A Place to Stand

Wrong numbers and calculations?

ERIC MAY: Well, what we‟ve been discussing for the last hour.

JEFF RUCH: So this is it?

CHARLES MONNETT: Well, that‟s not scientific misconduct anyway. If anything, it‟s sloppy. I mean, that‟s not – I mean, I mean, the level of criticism that they seem to have leveled here, scientific misconduct, uh, suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to, to change it.

One cynical possibility that fits the facts is that BOEMRE have sensitive political antennae. They recognise the warming fraud is on its last legs, as is Obama and wish to be able to say they recognised Monnett's dishonesty (omitting any mention of how long it took them) and got rid of him.If so the story is even more important than it seems because it means the warming fraud is so obviously dead that government bureaucrats are willing to act, ahead of the curve, to abandon the sinking ship (ok I know that mixes metaphors).

neilcraig Possibly spot on. I have met "scapegoating", whitewashing, blame-shifting, terms-of-reference restriction and all manner of devious scheming to achieve higher management's aims or prevent a perceived "adversary" prevailing. The techniques are honed to their highest level in government. The symptom is that a seemingly minor or irrelevant misdemeanour acquires the role of a weapon or "key trump card" or blackmail that can be rolled out at strategic moments.

our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”

Thomas Jefferson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

Thomas Jefferson

Sir,

I do not know if the Norwegian Labour government had gone quite as far as the British Labour one in deliberately but quietly encouraging mass immigration for "social reasons" as has been publicly admitted. Labour apparatchik Andrew Neather publicly boasted this a couple of years ago though the BBC and other "respectable" organs decided it was too unimportant to report -The "social reasons" appear to be a mixture of expecting immigrants to obediently vote for them combined with the Labour nomenklatura wishing to have immigrants to do their gardening and mind their children rather than uppity working class Brits.

It in no way justifies Breivik's killings to say that when a society finds there is no democratic safety valve whereby such real and important political issues can be debated (& immigration is hardly the only one where both opponents and facts are largely undebatable in our mainstream media and parties) contempt and hatred of the out of touch political classes is inevitable. The contempt felt for MPs misusing their expenses is a very long way from the hatred Breivik showed but they are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

If one did wish to justify Breivik's killing it would be possible to point out that almost all NATO leaders, including Norway's, participated in a criminal war against Yugoslavia resulting in NATO controlled police (formerly the NATO organised, armed and trained KLA) ethnically cleansing 350,000; carrying out massacres such as the Dragodan massacre where 210 civilians were killed just outside the British military HQ) and the dissection, while still alive, of 1,3000 entirely apolitical Serb civilians. It is difficult to see why such far greater atrocities have gone largely undiscussed in our mainstream media or that those who condemn Breivik but not these murders are right to do so.

Neil Craig

bogus impartiality (mathematician discovers that 2 + 2 = 4; spokesperson for Duodecimal Liberation Front insists that 2 + 2 = 5, presenter sums up that “2 + 2 = something like 4.5 but the debate goes on”) can, perversely, lead to bias in its own right, for it gives disproportionate weight to minority 58 views – and some of the minorities involved are expert in taking advantage of the platform offered. (p 58)

This point about false balance has often been made before, from the 2000 House of Lords Select Committee Report4, which criticised the tendency to pay undue attention to contrarian views “simply because confrontation makes good copy” to the 2010 Science and the Media paper2 that claimed that “applying the adversarial model to science stories has led to seriously misleading reporting”.

The presentational style of some coverage since that Impartiality Report has continued to suggest that a real scientific disagreement was present long after a consensus had been reached  (p71)

I am pleased to see somebody in the anti-nuclear power movement saying exactly what the arguments against it are (M Star May 20).

They are:

1. Safety

2. CO2 being produced by nuclear plants

3. The question whether there is a need for such electricity at all.

Elliot Folan does not dispute that the safety argument is bogus.

Indeed he criticises Unite, not for accepting that it is safe but merely for not being deterred by the other two arguments.

Considering that the world coal industry kills about 150,000 annually and the total death toll from the nuclear generation over the last 20 years is two, nuclear is clearly safer by many orders of magnitude.

The argument that nuclear produces unacceptable amounts of CO2 is false.

Because it does not involve conventional burning, nuclear produces a minuscule amount, indeed much less, per kilowatt, than windmills, which appear to be acceptable to windmill supporters.

The question of a "need" for the electricity is a different sort of argument. That there is a close relationship between electricity use and GNP is undisputed by any economist.

There is no question that we could get out of recession, if those in power wanted it, by allowing the provision of inexpensive nuclear power (at one-tenth or less the cost of windmills). The argument against needing power then is a purely philosophical one.

Do we wish progress, growth and reduction in poverty or do we want a return to medievalism?

Unite, which has a duty to support its members' interests, has no choice but to support progress. Indeed nobody with any respect for the history of socialism could do otherwise.

The traditional "left" should look on that as an opportunity to offer a far better, technologically progressive, alternative.

Neil Craig

 

1 - Fiscal policy discipline;

2 - Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;

3 - Tax reform – broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;

4 - Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;

5 - Competitive exchange rates;

6 - Trade liberalization – liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;

7 - Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;

8 - Privatization of state enterprises;

9 - Deregulation – abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudent oversight of financial institutions;

10 - Legal security for property rights.