"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."

The First Amendment assumes that the proper sphere of government is policies, not values. And so it protects the right of political participation and prohibits a state church that would define values.

The government had the right to decide to go to war with France. It did not have a right to decide what you should believe. Politics extended into the realm of policies, not beliefs.

But as religious belief declined, politics replaced it as the repository of moral and ethical values. This transformation began on the Left. The Left was the least religious in the traditional sense. And the most likely to build up an ideology of secular values with which to displace traditional religious values.

The last century witnessed an extensive effort to scrub religious values out of government. But this effort was matched by an equally comprehensive project to replace them with the Left’s own values. Unlike the wall between church and state, there were few legal safeguards against writing values into legislation if they were irreligious ones. The church was deemed to be the true threat. Not the state.

But the end result looks very much like an establishment of religion. Even in the church sense.

All week some of the very worst people in climate activism have been trying to make political mileage out of Hurricane Harvey.

What all these blowhard charlatans have in common is that they are all talking drivel. They are, as the Trump EPA rightly says, attempting “to politicize an ongoing tragedy.”

For climate alarmists every major weather event – especially ones that cause millions of dollars of damage to property and claim human lives – is never really a disaster or even a crisis but a heaven-sent opportunity to promote their alarmist narrative.

This is what Al Gore has just done in his box office flop An Inconvenient Sequel. He has collected lots of dramatic footage of floods, hurricanes, typhoons and so on and tried to conflate all this photogenic weather disaster porn with man-made climate change.

Meanwhile, here’s a reality check courtesy of actual weather data recorded by proper scientists from the days when scientists did actual science.  Harvey is a natural meteorological event which has nothing whatsoever to do with man-made climate change.

There are streets, schools and parks across the country named after a violent racist who urged the KKK to murder civil rights activists and claimed that racial integration was a Jewish conspiracy.

There’s a boulevard in Brooklyn named after a racist who admired Hitler and boasted of being the first fascist. Harvard has a prominent institute named after a bigot who defended Nazi bigotry.

New York City, Washington D.C. and Los Angeles all have streets named after a supremacist and nationalist who palled around with Nazis. New York City has a statue of him. Washington D.C. has an art tribute to him. If we are going to take down Confederate memorials, there’s no way he can stay up.

He must fall.

In 1961, Malcolm X introduced George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, on stage at a Nation of Islam rally. After Rockwell made a donation to the racist black nationalist hate group, Malcom X led a round of applause for the Neo-Nazi leader and called him, “Mr. Rockwell.”

There’s been a recent effort in Bethesda to rename Winston Churchill High School after Malcolm X. How can you rename a school honoring the leader who defeated Nazism after Malcolm, a Nazi collaborator?

[It is quite gratifying that TTP’s “Solar Warming” published ten years ago continues to be proven correct –JW]

Most global warming is natural and even if there had been no Industrial Revolution current global temperatures would be almost exactly the same as they are now, a study has found.

The paper, by Australian scientists John Abbot and Jennifer Marohasy, published in GeoResJ uses the latest big data technique to analyze six 2,000 year-long proxy temperature series from different geographic regions.

“Proxies” are the markers scientists use – tree rings, sediments, pollen, etc – to try assess global temperature trends in the days before the existence of thermometers.

All the evidence suggests that the planet was about a degree warmer during the Medieval Warming Period than it is now; and that there is nothing unnatural or unprecedented about late 20th century and early 21st century “climate change”.

In its latest country focus, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) upgraded the growth outlook for Asia’s largest economy to an average of 6.4 percent a year through to 2021, compared to 6 percent previously.

Could this be Pollyannic?  Because the IMF said the faster pace of growth would come at the cost of increased debt.

China’s total non-financial sector debt, including corporate, government and household debt, is expected to reach almost 300 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2022, up from 242 percent in 2016, as Beijing strives to achieve its goal of doubling 2010 real GDP by 2020.

That’s according to the IMF – and it could be far worse than that.  Analysts such as Charlene Chu are saying that

the real bad debt figure in China is up to $6.8 trillion more than official estimates.  And everyone knows not to trust China’s official estimates.

Britain has an opportunity to seize on the latest breakthroughs in gene (or DNA) editing and pioneer new approaches in agriculture, research and medicine.

We Brits are well placed to be bold but responsible gene editors. Bolder than continental countries, looking over their shoulder to the disapproving Roman Catholic church; more responsible than China, where decisions on such matters are taken by officials with little consultation with the public; and without the divisive culture battles over moral and legal issues that so often divide the United States on matters of biology.

Twenty years ago, America was relaxed about genetic modification, whereas Britain was easily panicked by the green movement into nonsensical fears of “Frankenstein foods”. Today, it is the other way around.

Hotted up by green campaigners who are aware of “climate fatigue” among their donors, Americans are increasingly torn over GMOs, despite decades of safe and environmentally beneficial experience of growing of them.  Here In Britain, we’re past that,