Archive for the ‘internet/free speech’ Category

A: Both shut down those who question them.

Tim Blair Oct 1st:

UPDATE II. And now I’m blocked:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access this server.

Oh well.

Al Gore the same month:

At a conference of environmental journalists, however, he briefly deigned to answer questions. The journalist who directed Not Evil, Just Wrong, a documentary that criticizes Gore’s alarmism, took advantage of the opportunity to ask Gore about the British judge who found that there were at least nine scientific errors in Gore’s film. The exchange is pretty entertaining; it ends with the journalist’s microphone being cut off:

When your opinions can stand up on their own, you aren’t obsessed with criticism. That would also explain this.

On Oct Post Tim Blair dared to tweak King Charles the Pious with the following post:

Then.

Now.

UPDATE:

Then. Then. Then.

Now. Now. Now.

Charles answer included the following:

Tim Blair seems to believe I was supposed to toe the right wing line on climate change forever. Now that I’ve invested the time and effort to educate myself on the issues and have changed my mind, I’m an unfaithful monkey who must be stoned.

But the Gods of Irony do not like to be mocked:

The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.

The actual BBC story is here:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Damion Thompson asks the question:

The BBC now has serious questions to answer. It has used millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money to advance a simplistic point of view that is beginning to fall apart under scrutiny. Did it not foresee that this might happen? And, now that statistics are beginning to point in the other direction, is it prepared to give equal prominence to a debate about climate change that is both respectable and urgent?

So as the evidence has changed to a degree that the Climate Change correspondent for the BBC actually questioned Global Warming Charles Johnson has managed to be convinced in the other direction.

There has been speculation that LGF is on the gravy train. Robert Stacy disagrees:

Some commenters have speculated that Johnson is now on the Soros gravy train, a conspiratorial suspicion that violates Occam’s Razor. Johnson surely isn’t a sellout, for this would mean that he had been bribed to betray some important principle or to dishonor some obligation of loyalty.

Yet no one has ever offered evidence that Charles Foster Johnson ever had any principle or honor, and or that he was ever loyal to anyone but himself. He has been consistently vicious and selfish, and this only escaped notice so long as it served Johnson’s interests to deceive those whose assistance he sought in advancing his own self-aggrandizing agenda.

I was in that camp for quite a while but the Global warming issue isn’t something that was a part of any kind of vendetta or a key issue for any of the people that Charles was feuding with. Combine this with the fact that the evidence is actually going the other way and this story:

Billionaire George Soros said on Saturday that he would invest $1 billion in clean energy technology as part of an effort to combat climate change.

and I must confess I just don’t know what to think anymore.

Update: Given my not knowing a new poll is in order.

Yes it’s Columbus day the day the left most loves to hate. (Next to Christmas of course)

You might think that it’s because a White (Italian) European sailed across the ocean and discovered lands where the Wheel wasn’t discovered, where people lived pretty much in the stone age, where cannibalism was a norm, where regular war took place between peoples and where the greatest and most advanced civilization in the Americas spent most of its time cutting out the hearts of captives to serve their Gods.

Now it has become fashionable to lionize the American Indian as “better” than Europeans. It’s certainly true that in some aspects Europeans demeaned and belittled their accomplishments but perhaps instead one might treat them as oh I don’t know, men? They had all the strengths and weaknesses of men however they belonged to a group of civilizations that were certainly not as advanced as European civilizations certainly not scientifically or militarily.

It’s interesting that the same people who insist that we don’t treat American Indians as a conquered people (they are) have no problem treating our friends of the old confederacy as a conquered people (they are too).

All of this is interesting but the REAL reason why our friends on the left despise Columbus isn’t what he did to America, but what he did to Europe.

For centuries before Columbus Europe was ruled by an elite that could ignore the people at will, they were the rich or the connected or the artiest who were patronized by them. They were able to live well off the backs of their serfs and renters, they had a class system that kept them on top.

Once religious freedom came in North America and the concept of Representative Government became the way of North America, the elites much like the followers of Saddam found themselves after his fall, saw their place at the top and the easy life and privileges came out of it.

Millions of those who served emigrated to the New World and after the American Revolution democracy strength increased all over the world. After world war 2 things were in dire straights for the elites, The only remaining powers were the US that bastion of democracy, and the USSR where they had their own feudal system based on party but with fewer of the comforts they craved.

Ah but then came the “European Constitution” and the European way and all we have seen since. Lo and behold the result of all of these things is the creation of…a set of elites bureaucrats who live on government largess that pays them to go to conferences with the best food and wine and act important.

It has taken 500 years but the European elites have almost re-solidified the class system that they once ruled by, the basis being not divine right, but bureaucratic power and regulation.

That is Why Columbus is hated by the elites, he set things in motion (although not meaning to) that threatened their power and has taken centuries to re-establish, and believe me those same elites want power here.

If you want to know what is going on with this administration keep that thought in mind, the idea of a set of elite bureaucrats with power of life and death but most importantly with the power of the gravy train for themselves. This is what it is all about, and always has been.

…consider this post at National Review:

K Lo, I turned on the TV this morning, and the news woman, going to commercial said , ” Next, the Vatican announces five new saints. Find out why people in Hawaii are celebrating.” You can guess where my mind immediately went!

Think of Bill Clinton it is over a decade later and he is still the butt of jokes whenever there is a shot of a young woman with him. It when the idea of an award or particularly an unearned comes up and Obama comes instantly to mind then he is in real trouble, for the next few weeks it is inveatable but if it keeps up then he is in real trouble.

The only way I can think of to get around it is in two parts: First to joke about it himself and second to actually DO something.