NATIONAL REVIEW SLINKS INTO DISGRACE

I took a look at the current state of Michael Mann's lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review, et al and left with great contempt for National Review. Steyn puts it best.

There are times when I wish I had the same kind of co-defendants I had in my free-speech wars in Canada: Maclean's, unlike National Review, is a dentist's waiting-room mag not an ideological mission, but they and I were as one in our fight not just against the Canadian Islamic Congress but against the now repealed Section 13. By contrast, National Review, for whom I wrote for a decade and a half, are offering the curious and fainthearted defense that they were never my publisher but merely an "interactive computer service provider" to which I had the access code (see page 49 of their most recent brief). They're a court filing or two from claiming they're Lufthansa and I'm Andreas Lubitz - just some crazy guy who locked himself in the NR cockpit. 

Oh, well. For all that, I've never felt more optimistic about how this case is going. If there is a "97 per cent consensus" on the science, all 97 per cent decided to steer well clear of Michael E Mann: Last fall, not a single amicus brief was filed on his behalf, not one. He claims he's "taking a stand for science", but evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for him.

On the other hand, and somewhat to my surprise, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Reporters Committee for Press Freedom, the American Society of News Editors, the Association of American Publishers, the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (The Village Voice et al), NBC Universal, Bloomberg News, the publishers of USA Today, Time, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Detroit Free Press, The Seattle Times, The Arizona Republic and The Bergen County Record have all filed amici briefs against his attempted shredding of the First Amendment. They're in no way fans of mine, but they recognize that this is the most consequential free-speech case before the US courts since New York Times vs Sullivan, and if Mann wins it would be a catastrophic defeat for the First Amendment. That said, on global warming and "climate change", they largely agree with him. But I've also been heartened to learn how many scientists across the spectrum want nothing to do with Mann (scroll down here), and regard a defeat for him in court as a victory for genuine science.

It's funny how the science of man made global warming is collapsing all around except in the dim-witted minds of alarmists and governments hell bent on screwing the tax payer out of more money in order to fix a global climate scare that all rational beings admit simply cannot be fixed. All they talk about is slowing the rate of increase by forcing the first world to join the third world in grinding poverty and starvation but there is never any talk about reversing the global effects of solar infall variation that has, over the eons, caused the world to warm and cool. Their insane shrieks of doom fall on ears increasingly deaf to people who so obviously manipulate the data and then lie about it.

They make laughing stocks of real scientists and researchers and have thoroughly trashed the time honored process of peer review. They have also, with the help of its own lawyers, destroyed the reputation of National Review.