The original story seemed straight out of Owen Johnson or Burt L. Standish’s school stories: Yale’s record-breaking quarterback forced to choose between the interview that could win him a Rhodes Scholarship and playing for Yale against Harvard in The Game, turns his back on dreams of Oxford and dons his uniform to take the field for dear old Yale.

The denouement in which Harvard proceeded to crush the Bulldogs 45-7 seemed a sufficiently inglorious return to ordinary reality, but the Kindly Ones were not finished with Patrick Witt and Yale.

The New York Slimes, last week, published a story based on information from anonymous sources (apparently from within the administration of Yale itself), flagrantly violating that institution’s confidentiality policies, alleging that Witt’s Rhodes application had been compromised by an “informal” sexual assault charge made against Witt in September by another student. The article went on to detail a couple of minor brushes with the law on the Yale senior’s record, hinting darkly at a pattern of criminality on the part of the Yale senior.

The New York Times’ decision to destroy a college senior’s personal reputation by elevating an anonymous allegation, unsupported by any evidence and purveyed by a secondary layer of anonymous sources, to national news provoked both astonishment from ESPN and well-deserved indignation from the Wall Street Journal.

What the Times’ smear article really represents is a shocking case of toxic spillover from the radical left-wing head of the Obama Administration’s Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Russlyn Ali’s personal campaign to reinvigorate Title IX Anti-Discrimination enforcement on American campuses.

Her approach amounted to nothing less than arm-twisting university administrations to participate in a federally-required witch hunt against “sexual harassment,” with sexual harassment defined in the broadest possible terms to include “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct” in any fashion connected with sex which is “unwelcome” to someone or anyone, and asserting that harassing conduct in general may create “a hostile environment” anytime the conduct is deemed “sufficiently serious” as to interfere with some student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program.

Russlyn Ali’s notorious “Dear Colleague” letter of 4 April 2011 essentially mandates new grievance procedures, processes, and tribunals, specifically reduces standards of proof, and threatens “appropriate remedies” for noncompliance including both withdrawal of all forms of federal funding and assistance and lawsuits by the Justice Department.

The Obama Administration’s Education Department mandates on-campus inquisitions into a supposititious pattern of nation-wide victimization of female students by sexual harassment and assault. Patrick Witt, a white male member of Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, ideally fits the favored profile stereotype of male harassers and assaulters. These days, a politically incorrect smart remark or an unwelcome date request can be construed as a punishable offense. Who knows who accused Witt of exactly what or why? We can, I think, tell that the charge did not rise to what we usually think of as a crime since no police complaint was made. He hasn’t been arrested or charged with any crime. The assault the Times reported was clearly one of the notional assaults prosecutable only in the kind of jurisdictions, like our university campuses, successfully annexed by the radical left, where justice consists of whatever Russlyn Ali says it is.

Mike McDaniel:

On December 8, 2011, appearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder baldly asserted that he had no idea who authorized the deadly Fast and Furious debacle and added that he would be “surprised” if any evidence about it could ever be found.

Put aside, for the moment, Holder’s lack of transparency which has become standard operating procedure for the most transparent administration in history, and consider that Mr. Holder is correct for two primary and likely reasons: he knows who is responsible for every facet of Fast and Furious and has no intention of ever revealing that information, and he has the most important, powerful ace any corrupt bureaucrat or politician could possibly have up his sleeve, but more on this later.

According to Fox News, on January 19, Patrick J. Cunningham, chief of the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division for Arizona, through his attorneys, has notified Rep. Darrell Issa’s Committee that he will not testify before the committee as requested and that if subpoenaed, will take the Fifth and refuse to testify to avoid incriminating himself.

It’s a common journalistic meme: young and pretty urban female fashionista, for one reason or another, winds up visiting the real America, picks up a gun, tries firing at a target, discovers that shooting a gun is really fun, and then puzzles over the meaning and moral ramifications of it all.

Yet, these are nearly always interesting to read, especially since the gun-owning reader knows better than Amanda Fortini does that she has begun the process of conversion from deluded ignorance to realism.

My first thought is, I can’t believe how loud that was. I’m wearing earplugs, but you don’t just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you’ve never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin’s reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don’t. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it’s that what I’ve just done initially frightened me, so there’s a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.

Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can’t indulge my free-floating worries. I can’t have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It’s almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she’s brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.

As I shoot, I again experience the strange, paradoxical sense of an act that’s familiar and unfamiliar at once. I’ve seen Clint do this; I’ve seen Arnold do this; I’ve seen Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton do it. Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.

Mark Steyn titled his excellent frustrated rant “Debate Night in the Titanic Ballroom.”

This country is broke, and the unprecedented scale of its brokeness is an existential threat. Yet, with the exception of Newt’s occasional flashes of contempt for the questioners, everyone else plays along with this absurd game. It’s not merely that the GOP is letting the left frame the contest but that a party willing to dignify this pitiful charade is sending a broader message about the likelihood of its mustering the determination to stand up to a Democrat-media establishment once in office and effect meaningful course correction.

I see Terence Jeffrey and Andy McCarthy are having a disagreement about the correct response to a question on gay adoption. The correct response is to take an unconstitutional federally-funded supersized condom, roll it over George Stephanopoulos’ head, and say, “That’s odd. I can no longer hear a word you’re saying. So let me throw in my two bits on impending multi-trillion-dollar ruin…”

Newt Gingrich remains the only GOP candidate rebellious enough occasionally to resist representatives of the mainstream media calling all the shots, defining all the issues, and orchestrating Republican debates to serve their own agenda, so I still prefer Gingrich of the available choices.

(excerpt)

In Hoc Anno Domini
December 24, 2005

When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order, for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too. There was oppression—for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave largess to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners to quiet those whom the Emperor proscribed. What was a man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, of a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying, Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s….

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians, the words he would have us remember afterward in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

This editorial was written in 1949 by the late Vermont Royster and has been published annually since.

Farhad Manjoo, Cornell ‘00, is Slate’s Technology Columnist, so his take on toy guns, one would expect, ought to be well-informed, sophisticated, appreciative, and realistic.

A technology columnist really ought to be the sort of person who knows all about real guns. Firearms are an extremely important and interesting, downright fundamental, form of technology, after all.

But Farhad Manjoo’s holiday article in Stale this year is rather different from what one might have expected.

Nerf guns (which propel sponge rubber tipped plastic darts) frighten Manjoo and send him into a tizzy of anxiety. He describes the Nerf Barricade as “one of the most powerful toy weapons ever built, capable of sending a 3-inch foam dart hurtling 30 feet through the air, and then doing it again and again every half second.”

How does that compare, Mr. Technology Columnist, to the old Daisy Model 25 pump action BB-gun, my generation’s idea of a toy gun, which fired a copper-plated .177” diameter BB at a velocity ranging from 375-450 fps (fast enough to break glass) from a tubular magazine as rapidly as you could pump the slide?

Shooting one’s friends in the face was regarded as verboten (you might put out an eye), but BB gun wars did regularly occur. The impact of a BB on human flesh stung smartly, even through clothing, and characteristically left a mark. It was a common form of deterrence to shoot oneself in the hand without flinching and then display the bruise. One’s interlocutor was thereby given to understand that you were not afraid of being shot with a BB gun, and was significantly less inclined to initiate hostilities.

Older generations of American boys additionally commonly played with home-made slingshots, a leather pad attached to two lengths of rubber strips cut from a discarded inner tube then affixed to a Y-forked branch. A good slingshot could propel much larger projectiles like marbles, ball bearings, or suitable rocks with good accuracy at very effectively damaging velocities.

We were bloodthirsty hunters in my boyhood, and we used to, I regret to say, kill the occasional incautious songbird with those BB guns. More becomingly, we also sometimes successfully nailed a rat found skulking in the open around the dump with our slingshots. (BBs just bounced off rats.) Try taking any variety of game with a Nerf gun.

But, it isn’t really the ballistic capabilities of the Nerf gun arsenal that sent Mr. Manjoo into a tailspin. It is, of course, the ethical considerations.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been playing with some of the new Nerf guns, and I’ve tied myself in knots thinking about whether ultrarealistic weapons are just harmless fun or whether they reveal something terribly wrong with modern American boyhood.

One feels bound to question the expertise and judgment of the technology expert who would describe the above Nerf Barricade as “ultrarealistic.” So few real firearms are made of yellow plastic, and when Mr. Manjoo expresses awed respect for a toy gun’s ability to propel a harmless foam rubber dart 30’, he seems to have lost completely any sense of proportion and relative capability between the real weapon and the toy.

Someone who finds a harmless toy “scary” is, by my standards, an incredible wimp. And the kind of people who have all these hyper-sensitivities and moral issues over boys playing at war are prigs and decadents. Our blue state pseudo-intelligentsia resides in a haute bourgeois dreamworld, perfectly safe and far removed from the ugly realities of human conflict and criminal predation, protected by rough men they neither know nor respect, in homogeneous enclaves in which they have created their own Eloi-style culture in which gross moral self-indulgence parallels their conspicuous material well being.

James Delingpole referred recently to the immense difficulty sane people face in trying to resist an unstoppable bandwagon of do-gooders and reformers, brainwashed kids, powerful NGOs, sanctimonious corporations, and politicians all pushing the party-line of Enviromentalist stupidity. At American Thinker, Peter Wilson admires the colossal scale of resources the other side has at its disposal, and notes just how deeply entrenched the green priesthood is at one of our most prestigious universities.

Australian science writer Jo Nova estimates that since 1989 the U.S. government has spent $79 billion on global warming-friendly climate research. Nova notes that the “figure does not include money from other western governments, private industry, [or universities] and is not adjusted for inflation,” and yet even this partial sum is 3,500 times the $23 million spent by Exxon in the same period. Global warming alarmists however continue to accuse skeptics of being duped by disinformation from well-funded carbon polluters, while they seem incapable of recognizing the far greater funding that supports their own efforts.

Case in point: I attended a “Harvard Thinks Green” program last week, which promised “6 all-star environmental faculty, 6 big green ideas.” (According to the flyer, “Green is the new crimson.”) The most polemical of the six speakers was medical doctor Eric Chivian, a founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the nuclear freeze group that won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. One of Chivian’s big green ideas: “legal restrictions on oil consumption.” Dr. Chivian lashed out at the evil Koch brothers, enunciating their middle initials as further evidence of their perfidy: “Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch,” who together with “vested interests” like Exxon-Mobil, have spent “tens of millions of dollars” on a “disinformation campaign,” aided by the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Vested interests? Take a look in the mirror, Dr. Chivian. His speech came from the podium in Saunders Theatre, a sumptuous wood-paneled auditorium in H.H. Richardson’s Memorial Hall, a clubhouse for the 1% at Harvard University. Dr. Chivian earns his generous salary as Founder/Director of the Harvard Medical School’s Center for Health and the Global Environment, which is “designated an official ‘Collaborating Center’ of the United Nations Environment Programme.” The Center’s Corporate Council includes 3M, Baxter (pharmaceuticals & medical devices), Johnson & Johnson, and Siemens. These are some deep pockets and vested interests.

Looking further: The sponsor of the evening was the Harvard Office for Sustainability, which is staffed by fifteen full-time employees, holding graduate degrees in things like Public Administration and the Sociology of Religion/Gender Studies. They hold titles like: Manager, Sustainability Communications; Manager, Sustainability Engagement; Coordinator, Business and Finance Sustainability Engagement Program; or Coordinator, FAS Green Resource Efficiency Program.

A separate department called Green Building Services employs seven full-time employees and manages student volunteer teams at Harvard College, the Business School and the Law School.

Harvard students can apply for the following 10-hour-a-week internships: Sustainability Innovation Challenge Engagement Assistant, OFS Events and Sustainability Engagement Intern, Housing and Real Estate Design Internship, Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program Research Assistant, Green Skillet Team Leader, Green Skillet Assessor, Green Office Liaison and the Green Ribbon Commission Internship.

Over at the Graduate School of Design there’s the Sustainable Design program G(SD)2. And Harvard Business School has a Green Living Program, “a peer-to-peer education program” that…well, you get the idea.

These various activities are supported by the Harvard University Task Force on Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions, commissioned by President Drew Faust, which is committed to reduce the University’s GHGs through 2016. In other words, these people will not be losing their jobs any time soon, no matter what happens at COP-18.

Reading this, I was reflecting that, if Jonathan Edwards and the other “New Light” enthusiasts of the mid-18th century Great Awakening had only taken care to arrange for the construction of exceptionally architecturally distinguished buildings to serve as centers for the study the personal experience of religious revelation and the penning of passionate sermons, and taken care to establish well-paid corps of special managers, communicators, coordinators, deans and interns, all devoted to intensifying man’s consciousness of his sinfulness, unworthiness, and dependence of Divine restraint, why, the emotionalist version of Congregationalism and Sunday hell-fire sermons about sinners in the hands of an angry God might never have gone out of fashion at Harvard and Yale at all.

British skeptic James Delingpole discusses why Warmism is so difficult to stop, despite the Climategate scandal.

7:46 video

The thing about both the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany was that the enemy was plain in view. We knew these guys were bad, they had black uniforms, they had swastikas, they had tanks – they were obviously the bad guys, they wanted to destroy us. What makes the modern environmental movement so dangerous is that it masks its intentions behind this cloak of cuddly, touchy feely, polar bear-hugging, Nobel Prize-winning righteousness. ...

What could be nicer than trying to save those cuddly little polar bears from melting due to our wanton greed and selfishness? It gels with a sense that I think grew in the affluent ‘90s, when people began asking themselves questions like, Shouldn’t there be limits to growth? You know, isn’t there more to life than consumption?

So, you have this alliance of ordinary people, of kids who’ve been brainwashed at school, of the big corporations which wanted to get in on the act by greenwashing their image, of powerful NGOs like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, of politicians wanting to be seen to take action in matters of public concerned. So what you have is this unstoppable bandwagon, all pushing this agenda based on the flimsiest of junk science.

David Ross takes the occasion of the documentary “Page One: Inside the New York Times” (2011) to deliver a devastating critique of “the newspaper of record”’s honesty, accuracy, prose style, quality of contributors, and exact place in the chain of biological phyla.

[T]he mainstream media, and the Times in particular, has done everything conceivable to hasten its own demise. The postmodern Times is a cavalcade of inaccuracy, omission, myopia, flagrant political bias, outrageously lousy writing, latent snobbery, and superficial urban sophistication. All the shallowness of the modern elite university has come home to roost at the Times. The worst offenders are surely the editorial sections (prose sinkhole) and the culture sections (lapdog of everything transgressive), but I reserve special ire for fellow Yalie Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer-winning book reviewer who’s done much to instantiate a self-important middle-browism as the default mode of the literary culture. The novelist Jonathan Franzen, for one, calls her “the “stupidest person in New York” and an “international embarrassment.” He continues, “Everyone in Europe says to me, “How can The New York Times let a person who is so patently tone deaf, who is so screechy rhetorically, so clearly unequipped to appreciate interesting books or even to enjoy them — how can that person be the lead reviewer?’”

Ross draws even more blood, as he continues:

Gail Collins, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman, Bob Herbert (recently departed), Nicholas Kristof, and Paul Krugman are the Bad News Bears of prose. Metal garbage cans tumbling down tenement stairwells are about as mellifluous. The newspaper industry has forgotten something it once knew: good journalism is a literary exercise.

Read the whole thing (and don’t overlook the hilarious takedown of the ineffable Thomas Friedman he cites by Matt Taibbi).

It is always tempting to fall into the mode of laudator temporis acti, but this is the same New York Temporis that published Walter Duranty’s denials of the existence of the Ukraine famine in the 1930s; the same newspaper which so thoroughly functioned as Fidel Castro’s publicist that wags responded to a Time’s employment advertising promotion of the 1960s by inserting pictures of Castro in the then-ubiquitous “I Got My Job Through the New York Times” posters; the same paper whose Sunday Magazine commemorated the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives the week of the final US withdrawal by publishing a picture of a contented North Vietnamese soldier, relaxing in a lawn chair (Kalashnikov across his lap, titled “The Blessed Peace;” and the same paper, which when news of the massacres of millions in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge broke in the early 1980s, studiously ignored the story.

The Times has always been a lying, propagandistic organ of leftism, and its cultural side has always been an intellectually dubious olla podrida of slavish trend worship, middlebrow establishmentarian cant, and cynical log-rolling. What Michiko Kakutani is to today, Bosley Crowther used to be a generation ago.

I think David Ross is right: the Times has gone downhill in factual accuracy, editing, and prose, but in those respects I think the Times is simply mirroring the larger culture and reflecting a collapse of standards of education in secondary schools and prestige universities.

What is different, though, today, I think, is the reckless and hysterical level of political partisanship. The Times used to be partisan, but it put the knife into its adversaries with discretion and a grave and carefully-maintained gentility. In those days, the Times and the liberal elite for whom it speaks, were unquestionably and unchallengeably on top and in American society’s driver’s seat. We live today in a post-Reagan revolutionary era, in which the status, authority, and even the economic position of the Times is seriously in doubt, so I suppose the Times’ increasingly thuggish behavior must be seen as a form of lashing out in frustration from the Fuerherbunker as it becomes increasingly evident that they are not winning in the end.

Newt Gingrich ought to start promising to eliminate the TSA.

News4Jax.com

Walter Russell Mead catches the New York Times moaning and groaning about the untidiness and imperfection, the awful messiness of productivity, wealth production, and new sources of prosperity.

The New York Times editorial page is doing its level best to kill any chance of American recovery and prosperity by crusading against anything anywhere that might help our energy woes, but sometimes its news pages inadvertently remind us that prosperity and energy development are closely connected.

This story on the “woes” of the midwestern oil boom shows how towns are throwing up housing for an influx of workers drawn by the breakneck development of new energy resources. In places the story exemplifies the whiny perfectionism so characteristic of millennial liberalism: everything has its down side and if we look hard enough we are sure to find it. (A Times story on Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana would not be complete without a reference to the economic plight of unemployed winemakers.) So a part of the country that hasn’t seen opportunity in decades is suddenly bursting with growth and new jobs, and the Times frets that conditions in the temporary housing are poor. Mourns the Times:

But now, even as the housing shortage worsens, towns like this one are denying new applications for the camps. In many places they have come to embody the danger of growing too big too fast, cluttering formerly idyllic vistas, straining utilities, overburdening emergency services and aggravating relatively novel problems like traffic jams, long lines and higher crime.

Via Meadia advice: get over it. This is what economic growth looks like. It is sudden, disruptive, often inconvenient. It messes with the status quo. New stuff gets built and not all of it looks like the Cloisters. All kinds of rough and hungry men flock to it; they sometimes misbehave. They spit on the ground, say unpleasant things about women, and generally fail to meet the behavioral standards of the Upper West Side.

Decline is so much more decorous.

Newt Gingrich has taken the lead in PPP’s national polling. He’s at 28% to 25% for Herman Cain and 18% for Mitt Romney. The rest of the Republican field is increasingly looking like a bunch of also rans: Rick Perry is at 6%, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul at 5%, Jon Huntsman at 3%, and Gary Johnson and Rick Santorum each at 1%.

Compared to a month ago Gingrich is up 13 points, while Cain has dropped by 5 points and Romney has gone down by 4.

A new national survey of Republicans indicates that it’s basically all tied up between Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, with Gingrich on the rise and businessman Herman Cain falling due to the sexual harassment allegations he’s been facing the past two weeks.

According to a CNN/ORC International Poll released Monday, 24% of Republicans and independents who lean towards the GOP say Romney is their most likely choice for their party’s presidential nominee with Gingrich at 22%. Romney’s two-point advantage is well within the survey’s sampling error.

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It must have been NYM’s recent endorsement.

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I reluctantly watched some of last night’s GOP debate.

How did the Republican Party get tricked into adopting a television entertainment-based pre-primaries system in which an astonishing superfluity of candidates, many with no realistic chance of winning the nomination, are invited to respond to questions selected by intensely partisan representatives of the liberal mainstream media, obviously chosen with the intention of inflicting the most damage to Republican candidates, individually and in general? Who is running the Republican Party that goes around agreeing to have our party’s debates hosted by MSNBC and CNN? Let’s fire that guy fast.

It’s obvious to lots of Republicans that this endless series of “Welcome to the Thunderdome” debates in which gleeful liberal commentators invite GOP candidates to enter the arena and beat up on one another is not the best thing in the world for us.

Last night, we saw again how these debates are conducted in an atmosphere of intimidation with the media’s version of GOP orthodoxy used as a weapon to bully candidates into knuckling under instead of arguing their own positions with anyone daring to speak independently (as Rick Perry did in an earlier debate) being Gotcha’d, awarded failing performance grades and described as having made a gaffe.

Republicans have been successfully mau-maued by liberals, and by our own dumbass law-and-order petite bourgeois wing, into making illegal immigration, really insane Anti-Hispanic immigration nativism, a bedrock, party identifying issue. Rick Perry, who excelled originally in having a more intelligent and honest perspective, was seriously damaged and finally bullied into mouthing typical politician’s platitudes on the same issue.

Perry attacking Romney for “hiring illegal aliens.” (Romney used a lawn service, instead of mowing his own lawn. His lawn service—like most lawn services throughout the country—employed low-skilled Hispanic workers, some of whom were not legal immigrants. The horror! You can, I think, divide Republicans on immigration politics between those accustomed to have enough money to employ a lawn service and those who mow their own lawns.) This was a depressing low point in the debate, particularly since it was combined with an unseemly competition to display manliness by trying to talk over one another. Romney actually kind of won by invoking civility.

Romney, I thought, was definitely the candidate one would prefer to hire to play the role of president in a movie. Herman Cain continues to surprise. He is far more articulate and capable of holding up his end of a policy debate than many professional pols. He also tends to be the best dressed guy on stage. His double-breasted blaser and bright yellow tie was a refreshing change from the classic candidate’s dark suit and red (maybe blue) power tie.

Ron Paul openly indulged in class warfare politics of envy, manifesting once again the appallingly common perfect congruence of what calls itself “libertarianism” and leftism. Why is this guy even there?

Santorum was surprisingly good, and he seems to be receiving too little attention and appreciation. He ringingly defended traditional American culture and values, and he came up with a clever argument (“I won running as an arch conservative in a swing state. If you can win in Pennsylvania, you can definitely beat Barack Obama.”) as to why he would be a superior candidate.

Bachmann looked and sounded good, but her hypermoralism didn’t really fit in, and I did not hear her very much.

Gingrich is definitely the wittiest and best debater of all the candidates. Unfortunately, like Bachmann, his presence and participation was really just that of an afterthought. If all these absurd debates really were deciding something, Gingrich ought to be winning.

Perry is significantly less smooth and practiced, less comfortable under the microscope, and less glib. He does not seem to know how to move fluidly off his prepared game plan, and he seems a bit abashed about his regional accent. Herman Cain has fun using ethnic dialect and accent when he wants to. Perry clearly feels at a bit embarrassed at having a heavy Texas drawl and is trying to minimize it.

Republicans need to start encouraging unserious candidates to quit wasting everybody’s time. Get Ron Paul, Huntsman, Bachmann, and Gingrich out of there as soon as possible.

Republicans ought to hold debates in friendly venues with friendly or completely neutral moderators.

Watching last night’s debate, I suppose I thought Romney and Herman Cain both demonstrated why they are doing well, Perry demonstrated what his problem has been, and beyond that, I thought I was not much the wiser. I am not persuaded that we ought to be nominating Mitt Romney. I see no point in the presence or participation of a lot of those candidates. I am not sure that these numerous debates may not be doing more harm than good.

Iowahawk imagines the Strangelove-esque phone call from the current occupant of the White House to Mexico, to explain that a little something has gone wrong with a BATF gun control operation.

Juan? Hola, amigo! Como esta?

Fine, fine. And how are Lupe and the kids?

College already? Boy, how time flies. Has she picked a major?

Splendid. And how is Juan Jr.? He’s what now, 13, 14? The last time I saw him he was only…

Oh.

Oh.

My goodness. Boy, that’s… that’s just terrible. My deepest sympathies to you and Lupe on your loss. I’ll have my secretary arrange for a memorial bouquet. I know he was a fine boy, and…

Now, Juan, let’s not jump to conclusions here. We both know there are lots of machine gun murders in Mexico, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re all…

Yes, Juan, I got your messages. As a matter of fact that’s why I’m calling this afternoon. I’ve had my people look into this thing and…

Mmhmm.

Mmmhmm.

Now… now Juan… let’s just calm down here a minute. Just, okay.. okay… let me please explain, okay? See, the funny thing is, it turns out, a couple years back there was, well, this stimulus program money, and then there were these brainstorming sessions, where, well, there were some ideas what to do with it. So, anyhoo, one of the ideas that happened was, ‘hey, what if there were, say, 2000 machine guns that got sent to Mexican drug lords?’ and so forth.

Well no, of course we couldn’t tell you. It would have ruined the surprise.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The Washington Post set some new sort of record for opportunistic associative campaign smear reporting, by proceeding to headline a story informing its readers at length that Rick Perry hunted deer and entertained guests at hunting camps belonging to family and friends located in rural spot, known locally decades ago as “N-word-head.”

Wikipedia identifies the origin of such toponyms and mentions their date of extinction on official US maps.

In several English-speaking countries, Niggerhead or nigger head is a former name for several things thought to resemble a black person (“nigger”)’s head.

The term was once widely used for all sorts of things, including products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often for geographic features such as hills and rocks.[citation needed] In the U.S., more than hundred “Niggerheads” and other place names now considered racially offensive were changed in 1962 by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

Nor did “N-word-head” survive as the name of the area in which the Perry and Reed families’ hunting camps were sited. At some unknown point in the past, again decades ago, someone unknown removed and painted over the sign once identifying a rural Texas location by that name.

The Post obviously had no reason to believe that either Rick Perry, or any member of his family, had named the area “N-word-head.” The Post had no reason to believe that Rick Perry, or any member of his family, had erected a sign consisting of a rock with the “N-word-head” name painted on it. The Post had no reason to attribute any kind of meaningful responsibility for the existence or use in the distant past of that toponymic expression to Rick Perry at all. But associating a conservative Republican presidential candidate with the N-word, even so tangentially, is a way of flinging a big handful of mud at him, and who knows? Some of it might get into some voters’ heads and actually stick.

As an example of political opposition politics, or of journalism, this kind of thing is about as unethical, low, underhanded, cowardly, and despicable as you can try to get away with. I notice that the reptiles and invertebrates that wrote this contemptible story did not even sign their names to it, and I’m not surprised.
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Herman Cain dramatically diminished my liking and respect for his candidacy yesterday by jumping right in and trying to make hay by using this bilge. Screw him.

Cincinnati.com:

House Speaker John Boehner made it clear in a speech to small business owners at the University of Cincinnati Monday that he is not in sync with the president’s plan to raise the tax rates of the wealthiest Americans.

“Giving the federal government more money would be like giving a cocaine addict more cocaine,’’ the West Chester Republican told about 100 members of the Goering Center for Family and Private Business at UC’s Alumni Center.

Obama knew perfectly well that the Republican-controlled House would never go along with an any-prospects-of-recovery-killing plan to raise taxes on the only sector of society capable of new investment and new job creation.

What Obama was doing was affirming his commitment to left-wing orthodoxy by embracing class warfare as an attempt to appeal to voters’ worst impulses.
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Hugh Hewitt named the game:

The president unleashes his inner Alinksy this morning with the release of his proposal for massive tax hikes, mostly on high income earners, accounting tricks and childish rhetoric. It is clear he has decided to run hard left in 2012, with all the tiresome cliches that involves.

The plan is a sham of course, an election year set-up just like the absurd demand in the Joint Session of Congress for Stimulus 2.0. This new, new plan isn’t dead upon arrival; it was dead before sending. And everyone knows it. Politico’s Mike Allen details the massive spin put on the highly partisan plan last night by the president’s tap-dancing and desperate team, but no one is fooled. Everything the president ever said about “working across the aisle” is trashed. The Chicago way is in the saddle. It’s the only way he and his advisors know.

The very good news is that the country knows, even if the MSM doesn’t.

From CBS News: “(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job.”

Oh, come on, CBS, you can do better:

(CBS/AP) WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders say they are rejecting President Barack Obama’s jobs proposals to rebuild schools and blighted neighborhoods, and help keep state and local employees on the job, and cure cancer and help the lame walk again, and find good homes for puppy dogs and kitty cats, and take a sunrise and sprinkle it with dew and cover it with chocolate and a miracle or two, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, and grow apple trees and honey bees and snow white turtledoves, and slow the rise of the oceans, and begin to heal our planet.

Anything I left out?

Ouch! When a democrat president’s talking points get laughed at by the liberal journalistic establishment, that president is in very big trouble.

Knife Safety: MyFoxBOSTON.com

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Princeton Professor Russell H. Nieli offers a serious critique of the establishment of AGW as orthodoxy on American university campuses and in the MSM. His list of issues is quite good, and so is his conclusion.

MIT’s Richard Lindzen, a long-time skeptic of the Gore-Hansen Model of global warming, has explained how the serious challenge to American scientific and military dominance posed by the Soviet launching of the Sputnik satellite in the 1950s sent a clear message to the American scientific community that has stuck with it ever since. After Sputnik, says Lindzen, it became clear that the way to gain status, prestige, and, above all, government funding for one’s scientific research, was through the medium of public fear and crisis creation. A similar dynamic was at work earlier, he says, in the creation of the Manhattan Project, which was originally established as a counterweight to what was believed to be an advanced Nazi atom bomb project. The threats and crises for which the government will shell out big money may be entirely real, of course, and not in need of any exaggeration or hype. But they may also be bogus or grossly inflated, a condition that Lindzen thinks accurately describes current global-warming concerns of the Gore-Hansen variety.

The New York Times science editor John Tierney offers a similar take on the global warming issue, stressing both the self-interest of scientists involved in crisis mongering and the more general, herd-like conformism that afflicts scientists along with everyone else. “I’ve long thought that the biggest danger in climate research,” Tierney writes, “is the temptation for scientists to lose their skepticism and go along with the ‘consensus’ about global warming. That’s partly because it’s easy for everyone to get caught up in ‘informational cascades,’ and partly because there are so many psychic and financial rewards for working on a problem that seems to be a crisis. We all like to think that our work is vitally useful in solving a major social problem—and the more major the problem seems, the more money society is liable to spend on it. … Given the huge stakes in this debate—the trillions of dollars that might be spent to reduce greenhouse emissions—it’s important to keep taking skeptical looks at the data. How open do you think climate scientists are to skeptical views, and to letting outsiders double-check their data and calculations?” (John Tierney).

The last sentence was an oblique reference to attempts by many climate scientists to suppress skeptical voices, which was so clearly in evidence in the scandalous Climategate emails. A commentator on Tierney’s blog adds the following valuable insight: “To survive, most workers in scientific fields must follow the grant money. If all the grants this year are for work on the crisis du jour, then that’s the work which gets done. The annoying fact is that somebody pays for science. The ‘somebody’ may be an Evil Oil Company, the Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, or anyone else with bags of money. We shouldn’t be too amazed when we find that the ‘somebody’ tends to get the science he or it wants to see.”

That money, power, vanity, and prestige may influence a scientific debate—or non-debate in the case of global warming—should not be very surprising. As I have said, scientists and scholars are human beings and prone to all the foibles and distortions of the human condition. This was the great insight of the mid-20th century “sociologists of knowledge,” and before them of most Calvinists and other discerning Christians (including most notably James Madison in Federalist No. 10).

But I think there is an additional element here that is less talked about but probably as important as the kinds of issues Lindzen and Tierney bring up. This is the attraction of global-warming orthodoxy not as a falsifiable scientific theory or source of research funding but as a substitute religion that engages all the energies and capacities to enhance meaning in life that an earlier generation of secular scholars and scientists often found in various brands of socialism or psychoanalysis. With the general decline and discrediting of both Marxism and Freudianism over the past thirty years radical environmentalism in various forms has taken their place in the lives of many secular intellectuals as a source of existential meaning and purpose. The insular, defensive, cult-like behavior displayed by so many global warming advocates when they are confronted with the concerns of informed skeptics reinforces such an interpretation and explains their refusal to debate dissenters. True believers have no converse with heretics. And such cult-like behavior reinforces one final suspicion: like socialism and Freudianism, global-warming alarmism may prove in time to be a God that failed.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Jonathan Adler got himself quoted approvingly by Megan McArdle, in her Atlantic blog, for identifying conservatives outraged by NJ Governor Chris Christie’s recent public testimony to his belief in Warmism as being guilty of “anti-scientific know-nothingism.”

Last week, Christie vetoed legislation that would have required New Jersey to remain in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), a multi-state agreement to control greenhouse gas emissions through a regional cap-and-trade program. The bill was an effort to overturn Christie’s decision earlier this year to withdraw from the program. Given conservative opposition to greenhouse gas emission controls, the veto should have been something to cheer, right? Nope.

The problem, according to some conservatives, is that Christie accompanied his veto with a statement acknowledging that human activity is contributing to global climate change. Specifically, Christie explained that his original decision to withdraw from RGGI was not based upon any “quarrel” with the science.

While I acknowledge that the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere are increasing, that climate change is real, that human activity plays a role in these changes and that these changes are impacting our state, I simply disagree that RGGI is an effective mechanism for addressing global warming.

As Christie explained, RGGI is based upon faulty economic assumptions and “does nothing more than impose a tax on electricity” for no real environmental benefit. As he noted, “To be effective, greenhouse gas emissions must be addressed on a national and international scale.”

Although Christie adopted the desired policy — withdrawing from RGGI — some conservatives are aghast that he would acknowledge a human contribution to global warming. According to one, this makes Christie “Part RINO. Part man. Only more RINO than man.” [“RINO” as in “Republican in Name Only.”]

Those attacking Christie are suggesting there is only one politically acceptable position on climate science — that one’s ideological bona fides are to be determined by one’s scientific beliefs, and not simply one’s policy preferences. This is a problem on multiple levels. Among other things, it leads conservatives to embrace an anti-scientific know-nothingism whereby scientific claims are to be evaluated not by scientific evidence but their political implications. Thus climate science must be attacked because it provides a too ready justification for government regulation. This is the same reason some conservatives attack evolution — they fear it undermines religious belief — and it is just as wrong. ...

[E]ven the vast majority of warming “skeptics” within the scientific community would agree with Governor Christie’s statement that “human activity plays a role” in rising greenhouse gas levels and resulting changes in the climate.

I am quite convinced that the planet is warming, and fairly convinced that human beings play a role in this. (When you’ve got Reason’s Ron Bailey, Cato’s Patrick Michaels, and Jonathan Adler, you’ve convinced me). I reserve the right to be skeptical about particular claims about effects (particularly when those claims come via people who implausibly insist that every major effect will be negative) . . . and, of course, of ludicrous worries that global warming will cause aliens to destroy us. But generally, I think global warming is happening, and even that we should probably do something about that, though I’m flexible on “something.”

However. Even if you disagree, it is reprehensible to have a litmus test around empirical matters of fact.

It is always difficult in addressing the enormous pile of rubbish and intellctual confusion that constitutes Warmism to decide exactly where to begin.

Megan McArdle tells us that she is “quite convinced that the planet is warming.” What does she mean exactly? If McArdle means that the climate is generally warmer today than in the 17th century when the Thames froze regularly in the winter, she is obviously correct. If she, on the other hand, thinks that the widely noticed warming trend that began around 1980 has continued uninterrupted to the present day and constitutes a meaningful pattern, she is obviously wrong.

It is generally accepted by everyone that mankind has been living for the last eleven thousand years in a period of Interglacial Warming. So, yes, Megan, the planet is warming. That’s is what happens during periods between glaciations.

The catastrophist statists allege that there is a grave danger of “climate change.” Climate change is a heads I win, tails you lose kind of proposition, as the climate is always changing. There is a major warming (or cooling) trend direction of the earth’s climate, and there are constant short-term variations of irregular interval.

Geologic evidence indicates that periods of glaciation have lasted as long as nearly two hundred million years. Climate change is an enormously long-term phenomenon and the earth’s climate has moved from extremes far beyond anything known in human history during times in which there was no possibility of human agency playing any role.

Human observational capabilities with respect to phenomena occurring over geologic periods of time is limited by the brevity of our life spans and also by the brevity of the existence of our species and our civilization. Anyone attempting to draw some kind of conclusions on the basis of temperature patterns going back three decades is an idiot.
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Warmism rests on unverifiable models and on one grand scientific metaphor, the notion that the earth’s atmosphere is like a greenhouse. But the greenhouse reference is only a metaphor.

A 2007 paper by Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf D. Tscheuschner argues, I think quite successfully, that the greenhouse model is incompatible with Physics.

The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and which is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism, in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with but radiatively equilibrated to the atmospheric system. According to the second law of thermodynamics such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation.

Mr. Adler’s accusation that aversion to Warmism amounts to “know-nothingism” is based on uncritical acceptance of the greenhouse metaphor and acceptance of the proposition that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide causes warming. Only superstitious savages would deny that carbon dioxide must be decreased.

Well, the role of CO2 in warming and the timing of increased CO2 is a seriously controversial issue.

There are good grounds for doubt that CO2 really is meaningfully increasing.

There is excellent data also showing that historically increases in CO2 occurred after planetary warming, not before.

Patrick J. Michaels may accept the Greenhouse model and claims of increasing CO2, but Mr. Adler and Ms. McArdle ought to delve a little deeper into these issues before climbing on board.

I will only mention in passing that it is possible, further, to dissent from Warmist Catastrophism by taking the view that a slightly warmer climate would not be an entirely bad thing, particularly if you happen to live in Canada, Scandinavia, or Russia.

And, even if one were to surrender completely and abandon critical science and skepticism, even if one were to simply accept that everything Al Gore says is true, human reproduction and increased energy use and industrial development will inevitably continue. The undeveloped world will not relinquish material progress and efforts to close the gap with the developed world, and no collection of treaties and international conferences will prevent everyone in India and China from wanting an automobile and a full assortment of electrical appliances. If human population growth and economic activity really dooms the planet, the planet is well and truly doomed, because government efforts will not succeed in preventing growth and progress.

The real Know-Nothings, the real parties guilty of a lack of seriousness and respect for science, are the people who accept the herd consensus of interested parties and the community of fashion as probative, and who are willing to accept on its say-so unverifiable models as established science.

Adler and McArdle are totally wrong. It would take a very thick book to discuss all the ways that Warmism fails to represent legitimate science, worthy of acceptance and suitable as a basis for public policy. Some of the issues are technical, but a lot of all this is basically pretty obvious.

To believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming, you have be an urban narcissist whose perspective on reality resembles Saul Steinberg’s 1976 “View of the World From 9th Avenue” cover. You have to be the sort of person who believes that human actions, the human world, biomass, and mental life absolutely dominate the natural world, that mankind could “destroy the planet” through nuclear war, or by further indulgence in materialistic consumption. You have to be a dualist and a fool, who believes that there is an essential disjunction between humanity and the natural world and that the key ingredient of the fundamental basis of life on this planet (photosynthesis) is a dangerous pollutant, and you have to be stupid enough to fail to notice that we are dealing with a popular theory based, at root, on a few years of warmer weather beginning in 1980 promulgated by the same people who were previously warning us about a New Ice Age.

Stupidity on this scale is incompatible with a role in the Conservative Movement. Sorry about that! That’s not religion. That’s just having intellectual standards.

If anyone had any doubts that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is essentially just a medical term for a confirmed habit of whining and malingering, this news item from Britain’s Guardian describing activists’ attacks on doctors questioning or investigating CFS demonstrates the existence of the sort of political constituency which genuine illnesses just do not have.

The full extent of the campaign of intimidation, attacks and death threats made against scientists by activists who claim researchers are suppressing the real cause of chronic fatigue syndrome is revealed today by the Observer. According to the police, the militants are now considered to be as dangerous and uncompromising as animal rights extremists.

One researcher told the Observer that a woman protester who had turned up at one of his lectures was found to be carrying a knife. Another scientist had to abandon a collaboration with American doctors after being told she risked being shot, while another was punched in the street. All said they had received death threats and vitriolic abuse.

In addition, activists – who attack scientists who suggest the syndrome has any kind of psychological association – have bombarded researchers with freedom of information requests, made rounds of complaints to university ethical committees about scientists’ behaviour, and sent letters falsely alleging that individual scientists are in the pay of drug and insurance companies.

“I published a study which these extremists did not like and was subjected to a staggering volley of horrible abuse,” said Professor Myra McClure, head of infectious diseases at Imperial College London. “One man wrote he was having pleasure imagining that he was watching me drown. He sent that every day for months.”

Chronic fatigue syndrome – also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) – is common and debilitating. A recent BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) feature suggested that as many as one in 250 people in the UK suffers from it. Patients are sometimes unable to move and become bedridden, occasionally having to be fed through a tube. For more than 20 years, scientists have struggled to find the cause, with some pointing to physiological reasons, in particular viral infections, while others have argued that psychological problems are involved.

It is the latter group that has become the subject of extremists’ attacks. The antagonists hate any suggestion of a psychological component and insist it is due to external causes, in particular viruses. In the case of McClure, her “crime” was to publish a paper indicating that early studies linking the syndrome to the virus XMRV were wrong and the result of laboratory contamination. So furious was the reaction that she had to withdraw from a US collaboration because she was warned she might be shot.

A similar hate campaign was triggered by a study published in the Lancet earlier this year. It suggested that a psychological technique known as cognitive behavioural therapy could help some sufferers. This produced furious attacks on the scientists involved, including Michael Sharpe, professor of psychological medicine at Oxford University. He had already been stalked by one woman who was subsequently found to be carrying a knife at one of his lectures.

“The tragedy is that this tiny group of activists are driving young scientists from working in the field,” said Sharpe. “In the end, these campaigns are only going to harm patients.”

The recent breakdown of civil society in British cities has been widely associated with welfare state entitlements and an all-encompassing liberal egalitarianism which insists on treating criminality as victimhood. A version of society Kipling predicted: “[T]he brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.”

But it must also be noted that the left’s aversion to punishing crime has consistently featured a single notable exception, a passionate determination to make a conspicuous example of any law-abiding citizen competing against the state’s monopoly of force by daring to defend himself against crime and violence. In such cases, liberal authorities have consistently been out for blood.

Joyce Lee Malcolm, a professor at George Mason University has made the study of the British experiment a personal specialty, and reports in the Wall Street Journal on some of the atrocities produced by the contemporary administration of justice British-style and their results in multiplying crime.

Great Britain’s leniency began in the 1950s, with a policy that only under extraordinary circumstances would anyone under 17 be sent to prison. This was meant to rehabilitate young offenders. But the alternative to incarceration has been simply to warn them to behave, maybe require community service, and return them to the streets. There has been justifiable concern about causes of crime such as poverty and unemployment, but little admission that some individuals prefer theft to work and that deterrence must be taken seriously.

Victims of aggression who defend themselves or attempt to protect their property have been shown no such leniency. Burglars who injured themselves breaking into houses have successfully sued homeowners for damages. In February, police in Surrey told gardeners not to put wire mesh on the windows of their garden sheds as burglars might hurt themselves when they break in.

If a homeowner protecting himself and his family injures an intruder beyond what the law considers “reasonable,” he will be prosecuted for assault. Tony Martin, an English farmer, was sentenced to life in prison for killing one burglar and wounding another with a shotgun during the seventh break-in at his rural home in 1999. While his sentence was later reduced to five years, he was refused parole in 2003 because he was judged a danger to burglars.

In 2008, a robber armed with a knife attacked shopkeeper Tony Singh in West Lancashire. During the struggle the intruder was fatally stabbed with his own knife. Although the robber had a long record of violent assault, prosecutors were preparing to charge Mr. Singh with murder until public outrage stopped them.

Meanwhile, the cost of criminal justice has convinced British governments to shorten the sentences of adult criminals, even those guilty of violent crimes, and to release them when they have served half of their sentence. Police have been instructed by the British Home Office to let burglars and first-time offenders who confess to any of some 60 crimes—ranging from assault and arson to sex with an underage girl—off with a caution. That means no jail time, no fine, no community service, no court appearance.

In 2009, 70% of apprehended burglars avoided prison, according to British Ministry of Justice figures. The same year, 20,000 young offenders were electronically tagged and sent home, a 40% increase in the number of people tagged over three years.

All sorts of weapons useful for self-defense have been severely restricted or banned. A 1953 law, the “Prevention of Crime Act,” made any item someone carried for possible protection an “offensive weapon” and therefore illegal. Today there is also a list of devices the mere possession of which carries a 10-year sentence. Along with rocket launchers and machine guns, the list includes chemical sprays and any knife with a blade more than three inches long.

Handguns? Parliament banned their possession in 1997. As an example of the preposterous lengths to which zealous British authorities would enforce this law, consider the fate of Paul Clark, a former soldier. He was arrested in 2009 by Surrey police when he brought them a shotgun he found in his garden. For doing this personally—instead of asking the police to retrieve it—he received a five-year prison sentence. It took a public outcry to reduce the normal five-year sentence to 12 months, and then suspend it.

The ban on handguns did not stop actual crimes committed with handguns. Those crimes rose nearly 40%, according to a 2001 study by King’s College London’s Center for Defence Studies, and doubled by a decade later, according to government statistics reported in the London Telegraph in October 2009.

Knives? It’s illegal for anyone under age 18 to buy one, and using a knife for self-defense is unlawful. In 1991, American tourist Dina Letarte of Tempe, Ariz., used a penknife to protect herself from a violent attack by three men in a London subway. She was convicted of carrying an offensive weapon, fined, and given a two-year suspended sentence.

The result of policies that punish the innocent but fail to deter crime has been stark, even before the latest urban violence. The last decade has seen a doubling of gun crime. According to the latest annual report of the Home Office (2009), there was a 25% increase in crimes involving contact, such as assault and battery, over the previous year.

Hat tip to Miguel.