James Delingpole's Blog, page 31

Japan: whatever happened to the nuclear meltdown?

Amazing, isn't it, what a little light military intervention can do to a nuclear crisis?

One minute, the world is facing nuclear meltdown armageddon to rank with – ooh, Three Mile Island at the very least, and quite possibly Chernobyl. A few (shockingly expensive) missile strikes over Benghazi and Tripoli later, though, and the Japanese nuclear crisis has all but vanished from the face of the earth.

Maybe we should start small wars more often. Or maybe – even better – the MSM could learn to start reporting on nuclear incidents like journalists instead of activists from Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.

I'm with Lewis Page on this one. In the Register, he writes:

As one who earns his living in the media these days, I can only…

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10 O'Clock Live is shedding viewers. Oh dear

Channel 4's groovy, topical, political comedy show for the nation's yoof 10 O'Clock Live is being hammered in the ratings. It launched in January with 1.4 million viewers. Now its audience has slipped to less than half that. Its commissioners at Channel 4 are putting a brave face on this. But it doesn't sound like the definition of a great success story. I wonder why that could be.

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Twitter: 'Tweet' went the birdy, and we did

About four years ago, my bleeding-edge techno guru friend John gave me some unwanted advice. "You've got to get yourself on Twitter!" he said. "Oh yeah? What's Twitter?" I asked. And when John explained in further detail I knew at once that Twitter was an utterly useless idea that was never going to catch on in a million years.

"So you're limited to 140 characters? How's that an improvement on a text or an email?" I asked. And: "But what exactly are you going to tell people in these 'Tweet' thingies? 'Mm. I have just had a delicious sandwich for my lunch'. That kind of thing?" And: "Isn't it kind of creepy having all these random strangers sharing every last intimate detail of your life?" And: "Who'd want to read this kind of drivel anyway?"

Now, though, I am eating my words. Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday, the company is worth around $3.7 billion and among the 200 million users sending 140 million Tweets daily, is a sneery sceptic turned complete addict called James Delingpole.

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Wind farms kill whales: blubber on the green movement's hands

So wind farms don't just despoil countryside, frighten horses, chop up birds, spontaneously combust, drive down property prices, madden those who live nearby with their subsonic humming, drive up electricity prices, promote rentseeking, make rich landowners richer (and everyone else poorer), ruin views, buy more electric sports cars for that dreadful Dale Vince character, require rare earth minerals which cause enormous environmental damage, destroy 3.7 real jobs for every fake "green" job they "create", blight neighbourhoods, kill off tourism and ruin lives, but they also

KILL WHALES!

According to researchers at the University of St Andrews, the sound of offshore wind farms is likely to mess with the whales' sensitive sonar systems and drive them ashore, where they get stuck on beaches and die.

Has anyone else noticed the gentle irony here? Well, let me…

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Nuclear power – some perspective

Yesterday I suggested that the fuss about imminent nuclear disaster was greatly overdone. And predictably, the first name invoked by one of the gang of shrill haters who congregate below this blog was Chernobyl. So I'm grateful to Roddy Campbell for producing this guest post on that subject.

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Triumph of the West

If at the beginning of the 15th century you'd had to predict who was going to dominate the world for the next 500 years, the answer would surely have been China. From the sophistication of its sanitation system to the size of its fleet, China — under the Emperor Zhu Di and his eunuch naval commander Cheng Ho — was a country going places. Its mighty, 400-foot-long ships sailed as far as Malindi on the East African coast and probably Australia. It had invented the clock and, of course, gunpowder.

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Liking the cut of Rommel's uniform doesn't make you a Nazi

'Oh Daddy, please can I have that Nazi eagle badge. Oh please, oh please.'

We're standing in the gift shop of the Baugnez '44 memorial museum outside Malmedy, Belgium — me, Grandpa (aka my dad) and Girl — and we're peering longingly into the original second world war memorabilia display case like Tiny Tims at Christmas. There are so many things we'd like if only we had the money: original GI helmets (€400 for a good one, with decent leather strap), packets of vintage Camels, tins of delousing powder, camouflage sticks, Wehrmacht pay books and, yes, Nazi eagle badges of all shapes and sizes. Inevitably, it's the German stuff we covet most.

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Did 'climate change' cause the Japanese earthquake?

No.

But that hasn't stopped one or two unscrupulous environmentalists trying to make the spurious connection. Top prize for shamelessness goes to one Staffan Nilsson, president of an EU offshoot called the European Economic and Social Committee.

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Alfred S: Australian schoolboy; climate hero

I've had some good news on the climate war front which I'm looking forward to telling you about next week. Till then, I invite you to join me in a toast to an Australian schoolboy named Alfred S who stood up to the vilification of his teachers and class mates by refusing to bow down and worship ManBearPig. (H/T Bishop Hill)

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Aussie sceptics destroy EU carbon commissioner

Is this the best five minutes of radio in the history of broadcasting? I think it might be. Have a listen and judge for yourself.

It's an Australian interview with Jill Duggan, a British woman who you almost certainly won't have heard of, but who yet holds the economic future of an entire continent in her grasp. As an expert on carbon markets for the European Commission's Directorate-General for Climate Action, Duggan will help mastermind the EU's bold – and massively expensive – plans to reduce Europe's carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. In the process she will of course destroy every last vestige of 550 million people's economic future: but until now – as is evident from her stumbling and surprise – no one has really called her on it.

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