Rush continued to be afflicted by the lurgy today, so I was honored to fill in behind the Golden EIB Microphone. All being well, he'll be back tomorrow.
You can find a few moments from today's show here. I defended Ben Carson, who I thought gave the only practical response to the latest school shooting, advising people to be prepared to rush the shooter. For this he's been pilloried as "insensitive", etc. In fact, in these situations around the world, how you act in the first few moments generally determines the outcome:
We tell our children all the time, to worry about the sea level in the Maldives, but we don't teach them to worry about things that are unlikely, but happen all the time. You have to move fast before a gunman takes control of the room, before he's figured out the landscape. That's what Ben Carson was talking about. That's when you have to act.
Listener Bud Harton responds:
How dare you!
Ben Carson would piss his pants if someone pointed a loaded gun to his head! So would you.
You have no idea what was going through the minds of those young people at the moment that lunatic was terrorizing them. No idea at all! do you think they might have been scared?
I am so bored by the dimestore ersatz empathy peddled by the likes of Bud Harton. Even the macho panty-pissing line is just the third-rate brain-dead reflex response of the unthinking. From page 186 of my international bestseller After America, discussing the mass murder at the École Polytechnique de Montréal:
Whenever I've written about these issues, I get a lot of e-mails from guys scoffing, "Oh, right, Steyn. Like you'd be taking a bullet. You'd be pissing your little girlie panties," etc. Well, maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:
'When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same circumstances', we make cowardice the default position.'
I prefer the word passivity – a terrible, corrosive passivity. Even if I'm wetting my panties, it's better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.
Americans who had no problem crowing about how their three brave young men showed those Euro-fairies how it's done rushing an armed man on that French train the other week suddenly think it's bad form for Ben Carson to commend the necessity of the same approach on the home front. Let's stipulate we're all terrified, we're all panty-pissers. But some actions are more likely than others to end the terror sooner, and with less bloodshed. And Ben Carson is right to promote them.
~We also noted the tortured logic of the Obama Administration, which is hailing Russia's military intervention in Syria as evidence of American success - because if America hadn't weakened Assad then Putin wouldn't have to go in to prop him up:
This is the Obama logic: Because they've supposedly weakened Assad -- and it's not at all clear they have -- the Russians have been forced to go in and prop him up. It's like Emperor Hirohito saying that America nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a sign of Pearl Harbor's great success.
~Continuing Rush's theme that "western civilization is erasing itself", I looked at the latest member of the Fauxcahontas tribe - Susan Taffe Reed, who was removed as head of Dartmouth's Native American program after it was revealed that she has no Indian blood and that the trible she claims to be from, the Eastern Delaware Nations, was founded by her maternal grandfather, an immigrant from Ireland.The cisInjuns were furious at the transInjun for her act of cultural appropriation.
~Finally, we noted the news that whole milk turns out not to be bad for you, and that the science that said it was was always incredibly flimsy. And for some reason that reminded me of my new book on another area of unsettled science, global warming. On page 169 of the book we consider one of the more obviously risible claims of Michael E Mann - his continued insistence that he is a Nobel Laureate. Even though the Nobel Institute itself has said that he isn't and has told him to knock it off. Steve Milloy notes at Breitbart that Mann continues to perpetrate this academic fraud:
At the end of September, I noticed that Youngstown State University had announced an upcoming November event with "Nobel Prize winner Michael Mann," a Penn State professor and inventor of the infamous hockey (hokey?) stick graph. I complained to Youngstown State that Mann had not won the Nobel Prize. He was merely one of hundreds of contributors to reports produced by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was the actual Novel Peace Prize winner in 2007. Mann has on multiple occasions falsely claimed to be a Nobelist, including on the jacket of one of his books and in litigation with pundit Mark Steyn.
To its credit, Youngstown State quickly wrote back and informed me that it would no longer describe Mann as a Nobelist. This at least the fourth time that I had seen to Mann being de-Nobeled. Even though the Nobel committee has made clear that IPCC contributors are not Nobelists, descriptions of Mann as a Nobelist keep arising. One wonders what the source is. I have twice tried to get to the root of this via the Freedom of Information Act, but was rebuffed by the National Science Foundation and the University of California-Los Angeles.
My book is called "A Disgrace to the Profession", and it's the story of the 21st century's most famous graph and the damage it has done both to science and public policy. It's available in paperback as well as - instantly! - in Kindle and Nook. We're a Top 200 bestseller at Amazon, and a smash on the Climatology Hit Parade.
~I'll be back on the air this weekend in a free-speech special with John Stossel at Fox News. It's called "Censored in America" and airs at 8pm Eastern this Saturday.
