Thanks for all your questions, and apologies for the mid-show disruptions. We'll post the recording of the livestream later tonight.
UPPERDATE! We're live now, so let's have at it!
UPDATE! We'll be going live in about 15 minutes, so do get ready to fire off your questions via the comment form below. See you at the top of the hour. And, to listen, simply click the livestream feed.
Today, Monday, we'll be attempting another Clubland Q&A session, live around the planet at 5pm US Eastern. We'll try to pin down the rest of the time zones below, but do, as they say, check local listings.
Before that, we had a busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with the launch of a brand new Tale for Our Time: my reading of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. No humbuggery here. Our Saturday movie selection discussed a film based on the events of the "Montreal Massacre", Polytechnique; and our Song of the Week presented an audio special on "White Christmas", with me and Irving Berlin's daughter gathered around Mr Berlin's very own piano. If you were tied up with other activities these last 72 hours or so, I hope you'll want to catch up with one or two of the foregoing.
We've been experimenting with different Q&A formats since we launched The Mark Steyn Club - print, video, general questions, single topic. But readers and listeners and viewers seem to enjoy our combined live text/audio format. So that's what we'll take a crack at later today. As soon as we go live, Club members are welcome to log-in and submit their questions via our comment form below - and I'll answer them as-it-happens on the audio livestream that should magically appear above (or possibly below - I forget which). And, if you disagree with my response, feel free to object to it in the comments, and I'll try to address a couple of the objections as we go along.
There's lots to talk about. Today is the hundredth anniversary since General Allenby dismounted and walked through the Jaffa Gate into Jerusalem - an event that can be said to symbolize the dawn of the post-Ottoman Middle East. As Allenby privately remarked, "Only now have the Crusades ended." It hasn't quite worked out like that - as attested to by this morning's breaking news in New York: a pre-Christmas pipe bomb at Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Speaking of Jerusalem, a century after the Ottoman eviction, a few other nations are apparently now ready to join President Trump in belatedly recognizing Israel's capital as the capital of Israel. In the United States, the Pervnado sweeps on, emptying out the schedules at NPR. In Canada, following my new SteynPost on the Lindsay Shepherd inquisition, I'm pleased to report a rare sign of life for free speech on the Wilfrid Laurier campus. In The Toronto Sun, Professor William McNally argues that there can be no compromise on free speech - and cites an old Steynism in support:
You cannot combine free speech and social justice advocates on a task force and expect a compromise. As Mark Steyn likes to say, if you combine ice cream and feces, the mixture is apt to taste more like the latter than the former.
On the subject of hostility to free speech, in the tedious Mann vs Steyn "hockey stick" defamation case, still mired in the constipated rectum of justice that is the DC court system, I often find myself on the receiving end of appeals to authority, and my lack thereof: I am not a credentialed climate science and have not published a single solitary paper in a peer-reviewed journal, and therefore I have no right to weigh in on the subject of climate change. Well, a bunch of credentialed scientists in the peer-reviewed-up-the-wazoo journal The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences took apart Mark Z Jacobson's paper on renewable energy. And Professor Jacobson responded by suing them, and in the same preferred venue of apparently every litigious scientist - the DC Superior Court:
The lawsuit has drawn comparisons to Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann's 2012 defamation lawsuit against National Review, Mark Steyn, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Rand Simberg, which remains mired in the D.C. Court of Appeals.
"In many ways, this is much worse than any of Michael Mann's lawsuits alleging defamation of character," Georgia Tech retired professor Judith Curry said on her Climate Etc. blog. "Jacobson's lawsuit seeks to settle a genuine scientific disagreement in the courts."
(The Mann suit is a trial by ordeal for yours truly. It's been going on for over half-a-decade, and, if you'd like to do your bit to keep me in the game, you could always stuff a loved one's stocking with a SteynOnline gift certificate this Christmas morn.)
Free speech, the Pervnado, pipe bombs, the Deep State coup...: I'll do my best to get to whatever you bring up this afternoon.
Whether or not you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club, you can listen to the Clubland Q&A live at 5pm US Eastern. And, if you're not yet a member but would like to be, you can sign up any time up to the appointed hour and still pose a question. Don't worry - we're not paywalling off SteynOnline or any of that nonsense. But Club membership does support all our video, audio and print content around the world - and in return confers a few benefits, including not only participation in our Clubland Q&A but also our monthly audio adventures, Tales for Our Time, including tonight's Part Four of A Christmas Carol, and our series of video poetry, which is my own personal attempt to counter the amazing evaporation of shared knowledge over the last generation. We're a convivial band in The Mark Steyn Club, and, if you fancy joining, either for a full year or an experimental quarter, you can find out more about it right here - or sign up a chum for our limited-time-only Christmas Gift Membership, which includes your choice of a handsome hardback book or CD set personally autographed by yours truly.
So see you back here live this afternoon at 5pm US Eastern. That's 2pm Pacific - and, beyond the Americas, 10pm Greenwich Mean Time, 11pm in Europe, the midnight express in Turkey, the wee small hours in India (sorry about that), a marginally less uncivilized hour of Tuesday morning in Oz, 11am in New Zealand and a little later in the rest of the Pacific.
But, whatever time it is where you are, we do hope you'll be able to join us. To listen to the livestream, simply click the "play" icon on the audio player (in certain browsers, the audio will start auto-playing). And to shoot me a question simply use the comment form below. See you in a few hours. And, for those who like pictures with their punditry, afterwards I'll be on air with Tucker Carlson, coast to coast on Fox News.
