Columnist.
As a child walking across a sports field during competition I suddenly heard my teacher scream for me to duck. The intensity in his voice was fierce, insistent. Without thought I dropped to my knees the instant a 16 pound metal ball flew over my head. I obeyed him without question because it sounded so urgent. Had I not dropped my head would have been smashed in and the hammer throw ended in disaster. My teacher wrapped me in his arms and declared me the luckiest boy in the world. If you had a curable disease, would you not rather know before it was too late? Would you ignore someone who cried in fear because they thought a hammer was about to crush your skull? I have heard it said that ignorance is bliss. It is probably only ignorant people who say this.
Most people agree that earth's climate probably experienced modest warming during the twentieth century. Politicians and not a few scientists say that the direct cause of rapidly rising temperatures is increasing concentrations of CO2 — the gas of life — which rose because of the European and American economic boom post World War II. They warn that warming will become catastrophic as CO2 concentrations escalate with the Chinese and Indian nations increasingly turning away from communist, and towards more free economic, policies.
Thirty years ago, on January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger shattered out of existence. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, the most famous member of the panel assigned to study the disaster, argued that the estimates of reliability offered by NASA management were wildly unrealistic, differing as much as a thousand times from the estimates of the engineers, who had called for the mission to abort due to extreme cold. But management, determined to fly, ignored their advice, holding to fancy rather than facts.
In early January 2016, over 100 armed militia took control of a closed wildlife park headquarters at the remote Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. What would provoke these militiamen to take such a drastic step as to occupy a federal nature reserve? Why would they risk a confrontation, one that might even turn violent, with government agents?
