Commentary by James Shott

Colleges are infected with liberal foolishness to a higher degree than ever before. It seems the most popular activity in colleges today is being offended. Many students are offended by such dastardly threats as contrary opinions, and males standing up while talking to seated females. This is the nature of things at too many campuses these days.

“Trigger warnings” are required to warn students of potentially “troubling class material,” and “microaggressions,” which are words and phrases that offend someone, even when the speaker intended no offense, are a really big deal.

A Harvard Law School dean has compared microaggressions to sexual assault and violence, and the University of California lists things that are just too horrible to say, including threatening phrases, like "everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough" and "America is the land of opportunity." Rough stuff, that.

Such terrifying things slip by traditional, older Americans unnoticed, but cripple younger folk. These hallmarks of modern American liberalism have grown from the seeds that sprouted the belief that feelings are more important than anything, and that everyone deserves a trophy for merely showing up.

Americans who graduated from the school of hard knocks are amazed and bemused at the hypersensitive nature of our once-tough culture, and wonder how this could have occurred. Our education system, at all levels, played a big role.

As these changes occurred they were accompanied by, and perhaps abetted by, the liberalization of the college professoriate.

The Daily Signal published an article discussing a UCLA Higher Education Research Institute study that documents the increase in liberal professors. “During the past quarter-century, academia has seen a nearly 20-percent jump in the number of professors who identify as liberal,” writes Natalie Johnson. “That increase has created a lopsided ideological spread in higher education, with liberal professors now outpacing their conservative counterparts by a ratio of roughly 5 to 1.”

In 1990 only about 41 percent of professors identified themselves as “liberal” or “far-left,” but by 2014 the percentage had risen to 60. Over that same period those identifying as “conservative” or “far-right” fell from 18 to 13 percent.

In 2011 liberal profs reached their highest point at 63 percent, while conservatives reached a high of only 22 percent, in 1993. At the other end, liberals never fell below the 41 percent mark, while conservatives were as low as 12 percent in 2011.

In a perfect world this political imbalance should make little difference. After all, what difference does it make if your math professor is a Democrat, Republican, unaffiliated with a party, a Trotsky-ite or whatever? Math is math, right? Biology, music theory, graphic arts, English grammar and most other subjects are not political in nature. And in an atmosphere where professors merely guide students in learning their subject, it wouldn’t matter. But what if for some strange reason it became trendy for professors to inject a bit of political proselytization into their lectures and lessons?

But isn’t secretly and deliberately indoctrinating young people with ideological attitudes while they think they are only studying how to write a proper sentence, determine a standard deviation, or studying the War Between the States fundamentally dishonest, you may ask? Yes, it certainly is. But bias isn’t always deliberate, according to Matthew Woessner, an associate professor of political science and public policy at Penn State Harrisburg.

He said this ideological imbalance “raises critical questions of whether students are getting a balanced education—not because there’s some conspiracy to block out conservative ideas, but merely because the people who are teaching are either not familiar with or don’t embrace conservative ideas.” Even when faculty attempt to present an issue in a balanced and impartial manner, he said, personal biases naturally bleed into material.

The UCLA study reflects that this liberal tilt among professors has had an effect, with data from 2009 showing that the number of students who said their political views were “liberal” or “far left” grew by 9.2 percent from their freshman year to their senior year.

Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, cast more of a cloud on the collegiate atmosphere, opining that the reported 5-to-1 ratio is “not very meaningful” because the terms “liberal” and “conservative” have become “exceedingly troubled.” Instead, Klein suggested that the imbalance between faculty members who vote Democratic compared with those who vote Republican is closer to 9-to-1 or even 10-to-1.

Ideally, there would be relative equality of liberal and conservative ideology among faculty. Woessner, however, suggests that equal numbers of liberal and conservative professors really isn’t necessary for higher education to work well, so long as a sufficient number of faculty hold different views “to create a space for enough conservative ideas that students are exposed at least nominally to these other perspectives,” he said.

It is critical for colleges and universities to work much harder to even out the ideological divide if higher education is to regain credibility for delivering a balanced education. No group should want that more than the professors themselves, who should prefer a reputation of integrity as opposed to one of having a finger on the scale.

Cross-posted from Observations

Striking a Balance Between Energy Reality and Ideological Fantasy

This time last year the Energy Information Administration (EIA) had just released a report showing the energy sources for electricity production in 2012.

That report showed that more than one-third of the electricity in the US comes from burning coal, and coal and natural gas together produce 67 percent of our electricity. And nuclear power comprises about 19 percent. That is the reality of energy production in the United States.

President Barack Obama prefers producing electricity with clean, renewable sources like solar and wind. Currently, wind accounts for just 0.11 percent of energy production and solar accounts for 3.46 percent, according to the EIA report.

The ideological fantasy is the idea that in a few years we can transition to producing a majority of our energy from sources that today account for less than 5 percent of energy production. Even ramping up wind and solar to produce the 37 percent of energy produced by coal in only a few years is a fantasy.

Under the most desirable circumstances imaginable, this transition would still be a tall order, and current circumstances are a long, long way from ideal. Solar energy is almost twice as expensive as natural gas, and wind energy is 46 percent more expensive than natural gas.

If the portion of electricity produced by natural gas were replaced with solar power, the price of electricity would increase by about 25 percent, and the costs for replacing coal-fired electricity with wind and solar are higher still.

Despite the difficulty with making this transition at all, or transitioning in a rational manner to keep pain and inconvenience to a minimum, the Obama administration is doing everything in its power to destroy the coal industry, and force the country to transition to producing electricity from clean sources that are not yet capable of doing the job.

Mr. Obama once said that anyone who wanted to build a coal-fired generating plant could do so, but the venture would go bankrupt, and those in coal producing states have already experienced the pain from this War on Coal.

Dan Lowery, writing for SNL Financial last September, paints the jobs picture: “Employment among U.S. coal miners plummeted by roughly 19 percent in the first quarter compared to the end of 2012, according to federal data.” He went on to say the number of employees of coal operators and contractors fell by more than 30,000 from 2011 to early 2013.

Coal jobs suffer from excessive government regulation, but also are affected by low natural gas prices. But then natural gas is also on the list of no-no energy sources.

An analysis for the Heritage Foundation predicts that significantly reducing coal’s share in America’s energy mix would, before 2030, destroy more than 500,000 jobs, cause a family of four to lose more than $1,000 in annual income, and increase electricity prices by 20 percent.

“Even worse,” authors Nicolas Loris, David Kreutzer, Ph.D. and Kevin Dayaratna write, “the Americans forced into unemployment lines and those paying higher energy prices couldn’t even claim that their suffering is helping to save the planet. If America stopped all carbon emissions, it would decrease the global temperature by only 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050.”

While loudly and frequently pointing out the problems with coal, oil and natural gas, the green faction remains mostly silent about the problems with wind and solar energy installations. The obvious weaknesses are that if the wind isn’t blowing and if the sun isn’t shining, turbines and solar panels produce no electricity. So when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining, more dependable sources must be used for production. That means that coal, oil and/or natural gas units must run 24 hours a day in backup mode in order to be ready when needed.

The wind and solar energy that the environmentalists count on to reduce pollution produced by fossil fuels actually create serious pollution problems themselves. Both use rare earth minerals in their manufacture, and the mining and processing of these minerals generates hazardous and radioactive byproducts.

Both wind and solar have a negative impact on wildlife. The mirror-like surface of solar panels attracts birds, which think they are bodies of water, like ponds and lakes. The birds then flock to the solar array, where they are fried from the heat of the reflected sunlight.

Wind turbines also claim their share of birds, in addition to warming the land beneath them. "Given the present installed capacity and the projected growth in installation of wind farms across the world, I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology," according to Liming Zhou, associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany. So, while they don’t put CO2 into the air, “clean” energy sources cause their own form of climate change.

Combining the substantially higher cost of wind and solar energy with the job losses from the War on Coal, and the fact that trading fossil fuels for “clean,” renewable energy will produce miniscule benefits to the environment, one has to seriously consider the wisdom of this obsession.

Election protections in the US Constitution are being circumvented

Commentary by James Shott

Back in the good ol’ days, school kids studied history and civics where they learned how and why America came to be. And they came away from that with an understanding of the wisdom the Founders applied in creating this country.

They learned that the first governing document was not adequate to accomplish the desired goals. The Articles of Confederation reflected the Founders’ profound and well-grounded fear of a too-strong national government, gave too much independence and control to the states, and had other problems that failed to provide a solid foundation for a cohesive nation.

Their solution to that misstep was to develop a new governing document that gave enough power to the federal government to hold the union together, but left the states with a significant degree of control and autonomy.

The Founders created a unique and enlightened form of government that prevented a small minority of self-serving people from controlling the masses, and also prevented a majority of citizens from imposing its will on the minority.

In creating the US Constitution to replace the Articles the Founders considered having Congress select the president, but the president would then be beholden to the Congress, confounding the idea of three co-equal branches of government. They also considered state legislatures or governors selecting the chief executive, but those ideas, too, were rejected. And they rejected electing the president through a purely popular vote, because they wanted to balance the power of the larger and smaller states. 


On this point, before being elected president then-US Sen. John F. Kennedy noted, “Direct election would break down the federal system under which states entered the union, which provides a system of checks and balances to ensure that no area or group shall obtain too much power.”

The deliberations on how best to select the president ultimately resulted in the creation of the Electoral College. But now there is an effort afoot to do away with this beneficial safeguard of the US Constitution that the Founders meticulously developed to best serve the citizens of their country.

Changing the Constitution requires amending the Constitution, and that requires the consent of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states; very difficult and unlikely to be accomplished any time soon.

The National Popular Vote (NPV) plan claims its purpose is “to ensure that every vote for president is equally valued no matter where it is cast.” However, it seeks to make this change without a Constitutional amendment. The Founders realized there might be legitimate reasons to change the Constitution, but also understood that such changes must have broad support among the citizenry and it therefore should not be too easily done. The system for amending the Constitution is demanding, as it should be.

Rather than approach this important change the proper way, by putting it before the people and the Congress through the amendment process, NPV advocates decided to take a short cut and simply subvert the Constitution through a back-door agreement.

The mission statement of the NPV initiative should therefore read: “Things aren’t working out to suit us, so we need to change the rules.” Its campaign seeks to obtain the consent of the majority of the 538 votes in the Electoral College to award electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the popular vote in each state, a system in which the inmates run the asylum.

The president will be chosen not by the electors voting as the voters of their state determine they should vote, but under the terms of an agreement among themselves.

This effort to buy control of presidential elections must be the work of the evil Koch brothers, or the TEA Party, right? Nope. It is uber leftist Hungarian-American multi-billionaire George Soros pulling the strings.


Ten states have already signed up for this subversion: New York, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont, California and Rhode Island. The District of Columbia also has joined the scheme.

Since the Electoral College protects the balance the Founders created with deference to states with smaller populations and by ensuring that the interests of these states be reflected in national decision-making, circumventing it through the NPV creates serious problems, according to former Federal Election Commission member Hans A. von Spakovsky:

** Recounts would be both more prevalent and more problematic.
** It could destabilize America’s two-party system, leading to a higher incidence of close elections and recounts.
** Provisional ballots could also lead to an extensive, widespread, and complex battle that could further delay and confuse the results of a presidential election.
** The plan would encourage vote fraud.

According to Mr. von Sapkovsky, “The NPV is unconstitutional because it would give a group of states with a majority of electoral votes the power to overturn the explicit decision of the Framers against direct election. Since that power does not conform to the constitutional means of changing the original decisions of the framers, NPV could not be a legitimate innovation.”

The NPV is yet another liberal idea that upon analysis turns out to be a lousy idea. Is it also criminal?

Cross-posted from Observations

NIPCC report disputes the conventional wisdom about climate change

Commentary by James H. Shott

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is a panel of scientists organized in 2003 by Dr. S. Fred Singer and the Science & Environmental Policy Project. Unlike the better-known Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is a government-sponsored and politically motivated group with a man-causes-global-warming bias, the NIPCC receives no funding from government and does not share the IPCC’s predisposition that climate change is man-made and therefore requires a United Nations solution.

Hence, Dr. Singer’s group, which consists of some 50 independent scientists from universities and private institutions around the world (the US, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Canada, Italy, the UK, France, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Spain) who disagree with the IPCC’s theory, “seeks to objectively analyze and interpret data and facts without conforming to any specific agenda,” according to a summary of the 1,200-page report “Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science” that was released in September of this year.

Most of what we read, see and hear from the media is the opinion held and promoted by the United Nations’ IPCC. No matter what your opinion about whether or not human activities have a significant effect, or any effect, on the Earth’s climate, it certainly cannot hurt to have available the analysis of a group of scientists – the NIPCC – that believes the data show a different reality than that promoted by the IPCC.

Among the group’s findings are:

•    Atmospheric CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases.

•    Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 emissions, which represents 34 percent of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

•    The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age modulated by natural multidecadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities.

•    CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere “greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population.

•    No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation.

•    The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between climate patterning and multidecadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years.

The summary also presents key facts about surface temperature that argue against the UN IPCC’s position, a few of which follow:

•    Whether today’s global surface temperature is seen to be part of a warming trend depends upon the time period considered.

•    Over (climatic) time scales of many thousand years, temperature is cooling; over the historical (meteorological) time scale of the past century temperature has warmed. Over the past 16 years, there has been no net warming despite an increase in atmospheric CO2 of 8 percent. (See second bullet above.)

•    There was nothing unusual about either the magnitude or rate of the late twentieth century warming pulses represented on the HadCRUT record, both falling well within the envelope of known, previous natural variations.

•    No empirical evidence exists to support the assertion that a planetary warming of 2 degrees Centigrade would be net ecologically or economically damaging.

These findings by this group of international scientists that contradict the positions of the IPCC gain strength from the evidence of fraud among scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, many associated with the IPCC. Emails exchanged between these scientists obtained in 2009 demonstrated fraud, dishonesty and errors in the arguments supporting the theory of man-made global warming.

As reported in Human Events online edition, some of the emails revealed contempt for disagreeable scientific data and a “slavish devotion to the climate change political agenda pushed by the politicians and government bureaucrats funding their research.”

In the report’s Conclusion the authors say: “Few scientists deny that human activities can have an effect on local climate or that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability?”

The Conclusion includes a quote by British biologist Conrad Waddington from 1941: “It is … important that scientists must be ready for their pet theories to turn out to be wrong. Science as a whole certainly cannot allow its judgment about facts to be distorted by ideas of what ought to the true, or what one may hope to be true.”

Those scientists who believe that man’s activities harm the planet should take this good advice to heart.



Cross-posted from Observations

The Washington Navy Yard shooting highlights many serious problems

Before the gun smoke had dispersed at the Washington Navy Yard, the agenda media reacted with a kind of grim glee that an “assault weapon” – an AR-15 – had been used yet again in a mass shooting.

The New York Daily News devoted its entire front page to the story with the headline, “Same Gun Different Slay,” in letters so big they took up two-thirds of the page. Inside the publication was an anti-gun column by Mike Lupica titled, “AR-15 is the rifle for the ‘sport’ of hunting humans.”

MSNBC even used an animation of the shooting, featuring an AR-15, while CNN's Piers Morgan said, "He was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle, another rifle, and a handgun.”

The Washington Post asked how the suspected shooter, Aaron Alexis, acquired “his weapons (an AR-15 assault rifle, a shotgun and a semiautomatic pistol were reportedly found on him).”

Some of this results from the drive to get news out first. But hardly all of it.

And then, of course, the politicians got into the act.

“A gunman appeared with an assault rifle, and several other weapons,” said Illinois Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin on the Senate floor.

California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein released a statement which read, “This is one more event to add to the litany of massacres that occur when a deranged person or grievance killer is able to obtain multiple weapons — including a military-style assault rifle — and kill many people in a short amount of time.”

Even the hallowed halls of academia were not immune to the ranting of the unhinged. (surprise, surprise, surprise!!)

“#NavyYardShooting The blood is on the hands of the #NRA,” tweeted David Guth, an associate professor of Journalism at the University of Kansas William Allen White School of Journalism. “Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters,” he continued. “Shame on you. May God damn you.”

To its credit, the University suspended Guth. With such as this in journalism classrooms, it’s no wonder there is bias in the news media.

“The contents of Guth’s tweet were repugnant and in no way represent the views or opinions of the University of Kansas,” an official statement said. Whether UK works like the federal government, and keeps suspended misbehavers on the payroll, it didn’t say.

Well, Sen. Feinstein, Sen. Durbin, Prof. Guth, et al, we certainly have had enough of these incidents. But we’ve also had enough of you folks and your mis-informing cronies in the media allowing your emotions and your prejudices to commandeer your thought process and produce automatic responses that are so grossly wrong.

The shooter had only his own recently and legally acquired shotgun when he started the rampage, and is thought to have taken a handgun from one of his security officer victims along the way. No “assault rifle” was involved.

Moving from the thoughtless responses of these demagogues to the somber realities and serious issues that exist, we need to recognize that the most serious of these is clearly not a need for more gun control.

Washington, DC has some of the strictest gun laws in the country and the Navy Yard prohibits weapons being carried by anyone except for military police and other law enforcement and security personnel; not even trained military personnel who may carry weapons when they are deployed can carry a weapon on the Yard.

Alexis, who worked for a civilian contractor at the Navy Yard, had a history of arrests for weapons violations and mental health issues. Except for him, the military and civilian personnel assigned to and working at the Navy Yard obeyed the rules and didn’t bring guns to the Yard. Stronger gun laws would have made no difference at all.

Like gun-free schools without armed security, gun-free military bases have become shooting galleries for people who do not obey gun control laws and want to do bad things.

All kinds of screw-ups took place here, among which are:

**Lousy security checks – Given his criminal and mental health past, how was Alexis able to legally obtain the shotgun and a security clearance?

**Dumb rules about weapons on military facilities – On both Ft. Hood and the Navy Yard, had military personnel carried weapons, the shooters might never have planned those attacks, but they almost certainly would have done far less damage.

**The base security staff was undermanned when the shooting started, and had to close the gates to the base so they could respond to the emergency, and that interfered with civilian police trying to get on the base to help.

**Media knee-jerk misinformation appears to have emanated from an anti-gun mentality that leads to a shoot first, get details later process.

At least the media didn’t try to associate Alexis with TEA Party organizations or the Republican Party, as has often occurred in the past; they would have been wrong about that, too. A friend of Aaron Alexis, Michael Ritrovato, told CNN’s Jake Tapper that he was “more of a liberal type, not conservative like I am.”

Let’s hold our breath to see how the media distort the coming debate over raising the debt ceiling yet again and a possible government shutdown.