Law takes a holiday

When the law goes on a vacation. Rules are unenforced or politicized. Citizens quickly lose faith in the legal system. Anarchy follows — ensuring that there can be neither prosperity nor security. The United States is descending into such an abyss, as politics now seem to govern whether existing laws are enforced.

Read these examples of how respect for the law is failing

Blog round up

For fans of Exodus, here's a terrific image of a burning bush

Can you be a libertarian and be pro-life?

This fellow changed from a believer to a climate change denier 

Probably this has been in the news, but Tom Brady's Super Bowl jersey has been found

Andy Warhol's previously banned painting of Mao Ze Dung is going on sale in Hong Kong.

 Glenn Reynolds tells us that a strict constitutionalist is better than a conservative activist

Scott Adams

Addresses the credibility problems of global warming science. What they need to do to convince him.

Video of the earth in different seasons

Here is a video of the earth over one year's time. As the earth rotates around the sun, the amount of daylight varies except at the equator. Watch this video from Astronomy Picture of the Day

Kellyanne Conway

If you are following the adventures of "Mrs Conway goes to Washington", you might enjoy this comprehensive article in New York Magazine.

As Trump’s highly visible and quotable campaign manager during the election’s final sprint, she became a constant presence on cable news and thus a subject of widespread fascination, armchair psychoanalysis, outrage, and exuberant ridicule. But rather than buckling, she absorbed all of it, coming out the other side so aware of how the world perceives her that she could probably write this article herself. Caricatures from that time, when hardly anyone believed Trump could defy the polls and win, depicted her wielding everything from a whip to a shock collar to tame her unruly candidate. But these days, serving as the senior counselor to the president, Conway is becoming less a supporting character than a bona fide celebrity in her own right. She is simply more famous — more beloved by Trump fans and more hated by Trump detractors — than anyone in any comparable role in any previous White House. 

Blog roundup

New York education officials are planning to scrap a literacy test for people trying to become teachers, claiming too many non-white individuals fail it and therefore weaken diversity within the profession. Don't teachers need to be literate in the English language?

Ben Carson has been in trouble lately for saying that slaves brought to the US were immigrants. It seems that Obama made that comparison eleven times.

President Donald Trump is "absolutely right" to claim he was wiretapped and monitored, a former NSA official claimed Monday, adding that the administration risks falling victim to further leaks if it continues to run afoul of the intelligence community. Everyone's conversations are being monitored and stored  More here on bugging by the Obama administration

UC Berkeley was on track to make education available to everyone for free, but the Obama administration killed the initiative by requiring handicap access.

Sweden is serving as an example of problems welcoming too many refugees from different (read Muslim) countries. Read what is happening to this society.

More on Middlebury College falling victim to liberal's opposition to free speech.   More on liberal bullying on campus

A new book from Amazon: Reasons To Vote For Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide. Be sure a look inside the pages and read the reviews.

During the Obama years: Every Single One of the lawyers hired into the Civil Rights Division were committed leftists. A Federal judge is blasting the unprofessional behavior of some

More on Jerry Brown's "Train to Nowhere" and it's funding and infrastructure difficulties.  More here on unrealistic ideas from California politicians

Elizabeth Warren is one of the most annoying politicians in government service. Apparently, she is not all that popular in her home state of Massachusetts either

A terrific story about a student's revenge for a bad grade

The story begins in 1982. A 19-year-old sophomore named Gregory Watson was taking a government class at UT Austin. For the class, he had to write a paper about a governmental process. So he went to the library and started poring over books about the U.S. Constitution — one of his favorite topics.

“I'll never forget this as long as I live,” Gregory says. “I pull out a book that has within it a chapter of amendments that Congress has sent to the state legislatures, but which not enough state legislatures approved in order to become part of the Constitution. And this one just jumped right out at me.”

That unratified amendment read as follows:

“No law varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.”

Basically, it means any raise Congress votes to give itself can’t take effect until after the next election, allowing voters to decide how they felt about that.

The amendment had been proposed almost 200 years earlier, in 1789. It was written by James Madison and was intended to be one of the very first amendments, right along with the Bill of Rights.

But it didn’t get passed by enough states at the time. You see, to ratify an amendment, you need three-quarters of states to approve it. This amendment, though it was 200 years old, didn’t have a deadline.

Gregory was intrigued. He decided to write his paper about the amendment and argue that it was still alive and could be ratified. He got to work, being very meticulous about citations and fonts and everything. He turned it in to the teaching assistant for his class -- and got it back with a C.

Read the rest of this astounding story

The problem with climate selection bias

There have been very many models to predict the effect of carbon dioxide on global temperature.  Building lots of models and then selecting the one which was right is not the scientific method. It's like using financial models to predict the behavior of the stock market; if you do enough of them, some will be right at predicting the future. Of course you test them by predicting the past and selecting ones which did the best job.  It turns out that none of them really predict the future.

It is the same with global warming. Some will do the best job by accident and have nothing to do with actual science.  It is well known that none of the past models predicted the stationary temperatures observed for the last 18 years or so.  Here's an article about confirmation bias as it relates to global warming.

What happened to those folks at Microsoft

Here is the famous photo of the original Microsoft gang. There's Bill bottom left.




This article will tell you where they are now.  Look for the reunion photo at the end.

How climate scientists can gain credibility

Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, has a generally fascinating blog. One subject that he covers with some regularity is global warming. In this entry, he explains what climate scientists are doing wrong if they want to convince the public to get concerned about global warming.

His regular coverage is interesting in that he professes a belief in global warming, though much of his material casts doubt on the issue.

Here's a compilation of  video clips of people laughing at the idea of Trump running for president.

And here's a compilation of video clips responding to his election

Be sure and click on parts 2, 3 and 4

Catching up on blogging

In a break from modern tradition, former President Barack Obama appears to be wading back into political waters. “It’s coming. [President Obama is] coming,” former Attorney General Eric Holder told a gaggle of reporters last month. “And he’s ready to roll.” Is that a good thing?

He won office at a time when America felt like it was already coming apart, and given the opportunity to be a true post-partisan leader who could unite the country, chose instead to run a highly partisan and ideological presidency. That began with his choice of the divisive issue of health care reform as his landmark legislation—Obamacare being Obama’s original sin—using every means necessary to pass it on a party-line vote. And he frequently resorted to unilateral decisions outside the scope of his constitutional authority.

Middlebury College is exhibiting signs of insanity. The latest in a series of leftist students preventing speakers from engaging with the campus. Criticized by students and professors alike, none of whom have read any of his books.

Genetically modified crops are making huge inroads into reducing world hunger, contrary to the desires of food activists. Not only are crops more bountiful, but healthier.

Gold rice is genetically-engineered to prevent blindness and malnutrition by providing vitamin A to impoverished children. Vitamin A deficiency kills 1.15 million children each year, according to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund.

Greenpeace protesters in 2013 destroyed a genetically-modified crop of Golden Rice in the Philippines due to alleged health concerns.  Academic studies estimate Greenpeace’s delaying of Golden Rice in India alone cost 1,424,000 life years since 2002.

New York University did a study of the outcome of the debates if Trump had been female and Clinton male. The results were surprising:

Her Opponent, a production featuring actors performing excerpts from each of the three debates exactly as they happened—but with the genders switched. Salvatore cast fellow educational theatre faculty Rachel Whorton to play “Brenda King,” a female version of Trump, and Daryl Embry to play “Jonathan Gordon,” a male version of Hillary Clinton, and coached them as they learned the candidates’ words and gestures. 

What was Jonathan Gordon smiling about all the time? And didn’t he seem a little stiff, tethered to rehearsed statements at the podium, while Brenda King, plainspoken and confident, freely roamed the stage? Which one would audiences find more likeable? 

Did Obama spy on Trump? Glenn Reynolds' weekly article in USA Today examines the evidence. 
And this New York Times reported said that Trump was wiretapped in January, but lacked evidence in March.  And more here from Roger Simon on wiretapping and the Russian connection  And here's more from Twitter.

Here's a terrific image of a P-47, a P-38, an A-10 and an F-35 flying in formation.

Sweden has been in the news lately because of Trump's imprecise speech being distorted by the media. However, things are not going well in Sweden because of their careless generosity with Muslim immigrants. They are bringing bad habits and crime to a nice country.  Here's further news from the problems in Sweden where immigrants are laughing at laws.


Tucker Carlson has become a star on Fox News because of his ability to challenge his guest's viewpoints. Here's an in-depth article in The Atlantic

A government ethics expert wants the federal government to investigate former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.'s $138,000-a-year payout from a combination of worker's compensation and Social Security disability benefits. Seems a bit much for someone who went to jail for stealing from the government.

Nestle is leaving California to get away from the lawmakers and activists. More on California's unfriendly business environment

Betsy DeVos is getting a lot of criticism about her lack of experience with public schools, most of it driven by the teacher's unions. Betsy cares about the students; the unions care about salaries and benefits, and most destructive, protecting bad teachers from dismissal. Here's a suggestion for someone to work for Betsy on higher education

Donald Trump has been mean to the media. This writer thinks not mean enough. And for further enjoyment, here's John McCain's take on the issue which ignores his past experience.

How important is a knowledge of history to the nation? Very important

Here's a compelling love story that has gone viral: You may want to marry my husband.

Articles of interest

Leftists believe in the power of money to solve all problems, much the same as Christians believe in the power of prayer to do the same. Leftists believe that the solution to everything is to throw more money at it. Failing schools? Recession? Institutionalized poverty? If the government simply throws more money at it, all will be well. It doesn't seem to work.

Media Sure It 'Heard' Sweden Comment Trump Never Said. What he really said

Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. Especially in the soft sciences

That's especially true in climate science. More than 300 scientists have urged President Trump to withdraw from the U.N.’s climate change agency, warning that its push to curtail carbon dioxide threatens to exacerbate poverty without improving the environment.

The Trump Russian connection has been in the news a lot lately.

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly couldBlocking oil and gas pipelinesOpening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductionsCutting U.S. military spendingTrying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.

Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.