Saturday, July 26, 2008

India: “What climate change?”

Lawrence Solomon reports on India’s "National Action Plan on Climate Change":

India loves the UN's climate change policies ...

Throughout its National Action Plan, India demonstrates that it will divert precious little of its scarce resources to solving the climate crisis.

... it's a money-maker for India and a lever with which to obtain western technology. As the Action Plan makes clear, there's only one condition under which India need spend a rupee to help curb global warming "--(if) these incremental costs are borne by developed countries and the needed technologies are transferred."

Very cagey. And India’s position on AGW?

... man-made global warming may not exist, and that if it does exist, its existence may be of no account to India.

"No firm link between the changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established,"

... why spend money on this possible non-event. Much better to focus on maximizing wealth and health.

It’s too bad our own political class can’t be as bold and realistic.

But get this! The chairman of the UN IPCC, the organization that has consistently and loudly warned that unless we curb GHG emissons "we’re all gonna die!!" is none other than India’s own Rajendra Pachauri - the same Rajendra Pachauri who helped draft and strongly supports India’s Action Plan. In other words he’s a monumental freaking hypocrite:
... he has been a vehement defender of the UN Panel's position, brooking no dissent from the view that time was short if the planet was to avert climate change catastrophe.
And at the same time:
He vehemently endorsed his Prime Minister's [AGW denying] National Action Plan.... [which] should be implemented and the west should "get off the back of India."
Incredible! I wonder how long Mr. Pachauri expects to keep his job at the UN IPCC.

Speculative hooey: health effects of climate change

A "not-yet-released Health Canada report" warns of the effects of climate change on health:
A major report on climate change and health forecasts a higher risk of injuries, illnesses and stress-related disorders brought on by more frequent bouts of extreme weather.
The report also calls on Ottawa to pay more heed to health and social services groups that plan for extreme weather, and to raise the public's awareness of ways to prepare for, and adapt to, climate change.
Though obviously I haven’t yet read the "500 page report" I suspect we can chalk it up as an utter waste of time - one more example of taxpayer funded useless junk. The possible health effects that could possibly, maybe, materialize IF Canada’s climate "changes" by who knows how much under the implicit and largely speculative assumption that said "climate-change" is caused by humans - ie. speculation on speculation on speculation.

But the government’s cautious handling of the study’s release seems encouraging. Despite the waste of time and money generating the report:
... the federal government paid a public relations firm $50,000 to choreograph the report's release, only to quietly post it online after 5 p.m. on a Friday.
No doubt, though, that the idiot eco-loons and AGW-true-believing MSM will do their level best to maximize the report’s importance. I heard about it yesterday via a local radio news-cast that pumped up the scary climate-change rhetoric.

"Loony-liberalism" a threat to liberty

George Jonas at his best:
... the force with the greatest capacity for becoming a threat to liberal democracy is liberalism itself -- meaning loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological menage a trois between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore, at once passionate and arid, that in Western societies has all but captured the educational and judicial machinery of the state.
In some, it's a virtual state religion, whose matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police.
... Democracy, far from being eco-fascism's enemy, seems to be its friend. Its enemy is liberty. That's why I think liberty has as much to fear from democracy as from autocracy.
... I wouldn't rule out anything, not even peace and tranquility, albeit more likely as a result of repression than of good government.
... I'd give individual liberty the worst odds. I think it will continue to decline in the 21st century.
Short, sharp and to the point.

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

The "bollock-brained" appeasement of Islam

Here's Pat Condell with some great straight talk on the stupid multi-culti appeasement of Islam.
He gets to the Canadian "Sock Puppets" at around the 5-minute mark.



[h/t]

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

The 10 year old bride


SANAA, Yemen (CNN) -- Nujood Ali is 10 years old, but she already has been married and divorced. It was an arranged marriage in which she said a husband three times her age routinely beat and raped her.
Criminal! But then wasn't her "husband" just following the Prophet Muhammad?

Monday, July 14, 2008

Obama the terrorist

Ouch!
The New Yorker's July 21st cover is generating a big flap.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Obama the pathetic narcissist

And Steyn on the same Hugh Hewitt show summarizing Barack Obama:

... Obama, ... it’s becoming increasingly clear that he hasn’t actually thought about anything much in recent years except becoming president.... But if you ask him about anything else, when he’s not doing one of his pathetic, scripted, great gaseous uplift of change you can believe in speeches, if you ask him a question off the cuff, that he’s not scripted on, he’s pathetic. He’s truly pathetic. ...listening to [unilingual] Obama talk about unilingual Americans being an embarrassment, I began to get a distinct Kerryesque whiff, the whiff of the Boston Brahmin hung over the Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian, or whatever he is.

... when you look at the flip-flopping and the changing of courses, and all the rest of it, what you see is a man who throughout his career has taken the path of least resistance. ... he’s never actually dared to take any position that would cause him any problems with the people he spent courting. That’s not the kind of guy...you want...sitting in the Oval Office.

He’s a very self-absorbed guy, and I don’t think he actually thinks about the wider world, except in terms of his place in it, like this extraordinary demand that the Germans found so offensive, that this man, who just happens to be a candidate, he’s not a head of state yet, or anything, demanding to be allowed to give a speech at the Brandenburg Gate... His self-absorption and narcissism is incredible.