Puff-Pastry Intellectuals

 False Rape Stories

In his book, Intellectuals Paul Johnson indicts successive, famous modern intellectuals for lying.  Not just an occasional porky, but a life-long dedication to fabrication.  Apparently, their “higher truth” and status as superior beings justified lying and living lives of systemic deceit.

This is not to say that all intellectuals are liars.  But the incidence is sufficiently common that anyone with the slightest dose of cynicism would at the very least suspend belief when prominent, celebrated intellectuals are involved.  Indeed, the more celebrity attached to an intellectual, the more likely professional deceit is at the core of their public (and private) personae.  Johnson does the numbers on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, poet Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Victor Gollanz and Lillian Hellman.  All were deceitful liars.  All built and cultivated a public image and a personal narrative that was untrue.

In recent weeks we have seen two incidences of what appear to be fabricated claims about rape.
  In the first, a starlet and self-appointed and self-promoted intellectual, Lena Dunham claimed to have been raped whilst a student at Oberlin College.  The claim was made in a book authored by Dunham.  It certainly helped turn her intellectualising into a rampant best seller.  But a few serious and professionally cynical journalists started to research her rape account.  It has quickly unravelled. Dunham has not co-operated in the least to assist corroboration of her claims. Lena Dunham appears to have joined a long, illustrious line of mendacious intellectuals.  What is common to them all is the telling of lies to augment and buttress the particular opinions and philosophies they wanted to peddle. 

This apparent disgrace has been fast-followed by a gang rape account alleged to have taken place in a  University of Virginia frat house.  Rolling Stone ran the story, only to issue an embarrassing partial retraction a short time later, acknowledging “inconsistencies” in the story.  Apparently the account of the complainant, “Jackie” was never cross checked.  As one commentator put it: “Erdely and her editors were so determined to find exactly what they were looking for, they took the word of one young woman and the say-so of a handful of activists as a substitute for proof.”

Jonah Goldberg, writing in the LA Times, had publicly questioned the story’s veracity.

Rolling Stone has published an incredible story about a rape at the University of Virginia. The story has sent shock waves around the country. But when I say the story is incredible, I mean that in the literal, largely abandoned sense of the word. It is not credible — I don’t believe it. 

He then goes on to pick the Rolling Stone piece apart. For his trouble, he received a barrage of criticism.

Goldberg further shows his lack of familiarity with the problem of college rape when he calls the victim’s friends the “worst … imaginable” for not immediately reporting her brutal assault. Here, Goldberg fails to appreciate the very real fear of being chastised for reporting a rape. I’m not saying that the friends were right in not reporting it, and I’m not making a judgment on whether or not the assault happened. But it’s clear that Goldberg’s cultural distance from modern campus life and disregard of the social consequences of reporting an assault render him inadequate to judge the veracity of a rape allegation.  Sadly, Goldberg’s piece is the type of ill-informed berating that makes victims of sexual assault afraid to come forward in the first place.

No, to the contrary, stories like Lena Dunham’s and “Jackie”, the alleged rape victim at the University of Virginia,–which at best are unsubstantiated, and at worst, downright fabrications for the “greater good”, actually have done terrible harm.  Rape is an awful crime.  But lying about it, or, at the very least, appearing to lie about it,  for purposes of propagandising against it makes dealing with rape ten times harder.  If there is shame about reporting rapes (and there surely is) Dunham and Rolling Stone have just made it much, much worse.  At the very least, Dunham and Rolling Stone thus far have indirectly facilitated and encouraged rape and rapists.

It is some–albeit small–comfort that Rolling Stone has partially retracted its piece.  But where was the necessary “willing suspension of belief” which is supposed to be the hallmark of Journalism 101 in the first place?  Oh, that’s right, Rolling Stone editors and journalists wanted the story to be true in the interests of  a particular propagandising position.

And that, dear friends, is the classic dissembling mode of puff-pastry, wannabe intellectuals.  On the other hand, those seriously committed to detecting and prosecuting rape will be gnashing their teeth in righteous anger and frustration at the harm these idiots and flakes have done. 
 

Myopia and Living in Denial

Send In the Clowns

A US Republican congressman recently opined that Vice-President Joe Biden was only two shoes short of a clown. The jibe was intended to remind the country why Republicans don’t want to impeach the President. Were Obama to go, Joe would ascend to the Oval Office. It’s a scary thought to many.

ISIL’s actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own. Today we grieve together, yet we also recall that the indomitable spirit of goodness and perseverance that burned so brightly in Abdul-Rahman Kassig, and which binds humanity together, ultimately is the light that will prevail over the darkness of ISIL. President Obama

But the jibe was a double entendre. The irony of the second meaning refers to that which Joe Biden presently lacks (two clown feet). Obama has them in spades. He is the clown complete with two enormous feet. The only time he opens his mouth is to change them. That’s why he is qualified for the top job, and Biden is a pale understudy. Uproariously funny.

Obama as the consummate clown entertained us all recently with his formal statement lamenting the sad death of an US aid worker, Peter Kassig, murdered by ISIS. Adopting the mien of a celebrated and revered Doctor of Theology, Obama emphatically assures us that Kassig’s murder had nothing to do with Islam and its teaching.

It is just this kind of chutzpah and ideological drivel which makes Obama the laughing stock of most of the world. His utterance in this instance reminds us of risible afflations of Soviet disinformation at the height of the Cold War, or, more recently, out of Pyongyang, North Korea.

Ends That Justify Dissembling

Habitual Liars

Every so often politicians or those active in legislative chambers “show and tell”.  They let us know what is (or has been) really going on.  One such moment has taken place in the United States.  One of the architects of deeply unpopular Obamacare has acknowledged (to a select audience) that at a critical point the language of the bill was crafted to disguise the truth.  The truth being disguised was that Obamacare, at its heart, is an enforced application of socialised medicine, where the more wealthy pay for the healthcare of others, through a taxing mechanism.

One of the architects of Obamacare said the law was written in a deliberately “tortured” way and relied on the “stupidity of the American voter” to ensure its passage.

In a newly unearthed 2013 clip, Jonathan Gruber, the MIT health economist who helped craft parts of the Affordable Care Act, got fairly candid about the tactics used to get the Affordable Care Act passed during a panel at the Annual Health Economists’ Conference last year.  “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes,” Gruber said in one 52-second clip. “If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. OK, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in – you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

Gruber then trumpeted the value of a “lack of transparency” — and called American voters stupid.  “Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really really critical for the thing to pass.” [Emphasis, ours]

Lack of transparency–or dissembling, deceit, lying–is ever a favoured device amongst the enemy, for they are children of the Father of Lies.  Ideologues, for whom a cause justifies all means to achieve it, will ever resort to lying and duplicity to get their way. 

In New Zealand our recent history provides a classic example.
  The former Labour Government was led by a cabal deeply committed to ideological feminism–the extreme kind–which wanted to see all women freed from the “shackles” of motherhood and parenthood.  Freedom would come from the State as it replaced mothers as the primary care-givers of young children, thereby allowing women to get into the work force soon after giving birth.  Women would then take a giant leap forward in the struggle to become “equal” with men.  The strategy was to develop the Israeli kibbutz model on a grand scale.  State-run day-care centres on every corner.

But Prime Minister, Helen Clark and her co-conspirators realised the electorate would never go for it.  So, it had to be “disguised”.  Very cleverly Clark began to trumpet early childhood education as critical to seeing children become effective students and scholars later in life.  Formal schooling would no longer begin at five years old, but would start from the cradle–at Early Childhood Education (“ECE”) centres, funded by the State (since the State in New Zealand has always funded education–well, at least ever since the end of the nineteenth century).

Who would ever deny every child a decent start in life?  But it was all a smokescreen.  The real objective was to liberate post-partum women so they could to get into the work force as soon as possible.  If people knew this from the outset, the measure would have been deep-sixed before you could count out the numbers.  But Clark and her mob were cunning dissemblers.  They succeeded handsomely.

But now the lie has become as  plain as the proverbial on one’s face.  The State, having set up ECE centres everywhere (and still going for it pell mell), and having blown the budget from an initial costing of around $400m per year to over a billion and climbing–has turned around and declaimed anyone teaching anything in ECE centres.  The official essence of education in a state Early Childhood Education centre is to teach nothing, nada.  If you are an ECE centre and you dare to attempt to teach four year olds anything, the educational authorities will have you in the principal’s office quick smart for the bollocking of your life.  Try teaching the alphabet.  Try instructing children in how to hold a pencil and draw letters.  You would be guilty of doing immeasurable harm to the poor wee ones.  Any more of that and your state license will be removed.

ECE centres are not about early childhood education at all.  That proposition was and is pure propaganda.  They are really about state-run baby sitting centres, enabling women to get into the workforce to live the feminist “dream”, thereby achieving “equality” with males.

Now, to be sure, not all who take advantage of the ECE rort are buying into the propaganda, nor the ideological vision of the secular feminists.  Some are using ECE centres for enabling contact with other children and neighbourhood parents.  Others are using them as day care centres whilst they go out to work, and so forth.  Each may be perfectly legitimate reasons.  But to pass all this off as early childhood education to enable children subsequently to succeed in schools, achieving high educational qualifications is a rort of gargantuan proportions.  Once again we are in Alice’s Wonderland.

But’s what’s a little lie amongst co-conspirators, if it achieves the greater goal, eh? 

Letter from the UK (About History’s Greatest PR Disaster)

Climate Change: The Biggest PR Fail In History

By James Delingpole 

 20 May 2014

Breitbart London

Just three per cent of Americans consider “the environment” the most important problem, according to the latest Gallup poll. (In Britain, too, people appear to be decreasingly worried about climate change).

This surely represents, by some margin, the biggest PR fail in history.

It was once conservatively estimated (by blogger Richard North) that the cost of propping up the global warming industry since 1989 was equivalent in real terms to five Manhattan Projects. But that was back in 2010, since when spending on green boondoggles (eg the Obama ‘stimulus’) has risen exponentially, so we’re likely looking at ten Manhattan Projects now.

A good chunk of that spending has, of course, gone towards “educating” the public.

This “education” takes many forms: from blatant propaganda, like the UK government’s £6 million “drowning puppy” ad campaign, the Obama administration’s recent Climate Assessment Report and the one released  by a group of compliant senior US military figures calling themselves CNA Military Advisory Board, to more subtle brainwashing ranging from school trips to wind farms and ice cream containers with pictures of wind farms on the side and oil company adverts illustrated with wind farms (to show they’re not just “all about oil”) to, well, pretty much everything these days from supermarket delivery vehicles boasting about how much biofuel they use to Greenpeace campaign ads involving polar bears to Roger Harrabin’s reporting for the BBC to Showtime’s Years Of Living Dangerously….

Truly, for nigh-on three decades now, there has been no escaping, anywhere, any time of day or night from the constant, bleeding-heart imprecations and blandishments of Big Green Brother.
  Imagine what a private business could do with that level of PR support. A campaign in which not just the government, not just the schools but even Big Oil companies, even supposedly badass, straight-talking generals from the US military were prepared to offer their muscle.

Why with a PR machine like that you could surely persuade your customers to do absolutely anything: to eat worms; listen all the way through a Bruno Mars album without wishing to stab your eardrums with a fork; anything.

Yet, ten Manhattan Projects’ worth of expenditure down the line, and we still can’t persuade more than a tiny fraction of the population of the urgent need to give up hot showers, iced water, air conditioning, air travel, car travel, warmth, comfort, prosperity, job prospects and economic growth in order to combat the unproven theoretical risk that slight increases in the trace gas CO2 may one day cause the planet to warm by a couple of degrees…

I wonder why that might be.

More Histrionics. More Noise Please. We’re Desperate.

The Way of the Fool

The IPCC has published its latest broadside in a flailing attempt to get its fictitious anthropogenic apocalypse back on track.  It’s got to the stage when it is becoming amusing.  We are now in the denouement stage of the plot.  We are in clear and present danger! shrieks the siren.  All kinds of calamities are about to fall upon the human race if the global temperature rises by between 2 and 4 degrees in the next one hundred years.  Case and argument is weak.  Shout louder. 

Excuse us.  Pardon.  Two degrees.  That hardly sounds like a calamity.  No, well, the script used to read eight to ten degrees, but the scaremongering and Chicken Littling has been toned down just a bit, especially since global temperatures have shown no signs of going up over the past fifteen years–despite carbon dioxide disgorgement continuing on its merry way over that time.  But in order to get action, a calamity of some sort must be concocted.  A “clear and present danger” must be manufactured from somewhere to make governments and the poor suckers they govern get in line.

Whilst the apocalyptic orchestra has toned down the volume, it has increased the screeching.  No harmonies or melodies in sight.
  This latest piece of IPCC desperation tries to paint the consequences of two degrees of warming over one hundred years in the most lurid, frightening, sensational, armageddon-esque lights possible.  To re-terrify the Commentariat and its chattering classes.  To use fear to get them to fall in line.  But as the years pass, the horror story more and more becomes farcical.

We note that some dumb media are striving their best to do what is expected of them.  This from Isaac Davison, in the NZ Herald:

New Zealand is unprepared for sea level rises of half a metre by the end of the century that could turn 1-in-100 year flooding events into annual occurrences, a blockbuster report on climate change has revealed today.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s much-anticipated climate update found that New Zealand had a significant “adaptation deficit” in the face of human-influenced global warming of between 2C and 4C by 2100.

The UN organisation’s analysis said the country was already witnessing climate change in the form of extreme weather events, and could expect more frequent and more intense storms and damage to coastal infrastructure and low-lying ecosystems as a result of rising oceans.  New Zealand scientists described the report as a wake-up call which should prompt New Zealand to “take its head out of the sand”.

A “blockbuster report”.   What a hoot.  More like a Roald Dahl bedtime story to terrify four year olds.  The UN gravely tells us that we are already witnessing climate change–as, of course, we have for the past five thousand years.  Folks, we may take you with a bit more seriousness if you dump the specious descriptor “climate change” to cover for what you really mean–“global warming”.  But the hard data does not support your propaganda, so you have engaged in trickery and deceit, trying to fool people.  No-one can deny “climate change” because the climate is changing all the time, whereas global warming is fictional.  That alone reveals your mettle.  But the only ones you are scaring are young children.  Adults long ago worked it out.  That’s why climate change barely registers in surveys of the public as something about which those with common-sense are concerned about. 

What is even more of a hoot is the cacophonous chorus of “the science is settled” by which is meant, “We don’t want to talk about whether global temperatures are rising or not.  It’s too embarrassing.  We know that they are not.  So we will just assert that they are and insult anyone who dares suggest otherwise.  We will beg the question.  We will assume what has to be proven.  Meanwhile, we will talk about all the horrendous consequences if it were true.  That way, we will more likely keep everyone in line.”  It’s what propagandists do.

But the chuckles get even louder when the NZ government responds to the latest diatribe of horror.  It has expertly palmed it off like a magician at the top of his craft.  So clever, so deserved.  Firstly, the NZ government welcomed the UN report.  “Good one, boys. We love this stuff.”  Next, the assertion that New Zealand is taking all of this climate apocalypse stuff really, really seriously–delivered, of course, in sober, sotto voce tones.  Then, the claim that the government has taken plenty of steps and measures to ensure that no calamities will cross New Zealand shores on its watch as it battles heroically against global warming.  And what it actually does as little as possible–which is precisely the right thing to do–because, underneath it all, the present NZ government knows that global warming catastrophism is a faux calamity, and even if it weren’t there are no votes in it anyway. 

Climate Change Minister Tim Groser said the report backed the view that adaptation was as important part of dealing with climate change that could not be ignored.  “While much of our focus is on getting international agreement on reducing emissions, some change can’t be avoided so we must be prepared to adapt.”  He noted that on top of the risks that this country faced, it could also benefit from reduced energy demand because of warmer winters and some regions could observe increases in spring pasture growth.

The IPCC report started out trying to moderate the extremism of previous efforts.  It not only watered down to more realistic levels the degrees of expected global warming, it also sought to call not for costly radical intervention but for gradual adaptation to it.  James Delingpole:

The economic costs of ‘global warming’ have been grossly overestimated, a pre-release leaked report – shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has admitted.  Previous reports – notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review – have put the costs to the global economy caused by ‘climate change’ at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.  But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.

If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it’s around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.  This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists – notably the Stern Review’s author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore – who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change.

But the summary of the Report reverts again to the old, tired, extremist alarmism.  Got to get those troops in line and moving.  Got to strike the fear of Hades into them.

Unfortunately, those expecting the IPCC’s Working Group II’s report to effect a new note of realism in global economic policy on climate change may be disappointed.  That’s because the Summary for Policymakers (the only part of the IPCC’s reports that policymakers tend to read) will – as usual – strike a much more alarmist tone than the contents of the more detailed report actually justify.

“Basically, it has been Pachauri-ised,” says Benny Peiser of the independent think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Peiser is referring to the IPCC’s jet-setting chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian former railway engineer who has consistently put an alarmist complexion on all the IPCC’s Summaries for Policymakers.

It turns out that the level of global warming now being speculated upon in the IPCC report is mild.  It turns out that if true, a bit of global warming will be good for us.   And that’s the whole matter in a nutshell.  Climate changes.  It cycles through warm and cold phases.  Human being adapt.  End of story.  But they adapt as and when something happens, not one hundred years in advance on the basis of something that might happen but most likely will not.  That is the way of the wise.

But to act now to prevent something which will gradually emerge over a one hundred year period, but which may not, and which, if it did, will have a slew of positive side-effects, would be idiocy.  It is the way of the fool. 

Global Warming Not a Problem–Even If True

Global Warming Will Not Cost the Earth

IPCC Report Admission

By James Delingpole

March 26, 2014

Breitbart London

The economic costs of ‘global warming’ have been grossly overestimated, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has admitted.  Previous reports – notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review – have put the costs to the global economy caused by ‘climate change’ at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.

But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.  If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it’s around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.

This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists – notably the Stern Review’s author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore – who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change. 

Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern was commissioned by Tony Blair’s Labour government to analyse the economic impacts of climate change. Stern, an economist who had never before published a paper on energy, the environment, or indeed climate change, concluded that at least two per cent of global GDP would need to be diverted to the war on global warming.

Stern’s report has been widely ridiculed by economists, whose main criticism was that its improbably low discount rate placed an entirely unnecessary burden on current generations. Even if you accept the more alarmist projections of the IPCC’s reports on “global warming”, the fact remains that future generations will be considerably richer than our own – and therefore far more capable of mitigating the damages of climate change when or if they arise.

But Stern’s Review, published at the height of the global warming scare, was seized on by policy makers around the world as the justification for introducing a series of economically damaging measures, including carbon taxes, more intrusive regulation and a drive to replace cheap, efficient fossil fuels with expensive, inefficient renewables.

This is why Lord Stern has been variously described as “the most dangerous man you’ve never heard of” and been held responsible for some of the worst economic excesses of the green movement.
As Bishop Hill wrote:

When you see wind farms covering every hill and mountain and most of the valleys too, you can blame Stern. If you can’t pay your heating bills, ask Stern why this has happened. When children are indoctrinated and dissenting voices crushed, it is at Nicholas Stern that you should point an accusing finger. When the lights start to go out in a few years time, it’s Stern who will have to explain why.  Despite years of having mainstream economists pointing to the flaws in the Stern Review there has been an almost unanimous collective shrug from the media, more interested in climate porn than the wellbeing of their neighbours.

These measures make no economic sense whatsoever, as economist Andrew Lillico argues here.

So the mitigation deal has become this: Accept enormous inconvenience, placing authoritarian control into the hands of global agencies, at huge costs that in some cases exceed 17 times the benefitseven on the Government’s own evaluation criteria, with a global cost of 2 per cent of GDP at the low end and the risk that the cost will be vastly greater, and do all of this for an entire century, and then maybe – just maybe – we might save between one and ten months of global GDP growth.

Unfortunately, those expecting the IPCC’s Working Group II’s report to effect a new note of realism in global economic policy on climate change may be disappointed.  That’s because the Summary for Policymakers (the only part of the IPCC’s reports that policymakers tend to read) will – as usual – strike a much more alarmist tone than the contents of the more detailed report actually justify.

“Basically, it has been Pachauri-ised,” says Benny Peiser of the independent think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Peiser is referring to the IPCC’s jet-setting chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian former railway engineer who has consistently put an alarmist complexion on all the IPCC’s Summaries for Policymakers.

As evidence for this, economist Richard Tol – a Working Group II author – asked yesterday for his name to be removed from the Summary For Policymakers. He said:

“The message in the first draft was that through adaptation and clever development these were manageable risks, but it did require we get our act together.”

“This has completely disappeared from the draft now, which is all about the impacts of climate change and the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is a missed opportunity.”

Letter From Australia (About Abiding Confusion)

Confusion should give alarmists pause for thought

Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun
February 12, 2014 8:00PM

[With the extended cold snap in the US, pundits, talking heads, and the feeble minded are busy asserting that the severe cold this northern winter is a result of global warming.  So, weather is not climate and does not count.  This is the first evasive manoeuvre.  Second, colder weather is a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  Therefore, global warming actually causes colder weather.  Ergo, colder weather is evidence of global warming. Second evasive manoeuvre.  

If it gets hotter and temperatures rise, it’s caused by mankind effecting atmospheric change resulting in rising temperatures.  If it gets colder–same deal.  Upshot: global warming ideology cannot be falsified.  Therefore, it is not scientific, since it is going to be “true” regardless of the data.  In the light of this extensive human foolishness, Andrew Bolt’s piece below is apt and timely. Ed]

YOU would think scientists of the NSW Climate Change Research Centre had done enough damage to their warmist crusade.

A month ago, its Professor Chris Turney got his ship of researchers stuck in Antarctic sea ice he had claimed was melting away.  “Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up,” Turney’s expedition wailed.  In fact Turney’s team — planning to examine parts of the Antarctic “highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming” — apparently hadn’t realised sea ice there had grown over three decades to record levels.  How we laughed.

Yet the self-deluded have to be complimented on their consistency.  All data which might indicate that the thesis is wrong is used to trumpet still more loudly how right the thesis is–Orwellian Doublespeak in spades.  Turney seriously told us amidst his frozen imbroglio that extending sea ice in Antarctica was actually evidence of global warming and shrinking ice world-wide.  One presumes, therefore, since A is not non-A, that less ice would indicate global cooling.  Not when you are confronting propaganda rather than science or logic.

Turney’s climate centre, at the University of NSW, sponsored this disaster, which ended with two icebreakers rescuing the mortified professor and his warming crusaders.  It’s farce like that which helps explain why the CSIRO reported last week only 47 per cent of Australians buy its spin that the climate is changing and we’re to blame.  Australians now rate global warming of “low importance”, the CSIRO sighed, and warmists faced “the challenge of finding the right language” to gee them up. But up bobs another Climate Change Research Centre scientist to show the warmists’ problem isn’t the “right language” but the false hype.

Public scepticism about the global warming hypothesis is gradually rising.  We suspect that another ten years of the sort of nonsense about how global warming is evidenced by every kind of weather condition will swamp the swamp for good.  Here is another example.

Two years ago, Professor Matthew England appeared on the ABC’s Q&A to attack Nick Minchin, the former Howard government industry minister and a sceptic. Minchin had raised a puzzling fact: the planet had not warmed further since 1998.  “Basically we’ve had a plateauing of temperature rise,” he said. CO2 emissions had soared, but “we haven’t had the commensurate rise in temperature that the IPCC predicted”.

England’s response?  “What Nick just said is actually not true. The IPCC projections from 1990 have borne out very accurately.”  England later even accused sceptics of “lying that the IPCC projections are overstatements”.

So imagine my surprise when England admitted last week there had been a “hiatus” and “plateau in global average temperatures” after all. Startled readers asked England to explain how he could call sceptics liars two years ago for mentioning a “plateau” he now agreed was real.  England was defiant: “In terms of my comments on Q&A, I stand by them. Back then, the observations had not departed from the model projection range. In the past year or two, 2012 average and also 2013, that’s no longer the case.”

What bull. In fact, five years ago the pause was already so obvious that Family First senator Steve Fielding confronted Penny Wong, Labor’s climate change minister.  “Global warming quite clearly over the last decade hasn’t been actually occurring,” Fielding said, and showed Wong the temperature charts. Wong and her advisers — chief scientist Penny Sackett and climate scientist Will Steffen — said he was wrong. Journalists mocked him. Except, of course, the warming pause is now so obvious even England now admits it.

What we suspect is actually on show here is “groupthink”.  Global warming has always been a political cause, an attempt to extort money out of governments to fund academic research, increase one’s academic profile for career reasons, exact a wealth transfer from richer nations to poorer nations via the United Nations, and so on.  When one’s constituency changes its tune on some aspect of global warming ideology (such as temperature data showing no global warming) the experts change their opinions more frequently than their socks. Groupthink is always the outcome of political ideology. Since the global warming hypothesis is pretty much hard data free, scientific opinions can change as readily as the political constituency that birthed it in the first place. 

True, the warmists always have excuses and the ABC reports each without noting how the latest contradicts the last. Last week it reported England’s new paper explaining the warming pause: “Stronger than normal trade winds in the central Pacific are the main cause of a 13-year halt in global surface temperature increases …”  England now claims those stronger winds somehow drove the missing warming into the deep ocean.  But only eight years ago the ABC reported the opposite: “The vast looping system of air currents that fuels Pacific trade winds … has weakened by 3.5 per cent over the past 140 years and the culprit is probably human-induced climate change.”

Eh?

Will the ABC at least apologise now to sceptics who warned of the warming pause it now reports? How about a sorry from chief science presenter Robyn Williams, who once likened sceptics to people who “told you paedophilia is good for children”.

Once it was passe to smear any counter view to the prevailing global warming orthodoxy as being a creature of Big Oil funding.  If so, asked global warming sceptics, where’s the money?  Let us at it. We are starving impecuniously in Scepticsville.  But the global warming narrative, being a creature of politics and political ideology, has always had a Marxist sub-text.  Global warming was caused by capitalism, big business, big money, corporate greed, and so forth.  So it fitted the narrative to frame sceptics as tools of Big Oil, rolling in dirty money.  Sceptics were guilty on two counts. First, their venal greed.  Second, their science was bogus, a creature of money, not truth.  Tenured scientists, receiving grants from governments and the UN octopus–well, that’s another story.  Their money was righteous, not tainted by evil profit and corporate greed. 

The Climate Change Research Centre might apologise, too. Another of its scientists, Professor Andy Pitman, once complained “climate scientists are losing the fight” because sceptics are “so well funded”, “don’t have day jobs” and “can put all of their efforts into misinforming”.  But warmists are being tripped up by stubborn facts, not corrupt sceptics. Where’s my warming, dude?

Emeritus professor Garth Paltridge, a former CSIRO chief research scientist, warns climate scientists hungry for power, fame and funding could have utterly trashed the reputation of science. They may have “been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem … to promote the cause.  It risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour.”

What a tragedy. Or is it? At least we won’t all die of heat.

What Webs We Weave

No H8? — Bombshell Book: Matthew Shepard Tortured, Murdered by Gay Lover

 

by Austin Ruse 14 Sep 2013, 10:07 AM PDT TheBlaze

[Philosophies and faiths can in general be known by their fruits.  Our Lord has instructed us to know people by their fruits–for good or ill.  The promotion of homosexuality is an ideological faith, part of an aggressive religion, which promotes the institutionalisation of human sexual lusts.  On the political front, one of the oft seen fruits of the movement to promote and normalise homosexuality is a love of lying and deceit to promote the cause.  This takes a variety of forms.  One is to allege that celebrities or public figures are secretly closet homosexuals.  Another is to engage in vicious personal vilification of ideological opponents.  The pivotal reason why truth telling is of little importance to the homosexual rights movement is due to it having no normative ethical standards by which it judges itself.  There are no moral absolutes in homosexuality, only situation ethics (“love” overrides all else) and utilitarianism (the end justifies the means). Of course these amoral ethical positions are not peculiar to the homosexual rights movement, but in our opinion they do typify it.

In 1998 a young homosexual male in Laramie, Wyoming was brutally murdered.  The general homosexual political narrative was to identify it first as a homophobic hate crime and second to use this horrible event as a cause c’elebre for the promotion of homosexual demand rights.  It is now being alleged that the homosexual propaganda network deliberately and knowingly distorting the truth, for the sake of the cause.  It would appear that the murder was actually a homosexual-on-homosexual hate crime and also a meth addict on addict crime.  That one homosexual would kill another is not the point.  That the homosexual lobby would lie and deceive the public about it is.  By these fruits we can assess the homosexual rights movement.  Ed.]

Almost everything you think you know about the Matthew Shepard narrative is false.

Matthew Shepard was the winsome young homosexual in Laramie, Wyoming who in October 1998 was tortured, killed, and left hanging grotesquely from a fence. He was discovered almost a day later and later died in the hospital from his horrific wounds.

On the night of October 6, Shepard met “two strangers” in the Fireside Lounge in Laramie. The two men offered Shepard a ride home but instead drove him to a remote area, robbed him, beat him with pistols, and left him splayed on a fence.  Cops found the bloody gun along with Shepard’s shoes and wallet in the truck of the two men — Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson.  McKinney and Henderson claimed the “gay panic” defense, that they freaked out when Shepard came onto them sexually and killed him in a rage. They made other claims, too, but were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Almost immediately Shepard became a secular saint, and his killing became a kind of gay Passion Play where he suffered and died for the cause of homosexuality against the growing homophobia and hatred of gay America.  Indeed, a Mathew Shepard industry grew rapidly with plays and foundations along with state and even national hate crimes legislation named for him. Rock stars wrote songs about him, including Elton John and Melissa Etheridge. Lady Gaga performed John Lennon’s “Imagine” and changed the lyrics to include Shepard.

Thanks to a new book by an award winning gay journalist we now know that much of this narrative turns out to be false, little more than gay hagiography.  As gay journalist Aaron Hicklin, writing in The Advocate asks, “How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that the facts are slippery — that thinking of Shepard’s murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?”

This startling revelation comes in The Book of Matt to be published next week by investigative journalist Stephen Jiminez, who over the course of years interviewed over 100 people including Shepard’s friends, friends of the killers, and the killers themselves.

According to The Advocate, one of the premier gay publications in the country, Jiminez “amassed enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard’s sexuality was, if not incidental, certain less central than popular consensus had lead us to believe.”

Even before Shepard died, two of his friends were peddling the narrative that he died at the hands of vicious homophobes. Within days the gay establishment latched onto what would drive the hate crimes story for years to come; even now, the Laramie Project, a stage play about the killing is performed all over the country. Indeed, it will be performed next week at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC.

But what really happened to Matthew Shepard?

He was beaten, tortured, and killed by one or both of the men now serving life sentences. But it turns out, according to Jiminez, that Shepard was a meth dealer himself and he was friends and sex partners with the man who led in his killing. Indeed, his killer may have killed him because Shepard allegedly came into possession of a large amount of methamphetamine and refused to give it up.

The book also shows that Shepard’s killer was on a five-day meth binge at the time of the killing. 

As to be expected, Matthew Shepard Inc. is rallying to denounce the new narrative that his homosexuality had little or nothing to do with his murder. The Matthew Shepard Foundation released this statement:

Attempts now to rewrite the story of this hate crime appear to be based on untrustworthy sources, factual errors, rumors and innuendo rather than the actual evidence gathered by law enforcement and presented in a court of law. We do not respond to innuendo, rumor or conspiracy theories. Instead we recommit ourselves to honoring Matthew’s memory, and refuse to be intimidated by those who seek to tarnish it. We owe that to the tens of thousands of donors, activists, volunteers, and allies to the cause of equality who have made our work possible.

The agenda of the sexual left lives on lies. As we all know now, the back-story that brought us Roe v. Wade was a lie. And here we find the Matthew Shepard story was also a lie.

The sexual left approves of such lies because they get to what they consider to be an underlying truth. The author of The Advocate piece writes, “There are valuable reasons for telling certain stories in a certain way at pivotal times, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold on to them once they’ve outlived their usefulness.”  [Emphasis, ours.]

Cheap Slurs

Science in the Propagandist’s Hands

In his superb book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg has a rollicking chapter on science.  It turns out that science has often become a club to beat up ideological opponents.  One of the most damaging slurs, apparently, that can be hurled at one’s opponent is to accuse them of being anti-science.

Here are some classics of the genre:

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election.  But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge.  And, in a time of severe challenges–environmental, economic, and more–that’s a terrifying prospect.

Paul Krugman, “Republicans Against Science,” New York Times, August 28, 2011.

More intelligent individuals m ay be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionary novel values and prefences (such as liberalism and atheism . . . ) than less intelligent individuals.

Satoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics and Political Science, “Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent,” Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2010.

We confess to enjoying great sport at lampooning the idiocy and stupidity of those who invest their own views and prejudiced cant with a veneer of superior intelligence.  There are none so dumb and stupid as those who proclaim their own (or their identify group’s) superior wisdom and intelligence, in the vain attempt to assure themselves they are “smarter than the average bear”.

Here is Jonah Goldberg’s amusing take on the circus:

A host of liberal activists and intellectuals are deeply invested in the idea that conservatives are “antiscience”.  Obviously, not all of these people argue in bad faith.  But many argue in very selective good faith.  They pick and choose the benchmarks of what constitutes being proscience.  So, for example, if you disagree with not only the diagnosis of climate change but the proposed remedies for it, you are antiscience.  Before it became clear that culling stem cells from human embryos was essentially unnecessary, it became a matter of faith that opposition to creating life in order to destroy it wasn’t a matter of conscience, but evidence of antiscience views.  . . . Defenders of embryonic stem cell research insist that opponents want to deny people life-saving remedies.  This is a horrendous slander on several levels, but if that is the relevant metric, how are we to deal with the armies of activists who oppose the use of DDT, which could save millions from malaria. . . . 

It is a scientific fact fire burns things.  One is not denying science when one seeks to ban arson.  No doubt, we could learn something  useful by conducting horrific experiments upon live human beings.  But conservative and liberals alike oppose such practices not because they are against science but because ethical considerations trump the pursuit of knowledge at all costs.  If Democrats came out tomorrow in favor of human vivisection and Republicans opposed it, Republicans would not suddenly become antiscience.  Rather, Democrats would suddenly become wrong.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 205f.]

All too often hurling the sobriquet antiscience against one’s opponent is a cheap slur, masquerading as an argument.  All too often science is a wax nose to be twisted and manipulated for ulterior ends.  All too often science is made to become the facile tool of  the propagandist. 

Tick, Tick, Tick . . .

Exploding Global Warming Myth Becoming Mainstream
 
Major Danish Daily Warns: “Globe May Be On Path To Little Ice Age…Much Colder Winters…Dramatic Consequences”!

By P Gosselin on 9. August 2013

 

Another major European media outlet is asking: Where’s the global warming?

Image right: The August 7 edition of Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, featured a major 2-page article on the globe’s 15-years of missing warming and the potential solar causes and implications.

Moreover, they are featuring prominent skeptic scientists who are warning of a potential little ice age and dismissing CO2 as a major climate driver. And all of this just before the release of the IPCC’s 5AR, no less!

Hat-tip: NTZ reader Arne Garbøl

The August 7 print edition of the Danish Jyllands-Posten, the famous daily that published the “Muhammad caricatures“, features a full 2-page article bearing the headline: ”The behavior of the sun may trigger a new little ice age” followed by the sub-headline: “Defying all predictions, the globe may be on the road towards a new little ice age with much colder winters.”

So now even the once very green Danish media is now spreading the seeds of doubt. So quickly can “settled science” become controversial and hotly disputed. The climate debate is far from over. And when it does end, it looks increasingly as if it’ll end in favor of the skeptics.

The JP writes that “many will be startled” by the news that a little ice age is a real possibility. Indeed, western citizens have been conditioned to think that nothing except warming is possible. Few have prepared for any other possibility.

In its latest 2-page report, the JP now appears to tell its readers that our views on climate science have to be much more open minded and unshackled from the chains of dogmatism.

JP starts by reminding readers that it was just over 100 years ago that the world had clawed itself out of the little ice age, which extended from 1400 – 1900, a time when the Thames river often froze over. All paths in determining the cause of the little ice age all seem to converge to a single factor: solar activity.

The Jyllands-Posten quotes David Hathaway:

‘We now have the lowest solar activity in 100 years,’ David Hathaway from American space research institute NASA newly concluded in connection to the release of new figures for the sun’s activity. He said the activity for the ongoing cycle is half of the previous cycle, and he predicted an even lower activity for the next cycle, which will hit us in few years.”

Suddenly even the greenest of media outlets among us are contemplating what the consequences of a quiet sun may be. The JP then quotes Irish solar specialist Ian Elliott, who says these consequences could be dramatic:

It indicates that we may be on the path to a new little ice age. It seems likely we are on the path to a period with very low solar activity, which could mean that we may have some very cold winters.”

Elliott then cites the ice-cold winters of 2009 and 2010 as early signs.
JP then cites at length Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark, who needs no introduction:

Since the 1940s and up to 10 years ago we have had the highest solar activity in 1000 years. The last time we had solar activity that high was when we had the Medieval Warm Period from year 1000 to around 1300. … Historically there has been a close connection between solar activity and temperature for the last 1000 years. Therefore the sun’s activity will also have influence the coming many years. … The unusual thing right now is that sun’s activity is decreasing while there’s a great increase in atmospheric CO2. For that reason the question is how much the earth will cool in a time of decreasing solar activity. … The development is beautifully consistent with a cooling effect of the solar activity in the same period. This could mean that the temperature will not rise for the next 30 years or maybe begin to decrease.”

JP also quotes Svensmark on the subject of the IPCC: “…many of the climate models used by IPCC and others overestimate the influence of CO2 and underestimate the influence of the sun. … The IPCC is very one-sided, so I don’t think there will be anything reasonable in the next report.”

Where did all the heat go?

In the second part (see right) of the JP’s feature story on climate science, the daily asks whatever happened to all the missing warming?

Despite predictions that the temperature on the globe should rise with a huge speed, nothing has really happened the last 10-15 years. However climate scientists are insisting we are in the middle of the heaviest global warming maybe ever, and that the temperature will rise with at least 2-4 degrees towards the year 2100.”

JP asks scientist Sebastian Mernild of the Glaciology and Climate Change Laboratory Center for Scientific Studies in Chile, who insists that ocean currents have taken the heat “down to the deep sea”.

Once unthinkable just a few years ago, the European media and JP are now starting to admit the oceans are a poorly understood wild card in the climate equation after all. JP openly states, “The oceans are generally regarded as the big wildcard in the climate discussion.” Jylland Posten ends its 2-page feature story with questions and comments by Svensmark:

How should ocean water under 700 meters be warmed up without a warming in the upper part? … In the period 1990-2000 you could see a rise in the ocean temperatures, which fit with the greenhouse effect. But it hasn’t been seen for the last 10 years. Temperatures don’t rise without the heat content in the sea increasing. Several thousand buoys put into the sea to measure temperature haven’t registered any rise in sea temperatures.”

=======
Special thanks to Arne Garbøl who brought this report to my attention, translated the content, and assisted me in putting this NTZ post up.

Tangled Webs Being Woven

Who Made Up the Porky?

Where did that fabricated story about the attack upon the US embassy in Libya come from?  This has now become the pressing question of the presidential campaign in the United States.

The story (now proven to be “spin”) came to the widespread attention of the country when  Ambassador Susan Rice went on six weekend talk shows one Sunday to tell the nation five days later that the attack upon the US embassy compound in Benghazi, Libya which killed four US government employees including the US ambassador, was a spontaneous demonstration of public rage incited and caused by an anti-Islam film made in the US. 

Up until that time few had heard of the now-demonised video.  Hillary Clinton’s US Secretary of State has now gone on the record stating that the State Department at no time, not even at the beginning of the attack thought that it was a public demonstration gone wrong.  This from the Daily Mail:

In a briefing on Tuesday, State Department officials said ‘others’ in the executive branch concluded initially that the attack was part of a protest against the film, which ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. That was never the State Department’s conclusion, reporters were told.

Both the State Department and the Defense Department believed that it was a deliberate, terrorist attack–from the beginning.  It had nothing to do, they concluded, with a public demonstration that turned violent.  This from Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense:

“The reason I think it pretty clearly was a terrorist attack is because a group of terrorists obviously conducted that attack on the consulate and against our individuals,” he told a Pentagon briefing.  “What terrorists were involved I think still remains to be determined by the investigation. But it clearly was a group of terrorists who conducted that attack against that facility.”

OK.  So where did the story come from?  Within one day, (Sept 12th) President Obama was implying that “denigration of religious beliefs” was the cause.

Sept. 12: As these homicides become clear, Obama says, “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others, but there is absolutely no justification for this type of senseless violence. None.” Obama then skips his daily intelligence briefing and jets to a Las Vegas fundraiser.

Within two days (Sept. 13th), Hillary Clinton was fingering the video as the true cause of the deaths of the Ambassador.

Sept. 13: “The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declares. “We absolutely reject its content and message.”

 The next day (Sept 14th) White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney said:

Sept. 14: “The unrest we’ve seen around the region has been in reaction to a video that Muslims, many Muslims find offensive,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announces.
That day, as the murdered Americans’ remains reach Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton says: “We have seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

Enter Susan Rice, the US Ambassador to the UN.   On Sunday, Sept 16th She emphatically told the nation via repeated appearances on national weekend cable shows six days after the tragedy that the deaths came from a public demonstration against a video defaming Islam which had been made in the US.  Now, we know (from Brit Hume) that no-one from the US administration is allowed to appear on the weekend talk shows without explicit approval from the White House.  So, Rice’s effort was a direct extension of the White House’s spin.

But now we know that it was all false.  The defence now has morphed into “Well, it’s what we were told at the time”.  OK.  So who told Clinton, Carney, Obama, and Rice et al. that the deaths in Libya were a result of a public demonstration against an anti-Islamic video?  No-one has come forward.  Clearly the US intelligence community, the Defense Department and the Department of State did not so brief their political masters.  It has now become clear they never believed that, even when it was occurring.

Where did the story come from?  Silence.  It is now clear that on the part of Clinton, Carney, Obama, Rice et al. it was a conjecture at best, or a wild fabrication, at worst.  But why?

Our best guess is because that’s the way Obama (and his colleagues) see the world.  They are pre-committed to interpret uprisings against the US in the Muslim world that way.  If Muslims are mad at us its because we have offended them.  It is at the heart of the Obama Doctrine.  It appears to be a classic example of the syndrome of fabricating “facts” to conform to a one’s world-view. 

Others have suggested that Obama had been extolling his success at defeating Al Qaeda via the execution of Osama Bin Laden.  To admit that terrorists were alive and well and fighting back would be a public humiliation.  Either way, it would represent fabrication and pure spin. 

There are few things more dangerous than a political leader who believes his own propaganda.  The Bible says that God gives men up to the remorseless tyranny of their own lies.  Obama and his coterie appear well down that track. 

Selective Editing

It’s Too Silly for Words

By the “playbook” of global warming alarmists, we are on very sound scientific ground to conclude that a devastating Ice Age is pending.  It will destroy life as we know it on planet earth. 

OK, so let’s open the global warming playbook to Page One:
This, from the Christian “Science” Monitor

Appearance of explosive WWI relics underscores Alps glaciers’ retreat

The Alps’ glaciers are in retreat at an alarming rate due to rising temperatures – as indicated by the discovery of rusted explosives left over from a nearly hundred-year-old cache.

Roped party members walk on a glacier from L’Aiguille du Midi in front of Les Grandes Jorasses in Chamonix, France, July 23.
(Denis Balibouse/Reuters)

---

By Nick Squires, Correspondent
posted September 17, 2012 at 1:43 pm EDT

RomeThey lay undetected for more than a century, a hidden legacy of the highest, most forbidding battlefield of World War I.  But last month, as Italy sweltered through one of the hottest summers on record, a cache of more than 200 rusted explosives emerged from beneath a melting sheet of ice in the Dolomite range in the country’s north.

The appearance of the explosives – at the end of the hottest summer since 2003 and one of the warmest since record keeping began – fed concerns about Italy’s rapidly dwindling glaciers and the threat posed by global warming. Across the Alps – not just in Italy but in neighboring Austria, Switzerland, and France – glaciers are in retreat at an alarming rate due to rising temperatures.

“In the worst-case scenario, by the end of the century glaciers in the Alps will be reduced to 5 to 10 percent of what we have now,” says Michael Zemp, a scientist with the World Glacier Monitoring Service.

OK, got the picture.  Heat wave in Europe means melting ice in the Alps.  Buried ammo gets exposed.  Oh, wait–was the ammo buried in ice, or in the earth.  In the earth; it had been buried beneath an ice sheet.  Implication: it must have been warmer back then in 1919, or whenever. 

But that aside, its the propaganda playbook that interests us more.  Melting ice means disaster.  OK.  So what would vast expansions of the ice field mean?  Yes, you have it right.  Disaster.  Man will be swamped with a looming ice age.  So at the same time, we are both going to cook to death and freeze to death. 

You haven’t heard about the freezing to death, the great global Ice Age about to descend?  Well, you should have.  Using exactly the same logic as the global warmist crowd, we would be perfectly entitled to make a credible claim to that effect, and to rubbish all opponents as denialists, anti-scientific luddites, etc.  Read the following, from Forbes:

Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

Antarctic Iceberg (Photo credit: NOAA’s National Ocean Service)

James Taylor, Contributor

I write about energy and environment issues.

Editor’s note:  An update from the author has been added to this article on September 20, 2012.

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.”

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.
Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.

Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

As meteorologist Anthony Watts explains, new data show ice mass is accumulating on the Antarctic continent as well as in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. The new data contradict an assertion by global warming alarmists that the expanding Antarctic sea ice is coming at the expense of a decline in Antarctic continental ice.

The new data also add context to sensationalist media stories about declining ice in small portions of Antarctica, such as portions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula (see here, for example). The mainstream media frequently publish stories focusing on ice loss in these two areas, yet the media stories rarely if ever mention that ice is accumulating over the larger area of East Antarctica and that the continent as a whole is gaining snow and ice mass.

Interestingly, a new NASA study finds Antarctica once supported vegetation similar to that of present-day Iceland.

“The southward movements of rain bands associated with a warmer climate in the high-latitude southern hemisphere made the margins of Antarctica less like a polar desert, and more like present-day Iceland,” a co-author of the NASA study reports.

The great con continues.

Letter From Australia (About Afghanistan)

It’s OK, We’re Winning

Candidate Obama infamously declared that “Afghanistan is the war we have to fight”.  Ever since it has been dubbed ‘Obama’s war’.  All the carefully orchestrated and choreographed reports from the war theatre tell us how well the war is going.  Eerie shades of Orwell’s 1984.

The reality?  Much different.  Here is one reality check–published in Australia, via the Sydney Morning Herald.

KABUL: For several years the United States has been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups. It is a bold effort to quell violence but one that US officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.

The disclosure comes as the House and Senate intelligence committee leaders declared that the Taliban had grown stronger since President Barack Obama’s deployment of 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in 2010.

As the US has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the ”strategic release” program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.  The releases are an inherent gamble: the freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence, and American officials warn them that if they are caught attacking US troops, they will be detained again. There are no guarantees, however, and officials would not say if those who have been released under the program have returned to attack US and Afghan forces.

”Everyone agrees they are guilty of what they have done and should remain in detention. Everyone agrees that these are bad guys. But the benefits outweigh the risks,” said one US official who, like others, discussed the issue on the condition of anonymity.

The releases have come amid broader efforts to end the decade-long war through negotiation, which is a central feature of the Obama administration’s strategy for leaving Afghanistan. Those efforts, however, have yielded little to no progress in recent years. In part, they have been stymied by the unwillingness of the US to release five prisoners from Guantanamo Bay, a gesture that insurgent leaders have said they see as a precondition for peace talks.

Unlike at Guantanamo, releasing prisoners from the Parwan detention centre, the only US military prison in Afghanistan, does not require congressional approval and can be done clandestinely. And although official negotiations with top insurgent leaders are seen by many as an endgame for the war, the strategic release program has a less ambitious goal: to quell violence in concentrated areas where NATO is unable to ensure security, particularly as troops continue to withdraw.

The program has existed for several years, but officials would not confirm exactly when it was established. Meanwhile, a pessimistic report on Afghanistan by the Democrat senator Dianne Feinstein, and the Republican congressman Mike Rogers, challenges Mr Obama’s assessment last week in a visit to Kabul that the ”tide had turned” and ”we broke the Taliban’s momentum”.

The politicians, who recently returned from Afghanistan, where they met President Hamid Karzai, told CNN they were not so sure. ”President Karzai believes that the Taliban will not come back. I’m not so sure,” Senator Feinstein said. ”The Taliban has a shadow system of governors in many provinces.”
The Washington Post, Associated Press

They say, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”  What then can be said about willing self-deceit on display here?  It has gone beyond shame to moral degeneracy.  And so the US is reduced to clutching at straws, within a propaganda cocoon of its own credulous making. 

How the mighty have fallen.  How the Taliban must spend most of their spare time uproariously  laughing.  Lo the inanity and ridicule that eventually attend nations which view war as diplomacy by other means. 

>Easy Dupes

>Pathetic and Destructive

Narratives are powerful.  They control what we identify as significant data or facts, how we empirically apprehend the data, what interpretations and shades of significance we place upon the evidence, and the conclusions drawn.  Absolute objectivity is impossible.  Only relative neutrality and disinterestedness are possible.  The cut of our jib determines the winds we catch and the sailing progress we make. True objectivity consists only in this: full disclosure of the jib’s cut whilst our sailing exploits narrative unfolds.

Post-modernism has challenged our culture to face up to the inevitable and intrinsic cant in everyone’s understanding.  That is why it is despised by those still claiming absolute objectivity, operating just by the facts, only the facts.  Every so often we see the pervasive power of narrative on ridiculous display.  It can lead to an easy gullibility and childish credulity.

“Gay Girl in Damascus” had been lionised by the Commentariate–which, as it happens, relentlessly denies the cut of its own sailing rig–both to itself and its audience.

>Mad Political Correctness

>Is There Any Other Kind?

National Public Radio (“NPR”) in the US is similar to national radio stations in New Zealand. Both are funded by the taxpayer’s money. Both are media organs that reflect their masters and have a consistent left-wing bias.

Juan Williams has worked as a commentator on NPR for over a decade. His sympathies lie with the prevailing bias operating in NPR, but he strives for objectivity and fairness. Every so often he gets splenetic about things a more objective look would eschew. But due to his gravitas and objectivity he has had a standing spot on Fox News as a commentator on various panels and cable news shows.

He recently was on a show hosted by Bill O’Reilly, and said some things that resulted in NPR firing him. Here is his account, which, given his professionalism, is believable.

Wednesday afternoon I got a message on my cell phone from Ellen Weiss who’s the head of news at NPR asking me to call. When I called back she said, “What did you say? What did you mean to say?” And I said, “I said what I meant to say.” Which is that it’s an honest experience that when I’m in an airport and I see people who are in Muslim garb, who identify themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I do a double take. I have a moment of anxiety or fear given what happened on 9/11. That’s just the reality. And she went on to say, “Well, that crosses the line.” And I said, “What line is that?” And she went on to somehow suggest that I had made a bigoted statement. And I said, “It’s not a bigoted statement.” I, in fact, in the course of this conversation with Bill O’Reilly, said that we have, as Americans, an obligation to be careful to protect the constitutional rights of everyone in the country and to make sure we don’t have any outbreak of bigotry. But that there’s a reality. You cannot ignore what happened on 9/11 and you cannot ignore the connection to Islamic radicalism. And you can’t ignore the fact of what has been recently said in court with regard to this as the first drop of blood in a Muslim war in America. And then she said, “You know, this has been decided up the chain.” I said, “You mean, I don’t even get the chance to come in and we do this eyeball-to-eyeball, person-to-person, have a conversation? I’ve been there for more than ten years. We don’t have that chance to have a conversation about this?” And she said, “There’s nothing you can say that will change my mind. This has been decided above me and we’re terminating your contract.”

Enough said. The question is what possible principled rationale could there be for taxpayers to fund a news media infected with such ideological cant. Come to think of it, what possible rationale could there be for the government to own, fund, and operate any media whatsoever? The one possible exception may be in a state of war when a government owned and operated media organ might be used for propaganda purposes to undermine enemies of the state.

Maybe that is the point. Maybe that is why governments continue to fund National Radio in New Zealand and NRP in the States. Maybe they reason that there are internal enemies of the state and they are anyone and anything with a political orientation not their own. And any political stance which seeks to shrink the power and size of government is regarded as an internal enemy.

From the perspective of fearing the emerging Leviathan, state funded media are a very, very bad idea. The Williams debacle is but a harbinger of the foetid rot within the body politic, and the public health danger it represents.

In the meantime, weep not for Juan Williams. No doubt he will be viewed as a martyr, and most media organisations will want to have a chat. His professionalism and his credibility and his reputation will have only grown through this incident.

>Slavery as Propaganda

>Misusing History

Inhumanity, like humanity, is universal.

Thomas Sowell

Many years ago, I was surprised to receive a letter from an old friend, saying that she had been told that I refused to see campus visitors from Africa. At the time, I was so bogged down with work that I had agreed to see only one visitor to the Stanford campus — and it so happens that he was from Africa. He just happened to come along when I had a little breathing room from the work I was doing in my office.

I pointed out to my friend that whoever said what she heard might just as well have said that I refused to go sky-diving with blacks — which was true, because I refused to go sky-diving with anybody, whether black, white, Asian, or whatever.

The kind of thinking that produced a passing misconception about me has, unfortunately, produced much bigger, much longer lasting, much more systematic, and more poisonous distortions about the United States of America.

Slavery is a classic example. The history of slavery across the centuries and in many countries around the world is a painful history to read — not only in terms of how slaves have been treated, but because of what that says about the whole human species — because slaves and enslavers alike have been of every race, religion, and nationality.

If the history of slavery ought to teach us anything, it is that human beings cannot be trusted with unbridled power over other human beings — no matter what color or creed any of them are. The history of ancient despotism and modern totalitarianism practically shouts that same message from the blood-stained pages of history.

But that is not the message that is being taught in our schools and colleges, or dramatized on television and in the movies. The message that is pounded home again and again is that white people enslaved black people.

It is true, just as it is true that I don’t go sky-diving with blacks. But it is also false in its implications for the same reason. Just as Europeans enslaved Africans, North Africans enslaved Europeans — more Europeans than there were Africans enslaved in the United States or in the 13 colonies from which the nation was formed. The treatment of white galley slaves was even worse than the treatment of black slaves who picked cotton. But there are no movies or television dramas about it comparable to Roots, and our schools and colleges don’t pound it into the heads of students.

The inhumanity of human beings toward other human beings is not a new story, much less a local story. There is no need to hide it, because there are lessons we can learn from it. But there is also no need to distort it, so that sins of the whole human species around the world are presented as special defects of “our society” or the sins of a particular race.

If American society and Western civilization are different from other societies and civilizations, it is in that they eventually turned against slavery, and stamped it out, at a time when non-Western societies around the world were still maintaining slavery and resisting Western pressures to end slavery — including, in some cases, by armed resistance.

Only the fact that the West had more firepower put an end to slavery in many non-Western societies during the age of Western imperialism. Yet today there are Americans who have gone to Africa to apologize for slavery — on a continent where slavery has still not been completely ended, to this very moment.

It is not just the history of slavery that gets distorted beyond recognition by the selective filtering of facts. Those who mine history in order to find everything they can to undermine American society or Western civilization have very little interest in the Bataan death march, the atrocities of the Ottoman Empire, or similar atrocities in other times and places.

Those who mine history for sins are not searching for truth but for opportunities to denigrate their own society, or for grievances that can be cashed in today at the expense of people who were not even born when the sins of the past were committed.

An ancient adage says: “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” But apparently it is not sufficient for many among our educators, the intelligentsia, or the media. They are busy poisoning the present by the way they present the past.

>The Seed of the Church

>Might and Main To No Avail

The phrase “Church under the cross” was coined during the Reformation. It refers to times and circumstances where Christian believers were subject to persecution. The twentieth century saw some of the most organised and relentless persecution of Christians ever recorded.

In the Soviet Union, religion in general was seen as a symptom of wider and deeper social evils. Just as we in our day may argue that drugs, or crime, or drunkenness signal a deeper malaise so socialist ideology argued that religion was symptomatic of more serious distresses. But people needed to be weaned off dependence upon religion in order for the real, underlying, and more substantial problems to be addressed. So, Marx:

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness.
Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, cited in Trevor Beeson, Discretion and Valour: Religious Conditions in Russia and Eastern Europe (London: Fontana, 1974), p.19.

For Marx (and Lenin, and those who followed in their train) religion was a false solution to a real problem. But you have to get an addict off the drug in the first place before you can make the changes which will make drug dependence no longer necessary. It goes without saying that this sort of condescending pity for Christians has become stock-in-trade for many people today. But in the Soviet Union condescension and pity soon took a more sinister turn. Once the Revolution was successful and (by definition) the underlying “real distress” had been removed there was no longer any need for religion per se. Therefore, to persist in a religion was an implicitly rebellious or seditious act: it was an unwelcome evidence that “real distress” still existed in Soviet society. To persist in religion, therefore, became an implicitly seditious act.

As a result, for over sixty years (three generations) Russian Christians and churches were subject to successive waves of persecution and oppression. The first steps were the “easy” ones for the Communist regime. Firstly, the power and influence of the Russian orthodox church had to be broken. Confiscation of land, plant, and property was announced by decree as early as 1918.

No ecclesiastical or religious association shall have the right to own property. Such associations shall not enjoy the right of legal entity.

All property belonging to churches and religious associations existing in Russia shall become public property. Buildings and objects intended especially for religious worship shall be handed over by special decision of local or central authorities, free of charge, for use by the religious association concerned.
Decree of Separation of Church and State, 1918.

Thus, at one stroke, all plant, property, and equipment belonging to the church was seized; its continued use by Christians was to be at the whim and pleasure of the state. But Lenin understood that to stamp out the Christian faith one had to prohibit the teaching and proclamation of the faith. All schooling and education by churches was therefore prohibited from 1918 onwards. Churches could only give and receive religious instruction privately.

In 1928, Stalin went further:

Religious associations may not organize for children, young people and women special prayer or other meetings, circles, groups, departments for Biblical or literary study, sewing, working or the teaching of religion, etc., excursions, children’s playgrounds, libraries, reading rooms, sanatoria, or medical care.
Beeson, p.40.

The state was starting to focus more attention on teaching and the fundamental aspects of communal or corporate religious life. Application of these laws tended to flow in waves. Oftentimes actual persecution went way beyond the law—draconian though they were. But some of the most severe oppression occurred under Khrushchev who launched a programme of militant hostility against Christians which lasted five years.

It was already illegal for parents to compel their children to attend church against their will. Young people under the age of eighteen were forbidden in any case to be members of religious organizations. Participation by them in church services or religious ceremonies of any kinds which had previously been discouraged was now illegal. Clergy . . . were forbidden to instruct children in any circumstances.
Beeson, p. 40, 41.

Notice the focus upon the children. The authorities had worked out that a considerable power lay in parents being able to lead their children in the faith. Intergenerational faith, and the transmission of the faith from parents to children lies at the heart of the Covenant of Grace. It is an appointed Divine mechanism for sustaining and expanding the Kingdom of God. The Communists came to understand that to extinguish religious faith they must strike at one of its root: cutting children off from the religious instruction of parents would prevent the inter-generational transfer of faith.

At the same time, children were to be subjected to the relentless propagation of militant materialist atheism in the schools (“scientific atheism”). Adults similarly were to be indoctrinated via the media, offices, factories, farms, and the army. Religion was presented as primitive superstition, illegal; the existence of God had been “disproved” by science; religion was a hoax, etc. This effort went on for years and decades.

What was the outcome? Despite all these efforts (or possibly because of them) by the 1970’s it was estimated that the percentage of people attending church in the Soviet Union was higher than in the UK. (Of course there were no reliable statistics). However, anecdotal evidence was striking. Western visitors to major metropolitan centres like Moscow and Leningrad reported that on Sunday one did not need to ask directions to a church service—you just had to follow the crowd.

One English visitor to Moscow in 1973 reported on his experience of visiting churches as follows:

At the first (church) we found that the service would not start until 8 pm and so we decided to return. Nearly two hours before, people were already gathering. The next was St Nicholas. We stood at the back for a while. I do not think I have every seen a church so full, with people standing shoulder to shoulder as at a football match. Where would one see that in England? The priest attracts the young and intellectuals as well as the faithful babushki (grandmothers). The third church, St John the Warrior, we could not get into at all . . . . The crowded congregation was tight-packed and reverent.
Beeson, p. 28.

The same visitor went on to Leningrad and described the singing in two of the services he attended:

. . . how melodiously Russian congregations sing, without any musical accompaniment. Those two congregational settings (Our Father, the Creed) sung by massed soprano voices, pure without being trained, were a foretaste of angels’ voices; they are so clearly part of the life and soul of the Russian people. At each of these services we were just in time to hear the congregations in their full joy of belief in the Risen Christ.
Ibid., p. 29.

The heart of true faith living in the hearts of His people. Decades of successive state persecution, suppression, bloodshed, ridicule, deprivations, indoctrination, and pressure could not extinguish it. One is reminded of the Word of the Lord through the prophet, Isaiah:

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth,
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater
So shall My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It shall not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
Isaiah 55: 10,11

>Re-Writing the Past

>Do We Have A Second Dismal Science?

The world of Middle Eastern archaeology is reported to be all agog at the apparent discovery of David’s ancient palace in Jerusalem. Archaeological finds of this magnitude (that is, discoveries made by professional, academic archaeologists, not–let it be noted–the touting of some fake artefact in a backyard Baghdad bazaar) are not common.

Our view is that they may corroborate a biblical account, but they certainly do not establish the credibility and trustworthiness of the Bible. The trustworthiness of the Bible is for those to whom the Spirit of God has opened their hearts to receive it as the very word of God. The ground of its veracity is God Himself, not speculations or ratiocinations from the minds of fallen man.

That is not to say, of course, that there is not an abundance of archaeological data and findings consistent with Biblical history. But archaeology comes with the inevitable “a priori” precommitments of researchers. The more scarce the data on any particular dig, the more a priori frameworks influence the “findings” or the outcome. Human speculation rushes in to fill up gaps in the data.

In any event, according to a recent report,

Dr. Eilat Mazar, world authority on Jerusalem’s past, has taken King David out of the pages of the Bible and put him back into living history. Mazar’s latest excavation in the City of David, in the southern shadow of the Temple Mount, has shaken up the archaeological world. For lying undisturbed for over 3,000 years is a massive building which Mazar believes is King David’s palace.

For Mazar, 48, one of the world’s leading authorities on the archaeology of ancient Jerusalem and head archaeologist of the Shalem Center Institute of Archaeology, the discovery was the culmination of years of effort and solid speculation. From the time she was a teenager, she had her nose in archaeology literature, and worked closely with her grandfather, renowned archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, who conducted the southern wall excavations next to the Western Wall. She holds a doctorate in archaeology from Hebrew University, is author of The Complete Guide to the Temple Mount Excavations, and in the 1970s and ’80s worked on the digs supervised by Yigal Shilo in the City of David. The significant discoveries made then, including a huge wall called the “stepped-stone structure” — which Shilo believed was a retaining wall for David’s royal palace or part of the Jebusite fortress he conquered — ignited Mazar to continue to look for the prize: David’s palace itself.

To put this discovery in contexte, we need to understand that biblical archaeology has now been effectively captured by idealogues. In no particular order, we cite first the “Islamic school”. This is populated by a bunch of Islamic academics and fellow travellers who seek to disabuse the world of any notion that historical Judaism even existed. They are the archaeological version of holocaust deniers.

For a growing number of academics and intellectuals, King David and his united kingdom of Judah and Israel, which has served for 3,000 years as an integral symbol of the Jewish nation, is simply a piece of fiction. The biblical account of history has been dismissed as unreliable by a cadre of scholars, some of whom have an overtly political agenda, arguing that the traditional account was resurrected by the Zionists to justify dispossessing Palestinian Arabs. The most outspoken of these is Keith Whitelam of the Copenhagen School which promotes an agenda of “biblical minimalism,” whose best-known work is The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History.

Even in Israel, this new school has found its voice. Israel Finkelstein, chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Archaeology, began championing a theory several years ago that the biblical accounts of Jerusalem as the seat of a powerful, unified monarchy under the rule of David and Solomon are essentially false. The scientific methods for his assumptions, called a “lower dating” which essentially pushes archaeological evidence into a later century and thus erases all evidence of a Davidic monarchy, were laughed off by traditional archaeologists. But his book, The Bible Unearthed, wound up on the New York Times’ best-seller list and he became the darling of a sympathetic media. He concluded that David and Solomon, if they existed at all, were merely “hill-country chieftains” and Jerusalem a poor, small tribal village. He claims that the myth of King David was the creation of a cult of priests trying to create for themselves a glorious history.

A second “critical” school had proposed that David’s palace would have been inside the walls of historical Zion, the fortified Jebusite city which David conquered. But since this was only around nine acres in size, it would never have been large enough to accommodate David’s palace. The “critical” school assumes that the Bible’s history is a collection of myths and human constructions about the past. The non-existence of David’s palace within the walls of historical Zion was offered as corroboration of the critical view.

Mazat, however, claims to have unearthed David’s palace outside the walls of the Jebusite city which would be entirely consistent with a time of power, prosperity, and active construction effort. One would expect that the ancient city would have expanded considerably when David made it his capital–and Mt Zion became the most holy place in all Israel. One presumes that King David did not have to contend with the Resource Management Act.

But Mazar always suspected that the palace was outside the original city, and cites the Bible to prove it. When the Philistines heard that David had been anointed, they went on the attack to apprehend him. This occurred after he conquered the Fortress of Zion, which was the actual nucleus of the city, and built his palace. The Bible says that David heard about it and “descended to the fortress,” (2-Samuel 5:17), implying that he went down from his palace, which was higher up on the mountain than the citadel/city.

“I always asked myself: Down from where? It must have been from his palace on top of the hill, outside the original Jebusite city.”

Mazar says she was confident in her assessment of where the palace would be. What she discovered was a section of massive wall running about 100 feet from west to east along the length of the excavation (underneath what until this summer was the Ir David Visitors Center), and ending with a right-angle corner that turns south and implies a very large building.

Within the dirt fill between the stones were found pottery shards dating to the 11th century BCE, the time when David established his monarchy. Based on biblical text and historic evidence, Mazar assumed that David would have built his palace outside the walls of the fortified but cramped Jebusite city which existed up to 2,000 years before; and in fact, the structure is built on the summit of the mountain, directly on bedrock along the city’s northern edge, with no archaeological layers beneath it — a sign that the structure constituted a new, northward expansion of the city’s northern limit.

What most amazed Mazar was how close the building is to the surface — just one to two meters underground. “The cynics kept saying, ‘there will be so many layers, so many remnants of other cultures, it’s not worth digging, it’s too far down.’ I was shocked at how easy it was to uncover it, and how well-preserved it was, as if it were just waiting 3,000 years for us to find it,” Mazar said.

It took Mazar years to find a backer to fund the dig. The reason: the project was too politically incorrect.

Despite her sound hypothesis and impeccable credentials, she couldn’t find any financial backers, as if no one in the academic world really wanted to find David’s palace. It would just be too politically complicated. It’s no wonder, when even mainstream archaeologists are inclined to play down finds which might be considered too highly charged with biblical or historical accuracy.

There is now apparently a widespread academic prejudice against any archaeological effort or discoveries that would even hint at the accuracy of the biblical historical record. Scholars don’t want to be tagged as “unsophisticated messianic fanatics.” An example is the case of Adam Zertal,

who in 1983 discovered an enormous sacrificial altar on Mount Eval, on the very mountain where Joshua was described in the Bible as having built an altar after the Jews crossed the Jordan River. The altar he found contained tools dating to the12 th century BCE, the time the Jewish people entered the Land, and its construction matched the descriptions of Joshua’s altar in both biblical and rabbinic texts. But instead of the expected excitement accompanying such a monumental find, Zertal’s academic colleagues ignored him and his discovery. The more vocal accused Zertal, a secular Jew raised on a kibbutz, of being politically motivated to support Jewish settlements in the area around Shechem (Nablus), where Mount Eval is located.

If economics had been dubbed the dismal science, the deplorable politicisation of middle east archaeology must run it a very close second. So much for academic integrity.

>Trumpeting Stalin

>Very Rotten Apples

One of the most disturbing scandals of the previous century was the willing complicity of the English and American intellectual “elite” with the Soviet regime. This elite, which effectively controlled some of the most prestigious newspapers of the day (for example, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Times) willed themselves to believe and assert the beneficence and goodness of the Soviet Union. Their naiveté, credulity, and willing suspension of disbelief leads a detached observer to conclude that they were puerile, but also corrupt in their gullibility. For them, the Soviet Union had to be an exemplar of a new and better world, because it had become a warranting concept, a justification for their own supercilious and bankrupt world-view in which man had the power to create a perfect, sinless utopia.

For example, Martin Amis, in his powerful book, Koba the Dread, described the fawning credulity and blind dishonesty of the founders of the New Statesman. This newspaper was

founded in 1913 by, among others, . . . the century’s four most extravagant dupes of the USSR: H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Wells, after an audience with Stalin in 1934, said the he had “never met a man more candid, fair and honest”; these attributes accounted for “his remarkable ascendancy over the country since no one is afraid of him and everyone trusts him”. Shaw, after some banquet diplomacy, declared the Russian people uncommonly well-fed at a time when perhaps 11 million citizens were in the process of dying of starvation. The Webbs, after extensive study, wrote a book which “seen as the last word in serious Western scholarship, ran to over 1,200 pages, representing a vast amount of toil and research, all totally wasted. It was originally entitled, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? but the question mark was triumphantly removed in the second edition—which appeared in 1937 at precisely the time the regime was in its worst phase.” (Robert Conquest). Sidney and Beatrice Webb swallowed the great Show Trials of 1936—38 and the New Statesman was not much less sceptical: “We do not deny . . . that the confessions may have contained a substratum of truth”; “there had undoubtedly been much plotting in the USSR”; and so on.
Martin Amis, Koba the Dread, (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 21. Emphasis, ours

Malcolm Muggeridge later described his eager enthusiasm when he worked as a reporter in Moscow in the early nineteen thirties:

How marvelous the Russian revolution seemed when it happened! A little bearded man wearing a cap, Lenin, had taken over the vast empire of the Tsars on behalf of the workers and the peasants; his Jewish lieutenant, Trotsky, had created a Red Army of legendary valour, without officers, gold braid, bands or any of the other contemptible insignia of militarism. How we rejoiced and cheered and exulted as the time . . . In the distant, fabulous land of the steppes and vodka the proletariat had seized power and the millennium had begun.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Tread Softly, For You Tread On My Jokes, (1972 edition) p. 23.

Muggeridge was married to Kitty, who was Beatrice Webb’s sister. He, of course, was one of the first of the fadishly socialist left-wing-set to face up to the truth about the Soviet Union. When he did he became a tireless opponent of the regime.

People who were supposed to be educated and intelligent came back from visits to the Soviet Union proclaiming it was a paradise. They swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. They were the regime’s willing cheerleaders in the West. For example, Solzhenitsyn describes how a group of prisoners were transported throughout the streets of Moscow in closed vans with signs on the outside in four languages proclaiming “Bread” and “Meat”.

One of the vans stopped at an intersection. A shiny maroon automobile was waiting for the same red light to change. In it rode the correspondent of a progressive French paper Liberation who was on the way to a hockey match at the Dynamo Stadium. The correspondent read the legend on the side of the van: MYASO—VIANDE—FLEISCH—MEAT. He remembered that he’d already seen more than one such van, in various parts of Moscow. And he took out his notebook and wrote in red ink: “On the streets of Moscow one often sees vans filled with foodstuffs, very neat and hygienically impeccable. One can only conclude that the provisioning of the capital is excellent.”
Cited in L Praamsa, The Church in the Twentieth Century, (St Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1981), p. 105.

Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, notes that his father joined the British Communist Party in 1941 and remained a “believer” in the Soviet Union for fifteen years. He realised later, with deep embarrassment, that he had willingly shut out the facts, and had credulously and gullibly accepted Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour. Overwhelmingly the intellectuals of the West were choosing to believe a lie. Yet the facts and the data were there all along for any who cared to look.

This shameful episode demonstrates the truth of the adage that there is none so blind as those who will not see. There are manifold contemporary instances of the same sickness. For example, almost without exception the Western liberal-academic-media-complex has shown itself gulled repeatedly by Palestinian and Hamas propaganda stunts over alleged atrocities by Israeli armed forces. Now, we do not doubt that atrocities may occur: what is clear, however, is that the liberal-complex itself does not maintain even the slightest scepticism about Palestinian and Hamas propaganda. The complex wilfully believes everything the Palestinians portray to be true.

We suspect that there is a complex of influences at work here. Firstly, there is likely the elite’s condescension towards the Palestinians (they are poor, ignorant, simple, and backward folk. They would not be sufficiently clever or subtle to lie or engage in propaganda). Secondly, there is likely the old Marxist ethic at work which equates good morals with the oppressed and the downtrodden (you can rely on the honesty and integrity of the Palestinians because they are the downtrodden; the Israeli’s, however, being oppressors, are evil and corrupted). Thirdly, there is likely to be the influence of the self-satisfied smugness and sense of superiority which belongs to the intellectual elites (we are too clever to be gulled by anyone; no-one would even try). Finally, there is likely to be the powerful suasion of guilt and pity, which leads the elite to “stand in solidarity with” the oppressed Palestinians no matter what as a means of assuaging their own self-loathing.

Another example is the way the Western liberal-academic-media-complex generally turns a very, very blind eye towards the oppression of women in Islamic society and ideology. It discounts its existence—and if oppression were to exist, it is regarded as a minor matter in the wider scheme of things. This is why the innumerable secular feminists which populate the liberal-academic-media complex religiously ignore the oppression of women in Islam. They have bigger fish to fry. Consistent Islam—the manifestations of Islam that are consistent with the Koran and authoritative Islamic traditions—is widely found amongst the poor and dispossessed. This fact alone demands solidarity and support from the elite feminists of the West, regardless of how they treat their women-folk. They are willing to accept it as mere “collateral damage” in pursuit of more important goals.

The bottom line is that the shamefulness of the adulation of the former Soviet Union by the Western intelligentsia has its direct descendants in our day. The rotten apple has not fallen far from the tree.

>Scholastic Mythbusters, Part IV

>Concluding Reflections

For the past two hundred years or so the Western world has taken great pride in science and the scientific method. The scientific method has become a propaganda front for empiricist rationalism. It propounds the neutrality and objectivity of human reason. It boasts of the autonomous ability of the mind of man to determine truth for itself, without precommitments or prejudice. It proclaims that the facts, are the facts, are the facts. The facts have a brute quality. In the end the facts or the data are asserted to speak through all errors, false ideas, and distorted views.

This breathtaking arrogance has led us into a state where the liberal academic complex plays tricks on itself. It has led to academia easily getting sucked in to myths which it then busily cloaks with claims about evidence and proof. The proof or the evidence turns out to be little more than selective fitting up to adorn the case.

When it comes to all human activity, and especially research and scholarship, objectivity requires that at all times the scholar remains self-conscious of his assumptions, precommitments and prejudices. He must be overt about his “conditioning” or his starting points and his biases as he researches, studies, and draws conclusions. This is the paradox of objectivity. In order to achieve true objectivity, the knower must be self-conscious—that is, he must be conscious and overt about his subjective state before he can achieve reasonable objectivity. In arguing his case, he must be transparent to others about his precommitments and prejudices. You first have to know yourself, before you can know anything else.

It is this prevailing lack of honesty and integrity about the “knower” that has distorted so much of what is “known”. It is what has seduced much of the liberal academic complex into believing myths. Michael Polanyi has argued that much of modern science is nothing more than intuition and guesswork. He believes that this is not a bad thing—in fact, it is inevitable. But the intuition and guesswork takes place within a context, an intellectual and scientific tradition which all scientists are taught as an apprentice learns from a master craftsman—and about which they must remain self-conscious at all times. Once they have mastered the tradition, they guess, then they test and examine—and that leads to advances in knowledge.

But this in turn leads to significant and irreversible changes in theory and conclusions. Today’s scientists think very differently about matter and the structure of the material world than they did one hundred years ago. The facts are not quite what they seemed—it turns out. There is nothing wrong with this: it only becomes destructive or harmful when scholars turn a particular set of framed data into an undoubted infallible orthodoxy.

It is not by chance that the examples of myths provided in our earlier posts all revolved around a recasting of history. The study of the past is one of those disciplines which is particularly susceptible to revision (“revisionism” was coined to describe the outcome of changing a “narrative” about the past) and to framing. Because all historical study is selective in its data mining and is concerned to produce a narrative or account or story, the risks of getting it wrong are considerable. When brute objectivity is assumed from the outset, the risks rise exponentially.

It is not by accident that the most persistent and powerful myth of our age—the cosmogony of evolutionism—is an attempt to construct a narrative about the past. Data is mined to construct and reconstruct the pattern. Polanyi describes how scientists must make value judgments every day.

The scientist in pursuit of research has incessantly to make decisions whether to take a new instrument reading or some other new sense impression as signifying a new fact, or to regard it merely as a new indication of an old fact—or else to reject it as having no significance at all. These decisions are guided by the premisses of science and more particularly by the current surmises of the time, but ultimately there always enters an element of personal judgement. Michael Polanyi, Science Faith and Society (London: University of Chicago, 1946), p. 90.

In contrast to the hard sciences, of which Polanyi is speaking, the influences of premisses, surmises, and value judgements are far greater when one is attempting to create and “prove” a naturalistic cosmogony because, after all, one was not there at the time. The evolutionist cosmogony, potent myth and narrative that it is, derives its potency from sources other than the data, which, in the very nature of the case are racked to ruin with surmises and value judgements and fitting.

Nor is it an accident that another powerful emerging mythical narrative is anthropogenic global warming. If narratives of historical cosmogony are necessarily thick with surmises and suppositions, prognostications of the future must be equally so.

Yet, in time, we believe both the myth of the evolutionist cosmogony and of anthropogenic global warming will be exposed and exploded for what they are: falsehoods. But whilst the hubris of Western rationalism retains its grip, the myths will endure and remain powerful conditioners of our times.