The Scientific Technological Elite
By Robert W. Ball, AT:
President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous 1960 farewell address contained more than an admonition about the danger of an expanding “military-industrial complex.” That speech was also an early warning of the current unholy alliance between the government and a scientific community dependent on the government for its funding.
[...]
Governments will gleefully fund anything that grows its power and control. The investment and stockbroker communities rub their hands together in anticipation of the trillions of dollars that will reach their fingers through “cap-and-trade” solutions. Energy companies will happily join the parade. An unwitting public, dependent on a grossly inadequate press, will swallow the garbage whole. The media loves nothing better than a chance to help “save the world.” Somehow it gives their lives meaning, and it certainly beats the difficult task of being real journalists. That is how a theory becomes a widely accepted “fact” even though true scientific investigation has been seriously lacking.
The results are now before us. “Science” has fraudulently provided liberal politicians with the means for total public control: anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming.
[...]
A note on humanism
David Warren:
Much of what George Orwell said was deeper than he knew. Yet he complained about quite superficial inversions of terms — “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength,” that sort of thing — and fixed his attention on political manipulations. His “Newspeak” terms, which entered vernacular English in 1949 through the publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four, are all political in nature: “doublethink,” “thoughtcrime,” “Big Brother,” and so forth.
Sixty years have passed since 1949, and now a quarter-century since 1984; a score since the Cold War suddenly ended. Today we can re-read Orwell in light undiffracted by old political battles.
We begin to see why he was so effective: not because he was an acute political thinker (which he certainly wasn’t; his prescriptions for problems were limp and commonplace). Rather, there was real poetry in him and, in his novels and journalism alike, he routinely dug through politics to the “condition humaine.”
While Orwell is not in my private pantheon of the greatest writers — huge respect for him, short of adoration — I mention him often because he is common currency in political journalism.
It is the same reason I too often mention that interesting but over-rated Bohemian fantasist, Franz Kafka: for terms like “Kafkaesque” and “Orwellian” are very useful in describing the techniques of manipulation, as well as the essentially demonic aspirations, in all versions of the ideological Left — whether socialist, feminist, multiculturalist, gay activist, or whatever.
[...]
The temple of science denial
Melanie Phillips:
I listened to the treatment of anthropogenic global warming on the BBC Today programme this morning with utter disbelief. First they had on the Climate Change Secretary (sic) Ed Miliband, who backed up Gordon Brown’s embarrassingly ignorant and fatuous sneer at ‘behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics’ by stating:
[...]
How to Make Eighteen Equal Twelve
ENV:
Occidental College professor Donald Prothero, who along with Michael Shermer debated Stephen Meyer and Richard Sternberg on November 30, complains that folks at the Discovery Institute are now attacking him with “everything they have.” Prothero writes on the NCSE’s blog Panda’s Thumb, “Normally, it is not worth dignifying their garbage with a response,” but in this case he wants people “to get the straight facts.”
According to Prothero:
[...]
A Former Terrorist Speaks Out
FrontPage:
As a young man in Cairo, Hamid Tawfik was recruited into the Egyptian terrorist group Al-Jamaa Islamiya. While he never carried out a terrorist attack, he espoused radical Islam and met with senior terrorist leaders, including Ayman Al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s second in command. Impelled by his conscience, Dr. Tawfik would go on to make a decisive break with Islamic terrorism. Today, he calls himself a “reformer of Islam” and, despite threats to his life, speaks out against the extremists whose ranks he once shared. In the following video, Dr. Hamid Tawfik discusses his way into and out of Islamic terrorism and exposes the psychology of Muslim terrorists from the inside out. He also sends a special message to the Jewish people. To watch the video,
Global Warming and Mt. Kilimanjaro
By BJøRN LOMBORG:
Climate change has captured the attention of politicians around the world. The following article is part of a series, leading up to the United Nations conference on global warming in Copenhagen that starts this week, on how ordinary people in different countries view the issue:
Every year, more than 10,000 tourists are drawn to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, driven in no small part by the fear that the mountain’s magnificent ice will soon melt.
Mary Thomas lives not far from their path, on the southwestern slopes of that mountain, but tourists do not come to her town of Mungushi.
[...]
Swiss Minarets and European Islam
by Daniel Pipes:
What importance has the recent Swiss referendum to ban the building of minarets (spires next to mosques from which the call to prayer is issued)?
Some may see the 57.5 to 42.5 percent decision endorsing a constitutional amendment as nearly meaningless. The political establishment being overwhelmingly opposed to the amendment, the ban will probably never go into effect. Only 53.4 percent of the electorate voted, so a mere 31 percent of the whole population endorses the ban. The ban does not address Islamist aspirations, much less Muslim terrorism. It has no impact on the practice of Islam. It prevents neither the building of new mosques nor requires that Switzerland’s four existing minarets be demolished.
It’s also possible to dismiss the vote as the quirky result of Switzerland’s unique direct democracy, a tradition that goes back to 1291 and exists nowhere else in Europe. Josef Joffe, the distinguished German analyst, sees the vote as a populist backlash against the series of humiliations the Swiss have endured in recent years culminating in the seizure of two businessmen in Libya and the Swiss president’s mortifying apology to win their release.
However, I see the referendum as consequential, and well so beyond Swiss borders.
[...]
Organized, Controlled Propaganda
By Online Sunday, CFP:
The following link is to a Guardian.co.uk news website, which in this article they tout about being the team which coordinated the text that over 50 newspapers will run in an organized reporting effort.
As stated in the second paragraph of this article…
This unprecedented project is the result of months of negotiations between the papers to agree on a final text, in a process that mirrors the kind of diplomatic wrangling among the world’s governments that is likely to precede any potential deal on climate change.
[...]
Advocacy journalism at its worst.
Climategate: the loonies are out of the asylum
By James Delingpole , Telegraph [UK]:
Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
[...]
Switzerland draws the line
Melanie Phillips:
The West is so bamboozled by multiculturalism, the doctrine that all cultures must be held to have equal value and any differentiation is prejudice, that it cannot see the destructive absurdity of this fuss.
For while it is having a fit of the vapours over the so-called threat to religious freedom represented by the minaret ban, it is silent over the fact that in Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia there is no freedom of worship, no churches are allowed to be built at all and apostates from Islam are punished by death.
Islamism is encroaching in Europe and the West because liberals are so paralysed by their own nostrums they cannot defend their own culture — a vulnerability the Islamists are exploiting to the hilt. The Western response to the ban is characterised by fear of the Muslim reaction to it — thus demonstrating to the Islamists once again that terror and intimidation work.
Islamists themselves have given the game away. Both Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Council of Britain have said that mosques and minarets in European cities ‘are manifestations of the proudly indigenous nature of Islam in Europe’.
But Islam is not indigenous in Europe. The last attempt by the Islamic world to conquer Europe was repulsed at the gates of Vienna in 1683.
[...]
Our rights are still at risk
Calgary Herald:
[...]
Human rights commissions, have taken advantage of the legislation which originated in the sensible orientation in most Canadians for civil debate, fair treatment, and tolerance.
However, the legislation has become problematic, which anyone with rudimentary awareness of the need for free expression to be closely protected could have told governments in advance, and did.
To police speech in this manner is to claim that Canadians and their lawmakers in 2009 have reached the pinnacle of perfection and wisdom in law.
That is hubristic and in error.
Settled wisdom must be allowed to be continually challenged, even when done in offensive ways precisely because free expression is a fundamental civil right which undergirds all other rights.
Governments and courts should be in the business of punishing actions, not most forms of verbal or written expression, the only exception being speech that advocates unlawful violence against anyone, not just minorities.
Complainants such as Lund should grow a thicker skin, the commission should delve into the history of why freedom of expression is too valuable to be injured by them or others, and the provincial government should strip Section 3(1)(b) out of the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act.
In defense of Sarah Palin & conservative women
By Lloyd Marcus, AT:
I was in Texas performing at a tea party rally (singer/songwriter of the American Tea Party Anthem). While waiting for my wife, I wandered into the hotel pub. It was Ladies Night. A cowboy practically had a line of women waiting to dance with him. He held them, firm but gentle. He confidently led and they gleefully followed. Each knowing she was in good hands.
I, along with others, by the looks on their faces, thoroughly enjoyed watching him dance with the women. Why did we enjoy it? It represented the way men should be and how women want them to be. Despite what the radical feminists say, women want men to be strong and confident without being jerks. It is called Biology.
[...]
Manhattan Declaration and Mainstream Values
By Janice Shaw Crouse, AT:
The recently released Manhattan Declaration, a nearly five-thousand-word document, explains how throughout history, Christians have steadfastly, persistently held to certain fundamental truths of their faith. These truths are not political, nor are they ideals newly imagined by bigots wanting to suppress other people. Instead, as the Manhattan Declaration documents in unambiguous detail, Christians have been unwaveringly committed to certain moral principles for over two thousand years. Far from being ancillary issues, these Bible-based truths are a part of the very foundation of the Christian faith: the sanctity of life, the divinely ordained nature of marriage, and religious liberty. Considered to be instances of divine revelation, they are open to neither compromise nor revision.
[...]
Climategate reveals ‘the most influential tree in the world’
By Christopher Booker, Telegraph:
Coming to light in recent days has been one of the most extraordinary scientific detective stories of our time, bizarrely centred on a single tree in Siberia dubbed “the most influential tree in the world”. On this astonishing tale, it is no exaggeration to say, could hang in considerable part the future shape of our civilisation. Right at the heart of the sound and fury of “Climategate” – the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia – is one story of scientific chicanery, overlooked by the media, whose implications dwarf all the rest. If all those thousands of emails and other documents were leaked by an angry whistle-blower, as now seems likely, it was this story more than any other that he or she wanted the world to see.
To appreciate its significance, as I observed last week, it is first necessary to understand that the people these incriminating documents relate to are not just any group of scientists.
[...]
The Church of Global Warming
By Patrice Lewis, WND:
Unlike Christianity (which offers salvation in the afterlife), the Church of Global Warming demands “salvation” in the here-and-now at the expense of the future. (The future of humans, that is. Gaia is a different matter.) It requires us to pare back our lifestyles to approximately that of cave dwellers in order to conform to their belief that the earth is doomed because of humans.
The Church of Global Warming has all sorts of doctrines to which its followers adhere. This includes spreading the wealth, social welfare at the point of a gun, restricting private gun ownership, global governance, enforcing limits to population growth (spooky idea) and other cheery concepts. Every one of these doctrines is antithetical to individual freedoms because freedom is the last thing the Church of Global Warming wants. The church cannot limit itself to voluntary participation because there are too many well-educated nonbelievers. It feels it must pass astonishingly restrictive laws to force nonmembers to adhere to its tenets. It doesn’t matter if millions protest at tea parties. This church is like the Borg from Star Trek: You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.
As with other false churches, we need to follow the money to understand the Church of Global Warming’s agenda.
[...]
U.N. Goes On Climate Change Blitz “Seal The Deal”- And You’re Paying For It!
They are whipping up hysteria, pressure and fearmongering because they are afraid the genie is out of the warmists’ bottle and their dreams of world fascism is slipping through their fingers.
ECP Centre celebrates victory for Stephen Boisson and Canadian liberty
By Tim Bloedow, ECP Centre
The ECP Centre (Equipping Christians for the Public-square Centre) is very encouraged to see that sanity prevailed in Alberta’s court system with the decision Thursday to overturn the abusive Human Rights Commission ruling against Stephen Boissoin. We are also grateful to have played an important part in the case, raising awareness of the case over the past several years and organizing three successful fundraising dinners in the spring of this year which helped to bring in over $25,000 from generous Canadians towards Mr. Boissoin’s substantial legal costs. We continue to receive donations designated to Mr. Boissoin’s legal defense and we are grateful for the Christians who take their faith seriously enough to be aware of these disturbing cases and who are able to donate to support fellow-Christians in today’s battles.
Those familiar with the case will know that seven years ago, a “human rights” complaint was filed against Stephen Boissoin due to his sharp criticism of homosexuality in a letter to the editor printed in the Red Deer Advocate. In December 2007, the Alberta Human Rights Commission issued a ruthless decision against Mr. Boissoin which itself was an expression of hatred against Christianity. The provincial HRC essentially became a tool for a homosexualist inquisition whereby Mr. Boissoin was ordered to give a false apology for the substance of his letter. He was banned from ever criticizing homosexuality again in public or private communications, and even from the pulpit. The implications of the decision were stunning in terms of the imposition of the state over the church and the restrictions on religious liberty. Mr. Boissoin was also fined $5,000.
Needless to say, Mr. Boissoin filed an appeal of the decision. His legal counsel Gerry Chipeur was very confident that they would win the appeal because the historic principles of fundamental justice were on Mr. Boissoin’s side so, in a real court where such rules applied, the absurd HRC decision wasn’t expected to stand. The plaintiff Darren Lund, however, is reported in the Calgary Herald as not having made up his mind whether to appeal the decision.
[...]
This was a targeted lawfare assault by the Alberta Government and Mr. Boissoin should sue the government for every penny he can get. That way maybe next time the province won’t be in such a hurry to rob decent citizens of their God-given freedoms.
The Canadians who changed the climate debate
By Richard Foot, Canwest News:
Canadians Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick have discovered faulty calculations in some of the key scientific studies behind the reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As Richard Foot reports, that’s made them pretty unpopular in some circles.
Steve McIntyre, pictured, and Ross McKitrick have become a serious thorn in the side of climatologists and others who say the planet is under serious threat from man-made global warming.
Steve McIntyre, 62, is a Toronto retiree. He plays squash, dabbles with numbers and insists he never set out to stir up any trouble.
So why does his name appear again and again — in the most unflattering ways — in hundreds of e-mails written by the world’s most influential climate change scientists, that were mysteriously taken from a computer in Britain last month and published on the Internet?
In these private messages, McIntyre is called everything from a “bozo” and a “moron” to a “playground bully.”
[...]
A corrupt cabal of global warming alarmists are exposed by a massive document leak
by Steven F. Hayward, Weekly Standard:
The distinction between utterly politicized scientists such as Jones, Mann, and NASA’s James Hansen, and other more sober scientists has been lost on the media and climate campaigners for a long time now, and as a result, the CRUtape letters will cast a shadow on the entire field. There is no doubt plenty more of this kind of corruption in other hotbeds of climate science, but there are also a lot of unbiased scientists trying to do important and valuable work. Climate alarmists and their media cheerleaders are fond of warning about “tipping points” to disaster, but ironically this episode may represent a tipping point against the alarmists. The biggest hazard to serious climate science all along was not so much contrarian arguments from skeptics, but rather the damage that the hyperbole of the environmental community would inflict on their own cause.
Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation). Today the climate campaigners want to forcibly sterilize the world’s energy supply, and until recently they looked to be within an ace of doing so.
[...]
Congressional Democrats are Climategate deniers
By JOHN FUND, WSJ:
The scandal involving leaked or purloined emails from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia finally reached Capitol Hill this week, but not in the way you’d expect. Democratic committee chairmen ignored the evidence of scientific skullduggery at the influential research unit, even as its head Phil Jones stepped aside this week to make way for an investigation.
Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment Committee, did rouse herself to comment on the emails, saying their release should be treated as a criminal matter. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘Email-theft-gate,’” she said. “Part of our looking at this will be looking at a criminal activity which could have well been coordinated.”
In the House, the Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on what Chairman Ed Markey said was “the urgent consensus view . . . that global warming is real, and the science indicates it is getting worse.” But the only witnesses were officials from the Obama administration, who support dramatic action on climate change. Republicans asked to have a global-warming skeptic appear but were denied.
[...]
The project is all about wealth transfer and pan-global re-alignment of spheres of influence, not climate. These ingrates managed to dumb down the population enough to pull the wool over their collective eyes and now they drag this complacent and debt laden society to the very brink of coolapse.
Wishful thinking, biased reporting endanger Rifqa Bary
By Pamela Geller, AT:
A new government case plan directs Rifqa Bary, the girl who fled from her family in fear for her life after converting to Christianity from Islam, to talk about religion with her Muslim parents, and work toward Rifqa returning home.
According to reporter Meredith Heagney of the Columbus Dispatch, who wore a hijab when she visited a Columbus mosque and has consistently filed slanted, anti-Rifqa stories on this case, the goal of this case plan is reunification of the Bary family. Ohio authorities would like to have Rifqa living back with her parents. They think that if Rifqa and her parents sit down and talk about their respective religions, with her parents explaining their Islamic faith and Rifqa explaining her Christianity, they hope this might lead to more understanding of some of the conflicts that led to this impasse in the first place.
This is classic wishful thinking. Why won’t the court listen to expert testimony on Islamic law? There is no discussion with apostates in Islamic law. The apostate is asked to return to Islam and, if he or she refuses, is to be killed. Mediation between Islam and Christianity? Tell it to Mecca.
[...]
Evangelicals Push Back Against Climate Change ‘Hoax’
The Christian Post:
A group of evangelicals, comprised of scientists, economists and theologians, called the mainstream view of pending catastrophe caused by climate change a “hoax” at an event Thursday just days ahead of a key U.N.-sponsored climate change conference in Copenhagen.
The evangelical scholars argued that science, contrary to what many leading scientists claim, does not support the claim that increased CO2 in the atmosphere is having a negative effect on the earth. Rather, no one currently really understands clearly how the earth is responding to the increase in the greenhouse gas, they say.
“There seems to be a misunderstanding about science,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Ala., at The Heritage Foundation-hosted event.
Spencer said there are two parts to science: measurements and interpretation of the measurements.
“I think people think that science is as simple as making measurements,” Spencer said. “[But] believe it or not most scientists – probably all the scientists I know that work in climate change – do have religious views about the earth and how fragile it is and that colors their research and how they interpret data.”
[...]
H/T: Linda at The Great Pumpkin
O’Reilly – MA Christmas Craziness (12.4.09)
Why is it ok to pander to the minority atheists but not to the nulti-sectarian majority? They are selfish ingrates.
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