The world is watching...

...The International Conference on Climate Change is devoted to answering questions overlooked by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Click on image to enlarge.) That panel concluded global temperatures may already have reached crisis proportions, and that human activity was a key driver in raising temperatures, primarily because of the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
But the 80 experts scheduled to speak at the Heartland conference say they will present a substantially different viewpoint.
“The number of people registered for this event is nearly twice as many as attended the 2008 conference,” noted Heartland President Joseph Bast. “And the presenters at this year’s conference are the elite in the world among climate scientists. We will be delighted to demonstrate once again the breadth and high quality of support that the skeptical perspective on climate change enjoys...updates to follow...Programme for Day 1 here...

The chorus of dissent is growing stronger...

...and the dissenters display significant courage by advocating an unpopular viewpoint when funding for institutions is under threat...
Dr. Kesten Green is a Senior Research Fellow with the Business and Economic Forecasting Unit of Monash University in Australia. Dr. Scott Armstrong a Professor at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Willie Soon is a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Together they say...
...The tiny fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased through the twentieth century. And yet, during that time, global average temperatures rose till about 1940, fell till about 1975, rose again till 1998, and then dropped away again. It is not surprising, then, that despite claims “the science is settled,” thousands of scientists disagree with forecasts of dangerous manmade global warming.
The IPCC first projected a global warming rate of 0.03°C per year in 1992. The errors of the IPCC projection over the years 1992 to 2008 were little different from the errors from the no-change model, when compared to actual measured temperature changes. When the IPCC’s warming rate is applied to a historical period of exponential CO₂ growth, from 1851 to 1975, the errors are more than seven times greater than errors from the no-change model.The models employed by James Hansen and the IPCC are not based on scientific forecasting principles. There is no empirical evidence that they provide long-term forecasts that are as accurate as forecasting that global average temperatures won’t change. Hansen’s, and the IPCC’s, forecasts, and the recommendations based on them, should be ignored.It would be irresponsible and immoral of policymakers to impose the heavy burden of costly anti carbon-based-energy policies, in the absence of any credible evidence that those burdens will result in net benefits to man, beast or tree...more here...

And from George Will, nationally syndicated columnist in the US...
...I’ve never seen anything quite like this in my now 40 years in Washington. I’ve never seen anything like the enlistment of the mainstream media in a political crusade — and this is a political crusade, because it’s about how we should be governed and how we should live; those are the great questions of politics. It is clearly for some people a surrogate religion. It’s a spiritual quest. It offers redemption. But what it also always offers, whether it is global cooling or global warming, is a rationale for the government to radically increase its supervision of our life and our choices. Whether the globe is cooling, whether it’s warming, the government’s going to be the winner and the governing class will be the winner...more, here...

Droolers, eye rollers, knuckle draggers and window lickers please note...

...What WILL they think of next? ...A few months ago, for a joke, Brendon O'Neil set up a Facebook group called ‘Climate change denial is a mental disorder (Facebook login required) ...HERE... It’s a satirical campaigning hub for people who think that climate change denial should be recognised as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and that its sufferers – who probably engage in ‘regular chanting and intensive brainwashing sessions in cult-like surroundings’ – should be offered ‘eco-lobotomies’ to remove ‘the denying part of their brain’. The group now has 73 members. (Sign up !) An excerpt...
...The Science proves two things beyond a shadow of a doubt: 1) Planet Earth will be consumed by a furious hellfire unless we reduce our carbon emissions by 92.8 per cent within the next eight years, seven months and two weeks. 2) This warming is DIRECTLY caused by human beings shopping in supermarkets (especially Tesco) and taking cheap flights to Prague.
There is a clear, proven and unquestionable link between human "fun" and the melting of the glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula, which will cause floods in Bangladesh and an epidemic of diarrhoea in Botswana (see the "Fun/Death in Botswana" pie chart produced by Danish climatologists for more information). So why do some people still DENY global warming, and call for a debate (!!!) about it?...
This group believes that these people are mentally disordered. Yes, some have signed up because they get the joke, but others are serious subscribers to the denial-as-insanity idea. ‘Thank God I’ve found this group’, says one new member, who is sick of other Facebook groups being ‘hijacked’ by unhinged eco-sceptics...more from Brendon O'Neil, of Spiked here, who observes...environmentalism remains a largely elitist project, beloved of politicians, priests and prudes....
... That is of course the reason that obsessive compulsive people like myself, who have to drink green blood every full moon, keep attracting, baiting, taunting and trapping greenies. Have a look at the Facebook site (link above) and add to the comments section...More ...here...

The green/left can relax now...

...it's business as usual. The honeymoon with the Obama presidency is over, and normal warfare can resume immediately....Hostilities re-commenced after Todd Stern, chief US climate negotiator in the State Department announced a split (read full text of Stern's speech here) between the US and the IPCC...

"...He argued that pushing for overly ambitious midterm targets is not required by the science and would undermine the political goal..."
NB. Climate Debate Daily featured this article from Quadrant in November 2008 predicting this split...
While we mustn't get too excited and read too much into this inevitable encounter with realism and discord, I predict that this schism marks (as Churchill said) "the end of the beginning."
What strikes me as particularly significant is the sentiment from Stern that the IPCC's mid-term goals were "not required by the science"... Hang on Sir...We have been led to believe that "the science" is settled, the scientists unanimous, and that "the science" predicts the end of the world as we know it, and furthermore that the Obama administration agreed with all the catastrophic scenarios...
Well they still do but.....as Prometheus points out...

...While many people have pointed to the fact that the science of climate change has advanced since the 2007 IPCC report, far more importantly, the ongoing discussion of policy options has rendered the IPCC obsolete. Pachauri has criticized the Obama Administration for its climate policies, so it will be interesting to see how the broader IPCC community reacts to the scaling back of expectations being set forth. This will be especially interesting as many IPCC scientists gather in Copenhagen later this month to “influence policy.” Will the Obama Administration be criticized by the scientists?
The second important point to take from this passage is a realization that climate policy must be governed by common sense and what is politically “possible” and “feasible.”

...so, the debate revolves around ongoing scientific advancement since 2007 and "common sense"and what is "politically possible"(ie, not everyone's fooled by this global warming/climate change BS) ...

...and meanwhile, the mainstream news media ignore the cooling planet...

...Temperatures have plummeted to record or near-record lows in 32 states this winter. On March 2, a global warming protest in Washington, D.C. was buried by nearly a foot of snow. And a new study warns that the Earth could be in for a 30-year cooling trend. Reality is not cooperating with the network news’ global warming theme, yet reporters are unwilling to even discuss the possibility that the Earth is cooling...more here...

Some light relief...

...click above to enlarge...and ditto for the stunning recruitment poster for the BNP. (Never mind that the Spitfire is flown by a Polish airman from a Polish squadron, and that the BNP is stridently anti-E.U...so why would they want representation there ? ) ...never mind, the spin doctors can handle the fall-out...

...and a candid picture of Al Gore (left) dispirited and down and out after the disappointing anti-global warming protest in Washington...

Weather forecasters have always been the butt of jokes...

...particularly in the UK, where foul weather is the national preoccupation...

The UK Met Office famously forecast this past winter to be milder than average...
25 September 2008 ...The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.

The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :

The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C - the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C...

...from "milder than average" to "the coldest winter in 13 years" is not just a slight blunder for a quasi-scientific body, on whom many individuals, businesses and institutions depend. Forgive the cynicism, but it seems that Met office personnel may just have made a guess, or let their ideology about global warming interfere with their objectivity, or perhaps just closed their eyes when they threw the dart...
Where are all the satirical TV shows of the past when they're needed ?

...and this, from another sceptic, William Happer Professor of Physics, Princeton University in a testimony to the US senate..."...Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative..." more here...

Radical New Hypothesis on the Effect of Greenhouse Gases...

...Al Gore, in his (in)famous movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, explained that as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases in the atmosphere, more energy is trapped, warming the planet. This assumption is central to the General Circulation Models (GCMs) and the current consensus on climate change. Michael Hammer, an engineer who specializes in spectroscopy, is sceptical of the GCM but his criticism is more fundamental. In the following paper, using the basic laws of spectroscopy, he shows that a significant portion of energy loss from the Earth’s surface is by direction radiation to space at wavelengths not absorbed by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This is in direct contrast to the IPCC explanation that there is low radiation from the Earth’s surface to space and potentially high radiation from the atmosphere to space.
Science is a process of getting it wrong and hopefully learning - on this single issue Michael Hammer and the IPCC can’t both be right.... more from Jennifer Marohasy, here...
...and this startling news too...
... It appears that global cooling recognition may be starting to make headway in the scientific community. We have this Discovery/MSNBC article about a NOAA scientist titled “Warming might be on hold, study finds“
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years...more, here... and here...

...and from William Briggs, statistician...

...Everybody knows it hasn’t been getting warmer, but it has been getting colder. So, are the climate models which predicted warmer and not colder wrong?
Well, Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee says, “temperatures should have gone up”. But nobody told the temperatures. Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton said, “warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.” Not to worry, “we’ll have explosive warming” Held says.
In other words, the models have been wrong up to now, they are still wrong, but we still believe them....

The bitterness, anger and hysteria levels are rising...

...further to yesterday's post below, allegations have been made that to criticise Al Gore's position on climate change is akin to colluding in mass murder. The attempted imposition of political correctness, is (as predicted by many), a tool of totalitarian thought with its only aim to stifle dissent...
...Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) responds...
“I am beginning to get a better understanding why some scientists react so strongly to some of the things we write here at Prometheus. For instance, one climate scientist suggests that my calling out Al Gore for misrepresenting the science of disasters and climate change (as well as Andy Revkin’s comparison of that to George Will’s misrepresentations) to be morally comparable to killing 1,000 people. I kid you not. I wonder how many climate scientists share this perspective.” ...see the full exchange here... , and here...

How long before "climate change denial" becomes a thought crime ?

Not long at all...before the thought police come calling...more here...

The fear of global warming catastrophe...

...is the fuel that drives the motor of the green ideologues. If the natural cyclical warming of the planet isn't accompanied by threats of famine, floods, disease, mass migration, hurricanes and plagues of locusts then the non-problem is seen for what it is.
Roger Pielke Jnr. (blogging as Prometheus, right) is established as one of the world's foremost authorities in environmental studies. Al Gore is established as a politician and film maker...
Gore's premise, as expressed in An Inconvenient Truth, that AGW means calamity for humanity, has been discredited as factually incorrect on several counts by UK courts. Pielke Jnr. has been investigating Gore's claim that increased extreme weather conditions, ie hurricanes, are an associated phenomenon of AGW...
In this article, Pielke Jnr. concludes...
...I do not fault Gore for being selective in his presentation of evidence or relying on non-peer reviewed sources. This is of course what politicians do in trying to make the best case possible for the actions that they support. However, when they do so, they run the risk that someone will call them on it....more, here...

Another nail in the coffin of global warming alarmism...

Biography...Roger A. Pielke, Jr. joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in 2001. He is currently Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). At CIRES Roger serves as the Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. He also served as the Director of Graduate Studies for the University's Graduate Program in Environmental Studies from 2002-2004. More, here...

Footnote...also see the trillion $ Porkapalooza, here...

The Germans have a pithy word for it...

...called "schadenfreude" (apologies to German speakers for earlier mis- spelling).

Schadenfreude means taking pleasure in others misfortune; an inside out umbrella on a windy day for example, Helen Clark getting a tongue lashing at Waitangi... stop it...I am taking a lot of pleasure from the fact that James Hansen's orchestrated agitprop exercise to draw attention to global warming has met with a frosty response...

...IntelliWeather Monday and hour by hour forecast for Washington, DC.
WINTER STORM WARNING IN EFFECT UNTIL 2 PM EST MONDAY Includes the Counties: District Of Columbia, Arlington/Falls Church/Alexandria
Includes the cities: Washington, Alexandria, Falls Church
Tonight…Snow. Snow accumulation of 4 to 8 inches. Brisk with lows in the lower 20s. North winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow near 100 percent.
Monday…Cloudy. Snow likely in the morning…Then a chance of snow in the afternoon. Additional snow accumulation around an inch. Total snow accumulation 7 to 8 inches. Brisk with highs in the mid 20s. Northwest winds 20 to 25 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of snow 70 percent...more from WUWT here...

Yes, yes I know weather isn't climate, nor is it always cooperative...

The world needs heroes, and here's one...

... in an era of stifling political correctness the celebrity had better watch out for the blacklist of our age...and unlike the era of Senator McCarthy it's not leaning towards socialism that earns a place on it. Today's Hollywood star mustn't espouse conservative values or be sceptical about the political ambitions of the green church. The sports star too, must take great care not to offend the liberal elite. Hats off then to Andy Roddick...

...the world has become the 4th Reich, when the United Nations is the fount of Hitler's hate-Jew ideology, it is incumbent upon all the remaining people on the planet who are not Nazis and Nazi sympathizers to support the rare non-Jews who stand up to the 4th Reich.
Andy Roddick was the first tennis player to publicly refuse to play in Hitler's tennis tournament in Dubai because the World Tennis Association wimped out and allowed Dubai to ban a Jewish Israeli player, Shahar Peer. Andy Roddick is a hero...more from ProCommerce, here...

Prime time US TV debate on global warming...

...is a definite possibility after John Kerry laid down a challenge to nationally syndicated columnist George Will.
Says Kerry "...A highly organized, well-funded movement to deny the reality of global climate change has been up and running for a long time, but it doesn’t change the verdict: the problem is real, it’s accelerating, and we have to act. Now. Not years from now...Stubborn or stupid — lets have a real debate and lets have it now.I know George Will well, I respect his intellect and his powers of persuasion — but I’d happily debate him any day on this question so critical to our survival..."
Wonderful news. Let's hope this is not mere bravado from John Kerry and that the chance for real debate doesn't slip away...the question is too important and the cost to us all is too high to ignore. If this debate comes to pass, then further televised debate between scientists would be a logical consequence...and the ratings !
Read more, here...
Someone must write, and possibly is writing a book about this unprecedented debate in modern scientific circles. An outsider can only begin to imagine the hostility within a university or research campus, (Auckland University for example) where staff exchange barbs via the letters column to the local paper. Shades of Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim !

Living the green sustainable lifestyle...

...takes dedication, sacrifice and embracing risk...
Greenies concerned about toilet paper, ( OMG it's made from trees ! ) have urged rationing and limited use, ie, recomending no more than 2 wipes and a gentle polish per sitting, but to be even more earth friendly, and in the hope of diminishing their carbon um, bumprint, have now come up with the greener (browner ?) alternative to paper; (and this is not a spoof,) recyclable cloth bum wipes...

...Using cloth toilet wipes actually has many advantages. For one, it's a lot more comfortable and soft on your most delicate body parts. It's also more economical, uses less paper, and saves you those late-night trips to the store. And cloth wipes can be used wet without any of the sopping disintegration that regular toilet paper is prone to. For a discussion of the practical aspects of using cloth toilet wipes, please check out our page detailing How to Use Cloth Wipes... (caution, may offend...)
...Wallypop customer Mary F. prefers to keep her wipes stacked in a basket next to the toilet, and her used wipes go in the wet bag hanging from the toilet paper holder...
...For some people, making the switch to cloth toilet wipes is a huge leap, that's true. But it doesn't need to be!
...Lately, with all the media attention, there've been a lot of naysayers talking about the stench. I can honestly say, our wipes don't stink...

...They even have a hemp alternative variety, and they don't stink...more, from Wallypop Family Wipes, here...

Corporate motto of Wallypop Family Wipes...Let us Explore your Niche Market...

And he's not even a proctologist...

...I have seen some ugly, ugly things this week. Some of them have focused on me for views that I have, but others involve people I know and respect. People who know better, or should know better, are engaging in tactics that can only be described as bullying, strong arming, character assassination, threatening, and McCarthy-esque. Most of these people characterize themselves as progressives...more here...

...Roger Pielke Jnr. (Prometheus) indulges the left, and their love of Orwellian newspeak by describing their self-appointed, hypocritical righteousness as "progressive". (Click on image to enlarge.) The left, assisted by a compliant news media, have misappropriated many words and phrases in the English language; social conscience, politically aware, gay, caring etc, etc, but none grates as much as "progressive," when describing their blindfold backwards march to socialism...

...Pielke Jnr's comment above comes after a hostile interview with a global warming alarmist here...

The left/liberal "progressive" these days is the true nostalgic, old fashioned Tory conservative; intolerant of dissent, arrogant and hostile to ideas other than those that are "ideologically sound"...

...and quote for the day, from Dr William Happer, Professor of Physics, Princeton University...

"...I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind, ... the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2...are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapour and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player...” more here...

Japan's Energy Commission dismisses the IPCC, Aussies launch an online petition...

...is it safe to say that Japanese scientists look sideways at IPCC doomcasters ? or that they have spotted a chink in the IPCC armour ? or that they regard the IPCC as a load of ah so's ?
(that last one from Obnoxio the clown.)
...Japanese scientists have made a dramatic break with the UN and Western-backed hypothesis of climate change in a new report from its Energy Commission.
Three of the five researchers disagree with the UN’s IPCC view that recent warming is primarily the consequence of man-made industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. Remarkably, the subtle and nuanced language typical in such reports has been set aside.
One of the five contributors compares computer climate modelling to ancient astrology. Others castigate the paucity of the US ground temperature data set used to support the hypothesis, and declare that the unambiguous warming trend from the mid-part of the 20th Century has ceased.
The report by Japan Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) is astonishing rebuke to international pressure, and a vote of confidence in Japan’s native marine and astronomical research. Publicly-funded science in the West uniformly backs the hypothesis that industrial influence is primarily responsible for climate change, although fissures have appeared recently. Only one of the five top Japanese scientists commissioned here concurs with the man-made global warming hypothesis.
JSER is the academic society representing scientists from the energy and resource fields, and acts as a government advisory panel. The report appeared last month but has received curiously little attention. So The Register commissioned a translation of the document - the first to appear in the West in any form...more from the 1988 Science Blog of the Year here...
and from the comments...
...the...leading Japanese party is about to loose (the) next elections. Their probable successors have declared to pursue a more Asian focused policy, and not to follow the US as uncritically as before.
I wonder if greenpeace’s extremely aggressive attacks...may have contributed to this...
...from Australia, news that The Australian Environment Foundation today launched an online petition opposing the federal government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”. The petition will eventually be presented to Parliament by Dr Dennis Jensen, MHR ...more here...

Being green, "is not cool anymore"...

...Today's climate change hysteria is on the wane; in spite of greenpeace agitprop, James Hansen's scare mongering and media adoration of bad news... there is an increasing and ongoing dissent within political and environmental circles, and a palpable sense of boredom about doomsday scenarios. In this essay by Steven Hayward, a clear parallell with "yesterday's crisis mongers" (the 60's and 70's population control movement) is clearly evident...

...More than 30 years ago political scientist Anthony Downs wrote in the Public Interest of a five-step "issue-attention cycle" through which public enthusiasm for an issue gradually diminishes as we come to recognize the high cost of drastic action, and that the nature of the problem was exaggerated or misconceived. The environment, he wrote, would have a longer cycle than most issues because of its diffuse nature, but it appears that the public is finally arriving at the late stages of Downs's cycle. Opinion surveys show that the public isn't jumping on the global warming bandwagon despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and full-scale media hysteria. More broadly there are signs that "green fatigue" is setting in. Magazine publishers recently reported that their special Earth Day "green" issues generated the lowest newsstand sales of all issues published in 2008. "Suddenly Being Green Is Not Cool Any More," read a London Times headline in August....

... A few environmentalists on the left understand the profound defects of the radical green approach to politics, along with the conventional green approach to global warming. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, self-described "progressives" and authors of one of the most challenging recent books on the environment, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, recognize and lament the authoritarianism of conventional environmentalism. "Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in quasi-authoritarian politics," Nordhaus and Shellenberger observe. While environmentalists like Eckersley embrace the postmodern language of "privilege" to denigrate traditional individual rights, Nordhaus and Shellenberger point up the obvious irony that it is environmentalism that is making the boldest claim to be given the most privileged position in politics: "The problem is not simply that it is difficult to answer the question ‘Who speaks for nature?' but rather that there is something profoundly wrong with the question itself. It rests on the premise that some people are better able to speak for nature, the environment, or a particular place than others. This assumption is profoundly authoritarian." ...more (well worth a read) here...

This post brought to you by the green movement...

...this, in an unusually serious vein, from the maestro Iowahawk...

...This is Bakouma Kpatekatola, a young man from the West African nation of Togo. In 2003, when Bakouma was 9 years old, my family became his sponsor through the Childreach-Plan USA organization. In the years since we became occasional pen pals; a few times a year we'd get a letter from him, in his native French, along with an English translation from his caseworker. Sometimes he spoke of coming to America. At Christmas the letters would contain a photo, which we ritually magnetted up on the fridge to chronicle his growth. We reciprocated with our family pictures. I sometimes wondered if he wondered about us like we wondered about him. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I didn't really notice when we didn't receive his annual Christmas letter last year. Yesterday we received a letter from his caseworker explaining why: Bakouma died in December of malaria. He was 14 years old...more here...

...ah, the hypocrisy of the "caring" left...Denis Dutton made Iowahawk's exact point in the NZ Herald in 2002...Why fear mongering greens doom children to death... remember this, when the attractive, naive young greenpeace volunteer accosts you in the mall next time...

Quotes for the day...

...the continuing reliance on data from Munich Re (insurance company) does not solve the basic issue, which is that attribution of the increasing toll of disasters to human-caused climate change remains speculative at best and not supported by science. To the contrary, increasing societal exposure and growing wealth in vulnerable locations are the overwhelming drivers of the increasing losses, a conclusion well supported by many studies...more from Roger Pielke Jnr (Prometheus) here...

...and note, "Fear is to the insurance industry what oil is to Exxon"... Anon.

The failure of multiculturalism...

...in Britain is leading to the steady rise of the British National Party (BNP). Decried as racist extremists by the political and media establishment, the BNP is gathering momentum with a recent win for a council seat in Kent, and is tipped for a European Parliament seat and other victories in the near future.

The left are of course aghast, but after decades of insult, the leftwing taunt of "racist" rings hollow. If they have been labelled racist so often, reason the voters, why not vote for a similarly labelled party ?

Melanie Philips explains...Britain is changing before our very eyes. As a result of the current rate of immigration, within half a century the projected steep increase in the UK’s population will be entirely made up of people not born in Britain — most of whom will have come from the Third World.
Meanwhile, the fanatically imposed doctrine of multiculturalism has brought about the erosion or denigration of Britain’s history, religion and identity, leaving generations of children — both indigenous and immigrant — appallingly ignorant of the common culture they need to share.It is entirely reasonable to want one’s country to express its own culture through its institutions, laws and practices. Yet those who defend this principle are called ‘racist’.
Britain is witnessing an alarming growth of separate Muslim enclaves ruled by a parallel Islamic Sharia law. It is entirely reasonable to want one system of law for all. Yet those who say so are called ‘Islamophobic’...more here...

...and news that the radical islamist MP, Lord Ahmed is to wear the striped pajamas for 12 weeks...The peer also faces expulsion from the Labour Party following his jail sentence.
A Labour Party spokesman said: "The Labour Party does not comment on individual cases, but under the party's rules any member who receives a custodial sentence is subject to automatic exclusion."

... Don't drop the soap M'lord...more here...

The Sorrow and the Pity...

...was the title of a 1971 film about French capitulation and cooperation with Hitler in WW2.
The movie title captioned a stunning photo (right) taken in 1940, of a weeping middle aged Frenchman watching the triumphant Wehrmacht march down the Champs Elysee. His tears are likely to have stemmed from the shame of French defeat and capitulation, and the realisation that the deaths of millions of his own friends and countrymen at Verdun and along the Western front in WW1 had been pointless and worthless slaughter...
...We now read that the Britain, the universal bastion of freedom, is to its eternal shame, the first EU country to bar an elected European legislator (Geert Wilders) from its territory for his political opinions...
...when two members of the House of Lords invited Wilders to give a screening of his film, the rabble-rousing Labour peer Lord Ahmed threatened to put 10,000 people in the streets. The home secretary, Jacqui Smith, warned Wilders that he would not be admitted to the U.K., since "your statements about Muslims and their beliefs, as expressed in your film Fitna and elsewhere, would threaten community harmony and therefore public security in the U.K." Wilders came anyway, on a British Midlands flight packed with 50 journalists and cameramen.When he was turned away as promised, he called British prime minister Gordon Brown "the biggest coward in Europe..."
...The problem is that Britain has--by act of Parliament--subordinated its own laws to the European Convention on Human Rights. Brussels, not Westminster, sets the rules. In the human rights context Wilders is a fellow European. And the British action sets a new precedent for relations among EU citizens.
...more, here...
...Winston Churchill, who promised and delivered to Hitler uncompromising and never ending resistance, and every British citizen who has served his country and values its ideals would join the unknown weeping Frenchman for the sorrow and the pity of sacrifice and abandoned principles. Although there is still some life in a few of them...
...from cantankerous, foul mouthed Old Holborn, comes a defiant and triumphant war cry...
...but compliance and cowed obedience from the European left...
...In the confrontation with Islamism, the Left has abandoned its principles. In the past it stood for cutting the ties to convention and tradition, but in the case of Islam it reinstates them in the name of multiculturalism. It is proud to have fought for women's rights, but in Islam it tolerates head scarves, arranged marriages, and wife-beating. It once stood for equal rights, now it preaches a right to difference – and thus different rights. It proclaims freedom of speech, but when it comes to Islam it coughs in embarrassment. It once supported gay rights, but now keeps silent about Islam's taboo on homosexuality. The West's long-due process of self-relativisation at the end of the colonial era, which was promoted by postmodernist and structuralist ideas, has led to cultural relativism and the loss of criteria....more, here...