Four views on democracy

Andrew P. Napolitano: What If Democracy Is Bunk?

What if you are only allowed to vote because it doesn't make a difference? What if no matter how you vote, the elites get to have it their way? What if "one person, one vote" is just a fiction created by the government to induce your compliance? What if democracy is dangerous to personal freedom? What if democracy erodes the people's understanding of natural rights and the foundations of government, and instead turns elections into beauty contests?

What if democracy allows the government to do anything it wants ...

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Peter Hitchens: If not Putin, Who?
I like Vladimir Putin. I wish I did not. But I cannot help it. I know that by saying so, I will trigger the lofty wrath of the right-thinking lobby which wants to portray modern Russia as the Evil Empire in a new Cold War.

In that war, which they are trying so hard to start, they will see me as a traitor. But it is exactly because I love my own country that I can see the point of Mr Putin.

He stands – as no other major leader does in the world today – for the rights of nations to decide their own business inside their own borders.

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Winston Churchill: Speaking on the Parliament Bill, the House of Commons November 11, 1947

... No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power. No Government has ever combined so passionate a lust for power with such incurable impotence in its exercise. The whole history of this country shows a British instinct—and, I think I may say, a genius—for the division of power. The American Constitution, with its checks and counterchecks, combined with its frequent appeals to the people, embodied much of the ancient wisdom of this island. Of course, there must be proper executive power to any Government, but our British, our English idea, in a special sense, has always been a system of balanced rights and divided authority, with many other persons and organised bodies having to be considered besides the Government of the day and the officials they employ. This essential British wisdom is expressed in many foreign Constitutions which followed our Parliamentary system, outside the totalitarian zone, but never was it so necessary as in a country which has no written Constitution.

The right hon. Gentleman spoke about Parliament, about the rights of Parliament, which I shall certainly not fail to defend. But it is not Parliament that should rule; it is the people who should rule through Parliament. That is the mistake he made, an important omission. All this was comprehended by those who shaped the Parliament Act and the settlement which developed upon that Act, so that it was never mentioned again for 36 years until now. That is what the Government are seeking to mutilate, if not to destroy. The object of the Parliament Act, and the spirit of that Act, were to give effect, not to spasmodic emotions of the electorate, but to the settled, persistent will of the people. What they wanted to do they could do, and what they did not want to do they could stop. All this idea of a handful of men getting hold of the State machine, having the right to make the people do what suits their party and personal interests or doctrines, is completely contrary to every conception of surviving Western democracy. "Some reverence for the laws ourselves have made," "Some patient force to change them when we will." We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.

I remember, many years ago, the late John Morley talking to me about a Greek word, born in the classical cradle of democracy, meaning the wish, the will, and the determination, with special reference to the gods, or to destiny, or, as it was adapted, to the desire of the mass, the inward desire of the mass of the people. This implied, that there should be frequent recurrence, direct or indirect, to the popular will, and that the wish—the —should prevail. That is what the party opposite is afraid of, and that is what this Act is devised to prevent. ...

... all these constitutions have the same object in view, namely, that the persistent resolve of the people shall prevail without throwing the community into convulsion and disorder by rash or violent, irreparable action and to restrain and prevent a group or sect or faction assuming dictatorial power. Single-Chamber Government, as I have said, is especially dangerous in a country which has no written Constitution and where Parliaments are elected for as long as five years. When there is an ancient community built up across the generations, "Where Freedom broadens slowly down From precedent to precedent"," it is not right that all should be liable to be swept away by the desperate measures of a small set of discredited men. "A thousand years scarce serve to form a State." "An hour may lay it in dust." This is the argument against Second-Chamber Government, which is evidently so espoused on that side of the House. In this field the outlook of His Majesty's Ministers is marked by the same meanness of thought and spirit which characterise so much of their action and which destroys their power to help or unite and save our suffering country. They wish to keep the present Second Chamber on the hereditary basis so that they can abuse it, insult it and attack it and yet to cripple its powers, although those powers stand on 36 years of modern Parliamentary title so that, in effect, it is both vulnerable and powerless. That is their tactical method. By this artful, and insincere scheme they hope to substitute for the will of the people the decisions of the Government. This sinister intrigue will be exposed by us, without fear, to the electorate resting upon a universal suffrage. ...

Look around at what is happening every day. The idea of a mandate is only a convention. A band of men who have got hold of the machine and have a Parliamentary majority undoubtedly have the power to propose anything they choose without the slightest regard to whether the people like it or not, or the slightest reference to whether or not it was included in their election literature. I will not expatiate upon the kind of laws they could pass if all is to be settled by a party majority in the House of Commons, under the discipline of the Whips and the caucus. But anyone can see for himself, and it is now frankly admitted on the opposite side of the House, that what is aimed at now is single-Chamber Government at the dictation of Ministers, without regard to the wishes of the people and without giving them any chance to express their opinion. There is, in fact, only one thing that they cannot do under the Parliament Act, 1911, and that is to prolong the life of Parliament beyond the five years' span to which we reduced it in those old days. I must say I am very glad we thought of it.

As a free-born Englishman, what I hate is the sense of being at anybody's mercy or in anybody's power, be he Hitler or Attlee. We are approaching very near to dictatorship in this country, dictatorship that is to say—I will be quite candid with the House—without either its criminality or its efficiency. But let the party opposite not imagine they will rule our famous land and lead our group of Commonwealths and our Empire—or what is left of it—by party dodges and Cabinet intrigues. Lots of people have tried to break the British nation and make it do things it did not want to do. Some were British and some were foreign. They all came a cropper. Do not imagine, I say to right hon. Gentlemen opposite, that you have got this country in pawn. The British are a proud people and, more than any other country in Europe, they have known how to control their rulers. You are our rulers now and we are going to show you that there are limits to your control. ...

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CanSpeccy: The Only Real Breach of the British Constitution

The only real breach of the British Constitution, Lord Salisbury believed, occurs if the government does something of which the great majority of the population strongly disapproves.

For decades, successive British governments have been doing something of which the great majority of the British population strongly disapproves:

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superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood

Angelina Jolie of the Council on Foreign Relations Conscripted To Sell Genocidal ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ War Doctrine

24 February 2012 14,485 views 45 Comments

by Martin Iqbal

Updated Sunday 26 February, 2012. Click here to go to the update.

Angelina Jolie, Goodwill Ambassador to the UN and member of CFR, is now using her profile to promote NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’ war doctrine. In an interview with the Balkans branch of Al Jazeera (NATO’s ‘Ministry of Truth’), Jolie (whose father has been a staunch defender of George W. Bush and who also visited Israel to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba) promotes her new film ‘In the Land of Blood and Honey’, a pro-war propaganda set-piece centred around the ‘humanitarian intervention’.
Set in Sarajevo, Jolie’s directorial debut aims to justify NATO’s brutal butchery in Bosnia during the 1990s, and Jolie even specifically refers to Syria in her Al Jazeera interview. She puts forth a string of utterly hollow gripes about the inactivity of the ‘international community’ as civilians suffer and die. Jolie’s selective morality means she doesn’t once mention Libya – a nation now butchered, fractured, and transformed into a torture state by NATO’s genocidal ‘humanitarian intervention’; an estimated 100,000 innocent people slaughtered by the very same ‘international community’.
Most likely reading from her pre-defined talking points, Jolie even calls out Russia and China for using their veto powers against the ever benevolent ‘international community’ vis-à-vis Syria.

“I think Syria has gotten to a point, sadly, where some form of, certainly, where some sort of intervention is absolutely necessary.
It’s so disheartening, it’s so sad, it’s so upsetting, it’s so horrible, what’s happening…at this time we just must stop the civilians being slaughtered…when you see that sort of mass violence and murder on the streets we must do something. And I know that the countries in the region are pushing as well, so I feel that this is a good global effort, but then there are these countries that are choosing not to intervene and I don’t feel, I feel very strongly that the use of a veto when you have financial interests in a country should be questioned, and the use of a veto against a humanitarian intervention should be questioned.”

Listen from approximately 8 minutes and 20 seconds in:

Hollywood superstar Angelina ‘Humanitarian’ Jolie is now baying for Syrian blood. The worst part is, due to our pitiful culture of celebrity worship and braindead media consumption, this episode may do great damage to the months of hard work that truth-seekers have done to expose this genocidal doctrine of war.

Update: 26 February, 2012
Yet another celebrity has been conscripted to sell the war on Syria. This time it’s UK singer Joss Stone telling the BBC that “these stories have to be told” otherwise the “massacres will just get worse”.

Via PoorRichard's Blog

The Amazing Ancient Culture of Syria: World's Oldest Known Melody, ca.1400 BC

By Michael Levy

This unique video, features my arrangement for solo lyre, of the 3400 year old "Hurrian Hymn no.6", which was discovered in Ugarit in Syria in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3400 years on a clay tablet, written in the Cuniform text of the ancient Hurrian language - it is THE oldest written song yet known! Respect, to the amazing ancient culture of Syria...السلام عليكم

Although about 29 musical texts were discovered at Ugarit, only this text, (text H6), was in a sufficient state of preservation to allow for modern academic musical reconstruction.

In short, the Cuneiform text clearly indicated specific names for lyre strings, and their respective musical intervals -- a sort of "Guitar tablature", for lyre!

Although discovered in modern day Syria, the Hurrians were not Syrian -- they came from modern day Anatolia. The Hurrian Hymn actually dates to the very end of the Hurrian civilisation (c.1400BCE) . The Hurrian civilization dates back to at least 3000 BCE. It is an incredible thought, that just maybe, the musical texts found at Ugarit, preserved precious sacred Hurrian music which may have already been thousands of years old, prior to their inscription for posterity, on the clay tablets found at Ugarit!

My arrangement here, is based on the that the original transcription of the melody, as interpreted by Prof. Richard Dumbrill. Here is a link to his book, "The Archeomusicology of the Near East": http://bit.ly/d3aovp

It is played here, on a replica of the ancient Kinnor Lyre from neighbouring Israel; an instrument almost tonally identical to the wooden asymmetric-shaped lyres played throughout the Middle East at this amazingly distant time...when the Pharaoh's still ruled ancient Egypt.

A photograph of the actual clay tablet on which the Hurrian Hymn was inscribed, can be seen here:

http://www.phoenicia.org/music.html

The melody is one of several academic interpretations, derived from the ambiguous Cuneiform text of the Hurrian language in which it was written. Although many of the meanings of the Hurrian language are now lost in the mists of time, it can be established that the fragmentary Hurrian Hymn which has been found on these precious clay tablets are dedicated to Nikkal; the wife of the moon goddess.

There are several such interpretations of this melody, but to me, the fabulous interpretation just somehow sounds the most "authentic". Below is a link to the sheet music, as arranged by Clint Goss:

http://www.flutekey.com/pdf/HurrianTabLtd.pdf

In my arrangement of the Hurrian Hymn, I have attempted to illustrate an interesting diversity of ancient lyre playing techniques, ranging from the use of "block and strum" improvisation at the end, glissando's, trills & tremolos, and alternating between harp-like tones in the left hand produced by finger-plucked strings, and guitar-like tones in the right hand, produced by use of the plectrum.

I have arranged the melody in the style of a "Theme and Variations" - I first quote the unadorned melody in the first section, followed by the different lyre techniques described above in the repeat, & also featuring improvisatory passages at the end of the performance. My arrangement of the melody is much slower than this actual specific academic interpretation of the melody- I wanted the improvisations in the variations on the theme to stand out, and to better illustrate the use of lyre techniques by a more rubato approach to the melody.

All of my 9 albums of mystical, ancient lyre music are now available from iTunes. For full details please visit: http://www.ancientlyre.com

Our Friends and Enemies in the Middle East

Senior Hamas leader rebukes Syrian ally Assad, backs rebels
Al-Qaida urges Muslims to help Syrian rebels
Jordan's Muslim Brotherhood urge 'jihad' against Syrian regime
Syrian security forces destroy Wahabi terrorist gang

France’s secret war against the Syrian people
The ‘Friends of Syria’ is a contradiction in terms
Syria's "friends" prepare military assault

Clinton calls Russia and China 'despicable' for failing to condemn Syria
China calls US critique on Syria "super arrogant"
 SYRIA: US-NATO Behind the Killings of Civilians

WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called Western democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pumps controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, including American citizens, where the government declares it vital to grope the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Grateful Arabs

ATTACKS ON BRITISH IN LIBYA; KILLINGS AND TORTURE EVERYWHERE

By Aangirfan

War graves in Libya

In Benghazi, in Libya, Commonwealth War Graves have been smashed up by the mad Islamists put into power by the USA and NATO.

Headstones commemorating British and Allied soldiers, killed during World War II, have been destroyed.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2106230/Insult-WWII-heroes-Graves-British-soldiers-smashed-desecrated-Libyan-Islamists-protest-U-S-soldiers-Koran-burning.html#ixzz1nNBepz3w ...

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THE RCAF: Al-QAEDA'S AIR FORCE

By Stephen Gowans

Canadian fighter pilots “flew 946 sorties and dropped almost 700 bombs” in last year’s NATO intervention in Libya. [1] But rather than enforcing a no-fly zone to protect civilians, the Canadian pilots—and their counterparts from other NATO countries—took sides in the conflict, intervening directly on behalf of anti-Gaddafi rebels.

But who exactly were the rebels that NATO sided with?

Private remarks by Canadian military officers, reported by the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, suggest the rebels weren’t everyday people thirsting for democracy, as NATO officials and mainline media made them out to be.

Gaddafi had claimed that “the rebellion had been organized by” Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb “and his old enemies the LIFG (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), who had vowed to overthrow the colonel and return the country to traditional Muslim values, including Sharia law.” [2] But this was dismissed by the West as propaganda.

Still, a “Canadian intelligence report written in late 2009…described the anti-Gadhafi stronghold of eastern Libya” where the rebellion began, “as an ‘epicentre of Islamist extremism’ and said ‘extremist cells’ operated in the region.” [3]

And Canadian military intelligence noted “in 2004 (that) Libyan troops found a training camp in the country’s southern desert that had been used by an Algerian terrorist group that would later change its name to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb or AQIM.” [4]

Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who had “joined the U.S.-backed resistance to the Soviet (intervention in) Afghanistan, fighting alongside militants who would go on to form al-Qaeda,” was emblematic of the militant Islamic character of the uprising.

“Mr. Belhaj returned to Libya in the 1990s and led the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in fierce confrontations with Col. Gadhafi’s” government. The LIFG was aligned with al-Qaeda. [5]

Belhaj was “the rebellion’s most powerful military leader.” [6]

This should have aroused suspicions about the true nature of the uprising, but there was an earlier clue that the Benghazi revolt was inspired by something other than a thirst for democracy.

“On Feb. 15, 2011, citizens in Benghazi organized what they called a Day of Anger march. The demonstration soon turned into a full-scale battle with police.

“At first, security forces used tear gas and water cannons. But as several hundred protesters armed with rocks and Molotov cocktails attacked government buildings, the violence spiralled out of control. Demonstrators chanted, ‘No God but Allah, Moammar is the enemy of Allah’.” [7]

Today, Libya is a warzone of competing militias. The Transitional National Council, anointed by the West as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, has no authority.

And now, one year after the uprising began, some NATO officials are admitting that NATO aligned itself with militant Islamic rebels to oust Gaddafi, who US officials had complained was engaging in “resource nationalism,” while oil companies denounced him for trying to “Libyanize” the economy. [8]

According to the Ottawa Citizen’s David Pugliese, some Canadian military officers in private refer “to the NATO jets bombing Gadhafi’s troops as ‘al-Qaeda’s air force’.” [9] ...

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EGYPT: A REAL REVOLUTION ON ITS WAY?

By Tony Cartalucci

In January of 2011, we were told that "spontaneous," "indigenous" uprising had begun sweeping North Africa and the Middle East, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt, in what was hailed as the "Arab Spring." It would be almost four months before the corporate-media would admit that the US had been behind the uprisings and that they were anything but "spontaneous," or "indigenous." In an April 2011 article published by the New York Times titled, "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," it was stated (emphasis added):

"A number of the groups and individuals directly involved in the revolts and reforms sweeping the region, including the April 6 Youth Movement in Egypt, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and grass-roots activists like Entsar Qadhi, a youth leader in Yemen, received training and financing from groups like the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and Freedom House, a nonprofit human rights organization based in Washington."

The article would also add, regarding the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED):

"The Republican and Democratic institutes are loosely affiliated with the Republican and Democratic Parties. They were created by Congress and are financed through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was set up in 1983 to channel grants for promoting democracy in developing nations. The National Endowment receives about $100 million annually from Congress. Freedom House also gets the bulk of its money from the American government, mainly from the State Department. "

It is hardly a speculative theory then, that the uprisings were part of an immense geopolitical campaign conceived in the West and carried out through its proxies with the assistance of disingenuous organizations including NED, NDI, LaHood's IRI, and Freedom House and the stable of NGOs they maintain throughout the world. Preparations for the "Arab Spring" began not as unrest had already begun, but years before the first "fist" was raised, and within seminar rooms in D.C. and New York, US-funded training facilities in Serbia, and camps held in neighboring countries, not within the Arab World itself.

In 2008, Egyptian activists from the now infamous April 6 movement were in New York City for the inaugural Alliance of Youth Movements (AYM) summit, also known as Movements.org. There, they received training, networking opportunities, and support from AYM's various corporate and US governmental sponsors, including the US State Department itself. The AYM 2008 summit report (page 3 of .pdf) states that the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, James Glassman attended, as did Jared C0hen who sits on the policy planning staff of the Office of the Secretary of State. Six other State Department staff members and advisers would also attend the summit along with an immense list of corporate, media, and institutional representatives.

Shortly afterward, April 6 would travel to Serbia to train under US-funded CANVAS, formally the US-funded NGO "Otpor" who helped overthrow the government of Serbia in 2000. Otpor, the New York Times would report, was a "well-oiled movement backed by several million dollars from the United States." After its success it would change its name to CANVAS and begin training activists to be used in other US-backed regime change operations.

The April 6 Movement, after training with CANVAS, would return to Egypt in 2010, a full year before the "Arab Spring," along with UN IAEA Chief Mohammed ElBaradei. April 6 members would even be arrested while waiting for ElBaradei's arrival at Cairo's airport in mid-February. Already, ElBaradei, as early as 2010, announced his intentions of running for president in the 2011 elections. Together with April 6, Wael Ghonim of Google, and a coalition of other opposition parties, ElBaradei assembled his "National Front for Change" and began preparing for the coming "Arab Spring."

An April 2011 AFP report would confirm that the US government had trained armies of "activists" to return to their respective countries and enact political "change," when US State Department's Michael Posner stated that the "US government has budgeted $50 million in the last two years to develop new technologies to help activists protect themselves from arrest and prosecution by authoritarian governments." The report went on to explain that the US "organized training sessions for 5,000 activists in different parts of the world. A session held in the Middle East about six weeks ago gathered activists from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon who returned to their countries with the aim of training their colleagues there." Posner would add, "They went back and there's a ripple effect."

Video: The Revolution Business. The revolutions are fake, the people behind them illegitimate.

....

That ripple effect of course, was the "Arab Spring" and the subsequent destabilization, violence, and even US armed and backed warfare that followed. While nations like Libya and Tunisia are now run by a BP, Shell, and Total-funded Petroleum Institute chairman and a US NED-funded "activist" respectively, Egypt has managed to ward off and expose the US proxy of choice, Mohammed ElBaradei, who's own movement was forced to denounce him as a Western agent.

By striking at the meddling, seditious NGOs, Egypt seeks to undermine the source of destabilization, the conduit through which US money and support is funneled through to "activists," and expose the true foreign-funded nature of the political division that has gripped the nation for now over a year. ...

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WHY DO PEOPLE IN THE WEST SUPPORT US/NATO'S GLOBALIST ENTERPRISE?

By CanSpeccy

What is being fast created is a global empire ruled by the 146 corporate entities that control the bulk of international business activity. The people of the so-called democracies go along with this project largely because they imagine it to be a war of the West against the Rest.

This is a pathetic misconception.

The Western nations have already been subjugated. Hence, the fraudulent mainstream media that pump nothing but controlled news and propaganda. Hence the ongoing genocidal program to destroy the nations of Europe as racial, cultural and religious communities. Hence, the progressive collapse in Western living standards. Hence, the reduction of the United States to a police state, where citizens can be detained indefinitely without charge or trial, where the president can order the assassination of anyone, where the government declares it vital to feel the genitals of every traveler.

How truly pathetic the people of the Western nations have become.

Libya was occupied and Gaddafi murdered, to Hillary Clinton's ecstatic delight, not because Gaddafi was "killing his own people," but because he put down a violent, US/Nato and Al Qaeda-backed rebellion, intended to restore Libya's resources to the control of the multi-nationals that already own the puppet regimes of Obama, Cameron, Harper, Sarkozy, et al.

The project was a success. Thirty thousand Chinese engineers and technicians were ousted from Libya, an American citizen installed as Libya's Prime Minister and the control of Libya's resources restored to the corporations that, through a network of elite groups meeting at Davos, or less publicly elsewhere, directs the crimes of US/Nato.

Sixteen trillion here, fifteen trillion there, soon you're talking real money

Google for "sixteen trillion" and you come up with some scary stuff:

Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion (Ahead of the Heard);
US$ 16000000000000.00 (sixteen trillion) bailout (Pravda Forum);
Bernanke Secretly Gives away Sixteen Trillion Dollars (News Goldseek.com);
FED doles out sixteen trillion in bailouts that banks don't have to repay (trulia.com);
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake (cup.columbia.edu);

and many, many similar stories, although none, it seems, from the mainstream media.

Then comes this speech in the British upper house by Lord James Blackheath, a man of supposedly wide experience of banking and finance, in which the speaker claims to possess documents indicating that the US Fed was a participant in a fraud involving the transfer of $15 trillion dollars from an Indonesian potentate to the Royal Bank of Scotland.



Wow. Beeeeezaaaaaaarrrrre.

However, on the Blackheath claim, at least, we can probably set our minds at rest, for according to Andy McSmith at the Independent the noble lord himself appears to have been taken in by a Nigerian-letter-type scam.

David James was a City businessman commissioned by the Tories, in opposition, to report on ways of eliminating government waste. Last week, the 74-year-old peer was exercised about a story he has picked up that $15trn – that is $15,000,000,000,000 – belonging to "the richest man in the world", Yohannes Riyadi, was deposited in 2009 in the Royal Bank of Scotland. Lord James said he remains baffled after a two-year pursuit of the story, but has all the information on a memory stick, which he is offering to hand over to the Government.

His documents include a letter from the Bank of Indonesia telling him the whole story is a "complete fabrication". He took his concerns to the Treasury minister, Lord Sassoon, who said: "This is rubbish. It is far too much money. It'd stick out like a sore thumb and you can't see it in the RBS accounts."

And an alert Financial Times blogger said that had Lord James googled "Yohannes Riyadi", the first item to come up would be a warning from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that the name is part of an internet scam designed to get money from the gullible. Two agents are trying to trace who is behind it. Perhaps Lord James should offer his memory stick.

But what of Bernanke's "secret," "not-to-be-repayed" "give away" to those undeserving banksters?

Thanks to an amendment by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Wall Street reform law passed in July 2010 directed the Government Accountability Office to conduct "the first top-to-bottom audit of the Federal Reserve."

"As a result of this audit, we now know that the Federal Reserve provided more than $16 trillion in total financial assistance to some of the largest financial institutions and corporations in the United States and throughout the world," said Sanders. "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

But what we also know from Page 137 of the Government Accountability Office report is that by last summer, every cent of the $16 trillion had been repaid. 

So perhaps what is most puzzling about the $sixteen trillion is that the US Fed does not do more to publicize the success of an operation that seems to have cost the US taxpayer nothing, while possibly saving the World from a total banking system collapse.

George de Mohrenschildt, George H.W. Bush, Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK

George de Mohrenschildt, a millionaire petroleum geologist and acquaintance of George H. W. Bush, befriended Lee Harvey Oswald in the period immediately prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

De Mohrenschildt supposedly committed suicide by blowing his brains out with a 20 gauge shot gun the day, in 1977, he was to be interviewed by an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

In this video clip, Bill O'Reilly explains the relationship between de Mohrenschildt and the CIA, and the curious circumstances of de Mohrenschildt's death.



In this article, Russ Baker explains why Bill O'Reilly's forthcoming book on the Kennedy assassination is unlikely to tell all.

When Science and Politics Mix

Politics has to do with appearances without regard for reality. Science has to do with reality without regard for appearances. When science and politics mix the results can be remarkable. Politicians prove to be ignoramuses, scientists prove to be liars. Climate science provides a wonderful example. Nobel Peace Prize winner, Al Gore, intent on making science serve political ends, proves himself to be an ass and the Nobel Peace Prize a joke. Dr. Peter Gleick, member of the US National Academy of Sciences, McArthur Foundation Genius Award winner, intent on shaping public opinion proves himself a thief and liar, and those who backed him, gullible dupes.

Those who care about the perversion of science and wish to avoid being themselves duped by scientists behaving as politicians or politicians falsely claiming scientific expertise should apply to every argument about science the following questions.

Does the argument rest upon observational data?

Are the data disputed by those with expertise to make a plausible judgement?

Do those who advance the argument deal honestly with those who question the data or the logic of the analysis?

On that basis, Al Gore's claim that past increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration were associated with increases in global temperature is based on observable facts, and the data are not, as far as I am aware, disputed by qualified experts. However, what the experts do assert is that Gore has the timing wrong, and that the rise in temperature always came before, not after, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration.

Did Al Gore openly acknowledge this criticism and revise his argument accordingly? Apparently not, and it is this failure that confirms that Gore does not seek to reveal the reality of climate change, but to manipulate public perception of climate change for political reasons.

In addition, it is essential to determine whether the data presented in support of an argument are comprehensive or cherry picked.

In his Forbes blog, the above-mentioned Peter Gleick assails those who claim that global temperature is not rising in a piece entitled "Global Warming Has Stopped"? How to Fool People Using "Cherry-Picked" Climate Data.

The current favorite argument of those who argue that climate changes isn’t happening, or a problem, or worth dealing with, is that global warming has stopped. Therefore (they conclude) scientists must be wrong when they say that climate change is caused by humans, worsening, and ultimately a serious environmental problem that must be addressed by policy makers.

The problem with this argument is that it is false: global warming has not stopped and those who repeat this claim over and over are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth.

These liars, ignoramuses and blatant disregarders of the truth Dr. Gleick fails to mention by name, but he aims to refute them with a series of graphs showing in every case, so he claims, a rising trend in global temperature.

In fact, for the past decade, there seems no discernible trend, but Gleick assures the reader that:

The linear trend (the blue line) over the past decade is relatively flat, but in fact it still exhibited a warming trend, despite the temporary cooling forces that are masking the overall warming

which seems something of a contradiction in terms. If the line is flat it is flat. To talk about a warming trend masked by "temporary cooling forces" appears to be sheer sophistry.

And note that the issue of the past decade is central to Gleick's case, for he has set out to refute those who say that despite the current rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, global temperature is not rising.

But if Gleick's argument about the last decade is dodgy, what about the rest of his evidence?

Four other graphs all show a rise in global temperature or global heat over varying time scales going back to 1880.

So do those graphs clinch his argument? Hardly.

As can be seen in the adjacent image, over the last 130 years, global temperature has been quite variable, falling between 1880 and 1910, then rising more or less continuously until 1945, after which it fell slightly before flattening out for 30 years, then rising until around 2000, since when it has been flat.

Does this reflect a close correlation with atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration? No.

Does it show, as Gleick asserts, that those who claim global warming has stopped "are either lying, ignorant, or exhibiting a blatant disregard for the truth"? No.

What it does show is that global temperature varies, sometimes rising sometimes falling, and that while the overall trend since 1880 is upward, the trend since 2000, when atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising quite rapidly,  has been flat.

Does this prove that human activity has no effect on climate? Absolutely not. It merely shows that global temperature fluctuates for reasons we do not fully understand.

But if global temperature has, for now, stopped rising, despite the continued and increasing human-caused rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, does that prove that human activity cannot harm the planet? Far from it.

Neither the climate "warmists" nor the warming "skeptics" know enough about the vagaries of the Earth's climate to make any definite statement. All that one can reasonably say is that changing the chemical composition and spectral properties of the atmosphere in an uncontrolled way, as we have been doing with increasing effect, does not seem like a very good idea, and could eventually have clearly apparent and seriously harmful environmental consequences. On the other hand, we cannot simply shut down the fossil-fueled economy overnight, without wiping out most of humanity.

What then to do? The answer is simple, though not easily accepted. Leave climate science to the scientists, and be very skeptical of everything the politicians, including those in white coats, have to tell you about the environmental, social and economic implications of the science.

But we have to act, many will assert. That is true, but we have to act in a state of uncertainty. There are risks whatever course is taken. We must hope for intelligent political decisions base on first-rate, unbiased science, not panic-driven actions serving ulterior political motives.

For now, neither the physical evidence nor the theoretical considerations suggest imminent danger. Viewed in the long-term, we are currently in a pleasantly warm and perhaps all too brief interglacial and seem in greatest danger not of harmful warming but of catastrophic cooling.

Greening the Sahara

Tensegrity sphere

Are you anxious to feed the hungry, combat the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, and see the desert bloom? If so, this piece, Greening the Sahara, outlining a scheme to do just that by irrigating the ten million square kilometers of the Sahara desert using solar power as the sole driving energy source may be of interest.

The scheme involves the use of geodesic spheres as gigantic, lighter-than-air cloud-containment structures that carry water-saturated air from the coast inland on the sea breeze, deposit the water over the desert during the cool nighttime and return to the coast either on the predawn land breeze or perhaps drawn by camels.

I had intended to add a cost analysis of the scheme but it is some months since I worked on the idea and the details about cost now escape me. As I recall, however, the thing was not altogether unfeasible. In fact, with some ingenuity in the construction of the hot air dirigibles, it seemed to me that the idea could payoff quite well.

Why the Eurozone Is About to Break Up

Image source: Euro Failure is Systemic.

Mish has a piece today entitled "Why Greece Must Exit the Eurozone." This states exactly what I said a while back, which confirms what a smart fellow Mish is.

Mish's article includes a quote listing the requirements for a successful monetary union as spelled out by Canadian Nobel Prize winning economist, Robert Mundell: requirements that, as we noted earlier, the Eurozone entirely lacks.

In fact, rather than the Euro monetary straightjacket, Europe would be better off with a multiplicity of currencies, as Canadian author Jane Jacobs explained in various works on the economy of cities. With a free-floating currency a country, region or city automatically maintains a currency exchange rate that under most circumstances insures balanced trade and full employment. If productivity falls relative to that of trading partners, the currency falls, achieving in effect, a reduction in real wages without modification in nominal wages. Conversely, if productivity rises relative to that of trading partners the currency exchange rate rises, thus achieving an increase in real wages without modification in nominal wages.

Because labor productivity varies not only country by country but region by region and city by city, the greater the number of free floating currencies within a trading area the greater the precision with which real wages are adjusted to productivity and unemployment is minimized.

An alternative to the complication of multiple currencies within a trade zone would be the implementation of automatic wage adjustments according to productivity. Because productivity is difficult to measure accurately and expeditiously, unemployment would be used as a proxy for the inverse of productivity. Thus as unemployment in any region increased, wages would be adjusted downward on a year-to-year, or month-to-month basis. Conversely, as the labor market tightened, wages would be adjusted upward.

A scheme to achieve regional adjustment in wages according to productivity within a currency union such as just outlined would solve the Eurozone crisis, and incidentally, win CanSpeccy the Nobel Prize for economics. But the idea is undoubtedly far above the heads of Merkozy and co, or most economists,  so the Eurozone break-up will proceed -- on March 23, so many people are saying.

Hitler's 9/11: How fortunate for leaders that men do not think

Via WRH

On November 7, 1938, Ernst vom Rath was shot outside the German embassy by Herschel Grynszpan, who wanted revenge for his parents' sudden deportation from Germany to Poland, along with tens of thousands of other Polish Jews. 

[The murder provided the Nazis with a justification for] a campaign of terror against Jewish people and their homes and businesses in Germany and Austria. The violence, which continued through November 10 and was later dubbed "Kristallnacht," or "Night of Broken Glass," after the countless smashed windows of Jewish-owned establishments, left approximately 100 Jews dead, 7,500 Jewish businesses damaged and hundreds of synagogues, homes, schools and graveyards vandalized. An estimated 30,000 Jewish men were arrested, many of whom were then sent to concentration camps for several months; they were released when they promised to leave Germany.

Excerpts from This Day in History. 

The stinking orthodoxies of the white self-hating liberal-left

By Patrick Buchanan

My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.

After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.

The calls for my firing began almost immediately with the Oct. 18 publication of Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?

A group called Color of Change, whose mission statement says that it "exists to strengthen Black America's political voice," claimed that my book espouses a "white supremacist ideology." Color of Change took particular umbrage at the title of Chapter 4, "The End of White America."

Media Matters parroted the party line: He has blasphemed!

A Human Rights Campaign that bills itself as America's leading voice for lesbians, bisexuals, gays and transgendered people said that Buchanan's "extremist ideas are incredibly harmful to millions of LBGT people around the world."

Their rage was triggered by a remark to NPR's Diane Rehm – that I believe homosexual acts to be "unnatural and immoral."

On Nov. 2, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, who has sought to have me censored for 22 years, piled on.

"Buchanan has shown himself, time and again, to be a racist and an anti-Semite," said Foxman. Buchanan "bemoans the destruction of white Christian America" and says America's shrinking Jewish population is due to the "collective decision of Jews themselves."

Well, yes, I do bemoan what Newsweek's 2009 cover called "The Decline and Fall of Christian America" and editor Jon Meacham described as "The End of Christian America." After all, I am a Christian.

And what else explains the shrinkage of the U.S. Jewish population by 6 percent in the 1990s and its projected decline by another 50 percent by 2050, if not the "collective decision of Jews themselves"?

Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, "so long as reason is left free to combat it." What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.

Consider what it is these people are saying.

They are saying that a respected publisher, St. Martin's, colluded with me to produce a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic book, and CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Fox Business News and the 150 radio shows on which I appeared failed to detect its evil and helped to promote a moral atrocity.

If my book is racist and anti-Semitic, how did Sean Hannity, Erin Burnett, Judge Andrew Napolitano, Megyn Kelly, Lou Dobbs and Ralph Nader miss that? How did Charles Payne, African-American host on Fox radio, who has interviewed me three times, fail to detect its racism?

How did Michael Medved miss its anti-Semitism?

In a 2009 cover story in the Atlantic, "The End of White America?" from which my chapter title was taken, professor Hua Hsu revels in the passing of America's white majority. At Portland State, President Clinton got a huge ovation when he told students that white Americans will be a minority in 2050.

Is this writer alone forbidden to broach the subject?

That homosexual acts are unnatural and immoral has been doctrine in the Catholic Church for 2,000 years.

Is it now hate speech to restate traditional Catholic beliefs?

Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.

Are such subjects taboo? Are they unfit for national debate?

So it would seem. MSNBC President Phil Griffin told reporters, "I don't think the ideas that (Buchanan) put forth (in his book) are appropriate for the national dialogue, much less on MSNBC."

In the 10 years I have been at MSNBC, the network has taken heat for what I have written, and faithfully honored our contract.

Yet my four-months' absence from MSNBC and now my departure represent an undeniable victory for the blacklisters.

The modus operandi of these thought police at Color of Change and ADL is to brand as racists and anti-Semites any writer who dares to venture outside the narrow corral in which they seek to confine debate.

All the while prattling about their love of dissent and devotion to the First Amendment, they seek systematically to silence and censor dissent.

Without a hearing, they smear and stigmatize as racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic any who contradict what George Orwell once called their "smelly little orthodoxies." They then demand that the heretic recant, grovel, apologize, and pledge to go forth and sin no more.

Defy them, and they will go after the network where you work, the newspapers that carry your column, the conventions that invite you to speak. If all else fails, they go after the advertisers.

I know these blacklisters. They operate behind closed doors, with phone calls, mailed threats and off-the-record meetings. They work in the dark because, as Al Smith said, nothing un-American can live in the sunlight.

Monty Python Philosophy Football

German MP's propose tax on the childless

The idea of taxing people who have no children will no doubt arouse indignation among the brains-washed liberal-leftist masses who have been educated to understand that the only thing wrong with sex is that it perpetuates the human race.

Some German MP's, however, have had the temerity to propose a tax on childless adults as a measure to combat the catastrophic, nation-destroying collapse in the German birthrate. By imposing a tax on the childless, the state would provide couples with an incentive to have children by at least marginally lessening the financial burden of so doing.

At the same time, those without children, would by virtue of the tax, come to bear part of the financial burden that others bear in raising the children upon whom they will become dependent in old age.

To some, the idea that the childless become dependent on other people's children in old age may seem strange, for they will argue, provided I have saved for retirement I will be dependent on no one. But that is not the case. Without a younger generation to provide the labor that delivers the goods and services that the elderly need in order to survive beyond the point of retirement, the elderly cannot remain alive however much money they might have saved.

Oh, it will be said by the thoughtless or the self-genocidal, there will always be immigrants to do the work that we are unable to do when we are old. But that is precisely the problem. If Europeans have no children, there will in future be none of the existing European nations remaining on the face of the Earth.

Yes, there will still be people calling themselves Germans, or French or English, but they will not be the descendants of those ancient races. The proposed legislation would be a small step toward ending the present ongoing self-genocide of the European peoples.

Read article from the German edition of The Local

Kurt Haskell Exposes Government False Flag Operation During Underwear Bomber Sentencing

Kurt Haskell

Infowars.com Thursday, February 16, 2012: Every victim of a crime in Michigan is entitled to make a statement in open court regarding the impact of the crime on their life. The statement is limited to the victim’s physical, emotional and financial well being as it relates to the crime. Keep that in mind as you read my statement.

Below is a copy of the victim impact statement I gave today at the Underwear Bomber sentencing hearing. When reading my statement, keep in mind that I am a practicing attorney in the State of Michigan.

In addition, I regularly practice in the Court the hearings are taking place at and therefore, I am somewhat limited as to what I can say. We were limited to 5 minutes each.

I wish to thank the Court for allowing me these 5 minutes to make my statement. My references to the government in this statement refer to the Federal Government excluding this Court and the prosecution.

On Christmas Day 2009, my wife and I were returning from an African safari and had a connecting flight through Amsterdam. As we waited for our flight, we sat on the floor next to the boarding gate.

What I witnessed while sitting there and subsequent events have changed my life forever. While I sat there, I witnessed Umar dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt, being escorted around security by a man in a tan suit who spoke perfect American English and who aided Umar in boarding without a passport.

Read more

Paul Volcker Slaps Down Bank of Canada Over Rules to Prevent Banks Too Big to Fail

By SIMON JOHNSON

 

Simon Johnson, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, is the co-author of “13 Bankers.”

The Volcker Rule is intended to curb “proprietary trading” – specifically, high-risk bets placed by our largest banks. The Dodd-Frank financial reform act put it into law, and the relevant regulators have proposed a detailed and credible set of regulations to make it work. In accordance with typical administrative procedure in the United States, comments on these regulations were solicited. The deadline was this past Monday.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Congress rightly decided that excessive risk-taking by very large banks had to be curtailed. Responsible regulators around the world are cheering from the sidelines, and that’s why I was shocked to see the recent comment letter from the Bank of Canada that criticized the American law.

The legislative intent behind the Volcker Rule is clear – and reaffirmed in detail in the comment letter by Senators Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Carl Levin of Michigan, the co-authors of the relevant part of the Dodd-Frank legislation.

The reason that the general approach and this specific regulation makes sense, given past practices and likely future risks, is laid out in meticulous and convincing detail in the comment submitted by Dennis Kelleher and his colleagues from Better Markets.

The big banks and their allies are naturally fighting back. They like the implicit too-big-to-fail subsidies and are apparently offering to split those with people who will support their positions in public (including some of my academic colleagues). Their collective lack of concern for the public interest is also natural, if somewhat callous.

But the executives of these companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to make profits, and they interpret the too-big-to-fail subsidies as helpful in this regard. Government support, after all, allows these banks to borrow more cheaply and to take on more risk (gaining more when they get lucky, precisely because they have “downside protection” provided by taxpayers).

Read more

The Second Great Depression and The Cause That None Dare Name

The decline in unemployment to 2008 was the result of an unsustainable
credit-based housing bubble created by the US Federal Reserve. Image source

Unemployment in Spain is around 23%. On a true measure, according to the Trades Union Congress, unemployment in the UK now exceeds 6.3 million people or more than 20% of the workforce. US unemployment according to the U6 measure is over 15%.

Among young people (aged 16-24) the rate of unemployment is even worse. In Spain, youth unemployment has surged over 50%. In the UK, youth unemployment now exceeds one million, while hundreds of thousands of immigrants flood in. For black youth in Britain the outlook is particularly grim with unemployment exceeding 50%. But for black youngsters in America, unemployment approaching 90% is catastrophic.

European youth unemployment. (Image source)

An economic disaster of such magnitude must have an apparent cause, which it does, but the Western political class and the controlled media, including much of the so-called alternative media, will not name it, striving instead to distract attention with endless bogus warnings about terrorism, excess population, resource shortages and global warming.

But in a World possessed of technology that to an earlier generation would appear to be of near magical power, the idea that the highly capitalized Western nations cannot provide their populations with opportunities to work and support themselves is absurd. And indeed if it were not absurd, why do the Western elites continue to promote a flood of immigration to the West, destroying ethnic diversity, social cohesion and religious compatibility while vilifying and criminalizing opposition to this genocidal program as racist and xenophobic?

As for resource shortages, most appear to be artificial. Food prices have been boosted by government programs to encourage the conversion of food into fuel at huge cost to taxpayers and with little if any net gain in energy. Oil prices have been boosted by the continual Western-generated threat or reality of war in the chief oil exporting regions of the World.

As for global warming, all we've seen so far has likely boosted crop yields, as must have the the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

The reason for mass Western unemployment must, therefore, be hidden in plain sight.

And the cause is in plain sight, though none in the media dare mention it. It is the 1994 GATT agreement that opened the Western nations to unrestricted free trade with the rest of the World, which is to say with the teeming masses of Asia, the Middle East and Africa, where hundreds of millions of workers are sweated for pennies an hour.

The outcome was predictable and predicted. In fact, Sir James Goldsmith felt so strongly about the damage that would be done to Britain by the 1994 Gatt Agreement that he formed the Referendum Party to take Britain out of the EU and thus make her free to regulate trade in the national interest. Goldsmith, however, died in 1997 and his party was absorbed by another Euroskeptic group now headed by a former commodities broker with a gift for lampooning the charisma-challenged EU leadership, but who seems to have nothing to say against global free trade.

But why, if Third-World competition is wreaking such havoc with Western job markets, does almost no prominent individual or mass media outlet dare speak of it? Because it is immensely profitable to those moving work from the West to the Rest, and it is they who own the political class and thus the education system, which should more accurately be called a system of state indoctrination and propaganda, the broadcast media, and the publishing industry.

As the great classical economist David Ricardo explained, "wages and profits are together always the same," meaning that if you lower wages you increase profits. It is no coincidence, therefore, that while the West suffers the severest depression in jobs and wages since the 1930's, profits of Western corporations are at record highs. In the United States, for example, corporate profits have doubled since 2000, while unemployment has increased by 150%.

What then is the solution? Briefly, there is none. True, we have proposed seeming solutions: either trade protectionism, or government intervention to speed wage convergence between the West and the Rest, while providing income support to those in the West whose wages fall below the subsistence level. But Western governments have shown no interest in either protecting jobs and job skills or preventing the flight of capital to low-wage, low regulation regimes, where profits are highest. It is sufficient, they seem to believe, to provide the unemployed with a dole to keep them alive with crumbs from the bankers' tables but in a state of smouldering resentment, while hastening wage convergence through currency devaluation. Unfortunately, for Western countries, the Chinese are putting on a fine performance in the race to debase, thus preventing the US and Europe from gaining competitive advantage through devaluation.

How will this end? Badly. It will end with the burial of Western Civilization and the emergence of the New World Order, which is to say a global plutocracy ruling over a mongrelized human population. There will be no West or Rest in the future. There will be one global mass, and anyone who objects to the genocidal destruction of their own race, nation and culture will be criminalized and silenced.

Unless, that is, there is push back. But there is no evidence that a reaction is possible, let alone occurring. Seeming opponents of the New World Order are mostly globalist controlled assets. How to tell? find out what they say about globalization of trade, mass migration and multi-culturalism. Most you will find are entirely on board with the Council on Foreign relations, Chatham House, and the pseudo-left-wing media.

Related post:
Crooks and Liars: Hell Is Cheap: China, Apple, And The Economics Of Horror
What's Wrong With Europe and What Needs to Be Done About It 
Robert Herndon:The globalist lies about the British job market

Is "Bad Science" an Oxymoron

View full size

By Alfred Burdett

Having written on occasion about scientific fraud, scientific data manipulation and outright scientific nonsense, I was invited by its creators to comment on a poster entitled Bad Science, the psychology behind bad research, offered as a resource on the ClinicalPsychology.net website.

"Scientists," states an introduction to the poster, "are some of our most trusted members of society ... [but] many scientists are not as trustworthy as we would like to believe. By engaging in various kinds of scientific misconduct, such as falsifying or fabricating data, scientists are getting the results they want without the honesty and integrity that we expect of the scientific institution."

As a scientist of almost 50 years standing, it's news to me that scientists are among the most trusted members of the community. Personally, I would trust a scientists no more and no less than I would trust a banker or a politician. And that is surely not being unduly cynical, for as everyone knows, when their work impinges on important economic or political questions, scientists can be remarkably responsive to the interests of those funding their work, whether it be the tobacco industry, the drug industry, the arms industry or a government with an agenda on climate change, HIV/AIDS, the psychiatric treatment of political dissidents, or the use of tactical nuclear weapons in populated areas. So it seems to me that the people at ClinicalPsychology.net are proceeding on the basis of a questionable assumption.

There is no question, however, that data falsification (are falsified data, truly data at all in the scientific sense?) and data fabrication are not activities to be encouraged, so when ClinicalPsychology.net tells us to read their "infographic" to find out how to fix the problem, we are prepared to read on.

However, what we find is little in the way of the promised account of the "psychology behind bad science" or effective means to "fix the problem," but mainly a series of assertions about the prevalence of scientific fraud. "Shady scientific research is rampant" we are told, which sounds bad, but what does it mean. Well for one thing, "One in three scientists admit to using questionable research practices," which include "dropping data points based on gut feeling," and "changing the results or design of a study due to pressure from a funding source."

So now we begin to have some idea what they are talking about, but it nevertheless remains vague. What, for example, does it mean to drop a data point "based on gut feeling"? Presumably it means that the scientist believes that they have a plausible justification for dropping the data point in question: "I noticed some crud in that tube when I was adding the reagents," or "the rat that died looked sick before we began feeding it GM corn." Adoption of such rationalizations for the selection of data is not considered acceptable practice but it has a venerable history in science, and while few would condone it, the question of whether it constitutes "bad science" is less clear than many might suppose.

Scientific knowledge is not a collection of facts, it is a system of laws, principles and patterns which allow us to infer from a given set of facts another heretofore unknown set of facts, including facts about past, present or  future. Thus science as a process of discovery is concerned, primarily, not with any specific facts, but with ideas about the relationships among facts in the observable world. Because there is uncertainty about all particular observed facts, there is no overwhelming reason to reject a good idea because it is inconsistent with some observation that "gut feeling", i.e., some plausible argument, suggests is false.

How can Wikileaks battle mainstream media disinformation by working in collaboration with the mainstream media? LOL

A project such as Wikileaks could provide a most effective mechanism for both diverting the alternative media with misleading or fabricated information, and identifying for termination genuine leaks damaging to US/NATO's imperialist agenda and the anti-social or criminal activities of multinational corporations.

That Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is a recipient of the Sam Adams Award "for integrity in intelligence," which is given annually by a group of retired CIA officers, appears to confirm the hypothesis that Wikileaks is an intel operation.

That Wikileaks claims to have as its primary interest, oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East in no way detracts from the notion that it is an intel or propaganda operation serving the the aims of Western hegemony.

That Wikileaks has collaborated extensively with the mainstream media in the selection and redaction of material to be leaked supports the same conclusion.

In this excellent analysis of Wikileaks and the parties with which it has collaborated, Professor Michel Chossudovksy spells out exactly why Wikileaks has the essential features of a mechanism for the manufacture of controlled dissent.

Human Biodiversity: Liberals Rediscover IQ

By Dennis Mangan

Whenever the subject of intelligence testing comes up, especially in the context of racial and ethnic differences in intelligence, or disparate outcomes in education, liberals can always be counted upon for their skepticism towards the entire subject of IQ testing. They will usually claim that the tests are either biased or don't measure anything real - as in "IQ measures the ability to take an IQ test". This is of course ironic, since individual differences in intelligence as measured by IQ testing is the most established and robust finding of modern psychometrics, and liberals constantly proclaim their devotion to science, only inbred conservatives being opposed to scientific findings.

But liberals become IQ believers when something like this happens: Low IQ & Conservative Beliefs Linked to Prejudice.

Some of the quotes from the article show how a study like this operates. For instance:

Social conservatives were defined as people who agreed with a laundry list of statements such as "Family life suffers if mum is working full-time," and "Schools should teach children to obey authority."

I guess smart liberals believe that a mother working outside the home full-time couldn't possibly have any downside for family life, and that their indoctrination of schoolkids in things like environmentalism, global warming, and the essential evilness of America's past don't constitute teaching children to obey their authority.

The essential point to make here is that the average Democratic Party member is very likely not as intelligent as the average Republican, since the Democratic Party contains more minorities, who on average score lower on IQ tests than whites. But once you point out something like that, liberals go into IQ denial.

How Iran Threatens the United States of Aggression

Each star marks the location of a US military base. Image Source: Juan Cole

Nulius in verba: On the word of no one

Or how the Royal Society betrayed its original purpose to become another quasi governmental organization spewing the scientifically correct official line

By Andrew Montford

Foreword by Professor Richard Lindzen

Andrew Montford provides a straightforward and unembellished chronology of the perversion not only of The Royal Society but of science itself, wherein the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry is replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority.

The simple chronology speaks for itself, though one cannot read it without thinking, at least, about the motivations. Already in the 19th century, gentleman scientists, like Darwin, noted the potential constraints on scientific inquiry that were associated with functioning within universities. The potential in recent years is obviously magnified by the near monopoly over science support exercised by governments. In the US, our National Academy of Science (NAS) has always had official status as adviser to the government. However, the role was relatively passive until the 1970s.

The 1970s saw a marked expansion of the National Research Council, the branch of the National Academy of Science responsible for responding to government requests. With the presidency of Frank Press (1981-1993), the staff of the NRC increased to over a thousand. Frank often boasted that The Royal Society was envious of the position of the NAS and the existence of its NRC. The global warming issue, it would appear, has offered The Royal Society the opportunity to rectify this situation.

Nevertheless, there are certain peculiarities of The Royal Society’s behavior that are perhaps worth noting. The presidents involved with this issue (May, Rees and Nurse) are all profoundly ignorant of climate science. Their alleged authority stems from their positions in the RS rather than from scientific expertise. This is evident in a variety of ways.

For example, in an exchange in the Financial Times (April 9, 2010), Martin Rees and Ralph Cicerone (President of the NAS) defended global warming concern by noting essentially that carbon dioxide (CO2) was increasing and that climate was changing. Of course, climate is always changing, and increasing CO2 must make some contribution, but none of this suggests anything alarming. The alarm results from controversial feedbacks wherein the small impacts of CO2 are, in current computer models, greatly amplified. With respect to these feedbacks, Rees and Cicerone say: “Uncertainties in the future rate of this rise (referring to global mean temperature anomaly), stemming largely from ‘feedback’ effects on water vapor and clouds are topics of current research.” That is to say, we don’t even know if there is a problem. Yet, Rees and Cicerone conclude: “Our academies will provide the scientific backdrop for the political and business leaders who must create effective policies to steer the world toward a low-carbon economy.”

In other words, regardless of the science, the answer is predetermined. Is this simply ignorance or dishonesty? My guess is that Rees and Cicerone were only mindlessly repeating a script prepared by the environmental movement. In this report Montford documents some disturbing general trends, which one can only hope that scientists of good standing shall increasingly continue to oppose.

Summary

For 300 years after its foundation, the Royal Society adopted a position of aloofness from political debates, refusing to become embroiled in the controversies of the day. This position was encapsulated in the Society’s journal, The Philosophical Transactions, which carried a notice that ‘It is neither necessary nor desirable for the Society to give an official ruling on scientific issues, for these are settled far more conclusively in the laboratory than in the committee room’.

In the 1960s, the society became increasingly involved at the interface of science and political policymaking.With the elevation of Robert May to the presidency, the Society became highly politicised, involving itself in political advocacy and media campaigns. In 1989 it had issued the first of its highly controversial position papers on climate change, a document that eschewed the sober language of the scientist in favour of denunciations of those who questioned the reality or extent of manmade global warming.

May’s political approach was continued by his successor, Martin Rees, with the Society’s authority being used to try to cut off funding of sceptic groups and with Rees putting forward positions on the economics of climate change. The Society issued a series of highly political statements demanding action from politicians.

Under Rees, another combative statement on the science of global warming was issued. With the Society again adopting a political rather than scientific tone, a substantial group of the fellows was stirred to action, demanding that the Society reconsider the unscientific way in which it was addressing the global warming question, the result being a much improved position paper on global warming that reflected at least some of the critics’ concerns.

Despite this, the Society has yet to distance itself from its former unscientific conduct, and the new president, Paul Nurse, has begun his term of office by staking out some very questionable positions on the role of scepticism in the climate debate.

Immense damage has been done to the reputation of the Society by its last three presidents. While the fellows’ rebellion has improved matters considerably, the continuing desire of the Society’s leadership to engage in political controversies represents a serious ongoing risk to the Society’s reputation and an abandonment of its principles.

Full report

Related: 
Canspeccy: The Trashing of Tim Hunt, a Breach of the Social Contract, the Death of a Civilization