Rape as a political act

Islam and the West, Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

I have heard, from several different sources, over the last several years, of the rise of violent crime in nordic countries consequent to the importation of Muslim immigrants, or settlers, as I think they really are. If you are a settler, you are there to impose your values, population, descendants and way of life on the local population. Only, in the case of Muslim immigration, the Nordic countries are paying to be conquered by welfare payments to Muslim layabouts. Talk about jizya!

The better source on this word jizya is Wikislam, which is much less politically correct.

Once a land is conquered by Islamic armies the ruler can impose a taxation on those non-Muslims who will not convert to Islam.

Jizyah is paid as a sign of submission and gives Dhimmis some legal protection in return. Under dhimmitude (the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims) Dhimmis usually are not allowed to carry arms to protect themselves, serve in the army or government, display symbols of their faith, build or repair places of worship etc. If the conquered do not wish to pay or convert, their fate may very well be slavery (under which, rape is permitted) or (as evidenced in the quotes above) death.

The amount of the Jizyah tax and the way it was collected varied from time to time and from place to place, but when imposed, the forced payment of Jizyah greatly stimulated the conversion of non-Muslims into Islam.[1] In some cases the taxation of the non-Muslims was so profitable that the Islamic rulers prohibited their subjects from converting to Islam, lest they should lose their income.

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Anders Breivik is not insane

Culture, Islam and the West, Political Correctness 4 Comments

By Dalwhinnie

Anders Breivik, the killer of those young 70-odd young socialists, was found insane by Norwegian psychiatrists.  Nonsense. He was a fully committed political warrior who slaughtered people with the firm conviction he was doing God’s work, same as any fanatic. Every Waffen SS soldier did the same. Every NKVD trooper who rounded up and shot Russian farmers, “spies”, “saboteurs” and other enemies of the Soviet regime was, by the same standard, a  “paranoid schizophrenic”. Millions of soldier fanatics for the emperor of their choice murdered as many people as Breivik – perhaps thousands more – and were given medals. The man is not mad; he is sane, but evil.

Secular humanists have trouble with evil in a different sense than Christians have trouble with evil. For the secularist God-abolishers, evil is not supposed to exist, and talking in those terms is suspect, like talking in terms of “humours” or other medieval claptrap. Evil is something which the progress of science is supposed to have abolished.

The Guardian has an interesting article from a Norwegian on the subject of Breivik which glimpses the truth and then retreats from it. The author sees the hatred which motivated Breivik as political in origin, but fails to draw the necessary conclusion that Breivik was sane. Locking him up, on whatever pretext, is the only answer. People so much agree on the necessity of putting him away that they close their minds to the possibility the man was entirely clear about his principles, willing to act on them, and knew the quality of his actions. Nazis were not insane. Breivik is not insane. Evil, but not insane.

The Guardian article writer says:

“As most Norwegians, I do not have the medical skills to support or overrule the verdict of a psychiatric commission. Either way, the paranoia and the crimes of Anders Breivik are his own, but his hatred does not come from a delusional mind. We recognise it as the white man’s hatred that we have known for a century. His acts of terror mirror the views and expressions of a multitude of rightwing extremists. He is not alone in his madness.”

First point: when Muslims kill for religion they are treated as having no relation to Islam, but when right wingers kill to preserve white culture, they are taken to be the expression of a multitude.

Second point: when I visited Norway in my twenties it was 100% white. I recall reading  recently that  Oslo is now 28% non-white. From the perspective of 35 years later, one should ask: who among the Norwegians voted for this? Does this justify Breivik? No, but that is not the point. Who in Norway consciously voted to turn their city in the space of 35 years years from Lutheran to nearly one-third African or  Muslim?

Third point: if Breivik’s hatred “does not come from a delusional mind”, as the Norwegian author admits, then wherein lies the insanity? Hatred is not insane. You may hate your boss, your enemy, your siblings, your parent, your job, but that does not make you insane. On the contrary, hatred may be the result of your rational and correct perception that someone or some group is fucking you over.

If there is ever a European civil war over Islam, Anders Breivik may be the John Brown of that struggle, the revolutionary abolitionist whose death (martyrdom?) helped to plunge the United States into the Civil War. Time will tell.

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Polygamy: What about the men?

Canadian Politics, Islam and the West, Political Correctness, Uncategorized 2 Comments

By Dalwhinnie

What about the men? What about the damage to society caused by all the surplus involuntary bachelors?

In the commendable decision to rule that a law against polygamy (strictly speaking polygyny) did not constitute an offence to Charter rights, the large obvious fact was missed, at least  in any coverage I have seen. My point is that, given the anti-male bias of contemporary society, the harm to men is not perceived, and if perceived, not thought worthy of mention.

Mr. Justice Bauman discussed the damage in terms of reduced male parental investment in children, and hence lower survival rates for children, higher rates of violent crime (from surplus men), exploitation of women and violence in the household, and the “lost-boy” effect, when male children reckon that they will never have a woman to love, so they leave the community.

If all of the society is polygynous, then there is no community which surplus males can leave except by emigration to another country which forbids polygyny. Fat chance of that for the Muslim world, and the 100 million surplus males of China and India.

And what do you do with 50 million surplus males, such as China or India have? The answer is obvious. You go to war. You have an inbuilt incentive to spend your surplus males on warfare, brigandage, and wife-gathering. And how do you gather a wife? You kill her husband, and take her home. Iran got rid of a huge surplus of its male population in the Iran-Iraq war(1980-1988), spending them as wastefully as they could. Half a million battle deaths resulted from the use of World War 1 tactics in that ill-fought conflict.

 

Among Mr. Justice Bauman’s many findings, these three struck me as closest to the theme of this article:

[785]     The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives. These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

[786]     Another significant harm to children is their exposure to, and potential internalization of, harmful gender stereotypes.

[787]     Polygyny has negative impacts on society flowing from the high fertility rates, large family size and poverty associated with the practice. It generates a class of largely poor, unmarried men who are statistically predisposed to violence and other anti-social behaviour. Polygyny also institutionalizes gender inequality. Patriarchal hierarchy and authoritarian control are common features of polygynous communities.

 

The damage is done by “the internalization of harmful gender stereotypes” is minuscule compared to the evident unfairness of polygyny to most males. Multiple wives mean sons without effective fathering, and produces  a surplus- unwanted collection of surplus males available for war, and crime, and disinclined for useful work. Osama bin Laden was the result of such an upbringing.

Such is the political correctness of our times, and its anti-male bias, that the principal harm of polygyny is mentioned briefly in the decision, and rates nothing in the media treatment of the question.

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Pope says Mass at Easter: a reflection on the news

American Politics, Canadian Politics, Climate Science, Islam and the West, Media, Political Correctness, Religion No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

“Pope says Mass at Easter.” Most headlines are of this sort. They tell us that the world is still in the same place as it was yesterday.  Other examples: “Fresh trouble in the Arab world”. “Seas rising because of global warming!” “Weather worse because of global warming”. They join the 35 other global warming hysteria headlines this month. For forty years we heard of IRA bombings in Northern Ireland and England; it was news when it stopped.

But this week we read headlines which may be of fundamental importance. The second experiment has demonstrated that neutrinos have moved faster than light. If this proves to be true and not merely the artefact of the experiment or observational bias, then the foundations of physics have just taken a five megaton hit.

So what is staying the same this month?

Eurozone crisis - same, but worsening.

Islamic inability to behave democratically? – same, but the evidence keeps coming in, all of which is ignored in the MSM picture of the world.

[Man-caused] global warming hysteria – the nails keep being driven in to that coffin, but the zombie keeps escaping.

My apologies to readers – job pressures have kept me from blogging lately. Happy is the blogger with a day job.

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“Racialized”

Canadian Politics, Culture, Freedom of Speech, Life, Political Correctness, Politics, Race, Religion 1 Comment

By Dalwhinnie

The recent suit at one of the too many human rights commissions by a Turkish-Canadian woman complained that, as a racialized ethical vegan, she was the victim of discrimination, and that she was part of a racialized minority. What pray tell, is a “racialized” person?

You will hear more about racialized persons, because the word acts like a dumptruck, transporting a host of grievance-mongering from one site of public discourse to another, without the bother of thought. Sort of like the German High Command sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train, to get the bacillus out of Geneva and into the prostrate body of Tsarist Russia, where it could really do some damage. (I digress)

Wikipedia says:

Racialization refers to processes of the discursive production of racial identities. It signifies the extension of dehumanizing and racial meanings to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group. Put simply, a group of people is seen as a “race”, when it was not before.

This led me to the fascinating entry by the University of Guelph on the subject, Understanding Racialization:

In the past, race was defined as a natural or biological division of the human species based on physical distinctions including skin colour and other bodily features. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white. It was used to establish a classification of peoples. Some of the greatest atrocities in human history have been associated with notions of racial superiority.

There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them. It is now recognized that notions of race are primarily centered on social processes that seek to construct differences among groups with the effect of marginalizing some in society.

While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society. The process of social construction of race is termed racialization.

I would say that these three paragraphs contain the essence of the leftist falsehoods that dominate public discourse.

Read the following and inform yourselves:

1. This notion of race emerged in the context of European domination of nations and peoples deemed non-white.

False. All people at all times have been conscious of racial differences, and “race” did not emerge in post-16th century Europeas an intellectual construct any more than height or weight did. Race, ethnicity, tribehood: each and all have been observed facts of life since before conscious thought, just as rabbits differ from hares, or both from deer. The intellectuals of Enlightenent Europe may have systematized the classifications, but they systematized classifications of everything: taxonomy and species collecting was the fashion of the time, viz. Linnaeus and the modern biological classification system.

The 4,000 year old pictographs of ancient Egypt show Africans and caucasians as recognizable races. The Romans pondered the origin of races as they looked upon the red-haired Scythians and the Negroid Nubians, and considered the origin of races as related to available sunlight in their native lands.

2. There is no legitimate scientific basis for racial classification.

False. Humans have evolved. (Darwin is apparently a new idea in some quarters). They are evolving still, at an accelerating rate. Races emerged as Africans left the African continent and colonized the rest of the world in a process starting about 50,000 years ago, settling areas where neanderthals had been before them.

Racial differences are real, genetic, unfolding in time, and evidenced by both organic processes and statistically-validated behavioral differences. I noted that the list of books above range in political acceptability from The Journey of Man, which has a PBS television series attached to it, to Philippe Rushton’s, which you can only get from non-Amazon booksellers. But they all say the same thing in different ways.

All humans who left Africa in ancient times are the products of adaptation to new environments, and various genetic compromizes have occurred over time to allow us to live in Asia, Polynesia, Europe, and the Americas.

3. Genetic science now tells us that physical characteristics and genetic profiles correlate more strongly between “races” than among them.

False. Stephen Jay Gould’s Marxist beliefs led him to to emphasize the commonlaity of our species-hood over the fuzzy distinctions of race. He has been debunked elsewhere. See readings above, but more particularly, see Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, for the more general attack on Gould’s bioogical ideas.

4. While biological notions of race have been discredited, the social construction of race remains a potent force in society

“The social construction of race”. Of all the untruths taught in universities, perhaps none is more pernicious for the long-term than the denial of the biological. It has the effect of placing racial tolerance on the false premise that there are no races. Since there are no races, in this view, race is a social construct. Hence “racialized ethical vegans” can become a race – a category of people able to suffer “racialization.” You do not have to be a race to suffer discrimination. People will and do discriminate about anything, frequently for the benefit of human society. (e.g. the fridge is filthy- clean it. Pick up your mess. Get a job. Change the oil in your car) Trillions of discriminations keep civilization working.

Understand this: tolerance has no meaning or moral worth if there are not real differences to be tolerated. Toleration is a political bargain to make society livable without the need for an established religion.

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Huzzah! Fox-hunting ban failing in England

Political Correctness, Politics, Sport No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

The Labour government banned fox hunting, in a purely class-based move to ruin one of the greatest pleasures of the English countryside. It was as class-directed as any legislative action, designed to humiliate, infuriate and belittle an entire section of the country — those who like living in the country and riding horses to excitement. It is not my cup of tea, and it is not yours either. And I am pleased to report that the ban is failing, for all the right reasons.

The Telegraph reports:

Seven years after the Labour government passed a contentious law intended to abolish hunting with hounds, the country’s hunts – which no longer chase a live animal, but merely a trail of artificial scent instead – are in the best shape anyone can remember.

Part of the reason is that the law has proved almost comically difficult to enforce. Beneath its stated object of outlawing the hunting of wild mammals with dogs, near-total confusion reigns. In theory, you can hunt mice, but not rats, rabbits but not hares, domestic cats but not wild ones. Birds of prey, but not foxhounds, can be set upon foxes. Yet a bigger factor appears to be that exquisitely delinquent streak in the British character that reacts against the hectoring and bossiness of officialdom. As a result, thousands of people who previously had little obvious interest in hunting have taken it up.

“Our membership has doubled to around 1,000 since the law was passed,” says Sam Butler, the Warwickshire’s ebullient Master. “The support we are getting from the communities is incredible. Our range of activities is expanding all the time. Even with the economy the way it is, when everyone’s watching where their money goes, we are hunting at least as much as ever.”

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British government to augment right to self defence

Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

The Guardian reports, to its consternation, the following: the UK government has announced, through its Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke, that it will clarify the right to self defence in one’s home.

“The move to clarify the law on self-defence follows a long campaign on the Tory backbenches in the aftermath of the 1999 Tony Martin case in which a farmer who shot a teenage burglar dead at his Norfolk home was convicted of manslaughter.

“The proposed amendment will make it clear that people threatened in their own home are not legally obliged to retreat and will not be punished if they use reasonable force to repel an intruder.

“While fleeing is usually the safest option if you feel threatened, people are not obliged to retreat when defending themselves or their homes,” Clarke said. “We will ensure that if you do react instinctively to repel an intruder, you will not be punished for it as long as you use reasonable force.”

“The detailed amendment makes it clear that the householder no longer has a legal duty to retreat in this situation, but the possibility that they could have done will be taken as a factor in deciding whether their use of force was reasonable.

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Head Start and Evidence-based policy

American Politics, Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

This charmer from the excellent review, City Magazine, on the well-established spending program, Head Start, which seeks to help black and other slum-dwelling children overcome their cognitive deficiencies.

“The news about social policy, it’s worth noting, hasn’t improved. A recent report by Isabel Sawhill and Jon Baron for the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy—an organization very much in the Glazer tradition—observed that yet another negative evaluation of Head Start (it has “almost no effect on children’s cognitive, social-emotional, or health outcomes at the end of 1st grade”) was “the 10th instance since 1990 in which an entire federal social program has been evaluated using the scientific ‘gold standard’ method of randomly assigning individuals to a program or control group. Nine of those evaluations found weak or no positive effects.”

Copies of The Bell Curve are available from your bookseller and if you have not read it, you are woefully uninformed of the consequences of intelligence differences, which are not, repeat not, matters of social arrangements. Any reader of this blog can afford the $5.20 purchase price of a used copy. Still in print at amazon.com.

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Steyn on the Rideau

Canadian Politics, Islam and the West, Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

I do not think there is anythng that needs to be added to Mark Steyn’s commentary, “Sunset on the Rideau“. Those who speak of the merits of multiculturalism either have not considered what culture actually means, or are active traitors to the ideals of liberal civilization.

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Chinese Culture

Christianity, Political Correctness, Race 9 Comments

By Dalwhinnie

Everybody (except me of course) is professing shock and dismay at the deliberate ignoring of the little Chinese girl, hurt and lying in the road.

You do not have to read a book on Chinese culture to realize that, apart from family, the Chinese have no extended civic relations to each other.

Nor are they, in the main, Christians, so there is no cultural commadment to love and care for one another.

They are a highly atomized society, the result of centuries of arbitrary state power crushing or preventing civic voluntary associations. Read Francis Fukuyama’s Trust, and all will be explained.

So this behaviour is not new, it is old, and it is very Chinese.

People really need to link two and two to get four. They need to link what they see of first-generation Chinese immigrants to what the Chinese people are like. In short, to act on the truth of stereotypes.

I once sat in the back of a taxi driven by a Caribbean black man through Toronto’s Chinatown. A car driven by a Chinese driver pulled out suddenly and without looking into traffic, nearly causing an accident. Broaching the subject of racial or cultural differences with a black man might have been indelicate, but I went ahead anyway.

“You see that? What an idiot”

“I see that all the time, man.”

“Uh, do you notice that Chinese drivers are really bad?”

“Terrible. Worst drivers in Toronto!”

So it is not just us white people who find first generation Chinese to be almost totally oblivious to their surroundings. They are oblivious, and it is my observation that they have been trained from birth not to notice what goes on around them. There is no assumption of community with their surroundings in China, why should we expect them to assume community responsibility here? The cultural assumptions it takes to produce western societies go very deep, and these have to be inculcated from birth.

This is yet aother instance of the untruth of multiculturalism. Ignoring babies lying in traffic is their culture, and always has been.

They are not going to learn any different unless we tell them that these are the values of this society and exemplify them in our own behaviour.

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“Factions” within the Iranian Government

American Politics, Political Correctness 1 Comment

By Dalwhinnie

This was Eric Holder’s explanation of the recent failed bomb plot of the Iranian government: it was to be blamed on “factions” within the Iranian government.

Sort of like the Waffen SS was a “faction” within Hitler’s government.

One of the pleasures I anticipate from a Republican victory in 2012 will be the removal of Eric Holder from power.

His several negative accomplishments include:

• Trying, but fortunately failing, to having Islamic terrorists involved in the September 11th attacks transferred to civilian court, virtually guaranteeing their being found eventually not guilty after a huge propaganda circus.
• Suing the state of Arizona for its tough measures against illegal immigration.
• Prosecuting members of the CIA team that engaged in waterboarding the said Islamic terrorists.
• Ending the prosecution of the new Black Panther Party for voter intimidation, a case that had been started in the Bush administration.

His defence of this action? Read this:

“When you compare what people endured in the South in the ’60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, to compare what people subjected to that with what happened in Philadelphia… I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line for my people”.
“My people”?

I am very tired of the argument “my people are angry” as an excuse and cover for anti-white racism, of which Eric Holder is an outstanding example.

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The Great Euro Swindle

Economics and Finance, Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

The Spectator writes:

“Very rarely in political history has any faction or movement enjoyed such a complete and crushing victory as the Conservative Eurosceptics. The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.”

“Now let’s turn to the BBC. In our Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Guilty Men, we expose in detail how the BBC betrayed its charter commitment, lost its sense of fair-mindedness and became in effect a partisan player in a great national debate — all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality.”

Sound familiar?

‘The defenders of sterling are, in the main, a group of elderly men with more stake in their past than in our future. They clothe their gut anti-Europeanism and Little Englandism in the language of rational economic argument.’

“Clothing your ______________ (racism, sexism, anything we don’t like) in the language of rational argument.”

Is that not the the essence of all leftist argumentation? Your soul is wrong, so we can ignore your rational argument.

Well worth the time to read.

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Ugandan village burned, kid killed, for global warming

Climate Science, Political Correctness No Comments

By Dalwhinnie

It always comes down to this: some corporal tells his privates to burn a village, and drive off the inhabitants, for some God-damned idiotic cause, so he can report to his sargeant that the enemy has been engaged and defeated.

This time it is global warming.

I am not making this up.

As the New York Times reports:

“Across Africa, some of the world’s poorest people have been thrown off land to make way for foreign investors, often uprooting local farmers so that food can be grown on a commercial scale and shipped to richer countries overseas.

“But in this case, the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming.”

When I use the term “global warming”, please understand that I mean “gigantic evil fraud akin to communism”.

People can murder millions with joy in the hearts, and global warming fanaticism is teaching this lesson once again.

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Did the press get what they wanted in Obama?

American Politics, Political Correctness 6 Comments

By Dalwhinnie

As Obama’s ineptitude becomes visible even to his acolytes in the liberal media, an interesting fight is breaking out between those, like Rex Murphy, who castigate the press for failing to do their duty of scrutinizing Obama enough, and another view which says that the press are enraged because their hero and tool has failed – they never meant to scrutinize him, they only meant to sell him.

The honest Mr. Murphy wrote in the Post this weekend:
Much of the Obama coverage was orchestrated sycophancy. They glided past his pretensions — when did a presidential candidate before “address the world” from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin? They ignored his arrogance — “You’re likeable enough, Hillary.” And they averted their eyes from his every gaffe — such as the admission that he didn’t speak “Austrian.”…..

(And how out of touch was O to complain on the hustings in southern Illinois about the price of arugula, a vegetable of which most people have not yet heard? It would have been a “let them eat cake moment” if a conservative had said the same.)
As a result, the press gave the great American republic an untried, unknown and, it is becoming more and more frighteningly clear, incompetent figure as President. Under Obama, America’s foreign policies are a mixture of confusion and costly impotence. It is increasingly bypassed or derided; the great approach to the Muslim world, symbolized by the Cairo speech, is in tatters. Its debt and deficits are a weight on the entire global economy. And the office of presidency is less and less a symbol of strength.
To the degree the press neglected its function as watchdog and turned cupbearer to a Styrofoam demigod, it is a partner in the flaws and failures of what is turning out to be one of the most miserable performances in the modern history of the American presidency.

Then there is the darker view, which I read on Daily Pundit (http://dailypundit.com/?p=43891).

It’s all bullshit, you know. This new meme, that the press “neglected its functions as watchdog.” It didn’t. It performed to perfection what it truly believes its function is: to help shape history, politics, and culture in ways it finds congenial. Early on, the press made a collective decision that helping to effect the election of Barack Obama would admirably fulfill that function, and so it did everything it its power to help him defeat, first, Hillary Clinton, and next, John McCain. There was no failure here. There was instead complete success at fulfilling their intentions.
Unfortunately for them, the man they elected was nowhere near as effective in advancing their mutual goals as they were at getting him elected in the first place. And so, rather than admit their willing efforts to elect him, and take responsibility for the resulting disaster, they would rather pretend that their sin was a “failure” to “act as a watchdog.”
The truth is, their only failure was to drastically overestimate his ability to do what they elected him to do. That’s what they’re really ashamed of. They thought they were electing a full-on Marxist hero. Instead, they elevated an incompetent socialist with pretensions to Marxism. And now, steeped in the misery and humiliation of their own miscalculations, they want to pretend – and want us to believe – that their only sin was neglecting to vet him properly.

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2011: Report Card – Anthropogenic Global Warming

Climate Science, Political Correctness, Science 5 Comments

By Dalwhinnie

In the manner of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s film critic who once admitted that she had not known anyone who voted for Reagan, I confess to not knowing anyone socially who takes global warming seriously.

I have a few cousins who believe it profoundly, but they are all Liberals and I avoid discussing any topic of controversy with true believers.

Probably by a natural process of affinity I have removed myself from the presence of such people, as I am too obnoxious, too condescending, and most of all, too knowledgeable about the geologic history of earth to be endured by warmists. They find it very hard to endure hearing of recent ice-ages, previous global warmings, and higher carbon dioxide concentrations tens of millions of years ago than exist now.
Yet you have surely noticed that, in the past year, the number of people of – shall we call them the informed classes- who espouse imminent eco-doom has declined? Have you noticed that pompous warmists have fallen silent?

Anthropogenic global warming was the largest, most sustained, best funded, and most persistent popular delusion since Marxism. It satisfied all elements of a pernicious metaphor – spaceship Earth. On spaceship Earth resources are always limited, and humans are always exhausting those limited resources because we are greedy, and we have not heeded the wisdom of Gaia.

Humans could not survive 6 weeks in open air without clothes, hunting gear, shelters and fire. Neither did our ancestors. That is why they developed sewing, hunting, fishing, farming, fire-making, and every other art conducive to survival and predominance. They knew they had to master their environments, not just live within them. Gazelles live within their environments. Look what happens to gazelles. If you do not want to end up as someone’s food, you had best keep a sharp lookout, travel in groups, belong to powerful clans, wield weapons, have a reputation for bravery and cunning, and have an exhaustive knowledge of plants, animals, and water sources. The automation of these functions by industrialization has permitted a great number of foolish people to walk about thinking otherwise, and still survive.

The second reason anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was so successful was that it fulfilled the aspirations of bureaucrats to manage the economy without accountability for results. It was a central planners’ dream come true, and unlike the Marxist version of central planning, all the AGW bureaucracy would need to do was to reduce living standards. They would not even have to have pretended to improve them.

“How shall we lower living standards today, Mr. Secretary?”
“Same way as always, boy. Tell them they are too rich and reduce their carbon dioxide emission quotas”.
“Aye aye, Mr. Secretary.”

Plus, the cap and trade idea was a wholly corrupt system whereby brokers would seize the scarcity rents of carbon emission quotas before the public treasury saw any of the money. To repeat, as government would have lowered carbon emission quotas, the remaining quotas would have become more valuable. But would governments have realized the benefits of these scarcities (resource rents)? Not at all. The traders in emissions quotas would have garnered all the increase of value, if value is the right term for the licence to burn fuel. And who might these brokers have been? The same people who brought you the recent financial crisis.
What happened? The Climategate leak of emails showed that the high-priests of AGW were engaged in massive cover-up of evidentiary gaps, vicious character assassinations, and unscientific group-think. The fact that there were only two observatories of global temperature in all the planet, and that billions if not trillions of dollars of investment would be shaped on the basis of fraudulent science conducted in one of them, shocked people into awareness.

Ultimately the global warmists could not control the discourse sufficiently to produce the results that would have justified the socialization of our economies. If there had been robust evidence that global temperatures were increasing, that CO2 concentrations were going up, that these were preponderantly caused by human activity and not natural forces, and that other causes: sun, cloud cover, did not play a role, the AGW scare might have had some strength.

Average global temperature has been rising since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850. CO2 concentration has been increasing. The problem with warmist science was that the causal linkage between CO2 concentration and rising global temperature was assumed; computer modeling replaced observation, hypothesis and testing. The geological and glaciological history of earth was ignored, and contrary evidence suppressed. Many a career was sidelined by the relentless pressure to conform to the Prevailing Doctrine. Yet despite the calumny by warmists of their opponents, the massive distortion of funding to “prove” what could not be demonstrated, and the relentless propaganda, the warmist cause is in deep disarray. No wonder Al Gore is off his rocker.

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