Skepticism from an old pro

"We've been all so brain-washed" - Dr. William Gray

I liked this post at 'A Dog Named Kyoto' featuring a video segment with meteorologist Dr. William Gray commenting on over-heated global warming alarmism.

Sustainable development - all you need to know

Once again, in his National Post column on Friday, Peter Foster set his critical sights on ‘sustainable development’. He observed that critics of the election of Zimbabwe’s Francis Nhema as head of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development have largely missed the point. While Nhema’s election is bad enough - what is far more deserving of criticism is the very notion of ‘sustainable development’ itself. His bottom line:

It is deeply ironic that the commission should only be brought into disrepute by the appointment of a witless representative from a banana-peel republic, not for the muddleheaded and/or dangerous nonsense for which it stands.

A few more quotes [emphasis mine]:

The definition of 'sustainable development' -- meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing the needs of the future-- was hatched by the UN's 1987 Brundtland Commission.

The definition manages to be at once bland, meaningless, utopian and dangerous. How can we know, much less add up, the "needs" of everybody on earth? How can we possibly gauge what the needs of "the future" will be?

Canada 's maestro of multinational multi-tasking, Maurice Strong, was a key member of Brundtland. ....It is essentially yet another of the sleeper cells set up to pursue Mr. Strong's impossible dream.

....as Mr. Strong has said without attracting sufficient laughter, what the world needs is a UN-based system to manage literally everything.

If anthropogenic global warming represents the mother of all management problems, sustainable development represents the matriarch of all political pretensions.

Sustainable development, like its semantic sister, corporate social responsibility, is merely the failed socialist wolf in the emperor's new sheepskin.

In short, reasons we should all recoil in horror from ‘sustainable development’:

• It’s socialist utopianism involving global central planning;
• Like most socialist ideas it’s not workable, even in theory;
• Maurice Strong was a key figure in hatching the idea;
• The U.N. is enthusiastic about it;

Fit to govern?

Diane Francis has been doing an interesting "credentials audit" of the federal political parties as a measure of their fitness to successfully steer Canada’s economy in an increasingly competitive world. It doesn’t look good.

In her National Post column last week the Conservatives come up short:

....two dozen people who are qualified to run a charity, launch a special-interest group or be Minister of Justice because they are lawyers.

...only one person qualified to be Minister of Finance [David Emerson].

In a second column the Liberals faired even worse:

...."talent pool" is so bereft it is downright worrisome.

...no savvy technocrats ...no street smarts. This is a crew capable of running Greenpeace, a farm, giving university lectures or running a law firm.

This week’s column covers the NDP and the Bloc. No surprises here:

...both have different names but are, at the root, merely European labour parties.

...[neither have any MPs] who would have the slightest clue about the nuances of tax, capital markets, income trust or most economic policies.

The recommended solution:

Canada's governance gap could be closed if candidates:

1) were required to pass a rigorous economic IQ test and
2) were paid the average of their past five years' salary with a cap of $500,000. This would encourage trained applicants to run.

That’s what I like about the American system - a separate, appointed, highly qualified executive branch to run the government.

However, it’s unlikely that anything will change (for the better) anytime soon - so I guess we just have to count our blessings and be thankful we’re as well off as we are.

Subverting the education system?

SDA has posted this item about a Saskatchewan parent’s outrage over the use of Timothy Findley’s "homo-erotic and pornographic" novel "The Wars" in a grade twelve curriculum.

I have to agree with sda commenter ‘ET’ and others who argue that the central issue is not so much the use of Findley’s novel in class but the degree to which the ‘education’ system has become a vehicle for leftist indoctrination.

I’m reminded of this interview with Brazilian political thinker Olavo de Carvalho concerning the influence of deceased (1891-1937, but not dead enough) socialist guru Antonio Gramsci:

[former Italian communist leader Antonio] Gramsci, side by side with the frankfurtians and the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, is one of the top masterminds of the so-called "cultural marxism", which is not a school of thought but a bunch of heterogeneous proposals having in common the hate [of] Western civilization, and the belief that, the cultural war against it, should precede and guide the political fight for socialism..........They try to accomplish the practical goals of marxism by means that disavow its theory.

[...]

[Gramsci advocated that] Disguised socialist influence should spread to every field of human social existence, including private life and the most intimate feelings. Child care, medicine, psychoterapy, religion and marriage counseling were preferential channels for the transmission of that influence. Christian churches, for instance, should not be criticized, but infiltrated in order to deprive them of their spiritual content and use them as megaphones for communist watchwords. At the same time, disguised communists should occupy all the posts in educational, cultural and media organizations, gradually and carefully expelling their opponents to the last man. Communist ideology should recast all the language of public conversations, in order to provide that every circulating opinion contributes unconsciously to communist-fabricated general results.

Conspiracy or not, it would appear that Gramsci’s philosophy is being fairly successfully applied.

Olavo de Carvalho's web-site.

Self-help

SDA’s excellent post today highlighting an essay by Stephen Den Beste triggered a few thoughts about poverty and aid.

Den Beste’s words about "development projects" and "why can’t we provide clean drinking water for everyone on earth", reminded me of the never-ending aid projects and campaigns to "help" long suffering Africa.

Many aid projects, as Den Beste hints, are "fundamentally easy" - the lowest of low-tech: digging wells for water, building fences for livestock, mosquito netting to combat malaria. These are the kinds of efforts that you’d think Africans would be fully capable of doing on their own.

Isn’t one of the big problems (albeit caused largely by dysfunctional and/or corrupt governance) in Africa the general economy, jobs, etc? Yet Western aid organizations are forever focused on funding and doing the work "for" Africa. Thirty years and a trillion or so dollars later it’s more of the same or worse. What’s that definition of insanity?

The only best way out for anyone ‘in need’ begins and ends with self-help. No one else can do better.

Denis Coderre - Liberal Party "official neo-colonialist"

Loved this post by Babbling Brooks over at 'The Torch' highlighting Liberal defence critic Denis Coderre's latest loony-tunes ideas on Afghan detainees.

"Do they not make a muzzle in that man's size?"

"You want a fast and easy way to endanger our troops and undermine all the great hearts-and-minds victories they've been winning in Kandahar province? Dictating to the Afghan government how they should conduct their internal affairs on their own soil will do it."

"Stephane Dion needs to pull back on this idiot's leash, and hard."

"Time for Travers and Coderre to hammer out the finer points of their plan over a nice, hot cup of SHUT THE HELL UP."

Priceless.

“Immoral” climate research?

Lawrence Solomon’s column "The Deniers: Part XXI" in yesterday’s National Post focuses on Polish scientist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, whose research proved a key IPCC assumption false: [Emphasis mine]

"The IPCC relies on ice-core data -- on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface," Dr. Jaworowski explains.

"These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless -- the IPCC has based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

While Dr. Jaworowski’s work is extremely important, the results aren’t that surprising. What is more surprising, shocking really, is that there was an organized effort to suppress his research on the grounds that it is "immoral" to do research that might contradict a preferred hypothesis:

"....in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be "immoral" if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research."

"Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article ...Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute's director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that "this is not the way one gets research projects." Once published, the institute came under fire .... Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski's science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding."

If there’s any "immoral" or unethical behaviour here it was on the part of those who, for political and financial reasons, attempted to suppress legitimate scientific inquiry.

How much more proof do we need that UN IPCC sponsored science, like many UN endeavours, is hopelessly politicized and corrupted?

Update: For a very comprehensive discussion on this issue see the article by Dr. Jaworowski "CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time" published in the journal EIR, March 16, 2007. This article was apparently the basis for Lawrence Solomon's column. Credit for finding it goes to Bill at A Dog Named Kyoto where there's an excellent summary and commentary. As Bill says, read the whole thing - it's worth the effort. It's an absolutely scathing indictment of the IPCC and all its hangers-on.