“The upgrading of the G20, Gordon Brown’s plans for planetary financial regulation, and the Copenhagen climate summit (whose inauguration of a transnational bureaucracy to facilitate the multitrillion-dollar shakedown of functioning economies would be the biggest exercise in punitive liberalism the developed world has ever been subjected to) are all pillars of “global governance.” Right now, if you don’t like the local grade school, you move to the next town. If you’re sick of Massachusetts taxes, you move to New Hampshire. Where do you move to if you don’t like “global governance”? What polling station do you go to to vote it out?”
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It’s not enough to be rich and famous if you’re not somehow “relevant”. Whether it’s Prince Charles or Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or any of these other guys, they all have the same message: “Hey, I deserve to live like this. Now shut up and shiver in the dark, you peasants”. December 12th, 2009 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The UK state sector is two large banks with a medium sized government attached. – John Redwood. Funny, but the UK government is not really medium-sized at all. This is still a big country on most measures. And the government’s share of GDP, our overbearing officialdom, and state colonization of civil society, are each now uncomfortably upper-quartile among democratic states and heading rapidly upwards. We are arguably now more governed than France, the home of dirigisme. December 6th, 2009 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
“The science is so settled it’s now perfectly routine for leaders of the developed world to go around sounding like apocalyptic madmen of the kind that used to wander the streets wearing sandwich boards and handing out homemade pamphlets. Governments that are incapable of – to pluck at random – enforcing their southern border, reducing waiting times for routine operations to below two years, or doing something about the nightly ritual of car-torching “youths”, are nevertheless taken seriously when they claim to be able to change the very heavens – if only they can tax and regulate us enough. As they will if they reach “consensus” at Copenhagen. And most probably even if they don’t.” December 4th, 2009 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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. December 3rd, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
– Commenter Frank39, who appears to have lived in East Germany, responding to another commenter on a post on Climategate from the German “Science Skeptical” blog. My thanks to the anonymous correspondent in Germany who pointed this out and provided me with the translation. December 1st, 2009 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
“When someone asks him how his day is going, Jack replies, “Previously, on 24…” I came across this line here. November 30th, 2009 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am almost surprised that we were treated so moderately by our captors – apart, that is, from the tragic, largely unexplained, decision to kill Tom Fox, the American Quaker. – Norman Kember, writing in the Guardian. November 29th, 2009 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still- just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig- the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”- and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure- something “we always do”. – C.S. Lewis, from an essay called The Inner Ring. I was reminded of this by David Foster of Chicagoboyz. November 29th, 2009 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the file pl_decline.pro: check what the code is doing! It’s reducing the temperatures in the 1930s, and introducing a parabolic trend into the data to make the temperatures in the 1990s look more dramatic. – Recycled to a separate posting today by ClimateGate blogstar Bishop Hill from among the comments on his earlier and ever expanding posting entitled The code. The Bishop adds: “Could someone else do a double check on this file? Could be dynamite if correct.” November 26th, 2009 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
“But another real benefit is that once you have registered no-one can steal your identity” – Home Office minister Meg Hillier, explaining the benefits of getting an ID card. Good to know that the science is settled, there. Seriously, though. What are these people smoking? November 24th, 2009 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
The state does not wither or even shrink when it pays charities to do its work. It merely decentralises the provision of services while expanding the centre’s command and control into new areas of public life. November 16th, 2009 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
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