A Place to Stand

The fact that the Scottish government funds the Edinburgh Science festival seems to have more to do with it giving James Hansen an "award" than his scientific achievement.
They invite him to Scotland, whose government are committed to the most expensive and Luddite measures anywhere in the world (to fight alleged catastrophic global warming) to demand a global "Green" government funded by a new global tax on us all. This does seem to throw even more doubt on the SNP government's alleged desire for independence than their long established enthusiasm for the "ever closer union" of the EU. In fact it is impossible to find any case where the SNP have preferred real independence to the ever growing power of international bureaucracies.
Is this a scientific award or a purely political one? It all depends whether Hansen has the successful scientific achievements required.
In 1988 he famously testified to Congress that we were in the midst of catastrophic global warming which would amount to 1/2 a degree per decade. That prediction proved false.
In 2008 he testified in court, under oath, in defence of vandalising British power stations, needed to keep our lights on, that "....What has changed recently is the steady global warming, at a rate of about 0.2°C per decade" & that "....Sea level is now increasing at a rate of about 3 cm per decade". In fact sea level is not measurably rising & there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995. Fortunately for him the law against perjury, which sent Sheriden to jail, were not tested against him.
In purely scientific terms it is impossible to find any discovery or prediction of his which has not failed the test of reality. That alone should exclude him from a scientific prize.
However there is worse. In 2008 Hansen publicly called for some sort of world body to arrest and bring to "trial" those who dispute catastrophic warming is happening.

When the Pope disputed Galileo's claim that the Earth orbits the Sun he used a "trial", imprisonment and the threat of torture, rather than the scientific method to "prove" the "consensus" view, of the time, that the Sun orbited the Earth.
By doing so, he ended, with finality, 1500 years in which Italians had dominated European science. The leading European nations became those then outwith the reach of the Inquisition. This shows what a delicate flower scientific freedom is & what a vital one. It also shows why a world government, with no society outwith to nurture free thought would be the worst thing, possibly excluding all out nuclear war, that could happen to humanity - & perhaps why "environmentalists" are keen on it.
There are no circumstances whatsoever under which anybody with any respect for science, or freedom, could support giving a government prize in the name of "science" to anybody who believes his scientific claims should be verified, not by test & measurement but by arrest, Inquisition" and "trial".
Were any organisation looking for people who deserve such a prize they need look no further than the nearly 50 former astronauts and scientists--including the ex-boss of the Johnson Space Centre who have said their own NASA organisation is on the wrong side in promoting the warming scare. My suspicion is that these words, from so many people with real scientific achievements behind them, will be found less "newsworthy" by our media.
Neil Craig
Ref - Hansen's world government call http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/06/nasa-scientist-climate-change

extracts from his testimony on oath http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2008/09/james-hansens-perjury.html

put sceptics on "trial" http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/fossilfuels.climatechange

medal http://www.sciencefestival.co.uk/news/environment/dr-james-hansen-receives-edinburgh-medal

the other NASA 50 http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/washington-secrets/2012/04/astronauts-condemn-nasa%E2%80%99s-global-warming-endorsement/469366
------------------------------
 
    This went out as a letter to the Scottish, UK & World press and, obviously proved Something Which May Not Be Said. It remains true.
 
     Hansen is not, by any objective standard a successful scientist since his various predictions have been proven false. But the fact that he calls for the "trial" of those who disagree automatically puts him on a par with Galileo's Pope and Lysenko.  That a government funded alleged "science festival" is awarding him and that our media censors even the slightest question on the subject puts us in a precisely equal position to the Lysenkoism of Stalin's regime and well ahead of the Vatican which at least had the excuse that they were supporting the historic position.
 
    The damage that both of these did was enormous and long lasting - in Galileo's case it lasted centuries, in Lysenko's case we do not yet know.

    This is the Board. I will be interested to see if they, or any part of the organisation feels able to dispute being corrupt anti-scientific parasites.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS
David Milne (Chair)

Ewan Aitken
Cllr Gordon Buchan
Cllr Ronald Cairns
Michael Fourman
Cllr Stephen Hawkins
Brian McMaster
Stuart Monro
Ian Ritchie
Cllr Conor Snowden
Ben Thomson
Ian Wall
Cllr Donald Wilson
Heinz Wolff
Philip Young
SCIENCE FESTIVAL ADVISORY GROUP
Maggie Aderin Pocock, Science Innovation Ltd
Hermione Cockburn, TV and radio presenter
Brian Cox, University of Manchester
Quentin Cooper, BBC Radio 4
Claire Fox, Institute of Ideas
Ian Sample, The Guardian
Nigel Townsend, Y Touring Theatre Company
Richard Wiseman The University of Hertfordshire

  A few days ago I wrote about the refusal of the British media to even report undisputed facts which do not fit the propaganda lies about Bosnia. I also sent this to papers across the UK & US, none of whom published any part of it.

   However I did get this from the UK's "Independent".

Alas, your interesting letter is far loo long and would require extensive rewrite to get it to viable length. If you resubmit it down to 250 words I'm sure we can find a good slot for it.

    Entirely reasonable if true. So here is the short version.

Coverage of the 20th anniversary of the "nation" of Bosnia was barely more balanced than the headlines at the time, telling us the Serbs had "started" it.

The fighting started when the (ex-Nazi) Moslems deliberately shot up a wedding party.
On the "Srebrenica massacre".

There is no evidence that the massacre of 7,000-15,000 Moslem soldiers ever took place. The total number of bodies found is under 2,000 which matches known combat casualties. When Izetbegovic first made the massacre claim it was accepted that the garrison of the town was 7,500 and he claimed they were all missing. It is now known that at least 7,000 of them reached Moslem lines and transferred to the Tuzla front, without being allowed to contact anybody.
There was a genuine prior massacre of civilians. NATO reached a deal whereby the town would become a "safe area" with the Moslem militia disarmed. Instead Moslems were given free reign to pass through the NATO lines to attack surrounding villages, inhabited mainly by women, children and old men. 3870 identified victims.

This was acknowledged the NATO commander at the time, on oath during the Milosevic "trial".
Nasir Oric, the Moslem commander was so proud of this that he showed western journalist videos of him beheading civilians taken from his extensive collection.

At the same time the Croatians, broke through the UN ceasefire lines to invade Serbian Krajina. This was organised by American and British officers and armed by Germany, with NATO air support. Quarter of a million people were driven from their homes. About half of them are still "missing". Even Croatians murdering the UN troops manning the dividing line did not stir any media interest, though it was clearly a genocide far worse than anything claimed of Srebrenica.

  Which, several days later and without explanation, remains unpublished.

 Though factual reporting about our government's complicity in (ex-)Nazi atrocities in Bosnia is not allowed by our "free and independent" media and any mention of the far more obscene dissection of thousands of living Serbs by our police has always been wholly unpublishable today's Indie has a disgraceful letter giving support to Jenny Tonge - anti-Semitic "Lib Dem" peer who has repeatedly made allegations of organlegging against Jews, without ever even attempting to produce 1 millionth of the evidence available, but censored, against NATO (ex-)Nazi police of such dissections.
-------------------------------

   On the other hand, to show that in accusing the Indie of lying and censoring in the Nazi cuase, across a broad range, I am in no way biased against them, here are a couple of letters of mine I hadn't previously realised they had published.

19th Oct 2011

David Cameron's publicly "calling in the energy companies to tell them off over prices" is a disgraceful bit of PR fluff. The the reason electricity prices are going up is purely because of the activities of politicians like him.
They have been told, for years, that taking money from bills to subsidise windmills is bound to put up prices – indeed it is so obvious they should not have needed telling. And if nuclear were not under the burden of politically imposed rules which have no possible safety justification it would cost about half as much.

21st March 2011

The media coverage of the Japanese nuclear "catastrophe", in which not one person has been killed or injured, far outpaced the coverage of the real catastrophe in which around 10,000 have died.
Nuclear remains far and away the safest method of generating power, as well as the least polluting and least expensive. This is known by all who have looked seriously at the issues. Perhaps, as the reactors continue to fail to explode, the media will acknowledge that their reporting has been both inaccurate and hysterical. Or perhaps they will simply move on to the next scare story, expecting their readers not to notice

Mutual Approval: If Jerry Pournelle were simply one of the world's best SF writers, he is much more, saying I edit well would be praise indeed. For him to call this blog "good stuff" is no end of a bonus.

If you are looking for some good short snippets to read, try http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/02/economic-political-wisdom-jerry.html which is, of all things, a compilation of ‘the wisdom of Jerry Pournelle’. Needless to say I didn’t do it, but I rather like what has been done. It’s a number of snippets of things I have said, mostly in the old View and Mail columns before we moved to Bluehost, and some of them are pretty good. This was good editing. There’s also other good stuff on that site.

    What I aim at in these collections is to get, in a few words, the basic principles. They are usually being applied to discussion of some current event, which will mean nothing in years to come - but the principle will.
-----------------------------------------
   If  the BBC, which so often starts "news" with "Scientists say  global warming may be worse than previously thought" were a news organisation this would be heavily reported by the MSM. Of course if anybody at all among the Beeboids was as willing to buck the bosses for honest journalism as these people the fraud would have died years ago.

Challenging statements from NASA that man is causing climate change, the [49] former NASA executives demanded in a letter to Administrator Charles Bolden that he and the agency “refrain from including unproven remarks” supporting global warming in the media.
“We feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate,” they wrote. “At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.”
The letter was signed by seven Apollo astronauts, a deputy associate administrator, several scientists, and even the deputy director of the space shuttle program.

-------------------------------------------
  While NASA scientists are putting their reputations on the line the corrupt thieving parasites in our Foreign Office are complicit in stealing millions from us to pay for eco-nazi propaganda against the politicians of Texas.

Did you know that you're paying for Texans to endorse anthropogenic climate change?

Rick Perry rightly criticises the British Foreign Office for attempting to change Texan minds on climate change

  This is how the corrupt international ecofascist nomenklatura help keep each other in the saddle.
-------------------------------
   Government planning to roll back our rights under the Freedom of Information Act.
------------------------------

An elderly woman was ordered to find a new GP because the “carbon footprint” of her two-mile round trips to the surgery where she had been treated for 30 years was too large.


   Actually I suspect the doctor simply found her, as an elderly patient, one of those who took a bit of work, thereby leaving him less time for golf. However the very fact that scum like that can use ecofascism as an excuse and expect to get away with it speaks volumes.
---------------------------

  The EU is about to engage in a war, albeit only a trade war, against the US, China, Russia, India and 19 other countries, over whether we are going to tax foreigners for burning carbon abroad.

In February, the two Asian giants, along with 21 other countries including the United States, signed up to the Moscow Declaration, a strategic blueprint for global trade ‘war’. It has a single aim: to make sure the EU’s Airline Tax never gets off the ground.
While the EU’s unelected Climate Czar Connie Hedegaard bullishly dismisses threats from the Moscow group of nations as “hypothetical” – exactly how is a cancelled order for planes “hypothetical” Connie? – actual elected leaders in European capitals are unlikely to remain as sanguine. Well before the first payment Airline Tax invoices are mailed in 2013 it becomes clear just how economically damaging a global trade war would be to European national economies.

  Obviously us getting into a trade war with the rest of the world is not only important but potentially disastrous. Which is why currently none of the relatively few MSM outlets to report it are in the EU.

    Last night the BBC, doing its bit for our glorious leader, currently in Indonesia, boasted of how "he" had got orders for a handful of Airbuses. Because of this fiasco "China has already cancelled orders for 35 European Airbus A330 jets, and is threatening to cancel on 10 more" but that isn't news we plebs are supposed to hear.
---------------------------------------
Lord Tebbit agrees with me that

The common ground is where voters of all persuasions find themselves. Very often that is on issues which are central to Conservative philosophy. Those issues should be emphasised by the Tories to pull Labour voters towards them, or as neilcraig put it these are the issues where the Tories are, or should be, on the same side as most people.

  I had singled out getting the economy growing, an EU referendum, freedom from nanny statism, cutting crime and cutting immigration. I think he is optimistic if he thinks that they are more at home in the Conservative party or even that they once were.
----------------------------------
   Discussing my support of off site manufactured housing, allowing housing to be produced more cheaply, my brother, who lives in New Zealand, mentioned Habode, a home which can be delivered on the back of a lorry and open out to nearly 900 square foot (3 times the lorry size).

  Anywhere
------------------------------

A Short History of Fuel Substitution in the UK - Proving, yet again, that peak oil.gas/coal/wood/whale oil etc. is simply an old lie whose details occasionally change.

   I particularly wish to draw your attention to this assessment of what getting a one off reduction in gas prices from North Sea gas (before we gad the oil) would do.

E] They assessed the likely overall economic benefit to the economy from cheaper energy as a one off gain of between ten and twenty percent in GDP over the ten years of conversion and might well create growth of half a percent per annum thereafter for many years as new customers came on line.

  I have been pushing the line that CHEAP ENERGY MEANS FAST GROWTH.

   If this was provably known back in the 1960s when the government were first promoting the development of North Sea gas then they know it now. Lets not let anybody connected to government ever, under any circumstances, claim that "renewables" were not deliberately promoted to put us into recession or that a single one of these thieving parasites was not personally fully aware of this.

   Last night BBC Newsnight Scotland carried an obsequious interview with James Hansen who is here to call for a global government and global tax in the name of CAGW.

  Though Gordon Brewer asked nothing but the slowest and easiest of questions the BBC, wishing to make at least a slight appearance of pointing in the direction of balance, followed this up with a proper discussion involving all sides.

  Though Gordon Brewer asked nothing but the slowest and easiest of questions the BBC, fully probing its reputation as some of the world's most  corrupt totalitarian fascist propagandist parasites simply masquerading as journalists, proceeded to hold a round table discussion between Brewer, the beeboid, Patrick Harvie, boss of the Scottish Ecofascist Party and some forgettable idiot who couldn't manage yo use his earpiece.

  Any appearance of a UKIP representative or other politician or scientist  to say that Hansen is full of it was thoughtfully censored.

   My letter on why handing over science policy to would be secret policemen like Hansen will appear hear as soon as the media have shown that dissent simply isn't permissible, or even sooner if any one find it is.

  Last week BBC Newsnight ran a "debate" among the "candidates for London Mayor". The candidate from Britain's largest national party the Tories, was there and from the 2nd largest, Labour, and from what could, at the time, be credibly argued as the 3rd, the LibDems and from the 6th, the Greens.

   The, then, 4th, UKIP and the 5th, the BNP were deliberately censored.

  I don't think anybody with any honesty can now claim that the BBC is anything other than a totalitarian fascist propaganda organisation actively engaged not merely in political propaganda but in party political propagandising.

   Also, as normal, the BBC questions were limited to "politics as celebrities" rather than "politics as issues" - something the green candidate specifically lamented. This is not inherently so party biased, though it is biased against smaller parties, but is at least equally corrupting of democracy.

  However that was last week.

Our poll for the Mail on Sunday on 25th March revealed that this year’s budget proved very unpopular, and at the height of the various controversies in the days after, we found that an 8-point lead had opened up for Labour.
Two weeks later, the Labour lead has dropped back to 5% (do note the margin of error is just over 3%), however the Conservative vote share has continued to contract to levels not seen since the 1997 general election.
LAB 35% (-4%) CON 30% (-1%) LD 11% (no change) UKIP 11% (+3%) SNP 5% Greens 3%, BNP 1% Plaid 1% Oth 2%

  Arithmetically, bearing in mind that UKIP was Britain's second party, behind the Conservatives at the last European elections, this means UKIP is not Britain's 3rd most popular UK wide party.

  Even more important is that this fits in a continuing trend

  Other polls have shown a less pronounced trend but these are where pollsters ask if you are going to vote Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem or "somebody else" which any pollster will acknowledge virtually certain to skew the result, as indeed obviously happened.

   Of course this is taking no account of the effect of media censorship on people's knowledge of and support of the parties. UKIP are almost entirely censored from the screen, getting 40 times less coverage per voter than the Greens (based on the last election where we got 4%). This actually understates the degree of censorship.

    YOU CAN EASILY CHECK HOW CORRUPT, IN THE INTERESTS OF PARTICULAR PARTIES, THE BBC IS

    Also, of course, on the issues of interest to various parties the state broadcaster is blatant that they  censor virtually any disagreement with the official "pravda" (See "Pravda" means truth by Heinlein)

     If coverage was matched to present support and UKIP was getting 11% of BBC coverage (the rest of the MSM take their lead from them) rather than under 1% I don't think anybody would credibly doubt that our support would be at least double. If their coverage was not also heavily slanted against us (although I would not like to see us getting the obsequious coverage the ecofascists always do) I don't think anyone honest would doubt it would at least double again. Actually at that stage our coverage would have to quadruple again but you will see the point even without that.

    In a Britain were the media not overwhelmingly controlled and censored in the cause of state totalitarian fascism the main parties' support would crumble as fast as ever happened in the USSR. We would also then be out of the EU, recession, criminal wars and ultimately, debt.

    With the trend proven here and the implacable refusal of any of the traditional parties to accept any reform towards the popular will, it becomes increasingly likely that it will happen anyway.