*Government by Wishful Thinking, by Steven Den Beste.

“The teleological world view on the left has been a factor in American politics to a greater or lesser extent since the 1960’s, but this is the first time it was largely in control. And the most likely outcome of it is to make most Americans understand just how deeply worthless, and outright damaging, it is. Which, in the long run, will be very good for America.”

Read the whole thing.

*Young Voters, Independents, Pose Problem for Obama, by Julie Mason.

*The Unrealistic Realist, by Mark Steyn.

*The Perversion of Language, or Orwell Revisited, by Mark Falcoff.

“Precision in language is an expression of accuracy in thought — or, as Orwell put it, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier to have foolish thoughts.” The emergence of an independent media on the Internet may help to clarify meanings, or at least introduce a proper discussion of what words really mean. For the time being, one can only nod in the direction of Orwell’s grave and hope for the best.”

ClimateGate and Copenhagen

*A Skeptic’s Guide to Copenhagen, by Tunku Varadarajan.

*Scientists Behaving Badly, by Steven F. Hayward.

“I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so.”

*Media Complicity in ClimateGate, at The Washington Times.

*The Warming Faithful Gather in Copenhagen, by Bruce Bawer.

“The plain fact is that after Communism disappeared in Europe, the Green movement arose to take its place as a counterforce to democratic capitalism — meaning that every crank and malcontent who previously would have been a Communist or fellow traveler now keeps busy ranting about the way in which capitalist societies, America above all, are brutally destroying the environment, greedily using up resources at rates a zillion times higher than people in developing countries. The global-warming cause is a subset of this — and to my mind it’s always seemed to be, for Europeans anyway, not only a means of elbowing the U.S. in the ribs, but also a convenient distraction, a way to avoid dealing with the continent’sreal problem, namely Islamization, while still allowing oneself to posture as a serious, responsible-minded citizen.”

Ouch.  Be sure to check out his book While Europe Slept, you won’t be disappointed.

*The Most Influential Tree in the World, by Christopher Booker.

“The most quoted remark in those emails has been one from Prof Jones in 1999, reporting that he had used “Mike [Mann]’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps” to “Keith’s” graph, in order to “hide the decline”. Invariably this has been quoted out of context. Its true significance, we can now see, is that what they intended to hide was the awkward fact that, apart from that one tree, the Yamal data showed temperatures not having risen in the late 20th century but declining. What Jones suggested, emulating Mann’s procedure for the “hockey stick” (originally published in Nature), was that tree-ring data after 1960 should be eliminated, and substituted – without explanation – with a line based on the quite different data of measured global temperatures, to convey that temperatures after 1960 had shot up.”

RELATED: Understanding ClimateGate’s Hidden Decline, by Marc Sheppard.  This is a great overall review of the “trick” used to “hide the decline,” and is too in depth and too good to summarize or paraphrase.