Wow. One cool spring and your case is proven. And what if there should be a hot summer? Again? (And again and again and again?) There have been a number of heat waves around the world that going by past statistics should have been so rare they'd only come around once in a thousand years.

Peer reviewers are mortal and fallible. But they're also ambitious and skeptical. The system doesn't allow out and out fraud to prosper. Frauds get exposed, and the whistleblowers make a name for themselves. Simple innocent errors also get exposed. And the truth emerges triumphant.

Actually, I'm and admirer of Sowell. He's not exactly a scientist, but he takes the scientific method to heart.

"Regulatory science" can be outright science, done for the cause of determining whether the facts warrant, in some regulator's opinion, regulation. The scientist just does the science. Take lead in gasoline. It so happens that leaded gasoline, when burned, disperses lead into the air, and that lead settles out into the dirt and walls of the neighborhood. And the lungs of the neighbors. Lead poisoning can result. Children living near freeways had lower IQ's . That's fixed now. Take the "ozone hole". Whatever the merits of regulations to make it shrink, the scientists did their part honorably. Likewise, the military. Both flew into mortal danger to get the data. No 2nd chance if an engine fails over Antarctica in winter.

Tamerlan and Dzhokar learned English just fine. Their father gets by. Both were bright young men. One was a golden gloves boxer, the other did well at a competitive high school and earned a scholarship to a reputable four-year university. They showed a considerable degree of skill at working from plans, without any hands-on instruction, to build things that worked. Aside from their religion, their tribal background, and their family's essentially fraudulent claim to be refugees (the parents WENT BACK to the place they claimed to be refugees from!), they fit the profile of the best kind of immigrant we can hope to get in large numbers.

This stuff about "wake up" is crying over spilt milk. For all intents and purposes, the US has open borders except for high-skill would be immigrants. Those are mostly rejected. Persons who make an above-average income are deemed at-risk of Republican voting tendencies, and the permanent establishment wants a society in which an unchallengeable majority of the voters sees the Democrats as guardians of a welfare state and the source of the transfer payments that are their mainstay. The Democrats now have this. Whole states are so far gone down this road that Republicans don't even field serious candidates for major statewide or national office. Chain immigration is their greatest achievement. They have elected a new populace.

It depends. Suppose, just to take the extreme case, that the baby is born without most of the brain, including the parts that govern vision, speech, planning, and voluntary movement of the limbs. This baby cannot possibly live. It can, at best, breath on its own for a while. It can't suckle, cry, etc. It cannot ever learn anything because it hasn't the equipment to learn anything. It's paralyzed. It cannot feel pain or pleasure or anything else. It was born brain dead. It's dead. There's no point in putting medical care into its body. Nothing will help.

The cuts to air traffic controllers are the only really solid example of this. There is nothing in the law that says you have to target your spending cuts to air traffic controllers. The money spent on them is spent out of a bigger bucket and other parts of the bucket could be cut instead. On top of that, nothing in the law says that big, crucial hubs must be cut to the same proportion as the rest. There are many regional airports that don't much matter in the larger scheme of things. Most of them, perhaps, in "red" states, but we could ask that these take the hit if he's determined to furlough some fixed number of air traffic controllers.

The Saudi became a non-suspect because he was innocent. When you figure out who done it, you can drop everybody else off your suspect list.

That would go back on policy established before George Washington's time, and which he endorsed as wise and fruitful. And who would be next? I'd nominate the Scientologists. And then the Santeria. And then the Bahai. *The list would just keep growing. It's like potato chips. Who eats just one? * Not really. They're nice.