The Hater tribe

The lunatic lefties no longer consider people who disagree with them to be wrong, no they consider them heretics or 'phobics' of some sort, e.g. homophobic and Islamaphobic:

Hate crimes are of course the invention of the secular left, especially the homosexual activists. In their books, anyone who disagrees with their agenda is guilty of hate, and that should be punished by law. It is simply a means by which the coercive utopians seek to stifle all dissent and silence all critics.

But let’s suppose for the moment that such a beast in fact exists. If anything, if there are hate crimes, they seem to be coming from the militants. I have documented how the leftist activists engage in hateful activities on a regular basis. (Muehlenberg 17.8.12)
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2007/05/03/fake-hate-crimes/

The hidden truth about our current society and the way that society in the not-to-distant future is developing is captured rather well in this article by Bill Meuhlenberg:
http://www.billmuehlenberg.com/2012/08/16/hate-crimes-and-lefty-double-standards/

The Media does have lot to answer for but not in the way that the watermelons of the left would have us believe.

Playdoh truth

What the Post-Modern deconstructionists have done well is to devalue truth based on facts by calling into question the idea of truth altogether. This approach means that facts themselves are open to manipulation and are frequently distorted to 'prove' sometimes the very opposite of what they are actually indicating. Truth now belongs to the tribe...falsehood lies in the realm of all of those who oppose the tribe.

The defenders of Assange are tribalists - the collective. Assange must be excused because he is one of them. And the facts must be displaced by the myths of the tribe. The women accusing Assange count for nothing. They are outside the tribe, and threaten it. (Bolt 17.8.12)

A clarion call

When you consider the attack on marriage by the gay lobby, reflect on this rather profound statement by Princeton University professor Robbie George:

The two greatest institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage. These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together. Contemporary statist ideologues have contempt for both of these institutions, and they fully understand the connection between them. We who believe in the market and in the family should see the connection no less clearly.

The whole article is worth a read.
http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/mirandadevine/index.php/dailytelegraph/comments/preserving_the_family/

Culture wars!

Roger Scruton makes some extremely valuable points in this article:
http://spectator.org/people/roger-scruton/all.xml

This is a small extract from the article:

SO WHAT SHOULD CONSERVATIVES BE DOING? This is the last of my regular articles for The American Spectator, so let me conclude a happy period of my life with a few observations for future use. Our work, it seems to me, consists in what Plato called anamnesis -- the defeat of forgetting. We cannot ask young people to live as we lived or to value what we valued. But we can encourage them to see the point of how we lived, and to recognize that freedom without responsibility is, in the end, an empty asset. We can tell them stories of the old virtues, and enlarge their sympathies toward a world in which suffering and sacrifice were not the purely negative things that they are represented to be by the consumer culture but an immovable part of any lasting happiness. Our task, in other words, is now less political than cultural -- an education of the sympathies, which requires from us virtues (such as imagination, creativity, and a respect for high culture) that have a diminishing place in the world of politics.

Of course, we should do our best to control the growth of the state and to make it more difficult to depend upon its constant expansion. We should seek, through whatever avenues remain, to rebuild our education system with knowledge rather than “self-esteem” as its product. There are a hundred small-scale ways in which we can help the next generation not to fall completely into the trap that is being prepared for it. But there is no way, I fear, to destroy that trap entirely. For it is built from human ingenuity and baited with our own desires.

The great unmasking

A must read article for sceptics of all ages and creeds but in particular those ageing white conservative males like myself.
It unmasks the pretensions of the elite who would occupy and rule through fear and gives the lie to the crazy ongoing catastrophic theories that pretend to give pretext to a constant state of 'emergency'.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/08/the-climate-of-opinion

Group think

This is a situation/problem that applies to many groups of 'experts', I have no doubt...not least those who consider themselves the experts in climate change.

I also was fairly careful not to go out on a limb, which basically meant following the herd of other economists. None of those economists, I am satisfied, knew more than I did, so it is a mystery how particular consensuses emerged. I suppose it was through some collective process of osmosis. (Peter Smith-Quadrant)

AGW squib

The big guns of the Global warming tribe are in fact small peashooters.

You’d expect a professor to have done the basic research.
Naomi Oreskes is famous (of sorts) for the book: Merchants of Doubt — it seeds doubts about skeptics by saying that skeptic’s “seed doubts” about climate change.
The skeptics seed doubts by questioning the evidence and pointing to contrary results (isn’t this known as “discussion”?). Orsekes seeds doubts by digging through biographies, analyzing indirect payments of minor amounts, hunting through unrelated topics and tenuous associations from 20 year old contracts.
The hypocrisy of saying that skeptics attack the messenger is lost on Orsekes who specializes in … attacking the messengers.
Oreskes’ work is based on a logical fallacy, inept research, and incompetent reasoning.
What is remarkable is that so many “intellectuals” or journalists can’t or won’t see through her thin rhetoric.

1. Oreskes can name virtually no significant funding for skeptics. Skeptics are almost all unpaid volunteers, working out of professional and patriotic duty, appalled by the illogical, anti-science sentiments of people like Oreskes.
2. The enormous “vested interests” are well over a thousand to one in favor of alarmism as measured by funding, yet Oreskes has not even considered them. The largest proactive skeptical organization (Heartland) has a budget that is one hundredth of Greenpeace and WWF’s combined. Funding for alarmist research since 1990 is at least $79 billion, and probably a lot higher. Funding for skeptical research is so small, no one can add it up. The oil giants like Shell and BP mostly support alarmism and carbon markets. The global carbon market was worth $176 bn in 2011, about the same as the global wheat trade, and the renewables investments added up to $243 bn in 2010. These are very large amounts of vested interest. Since Oreskes is blind to the real money in the debate we can only assume she is an activist rather than a historian.
3. She resorts to twenty year old documents about tobacco funding to smear by association because she has so little real evidence of actual funding or misbehavior of skeptics. As it happens, Fred Singer was never directly paid by a tobacco company, has never doubted that smoking causes cancer, but corrected a scientific error in a paper on passive smoking. He deserves thanks. Oreskes owes him an apology.
4. Skeptics far outrank believers in both numbers and in scientific kudos. They have won real Nobel Prizes in physics, the climate scientists Orsekes quotes have won “Peace Prizes”. Skeptics can name 31,500 scientists including 9,000 PhD’s and hundreds of professors. The IPCC can name 62 people who reviewed the critical chapter nine of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, some of them reviewing their own work. Alarmists don’t try to counter the Petition Project with a petition of their own because, even with all their supporters on the scientific gravy train, they don’t stand a chance of coming up with a number large enough to prop up their claims that 97% of scientists agree.
5. Oreskes claims “deniers” attack the messenger, which on it’s face is true, except that she is the one who denies the evidence and attacks the messenger. She is the Queen of Smear and The Merchant of Doubt herself. Virtually no one has done more to smear opponents in this debate than she has. She refers to them continuously as “Deniers” — though she cannot name any evidence they deny, she has dug mindlessly into the paltry funding, biographies, or association and connections with topics that are totally unrelated to our atmosphere. Skeptics keep asking for evidence. It’s been 30 months since I asked, and no one can provide THAT mystery paper that supports the catastrophic claims.
6. Oreskes keeps stating that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increases the temperature of the planet, but almost all the leading skeptics agree with it. Why does she keep stating it, as if it is a point of contention? She wants the audience to believe that this is what the debate is about, while the skeptics agree that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that causes warming — but dispute the feedbacks asserted by models (which account for two thirds of the forecast increase in temperatures), but which is completely absent in the observations. Is Oreskes ignorant and incompetent in assessing the real scientific debate or is she deliberately deceiving her audience? Only she knows.

When she says those in denial reject “the scientific evidence”, she mistakenly believes that “evidence” about climate change is an internet poll of government funded researchers. It’s an anti-science position akin to witchcraft. Tens of thousands of real scientists, including men who walked on the moon, and Nobel Prize winners of physics, know that evidence for climate change comes from thermometers, ice cores, satellites and fossils. Real scientists can quote 1,100 peer reviewed papers that support their skepticism. Naomi Oreskes can quote no real evidence that supports her catastrophic pet hypothesis. Instead she thinks computer simulations produce “observations” and scientist’s opinions are worth measuring and quoting.

theres more....