Barrel Strength

Roger Scruton nails it.

 I interrupt him in the middle of a portrait of conservative and liberal attitudes:

“Those two portraits are familiar to everyone, and I have no doubt on which side the readers of this magazine will stand. What all conservatives know, however, is that it is they who are motivated by compassion, and that their cold-heartedness is only apparent. They are the ones who have taken up the cause of society, and who are prepared to pay the cost of upholding the principles on which we all — liberals included — depend. To be known as a social conservative is to lose all hope of an academic career; it is to be denied any chance of those prestigious prizes, from the MacArthur to the Nobel Peace Prize, which liberals confer only on each other. For an intellectual it is to throw away the prospect of a favorable review — or any review at all — in the New York Times or the New York Review of Books. Only someone with a conscience could possibly wish to expose himself to the inevitable vilification that attends such an “enemy of the people.” And this proves that the conservative conscience is governed not by self-interest but by a concern for the public good. Why else would anyone express it?”

Read more.

Fanaticism is shouted out by Cabinet ministers and policy choices continue to be made for purely political reasons, despite the collapsing “science”  of man-caused global warming. The zombie stumbles on.

 
Britain’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, declares war on climate change skeptics.

“Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC’s four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel’s work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

“However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. “It’s worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,” he said.”

“The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

Yep, I guess it would.

Worse, in a way, is Canada’s Jim Prentice saying Canada will reduce its CO2 emissions by 17%.

 ”Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government’s plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.

Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s official deadline of Jan. 31.

He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.”

 In the case of Prentice, does he believe a word he is saying? Or is he just talking for the microphones?

A great source of left wing insanity is Open Left. It helps me guage the extent to which Climategate and the implosion of global warming doctrine has made any progress in leftist mindshare. Zilch. Nada.

In a recent posting, Paul Rosenberg of Open Left cited NASA’s latest figures, courtesy of James Hansen.

[These figures are trashed in Watts up with that here]

The alarmist figures show a one degree Celsius rise of global temperature since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. [Never mind the conceptual difficulties of a "global" temperature and the statistical underpinnings thereof].

This one degree rise in temperature since 1850 shows, according to Rosenberg:

“No rational person can pretend that there’s any doubt about global warming. It’s way too late for that. By now it’s clear that the “let’s hear both sides” crowd is openly pro-lie, and in fact, pro-end-of-human-civilization. They are moral monsters. Period.”

So, let us get this straight. A one degree rise in global temperature (forgetting all the measurement issues associated with the declining number of weather stations), since the end of the Little Ice Age (1300-1850) means that the world has warmed up by one degree centigrade. And this is a moral catastrophe!

Did human-generated carbon dioxide emissions play any role in this?  What role? What proportion of this quite insignificant rise of one degree centigrade have to do with us? This question is never asked.

Never mind, you hideous moral monster! My feeling trumps your fact! In the instant case, the hideous moral momonster is George Will. This does not suffice to temper author Rosenberg’s vitriol. The problem is – you guessed it – the System. (How many times have you hear a leftie use the words “the system” to prevent rational thought? But I digress.)

Speaking of George Will and how he was not censured enough, Open Left rants to its true believers:

“The problem …is the system.

“And not “just” when it comes to global warming. The problem is the system when it comes to everything. The “war on terror”, the financial system, the broken Senate, the dictatorial Supreme Court, all of these are ultimately nothing more than symptoms of the underlying fact that the system is the problem. Because the system simply does not care about the truth. Which means it doesn’t care about anything or anyone, other than covering its own sweet sociopathic ass. “

Open Left then proceeds to castigate Obama for not being pur et dur enough.

Conclusion: Any time you are tempted to think that you are being too harsh in your understanding of the political Left, read their blogs. Confirm and strengthen us, Lord, in our faith. And confirm and strengthen us, lefties, in our rejection of your doctrines and self-righteous  moral posturing, by better acquaintance with what you think and how you behave. Amen.

James Delingpole of the Telegraph has a charmingly sly proposal for the retention of Rajendra Pachauri, in order to complete the destruction of the IPCC.

“Joshua, when fighting the battles of the Lord, prayed fervently that the Almighty would continue the light of day, that he might complete the overthrow of his enemies.”

Delingpole writes:

“But let’s not underestimate the scale of the struggle we climate rationalists have ahead of us. AGW is the biggest and most far-reaching scientific scandal in history, whose tentacles spread into almost every aspect of our lives, from how we dispose of our trash and how we light up our homes, to how we travel and how we are taxed and regulated. Big business stands to make a fortune out of the scam; for governments it’s a way of extending their control and increasing power; for eco-fascists it’s a way of destroying industrial civilisation.

“This conspiracy is much, MUCH bigger than one unfortunate bearded troll-impersonator.”

Unfortunately, none of the heavy hitters in the global warming establishment appear to have come to his defence.

One of the things that was unusual about SOTU address yesterday was that Obama, when mentioning a person, did not use names.  This is unusual for presidents who like to weave a personal narrative.  An example is as follows.

Talk to the small business in Phoenix that will triple its workforce because of the Recovery Act.

Talk to the window manufacturer in Philadelphia who said he used to be skeptical about the Recovery Act, until he had to add two more work shifts just because of the business it created.

Talk to the single teacher raising two kids who was told by her principal in the last week of school that because of the Recovery Act, she wouldn’t be laid off after all.

Are these real people or figment of Axelrod’s imagination?  Perhaps there is another reason why they are not named, along the lines of what was first enforced by Obama’s fellow African Mobutu Sese-Seko.

At one point, in early 1975, the media was even forbidden from mentioning by name anyone but Mobutu; others were referred to only by the positions they held.

Konrad Yakabuski drops this among many prize clangers in his defence of Obama’s petulant State of the Union speech:

In theory, Mr. Obama did not need to sound as contrite as Bill Clinton did in his 1995 State of the Union speech…

[...]

[T]he new President’s electoral reversals to date – in two governors’ races and the special vote to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat – have been surface wounds compared to the near decapitation Democrats experienced in 1994.

Yup, just a flesh wound:

And it gets better:

Unlike Mr. Clinton, who declared in his 1996 State of the Union speech that “the era of big government is over,” Mr. Obama seems resigned to presiding over the biggest American government ever.

Resigned to it? When was there ever a sign that this was not in fact Obama’s cherished dream?!

No doubt Mr. Yakabuski is feeling that Matthews-like tingling in his leg as Obama takes manly grasp of the helm to set the controls for the heart of the sun.

Forget prorogation, which is a temporary blip in the microcosm of Canadian politics.   Remember Copenhagen. Do you? Do you know how big a victory we won?

The scale and speed of the collapse of the AGW scare ought to inspire us with trust that truth will prevail. It is doing so before our eyes.
 

The rats are leaving the ship. Andrew Weaver, one of Canada’s leading scientific bedwetters on the subject, has declared the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri,  tainted

“Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria, says the leadership of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has allowed it to advocate for action on global warming, rather than serve simply as a neutral science advisory body.

 ”There’s been some dangerous crossing of that line,” said Weaver on Tuesday, echoing the published sentiments of other top climate scientists in the U.S. and Europe this week.

 ”Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” he told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”

To those more familiar with the story, Andrew Weaver has been foremost among those who have crossed the line into advocacy. But let that rest.

• Himalayan glacier melting has been shown to be speculation based ona telephone call to a glaciologist working for one of Pachauri’s organizations.
• Missing weather stations have been shown to have been selectively removed, not maintained or not reported (for whatever reasons) from places that are more remote, or at higher elevations, than the weather stations kept open. The result is selective favouring of those weather stations exposed to more urban heat, and a great reduction in sample size, and hence the reliability, of temperature records.
• The IPCC itself is under severe, and heeded, criticism for its methods and behaviour.

“Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have “cherry picked” the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather.”

 Some stories play out over decades. Global warming is one of them. Considering the amount of government funding which sustains it, it has proven remarkably fragile in the face of the email leaks of climategate. Considering also the massive buy-in of the MSM and ordinary people to its simple tale of global sin  through CO2 emissions and global redemption through carbon offsets, it is amazing how quickly intelligent people do not discuss it anymore.

If you are still skeptical as to whether sanity has prevailed, then read this: and this: The bedwetters are declaring it a disatrous year for global warming “science”.

Remember: whether the earth is warming or cooling is a matter of science; what we might need to do about that is a matter of policy, if we can affect the outcome at all. There is plentiful evidence that we are not causing, and cannot cause, much of an impact through CO2 emissions. There is absolute proof that we can cause environmental catastrophes without blinking an eye: deforestation, overfishing, overgrazing, and so forth. So while truth has prevailed against lies, hubris and folly, on this major issue, the latter three have plenty more force in them yet, and always will.

Bill Gross of PIMCO is well known for talking up things that would most benefit his bond funds but this chart is too interesting to pass up.

The most interesting data point in this graph is Japan.  A country with declining demographics and a significant outstanding debt.  With no way to get out of mountain of debt it is safe to say that Japan as nation is in deep peril.  The problems of Greece are well known, along with their inability to do anything about it, which brings us to Canada.

If that graph had been done in the ’90s, Canada would have been a proud member of the “Rings of Fire” club.  What changed?  Starting in the early 90s the size of the Canadian government diminished and that was made possible by majority government under Liberals, which did not have to engage in negotiations with the opposition parties to implement their agenda.  This is instructive because of the problems US will face, when trying to tackle their debt.    California gives us insight into how problem will unfold at the federal level in US.  Specifically the inability to reach an agreement on budget, which Canada was able to avoid due to its parliamentary structure.  Can anybody in US say Second Republic?

Bill Gross goes on to paint a grim picture of UK, which your correspondent cannot disagree with.

Dr. Ceausescu, wife of Romanian leader Nicolae “The Genius of the Carpathians” Ceausescu, an eminent scientist of great repute, regarding who Wikipedia noted the following, now has some competition.

Ceausescu was given many honorary awards for scientific achievement in the field of polymer chemistry during the period when her husband ruled Romania. However, her educational and scientific achievements are disputed.

Ceausescu graduated from the University of Bucharest with a PhD in polymer chemistry and top in a class of 100 women with the honor of summa cum laude. Her thesis has 162 pages, 32 tables, 40 figures and 440 references and describes the invention of a very valuable artificial material. Her detractors consider it unlikely that a person like her would have been able to write such a thesis herself. After the Revolution of 1989, several scientists have claimed that Elena had forced them to write papers in her name while a later report from her instructors claims she had rarely attended lectures or classes, and instead had sent Securitate agents to drop off her homework. Allegedly, she was once thrown out of an adult education chemistry exam for cheating. Some claim the university gave her the honor of the doctorate solely because of her political position.

In trying to cement the claim that Barrack is much smarter than Elena, Axelrod stated this.

“This is someone who in law school worked with [Harvard professor] Larry Tribe on a paper on the legal implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity,” said senior adviser David M. Axelrod. “He does have an incisive mind; that mind is always put to use in pursuit of tangible things that are going to improve people’s lives.”

Was this a case of Charles Johnson traveling with his fan club?

Man caught at airport with 44 lizards in pants

Obama fan Evan Thomas – “I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above – above the world, he’s sort of God.”

Obama regretter Jill Dorson – “I’m not sorry for you. I’m sorry for me. Because I voted for Obama for me, not for you. I voted for hope and change and all the intangibles that Obama was peddling in the wake of the financial crisis, Sarah Palin, Sept. 11 and all the other ills that shook our country in the last decade. I wanted something new. Something different. What I got was, I suppose, exactly what I voted for – a spin doctor. And not a very good one at that.”

Obama regretter David Green – “Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime.  Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis.  It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been lost in a single year.”

Obama ex-fans in Indonesia – Members of the “Take Down the Barack Obama Statue in Menteng Park” group on Facebook say Obama has done nothing for Indonesia.  “Barack Obama has yet to make a significant contribution to the Indonesian nation. We could say Obama only ate and shit in Menteng. He spent his subsequent days living as an American,” the web page says.  “For the dignity of a sovereign nation, Barack Obama’s monument in Menteng Park must be removed immediately.”

No matter what the political persuasion, one thing almost everybody can agree on about Obama is his monumental ego and narcissistic tendency that knows no bounds.   Peggy Noonan, one of the members of the growing band of Sorry-I-voted-for-Obama movement, noted the following after Brown’s election.

President Obama carried Massachusetts by 26 points on Nov. 4, 2008. Fifteen months later, on Jan. 19, 2010, the eve of the first anniversary of his inauguration, his party’s candidate lost Massachusetts by five points. That’s a 31-point shift. Mr. Obama won Virginia by six points in 2008. A year later, on Nov. 2, 2009, his party’s candidate for governor lost by 18 points—a 25 point shift. Mr. Obama won New Jersey in 2008 by 16 points. In 2009 his party’s incumbent governor lost re-election by four points—a 20-point shift.

One would think that this would be enough to knock some sense into Obama.  Or the fact that according to Gallup he is the most divisive president at the end of the first-year, boasting a a 65% difference between Republicans’ and Democrats’ job approval rating, would cause one to rethink facts.  But no, Barry trundles merrily along.

In a report today Rep. Marion Berry discussed with Obama the possibility of a wide-ranging defeat in the upcoming mid-term election.  Rep. Berry stated the following.

“I’ve been doing that with this White House, and they just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

It is far too early to predict a 54-seat swing, which happened in 1994, but Obama’s reaction leads one to believe he is unlikely to have learned much from previous debacles.  It is instructive to recall that Bill Clinton was a politician who was at ease with the voters  and easily connected with them, as opposed to Obama, who is frequently viewed as detached, cold and aloof by the electorate.  All this from a guy who can’t even speak to sixth graders without help from TOTUS.

Former “Happy Days” star Scott Baio jokes about Michelle Obama and gets real pushback in the form of death threats.

Is it only a matter of time before the Obama United Football Club hits the streets?

Oh, right:

UPDATE

More likely candidates for the OUFC mantle:

The free-spending Democrats, and the corresponding decline of the US Dollar, are forcing a rethink amongst the central bank.  FT reported today that Russian central bank has started purchasing Canadian Dollar to diversify their bank reserve holding.

Russia’s central bank announced on Wednesday that it had started buying Canadian dollars and securities in a bid to diversify its foreign exchange reserves.

Analysts said the move could be a sign of increased diversification of emerging market central bank assets away from the dollar and into investments denominated in other commodity-linked currencies, such as the Australian dollar.

The Russian purchase seems to be little late in the game, given that the Canadian Dollar has rallied from under 80-cents to almost par, but the purchase seems to be part of a longer term strategy of diversifying into currencies that will benefit from inflation.  The massive increase in the US money supply makes this a likely scenario.

Obama stated the following in an ABC interview this morning.

“Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts but the mood around the country: The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” the president said in an exclusive interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

After blaming Bush for Coakley’s loss, he then goes on to state the following.

If there’s one thing that I regret this year, is that we were so busy just getting stuff done and dealing with the immediate crises that were in front of us, that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.

This from somebody who averaged more than one talk or interview per day.

Update

NYT’s resident idiot, Paul Krugman, says that Obama didn’t blame Bush enough!  You can’t make this up.

… Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations.