Climate swindle

These are the words, published by the Royal Society, of a man who is said to support the proposition that there is a significant human contribution to global warming (in all the following quotations, any emphasis is added):

[In the pre-human era] Earth has undergone enormous variations in climate state with changes taking place over times ranging from decades to millennia and longer.
[...]
So now we come to the modern climate problem. We know that it is capable of remarkable changes without human intervention. We also know that it has elements with very long memory times (the ocean, the ice caps, and some land processes including the biota). There is the possibility of solar fluctuations about which we know very little. The instrumental record only goes back about 300 years (being very generous) and global coverage is only really available following World War II. In many cases, we have no direct evidence for the spatial structures of natural variations and so find it almost impossible to compare observed changes with those known not influenced by human activities.
[...]

Thus at bottom, it is very difficult to separate human induced change from natural change, certainly not with the confidence we all seek.

But who concludes:

In these circumstances, it is essential to remember that the inability to prove human-induced change is not the same thing as a demonstration of its absence. It is probably true that most scientists would assign a very high probability that human-induced change is already strongly present in the climate system, while at the same time agreeing that clear-cut proof is not now available and may not be available for a long-time to come, if ever. Public policy has to be made on the basis of probabilities, not firm proof.

The man is Professor Carl Wunsch, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physical Oceanography at MIT, and it's worth pondering his words carefully, not least because he is angry about the way he was persuaded to participate in the filming of the Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. As The Observer put it yesterday, he felt the documentary:

was 'grossly distorted' and 'as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two'.

He says his comments in the film were taken out of context and that he would not have agreed to take part if he had known it would argue that man-made global warming was not a serious threat. 'I thought they were trying to educate the public about the complexities of climate change,' he said. 'This seems like a deliberate attempt to exploit someone who is on the other side of the issue.' He is considering a complaint to Ofcom, the broadcast regulator.

Wunsch has published a statement on his website at MIT. It begins:

I believe that climate change is real, a major threat, and almost surely has a major human-induced component. But I have tried to stay out of the `climate wars' because all nuance tends to be lost, and the distinction between what we know firmly, as scientists, and what we suspect is happening, is so difficult to maintain in the presence of rhetorical excess.

But later he states:

I am on record in a number of places complaining about the over-dramatization and unwarranted extrapolation of scientific facts. Thus the notion that the Gulf Stream would or could "shut off" or that with global warming Britain would go into a "new ice age" are either scientifically impossible or so unlikely as to threaten our credibility as a scientific discipline if we proclaim their reality.

And concludes:

As a society, we need to take out insurance against catastrophe in the same way we take out homeowner's protection against fire. I buy fire insurance, but I also take the precaution of having the wiring in the house checked, keeping the heating system up to date, etc., all the while hoping that I won't need the insurance. Will any of these precautions work? Unexpected things still happen (lightning strike? plumber's torch igniting the woodwork?). How large a fire insurance premium is it worth paying? How much is it worth paying for rewiring the house? $10,000 but perhaps not $100,000? There are no simple answers even at this mundane level.

How much is it worth to society to restrain CO2 emissions--- will that guarantee protection against global warming? Is it sensible to subsidize insurance for people who wish to build in regions strongly susceptible to coastal flooding? These and others are truly complicated questions where often the science is not mature enough give definitive answers, much as we would like to be able to provide them. Scientifically, we can recognize the reality of the threat, and much of what society needs to insure against. Statements of concern do not need to imply that we have all the answers. Channel 4 had an opportunity to elucidate some of this. The outcome is sad.

If these are nuanced arguments, one thing is plain: Professor Wunsch is a painstaking and honest scientist, who is deeply critical of the terms in which the Anthropic Global Warming (AGW) argument is often put. He is at pains to show the huge problem with the theory that there is a significant human component in modern climate variation - that this is not provable. Not that it hasn't been proved, but that at the moment it is incapable of proof.

I quoted Richard Feynman on cargo-cult science a few days ago:

There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in "cargo cult science"... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards... For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it... Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.

Wunsch emerges from this test with great honour, but almost all advocates of AGW are shown in their true colours - as cargo-cult scientists. Anybody who waffles about scientific consensus or says "the jury's verdict is in" is a disgrace.

And let's note again that Wunsch is presented, and seems now in the wake of the C4 controversy to see himself, as a pro-AGW advocate. He isn't - he is a pro-science advocate. He does not retract any of the points he made to the benefit of the producers of the documentary in question. He does not address, though there is no reason why he should, the documentary's demonstration of the difficulties any dissenting voice has in getting researched and published. In this climate, it is easy to wonder what the picture might be with a more balanced research environment.

So where does that leave us?

The following points remain unaltered and unchallenged:

• Climate change scares have characterised the 20th century and are really just a form of millenniarism.


• There might be a significant human contribution to global warming, but nobody knows.


• The environmental movement in general and AGW debate in particular has been colonised by ultra-leftists who are trying to use it to impose Stalinist micro-management on every person on the planet


• This has affected public policy and society to an unprecedented and unwarranted extent

Wunsch talks of approaching the issue as one might approach house insurance. He's absolutely right. It is not a matter of accepting every recommendation of the latest crop of green Stalinists - indeed we should be wary of accepting any of their ideas, they have a uniquely appalling track record in every respect: humanitarian, scientific, economic and social. Instead, we have an economic case to consider and under no form of analysis can it be right to cripple our economies at the behest of a bunch of Luddite totalitarians.

By a happy coincidence, there are answers at hand that would provide the Professor's recommended insurance policy, and also answer several other problems. Even if they are not globe-threatening, hydrocarbon pollutants are unpleasant. Our reliance on oil products is politically inconvenient, to put it mildly: a little less reliance on the benevolence of Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Saudi Arabia would be a good thing.

The rapid introduction of sufficient nuclear generating capacity for the whole of our immediate and foreseeable needs would be sensible. Additional resources should be devoted to nuclear fusion research. Alternative sources of power for vehicle engines are all but ready. Announce a phased-in ban on the sale of new vehicles with oil-based engines and let the market sort it out.

Technology shift is the answer. It always has been.

Monday, monday

No posts today. Too much to do.

300 x 70,000,000

Which film:

... from the creator of Sin City was cheap to make and shot in only 60 days and cast with no stars...

... and was 'R' rated grossed $70 million on its opening weekend, in the best take ever for a March opening?



Clue: it's about a courageous defense by an identifiably western people against be-turbanned religious maniacs.

Egyptian Muslims for Human Rights

This is wonderful news:

100 of Egypt's elite –mostly Moslem- politicians, writers, professors, lawyers, etc... Signed a petition pleading with President Mubarak, the legislators, the political parties, NGOs, and the people of Egypt to interfer and amend article 2 of the constitution within the package of amendments being currently discussed in the parliament. Article 2 states that "Islamic Shariy'a is the main source of legislation". This article was introduced in its current form in 1980 by the late President Sadat who sought to counter leftists and communists by inflating the power of religious groups who later turned against him and killed him.

The petition was distributed by Egypt's Center for Human Rights (a local NGO). In the letter, the activists stated that declaring a particular religion for the state is against the supposedly neutral status of the state, which belongs to different religions not mentioned by the Egyptian constitution. This has resulted in rulings that denied some Egyptian citizens the right to state their beliefs, leaving them with the only option to change or lie about their beliefs to get official documents such as IDs.

The petition deserves to be quoted in full. Remember - these are mainstream Muslim intellectuals pleading for equal rights for non-Muslims in Egypt:

The 1980 amendment that declared Islamic Shariy'a to be the main source of legislation does not state any other sources for this purpose which makes it the only source. This has been used in reality by the Constitutional Court in related rulings, besides, legislations in any country are formed by a mix between elements inspired by its accumulated civilizations and responding to the needs of development of the society in space and time. No one argues that Islamic Civilization forms a main source in the cultural composition of Egyptians, however, it is not the only component otherwise it will erase the other contributions -such as Pharaonic, Coptic, and others- in forming the conscience, and culture of Egyptians.

As much as it is not possible to abstract the Islamic Civilization only in the legislations that this civilization has produced at a certain era, nor is it possible to abstract it by one of the many political trends that flourished in that era. Hence, it is imperative that the text [of the constitution] reflects that historical and contemporary fact, to avoid being accused of working to force the rulings of certain religion on those who do not believe in it in contradictions to all international treaties for human rights to which Egypt is a signatory, hence ignoring the presence of other religions and beliefs in the Egyptian society with different rulings, degrading the value of these beliefs and religions, and their followers. This fact has its reflection in social and political day-to-day life, and in court rulings, deepening the feelings of injustice and insignificance by other religions and beliefs' followers, and increasing the feelings of superiority and contempt to others by the other party.

The experience of a quarter of a century since the introduction of this amendment shows that this amendment was a factor -besides other factors- in the decline of the supposedly neutral role of the state towards its citizens, and in breaching the right of equality without regard to religion, which has become an incontestable reality no one can deny no matter how large or small this inequality is in all aspects of life be it social, cultural, political, economical (including Banking and Stock Exchange), and the spread of an environment of extremism, on the account of freedom of scientific research, innovation, artistic and literary creativity. Educational material, and government owned media outlets became a prime source for spreading religious xtremism to the extent that the ministry of endowment published a book pronouncing the followers of other religion to be infidels, and that their money and blood are fair game.

In order not to misunderstand the signatories of this petition, the undersigned emphasize the fact that Islam is the religion of the majority of citizens, and that the general values and principals of religions are some of the important sources of legislation, in a way that does not conflict with Egypt's international obligations according to international human rights treaties, nor should this conflict with the rights of citizenship, and all civil rights that doesn't depend on the individual's religion, and it is important that all government body be neutral towards the [different] religions and beliefs and their followers.

The undersigned appreciate the good intentions behind the proposal to add the "Principal of Citizenship" in article one of the constitution, they note that this amendment doesn't provide any tangible constitutional guarantees, especially in the presence of article 2 as it is, which makes amending this
article a necessity.



The undersigned include Dr. Refaat El-Saeed (Tajamoo Party), Hussein Abdel-Razik (General Secretary Tajamoo Party), Farida El-Naqash (editor of Ahaly newspaper), Bahyeldin Hassan (Cairo Center for Human Rights), Ahmed Higazy (poet), Sayed Al Qemni (thinker), Father Ikram Lmaey (Professor of comparative religions), Gamal El-Bana thinker and islamic missionary), Hafez AbouSeada (National Center for Human Rights) Ahmed Seif Al-Islam (manager of Hisham Mubarak for law), Dawood Abdel Sayed (movie director) Dr. Gaber Asfour (former head of supereme councel for antiquity) Mahmoud Amin El-Alem thinker), Mohamed Nouh Musician) Dr. Hala Mostafa (editor in chief of Democracy magazine), Dr. Fouad Abdel-Menaem Riyadh (National Council for Human Rights), Nigad El-Boray (Democracy Developement Group), Mohsen Lotfy ElSayed (chairman of Masr El-Om party - pending approval), Dr. Kasem Abdou (head of History Department), Sameh Fawzy (Writer & Political Analyst), Magdy Khalil (Political Activist), Adel Al-Gendy (Writer), Nabil Sharaf eldin, Maged Ateya, Nabil Zaki, Ahmed Samih(manager Andalus Center for Tolrerance Studies), Mohamed Zarea (manager of Arab Organization for Criminolgy Reform) Moataz Al Fogairy (program manager - Cairo Center), Gamal Eid (manager - Arab Network for Human Rights Studies), Hosam Bahgat (Manager - Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights).

Thinking allowed

There's going to be a lot more of this sort of thing:

Rats appear capable of a complex form of thinking before known to exist only in humans and other primates — the capacity to reflect on what they do or do not know.

The problem with human understanding of the intelligence of other species is that it has been impeded by two incorrect frames of reference.

The first is religious in origin - the presumption that other species are not intelligent based on an assumption of man's unique position in the universe.

The second is anthropocentrism, as illustrated by the Turing Test for artificial intelligence:

a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with two other parties, one a human and the other a machine; if the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test.

That's just a test for the effective impersonation of human psychology, and why this should be assumed to be synonymous with intelligence itself is a mystery.

Non-human intelligence will plainly not be human. Yet if the word "intelligence" is to have any meaning beyond the human, we need to be prepared to accept that other species will have differing forms of intelligence.

There has been a tendency in the past for the attribution of intelligence to non-human species to be dubbed anthropomorphic. While people have been quite willing to accept that organs like hearts perform the same functions in all species including humans, the human brain has been held to unique - for absolutely no good reason.

A more useful term might be "lithomorphism" - the attribution of the qualities of inanimate objects like rocks to creatures that are plainly living.


And of course this has profound implications for the human understanding of the ethical basis for our relationships with other species.

Czech Mate

Czech President gets it:

Speaking at the Cato Institute, a public policy think-tank, President Vaclav Klaus said that environmentalists who clamor for policy change to combat global warming "only pretend" to be promoting environmental protection, and are actually being driven by a political agenda.

"Environmentalism should belong in the social sciences," much like the idea of communism or other "-isms" such as feminism, Klaus said, adding that "environmentalism is a religion" that seeks to reorganize the world order as well as social behavior and value systems worldwide.

(The Cato Institute is a libertarian, free market think tank)

One million signatures sought

for equality for women in Iran:

Iranian women’s rights activists are initiating a wide campaign demanding an end to discriminatory laws against women in the Iranian law. The Campaign “One Million Signatures Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws” is a follow-up effort to the peaceful protest of the same aim, which took place on June 12, 2006 in Haft-e Tir Square in Tehran

We the undersigned, representing international women’s groups and activists, human rights organizations and activists, university and academic centers, and social justice initiatives, would like to express our support for Iranian women in their effort to reform laws and achieve equal status within the Iranian legal system.

The website is here, the petition is here.

Via Azarmehr.

Cameron's Scottish suicide note

David Farrer points out a consequence of the Cameron Conservatives' contemptible climate bandwaggoning:

"The Conservatives will also suggest - most controversially of all - rationing individuals to as little as a single short-haul flight each year; any further journeys would attract progressively higher taxes, a leaked document entitled Greener Skies suggests."
[...]
Edinburgh has been one of Britain's fastest growing airports over the last decade or so. Much of this expansion has been in business travel that's connected with Edinburgh's huge financial sector. As well as more than 50 flights per day to London we now have two daily services to the US. None of this would have been imaginable when the Tories were last in power.

Ted Heath all but destroyed Scottish fishing when he it sold out to the EU and now the Tories plan to wipe out our most important industry. How long will the Royal Bank (the world's fifth largest) keep its headquarters here under Cameron's proposals? It's not a coincidence that it's located right next to the airport. HBoS, Standard Life, Aegon and the rest are hardly likely to stay here either if their people can't fly up and down to London whenever required.

So why didn't Cameron announce this in Perth? I expect that this omission wasn't deliberate. I doubt if anyone in Notting Hill even knows about the importance of air travel to Scotland.

A conspiracy theorist might think that this plan had been drawn up by the London-based banks to kill off their Scottish competitors. Here's another theory: Cameron is in the pay of Alex Salmond. Nothing else makes sense does it?

Unless of course the Tories are completely bonkers...

Endangered species

Global warmening nuts.

Not Polar Bears -they're thriving:

"There aren't just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears," said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals.

I want one

Beer-tossing refrigerator.

The Law of Unforeseen Consequences

This jumped out at me from a very interesting survey of Egypt's population with an accent on attitudes to a proposed change to a constitutional provision that "Islamic Shariy'a as the main source of legislation in Egypt."

The reason behind the explosion of religiousness in Egypt is simple; the government has shutdown any form of political gathering for so long! The only available network for indoctrination became the mosque or the church! You don't have to be educated; you don't have to commute for large distances; you just walk to the house of worship even at the university where political activities are banned. University mosques have been used over and over again in political mobilization by what used to be known as the Islamic Front students.

Medical Spoof

Or was it?

Read the comments as well. Money quote:

Experience and academic ability are elitist principles which the Government has worked hard to nullify.

Health and Safety in action

Hmmm...

A farmer is recovering after falling down an open drain and injuring her ankle at a health and safety demonstration.

Building

That's nice. I picked up blogging again in October last year and my technorati ranking just went down into five figures today. I suspect that's a precarious gain, but it's still good to see.

Traffic is hovering around 1000 unique visitors a week, but seems fairly static there. Flurries have given 1000 plus a day, but they are lamentably rare. Very few comments, presumably because my posts are so magisterial there is little to add. Or something.

Onwards and upwards.

Dell mulls open source

This has been in the rumour mill for a couple of weeks:

Dell Inc. (DELL) is considering offering the Linux operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows on its personal computers, a Dell spokesman said on Tuesday.

The PC maker said it received more than 100,000 customer requests for Linux in a "suggestion box" posted on Dell's Web site less than three weeks ago.
[...]
Making Linux available on other Dell PCs has been the top request since the Web site was launched on February 16, according to data posted on the site, as of Tuesday evening.

The second most popular request was that Dell offer another popular free software title, OpenOffice, which competes with Microsoft Office programs including Word...

It's just a matter of time.

Blog censorship in Egypt

The Arabist reports:

The head of the very same Court imprisoned blogger Kareem Soliman will be appealing to next week is launching a lawsuit to get 21 blogs and websites blocked in Egypt

A quoted email gives more detail:

It seems that Judge Abdel Fattah Morad, head of Alexandria Appeal Court, has started a lawsuit against the government in Egypt’s Administrative Courts in order to block a number of Egyptian websites. The list, 21-websites-long, includes the blogs and sites that took part in the discussion around the book the Judge has written, and the wide plagiarism evident in the book copying HRInfo’s report on Internet Freedoms in the Arab World, and a how-to-blog guide written by blogger Bent Masreya.
[...]
What worries me, however, is that this is a judge whose ruling cannot be appealed. He can silence, imprison or execute people, and he oversees our elections.
Once the blogs are found offensive by the court, then in light of the Egyptian’s regime reputation, it is automatic to prosecute the bloggers. This is an early warning.

What were they smoking?

Tim Worstall on the drugs report:

Why is it so difficult for people to understand that it's the illegality that causes the problem? That being so, it's the reversal of the illegality that will be the solution.

Worth reading in full.

Whiplash

Understated humour has a long tradition in the hard sciences. My favourite example is from the 1970s, when Richard Feynman commented of a theory that predicted, under some circumstances, a result of infinity that it was "wrong, experimentally".

There was plenty of wry understatement in the documentary that screened last night on Channel 4. The Great Global Warming Swindle was full of remarks like "The theory does not fit the facts". But there was also a great deal of exasperation. The evidence and scientific consensus are clearly overwhelming: global warmening alarmism is an outright, deliberate fraud.

If you missed the show, clips have already appeared at YouTube.

The only part of the chain of evidence I had not previously known was Margaret Thatcher's role. When confronting the Miners Union in the 1980s, she wanted to play up justifications for abandoning coal power, and carbon emissions were a useful excuse. She set up research funding that can in hindsight be seen as the first little piece of snow starting to roll down the slope, that has become the massive snowball that provides such a rewarding work-life balance for so many gravytrainers today.

To summarise the main points:

• Carbon levels in the atmosphere and global mean temperatures have very very similar graphs, but the carbon dioxide levels lag temperature by a couple of centuries. In other words, temperature variations cause CO2 variations, and not the other way round.


• The mechanism for this is well understood: the oceans absorb more CO2 when they are cool, and emit more when they are warm, but they take a long time to warm or cool, hence the time lag.


• The global mean temperature graphs do not follow the graph of human CO2 emissions. There is no measurable connection between the two things.


• The global mean temperature graphs do follow those of solar activity, exactly, over any time period you care to choose


• The mechanism for this is now well understood: solar wind affects cloud formation and clouds are the principle driver of temperature


• As a corollary, if current warming were the result of a greenhouse effect there would be higher rates of change in the upper atmosphere. There aren't.


• Climate alarmists have shamelessly jumped from warming, to cooling, to warming again during the 20th century.

It was also good at showing how the left, following the fall of communism and the disgrace of socialism, entered environmentalism (the "watermelon" syndrome - thin green skins, bright red inside) and coöpted it as a vehicle for revolutionary social change. And how their campaigns today boil down to working to make sure the world's poorest people die young after lives of grinding poverty and ill health.

I am still suffering from whiplash caused by the cuts between a young African woman trying to light a fire in her hut to cook a meal, and the lavish beanfeast going on a short distance away from her as immensely wealthy NGO, UN and government delegates to an environmental conference met in luxurious air conditioned halls to discuss how to make sure the young African woman's country can be prevented from developing. A small hospital was shown that gets its power only from solar panels. It can either have lights switched on, or the medicine refrigerator, but not both.

If you missed it, catch up at YouTube.

When it finished, I switched channel on the TV. Question Time was on BBC1. Patrick Mercer was the subject under discussion. A group of professional politicians and a journalist who have all decided to cling to the global warmening bandwagon-of-dishonesty were competing to see who could be the most pious liar in the studio.

Mercer's remarks had been unacceptable in this day and age, they all agreed. There were angry exchanges about who agreed the most. It proved the Tories are the nasty party, said some kind of blonde dwarf from the Green Party. A Labour Party harpy agreed, but much more than the blonde green dwarf. Alan Duncan from the Tories - normally a refreshing change - toed the line. Mercer's remarks were unacceptable. There was no room in the modern Conservative Party for such comments.

He was right, of course. Mercer was honest, straightforward and blunt, and there is no room for that in any of the main parties, nor in the Greens.

I switched the TV off.

Hobos hiding

Tim Blair points up some great Vegemite* from Paul Toohey:

Labor still likes to imagine it’s a folk singer belting out tunes for the weak and needy. But Labor hasn’t gone and had a chat to the weak and needy for decades. If they did, they’d find something out: that the hobo hiding under the shop awning corner will clutch his bottle of McWilliam’s Port hardest to his chest when Labor comes by, fearing it will reach down and guzzle the last remnants, spitbacks and all.

Stick a "u" in it, and you have the Rusty Chancellor walking down The Strand, with winos flinching as he passes. Everyone else he passes will be checking their pockets, and finding their wallets have disappeared.


*Potted Aussie goodness

Rhetorical question of the day

Iain Dale posts as follows:

Robin Aitken spent 20 years as a BBC current affairs journalist. He's written a BOOK about the experience, called CAN WE TRUST THE BBC? He confirms Andrew Marr's assertion that there is an inbuilt liberal bias within the BBC. The book has received widespread coverage in the press, but Aitken reckons the BBC have put a blanket ban on him appearing on their airwaves. The BBC deny any such ban exists, but the fact remains that not a single programme has interviewed him on his book.

The title of this post?

Why Won't the BBC Interview Robin Aitken?

Oppressed masses

Dr Rant is cross:

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible”
George Orwell; Politics and the English Language.

Orwell's apposite observation is of profound relevance in the current era of malicious political spin. As Patricia Hewitt rambles on about ‘better care’ and ‘safer patients’, the accumulating evidence to the contrary is beginning to bury her; her grave will not be a shallow one. Hewitt has been joined in her deceitful discourse by countless other soulless stooges, chief among whom are three men: Tony ‘talking testicles’ Blair, ‘Liam ‘liar liar’ Donaldson and Andy ‘boring and banal’ Burnham. These mouthpieces of maleficence have come to embody the very beast they represent. Hollow mercenaries who have coalesced with the dire DoH machine, and in so doing their franchise is gathering mass as it tries to suppress all those who challenge its lies with reason.
[...]
It is time to rise up and teach this group of bastards a lesson they will never forget, the lesson shall demonstrate the power of the oppressed masses; a power that, when unleashed in times of desperation, remains a formidable weapon against these arrogant and deceitful dictators.

Just so.

Hiding behind racism

Patrick Mercer has resigned from the Tory front bench over some remarks about racism and the armed forces:

"I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless, but who used racism as cover for their misdemeanours," the MP for Newark said of his time in the Army in an interview with the Times.
[...]
"I had five company sergeant majors who were all black. They were without exception UK-born, Nottingham-born men who were English - as English as you and me," he told the Times.

"They prospered inside my regiment, but if you'd said to them: 'Have you ever been called a nigger?' they would have said: 'Yes'. But equally, a chap with red hair, for example, would also get a hard time - a far harder time than a black man, in fact.

"But that's the way it is in the Army. If someone is slow on the assault course, you'd get people shouting: 'Come on you fat bastard, come on you ginger bastard, come on you black bastard'."

Mercer was absolutely right about this. At the moment, the only people who don't take part in friendly, if muscular, banter in, say, the police force are members of ethnic minorities. When people have to watch what they say and treat people differently according to their colour it drives a wedge between the races. Yet constant reference to race, in a sort of Love Thy Neighbour way, is intolerable.

It's a tough problem. We have to learn to get over both racism and its legacy so we can reach the point where people aren't walking on eggshells, and aren't hating or underestimating people because of the colour of their skin. Sacking Mercer for calling a spade a spade doesn't help.

Nor, in another example of the syndrome Mercer was complaining about, does this:

Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei, of the National Black Police Association, called last night for an investigation by the IPCC, saying that it was "absolutely" a concern that race may have been an issue.

Race? A young woman got so drunk in a club she can't remember what happened, became violent, got thrown out, started smashing up one of the bouncers' cars (she has been convicted of this) then, when the police were called, attacked them:

"She now began to kick, spit and make attempts to bite me. As her hands became free, she tried to grab handfuls of my genitals and knee and kick me in the same place.

"At this point, I struck her as hard as I was physically able with my right fist in an attempt to subdue her. There was no effect, so I did it twice more."

Ms Comer has said she was unaware of what had happened during the arrest until shown the film

But now she has seen it(.wmv download) she is going to sue.

I've watched it. She's a shameless opportunist who should think about her own behaviour.

But what can we say about Ali Dizaei? He is a disgrace to the British police force, calling "race" in a way no less opportunistic than the compensation cynicism of Ms Comer.

Mercer should stay and Dizaei should be the one resigning.

UPDATE: Dizaei gets worse. From the Pub Philosopher:

If you wrote a book slagging off your bosses and published it while you were still working for them, wouldn't you expect to be fired? You certainly wouldn't expect them to promote you a couple of weeks later, would you?

But Chief Superintendent Ali Dizaei seems to think that a different set of rules apply to him. After publishing some serious allegations against senior police officers, he went ahead with his application for promotion. He was turned down, along with another five of the nine applicants. The Guardian reports that Mr Dizaei may sue the Met for race discrimination.

Drugs

I haven't read this yet but it sounds promising:

Demonising drugs and those who take them is counterproductive, according to a two-year study into Britain’s drug policy.

The RSA Commission report says that the concept of "drugs" should be extended to alcohol and prescription drugs and dismisses current drugs policy as "not fit for purpose".

The current policy, its says, is driven by “moral panic” and is ineffective, with huge amounts of money being wasted on “futile” attempts to get drugs off the streets.

Josh Wolf

Josh Wolf has become a cause celebre for the fruitbat left, but I don't see many right wing or libertarian voices raised in his support and that's a shame. Wolf is a San Francisco based blogger and videographer who was a pioneer of video blogging. He is a far-left anarchist, but that doesn't have anything to do with the problems he's facing right now, because in principle they could happen to any citizen - or indeed mainstream - journalist. And it's time more noise was made, not least because of this:

Wolf has served more prison time [184 days and counting] for refusing a court order than any other journalist in US history.

In 2005, Wolf videoed an anti-G8 demonstration that turned violent. He sold some of his footage to media organisations. The Federal authorities ordered he release other footage but he refused.

The reasons he and his supporters cite generally revolve around First Amendment rights and the right of journalists to protect their sources (which doesn't seem to me to apply in this case), but I suspect a factor is also that he agrees with the people he filmed burning police cars and doesn't want them to get arrested.

But although there is a certain amount of posturing in his stance, and there is straightforward dishonesty on the part of many of his advocates on the left who choose to imply he has been imprisoned for blogging, he is in the right. He should not have to hand over his footage.

If violent demonstrators knew that journalists filming them would be compelled to hand over footage, they'd attack the journalists. We need to know these events can be filmed and increasingly we need them to be filmed and photographed by citizen journalists. That's because the mainstream media is squeamish to the point of dishonesty when it comes to showing horrific anti-semitic banners at Stop The War rallies, left-wing violence and the neo-Nazi behaviour of organisations like Hezbollah.

Wolf's campaign, if successful, would be of much more benefit to libertarians and the right than the left. All journalists, including citizen amateurs, need to be able to protect sources, exercise free speech and withhold source material.

There's a petition supporting Wolf here. I just signed it.

Petition on behalf of jailed Iranian women's right activists

From Azarmehr's blog:

I have received and signed the following petitions in support of the arrested Iranian women campaigners:

In English
http://action.humanrightsfirst.org/campaign/WomenArrests?qp_source=ga%5fadv

and this one in Persian addressed to Ayatollah Shahroodi, head of Islamic Republic judiciary and Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel, chair of the Islamic consultative assembly:
http://www.meydaan.com/petition.aspx?cid=52&pid=11

I've signed the English one. I'd probably sign the Persian one if I had the faintest idea what it says.

Open source in the public sector

Good for George Osborne:

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has promised that an incoming Conservative government would create a level playing field for open source software in the UK, in a move which could save taxpayers more than £600 million a year.

In a speech at the Royal Society of Arts, he also announced the appointment of Mark Thompson, of the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, to advise the Party on how to make Britain the open source leader in Europe.

This is long overdue.

gov.uk

It's been a big day for access to this blog from government networks. A bijou groupette of hits from my friends at the GLA is an occasional treat I've become used to, but I rarely have the honour of hits from the Whitehall gateway David Miliband used to access Guido. Normally, the majority of my government type traffic comes from the US, and probably the majority of that from military servers.

Is this going up in the world, or going down?

China unblocked

Hey - it must be at least semi automatic.

Earlier today I noticed that this blog was blocked by Chinese firewalls. For a month or so I'd been seeing a build-up of readers from China - who are very welcome indeed - and this had abruptly ended, so I tested the availability via Great Wall of China and I was indeed blocked.

As an afterthought, I added some boilerplate pro-communist rhetoric, aided by my midget-flinging friend, and lo and behold, the block was raised. As at the time of writing I am accessible from within China and this was brought to my notice by a small number of hits from that wonderful country (I dream of visiting China, incidentally, and wish it wasn't a dictatorship. Whoops...).

What does that mean? Any human reader would have noticed that the added bullshit was just that - bullshit - and ignored it. The system is at least semi-automatic. That was my guess, because there are a lot of websites out there.

So now we have a tool for getting past the Chinese firewalls, very similar to that used by spammers who include increasingly sophisticated ballast text to get past bayesian filters. Ta da!

UPDATE: Mao great leader lifelong revolution glorious people's workers ownership community.

UPDATE2: This actually calls for some pedantry. It means that the Chinese firewalls are probably using spiders and heuristic testing of text found on sites. The "probably" comes from the fact that the great wall website may not be perfect (it says so itself). Nonetheless, I went from maybe 20 Chinese hits a day - not a lot, I admit, but with 80% uniques from different cities (assuming the GeoIP stuff for China is accurate) - to zero for three days, to a dozen in the past hour. So it's worth bearing in mind.

Democratic House of Lords?

MPs have voted for a fully elected House of Lords (non British readers please bear with this - there are some people here still who don't feel that governments should be fully elected...):

The proposal for a 100% elected Upper House of Parliament was carried by a margin of 113, gaining the greatest support of any of seven options for the future of the Lords.

Although the vote is merely indicative and does not automatically become law, it will weigh heavily when the Government comes to draw up legislation for reform of the Second Chamber.

This is wonderful news. It's not certain to happen, but a proper democracy, with limitations on and balances within government powers is seriously overdue in the UK.

What's more, it would mean no more Bishops in the Lords, and therefore end the calls for representatives of other religions to have seats. That would be the best news since female suffrage.

Taliban leader unveiled

Even after this sort of incident, there are still fruitbats who want to see the veil worn in the West.

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan soldiers caught a senior Taliban commander at a checkpoint who was wearing a burqa, while NATO forces on Wednesday fought Taliban militants in the second day of the alliance's largest-ever offensive in Afghanistan.

Mullah Mahmood, who is accused of helping the Taliban detonate homicide bombs, was caught Tuesday in Kandahar province while wearing the all-encompassing Islamic veil worn here by women, NATO said.

Egypt steps into the light

One step forward, but a vital one:

Today is a fantastic day in Egypt's history. The Parliament has finally removed any word that stated that Egypt is a socialist country from the constitution. We are, for all intents and pruposes, a capitalist country now. So, why am I not happy?

Maybe it's because I know that those are hollow words replacing even hollower words to begin with. A country is not a capitalist country just by calling itself capitalist, the same way a country is not a socialist country by calling itself socialist. What matters is the way they conduct themselves, the way they run the government. And in a country where education, healthcare, and food are subsidized, and where we hire people we don't need and can't by law fire them, is not a capitalist country, no matter what you call it.

We know the feeling. But it's still an advance.

China on my mind

Well, I guess I just joined the ranks of the just.

I'd been getting increasing numbers of hits from China, and was starting to wonder why. But now they have stopped. I've been blocked.

UPDATE: Just an experiment to see how this works: China wonderful glorious leader long live people's republic revolution.

Ming - with added backbone

Via The Devil's Kitchen, Ming uncut, by The Spine:

Sharia in action

Multiple opinion polls have suggested that tens of thousands of British Muslims want to see this here:

A 19-year-old Saudi woman who was kidnapped, beaten and gang raped by seven men who then took photos of their victim and threatened to kill her, was sentenced under the country's Islamic-based law to 90 lashes for the "crime" of being alone with a man not related to her.
[...]
Five of the rapists were arrested and given jail terms ranging from 10 months to five years. The prosecutor had asked for the death penalty for the men.

The Saudi justice ministry, however, said rape could not be proved because there were no witnesses and the men had recanted confessions they made during interrogation.

The judges, basing their decision on Islamic law, also decided to sentence the woman and her original blackmailer to lashes for being alone together in his car.

And some of them have the gall to complain about the BNP. Radical political Muslims are vastly worse than the BNP.

Banning citizen journalists in France

I do just have to nip in to mention this:

Sixteen years ago, amatuer videographer George Holliday captured history when he taped Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King.

Today, if something like that happened in France, the videographer could face prison time under a law approved by the country's highest-ranking constitutional authority that says only professional journalists can film or broadcast violent acts, according to Macworld.

Click here to read the full Macworld article.

The legislation passed by the French Constitutional Council could lead to a U.S. $100,000 fine or five years in jail for eyewitnesses who film acts of violence or people who run Web sites that publish the images.

French lawmakers in favor of the rule said it targets the practice of filming or broadcasting violent acts for the purpose of amusement for the attacker's friends.

But a French civil liberties group, Odebi, charges the videographer or distributor could end up with a worse penalty than the person or persons actually carrying out the violent act, and warn against the possibility of a new judicial system to specifically control the publication of information on the Internet.

This means that a French equivalent of the citizen journalists Zombietime and Moonbat Media could find themselves unable to work.

Interesting. You can tell where the serious action is right now, and it ain't in the mainstream media.

Lull

No posts for a couple of days - things to do.

Disillusionment

Via Iain Dale, Francis Maude on the most corrupt government of the modern era:

Labour by contrast have entered a resounding veto on any such cap [on individual donations to political parties]. They maintain that the trade unions are a special case. Well, in one sense they are. The proportion of Labour's funding provided by a handful of trade union leaders is around 70%. And there is nothing remotely covert about what is given in return. It is all there to be seen. To pay for the 2005 election campaign, Labour reached a deal with the unions called the Warwick Agreement. The unions stumped up £12 million to fund Labour's election campaign. And in return, there was £10 million of taxpayers' money for the Union Modernisation Fund, extra rights for strikers, and a deal which means civil servants still get to retire earlier than those in the private sector.

This has all the hallmarks of a straightforward commercial transaction. It is precisely this kind of trade - cash for policy, or in the case of the Union Modernisation Fund union cash in return for taxpayers' cash - that has eroded public confidence in the integrity of the political process.

All true. But this isn't why we are disillusioned with politics. We knew NuLabour would be in-your-face what-you-going-to-do-about-it corrupt when we saw Bernie Ecclestone walking into Downing Street with a big fat shit-kicker smile on his face within days of the 1997 Labour victory. By then, we were so sick of the brown-envelopers that we hardly cared any more. Anything would - or at least might - be better than John "Little Chef" Major and his band of Estate Agents.

The disillusionment comes from the fact that all the main political parties consist almost entirely of self-serving functionaries, welded to the perpetual surrender of power to unelected and ostentatiously corrupt EUropean plutocrats, confiscating ever more of our incomes, addicted to gesture legislation, contemptuous of voters, fraudulent, patronising, self-aggrandising, unprincipled and steeped in the corruption of democracy that comes from the realisation that you can vote yourself other people's money.

We have a health service that fails regardless of how much money is poured into it - and for all the main parties the only answer they can find is to pour in yet more money; that turns a selfless profession like nursing into a sham of "nurse quacktitioners" qualified principally in "team work studies" and race awareness, then invents a plethora of new jobs - nursing assistant, physicians assistant - to try to get blood taken and bums wiped while the nurses are holding team meetings at the nursing station; that has turned GPs into production line managers; that has so shattered the bonds between the community and doctors that A&E and the ambulance service have replaced routine doctor appointments and home visits; that has managed the astonishing feat of pouring vast sums of new money into the pockets of those who work in the Health Service AND shattering their morale.

We have an education system that refuses point blank to promote academic excellence; that takes pains only with failure; teaches children contempt for their history and for any past achievement including that which has led to the accumulation of knowledge we depend on; betrays the responsibility adults have to feed kids properly, see they exercise, cultivate and nurture them; fakes results with multiple choice tests an ape could pass just by randomly selecting answers and continuous assessment of projects their parents and teachers can help them cheat; pours billions into shiny IT suites that are used for nothing except training children to use the software products of just one monopolist company, and for surfing the internet for wikipedia articles to copy and paste into coursework; and pours out children with such appalling literacy and numeracy skills that businesses and universities have had to introduce remedial classes for new entrants with stunning A grade qualifications.

We have a defence policy that has tried to play the role we had in the nineteenth century when we had the most powerful military in the world while cutting the armed services until they are on the same level as Belgium, that relies on fraud to persuade a bunch of lunatic tossers on the Labour back benchers to vote against the principles they found imagining they were oppressed nineteenth-century factory workers expoited by capitalists in top hats, and in performing the mental gymnastics necessary to whoop up industrial-scale Soviet slavery while at the same time imagining themselves to be saintly Quaker moralists.

We have an increasingly institutionalised, fearful client class of welfare and public-sector dependents, clamped to the teat of the state suckling on taxpayers' money and unable even to imagine standing on their own feet.

We have a burgeoning class of parasitic non-jobsworthies, producing terrabytes of reports, sticking masking tape on desks to show where the pens should go.

We have a fire brigade that makes the Miners Union look like reckless libertarians.

We have a police service that will drive past a bank robbery to arrest an elderly couple suspected of making homophobic remarks.

And we have bartered our freedoms - the universal franchise, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience - for the grant-aided benevolence of organisations of bearded nutters pledged to our destruction. We have even allowed slavery - Eastern European sex slaves, domestic workers from the Middle East and Africa, forced marriages - to return to the country that first outlawed it while our Prime Minister mouthes empty and dishonest apologies to pander to the identity politics that underly every form of fascism the world has ever seen.

We've seen the British legal system shot through the head, and all pretence of due process and the separation of powers abandoned, in order to pander to a theocratic monarchy that executes foreigners and leaves their headless bodies hanging in the streets, yet not one of the main political parties thought this was serious enough a problem to warrant them making a stand.

The House of Lords has been prostituted.

The English now have taxation without representation when their money is spent by the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies. We have a system of devolution designed to ensure one party keeps power in Scotland and Wales by excluding English votes, while trying to keep the same party in power in England by including Scottish and Welsh votes; that has tried to abolish a country - England - with more than a thousand years of continuous history; that tries to buy votes within England through the weapon of selective public spending.

And we have a constitutional settlement that places the powers of a divine monarch in the hands of elected dictators who have no sense or understanding of the liberties and rights of the freeborn citizens of the country they govern.

But we don't have a single, solitary mainstream political party willing to step outside their focus groups and market research consultations for a moment to deal with these fucking problems.

Labour knows what to do: increase central control, increase taxation and abolish the liberties even Mediaeval Kings didn't dare threaten. Oh, and piss on the Anglosphere we gave birth to while embracing a Napoleonic, authoritarian, weak, capitulating Europe.

The Lib Dems know what to do: increase taxation - in response to every single fucking problem under the sun. There have been at least a hundred "extra penny on taxation" announcements. Oh, and piss on the Anglosphere we gave birth to while embracing a Napoleonic, authoritarian, weak, capitulating Europe.

The Conservatives know what to do: copy Blair, mouth dishonest platitudes to try to keep their core vote onside while pandering to the client state. Oh, and piss on the Anglosphere we gave birth to while embracing a Napoleonic, authoritarian, weak, capitulating Europe.



That's why we're disillusioned. Mr Maude. That's why we're disillusioned, Mr Dale. And neither of you is going to do a damn thing about it.

The debasement of Europe

Now, I'm a person Blackfive would undoubtedly disapprove of, and so would Chief Warrant Officer Frank Kovacs. But I salute them, and I'm so very deeply ashamed that nothing like this could ever happen here. From Kovacs' diary:

February 17, 2007, 0350 curbside at 24th and M, Washington DC . 16 Degrees with a light breeze. Going home after my second week of freezing temps to my home in SoCal. Fly my aircraft, ride a horse, climb a mountain and get back to living. I'm tired of the cold.
[...]
0450 engaging the self-serve ticker machine and it delivers my ticket, baggage tag and boarding pass. Hmmm, that Marine is all dressed up early.? Oh, maybe,,,Hmm, "Good Morning Captain, you're looking sharp."
[...]
That Captain now has five others with him, BINGO, I get it, he is not visiting his lady, he's an official escort. How I remember doing that once, CACO duty. I still remember the names of the victim and family, The Bruno Family in Mojave., all of them, wow, that was 24 years ago. I wonder if we will ever know who and why
[...]
On board, 0600: "Good morning folks this is the Captain. This morning we have been attending to some additional duties and I apologize for being 10 minutes late for pushback but believe me we will be early to LAX. This morning it is my sad pleasure to announce that 1st LT Jared Landaker USMC will be flying with us to his Big Bear home in Southern California . Jared lost his life over the sky's of Iraq earlier this month and today we have the honor of returning him home along with his Mother, Father, Brother and uncles. Please join me in making the journey comfortable for the Landaker family and their uniformed escort..."
[...]
4 hours and 35 minutes later over Big Bear MT, the AB320 makes a left roll and steep bank and then one to the right. Nice touch CAPTAIN. Five minutes out from landing, the Captain, "Ladies and Gents after landing I'm leaving the fasten seatbelt sign on and I ask everyone in advance to yield to the Landaker family. Please remain seated until all members have departed the aircraft. Thank you for your patience, we are 20 minutes early."

On roll out, I notice red lights, emergency vehicles everywhere. We are being escorted directly to our gate, no waiting anywhere, not even a pause. Out the left window, a dozen Marines in full dress blues. Highway Patrol, Police, Fire crews all in full dress with lights on. A true class act by everyone, down to a person from coast to coast. Way to go United Airlines for doing the little things RIGHT, because they are the big things; Air Traffic Control for getting the message, to all law enforcement for your display of brotherhood.

When the family departed the aircraft everyone sat silent, then I heard a lady say, "God Bless You and your Family, Thank You." Then another, then another, then a somber round of applause. The Captain read a prepared note from Mrs. Landaker to the effect, "Thank you all for your patience and heartfelt concern for us and our son. We sincerely appreciate the sentiment. It is nice to have Jared home."

After departing the a/c I found myself along with 30 others from our flight looking for a window. Not a dry eye in the craft. All of us were balling like babies. It was one of the most emotional moments of my life. We all stood silent and watched as Jared was taken by his honor guard to an awaiting hearse. Then the motorcade slowly made it's way off the ramp...

Shame

This is a disgrace:

A 68-year-old grandmother who "passionately" believes in using cannabis to relieve pain went before a judge and jury today charged with growing and possessing the drug.

If I were on the jury, I would acquit her.

Oh please. Pleeeease...

Let City Unslicker be right:

A market for TV PSB [public service broadcasting] is a much better idea than the current system; we still get the content and have to pay, but not to support the whole administrative monolith that is the BBC.

Another authoritarian Tory twat

The Telegraph's coverage of today's item of gesture politics reveals the banning of imitation samurai swords.

Here's what happens with micro-management of the law, and for convenience I'm going to use a few abbreviations. "Martial arts accessory" will be MAA1, MAA2 and so on, "kitchen implements" KI1, KI2 etc, "sports accessory" will be SA1, SA2 and so on, "gets a headline" will be GAH, "then gets banned" becomes TGB, "crime levels rise" is CLR. OK? Right:

MAA1 GAH, TGB, CLR.
MAA2 GAH, TGB, CLR.
SA1 GAH, TGB, CLR.
KI1 GAH, TGB, CLR.
SA2 GAH, TGB, CLR.
MAA3 GAH, TGB, CLR.

And so on. All the time, crime figures rise. Why? Because the incompetent, authoritarian twats are more concerned with gesture politics than actually enforcing the law, which makes it an offense to attack anyone with anything - tire irons, kitchen knives, barbie dolls, upright pianos... it's irrelevant.

Meanwhile, 76 year old Maurice Smeggins of Bournemouth hasn't realised that the flimsy piece of Christmas-cracker shit hanging on his wall is in fact an imitation samurai sword. He calls the police because he thought he heard a noise in the night - incredibly, someone from the local nick actually turns up, sees the sword, and gives Mo a caution, so now he has a criminal record. Meanwhile, crime figures rise - and not just bogus ones. Bradawls have become the latest accessory for the nightclub brawling classes.

But there are Tory MPs who can't see a moronic, populist, empty bandwagon without jumping on. The Telegraph reveals that:

Last year, Tory MP James Brokenshire (Hornchurch) said cheap samurai swords were as easy to buy "as purchasing a Lotto ticket".

Thanks for the tip, James. I'm off to Budgens to buy a samurai sword, before the ban kicks in.

Fatuity is a feminist issue

In the seventeenth century, Sandra Harding informs us, soberly,

"presumably" the gender metaphor, in which nature is understood as a woman waiting to be ravished, was fruitful for science as well [as the machine metaphor]... so why not refer to Newton's laws as "Newton's rape manual" instead of "Newton's mechanics"?

If you think that's understating the case, you're in good company. She fleshed it out, if that isn't an insensitive way to put it, as follows:

Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica is a 'rape manual' because 'science is a male rape of female nature'.

Good company because Harding is one of America's leading intellectual postmodernists,

a professor of Social Sciences and Comparative Education at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the Director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Harding previously taught at the University of Delaware for many years. She earned her PhD from New York University (NYU).

The good news, as I learned this evening from Butterflies and Wheels, is that she has a new book out with the snappy: that is to say pithy (even painfully brief) title - Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Race and Gender in Science). Amazon gives us a tantalising glimpse into the book with a quote of the first sentence:

It has been tempting to ask "Is science racist?" when noticing the complicity of modern Western scientific assumptions and practices with their cultures' racist projects.

Tempting indeed. Luckily, while you wait for Amazon to deliver, there are a couple of reviews on the web to whet even further your appetite. The publisher's website tells us:

In Science and Social Inequality, Sandra Harding makes the provocative argument that the philosophy and practices of today's Western science, contrary to its enlightenment mission, work to insure that more science will only worsen existing gaps between the best and worst off around the world.

The idea that the enlightenment mission of science is to reduce inequality is an unusually fatuous one, even for a feminist postmodernist. While some people in the world live in stone age, iron age and developing world environments, any successful science undertaken anywhere else in the world can only increase global inequality.

But any claims to intellectual respectability that postmodernist critiques of science might have had collapsed in 1996, with the Sokal Affair. Now, a decade later, although Humanities departments plough on with their verbose and stern "critiques", the air around them is full of the sound of laughter - even if that laughter gets a little strained when we realise we are paying for our amusement though our taxes.

In 1994, a book called Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels With Science was published. This was an open attack on postmodernism. Two years later, a magazine called Social Text (a postmodernist journal of "critical theory") announced it was putting together a special issue called Science Wars. Alan Sokal, Professor of Physics at New York University wrote a deliberate hoax article and submitted it to the magazine. The piece was titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity. He described it as follows:

Like the genre it is meant to satirize -- myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list -- my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. (Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have the knack.) I also employed some other strategies that are well-established (albeit sometimes inadvertently) in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words.2 (N.B. All works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented.)

After he revealed it as a hoax, the editors of the magazine responded in a way that said a great deal more about themselves than they perhaps intended. They were self-exculpatory:

From the first, we considered Sokal's unsolicited article to be a little hokey.

Patronising:

Sokal's article would have been regarded as sophomoric and/or outdated [but not - you will note - incoherent] (and therefore unnacceptable to the editors) if it had come from a humanist or social scientist

And, of course, took refuge in the ad hominem attack:

In the view of our editors, Alan Sokal was now revealed to be either a) a leftist whose self-loathing has been activated by conservative caricatures of the cultural left, or b) a leftist whose genuine sense of commitment led him to a questionable manner of expressing his political point. In either respect, his actions smacked of a temper often attributed to "unreconstructed male leftists." More to the point, the boy stunt pulled by Sokal seemed typical of the professional culture of science education.

In other words: bullseye.

Police thyself

About a week ago I heard noise, shouting voices, just outside my front door. I went out and there was a group of maybe half a dozen teenagers there, sixteen or so years old, pushing and half-fighting on my drive, beered up and boisterous. I made them go away; it seemed OK. A couple apologised as they left, one or two glared a bit.

When I went out this morning to load up my dogs to take them for their morning walk, I saw paint stripper all over the roof and bonnet of my Land Rover. Maybe this is some kind of global warmening nutjob taking revenge for my carbonny ways. Or maybe it's one of the kids. I guess I'm not especially short of enemies, but I haven't had a death threat for months now, so my money's on the kids.

I needed a crime number for the insurance, so I called the police. I was given one, but most of the call consisted of information about data protection and the fact that my details would be passed to Victim Support. Miami Vice, NuLabour style: police in a call centre, counselling instead of investigation, and the insurance company picks up the bill. Good thing too - Ferraris are so carboniferous.

The police did suggest I could ask all my neighbours whether they heard or saw anything. If I managed to get some evidence, then they might look at it. That seems like a bit of role displacement to me. I thought the police investigated and then passed evidence on to the CPS. So now I do the police work and they... er... Well, they check for expired tax disks on the bypass, using those special number plate recognition cameras.

That seems fair. The traffic check vans are so cool, with their blacked out windows. Plus, it's raining, and I wouldn't want their "Serving the Community" badges to get damp.

Leaving the police to their thermos flasks and sandwiches, I get to do the house to house enquiries. For this, I need a clipboard, a reflective jacket - combining investigative work with high-visibility outer garments is something of a personal obsession - and some comfortable shoes.

Maybe I could take DNA samples from all my neighbours while I'm at it. After all, only those with something to hide could possibly object, and they'll need to give samples of body fluids to get their new library card when it comes up for renewal so they might as well get used to it.

All set. This is great. I haven't had so much fun since I placed my recycling bin four inches to the left of the designated pavement location one day and had to take my own bottles and cans to the dump for a month, to learn the virtue of civic obedience.

I'll write up the results of my enquiries in a few days. But first, it's time to proceed in a northerly direction.

Tea for two

One of my dogs just called me over to the laptop. I think he's trying to make a point.

Via Tim Blair.

Fox news: evolution proved

Fox news is often considered to be part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy™ that teams American Neo-Con interventionists with Young Earth creation loonies.

Say it ain't so:

CLEVELAND — A new dinosaur species was a plant-eater with yard-long horns over its eyebrows, suggesting an evolutionary middle step between older dinosaurs with even larger horns and the small-horned creatures that followed, experts said.
[...]
That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan's find would turn up.

"Lo and behold, evolutionary theory actually works," he said.

Failed state watch

Two demonstrations in Iran, brought to us by The Spirit of Man:

Around 21 women's right activists have been beaten and detained by Iranian regime security forces while protesting in front of the Islamic Revolutionary Courts on Sunday 4th of March.

and:

Yesterday, thousands of teachers from across the country gathered in front of the Iranian regime's Islamic Assembly to express their frustration with the short-comings and show their anger at current overwhelming discriminations existing in their working environments.

A schoolteachers' strike is considered likely.

Revolution or death

It's impossible to say whether the shooting of Paul Joyal this past Thursday was a casual crime or something more sinister. Joyal is the Russian expat Putin critic, who said of the poisoning of his acquaintance Alexander Litvinenko:

A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin: “If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you and we will silence you—in the most horrible way possible”.

The FBI are said to be involved in the Joyal investigation.

Either way, discontent at the regime of Putin is growing:

On Saturday at noon, defying the city authorities' ban on organizing an event, over 5000 people in St. Petersburg joined the anti-Putin "March of the Discontented," launched by the Other Russia opposition movement, a group of improbable allies brought together by Putin's repressive intransigence. The demonstrators marched in St. Petersburg, which happens to also be President Vladimir Putin's birthplace and showcase for his G-8 peers. A showcase Russian city hadn't seen that size of a protest for a decade. The violent street clash not only ushered in the year of parliamentary and presidential elections, it also called into question the Kremlin propagandists' claim that eight years of Putin rule has created stability in Russia.

Hard to handle

Now, here's a tough one to handle for anyone obsessed with identity politics, and the dialectic of the oppressed versus the oppressors:

OKLAHOMA CITY — Cherokee Nation members voted Saturday to revoke the tribal citizenship of an estimated 2,800 descendants of the people the Cherokee once owned as slaves.

UPDATE - I stand corrected (and this deserves to be on the main page). Comment from a regular barrage of midgets:

Nah, that's easy: It's false consciousness. The verbal violence of white male hegemony has cracked the solidarity that members of the diverse ethnic community instinctively feel. This just proves how necessary it is to shut down the right-wing noise machine. As long as brownshirted white male redneck stormtroopers like Michelle Malkin are permitted to engage in their devastating and savagely violent attacks from behind the convenient screen of the First Amendment, social justice is an impossibility.

Science and global warming

I'd like to suggest the the present climate, as it were, of opinion and debate about global warming is not scientific, and that science is by nature skeptical. I'd also like to suggest that science relies on and depends on a libertarian environment. But you wouldn't take my word for it. So I'm going to use the words of Richard Feynman:

There is one feature I notice that is generally missing in "cargo cult science"... It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty — a kind of leaning over backwards... For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid — not only what you think is right about it... Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them.

and

No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.

Gibberish

Charles Moore writes about our nuclear deterrent in today's Telegraph. From the comments section - and from someone who plainly regards him or herself as a gritty realist:

Perhaps the money is better spent on social services and education, which is where the new matrix of power lies. The UK must exploit biopolitical sources of power rather than beat the drum about old and staid geopolitical instruments of power!

I defy anyone to extract concrete meaning from those sentences.

Sinister politics

The "Decent" left website Harry's Place links, with comments turned off, to hatemytory.com where you can vote for randomly selected Conservatives under the banner heading "How much do you hate this Tory?"

hatemytory.com is a part of the transpero project. Transpero attempts to rally a flagging Blairite wing of NuLabour, stating that:

Despite all the claims of the Thatcherites it is Blair, not Thatcher, who has secured economic success for the people. The Tories gave us boom and bust with mass unemployment and called it all 'a price worth paying'.

Labour's success can be measured by the fact it is impossible to imagine any party now running for office and defending the core economic project and record of the Thatcherites.

The dishonesty of this is almost impressive; NuLabour has kept all the significant Thatcherite economic and labour reforms, and has been coasting on the Tory economic legacy.

Transpero has two live projects, according to its website: hatemytory.com and theblairera.org.uk, which is just a hagiographic Tony worship site, complete with photograph of Blair gazing statesmanlike into the middle distance.

All three websites are registered by Adrian McMenamin, an old associate of Peter Mandleson and a well-known spin meister with previous experience of Internet dirty tricks. He once dressed up as Sherlock Holmes, pretending to be searching for Oliver Letwin who was hiding after some incautious remarks.

Such fun. hatemytory.com is almost certainly meant to be fun too. This is a guess, because if you're not on the left, it's difficult to equate hatred with fun. If you are on the left, it seems to be easy.

At McMenamin's blog he writes of his joy at being plugged at Harry's Place:

I still remember the joy when I first discovered Harry’s Place about two or three years ago - suddenly a place where nobody apologised for smashing fascists just because they claimed to be “anti-imperialists” and where there was a robust defence of Tony Blair’s approach to foreign policy.
So I am very pleased that they are now linking to HateMyTory - time a few lefties influenced the voting there.

Of course, I broadly disagree with most HP posters on their rather uncritical stance on Israel’s policy on occupation - but that is usually because I expect more and better from the pro-Israeli left - it’s no good asking Palestinians and their supporters to commit to democracy whilst endorsing a 40 year military occupation.

Harry's Place is associated with The Euston Manifesto, which McMenamin has signed, stating his reasons:

I signed because I think the progressive and humanist values of the enlightenment need to be defended and because the British left needs to show those are its values.

Ostentatious hatred is not something I think of as an enlightenment value. It is, however, very characteristic of the left - "decent" or not.

Prohibition

This was written in the context of global warmening at Muck and Mystery, but applies to any form of prohibition - alcohol and drugs included:

One of the best indications that the prohibitionist agenda is intellectually, ethically and aesthetically bankrupt is that proponents have taken refuge in moral arguments. They skip right over debate of what is right and wrong, assume that their views are right, and claim a moral duty to do what they claim is right. Those who dispute the rightness of these behaviors can then be demonized as immoral heretics.

Giving words power

Maybe you walk your dogs somewhere different to me, but I can't recall ever hearing anyone shouting "Hey, Bastard, come here", or "Twat, sit. That's a good dog, Twat". People don't generally give their pets names that are abusive or insulting. So the most likely reason why Guy Gibson named his black labrador "Nigger" is that it was black, not that he wanted to call it by a racist epithet.

Nevertheless, such is the contemporary sensitivity to the "n-word", the dog's name is generally suppressed or altered whenever the film The Dam Busters is shown. That's a shame because it conceals from a modern audience an interesting linguistic fact: that the word "nigger" began life as a general nickname for black things. It didn't mean something bad. Black did not equal bad.

We rarely hear about the attitudes of the white English towards black American servicemen during the Second World War:

From May 1942 until the end of World War II, some 130,000 black GIs came to Britain. Most contemporary accounts tell how they felt completely liberated in Britain compared to their restricted lives in the United States. Many were at first astonished and then delighted to find a white society that actually showed them hospitality and then respect.
[...]
The American brand of racism did not come naturally to British civilians. Many had welcomed the blacks and were adamant that all soldiers - black and white - fighting for European liberty should be treated the same. When rioting between black and white soldiers broke out in a city centre and military police waded in, some British locals lined up alongside the black GIs.

Researching this, for one reason or another, I have found some lovely anecdotes. When the American Defense Department brought pressure on the British War Office to discourage the accommodation of black GIs in mixed lodgings, the War Office wrote to a number of Landladies stating that they should not offer rooms to black GIs. The Landladies wrote back, stating that the money of black servicemen was as good as that of white ones, and they would continue to rent them rooms, thank you very much.

I do feel it would be entirely beneficial were these stories as well known as the equally true but possibly much less common experiences later of "no dogs, Irish or Blacks" notices we have all heard of.

In the 1940s, then, the word "nigger" did not seem to carry a negative connotation in England. Of course, it did then come to be associated only with racial prejudice. Words change and evolve, and so do attitudes to them.

It's fascinating to note that, in the wake of a vote by New York city council to ban the use of the word "nigger" in the city, the only voices of protest have been black:

The black American comedian Chris Rock uses the N-word in his routines and showed little sympathy with the move. He said: "What? Is there a fine? Do judges say, '10 years, nigger!"

Others agreed that the resolution is a waste of time. "We grew up saying it, and it's what I say all the time," said Tiara Smith, 17, from Dallas. "It's not going to stop anybody from saying it."

Sabrina Vidal, 19, a New Yorker, said it didn't really bother her to hear the word in lyrics. "Some people are really offended by it, but me personally, I think there is much more out there to worry about than some word," she said.

Some blacks argue that co-opting the word and giving it a new meaning has taken away its negative impact. The Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx recently said he would not stop using the word, and didn't see anything inappropriate about blacks using it among themselves.

Lenny Bruce doesn't seem to have lost his contemporary relevance, which is a shame because we haven't moved on as we might. In one of his most famous routines, he said:

Are there any niggers here tonight? Could you turn on the house lights, please, and could the waiters and waitresses just stop serving, just for a second? And turn off this spot. Now what did he say? "Are there any niggers here tonight?" I know there's one nigger, because I see him back there working. Let's see, there's two niggers. And between those two niggers sits a kike. And there's another kike— that's two kikes and three niggers. And there's a spic. Right? Hmm? There's another spic. Ooh, there's a wop; there's a polack; and, oh, a couple of greaseballs. And there's three lace-curtain Irish micks. And there's one, hip, thick, hunky, funky, boogie. Boogie boogie. Mm-hmm. I got three kikes here, do I hear five kikes? I got five kikes, do I hear six spics, I got six spics, do I hear seven niggers? I got seven niggers. Sold American. I pass with seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kikes, three guineas, and one wop. Well, I was just trying to make a point, and that is that it's the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness. Dig: if President Kennedy would just go on television, and say, "I would like to introduce you to all the niggers in my cabinet," and if he'd just say "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" to every nigger he saw, "boogie boogie boogie boogie boogie," "nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger" 'til nigger didn't mean anything anymore, then you could never make some six-year-old black kid cry because somebody called him a nigger at school.

The real difference between Bruce's idea and the quote above from Jamie Foxx is that Bruce called for the involvement of people of every colour in rendering the word powerless, whereas Foxx wants this to be the province only of black people. At first sight, Foxx is the racist.

At second sight too. Identity politics - whether based on race, nation or class - is the root of all fascism. It is deeply disheartening that campaigns for racial equality have somehow morphed into organisations, like BLINK, that filter everything through a lens of undisguised racism, at the taxpayers' expense ("When We Ruled" - the "we" being black people - is the title of a book advertised at the top of their website. Try inverting that...).

I always thought Bruce was unrealistically idealistic in his call for the neutering of hate-language through coöption, but now I think he was right. Limiting free speech does not cure underlying problems, and adds new ones. After all, as Lenny also said:

Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.

Lots of people find the word "fuck" offensive. To paraphrase a hippy mantra of the Vietnam era, you can use an aeroplane to drop napalm on children, but you can't write "fuck" on its cockpit, because that would be obscene. It's stupid.

It's also worse than stupid. Take away the word "nigger" from all but black people and you get linguistic apartheid, where one group of people get to police the language of another, without their own being policed in return. Absurd concessions start being made to the new speech-police, like the enforced resignation of a man who used the word "niggardly" - which has no racial meaning whatsoever, in the correct way, in an appropriate place during a conversation. Police officers in the UK are told not to use the phrase "a bad egg", because it's racist. Why? Because "good" eggs were white and "bad" eggs were brown. This is nonsense - bad eggs were eggs that were old, something people encountered more often in the past when quality controls were less well developed, and that people who keep chickens encounter today when they try an egg they found lying under a bush. You can't tell a bad egg from the outside, because it looks the same as a good one - that's the whole point of the phrase.

So people not only have to obey these absurd regulations, they also have to accept a plain untruth as the justification.

The word "nigger", used as a racial epithet, is foul, and people who do that are rightly ostracised. Racial prejudice in all its forms is held in contempt by all right-thinking people. In fact, increasingly, prejudice in all its forms is only held in contempt by the libertarian right; large sections of the left have bought into racist identity politics, especially anti-Semitic prejudice, in a way that troubles many who have always thought of themselves as of the left, and there's something of a fightback going on at the moment.

New York City has not been racist with this legislation - it applies to all races. It's still wrong. Legislation against language is not the answer.

Banning love

From UPI:

Publishers displaying books at an international book fair in Saudi Arabia are coming under scrutiny and pressure by religious police.

Saudi Arabia's semi-official al-Watan daily said Thursday the religious police tried to remove exhibited books on love and different religions at the Riyadh International Book Fair that opened Tuesday.

Stock market solutions

There has been a lot of comment about recent stock markets volatility, with most major markets registering significant falls this week. Why oh why has nobody pointed to the obvious solution, articulated so superbly by President Ahmamadbastard of Iran, just two years ago?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told the latest cabinet meeting in the Iranian capital that “if we were permitted to hang two or three persons, the problems with the stock exchange would be solved for ever”

We are all Ethiopians

This is what happens when you're serious about defeating jihad:

A senior U.N. official says Somalia is at a "turning point" with the population buoyed by a new government.

U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator Eric Laroche Thursday told reporters at U.N. World Headquarters in New York he hopes the trouble-plagued country will take advantage of the opportunity to return to peace and stability.

It has had no functioning government since the regime of Muhammad Siad Barre was toppled in 1991.

Since the Ethiopian-backed Transitional Federal Government routed the Union of the Islamic Courts almost three months ago, "the federal government has a roadmap," the official said. "They know what to do."

Yes, they do.

Iraq update

What you won't be reading in the mainstream media, from Bagdhad-based blogger Iraq The Model:

Operation “Imposing Law” continues in Baghdad. In contrast with previous operations to secure the city, this one is managing to not only keep the initial momentum, but the operation’s effects seem to be growing as well.
[...]
Still, things are a long way from perfectly peaceful. Bombs continue to disrupt the calm of Baghdad. The suicide bombings carried out by al-Qaeda constitute the largest number of incidents. At the same time there has been a sharp decline in the number of bombings set off by remote control on the part of the regular insurgents.

As we noted in earlier reports, we feel safer about moving around in the city now than we did a month before. I have recently been to districts in Baghdad where a month or two ago I wouldn’t have thought of going to. In the last week or two I’ve showed my ID to soldiers and policemen in checkpoints dozens of times. A few months ago this was considered an extremely risky thing to do — especially for someone whose ID shows a name and profession such as mine. “Omar” is a pure Sunni name and everyone here knows that scores of young Baghdadi men were killed by death squads just because they had the name.

Numbers are always useful in assessing results of any effort, and the numbers so far are on the good guys’ side. I read today that the count of various death squads’ victims for this month is one half that of January, and little more than one third that of December of last year. This comes from the official figures reported by the Baghdad morgue.
The other number that’s become one of the important parameters for assessing the situation in the Baghdad is the number of displaced families that have returned to their homes since the beginning of Operation “Imposing Law.” This one too is giving a positive sign. The last official count by the authorities brought the total to little over 1,020 families in just two weeks according to Baghdad paper al-Mada.

While many Iraqi families are returning to the homes they once were forced to leave, there are also Baghdadis who are reopening their stores, ending the months they spent out of business because of violence and intimidation. Some streets that were virtually deserted a few months ago are slowly showing signs of returning to life.
[...]
The results of Operation “Imposing Law” are not magical. We didn’t expect them to be magical. The commanders didn’t claim they’d be when the Operation began. Still these latest developments are certainly promising. And let’s not forget that what has been achieved so far was achieved while many thousands of the new troops assigned to Baghdad are yet to arrive.

Clareification

David T at Harry's Place has the details.

Of mice and men

It seems that size does matter:

A longer penis attracts the ladies — in the rodent world, that is, according to a new study.