James Delingpole's Blog, page 53

Why us?

I have been depressed lately and Why Did You Kill My Dad? (BBC1, Monday) wasn't what I needed at all. In it award-winning film-maker Julian Hendy interviewed the families of some of the 100 innocents who are randomly murdered each year by psychopaths. Hendy's dad was one of them. It was all so sensitively, movingly done, and the 'Why us?' testimonies of the bereaved parents, wives and children were so heartbreaking that it made you want to cry.

The villain of the piece was the psychiatric...

Ayn Rand's books are deliciously anti-statist, but her philosophy is borderline Nazi

'I am Howard Roark in a world of Ellsworth Tooheys…' I tweeted in a fit of depression the other day, though I rather wish I hadn't. I'm not an architect — and if I were I definitely wouldn't be a humourless monomaniac into concrete and influenced by Le Corbusier; I don't have hair 'the exact color of ripe orange rind' (does anyone?); I'm not a rapist; and, to be honest, I'm not even sure I like the novel that much anyway.

It's called The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and if you haven't read it t...

Greens sacrifice babies to Satan, sell grandmothers into slavery, etc

So it's true: as some of us have suspected all along, Greens really are much more insidiously evil than the rest of the human race. All that eco-righteousness, all that ostentatious recycling and non-disposable-nappy-washing, all that more-healthily-flatulent-than-thou pulse-scoffing, all that "ooh-get-me-I-never-fly-unless-I-have-to-because-I-read-somewhere-that-Carbon-Footprints-are-like-really-bad-for-Mother-Gaia" (Yes that means YOU, Hannan) – it's all just a cloak of sanctimony used to h...

Sir John Houghton: AGW is real because I've got a knighthood, I'm a scientist and I say so

"Let's be honest…." says Sir John Houghton, formerly chief of the Met Office and leading climate doom-monger, in a fascinating article in today's Times. Fascinating, that is, for what it is says about our supine MSM's apparently boundless appetite for allowing itself to be used as the climate fear promotion lobby's uncritical propaganda mouthpiece.

Can you imagine the leader of Hamas being given freedom to explain in a national British newspaper column how his party had always been an ardent s...

Herod orders top UN scientists to investigate mysterious infant slaughter in Judaea

What marvellous news to learn that the UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon is to launch a thorough investigation into the science behind climate change! It's the equivalent of Kenneth Lay promising to organise a full and frank investigation into the accounts at Enron, or Herod ordering an urgent inquiry into the appalling and mysterious slaughter of infants in Judaea: all it will do is end up confirming the prejudices of the person who commissioned the report.

And as Ban Ki Moon himself says...

Two things I love about the Arabs

Today's blog is brought to you from Dubai, courtesy of Emirates Airlines, which is sponsoring the city's annual Festival of Literature. As always when I'm in the Middle East, I'm instantly reminded why it is that Britons from TE Lawrence to the Prince of Wales to pretty much anyone who has ever worked in our Foreign Office tends to go weak at the knees over Arab culture: because when you're on the receiving end of its hospitality, there are few finer experiences in the world.

This Literature F...

How the British Establishment is conspiring to prop up the AGW myth

News has just reached me that the great Professor Ian Plimer, scourge of climate-fear-promoters everywhere, has been suddenly disinvited by the Royal Society of Artists (RSA) from a lecture he was due to give in May before an audience including the Duke of Edinburgh.

Here's part of the embarrassed kiss-off Prof Plimer received from the RSA's chief executive:

I am afraid I am writing to you with some disappointing news regarding

the Prince Philip Annual Lecture on 5 May.

As you well know, the...

Why we need more conservative madrassas

Question Time: celebrating the cosy consensus

Watching another dismal episode of the BBC's Question Time last week, I realised why British politics is in such a dire state. It's because the language of debate has been hijacked so comprehensively by the liberal left that not even conservatives dare speak up for right-wing views any more for fear of being dismissed as extremist.

By "right wing" I don't mean anti-semitic, xenophobic, "racist", "sexist" or any of the other glib caricatures...

The majesty and usefulness of recycling captured in an exquisite hand-crafted child's toy

A Texas reader, Robert Birch, wishes to draw your attention to a magnificent artistic creation he is selling on Ebay, which he lovingly constructed from 100 per cent recycled materials (not all of them organic, unfortunately, but still…). Clearly he believes as passionately in the virtues of recycling as I do. Unfortunately I can't seem to reproduce the picture here.

But I urge you, go to his Ebay page, think of all the world's children who are being drowned, starved or bored to death thanks t...

What Dave and his chum Barack don't want you to know about green jobs and green energy

Green jobs are a waste of space, a waste of money, a lie, a chimera. You know that. I know that. We're familiar with the report by Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez of the Rey Juan Carlos University in Spain which shows that for every "green job" that is created another 2.2 jobs are LOST in the real economy.

We also know that alternative energy is a fraud – only viable through enormous government (ie taxpayer subsidy) and utterly incapable of answering anything more than a fraction of our energy...