Neither Red Nor Hot

Over at Capitalism Magazine are two articles well worth a full read that each address themes I've discussed here before.

The first discusses the larger issue behind the Ward "Cherokee" Churchill controversy: separation of academy and state. From the article.

[I]t is no solution for the government to put pressure (or worse) on public universities whenever a professor teaches ideas opposed to the views of a majority of taxpayers. The moment the government becomes arbiter of what can and cannot be taught on campus, the moment speech becomes subject to majority vote, censorship results.

What then is the answer? Privatize the universities.

The truth is that public education as such is antithetical to free speech. Whether leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund universities from which their academic spokesmen are barred (as Gov. Owens’ solution requires), or non-leftists are forced to pay taxes to fund professors who condemn America as a terrorist nation, someone loses the right to choose which ideas his money supports.

And for those who want a more humorous take on the National Whinjun, read this (via Watcher of Weasels).

The second article discusses global warming as a religion. (At this blog, I've discussed the lack of scientific evidence for global warming and the idea of environmentalism as a religion before.)

A federal hurricane research scientist named Chris Landsea has resigned from the UN-sponsored climate assessment team because his group’s leader had politicized the process. Landsea said there was little evidence to justify Kevin Trenberth’s assertion in October that global warming was responsible for the strong hurricanes experienced this past year and that “the North Atlantic hurricane Season of 2004 may well be a harbinger of the future.”

Said Landsea in his resignation letter, “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity had been due to global warming. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.”

Landsea closed his resignation letter by saying, “I personally cannot in good faith contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”

Read both articles. They're excellent.

-- CAV

Updates

2-17-05: (1) Added link to entry on environmentalism as a religion and corrected description of link to global warming entry. (2) Corrected two typos. (How did I misspell "environmentalism" the same way twice?)