Saturday, December 12, 2009
"SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS" - SCOTSMAN LETTER
Tom Ballantine (letters weds & again on friday) says that 84% of scientists believe in catastrophic global warming. This seems an interestingly precise figure, though it is well down from the "99%" or indeed "99.9%" claimed previously by alarmists. I would be interested to see what actual evidence he has for this assertion. The largest single expression of opinion is the 31,000 scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition saying rising CO2 is beneficial so Mr Ballantine should be able to produce a petition showing 162,000 scientists saying the opposite & other alarmists petitions of anything up to 31 million. On a number of alarmist websites, including "Realclimate" I have asked for the names of 2 prominent scientists, not funded by government or an alarmist lobby who have said that we are seeing a catastrophic degree of warming & none of them have yet been able to name even one. I extend this same invitation to Mr Ballantine & other Scotsman readers.The highlighted bit is what they printed. Pity they left out the challenge to anybody to name even 2 independent alarmist scientists, particularly with the assorted politicians on radio yesterday failing that challenge. Ballantine's letters saying "84%" were on Wednesday & Friday. He also had this letter which doesn't use that interesting figure.
Labels: global warming, letters
Friday, December 11, 2009
BRIAN TAYLOR'S BIG DEBATE - BBC RADIO SCOTLAND
Radio Scotland runs this every Friday 1.15 - 2.00 & today I was in the audience. Most of the rest of the audience consisting of 2 classes of schoolchildren & their teachers.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mk70p/episodes/player
The 4 panelists were David Whitton, Labour MSP; Rob Gibson, SNP MSP; Patrick Harvie, leader of the Scottish Green Party & MSP; & Alastair Northman, token business representative.
The questions were on
(1) cutting class sizes in schools in which an audience member made the only serious point - that discipline is more important. Naturally the teachers there were rather keen on more teachers & money.
(4) on the new expenses revelations about which everybody was suitably indignant.
(3) global warming: I had put in a question which wasn't accepted but was told I could probably ask during the discussion which I did
We know the globe is actually currently cooling rather than warming; we know there has been massive fraud among the people collating it; we know that over 31,000 scientists have signed a petition it isn't a problem & a CO2 rise is beneficial. Yet we are told there is a "scientific consensus". There is certainly a consensus among politicians & journalists but can any member of the panel name 2 prominent scientists who say we are suffering catastrophic warming & aren't funded by government or alarmist lobbiesBrian said "so you don't believe in it", I answered "I think it is an eco-fascist fraud" he joked "don't sit on the fence" before handing it to Partick Harvie.
Harvie's response was that global warming is certainly happening - that the last decade is the warmest on record (true IF the CRU figures are correct - if the US figures are correct the 1930s were - but in either case is moving the goal posts because the year on year figures show a decline. He said nobody could argue about the need to cut CO2 - I said from the audience that I could but I doubt it was heard but was very silly assertion of his. He made no attempt whatsoever to name even one independent scientist who supports catastrophic warming & I have no doubt, that as Green Party leader he knows enough on the subject to do so if there were a number of them.
The other panelists also decided not to answer the question. There were digressions into peak oil & general platitudes but no attempt by any of them to name a single independent member of this alleged "overwhelming scientific consensus. I have asked this same question on Realclimate & elsewhere & have never had a responsive response so clearly they know the "scientific consensus" claim is a total lie told only by total liars.
Question (3) about how dreadful it was that public employees' jobs should be on a shoogly peg just because the economy is in freefall. This went down quite well with the teachers, indeed me, Alastair & 1 other may have been the only non-government workers there. The discussion moved to how dreadful it was that bankers weren't lending money to redundant teachers (lets be fair that might make a worthwhile redundancy package) & thus to how dreadful bankers are. I again put up my hand & to my pleasant surprise, was called. I said
Banking is an international business so why should bankers lend money to ventures in Scotland when we have some of the world's most expensive electricity & our MSPs have voted unanimously to shut down half of it over the next 11 years, when they could invest in Chinese industryThe audience were understandably not enthusiastic about this option & one of the pupils answered that they would be keen to invest here because we have the Commonwealth Games. Rob Gibson MSP answered that the banks should be made to lend to British people because we own the banks. Both got a cheer. I suspect Mr Gibson is closer to being right but I would not say that his understanding of economic reality is much greater than that of the schoolboy.
After it finished the lanky bearded student type sitting in front of me disputed with me but since he knew no actual facts quickly moved on to peak oil on which he knew nothing & then to the environmental desirability of maintaining the Canadian tar sands because of all the animal ecology living in it. I said that, not being a believer in God I didn't think that particular pieces of land had been placed there with a duty that we never change it. He asked me if I would be surprised to learn that he was a minister & i said disappointed but not surprised.
The BBC will shortly run a "debate" on Scotland's Green Future. I have written to them saying that if they want a debate involving alternate views I would be interested in being in the audience. Any bets?
However I am pleased with this since it went out live & it was clearly apparent that the eco-fascists' claims of "scientific consensus" are based on no actual facts. That is probably as much as anybody can do facing the political & media fascist consensus.
Labels: global warming, Media, Scottish politics
Thursday, December 10, 2009
STATE OF FEAR - MICHAEL CRICHTON
In a comment yesterday I mentioned Michael Crichton's book State of Fear & in particular the lecture, squeezed into the narrative as a conversation, about how government uses false fear stories to keep us alarmed & hence clamorous to be led to safety. It is chapter Oct 13 - 9.33 of the book which you should certainly read. I have, insofar as practical, edited it down to the basic lecture.
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ecology of thought .. And how it has led to a State of Fear
Ten years ago, I began with fashion and slang, the latter being of course a kind of verbal fashion. I wanted to know the determinants of change in fashion and speech. What I quickly found is that there are no identifiable determinants. Fashions change for arbitrary reasons and although there are regularities, cycles, periodicities, and correlations - these are merely descriptive, not explanatory.
I realized that these periodicities and correlations could be regarded as systems in themselves. Or if you will, ecosystems. I tested that hypothesis and found it heuristically valuable. Just as there is an ecology of the natural world, in the forests and mountains and oceans, so too there is an ecology of the man-made world of mental abstractions, ideas, and thought. That is what I have studied.
Within modern culture, ideas constantly rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something, and then, bit by bit, they stop believing it. Eventually, no one can remember the old idea, the way no one can remember the old slang. Ideas are themselves a kind of fad, you see.
Why do ideas fall out of favor, you are wondering? The answer is simply they do. In fashion, as in natural ecology, there are disruptions. Sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. Accidental, haphazard, unexpected, abrupt change. That is what the world shows us on every side.
But just as ideas can change abruptly, so, too, can they hang on past their time. Some ideas continue to be embraced by the public long after scientists have abandoned them. Left brain, right brain is a perfect example. In the 1970s, it gains popularity from the work of Sperry at Caltech, who studies a specific group of brain-surgery patients. His findings have no broader meaning beyond these patients. Sperry denies any broader meaning. By 1980, it is clear that the left and right brain notion is just wrong the two sides of the brain do not work separately in a healthy person. But in the popular culture, the concept does not die for another twenty years. People talk about it, believe it, write books about it for decades after scientists have set it aside.
Similarly, in environmental thought, it was widely accepted in 1960 that there is something called the balance of nature. If you just left nature alone it would come into a self-maintaining state of balance. Lovely idea with a long pedigree. The Greeks believed it three thousand years ago, on the basis of nothing. Just seemed nice. However, by 1990, no scientist believes in the balance of nature anymore. The ecologists have all given it up as simply wrong. Untrue. A fantasy. They speak now of dynamic disequilibrium, of multiple equilibrium states. But they now understand that nature is never in balance. Never has been, never will be. On the contrary, nature is always out of balance, and that means that mankind, which was formerly defined as the great disrupter of the natural order, is nothing of the sort. The whole environment is being constantly disrupted all the time anyway.
If you study the media, seeking to find shifts in normative conceptualization, you discover something extremely interesting. We looked at transcripts of news programs of the major networks NBC, ABC, CBS. We also looked at stories in the newspapers of New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles, and Seattle. We counted the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking.
There was a major shift in the fall of 1989. Before that time, the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague, or disaster. For example, during the 1980s, the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition, prior to 1989, adjectives such as dire, unprecedented, dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper headlines. But then it all changed.
These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000. And the stories changed, too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty, panic.
"Why should it have changed in 1989?"
Ah. A good question. Critical question. In most respects 1989 seemed like a normal year: a Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; Jane Fonda, Mike Tyson, and Bruce Springsteen all got divorced; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France, and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other. But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision in the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should coincide so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Which happened on November ninth of that year.
At first we thought the association was spurious. But it wasn't. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet empire. And the end of the Cold War that had lasted for half a century in the West.
I am leading to the notion of social control. To the requirement of every sovereign state to exert control over the behavior of its citizens, to keep them orderly and reasonably docile. To keep them driving on the right side of the road or the left, as the case may be. To keep them paying taxes. And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear.
For fifty years, Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the other side. Fear of nuclear war. The Communist menace. The Iron Curtain. The Evil Empire. And within the Communist countries, the same in reverse. Fear of us. Then, suddenly, in the fall of 1989, it was all finished. Gone, vanished. Over. The fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something had to fill it.
environmental crises took the place of the Cold War
That is what the evidence shows. Of course, now we have radical fundamentalism and post 9/11 terrorism to make us afraid, and those are certainly real reasons for fear, but that is not my point. My point is, there is always a cause for fear. The cause may change over time, but the fear is always with us. Before terrorism we feared the toxic environment. Before that we had the Communist menace. The point is, although the specific cause of our fear may change, we are never without the fear itself. Fear pervades society in all its aspects. Perpetually.
Has it ever occurred to you how astonishing the culture of Western society really is? Industrialized nations provide their citizens with unprecedented safety, health, and comfort. Average life spans increased fifty percent in the last century. Yet modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them. They are in a particular panic over things they can't even see - germs, chemicals, additives, pollutants. They are timid, nervous, fretful, and depressed. And even more amazingly, they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusional global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear.
How has this world view been instilled in everybody? Because although we imagine we live in different nations France, Germany, Japan, the US in fact, we inhabit exactly the same state, the State of Fear. How has that been accomplished?
In the old days citizens of the West believed their nation-states were dominated by something called the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower warned Americans against it in the 1960s, and after two world wars Europeans knew very well what it meant in their own countries. But the military-industrial complex is no longer the primary driver of society. In reality, for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And it is dedicated to promoting fear in the population under the guise of promoting safety
Western nations are fabulously safe. Yet people do not feel they are, because of the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable, precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population. Lawyers need dangers to litigate, and make money. The media need scare stories to capture an audience. Together, these three estates are so compelling that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless. If it has no basis in fact at all. For instance, consider silicon breast implants.
recall that breast implants were claimed to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. Despite statistical evidence that this was not true, we saw high-profile news stories, high-profile lawsuits, high-profile political hearings. The manufacturer, Dow Corning, was hounded out of the business after paying $3.2 billion, and juries awarded huge cash payments to plaintiffs and their lawyers.
Four years later, definitive epidemiological studies showed beyond a doubt that breast implants did not cause disease. But by then the crisis had already served its purpose, and the PLM had moved on, a ravenous machine seeking new fears, new terrors. This is the way modern society works by the constant creation of fear. And there is no countervailing force. There is no system of checks and balances, no restraint on the perpetual promotion of fear after fear after fear&.
"Because we have freedom of speech, freedom of the press."
That is the classic PLM answer. That's how they stay in business, but think. If it is not all right to falsely shout "Fire!' in a crowded theater, why is it all right to shout "Cancer!' in the pages of The New Yorker? When that statement is not true? We've spent more than twenty-five billion dollars to clear up the phony power-line cancer claim. Twenty-five billion dollars is more than the total GDP of the poorest fifty nations of the world combined. Half the world's population lives on two dollars a day. So that twenty-five billion would be enough to support thirty-four million people for a year. Or we could have helped all the people dying of AIDS in Africa. Or built a Space elevator -Neil Instead, we piss it away on a fantasy published by a magazine whose readers take it very seriously. Trust it. It is a stupendous waste of money. In another world, it would be a criminal waste. One could easily imagine another Nuremberg trial this time for the relentless squandering of Western wealth on trivialities and complete with pictures of the dead babies in Africa and Asia that result.
At the very least, we are talking about a moral outrage. Thus we can expect our religious leaders and our great humanitarian figures to cry out against this waste and the needless deaths around the world that result. But do any religious leaders speak out? No. Quite the contrary, they join the chorus. They promote "What Would Jesus Drive?' As if they have forgotten that what Jesus would drive is the false prophets and fearmongers out of the temple.
We are talking about a situation that is profoundly immoral. It is disgusting, if truth be told. The PLM callously ignores the plight of the poorest and most desperate human beings on our planet in order to keep fat politicians in office, rich news anchors on the air, and conniving lawyers in Mercedes-Benz convertibles. Oh, and university professors in Volvos. Let's not forget them.
The world has changed in the last fifty years. We now live in the knowledge society, the information society, whatever you want to call it. And it has had enormous impact on our universities.
Fifty years ago, if you wanted to lead what was then called "the life of the mind,' meaning to be an intellectual, to live by your wits, you had to work in a university. The society at large had no place for you. A few newspaper reporters, a few magazine journalists could be considered as living by their wits, but that was about it. Universities attracted those who willingly gave up worldly goods to live a cloistered intellectual life, teaching timeless values to the younger generation. Intellectual work was the exclusive province of the university.
But today, whole sectors of society live the life of the mind. Our entire economy is based on intellectual work, now. Thirty-six percent of workers are knowledge workers. That's more than are employed in manufacturing. And when professors decided they would no longer teach young people, but leave that task to their graduate students who knew much less than they did and spoke English poorly the universities were thrown into crisis. What good were they anymore? They had lost their exclusive hold on the life of the mind. They no longer taught the young. Only so many theoretical texts on the semiotics of Foucault could be published in any single year. What was to become of our universities? What relevance did they have in the modern era?
The universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry, formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the PLM. Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can't say. Thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.
The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core.
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involution It is the next step in the development of nation-states. Indeed it is already happening. You must see the irony. After all, twenty-five billion dollars and ten years later the same rich elitists who were terrified of power-line cancer are buying magnets to strap to their ankles or put on their mattresses. Imported Japanese magnets are the best, the most expensive in order to enjoy the healthful effects of magnetic fields. The same magnetic fields only now they can't get enough of them. Why don't these people just lie back against a TV screen? Snuggle up to a kitchen appliance? All the things that terrified them before. They even sell magnets in the health magazines! No one remembers even a few years ago! George Orwell.
Labels: eco-fascism, Fear, Media
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
CLIMATE FRAUD - WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE CONSPIRACY
This is from a recent Wall Street Journal article. Note that I still have not found anybody on the alarmist side who can name 2 members of the alleged consensus who are not paid by government or alarmist lobbyists who have said they believe in catastrophic global warming. Let me extend this invitation to any supporter of the claim anywhere in the world (a copy is also going to parties supporting alarmism). Subject to somebody producing some genuine examples I think we can say that, with the largest single expression of scientists being the 31,000 who said CO2 rise is a good thing, the claims that there is or ever has been a scientific consensus is a total & deliberate lie. It is a libel against real scientists told by wholly corrupt lying fascist politicians & journalists:
Last year, ExxonMobil donated $7 million to a grab-bag of public policy institutes, including the Aspen Institute, the Asia Society and Transparency International. It also gave a combined $125,000 to the Heritage Institute and the National Center for Policy Analysis, two conservative think tanks that have offered dissenting views on what until recently was called—without irony—the climate change "consensus."
To read some of the press accounts of these gifts—amounting to about 0.0027% of Exxon's 2008 profits of $45 billion—you might think you'd hit upon the scandal of the age. But thanks to what now goes by the name of climategate, it turns out the real scandal lies elsewhere. Hanson said Executives doing this should be imprisoned & even Britain's, government funded, Royal society said such research shouldn't be funded
Climategate, as readers of these pages know, concerns some of the world's leading climate scientists working in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage inconvenient temperature data—facts that were laid bare by last week's disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU.
But the deeper question is why the scientists behaved this way to begin with, especially since the science behind man-made global warming is said to be firmly settled. To answer the question, it helps to turn the alarmists' follow-the-money methods right back at them.
Consider the case of Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and the man at the heart of climategate. According to one of the documents leaked from his center, between 2000 and 2006 Mr. Jones was the recipient (or co-recipient) of some $19 (£13.7 million) million worth of research grants, a sixfold increase over what he'd been awarded in the 1990s.
Why did the money pour in so quickly? Because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly: The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?
Thus, the European Commission's most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that's not counting funds from the EU's member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA's climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA's, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. American states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. (total $2.6 billion in USA) In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.
And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls "green stimulus"—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely...
None of these outfits are per se corrupt, in the sense that the monies they get are spent on something other than their intended purposes. But they depend on an inherently corrupting premise, namely that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent—including the thousands of jobs they provide—vanishes. This is what's known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
Which brings us back to the climategate scientists, the keepers of the keys to the global warming cathedral. In one of the more telling disclosures from last week, a computer programmer writes of the CRU's temperature database: "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seems to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. . . . Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight. . . . We can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"
This is not the sound of settled science, but of a cracking empirical foundation. And however many billion-dollar edifices may be built on it, sooner or later it is bound to crumble.
Assuming the EU member countries have individually matched the central money that comes to $8.6 billion (£5.2 billion) given annually purely to those few former scientists who have been willing to push this lie. Normal grant levels, or something close, have been maintained for those who say nothing either way & immense efforts have been made not only not to fund any real research but to browbeat private donors, even with threats of imprisonment to prevent any research which might find contrary results. If they thought it were true they would not need to suppress sceptical funding. It is thus absolutely proven that the "catastrophic global warming" campaign is not an accidental instance of public hysteria but a careful government campaign across Europe & North America, deliberately & enormously funded for the purpose of promoting a lie so that the totally corrupt rulers can use this scare story to establish fascist controls on our lives & prevent the common people enjoying the wealth the rulers do.
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Dear Labour,/Green,/LibDem/SNP/Conservative Party,
I have published the undernoted blog in which I use the fact that nobody on the alarmist side has been able to name 2 prominent scientists who form part of the alleged consensus who have actually said catastrophic global warming is happening & are not paid by government or alarmist lobbyists, as evidence that it is not only a fraud but a particularly well well funded fraud designed for the purpose of letting you fascists control us. In the circumstances I am certain that if you can disprove this allegation by producing some such scientists you will be eager to do so.
Labels: eco-fascism, global warming, Government parasitism
Tuesday, December 08, 2009
BIG ENGINEERING 40 WORLD PEACE BY PRIZE
Some time ago I blogged about the Fredkin Prize which was a comparatively small series of prizes for achieving a computer programme capable of beating a Grand Master at chess. Put up in 1980 the main prize was won in 1997.
With Moore's Law (computer capacity doubles every 18 months) it has now increased some million times since 1980 & 250 times since 1997. Time for something bigger. The golden aim of such computer science is something that can pass the Turing Test - be able to carry out a conversation indistinguishable from that of a human (& more technical way of saying a computer with human level intelligence). I will aim for something lower - or higher.
I propose a series of prizes should be put up for a process culminating in the establishment of an open source computer programme which could determine the legality of national actions under international law.
The prizes should start with something capable of rendering a simulated decision in a war game atmosphere which both sides agreed was satisfactory. Then a larger prize for something used in a real situation & ultimately for one which successfully acts as a judge on the International Court of Justice, or if that option is refused, is able, on its own to render judgement in a years worth of different cases with judgements not agreed by a worldwide panel, to be inferior to the ICJ rulings. It is obviously necessary that, though the copyright remains in the designer's hands, the programme be open source so that it can be checked & run by anybody who needs to be able to trust it.
Law is a very computer like system with either/or decisions, set rules, logic & great importance laid on previous examples. As such it would be much easier for a computer programme to impersonate a superior judge than an ordinary human being.
It is overstating to say this would provide peace on Earth but it would provide a framework for it. Conflict usually occurs when both sides have convinced themselves they are in the right. Even where it isn't it is usually important for bystanders to be able to make a decision on that order.
I have blogged previously on the Yugoslav wars. It is arguable that the greatest harm from these wars is that international law has been almost eliminated by the way that not only did NATO deliberately flout much of it (the Helsinki Treaty admonition to respect the territorial integrity of other signatories such as Yugoslavia, the UN Charter with similar provisions, The Montevideo accord giving specific rules where "recognition" of states is allowed, the Nuremberg Trials "where planning aggressive war" was declared to be the primary war crime etc etc) but that they have used their influence on the ICJ to produce judgements which are clearly corrupt (that the ICJ claimed to have no authority to judge on whether NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia was a war crime because Yugoslavia was suspended from the UN, but previously ruling on a case brought by Bosnia & Hercegovina against Yugoslavia when B&H was not & never had been a UN member being the most disgraceful) while NATO abused the UN rules to set up & fund its own "court" to try Serbs but only token Croats & Moslems & zero NATO leaders.
The world needs a rule of law more desperately than at any time in history since the world is smaller & thus more vulnerable - decisions in isolated Afghanistan can mean acts of war within the USA. Such vulnerability to foreign power was inconceivable to the USA of a century ago though it was a much less overwhelming power.
I do not say that having such decisions on record would automatically stop any aggressor but it would provide a major dampening effect to tension. Any aggressor would be known, both by its neighbours & by its own people to be the aggressor & that would make the attempt much more chancy. If it reduced the chances of an aggressive war it would also reduce the motivation for a pre-emptive attack. Not perfection - perfection would be having a mass UN army purely under the control of this Judgement Programme which I would most definitely oppose - but a major pressure towards peace, while maintaining freedom.
Bearing in mind the size of the Fredkin Prize (initially $360,000 in today's money boosted to $4 million) this seems a low price for world peace, which is why though this is not physically big like the other BE projects it is BIG.
I would limit this to the International Court of Justice not the International Criminal Court which, until Yugoslavia, had a significant role in promoting peace, not least between the super powers - indeed the fact that both sides showed extensive respect for the letter of international law may have been a major reason the cold war stayed cold. Anybody who thinks the ICC rules & precedent can be put into a computer programme without it issuing indictments against most of the world's leaders including our own is welcome to try.
Labels: Big Engineering, International politics, X-Prizes
Monday, December 07, 2009
CLIMATE FRAUD - CIVIL SERVANT
Sir Muir Russell, chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, who has no previous links with the climate science community, will lead the investigation into allegations that leading academics at the University of East Anglia manipulated data on global warming.Nigel Lawson's Global Warming Policy Foundation has, at least to some extent gone for it
He will also look at whether the university’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was in compliance with its Freedom of Information (FOI) policies and the Environmental Information Regulations for the release of data. contd
Benny Peiser, director of the "sceptic" thinktank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, welcomed the choice of Sir Muir, saying that it was essential that the university chose someone without connections to the climate science community.However what is not mentioned is that while Sir Muir Russell is not a climate scientist or indeed scientist at all he does have previous experience of whitewash which seems to have escaped notice in London.
"We're not giving the inquiry a blank cheque, we will be monitoring it very carefully," he said. "If the inquiry is done properly and the scientists are cleared we welcome their restoration into their jobs."
He was appointed Permanent Secretary at The Scottish Office in May 1998, and to the Scottish Executive since its establishment in 1999. He was widely believed to be primarily responsible for the massive overspend on the new Scottish Parliament Building and was criticised by Lord Fraser of Carmyllie's enquiry for failing to keep the politicians informed that the expenditure was far in excess of the budget. - wikipediaThe Scottish Parliament building was the project of Donald Dewar, then Scottish Secretary & subsequently first First Minister. If "Tam Dalyell is wicked and alarmist in saying that the Scottish Parliament will cost a penny more than £40 million" would be truthful. In fact it actually cost officially £414 million (in practice £430-£470m including landscaping etc). It was a scandal of enormous magnitude here & correctly seen as the Holyrood politicians were "numpties" (overblown incompetent fools is the best translation).
The subsequent greywash managed to avoid making anybody to blame for this & in particular blaming any of the ministers. Insofar as anybody was in any way responsible it was "senior civil servants" who alone had decided to keep all the information from government ministers & decided not to put the contract out to a fixed price bidder. The most senior of these was the permanent Secretary Sir Muir Russell. The result "did not rule out the possibility of taking disciplinary action against civil service staff, although subsequent Scottish Government investigations resulted in no action being taken against individual public officials involved with the project."
Sir Muir's subsequent history does not show that being the alleged primary person responsible for blowing £400 million reflected adversely on his career prospects. Indeed the cynical could say that it looks rather more like reflecting political gratitude that he had prevented those in charge getting the blame they deserved.
All in all anybody want to bet against East Anglia's enquiry deciding that none of the emails are as bad as they look, there is nothing much wrong with breaking the Freedom of Information Act, that destroying the data was a sensible way to save space rather than a breach so basic to science that Jones & co simply can't be called scientists & that none of it impinges on the credibility of the theory based on the destroyed data.
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Meanwhile the IPCC have announced an enquiry into climategate
"Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that the allegations raised by leaked e-mails in the so-called "climategate" controversy were too serious to ignore.& instantly concluded with the new line
"We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it," he told BBC Radio 4's The Report programme. "We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail."
The vice chairman of the IPCC panel, Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, says there had been a purpose to leaking the emails.Which means business as usual for the catastrophic warming "believers" gathering in Copenhagen who in the interests of saving the planet have ensured "the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”
"The intention is clearly to distract the confidence negotiators have in the science," he said.
"I had to look at some of the emails, not all of them, but even if you remove the evidence that those scientists were working on, it doesn't change anything to the IPCC conclusion."
Whatever one thinks of the original lentil eating Luddites of the "environmental movement & I have made it clear I do, they look pretty good compared to the corrupt parasites of big government who have co-opted their programme as a way of keeping us paying taxes to them.
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Dear Gordon Brown,
I understand you have called me & all the others who doubt that the current global cooling is is a sign of a catastrophic level of global warming "flat-earthers" I deny believing the Earth to be flat or indeed to be in any way anti-science.
I must ask that either you publicly retract that lie in connection with myself & anybody else of whom it is untrue, or provide some evidence that I hold such a belief. Obviously those 2 options are the only possible ones open to anybody who is, in any way whatsoever, honest
In the event, which I do not anticipate, you prove yourself to be a totally dishonest & corrupt person by not taking either option I will ask the Labour party to dissociate themselves from such claims. Obviously in the event of the party or any member not being wholly dishonest, corrupt & unable to be trusted ever on any subject whatsoever, they would have to dissociate themselves from the claim.
(I'll let you know if he or his party or any member retract)
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And finally
A couple of people have pointed out that I am named by Prof Jones as a "prat" in these leaked emails. That puts me in very good company & lets be fair - I haven't exactly been kind to him either.
I had sent Mr Briffa an email on the tree ring data actually being based not only on a sample of only 12 but much more damagingly that Russian tree rings from the same site which would have changed the average to show no warming had been excised.
This is the response they decided not to send
If we are to respond, it would be to indicate that there are multiple sources of supportingThis is simply fluff not answering the question. Since this "international scientific assessment" is based on these & related figures it seems this structure is being kept up there by each end using the other as its foundation.
evidence and that we continue to place our confidence in the international scientific
assessment process. This confidence has proven to be well placed.
Roger
Labels: British politics, Fear, global warming
Sunday, December 06, 2009
CAMERON SPEAKS ON "ELFIN SAFETY" PARASITISM
I know the over-the-top health and safety culture that has grown in our country in recent years provokes a lot of understandable anger.I saw this speech via LibDem Voice which was rubbishing the idea that we could cut the nanny state in the normal illiberal manner. I put up this comment
But anger itself is not solution.
Instead we need a forensic examination of what has gone wrong and the steps we need to take to put it right.
We know what has gone wrong.
Excessive rules have given the impression that we have a right to a risk-free life…
…and that impression has been exacerbated by prominent claims and pay-outs.
The consequence has been spiralling costs and a slow death of discretion, judgement and social responsibility.
And what I have described today is the beginnings of putting it right.
For every piece of health and safety legislation, we need to ask whether it fulfils a useful purpose – and if not, it must go.
And we must bring some common sense to the laws surrounding compensation.
I want people to know that with the Conservatives, government will let you get on with your life without unnecessary rules and regulations.
I want everyone to know that with the Conservatives, if you do good, get involved and make a contribution, the system will back you.
And I want people to know that with the Conservatives, the legal system will be there protecting those who need it most.
That’s the change I believe people want – and that is the change we offer.”
You say the conkers stray is a myth. And to prove this quote a department PR piece saying it is true but is such a silly idea most schools don’t do it. This is a redefinition of “myth”. When it is true it isn’t a myth.which in the party's normal illiberal manner, they censored.
This is an unusually sensible position of Cameron’s & the “LibDems” have put themselves firmly on the side of ever bigger & immensely destructive government micromanaging of everything no matter how silly. National wealth is the single greatest factor in safety & it is easy to prove that all the national wealth wasted on such nanny-statism causes the deaths of orders of magnitude more people than the H&S regulations save. Their purpose is bureaucratic big government for its own sake & absolutely nothing to do with safety. How illiberal of you to support that.
Labels: British politics, Government parasitism