Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

The publication in the New Haven Register of one of my columns produced a letter of protest on 4/12/17 from climate scientist Michael Mann. Both the original column and Mann’s response may be found in Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes From A Blue State here “ The Curse Of Victimology .” The gravamen of the column and blog, put in a single sentence, is this: Scientific matters in dispute should not, and perhaps cannot, be decided by courts. The blog and column also touches on victimology. Corollary: Courts should not be used by “scientists” as a thumbscrew to silence legitimate scientific inquiry.

Andree in Malta “It’s not what you known that counts. It’s not even who you know that counts. It’s what you got on who you know that counts.” -- Sicilian saying It may be possible that there is a Sicilian crouching in the soul of every journalist worth his ink. My recommendation for people who travel is to allow for a bit of serendipity in their trip. Malta, for Andree and me, was the serendipitous part of our travels to Italy and beyond. Why, it may be asked, Malta? Because of Mary from Malta, of course. We met MFM while living in Bethel Connecticut some years ago, when the world was young and Europe was not on the point of economic collapse. Mary and her husband lived next door, and Andrée and she struck up a friendship that revolved around Malta, a mystery my wife had not yet penetrated. Andrée is a voracious reader of mysteries -- and people. When after several trips to Europe we became poorer and poorer – owing mostly to politicians on this side of the pond who do n...

The picture of Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy given us by reporter Ted Mann in a twelve part series is that of a self-assured reformer perpetually on the go. Mr. Malloy is in a hurry to re-invent Connecticut. He is everywhere in the state, doing everything, his calendar of events much more crowded than that of his predecessor, former Governor Jodi Rell. If Mrs. Rell was the turtle governor, Mr. Malloy is the chief executive hare. The most recent media release of the New Year, soon to be supplanted by dozens of others, is captioned: “THURSDAY: GOV. MALLOY DONATES BLOOD; HOLDS CEREMONIAL SIGNING OF JACKSON LABS BILL; ATTENDS AGRICULTURAL MEETING; SPEAKS AT EDUCATION WORKSHOP; ATTENDS TOWN HALL MEETING IN NORWICH.” Reporters in the state might not be surprised should they receive from Mr. Malloy’s various a release announcing that the governor next Thursday will be spit shining Mintaka, the third star in Orion’s Belt. Newt Gingrich, a Republican presidential wannabe, has been crit...

National Review, the county’s premier conservative magazine, wacked Newt Gingrich with a big stick in its December 31 pre-Iowa vote issue. The magazine featured on its cover a zany cartoon of Mr. Gingrich on the moon with a lead line above its masthead – “The Editors: Against Gingrich.” There are four feature articles on Mr. Gingrich, all cripplingly critical: “’How Speaker Newt Balanced The Budget’ (and why president Newt would not)” by Kevin Williamson; “‘Amnesty Again’ (Gingrich’s plan would reward criminals and make the law arbitrary)” by Kris Kobach; “‘Some Shade Of Green’ (The former Speaker has a longstanding love-hate relationship with environmental reform)” by Jonathan Adler; and perhaps most devastating, “‘The Gingrich Gestalt’ (You take a dubious record. You take some wacky ideas, you take a narcissistic personality…)” by Mark Steyn, more politically astute than the late Christopher Hitchens and just as dangerous. Together the articles do not represent, shall we say...

Rick Green, a Hartford Courant columnist and blogger , reports on his blog CTConfidential that “Rowdy students prevented New Canaan's Ann Coulter from speaking in Ottawa” Canada, and he added “That will stop her” in apparent approval. Closer to home, UConn students successfully blocked Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton   from speaking on campus. Coulter said later that the Canadian university that scheduled her to speak was a second rate institution, and Boughton, who is running for governor on the Republican ticket this year, politely protested his exclusion from a law school panel before which he had been invited to speak. Boughten did not characterize UConn as a second rate college. Canada, more or less patterned after European models, has no First Amendment rights. Mark Steyn, a Canadian writer much published here in the land of Jefferson and Madison, has had a tougher time of it in Canada, where a quasi governmental agency – the amusingly miss-named Canadian Human Rights Comm...

Mark Steyn says we’re on our way to Europe, a trip he’d rather avoid. But why not have a few laughs along the route to utterly predictable ruin? Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is on TV explaining the (at this point the congregation shall fall to its knees and prostrate itself) "stimulus." "How," asks the lady from CBS, "does $335 million in STD [Sexually Transmitted Disease] prevention stimulate the economy?" "I'll tell you how," says Speaker Pelosi. "I'm a big believer in prevention. And we have, er… there is a part of the bill on the House side that is about prevention. It's about it being less expensive to the states to do these measures." Makes a lot of sense. If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries. To do this, we need trillion-dollar deficits, which our children and grandchildren w...

In a wonderfully literate preview of the Obama Era, Mark Steyn in National Review examines the pitfalls of Obamaism. “And, whether or not we get a massive federal program of rural library construction, we seem certain to get an acceleration of the grim leftward ratchet effect: “(a) more subordination of the dynamic part of the economy to arthritic government regulation; “(b) more of the remorseless annexation of health care by government, until eventually the point about whether to move to a socialized system will be entirely moot; “(c) more so-called tax cuts, a term the Democrats have successfully usurped to apply to nanny-state “credits” the government condescends to allow you in return for living your life the way they want you to; “(d) federally funded preschool and a few other entitlements that will metastasize way beyond any attempted constraints and further deform the relationship between the citizen and the state; “(e) continued incremental removal of citizens from the federal...

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said that he would rather be quickly shot than to be trampled to death by geese. That is exactly the way human rights are lost – not in one fell swoop, but by a slow insidious process of attrition, hardly noticeable at all. The right of freedom of speech in Canada and elsewhere has now come under attack by an aggrieved group that – marvelous irony – is using the state, normally the guardian of the constitutional right of unfettered speech, to suppress free speech. Ira Levant has already felt the tread of geese on his back, and now it is Mark Steyn’s turn. Steyn , the author of “America Alone: The End of the World as We Know it,” is also a prolific, international conservative political commentator who has written for such publications as National Review, The New York Sun and The New Criterion. Last month, according to a story in the Jan 14 edition of the Washington Times , Steyn became the subject of “a CHRC (Canadian Human Rights C...

The floodgates are now open.

According to Gerald and Natalie Sirkin, two Connecticut commentators who have appeared on this site before, Europe is becoming less significant and, so to speak, less European. THE DEATH OF NATIONS by Gerald and Natalie Sirkin "That's how great nations die -- not by war or conquest, bit bit by bit, until one day you wake up and you don't need to sign a formal instrument of surrender because you did it piecemeal over the last ten years -- Mark Steyn Nations are dying around us. Literally. One illness they have is bad demographics. To hold a population steady, a country needs a fertility rate (meaning average number of children born per woman) of 2.1, assuming no immigration. The United States has a fertility rate of roughly 2.1 . Compare that to France 1.89, the Netherlands 1.72, Canada , 1.48, Germany 1.35, Japan 1.32, Italy 1.23, Russia 1.14, Spain 1.1 . With those fertility rates, populations are aging and shrinking. Russia, from a population of 148 million in t...