James Delingpole's Blog, page 2

In which finally I discuss the hell of being born Trans Class

“Trans Race” victim Rachel Dolezal has attracted much mockery from some quarters for claiming to be a black woman trapped in a white woman’s body.

All I can say is: she should be so lucky. I personally have spent my entire miserable life suffering from a far more painful, emotionally draining, and tragically irreversible handicap. It has ruined my career, it has blighted my children’s future, it is a constant source of disappointment to my wife and could well one day lead to a very ugly divorce. I’ve had difficulty talking about it before because it’s such a sore topic. But now, thanks to the brave example of Rachel Dolezal I have been shown the way.

Today, finally, I have plucked up the courage to speak out in the hope that fellow sufferers of this awful disability might finally be able to talk openly about the misery this tragic condition has brought upon them. Perhaps we could even form a campaign group and demand government compensation.

The problem is this: I was born Trans Class.

Imagine how it feels to stare into your bathroom mirror every day and to see, reflected back, not the extravagantly be-sideburned, gimlet-eyed, red-cheeked aristocrat you know you really are, but just the pallid, gaunt features of a middle-middle-class nobody struggling to make a living, just like all the “little people”.

Imagine waking up, not in the four-poster-bed that has been in the family for generations and which its rumoured Anne Boleyn once slept in, but just a fairly ordinary pocket-sprung number you picked up ten years ago from a boring high street chain with some name like SlumberWorld or DreamLand or Bed-U-Like.

Imagine the stabbing agony you experience every day when you realise that nothing you ever do – NOTHING – is ever going to alter the fact that you will never have a foxhunt bearing your name (like the Duke of Beaufort does), that neither you nor in all likelihood your children, will ever inherit a 52 bedroom Baroque palace with 5,000 acres of parkland landscaped by Capability Brown and swarming with unusual-looking sheep, rare-breed cattle and exotic deer which your ancestor brought back from the Forbidden City in Peking.

Imagine the horror of knowing that instead of having your every whim catered for by a retinue of liveried servants – as is your natural birthright – you instead actually have to put your leaves into your teapot yourself, then pour boiling water on it from an electric kettle, then wait for it to brew for four minutes, then pour it out into a cup which isn’t made from antique finebone china but has Mr Silly on it and came from some unspeakable supermarket like Tesco, not to mention all the other crap that ordinary people have to do because they know no better and weren’t born Trans Class like you and are therefore more dumbly accepting of their lot…stuff like putting out the rubbish once a week for the binmen, and having to floss your teeth rather than getting your cheeky chambermaid Moll to do it and having to watch television rather than having your staff watch it for you and then give you a written summary in copperplate.

Imagine sticking both arms out every morning then remembering, with a shudder, that there is no valet to slip on your frock coat and that in fact all you’ve got is a bunch of Charles Tyrwhitt shirts and the same old pair of jeans which you’re going to have to put on yourself.

Imagine….well there’s really no point because you can’t bloody imagine. Unlike me – unless of course you are a fellow Trans Class victim – you won’t have sufficient intellectual refinement or imagination to imagine, because your proletarian brain won’t let you.

So since you lack the inability to imagine, I’ll just have to tell you.

I was born an 18th century Duke with a vast estate, a stable of two dozen hunters, a bevy of mistresses, a summer “nooky house”, more estates in the West Indies (where I can assure you that the workers are all very happy with their lot and address me cheerfully as “Massa Duke, Sir”), a beautiful if slightly remote wife who is related to the King, lots of paintings (especially of me) by Gainsborough and Reynolds, yet I am trapped in the body of a middle-class, middle-aged journalist in ugly, pointless, 21st century Britain.

And it is HELL, I tell you, hell.

That is why from now on, to help my cope with my disability, I shall expect to be addressed as “Your Grace”, be given the place of honour at those of your miserable dinner parties I deign to attend, and be treated at all times with deference bordering on worship.

Thank you, Rachel Dolezal for showing me the way. You may be a horrid wretched oik from the Colonies (job going on my West Indies estates, if you’re interested) but you have enabled me to become who I really am.

After all, it’s not the body you were born into that defines you. That’s just an oppressive social construct.

What truly defines you is how you feel so I’m going to say it proud and I’m going to say it loud:

I. AM. A. DUKE.

From Breitbart

Jonathan Chait talks Chait on climate change

There’s a long article in the grown-up Australian magazineQuadrant which I wouldn’t expect columnist Jonathan Chait to be capable of finishing, let alone comprehending.

But since it’s quite germane to a silly piece he has published in New Yorkmagazine entitled “Scientists Drop Science Bomb on Climate Skeptics,” I thought I might kindly help the afflicted by offering a precis.

The piece is by science writer Matt Ridley (well known to readers of London’s Times, The Wall Street Journal, and of books including Genome and The Rational Optimist) and it’s called”What The Climate Wars Have Done to Science.”

Ridley, formerly a believer in Catastrophic Man Made Warming (CAGW), describes how the scales fell from his eyes and he came to realise that climate change alarmism was a massive fraud akin to Stalin-era Lysenkoism or the persistent myth (invented in the 1950s by Ancel Keys) that dietary fat is the main cause of heart disease.

He reached this conclusion using the traditional scientific method of “looking at the evidence.”

From Michael Mann’s utterly discredited “Hockey Stick” to the similarly bankrupt nonsense that there is a “97 per cent” consensus on CAGW, Ridley demonstrates that almost all the evidence climate alarmists have marshalled in order to support their extravagant claims about man-made climate doom is in one way or another doctored, dishonest or corrupt.

The problem has got so bad, Ridley argues, that “it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science”.

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudo-science – homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

One of these dogmas, just like Lysenkoism, just like Ancel Keys’s now discredited theories on dietary fat, is Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming theory.

Ridley goes on to provide lots of examples of this establishment-endorsed junk science in action – many taken from an excellent book which I highly recommend (not least because it features me) called Climate Change: The Facts (which you can buy here at Mark Steyn’s place).

He tells the tale of Camille Parmesan who produced a paper on the Edith checkerspot butterfly which, though subsequently proved to be utter nonsense by an ecologist, nevertheless earned her 500 citations, an invitation to the White House and a slot contributing to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Why? Just because her paper conformed to the Establishment’s approved narrative that almost everything going wrong in the natural world can be blamed on “climate change.”

Read the article. There’s plenty, plenty more where this came from. So much, indeed, that you can’t help wondering: how do these shysters get away with it? How can so many scientists have been bent from the true path? How come their work gets such unquestioning coverage from science correspondents whose job ought to be to sniff out dishonesty and fraud? Why are these scientists not held to account by the supposedly distinguished institutions where they work or by the government bodies which fund them?

The answer, Ridley explains, is that the truth has fallen victim to a greedy and out of control green industry.

“…inch by inch, the huge green pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms – over population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops – have often proved wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the most exaggeration trousered the most money.

In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be debunked. These huge green multinationals with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and the media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous.”

So when Jonathan Chait pompously invokes the name of “Science” to support his cause – and accuses “skeptics” of being anti-science – what he in fact means by “Science” in nothing that Newton or Einstein would have understood by the word.

Chait is not a scientist. Neither am I. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that Chait – presumably – considers himself to be a journalist and something of a master of snark.

You can tell from the sarcastic relish of his concluding paragraph:

So now that we know there is no pause, or even a slowdown, science-loving conservatives can rest assured that the conclusions of the climate-science field are correct, and the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere does in fact trap heat. Obviously, right? Conservatives placed so much weight on the apparent existence of this pause that there’s no way they would just immediately switch over to some other justification for their same skepticism, like some kind of reflexive ideologues.

Well all I’ll say, as a fellow snark practictioner, is that if you’re going to adopt a tone as lofty and sneery as that, then you’d better be damned sure of your facts.

You’d better be aware, for example, as Chait so clearly isn’t, that there is a very effective counterargument to this “Science” paper he has set so much store by, which shows it up for the dishonest, incompetent, politically motivated artefact it really is.

If not, there’s a severe danger that you’ll end up being accused by the better-informed of having churned out an article which we in England are fond of dismissing with a phrase not unakin to, “This is a load of complete and utter Chait!”

Read more at Breitbart

In which I call out some two-bit hack called Jonathan Chait and hand him his reamed arse

There’s a long article in the grown-up Australian magazineQuadrant which I wouldn’t expect columnist Jonathan Chait to be capable of finishing, let alone comprehending.

But since it’s quite germane to a silly piece he has published in New Yorkmagazine entitled “Scientists Drop Science Bomb on Climate Skeptics,” I thought I might kindly help the afflicted by offering a precis.

The piece is by science writer Matt Ridley (well known to readers of London’s Times, The Wall Street Journal, and of books including Genome and The Rational Optimist) and it’s called”What The Climate Wars Have Done to Science.”

Ridley, formerly a believer in Catastrophic Man Made Warming (CAGW), describes how the scales fell from his eyes and he came to realise that climate change alarmism was a massive fraud akin to Stalin-era Lysenkoism or the persistent myth (invented in the 1950s by Ancel Keys) that dietary fat is the main cause of heart disease.

He reached this conclusion using the traditional scientific method of “looking at the evidence.”

From Michael Mann’s utterly discredited “Hockey Stick” to the similarly bankrupt nonsense that there is a “97 per cent” consensus on CAGW, Ridley demonstrates that almost all the evidence climate alarmists have marshalled in order to support their extravagant claims about man-made climate doom is in one way or another doctored, dishonest or corrupt.

The problem has got so bad, Ridley argues, that “it is at risk of damaging the whole reputation of science”.

Sure, we occasionally take a swipe at pseudo-science – homeopathy, astrology, claims that genetically modified food causes cancer, and so on. But the great thing about science is that it’s self-correcting. The good drives out the bad, because experiments get replicated and hypotheses put to the test. So a really bad idea cannot survive long in science.

Or so I used to think. Now, thanks largely to climate science, I have changed my mind. It turns out bad ideas can persist in science for decades, and surrounded by myrmidons of furious defenders they can turn into intolerant dogmas.

One of these dogmas, just like Lysenkoism, just like Ancel Keys’s now discredited theories on dietary fat, is Catastrophic Man Made Global Warming theory.

Ridley goes on to provide lots of examples of this establishment-endorsed junk science in action – many taken from an excellent book which I highly recommend (not least because it features me) called Climate Change: The Facts (which you can buy here at Mark Steyn’s place).

He tells the tale of Camille Parmesan who produced a paper on the Edith checkerspot butterfly which, though subsequently proved to be utter nonsense by an ecologist, nevertheless earned her 500 citations, an invitation to the White House and a slot contributing to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. Why? Just because her paper conformed to the Establishment’s approved narrative that almost everything going wrong in the natural world can be blamed on “climate change.”

Read the article. There’s plenty, plenty more where this came from. So much, indeed, that you can’t help wondering: how do these shysters get away with it? How can so many scientists have been bent from the true path? How come their work gets such unquestioning coverage from science correspondents whose job ought to be to sniff out dishonesty and fraud? Why are these scientists not held to account by the supposedly distinguished institutions where they work or by the government bodies which fund them?

The answer, Ridley explains, is that the truth has fallen victim to a greedy and out of control green industry.

“…inch by inch, the huge green pressure groups have grown fat on a diet of constant but ever-changing alarm about the future. That these alarms – over population growth, pesticides, rain forests, acid rain, ozone holes, sperm counts, genetically modified crops – have often proved wildly exaggerated does not matter: the organisations that did the most exaggeration trousered the most money.

In the case of climate, the alarm is always in the distant future, so can never be debunked. These huge green multinationals with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have now systematically infiltrated science, as well as industry and the media, with the result that many high-profile climate scientists and the journalists who cover them have become one-sided cheerleaders for alarm, while a hit squad of increasingly vicious bloggers polices the debate to ensure that anybody who steps out of line is punished. They insist on stamping out all mention of the heresy that climate change might not be lethally dangerous.”

So when Jonathan Chait pompously invokes the name of “Science” to support his cause – and accuses “skeptics” of being anti-science – what he in fact means by “Science” in nothing that Newton or Einstein would have understood by the word.

Chait is not a scientist. Neither am I. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that Chait – presumably – considers himself to be a journalist and something of a master of snark.

You can tell from the sarcastic relish of his concluding paragraph:

So now that we know there is no pause, or even a slowdown, science-loving conservatives can rest assured that the conclusions of the climate-science field are correct, and the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere does in fact trap heat. Obviously, right? Conservatives placed so much weight on the apparent existence of this pause that there’s no way they would just immediately switch over to some other justification for their same skepticism, like some kind of reflexive ideologues.

Well all I’ll say, as a fellow snark practictioner, is that if you’re going to adopt a tone as lofty and sneery as that, then you’d better be damned sure of your facts.

You’d better be aware, for example, as Chait so clearly isn’t, that there is a very effective counterargument to this “Science” paper he has set so much store by, which shows it up for the dishonest, incompetent, politically motivated artefact it really is.

If not, there’s a severe danger that you’ll end up being accused by the better-informed of having churned out an article which we in England are fond of dismissing with a phrase not unakin to, “This is a load of complete and utter Chait!”

Read more at Breitbart

‘Hide the Pause': the latest great global warming cover up

What’s the most embarrassing and inconvenient truth for the cause of climate alarmism?

Probably the fact that there has now been no “global warming” for 18 years and six months. Not only does this contradict all the doomladen climate models cited in the IPCC’s various reports – none of them predicted the so-called “Pause” – but it also means that not one of the kids in school being fed climate propaganda by their on-message teachers has ever personally lived during a time of global warming.

So it’s quite understandable that – just as they tried to do with the “Medieval Warming Period” and also “the decline” (which proved so troubling to Michael Mann and his pals) – the alarmists are doing their damnedest to write the “Pause” (or, if you will, “hiatus”) out of scientific history.

And now they’ve done it!

Or so the journal Science tells us in a new paper being greeted with a predictably rapturous reception by the usual suspects at the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times.

Here, for example, is Pravda’s take:

The so-called hiatus has been touted by non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science. Those claims have resonated; two years ago, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change felt the need to explain why the Earth was not heating up as expected, listing such reasons as volcanic eruptions, reduced solar radiation and the oceans absorbing more heat.

“The reality is that there is no hiatus,” said Tom Karl, director of the National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina. He is the lead author of a study published Thursday in the peer-reviewed journal Science

So that’s it then, is it? Game over for the deniers, now dramatically disarmed of their most powerful weapon by “the Science”?

Er, not quite, no, as this exquisitely damning rebuttal from the Global Warming Policy Forum makes clear.

The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening.

And how did Karl et al notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.”

Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along.

Karl’s paper makes much of the fact that the methods used for gathering sea temperature data have changed over the years: in the old days it used to involve buckets; more recently, engine intake thermometers. Hence his excuse for these magical “adjustments”. Apparently (amazingly, conveniently), the measurements used since 1998 have been “running cold” and therefore needed correcting in a (handy) upward direction in order to show what has really been happening to global warming. Once you realise this – global warming turns out to be as real and present and dangerous as ever it was.

As the GWPF reports there are several glaring problems with Karl’s paper, starting with the fact that it contradicts all the other surface temperature data sets and also satellite data (which clearly shows no warming post 1998). Also, without any plausible explanation, Karl also chooses not to use the data from the Argo array “that is our best coherent data set on ocean temperatures.” The suspicion naturally arises that this is because if Karl had used the Argo findings, they would have made his paper look ridiculous.

But, of course, accuracy and scientific integrity was never the point of this exercise.

Rather, it’s sole point was to garner quotations like the ones amassed by the Guardian (et al) and relayed to the faithful who will now unquestionably accept it as evidence that their cause is just.

Here below is the rationale for Karl’s paper. The actual science is a sublime irrelevance for, as ever, this is all about politics.

Prof Michael Mann, whose analysis of the global temperature in the 1990s revolutionised the field, said the work underlined the conclusions of his own recent research.

“They’ve sort of just confirmed what we already knew, there is no true ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’ in warming,” he said. “To the extent that the study further drives home the fact … that global warming continues unabated as we continue to burn fossil fuels and warm the planet, it is nonetheless a useful contribution to the literature.”

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at London’s Grantham Research Institute, said the news that warming had been greater than previously thought should cause governments currently meeting in Bonn to act with renewed urgency and lay foundations for a strong agreement at the pivotal climate conference in Paris this December.

“The myth of the global warming pause has been heavily promoted by climate change sceptics seeking to undermine the case for strong and urgent cuts in greenhouse gas emissions,” said Ward.

Since scientists began to report a slower than expected rate of warming during the last decade, climate sceptics have latched on to the apparent dip in order to question the validity of climate models.

Last February, US Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told CNN: “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.”

Cruz’s rival for the Republican nomination, Jeb Bush, was using the pause to argue for inaction as early as 2009.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

IPSO: a great new way for bullies to muzzle the press

Censored Concept

One of the fundamental principles of English common law is that you are innocent until proven guilty. And rightly so, for imagine how unfair it would be if any old loon with an axe to grind had only to lodge a trumped-up complaint with the relevant authorities in order to have you punished for no reason whatsoever.

Actually, though, this cruel and capricious system exists in Britain. It’s called the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) and, as might be expected of the bastard offspring of the Leveson inquiry, it’s doing an absolutely first-rate job of empowering bullies and curbing freedom of speech in order to assuage the spite of that small but vocal lobby of caught-red-handed luvvies, lefty agitators and failed hacks which thinks our press has got too big for its boots.

Not that you would necessarily guess this if you went to Ipso’s website. Its Editors’ Code of Practice seems reasonable enough (‘The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information…’) and, scrolling down its list of rulings, what you find in the vast majority of cases is the phrase: ‘The complaint was not upheld.’ This would suggest that Ipso is both judicious and restrained.

Or so you’d think till you become the subject of one of its investigations. This happened to me recently. I can’t give you the exact details but suffice to say that I’d written something so uncontentious and easily verifiable that I might have written, ‘The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.’ Yet still, a political activist decided he had sufficient grounds to complain about this. And rather than tell him where to go — as five seconds on Google would have enabled their salaried and presumably time-rich staff to do — Ipso decided it was meet and right to make this imaginary problem my problem.

When I replied to their query with a link to a scientific website clearly showing that the sun does rise in the east and does set in the west, I thought that would be an end to it. But no. Mr Activist hit back with an even longer screed, vigorously disputing that the evidence I had provided said what I claimed it did, and demanding recourse.

‘Could we perhaps offer to remove these pars in the online version?’ suggested the newspaper’s readers’ editor diplomatically. ‘No!’ I said. ‘He’s trying it on and there’s a point of principle here. Correcting mistakes is one thing. But censoring stuff for the crime of being true? No way.’

Now, of course, I have every confidence that, when this issue is eventually resolved, Ipso will come to the only sensible conclusion. But by then it will be too late — for I will already have been forced to waste hours dealing with the kind of red-crayon complaint which, in more sensible times, would have been dealt with simply by allowing the ‘reader’ to present his case in the ‘letters to the editor’ section.

This is what Mark Steyn means when he says: ‘The process is the punishment.’ He’s referring to the far more onerous, costly and time-consuming legal case in the US that he is fighting with climate scientist Michael Mann, but when it comes to the way Ipso is being used the principle is much the same.

These activists needn’t care what Ipso’s eventual ruling is: by that stage they’ll have won regardless. Unlike in the law courts, they will have successfully intimidated and inconvenienced their enemies while incurring no financial risk. Not that money is a problem for them anyway because, quite often, making these complaints is what they are paid to do. Bob Ward, for example, a serial complainant who most recently brought an Ipso case against the Mail on Sunday for saying something he didn’t like about Arctic sea ice, has a lucrative job at the Grantham Institute, among whose raisons d’être is to make life impossible for climate sceptics.

For the journalists on the receiving end of this punishment by process, though, it’s a different story. Christopher Booker, for example, now sometimes finds himself wasting days on end fending off complaints brought by activists passing themselves off as concerned readers. One case cost him 12 solid days in lost work. He has the facts on his side and is confident of eventual victory. But even when Ipso finds in his favour, the hassle of making his defence (unpaid) will amount to the equivalent of a fine worth many hundreds of pounds.

Now, we all have our problems in this increasingly overregulated world, so I don’t expect you to shed too many tears for the plight of the freelance journalist. But what should definitely worry you about this use of Ipso is its effects on freedom of speech.

Consider Andrew Gilligan, the brave and brilliant scourge of Islamist skulduggery (from the Trojan Horse affair to Lutfur Rahman), who now has to set aside ‘a day or two’ each month just to deal with Ipso complaints. His newspaper, the Sunday Telegraph, is happy to build these costs into its reporting budget. But for some publications, the inconvenience and expense is so off-putting that they simply give up and pursue less obstreperous targets. These complaints wear people down and stop them reporting.

This is just the sort of thing that wiser heads warned would happen at the height of the Hacked Off hysteria. Weren’t Leveson’s recommendations supposed to protect us from bullies, rather than enable them?

From The Spectator

Terrible news for climate catastrophists: the Sahara is getting greener

Good news: the Sahara desert is getting greener because of “climate change.”

Climate change has achieved what Bob Geldof and Live Aid failed to do by ending the drought in the Sahel region of Africa that killed more than 100,000 people in the 1980s, a study has found. Rising greenhouse gases caused rains to return to the region south of the Sahara, from Senegal to Sudan, boosting crop yields since the 1990s and helping the population to feed itself without relying on foreign donations. The study, in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that Sahel summer rainfall was about 10 per cent, or 0.3mm, higher per day in 1996-2011 than in the drought period of 1964-93.

Well, I say “good news”, which obviously it is for the starving Africans scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert, and, indeed, for those of us who prefer to see Africa as an economic success story waiting to happen rather than a looming demographic threat.

But I predict that there will some people who are going to take this news very amiss. The sphincter-poppingly furious crew of greenie activists at the George-Soros-funded website DeSmog blog, for example. As Bishop Hill notes, when, a few years back, the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Phillip Mueller produced a paper predicting this very thing, the red-faced greenies of DeSmog rushed angrily to poo-poo it:

It is wild speculation to assert that any recovery in the Sahel is a result of global warming and to dangle the prospect of a future green Sahara is the exact opposite of the message provided by Mueller’s reference on the matter. However welcome the re-greening of parts of the Sahel, it cannot be relied on.

This is how the left rolls, as a very astute Times article once noted in a different but parallel context, when describing how apologists for the European Union enable it to enlarge its powers first by ridiculing their opponents, then by slily – but not apologetically – conceding that they were right all along.

It is at first denied that any radical new plan exists; it is then conceded that it exists but ministers swear blind that it is not even on the political agenda; it is then noted that it might well be on the agenda but is not a serious proposition; it is later conceded that it is a serious proposition but that it will never be implemented; after that it is acknowledged that it will be implemented but in such diluted form that it will make no difference to the lives of ordinary people; at some point it is finally recognised that it has made such a difference, but it was always known that it would and voters were told so from the outset.

I’m very much looking forward to the bit where the greenies get to the final stage of historical revisionism. “But, of course, we knew that global cooling was the real problem and that we were heading towards a new ice age,” all the usual suspects – from the once-distinguished heights of NASA and the Royal Society to the stygian depths of DeSmog – will all chorus. “Why we were all predicting as much as long ago as the 1970s…”

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Rod Liddle does his anti-foxhunting Dad Dance again. Oh, puh-lease.

Rod Liddle – the thinking man’s Ricky Gervais – has been doing his Dad Dance routine again. You know the one. It’s where he shows how down-with-the-kids and still-in-touch-with-his-radical-leftist-working-class-roots he is by telling you how utterly he loathes foxhunting and how, instead of giving parliament a free vote on the issue, David Cameron should be making it even more illegal than ever because, like, it’s barbaric.

Rad, Rod. Rad!

You can almost smell the oestrogen and plait-haired armpit sweat of all the hot PETA chicks swarming to kneel in appreciation of Rod’s bunny hugging caringness, can’t you?

But I have to say that as both a longstanding friend of Rod’s and a huge admirer of his writing, I find this particular Dad Dance of his embarrassing and demeaning and I really wish he wouldn’t do it.

When he writes crap like this it’s a bit like Led Zeppelin reforming to do a three month stint at Caesars Palace. (“Stairway to Heaven guaranteed Every Nite!!!“). You just think: “No, Rod. Really. You’re better than that.”

It’s crap because it’s airheaded and fluffy and mawkish and horribly redolent of the kind of Guardianista Liberalthink that, as a rule, Rod rightly professes to despise.

Saying foxhunting should be banned because you think it’s cruel and barbaric is as insightful and thought-through and original as venturing, say, that “The true mark of a civilised country is how well it treats its old/disabled/ethnic minorities/prisoners/delete as appropriate” or that you believe in “social justice” and that everyone should have a “living wage” and that for the sake of “future generations” we should learn to live more “sustainably” and that the “problem with Communism is that has never been really tried”. Or even “today is the first day of the rest of your life”. Or “you don’t have to be mad to work here. But it helps!!!”

It’s crap because it’s such a pathetically obvious piece of virtue-signalling. Next time, Rod, just save yourself the bother and write: “I hate the Daily Mail.” That’ll do you.

It’s crap because it’s so nauseatingly illiberal – in the old-fashioned sense of the world.

Now I’m perfectly aware, having had discussions with Rod on this point that he doesn’t want to belong to any kind of liberal tradition – Classical liberal or Guardianista – because he thinks of himself more as Old School authoritarian left.

So all I’ll say on this point is that I find it a bit disappointing that a man who at periods in his life has not exactly been unburdened with personal vices himself should be so indecently keen to cast the first stone at the weaknesses of others.

If, that is, you consider a desire to go foxhunting a weakness. I personally don’t. I think that wanting to go hunting is the most natural thing in the world because it answers the call of one of our most strongly inbuilt atavistic instincts: without the hunting urge we would never have survived, let alone evolved to the point where people were able to invent football and go to Millwall matches and shout clever obscenities at one another, like some people do for their harmless fun, naming no names, eh, Rod?

And frankly, only someone of the Whiggish perversion would be smug enough to imagine that this instinct is something we have all since evolved out of. Yeah, right. You might as well look at the current goings on in Syria and Iraq and pronounce sagely that human beings are no longer drawn to violence.

But that’s by the by. My biggest objection to the arguments of Rod and people like Rod who think they are being civilised and sophisticated and decent in their opposition to hunting is very simply this: that they are miserable, puritanical kill-joys.

I’m not asking the Rod Liddles of this world to be persuaded by all the sub-arguments for the continued existence of hunting – the ones about conservation and tradition and pest control and so forth – because I know, given their class-resentment-inspired bias and their ooh-I-care-about-furry-animals-me moral preening, they’ll always find counterarguments and because in any case they’re just a distraction from the only argument that really matters.

Hunting is a good and desirable thing because it makes those who do it very, very happy without harming in any way whatsoever those miserable sods who disapprove of it.

If you believe in liberty, if you believe in the primacy and the good of mankind, you could never seriously be opposed to hunting. And yes, it really is that simple.

Read more at Breitbart London

From IRA murders to ISIS atrocities: why gay marriage makes it all OK

Pan

Which is worse:

a) opposing gay marriage

or

b) abducting a mother of ten in front of her weeping children, suffocating her with a plastic bag, shooting her in the head and burying her in an unmarked grave?

Well, obviously we know the answer is a) because we can see it in the above heartwarming picture, taken during the recent Irish referendum on same sex marriage.

It shows gay rights activist Rory O’Neill (aka drag queen Panti Bliss) sharing a lovely group hug with David Norris (an Irish Senator who lobbied for the 1993 decriminalisation of gay sex) and, of course, with the unmistakably vulpine figure of Gerry Adams, the sinister Sinn Fein president who continues to deny he was ever a member of the IRA.

Aaaahhh. Doesn’t it make you feel all warm and gooey inside?

Well it doesn’t have that effect on me, I’m afraid. In fact, if I’d voted “yes” in the Irish referendum and someone had subsequently showed me that photo, I’m pretty sure I’d want to stick an orange in my mouth, tie a noose around my neck and top myself for the very shame of it.

For, if a picture is worth a thousand words, that particular one is worth more like a hundred-thousand-word book entitled “Absolutely Everything That Is Wrong With The Modern World.”

It refutes, far more articulately and unanswerably than any member of the hapless “No” campaign managed, every one of the arguments advanced by the “Yes” campaign simply by setting them cruelly in the context of the real world.

In this real world, an army of beheading, crucifying, rapist terrorists who slaughter women and children and chuck gay men off high buildings has taken control of another major Iraqi city and of one of the world’s greatest ancient sites (which it will soon no doubt strive to erase from the earth); the global economy succumbs to ever more burdensome regulatory capture by a self-serving cabal of lawyers, technocrats, corporatists and politicians over whom we have less and less democratic control; a mendacious, aggressive and supremely well-funded and well-connected green movement is trying to destroy free markets, drive up energy prices and impose on us one world government in the guise of a nebulous concept called “sustainability”; uncontrolled immigration is rendering many of our countries increasingly unrecognisable; the elderly (and not-so-elderly) are dying, parched, and neglected in their own blood and faeces in a healthcare system no longer fit for purpose; Muslim rape gangs continue to prey on vulnerable white girls with near impunity in towns all over Britain; the Mediterranean is fast reverting to the era of Barbary piracy; Putin is hotting up the Cold War; China doesn’t give a damn; across most of the “free West” defence spending is being cut to the bone is if there were no longer any more causes worth fighting for; in the wake of Prince Charles’s visit to Ireland we learn the happy news that the people who blew up his godfather may have been granted permanent immunity from prosecution. Oh, and the same is almost certainly true of the senior IRA commander who ordered the killing of Jean McConville (the mother of ten mentioned at the beginning) and who – if we are to believe this investigation by the New Yorker – may not be unconnected with the beaming grey-bearded fellow who posed for selfies with Panti Bliss and others at the recent “Ireland goes gay” bullying smug-fest.

Obviously my list of things that are seriously wrong with the world is by no means comprehensive. But it does, I hope, give an indication of just how many serious issues are being swept under the carpet today by a culture which would rather buoy itself up with feel-good gesture politics like the (technically entirely unnecessary) Irish referendum than grapple with the problems that really matter.

Read more at Breitbart London

 

Green activists explain how to brainwash kids with climate porn

As the Jesuits almost said: “Give a child until he is seven and I will show you the fully indoctrinated, yogurt-weaving, polar-bear hugging eco loon.”

Such, at any rate, has been the message at one of the panel discussions at this year’s luvvie-fest of impeccably correct thinking, the Hay Literary Festival, where a group of “CliFi” authors have been singing the praises of brainwashing the impressionable young through the medium of kiddie-friendly climate pornography.

Climate activists are targeting children through a new range of ‘cli-fi’ – climate fiction – novels which seek to highlight the dangers of global warming.

David Thorpe, author of the book Stormteller, said that children were more open minded and claimed that writers could ‘infect’ their minds with ‘seriously subversive viral ideas’.

He was speaking at the Hay Festival alongside ‘cli-fi’ authors George Marshall and Saci Lloyd.

“I like writing for children because their minds are still forming,” said Mr Thorpe whose novel is set in a coastal Wales ravaged by climate change and rising sea levels.

“They are asking all sorts of questions about how the world is working. Their minds haven’t been tainted by ideological bias, they are still open minded about it.

“You can try to be seriously subversive and try to infect their minds with these viral ideas that they can explore on their own to make it exciting. When I was that age I loved having my mind boggled.”

Saci Lloyd, author of the children’s book, The Carbon Diaries, said it was important to write engaging stories for children while keeping climate change as an underlying theme, so it was not obvious that it was a central topic.

Interesting use of the word “subversive” there in the novel sense of “achingly conventional”. I don’t know how many classes you’ve visited, David Thorpe – quite a few, I would imagine, given my understanding of how assiduously children’s authors court schools in order to have their jottings whacked willy-nilly onto parents’ bills – but what you might have noticed had you been paying any attention is that “global warming” is taught these days as assiduously as the Sermon on the Mount, the parables and the Ten Commandments used to be in the past.

Also on the panel was a chap called George Marshall, author of a book called Don’t Even Think About It: Why our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.

“We need to get climate change out of the rational side of our brain and into the emotional part because that is where attitudes are formed on the basis of our values,” he said.

So if the facts don’t suit you, make stuff up. Yeah, I get it.

 

Read more at Breitbart London

Benefits Street: if anyone’s being exploited here it’s the taxpayers who fund these bludgers

My favourite scene in the first episode of the new series of Benefits Street (Mondays, Channel 4) — now relocated to a housing estate in the north-east, but otherwise pretty much unchanged — was the one where the street’s resident stoner and low-level crim Maxwell has to attend a court summons.

Really, if the whole thing had been scripted and faked by the film-makers (as I’m sure it wasn’t: no need), it couldn’t have worked out better. With just 15 minutes to go before Maxwell’s court hearing seven miles away, his brother turns up to give him a lift on his motorbike.

But there’s one small problem. Maxwell’s brother is still under the influence of the vast quantities of diazepam he’s carrying with him in his bag. ‘I took ten last night. I don’t even know what day it is.’ The sensible solution, they decide, is to park the bike at Maxwell’s house, neck a handful more pills, and make their way to the court by bus. Unfortunately, en route, they are assailed by an urgent need to stop for a lollypop called an Ice Bucket. From inside the newsagent, the camera captures the bus they should have taken whizzing past. Maxwell and his brother appear mildly affronted by the stubborn failure of Reality to accord with the plan in their heads. Increasingly delirious, they stagger on…

I suppose if you were a Guardian reader — or indeed Maxwell’s local MP Alex Cunningham, who has been trying to get mileage out of this issue — you’d think this was exploitation. Here are ordinary non-working folk being wheeled out like performing monkeys for Channel 4’s latest ratings-grabbing exercise in ‘poverty porn’.

Actually, though, I think if anyone is being exploited here, it’s those of us who have to fork out for these epically useless scroungers’ welfare bills. Their housing benefit alone — in Stockton-on-Tees’s Kingston Road and its equivalents across the country — costs us nearly £24 billion a year. Add to that the disability benefit paid for dubious conditions like Maxwell’s — he suffers memory loss: not altogether surprisingly given the acres of weed he smokes each day — and the cost of his various court cases and you can’t help thinking that the bread and circuses of shows like Benefits Street are the very least we deserve in return for our compulsory generosity.

Anyway, the new gallery of characters in this latest Benefits Street don’t feel they’re being exploited, so what’s the problem? Not only — it’s quite clear — do they relish the opportunity of becoming the next White Dee, but actually the portrait the programme paints (when it’s not having a snigger) is of a community admirably cheerful and resilient in the face of hardship.

The street is bound together by its two matriarchs Sue and Ju — with 11 children between them, one severely disabled and very lovingly cared for. Yes, they’re all on benefits, but they’ve created a thriving micro-economy based essentially on barter and favours: free hair-dying for free roast dinners, and so on.

How accurate this slightly rose-tinted portrait is, with its tasteful soundtrack and its sometimes flattering photography — Sue and Ju, bathed in sunlight, spirited, indomitable and proud — you can never quite be sure. Well, actually you can: you know it’s a lie because all documentary series like this are, be they Benefits Street, Geordie Shore, Made in Chelsea or The Islandwith Bear Grylls.

There’s been controversy recently over The Island (Wednesdays, Channel 4) because it turns out that the pristine and remote islands on which the two groups of survivors (one male, one female) have been cast away aren’t quite as authentically wild as Grylls’s rugged, sweating pieces-to-camera suggest. Well, not in the case of the girls’ one, anyway. Those ‘wild’ pigs we saw the girls accidentally stumble across: the reason they’re so tame and acquiescent is that they are domestic animals that were put there by the producers to give the girls something to hunt and kill.

As a massive fan of the show, I can’t say I’m too affronted by this cheat, not least because of the hilarious light it has enabled the series to cast on the quintessential differences between men and women. On the boys’ island, the men have quickly found their feet as Lord of the Flies savages, successfully trapping and killing a quite big crocodile (an endangered variety, apparently, but tough). But the starving girls, on encountering two cute piglets, decided to make them their friends. They named them Sage and Onion and cuddled them in bed at night like teddy bears. Only later did it finally occur to them that if they didn’t get some protein soon, they’d all die. Cue a heartbreaking moment of double petricide…

From The Spectator