RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Wednesday, 14 Americans were shot dead and another 17 injured at a Christmas party in San Bernadino. The temptation to retreat instantly to one’s tropes is very powerful – and Sam Stein, who is “Senior Politics Editor” of The Huffington Post, surrendered in a nano-second:

Planned Parenthood is about 1.3 miles from site of shooting. CNN, however, is reporting that the shooting didn’t take place there.

In fact, the slaughter appears to be the work of one Syed Farook, a US-born county employee described by his father as a “devout Muslim”, assisted by a woman who may or may not be a wife or girlfriend. They had body armor and sophisticated weaponry. One male is dead, as is a female, Tashfeen Malik – apparently one of those harmless Muslim “women and children” the President was sneering at scaredypants Republicans for being such bedwetters about.

Responding to the carnage in Paris, Barack Obama said that the most “powerful rebuke” you could send to the terrorists was to go ahead and hold the big climate conference as scheduled and show the killers that the world would not be deflected from talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century. The President spoke at the conference yesterday. Today can be seen as a “powerful rebuke” to the fatuities of Obama.

I’ll have more to say about Wednesday’s events on The Hugh Hewitt Show, live from California on Thursday at 6pm Eastern/3pm Pacific.

~On a related subject, given that (according to Bernie Sanders) climate change leads to terrorism, on Tuesday I’ll be making a rare appearance in Washington:

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, will convene a hearing titled “Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate” on Tuesday, December 8 at 3 p.m. The hearing will focus on the ongoing debate over climate science, the impact of federal funding on the objectivity of climate research, and the ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science.

Witnesses:

Dr. John Christy
Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center, University of Alabama in Huntsville

Dr. Judith Curry
Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. William Happer
Cyrus Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics, Princeton University

Mr. Mark Steyn
International Bestselling Author

*Additional witnesses may be announced

The additional witness has since been announced: Dr David W Titley, RADM USN (ret) and now of (ta-da) Penn State.

If you know your Washington, it will be at the Senate Russell Office Building, Room 253. If you arrange your affairs to give that benighted town a wide berth, it’ll all be on C-SPAN and government livestream. Judith Curry has more here, as does Bloomberg. The Hot Whopper is not taking it well.

~Our French readers may be interested in this interview re me and my cat and our bestselling cat album over at the francophone feline website Bonjour Le Chat:

Nous avons reçu des questions sur Marvin, le chat de Mark Steyn, qui l’a décidé à enregistrer un disque de chansons toutes consacrées aux chats! Voici ici Marvin, chaton ramassé affamé dans les rues de Brooklyn voilà un an, maintenant devenu une star du show business.

It was a fun interview, which I’ll translate a few highlights of in the days ahead, but it doesn’t seem quite appropriate tonight – at the end of yet another somber day in which, as in Paris, ordinary citizens going about their business are dead and in mainstream western media the reasons for their death cannot be honestly articulated. See you on the radio later today.