James Delingpole's Blog, page 13

Why some of us feel particularly bad about the death of Robin Williams

Robin Williams is dead and I can’t remember when I felt quite so cut up about the premature death of a Hollywood star.

This is particularly odd given that I never could stand a single one of his movies I ever saw (I’m keeping Dead Poets Society in reserve: my son tells me it’s good) and never laughed once at any of his comedy turns, starting with Mork and Mindy, which left me cold.

But now that he’s gone – and in such sad circumstances – I’ve a suspicion that those like me who were always allergic to Williams’s comedy may now reconsider their position and will watch his films in a completely new light.

Read more at Breitbart London

Six reasons why ‘climate science’ should definitely be on the school curriculum

The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Gina McCarthy has said in an interview that she believes “climate science” ought to be included in the school curriculum.

“Very much so,” she says. “I think part of the challenge of explaining climate change is that it requires a level of science and a level of forward thinking and you’ve got to teach that to kids.

“People didn’t have a sense of how dramatic climate change really is, and what it means for all of us. So that’s been a challenge. But what’s great about renewables is that when you put a solar panel on the roof of a school, you change the entire dynamic of education for the students. It’s hands-on.”

Some cynics may accuse the woman of talking gibberish.

Personally, though, I think she’s absolutely right….

Find out why at Breitbart London

Eton is a four letter word. What ‘School’ tells us about Boris and Dave

“Eton is a four letter word.”

I can’t remember which massively successful Old Etonian actor said that – there are so many: Eddie Redmayne, Harry Lloyd, Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Damian Lewis – but whichever of the gazillions it was you know what he was getting at. An Eton education is as much as stigma for some as it is a badge of honour for others.

Two perfect examples of this are Prime Minister David Cameron and Mayor of London Boris Johnson.

Both went to “School”, as Etonians will insist on calling it (the capital in the S is silent). But where David Cameron finds it an albatross round his neck, Boris Johnson exults in it. This tells us something about Eton; but much more about the characters of the two men.

Read the thrilling conclusion at Breitbart London

The Great Diesel Scandal

Last year, for the first time since passing my driving test three decades ago, I finally bit the bullet and bought the kind of car my dad had been urging me to get for as long as I can remember: a sensible diesel one.

‘They’re so much more economical,’ my dad had kept telling me.

He isn’t necessarily right about everything, but I trust him on cars. In his youth he used to race them as a hobby and, unlike me, he knows a piston from a spark plug.

‘Quite a bit of poke under the bonnet, too. What with fuel injection, they’re just as nippy as petrol cars. Also, they hold their value for much longer . . .’

Read the rest at the Daily Mail

Never mind Gaza: what about the Yezidis?

There was one part of Baroness Warsi’s resignation letter I admired: that was when, just after she’d condemned the Coalition’s inaction over Gaza, she brought the full weight of her righteous indignation to bear on Britain’s abject failure to stop the Yezidis being massacred in Iraq.

No not really. a) the Yezidis aren’t being killed by Jews, but rather by Muslims, which I guess doesn’t make it such a big deal and b) I doubt Baroness Warsi has even heard of the Yezidis.

But then, to be fair, few people had until their bodies started being posted up in pictures on Twitter, often minus their heads, and with grinning ISIS jihadis posing behind them….

Read the full article at Breitbart London

Baroness Token resigns. Cameron should have known: ‘Never buy the first pony you see.’

Saaeda Warsi – aka Baroness Warsi; akaBaroness Token – has announced her resignation from the Cabinet in a style entirely becoming her class, intelligence and sophistication: on Twitter.

Her departure will no doubt come as an enormous relief to the more traditional Conservatives in her party, many of whom felt that Warsi’s appointment to a Cabinet post – even one as meaningless as “Minister for Faith and Communities” had less to do with her brilliance, integrity and raw talent than it did to Cameron’s desperation to get his first Asian Muslim female on the books. One of them once described Baroness Token to me as a classic example of “Never buy the first pony you see.”

Read more at Breitbart London

Gaza: spare me your sick, dishonest, manipulative dead baby photos

Did you see the photograph of the Middle Eastern boy blown apart in an explosion?

I did, unfortunately. Someone insisted on posting it in my Twitter timeline. For my education, presumably.

The boy – no older than five – was on a hospital bed. It must have happened very recently because there was still colour in his face. His eyes were closed and his expression – he can’t have seen it coming, thank God – was serene. You might almost have imagined him asleep, if it weren’t for the fact that his body was in bits: head and severed torso; an arm; legs and lower body; entrails.

Whoever did this, I thought, is really, really sick.

But I didn’t mean the Israelis – who, I imagine, were the people I was expected to blame. Rather, I meant the sicko who scooped up the boy’s remains while they were still fresh and insisted on laying them out, like some grotesque jigsaw, in order to snap them artfully for a propaganda shot. And also, all the sickos out there who have been reposting photos like these all over the internet in order to make what they seem to imagine is an unarguable point about Israel’s war on Hamas.

Read more at Breitbart London

Why I don’t want the NHS to spend my money on sperm banks for lesbian couples

“NHS to fund sperm bank for lesbians,” reports the Mail On Sunday.

Or, as someone put it on Twitter:

 

The people must be allowed to have their cake and eat it or they’ll sulk…..

There are lots of things that puzzle me about the ‘enlightened’ thinking behind this new measure. Like:

Is it really the State’s job to decide on our behalf that families in which children reared by two parents of the same sex are now every bit as socially desirable as those with the more traditional female mother and male father arrangement?

Who made this new rule and how come we got no say in the matter?

Given that the National Health Service is effectively bankrupt isn’t it a bit of a decadent luxury to strain the creaking system still further by diverting scarce resources that could have gone towards say, cancer care, on an area of “medicine” that has rather more to do with lifestyle choice than it does with urgent clinical necessity?

And

When is this egalitarian lunacy going to end?

Read more at Breitbart London

Exposed: the self-inflicted Hamas ‘massacre’ blamed by the media on Israel

An enterprising blogger’s diligent spadework has revealed the truth behind an Israeli ‘massacre’ that never was. (H/T Jonathan Foreman)

According to the Hamas version of events – widely promulgated in the media by ITN, the Telegraph and the Belfast Telegraph – an Israeli airstrike on a crowded market place during a partial ceasefire in the Shijaiyah neighbourhood of Gaza City on July 30th, 2014 was responsible for the deaths of 17  people, including blue-helmeted photojournalist Rani Rayan.

However as Thomas Wictor has incontrovertibly demonstrated using close analysis of film footage of the incident, the deaths were not caused by Israeli shrapnel but by secondary explosions from a vast cache of Hamas rockets.

Oh, and the market wasn’t ‘crowded’ either: it had been closed for the day.

And this particular area wasn’t included in the ceasefire zone, either, because Hamas was continuing to fire rockets from it.

Read more at Breitbart London

Green MP Caroline Lucas tries to keep science out of climate science

Green MP Caroline Lucas has written to Labour leader Ed Miliband to protest that one of his MPs, Graham Stringer, has been telling the truth about climate change.

The letter, an apparent attempt to get Stringer sacked from his position on the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, begins:

I’m writing with regard to yesterday’s report from the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee on climate science and the 5th assessment report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

I’m sure that we will both welcome the Committee’s unambiguous endorsement of the integrity of the science and the compelling case for urgent action to cut carbon emissions and secure a global climate deal.

However, in light of your criticism of the Prime Minister for having climate deniers in his Cabinet, and your comments about the harm caused to our country by delay and dither on climate change, it was especially disappointing to see Graham Stringer, a senior Labour MP, join forces with Conservative MP Peter Lilley in an attempt to undermine the findings.

As Caroline Lucas should know – she’s an English Literature graduate – this is a wonderful example of irony.

Read more at Breitbart London