Hello,
I wish you all the very best for Christmas and of course, the New Year.
Here's a little bit of silly fun from 1955:
Until next year
Why this Blog?
A place where I can lament the changing times; for eccentric comments on current affairs and for unfashionable views, expressed I hope, in cogent style; also occasional cris de coeur largely concerned, I regret to say, with myself.
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Sunday, 6 December 2009
My Position on Climate Change
Ha-ha!
No that's not exactly it, but in some ways not far away.
Of course the climate is changing; since it has been changing since the dawn of time, where's the surprise? And yet we are harangued daily about our so-called "carbon footprints" and our CO2 emissions etc.
I am often depressed at the lack of a sense of history amongst contemporaries and the current near-panic, fuelled by the alarmist media is a classic case-in-point.
Even today the ludicrously-incorrect phrase "global warming" is still to be heard. In case you didn't know, here are a couple of facts:
1. The earth has actually been COOLING since 1998.
2. The earth was hotter in medieval times than it is now: Chaucer wrote of vineyards in northern England. (Of course if the panic brigade is correct, this hot period was due to the fact that the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and King Richard II drove Ferraris)
The medieval hot period was followed by "The Little Ice Age" a period of low temperatures that lasted until the 18th century since when the earth has been warming. I do not believe for one minute that human activity (by which I mean consumption of fossil fuels and industry in general - I admit to concern about deforestation which might be a factor) is responsible for any change in temperature trends - or if it is, it is most likely immeasurable.
And now we are to have, starting tomorrow, the ridiculous UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Too late to stop it, since it was only recently that the balloon went up in regard to the leaked data and emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, an institution that receives very large sums of money from around the world and is supposed to be the leading authority on the subject. The leaked documentation demonstrates that so-called scientists have been "losing" and manipulating data - presumably in the interests of self-aggrandisement and perhaps to keep the money flowing in. Please read the following:
Climategate - read all about it
By Andrew Bolt
Christopher Monckton writes the first book(let) on Climategate, the greatest scientific scandal in our lifetime. The summary:
The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible… He had revealed what many had long suspected:
# A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
# The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
# The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
# The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
# They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
# They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
# They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
# They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
# They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
# They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
# They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
# Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.
SOURCE
The above comes from a splendid (in that I agree with its content!) website called Greenie Watch.
There is plenty of eyebrow-raising material to be read there. Recommended. I particularly enjoyed this video, although sadly it seems that the presenter is still "on-message" even using the incorrect term "global warming" several times:
"'Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented!'
Ho ho, about time that that appalling windbag was deflated a little.
I am not generally given to conspiracy theory, but I know for certain that if anything (God forbid) is agreed at Copenhagen, then the result will be taxes. Now we have just endured a severe world-wide recession. Any connexion I wonder?
By the way, Greenie Watch included in a temperature trend chart the following, showing the temperatures at Copenhagen since 1880. I think that the graph speaks for itself:
Until the next time.
No that's not exactly it, but in some ways not far away.
Of course the climate is changing; since it has been changing since the dawn of time, where's the surprise? And yet we are harangued daily about our so-called "carbon footprints" and our CO2 emissions etc.
I am often depressed at the lack of a sense of history amongst contemporaries and the current near-panic, fuelled by the alarmist media is a classic case-in-point.
Even today the ludicrously-incorrect phrase "global warming" is still to be heard. In case you didn't know, here are a couple of facts:
1. The earth has actually been COOLING since 1998.
2. The earth was hotter in medieval times than it is now: Chaucer wrote of vineyards in northern England. (Of course if the panic brigade is correct, this hot period was due to the fact that the likes of Geoffrey Chaucer and King Richard II drove Ferraris)
The medieval hot period was followed by "The Little Ice Age" a period of low temperatures that lasted until the 18th century since when the earth has been warming. I do not believe for one minute that human activity (by which I mean consumption of fossil fuels and industry in general - I admit to concern about deforestation which might be a factor) is responsible for any change in temperature trends - or if it is, it is most likely immeasurable.
And now we are to have, starting tomorrow, the ridiculous UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Too late to stop it, since it was only recently that the balloon went up in regard to the leaked data and emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, an institution that receives very large sums of money from around the world and is supposed to be the leading authority on the subject. The leaked documentation demonstrates that so-called scientists have been "losing" and manipulating data - presumably in the interests of self-aggrandisement and perhaps to keep the money flowing in. Please read the following:
Climategate - read all about it
By Andrew Bolt
Christopher Monckton writes the first book(let) on Climategate, the greatest scientific scandal in our lifetime. The summary:
The whistleblower’s data file revealed, for the first time, the innermost workings of the tiny international clique of climate scientists, centered on the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, that has been the prime mover in telling the world that it is warming at an unprecedented rate, and that humankind is responsible… He had revealed what many had long suspected:
# A tiny clique of politicized scientists, paid by unscientific politicians with whom they were financially and politically linked, were responsible for gathering and reporting data on temperatures from the palaeoclimate to today’s climate. The “Team”, as they called themselves, were bending and distorting scientific data to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.
# The Climate Research Unit at East Anglia had profited to the tune of at least $20 million in “research” grants from the Team’s activities.
# The Team had tampered with the complex, bureaucratic processes of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, so as to exclude inconvenient scientific results from its four Assessment Reports, and to influence the panel’s conclusions for political rather than scientific reasons.
# The Team had conspired in an attempt to redefine what is and is not peer-reviewed science for the sake of excluding results that did not fit what they and the politicians with whom they were closely linked wanted the UN’s climate panel to report.
# They had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.
# They had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures in the paleoclimate.
# They had expressed dismay at the fact that, contrary to all of their predictions, global temperatures had not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years, and had been falling for nine years. They had admitted that their inability to explain it was “a travesty”. This internal doubt was in contrast to their public statements that the present decade is the warmest ever, and that “global warming” science is settled.
# They had interfered with the process of peer-review itself by leaning on journals to get their friends rather than independent scientists to review their papers.
# They had successfully leaned on friendly journal editors to reject papers reporting results inconsistent with their political viewpoint.
# They had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase and corrupt science for political purposes.
# They had mounted a venomous public campaign of disinformation and denigration of their scientific opponents via a website that they had expensively created.
# Contrary to all the rules of open, verifiable science, the Team had committed the criminal offense of conspiracy to conceal and then to destroy computer codes and data that had been legitimately requested by an external researcher who had very good reason to doubt that their “research” was either honest or competent.
SOURCE
The above comes from a splendid (in that I agree with its content!) website called Greenie Watch.
There is plenty of eyebrow-raising material to be read there. Recommended. I particularly enjoyed this video, although sadly it seems that the presenter is still "on-message" even using the incorrect term "global warming" several times:
"'Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented!'
Ho ho, about time that that appalling windbag was deflated a little.
I am not generally given to conspiracy theory, but I know for certain that if anything (God forbid) is agreed at Copenhagen, then the result will be taxes. Now we have just endured a severe world-wide recession. Any connexion I wonder?
By the way, Greenie Watch included in a temperature trend chart the following, showing the temperatures at Copenhagen since 1880. I think that the graph speaks for itself:
Until the next time.
Saturday, 28 November 2009
(Not so) Silly Season Story?
An "Alien" apparently. Picture source hereJust a quick one this time, from another article in the Daily Telegraph today.
The report states that the Space Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences says that aliens already exist on Earth. Mr Lachezar Filipov, who is the deputy director of the Institute is quoted as saying:
"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time."
No, Mr Filipov, they are not actually aliens; they are ostensibly human.
They work for the police, the secret services, the tax authorities, the customs and excise, the health and safety departments, the race relations industry, the "animal rights" industry, terrorist groups, the music industry, and probably another 1001 nosey-parker organisations. Here in France there are also local busybodies who fulfil themselves spying on their neighbours and sneaking to the "Fisc" (tax authority) rather as "right-thinking" citizens did in Soviet Russia and Stalinist East Germany; these too are not actually "aliens" within the meaning of the word (though they are to me!)
Mr Filipov also says that his Institute is studying 150 crop circles; I doubt he'll find anything there, although Reg Presley of the Troggs might be interested.
The report states that the Space Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences says that aliens already exist on Earth. Mr Lachezar Filipov, who is the deputy director of the Institute is quoted as saying:
"Aliens are currently all around us, and are watching us all the time."
No, Mr Filipov, they are not actually aliens; they are ostensibly human.
They work for the police, the secret services, the tax authorities, the customs and excise, the health and safety departments, the race relations industry, the "animal rights" industry, terrorist groups, the music industry, and probably another 1001 nosey-parker organisations. Here in France there are also local busybodies who fulfil themselves spying on their neighbours and sneaking to the "Fisc" (tax authority) rather as "right-thinking" citizens did in Soviet Russia and Stalinist East Germany; these too are not actually "aliens" within the meaning of the word (though they are to me!)
Mr Filipov also says that his Institute is studying 150 crop circles; I doubt he'll find anything there, although Reg Presley of the Troggs might be interested.
A Brave Man I think
This time it's Russia. I have generally concentrated on Russia's soviet past in previous postings hereabouts, but today I shall mention something contemporary.
There is, in reality, little real freedom of speech in the so-called democratic west; in recent Russia there appears to be rather less. There have been several murders of certain characters who had, it seems, the effrontery to criticise the system (a.k.a the Kremlin) and a distinctly laggardly approach to solving these dreadful crimes. Recently a lawyer has died in prison in Moscow, apparently as a consequence of the authorities withholding medical treatment. Of course President Medvedev has ordered an inquiry. I doubt if anything will happen though; I seem to recall that the president has ordered various inquiries... I have a nasty feeling that his prime-ministerial colleague is unlikely to be in accord.
Anyway, today's post concerns Russian outrage over a new film about the first Tsar: Ivan the Terrible. A prominent historian, Vyacheslav Manyagin, has asked that President Medvedev ban the film as it is deemed to be "an insult to Russian statehood" (!) Obviously M. Manyagin is not the "brave man" I referred to in my title.
The brave man is M. Pavel Lungin who directed the film. In response to these criticisms he made a very brave (especially in today's Russia) response. He said, in an interview with the Moscow Times:
"We can see a lot of the characteristics of his power today [...] After his reign, Russia was left behind in the process of progress. We have made no headway since that time."
I found this story reported in today's Daily Telegraph. Full article here.
There is, in reality, little real freedom of speech in the so-called democratic west; in recent Russia there appears to be rather less. There have been several murders of certain characters who had, it seems, the effrontery to criticise the system (a.k.a the Kremlin) and a distinctly laggardly approach to solving these dreadful crimes. Recently a lawyer has died in prison in Moscow, apparently as a consequence of the authorities withholding medical treatment. Of course President Medvedev has ordered an inquiry. I doubt if anything will happen though; I seem to recall that the president has ordered various inquiries... I have a nasty feeling that his prime-ministerial colleague is unlikely to be in accord.
Anyway, today's post concerns Russian outrage over a new film about the first Tsar: Ivan the Terrible. A prominent historian, Vyacheslav Manyagin, has asked that President Medvedev ban the film as it is deemed to be "an insult to Russian statehood" (!) Obviously M. Manyagin is not the "brave man" I referred to in my title.
The brave man is M. Pavel Lungin who directed the film. In response to these criticisms he made a very brave (especially in today's Russia) response. He said, in an interview with the Moscow Times:
"We can see a lot of the characteristics of his power today [...] After his reign, Russia was left behind in the process of progress. We have made no headway since that time."
I found this story reported in today's Daily Telegraph. Full article here.
Here's a picture from the film:
Nice... Picture source, here.I sincerely wish M. Lungin a long and successful career...
Until the next time
Until the next time
Monday, 23 November 2009
Moving - "Ukraine's Got Talent"
This video is stunning; it helps if you have a sense of history, and some knowledge of the beastliness suffered by the Ukrainians under "the great leader and teacher" a.k.a; mass torturer and murderer, Josef Vissiaronovich Stalin.
But even if you do not have this knowledge you are certainly bound to be in awe of the talent of Kseniya Simononva.
Until the next time
But even if you do not have this knowledge you are certainly bound to be in awe of the talent of Kseniya Simononva.
Until the next time
Monday, 5 October 2009
A Little Silliness
Sorry friends that it has been so long; duty calls and at present I have WORK - that famous four-letter word - also known as "The curse of the drinking class."
Anyway, talking of drink, I came across this splendid bottle of wine today. Its contents were not, as perhaps might be expected, la merde!
Until the next time
Anyway, talking of drink, I came across this splendid bottle of wine today. Its contents were not, as perhaps might be expected, la merde!
Until the next time
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