Pissed off Pelosi punches up pedantic President

Sources close to Congressional House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, have confirmed a rumour that President Barack Obama recently received executive “emotive training” in Hawaii from one of America’s top professionals in the field, Edward Cunningham, of the First and Best Chance management communications consulting firm, headquartered in Houston, Texas. Cunningham was dispatched by the Democratic Party on an emergency basis to assist Obama to overcome his devotion to the “cool image” form of Presidential persona.

Pelosi, who is also vacationing in Hawaii, was reported to be incensed at Obama’s detachment from the terrifying incident on Christmas Day when a Muslim terrorist nearly blew up a Northwest Airlines airplane with nearly 300 hundred passengers on board. Obama left it to his Homeland Security head, Janet Napolitano, to walk point and handle the public relations, while he continued to golf and play tennis.

After public blowback to Napolitano’s assurances that “the system worked” and still no word from Obama, Pelosi blew up and reportedly said,

“Doesn’t that self-absorbed pedantic prick understand or care how many Democratic seats will be contested in 2010? Doesn’t he understand that the American voters want to know that he cares about these things?"

It was Pelosi who authorized dispatching Cunningham to Hawaii.

Cunningham specializes in coaching senior corporate management to appear concerned and empathetic during contract negotiations with their unions. His clientele is a who’s who of American blue chip corporations. He was recently most active in the auto makers’ contracts, being credited with gaining wage and benefit roll-backs that would unlikely be achieved without his Sincerity™ training package.

One senior negotiator with GM, who declined to be identified for this story, credited Cunningham with at least 50% of the gains by management that led to the company coming out of bankruptcy earlier than expected.

“Until I grasped the concept of always looking sincere, whether I mean it or not, I doubt I could have had the traction I had at the negotiating table. Cunningham even taught me how to ‘tear up” on cue when listening to a union patented sad story. It worked like a charm,” said the negotiator. “I think Obama will get a lot out of this training.”

Obama has recently been portrayed in the media as "sounding angry” about America’s security lapse.

Obama has his "classroom moment" without Michael Moore's twit comments

It appears that U.S. President Barack Obama has had his epiphany and discovered at last what it means to hold this job.

It is not about letting “no crisis go to waste”, about transforming the United States into a mini-me European state, about propping up banks, or telling the car industry how to do its business, or even helping Big Pharma remain Big Pharma. The single most important job of the President is to keep America safe and Americans secure. Because, if you can’t do that, the rest doesn’t really matter very much.

I think that lesson has now sunk in.

Film maker Michael Moore made much mockery of a video of former President George W. Bush appearing stunned in a children’s classroom for about seven minutes after being told of the 9/11 attacks. He further made cracks about Bush always seeming to be on vacation.

Now his favourite President waits three days on his golfing vacation before commenting directly on the near catastrophe at Detroit airport and the complete catastrophe in the world-wide anti-terrorist net. Then Obama comes out sounding very much like Bush, talking about tracking down those responsible. And for the second day in a row he has now spoken publicly about fixing the security mess and actually sounding as if he were really angry about it – like it might matter to him.

I checked Michael Moore’s website this morning before writing this. He has a big open letter to the President telling him not to send more troops to Afghanistan and to fire his generals. He was some silly twitter comments about the Detroit incident, saying how the troop surge didn’t prevent the terrorist boarding the airplane. But he has nothing to say about Obama being on vacation and taking nearly 72 hours to show a public reaction to the terrorist threat.

Hey Michael, how about some even-handedness? Why don’t you comment on how Obama is handling this failure in American security the way you were so ready to do with GWB?

A Bronx Cheer for the big guy at the end of the aughts

It is customary at the end of a year to reflect on the events of that year and what we might have learned from them, for better or for worse. The same sort of exercise applies to the end of a decade. Often media writes these reflections up as the most “newsworthy” stories, etc. Since media claims to be the gatekeeper of news, this is kind of a poor man’s Academy Award show, where industry insiders pat themselves on the back for their picks.

I am a blogger, so screw MSM. I’ll sort my way through the decade.

With respect to the past year, I would say that climate science gets the top billing.

First, we had the Copenhagen conference, two years in the planning, which was supposed to set the stage for an embryonic world government to deal with planetary resources. By any measure it completely failed. It was probably the last gasp of something Maurice Strong put in motion 30 years ago.

Many of the same sad bunch will meet in Mexico City next year, but it won’t hold a candle to the promise that was to be Copenhagen.

Second, we had the leaked or hacked e-mails from the climate science top dogs who admitted to themselves, if not to us, that the science is anything but settled. Leaving aside the career jealousies and the attempts to control the peer review process that were evident in these 2,000 pages of e-mails, they puzzled over the hiatus in warming for the past decade, had no explanation for it, admitted it did not fit the theory, and began to doubt their own analysis and the data behind it. They clearly demonstrated that they had really no idea why the world of the past warmed or cooled, having dismissed ice core samples as being imprecise and having trouble making tree ring data fit the theory as well.

I am told relentlessly by fans of AGW that the medieval warm period is irrelevant, and in any case, we don’t know enough about it, and that all that matters is the dramatic rise in the past century of CO2. This is unprecedented they tell me.

How do we know, I say, when we don’t anything reliable about the past? Logic fails here for reasons I get into later.

What also fails to knock these folks off their game is that the temperature and the CO2 have not been consistent. For periods in the past century, including the last decade, the temperature has not been inexorably rising as the AGW says it should since the CO2 has been unalterably rising.

I would say that many more people believed the AGW hypothesis than disbelieved it at the beginning of this decade and, at the end of the decade, these numbers have reversed, with more disbelieving it than believing it. This will have political consequences.

During this decade, I would say religion was the most important driver in world affairs. And by that I mean religion in its broadest sense, including the religion of global warming.

We started the decade believing a new era of reason, science and rationalism would prevail. Not more than a year passed and we saw religious zealots of Islamic persuasion carry out audacious suicide attacks on the cities of New York and Washington.

One of the fallouts from these attacks was the new stringent security rules that air travelers were subjected to before they could board airplanes. At the end of the decade, yet another in a long line of Islamic attempts at murder by aircraft in Detroit has led to even more onerous impositions on air travelers.

So, on behalf of all civilian aviation, let’s give Mohammed a big Bronx cheer.

One of the things that began to dawn on western societies during this decade was the impact of Islam, not just in Islamic countries, but in the heart of western civilization. We have not yet found a way to effectively deal with this foreign political-religio philosophy and I expect the next decade will see us increasingly absorbed by that issue.

One of the things that has become clearer near the end of the decade, however, is that, like the doubts that have begun to permeate over the certainty of climate science, the rose-coloured lenses that viewed Islam as “one of the world’s great religions” and a “religion of peace” have cracked and fallen away.

In Europe, the people are either voting with their feet, leaving for non-European western nations, or are organizing populist political parties that take aim at Islam as a menace. The political establishment in Europe is on shaky ground having spent its political capital during the decade appeasing and propping up Muslims while simultaneously suppressing nascent European nationalism. Its cupboard is nearly bare and I would expect to see the old guard swept away in future elections by those who do not wish to see the Islamification of Europe. After all, there are still many more Europeans who vote than Islamists and they know they will have to act politically soon while they still can.

The outcome will not be pretty.

Australia has shown some muscle in dealing with the issue, but Canada appears to be still very much asleep at the switch.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Americans have elected an anachronism to the highest office. Just as the rest of the world begins to march down a different path opposing Islam, President Obama runs around the planet praising the religion to the skies, misrepresenting it in the process, and promising to defend the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab, ignoring the right of Muslim women not to wear the hijab.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that his efforts are viewed by the Islamic world as weakness, and by even some of the jellyfish European politicians as foolish, and by the American public as misguided.

The day after the Fort Hood massacre, Obama cautioned the public not to jump to conclusions. Three days after the attempt to blow up the airplane in Detroit he has not said anything to the American public. Air travel in the United States is in complete turmoil, but not a word directly from the President. Perhaps if the news stories had been framed, not as another Muslim terrorist at it again, but as white people arresting a black man on board an airplane, he would be inclined to be more loquacious.

Unless he shifts ground within the next year, he will probably suffer the worst fate a President can endure; he will lose his moral authority to govern.

Police thinking. Hypocritical newspapers.

In Ontario, a rash of traffic accidents and fatalities from mostly young drivers racing each other on the highway resulted in the provincial nanny state recently enacting a draconian “stunt driving” law that has some serious penalties attached to it: $10,000 fine, jail time, loss of driver’s license, etc., if you are caught going 50 kilometers an hour over the posted speed limit.

While it has been used to prosecute the people the law was intended to affect, in typical police fashion, foolish charges have been laid against those who are speeding for other reasons; such as, trying to pass a big transport truck on the highway to get to a safe lane. After a couple of these showed up in court, the judges ruled the law unconstitutional and those rulings await the appeal of a higher court.

Meanwhile an auto mechanic was charge with speeding on the express highway on his motorcycle. He was going 243 kph in 100 kph zone on a multi-lane expressway. There was no evidence of racing and the prosecutor chose not to proceed with the stunt driving charge. The man was convicted and fined about $1,400.

Accrding to a story in today's Toronto Sun, Mr. Julian Fantino, the Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner, a strong supporter of Ontario's stunt driving law, said in an e-mail: "I am disappointed that the sentence did not also include a psychiatric assessment before the individual is allowed the privilege of driving in Ontario."

If you are ever in doubt about the wisdom of letting the police mind set the public agenda, that statement should do it for you.

Anybody who has ever ridden a motorcycle knows that they cry out to be let loose on a good open road. There is no thrill to compare to cranking one of these things up to its high end to see how it can fly. That may be careless, or even reckless, behaviour, but it is certainly not abnormal.

What is abnormal is having a top police official who thinks that anybody who wants to experience the thrill of riding a motorcycle at a speed beyond the humdrum one permitted by law needs a psychiatric evaluation.

And Another Thing

There are four daily newspapers in the Toronto area market that duke it out for circulation honours and advertising revenue. The one in that regional market with the largest circulation is the Toronto Star.

In my mind, it is unique in another way. I find its rivals generally consistent in political bias. The Star, however, has no shame.

In a recent op-piece, penned by one of their editorial editors, Martin Regg Cohn, the writer pretends to be former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, chastising the current PM, Stephen Harper, for how he is handling his international profile, particularly his relations with the American President, and comparing Harper’s allegedly dismal performance with Mulroney’s stellar one.

I am old enough to recall how the Star treated Mulroney and his government for the eight years when he was in power. I cannot recall them ever praising him for anything. This attitude was not just in the editorials, it infected every single columnist in the newspaper. Even the humour guy, the late Gary Lautens, who I thought was a genteel person who would never say the word “shit” if his mouth were full of it, wrote a serious, nasty rant against Mulroney to my complete surprise.

I recall that the government did some polling during the public discussion of the free trade agreement with the United States, then in the offing. The pollsters determined that 47% of the country’s opposition to the Mulroney-sponsored deal came from the Toronto Star.

The Star vilified Mulroney for having a close relationship with Ronald Reagan. Now they are pretending that was a good thing.

What a nest of hypocrites!

Lockerbie bombing revisted

In August of this year an international flap arose over the release on alleged compassionate grounds of convicted Lockerbie aircraft bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi to his home country of Libya. Supposedly he was due to die within three months from cancer.

As of this past Wednesday he was still alive.

At the time, I did not buy into the compassion part of the story. There was some scuttlebutt that it was done because of some commercial deal in the offing between the U.K. and Libya, but I thought the truth lay more in that fact that al-Megrahi was appealing his conviction, that the case against him at trial was shaky, that he might well have succeeded on the appeal and it would embarrass the government.

When he arrived in Tripoli he was greeted as a conquering hero.

During his trial the defense portrayed him as a lowly airline employee.

New information has now been revealed that was not available at his trial.

Al-Megrahi was sitting on a Swiss bank account containing nearly three million U.S. dollars in today’s currency. Furthermore, he was involved in the purchase of development of chemical weapons for Libya and he attempted to purchase 1,000 letter bombs from Greek arms dealers, while he employed as a Libyan intelligence officer.

So far, the Scottish government has declined to make his medical records available for public scrutiny.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that he was the Lockerbie bomber, but it does suggest he was anything but a lowly airline worker, and in terms of international terror activities, certainly not an innocent man.

Margolis should sit on a minaret and rotate

Muslim countries have been threatening to take economic action against Switzerland for the recent plebiscite that resulted in a ban on the construction of future minarets. The hypocrisy of these countries that do not permit the construction of churches or synagogues, or the open and free worship of religions other than Islam, is monumental.

The Swiss vote did not result in the destruction of existing minarets or in any restriction on the building of mosques or the free and open worship of Islam in Switzerland.

It would be nice if leftist writers in the free world would write something about the lack of religious freedoms in the Islamic world, but they cannot break out of their self-imposed ideology of guilt and blame against the West for its supposed transgressions.

A case in point is a recent column by Eric Margolis, in the Winnipeg Sun, who says he has a “deep love” of Switzerland where he spent some time as a youth, but goes on to say he has no use for the Swiss who are “xenophobic” and “racist”. They are also “fiercely nationalistic”, as if that were a fault for which they should be embarrassed.

It is interesting to compare this alleged xenophobic, racist and very nationalistic European country with Canada, which is not particularly nationalistic, and is not generally considered xenophobic or racist. About 19.8% of our population is made up of immigrants compared to 25% of the Swiss population. Odd that a nationalist, racist and xenophobic country would have such a high percentage. Canada takes in nearly 300,000 new immigrants a year, yet we still lag Switzerland.

Margolis claims that the persecution of the Muslims is exactly like that of the Jews under the Nazis.

What utter nonsense.

The closer parallel would be how Muslim countries treat Jews and Christians and Infidels.

The 20th century accusation against Jews being a threat to Europe was entirely fictional and the case against them being a “race” of people who were sub-human, rather than simply adherents of a religion, was equally concocted out of thin air. The Jews made the effort to integrate with the European society, and as Naill Ferguson has pointed out, there was a great deal of inter-religious marriage. Furthermore, the authorities, the elites and the establishment in Europe all collaborated in this fiction to suppress and eventually to nearly destroy European Jewry.

In contrast, European elites treat Muslims with kid gloves. Muslims are reluctant to integrate, they do not intermarry and prefer spouses from their old countries to Muslims that have been Europeanized, and yet they are not treated as if they are sub-human the way the Jews were. In Europe, as in Canada and the United States, the majority of reported hate crimes still continue to be directed against Jews, not Muslims.

It is the politically dispossessed European nationalists who are threatened by these European political elites who decry nationalism in the name of multiculturalism.

Margolis says he admires the Swiss plebiscite system, but prays that the organs of the state in the hands of the right-headed people will overturn the will of the electorate. It doesn’t occur to Margolis that if that is how the people feel about this subject perhaps the elites should be doing something to address the concerns of the general public rather than branding them all as unthinking racists.

This is typical leftist-elitist thinking – it is fine to have an appearance of democracy as long as the rabble don’t take it too seriously and prevent their betters doing the necessary things that are for their own best interests which the proletariart are incapable of determining for themselves. It is a strange sentiment coming from a guy who claims he is a Republican conservative.

It may well be that the Muslims in Switzerland are all pussycats, as Margolis claims they are, but the Swiss have television sets, the Internet, and newspapers, just as the rest of us do, and they can read the writing on the wall of what will eventually happen to European culture in an Islamic-dominated Europe.

Nonie Darwish, the expatriate Egyptian, makes the point that the rich culture of ancient Egypt was left to be buried in the sands of the desert by the Muslims for whom history starts with Mohammed. It was the European invaders from France and England who took an interest in Egypt and saved and resurrected its glorious past.

The Swiss have started down the road of saving their culture, despite their elites, not with their assistance. This is a cultural battle, not a racist one.

The irrelevance of Copenhagen and the relevance of the burka

If you ever wondered whether the world-wide meeting in Copenhagen this week has any relevance to the real world, this news story from Politico.com should sort that out for you pretty quickly.

COPENHAGEN –Iranian Prime Minister Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe plan to address negotiators at international climate talks in Copenhagen next week.


The three leaders are listed in a line-up of more than 180 government officials published in a United Nations schedule of speakers. Each head of state will have up to three minutes to address roughly 700 delegates, reporter, observers and civil society groups.


The assistant president of Sudan, Nafie Ali Nafie kicks off the speeches at noon on Wednesday.


Nafie chairs the G-77 group, a block of developing nations pushing hard for more money and stricter emissions cuts from rich countries.


Mostapha Zaher, director-general of Afghanistan's Environmental Protection Agency, is listed as the final speaker. He’ll take the podium slightly before 2 a.m. next Friday.


Other leaders addressing the conference include everyone from Saad Hariri, the prime minister of Lebanon, to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.


Roughly 110 world leaders plan to attend the talks, an unprecedented number for a climate conference. Typically, only a handful of top leaders attend the negotiations. President Barack Obama is expected at the meeting on Friday.

Note that the speakers are limited to 3 minutes each. The Iranian leader was limited to 15 minutes at the United Nations and went on and on and on for 40 minutes without interference from the Chair. With Mugabe and Chavez scheduled as well, look for more CO2 to be spewed into the atmosphere than is produced in this country in one year. I would like to see any of these three limit themselves to 3 minutes.

You may be wondering why I led off with the picture. It is a woman in the U.S. midwest who is dressed to deal with the deep freeze that is currently setting new temperature lows in North America as a result of global warming. I included the picture because I have been opposed to the Burka, but I think I may have discovered a practical use for this garment in combatting the intense cold caused by global warming.

The Protocols of Obama

Obama arrives in Norway for his Peace Prize


There is a story in the Guardian about President Obama pissing off the Norwegians because he won't participate, as Peace Prize winners usually do, in a series of planned public events. The most serious accusation is that he will not have lunch with the King of Norway.

Now, if ever there was evidence that Obama doesn't like Europeans this has to be it. A man who loves to bow to royalty passing up an opportunity to get his picture taken doing it again, what's with that?

Oh yes, the King is a white man.

UPDATE

Apparently, even though he did not have lunch with the Norwegian King, Obama met him and this is how he greeted him. Compare with the Saudi and Japanese bows below. I could be wrong -- it could have nothing to do with Obama's distate for the history of the white race, it could be because Arabia and Japan own so much of America, and Norway was foolish enough to buy American toxic derivatives.


Norway

Arabia

Japan

Quote of the day

This one comes to us from Rajendra Pachauri, the jet-setting head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He once flew from New York to Delhi, over a weekend, to take in a cricket match.

He defended climate research in the face of a controversy over e-mails pilfered from a British university, which global warming skeptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn't fit their theories.

"The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," he told the conference.

Pachauri seems unconcerned that the scientists on whom his panel relies have lost the original data, so fudged the data they have that it is incomprehenisble, and that they conspired to defeat freedom of information laws and corrupted the peer review process to hide their incompetence. The fact that these same folks beat themselves up because they could not explain the last decade of static or cooling temperatures with the AGW theory to which they cling (like religion and guns), seems not worth considering to our globe-trotting Chairman.

The next time somebody tells you what we need is a world government, keep this quote in mind.

Montreal massacre redux

Since this is the 20th anniversary of an iconic mass murder in Canada, it seems obligatory for bloggers and media types to say something about it.

On December 6, 1989 a young man, called Marc Lepine, entered a post secondary institution in Montreal, separated an engineering class into males and females, sent the males out of the room and proceeded to gun down the women. He then wandered through the school shooting other people at random, but mainly targeting women. Eventually, after killing 14 women and wounding 14 others, including four men, he killed himself. He left a suicide note indicating that he wanted to kill feminists.

Over the years, a lot of explanations have been given for his behaviour, all of it centering on a psychological explanations.

His actions spurred feminists to use the anniversary of the event as a kind of a club to draw attention to violence against women. It also led to tightening of gun ownership laws.

One of the things almost never mentioned, however, is the role religion might have played in this. This is interesting because it is common to find that feminists ignore the plight of their fellow women who suffer injustice at the hands of religion, especially Islam.

Marc Lepine was a name that he adopted when he was 14 years of age. Up to that point, he had been known as Gamil Gharbi. His mother was French Canadian, a professional nurse. His father was an Algerian immigrant, a Muslim Arab. By all accounts, the father was not a “regular go to the mosque” Muslim, but he certainly grew up in a Muslim household and culture in Algeria. He despised women and treated his wife and children abysmally, making sure that the children also were deprived of a close relationship with the mother.

He eventually abandoned the family and the mother went back to work as a nurse to support the family. That is when Gamil changed his name to Marc and adopted his mother’s maiden name as his last name.

Twenty years ago it is not surprising to find that nobody would have considered the religious influence in this matter. Yet, even today, accounts of the events fail to offer any religious angle.

This is what Nonie Darwish has to say in her latest book, Cruel and Usual Punishment about the impact of Sharia law on the role of Muslim males.

According to the rules a man is not to take his wife into matters of any importance, he must not reveal his secrets, he is not to tell her the amount of his property, in case she exercises her built in bad judgment to influence him and cause him ruin. He is also not to give her an excess of affection lest she gain power over him. Simply put, a husband is not to trust his wife nor ever show her much love.

A man’s role in the home has been narrowed down to that of the feared disciplinarian and controller. According to codified Islamic Law: The Prophet said, “Hang up the whip where the members of the household can see it.”

It may well be that Lepine’s father didn’t attend the mosque, but his behaviour in the home would suggest that he well understood the law of Islam.

To what extent did his “role model” activities shape Lepine’s attitude to women?

Perhaps feminists would care to dwell on that.

Two steeples good, four minarets bad

I have been pondering the meaning of the Swiss vote on banning further construction of minarets, a proposition which passed by 57.5% of those who voted. The website, Gates of Vienna, has an excellent summary of official reaction to it, both in Europe and in Muslim countries.

One thing that has struck me observing the European scene for the past couple of years is how out of touch the ruling elites, political and media, are with the sympathies of the European people they are supposed to represent or understand. The rising election fortunes of political parties whose mandate is to stop further Islamization of Europe in several EU countries is one sign. Now this direct and unfiltered vote from what is normally considered Europe's best example of a peaceable state puts another nail in the coffin of disconnect.

Each time something that might upset Muslims happens the elites fall all over themselves rushing to ensure Muslims that they are still valued. This is followed sometimes by the condemnation of "the people" for being xenophobic.

Given the chance to express themselves by a direct vote like this or by a representative vote for an extremist party the proletariat is telling the elites that they do not wish to see their European heritage and culture replaced by an Asian one. Moreover, the more the elites push multiculuralism on the people as a policy which allows the Asian culture to grow, the more the Europeans push back. There is evidence that many pockets of Islam in Europe do not desire to integrate and accept European norms. Likewise, there are many Europeans who do not wish them to integrate. The multicultural experimentation of the European elites is running into serious trouble.

Seventy years ago the Europeans turned their backs on another religio-culture, the Jews. Nobody had done more to try to integrate themselves into European culture and society, and to make themselves visibly indistinguishable from the majority, than the Jews. In no sense did they represent a competing culture and religion. Yet, they were rejected by Europeans when the political atmosphere became charged and extremist and European identity was in play.

Here you have a competing religion and culture that, to a large extent, does not waste its time trying to become European in the sense of embracing European values, customs or clothing.

The elites need to do more to ensure the proles that they have an answer to the perceived threat from the morlocks, and worry less about assuring the morlocks that the proles are under control.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets

I saw an interview on television last night with George Monbiot. He is a columnist in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and the author of a climate change book, Heat: How to stop the planet burning. The title pretty much tells you which side of the climate debate he is on, although he would object to that statement, since he firmly believes there is no real debate, as all the so-called deniers are just poseurs arguing bad science or non science.

I read through some of his archived columns and the Wikipedia description of him this morning and he has quite the curriculum vitae. He seems to me to be an anti-establishment activist. Monbiot is an advocate of the “consume less” society. Naturally, supporting the conventional wisdom on climate change fits that political agenda to a tee.

I was interested to see him because the news of the leaked e-mails from the British Climate Research Unit shook him up. He called for the head of that institute, Phil Jones, to step down.

But he seems to have recovered his cool, if last night’s interview was an indication. He was smooth, poised, polished and definitely in command. He was here to accomplish two things: to participate in a climate change debate and to beat up on Canada for foot -dragging on climate change and interfering with the rest of the world that is rushing to get on with the program at Copenhagen.

Of course, he was asked about the leaked e-mails and he was in full defense mode, characterizing it as maybe evidence of some bad behaviour by 3 or 4 people, but in no way derailing the accepted science of climate change. According to him there are “hundreds” of “lines” of evidence in the scientific community, from across many disciplines, which support the IPCC view of the world’s coming climate.

I found that statement interesting for a couple of reasons.

First, the usual accusation against the climate deniers is that they are not “climatologists”, even if they have other scientific credentials. This ignores the fact that there are climatologists who dispute the AGW theory, some of whom used to be “go to” people for the IPCC, who have since dissociated themselves from it. Leaving that point aside, here we have a pro-IPCC supporter flogging the fact that non climatologists support AGW as proof of the theory.

Hmmm.

A little hypocrisy at play there.

Secondly, it is more than 3 or 4 scientists at the heart of this initial scandal. As well, similar accusations have cropped up in Australia and New Zealand regarding the accuracy of the temperature records around the globe.

What Monbiot didn’t say is as important as what he did say. These so-called “3 or 4” that he went to lengths to dismiss as irrelevant are not your backroom, white-coated lab geeks, with plastic pocket protectors and Scotch Tape holding their outsized eyeglasses together. These scientists are the rock stars of the IPCC and the face of the public shilling for AGW. It would be like collusion amongst Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, or any other high scoring hockey players who might have played at the same time, to limit their goal output to influence the outcome of the games their teams play.

Monbiot failed to address the most distressing point of all (which the interviewer should have asked him). The CRU lost all the original temperature data records, so nobody can be sure what the base measurements were. It is also clear from the e-mails that the data base they do have, which was manipulated and massaged from the original data, is seriously corrupted to the point that the complier gave up in frustration trying to make sense of it.

Now you can say what you like, as Monbiot did, that biology, chemistry, physics, etc., all support the AGW theory, but in the end, it is the temperature that matters. If you can’t rely on a verifiable base of accurate temperature, how can you predict how that has changed? You have built a theory on sand, not concrete.

Monbiot dismissed the idea of a world-wide conspiracy to fabricate global warming, indicating that not only would thousands of competitive scientists have to stop being competitive to make it happen, but also politicians and media.

Yes, but only if you think of conspiracy as a planning exercise, like a bunch of crooks getting together to plan a break into a bank vault after hours.

There is another sense of conspiracy in the form of the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time). It is not planned, it is simply embraced. It is a mass movement, not unlike a religious movement. In one of his columns on his blog, Monbiot dismisses climate deniers as belonging to a religious movement.

But the same could be said for AGW supporters.

Climate “science” is based on computer algorithms, which depend for their reliability on a good base of information (which we have just discovered through these e-mails that we do not have) and the ability to compute huge swaths of measureable data accurately. The climate models all fail in one fashion or another to take account of all the chaotic nature of the relevant climate inputs. In short, their reliability as accurate predictors is suspect.

In the normal course, one would have to say this is a stupid basis on which to reorganize our global societies.

So what accounts for Copenhagen, if it is not reason?

The answer is simply that it is a mass movement, not really any different from the South Sea Bubble or the Tulip Bubble or any of the other historical parallels where multitudes of people bought into the theory of the rising tide and jumped on board before the ship sailed and stranded them on shore. People want to believe that they can change the planet to something better. It is utopia in all its glory at play.

Here is a paragraph from Eric Hoffer’s excellent little book on mass movements, The True Believer:

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and the potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.

George Monbiot’s personal history reveals a person who is a malcontent and wants to change the world. His pathology is shared by millions in the developed world who feel guilty about the consumerism and waste they have embraced, the unsustainable globe. The AGW theory is just the wedge they need to bring about the utopian world of which they dream.

And here is what Hoffer had to say about that:

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them.