Hungary's revolt - by Richard... Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Hungary's revolt - by Richard... Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Ambrose says it augurs ill for Greece. This is the collapse of Hungary's talks with the International Monetary Fund and the EU that we picked up on Sunday. It is a chilly reminder that sovereign debt crises do not end with a rescue package and a click of the fingers. As austerity drags on for year after year, democracies react, he writes.

The thing is, if it is as bad as he makes out, and as bad as I think it is, then it would be on the front page, instead of this meaningless fluff about a "big society". If this goes down, we'll be lucky to have a society at all, unless you count Grozny as a model (pictured).

But then I keep forgetting that our newspapers don't do real news any more, alongside our politicians who don't do real politics. So, when it happens we're likely to get little warning, and we'll be totally stuffed before we even realise it. Whoever said ignorance is bliss? 

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Day 10 - Battle of Britain - by Richard... Monday, July 19, 2010

The official RAF report for this day seventy years ago, speaks of low cloud. There was, it continues, very little enemy activity, probably owing to bad weather. At the end of the day, it admitted to four Hurricanes lost (two crashing on landing), against one enemy bomber destroyed and two "probables". That was a lie, but the record survives to this day on the MoD website.

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Still glaciers - by Richard...

The climate sceptic world was somewhat entertained yesterday by the news from Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times that the US government has suspended its funding of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit (CRU), citing the scientific doubts raised by last November's emails "leak".

There is a lot more to this story than meets the eye, as the episode has provided a trigger to examine how much of the climate monitoring and analysis is being carried out, with the stress on the CRU work only being suspended. Something new and different may yet come out of this, which would make any triumphalism on the part of the cleptics a tad premature.

A similar caution might be extended to warmists getting over-excited about a brace of photographs taken of the Everest glaciers. One (above), is a 1921 photograph taken by George Mallory of the Rongbuk Glacier. In the distance is the northern slope of Mount Everest and the Tibet Autonomous Region. Then we see the same view (below), only the photograph is taken in 2007 by David Breashears of the Rongbuk Glacier.

Like dogs to their vomit , this is one of the many issues to which the warmists keep returning, even though – as has carefully explained, the relevance of this one glacier, in the grander scheme of things, is absolutely nil. 

Some glaciers expand, others retreat, for reasons we know not why. One thing about the Himalayan glaciers we do know is that they are not directly affected by global warming as these are high altitude glaciers, well above the permanent snow line and unaffected by small increases in temperature.

Glaciers, however, have that iconic character which means that the hard-core warmists cannot allow their status to be anything other than "under threat", and so we see yet again the spectre of retreating ice raised. There re-appearance, however, tells us nothing about climate but a great deal about the climate change industry. They are worried and while nothing very much is showing on the surface, as we all know, still glaciers run deep.

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Careers for the stupid - by Richard...

Melanie Phillips doesn't seem to like Baroness Ashton. The "way in which she was appointed to her £270,000-a-year post and her subsequent performance in office have provided a veritable parable of the cavorting caravan of the contemptuous and the contemptible that is the EU," she writes.

Interestingly, her piece gets 22 comments. Thefatuous Spelman and her comments on burkas gets 367 (so far). And it's easy to jump on the band wagon and dismiss this woman as stupid ... but it has always been very obviously the case that this woman has been struggling with her brain cell count for an awful long time ... yet she still gets promoted! The woman really is seriously thick.

We do have an interesting phenomenon here. How is it that stupid people are so attracted to politics, and why is it that they do so well? Perhaps the second question answers the first, as politics certainly does seem to be one of those few callings where (like the military) stupidity seems to be a career asset. The thicker you are, the higher you tend to go.

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Hooray! - by Richard...

Now, you're never going to convince the kids that global warming is a bad thing. All that moneyspent on propaganda ... totally wasted! Heh!

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Worse than stupid - by Richard...

"BRITAIN faces years of blackouts and soaring electricity bills because of the drive toward green power, a leading energy expert warned last night."

That's in The Daily Express this morning. Something like it has been published elsewhere many times, particularly in The Daily Mail, by Booker and others. I've lost count of how many times I've written about it, and you would not thank me if I went back into the blog and found out.

There is not a single expert in the field who says different, who does not agree that the present "green" policy is the road to perdition. Wind does not work, solar is an expensive rip-off and the rest of the renewables don't amount to diddly squat.

Yet still the politicians prat about. There is a sort of equivalence between now and the thirties, when the politicians were ignoring the advice of the experts to re-arm. But in this case, we have the bizarre situation where the politicians are spending more, to achieve less – much less.

They really do not seem realise what is going to happen to them or their successors. We talk in our jokey way about rising up and slaughtering them all. But if you take a cold, hard look at what is going to happen to this society when the lights go out and the supermarkets shut down, slaughter is the least of what is going to happen.

These people are worse than stupid and time is running out. What is it going to take to get through to them?

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