Andrew Bolt's Blog, page 1895

If Blair's ministers didn't know war was, they're too dumb to complain now

For Britain to have yet another inquiry into the Iraq war, seven years after the toppling of a genocidal dictator, since replaced by an elected government, seems an attempt to punish Tony Blair with exhaustion and to nag everyone else into submission into the appeasement camp.

How unworldly the debate is may be judged by this question put to the clearly astonished and even amused Blair: did his own Cabinet know that he was planning for war if Saddam Hussein didn't met the UN's final, final ultimata? 

The BBC line

Peter Sissons tells us what any viewer should have worked out for themselves:

For 20 years I was a front man at the BBC, anchoring news and current ­affairs programmes, so I reckon nobody is better placed than me to ­answer the question that nags at many of its viewers — is the BBC biased?

In my view, 'bias' is too blunt a word to describe the subtleties of the ­pervading culture. The better word is a 'mindset'. At the core of the BBC, in its very DNA, is a way of thinking that is firmly of the Left.

By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent. ­Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ­running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover. In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told 'it's all in there'…

I am in no doubt that the majority of BBC staff vote for political parties of the Left. But it's impossible to do ­anything but guess at the numbers whose beliefs are on the Right or even Centre-Right. This is because the one thing guaranteed to damage your career prospects at the BBC is letting it be known that you are at odds with the prevailing and deep-rooted BBC attitude towards Life, the Universe, and Everything…

Whatever the United Nations is associated with is good — it is heresy to question any of its activities. The EU is also a good thing, but not quite as good as the UN… All green and environmental groups are very good things. Al Gore is a saint. George Bush was a bad thing, and thick into the bargain. Obama was not just the Democratic Party's candidate for the White House, he was the BBC's. Blair was good, Brown bad, but the BBC has now lost interest in both.

Sounds like the ABC.

Sissions describes the last straw:

I was at Television Centre preparing to anchor the 5pm-6pm news, the centre-piece of which was to be an extended interview that I would conduct with Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman.

I did what I have always done before thousands of interviews in my 45 years as a broadcast journalist. I drew up a list of the most important current issues that I felt she needed to be asked about, drafted a few core questions…

Then it started — a steady stream of email messages from producers telling me what to ask. Three or four of them all wanted to have their say, and they seemed particularly twitchy about Harman being interviewed by me, unsupervised. Most seemed to be fully paid-up members of her fan club… Then, half an hour before transmission, a ­producer arrived with a list of questions for Harriet Harman emailed in by viewers.

This was news to me, but I had no choice in the matter because they had already been set up with ­captions, and it was my job simply to put them to her. After that, if there was time — and the interview was to run to no more than eight minutes — I could put some questions of my own.

I was asked what I had in mind, and I said that I was going to ask her about a row brewing in the morning papers about Gordon Brown not inviting the Queen to the 65th anniversary commemoration of D-Day. The response shocked me. I was told this was not a topic worth raising because it was 'only a ­campaign being run by the Daily Mail'…

I did ask the question, and she, clearly uncomfortable, promised a statement when she had found out all the facts.

But as I drove home that evening, I asked myself if I wanted to go on working for the BBC. By the time I arrived home, I'd decided to leave

Any worse, and no will vote NSW Labor at all

Newspoll shows NSW Labor hurtling towards utter, utter devastation at the March polls. Twenty per cent primary support leaves it battling the Greens for Opposition status, and the two-part support is just as disastrous:

On a two-party preferred basis, Labor is trailing on 34 per cent to the Coalition's 66 per cent.

Labor has even made sure it's leaving voters with exactly the very worst impression just two months before the election:

In The Sunday Telegraph's exclusive Galaxy poll, an extraordinary 83 per cent of voters believe the Labor Government has done a poor job handling the electricity assets sell off - and just 10 per cent said they had done well.

And not only do voters not like it, 80 per cent of the 800 voters polled by galaxy last week believe Labor should be held accountable for any financial losses that may arise in the future over the bungled $5.3 billion sale.

What "consensus", Kimo Sabe?

If 1 billion Indians won't buy man-made global warming, our own efforts to "stop" it will look even more pitiful.

Jairam Ramesh, India's Environment Minister:

There is a groupthink in climate science today. Anyone who raises alternative climate theories is immediately branded as a climate atheist in an atmosphere of climate evangelists. Climate science is incredibly more complex than [developed countries] negotiators make it out to be… Climate science should not be driven by the West. We should not always be dependent on outside reports.

The Hindustan Times, 21 January:

India has once again challenged the UN's climate science body - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) --- through a new scientific paper. The Environment ministry sponsored paper says that human induced global warming is much less than what the R K Pachauri headed IPCC had said.  The cause is reduced impact of Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) on formulation of low clouds over earth in the last 150 years, says a paper by U R Rao, former chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation, released by Environment minister Jairam Ramesh.

(Via Benny Peiser.)

UPDATE

Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, isn't convinced, either:

Watch the latest video at video.foxbusiness.com

(Thanks to reader Lime Light.)

100 years later, Twain finally speaks

It's amazing that only now is this great man's autobiography published - but that's just what he demanded:

Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published.

The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century.

That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography.

Can't wait to read it. It's said to be 400 pages of bile, but Twain's bile is still worth bottling:

This was another unrealised dream of riches for Twain, the worst of which concerned his investment, "over more than one fifth of my life", and loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars in James Paige's never-completed development of an automatic typesetting machine. The editors calmly refer to Twain's "unsparing account of his own beguilement". Twain was also unsparing of Paige. Although they always met on "effusively affectionate terms", Twain believed that Paige knew that "if I had his nuts in a steel trap, I would shut out all human succour and watch that trap till he died".

How badly the publishers understood the market:

Apparently, the University of California Press was a little uncertain of the potential, and only planned for a measly 7,500 copies. But in the short time since its release, the late Twain is on best-seller lists, and The New York Times reports that the university press is now thinking that 275,000 isn't enough.

But if Twain banned publication, he didn't say anything about audio recordings. Click the video above to hear some extracts. Background to the publication below:

We'll spend billions to stop 0.001 degrees of warming by 2050

Christopher Monckton does the maths for the Gillard committee that's working out how to slash our emissions:

Suppose the Australian committee's aim is to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2050....

A 20 per cent cut by 2050 is an average 10 per cent cut from now until then. Carbon dioxide concentration by 2050 probably won't exceed 506 parts per million by volume, from which we deduct today's concentration of 390 ppmv. So humankind might add 116 ppmv from now until then.

The CO2 concentration increase forestalled by 40 years of cap-and-tax in Australia would be 10 per cent of 1.5 per cent of that 116 ppmv, or just 0.174 ppmv. So in 2050 CO2 concentration would be ... 505.826 ppmv…

Thus what we maths wonks call the proportionate change in CO2 concentration if the committee got its way would be 505.826 divided by 506, or 0.9997. The UN says warming or cooling, in Celsius degrees, is 3.7 to 5.7 times the logarithm of the proportionate change.

It expects only 57 per cent of manmade warming to occur by 2100: the rest would happen slowly and harmlessly across 1000-3000 years.

To be charitable to the committee, let us take the UN's high-end estimate. The warming forestalled by cutting Australia's emissions would be very unlikely to exceed 57 per cent of 5.7 times the logarithm of 0.9997: that is - wait for it - a dizzying one-thousandth of a degree by 2050.


I have set out this calculation to show how certainly it is known that all attempts to cut CO2 emissions will expensively fail.

(No comments during break.)

Who will be the first this time to whinge for Australia Day?

Bob Murray lays a sure bet:

HERE are some forecasts, hopes and suggestions for the Australia Day period: the forecast is that there will be all the usual complaints about the day, the flag, the national anthem, the Constitution, the head of state and the federal system.

I expect we'll hear from at least one of the following: Ray Martin, Tom Keneally and Greg Barns.

(No comments during break.)

Putting a name on the present

Karl Quinn:

In Australia, Oprah ''gave away'' $1 million worth of computer gear to a needy school (donated by IBM and Hewlett Packard). She gave away $250,000 to a cancer sufferer and his family (donated by X-Box). She gave away 6000 pearl necklaces (donated by West Australian pearl producer MG Kailis) and 6000 diamond pendants (donated by Rio Tinto). And, of course, she gave away the trip of a lifetime to each of the 302 ultimate fans who accompanied her from Canada and America (donated by Australian tourism bodies).

None of which is to say there is not a lot to admire in Oprah's generosity. It's merely to make the point that when Oprah gives, there's a very good chance someone else is picking up the tab - even as she is picking up the glory.

Wind farms cause far more damage than they fix

They are an insult to the intelligence and an outrage on the landscape, and soon they'll prod enough powerful people into stopping this march of the triffids:

ONE of Australia's most successful company receivers is taking on the proponents of a $400 million wind farm development that plans to place turbines taller than the Sydney Harbour Bridge overlooking his rural getaway on the NSW southern tablelands.

"It started out as a NIMBY (not in my back yard) issue, but it is now much more than that," said Tony Hodgson, who co-founded the insolvency specialist Ferrier Hodgson, which has handled some of Australia's highest-profile corporate collapses…

Hodgson bought his property in Collector, about 30km west of Goulburn, five years ago and said he learned of plans for a 160-megawatt, 80-tower wind farm in October.

He has launched a furious campaign against wind farm proponent Transfield Services, the state government and his absentee neighbour, a Double Bay cafe owner who has agreed to host some of the proposed wind towers in exchange for lease payments estimated at $1m a year for 20 years…

Mr Hodgson has formed a Friends of Collector group to lobby against the development… Mr Hodgson said he did not want the Collector wind farm to go ahead but, if it did, Transfield should be forced to make payments to the local community… He said the company should also be forced to lodge a bond of $200m to cover the cost of decommissioning the wind turbines at the end of their life.

Opponents ... also want an inquiry into the environmental and economic value of wind farms ...

Bring on that inquiry, and investigate the issue from the ground up. Is global warming really man-made? Is it actually a danger overall? What difference would our wind farms make anyway? Isn't the visual pollution of wind farms more real and harmful than any warming they allegedly avert? And if we really must slash our gases, aren't there far cheaper and less harmful ways to do it?

Just look what the rotten things have done to one of my favorite views in Victoria, when you crest the hill at Kilcunda to finally see the great sweep of coast to Wonthaggi:

Learn the lessons of Wivenhoe before the heavy rains of February

Hedley Thomas: the evidence suggests the Brisbane floods were man-made. And he's not talking about global warming.