James Delingpole's Blog, page 27

10 reasons to be cheerful about the coming new Ice Age

It's official: a new Ice Age is on its way. In what has been described as "the science story of the century", heavyweight US solar physicists have announced that the sun is heading for a prolonged period of low activity. This makes global cooling a much more plausible prospect in the next few decades than global warming. Indeed, it might even usher in a lengthy period of climate grimness such as we saw during the Maunder Minimum (when Ice Fairs were held on the Thames) or the Dalton Minimum (which brought us such delights as the 1816 Year Without A Summer).

Here's how Watts Up With That reports the bad news:

A missing jet stream, fading spots, and slower activity near the poles say that our Sun is heading for a rest…

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Vote Blue, Go Green, Ruin Britain

Sometimes it takes a trip abroad properly to ram home just how screwed your country is. And so it proved when, on the deck of a Baltic cruise ship, I first read reports of Scottish Power's dramatic gas and electricity price rises. Instead of experiencing a wave of fury, as no doubt I would have done at home, what I felt instead was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality.

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I'm on a cruise with lots of rich, conservative Americans. And it's brilliant

No, this isn't one of those articles written after the event, where you only pretend you're writing from an exotic dateline but you've actually since got home. This time I really can see the Ruritanian towers of Tallinn's old city reflected in the mirror in front of my writing desk.

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Is he a genius?

You'll forgive me, I hope, for coming back so soon to the subject of Adam Curtis, the first part of whose All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace was so ably dissected by Simon Hoggart last week. Only, no less a personage than Bryan Appleyard of the Sunday Times has estimated Curtis as 'TV's greatest documentary maker' and the BBC obviously agrees. So, really, two Speccie TV reviews in a fortnight is surely the barest minimum this genius deserves.

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Lord Fellowes is right: posh people are the last persecuted minority

This morning I had a debate on BBC Radio 4's Today programme with someone called Owen Jones on the issue of class in modern Britain. It was provoked by Lord Fellowes (aka Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey), who argued in a Times interview that toffs are the one remaining minority in Britain against which it is considered acceptable to discriminate.

Recently, he was watching Loose Women — "a programme I rather enjoy" — and one of the participants declared: "I hate posh blokes." Lord Fellowes says: "There was a cheer from the audience. If I said, 'I hate Americans', or 'I hate blondes', or 'I hate common blokes', that wouldn't work. But somehow that one…

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There will never be justice if we leave it to lawyers

The big question this week is: 'Should Giles Coren be bound, gagged, shackled and sentenced to life imprisonment in the torture block of the sexual offenders' wing of Black Beach maximum security prison in Equatorial Guinea, there to become the plaything of Mad "Mamba" Mbigawanga, the Man-Rapist Giant of Malabo?'

Well, obviously, when you put it like that, the answer's obvious.

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All hail Adele for committing the music industry's worst sin

Is Adele the bravest, craziest, most downright wonderful star in the history of pop? After what she has just told Q magazine on the subject of tax, I think she might well be.

Here's what she said: "I'm mortified to have to pay 50 per cent! [While] I use the NHS, I can't use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are ––––, and I've gotta give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [her album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire."

The reaction from Guardian readers online has been typically unpleasant: "£4 million is nothing compared to the money the NHS needs for the psychological damage her painfully bad excuse for…

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My problem with Barack Obama isn't that he's black…

…My problem with Barack Obama is that he's a white liberal.

All right, I've cracked this joke at least twice before – once in Welcome To Obamaland and once in 365 Ways To Drive A Liberal Crazy – but it's always worth repeating for at least two good reasons. 1. It's true. 2. It annoys the hell out of all those liberal-lefties who love to pretend that attacks on their pet president are racially motivated. As, predictably, many of them did below my last blog post O'Bama? Oh puh-lease!

Here's one of the paragraphs they found so offensive:

"Except, when he's in Africa, of course, when he disappears into the dry ice and re-emerges with a grass skirt and a bone through his nose and declares himself to be Mandingo, Prince of the Bloodline of the Bonga People, Drinker of Cattle Urine, Father of A Thousand…"

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O'Bama? Oh puh-lease!

Ah Bejaysus and Begorrah! Oi'll be swearin' boi the auld shrine to the Vorgin with the shamrocks growin' round it next to the hill where Cuchullain slew the Great Leprechaun of Kildare on St Patrick's Day that Barack Seamus O'Toole Flaherty Joyce O'Bama is the most Irish US president that ever set foot on the Emerald Oisle, so he is, so he is.

Except, when he's in Africa, of course, when he disappears into the dry ice and re-emerges with a grass skirt and a bone through his nose and declares himself to be Mandingo, Prince of the Bloodline of the Bonga People, Drinker of Cattle Urine, Father of A Thousand Warrior Sons, Keeper…

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Big Brother Beeb

For the past few weeks, unnoticed by all but the most sharp-eyed critics, BBC1 has been running a Celebrate Communitarianism season.

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