American tea-party dishes hopey-changey thing

As all sentient people on the planet are now aware, Sarah Palin is a figure of extreme derision. She has been mocked for her ignorance of the world beyond Wasilla, Alaska, her total absence of education let alone sophistication, her wince-worthy wordplay, her homespun hicksville homiletics, her God-bothering gabbiness, her chavvy dysfunctional family (is she the grandmother of her son?? is she the mother of her grandson???), her hair, her glasses, her hockeyness, her beyond caricaturableness...has there ever been such a total idiot and embarrassment in political life?

How is it then that such an all-time airhead who, we were reliably informed, was ‘toast’ when she bowed out of Alaskan politics, has now put herself at the head of the most significant grassroots movement in America, the ‘Tea-Party’ populist revolt? The ‘Tea-Party’ movement started as a set of word-of mouth spontaneous protests against big government in general and Obama’s policies in particular; it caught fire and has now grown into a force big enough seriously to discomfit the Obamatons (and also the Republicans). As with all movements which reflect the passionately held views of ordinary people that they are not being listened to, the ‘Tea-Party’ movement was ignored and scorned in equal measure by the American pundocracy and dismissed by mainstream politicians.

It was therefore a movement tailor-made for Sarah Palin, who was duly received ecstatically when she addressed it last weekend. You can see why they love her: it’s called cutting to the chase, aka going for the jugular:

‘How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?’ she asked at one point. She blasted [Obama] for rising deficits, ‘apologizing for America’ in speeches in other countries, and for allowing the so-called Christmas bomber to board a plane headed for the United States, saying he was weak on the war on terrorism. ‘To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law,’ she declared.

As Mark Leibovich wrote in the New York Times:

Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before. Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office.

‘Few public figures not in office have leveraged the nexus between media and political positioning as Sarah Palin has,’ said the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett (who negotiated, among other things, Ms. Palin’s lucrative deal with Fox News, an arrangement with the Washington Speaker’s Bureau that pays her a reported $100,000 a pop, and a deal with Harper Collins to write her memoir, ‘Going Rogue,’ which has already earned her upward of eight figures). Beyond what her Fox-watchers and Facebookers can see, Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation.

That’s some stupid woman.

What obsesses people is whether Palin will run for President against Obama. But her significance goes beyond the question of whether she personally can or should do so. As Jennifer Rubin noted on the Commentary blog:

She is making the case that there is a powerful political movement, test run in Massachusetts, for independent-minded populists and conservatives.

The key point about Palin and the ‘Tea-Party’ movement is the challenge these are flinging down represent to the political establishment, Republican as well as Democrat, conservative as well as liberal. What Palin articulates -- the reason for her appeal and for the strength of the ‘Tea-Party movement’ -- is the ‘core’ conservative agenda that not just Democrats but also Republicans to at least some extent appear to have lost sight of.

In Britain, that core conservative agenda of defending life, liberty and social order (which in turn offers the best chance of success in the pursuit of happiness) is scorned not just by Labour but by the ‘Red Tory’/’Blue Labour ‘hopey-changey ‘Cameroons. ‘Core conservative’ voters, currently scorned and abandoned by the Conservative party, are in despair over the non-choice on offer to them at the forthcoming election.

Britain needs its own ‘Tea-Party’ movement to challenge the whole dopey-changey thing here, too.

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The phosphorus cloud over Ha'aretz

Two days ago, the BBC ran with a story that the Israel Defence Force had disciplined two senior officers for firing white phosphorus shells at a UN compound in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, endangering the lives of civilians. Given the enormous traction that had been given to claims that Israel had used phosphorus shells illegally in Gaza, with accusations that it had thereby recklessly endangered civilians and injured them through burns, the story was damaging. Even though it appeared that this had been a one-off breach of the international rules – which permit the use of white phosphorus in warfare to create either smoke or illumination but not to endanger civilians – rather than the wholesale unlawful practice which had been claimed, even one such incident was clearly a political setback. Accordingly the Times in particular – which had long been running a campaign that Israel had made unlawful use of white phosphorus  and tried to cover it up – ran a news story headlined

Israeli officers get ‘slap on wrist’ for white phosphorus use in Gaza

while a (balanced) leading article opined:

A ‘slap on the wrist’ (to quote one senior Israeli official) is an indefensibly cursory punishment for those responsible. Even so, it should be seen for what it is — a clear acknowledgment by Israel that, during the conflict, it behaved in a manner in which it should not.

Except that it hadn’t. The story, it appears, was wrong. The two officers were reprimanded not for firing phosphorus shells but artillery shells. Phosphorus shells were being fired on this occasion, but entirely lawfully -- in order to create smoke to deter Hamas from firing its anti-tank weapons. The irony was that the officers were reprimanded for not firing phosphorus but disobeying their orders by firing artillery shells which endangered life (although no-one was actually hurt by them).

So how was this story got so terribly wrong?

The fault appears to lie with a front page story in the Israeli paper Ha’aretz (no longer available on line, it seems) by Anshel Pfeffer. This said:

An Israel Defense Forces brigadier general and another officer with the rank of colonel endangered human life during last year’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip by firing white phosphorous munitions in the direction of a compound run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the Israeli government says.

The finding acknowledges, at least in part, allegations by international organizations. It was contained in a report that the government provided to the United Nations over the weekend in response to last September’s Goldstone Commission report.

Gaza Division Commander Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg and Givati Brigade Commander Col. Ilan Malka, were the subject of disciplinary action by GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yoav Gallant after headquarters staff found that the men exceeded their authority in approving the use of phosphorous shells that endangered human life, the Israeli government report said.

In fact, the Israel government report had not said that at all. As CAMERA records, it had merely said this:

100. The special command investigations also uncovered some instances where IDF soldiers and officers violated the rules of engagement. For example, in one case, a Brigadier General and a Colonel had authorized the firing of explosive shells which landed in a populated area, in violation of IDF orders limiting the use of artillery fire near populated areas. The Commander of the Southern Command disciplined the two officers for exceeding their authority in a manner that jeopardized the lives of others.

108. One of these incidents involved alleged damage to the UNRWA field office compound in Tel El Hawa. The special command investigation revealed that, during the course of a military operation in Tel El Hawa, IDF forces fired several artillery shells in violation of the rules of engagement prohibiting use of such artillery near populated areas. Based on these findings, the Commander of the Southern Command disciplined a Brigadier General and a Colonel for exceeding their authority in a manner that jeopardized the lives of others [my emphasis].

And on white phosphorus, it said this:

118. The Military Advocate General reviewed the entire record of the special command investigation. With respect to exploding munitions containing white phosphorous, the Military Advocate General concluded that the use of this weapon in the operation was consistent with Israel’s obligations under international law.

119. With respect to smoke projectiles, the Military Advocate General found that international law does not prohibit use of smoke projectiles containing phosphorous. Specifically, such projectiles are not “incendiary weapons,” within the meaning of the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons, because they are not primarily designed to set fire or to burn. The Military Advocate General further determined that during the Gaza Operation, the IDF used such smoke projectiles for military purposes only, for instance to camouflage IDF armor forces from Hamas’s antitank units by creating smoke screens.

120. The Military Advocate General found no grounds to take disciplinary or other measures for the IDF’s use of weapons containing phosphorous, which involved no violation of the Law of Armed Conflict. Nevertheless, the Military Advocate General’s opinion did not address a number of specific complaints that were received after the investigation concluded and which are being investigated separately.

So why did Pfeffer report that the officers were disciplined over the firing of phosphorus shells? Apparently because a footnote to paragraph 108 states:

‘IDF forces fired several artillery shells in violation of the rules of engagement prohibiting use of such artillery near populated areas.’

CAMERA goes on:

The footnote refers readers to paragraphs 431-437 of a July 2009 extensive report issued by the Israeli army about Operation Cast Lead (‘The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects’). Those paragraphs deal at length about the army’s use of white phosphorous close to the aforementioned UNRWA facility at the same Jan. 15, 2009 incident in Tel Al Hawa. That report’s conclusions about the use of white phosphorous at Tel Al Hawa were:

In conclusion, the incident took place during intense fighting, which involved Hamas’ deployment of anti-tank units equipped with advanced anti-tank missiles north of the UNRWA compound.  Hamas thus placed the compound between themselves and the IDF forces.(266) The IDF implemented an effective smokescreen as a protective measure in response to this threat.  The operational advantage of using the smokescreen was significant.  The IDF anticipated that the risk to civilians and civilian objects was limited in relation to this operational advantage.  Unfortunately, however, three individuals were injured and U.N. facilities were damaged.

After Pfeffer’s story appeared, the IDF apparently protested at the false assertion that the officers had been disciplined over the prohibited use of phosphorus.  Subsequently, Pfeffer published an updated story on line which carried the IDF’s response – but in a way that still repeated the error in the original story:

The Israel Defense Forces on Monday denied that two of its senior officers had been summoned for disciplinary action after headquarters staff found that the men exceeded their authority in approving the use of phosphorus shells during last year's military campaign in the Gaza Strip, as the Israeli government wrote in a recent report.

In an official response provided to the United Nations over the weekend in response to last September’s Goldstone Commission report, the government said that a brigadier general and another officer with the rank of colonel endangered human life during by firing white phosphorous munitions in the direction of a compound run by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

In a further story today, Pfeffer is still repeating his original false assertion about what the government report said, while providing quotes from the IDF which make the true position even clearer:

IDF officials yesterday downplayed the significance of the proceedings against Gaza Division commander Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg and former Givati Brigade commander Col. Ilan Malka, conducted by GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant, saying that it would not affect their future promotions.

It was determined that the officers had exceeded their authority in authorizing artillery fire, which IDF sources said yesterday had been fired to create cover to assist in the extrication of IDF troops, some of whom were wounded, from a position where Hamas had superiority. The sources also said that while the firing of the shells did endanger human life, no injuries were actually sustained as a result.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office said yesterday that contrary to the reports provided by the government to the United Nations on Friday, which stated that Eisenberg and Malka were disciplined for using smoke shells containing white phosphorus, they were disciplined not for using the phosphorus shells but rather for giving the authorization to fire regular artillery shells.

In yet another story today about the Israel government report, however, Pfeffer now finally gets it right:

Senior reserve officers criticized the IDF yesterday for not revealing it had reprimanded two senior officers for exceeding their authority in using artillery during the operation.

Meanwhile, Ha’aretz’s respected defence correspondent Amos Harel – who in Monday’s paper wrote a commentary which reported the disciplinary proceedings accurately by referring to artillery shells and making no mention of phosphorus – today makes the position very clear:

The affair for which Eisenberg and Malka were later reprimanded was not mentioned at the briefing - the matter of the unjustified artillery fire: the use of live ammunition to help rescue a Givati Brigade platoon from a situation in which they were under anti-tank missile fire from Hamas - even though the orders allowed firing only smoke shells. The investigation found that Malka exceeded his authority, but his orders did not cause the death of any innocent civilians. Division commander Eisenberg, who was not directly involved in the decision, requested to be tried too, so as not to abandon his brigade commander [my emphasis].

The false assertion that the IDF reprimanded its offers over the illegal use of white phosphorus has now gone round the world. Will Ha’aretz come clean about its mistake? Will the BBC, the Times et al broadcast and print that this was in fact untrue? I’m afraid it’s the usual story – that a lie is half-way round the world before the truth even gets its boots on.

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Not waving but drowning

The climate change zealots continue their free fall into utter ridicule. Yesterday, the government’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, told the Independent that the

highly sophisticated hacking operation that led to the leaking of hundreds of emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia was probably carried out by a foreign intelligence agency.

Ah! Reds under the sea-bed! But by today King had retreated. The Guardian reported:

Sir David King admitted he possessed no inside information about the leaks of embarrassing emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, and had merely been speculating on material already in the public domain. His remarks to a journalist had been a ‘side-issue’, he said. But it emerged that he had been misinformed about key facts. One of his grounds for believing a high-powered team of professionals were behind the leak, he said, was that there had been a wide spread of emails going back decades ‘between very different people’. He told the Independent: ‘The emails date back to 1996, so someone was collecting the data over many years.’ In fact, as UEA confirmed today, all the files and emails were archived on a single backup server on the Norwich campus. Once access was gained, it would have been simple to copy all the material.

Sir David King FRS is a former professor of physical chemistry and one of this country's most distinguished scientists. Yet he has shown himself here to be sloppy with facts and prone to wild conspiracy theorising. Is it any wonder therefore that he is a climate change zealot? This frighteningly closed-minded individual was a key force in shaping Britain’s science policy from 2000 to 2007.  

The Guardian’s take on all this today is fascinating. It splashes on the apparent discovery of yet another global warming academic scam, once again involving Phil Jones of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (the one at the centre of the dodgy emails saga). The story reveals how Jones and a collaborator have been accused of scientific fraud for attempting to suppress data that cast doubt on a key 1990 study, on the extent to which cities contributed to and thus distorted global warming statistics, by covering up flaws in the data from Chinese weather stations.  In a fuller account, the paper reports:

...when, in 2007, Jones finally released what location data he had, British amateur climate analyst and former City banker Doug Keenan accused Jones and Wang of fraud. He pointed out that the data showed that 49 of the Chinese meteorological stations had no histories of their location or other details. These mysterious stations included 40 of the 42 rural stations. Of the rest, 18 had certainly been moved during the story period, perhaps invalidating their data.

Keenan told the Guardian: ‘The worst case was a station that moved five times over a distance of 41 kilometres’; hence, for those stations, the claim made in the paper that ‘there were “few if any changes” to locations is a fabrication’. He demanded that Jones retract his claims about the Chinese data.

But as both Andrew Bolt and Philip Stott point out, this Guardian ‘exclusive’ is not actually new at all. Stott writes:

Indeed, ‘exclusive’ is hardly the case, for the serious allegation of fraud was first investigated in the academic journal, Energy & Environment, as early as 2007 [see: ‘The fraud allegation against some climatic research of Wei-Chyung Wang’ by Douglas J. Keenan, Energy & Environment 18: 985–995 (2007): doi: 10.1260/095830507782616913]. Here is a .pdf version of the original paper, and here is what the Abstract states:

‘Wei-Chyung Wang has been a respected researcher in global warming studies for decades. I have formally alleged that he committed fraud in some of his research including research cited by the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2007) on “urban heat islands” (a critical issue). Herein, the allegation is reviewed, and some of its implications are explicated.’ We should further note that this allegation was also taken up at the web site, Climate Audit, on June 18, 2007.

... Moreover, and more worryingly, we must note that this allegation was published in Energy & Environment, the very journal that we now know was being traduced in the revealing UEA e-mail exchanges. Here is just one example, dated 14.00 04/12/2007:

‘I don't read E&E, gives me indigestion - I don't even consider it peer-reviewed science, and in my view we should treat it that way. i.e., don't cite, and if journalists ask us about a paper, simply explain its not peer-reviewed science, and Sonja B-C [Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, University of Hull], the editor, has even admitted to an anti-Kyoto agenda!’

Now this is dreadful. Here we are witnessing the dangerous downside of peer reviewing, in which a cabal try to enforce its own view of ‘the science’ by trashing a critical journal and/or by attacking its editor ad hominem.

Andrew Bolt wrote about the Keenan/Wang imbroglio last year. Bolt comments:

For all this time, the Guardian kept up its alarmist campaign on global warming, and ignored this particular scandal. But today I read that the Guardian has a ‘scoop’ thanks to its ‘investigation’ and ‘today reveals’ what it last year wouldn’t... This example actually suggests how complicit the media has been in keeping the global warming scare alive by failing to report what was actually under its nose. But now there’s a great change. There is now a race on to uncover the next big IPCC scandal, and I doubt the great climate change scare can survive. The papers will, of course, take the credit.

Of course. Who now remembers the names of all those in the British progressive intelligentsia who endorsed Stalinism during the inter-war years – and which particular newspaper was their cheerleader, I wonder?

Meanwhile, with spectacular timing the new green Tory party has chosen this of all moments to announce that they have poached from the government one Sir Nicholas Stern to advise them on

the creation of a Green Investment Bank to drive the development of climate-friendly technology.

Yet Stern’s 2006 report on the economics of climate change was not only discredited by serious economists but its fundamental premise of man-made global warming is currently in meltdown. With even the Guardian now trying to distance itself from the climate change madness it has done so much to create, the Tories now risk being the last people stranded on the melting floe of ideology as it calves into the sea of denial.

You’d have to have a heart of ice not to laugh.

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By the waters of denial they sit and weep...

A few days ago, Analysis on BBC Radio Four featured a programme about environmentalism by Justin Rowlatt which concluded that the green movement was using climate change as a cover to smuggle in other agendas such as poverty or equality. No! You don’t say. It was a timid, tentative thesis; the fact is that from the start environmentalism has self-evidently been all about changing the nature of society rather than changing society’s views about nature. And of course Rowlatt’s concern was that these hidden agendas might only confirm people’s scepticism about the science of anthropogenic global warming, which as we all know is Settled and an Unchallengeable Consensus, amen.

Nevertheless when the BBC, no less, starts to allow an interviewee to start telling the truth like this:

I hate to say this – but there is a very strong –it’s very small – but there is a very strong green fascism in much of the environmental world. I’ve heard it said at meetings I’ve been at – that climate change is so important - democracy has to be sacrificed

something big is definitely happening. And that something is the disintegration of anthropogenic global warming theory. The ‘scientific’ basis for it is de-materialising day by day, leaving merely the sulphurous stink of intellectual fraud on an epic scale.

The IPCC has been forced to admit that it was wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 and has been accused of falsely linking global warming to a rise in extreme weather events. Subsequently it was revealed that the IPCC stated that

observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information. However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them. The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Roger Pielke further reveals that the influential (and idiotic) Stern review, which relied upon an IPCC misrepresentation of a piece of research to make misleading claims about the link between rising temperatures and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, quietly modified its own figurers after publication to conceal the error – and yet still got it wrong.

The government’s chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, has said the impact of global warming has been exaggerated and there is an urgent need for more honest disclosure of the uncertainty of predictions about the rate of climate change:

When you get into large-scale climate modelling there are quite substantial uncertainties. On the rate of change and the local effects, there are uncertainties both in terms of empirical evidence and the climate models themselves.

You don’t say!! And just look also at what the Chinese are saying:

...the IPCC reports contained very little data from Chinese researchers. I was told the IPCC refused to consider Chinese data because the Chinese research was not peer-reviewed. China is not a small country. Its landmass spans several climate zones and includes the roof of the world. I have to wonder how data from China would affect the IPCC’s findings.

How indeed! And let’s not dwell again on the scandal at the University of East Anglia where scientists upon whose work the IPCC relied for its apocalyptic predictions were exposed as being willing to manipulate the data to exaggerate the extent of global warming; nor the great Hockey Stick That Wasn’t Cricket, which managed to lose several hundred years of climate history to arrive at the ‘evidence’ that 20^th century climate warming was aberrantly high; nor the testimony of numerous distinguished former IPCC reviewers that their research had been distorted or falsified.

The great Philip Stott, the (now emeritus) professor of biogeography who for the past twenty years has patiently explained the bogus anti-science behind AGW theory and its real agenda of anti-western, anti-capitalist, anti-human ideology, has put up a terrific post about all this on his blog, The Clamour of the Times. It is, as he says, nothing less than the collapse of a Grand Narrative, of a jaw-dropping speed and magnitude:

And what can one say about ‘the science’? ‘The ‘science’ is already paying dearly for its abuse of freedom of information, for unacceptable cronyism, for unwonted arrogance, and for the disgraceful misuse of data at every level, from temperature measurements to glaciers to the Amazon rain forest. What is worse, the usurping of the scientific method, and of justified scientific scepticism, by political policies and political propaganda could well damage science sensu lato - never mind just climate science - in the public eye for decades.

Here’s the kind of thing he means:

Indeed, the nonsense written about the Indian Sub-Continent has been a particular nadir in climate-change science, and it has long been judged so by many experts on the region. My ex-SOAS friend and colleague, Dr. Robert Bradnock, a world authority on the Sub-Continent, has been seething for years over the traducing of data and information relating to this key part of the world. In June, 2008, he wrote:

“However, in my own narrow area of research, I know that many of the claims about the impact of ‘global warming’ in Bangladesh, for example, are completely unfounded. There is no evidence that flooding has increased at all in recent years. Drought and excessive rainfall are the nature of the monsoon system. Agricultural production, far from being decimated by worsening floods over the last twenty years, has nearly doubled. In the early 1990s, Houghton published a map of the purported effects of sea-level rise on Bangladesh. Coming from a Fellow of the Royal Society, former Head of the Met Office and Chair of the IPCC, this was widely accepted, and frequently reproduced. Yet, it shows no understanding of the complex processes that form the Bengal delta, and it is seriously misleading. Moreover, despite the repeated claims of the World Wide Fund, Greenpeace, and, sadly, Christian Aid, the melting of the Himalayan glaciers is of completely marginal significance to the farmers of the plains in China, India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. One could go on!”

Maybe Dr Bradnock might have a word with Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Poor Miliband – the Minister for Laputa -- appears to be at breaking point over all this. At the weekend he made a piteous plea:

Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband issued a warning that recent controversies over scientific data must not be allowed to undermine efforts to tackle global warming. Mr Miliband said the evidence that man-made climate change was occurring was ‘overwhelming’ and was backed by the vast majority of scientists.

Miliband resembles one of those people who are discovered living in the jungle decades after the end of a war without realising it is all over. Someone should sit him down with a nice strong cup of hot sweet Fairtrade tea and a blanket over his shoulders, and embark him without delay upon a course of post-traumatic stress counselling.  An awful lot of reputations are about to be reduced to, um, carbon – his included.

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