James Hansen and the corruption of science

Al Gore isn't the only environmentalist to have made a bundle on climate alarmism. So has his "science" adviser, Dr. James Hansen.

Hansen is the taxpayer-funded NASA scientist who (1) initiated the global-warming scare in hyperbolic congressional testimony in 1988, (2) claimed that President Bush was trying to "muzzle" him (even while he was conducting more media interviews than any government "scientist"), and (3) actually advocated prosecution of businessmen for advocating contrary views ("deniers," he called them), for "crimes against nature." Can't let a pesky little nuisance like the First Amendment get in the way of a good scare campaign, now, can we?

Well, it turns out that the self-righteous-but-ethically-challenged Dr. Hansen sports an $8,000 Rolex and somehow "forgot" to report $1.6 million in income to the IRS. So, despite his denunciations of capitalism for despoiling the environment, it seems that he's found big money to be had from the taxpayers in government jobs that purvey panic. Just as there has been vast wealth for his political stooge, Mr. Gore. Both enjoy the good life, wining and dining at climate conferences around the world, and traveling in cushy limos and private jets, while chiding the rest of us for leaving behind "carbon footprints."

Inmates harass victims via Facebook

NEWS STORIES THAT PROVOKE ME TO WRITE VIGILANTE NOVELS, #12,576 of a series:

"Inmates harass victims via Facebook"

How? By using smart phones smuggled into prison to allow them to connect to the internet and establish accounts on Facebook.

And their "punishment" for these direct coercive threats against their victims? Not longer prison terms tacked onto their sentences. No, instead, they only have a few weeks cut from their early-release credits. "Early release" from prison has thus become the norm for inmates -- just another welfare-state "entitlement."

Anyone still think that in HUNTER I was exaggerating how corrupt and anemic the criminal "justice" system has become?

College scholarships...for murderers

Just when you think you have seen and heard it all, you find yet another example of the moral inversion that is destroying our culture.

Bruce Reilly, a first-year at Tulane [University’s School of Law in New Orleans] ... had pled guilty to second-degree murder and robbery and served 12 years in prison. When he was 20 years old, Reilly beat and stabbed to death a 58-year old English professor at Community College of Rhode island, capping off his crime by stealing the professor’s car, wallet, and credit cards. In short, he is a felon....

The fact that Reilly is an admitted student in Tulane’s law school should be at least curious and potentially worrisome to the students, alumni and supporters of that school. The Louisiana Bar, like all other states, requires proof of good moral character and fitness to be admitted to the bar, a requirement that almost always excludes felons – particularly those who have been convicted of a violent crime as heinous as Reilly’s. (The fact that he is out of prison after only 12 years when he murdered and robbed an older college professor doesn’t say a lot for Rhode Island’s criminal justice system, either.) It is next to impossible for him to become a licensed attorney even if he graduates, as Tulane University officials must surely know.

As at least one student complained to The Times-Picayune, Reilly is taking up “another’s space in the law school even though he may never be able to practice as a lawyer because of his conviction.” But it gets worse.

Reilly is attending Tulane on an NAACP scholarship and a Dean’s Merit Scholarship. The NAACP has made it very clear in its public statements and its litigation that it believes that the constitutional right of states under the Fourteenth Amendment to take away the right of felons to vote is “discriminatory” and “undermines the most fundamental aspect of American citizenship” (which the NAACP apparently thinks means being able to murder and vote at the same time).

As the hero said in my thriller HUNTER, correcting Edmund Burke:

"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is an enabler."