Thursday, January 20, 2011

Joy-Ann Reid The Miami Herald

January 20, 2011

Joy-Ann Reid
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: Welcome to the Big Leagues – Some comments on your column in the Herald about how the wich, wascally, Wepublicans are so mean they should be horsewhipped, metaphorically speaking. That could be an example of “violent rhetoric on the Right” but since it’s directed at the Right it can’t be, right?

Ms Reid,

Congratulations!

I hereby name you to be this year’s first Board Certified modern American Liberal ink stained wench.

All it took was perseverance and a fully developed genetic ability to believe that feelings and ideas are the same; that History is a myth; that human nature is politically perfectible; that words and deeds are the same; that profit is evil; and that, finally, all we need is love.

Before else I would like you to use your new media status to find out if Richard Gere had dinner at the White House last night. Lord Barack had Uncle Wong, the head Chi-Com, in for a big chow down. Gere has been chanting “Free Tibet” for years. Wong and his predecessors have held Tibet under their lion’s paw since 1959. Maybe Gere would have thrown a butter sculpture of the Dalai Lama at him. Who knows? Get back to me on that, please. I do know that Jackie Chan was there as a guest of his famous uncle, noted sleuth and gum shoe, Charlie.

The Republican Right is, to paraphrase Johnson, [Samuel. Not Michael, not Lyndon] evil and the source of evil in others.

Who knew that Jesse Jackson was an acolyte in the church of Rush Limbaugh? I can think of no other reason why he would say, and on national TV, that he wanted to “cut Obama’s nuts off”.

It’s easy to see why Glenn Beck would have helped in the production of the movie version of “The Assassination of George W. Bush”. When he produces “The Assassination of Barack H. Obama” he can say that “turnabout is fair play”. He can, can’t he?








It’s easy to highlight the Simian qualities of Lord Barack the Beneficent. After all, the Democratic Party and the New York Times acquiesced in calling Lincoln a “baboon”.

The supporters of John Adams said that if Thomas Jefferson won the election his supporters would rape the women and butcher the babies.

You decry the “violent rhetoric on the Right”.

3 years ago Senator Durbin [D-IL] AKA “Little Dick”, said that GIs were acting like Nazis.

Yesterday, Congressman Cohen [D-TN] AKA “What a Putz”, said that Republicans were Nazis.

.How would you characterize the above quotes? Interestingly, both men said those things on the floors of Congress. You know, of course, that no member can be held accountable for what is said on the floor. Wouldn’t it have been nice if some full time professional Kumbaya keeners had denounced the statements?

How about “violent rhetoric on the Left”?

Julianne Malveaux, an erstwhile modern American Liberal ink stained wench, now a full time college loan promoter, once wrote that the wife of Clarence Thomas should feed him ice cream for breakfast, crème Brule for mind-morning snacks, double bacon cheeseburgers for lunch, pizza in lieu of high tea, and lard, both fried and broiled, for dinner. If he had a tummy ache she hoped that Mrs. Thomas would IV him with egg nog, beer, and Crisco. Black men have a tendency to hypertension. This leads to a statistically disproportionate number of myocardial infarctions and cerebral hemorrhages in Black men. [That this is doubtless caused by the Republicans, and who says we don’t have death panels, there can be no doubt] Could this be a fuzzy paradigm of “violent rhetoric on the left”?

Fame and fortune await.

Once you get over the truth, and a damned inconvenient truth at that, that “stones are hard and water is wet” you’ll go far. I smell Pulitzer. Somebody has to fill the void left by Janet Cook’s career change.

You go, girl!



Speaking of Janet Cook, could it not be defined as inherent institutional racism that she was made to give back her Pulitzer Prize and made a pariah by her employer, the Washington Post, while Walter Duranty remains undiminished?

Cook made up a story of a drug addict’s child. I am told that while it was completely false it was a fascinating tale. In many ways it was the predecessor to the Dan Rather report on President Bush. “False, but accurate” was his clever retort. In the end, no one was hurt.

Duranty lied about what Stalin was doing in Ukraine in 1931 and 1932. As many as 8,000,000 people died because of his lie. Further, Hitler noticed that the West did nothing. Duranty took the first step that ended with 12,000,000 going into the oven. The New York Times refuses to acknowledge his perfidy. Need I tell you that Duranty was a White man?

Double standard? “You betcha”, as Sarah Palin would say.

Before you are on the View maybe you could tell me what happened to the “Summer of Recovery”. Did I miss it? Was it a victim of Climate Change?

I’ve been trying for 2 years to find, either in Broward or Miami-Dade, a “shovel ready” project. Any ideas?





Kevin Smith

Michael Putney The Miami Herald

January 14, 2010

Michael Putney
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “that’s you and me, bunky” – Some comments on your column about the governance of Florida with a covert air of what have those damned voters done now.

Mr. Putney,

The Great Nechemie, CPA to the big time Democratic pols of New Jersey [plus me], and the only man I knew who voted for Henry Wallace, oft times called me “Bunky”. Since he has gone to that great counting house in the sky, Green Eye Shade Heaven if you will, I consider it my duty to keep his name alive.

Your reference to the $33,000,000 mortgage that the people of Florida took out to build a court house, hereinafter referred to as Taj Mahal 2, misses, in typical modern American Liberal fashion, the point.

I began to vote against all bond issues – no exceptions – in 1984. The reason was simple. The language in the referendum was in violation of Federal law. The particular law is called the Truth in Lending Act.

I bought a new car that year. The dealer wanted to finance the purchase. He explained how much the loan would cost me right down to the last penny. He even told me how the Rule of 78 would apply should I, in a burst of husbandry disguised as a memorial to the doomed Polonius, decide to prepay the loan.

Thus, the people of Florida did not pay $33,000,000 for TM2. We will pay $82,000,000 for it. That figure consists of the original amount, $33,000,000, plus $49,000,000 in interest. If a Suede Shoe Sam, a used car salesman wearing electric blue slacks with a knock off Versace shirt, did not tell me how much the loan would cost me I would wind up owning his lot. Shouldn’t voters have the same right?

From that day to this every referendum about indebtedness gets an automatic “NO” from me. Whether it’s for manatee charter schools, bovine eructation internal combustion engine plants, highways, bigger highways, Save the Swamp, the one most treacley, the lachrymose laden, perpetual plaint “For the children”, and the latest pilfery, underfunded public pension plans it gets an automatic “NO”.

You may want to take a peek at the MOATC – the Mother of All Taj Mahal Courthouses.




It’s in Boston.

The people of the United States began to build a Court House in Boston in the late ‘80s. After getting the people of this fair land to spend $15,000,000,000 [that’s 15 billion dollars] to build a tunnel under Boston a new Federal building was a mere bagatelle.

Little did the sap citizens know that it had both beginner and advanced ski slopes in the basement. In addition to waterfalls and an East Cost version of purple mountain majesty above the fruited plain there were salmon runs, parquet basketball courts with the voice of Johnny Most in perpetual rasp, mosh pits, alas, no pistol ranges, a rubber room for anybody named Kennedy, and a mirror lined smoke filled room so that the Judges could better decipher the penumbras and emanations that the Founders had hidden in the Constitution.

No one knows how much it cost. If it were built as well as the Boston Tunnel, known affectionately as the Big Ditch, no one will ever know how much it will cost. The tunnel ceiling, in continuous repair mode, doesn’t leak that much anymore. Miles of Duck Tape and tankers filled with Gorilla Glue seem to have stanched the surge. Global Warming, the reason why the water in Boston harbor has risen 26 feet, might yet overcome it.

Dillard High School, one of the crowns in Broward County education, has incurred rebuilding and renovation costs of almost 5 times the original construction cost. As the legal community likes to say, “Stare decisis”.

The man in charge of the Boston Court House was Chief Judge David Breyer. It was like putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank. Spending the public’s money like a thirsty sailor on leave did not prove to be a career impediment for him.

I’ll say this for modern American Liberals. They take care of their own.

I am not sure there is a declarative sentence definition of “snarkiness” but your comments on Governor Scott’s familiarity with the words of “God Bless the U.S.A” is surely a supreme specimen of “snarky”. I am sorry that “at least”, as in “at least I know I’m free”, rankles you. Would you have preferred that he accompanied some long haired transgendered tattooed hippy zither maestro playing “Kumbaya”? How about “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow”. Would that have given you hope for the future? To quote Lord Barack the Beneficent and Blessed be his Name, Scott “won” the election. He can pick any song he wants.

You know what rankles me? The ability of an ink stained wretch to have his olfactory senses so trained that he is unaware of the foetid bouquet of his “Nonmalodorous Fecal Matter Syndrome. ?? Send a SASE.



At the memorial service/pep rally in Tucson there were tee-shirts which said “Together We Thrive”, a slogan destined to be forgotten in record time, a man from the other side of the mirror babbling on about Father Sky and Mother Earth, cheerleaders, and yet one more rendition of “Theme for the Common Man”. The estate of Aaron Copeland has surely benefited handsomely from it being played at every public function that has a Democrat holding the microphone. The only thing missing was Oprah, her couch, and Dr.Phil.

Am I the last man standing who thinks that Mozart’s “Requiem” may have been a tad more appropriate? Surely someone in the White House has heard of Beethoven.

Perhaps Scott will turn out to be a helpless naïf in the Tallahassee Knocking Shoppe called the legislature and controlled by hated special interests, particularly those that advocate things that you oppose. Perhaps he will turn out to have some Mary Magdalene qualities. Perhaps is, like money, the Mother’s Milk of Politics. It’s why we have elections.

In either event the people, those ungrateful lizards, have spoken.


Kevin Smith



PS – I am from Hudson County, New Jersey. Bayonne to be precise. The first Taj Mahal we learned about was not the one in Agra but the one in Jersey City. It was the Hudson County jail. The Sheriff was known as Ali Baba. Guess what his deputies were called.

Monday, January 17, 2011

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz

January 16, 2011

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz

Pembroke Pines, FL

RE: Rhetoric, heated or otherwise; discourses, reasoned or otherwise; free speech or not; “slippery slopes” and/or “chilling effects”. Some comments on your essay in this morning’s Miami Herald.

Debbie, Debbie,

First, a style point.

Your CV says that you have two degrees in Political Science. That should mean that you would be familiar, if not necessarily conversant, with all things Greek: Ideas, History, literature, culture, and its lasting effect on Western Civilization.

The Trivium, the capstone of Western Man’s development and a monument to reasoned discourse, consists of three parts: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Grammar is the glue allows Rhetoric to present an argument in, forgive me, Logical order.

Your piece in this morning’s Herald contains a glaringly egregious error. You say “…for none of us are immune”. That is akin to having 6 hecates debating 6 harridans, said debate being refereed by Lillian Hellman with Bella Abzug being the time keeper, by using their finger nails on a blackboard to make their arguments.

None is a collective noun. The correct verb in this instance is “is”. Gosh! I sound positively Clintonesque, don’t I?

It is a small point, no bigger than a man’s fist against the horizon, but it is a vital part of making an argument. Was it Alice or the Red Queen who said, “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean”.

It is possible that you did not write this. I have fond memories of you being on TV when your flack catcher, doubtless an employee on a public payroll, said that you could only take a few questions because “Debbie’s time is so precious”.

You may want to spend some of that “precious time” snuggling up to Strunk & White. If you can’t why not have some of your amanuenses do it.

You write movingly of Congresswoman Giffords because a man with snakes for brains shot her.





My last gun fight was 18 years ago.

The first police officer was dead before he hit the ground.

The second one took a .357 slug from 10 feet. It went into his right quadrant about one inch from his sternum. The hole was about the size of a quarter, a 25 cent piece.

I rendered immediate first aid for 17 minutes before the paramedics arrived.

He danced at my daughter’s wedding 2 ½ years later.

I know what damage a mad man with a gun can do.

I use that knowledge as a starting point

In your examples of the “bile and vitriol that have been tearing us apart at the seems” you use as examples the vandalizing of Congressman Grisalva’s office, Congresswoman Giffords’s windows being shot out, and Congressman Perrielo’s gas lines being cut.

I tell you that the Greeks would have told you that correlation is not causation. Further, if you know any prosecutors, ask them what kind of a case could be made with such evidence as you present.

Speaking of “slippery slopes” and “chilling effects” we are coming up to the 10th anniversary of you sending Agent Thomas and Agent Mineva of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to my house because of something I wrote to and about you. These men had badges and guns.

Thomas Jefferson, noted oenophile and revolutionary, said that when people fear the government we have tyranny. When the government fears the people we have liberty.

Your examples of “bile and vitriol” lacked one thing. You neglected to mention that the victims were all Democrats.

Speaking of Democrats, don’t you think you should have mentioned Democratic Senator Manchin of West Virginia? In the election to fill former KuKluxKlan member Robert Byrd’s seat – He was Deputy Grand Kleagle, wasn’t he? – he shot an ad using a scoped high powered rifle to shoot a hole in the proposed Tax and Cup Bill. I was in the coal business in West Virginia. That’s how I know that the rifle was high powered.






Why didn’t you include Julianne Malveaux? She said that she hoped that Justice Thomas’s wife fed him a high fat diet so that he would have a heart attack and a stroke.

How about Nina Totenberg? As the equine visaged hit lady of NPR she said that she hoped that one of Senator Helms’s grandchildren got AIDS.

Do you remember when Alec Baldwin said that “Congressman Henry Hyde should be stoned to death”?

How about Michael Moore wishing that more Republicans had died on 9/11?

Sean Penn, the special friend of Castro and Chavez, suggested terminal rectal cancer as a policy towards anyone in opposition to him.

Why wasn’t the movie “The Assassination of George W. Bush” denounced as being filled with “bile and vitriol”?

Even a knowledge not past cursory would show that my examples have one common thread.

They are all modern American Liberals.

Apparently none of them makes the cut when you call the roll of “bile and vitriol” spewers.

Could it be that you have “no enemies on the Left”? Could it be another syndrome common to mALs everywhere? Arnold Lunn, in the middle of a “low dishonest decade”, named it “eclectic indignation”.

Speaking of contemporary Sophists, whatever happened to Mrs. Clinton’s crusade to find the big money roots of the “vast Right-Wing conspiracy”? It’s been 15 years since she asked her fawning friends and sycophants in the media to find out who was after her husband. It’s about the same time that OJ has been trying to find his wife’s killers. Any updates on either of them? [Vlad Cheney, the evil twin of former VP Darth Cheney, gets my vote.] Didn’t Senator Clinton say, in voice that made banshees sound like a Glee Club of Suzan Boyles, that she was “sick and tired” of being told that she was unpatriotic because she was opposed to President Bush? Didn’t she say that General Petraeus was a liar? Was there any “bile and vitriol” there?

Senator Durbin [D- Il] compared American military personnel to Nazis. Beyond “bile and vitriol” shouldn’t that have entered the realm of “blood libel”?

When “bile and vitriol”, particularly in American politics, are mentioned it is good to have some knowledge of the campaigns of 1800 and 1876. They make last year’s campaigns look like a garden party. And they did it without electricity!

The incumbent in 1800 actually had a law passed that made it illegal to criticize the government. He was not returned to office.

Silly me, but I assume you know that the Democratic Party and the New York Times wanted a negotiated settlement with the South in the Civil War. Does that mean that they both favored slavery? Since both acquiesced in calling Abraham Lincoln a “baboon” does that mean that they were complicit in his assassination?

Did “bile and vitriol” cooked in a “climate of hate” cause dedicated Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, to shoot John Kennedy?

Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy because he thought it would help his countrymen. What “bile and vitriol”, other than that of any anti-Semite, caused him to so act?

Should any blame be given to Jodie Foster for the shooting of the Great Reagan? [Can you imagine Walter Mondale playing poker with Gorbachev at Reykjavik? I can’t either.]

Edmund Burke, another descendant of those pesky Greeks, said the never ending conflict in any society is between freedom and order. What happened in Tucson was the work of a drug crazed mad man. It is anathema for a modern American Liberal even to entertain the idea that evil, evil as real as your boot, exists. The group instinct is to control, to stifle, to limit freedom in the name of the common good.

Tread lightly on curbing anyone’s speech.


“Free men speak with free tongues”


Kevin Smith


PS – Has your 11 year old daughter, the one who is worried about Florida enforcing Federal laws about immigration, studied the life of Amy Carter? Who can forget her father, the worst President of the 20th century, using his daughter’s supposed fear of nuclear proliferation in his debate with Governor Reagan. Perhaps you could assign your civic minded daughter to find out if the words “aid and comfort to the enemy”, words found in the Constitution, apply to Senator Reid [D-NV] when he said “the war is lost”?

William V. Gibson The Sun-Sentinel

January 12, 2011

William V. Gibson
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Los Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316

RE: To drill or not to drill in the Gulf? That is the question raised in article about same. And will there be a follow up article on whether or not we can depend on Hugo Chavez to help us in our time of need?

Mr. Gibson,

Senator Graham, Co-Chairman of the Woe is Us ‘Cuz We Still Burn Fossil Fuels and Let’s Bring Ned Lud Back Committee, said

“We’ve been wise enough not to drill in our own
property and politically able to maintain a
buffer in terms of federal water.”

Would not Logic dictate that as soon as Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama discover this they will demand the same protections for their tourist and fishing industries?

It is always an inconvenient truth but facts are hard things.

25% of the gasoline used in this country comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Florida is getting a free ride. We share in the harvest without having to worry about the planting and tending. Until bovine eructations, manatee musk, or excess Sheep Dip become a fuel that is an economically viable way of getting people from Point A to Point B we are going to have live with gasoline and the consequences thereof.

Perhaps Floridians will be made so mad by an excess of “Rainbow Stew” that they will give up their cars for one week a month. Perhaps a fifth Gospel will appear. Perhaps men will become angels.

Senator Graham, in a stirring tribute to the empirically self evident, said, “I don’t believe that anybody can say categorically that any set of recommendations, if totally adopted, would give us zero risk that this would occur again”.

Harland & Wolf, the company that built the R.M.S. Titanic, would agree with that statement. Ditto for the people who built the Challenger.

Tell me. Do they still put erasers on pencils?

“Man was not made for safe havens.”





Senator Graham proudly proclaimed in his long weekend run for the Democratic nomination for the Presidency that he was a product of the public schools of Florida. Res ipso loquitur. They were bad then too. It’s good to know that it didn’t start with Governor Bush.

Your article does not mention whether or not Senator Graham addressed the problems of Cuba drilling off its coast. Would I be thought a cad if I were to mention that the United States affirmed the right of a sovereign nation, in this case the fun loving Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Cuba, to drill in international waters contiguous to the United States? Further, this treaty was signed by Democrat Jimmy Carter and ratified by a Democratic Senate.

BP is an entity subject to the Secretary of the Interior putting his “boot on its neck”. The President of the United States, a man whose thin CV lists him as a former teacher of Constitutional Law, came down squarely for the Rule of Law by saying as soon as he found the proper ass to kick by God he was going to kick it.

Does that border on retroactive corporate hate speech?

Absent the forcible entry of the United States Navy how does this administration, or any administration, intend to keep Florida oysters, sword fish, stone crabs, and various sun lovers free from the perils of petroleum and its bastard spawn, petrochemicals, spewing from Cuba? Que paso if the Chinese are doing the drilling? It is true that there is no limit to the madness and lunacies that modern American Liberals can bring forth given an unlimited budget, a word processor, and no one saying “Liar, liar pants on fire”.

Shouldn’t the Sun-Sentinel show us the way to energy independence or energy altruism by promising not to use any air conditioning in its World Headquarters this summer? Think of how those saved polar bears will be able to protect the fragile Arctic environment by eating more of those pesky baby seals.

Deo gratias for mush brained modern American Liberals. Who else can make us feel warm and fuzzy about our inner selves?




Kevin Smith

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Gary Stein The Sun-Sentinel

January 12, 2011

Gary Stein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: “Right Wing whining is out of control” – Some comments on you not quite over the top snarky column on political discourse in today’s Sun-Sentinel.

Mr. Stein,

“There’s a $5 Dollar Fine for Whining” is one of my favorite Texas saloon songs.

When you’re right you’re right. Modern American Liberals, an inbred motley collection of curs who can look through a keyhole with both eyes at the same time, are known for their civility, their restraint, and their manners.

Thus, when Michael Moore, he of triple cholesterol numbers, a man who has killed at least 3 cats by stepping on their tails, said “more Republicans should have died on 9/11/01” he really meant that anyone who thought that Bush 41 was a good guy and that Bush 43 was a chip off the old block should have a major league Time Out.

Thus, when Alec Baldwin said that “Henry Hyde should be stoned to death”, he really meant that it was OK to hit him with a water balloon or a cream pie.

Taken out of context, some foolish people, people easily lead by demagogues, “mind numbed robots” who think that Wal*Mart exploits single moms who are women of color with children in need of a good Ritalin program, might think that it was OK to go and kill a Congressman. Luckily we have our vaunted social safety net to intervene and prevent a tragedy. [Did you ever wonder why “tragedy” is modified by “senseless”? Wouldn’t that mean that there is a “sensible tragedy” out there?]

When Lord Barack the Beneficent, and Blessed be his Name, said that he “wanted to kick somebody’s ass” what he really meant was that there is no such thing as a bad boy and that a steady diet of Midnight Basketball would have prevented the BP blowout.

When you become familiar with “tu quoque” get back to me. Meanwhile, “Congress shall make no law…” is still in force.




Kevin Smith

Professor Greenville Draper

January 10, 2011

Professor Greenville Draper
Department of Earth & Environment
Florida International University

Miami, Florida

RER: What do you have against Dante? – Some comments on your not quite snarky blurb on the Yahoos who don’t genuflect at the altar of Climate Change, nee Global Warming, nee Global Cooling, nee the “Of course the world is flat” school, as proclaimed by you in this morning’s Miami Herald.

My dear Professor,

Since Professor Paul Ehrlich, and by Crikey if there is a smarter guy anywhere I want to meet him, told the world in 1970 – 40 years ago – that the race was between starving to death and freezing to death with the finish line ending at the year 2000 I feel like I have been on borrowed time for the last 11 years.

Full disclosure requires me to tell you that I am “calorically challenged”. That 3rd Worlders are starving because of my insatiable desire for Blue Fin sushi, Kobe beef, Crème Brule, farm raised peccary, Big Macs, brown whisky and red meat, there can be no doubt. Alas, my need for inorganic endive and rugala, flavored pop corn, and hot house truffles [both black and white], all of which require inordinate amounts of fossil fuel to raise, will be on my conscience until my cholesterol levels cause my liver to explode.

You say, as only someone totally unfamiliar with the Trivium, that it, it being defined as someone who thinks the Wizard behind the curtain is full of ca-ca, “defied logic”.

#1 – As one of the capstones of Western Civilization logic should be Logic.
#2 – It can’t be “defied”; it can only be offended.

You say “skeptic” as if it were a four letter word. In case you haven’t noticed “skepticism” is what makes the dog hunt.

All scientific discovery is based on “skepticism”.



I know that in the Ptolemaic and/or Copernican universe the sun either revolves around the earth or it doesn’t because it does both but only in Age comfortable with Aquarius, and I still haven’t figured out which is witch and then Galileo came along and really queered the pitch [N.B. the play on words.] I do know that Columbus didn’t fall off the edge of the earth as the universally accepted science of the time said he would. The only thing I am sure of is that skepticism did not begin with the sudden realization that former Vice President Alpha Gump was/is/ and shall be a horse’s ass of Homeric proportions.

The History of Science, beginning with Aristotle, shows that someone saying “What if”, or “I don’t believe it”, or “Prove it”, is when palpable progress is made. Further, “correlation is not causation” is a lesson that must be learned over and over and over, and over again.

The supposedly unimpeachable science of the Autism and Measles vaccine connection is now in the same category as the Bermuda Triangle or tomatoes are poison. Children died because an alchemist in a white lab coat lied. What makes that worse is that the scientific world gulped and said nothing. Meryl Steep, noted chemist, biologist, and boob warned us of the dangers of Alar. Erin Brockovich made a fortune warning us of a danger that didn’t exist. Malaria, literally bad air, was essentially wiped out until Rachel Carson, one of the 20th century’s greatest quacks, doctored the books and got DDT banned. 2,000,000 sub-Saharan Black children die each year because fairly affluent White First Worlders feel warm and fuzzy about themselves. Donna Shalala, when she was a Clinton cabinet officer in 1996, told us that we would all be dead from AIDS in 10 years. At least she gave us 6 more years than Professor Ehrlich. Go Canes!

Cranberries, Phisohex, Saccharine, salt, incandescent light bulbs, diapers, Mark Twain, DWEMs, cigars, plastic versus paper, asbestos, leaded gasoline, waxing and waning ozone layers, drowning polar bears, Lysenko, Margaret Sanger and “culling the herd”. Who says Ned Lud is dead?

Weren’t scientific theses subject to independent replication and verification? At the very least wasn’t the discovery of a perpetual motion machine on the East Coast subject to some testing by neutral scientists on the West Coast?

Whatever happened to what was once called the scientific method?

The story may be apocryphal but Einstein was said to have posted all his work into the early 20th century universe of physicists. He knew he only had to be proved wrong once. If he were, or so he was supposed to have said, he “could get on to something new”.




A Senator from a profoundly crooked city, county, and state, a place where the pennies on a dead man’s eyes would not survive the first round of mourners, a place where no stove could be hot enough to keep a quarter on it when the “boys” are in the kitchen, told us that if we voted for him the oceans would stop rising and that the temperature would cool.. Your CV lists you as a Professor of Earth and Environment. If you had a first year survey student say that what grade would he earn?

I await the annual Jeremiad about the snows once again receding from Mt. Kilimanjaro. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the snows have been receding since 1888. Can anything be made of the fact that 1888 was the first year that they were measured? One uptick here is that we may yet find out how those damned leopards got up there.

You say that you are “not a little annoyed with the Miami Herald publishing letters” preaching heresy. Although I am positive your litotes was unintentional I applaud you for the first totally honest thing you said.

The modern scientific community is made up of naked Emperors who twice a day commands the tide to bend to accepted truths. At least Canute knew his sycophants were full of “it”. In this instance “it” needs no definition.




Kevin Smith


PS – As to my throwaway line asking you what do you have against Dante I am sure you know that there was an upward spike in temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere 1100 years ago. Several things happened because of this. More land became arable. More protein was grown and consumed. Man got smarter. We had the Renaissance. Dante’s opening line was “Halfway through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error”. Sound advice then. Sound advice now.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Victor Davis Hanson

Interesting article by Victor Davis Hanson on the importance of Liberal Arts can be found here.