Wikileaks Fallout: Fox News Comments are Nuts!

This is no big surprise - the commentators on Fox News are nuts - and nothing brings the nuts to the surface like a big news story pushing reality into their cosy neo-con world view as the fall out from the wikileaks story contines... Here's a tiny sample of the crazzzsy on offer there:

We are fighting a war here folks,s--t happens in war. If we have a group targeting our worst enemies,good for them,and i wish them much success. We already know Pakistan cannot be trusted,and that Iran assists our enemies,so what's new? Get out of the way Mr. President,and liberal anti-war activists,and let us win this war! Otherwise, Afghanistan will indeed be O'bama's Vietnam,and another of many blights on his legacy. Imagine being a worse President than Jimmy "pea-nuts" Carter.

Right - 'cos for the bulk of the war - from 2001 until 2009, the forces of the right were in control and they did sooo well winning the war. Not. Face it, the right had this war, ran it as it saw fit - and fucked it up royally. Next.

I say Obama himself is behind all this mess. Who else would have easy access to so many classified WAR documents? IMPEACH OBAMA, IMPEACH WIKILEAKS!

This has to be a joke. So Obama, who has taken over the war, leaks documents that embarras his running of the war and you want to impeach Wikileaks - a website? Woah. Logic died today.

There is no doubt in my mind that this leak and others is a deliberate attempt by left wing liberals worldwide to undermine us in the USA. We should be concentrating the Justice Department force on this, NOT the Arizona Laws. As long as this administration is run by left wing radicals you can forget having ANY secrets as there are traitors in our midst at ALL levels. It is time for the truth to be told that the USA has been infiltrated by communists for many years just waiting for the opportunity to destroy us. The fact that SERVING members of our military forces are part of this illegal exposure of what are effectively SECRETS should be a warning to all real Americans who do NOT want to be part of the New World Order as espoused by many of our politicians.

Ah, the New World Order - those sneaky people are behind everything! So the war that was started by the NWO is now being exposed by the NWO? Woah. Logic died today. Again.

Afgan War: It's a Huge Cluster-Fuck

Like we didn't know it, but now the evidence is there to back it...

[The] collective picture that emerges is a very disturbing one. We today learn of nearly 150 incidents in which coalition forces, including British troops, have killed or injured civilians, most of which have never been reported; of hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, two armies which are supposed to be allies; of the existence of a special forces unit whose tasks include killing Taliban and al-Qaida leaders; of the slaughter of civilians caught by the Taliban's improvised explosive devices; and of a catalogue of incidents where coalition troops have fired on and killed each other or fellow Afghans under arms.

Reading these logs, many may suspect there is sometimes a casual disregard for the lives of innocents. A bus that fails to slow for a foot patrol is raked with gunfire, killing four passengers and wounding 11 others. The documents tell how, in going after a foreign fighter, a special forces unit ended up with seven dead children. The infants were not their immediate priority. A report marked "Noforn" (not for foreign elements of the coalition) suggests their main concern was to conceal the mobile rocket system that had just been used.

In these documents, Iran's and Pakistan's intelligence agencies run riot. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is linked to some of the war's most notorious commanders.

Man, where to start...

- Civilians killed left, right and centre; and the coalition does not seem to care much, "casual disregard for the lives of innocents..."
- "hundreds of border clashes between Afghan and Pakistani troops, two armies which are supposed to be allies..."
- "slaughter of civilians caught by the Taliban's improvised explosive device"

And so on... a massive cluster-fuck.

Fighting for God - Fighting Evil (eeek!!!)

So what does this image show?



A religious nutter with holy book and gun.

So what does this image show?



Religious nutters with holy books and guns.

Not much difference between the two - one Muslim and one Christain, both convinced that in the battle of good vs evil they are on the side of good along with thier version of God.

Scary.

And here's a scary story where soldiers in the US military opposing the Christianisation of it, get death threats - including ones aimed at their kids. Prince of peace? Hmmmm.

Climate Deniers Call for Censorship

Climate deniers like to trumpet the ideas that they are about freedom and openness and against censorship:

It seems NASA has an agenda concerning Global Warming, and if you don’t believe the Cult, you’d better keep your mouth shut.

Yet they always seem to call for censorship when people in turn criticise them - like their so-called scepticism - only runs one way. They want censorship for their critics but freedom for them just as they shout about the most mundane error in climate science and ignore the huge whoppers they and their followers commit. Here's another example of the double standards:

Please contact Father Dennis J. Dease, President of St. Thomas University, djdease@stthomas.edu, and invite him - even at this eleventh hour - to take down Abraham's talk altogether from the University's servers, and to instigate a disciplinary inquiry into the Professor's unprofessional conduct, particularly in the matter of his lies to third parties about what I had said in my talk at Bethel University eight months ago? That would be a real help.

That's what I call freedom, debate and openness.

Hottest June on Record

More worrying temperature data as June turns out to be the hottest month on record. Now all of a sudden the climate change deniers understand the difference between 'weather' (what is happening now) and 'climate' (the long term trend). They could not get their heads round these concepts when it was cold and snowing (in part of the world) and they could all have a laugh about things and ignore that in other parts of the world it was all too hot (Australia was having a heat-wave at the time). This comment sums it up in a tongue-in-cheek manner:

So when the weather's hot, short-term fluctuations are totally irrelevant and we need to look at the picture over the very long term. When the weather's cold it disproves the reality of climate change. Basically AGW is false, and we know this because any evidence to the contrary must be wrong.

Info tour - US anti-war activists imprisoned in Iran

An event worth looking at:

At short notice a number of individuals from various Bristol networks have pulled together to host this event about the strange arrest of US anti-war and justice activists arrested on the Iraq/Iran border. Come and find out about this tricky situation...

Info tour about US anti-war activists imprisoned in Iran

On July 31, 2009, Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer, and Josh Fattal - were arrested at the border of Iran. After nearly a year, they are still being held without charges, without a single visit from their lawyer, under allegations of espionage. The families still have no idea when they might be released.

A fourth member of the group, Shon Meckfessel narrowly avoided imprisonment himself and is kicking off a thirty city European tour in Bristol to publisise their situation and to call for their release. Shon will be speaking about the three activists, their work and their current situation at 7.30pm, Wednesday 14th July, at Kebele Social Centre, Robertson Rd, Easton, Bristol BS5 6JY.

Metro needs to get a sense of humor

Getting the lawers out to tackle a spoof - seems a bit like bullying to me...

The Metro has obtained a High Court injunction against “all persons responsible for the publication and/or distribution” of a Metro spoof paper that was distributed by campaigners at London tube stations on Friday morning. But since the spoof was produced and distributed anonymously, the injunction seems to have been served upon the wrong people, in what appears to be a guilty-by-association verdict.

The spoof paper, which has also been circulated on the web, has a similar masthead and layout to the free daily, with a zero instead of the O. The owners of Metro, Associated Newspapers Limited, claim this is an infringement of the company’s trademark copyrights, while campaigners argue the company directors “do not have a sense of humour” and have “gone too far in suppressing free speech to protect their commercial interests.”

You can see the spoof in question here: http://metr0.co.uk/

David Mitchell Spells it Out

Great polemic that makes a lot of sense...

We are going to need people like David to counter the denial bullshit - why because the denial crew have got a lot of things in their favour.

- Using oil and stuff has lots of nice things about it - like flying.
- The right-wing media (which is most of it) are on their side so can be relied upon to twist, distort and bullshit along with then.
- There is lots of money on the denial side - big oil and think thanks have pumped the denial side with lots of cash.
- Most people would rather it is not happening. We'd all love to be told it's not true. Thus counter information appeals to us while the facts don't.
- We tend not to like scientists much - we think of them as smart asses. (Which is not true if you meet them)

However as David says - the facts are it is true. After the denial crew and their wealthy and powerful allies have been attacking every single pillar of climate science relentlessly for decades, the science (not it's perception) is more solid than ever. It's more real than ever and getting real-er!

So we have to get real.

Climate Science Is Right

The main news from the final of the slew of inquiries into the hacking of some climate scientist's email (the CRU or Climate Research Unit) is that apart from a few minor areas, they were honest and accurate in thier work. Put simply - climate science is right. Not that you'd know that from the right-wing media who are busy focusing on the minor points - but then they have to else it makes all the rubbish they wrote prior to this look like, well... rubbish.

Within the denailosphere, the predictable doddering ediface of conspiracy grows ever more absurd. Why? Because when a conspiracy thoery encountered information that disproves it, it must grow and absorb the counter-information into the conspiracy. Hence all the climate-creationsist conspiriacy does it grow more and more absurd by the day... Here's what one denialist had to say:

I guess the main question coming out of the Muir Russell report is: when is he going to be appointed to the House of Lords and his choice of appellation? Lord Muir of Holyrood? They adopted a unique inquiry process in which they interviewed only one side – CRU. As a result, the report is heavily weighted towards CRU apologia.

See how that works? The twisted logic is; Muir Russell does not agree with denail therefore Muir Russell must be in on the scam.

But lets ask another question - how do we know that the climate science is right? The report's authors did a very clever thing to test if they were right. What they did is got hold of some publically avalible temprature data (not from the CRU) and got hold of some publically avalible computer code to analysie it (not from the CRU) and ran the analysis. If the CRU were lying/wrong then the tempature reconstructions would look different to the results the CRU got. If the CRU were right, then the resonstructions would look the same as the CRU's results. What happened? The resonstructions looked the same as the CRU's results. Slam dunk. Here's how one commentor put it:

the report has proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Inquiry had enough independent brains to reproduce the software code on the original information available in a short space of time.

Which in turn proves that all climate sceptics who complain about the code not being available are not particularly bright - at least when it comes to writing and/or understanding code.

Which in turn also makes me openly wonder whether climate sceptics bleating about unavailability of the code would even have the faintest idea what to do with it if it was served to them on a silver platter.

Give it up mate. You guys are really starting to look like a flock of headless chooks now.

Amen. And here's the kicker to the conspiracy theory - there are very powerful forces who would love nothing more than climate change to turn out to be a scam - the Republican Party, the oil, coal and gas industries, the right-wing media, Russia, Saudia Arabia (home to the largest reserves of oil) etc. If somebody could come out and show it's a hoax, from from being in danger - they'd be fetted by all of the above and more as heros. So why would sombody risk thier reputation to back a handful of climate scientists? Again, this comment sums it up...

After each inquiry we all have heard the same calls long and loud from the denialosphere: "Whitewash, whitewash ..." but it can be shown to hold no water with a simple explanation. I have a coin (20c)and i'll flip it. If it comes up heads then you can have the coin. If it comes up tails then you give me $100. Will you take that bet? No? Why? Because it is a dumb bet. Only an idiot would risk $100 to win 20c. This is the case with these inquiries. If it were truly a whitewash then I do not know anyone who would risk their reputation and the reputation of an institution to which they belong to rescue the reputation of another. If there was even a hint of impropriety, Mann, Jones and the CRU would have been hung out to dry and the members of these panels would have distanced themselves quicker than you can pass wind. When the currency of these researchers and institutions is reputation, if dodgy deeds were done no-one would risk their reputation to ressurect another's. Why? Because it is a dumb bet.