Barrel Strength

But where is the Danish resistance?

In a rambling rank admission of the growing political endurance of Stephen Harper, ageing typist Lawrence Martin fails to answer a critical question: what is Lawrence Martin’s “safe word”?

Klavan: “Shame and guilt and self-hatred are universal.  Whether you chalk it up to original sin or to Oedipus or call it Jewish guilt or Catholic guilt or white guilt or black guilt, every single one of us knows he is not the person he was made to be.  There are honest ways to confront that.  You can kneel before God and pray for forgiveness and live in the joy of his love.  Or you can drink heavily and make sardonic remarks until you destroy everyone you care about and then keel over dead – that’s honest too. 

“But what a lot of people do is try to escape their sense of shame dishonestly by constructing elaborate moral frameworks that allow them to parade their virtue and their lavish repentance without any real inconvenience to themselves while simultaneously indulging in self-righteousness by condemning others for their impenitent evil. 

“That’s the bad version of religion – the sort of religion Jesus came to dismantle.  And that’s exactly the sort of religion leftism is:  an elaborate system for hiding shame behind a cheap mask of virtue. 

“That’s why they demonize any opposition.  To them, we’re not just disagreeing with them, we’re threatening to tear off the mask of their virtue and reveal them to themselves.  Which, without God or sufficient whiskey, would be unbearable.

Andrew Klavan is a screenwriter, crime novelist, and former atheist.

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/tiger-woods-index.html

The method used divided webpage lookups by media articles, or pages.  (The author is British).

“Using the TWI (Tiger Woods Index) as a comparator, the public in general are more interested in “Climategate” than Tiger Woods, by a factor of nearly 20 times.

“Applying the “ratio analysis” (doesn’t that sound grand!) to ten current issues, including the two already mentioned, an arbitrary list emerged, ranked by importance to the general public, against media interest. This is as follows:

1. Climategate: 28,400,000 – 2,930 = 9693
2. Afghanistan: 143,000,000 – 154,145 = 928
3. Obama: 202,000,000 – 252,583 = 800
4. Tiger Woods: 22,500,000 – 46,025 = 489
5. Gordon Brown: 12,300,000 – 37,021 = 332
6. Climate change: 22,200,000 – 68,419 = 324
7. Sally Bercow: 25,000 – 86 = 290
8. David Cameron: 545,000 – 4837 = 113
9. Meredith Kercher: 261,000 – 3,471 = 75
10. Chilcot Inquiry: 125,000 – 4,350 = 29

The author says that a statistician might fault him but that, unlike Micahel Mann, his methods and date are open to public insepction.

The method allows for infinite expansion. It allows for a possibly consistent measure of public interest versus newspaper (media) interest. More work needs to be done on this, because it is a simple measure of the frequent gap between popular interest in a topic and the newspaper’s interest.

Warning:

If you read these global temperature charts, covering the last 400,000 years, your mind will be changed.

No discussion of the world’s climate should be in terms less than a thousand years at a time.

The same chart appears in Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, showing that we are now in the sixth interglacial in a 400,000 year long ice age. The ice will be back.