Barrel Strength

The article, published in today’s Globe and Mail, and derived from the Guardian, has to be read in the complete inverse of its intentions:

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.

I was stirring the risotto tonight, telephone on the shoulder, crowing about what a great week it was for conservatives. Oban was my interlocutor at the other end of the call. The hack of the Climate Reseach Unit at East Anglia University continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Global warming exposed as fraud! Berlin Wall falls! Communism over! Hurrah!

Yes, I have been exultant. I have probably made myself more than usually obnoxious to wets, bedwetters, warmists, leftists: the vast throng of the wrong.

Oban pointed out, in his usual mild but incisive way, that the other crew of ideologues who had been proven decisively wrong, and who had cost the world economy a few trillion, not by treaty but by unintelligible debt instruments, were the pure marketeers, the libertarians, the ones who thought that the market would always assess risk correctly, and that therefore no financial crash was possible in an environment of pure information. Yes, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, chief architect of the laisser-faire in markets for the last 15 years. The one who constantly preached to the US Senate that there was no need for the US Commodities Trading Organization to regulate debt instruments which were at the base of the current financial crisis.

All true. But you know the difference? Alan Greenspan came to the US Senate and admitted he was wrong. He said he was completely wrong about the capacity of markets to assess risk. In short, his postulate, the equivalent of e=mc², was wrong.

“”I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” said Greenspan.”

In the New York Times coverage of that story, he said:

But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”

“The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower,” he said.

Despite his chagrin over the mortgage mess, the former Fed chairman proposed only one specific regulation: that companies selling mortgage-backed securities be required to hold a significant number themselves.

I am waiting, but not holding my breath, for Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann et alia, to admit to their errors, let alone crimes.

Dear Dalwhinnie:

I am just back from China and I am receiving e-mails from you about “scandal” and  “the hoax of the century” and it has to do with climate change.

There are some who have a notion that arguments about climate change are at best exagerated and perhaps are part of some dreadful conspiracy that (left-leaning?) states are involved in to .. and then I lose the plot. 

I have read and viewed what was sent on. Today is was about the Queen’s speech on climate change and (the British government-inspired position) that we should take these things seriously and that climate change is having untoward effects, which sensible conservative thinkers (like yourself) think is a hoax.

There MUST be a sub-text here. Read the rest…

It is incredible, shameful and funny all at the same time, but Russia Today is doing a better job than CBC at covering Climategate.  Of course, CBC is not covering it at all. A couple of pieces. In the first one, a discursive feature, your hand-wringers and bed-wetters will get to Alex Jones and suspend what is left of their thinking processes – the point of course is that scientists have been caught out so badly that even this guy can say what he likes about them – and still be right.

In the second one, a debate featuring Piers Corbyn, who runs a private weather service, makes a lot of money at it, is no longer allowed to bet on himself with British bookies, and knows the same way you and I do that solar cycles have much more impact on weather and climate than carbon dioxide.

The government takes our money and gives it to the CBC. Incredible.

Quirks and Quarks posted a ‘denial denial’ editorial on its website yesterday afternoon, and so far, not a single comment.  When I tried to post one, the message said it was being held for review.  Yes, things are busy coming up to air time, but comments last Friday were posted within about an hour of an article going up.

This is great:

CBC has been whipped like a rented mule by Russian television. CLICKSKI. You don’t need Russian or massive taxpayer subsidies to understand the story.  It is a disgrace that the public broadcaster has not run this story.

Seriously, the word occurred as indirectly as it possibly could have, but they conquered their inherent distaste and used it.  But really, it is only validation of the fact that there really is ‘citizen journalism’ and it is happening in the comments sections of news – all right, a provisional term for what they actually do – outlets like the Globe and the CBC.

You have referred to the climate crisis as Global Warming, Climategate and Climate Change… There may not be consensus on the nomenclature, but clearly this is a topic that resonates with readers.

Considering the legacy of 9/11 – The Globe and Mail (26 November 2009)

George Monbiot, England’s chief propagandist for anthropogenic global warming (AGW), has recently found reason to call for the resignation of Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit for criminal suppression of evidence.

In a column produced in November 2 this year, he tried to explain why global warming denial was spreading so fast.

“Almost all my fiercest arguments over climate change, both in print and in person, have been with people in their 60s or 70s. Why might this be?” he asked.

He answered his rhetorical industry thus:

“A recent paper by the biologist Janis L Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult for people to repress thoughts of death, and that they might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival(14). …. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

“If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven’t been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?”

Here are simpler reasons for opposing AGW, even before the recent news of fraud and bad evidence.

1. We can smell a commie rat.

The notion thatthe advanced industrial powers should send money to the Third World in perpetuity, and lower our standards of living, while obeying the dictates of interfering moral busybodies, strikes us as just another commie plot. We have lived through the twentieth century and we went to university with communists. We recognize them for what they are.

2. We can read a book or two on geology and glaciology

Geology trumps climatology. Rock beats air. For the last 400,00 years, we have been in an ice age, of which this latest interglacial has been one of six interruptions. The likelihood that processes which have continued for hundreds of thousands and even millions  of years to trump human activity strike us as a reasonable bet. In the last billion years, there has been ice at the polar caps for only 20% of that time. Think about global warming in that context.

3. We can recognize fanatics and enthusiasts when we see them

The most disturbing aspect of most of the global warming proponents is their enthusiasm: a word which connotes being taken up with godliness and God – the Greek word theos is the core of the word. They, and not we skeptcs, seem to be impervious to argument, quick to find moral fault in those who are insufficiently persuaded, and invested with vast moral superiority. If I found a skeptical global warmist I could talk to him reasonably. But I search for them and find them not. Maybe some of Monbiot’s psychologizing might better be directed to the understanding of warmist enthusiasm.

When you look at the work being done on the East Anglia data by different software professionals, it is hard not to see it as a forensics exercise. All we see are the results – the crime – and scraps and pieces of what led up to to it. On Bishop Hill and Strata-Sphere and other sites, people are trying to figure out where the climate data came from, and what the researchers did with it to reach their conclusions.  The picture that emerges, even for someone who knows nothing about programming, really does point to a sustained effort to derive a predetermined outcome. This impression is sustained by the energy with which various scientists resisted sharing their original source data. Some of it somehow just kind of went away in the eighties, for lack of storage space. Some cannot be released because it was purchased from the states or entities that own it.  If that is the case, it would perhaps be within the means of investigators to buy the data themselves.

They asked people to submit questions that should be asked at next week’s Munk debate, but were too slow to cut off the responses.  They got up to twenty before, oh, I don’t know, something broke in their Internet and they couldn’t accept any more.  The twenty that did get posted were kind of interesting.  I really like the ones that refer to the CRU story that the CBC seems unaware of. I list the questions below, in case the CBC’s Internet is broken so badly that the questions disappear.

Chat Questions (20)

With the revelations of scientific fraud in the AGW debate, I await the emergence of our next Senator McCarthy. Who was a party to this conspiracy? Who is covering up for them? How many warmists have been inflitrated into government? What is their relationship to Maurice Strong? Who authored the Copenhagen Treaty and why are they still in government?

Why is the Gaiain religion Leftist?

Let’s start with Leftism. I posit that there is such a thing as Leftism, which is a permanent feature of the human species. It basically says a large No to reality. Reality is wrong and needs to be fixed. Here is a set of its characteristics:

• The world is wrong at some fudamental level.
• The world is rationally knowable.
• Our party has that knowledge.
• That knowledge is perfect.
• Armed with perfect knowledge, we can remake the world.
• Since our knowledge is true and perfect, those who oppose us must in principle be ignorant, or in bad faith.
• The only thng standing in the way of remaking the world into the place it ought to be is the ignorance and bad faith of those who do not know.
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge.

Compare this to the Gaian religion/ideology:

• man is poisoning the planet with carbn dioxide, and if nothing is done, we will destroy ourselves with the by-products of fossil fuel consumption.
• Our science is unassailable.
• We can re-engineer the world production systems through treaties requiring new production methods to reduce carbon footprints, as well as wealth transfers  engendered by those transfers.
• Those who oppose us are ignorant or deniers.
• The only thi
• We are entitled to seize power and remake the world in the name of this knowledge: viz. the Copenhagen Treaty.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

I had the pleasure of wading through Blacklisted by History, the story of Senator McCarthy’s struggles against the American Democratic establishment to reveal the extent of Communist penetration of the US government. The author, Stanton Evans, makes it clear that Joe McCarthy, the Catholic ex-Marine and Republican Senator from Minnesota, was substantially right. The US government had been significantly penetrated by Communists during the Roosevelt period, and the Democractic establishment in the Truman period did its best to stonewall McCarthy and ease the Communists out gently and without a public purge. Some Communists, such as Alger Hiss, stayed protected by the Democratic establishment  long after a more realistic apprecation of the facts would have counselled greater vigilance. A lot of anti-McCarthyism was a class reaction of  the Establishment against attacks by an upstart from a lower social class.

Read the rest…

This is as stylized as kabuki and as predictable as left-wing lunacy.  The Citizen and Canwest don’t want to get caught off-base on this Climategate thing, so they test the waters with David Warren.  If the sky does not fall, then perhaps in a few days John Robson might mention it.  At the Globe, it will almost certainly be their house contrarian Margaret Wente who touches the story first – and maybe last.  Don’t misunderstand. These writers are not being used to legitimize or validate these stories, they are used to signify that the newspaper is aware of them but does not consider them newsworthy. The Citizen and the Globe want to make it clear that they noticed strange people saying strange things. That’s all. That is why they use their in-house ‘writers on strange topics’ – to ensure that the publications are broadcasting their distaste, their distrust and their distance from the topics they are writing about.  As for the CBC? Forget the CBC.

A good story by the excellent Declan McCullagah. Please read through some very good comments, particularly about the almost criminally bad data use.