James Delingpole's Blog, page 9

US professor discovers the reason for Islamic State: climate change, apparently

A New York professor has discovered the real reason for the rise and rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq: not Islamist fundamentalism, death-cult nihilism or regional power struggles but climate change.

Charles B Strozier, Professor of History at the City University of New York, enlarges on his fascinating thesis at the Huffington Post.

While ISIS threatens brutal violence against all who dissent from its harsh ideology, climate change menaces communities (less maliciously) with increasingly extreme weather. Most of us perceive these threats as unrelated. We recycle water bottles and buy local produce to keep the earth livable for our children — not to ward off terrorists. Yet environmental stressors and political violence are connected in surprising ways, sparking questions about collective behavior. If more Americans knew how glacial melt contributes to catastrophic weather in Afghanistan — potentially strengthening the Taliban and imperiling Afghan girls who want to attend school — would we drive more hybrids and use millions fewer plastic bags? How would elections and legislation be influenced?

As evidence for this novel theory, Professor Strozier – with help from one Kelly A Berkell, attorney and research associate at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice – cites the four-year drought which ravaged Syria from 2006 to 2010, setting off a “dire humanitarian crisis for millions of Syrians”.

He argues:

Drought did not singlehandedly spawn the Syrian uprising, but it stoked simmering anger at Assad’s dictatorship. This frustration further destabilized Syria and carved out a space in which ISIS would thrive.

It is, apparently, a matter of some concern to the professor that this truth is not more widely recognised.

The connection between climate change and conflict continues to evade mainstream recognition, despite reports by think tanks, academics and even military experts. A leading panel of retired generals and admirals, the CNA Corporation Military Advisory Board, recently labeled the impacts of climate change “catalysts for conflict” in vulnerable regions. The Pentagon concluded similarly in this year’s Quadrennial Defense Review that the effects of climate change are “threat multipliers,” enabling terrorism and other violence by aggravating underlying societal problems.

Indeed. We have written about this unlikely alliance between the US military and the climate alarmism industry at Breitbart too. But the conclusions we have drawn on this are not quite as enthusiastic as Professor Strozier’s. Au contraire, the US military’s weird decision to lend its authority (and vast budget) to endorsing the discredited junk science of the warmist establishment is in much the same league of unforgivable irresponsibility and institutional political correctness that made, for example, the Fort Hood massacre possible.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Face it, the right are going to lose the next UK general election. Unless…

David Cameron has said he thinks schools should teach mainly in imperial measurements rather than in nasty, foreign, and undeniably French metric.

Funny that. It’s almost like he’d had spies at the rowdy Conservative conference fringe event the night before – staged by smokers’ rights campaigner Forest and Conservatives for Liberty – where I raised this very topic in a speech on Europe. I noted the irony that even though we defeated Napoleon in 1815 and Hitler in 1945 we still seem to have inherited half their policies all the same. From Hitler, inter alia, we got the clampdown on smoking and the obsession with environmentalism. From Napoleon, among other things, we got the metric measurement system – despite the fact that most of us continue stubbornly to think in pints and miles rather than half litres and kilometres.

Prime Ministers don’t make these casual asides by accident. Clearly, what’s going on here is that Cameron has been advised to chuck a few gobbets of red meat to the more reactionary wing of the Tory party: to the kind of people, in other words, who feel badly let down by four years of Cameron’s dogged centrism and who are now sorely tempted to throw in their lot with UKIP instead.

We heard similar right-wing mood music in Chancellor George Osborne’s speech yesterday: the freeze on benefits; the emphasis on tax cuts rather than spending rises; the renewed commitment to tackling the deficit. I was reminded of the chats Osborne and I used to have in the playground when our children were briefly at the same school together. “Just you wait till we form a majority government: then you’ll see what real Tories we are…” he used to say.

As a natural small ‘c’ conservative, I have little problem with this rightwards turn. (Though I think this imperial stuff is forgettable nonsense: yes it’s all jolly and jingoistic but let’s get real – the 30cm ruler is here to stay and it’s not like we’re going to go back to pre-decimal currency). But let us not be under any illusions as to why this is happening. It is not because the Cameron claque has suddenly realised that they were right-wing all along and that actually, come to think of it, they really do believe that the state has got far too big and that we’d all be better off outside Europe. It’s because their minds have been concentrated by opinion polls showing that, thanks to UKIP splitting their vote, the Conservatives are on course to lose the next election to Ed Miliband’s socialists.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Wildlife populations have dropped over 50 per cent since 1970 says WWF. Bollocks!

The world’s wildlife population is collapsing – with fewer than half as many wild animals around today as there were in 1970. So claims the WWF (Worldwide Fund for Nature) in its latest

headline-grabbing report.

Here are some reasons why we ought to take these claims with a massive pinch of salt.

1. The WWF is not an objective scientific body but an environmental activist organisation with a strong vested interest in ramping up public hysteria, a) to put pressure on government to advance its preferred green totalitarian measures and b) to increase donations.

This is clearly evident if you actually look at the report from which these headline figures are taken. It abounds with scaremongering claims like: “We are not only threatening our health, prosperity and well-being, but our very future”, with pseudo-scientific greenie-lefty jargon like “planetary boundaries” and “sustainable development”, and anti-capitalist, anti-growth admonitions like “Changing our course and finding alternative pathways will not be easy. But it can be done.”

2.The environmental movement has a long and undistinguished track record of overstating population decline and species extinctions in order to exaggerate its case. Most recently we saw this in the tale of the “extinct” giant snail that wasn’t. Few would dispute that as human populations grow and land is developed and deforested animal populations will come under increasing pressure. But that 53 per cent figure looks about as trustworthy as those equally dubious claims by ecologists claiming that as many as 40,000 species go extinct every year. Really? Where are the bodies?

3. These are not solid scientific figures but extrapolations based on estimates, expressed as a modeled trend. The Global Living Planet Index (LPI)? Oh yeah? And what’s one of them when it’s at home? In order for us to take it seriously, we must first trust the accuracy of the raw data on individual species populations (dependent on what may be partial and limited field studies), second the way this data has been adjusted by the WWF to extrapolate a global trend. As we’ve seen with global warming, the opportunities for cherry-picking, confirmation bias and outright fraud are legion.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

On Gamergate – and why Grand Theft Auto V is the Helm’s Deep of freedom of expression

The last — and only — time I had sex with a whore she was so impressed by my performance that she begged me to do it all over again. I thank the drugs. Before popping out in my stolen car for my rendezvous with my skanky ho, I had smoked a couple of fat blunts which I’d found ready prepared for me by my bitch next to my beer fridge and it put me in just the right mood.

But none of this was ‘real’. I was playing the video game Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV) and enjoying the transgressive thrills of living the life of a young black hoodlum in inner-city America. It’s an experience I can highly recommend, not just because you get to steal flash cars, deal drugs, drive the wrong way down one-way streets, change into any number of hoodies and cool sneakers, and shoot people — but also because as you’re doing it you’re sticking a defiant finger up to the Man. Or more specifically, to the stifling worthiness of our modern culture whose default position on innocent pleasures like this is to condemn them for their outrageous sexism, racism, misogyny and violence.

And yes, maybe games like GTAV are all those things, but it doesn’t seem to do them much harm at the box office. Au contraire: on its release last year GTAV became the most successful entertainment product in history, earning $1 billion within its first three days of release. No doubt the superb gameplay was a draw. As were the groovy soundtrack and state-of-the-art graphics. But the clincher, I suspect, for a lot of its young male fans, was the sheer joyous escapism into a universe where you can still act out your most politically incorrect fantasies without some professional victimhood group like 350.org or Everyday Sexism demanding you be carted off in the Outrage Bus for compulsory re-education.

You only have to consider briefly what has happened to the various other branches of the culture and entertainment industry to appreciate how rare this is. We live in a world where basketball club owners and football managers are expected to converse, even in private, like Harriet Harman at an equality seminar; where Hollywood scarcely dare cast an African-American in any role other than police chief, supreme court judge or the voice of God; where the crazed terrorists in TV dramas are invariably rogue Mossad agents or crazed Christians; where you can mock any religion you like on stage, provided it’s not the Religion of Peace. Gaming is the last bastion, the Helm’s Deep of freedom of expression.

Some say the reason that the computer industry managed to get so rich is that it grew faster than government’s ability to constrain and regulate it — and something similar probably explains the untrammelled rise of the games industry. You’re probably not aware — most people aren’t — that it is now bigger than Hollywood, worth $80 billion a year. It rose without anyone noticing, because gaming has long been unfairly stigmatised as an activity for malodorous bedsit-dwellers rather than cultural trendsetters. And it grew to be so enormous by doing what other branches of the entertainment industry have largely forgotten: not by giving punters what they ought to like, but what they actually want.

Read the rest at The Spectator

Why conservatives shouldn’t ‘believe’ in climate change

Have you ever wondered why conservatives don’t talk more often about nationalisation of industry, wealth redistribution, affirmative action, the need for higher taxes and more government intervention, Islamophobia, the glories of multiculturalism, the “war on women”, and the urgent need to rein in economic growth in order to give the planet a more sustainable future?

Me neither.

Conservatives don’t talk about these things because they are idle leftist preoccupations which have no place in a political philosophy based on personal responsibility, liberty and empiricism.

Which is why I’m a little puzzled by the latest outburst by Meghan McCain – daughter of US senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain – on the Pivot cable TV talk show Take Part Live.

She said:

“I do watch Fox News at night on occasion — and a lot of the time you see people throwing around climate change: ‘Of course climate change isn’t real! This is just a liberal issue! I think this is a cultural issue.”

“If we make this more accessible to people and turn this into a cultural issue meaning, Republicans, you’re not going to be able to hunt and fish as much — which I love doing — if there is no fucking fish to get!”

So another of the many dire consequences of climate change is that there will be no more “fucking fish”. Who knew? Clearly, with her high-level connections Ms McCain must have access to some privileged information since, so far as I’m aware, no serious scientist to date has tried to parlay “fucking fish” into their litany of predicted climate doom. (It’s not like fish – fucking or otherwise – are exactly going to be bothered by rising sea levels, is it?)

Still, Ms McCain is right about one thing. Climate change is, indeed, a “liberal” issue. In polls across the Western world, conservatives have always emerged as much more sceptical about man-made global warming than people on the left.

According to the left’s version of events this is because conservatives are ignorant, out of touch, anti-science and selfishly reluctant to change their greedy, sybaritic lifestyles.

(Hence the cheap shot from McCain’s co-presenter Jacob Soboroff, who said: “Put this shit on a beta tape or on a DVD and send it to all the Republicans without Internet!”)

But actually it’s much simpler than that. Conservatives are sceptical about “climate change” because they sense instinctively that this is a political issue rather than an environmental one – a suspicion given strong credence by the ongoing lack of convincing evidence that recent global warming is in any way catastrophic, unprecedented or significantly man-made.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Palestinians reveal the truth about Gaza: ‘Hamas wanted us butchered so it could win the media war against Israel’

Now that the smoke has cleared from the recent Israel/Gaza conflict the truth of what really happened is finally beginning to emerge. Hamas – the terrorist regime which controls Gaza – does not come out of it well.

“If Hamas does not like you for any reason all they have to do now is say you are a Mossad agent and kill you.” — A., a Fatah member in Gaza.

“Hamas wanted us butchered so it could win the media war against Israel showing our dead children on TV and then get money from Qatar.” — T., former Hamas Ministry officer.

“They would fire rockets and then run away quickly, leaving us to face Israeli bombs for what they did.” — D., Gazan journalist.

“Hamas imposed a curfew: anyone walking out in the street was shot. That way people had to stay in their homes, even if they were about to get bombed. Hamas held the whole Gazan population as a human shield.” — K., graduate student

“The Israeli army allows supplies to come in and Hamas steals them. It seems even the Israelis care for us more than Hamas.” — E., first-aid volunteer.

“We are under Hamas occupation, and if you ask most of us, we would rather be under Israeli occupation… We miss the days when we were able to work inside Israel and make good money. We miss the security and calm Israel provided when it was here.” — S., graduate of an American university, former Hamas sympathizer.

These quotes were collected by Mudar Zarhan, a Jordanian-Palestinian writer and activist at the Gatestone Institute, who used his contacts in the West Bank to secure secret interviews with friends and family members in Gaza. All spoke anonymously because of the understandable fear that if their identities were revealed they would face execution by the ruthless Hamas regime.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Radio Free Delingpole: Scotland’s bloody stupid referendum; Gamergate

Here is my latest Radio Free Delingpole podcast, with special guest Milo Yiannopoulos

It’s bloody great, as usual.

 

Report: wind industry riddled with ‘absolute corruption’

A Mexican ecologist has blown the whistle on the corruption, lies and incompetence of the wind industry – and on the massive environmental damage it causes in the name of saving the planet.

Patricia Mora, a research professor in coastal ecology and fisheries science at the National Institute of Technology in Mexico, has been studying the impact of wind turbines in the Tehuantepec Isthmus in southern Mexico, an environmentally sensitive region which has the highest concentration of wind farms in Latin America.

The turbines, she says in an interview with Truthout, have had a disastrous effect on local flora and fauna.

When a project is installed, the first step is to “dismantle” the area, a process through which all surrounding vegetation is eliminated. This means the destruction of plants and sessilities – organisms that do not have stems or supporting mechanisms – and the slow displacement over time of reptiles, mammals, birds, amphibians, insects, arachnids, fungi, etc. Generally we perceive the macro scale only, that is to say, the large animals, without considering the small and even microscopic organisms…

….After the construction is finalized, the indirect impact continues in the sense that ecosystems are altered and fragmented. As a result, there is a larger probability of their disappearance, due to changes in the climate and the use of soil.

Then there is the damage caused by wind turbine noise:

There is abundant information about the harm caused by the sound waves produced by wind turbines. These sound waves are not perceptible to the human ear, which makes them all the more dangerous. They are also low frequency sound waves and act upon the pineal and nervous systems, causing anxiety, depression (there is a study from the United States that found an elevated suicide rate in regions with wind farms), migraines, dizziness and vomiting, among other symptoms.

But the wind turbine operators are able to get away with it because the system is so corrupt.

What happens is absolute corruption. I have to admit that generally there are “agreements” behind closed doors between the consultants or research centers and the government offices before the studies are conducted. They fill out forms with copied information (and sometimes badly copied), lies or half truths in order to divert attention from the real project while at the same time complying with requirements on paper. Unfortunately, consultants sometimes take advantage of high unemployment and hire inexperienced people or unemployed career professionals without proper titles. Sometimes the consultants even coerce them into modifying the data.

Research centers, pressured by a lack of funding, accept these studies. It is well known that scientists recognized by CONACYT (National Counsel on Science and Technology) accept gifts from these companies, given that they need money to buy equipment for their laboratories and to fill their pocketbooks to maintain their lifestyles. This is the extent of the corruption. Upon reviewing these studies, it is clear that the findings are trash, sometimes even directly copied from other sources online. These studies tend to focus on the “benefits of the project” and do not include rigorous analysis.

The Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) does follow-up to the studies, but everything can be negotiated. The bureaucrats have the last word.

Read more at Breitbart London

Scottish referendum: Britain is still Great – but for how much longer?

First the good news. Thanks to last night’s “No” vote in the Scottish referendum Britain has been spared the following: a run on the pound; the hasty exodus of Scotland’s finance industry; the premature death of UKIP; the gloating of Alex Salmond; a Red-Wedding-style outbreak of backstabbing and bloodletting among Tories and Labour alike; a collapse in the markets; at least two years of procedural sclerosis in the British and Scottish parliaments; the entirely unnecessary and utterly ill-considered rupture of a the greatest Union between nations the world has ever known; waking up this morning to find ourselves no longer in bed with cherished (if fractious) friends, allies, partners and comrades alongside whom we’ve fought, loved and prospered for over 300 years.

Now the bad: it’s all over anyway.

What Alex Salmond and his Scottish National Party (SNP) insurgency achieved in Scotland last night is equivalent to what the Viet Cong and NVA achieved during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. Yes they may have lost the battle. But it was their stepping stone towards ultimately winning the war.

Just as the speed and aggression and co-ordination of the Tet Offensive caught the complacent US military and political establishment on the hop, so were David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and all the other “Better Together” campaigners completely wrong-footed by the Saltire insurgency of Alex Salmond and his woad-painted nationalists.

With hindsight, we can all tell ourselves that last night’s victory for the “No” vote was inevitable. With almost the entire British political establishment – including three prime ministers – behind it, not to mention an excedingly rare and unlikely union of the left and right media (and The Daily Mail shall lie down with The Guardian and the BBC…), as well as three hundred years of history, the continuation of the Union ought to have been a foregone conclusion.

But that is certainly not how it has felt in the last fortnight. Hence the unseemly scramble we witnessed in the last few days as Cameron and co headed north to grovel and abase themselves on broken glass promising Scotland anything and everything just so long as it remained in the Union.

And so it has come to pass: a small tactical victory has been gained at the expense of a massive strategic defeat.

Read the rest at Breitbart London

Memo to the BBC: it’s not the ‘far right’ which decapitates aid workers or rapes schoolgirls

Here is the news: in Australia, a plot by Islamic State sympathisers to capture random members of the public and chop their heads off has been foiled by security services; in Syria, two Americans and a British hostage have been beheaded by an Islamist nicknamed Jihadi John – and another innocent Briton (a taxi driver captured while working for an aid convoy) has been told he is next on the list; across Britain, in the aftermath of the Rotherham enquiry, more and more evidence is emerging that in towns and cities all over the country mostly underage white girls have been systematically groomed, raped and trafficked by organised Muslim gangs, with the complicity of local government authorities, charity workers, police officers and the broader Muslim community.

Luckily, thanks to the BBC, we know what the real problem is here. It is, of course, our old friends, “Islamophobia” and “the spectre of a far right” backlash.

Both of these alleged threats featured prominently on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, including an interview with a former, self-confessed “far right” thug who revealed – presumably to no listener’s especial surprise – that the organisation to which he had belonged was racist, prone to violence, and likely to react strongly to issues like the Rotherham rape gangs.

Today also ran an interview with Tell Mama – the one-man activist organisation run by Fiyaz Mughal which has long since been exposed for its exaggerations and its threadbare methodology in cooking up an alleged spate of “anti-Muslim” hate crimes.

When, for example, last year Tell Mama reported that there had been 212 anti-Muslim incidents, it turned out that 57 per cent of these comprised disobliging comments on Twitter or Facebook, many of them emanating from outside Britain.

And the BBC Today show rounded off with a Muslim spokeswoman who was given space to assure listeners that mosques around Britain were already doing a great deal to combat extremism but hadn’t been given credit for it.

Phew. So that’s all right then.

Except, of course, it’s really not all right.

Perhaps it wouldn’t matter so much if this BBC feature were a rare aberration. But it’s not. It’s long-term house policy. Barely were the bodies of the 52 victims of the 7/7 London bus and tube suicide bombings cold than the BBC’s reporters were out pounding the streets looking for evidence of the real issue of concern – not Islamist extremism and its numerous fellow-travellers, of course, but yes, for the spectre of Islamophobia and an anti-Muslim backlash by “the far right.” It responded in the same way after the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby – complete, of course, with an interview about the “cycle of violence against Muslims” and the “underlying Islamophobia in our society” by our friend Fiyaz Mughal of Tell Mama.

Read the rest at Breitbart London