The nefarious corporate behemoth Glaxo-Smith-Kline, whose dastardly deeds we’ve covered before, has added yet another horrendous entry in the ledger of terrible deeds that oppress the poor and downtrodden of the world.
It has put all its knowledge and patents of chemicals that are useful in killing malaria parasites in the public domain.
When will the madness end?
Apparently eager to compete with the vile Pat Robertson (but I repeat myself), actor Danny Glover blames the Haiti earthquake on you not using cloth shopping bags.
Thankfully, contrary to the fears expressed in my last post, the Copenhagen conference did not finally end up with a substantive deal.
The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.
It seems that there has been an eleventh-hour deal in Copenhagen.
If you don’t think giving hundreds of millions of dollars to an unelected, unaccountable bureaucracy with absolute power over the majority of the world’s economies is an inevitable recipe for corruption and tyranny, consider this:
Lord Monckton, an official delegate from the UK to Copenhagen, was barred from the conference hall, thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious by the police today.
His crime? Pointing out that the “evidence” for global warming “climate change” is suspect at best and completely fraudulent at worst.
I’m sure there are some who regard this as just a good start.
For some perspective on the mild uptick in temperature at the end of the twentieth century, watch this video:
Update: James Randi, the world’s foremost debunker of pseudoscience of all kinds, weighs in:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a group of thousands of scientists in 194 countries around the world, and recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — has issued several comprehensive reports in which they indicate that they have become convinced that “global warming” is and will be seriously destructive to life as we know it, and that Man is the chief cause of it. They say that there is a consensus of scientists who believe we are headed for disaster if we do not stop burning fossil fuels, but a growing number of prominent scientists disagree. Meanwhile, some 32,000 scientists, 9,000 of them PhDs, have signed The Petition Project statement proclaiming that Man is not necessarily the chief cause of warming, that the phenomenon may not exist at all, and that, in any case, warming would not be disastrous.
Happily, science does not depend on consensus. Conclusions are either reached or not, but only after an analysis of evidence as found in nature. It’s often been said that once a conclusion is reached, proper scientists set about trying to prove themselves wrong.
…
It’s easy enough to believe that drought, floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes are signs of a coming catastrophe from global warming, but these are normal variations of any climate that we — and other forms of life — have survived. Earth has undergone many serious changes in climate, from the Ice Ages to periods of heavily increased plant growth from their high levels of CO2, yet the biosphere has survived.
People with more time on their hands than me have been poring over the source code in the leaked CRU files. Here is a snippet of IDL code that produces a graph showing temperature data for the twentieth century (osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro):
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8, 1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.
This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.
Herodotus was right. A team of archeologists has discovered Achaemenid artifacts and human remains near the oasis of Siwa, leading them to believe they have discovered the lost army of Cambyses:
It was a rock about 114.8 feet long, 5.9 feet in height and 9.8 feet deep. Such natural formations occur in the desert, but this large rock was the only one in a large area.
“Its size and shape made it the perfect refuge in a sandstorm,” Castiglioni said.
Right there, the metal detector of Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat of Cairo University located relics of ancient warfare: a bronze dagger and several arrow tips.
“We are talking of small items, but they are extremely important as they are the first Achaemenid objects, thus dating to Cambyses’ time, which have emerged from the desert sands in a location quite close to Siwa,” Castiglioni said.
About a quarter-mile from the natural shelter, the Castiglioni team found a silver bracelet, an earring and few spheres which were likely part of a necklace.
“An analysis of the earring, based on photographs, indicate that it certainly dates to the Achaemenid period. Both the earring and the spheres appear to be made of silver. Indeed a very similar earring, dating to the fifth century B.C., has been found in a dig in Turkey,” Andrea Cagnetti, a leading expert of ancient jewelry, told Discovery News.
Demonstrates that ancient writers might have known what they were talking about.
The Averter of Evil, the Mouse-Catcher, the Delphinian, the Radiant God, the Watcher of the Heavens, graciously answered his priestess’s prayer and granted his gift of divine fire today to the nation of Canada.
He had withheld his favour from the past three Winter Olympics, so Canadians should feel especially εὐδαιμονίαι.
Turns out there’s still at least one religion whose priests can sodomize children and be excused and even applauded.
The religion I speak of is, of course, Progressivism, whose self-appointed high priests are the glitterati of Hollywood. Roman Polanski, a genius at film directing, admitted to drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl, and then fled the country. Now his extradition to the US is being protested by a large number of hollywood celebrities. (Thankfully there are some, both celebrities and non, who are rightly appalled by this.)
It’s a little ironic, don’t you think, that in this day and age a high-status male can sexually assault a child and be excused and applauded. How very . . . patriarchal.
Camile Paglia has some trenchant words for her fellow Democrats:
Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.
She doesn’t spare the GOP, either.
If I were American I’d probably join the Modern Whig party.
I’ve recently been reading about the secretive fundagelical political organization described in Jeff Sharlet’s disturbing book, The Family. Some further links are via Amicus Dei and Slacktivist.
While I have some minor quibbles with certain aspects of Sharlet’s interpretation, the evidence and conclusion are as compelling as they are depressing: the US government — of both parties — and financial elite are pervaded by a clandestine organization whose express goal is global theocracy, and whose members, lacking any moderation via the wider context of scripture or theology or the main stream of orthodoxy in the church, are, as C.S. Lewis warned, capable of blithely colluding in the worst kind of oppression and violence in the name of “the will of God”.
Now that President Obama has invoked the deity in a matter of national policy, Republicans in the future need fear no criticism for faith-based initiatives.
All they have to do is say, “As President Obama said so truly, we are God’s partners in …”
Schadenfreude, anyone?
We need a way to get off the planet.
The UK and the USA, once bastions of civil liberties, are becoming more and more totalitarian.
The UK is installing cameras in families’ homes, to monitor whether their kids are going to bed on time. But only the “worst” families. That’s all right, then.
George W. Bush (whose foreign policy I supported)’s vaguely Orwellian “Department of Homeland Security” was bad enough, but the current stifling of dissent by the Obama administration is chilling. It is all too clear that those liberals who professed fear that Bush would suspend the Constitution and civil liberties were simply projecting.
There has been a wide groundswell of grass-roots opposition to Obama’s 1400-page government expansion healthcare bill. Under Bush, dissent was the highest form of patriotism. Now, the Obama administration has set up an email address where people can inform on their neighbors who oppose the plan.
Now groups of administration supporters are denying concerned citizens access to town hall meetings, even to the point of physical violence.
Inform on your neighbors for disagreeing with the President. If you show up to tell your Congressperson your opinion, violent gangs of government thugs will beat your head in.
No wonder Obama won’t criticize Ahmadinejad.
The grand human experiment that began with the Magna Carta and culminated in the Declaration of Independence seems to be grounding on the shoals of corruption and the license that progressivism gives to those who crave power over others.
We need a way to move on out and start new afresh. Ad Astra!
After the Iranian regime slaughtered dozens and maybe hundreds of protestors today, President Obama released a statement calling on the Iranians to not be “unjust” — to pick only the bad teenage girls to shoot in the head, I guess.
Then he went out for ice cream.
We can now reveal that the President had vanilla frozen custard in a cup with hot fudge and toasted almonds.
Wow.
I have refrained from comment on the revolution-in-the-making in Iran because I would far rather pay attention to my infant daughter’s growing grasp of motor control.
But just the other day I expressed the hope that Obama’s apparent waffling on the Iran situation was aimed at not providing the regime with an excuse to suppress the protests as being instigated by the Great Satan.
But if that was the case, and he has now decided to change his approach, is “don’t be unjust” the best he can come up with? Surely there could have been some “grave concern” or “strongly-worded” diplo-speak.
But it is even more evident now than it has been that the President is simply floundering.
I predicted on his election that he would be the next Carter. Ironically, it looks like Iran will prove the character of both.
Lileks on the horror that is suburbia:
we drove deep into the exurbs for a little dinner gathering at her piano teacher’s house, where a brilliant young kid played flamenco guitar on the porch. Home-schooled. Arranges his own stuff; wants to go into economics. As I twittered at the time: ah the culturally destitute burbs, with the sound of an expertly strummed guitar floating over the golf course behind the house. Good thing the street wasn’t a cul-de-sac, or people might have come out with pitchforks. Stop that art there! This is the suburbs! Only grey, materialistic lives are permitted here!
A huge step in reducing Liberia’s crippling foreign debt:
In a huge step forward, this week Liberia slashed its foreign debt by buying back $1.2 billion in commercial debt — about one-quarter of its foreign debt — from its private foreign creditors, including banks, hedge funds, and other “distressed debt” investment funds. President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf announced today that the Government had purchased the debt at a discount of nearly 97 percent off the face value, the deepest discount ever negotiated on developing country commercial debt. The $38 million needed for the deal was provided by some of Liberia’s strongest partners — the World Bank, Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States, so the debt was eliminated at zero cost to the people of Liberia.
Congratulations to everyone involved. Now ignore the example of a certain American President and keep a balanced budget!
Those dastardly drug companies, aided and abetted by software monopolists, are at it again: developing the first effective vaccine against malaria, a disease which kills a million children a year in Africa.
Damn Bill Gates and his running dogs at Glaxo-Smith-Kline!
Reading sites like Climate Audit and Niche Modeling is a great eye-opener if you want to know where the data comes from that supports the current apocalyptic frenzy around the subject of global warming.
Suffice it to repeat the old saw about “lies, damn lies, and statistics”. The only overall temperature measurements we have are from satellites, and only since 1979. They show that the last ten years have actually seen a cooling trend. Land-based temperature measurements, which go back a hundred years or so, are extremely hard to interpret, due to the fact that most temperature stations are in urban areas, which tend to be hotter than rural areas. Data before a couple hundred years ago is indirect, based on things like ice cores and tree rings. In order to get a reliable picture from that kind of data, you need to make all kinds of initial assumptions about how the data should be interpreted. Then you run the data through an extremely convoluted statistical program. When the tree-ring and ice core data is run through Hanson’s famous program, you get the infamous “hockey stick” graph that shows rapidly rising temperatures for the forseeable future.
The funny thing is, you can run completely random noise through Hanson’s program and it will still output a hockey stick graph.
Anyway, don’t take my word for it:
I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.
FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
There is no doubt that some parts of the world have been warmer in recent years than in the last century or so. But there is very little reason to believe that those warm spots are part of a global trend, or that they will keep warming. Even in the past thousand years, parts of the world have been much warmer than they are now — the Arctic in the middle ages — and colder — England only 200 years ago.
There’s been a bit of a buzz lately over seasteading, a libertarian project to develop practical floating habitats for people who want to form their own mini-governments in international waters.
The guiding principle is “dynamic geography” — the idea that if people don’t like their government, they can move to a different one. People can try out various different kinds of governments and social systems, to see what works for them.
I think that’s a really cool idea.
But am I the only one to see the huge glaring problem with the details of this particular implementation? How are people supposed to exercise their freedom of choice of government when they’re STUCK ON A FLOATING PLATFORM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN?
Something that gets me steaming is the current fashion opposing the vaccination of children. Some perspective:
Even if the myth [that vaccines cause autism] were true, not vaccinating your children would be a poor solution.
It has been such a long time since we’ve had to deal with polio and smallpox, that people have forgotten just how scary they were. In 1952, at the height of the polio epidemics, around 14 out of 100,000 of every Americans had paralytic polio. 300-500 million people died of smallpox in the 20th century. Add in hepatitis A, hepatitis B, mumps, measles, rubella, diptheria, pertussis, tetanus, HiB, chicken pox, rotavirus, meningococcal disease, pneumonia and the flu, and no wonder experts estimate that “fully vaccinating all U. S. children born in a given year from birth to adolescence saves an estimated 33,000 lives and prevents an estimated 14 million infections.”
There may indeed be dangers with vaccinations. But the dangers of not vaccinating far, far outweigh them.
Some excellent perspective on the war in Iraq from Fouad Ajami in the Wall Street Journal:
It is not easy to tell people of threats and dangers they have been spared. The war put on notice regimes and conspirators who had harbored dark thoughts about America and who, in the course of the 1990s, were led to believe that terrible deeds against America would go unpunished. A different lesson was taught in Iraq. Nowadays, the burden of the war, in blood and treasure, is easy to see, while the gains, subtle and real, are harder to demonstrate. Last month, American casualties in Iraq were at their lowest since 2003. The Sunnis also have broken with al Qaeda, and the Shiite-led government has taken the war to the Mahdi Army
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