Harry gets a makeover

11:14pm

The excellent Harry's Place has a stylish new look (goodbye to the cod cyrillic logo, which says something). Invaluable for its open-eyed critiques of the left, from the left, now it looks great too.

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Can someone pause Al Gore for the next decade?

8:25pm

It is, we are told, as inevitable and inexorable as night follows day that, as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere goes up, so too does the temperature of the world. Inconveniently for this axiomatic truth, however, while carbon dioxide has continued to increase the temperature of the planet has stayed flat over the past decade and even recently dropped like a stone. Never mind: man-made global warming turns out to be the most obliging of theories because now we are told that this inexorable process of heating is now to take a ten-year pause.

The Telegraph tells us that global warming is to stop

while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions… This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been

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A monstrous regimen

6:53pm

Not before time, a family judge has fired a broadside at the way in which the English family courts enable decent fathers to be persecuted by vengeful estranged mothers. The Times reports that Lord Justice Ward gave vent to his feelings after telling a father that there was nothing he could do to help him to re-establish contact with his teenage daughter who had been turned against him by her ‘vicious’ mother.

The ‘drip, drip, drip of venom’ poured into the daughter’s ears by the mother included accusations of sexual abuse against the innocent father after the couple divorced, the judge said. The former wife’s tactics were so successful that the daughter wrote to her father when she was 9 saying that she wished he was dead… Lord Justice Ward told the father that the

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The dopey blue line

6:07pm

What an idiotic response by the police to the government’s reported determination to reclassify cannabis as a class B prohibited drug in an attempt to reverse the significant damage done by downgrading it to the relatively anodyne class C. According to the Guardian,  the police have stamped their size twelves and declared that they will not adopt a tougher approach to cases of simple possession of cannabis if the drug is upgraded. A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers said:

The key will be the discretion for officers to strike the right balance. We do not want to criminalise young people who are experimenting.

But by declaring that they will refuse to arrest and charge anyone caught in possession of cannabis, they are ruling out the use of such discretion. Furthermore, the issue is not — as...

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The war against the Jews (19)

5:17pm

I really can’t bring myself to wade into those sewers known as the Guardian and Independent, but Tom Gross, who has a strong stomach, provides samples here of the poisonous effluent they are pumping out about Israel — thanks in part to the usual suspects whose Jewishness is not so much ancestry as pathology. Vile beyond measure — and beyond all reason.

The Independent’s Johann Hari, who figures prominently in this catalogue of shame, recently won the Orwell Prize for journalism. Tom Gross notes that Hari cited a fabricated quote by the Israel-hating Israeli academic Ilan Pappe. This was actually the second time he had done so, despite the fact that the first occasion 18 months ago provoked the (himself controversial) Israeli ‘New Historian’ Benny Morris to write this letter to the paper denouncing the quote as a fabrication....

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Israel at 60

10:02am

I have a piece in the Spectator magazine itself today marking Israel’s 60^th anniversary next week. You can access it here.

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