Heartland Weekly – Dear President-elect Trump: Don’t Listen to Ben Santer

Trump Looking To Go ‘Big League.’ Members of Congress Say They’re Ready. Let’s Do It
Seton Motley, Freedom Pub
President-elect Donald Trump is from all appearances looking from Day One to very rapidly go very “big league.” And by “big league” he means huge reductions in the amounts of the federal government to which we are subjected. Trump’s not doing this as the implementation of a lifelong ideological crusade because he’s not an ideological crusader. He’s a businessman – he just wants things to work. And he has spent a lifetime watching government (at all levels) royally screw up … basically everything. Call this the Reality Revolution. READ MORE

Arthur B. Robinson Joins Board of Directors of The Heartland Institute
The Heartland Institute announced this week that Arthur B. Robinson, Ph.D. has joined its Board of Directors. Dr. Robinson is a distinguished chemist, founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, editor of the influential newsletter Access to Energy, and curator of the Global Warming Petition Project. “Art Robinson has made considerable original contributions to science in the area of climate, as well as nutrition and health,” said Dr. Herbert J. Walberg, chairman of The Heartland Institute’s Board of Directors. “An independent scientist, he is free from the grant-seeking and publish-or-perish incentives of the academy. We’re delighted he has chosen The Heartland Institute as his platform to be active in the most important public policy debates the country faces.”  READ MORE

Dear President-elect Trump: Don’t Listen to Ben Santer
Jim Lakely, Freedom Pub
On December 22, Ben Santer – one of the climate scientists most responsible for politicizing and then corrupting climate science – wrote an open letter to Donald Trump once again pretending to speak on behalf of “science.” We can expect many such cries of despair and shouts begging for attention (and continued funding) in the future. Happily, it is unlikely that Trump will listen to Santer’s ignorant voice, but just to be sure, we are reminding folks of the role Santer played in distorting the Second Assessment Report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. READ MORE

Featured Podcast: Jim Blockey: Public Schools – The Worst Case of Child Abuse in American History
Teresa Mull, managing editor of School Reform News, talks with Jim Blockey, author of the provocative book Public Schools: The Worst Case of Child Abuse in American History. Blockey explains the dangers public schools pose for our children, what’s really going on inside today’s classrooms, how things got this way, and most importantly, what parents can do about it. LISTEN TO MORE

56 People Have Donated Books to the Michael Parry Mazur Library at the Heartland Institute!
A recent donation of books by the Public Interest Institute of Iowa brings the total collection to more than 14,600 books. Recent revelations of “fake news,” hacking, and censorship of conservative and libertarian views and organizations by Google, Twitter, and Wikipedia make the case for having a physical library of liberty.

Please make a contribution to The Heartland Institute to help us offset the personnel, shipping, promotion, and overhead costs associated with the library. We have big plans for 2017, but we need your financial support as well as your books to make them come true. LEARN MORE

The 25th Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union
Richard Ebeling, Freedom Pub
December 24, 2016 marked the 25th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union as a political entity on the map of the world. A quarter of a century ago, the curtain was lowered on the 75-year experiment in “building socialism” in the country where it all began following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, led by Vladimir Lenin in November 1917. Some historians have estimated that as many as 200 million people worldwide may have died as part of the 20th century dream of creating a collectivist “paradise on earth.” READ MORE.

Coalition of Professors Works to “Increase Viewpoint Diversity” on Campuses
Jane S. Shaw, School Reform News
A budding coalition of professors has formed in an effort to protect free speech and foster a broader range of ideas and perspectives on the nation’s college campuses. The group, which calls itself “Heterodox Academy,” states on its website, “We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities. We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of ‘viewpoint diversity.’ When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged. To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy.” READ MORE

Bonus Podcast: John Dietz: Pennsylvania’s 40% Tax on Vaping Products
Lindsey Stroud, government relations coordinator at The Heartland Institute, continues with another Voices of Vapers podcast. The series highlights the individuals involved in the vaping community and efforts to adjust the Food and Drug Administration’s deeming regulations that permit e-cigarettes and vaping devices to be regulated as tobacco products. In this podcast, Stroud talks with John Dietz, current vice president of the Pennsylvania Vape Association. LISTEN HERE

Republicans Plan to Roll Back Obama Legacy
Ben Johnson, Heartland Institute
Congressional Republicans are preparing a federal-regulatory-repeal wish list for President-elect Donald Trump. U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) told reporters in December he is sending Trump a 21-page report detailing federal regulations requiring executive action to be rolled back or reviewed. To help the cause, Congress should reintroduce and approve the Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act (SCRUB), a bill that would create a bipartisan commission for reviewing, identifying, and removing outdated federal regulations. READ MORE

High Temperatures at North Pole Not Unusual
H. Sterling Burnett, The Federalist
Much has been made about the well-above-average temperatures the Great White North has experienced this year and during the winter of 2015.While temperatures in the Arctic are relatively high, high temperatures, while not the norm, are also not unusual. That’s because the kind of weather patterns that have caused the past two years of warmth have happened once or twice each decade at least since the 1950s, according to a recent paper that will appear in the influential journal Nature. READ MORE

New Webpage on Wikipedia’s Lies
Now there is a single website that collects dozens of articles, including scholarly research, on how Wikipedia, the “free encyclopedia,” is actually the fake encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the first place millions of people go to learn about organizations and individuals they hear about in the news or online, but the profiles posted there are biased, unreliable, and often libelous. The Heartland Institute’s Wikipedia profile contains many lies and errors, but we are not alone: thousands of profiles have been similarly hacked by leftist activists. READ MORE