Catching up

Yes, I know, Climategate is not the only issue around either. But I do need to show that I am on top of things (and if you believe that, you'll believe anything). Fortunately, I do not have to write much on the subject as the Boss on EUReferendum has been doing so for days now. No-one can say they have not been kept informed on developments, not if they read EURef.

Still, a few links to articles here and there will not come amiss. Let's start with the most entertaining one: Al Gore being faced with an inconvenient truth again, this time from a scientist, whose words he has been twisting and misquoting. As James Delingpole points out, it is something for the Times to write critically of the Goracle. Maybe the former Vice-President and presidential hopeful ought to have stuck to his plan to avoid the Copenhagen conference. Nobody is having a good time there, apart from Lord Monckton.

On the sane side of the debate, here is an article by Bjorn Lomborg in the Wall Street Journal. Lomborg has been the butt of hysterical attacks by the "scientific consensus" a.k.a. man-made global warming alarmists. Now that the "consensus" is unravelling before our very eyes and much of the basis for it is shown to be of doubtful integrity (something Lomborg's own work does not lack) he may well be spening much of his time with a big smile on his face.

Maybe, then again maybe not, as he is investigating and writing about serious problems that face the population of the poorest countries: malaria, HIV/AIDS, lack of clean water and other suchlike worries with possible global warming coming low down in the list of priorities. Lomborg discusses ways of dealing with real problems and we should all be paying attention. Even if we disagree with his suggested methods, it is worth remembering that this is what we need to be talking about.

Iain Murray and Roger Abbott compare "the obfuscation and arrogance of the implicated scientists to the openness and humility of Albert Einstein". Astonishingly enough, the real scientist and undisputed genius comes out as someone who was much more open in his attitudes to his own and other people's work.

David Bellamy summing up the evidence of the last couple of centuries is entertaining as ever.

And that, for the time being, is enough climategate. I had to show I knew it was happening.

Back to blogging

Not sure where the time goes but blogging has not been a high priority with me recently, as readers would have noticed. Well, maybe. But today's messages have brought information that there is a "bloggers' lunch" in Parliament for what appears to be the bloggers who are undoubtedly part of the establishment. Possibly only those on the right, those on the left having their own lunches, teas and dinners. Then again, there is not a great deal of difference between them in their attitudes and interests.

So that does it. Time to return to blogging and to resume work on the real blogosphere, the one that cannot be bought by the political establishment and has its own agenda, part of which is to bring that establishment to heel.

There are other issues in the world, apart from the miserable rows between our benighted politicians about who insulted whom at what point. In fact, there is a world out there.

UKIP acquires another well known peer

If you put Lord Monckton UKIP into Google News, you get precious little (though there are stories of Lord M's speech being interrupted by organized Greenie Youth Gangs in Copenhagen). Well, there is a Polish story about the noble peer joining UKIP that quotes the leader of that party, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, who explains that, naturally enough, the new recruit is going to be spokesman on climate change.

Once you get to blogs, the story is different: there are quite a few that have already picked up the news. OK, to be fair one of the blogs is by George Moonbat Monbiot on the Guardian website and he is wondering whether Monckton will be an asset or a liability. The same one might ask about Moonbat Monbiot and the Guardian.

So the news is: Lord Monckton, former special adviser to Margaret Thatcher and leading global warming sceptic (as well as one world government nutter but nobody is perfect) has joined UKIP. The Conservatives may think they are well rid of him but one cannot help wondering whether this is the first of many ex-Conservatives attracted by the new leadership of UKIP.

A real rube abroad

Some are impressed by the fact that President Obama proclaimed himself to be unworthy of the Noble Peace Prize in his acceptance speech (but not too unworthy to accept it or is he not worthy of being so unworthy that he would have had to refuse it?), others are cheering or in the case of the New York Times showing unease at his robust defence of the war against terror.

The most interesting story of the day was picked up by Glenn Reynolds on Instapundit several hours ago and is now being aired by AP News as well. It seems that once again President Obama, the man who was billed as the sophisticate who would make the world forget the rube Bush, has behaved with the sort of rudeness one expects … well … from a cowboy and a rube.

Obama had quite a whirlwind day Thursday — he signed the Nobel guest book, huddled with Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, met with King Harald V and Queen Sonja, and delivered an acceptance speech after he was formally presented with the prize. He also joined the king and queen at an evening banquet.

But he skipped several other activities, including lunch with the king, a news conference at Oslo's Grand Hotel, CNN's traditional interview with the prize winner and a "Save the Children" benefit concert, where organizers replaced him with an Obama cardboard cutout. Obama also won't be around for Friday's Nobel Concert.

Obama blamed his schedule. "I still have a lot of work to do back in Washington, D.C., before the year is done," he said during an appearance with Stoltenberg. The president's quick visit also reflected a White House that saw little value in trumpeting an honor for peace just days after Obama announced he was sending more troops off to war.

The White House and the President also, one must assume saw little value in being courteous to Norway and its King and people. After all, what does he get out of it? He already has the Peace Prize. Nothing more is needed.

Or as the Daily Beast puts it:

A day before President Obama receives his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the president’s treatment of his Norwegian hosts has become hot news across Scandinavia.

News outlets across the region are calling Obama arrogant for slashing some of the prize winners’ traditional duties from his schedule. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” sniped the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, amid reports the president would snub his own exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center. “A bit
arrogant—a bit bad,” proclaimed another Aftenposten headline.

…

Also among the dissed, according to news reports: a concert in Oslo on Friday that was arranged in his honor, and a group of Norwegian children who had planned to meet Obama in front of City Hall.

“The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”

I can quite understand why President Obama might not want to waste any time looking an exhibition about his own achievements – he knows better than anyone how thin those are. But as to whether he means to be rude or not, one remains doubtful. After all, this is not the first time he has behaved like a rube abroad.

Remember the time he decided to chill out with his family instead of accepting an invitation to a dinner during a state visit to Russia, a visit that he appeared to confuse with a family holiday? And the time he decided to go on a romantic night out with the First Lady in Paris instead of a formal dinner with the French President who was his host during another state visit that this sophisticate confused with a family outing?

Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds reports two interesting stories: from Hot Air we hear that the Norwegians have decided to substitute a cardboard cut-out at one of the concerts the new Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is missing (picked up by AP as well); and 44 per cent Americans would like Bush back as President. That’s nothing serious – presidents always look better when they are gone. The interesting point is the one he quotes from the forum on Ann Althouse’s blog, which is an acquired taste, in my opinion:

I think the point of the comparison is this: Bush endured 8 years of wall-to-wall, 24/7 liberal bashing from multiple networks. Meanwhile, Obama was coronated and has enjoyed wall-to-wall adoration from the same multiple networks. If Obama's numbers, 11 months in, already approach Bush's after EIGHT years, then, baby, you've got serious problems.

I must admit I did expect that famed honeymoon to last for a year or so but then even I did not expect Obama to be so crass in everything he did. What am I admitting to here?

Apologies

As I am particularly busy today and as my internet connection is particularly slow, blogging will be light to possibly non-existent. So, I thought, some more entertainment. I don't believe we have had Ann Miller, possibly the best solo female dancer in Hollywood musicals (and later on Broadway). Here she is in what she considered to be her best number: Shaking the Blues Away from Easter Parade. The rather appalling story is that she was actually in a back brace when she recorded this (though it is hard to see where) because some months before that her then husband had pushed her down the stairs and she had broken her back and, soon afterward, lost the baby she was carrying. Yet she produced this amazing dance:

Corruption of the mind

There can be little doubt in anybody’s mind that motivates politicians is love of power, which is even more of a corrupting influence than power itself. It is, after all, the love of money that is the root of all evil not money itself. The same goes for regulators of various stripes who are really politicians that do not ever need to face the electorate.

The declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that CO2 (a naturally occurring substance and a necessity for plants) to be a danger to human health may sound like a stupid joke. In fact, it is a huge power grab by an unelected agency and the Executive because Congress is refusing to play ball (well, Senate is) on the Cap and Trade Bill. The legislative is being by-passed and the greenie hysteria is being used for something not envisaged by the Founding Fathers. Iain Murray explains it all in detail.

This is the latest example in the United States of such a development but we see this everywhere – from the UN to our own government, backed, in this case by that bunch of sheeple, our Parliament.

In a way that is not the interesting part of the story. Politicians of whatever variety use any excuse to grab power is a story in the sense of dog bites man or supermodel takes drugs is a story.

It is the scientists who knowingly produced inaccurate (at best) information, refused to answer questions, destroyed raw data and generally falsified the evidence that underpinned this debate, then hysterically refused to discuss matters or answer questions even when they came from other scientists that are of interest.

After all, the overwhelming majority of scientists do not start their careers with the thought of falsifying information, not even in order to keep a highly paid job or scholarship. Those considerations will go a long way but how did we get to the position that scientific establishments became promoters of propaganda in order to feed governments’ and regulators’ desire to control the population and scientists (for the most part) went along with that? We do not live in the Soviet Union where disagreement with the party line on science meant imprisonment, torture, labour camps or a bullet in the back of one's head.

Pondering over this and coming to no obvious conclusions I recalled one of the most impressive films I saw this year: Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn. The subject matter is obvious: this is about the monstrous crime carried out by the Soviet Union and its security forces against Polish officers, whom they imprisoned seventy years ago and murdered in their thousands in the spring of 1940.

It is also about other things: survival in terrible circumstances, the fate of a country and its people caught between two totalitarian regimes, and individual reaction to those regimes. About one third of the film takes place in the immediate post-war months in Poland and we follow several characters as they deal with the fact that once again Poland is occupied and the truth about what happened to the officers Katyn is being suppressed.

How is one to react? Some refuse to knuckle under and defy the authorities with the truth. Others decide to keep quiet in order to rebuild their lives. The conflict appears most clearly with two sisters, whose brother had been one of the victims of Katyn. One, a girl who has survived the Warsaw uprising and its brutal suppression, announcing that she is on the side of the murdered not the murderers, goes to a great deal of trouble to set up a memorial stone for her brother with the truth of his death inscribed on it. We last see her being pushed into an underground cell; the memorial is now a broken slab with the information obliterated.

Her sister takes a different view. She knows the truth but thinks that as Poland will never be free again, it is best to keep quiet, and try to rebuild the country. She encourages (in vain, as it turns out) a talented young man to re-write slightly his CV by omitting the words about his father, “murdered by the Soviets”, because she considers it to be more important for the young man to study, to create, to help build a new society than to insist on shouting the truth from the rooftops.

Much to be said for that point of view, one cannot help thinking, as one watches the destruction of all those who know and speak the truth. But then a thought occurs: yes, this seems a very small compromise with a probable good result. Yet how many more compromises will this young woman, the director of the art college, have to make in the future? Will she have to betray people? Almost certainly she will find herself having to reject those whose parentage is unsatisfactory in the new socialist republic unless she encourages them to tell even bigger lies. How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?

At what point would a scientist, who, let us say, genuinely believes in man-made global warming, decide that a little bit of fiddling with the evidence in a good cause makes perfect sense? And having done that little bit of fiddling does he find himself having to cover up for it and for the fact that man-made global warming has become a “scientific fact” on the basis of his ever so slightly fiddled evidence? When do they find that there is now no drawing back without losing a great deal of face and creating a great deal of trouble for everyone concerned? How far can one go before one is completely enmeshed in mental corruption?

Showtime: Mack the Knife

Let me start with an explanation: I was not brought up on the Bobby Darrin version (I don't like him, anyway) or the Armstrong or the Sinatra versions though I did hear them in my youth. No, I was brought up on the original, dark, sinister version, whether performed by Bertolt Brecht himself (not terribly well), Ernst Busch, the ballad singer in Pabst's film or sundry imitators. How that terrifying song managed to become jolly entertainment is fascinating and I wonder whether anybody has done a proper study of the transformation.

So, here are several versions. First off, Bert Brecht, the Communist propagandist, apparatchik, stool pigeon who betrayed various friends, lovers and comrades and the man, who wisely did not flee to the Soviet Union when the Nazis came to power, but to the Scandinavian countries and then the United States, returning to socialist East Germany only when it became obvious that he would be a great man there.



That is not a great performance but this is. Ernst Busch was an actor and a singer as well as a Communist agitator. It is as well to remember that the Communists did their very best to undermine the fragile Weimar Republic, aiding, though indirectly, the ascent of Hitler and the Nazis.

Busch did go to the Soviet Union together with many other German Communists but unlike those, he survived. In 1937 he went to Spain to fight in the International Brigade and survived the purge that the NKVD instituted among those. When Franco won Busch, interestingly enough, did not return to the Soviet Union. Perhaps, he knew what awaited him there.

He went to Belgium where he was interned by the Nazis after the invasion. Imprisoned in Belgium and France during the war he survived to move to East Germany to become yet another great man and fighter for freedom. Well, as long as the people did not demand freedom from the Communists as they did in Berlin in 1953. Neither Busch nor Brecht were in favour of the workers then.

Of course, there may have been other reasons for Busch's sojourn in Belgium and France. The NKVD was rather anxious to know about various ex-Communists and other left-wing activists who were in Nazi camps.



Well, enough already of this German gloom. Let us have some entertainment. Here is one of my favourite versions by Dinah Shore and Pearl Bailey, both wonderful singers and entertainers.