Groundhog Day for the Fifth Column Of Malice
(31 Dec08) “.... Nothing is clearer than Hamas's strategy. It gives Israel the choice between rockets and media , and Hamas thinks it is a situation of, ‘We win or you lose.'...The smug smiles are wiped off the faces of Hamas leaders. Yet they have one more weapon, their reserves, they call up the media. Those arrogant, heroic, macho victors of yesterday--literally yesterday as the process takes only a few hours--are transformed into pitiful victims. Casualty figures are announced by Hamas, and accepted by reporters who are not on the spot. Everyone hit is, of course, a civilian. No soldiers here. And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way..... But for exercising its legal duty in accordance with international law, Israel is condemned and told to stop by politicians such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband. The moral inversion is staggering. Miliband has called for an immediate ceasefire by Israel. The implication is that Israel should suffer the Palestinian rockets attacks indefinitely.... Israel has demonstrably not been targeting civilians but Hamas terrorists. Despite the wicked impression given by the media, most of the casualties in this operation have been Hamas operatives. Even Hamas itself has admitted that the vast majority of sites Israel has hit were part of their military infrastructure...” Groundhog Day for the Fifth Column Of Malice , Melanie Phillips , Spectator “....If by ‘disproportionate' is meant merely an imbalance in the numbers who are killed on either side, this is actually inescapable if the infrastructure of aggression is to be defeated. Many more died in Afghanistan than in the 9/11 attacks; yet that war was necessary to destroy the Taleban. Many more died in Nazi Germany or Japan than in Britain or America during World War Two. Yet the scale of the Allied offensive was necessary to defeat Nazism and prevent yet more carnage amongst its designated victims. The disgusting fifth column in the Gaza conflict, however, is – as ever – the western media..If the media have mentioned the attacks on Israel at all, they have done so as an afterthought. The main story is ‘disproportionate' Israeli violence.... it is Hamas that is refusing wounded Gazans access into Egypt for treatment -- and indeed the Egyptians even opened fire on them. So where are the screams about Egyptian and Hamas brutality? Where are Amnesty and Oxfam's condemnation of Hamas and Egypt? Hamas has been blamed for this war by Mahmoud Abbas, who said Hamas could have avoided this attack if it had prolonged its ‘cease-fire'. It has been blamed for this war by Egypt; and Arab states which are terrified of Islamism in general and Iran in particular are privately rooting for Israel to wipe Hamas out. Even the Israeli left is supporting this operation. The only people taking the side of the genocidal terrorists of Hamas are the western media, parroting their propaganda....”
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
(29 Dec08) “....Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects. First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare......Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown..... Secondly , 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.....” 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved , Christopher Booker, Telegraph.co.uk “.... Thirdly , as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world.... All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess. As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.....”
Double standards a threat to democracy
(29 Dec08) “....Last week John Faulkner released his electoral reform green paper, which asks some weighty questions about how best to reform our democracy from the improper influence of political donations. However, genuine reform will require the Labor Party to do its own house cleaning: kicking its addiction to union money and its reliance on union election campaigns. Anything less is window-dressing, at best.... And the piece of political dynamite for the ALP: address the tax privileges that allow tax deductions for union contributions used for political purposes while denying tax deductions for contributions to the Liberal Party and other parties?.... While companies can only hope their money will earn them political favours, unions can count on it happening. Annual affiliation fees unions pay to Labor secure representative rights at party forums. It's guaranteed under the ALP's constitution: union representatives get 50 per cent of seats at ALP state conferences to dictate Labor Party policy.....” Double standards a threat to democracy , Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian “.....When proposing the green paper, Faulkner promised to consider all options, including a ban on union donations and affiliation fees. "All money received by political parties - quantum as well as nature - will be examined, " he said. But will Labor be brave enough to do something? Labor Party national secretary Karl Bitar was quick to distinguish affiliation fees from donations because, he said, "under our rules, unions affiliate to have a role in the party". How convenient.... This problem is compounded by Labor's dirty little political secret. Union dues and levies are fully tax deductible. Yet Labor plans to remove the deductibility of donations to the Liberal and other parties. That discrepancy gives Labor vastly increased firepower compared with its opponents. Labor, for example, can count on unions running pro-ALP Your Rights at Work-style campaigns using fully deductible union dues while the Coalition must struggle by on a meagre diet of donations slowed to a trickle by the Rudd Government's abolition of tax deductibility..... If Labor's bill to reduce thresholds for disclosure becomes law without any further action, the one-way skew will become even more pronounced. The green paper on electoral reform is therefore likely to be mere camouflage to conceal these electoral tricks....”
Demand for removal of Environment Commissioner
(25 Dec08) “.....A demand for Dr Jan Wright, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, to be removed from office is to be conveyed to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon Dr Lockwood Smith, by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. The Coalition's chairman, Rear Admiral Jack Welch, said: “Dr Wright's apparent ignorance of the nature and processes of science, her blatant bias in the on-going scientific debate about climate science, and her attempts to muzzle free speech and scientific debate mean that she has forfeited any right to a position that demands integrity, professionalism and neutrality”. The coalition's demand has been sparked by an op-ed article by Dr Wright in the Wellington newspaper Dominion Post. Admiral Welch said: “the entire tenor of the piece is disturbing. It shows that she either does not understand the fundamentals of the scientific method, or worse, has sacrificed it to suit another agenda... Dr Wright has obviously not bothered to research the facts freely available about the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).....” Demand for removal of Environment Commissioner , New Zealand Climate Coalition “.....Dr Wright is palpably incorrect when she asserts that 4AR was ‘written by 800 scientists and peer-reviewed by 2500 more.' The basis of IPCC climate ‘scenarios' ( their word - they specifically disavow ‘predictions' ) come from Chapter 9 of Working Group 1, which had just 44 contributing authors, more than half of whom had co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9..... Chapter 9 was reviewed by only seven chapter authors, eight government reviewers, and 47 individuals, a total of 62, of whom only five expressed support for the chapter as a whole.... “ One of those 62 reviewers was our own Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, an expert IPCC reviewer for the past 18 years, who comments: ‘After many voluminous reports they have yet to put forward a single scientific argument that can relate climate changes or temperature changes to changes in greenhouse gases. Instead they resort to hype and spin. The IPCC is run by a hard core of only a few dozen scientists, largely nominated by Government Environment Ministries, and its “peer-review" process is actually "pal-review", where anybody who disagrees with them is automatically excluded.'.....”
(17 Dec08) “....The Islamic community plans to build a Muslim-only housing development and recreation centre as part of a $10 million complex in Rivervale.... Mr Ghauri rejected claims the housing would further isolate sectors of the Muslim community from mainstream society, claiming the venue would be used to teach Islamic youth how to become good Australian citizens.... Abdul Jalil Ahmad said it was useful for different religious or ethnic groups to have separate residential enclaves so their customs and exotic cooking smells did not offend neighbours.....” Muslims plan $10m enclave , The West Australian “.....In South Africa, because of apartheid, all different communities were set up and it worked well. It kept people separate. We can be together in terms of our contribution to the wider community.... it would provide affordable housing for Muslims and be first-stop accommodation for Islamic students and newcomers to help integrate them into society.... Ethnic Communities Council president Ramdas Sankaran supported the development of a Muslim recreation hall but said a separate housing complex for any religious or ethnic group was a “deplorable” idea because it undermined social cohesion and promoted segregation...”
Pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today. How and why we are told otherwise?
(17 Dec08) “.....How many failed predictions, discredited assumptions and evidence of incorrect data are required before an idea loses credibility? CO2 is not causing warming or climate change. It is not a toxic substance or a pollutant..... Proponents of human induced warming and climate change told us that an increase in CO2 precedes and causes temperature increases. They were wrong. They told us the late 20th century was the warmest on record. They were wrong. They told us, using the infamous “hockey stick” graph, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) did not exist. They were wrong. They told us global temperatures would increase through 2008 as CO2 increased. They were wrong....” Pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today. How and why we are told otherwise? Dr Tim Ball “....They told us Arctic ice would continue to decrease in area through 2008. They were wrong. They told us October 2008 was the second warmest on record. They were wrong. They told us 1998 was the warmest year on record in the US. They were wrong it was 1934. They told us current atmospheric levels of CO2 are the highest on record. They are wrong. They told us pre-industrial atmospheric levels of CO2 were approximately 100 parts per million (ppm) lower than the present 385 ppm. They are wrong.
This last is critical because the claim is basic to the argument that humans are causing warming and climate change by increasing the levels of atmospheric CO2 and have throughout the Industrial era. In fact, pre-industrial CO2 levels were about the same as today, but how did they conclude they were lower? In a paper submitted to the Hearing before the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski explains...”
(13 Dec08) “.....The Rudd Government has pressed the button on plans to change Australia's governance to entrench protection of human rights and minority interests by giving fresh authority to judges. The panel announced this week by Attorney-General Robert McClelland is geared to this outcome. It will mandate a bill of rights or a variation of this model, or create new mechanisms to give judges influence over the legislative process.... McClelland's panel and his slanted terms of reference suggest it is fanciful to believe that the status quo is an option. Rudd will commit to serious change that alters Australia's constitutional foundations and brands Labor as the party of minority interests.. Rudd and McClelland are playing with fire. They are playing with the authority and integrity of Australia's High Court. McClelland's statement this week was shallow, unconvincing and misleading.... the bill of rights has the potential to affect our institutions, governance, High Court and constitutional traditions in fundamental ways..... Herein lies the problem. It is the potentially insurmountable obstacle for the legal and human rights coalition seeking such reform. They have never given much credence to public opinion. This change bolsters minority interests at the expense of the public interest. In the vital migration jurisdiction, it bolsters the interests of non-citizens at the expense of citizens and the border security policy. And within the system of governance, it shifts influence (and probably power) from elected politicians to non-elected judges.....” Uncharted Waters , Paul Kelly. The Australian “.... These are unpopular ideas with most Australians but championed by special interest groups (refugees, gays, human rights lobbies) that generate huge publicity for their causes.... The intellectual contradiction on page after page of Brennan's book is his conviction that empowering judges is a fundamental mistake while he cannot envisage any other way to advance human rights... Judicial activism is the exploding feature of Australian governance. Yet it has not and it cannot solve the problem. Resort to even more judicial activism will create a huge churn of red tape and fat lawyers. It will not assist human rights. This reality is obvious but neither the ego nor the self-interest of the legal profession will concede it.....The lawyers enshrine the Ahmed al-Kateb case as proof of their cause. The point should be confronted. Al-Kateb, a stateless Palestinian, was an unauthorised boat arrival. He was not an Australian citizen, not a migrant and found repeatedly not to be a refugee. He was in breach of Australian law and the High Court upheld that law, which meant he was kept in detention. The claims by lawyers that this case of a non-citizen and non-refugee constitutes grounds for Australia to alter its system of governance are, frankly, preposterous.....”
Scientists abandon global warming 'lie' 650 to dissent at U.N. climate change conference
(12 Dec08) ”....A United Nations climate change conference in Poland is about to get a surprise from 650 leading scientists who scoff at doomsday reports of man-made global warming – labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion. Later today, their voices will be heard in a U.S. Senate minority report quoting the scientists, many of whom are current and former members of the U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change .... About 250 of the scientists quoted in the report have joined the dissenting scientists in the last year alone. In fact, the total number of scientists represented in the report is 12 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the official IPCC 2007 report....Scientists abandon global warming 'lie' 650 to dissent at U.N. climate change conference
1 . Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history. When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists. " -- U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.....
2 . Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp. Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." -- Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, and is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee....”
3 . CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another. Every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so.. Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver's seat and developing nations walking barefoot. " -- Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan..
4 . “ It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." -- U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration..
5. “ Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." -- Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand....”
The Political Corruption Behind Barack Obama and Chicago
It's worth noting that this was written in January 2008
(12 Dec08) “.....You'll never understand Barack Obama unless you understand the uniquely corrupt city he's from: Chicago. Other big cities have term limits, tax revolts and reform. Not Chicago. Chicago's has had a Democratic Mayor since 1931.This is something of a modern day record in big city politics.Today, Chicago has a city council with 50 Alderman and 49 of them are Democrats. When you hear any Chicago Democrat talk about change, they are never talking about Chicago changing.... The city's grim reputation is rooted back in the Roaring Twenties when Al Capone emerged victorious from gang warfare and went on to become a household name. Oddly enough, far less is known about his successors and their grip on the city during the last half of the twentieth century.... To understand Obama you've got to understand just who his long time friend Tony Rezko is. Rezko is Obama's long time friend and political sponsor who's been indicted and going to trial on February 25,2008 for trying to extort money from a teachers' pension fund. It appears that Rezko wanted his friend Obama to get a great deal on a real estate purchase.As the Chicago Sun-Times reported on November 5, 2006....” “Obama has been friends with Rezko for 17 years. Rezko has been a political patron to Obama and many others, helping to raise millions of dollars for them through his own contributions and by hosting fund-raisers in his home....” The Political Corruption Behind Barack Obama and Chicago “....Obama seems to be less than honest about his dealings with Rezko. As Media Matters busts Obama on his Rezko denials... As a state senator, Barack Obama wrote letters to city and state officials supporting his political patron Tony Rezko's successful bid to get more than $14 million from taxpayers to build apartments for senior citizens. The deal included $855,000 in development fees for Rezko and his partner, Allison S. Davis, Obama's former boss, according to records from the project, which was four blocks outside Obama's state Senate district. Obama's letters, written nearly nine years ago, for the first time show the Democratic presidential hopeful did a political favor for Rezko -- a longtime friend, campaign fund-raiser and client of the law firm where Obama worked -- who was indicted last fall on federal charges that accuse him of demanding kickbacks from companies seeking state business under Gov. Blagojevich .The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he's known Rezko, "I've never done any favors for him.....Obama wrote letters to local officials on behalf of a project controlled by indicted real-estate dealmaker Tony Rezko, the Chicago Sun-Times' Tim Novak reports. "The letters appear to contradict a statement last December from Obama, who told the Chicago Tribune that, in all the years he's known Rezko, 'I've never done any favors for him.....”
Originally posted in November 2007 Interactive representation of sea levels around Australia
(16 Nov 07) This is an absolutely fascinating link. It presents an interactive representation of sea levels around Australia over the last 100000 years . Have a tool around
REPOSTED Flood of misinformation likelier to drown Maldives
(13 Nov 08) “….ABC Radio's Peter Cave reports the IPCC claim the island nation (The Maldives) is in imminent danger of climate-induced flooding…. Andrew Hewitt, executive director of Oxfam Australia: What will be needed is international action and co-ordinated action to respond to the consequences of climate change…. Is the Maldives really about to be flooded because of climate change? Not according to a project conducted by Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University…. “ we find no signs of any ongoing sea-level rise. Our results comes from visits to numerous islands ... and includes coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating. Present sea level was reached about 4500BC. In the past 4000 years, sea level oscillated around the present. In the past decade, there are no signs of any rise in sea level …” Flood of misinformation likelier to drown Maldives The Australian “….The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation suggests another reason the Maldives may be under threat: “….. Coral mining is an important activity in the Maldives having long-lasting impacts on reefs. Coral is virtually the only building material available in the country and coral mining is widespread….. The physical impact of coral mining depends on the type of reefs in question. Island house reefs act as physical barriers, protecting the coral islands against wave action by dissipating most of the energy in the incoming waves before they reach the beach. Mining corals from the reef flats effectively removes this physical barrier and leaves the islands prone to increased wave action, swells, storm surges and, consequently, erosion….”
The original source from Stockholm University: The Maldives Seal Level Project.11: Past-Present-Future
(3 Dec08) “...The United Nations Climate Change Conference kicked off in Poznan, Poland, on Monday with representatives from around the world working to negotiate the framework for a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol. Stephen Hockman, the former head of the British Bar Council and a deputy High Court judge, has an idea why Kyoto failed to reach its emission goals and has proposed a remedy: creating a body similar to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.....The new court would have the ability to sanction and perhaps even punish those who violate or fail to obey climate change treaties such as Kyoto....Many, if not all, warm-mongers consider the Industrial Revolution a crime against humanity, or at least against the Earth goddess, Gaia. Global warming alarmist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Al Gore's favorite scientist, has said in the past that heads of major fossil-fuel companies who spread disinformation about global warming should be "tried for high crimes against humanity and nature....." Criminalizing Carbon , Investor's Business Daily “...World War II was followed by the Nuremberg trials of war criminals for their crimes against humanity.... Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and next head of the European Union starting in January, recognizes such authoritarianism and totalitarianism when he sees it. He sees global warming hype not as an attempt to save the planet but as a campaign to collectivize it, to put the nations of the world and their economies under the thumbs of global planners. Writing in the Financial Times, he warned: "As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not communism...."
For other interesting features be sure to visit November 2008