Why We Believe in Gods...

Amazingly interesting talk. Worth it!

Maggie's Iraq Legacy

I have spent plenty of angry words here over Neo-Labour and their disaster/war-crimes in Iraq, however that does not mean the Tories are off the hook - no... Their heroine, Maggie was a blood soaked arms dealer amongst other things who armed Saddam;

Only where dealing in arms was concerned did she display the kind of recklessness and lack of scruple that is now being blamed for the global financial crisis, and that she did from the beginning of her first term of office. On 29 January 1981 a meeting of the overseas and defence committee of the cabinet, chaired by Thatcher, agreed to interpret the Anglo-American ban on exporting arms to either side in the Iran-Iraq war more flexibly than was honest. Within months the arms-trade subsidiary of the Ministry of Defence was building an integrated weapons complex in Basra, and over the following years the "defence allocation" to Iraq continued to multiply. Iraq did not pay up; the extent of the defaulting is not known, but this particular toxic debt had probably grown close to £3bn by the time the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and all bets were off.

The deals Thatcher made later, and apparently off her own bat, were impenetrably secret, the amounts of money vast. She sold armaments to King Hussein of Jordan, President Suharto of Indonesia and President Pinochet of Chile, offering them massive amounts of easy credit and the full support of the export credit system. In April 1985, after a series of meetings with the Saudi defence minister's son, one of them when she was away from Westminster on holiday in Salzburg, she set up the Al-Yamamah contract worth £40bn, to be paid partly in oil. It is has been reported that her son, Mark Thatcher, was paid commission of between £12m and £20m, although he has denied it.

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Denial Watch: The Media Trail of Denial

This is an interesting article on how a piece of disinfomation - the misreporting of a press release about the impact of the ozone layer on sea ice, gets turned into a denial news report in one of Rupert Murdoch's outlets and then recycled by the others building the spin into news;

First we have yet another entry in The Australian’s (owned by Murdoch’s News Corp) continuing war on science (well-documented by Tim Lambert). It conflates two well-trod phenomena in the Antarctic (slight upward trend in recent sea ice, not all of the continent is uniformly warming as much as the western peninsula) to further the impression that Antarctica is somehow evidence against anthropogenic warming and resulting climatic change. As one can see at Lambert’s Deltoid site, for The Australian to engage in misdirection on climate change is not in and of itself exactly “news”.

However, the story is then picked up by another Murdoch/News Corp Ozzie outlet, News.com.au, giving it legs beyond the usual Australian idiocy. The story really catches fire, though, when it is further trumpeted by Murdoch/News Corp’s US media centerpiece, Fox News. From there it travels through the usual far right denialosphere outlets, such as Glenn “Mad Max” Beck, and on into Greater Wingnuttia.

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Torture - Why Did Bush Use It? To seek Iraq-al Qaida link...

We've already heard how torture leads of inaccurate intelligence and gives great propaganda to al Qaida. So why use it? Not for national security, oh no, for politics, to try and link Iraq and al Qaida. That's why...

The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.

Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W. Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime.

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Denail Watch: Magical Denialism

It struck me as odd today that there is a strong running thread within global warming denailism that is happy to use magicians as evidence. Now I don't mean theatre magic, pulling bunnies out of hats, as much fun as it is. No I mean that there are people who's methodologies are in the same vein as Alchemy, Demonology or Sorcery - who are used as 'evidence'. Sounds odd, but here's the evidence;

Example one - recently the right-wing Cato Institute published a series of ads in prominent media outlets, signed by 100 'scientists' who claim that the science of global warming are not yet set. The word 'scientists' is in 'inverted' commas became of the 100, only 3 were climate scientists and many were, well a bit odd - take for example one of the signatories - Dr. James DeMeo. Director, Orgone Biophysical Research Lab. Orgone? Well it's;

"Orgone energy is a hypothetical extrapolation of the Freudian concept of libido first proposed and promoted in the 1930s by psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich."

Wtf? An 'expert' in mystic sexy energy that can't be proved is a 'scientist' who knows about global warming. Sounds like Sorcery to me!

Example Two: Now check this little bit of denailism;

Last year, the Government of the Maldives warned that rising sea levels would swamp the country and the entire population needed a new home. The global-warming faithful immediately announced it was all the fault of rich countries, which had to help. The stunt was spoiled by Swedish scientists, who had the data to demonstrate that the sea level around the Maldives was the same now as 4000 years ago and showed no signs of change. Certainly the Maldives have a problem but a major cause is much more mundane - mining coral for building material has removed reefs that provide a barrier against the ocean.

Sounds credible but is full of rubbish, but who are the 'Swedish scientists' who 'spoiled' all this? Turns out it it not a team of 'scientists' but a single person who is a dowser. What is dowsing?

Dowsing, sometimes called divining, doodlebugging (in the US), or (when searching specifically for water) water finding or water witching, is a practice that attempts to locate hidden water wells, buried metals or ores, gemstones, or other objects as well as currents of earth radiation without the use of scientific apparatus.

Yes, more magik! More Alchemy! Super-psychik witch energy being used to predict sea levels. It is also not at the fringe of denialism - it is central - the Cato ads being major propaganda pushes featuring a whos-who of denailism and the second quote is from major newspaper, the Australian.

This is typical of the double standards of denialism, imagine if the IPCC report was based on the work of some Demonology? They would (rightly) go mentalist - but it is not it si based or boring science and there is now so much evidence supporting the consensus, indeed saying the consensus is too conservative, that Occultism is all denailism has left.
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Lying Fucking Cops, Complicit Fucking Media

I fucking knew it - when that poor guy at the G20 protests in London died, I was told second hand that the police has been pelted with bottles when they tried to help him. Lying fucking bastards. Not only was this not the case, but footage that has emerged clearly shows a copper assaulting the guy - knocking him to the ground, while the protesters are the ones trying to help him up. Lying fucking bastards. They lied at Forest Gate, over De Menezes and what does the IPCC do? Fuck all. Useless. Here's the footage:



So what did the media say about the lying police claims? Did they investigate? Well the Guardian did and credit to it, but plenty of others took the lying police claims at face value and reported them;

The Sun: Man dies as bottles lobbed at rescuers. POLICE were battered with beer bottles and cans as they desperately tried to save a dying man at the height of the G20 riots in London last night.

Sky News: The man was found after collapsing at a protest camp near the Bank of England. Police said bottles were thrown at them while they attempted to treat him.

So as a result of this type of reporting we get things like this; a commentor on the Independent laps it all up; "A law abiding citizen died on his way home from work died because of the protests not because of the police."

I am not surprised that the media don't learn from past police lies. They don't want to. This is why we should be doing our own media.

More on this;

http://bristle.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/the-guardian-the-police-murdered-ian-tomlinson/
and
http://www.chickyog.net/2009/04/02/sky-news-not-learning-lessons/

Denial Watch: The Bible Says Climate Change Can't Happen

I re-checked the date of this post to see if it was the 1st April, but no, it seems it is not. You could not make this shit up; Climate change can't be real because it would contradict the Bible:

When God finished His creation, "God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Do you think he would have judged a fragile system biased by unidirectional feedbacks toward destruction that way? No, He would not. Indeed, the global destruction of the Flood required His supernatural intervention (Genesis 6-8), after which He promised Himself, "I will never again curse the ground on account of man ...; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease" (Genesis 8:21-22)-the repeated pairs of opposites being the poetic device called merism, implying that God had committed Himself to ensuring that all the cycles needed for human (and other) thriving would continue.

It is so wrong I don't know where to start. Wow; now we have already seen points in the Earth's where life nearly died, that were not Noah's flood. But it also commits the basic fallacy of thinking the planet is designed for us and that climate change threatens the planet - it does not, life and the planet will continue; just not in this form.

Still this does give a single bight spot in the huge dark could of climate change; that when it happens, the Bible is proved wrong. Hurah!

Denial Watch: It's the Ideology That is Broke

As a new denialist (though the denialist arguments are much weaker than before) spools off on Bristol Indymedia; This is a great comment from DavidCOG posted on the highly recommended blog by Greenfyre on the subject of not only denailism but also the mainstream denial that our politicians are in after being happy to pay trillions to bail out the banks and unwilling to bailout the climate. The bits in italics quote an earlier comment.

> “They are lying, and they know it. … convinced themselves that they serve a greater ‘Truth’…”

This is the only way I can make sense of ‘these people’. They have convinced themselves that ACC cannot possibly be true because the implications of it being true run counter to their conservative / libertarian / whatever political / social ideology. They’ve become certain that it’s only a matter of time before the *real* evidence is uncovered, and while they’re waiting for that, it’s perfectly justifiable to ‘bend’ the truth a little - anything to stop the leftists / Marxists / socialists making a big land grab.

And there is no antidote to that. There is no evidence or rational argument that will sway them.

> “…the death match we are now engaged in. … That may seem an overstatement…”

Not really when one reads things like http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127011.500-arctic-meltdown-is-a-threat-to-humanity.html?full=true We’re playing Russian Roulette with tipping points - and the conservatives are pulling the trigger with grim enthusiasm.

And outside of the public battle for truth, I see little or no sign of our ‘leaders’ doing anything to save us from the coming tsunami. Over here in the UK, PM Brown has made many fine speeches, but his actions don’t match. £120 million for renewable investment, £2,300,000 million for bailing out car makers. And more of the same from the G20 - http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/apr/02/1. These people think we can consume our way out of the problem.

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More on Bristol's Neo-Labour Hope

I posted a short article about the new guy from the Neo-Labour party and how hollow his rhetoric sounds. I wrote;

Would this be the same Labour government who for the last eight years allied itself to the most significant anti-Climate Change activists in the world, the Bu$h regime. The same government who approved the third runway at Heathrow and who – via its proxy in SWRDA has, until recently, been using public funds to subsidise airport development in the region.

Then Paul (or at least a poster claiming to be Paul) appeared on the blog to comment;

Yes these are the reasons I want to take the debate to the heart of Government...

and:

and there was me expecting a endorsement from the anarchists of Bristol. I am standing to change and improve the Labour Government not to endorse everything they have done. Indeed I was partly motivated to put myself forward to the local Labour Party to ensure that a robotic yes person politician was not selected.

I will be publishing a fuller political statement on my website soon to set out where I stand on a range of issues.

So at least he has a sense of humour. But seriously - how bankrupt is Labour? Totally. It is staggeringly simplistic (or simply propaganda to us voting masses) that Paul thinks he can 'take the debate to the heart of Government' - a government who don't give a shit about what you or I think.

At a local level; the ongoing debacle over cycling city and Red Trousergate shows the lack of environmental will-power of the local Labour party; they they had wanted the enviroment to count - they could have made it so. But no, it's spin and developers first.

At a national level; Heathrow - no clearer demonstration of climate first could be shown, but not - its developers and spin first. The recent account of the twists and turns of the official reports and consultation in such a way to favour the polluters is staggering. (examples 1 ,2 & 3)

At an international level; Former Neo-Labour leader, friend of big oil, Tony 'War Crimes' Bliar is going to be raking in even more ca$h as an advisor to the Colombian government of Álvaro Uribe. Yes, Bliar is helping out with a government of death squads, big oil and environmental degradation thanks to the failed coca spraying.

Face it if environmentalism is a left turn on the political road-map, then the Labour party is a right.
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