ACORN – The Final Nail

When the ACORN scandal hit the ‘community organisation’ had one excuse. They claimed that the undercover couple had visited many offices and been turned away, and only in a handful were they offered advice on how to cheat the taxes on money they earned from underage sex slaves.

In particular ACORN claimed Giles and O’Keefe were turned away from New York and San Diego offices (video evidence has already been shown that they were actually helped there). Most importantly they were not only refused advice in Philadelphia, but were told to leave the office and the police were called.

Errrrrrmmmmm, or not, as the case might be.

Incidentally the ACORN employee’s voice is muted, for legal reasons.

How can anyone who knows about this now fail to utterly condemn ACORN? How can ACORN continue to function, when they don’t know what else Andrew Breitbart has to release? How can they have any credibility when everything they have said has turned out to be a lie, because Breitbart really, really knows his business, knew exactly how ACORN would react and had the evidence to respond to everything, so ACORN’s defence only made things worse at every stage?

Arrogance of Authority

A great case of someone who let his own arrogance overcome any doubts he might have had. A Justice of the Peace in Louisiana has decided not to sign a marriage license because the couple are of mixed race.

Now I happen to accept his claim that he is not racist, and that he simply believes the marriage is less likely to last. This does not necessarily show racism. What it does show is that he thinks his views are more important than this couple’s decision about their own life, and that he thinks that statistical norms should determine an individual case.

Another time where someone should have more doubts.

Hat tip Instapundit.

Why Are You So Greedy?

The most stupid question I have ever heard on national television. It simply indicates that the BBC have no idea of the concept of the market, and of choice and freedom.

Anne Robinson was talking to the Marketing Director of Centre Parks holiday park company on Watchdog, the consumer-affairs programme on BBC1. She was trying to claim that it was some sort of dreadful offence that Centre Parks charge people far more in the school holidays than outside. She was livid, and went through a whole host of random complaints. She showed no hint of understanding when the Marketing Director pointed out that they were full at that time, so people must feel that it is value for money, and she went on at him about the additional charges they make for their activities.

The funniest part was failing to see the irony when people started saying that they had gone or would go elsewhere due to the price at Centre Parks. That is their choice – they are not forced to go to Centre Parks, or to indulge in extra activities when they are there. It is their choice to pay what Centre Parks’s choose to charge.

This shows the core problem with the BBC. They are an insular organisation, where charges and pay are not related to choice or to freedom but to some arbitrary concept of “fairness”. Oh, and that they think that paying Jonathan Woss £6 million a year has any relation to fairness.

Update: this self-righteous piece of ignorance is online now.

Bercow Not Such a Berk

Although I stand by previous comments about Bercow and his pompous decision to appoint himself a special advisor. However I was always willing to give him a shot at the job before condemning him as speaker. I hoped he would do well by the House, even as I feared he would not, but it seems he might be making a decent fist of it. At the least he is far better than Michael Martin, perhaps with time he can come up to Betty Boothroyd and Sir Bernhard Wetherill’s standard. We can only hope this continues.

The ‘Far-Right’ and the Left

The media always term the BNP and other neo-Nazi or neo-fascist organisations ‘far-right’. This is despite the fact that they are always socialist, of course the term Nazi explicitly includes socialism. Despite the fact that they appeal to disaffected Labour voters in the UK, hence the BNP success in areas where Labour once held sway.

So I am far less surprised than Lucy Lips at Harry's Place that left-wing Labour MP Clare Short and Liberal Democrat peer Jenny Tonge shared an anti-Israeli platform with neo-fascist MEP Kristina Morvai of the Hungarian nationalist party Jobbik, as well as the usual supporters of terrorist Hamas.

So where are the cries of horror in the news? where are the commentators decrying a sitting British MP making common cause with Jobbik, a Hungarian Party that discussed alliance with the BNP?

Although I have some doubt that Jobbik are as extremist as Harry’s Place make out – the evidence that they are anti-Semitic (apart from the anti-Israeli stance common to many left-wing British organisations, placing the only Jewish state as a unique villain for no apparent reason) is very weak. They do however seem to be anti-Roma to rather a strong degree, as well as nationalist. Most telling their MEPs discussed making common cause with the BNP and the French Front National in the European Parliament (they did not join Euronat, the party the BNP and FN MEPs belong to) and Nick Griffin, the BNP MEP spoke at a Jobbik rally.

So Jobbik is not a respectable party. It is far less respectable than the parties in Latvia and Poland that our esteemed Foreign Secretary managed to offend when criticising Conservative alliance with them in the European Parliament. Yet a Labour MP, former cabinet member can openly associate with one of their MEPs, and make common cause without any comment being made.

More on Global Cooling

This could be an important time, leading to great relief and perhaps great fear. It appears that the media are finally seeing the cracks in global warming. Much as I hate to link the Daily Mail, as I have said before sources that go off the deep end sometimes will also are sometimes go the whole way, where few others dare go so far.

So temperature records are falling in falling temperatures. Austria’s earliest recorded snows, an American town breaking record low by seven degrees.

Even the alarmists are admitting that temperatures might fall for two decades, although they insist that the rising trend will overcome that.

It is easy to see the fatal flaw in their argument, it is mentioned in the Daily Mail article, “…the global cooling from 1945 to 1977…”. So the globe was cooling until 1977, and the warmest year since 1934 was 1998, and the world has been at an even temperature then cooling since, and now might cool for two decades.

So let me see if I have the sequence right, starting in 1947. The world cooled for three decades, then warmed for two decades and then is about to cool for another two decades before returning to a warming trend. Ooooookaaaaaay. Errrrrrrmmmmmm, I am not sure if you’re getting this, but I don’t see any consistent trend at all here. I see a pattern of rising and falling temperatures, probably therefore dominated by a factor that itself rises and falls.

Since the alarmists have been going on at us for 15 years now about the fact that CO2 levels have been rising exponentially, I am getting the idea that they don’t fit the pattern. I am not sure what physics these guys have, but mine is a little rusty; I did leave university 14 years ago. Can an exponential rise in CO2 really trigger oscillations in temperature? I reckon  it’s possible, but I also am damned sure that is not what those little models predicted.

With the hockey-stick curve having fallen for a second time, and no sign of sea-level rises the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is looking remarkably thin.

Nobel Prize Explained

So it appears it was not just the politics of the left but the venality and vanity of the left. It seems that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize to allow Thorbjørn Jagland to meet the world press. Jagland (who I must admit has a great name – sounds like the bastard child of a Norse god and a member of Abba) is the chairman of the committee, and a left-wing politician. He is also general secretary of the Council of Europe.

His own words seem to indicate that he chose Obama for publicity, in order that he would gain reflected glory. Read the final page of the article if nothing else. However the whole thing is worth reading for the political context, and commentary on Jagland’s use of the Prize for his own gain and for politics, but also a sense of his cluelessness that he might have done anything wrong.

Oh, and a great new example of the racism in left-wing politics. “Bongo from Kongo”?

So How Are Those IPCC Predictions Working Out?

The IPCC did a lot of detailed work, in fact a surprising amount considering the lack of contributors who had actually published anything in peer-review literature before. A lot of this was to support the central ideas required to convince people of climate change. Since Carbon dioxide does not actually absorb much energy that has previously escaped absorption by water or existing carbon dioxide levels, it was important to deal with other greenhouse gases.

One of the powerful greenhouse gases associated with human activity is methane, biogenic methane being produced by farming among other sources. Of course anyone modelling future climate would need to estimate the levels of methane, so how were the predictions now we can predict them against actual changes seen in the atmosphere?

Well I’m convinced that the IPCC could avoid arse/elbow confusion, although some are not.

Thanks again to those Small, Dead Animals.

Outrageous (updated)

This is everywhere, so I shall be brief. Really I am just registering my astonishment that the Guardian “newspaper” has been banned from reporting the proceedings of parliament. This is a genuine constitutional outrage, and should not have been even contemplated. Having been attempted it should not have been allowed. Guido adds the details that the Guardian is forced to omit, using his off-shore server privilege (the US has the freedom of speech stuff right).

The Trafigura case is a truly awful story, disgusting, basically down to killing black people for profit. They certainly should not be protected by our courts!

So who is going to stop Carter Fuck? They seem to be implicated in every disgusting cover-up (any law firm with a long-standing Private-Eye nickname is suspect).

Update: just to link to the Guardian's report on Trafigura. Thanks Speccie.

Update: gag order lifted, many are crediting a widespread internet campaign, on blogs and Twitter.

On The Subject of Education Again

PJTV has a video of a large demonstration in Washington DC, against Obama’s proposal to cancel a school programme similar to that recently hard-won in Los Angeles.

A few points I’d like to note about this, apart from obvious that the teaching unions connect this with the objections to the LA scheme.

Each pupil on the scheme costs the government half what a child not on the scheme costs. Even so this costs money, because in a sop to the unions bad schools do not lose funding when they lose pupils – they are in effect paid for pupils no longer there. This is probably why it is the only such scheme in the US that has not triggered general improvements in the local schools (as has the similar Swedish system).

People still proclaim their love for Obama, despite opposing his policy (DC is administered by the Federal Government). That really does bemuse me, when he has done nothing beneficial for them. Obama said he would keep the scheme going if research showed it working, which it does. He is willing to go back on that for a union – so who can now deny he is a socialist?

Obviously the NUT opposes the Conservative’s similar policy for the UK. We shall have to see what arguments and slogans they come up with. The best slogans are succinct but point clearly to sound arguments, and ‘Put Kids First’ seems to fit the bill to counter the unions.