I Wonder When
*
I wonder when people last got widely and publicly ridiculed for not believing in God: probably not for several hundred years.
Nowadays, you'd get a slightly odd look for doing the opposite and expressly stating your faith. But, if you really want to know what it's like to be a 16th-century heretic, try saying you're a bit sceptical about man-made global warming.
Temperatures do seem to have gone up a little, even though environmentalists acknowledge that we might be in for a cool spell now. And we've certainly had our fair share of tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons recently. Still, no one has convincingly proved that all this is definitely man's fault. Try saying that in polite circles and it's like saying you're partial to roasted babies.
I understand people disagreeing with global warming sceptics, but not the jeering, ridiculing way they do it. I'm not sure I'm right; they're convinced I'm wrong. They're convinced, too, that they have the moral high ground, that all sceptics are sworn enemies of nature, flowers and puppy dogs.
Environmentalism is the new secular faith - school prayer for liberals, as an American philosopher put it. The faith is a strict one. You're not allowed to join if you think that it's sensible to keep an eye on the environment but don't think that man is to blame for changes in world temperature.
You must believe in the full package. If you do, you are blessed, free from sin and allowed the pious smugness you find in the worst sort of religious believers. It's not enough to believe in these things yourself; you must condemn others for not sharing your belief.
Blog.
It's as if hundreds of thousands of people, some of them prominent scientists, are made of glass and cannot be detected by an ABC-trained eye. Nor can even the noisiest of them be heard by an ABC ear - or the ear of almost anyone in the media.
Take Dennis Jensen, for instance. This federal Liberal MP, who has a PhD in physics, gave a speech in Parliament outlining the latest scientific evidence that the world stopped warming a decade ago.
He had charts from the four international bodies that measure world temperature, including Britain's Hadley Centre, showing that since 1998 world temperatures have stayed flat, contradicting all official predictions. And he warned: "This data shows that the temperature has flatlined over the last 10 years.
"Observation does not fit theory and yet the theory is deemed correct."
You'd think evidence that the world may no longer be heating - indeed, say some sun-studying scientists, may even start cooling - might be of interest to reporters, given our governments are spending billions to pretend to stop a warming that may not be happening, and may not be our fault. Or even bad.
Yet not a single newspaper or television report mentioned Jensen's speech. He was so invisible that there's no pink dot for him on the Chaser map.
In the two days since Jensen spoke, the evidence he's right has firmed.
Now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of those four temperature monitors, has found that the temperature of the lower troposphere has cooled more in the past 16 months than it warmed in the previous 100 years.
A blip, maybe, but unexpected.
And, with satellites and weather balloons not detecting any warming of the troposphere in tropical regions, again contradicting the predictions of every global warming model, it's no wonder 31,000 scientists, including Australia's Prof Bob Carter, last month signed a petition declaring there was still no proof humans were warming the world to hell.
Andrew Bolt.
In a gathering circumference, in growing despair at the blithering dishonest ideologically driven propaganda eminating from the Gucci communists who rule us, the gathering despair and dislocation at the gap between the way lives are lived and the plethora of words spewing from their mouths. There was such a plethora of concerns, domestic violence, obesity, child welfare, global warming, that the counter concerns, competency in government, abuse of statistics, the damage of fear driven and inaccurate campaigns, were entirely drowned out. Anyone who disagreed was pilloried. How did we get here?
How did we get to a place, a space, where honesty was only a distant and obscure cousin. Where people didn't care about the truth, as long as they were in the pack. Where government ministers knowingly used worst-case scenarios to justify their ever tightening control on the populace. Where the idiots reigned. Where the distant wind in the gums, the puff of pink clouds, the ancient connection to the land that all of us glimpsed at one time or another, was wiped out in a peurile parade of hysteria and nonsense.
That's what was happening; as they, the rulers, sat in their luxury cars, the engines idling uselessly for hours. How much they must envy China, where dissent just simply wasn't tolerated and the press was not free. Here the press is controlled by fashion, there it is controlled by the gun. How they must wish no one could pursue them or hunt them down. How they must wish the honeymoon had never ended. The fools we call politicians are making hay while the sun shines; all on their massive salaries and air conditioned lives, the shockingly huge expense accounts.
And no one asks us: what do you think? Because they all know better. After they hunt down the separated dads who allegedly owe money, hunt them down and shoot them in a corner, drive them into crummy little caravans in the back of remote caravan lots, the only places they can afford. The government doesn't care. The bureaucrats don't care. As they turn hundreds of thousands of people's lives into mud.
They're talking now, their latest insanity, of an emissions trading scheme. It's a confident prediction: it will be a fiasco of the absolute first order. Another Labor bureaucracy, another mess. Another set of left-wing lunatics driving the agenda. Another place where theory and fact don't meet, and they don't care. How quickly the shine has come off, after all the evil manipulation and utter professionalism that they showed to get there. Labor ran a brilliant campaign, and their predecessor, the every where John Howard, frenetic, frantic, pathetic, desperately buying our cheap votes, was finally, emphatically, shunted off into history.
The current lot look worse by the day. Yesterday they were abusing figures in parliament to justify their global warming hysteria. Tomorrow it will be something else. The day after that... the day after that there will be another campaign, another launch, another speech, another piece of putrid propaganda to a gullible public. Why does no one bell the cat? Why did none of his colleagues tell Howard he was destroying the image of conservatives, that it will now take years before they are ever trusted again. Why did no one say Work Choices was a disgrace; you can't implement major changes to people's lives without evening mentioning it at the last election.
And why, oh why, does no one stand up? Why, oh why, do people swallow the propaganda and not even question it, not even care? If only this was our darkness, this was our future, a place where the truth was told, a place where people questioned the received wisdom, queried the government, didn't sit po faced watching Dumb and Dumber, had a sparkle in their eye as they examined the status quo, breaking forward into a new life.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=34&objectid=10518393
The world's millionaires club is getting bigger - and its members decidedly richer.
The number of people around the globe with at least US$1 million ($1.3 million) in assets grew 6 per cent last year to 10.1 million, says the 12th annual World Wealth Report released yesterday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini Group, a consulting firm.
An additional 600,000 people became millionaires or richer even as problems tied to the United States credit crisis spread in the second half of the year.
The combined wealth of the millionaires' club meanwhile grew 9.4 per cent to US$40.7 trillion. Their average wealth, which didn't include primary homes, surpassed US$4 million for the first time.
The super rich - those with at least US$30 million - grew 8.8 per cent in population while their accumulated wealth grew 14.5 per cent. This rarefied group controls about a third of the US$40.7 trillion.
For such an elite club, 10.1 million may seem like a lot of members. But the figure represents just 0.15 per cent of the world's population of 6.7 billion.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/ball-in-qantas-court-says-union/2008/06/24/1214073216287.html
Qantas engineers are considering further industrial action after rolling stoppages across Australia's eastern seaboard caused the cancellation of 18 flights today.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers' Association said the ball was now in Qantas' court, and it could end the dispute when it wanted to.
The association's federal president, Paul Cousins, told reporters today he hoped the stalemate over the pay dispute would not go on much longer.
"Our objective is still to keep pressure on Qantas in this current offer situation," he said.
"The last thing Qantas engineers want to do is inconvenience the travelling public, but it is unacceptable for a company that is making record profits to expect these hard-working, highly-skilled engineers to take a real pay cut.
"Despite several weeks of high-level negotiations, Qantas management is still not prepared to offer its engineers a pay rise that meets the cost of living at this point in time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/africa/26zimbabwe.html?em&ex=1214539200&en=3bc1a09cd7245467&ei=5087%0A
Queen Elizabeth II has stripped Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s strongman president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he has presided, the British Foreign Office announced Wednesday.
The rebuke showed the extent of international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence to go ahead with a presidential runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of race on Sunday because of the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.
Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted an honorary knighthood during an official visit to England in 1994 when, the foreign office contends, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”
But with the widespread attacks against the opposition, the foreign office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping a dignitary of an honorary knighthood is exceedingly rare. A foreign office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done — in 1989 to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.
I wonder when people last got widely and publicly ridiculed for not believing in God: probably not for several hundred years.
Nowadays, you'd get a slightly odd look for doing the opposite and expressly stating your faith. But, if you really want to know what it's like to be a 16th-century heretic, try saying you're a bit sceptical about man-made global warming.
Temperatures do seem to have gone up a little, even though environmentalists acknowledge that we might be in for a cool spell now. And we've certainly had our fair share of tsunamis, hurricanes and typhoons recently. Still, no one has convincingly proved that all this is definitely man's fault. Try saying that in polite circles and it's like saying you're partial to roasted babies.
I understand people disagreeing with global warming sceptics, but not the jeering, ridiculing way they do it. I'm not sure I'm right; they're convinced I'm wrong. They're convinced, too, that they have the moral high ground, that all sceptics are sworn enemies of nature, flowers and puppy dogs.
Environmentalism is the new secular faith - school prayer for liberals, as an American philosopher put it. The faith is a strict one. You're not allowed to join if you think that it's sensible to keep an eye on the environment but don't think that man is to blame for changes in world temperature.
You must believe in the full package. If you do, you are blessed, free from sin and allowed the pious smugness you find in the worst sort of religious believers. It's not enough to believe in these things yourself; you must condemn others for not sharing your belief.
Blog.
It's as if hundreds of thousands of people, some of them prominent scientists, are made of glass and cannot be detected by an ABC-trained eye. Nor can even the noisiest of them be heard by an ABC ear - or the ear of almost anyone in the media.
Take Dennis Jensen, for instance. This federal Liberal MP, who has a PhD in physics, gave a speech in Parliament outlining the latest scientific evidence that the world stopped warming a decade ago.
He had charts from the four international bodies that measure world temperature, including Britain's Hadley Centre, showing that since 1998 world temperatures have stayed flat, contradicting all official predictions. And he warned: "This data shows that the temperature has flatlined over the last 10 years.
"Observation does not fit theory and yet the theory is deemed correct."
You'd think evidence that the world may no longer be heating - indeed, say some sun-studying scientists, may even start cooling - might be of interest to reporters, given our governments are spending billions to pretend to stop a warming that may not be happening, and may not be our fault. Or even bad.
Yet not a single newspaper or television report mentioned Jensen's speech. He was so invisible that there's no pink dot for him on the Chaser map.
In the two days since Jensen spoke, the evidence he's right has firmed.
Now the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of those four temperature monitors, has found that the temperature of the lower troposphere has cooled more in the past 16 months than it warmed in the previous 100 years.
A blip, maybe, but unexpected.
And, with satellites and weather balloons not detecting any warming of the troposphere in tropical regions, again contradicting the predictions of every global warming model, it's no wonder 31,000 scientists, including Australia's Prof Bob Carter, last month signed a petition declaring there was still no proof humans were warming the world to hell.
Andrew Bolt.
In a gathering circumference, in growing despair at the blithering dishonest ideologically driven propaganda eminating from the Gucci communists who rule us, the gathering despair and dislocation at the gap between the way lives are lived and the plethora of words spewing from their mouths. There was such a plethora of concerns, domestic violence, obesity, child welfare, global warming, that the counter concerns, competency in government, abuse of statistics, the damage of fear driven and inaccurate campaigns, were entirely drowned out. Anyone who disagreed was pilloried. How did we get here?
How did we get to a place, a space, where honesty was only a distant and obscure cousin. Where people didn't care about the truth, as long as they were in the pack. Where government ministers knowingly used worst-case scenarios to justify their ever tightening control on the populace. Where the idiots reigned. Where the distant wind in the gums, the puff of pink clouds, the ancient connection to the land that all of us glimpsed at one time or another, was wiped out in a peurile parade of hysteria and nonsense.
That's what was happening; as they, the rulers, sat in their luxury cars, the engines idling uselessly for hours. How much they must envy China, where dissent just simply wasn't tolerated and the press was not free. Here the press is controlled by fashion, there it is controlled by the gun. How they must wish no one could pursue them or hunt them down. How they must wish the honeymoon had never ended. The fools we call politicians are making hay while the sun shines; all on their massive salaries and air conditioned lives, the shockingly huge expense accounts.
And no one asks us: what do you think? Because they all know better. After they hunt down the separated dads who allegedly owe money, hunt them down and shoot them in a corner, drive them into crummy little caravans in the back of remote caravan lots, the only places they can afford. The government doesn't care. The bureaucrats don't care. As they turn hundreds of thousands of people's lives into mud.
They're talking now, their latest insanity, of an emissions trading scheme. It's a confident prediction: it will be a fiasco of the absolute first order. Another Labor bureaucracy, another mess. Another set of left-wing lunatics driving the agenda. Another place where theory and fact don't meet, and they don't care. How quickly the shine has come off, after all the evil manipulation and utter professionalism that they showed to get there. Labor ran a brilliant campaign, and their predecessor, the every where John Howard, frenetic, frantic, pathetic, desperately buying our cheap votes, was finally, emphatically, shunted off into history.
The current lot look worse by the day. Yesterday they were abusing figures in parliament to justify their global warming hysteria. Tomorrow it will be something else. The day after that... the day after that there will be another campaign, another launch, another speech, another piece of putrid propaganda to a gullible public. Why does no one bell the cat? Why did none of his colleagues tell Howard he was destroying the image of conservatives, that it will now take years before they are ever trusted again. Why did no one say Work Choices was a disgrace; you can't implement major changes to people's lives without evening mentioning it at the last election.
And why, oh why, does no one stand up? Why, oh why, do people swallow the propaganda and not even question it, not even care? If only this was our darkness, this was our future, a place where the truth was told, a place where people questioned the received wisdom, queried the government, didn't sit po faced watching Dumb and Dumber, had a sparkle in their eye as they examined the status quo, breaking forward into a new life.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/category/story.cfm?c_id=34&objectid=10518393
The world's millionaires club is getting bigger - and its members decidedly richer.
The number of people around the globe with at least US$1 million ($1.3 million) in assets grew 6 per cent last year to 10.1 million, says the 12th annual World Wealth Report released yesterday by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini Group, a consulting firm.
An additional 600,000 people became millionaires or richer even as problems tied to the United States credit crisis spread in the second half of the year.
The combined wealth of the millionaires' club meanwhile grew 9.4 per cent to US$40.7 trillion. Their average wealth, which didn't include primary homes, surpassed US$4 million for the first time.
The super rich - those with at least US$30 million - grew 8.8 per cent in population while their accumulated wealth grew 14.5 per cent. This rarefied group controls about a third of the US$40.7 trillion.
For such an elite club, 10.1 million may seem like a lot of members. But the figure represents just 0.15 per cent of the world's population of 6.7 billion.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/news/ball-in-qantas-court-says-union/2008/06/24/1214073216287.html
Qantas engineers are considering further industrial action after rolling stoppages across Australia's eastern seaboard caused the cancellation of 18 flights today.
The Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers' Association said the ball was now in Qantas' court, and it could end the dispute when it wanted to.
The association's federal president, Paul Cousins, told reporters today he hoped the stalemate over the pay dispute would not go on much longer.
"Our objective is still to keep pressure on Qantas in this current offer situation," he said.
"The last thing Qantas engineers want to do is inconvenience the travelling public, but it is unacceptable for a company that is making record profits to expect these hard-working, highly-skilled engineers to take a real pay cut.
"Despite several weeks of high-level negotiations, Qantas management is still not prepared to offer its engineers a pay rise that meets the cost of living at this point in time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/world/africa/26zimbabwe.html?em&ex=1214539200&en=3bc1a09cd7245467&ei=5087%0A
Queen Elizabeth II has stripped Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s strongman president for nearly 30 years, of his honorary knighthood as a “mark of revulsion” at the human rights abuses and “abject disregard” for democracy over which he has presided, the British Foreign Office announced Wednesday.
The rebuke showed the extent of international frustration over Mr. Mugabe’s insistence to go ahead with a presidential runoff on Friday, even though his sole opponent, Morgan Tsvangirai, pulled out of race on Sunday because of the persistent violence and intimidation against him, his party and their supporters.
Mr. Mugabe’s government has had a long history of human rights abuses, but he was granted an honorary knighthood during an official visit to England in 1994 when, the foreign office contends, “the conditions in Zimbabwe were very different.”
But with the widespread attacks against the opposition, the foreign office said the honor could no longer be justified. Stripping a dignitary of an honorary knighthood is exceedingly rare. A foreign office spokesman could think of only one other time it had been done — in 1989 to the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu.
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