Barrel Strength

Lawrence Solomon cites,

“The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.”

“Climate science” has become one of those words you cannot hear without airquotes. Like “Study shows”.

What other interpretation can you give to the following item?
 

“Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.

“In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran. To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.”

Whatever you may think of the Saudi royal family, they at least can tell who the wackos are in their neighbourhood, and it is not Israel, which they know already possess nukes sufficient to turn Mecca and Medina into glass. The heirs of Mohammed, the guardians of the Hejaz, and of the sacred places of Islam, are making themselves as agreeable as possible to the needs of the Israeli Air Force on its way to bomb Iran.

Does this not tell you something very deep about the real constitution of the world? Does this not say that the Sunnis fear and loathe the Shi’ites more than they do the Jews, and by a long mile?

(Apologies to the over-sensitive for referring to the Israelis as the Jews, but we have to consider the issue from an Islamic and not from a liberal point of view).

And reach way out for a spin doctor up to the task.

How many big stupid ideas have marched through our institutions in our lifetimes, wrecking as they go?

Let us define what we mean. A Big Stupid Idea is any idea which, though it may once have been true, or is partly true, is pushed to such an extreme that it lasts beynd its time, or worse, is pushed to the exclusion of its necessary qualifications. a truth can become an untruth when it is claimed to be the Whole Truth.

I invite anyone to add their own Big Stupid Ideas to the list.

And pardon the offence to my market-oriented friends, but the latest big stupid idea is:

1) The market is the solution.

Uh, no. The market is a restricted sand-box whose rules and dimensions are determined by non-market institutions such as courts and parliaments, the rule of law, and the guardian forces of the state which protect the sandbox, and the tolerance of the public for its outcomes.

When those who play in this sandbox load the ordinary joes of this life, including you and me, with their failures, but privatize the winnings, society reacts negatively. The social contract between those who play in the sandbox and the rest of us is a real fact, which the Ayn Randists ignore at their peril.

2) Genetics has no (legitimate) role to play in the determination of social outcomes.

I can never figure out whether this is an “is” argument or an “ought” argument, but in either case it is wrong. The abundant new evidence accruing daily about the role of the genetic in every social outcome (viz. The Bell Curve, Before the Dawn, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion) and in the fundamental composition and success rate of various humans is so overwhelming that only an ideologist could be blind to it. As to the “ought” portion of the argument, I rely on the immortal words of Eric Voegelin:

“All men are equal, and all men are unequal. And the ways in which they are equal are as interesting and important as the ways in which they are unequal. Any society which forgets the truth of either fo these two propositions will end in violence.”

Thus, recent findings include the facts that: race is not a social construction, but a real biological fact; intelligence is distributed differently among ethnic and and racial groups; evolution has not stopped, but is in fact accelerating; a great deal of the different outcomes among nations and peoples is not therefore the result only of unfair exploitation, but of genetic factors. How to make outcomes fair in such as situation is not a trivial exercize in forced redistribution.

From the failure to provide for the genetic factors of life proceeds many further errors and false ideas.

On a smaller scale, here are few more:

3) Isreal is an apartheid state: the Palestinians are the blacks; the Israelis, the Afrikaners.

From this narrative, everything flows. ThePalestinians are the virtuous underdog, the Israelis the white supremacist masters. The role of Islam in making this inter-ethnic and religious issue intractable is ignored. Apparently intelligent people believe this. It has the effect of letting them know they are on the right side, which is its main function. No further thought required.

4) Islam

God has commanded you to obey God’s ravings, accurately recorded verbatim in the Koran, to tyrannize and subdue every other person in the universe, and the female sex especially. Jews are to be exterminated on the Day of Judgment. And so forth.

Need I say more?

5) Man is causing irreversible damage to the environment through burning fossil fuels, and only a concerted, coordinated global campaign to reduce carbon emissions can save the planet.

This is the latest emanation of leftist control fantasies, after the failure of Marxism. It is just the zombie of state socialism with an another compelling pseudo-scientific justification, rising from the grave of Communism.

The fact that we can and should take better care of resources (fish, forests, air, soils) than we do has nothing to do with the spiritual impulse to control every living thing which lies at the core of ecologism. Making the production of carbon dioxide as sin is about as sensible as making lust a sin. If it worked for the Christians, then why not for the Greens?

What are your candidates for Big Stupid Ideas? At best they should not be restricted to Canada or North America. They should be working through the culture more or less around the world, or the english-speaking portion of it that we are familiar with.

The nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper believes Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were removed to Syria before the coalition invasion — with Russian help:

On Iraq, Gen. Clapper said in an interview with The Washington Times in 2004 that “I think probably in the few months running up prior to the onset of combat that … there was probably an intensive effort to disperse into private homes, move documentation and materials out of the country. I think there are any number of things that they would have done.”

[...]

John A. Shaw, a senior Pentagon technology security official during the Bush administration, however, said he believed that some Iraqi weapons and materials were covertly shipped out of Iraqi factories with the help of the Russians. Satellite images released in 2004 by the Pentagon also showed Russian vehicles loading goods at Iraqi factories, but the nature of their cargo has not been determined.

Mr. Shaw has said Gen. Clapper was present at a meeting of East European intelligence officials who disclosed the Russian role in moving the Iraqi material out of the country.

Stieg Larsson’s Elizabeth Salander series is a moderately entertaining read, despite everything bad I am going to say about it. Having stayed up too late last night finishing the last of the  series, I must complain about some of Larsson’s tedious moralizing leftism, and his dhimmitude to women.  

Lest you think me unfair imputing leftism to Larsson,  which oozes through the books, the Wikipedia entry for him states:

Larsson was initially a political activist for the Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers League), a photographer, and one of Sweden’s leading science fiction fans.[3] In politics he was the editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen. He also wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen

The series of three books is built around various men behaving badly towards women. Even the male protagonist, the journalist Blomkvist, is criticized for a love ‘em and leave ‘em attitude. What was Stieg Larsson repenting? 

Blomkvist’s fictional sister says of him: “He screws his way through life and doesn’t seem to grasp how much it can hurt women who think of him as more than a casual affair.”

The strange, anti-social heroine, Lizbeth Salander, has been the subject of a vast conspiracy to ruin her life, run by a section of Swedish Security Police.

Her father, former member of Russia’s military intelligence,  ran a white slavery business; her half-brother murders women for sport.

A colleague of one of the central women in the story sends her vicious emails because she would not look at him in high school.

The central villain in the first Stieg Larsson book tortures women to death in his basement.

Salander, the heroine, is attacked  by biker thugs, of whom she disposes readily.

Her father puts a .22 bullet in her head.

It goes on and on.

Like many modern books, the last one in the series needs a thorough editing. The first half of the book could have been dropped with no loss of interest or importance to the devlopment of the plot. In fact the second and third books are badly written. Far too many characters are introduced. The plots go nowhere for weeks of fictional time.

Then there is the relentless recitation of facts and brand names which characterize modern police procedurals. No one has an orange soda; they have a Ramlosa (European brand name). Every car trip is described street by street: for example – “She turned left of Helmansgatan, drove a couple of blocks to Svavelsjo, and parked in front of the Tre Kronor.” Who gives a damn?

The weirdest thing, for a North American, is the feeling that in Sweden, we are seeing a vision of our own future. Larsson envisions a society so tightly bound up in procedural fairness and privacy laws that its organs of state seem barely able to function. The police are barely effective. The state also seems to have a thing against people taking measures to defend themselves. For example, the heroine Salander is charged with manslaughter for killing her father, after the fucker had popped a .22 into her head, and she had clawed her way out of a shallow grave and subsequently put an axe in his face. Credentialism runs unchecked: there is a sort of collective gasp of awe when the  lawyer defending Salander at her trial reveals that she has a degree in pyschology. Whoopie doo!

Stieg Larsson’s male lead, Blomkvist, says towards the end of the tale, that the principal issue is men’s violence towards women.

I agree that the villains in Larsson’s books are all men and they richly deserve the fates he devises for them, but a moment’s reflection will indicate that each sex can be evil in the manner of their own kind. I suspect that Stieg Larsson would not agree to the proposition that men and women are morally equal.

Sweden is the place where one of the Muhammad cartoonists  is assaulted when he tries to give a lecture at a university, where he sleeps in different houses at night, and where the burka-clad woman who calls for his death does so with impunity, where the Malmo fire department needs police protection to enter Muslim parts of town, and yet the imaginiation of the earnest dweeb leftist Stieg Larsson is taken up with violence against women of every kind except the principal source, even in his own country, Islam. Go figure.

You can wait for the movies of the Larsson books; they will be more tightly edited.

____________________________

A good review of the books – one which agrees with me – can be found in an interview with Larsson’s wife, Eva Gabrielsson, in the Guardian, of all places.

When viewing this video recall that this not somebody’s crazy aunt that escaped from the attic or somebody who jumped out of a witch cartoon, but the “dean of the White House press corps.”

Does she recall any history at all?  Jews have been living in that part of the world before two guys named Muhammad and Gabriel hooked up in that part of the world.   Also, since when did America become a designated home for the Jews?

With “elites” as stupid as this,  is it any wonder that the common man voted for Obama?

From homegrown terrorists to presidential mentors, the careers of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn have now diversified into international agents provocateurs:

Former Weather Underground leaders William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, as well as Code Pink founder Jodie Evans, helped organize the Free Gaza Movement, which launched the six-ship flotilla from Turkey to Israel that ended in a violent clash with Israeli Defense Forces, BigGovernment.com reported.

In January, the trio were spotted in Egypt attempting to stir up crowds on the streets with 1,400 other left-wing activists after the Egyptian government refused to allow Free Gaza Movement members to enter the Gaza Strip. About 100 marchers were eventually allowed to cross the border, where they were met by former Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh.

[...]

And if there’s any doubt that this was a political set-up instead of a  humanitarian mission, the fact that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez promised to join a future convoy should dispel any doubts.

Unlike those who have earlier displeased the God-President, Ayers and Dohrn may prove harder to throw under the bus, given their skills as remorseless bomb-makers.

Gaia has once again shown she is able to adjust to changing conditions and look after herself without help from Algore or the UN  IPCC Chicken-Littles, with all of their Doomsday forecasts of the consequences of AGW.

Many low-lying islands in the Pacific are growing in size to counter the effects of rising sea levels, according to new research.

Scientists have feared that many of the small islands throughout the South Pacific will eventually disappear under rising sea levels caused by climate change.

But two researchers who measured 27 islands where local sea levels have risen 4.8 inches over the past 60 years, found just four had diminished in size.

The study found that the coral islands are able to respond to changes in weather patterns and climate, with coral debris eroded from encircling reefs pushed up onto the islands’ coasts by winds and waves.

more

File this under you-can’t-make-this-up.

‘Titanic’ director Cameron joins effort to plug Gulf spill

Is it possible that a ‘Star Trek’ director would have better luck?

Update:  Gulf spill headline.

Effort to contain Gulf oil stalls with stuck saw

It would be best to call the director of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’.

BBC reports that Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has announced his resignation after just eight months in office.  The reason given is as follows.

It comes after he broke an election pledge to move an unpopular US military base away from the island of Okinawa. ..

Mr Hatoyama had been under pressure to quit since last week when it was confirmed that the deeply unpopular Futenma US base would be staying on the southern island of Okinawa.

What are the chances of Obama resigning after promising to close Guantanamo during the election campaign?

Virginia Postrel, former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine examines how the illusion of Obama is yielding to his actual political frailty:

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour.