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Epic Fail

Feb 9th, 2010
by NickM.
No comments yet

Remember back in ‘97 when Labour said it wanted 50% of kids to go to university?

Remember Tony’s three priorities: “Education, Education, Education”?

Well, read this.

Thirteen years and tens of billions later Labour have failed completely on their biggest flag-ship project.

It’s enough to make Santa Claus himself violently let-go at both ends in a fit of inchoate rage.

I don’t want them out in the wilderness. I want them hung, drawn and quartered. Alas, not even the wilderness is likely because iDave is about as useful as a celery cricket bat.

PS. And the least said about the UK’s withdrawl from Cassini just as it’s getting really interesting the sooner I’ll stop stop weeping tears of boiling-blood.

.

Posted in: Britain, Going to the Dogs, Lefties, Science.

Tomorrow Belongs to Them…

Feb 9th, 2010
by NickM.
No comments yet

This from a school newsletter…

“The children are always pleased when parents hear them sing at our assembly shows, so please come along if you can. Remember to bring your CRB checks with you”

That’s from Britain in 2010, not Germany in 1938. That is outright fascism. Please read the whole thing and get plum-dog fightin’ mean. “Papers, please!” to see your own kid singing… Actually it’s more something to make one deeply sad rather than angry.

Don’t read it if you suffer from some sort of heart condition though.

PS. Today is EU Safer Internet Day. All your firewalls are belong to us!

Posted in: Britain, Control Freaks, Europe, Fuck off out of our lives, Propaganda.

Real agenda

Feb 9th, 2010
by CountingCats.
3 comments

Australia has about a million camels.

You didn’t know that, did you?

During the 19thC camels were imported to transport supplies across the more arid areas, and in the nature of things some went feral. Well, there are an estimated million of the buggers now; in fact, Oz exports camels to Saudi Arabia.

Bet you didn’t know that either.

Anyway, seems camels are a prime source of methane…. Yep, camel farts = global warming.

Sigh.

Now when it comes to Al Gores favourite money spinner the Australian government are tending to the completely deranged, still planning on legislating a CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme) in the face of the collapse of the credibility of both the motley CRU and the IPCC. Idiots.

Well, that’s how they present themselves anyway. Deeply caring for the Environment.

Now, this is where the camels enter the picture. It has been pointed out that these feral camels, who everyone wants rid of anyway (apart from the more extreme bunny huggers), generate lotsa greenhouse gasses, an amount equivalent to 300,000 cars. So culling the camels could do a great deal to keep the boogie man from the the door. Cutting camel numbers is a sensible move in itself, AND it cuts carbon, who could object?

Penny Wong, that’s who. Now Senator Wong is the Climate Change Minister and the one person in Australia with the responsibility provide a lead in cutting the emission of plant food.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Australian there was little point doing anything about Australia’s feral camels as only the CO2 of the domesticated variety is counted under the Kyoto Protocol. That equates to only a small number of the beasts, the sort found lugging tourists around Cable Beach in Broome and at Monarto Zoo, southeast of Adelaide.

So, there you are. That’s what matters. The aim isn’t to cut carbon dioxide emissions, it is to meet treaty obligations and strut across the world stage pretending to a concern that really doesn’t exist.

What a joke these people are.

Posted in: Australia, Climate change, Climate fraud, Control Freaks.

Enlightenment

Feb 8th, 2010
by PaAnnoyed.
16 comments

Part of the following is a comment I made earlier in reply to a couple of very good comments – good because they questioned, they provoked debate, and they expressed sentiments I would generally agree with – that Nick thought would make a good post.

And I decided that it was well-worth bringing up, because it involves a system of values that we often defend here without clearly defining it: The Enlightenment.

—

Are you daring to question the absolute authority of Science?!

Good! That’s an Enlightenment value you’re using there. The Enlightenment was all about the transition from tradition, authority, hierarchy, and keeping everything the same to a system of changing society, questioning authority, extending boundaries, and making things better. It is about learning, about checking facts, about trying to figure out better ways to do things, and better things to do. It is about being never satisfied with what you’ve got.

The Enlightenment has its enemies - people who fear change, who fear what we might do if allowed to develop unchecked, who cannot bring themselves to believe that the party can go on indefinitely - and so they try to rein it in. We’ve got to stop consuming. Stop degenerating. We’ve got to control society. Not hurtle blindly towards the singularity; the catastrophe curve’s edge.

What you are both complaining about is in large part the fruit of their efforts. Reason being used to justify more control is not what the Enlightenment was about! Thinking we had all the answers is not what it was about! Those are the anti-Enlightenment. Those are our regression to what came before.

Feminism, the overturning of patriarchal assumptions, is pure Enlightenment thinking. The awareness that Science is limited comes directly from the Enlightenment - Scholasticism before it thought Aristotle had all the answers, to the point where they didn’t even bother to look. Religion taught that all the answers we needed were to be found in the Bible. (Or the Koran, in other jurisdictions.) The freedom of blogs is very Enlightenment - you wouldn’t even be on here if it wasn’t for this philosophy.

While Statism has often pretended to have the aims of the Enlightenment, its methods are diametrically opposed. Not control, but freedom.

And deductive reasoning is not cold. That part is about clear sight, about not lying to yourself. You might not like what it tells you about the world around you, but you have a better chance of doing something about it, and of not making things worse, if you use reason and observation, rather than what you think ought to be true. The world is sometimes cold, not reason. Some people, I know, prefer to live their lives wrapped in the warm pink clouds, but they keep on bumping into things, and then blaming somebody else. That’s their choice, though.

Charlie’s problem is that he can’t keep up. He’s not bright, so he can’t help with the mental heavy lifting involved in actually making things better. And he can’t keep track of all the changes brought about by those who do. He’s lost and frightened in the modern world. And he wants a simple world where simply making stuff up and wanting to believe it is so is enough, and has value. He acquires his beliefs from those who think the same way.

The past had its good bits, and it is important not to throw them away, in our rush to re-make the world. But it is not against the principles of the Enlightenment to do so. It isn’t about change for change’s sake. We have sometimes been careless that way, and that’s genuinely regrettable, and we ought to do better. But it’s not a reason to stop.

—

I’m not the first to make the attempt. One of the more famous was by Immanuel Kant, an Enlightenment thinker writing in 1784. It’s well worth reading in full. But I’ll pull out a few quotes to show just how firmly libertarian beliefs are founded upon this movement, and just how much we owe to them.

Continue reading →

Posted in: Freedom, History, Human Rights/Human Freedoms, Philosophy, Society.

Greenhouse Update

Feb 8th, 2010
by PaAnnoyed.
7 comments

Since my earlier post on Greenhouse Effect physics, I’ve come across a few more useful bits and pieces.

First, I’d like to say thanks to everyone who linked to it around the blogs. I’ve seen it turning up in some surprising places, and usually the context is complimentary. It’s very much appreciated.

Secondly, I’d like to remind people that it’s only the start of the story, not the whole thing. There are a lot of complexities glossed over. There is still a lot to argue with. But it is my belief that you can’t even start the proper debate until you understand your opponent’s argument. This confusion has been caused by the warmists, using a maze of conflicting and unrealistic explanations to sell the scare and confuse any challenge. But sceptics have done too little to clear the fog away.

In the original piece, I mentioned an IPCC-endorsed paper that describes the physics, but unfortunately it was behind a paywall. Well, here is a copy that’s freely available. Grab it while it’s still there.

Here’s another one on Venus by a familiar name from the past. I remember loving his TV shows as a kid. If I had known how much trouble his research was going to cause…

And Eli Rabbett (a prominent and sometimes condescendingly inaccurate  AGWer) gave a link to an interesting set of climatology lectures by professor David Archer. You can find a lot of what I talked about in the second half of chapter 5, “Why It’s Colder Aloft”. It’s a big file, but if you have half an hour spare it’s worth a look. He covers a few bits I skipped, and although there are other parts where I didn’t think much to the clarity of his explanation, I thought that bit was a generally good treatment of a complicated topic. I plan to have a look at the rest later on.

It’s surely a scandal that it has been so difficult to find an accurate exposition on how this bit of physics, supposedly the basis of the greatest challenge of our generation and the justification for a global economic and political upheaval, is supposed to work.

It does sometimes feel now as if there’s not as much point in researching this any more – with Climategate and the turning of the tide in the British media, I almost feel as if it’s already all over. That we just need to sweep up the pieces. But it isn’t, and there are people over there thinking that if they can just ride out the storm until the public lose interest again, they can carry on with their schemes as before.

And we not only need to stop them, but we need to remember – to scorch the knowledge into society’s collective memory – so that when the next big scare comes along, which it will, it won’t have dropped down the memory hole again, like all the others, and we might actually have learned something useful from it all.

Posted in: Climate change, Science.

The Prince of Darkness

Feb 4th, 2010
by NickM.
41 comments

Here day fights with night.
- Victor Hugo, final words.

What a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.
- J Danforth Quayle, not his final words, alas.

No, the Prince of Darkness is not Mandelson. Or Quayle (he put his cowl on backwards, tripped-over a coffee table and is now in the ER).

It is this fuckwit. Yes, the heir to the throne has declared war on the Enlightenment. Cheerless Charlie Chuckles is a well of pissulence that never runs dry. He truly is a twatmeistering cunt-bugle of the very first water. When he isn’t building Potemkin villages or talking to organic vegetables or wishing he was an unattractive woman’s tampon he is being over six feet (I never knew they stacked shit that high in Windsor) of national embarrassment in a double-breasted jacket and uttering pearls of wisdom such as this…

The Prince of Wales has never been a man to suffer from a lack of enemies, from modern architecture to intensive farming. Yesterday, however, he declared war on a new — but also ancient — adversary: the Enlightenment.

Wait for it. Wait for it! I shall expand.

Long regarded as the foundation of contemporary political and intellectual culture, by way of influences ranging from the American Declaration of Independence to the scientific method as embraced from Isaac Newton on, the Enlightenment was based on the belief that all society’s ills could be vanquished by the application of reason.

I would quibble with the “all” in the last bit but I dunno maybe the Times staffer is being cutesy because the application of reason is not the Chuckles’ strongest attribute. He of course does excel at being the highly enriched weapons grade tit-end of the nation. Sell him to Iran and we can all kiss our arses goodbye.

Its seminal figures included the likes of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau. To Prince Charles, however, it is old hat. “I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,” he told a conference at St James’s Palace. “I felt proud of that.”

Well, with the exception of Rousseau who was indeed a right cunt (actually rather a left cunt but the key point is that he was a cunt and French to boot) they were all great thinkers which is more than can be said about the cunt left, right and centre behind Duchy Originals.

The Prince, who was talking at the annual conference of The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, went on: “I thought, ‘Hang on a moment’. The Enlightenment started over 200 years ago.

The profundity of that observation leaves me pitying the plants he talks to. I mean they can’t get away. Poor fuckers.

“It might be time to think again and review it and question whether it is really effective in today’s conditions, faced as we are with huge challenges all over the world. It must be apparent to people deep down that we have to do something about it.”

If I were Chuck’s doctor I would diagnose a severe case of dosomethingitis compounded by a case of handwringiness and suggest he is put-down so he suffers no more. Look Chuckles, I shall if you wish, tap the truth into your dense skull with a ball-peen hammer in a way that no homeopath can cure if you want. Science is the solution: science, reason, technology, logic, the values of Enlightenment are the solution. Ever wondered why it’s called the Enlightenment? No, you twat, you haven’t. You think you should rule over some rustifarian demi-paradise as some sort of philosopher-king. That’s it in a nutshell isn’t it? No fucking wonder the Enlightenment thinkers in the American colonies got rid of twatting cuntpoles like you.

“We cannot go on like this, just imagining that the principles of the Enlightenment still apply now. I don’t believe they do. But if you challenge people who hold the Enlightenment as the ultimate answer to everything, you do really upset them.”

Oh sweet Jesus in a Toyota Yaris with a stuck accelerator (the apostles on the other hand fared better - they were all in one Accord) where to start with that complete twatteration of best bollocks. Yeah, us folks get upset and when we get upset despotic monarchs called Charles have a disturbing tendency to have to take their heads home in a basket. I’m already sharpening my little mashie.

Instead, the Prince advocated a holistic approach to the world’s problems — including housing, healthcare and agriculture — that involved local initiatives rather than globalisation, and worked in harmony with nature rather than against it.

When I hear the word “holistic” I reach for my BAR and don’t worry about the safety. As to the rest… I shall not comment much for fear of giving myself some sort of cardiac episode. What an utterly spherical cunticule of a buggerfucktwat!

“I believe it is of crucial importance to work with, in harmony with nature, to rediscover how it is necessary to work with the grain of nature, as it is necessary to work with the grain of our humanity,” he said. “What is the point of all this clever technology if at the end of the day we lose our souls, and the soul of nature of which we are a part?”

So all this tech you are against Chuck, all this product of far, far better men and women than you could ever be if you had a Poincare time-scale of self-improvement that are advances in the natural sciences is to be junked? I’m getting angry now… Fuck you Charles. Fuck you and fuck the Bentley you rode in on.

Acknowledging that his views did not always fit with the mainstream, he said: “It is very difficult to challenge and overcome current conventional ways of looking at the world.”

Yes it is Chuckie Egg. That’s why the likes of Newton, Darwin and Einstein had to be geniuses. And you are not. I have seen my cat catch things smarter than you.

The Prince also made an impassioned call for houses to be built so that birds, such as swallows and swifts, could make their nests there. “It is immoral not to consider those other species that share this planet with us,” he said. “If the swallows and swifts stop coming here and nesting on the buildings that I love, then there is no point to life. Literally. It is symbolic, like the albatross. If that becomes extinct then I think we deserve nothing but reprobation.

He’s having a go at the birds now! He’s totally lost even the dismal turdulence of a plot he had earlier.

“We have to consider these issues. That is another reason why I have battled so hard in this area, despite the unbelievable abuse that is heaped on me every time I open my mouth.”

One wonders why that happens Chuckles? It must be fucking awful for you to be so misunderstood and I’m sure two palaces and half of Cornwall are not suitable compensation. Please Charles, just fuck off and live in a yurt and contemplate your own arsehole (if you can find it with both hands) and let the rest of us get on with the twenty-first century. Please do it because I’d rather be forced to felch Bernard Bresslaw live on an ITV1 show hosted by Ant and Dec than see you as King.

I am a product of the Enlightenment and you will not be the head of state of the nation that basically invented the modern world. I shall fight against the endarkening you propose. I shall fight against you being “Defender of Faiths” you fuckulent cockmonger of a wanker’s biscuit and it’s not just me. I shall do this because I do not wish to see the country of Newton, Locke and Maxwell ruled by some sort of thickie retread of a dark age king - Charles-a-Mangey perhaps? You have been warned Chuckles. We will not stand for this deranged feudal nonsense. It’s our country now and not your fucking fiefdom. We are free men and women because of the Enlightenment and we shall defend that. And there are an awful lot more of us than there are of you.

If this blog has purpose (a very moot point) it is to speak-up for the values of the Enlightenment. Certainly the Anglospheric one. And if that means me suggesting The Prince of Wails (if he doesn’t shut the fuck-up) is dragged through the streets on a tumbrel and pelted with crappy organic vegetables to being made permanently non-holistic by a sharp item taking him in the neck at 9.81m/s/s then so be it.

Everywhere we are beset by mysticism and tyranny and I’m taking my world back one blog-post at a time. (And yes, people do read this drivel - probs at the mo it’s Special Branch).

We are the greatest civilization of all time and we are not going down without one hell of a fucking fight.

Posted in: Barbarism, Beyond Belief, Britain, Civilisation, Econasties, Freedom, Fuck off out of our lives, Going to the Dogs, Jumped the Shark, Nasties, Total Mentalists, twats.

An unintentional truth

Feb 4th, 2010
by CountingCats.
10 comments

The horror is, Sunny Hundal may even be correct:

After watching last night’s Newsnight, I can only come to one conclusion: the BBC has become this country’s most pernicious climate-change-denying media outlet in the UK.

Which only goes to emphasise just how much the others toe the (warmist hysterical) party line?

Posted in: Climate change, Climate fraud, Mainstream Media.

Green kills

Feb 3rd, 2010
by CountingCats.
5 comments

Professor Jones said: “I feel tremendously pressurised by all this but I’m trying to continue my work in the science. I think it’s very important and it’s potentially very serious for the future of mankind in decades to come.”

Dear God Almighty, doesn’t your heart bleed? The man is a fucking crook, he connives to deceive, treats his peers with contempt, lies to hide his crappy inner workings, and is responsible for advice which has led governments to adopt worthless policies which are killing his fellow human beings.

And he feels “pressurised” on being found out.

Ah, diddums.

Climate lies kill.

Posted in: Climate change, Climate fraud, Control Freaks, Green Kills, Lefties, Morality.

Miranda has a fan

Feb 3rd, 2010
by CountingCats.
8 comments

About 1:06 in. What can I say? Bankers are human too.

Posted in: Beautiful women, Cool!, Humour.

The Hardest Word…

Feb 3rd, 2010
by NickM.
20 comments

India has a fine tradition in the sciences. They in fact invented zero.

Some great Indian scientists must be developing high angular momentum in their graves at this though…

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the assertion in its 2007 report had “cost us dear” in the fight against global warming and helped boost the efforts of sceptics.

Despite the IPCC previously admitting it had made a mistake in its assessment on climate change, Dr Pachauri refused to personally apologise for the error because he was not responsible for that part of the report.

Look, you daft sod. We are not scpetics because we want to be. We are sceptics because we don’t believe.

In an interview published on Wednesday, the IPPC chairman said a personal apology would be a “populist” step as he continued to refuse calls to resign.

“You can’t expect me to be personally responsible for every word in a 3,000 page report,” he said.

Actually I do expect you to be responsible because we are talking here of a multi-trillion dollar re-tooling of the global economy. You lot elevated this to the greatest scientific challenge ever. Live up to it.

“I don’t do too many populist things, that is why I’m so unpopular with a certain section of society.”

Why am I reminded of Jim Hacker making “courageous” decisions here. And no, you are unpopular bcause you’re a devious cunt on the make. Got that? You also seem to be sporting a comb-over of Bobby Charltonesque proportions. Something to hide or is he just insulating your head to save energy?

“We’re in an information society today and we have to respond adequately and professionally. We’ve been weak in that regard to be honest. The IPCC is starting to realise we’re living in a very different world to what we had in 1988.”

That is the quote of the century so far. That is priceless. It’s taken them ’till 2010 to realise it’s not 1988. That is a statement of Ratnerish proportions. I’m glad he shared the profound insight that I didn’t merely imagine the last two decades with me because I was about to go to Our Price and buy the new Duran Duran album on vinyl.

Dr Pachauri, who claimed he was subject to lies about his personal income and lifestyle, admitted the mistake had seriously damaged the IPCC’s credibility and

While he claimed it was an isolated mistake, that he put down to human error and which was “totally of character” for the panel, had undermined the “basic truth” that human activity was causing temperatures to rise.

Another piece of pricelessness. The basic truth? Human error? Well yes if a scientist gets it wrong it is human error. It wasn’t the cat’s fault was it? I wouldn’t trust these fuckers with Bunsen burner let alone the future of the planet.

The IPCC admitted that the prediction was based on a report written in a science journal and even the scientist who was the subject of the original story admitted it was not based on fact.

We are now so through the looking-glass it’s beyond rational comment. I mean if science isn’t based on fact then basically you can just make any old shit up can’t you? Oh…

Dr Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said that
the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

Right… I shall return to the academy and enroll in a PhD in guessing. Every other bugger seems to be doing it. And wasn’t Nehru the deranged loon who drank his own piss? This just gets better and better.

The article, in the New Scientist, was not even based on a research paper – it evolved from a short telephone interview with the academic.

“I think this mistake has certainly cost us dear, there’s no question about it,” Dr Pachauri said.

A telephone interview. From India. Did he also claim he could save them money on their car insurance? Dr Pauchauri still of course doesn’t get it. It has cost them dear but it has cost them dear because they are wrong and not because it has undermined public confidence or some guff like that. Science should not be a PR exercise.

“Everybody thought that what the IPCC brought out was the gold standard and nothing could go wrong. But look at the larger picture, don’t get blinded by this one mistake.

“The larger picture is solid, it’s convincing and it’s extremely important. How can we lose sight of what climate change is going to do to this planet? What it’s already doing to this planet?”

So convince me then. With like evidence and stuff and not wild speculation.

The IPCC’s remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government’s worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.

The Sunday Telegraph disclosed at the weekend that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC’s use of so-called “grey literature” – sources outside peer-reviewed academic journals, such as reports from campaign groups, companies and student theses.

Jeezus. I couldn’t make this shit up if I had an electrified shit making machine. Peer review is to science what double-blind is to drug-trials. And might those “campaign groups, companies and students” have a dog in this fight? And a nose in the trough?

He told The Guardian that reports of further errors in the IPCC report linked to grey literature were spurious and the result of a “factory” of people “only there to create pinpricks and get attention”.

I’m sorry. If this is what scientists are up to, if this is what they are reduced to then I’m ashamed. Science without scepticism might as well be medieval demonology. I have always been fond of the line from the Indiana Jones movie (forget which one), “Trust me I’m a scientist”. I shall now have to retire that. These people are terrified. They have been caught with their pants down in the convent school dorm and Mother Superior has the mangle out. The lack of rigour here is mind-blowing to me. They might as well have been reading goat entrails. It is appalling. It will do to science what kiddie-fiddling priests did to the Catholic Church. It’s really bad. It’s a shocking betrayal of the great quest for knowledge because not only are these people wrong and not only are they liars but I don’t think they even see it anymore. They are gerrymandering data to fit a conception that must be true. It is truly post-modern in it’s creation of the “truth”. Science was meant to be our last line of defence against Po-Mo thinking. Well, the enemy are already well within the fort aren’t they?

I have thought for quite some time that AGW was a crock but I never thought this level of chicanery would come out. I’m frankly stunned.

And I feel deeply betrayed.

PS I knew a lad at Leeds University who did a PhD in mathematical logic. The external examiner said his thesis was brilliant. He told him right at the start of the viva that he’d passed and then said, “Yeah, I know you wanna go down the pub with your mates but I’d really like to talk with you for an hour or so…”. He then advised the chap that he’d need to make one correction. It was in the references and it was changing a “z” to a “Z”. The student might have been a damn fine logician but he didn’t know jack about German or the fact that all nouns such as “Zeitung” are capitalised in that language. Now that is rigour. That’s how science ought to be. This examination determined one bloke’s career as an academic pure mathematician. It was done with more care than the IPCC have lavished on completely changing the global economy. That’s why I am shocked.

Posted in: Beyond Belief, Civilisation, Climate fraud, Morality, Science.

Future War

Feb 3rd, 2010
by NickM.
2 comments

There is a thoughtful article over at the Times on the future of the RAF.

Obviously I don’t want to see the RAF subsumed into the Army but I can see the logic. Arguably the writing was on the wall for the RAF when the RN took over the strategic nuclear role and the RAF evolved into what is essentially a tactical force. The Tornado has to go. They must be knackered. I don’t care that they’ve been upgraded to GR4 standard the airframes must be shot by now what with all that low-altitude flying and all. There was a study a while back that was canceled to look into what to replace the Tornado with. It was called FOAS (future offensive air-system) and it stalled due to cost and complete lack of focus. Considered where things as disparate as launching missiles from A400M transports, drones and the idiotic idea of developing a stealthified strike version of the Typhoon (If you want a massive cost and time over-run scandal that is exactly what to do).

The article is slightly off about the JSF. The Raptor is the first fifth gen fighter. I also disagree with the appraisal of the F-35’s penetrative powers. It’s not that stealthy (word on the street is it only really has forward aspect stealth) and it can’t supercruise. The later point is important because the combination of stealth and speed is the way to go because the two together dramatically narrow the window of oportunity of the bad guys to do anything about you.

But the real meat of the article is the question of what threats we may face. And please dear God don’t tell me we’ll still be fighting the Taliban in 2020… I fully agree with the RAF guy that we must be prepared to face the prospect of heavy metal shooting wars. Because if history has told us anything it is that you just never know who might cut-up rough. Had you even heard of the Falklands before 1982? And of course there is the nightmare of facing China and Russia of course remains a premier-league player for the awkward squad. The point is the reason we are engaged in asymetrical warfare right now is that our Islamist enemies know that if they came out in conventional fashion and directly faced us in something as old-fashioned as division-level combat they would have their raggedy asses handed back to them on a plate. And of course any fool knows you can’t run down something like the RAF and rehydrate it overnight. Given the lead times for procurement doing a late ’30s all over again is just not an option. Yes, obviously COIN is a focus at the mo but we got to maintain a flexibility. The argument that these folks have that wars between states are over is naive. In fact their argument is defeated by their own reasoning. Before 9/11 came out of a clear blue sky did anyone think the British Army would end-up fighting in Helmand? No. This counter-insurgency war was unexpected. Something else would probably be equally unexpected (although of course there is always the usual suspects) and a heavy metal war can’t be ruled-out and it certainly can’t if we don’t prepare to deter it. I think there’s an old adage there which seems not to have been heeded in some quarters.

Of course there is also the fact we are stonier than a Yemeni execution to consider but we really can’t afford to draw down our hi-tech forces in the name of focusing entirely on tear-assing round the ’stan shooting weird-beards. Indeed one of the lessons of 9/11 is the shockingly small level of fighter cover over the USA at the time. I think there was something like two interceptors ready to roll before the WTC got whacked. A point to ponder. I mean the works of Sun-Tzu are out of copyright by quite some time and cheaply available. Everyone knows you go for the weak-point of your enemy. In fact my cat knows that. I’ve seen him take down a bigger cat by ambush and leaping legs akimbo onto it’s back with terrifying fury. I mean Hell’s teeth why do you think the Germans went round the Maginot line? I shall not even mention the latest whiz-bang scheme to hook-up more with the French. We need them “onside” like a brothel needs a clap outbreak. But I shall mention the bizarre idea that we don’t need aircraft that can penetrate enemy air defences because the Americans will whack them first. We can’t always count on the USA. Well we can but they must be getting bloody sick of it by now and if we formulate a defence policy that specifically states that we expect our pals across the Atlantic to do the heavy lifting I wouldn’t blame the USA for telling us to sod off. In any case being allies means fighting on the same side and not expecting the other guys to do the serious arse-kicking for us. Another lesson from World War II to bear in mind is that Mussolini only declared war on France after the Wehrmacht had nearly finished the job. Hitler was apparently not pleased about this. And for once I can see the mono-testiculated bastard’s point.

So, yeah. We need to keep the RAF as a force that can take on anyone. As we need an army and navy that can do the same. The idea that we should tool-up entirely to take-out religious maniacs in Toyota Hi-Luxs is absurd and dangerous. I have mentioned some history. I’ll go further. I shall go back to Homer and the story of Achilles in the Iliad. We can’t afford any heels like that. Full Spectrum Dominance = Security. The Greeks knew it, the Carthaginians knew and now you know it.

I bet you thought I was going to quote from The Simpsons there. Actually I did.

Posted in: Anglosphere, Aviation, Britain, Civilisation, War.

Rageh Omaar

Feb 2nd, 2010
by NickM.
33 comments

Mr Omaar would appear to be back on the BBC. I thought he had permanently buggered off to Al-Jazeera. It would appear he has not. He got a “God-slot” show last night that was about the Old Testament Prophet Abraham and his role in the three Abrahamic religions.

Now, obviously Abraham is historically important but… I mean are we supposed to take seriously the heresay of Omaah about some daft bastard who took a chopper to his chopper? I am no Biblical scholar but it would take more than the voice of God himself to persuade me to mutilate my todger with a fucking hatchet. He must have got a lot in return…

And he did. He got Israel according to Omaah. Now herein lies the rub. The State of Israel does not just exist because someone took his little mashie to his cock umpty thousand years ago. Was it the bronze age? I think it was. Jeezus wept - that’s gotta smart! Omaar presented the Israeli argument entirely in terms of Abraham’s covenant. Now I appreciate that for some religious Jews that matters a lot but Omaah didn’t even really touch on the political aspects of Zionism. He didn’t mention Czarist pogroms or the Final Solution or the Balfour Declaration. He presented a case that the Jews claim a right to Israel (which, and this wasn’t mentioned either, is a secular state that has a Jewish majority) solely on the cock-lopping antiquities of some obviously deranged Old Testament Prophet. Well, they all clearly were totally barking. I mean just look at Noah.

I take a rather different view from Omaah. Israel has a right to exist simply because it can defend itself and because unlike the mad-cap lunatics that surround it Israel has actually made a bloody good go at creating a reasonable state. Now I’m not claiming Israel is perfect (they could do away with conscription for a start) or that Syria, say, is the actual arsehole of the entire Universe (if it ain’t it’s well within farting distance, though). Israel should exist because it’s better than the alternative of Hamas running the shop. It’s that simple. It’s comes down to this. Would you rather live in Tel Aviv or Riyadh? I’m not even going to mention Mecca because you can’t even visit Mecca unless you are a follower of Muhammed’s book. In the mid ’90s an Israeli transexual won the Eurovision. In most of the Arab world (s)he would have been stoned to death. In short I support Israel because Israel is civilisation and it’s neighbours are barbarians. I know that is a rather Randian sentiment (hey, another Jew!) but so fuck because it is also true.

But that’s not my main point. This TV show was horrendously biased. Omaah made much play of the - too me - supernatural claim the Jews have on Israel and as I mentioned failed to point out the real history but he also lied by omission. Guess what he didn’t say?

He didn’t mention a fundamental of Islam. Back when those jihadi lunatics blew-up commuter trains in Madrid much of the media concentrated on the then Spanish government’s strong support of the USA. Well, I guess that was a factor but my first thought was, “The fuckers want Al-Andalus back”. For wherever the black flag of Islam has flown is Muslim forever. Right, by that token I’m off to reclaim Calais! Omaah effectively ridiculed the Jewish claim to Israel as supernatural nonsense (and no he didn’t mention that the Jews bought the land by and large and got the rest by the international law of righteously kicking the fuck out of the other cunt) but failed to mention that the Islamic claim is based upon equally supernatural nonsense.

Of course we libertarians all know that land is yours if you bought it and can defend it (for we are not naive).

And this was all made possible by the unique way the BBC is funded. On a basis with the economic mastery of a Northern Rock accountant and the morality of a back-alley gang-rape.

And that’s “back-alley” in both senses.

Posted in: BBC, Barbarism, Civilisation, History, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Mainstream Media.

Deceived By His Own Observations

Feb 1st, 2010
by PaAnnoyed.
9 comments

Lord Stern was the one who did the economic analysis used by the British Government to justify the climate change act. It has been discovered that he extrapolated from an unpublished paper that in final conclusion said the opposite of what Stern claimed.

The response is particularly strange:

A spokesman for Stern said: “Muir-Wood may have been deceived by his own observations.”

Has anyone got a clue what the hell that means?

Posted in: Climate fraud.

The Lord Withdraws His Motion

Feb 1st, 2010
by PaAnnoyed.
7 comments

The FOIA amendment was proposed, the government said they had seen no evidence, the proposal was withdrawn.

Is that it?

Posted in: Government.

Correct Theoretically

Feb 1st, 2010
by PaAnnoyed.
5 comments

From the trail of 1054756929.txt – the one that starts with the salutation “Hi Big Boy”.

Hi Keith,
Okay, today. Promise! Now something to ask from you. Actually somewhat important too. I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. They use your Tornetrask recon as the main whipping boy. I have a file that you gave me in 1993 that comes from your 1992 paper. Below is part of that file. Is this the right one? Also, is it possible to resurrect the column headings? I would like to play with it in an effort to refute their claims. If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical, with a lot of Box-Jenkins stuff in it. It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved inverse regression method is actually better in a practical sense. So they do lots of monte carlo stuff that shows the superiority of their method and the deficiencies of our way of doing things, but NEVER actually show how their method would change the Tornetrask reconstruction from what you produced. Your assistance here is greatly appreciated. Otherwise, I will let Tornetrask sink into the melting permafrost of northern Sweden (just kidding of course).
Cheers,
Ed

There’s lots to talk about here.

The email is titled “Review- confidential REALLY URGENT”. The cosy back-room etiquette of peer review is often a convention more honoured in the breach than in the observance, but it is generally considered “not the done thing” to go passing round details of advance copies of other people’s papers prior to publication. Especially to competitors in the field. Ed knows this, which is why he put “confidential” on it, but it’s for the Cause, isn’t it?

Why is Ed Cook having to ask for data via this private back channel, rather than going to the public record of evidence published with the paper? The complaint is that they don’t re-do the Tornetrask reconstruction (a tree ring reconstruction of temperature) with their method, but apparently not even Ed can obtain the data needed to do so, without asking Briffa privately as a warmy-buddy. Clearly, the original study is not openly replicable, either.

There are many editorials out there dismissively stating that various warmists with vested interests have gone through all the Climategate emails and found none of them cast any doubt on the validity of the science. Which others then repeat, saving themselves the bother of looking. But I think that up there with “hide the decline” should be this phrase: “It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically”.

Speaking as a mathematician, I am outraged that any scientist should write “It is also an ugly paper to review because it is rather mathematical”. I know that some of you who suffered through school maths (which is to real maths as finger-painting in primary is to the Sistine Chapel ceiling) will not agree with me, but mathematics is a subject of beauty and marvel. That the climatologists seem uncomfortable with heavyweight maths and stats is very revealing. It has long been thought that they’re not very good at it.

Incidentally, that “Box-Jenkins stuff” refers to the classic and standard textbook on analysing time series, which is actually what Briffa & Co. are doing. It is the “classic, seminal, and authoritative book that has been the model for most books on the topic written since 1970.” It is the foundation stone of their entire subject! To dismiss it as “stuff” would be like someone working on General Relativity dismissing a criticism of their methods as full of “Einstein stuff”!

Because I think Box-Jenkins is pretty cool, I’m going to have a go at talking about some of what they were dismissing. To give you a flavour of it, anyway. People who don’t like maths should look away now. But the point I’m going to discuss is pretty important to the debate, anyway.

First, take a look at this chart:

Autoregressive time series

I have plotted some data in dark blue, and helpfully drawn a trend line through it.

The data clearly goes up. Could it be going up by chance?

Continue reading →

Posted in: Climate change, Climate fraud, Mathematics, Science.

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