Huge parallels - by Richard... Monday, March 29, 2010

Huge parallels - by Richard... Monday, March 29, 2010

How ironic it is that The Guardian, of all newspapers, should be picking up on the "flu pandemic" scare which afflicted the nation last year.

We touched on this in late January but now this newspaper is reporting the findings of a draft report to the Council of Europe. It asserts that the World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers.

Says Labour MP Paul Flynn, vice chair of the council's health committee, the loss of credibility could endanger lives. 

As to the report, it declares that, "This decline in confidence could be risky in the future. When the next pandemic arises many persons may not give full credibility to recommendations put forward by WHO and other bodies. They may refuse to be vaccinated and may put their own health and lives at risk."

As we now know, the discrepancy between the estimate of the numbers of people who would die from flu and the reality was dramatic. In the United Kingdom, the Department of Health initially announced that around 65,000 deaths were to be expected. 

By the start of 2010, this estimate was downgraded to only 1,000 fatalities. By January 2010, fewer than 5,000 persons had been registered as having caught the disease and about 360 deaths had been noted.

It cannot be stated often enough, or with sufficient emphasis, that we have been there before. This is exactly a parallel with the salmonella and BSE scares – the latter with the 500,000 deaths a year forecast, with senior medical officers and "scientists" solemnly pronouncing that we were all in mortal peril.

And, of course, the media lapped it up, giving short-shrift to the "sceptics" like myself, who said it wasn't happening, wasn't going to happen and that the "experts" were talking out of their backsides.

Here we are again with global warming – the same "consensus", the same certainty from a gang of so-called experts, the strident calls from the politicians and the media, all piling in to pronounce that we are all in mortal peril. But, with the lack of joined-up thinking that so profoundly affects papers like The Guardian, they cannot see the connections.

But all these experts can't be wrong, the experts bleat. Yet, history and recent experience tells us that experts are quite frequently wrong. When a madness such as the salmonella scare, BSE, swine flu and the rest, take hold, most likely the prevailing orthodoxy will always be wrong.

So it is with global warming – but this time the scaremongers have picked an unfalsifiable theory, and falsified the evidence, so that their dishonesty is concealed. Despite that, the dynamics are the same – there are huge parallels, and only the retarded and the self-interested can fail to see them. 

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"We will not prevail in Afghanistan" - by Richard...

The sooner Canada gets its troops out of Afghanistan the better because the mission is a waste of lives and money in a doomed cause, one of Canada's most eminent diplomats told a Montreal conference Sunday.

That is Robert Fowler, who has told the Liberal party's Canada 150 conference: "The bottom line is that we will not prevail in Afghanistan." He adds: "Once we understand and accept that reality it is time to leave, not a moment, not a life and not a dollar later."

Fowler is not a man to be dismissed easily. He has been a foreign policy adviser to three Canadian prime ministers, deputy minister of national defence and Canada's longest-serving ambassador to the United Nations. More recently, as special UN envoy to Niger he was kidnapped by al Qaeda in December 2008 and held captive in the Sahara for 130 days.

On Afghanistan, he said that it is difficult to rationalise or understand what the Canadian mission can accomplish, what with the Taleban gaining in strength and reach day by day. 

"They say look at the number of little girls we have put in school – at a cost of 146 Canadian lives and an incremental cost of $11.3 billion. My, think of the number of little girls we could put in school throughout the Third World – particularly in Africa – with that kind of money. And without having to kill and be killed to get that worthy job done."

He said it appears that our goal in Afghanistan is to colonize the country and replace its culture with ours, a mission impossible for which the Taliban know Canada lacks the resources and dedication to accomplish.

But the money quote is this: "They understand," says Fowler, "enough about our attention-deficit addled politics to know that we simply do not have the heart for a long-haul casualty-heavy, intense, brutal, no-holds-barred struggle in which none of our vital interests are engaged."

What applies to the Canadians applies to us in spades. The "Afghanisation" process is a charadeand, for once, The Independent is right.

Crucially, though, there is a more pressing reason why we should depart. Simply, it is this: by common consent, this conflict cannot be resolved by military means. For there to be long-term peace and security, there has to be a political solution. But we are not even attempting to search for, much less broker a political solution. The complexities are being ignored as the conflict is presented in "goodies" versus "baddies" terms.

But there is not one conflict, but several – and many "players" – internal and international. And at the top of the heap is India, allied with Iran, in a proxy war against Pakistan, supporting a tribal Afghan leader who would rather be fighting Pakistan, the traditional enemy, than his own peoples. Yet we pretend that, somehow, Afghanistan and Pakistan - these ancient enemies - are "allies", with common cause against the "Taliban" and the Global War on Terror.

Left to itself, the Afghan government would have its Army ranged on the border with Pakistan, seeking resolution of the Century-old border dispute, centred on the British-defined Durand Line. 

The Indians would be supporting the Afghan government, primarily as a means of destabilising Pakistan. The Chinese would be moving in (as they are now) to buy up the mineral assets of the nation, bribing officals to keep them sweet. Pakistan would be paying the tribes (aka "Taliban") to subvert the Kabul government and to damage India. India, for its part, would be paying the same and different tribes, to damage Pakistan. Iran would be working with India, as long as the money (our money, the money we pay in aid to India) was there, but subtly subverting Kabul.

The Pashtun tribes, as always, would be butchering each other, fighting against the government, for the government, some for Pakistan, some for India, and some for whoever paid better or last, including Saudi Arabian paymasters if the mood took them and the money was right. The Baluchi would be fighting everybody, including themselves.

To resolve the issue would require sitting down at a table with Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, the northern "stans", China and also Russia, and banging heads together.

But even getting the Indians and Pakistanis in the same room, much less round a negotiating table, is almost an impossibility. And we are not even trying to achieve that. We need to keep India sweet, to support our global agenda on climate change, and it is not going to play ball if we start confronting its government with things it does not want to hear.

We could help the Afghan peoples (some of them) – by brokering a political solution. If that was on the table, it might be worthwhile having the military there to support the process. Since we are not prepared to do that, we are not helping. We are just postponing the inevitable.

Short of that political solution, we are left with an irresolvable, low-grade conflict that our military cannot win. It can temporarily prevail where it has enough resource to saturate an area. But, in the longer term, it can only endure, taking casualties in an endless war of attrition until patience and the money runs out. Then we will have to leave. We would be better doing it sooner, rather than leave it until then.

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A thoroughly dishonest letter - by Richard... Sunday, March 28, 2010

In response to Booker's piece last week on the £60 billion WWF "REDD" scam - amplified in my parallel post - we have today a thoroughly dishonest letter from William Y Brown, president and CEO of the Woods Hole Research Center.

There are two parts to the letter and in the first – which we deal with in this post – Brown complains of Booker describing the Center as a "global warming advocacy group". We are, he responds, "a widely respected scientific institution whose scientists publish dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles annually in the world's most prestigious scientific journals, including Science and Nature, with much of the work supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA." 

The dishonesty of this claim is transparent, evident from the center's own website where it tells us that it is an "independent, non-profit institute focused on environmental science, education, and public policy." As to its "mission", it seeks to "conserve and sustain the planet's vegetation, soils, water, and climate by clarifying and communicating their interacting functions in support of human well-being and by promoting practical approaches to their management in the human interest."

Even the most dispassionate analysis cannot find in the center's own text any support for its proposition that it is a "scientific institution". It seeks to "conserve and sustain", thence by "clarifying and communicating". It does so "in support" of an objective, and it is concerned with "promoting" practical approaches. It is also focused on "public policy".

Laudable though these activities might be, they are not science. This is advocacy, where, effectively, scientific method and personnel described as "scientists" are used as tools to promote a "mission". And, even without that, the background of its founder, George M Woodwell and his links with other advocacy groups tell you exactly where it stands. 

Woodwell is an ecologist "with broad interests in global environmental issues and policies." He was also a founding trustee and continues to serve on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is a former chairman of the board of trustees and currently a member of the National Council of the WWF, a founding trustee of the World Resources Institute, and a founder and currently an honorary member of the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund.

Then, as regards its advocacy operation, it tells us:

The Center's Program on Science in Public Affairs focuses on the importance of bringing science to bear on policy formulation and on the adoption of international agreements governing these topics. As a result, our staff has been intensely active in scientific and policy research surrounding both global climate change issues, and issues concerning world forest resources. Our efforts emphasize the importance of participation by developing countries in international legal discussions, the resolution of north-south conflicts, and the role of nongovernmental organizations in international processes.

This confirms, in their own words, the role of their "science". They are using it "to bear on policy formulation and on the adoption of international agreements governing these topics". In other words, it is not "science" as such, but the use of scientific method as an advocacy tool, the end being, as the center clearly states, the attainment of political objectives.

Richard Lindzen had them sussed many years ago, when he wrote:

It is, of course, possible to corrupt science without specifically corrupting institutions. For example, the environmental movement often cloaks its propaganda in scientific garb without the aid of any existing scientific body. One technique is simply to give a name to an environmental advocacy group that will suggest to the public, that the group is a scientific rather than an environmental group. Two obvious examples are the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Woods Hole Research Center.

To set up an advocacy organisation with all the tools and appearances of being a scientific institute is a clever technique, but it is essentially dishonest. To then pretend that its output is "science" is also dishonest. And that is precisely what the second part of the letter does, which we will deal with in a separate post.

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Like rabbits in headlights - by Richard...

The anti-EU party UKIP is often accused of being a "single issue" party, and indeed it is – and that issue is "who governs us", Westminster or the European Union. 

But in exactly the same sense, the Westminster rabble have become single issue parties. The no longer have any distinguishing policies so their only issue is which party should have the dubious privilege of sending its leader to live in No 10 Downing Street.

The lack of policy – at least on the "big issues" such as public debt - is highlighted by Booker today, in his column, which takes a break from leading on global warming.

He sets out the stall, recording that the eventual self-destruction of Britain was sealed on 14 July 1998, the day when Gordon Brown first indicated that he was going to take the brakes off public spending.

In 1997, the annual bill was £322 billion and after Mr Brown's 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review, it was projected that it might almost double, over 10 years, to more than £600 billion. And so it turned out, with current spending at £661 billion.

Such is the dire state of the economy though that more than a quarter of it is having to be borrowed, giving us a larger public sector deficit than Greece, an overspend so colossal that the Government itself predicts that in just four years' time our national debt will have doubled, to £1.4 trillion – equal to our present annual national output. 

And if our international credit rating is downgraded, as seems very possible, we will have to pay even more to borrow the money. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, we may soon be shelling out some £74 billion a year – £60 a week from every household in the land – not to reduce our debt, but simply to pay the interest.

Therein lies the background, and therein lies our dilemma. Not only does the current government seem unwilling or unable to do anything about this spiralling debt, neither does the leather-jacketed Mr Cameron. As we step out from the cliff edge over 5,000 feet of nothingness, neither of the parties seem to have the slightest idea what to do.

Yet, even on the back of an envelope, Booker and I could (and have) sketched ideas that could easily save more than £100 billion a year and, with a little more effort, we would have no difficulty in reining in public expenditure, bringing it back to well under the £300 billion annual mark.

That is the great tragedy of it all. As Booker writes, like rabbits in headlights, our politicians wait paralysed for the crunch that must inevitably come, totally devoid of plans, devoid of any sense of urgency, devoid of anything approaching leadership or intelligence.

The single and only issue that dominates their foetid little brains is that we should vote one or other of their parties into what is laughingly called "power", thus allowing the victorious leader to disport himself as prime minister. Unsurprisingly, in response to their increasingly strident calls of "vote for me", the electorate only has a single question: "Why?"

And to that question, none of them have an answer either.

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Is this what politics has come to? - by Richard...

With our dismal crew of politicians no longer able to deal with real politics, we asserted recently, the election campaign becomes a beauty contest.

How true that turns out to be, with The Sunday Telegraph news pages devoted to a fashion commentary on the garb of our would-be leader.

This is the sort of sterile, vapid content that you used to see in middle-order women's magazines, as they trilled about the latest outfits of persons in the news, but such trivia is now elevated to the main pages of a national newspaper.

It says almost all you need to know about contemporary politics that, on the one hand, Cameron felt he needed to make a "fashion statement" and, on the other, that a once-serious newspaper felt the need to report on it, other than to point out that the wearer has completely lost the plot.

A Conservative leader addressing a public meeting wears conservative clothes – full stop. A slightly over-weight, middle-aged article who feels the need to make a ludicrous "fashion statement" is neither a Conservative, a man, nor a leader.