...and now another party...

...and this one's even sillier than the last Extremely Silly Party. This is a party searching for a name, and it has been formed to attract all the really silly people. They are already rolling up. Hone Harawira, Nandor Tanczos (alas minus the hilarious dreadlocks) sexy Sue Bradford (that's not her on the right, that's sexy Sue Kedgley) John Wacko Minto !! Matt McCarten and one or two other hopelessly deluded lefties...The party name they are most (un)likely to choose is The Really Politically Correct Party, which is a great shame, as all their utterances will be sooooo ideologically sound. But what a wonderful election we can look forward to...a Prime Minister enjoying record popularity with a rejuvenated right wing partner versus a moribund opposition Labour Party, a dispirited Maori Party, a flaky Green Party, a lost and abandoned Winston First Party looking for a space at the trough and now with this new exceptionally untalented vote splitter party yet without a name. STOP PRESS...it's now The Mana Party...destined of course to be an uninfluential and powerless minor party after the election.

Ahh democracy is wonderful...the November election will be more fun than the Fuhrer's birthday party!

Footnote...climate change is gone. The new term is Global Climate Disruption...from The Washington Times...There is no evidence that America is facing an increased risk from tornadoes based on human activity or carbon-dioxide emissions, but what if it is? Can we accept that risk? “What if global warming *does* cause more and more powerful tornadoes in the south?” asks The Atlantic. “What then?” This type of non-argument is typical of the reasoning the alarmist camp has been forced to employ as the factual basis for their pet theory crumbles. The questions the global-warming crowd should be asking themselves are: What if everything they have so deeply believed and trusted over the years turns out to be completely wrong? What if the belief system that has given their lives meaning for decades can no longer sustain its inner contradictions? What if their god dies? What then?

The Tea Party...

...has there ever been a popular movement like it ?

Our news, filtered as it is through a liberal, left leaning news media gives us only scant detail of what these Tea Party protesters are on about. A friend sent me a newsletter from an expat Kiwi living in the USA which contained this link...

As he explains...(the link) has become enormously popular with 6 million “hits” in its first four days. Why I ask you to view it is because it encapsulates the psyche of America – the distinctiveness of the country. Within the oratory of the narrator lies the heart of what made America great – rugged individualism and freedom of expression. Notice the devotion to the military and its place in society. When America goes to war it is always about freedom; freedom to maintain the American way of life. So those who die in these wars are exalted. You will hear an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln, “that unfinished cause for which our soldiers willingly go to battle...” It is very easy for this country to engage in war, because the cause is never finished.

The Kiwi expat quoted above however, is not necessarily a cheerleader for the anti-Obama brigade. He points out inaccuracies and hyperbole. They are there for sure, but compared to the years of psychotic anti-Bush venom and hate, these anti-Obama protesters seem quite restrained. Judge it for yourself, check the link out...

A post-mortem on the greens...

...from the journal The New Republic which asks, in its lead article the question of the day ... Has the Green Movement been a Miserable Flop ?

What the hell went wrong? For months now, environmentalists have been asking themselves that question, and it’s easy to see why. After Barack Obama vaulted into the White House in 2008, it really did look like the United States was, at long last, going to do something about global warming. Scientists were united on the causes and perils of climate change. (Interjection. Loud raspberry from stage right.) Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth had stoked public concern. Green groups in D.C. had rallied around a consensus solution—a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions—and had garnered support from a few major companies like BP and Duke Energy. Both Obama and his opponent, John McCain, were on board. And, so, environmental advocates prepared a frontal assault on Congress. May as well order the victory confetti, right ? Instead, the climate push was a total flop... more of this exquisite lefty hand wringing here...

...with self-hating comments to brighten your day like this ...
The failure of greens (not Greens) to accomplish anything is horribly despressing, but not at all surprising. It's a never-ending slow-motion trainwreck that demands decisive and forceful leadership from people who have shown time and again to be utterly devoid of any leaderly qualities. It's like watching the debacle over the debt, except worse, since at least everyone recognizes that a problem exists there. Particularly bad is that leadership on this issue must come from Americans, whose primary qualities are greed, individualism and anti-intellectualism. It does not inspire much hope...

For my money, the failure of the green political movement has come about because of blatant green anti-capitalism- served up with green hypocrisy, dishonesty and patronising faux-concern for the planet. (As an example see Maurice Strong's statement below this blog's masthead and follow this link.) Rather than a true environmental movement, the green political machine has been shown to simply be the present day vehicle of the political left. Since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, green tactics have been to arouse fear and guilt among the gullible. Green fear mongering and green double talk has finally been discredited and dispersed by public opinion and debate. More blood-letting of course is still to to come, probably with an imminent metamorphisis of the defeated green left into a modified political vehicle. I bet the tactics stay the same though.
Where will they go ? ...the anarcho-animal rights/anti-globalisation loonies are all that's left these days. What will the green gasbags do ?

There's no excuse...

...for child abuse... So said the 1994 bumper sticker. Since then NZ has been subject to child abuse reports that sicken, shame and horrify. The term child abuse in itself understates the horror of it all - it makes it sound like childish banter and bullying in the playground. Child torture is a much more accurate term. Michael Laws of the Sunday Star Times has dared to dwell on the subject. He alone features it regularly in his columns to the shame of other journalists. If the issue involved systematic ongoing conservation or environmental concerns many more would no doubt join in as would editors and protest groups. Similarly muted are the voices of politiciansand bureaucrats, except of course to say that more "resources" are needed to fight it, as if throwing money around will alleviate our national shame and agony. What a pathetic, cowardly lot we all are !

Chief among the cowards are our Maori MP's. They are aware that proportionally, Maori statistics outweigh all other groups - with regard to offenders and victims. Maori MP's no doubt shed silent private tears over reports of dead and battered children, but the main sentiment from them that reaches us is that historic colonial oppression is a major causative factor and that more research and more money and more Maori cultural awareness is needed from us all to solve the problem. No mention of any shame or any personal responsibility, or the fact that for decades young mothers have been encouraged with cash handouts to bear children away from the shelter of the secure family unit into the whanau, where the young child is subject to attack from the current (non blood related) boyfriend(s) and all others.

I recently heard Paula Bennett, our Minister for Social Welfare speak. She said that her department are aware of 30,000 cases a year of child abuse and brutality. Many cases of severe injury; burns and broken bones, go unreported. It is only the more sensational and horrific that make the news.

The real news then, behind this posting is simply that deliberate brutality inflicted on children is evil. The concept of sin has all but vanished from our terminology, we even use the word "wicked" as a positive adjective of endorsement. I intend to do my small bit to publicise the evil of child abuse and its circumstances here in NZ, and in particular to publicise the politicians whose ineffectual hand wringing over it effectively condones and prolongs the scandal of it all. We have a general election looming in NZ. I will be agitating to see that each political party has a policy to help reduce the numbers of abused children. I have a feeling that many voters are disgusted, dismayed and angry over the hypocrisy, inactivity and double talk that surrounds the problem. A helpful site I have stumbled on is FamilyIntegrity.org.nz. Please pay it a visit. Enough is enough...

Why oh why...

...does this ludicrous AGW farce continue ? Like a Terminator that won't die, or a Monty Pythonesque knight with severed arms and legs that won't yield, the malevolent AGW ghost won't depart. The science behind it has been shown to be dodgy, the statistics shonky, the main instigators are accused of self interest (think Al Gore) yet politicians such as our Minister for the Environment, Mr Nick Smith continue to defend it and the costs it will incur. Smith has announced an Emissions Trading Scheme that aims to halve our CO2 emissions by 2050. For once, I have to agree with the Alfred E. Neuman look alike Russell Norman of the Greens who says...the pledge to halve New Zealand's greenhouse gases emissions is "unambitious" and shows the Government is not serious about addressing climate change ..."If they were serious about a target they would set milestones that they could be held accountable for, not a target that is 13 electoral cycles away." Nobody is in the least concerned any more about so-called catastrophic climate change, nobody that is except the socialist greens, so why on earth even bother ? More here...

The heroes of Fukushima...

...are the clean up workers who may well be quite calmly and rationally comitting suicide. After the Christchurch earthquake the deliberate acts of heroism and compassion were a wonderful testimony to the strength of character of those involved. This altruism is a feature of most of us I think, but is ingrained in the Japanese psyche. One only has to think of their military heroism as exemplified by the WW2 Kamikaze pilots. Their spirit is reflected so clearly in the heroism displayed at Fukushima...

...Apart from that, this post is a brief analysis of the human cost of energy consumption...

...The earthquake and tsunami in Japan delivered a devastating one-two punch to that island nation and to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. So what does much of the world do? You guessed it. They blamed the designers, builders and operators of the nuclear plant for not doing a good enough job. They call for all reactors in the world to be closed down. Electricity has been restored to all the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan. That means that the control panels have lit up and banished the inky darkness. Electricity is available to the electrical cooling pumps.The overall situation is looking much better. They are not out of the woods yet, but day by day the residual nuclear decay heat, in the reactor fuel elements, is dropping and the prospect for any major release of nuclear material is diminishing.

It seems likely that the main toll from the nuclear emergency will be to a small number of heroic plant workers and emergency responders who continue to brave exposure to radiation to restore cooling to the reactors.The focus for Japan and the world should remain on recovery from this crisis and we should be wary of any seeking to exploit, rather than solve the situation. Serious risks remain, however, it is appropriate to place the harm and risk from Japan's nuclear emergency in context of the full scope of the tragedy. The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami stands at 9,300 with 13,800 missing. These numbers continue to rise. Any death or injury is tragic, but inside the nuclear plant only one person, a crane driver died from injury sustained, and some nuclear workers may have been exposed to high levels of radiation. Outside the nuclear plant no people have been injured in any way from any radiation...

... The Fukushima plant was forty years old, near retirement. Its staff did a fantastic job under the circumstances. There was no disaster. No people outside the plant got injured, no property outside the plant was damaged by nuclear material. Give the reactor crew a round of applause. Nuclear power just got a whole lot better and safer. Nuclear power survived the onslaught well, and we learned a great deal. The lessons learned will be shared with the rest of the world to the betterment of all. Current designs could withstand even this worst-case scenario. Nuclear power remains, safe, viable and vital.

We should also compare the harm done from this and other nuclear power emergencies with past power plant disasters.

Look at the following list (from “What is the worst kind of power plant disaster? Hint: It's not nuclear” by Annalee Newitz):

1975: Shimantan/Banqiao Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 171,000
Cost: $8,700,000,000
What happened: Shimantan Dam in China's Henan province fails and releases 15.738 billion tons of water, causing widespread flooding that destroys 18 villages and 1500 homes and induces disease epidemics and famine.

1979: Morvi Dam Failure
Type of power: Hydroelectric
Human lives lost: 1500 (estimated)
Cost: $1,024,000,000
What happened: Torrential rain and unprecidented flooding caused the Machchu-2 dam, situated on the Machhu river, to burst. This sent a wall of water through the town of Morvi in the Indian State of Gujarat.

1998: Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation Jess Oil Pipeline Explosion
Type of power: Oil
Human lives lost: 1,078
Cost: $54,000,000
What happened: Petroleum pipeline ruptures and explodes, destroying two villages and hundreds of villagers scavenging gasoline...read the full article here...

The radiation bogey man...

As an ex-radiographer I remember being taught to respect and avoid radiation. At work each day we used to put on a radiation monitoring badge which was sent every month to the National Radiation Laboratory in Christchurch where our exposure to what we called scattered radiation was assessed. We wore lead rubber aprons when working with prolonged radiology techniques, and some even wore lead rubber gloves when using old out-dated fluoroscopic equipment. Even today I have some distaste for dental xray techniques and the often cavalier attitudes of dental staff when taking them. Health risks from radiation are real, as the effects over a lifetime are cumulative.

However, in "nuclear-free" NZ, the militant anti-US brigade have succeeded in inducing hysteria among the general population over all nuclear issues. Food irradiation for example, to prolong shelf life was mooted and rejected with allegations of "frankenfood" mutations possible. Nuclear propelled ships are not allowed in our harbours because some feel they may become transformed into nuclear explosions.

A healthy respect for radiation is to be aware of its dangers, yet embrace its benefits. Much as we do with electricity and petrol. With this in mind I am delighted to see from a Mr Randall Munroe, a Radiation Dose Chart illustrating the wide range of radiation we may experience or hear about in a lifetime; from sleeping next to someone (0.05 micro-sieverts) to a flight from New York to LA (40 micro-sieverts) to the maximum yearly dose permitted for US radiation workers (50 milli-sieverts)...full chart here...

Another illustration of comparitive radiation exposures compares radioactive seepage of naturally occuring radon gas from rock...Radiation exposures in highly publicized nuclear accidents are thus considerably lower than those received by people in these (high radon) areas every day. Note that the Pennsylvania area includes the region around the Three Mile Island plant; people living near that plant get more radiation exposure from radon in their homes every day than they got from the 1979 accident. Within any area, there is a wide variation in radon levels from house to house. About 5% of us, 12 million Americans, get more than 1,000 mrem (1 mrem = 0.00001 Sv = 0.01 mSv = 10 μSv ) per year, and perhaps 2 million Americans get over 2,000 mrem per year from radon. In a few houses, exposures have been found to be as high as 500,000 mrem per year...more here...

Radiation is and always has been part of all our lives. Its peaceful usage in medicine and in modern well controlled nuclear power plants will remain and help drive modern society into a more prosperous and safer future - Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Windscale and Chernobyl notwithstanding...hat tip PKH

The wearing of the green...

...will last as long as we keep commemorating St.Patrick. Green politics though are of a much less durable nature. Now that the mainstay of the green movement - runaway apocalyptic global warming - has lost its potency, green political impetus has waned, and the hope of global wealth redistribution to save the planet has all but died. Green eco-pornographers though have been given CPR, courtesy of Fukushima. The earthquake that partially destroyed the Fukushima plant and the ensuing tsunami that inundated vast swathes of land were both exceptionally severe episodes however, Fukushima is not the devastating indictment of nuclear power that the greens would like. Indeed, the awful calamity and its aftermath will eventually strengthen the case for an expanded nuclear industry with even more robust safety parameters.

From the BBC... Power hopes rise at the Japan plant...

...Fukushima now becomes the third level five incident in half a century of nuclear power. The first was the Windscale reactor fire in the UK in 1957 - the second, the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island in the US in 1979. Richard Wakeford from the Dalton Nuclear Institute, a visiting professor in epidemiology at the University of Manchester, recently re-assessed the effect of radiation released at Windscale. Using data and computer models, his scientific paper concluded that the release could have caused about 240 cases of cancer, half of them fatal. However, inquiries into Three Mile Island concluded it probably caused no deaths.
That raises the question of why both are in the same INES category, given that Three Mile Island did not, in the end, have more than a local impact. "The reason why Three Mile Island was rated a five is that there was major damage to the reactor core and there was potential for a widespread release of radioactive material - it didn't happen, but that potential is built into the event scale," said Professor Wakeford...

As time passes, the (Fukushima) reactors should in principle become less dangerous. The rate at which they pump out heat decreases quickly, and by now the rate should be down to about one-thousandth of what it was a week ago, just before the Tohoku earthquake triggered a shutdown.Prospects of exposure to perhaps the most dangerous radioactive substance, iodine-131, also diminish rapidly. It decays quickly through radioactivity - after eight days, half the atoms present initially will already have decayed away. ..In addition, the continuing efforts to keep seawater flowing into reactors 1, 2 and 3 appear to have been relatively successful on Thursday and Friday. If the reactors have been cooled, fuel rods will have been degrading at a slower rate, again curbing the release of radioactive substances.

On Friday afternoon, radioactivity readings had reportedly declined to less than 500 microsieverts per hour on site - below the level at which operators have to sound the alarm...The cure for the plant's immediate problems could be the restoration of electrical power. A grid connection was hooked up on Friday, although technicians were clearly struggling to power up systems around the site given that some of the plant's internal circuitry had been damaged by the tsunami or the gas explosions. The nuclear safety authority outlined a timescale that would see power restored in reactor buildings 1-4 by Sunday.
If this all works, the prospects of the Greenpeace scenario should recede. Then it will be time to take stock...(and once more re-evaluate the credibility of greenpeace ). And it may turn out, said Richard Wakeford, that no deaths at all will be attributable to the Fukushima incident. "If you take one of the workers who's been exposed to 100 milliSieverts (mSv), that's not going to have any serious short-term effects," he said - "certainly nothing like the situation facing the Chernobyl emergency workers that killed 28 of them.
"The risk of a serious cancer arising from that kind of dose would be less than 1% in a lifetime - and you have to consider that the normal chance of dying from cancer is 20-25% anyway."As for people outside the plant - I can't see any chance of picking out the effect of the Fukushima releases against the general background of cancers." More here...

...and a Sinner Repents...from George (Moonbeam) Monbiot at the Guardian...the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology...full column here...

Green jubilation...

...will be short lived as the damaged Japanese nuclear reactors are brought under control. What will become more apparent as time goes by is the difference between Chernobyl, where safety procedures were absent and where reactor design (rejected by the UK in the 1950's) was inadequate, and this incident, where one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded has tested emergency procedure to the limit.

In Japan, as in Christchurch last month countless heroes are emerging from the devastation. I salute them all.

When reconstruction and reappraisal begins to take place, nuclear energy will come under the spotlight like never before. This time however, unlike Chernobyl, green fear-mongering will be tempered by the pragmatic reality of nuclear versus coal/wind/ solar energy sources. And when the Michael Moore's of the left have had their say, nuclear energy will be seen to have survived with its safety reputation intact. For up to date information and comment re reactor status, see Brave New Climate here...

And as for wind farms...well, courtesy of PKH, this startling news ...According to researchers at the University of St Andrews, the sound of offshore wind farms is likely to mess with the whales’ sensitive sonar systems and drive them ashore, where they get stuck on beaches and die. More here...and the original press release here...

Windfarms KILL WHALES...buy the T shirt !

Clive James...and the death of environmentalism...

....on Climate Change and the recent Aussie floods.

While commentators like Clive James and many others assess the moribund state of climate alarmism correctly, main stream media still run a diluted form of green orthodoxy. Here, Clive James, always a good read, is in fine form poking a sharp stick in the eye of the dying green global warming dragon...

Poetry, said Auden, makes nothing happen. Usually it doesn't, but sometimes a poem gets quoted in a national argument because everybody knows it, or at least part of it, and for the occasion a few lines of familiar poetry suddenly seem the best way of summing up a viewpoint. Just such an occasion has occurred recently in Australia. By the time the heavy rains first hit Queensland early this year, the theory of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW, to borrow the unlovely acronym) was ceasing to exercise unquestioned thrall in the minds of Australia's progressive voters. But spokespersons for the Green party clung on to it, encouraged by the fact that the theory, in its Climate Change form, was readily applicable to any circumstances.
Before the floods, proponents of the CAGW view had argued that there would never be enough rain again, because of Climate Change. When it became clear that there might be more than enough rain, the view was adapted: the floods, too, were the result of Climate Change. In other words, they were something unprecedented. Those opposing this view — those who believed that in Australia nothing could be less unprecedented than a flood unless it was a drought — took to quoting Dorothea Mackellar's poem "My Country", which until recently every Australian youngster was obliged to hear recited in school. In my day we sometimes had to recite it ourselves, and weren't allowed to go home until we had given evidence that we could...more here...and...

The Long Death of Environmentalism
Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, "The Death of Environmentalism." In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and "An Inconvenient Truth." The latter backfired -- more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out -- the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change...more here...

Not a lot happens here...

....because in many ways we're a constipated little country, struggling with all the local issues of the moment. We are usually elated or sometimes distraught over sports performances, smug or irate about social scandals, bored, angry or dismissive re our elected MP's, reeling with dismay over yet another account of murderous child abuse, yet at the same time complacently enjoying our sometimes eccentric climate and our beautiful land.

Then...Tuesday 22 of February.

I have visited Christchurch often, but don't really know it. The last time I was there a dear friend and I laughed our way around Cathedral Square at night, enjoyed the pub music from The Black Velvet Band and tripped the light fantastic. The earthquake of September 9th last year came and went causing significant property damage but with no loss of life and everyone saw it as yet another example of serendipity typical to us Kiwis.

Then this awful calamity. It has brought to the fore all the very best (and a few of the very worst) character traits of New Zealanders. We like to think we are tough, yet we have some class. We like to think we are stoical and relatively unemotional, yet we can empathise with suffering. We like to think that if we had to, we could cope with adversity and awful tragedy just as well as our parents and grandparents did last century. We like to think these things but really we're a little afraid that our thoughts are a deception.

Well they are not.

I am writing this a thousand kilometres away from Christchurch, yet I know from all that I have heard, seen and read in the last days that Kiwis under stress have responded and are responding to fear and hardship with a degree of courage and steady purpose that gives me great hope for our future. I have listened to daily commentary and interviews on Radio NZ through tears, and marvelled at the coolness and eloquence of ordinary people caught up in horror. I have tried as a Christian, to understand how the deaths of young children can be part of God's plan, and have reached for the writings of CS Lewis and others. I've found comfort and faith in their words, and in the words of Peter Beck, Dean of the shattered Christchurch cathedral.

The earthquake he said, is just the planet "doing its thing". The real acts of God are seen in the compassion, heroism and fortitude of the huge majority of people suffering yet coping with disaster. They suffer and cope as I write this feeble tribute to them and to all the dead and injured.

May we all simply hope that this catastrophe brings re-awareness of ourselves as good people, and dispels lingering doubts about our strength and unity.

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains : it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world." CS Lewis "Mere Christianity".

A cultural tipping point in the UK...

courtesy of Samizdata...Remarkable developments are in train at London's Royal Court Theatre, in the form of a play that is about climate science, but is not Watermelon propaganda...The Heretic, a new play by Richard Bean:
Book your tickets now, this play is a must-see comedy... nearly all the major recent climate change stories are woven into the play: the lack of sea level rise, the politicisation of science by the IPCC, Glaciergate, the logarithmic effect of CO2 the misanthropy of some environmentalist groups, the 'one-tree' hockey stick, and, of course, Climategate. But the issues are put on the table, without arm twisting, encouraging the audience to go out and do their own research.
Maybe I am reading far too much into this, but this sounds like it could be something of a cultural turning point in Britain. For decades now, there has been a self-reinforcing feedback loop shutting out anything but left wing friendly dramas from the live theatre in Britain, or so it has seemed.. No anti-lefty dramas - e.g. praising Thatcher or heroic entrepreneurs or working class vigilantes, or denouncing bossy social workers or manipulative communists or ridiculous civil servants or psychotic and tyrannical Islamists, or pointing at the state itself as the prime mover in the banking crisis - have made sense to the theatres, because the audience for such things hasn't been there, and because writers have been disinclined even to bother writing such things... And because there is no non-lefty drama, the audience for such things never comes...
Crucial to the willingness of another audience to show up to see this play is that it can be urged to do so on the internet, despite the major official organs of British theatre publicity, notable the BBC and the Guardian, apparently trying, just as they have tried with Climategate itself, to be very sniffy and dismissive. If a new audience does show up in strength at the Royal Court to see The Heretic, then that could result in Britain's theatres saying: hey, I wonder if there are other non-lefty-friendly "issues" out there that we haven't done before, because the BBC and the Guardian haven't allowed us to?

...will our local thesps take up this challenge I wonder ?

Hone Harawira a.k.a. Walking Eagle...and a pat on the back...

...Of all our useless trough feeding MP's, one stands out more than others...a true racist and self hater whose diatribes are grudgingly tolerated by a weary nation; Mr Hone Harawira. THIS interesting anecdote about Hone comes (courtesy PKH) simultaneously with the news that his own political cronies are once again at loggerheads with him (not that they have any moral authority to be critical - keeping a guilty silence over their own shortcomings) over his allegations that his daughter would be loathe to vote for the pathetic bunch that call themselves The Maori Party...

...On a recent trip to the U.S.A. , Maori Party M.P. Hone (rhymes with bonny) Harawira (alias John Hadfield, his true name, his grandfather was a pakeha (white)) was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nations in Kitimat, B.C. about his recent examples of how to inflame the Maori Indigenous situation in New Zealand.He spoke for almost an hour, echoing his racist mother's doomed-to-fail radical ideas for increasing any First Nation's standard of living.At the conclusion of his speech, the tribes presented Hone with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name - "Walking Eagle".The proud Hone then departed with his entourage, waving to the crowd as he left a news reporter later asked the American Indian Chiefs how they came to select the new name given to Hone..They explained that "Walking Eagle" is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.

...and from Imre Saluzsinsky writing in The Australian...

WE did it. For once, we acted collectively, as humans, huddled together on a fragile planet, rather than as selfish individuals. And we did it: we beat global warming.
So now let's move on.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology, 2010 was Australia's coldest year since 2001. Since logic tells us the planet can't be getting hotter and colder at the same time, we can confidently pronounce global warming dead, buried and comprehensively beaten.
This victory happened because individuals pulled together, within nations, and then the nations of the world themselves pulled together. Meetings were held in places such Kyoto. Rousing speeches were made by world leaders. People clapped and felt good about themselves. Documents were signed.Clearly, with each meeting, each speech, each inked treaty, global warming was pushed back.
Here in Australia, we also did our bit, big time. We declared global warming the great moral challenge of our generation. We talked confidently about doing something or other. (OK, I can't remember what it was, and we never actually did it, but then we talked about doing something different . . . though maybe not straight away.)Anyway, it worked, because last year was the coldest year since 2001.
Tim Flannery, Al Gore and others published books and made films. Clearly they deserve a slice of this massive victory over global warming. To them we say: "Thank you, gentlemen, you may now return to private life."
But now that we know what we can do by dint of collective effort, we should turn to new challenges....more here...

Quote of the day...

...from Richard Lindzen on climate change, corruption and economic meltdowns...

...When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.
With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence. More here...

Simply deelicious...

...the real decline of the environmental movement began with the awareness of the fact that Rachel Carson got it wrong; and that since the popular media embraced her anti-DDT polemic millions have died unecessarily from malaria. The late Denis Dutton, Petr Bekmann (Access to Energy) and prior to him Julian Simon (The Ultimate Resource) and a host of others have pointed out green lies and hypocrisy, and illuminated the fact that green politics are fear and envy based alone. Administering another coup de grace to the old green hippies is Ben Pile of Spiked online...

... Environmentalism has been a loud and bizarre spectacle of UK politics, but it has never moved more than a handful of people out onto the streets at any one time. It has never achieved sufficient numbers to count as a political force. And there has been no cohesive environmental philosophy. Instead, as Lynas admits, environmentalists were united, not by science, but by their emotional rejection of contemporary society.
As with most criticism of environmentalism, it is often the reaction to it that reveals more than the criticism itself. Monbiot replies that the movement was unsuccessful, not because it failed to capture the minds of the public, but because ‘we are massively out-spent by corporate-funded movements which have had hundreds of millions poured into them telling government and the media there isn’t a problem’, a claim which surely ignores the UK and EU governments’ environmental policies. He complains that Channel 4 has ‘broadcast a series of polemics about the environment… over the last 20 years’. But the three films he’s talking about – Against Nature, The Great Global Warming Swindle and What the Green Movement Got Wrong – occupied no more than six hours of two decades of near continuous broadcasting. What environmentalists lack in terms of a sense of proportion, they make up for with a sense of persecution.What Lynas has realised, and Monbiot has not, is that ‘sceptics’ did not undermine the environmentalists’ cause. Environmentalists were their own worst enemy. They have alienated the rest of society by their own uncompromising and misanthropic outlook. The challenge for the new environmentalists is to emerge from this crisis of their own making into an era of growing scepticism, while keeping an eye on the consequences of their arguments. But without the precautionary principle, alarmism, doom and catastrophe, and premature claims to scientific certainty, what is environmentalism?

Jolly hockey sticks...

Zombie (bless him) says...The data underlying the famous “hockey stick” global warming graph has finally been found after having earlier been misplaced by leading climate researchers. The newly recovered data confirms the accuracy of the abrupt upward turn in readings characteristic of the “hockey stick” shape found in many global warming projections.
Up until now, however, the data on which the controversial graph had been based was presumed to be lost, so it was not known exactly which aspects of global warming the chart illustrated. Now that the data has been recovered, scientists can state with complete certainty that this updated chart accurately chronicles the past and future trajectory of the global warming crisis.
View the full-size graph by clicking HERE or on the small version shown at right...

Hansen's (and others) predictions...

As we move into 2011, it's pertinent to remind ourselves and others of the threats, warnings and outright lies from the green left over AGW. NASA's James Hansen has been one of the most upfront and outrageous of the lot. Now he's getting skewered. Hansen has been wetting himself over global warming for 20 years. 25 metre sea level rises, England to become "a tropical paradise"...Now delighted bloggers are highlighting his ecoporn fetish. From the comments after this Bishop Hill post......


...One by one these wild doomsday predictions are coming back to haunt the Chicken Littles. When I started to doubt the whole Global Warming thing my first thought was that time will tell as the predictions that were then being made either happened or failed to happen. The hallmark of good science is that it makes predictions which are later verified. It is not necessarily a sign of bad science when predictions don’t work out because at the cutting edge everyone is still learning and refining what they know. However, anyone making confident predictions of the future when all of their previous predictions have spectacularly failed, is unlikely to be taken very seriously. At least we hope not....

The whole article is a delight. More here...


...and in the same vein, bowing towards Julian Simon, this is a treat from JoNova...Busted predictions from brazen prophets...

...examples..

• Within a few years “children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Snowfall will be “a very rare and exciting event.”
  David Viner, East Anglia CRU, 2000.
• In June 2007, Tim Flannery warned Brisbane that its “water supplies are so low they need desalinated water urgently, possibly in as little as 18 months”. Last month Brisbane recorded the wettest December in 150 years.

...and here, with thanks to Samizdata, Spiked Online commentator Brendan O'Neill puts it very nicely indeed...

"What it really shows is the extent to which the politics of global warming is driven by an already existing culture of fear. It doesn’t matter what The Science (as greens always refer to it) does or doesn’t reveal: campaigners will still let their imaginations run riot, biblically fantasising about droughts and plagues, because theirs is a fundamentally moralistic outlook rather than a scientific one. It is their disdain for mankind’s planet-altering arrogance that fuels their global-warming fantasies - and they simply seek out The Science that best seems to back up their perverted thoughts. Those predictions of a snowless future, of a parched Earth, are better understood as elite moral porn rather than sedate risk analysis."

Choose a caption...

...now I'm going to show him how to gut it and fillet it. Then we'll eat it raw...

The Hadron Collider and God...

... Scientists have always wondered about The Big Bang. What actually happened during it and immediately afterwards ? The Hadron Collider is attempting to duplicate conditions that will help answer these questions...but not it seems to help answer an even bigger question...What came before The Big Bang ?Now some scientists are claiming that "mysterious forces" - yikes ! -are at work sabotaging or jinxing their quest...

"SCIENTISTS claim the giant atom-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being jinxed from the future to save the world.
In a bizarre sci-fi theory, Danish physicist Dr Holger Bech Nielsen and Dr Masao Ninomiya from Japan claim the LHC startup has been delayed due to nature trying to prevent it from finding the elusive Higgs boson, or "God particle".
They say their maths proves that nature will "ripple backward through time" to stop the LHC before it can create the God particle, like a time traveller who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.
“One could even almost say that we have a model for God,” Dr Nielsen says in an unpublished essay.
“He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.”
"While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus," Dannis Overbye wrote in the New York Times.

"In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus...." More here...

Denis Dutton 1944-2010

One of this country's favourite adopted sons, Denis died aged 66, shortly after Christmas.

All those who knew, worked and rubbed shoulders with Denis knew him as a lively, entertaining and passionate man, who cared deeply for the truth. (His masthead motto on his website Arts and Letters Daily is Veritas Odit Moras - truth hates delay). Aldaily.com shot Denis to worldwide fame, and has been recognised year after year as an indispensable internet resource. According to the NY Times... "As one of the first people to recognize the power of the Web to facilitate intellectual discourse, Professor Dutton was hailed as being among “the most influential media personalities in the world,” as Time magazine described him in 2005"

Denis had a wide range on interests; philosophy, art, politics and music, with firm convictions and knowledge to defend his preferences and biases. One of his pleasures was to shine the spotlight on the hypocrisy of the green political movement - and when media sycophancy towards the greens wanes, Denis will be seen as one of the foremost torch bearers for truth. Denis and I had a hero and a reference book in common: Julian Simon "The Ultimate Resource".

I knew Denis via my membership of ACT and the Sceptics Society, and it was my very great pleasure to find appropriate articles for Climate Debate Daily (sister site to Arts and Letters Daily) and see them appear - on what has become an influential site in the pivotal battle against green leftists...

Denis will be sorely missed by truthseekers worldwide.

Kia ora, tena koe mate.

A report on Denis' funeral from The Christchurch Press here...