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Within a few seconds of cranking up my computer this morning I was reading this posting by Steve McIntyre, which I got to via Bishop Hill, who says of it:
McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It’s not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and “hide the decline” from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.
There are going to be months of revelations like this.
So that’s two links to the McIntyre posting in this already. The internet already contains a lot more. Watch it go viral, much as this just did.
A commenter on McIntyre’s posting, Jonathan Fischoff, says:
Every time I hear people say “the emails are out of context!” I think, be careful what you wish for.
Chris S says:
People are now beginning to realize how “so much was owed by so many” IPCC Summaries, “to so few”.
Indeed.
What of Al Gore‘s other argument (beside the taken-out-of-context argument), that all these CRU emails are ten year’s old, so, really, what the flip? As thousands have already pointed out, many of the CRU emails, which Gore has clearly not read or even read very much about, are far more recent. But yes indeed, the emails scrutinised in this latest McIntyre posting do indeed go back a decade. But what that shows is: so does the scientific dishonesty. Gore is saying: “Relax, it goes back a long way, these guys have been conning us for a decade.” This doesn’t really work as a put-down, does it?
Will “the media” give this McIntyre posting the attention it deserves? I am increasingly thinking that it doesn’t matter what these people say or don’t say about this story, or about anything else. McIntyre’s posting, one of the many fragments of this far bigger mega-story, is now out there, for anyone with internet access who wants to read it, and read about it. Tens of thousands of comments on it, attached directly to it, and such as this one that you are reading now, are even now being concocted, by and for all who care. Whether the old-school journos join in (Delingpole is a good example of that trend) and thereby become part of the new media, or prefer to keep looking away (see Delingpole’s excellent recent posting about the pathetic Climategate non-performance so far of Private Eye) this says more about their own future than it says about the story itself. As with the named and shamed CRU scientists, the exact motivation behind each particular item of old-school media deception, neglect or misdirection is a matter of debate. The fact of it is not, and any who want to can now see this.
Michael J just emailed me this link to a piece by a scientist. The point is, guys like this can now can now say all this. He no longer needs any journo to open the door for him.
Bishop Hill, who has been working overtime to keep apace with the whole University of East Anglia climate change kerfuffle, has this remarkable example of how some journalists have been threatened by AGW alarmists. How lovely.
By the way, as a native of East Anglia, I feel ashamed of how my region has been tainted by these arseholes. When the UEA was originally built back in the 1960s, it was constructed, much to my father’s chagrin, on a golf course. Given the collapse in that institution’s reputation as a result of the emails, perhaps it should revert to golf and do less harm to what remains of the UK’s intellectual life.
So when Peter Mansbridge went on the National tonight to admit what he had surely known for days, we didn’t watch to find out what’s contained in FOIA 2009.zip, for we’d read it for ourselves.
We only watched to see if he had.
For perhaps the first time in the history of mass media, the gatekeepers broke a major scandal to an audience fully 10 days ahead of them.
– Small Dead Animals describes how the mass media of Canada finally got around to noticing Climategate. Thank you Counting Cats.
Last night I channel hopped into Question Time, the BBC’s late night political panel show, and caught the beginning of the question they had about climate, etc.. And I can report that, although maybe only temporarily, there has been, I think, a definite change of atmosphere in the argument about climate change.
Melanie Phillips and Marcus Brigstocke said, respectively, yes and no, to the question about whether global warming was a scam. Neither Brigstocke nor Phillips said anything I haven’t heard either say several times before. Brigstocke made much of the fact that the articles he agrees with about melting icecaps were all “peer reviewed”, which Melanie Phillips wasn’t able to come back on, as she was surely itching to do. But Brigstocke wasn’t the sneering, jeering, arrogant shit I’m used to. Melanie Phillips was heard reasonably politely, and the general tone of the event was thoughtful and hesitant rather than dogmatic and intolerant of dissent. David Davis made a point of criticising the use of the word “denier” to describe people who might disagree with you. Science, he said, can’t work like that. Science is never settled, he said. Nobody objected to those claims in any way.
But it wasn’t so much what they all said. It was more how they said it, and the general atmosphere of how it was received. The audience was the usual pro-warming crowd, but its partisanship was not the monstrous thing I usually see on Question Time, and it included at least two brave souls who thought quite differently, because they said so out loud. First, there was the questioner, who dared to use that word: scam. And at the end there was a bloke who claimed, mentioning those familiar (to us lot) historical stories about the medieval warm period, that “only one point of view is allowed”. But as he himself proved, both by how he spoke and by how he was allowed by all others present to speak, i.e. without jeeringly self-righteous interruptions, that he was a bit out of date.
Put it this way. A mere wordsmith like me struggles to get across what the change was. But a theatre or movie director would have known at once that something quite big had happened, and would have been able to itemise quite a few more specifics to back up that observation than I can, to do with body language, tone of voice, crowd noises, and so on and so forth. I hesitate to say that “things will never be the same again”. But I do think this might now be true.
Listening to Brigstocke talking about the problems he said the Inuits have been having, and about retreating icecaps and water that is less saline than usual because of so much ice melting into it, made it clear to me that the question now is: How much evidence is there, still, for the global warming thesis, that has not been taken out, not contaminated (so to speak) by those wretched CRU conspirators. (Later: in connection with that, see this. Even later: I’m not completely sure, but I rather think this may be one of the very best pieces yet on all of this. And whatever you do, don’t miss the final paragraphs about all those bewildered environmental correspondents. Real Samizdata quote of the year stuff.) → Continue reading: Question Time and questioning the Times – how the climate of opinion has changed
Rupert Murdoch is not a stupid chap, but I cannot understand how he can fail to see the absurdity of his latest remarks. His threat to block his online content from search engines is an indication he does not grasp the fact his content is almost entirely fungible in a world where the plentiful alternatives are simply a click away.
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.
Let me correct that…
Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to find alternative content elsewhere online.
Not only will people not be motivated to pay Rupert Murdoch for content if they cannot find it via google, they will not even be aware of the content Murdoch is hiding from them. In short, Murdoch will become completely irreverent irrelevant on-line almost overnight and I am not sure why he thinks all too many people will care one way or the other. This is a bit like threatening someone that if they do not give him their money, Murdoch will cut his own throat. Er, sure Rupert, whatever. I suspect folks at the Guardian (who may not be my favourites ideologically but they certainly ‘get’ the internet better than most) and elsewhere can hardly believe their good luck.
Sorry to obsess on the subject but I just keep seeing these howlers by the professional journalists who we are told are so essential for democracy/social justice/world rotation/whatever. The latest giggler comes from Ed Pilkington writing in the Guardian:
There is also evidence that Hasan purchased a high-powered pistol three weeks ago as well as several high-capacity ammunition rounds that would allow him to continue firing without reloading.
Well… a 5.7mm pistol round is kind of low-powered really, at least in terms of ‘stopping power’ and I suspect the main reason that traitorous Muslim creep at Fort Hood killed so many people was they were defenceless and thus died from multiple point blank shots… therefore I can well believe he purchased several high-capacity magazines… you know, the sticky-down bits that hold the “ammunition rounds” (presumably as opposed to “newspaper rounds” or “doctor’s rounds”)… hehehe…. and I assume he got several so that he could reload quickly during his shooting spree.
It seems a crime reporter writing for a ‘quality newspaper’ does not need to know even the most rudimentary technical terms when describing a firearm used in a crime. The fact the editor of the Guardian lets a journalist make a ass of himself writing about something they obviously both know nothing about tells you a great deal about the state of the ‘indispensable’ news media.
I am grinding my teeth trying to restrain myself from commenting on some of the drivel being written about the recent murder of US soldiers by a muslim US army officer… but this is just a measure of the ignorance that permeates the profession and which is directly responsible for the growth of so called ‘new media’, i.e. things like blogs. Nick Allen writes in the Telegraph in an article titled “gunman used ‘cop killer’ weapon in massacre at US Army base” (a catchy ‘yellow journalism’ title if ever there was one):
Major Nidal Malik Hasan, 39, used an FN Five-Seven, a semi-automatic pistol popular with SWAT teams, that can fire armour-piercing bullets.
Oh for fuck sake. Any weapon can fire ‘armour-piercing bullets’. I know little about Nick Allen, but I assume he is a Brit and therefore knows bugger all about firearms and thus parrots the equally dismal urban US journalist propensity to describe any handgun firing a round capable of penetrating (some) body armour as a “cop killer”. Also I strongly suspect 9mm and 10mm handguns are far more popular with SWAT teams, as SWAT teams have rifles for use against armoured targets.
The weapon is designed for high(-ish) penetration for use against low end body armoured targets (the victims at Fort Hood were almost certainly unarmoured), but it has rather poor stopping power (that said, when it comes to handguns, bullet placement rather than calibre is the largest single determinant of stopping power), making the FN actually a poor choice… presumably the high magazine capacity may have been why the murderer chose it, knowing he was going to commit his crimes at very close range in a ‘target rich’ environment.
If journalists want to be credible, they need to try to avoid loaded (no pun intended) and rather ignorant terms like “cop killer” and not make meaningless remarks about weapons being capable of using “armour piercing” rounds (which is just another way of saying “they can shoot the rounds they are loaded with”). This ghastly incident contains more than enough news fodder that such sloppiness is inexcusable from ‘professionals’.
For the New York Times writer Mr Frank Rich to complain of “Stalinism” among conservatives is interesting, considering that the New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty helped cover up the murder of tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
Indeed the New York Times won a Pulitzer Price for Mr Duranty’s reports (which were one long cover up of the above mentioned murder of tens of millions of people) a prize that it has been asked to return – and has never done so.
Nor is this ancient history.
The publisher of the New York Times is a far left person who (for example) supported the Communist forces in IndoChina (including in Cambodia where the Marxists exterminated one third of the entire population).
The New York Times also has long supported Barack Obama – a man with a life long record of Marxist links. And should anyone care to deny that Barack Obama is a Marxist (in spite of his recent appointments of such people as Van Jones and Mark Lloyd) would they please give me the date when Obama stopped being a Marxist.
Obama was clearly a Marxist when, for example, he was going to Marxist conferences whilst a post grad at Columbia in New York (by the way can the public please see his thesis on “Soviet Disarmament Policy”) so when did he stop being a Marxist? I am not asking for a particular day – a year will do.
Did he (for example) react to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 by breaking with Bill Ayers and the other Comrades in Chicago – by resigning from all the boards on which they sat together perhaps? I think not.
I mean nothing “racist” when I say that for a New York Times writer to call someone else “Stalinist” is for the pot to be calling the kettle black.
P.S. Unlike Glenn Beck I would take any accusation of being a “McCarthyite” as a complement. But then I have read “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans, whereas (sadly) Mr Beck gets his version of events from his memory of the CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow. Although, I suspect, that as an-alcoholic-who-is-not-drinking-today Mr Beck has an understandable bias against Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who never really faced up to his drinking.
There is obviously plenty of controversy – seen across the internet and the MSM – about the decision by the BBC, the UK state broadcaster, to let the British National Party leader Nick Griffin appear on the BBC’s Question Time current affairs show. For non-Brits, I should explain that QT is a show where a panel of politicians, pundits and the occasional “personality” take questions from an audience. The audience is selected, according to the BBC, from a supposed balanced cross-section of the public. What in fact this means is that such folk are often drawn from a series of pressure groups and the like. The journalist Paul Johnson once said, many years ago, that if the QT audience were representative of the UK population as a whole, he would think of blowing his brains out. I agree. If I ever chance upon the programme, I feel murderous not towards the panelists, but towards a large part of the audience. It fills me with despair.
Even so, the decision of the QT producers to let this man on the show has thrown up some bizarre arguments. This morning, the Labour MP and pundit, Diane Abbott, told the BBC Breakfast TV show that Griffin should not appear. At the core of her argument, if one can dignify it with such a word, was the idea that only “mainstream” parties should be allowed to be panelists. The interviewer did not immediately hit back with the question as to what Ms Abbott defines as “mainstream”. After all, one could object to a Labour, or indeed Conservative politician, appearing on the show on the grounds that both parties support the idea of seizing a large portion of our wealth on pain of imprisonment; support wars against countries that, whatever the justification, involve the deaths of innocent civilians; support the UK’s membership of an oppressive and undemocratic European federal state, have taken away the right of self-defence for householders; have supported, and continue to support, an intrusive, meddling and yet also incompetent state apparatus. On those grounds alone, one could argue that such politicians should not only be banned from Question Time or any other forum, but hanged from a lampost.
Given that the BNP – a party with a hard-left, socialist economic agenda, by the way – has been elected to several seats in the EU Parliament, it would be odd not to allow the leader of a party that has won a million votes not to be held to account in the run-up to a general election next year. Of course, if we had a genuine free market in broadcasting, the editorial judgement of the BBC, which is funded by a tax, would be irrelevant. But given we have a state-financed broadcaster, that broadcaster, under its charter of incorporation, should enable elected political parties to be put to the public test. The BNP is an odious party for a libertarian, and Mr Griffin is, as his background suggests, a nasty piece of work. What have other parties to be afraid of in putting this lot under the media microscope?
The story, which I learned about today, here, has already done the rounds. After all, it happened a whole two days ago. Still, all those interested in new media, and all who fret about where news will come from if newspapers collapse, will find (will have found) the story interesting. It’s the sort of thing they presumably now study in media studies courses. If not, they should. Not that you need to be doing a media studies course to be studying the media (and the rest of us certainly shouldn’t have to pay for you to do this), but you get my drift.
Basically, a London Underground staff member called Ian swore at an unswervingly polite old man who had got his arm stuck in a train door and was trying to explain that fact to Ian. Ian said (shouted more like) that the old man would have to explain himself to the police. At that point a nearby blogger who just happened to be there, Jonathan MacDonald, started up his video camera, and soon afterwards did a blog posting, complete with video footage, about what he had witnessed. In due course the mainstream media tuned in, and went ballistic.
If you do feel inclined to follow this up, I suggest reading the original blog posting, and then some thoughts, also by Jonathan MacDonald, concerning what it all means. He supplies copious further links.
Sir Christopher Bland (somewhat unfortunate surname, Ed) has a debate in the latest edition of the UK magazine, Standpoint, with Charles Moore, former Daily Telegraph and Spectator editor, as his opponent. Moore – who has vowed not to pay the BBC licence fee tax until Jonathan Ross – a boorish chatshow host and radio DJ – is sacked for a certain incident, challenges the whole idea of tax-financed broadcasting. His arguments are forceful, not least the point that the BBC, as a privileged recipient of funds raised on pain of imprisonment, can and does undermine would-be commercial competitors, therby stifling potential new ideas and models of broadcasting. He points out that while the BBC claims to not be biased, it is in fact biased, and it would be better for such biases to be upfront rather than concealed. I am sure that Samizdata readers are mostly familiar with the standard liberal critique of the BBC’s very existence, so I will not rehearse the argument here again.
What struck me, however, is how lame Sir Christopher’s debating points are. Check them out for yourself, gentle reader. Pretty much most of his comments fall into the “only a fool could deny how wonderful the BBC is” and gives variations on how the sky will fall in on the quality of UK television if the licence fee system is scrapped. We get the now-standard sneer about American and foreign TV. Zzzzz. In fact, he rarely engages very energetically with Moore’s points; rather, he harrumphs that Moore is some sort of free marketeer zealot, and of course, brings out the standard BS line that anyone who disagrees with tax-financed broadcasting is a “philistine”. The lameness, the refusal to think in principles of any coherent kind, is really quite striking. It is hard not to smell a certain whiff of defeat.
The attitudes of Sir Christopher – no doubt a most civilised and agreeable member of what might pass for the “establishment” in this country – are pretty widely shared across much of the population. His worldview, his inability to understand a world in which the state did not grab such a huge share of our lives and attempt to manage it, is shared, for example, by all those who cannot consider how healthcare will be delivered without a Soviet-model system such as the NHS. Moore makes this point; he even points to the parallel between the old Church of England, and its now-abolished tithe on parishioners, be they Anglicans or not, and the licence fee, which is paid by those who either watch the BBC, or who do not. Bland, of course, just brushes it aside. One suspects that much of his worldview is shared by the likes of David Cameron.
Incidentally, I thoroughly enjoyed reading Standpoint. It is a definite plus in the UK magazine scene.
It’s no secret. No secret at all. Every second or third blog I read has stuff about it. Film Director Roman Polanksi (Repulsion, The Pianist) did something bad of a rape-like nature to a teenage girl several decades ago, and lived in Europe from then on.
But now they are going to extradite him or not as the case may be, from France or Switzerland (somewhere European), and big cheese lists of Hollywood big cheeses are saying he’s a great artist and therefore regular morals and laws and suchlike don’t apply to him, ease up, forget about it, freedom of artistic expression, it wasn’t really rape (“rape-rape” as Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost, Girl, Interrupted, Rat Race) has famously put it), it was her fault, it was her mother’s fault, it was the judge’s fault, blah blah, and the rest of us are saying: bullshit you evil bastards.
If you care about the details you now know them. I care about the details, a bit, and I too am of the bullshit you evil bastards tendency. Not my point here. No, what interests me about this ruckus is how the internet has so completely changed the rules of such debates, and so completely wrong-footed the big cheese evil bastard team. → Continue reading: How the internet has put Roman Polanski and his idiot Hollywood defenders in the spotlight
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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