RUTHFULLY YOURS

Several state attorneys general have joined in a campaign to prosecute energy companies for “misleading investors” on global warming.

These AGs claim a conspiracy implying that investors are unaware that climate changes may impact investments and have committed to using the power of the state to prove it. In November 2015, Exxon Mobil was targeted by New York State attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman by pursuing a strategy based on claimed similarities to the way tobacco companies were found guilty in 2006 of suppressing their own research showing tobacco being both harmful and addictive.

Virginia AG Mark Herring joined five other AGs and former Vice President Gore in the goal of determining “whether fossil fuel companies misled investors and the public on the impact of climate change on their businesses.” Herring is also a supporter of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan (CPP).

When scientific argument fails its cause, governmental legal prosecution becomes Plan B. “Attorneys General and law enforcement officials around the country have long held a vital role in ensuring that the progress we have made…” according to Gore. That is the “inconvenient truth” of governmental dogma.

Claiming disastrous climate change related to human activities, alarmists disregard eons of natural climate variations. Climate change is a vague term and is often undefined. No student of history denies that the climate changes. These AGs posturing as legal determiners of scientific truth join the current vogue to label variations in some idealized concept of an unchanging “normal” climate (the Goldilocks Climate) as a disaster. The evidence is otherwise: sea level rate-of-rise remains about 7 inches per century, droughts are cyclical, tornadoes are less frequent and less deadly, fewer hurricanes are hitting the U.S., even the polar bears are thriving. Global temperatures have plateaued for 18 years even as CO2 levels have increased 10 per cent (the recent El Nino caused an expected temperature spike).

Do you know who is selling you that souvenir T-shirt in the airport? You might want to.

In the late 1970s, it became known to international security agencies that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) owned a variety of duty-free shops in airports across Africa. They didn’t get too excited — selling newspapers and snack food didn’t seem particularly dangerous, and the breech of security posed by terrorists with all-airport access passes doesn’t seem to have aroused any great level of concern.

But that was before we stripped to our skivvies and dumped our lattes in order to board a plane. After years of hijackings and the horrors of 9/11, surely we’re smarter now.

Or not. Following the ISIS-orchestrated bombing at the Brussels Zaventem airport, part of a two-pronged attack that killed 31 people and injured more than 300, Belgian police disclosed that more than 50 known ISIS supporters are working in the airport as baggage handlers, cleaners, and catering staff. They have unprecedented access to passenger areas, back hallways, runways, and onto the airplanes themselves. The situation was so dire before the March 22nd bombing that Israeli inspectors warned the Belgian authorities of the danger. Similar warnings may also have come from the United States. No matter — nothing at all was done.

Some European countries, particularly the UK, have stepped up security around airports and other major facilities. But their focus is almost entirely on people passing through the system — passengers and their families — while the truth is the insider threat receives only perfunctory consideration in most Western venues.

Apart from airports, insider threats have been noted at nuclear power plants. In Belgium at least two atomic power stations have had jihadists working inside — at least two of whom went off to Syria to fight for ISIS. A plot, uncovered in Belgian authorities in February, appears to have targeted a senior scientist in hopes of acquiring nuclear material. Time magazine reported that 12 nuclear plant workers were stripped of their access badges — eight before the Zaventem bombing and four after.

The threat of an attack on a nuclear facility raises many horrific possibilities: a reactor meltdown, the theft of radioactive material for a dirty bomb, or holding a nuclear plant hostage threatening to destroy it unless specific conditions are met. But the most immediate and dire danger is a combination of an airplane hijacking and a 9/11 style hit on an atomic power plant.

Conservatives have good reason to view American universities as hostile territory. The 2006 Politics of the American Professoriate survey, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, found that 17.6% of faculty in the social sciences consider themselves Marxists. Only 3.6% consider themselves conservatives. The same survey suggested that if the election of 2004 had been held exclusively in faculty lounges, John Kerry would have won in a historic landslide, 77.6% to 20.4%.

Progressive academics, otherwise so skilled at finding the prejudice behind every disparity, typically shrug this off. According to Mr. Gross, the explanation professors most often give for the scarcity of conservatives among their colleagues is that conservatives are close-minded. The second most popular explanation is that they are too money hungry to settle for a professor’s salary. In other words, if conservative academics are rare, they have their own defects to blame.

In “Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University,” Jon A. Shields and Joshua M. Dunn Sr. are not complaining—conservatives both, they are tenured political scientists at Claremont McKenna College and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. They aim to understand those conservatives who, despite being “widely stigmatized in academia,” have nonetheless made a home in higher education: What are they like, and how do they think they are doing?

Messrs. Shields and Dunn “interviewed and surveyed 153 conservative professors in six disciplines in the social sciences and humanities” at 84 universities. They located a diverse group of conservatives, including libertarians, by gathering names from conservative journals and organizations, and then they asked those professors to identify other conservatives. Messrs. Shields and Dunn do not claim that their sample is representative. But the results of their study, the first of its kind, are intriguing. CONTINUE AT SITE