I was invited to be on the Murnaghan programme on Sky News this morning – which I always find a great deal more intelligent than the Andrew Marr alternative on the BBC. I declined because I did not want to get up and get a 7.30am train from Ramsgate on a Sunday morning. I had a meeting until 11.30pm last night planning a conference on human rights in Balochistan [I still tend to say Baluchistan], and I have a newly crowned tooth that seems not to want to settle down. But I am still worried by my own lack of energy, which is uncharacteristic. Is this old age?
I also have some serious work to do on my Burnes book, and next week I shall be staying in London to be in the British Library reading room for every second of its opening hours. So there may be a bit of a posting hiatus. I have in mind a short post on an important subject on which I suspect that 99% of my readership – including the regular dissident commenters – will strongly disagree with me.
This is a peculiarly introspective post, perhaps because my tooth is hurting, but I seem to have this curmudgeonly spirit which wishes to react to the huge popularity of this blog by posting something genuinely held but unpopular; a genuine view but one I don’t normally trumpet. The base thought seems to be “You wouldn’t like me if you really knew me”.
Similarly when I wrote Murder in Samarkand I was being hailed as a hero by quite a lot of people for my refusal to go along with the whole neo-con disaster of illegal wars, extraordinary rendition and severe attacks on civil liberties, sacrificing my fast track diplomatic career as a result. My reaction to putative hero worship was to publish in Murder in Samarkand not just the political facts, but an exposure of my own worst and most unpleasant behaviour in my private life.
I am in a very poor position to judge, but I believe the result rather by accident turned out artistically compelling, if you don’t want to read the book you can get a good idea of that by clicking on David Tennant in the top right of this blog and listening to him playing me in David Hare’s radio adaptation.
Anyway, that’s enough musing. You won’t like my next post, whenever it comes. Promise.
don’t know if you meant this one: http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/
strait of hormuz isn’t blacked out but there are quite a number of ‘unspecified’ ships and a higher proportion than I can immediately see in other areas.
Not sure what I make of the absolute lack of any shipping in the red sea though…
He will also recognize the honor if we use any of his other pseudonyms (Raoul Duke et al)
Ben, what shall we raise our intoxicants to?
Here’s to Raoul Duke!! Shoot me into space!!
Geoff – I appreciate the fact that you have taken the trouble to investigate the petition further but may i suggest that you do yourself a dis-service and contradict your own point by googling a few names and then confirming your own pre formed opinion? Like it or not,there are over 32,000 scientists who have signed this petition – some may be old,same will indeed be of dubious character, and some may very well now be dead. I’d suggest that is the kind of variety you would find with any large group of 32,000 people
Regardless of how many signers of the Oregon petition have PhDs, that’s still an overwhelmingly larger number than is to be found at the IPCC. What exactly qualifies the economists or sociologists listed among the limited number of authors at the IPCC more than others? By your definition, they have no right to an opinion either. Why would you rather take the word of a handful of scientists pressured by political elements over 32,000 qualified scientists? (whether they are dribbling prune eaters or not)
But this misses the point – the point being to blow away this myth of consensus fed by the IPCC, as the Oregon petition and report does well as countless reputable other reports,some of which i’ve put up links for.
The main contention still seems to be that the IPCC isnt properly peer reviewed at all – far more worrying than potential dead petition signers: http://patdollard.com/2012/07/report-ipcc-illegitimate-not-peer-reviewed-must-be-overhauled/
Hi Clark! I had thought all that was left Doune The Rabbit Hole. Yes, it’s insignificant whatever it was/is. I can get angry quite quickly, but I forget about it v quickly too. Often overnight, in fact. Let’s just move on.
Clark; Here it’s 3 p.m. but early cheer is afoot.
Here’s to the Iconoclast. A toast to one who was truly original, and lived every day like it was his last !
Holy Moly. I just realized my pseudonym is misspelled.
Ben Fraklin, indeed.
Chris Jones
couple of points – I picked 8 names. 7 showed no result other than linking back to the list and one showed activity in the 50’s. My sample size may have been too small to satisfy rigorous statistical method, but I fail to see what the relevance of the petition size is. Whether the petition was 50 signatures, 32k, or 7 billion – my sampling of it showed 100% fail. Criticise my sample size if you will, but I am not investing more time than I did.
also – you defend the number of the signers who have phd’s. I made no assertion that the signatories *should* have phd’s. I merely picked the ones who claimed to be, on the basis that their work should be easier to find.
As for your question – “Why would you rather take the word of a handful of scientists pressured by political elements over 32,000 qualified scientists?”. Not only do I challenge you to show anywhere I have so much as hinted at taking the IPCC’s word, I ask you to carefully re-read my post where I overtly stated that to take *either* side of the argument would be a leap of faith for me which I am not willing to take.
As in my reply to scousebilly, I believe you are also pushing me into the ‘for us or against us’ false dichotomy.
I don’t know if there is genuine scientific consensus or not. I am not engaged in that field, and I am not going to pretend to know something I don’t. Nor, for largely similar reasons, do I know if the IPCC are conducting a full, rigorous and honest examination or if they are framing the data around a sponsored agenda My one and only point was simply that I believe the Oregon petition to be of no value in the debate, riddled as it is with problems. I held up the problem I noticed by my own examination. A ten minute look at the complaints against it will show many more, easily verifiable issues of bias and inaccuracy.
Ben, thanks for the inspiration.
Glenn, what about one of these?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_Series_C_Black_Shadow_1950.jpg
We can’t stop here; this is bat country!
Och, Ben, it’s one of those psychedelic coincidences. I’m sure I spelt it like that the other day, and then corrected it. I must stop cheating with the mod’s interface! You spotted me doing that early on and asked, but I think I exercised my right to remain silent…
Chris Jones, Geoff has a point. If you want to trust that petition after Geoff’s sampling of it, you should really check it out yourself. It isn’t Geoff’s job.
Chris Jones – one further point – I followed the link you posted to patdollard.com.
Having read the selected issues raised there, I went to the report itself on the IAC’s website. Whilst they had recommendations for the IPCC to make changes in certain practices, their conclusion began “The Committee concludes that the IPCC assessment process has been successful overall and has served society well.”
To me, that doesn’t sound like they are about to move onto blowing the IPCC’s methodology apart. Sounds more like someone cherry-picked the bits he wanted to.
Ah, yes. The Vincent Black Shadow. When HST was compiling Hell’s Angels he showed up at a meeting with the MC Club and was derided for arriving aboard a BSA 650. They had little respect for what they called ‘Limey’ bikes, and he was crestfallen. My choice in the late 60’s was Triumph Bonneville. What a bike !
Clark; Do you use an anonymizer?
Mark Golding,
The dollar scam is an old favourite to explain away the underlying reasons for empire of aggression, trouble is, it is only part of the truth. The bigger picture is the fundamental flaws in the US promoted and endorsed accounting systems that have brought about a bankrupt empire to further deplete the world resources, through its chicanery.
Are you for simplifying the problem, hence the promotion of the dollar scam? Or are you for exploring further and exposing the flaws in the systems?
Finally, there is this almost inane belief that US will stop after the next war, and so war every time a war has ended US has come out with a new target for the next war, when will people understand what Gore Vidal termed as perpetual war for perpetual peace, not as sound bite, but he reflected the nasty reality underlying the US foreign policy?
US will be going to fight Russians and Chinese and then any other nation that sports more than a Swiss army knife, world war three is indeed the world war that will not stop until every country has been destroy.
@ technicolour 16 Sep, 2012 – 12:48 pm
Bunny boiling! It’s the new black 🙂
mfi
PS: Sorry Craig like a far better known Irishman I can resist everything except temptation.
mfi
Ben, no, I haven’t tried that yet. I do block a most JavaScript and cookies. So, looking at Statcounter for this site, you wouldn’t be able to say “looks like he’s using Safari 5.1 on MacOSX at 1440×900 resolution”, for instance.
I’m still struggling to acquire my real hacking skills. I thought I might dedicate a junk computer to running a TOR node, but that’s another thing I’m yet to get around to.
Here’s a link you might like to check up on occasionally. RMS seems to be one of the good ones. You can e-mail him articles, and if he thinks they’re worthy, he posts a link:
http://www.stallman.org/archives/polnotes.html
http://www.stallman.org/
Are you suggesting TOR might not be a good thing? That’s what I was going to suggest. Seems to work, albeit more slowly, for me.
Thanks for the link. I always ass-umed it was a pejorative. (hacker)
Oh, and thanks for the Stallman link. It’s a treasure.
You like the Bonnie? I tried one of those, I thought I was riding a sit-on lawnmower. ‘Til I opened it up, of course. Sturdy. Ever tried a Norton Commando? Most exciting bike I ever rode. It complained every second that it wasn’t accelerating, but twist that grip and it just loved to please.
I had a Guzzi for years. It’s favourite thing was climbing steep, narrow roads with hairpin bends. Psychic steering, it seemed to know which bit of road to head for. Lovely brakes. When I broke a finger on my left hand (showing off) I moved the clutch lever onto the right-hand bar, and toured from York to Liverpool to Bristol to London and back to York. Integral braking, so the right foot sufficed.
Hackers built the Internet. Free Software is about freedom, not price. Think free speech rather than free beer. Nothing wrong with free beer, of course, but the freedom to drink it, and to tell your friends about it, matters a whole lot more.
The corporate media trash the Hacker ethic, of course; it’s opposed to everything they stand for. The Hackers came from the MIT Artificial intelligence lab. Most of the Internet runs on Free software. This site is hosted on the Apache web server, of course.
Whoever controls the code, controls the computer. When Windows puts up that little icon “My Computer”, that is (or rather was) Bill Gates’ little message to the user, taking the piss. You doubt? When you shut down Windoze on a machine without the software switch-off, the message says “It is now safe to turn your computer off”!
Clark – Indeed i have – my google search came up with a 4/5 result. In the interest of fairness maybe you should also ask others to check who all the people on international committees pushing the man made global warming agenda are, and if all their findings are based on independent empirical evidence. Lets shine a light on every single facet as Geoff wisely suggests.
Geoff – glad you had a look at that site as well. Another very interesting quote from the same chapter as you’ve quoted is:
“The Committee found that some existing IPCC review procedures are not always followed and that others are weak. In particular, Review Editors do not fully use their authority to ensure that review comments receive appropriate consideration by Lead Authors and that controversial issues are reflected adequately in the report”
http://reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net/report.html
In an earlier pre publication version released online before the watered down version was published the IAC reported that IPCC lead authors failed to give:
“due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22).
It goes on to report that the IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents”
As the author Joseph L. Bast puts it “In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed”
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/07/ipcc_admits_its_past_reports_were_junk.html
I was more of a ‘straightaway’ biker. It cornered better than the Trident I test drove, and i was sold on the Bonneville’s low-end acceleration .
As to the Vincent…..
“”Whats that?”
“A fantastic bike,” I said. “The new model is something like two thousand cubic inches, developing two hundred brake-horsepower at four thousand revolutions per minute on a magnesium frame with two styrofoam seats and a total curb weight of exactly two hundred pounds.”
“That sounds about right for this gig,” he said.
“It is,” I assured him. “The fucker’s not much for turning, but it’s pure hell on the straightaway. It’ll outrun the F-111 until takeoff.”
“Takeoff?” he said. “Can we handle that much torque?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll call New York for some cash.”
——————————–
[At the entry desk for the Mint 400]
“What’s the entry fee?” I asked the desk-man.
“Two fifty,” he said.
“What if I told you I had a Vincent Black Shadow?”
He stared up at me, saying nothing, not friendly. I noticed he was wearing a .38 revolver on his belt. “Forget it,” I said. “My driver’s sick anyway.”
His eyes narrowed. “Your driver ain’t the only one sick around here, buddy.”
“He has a bone in his throat,” I said.
This is what Stallman wrote that made software freedom possible:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html
Electric bikes running on nimhs and supercaps and tiny little engines and pedals, for extended range and pinching the buttocks. More Zoom less Boom.
Clark: Very nice! Although personally (this may be considered unadventurous) I think having a very modern bike is a different experience altogether. Performance is one of the great joys of motorcycling, and having something probably 100 times more reliable than 1960’s technology, will allow you to push it a lot more. Brakes you know will really work, all that random twitchiness engineered out of it, not to mention incredible performance and reliability from the engine.
Mind you, I did pick up an old Yamaha powervalve in pretty good nick recently, with a view to doing it up over the Winter. It rattles and rasps, and the engine has a nasty tendency to blow up instead of delivering it’s customary (rather surprising) kick. But it’s a hoot to ride all the same.
“TOR […] Seems to work, albeit more slowly, for me.”
Yeah, that’s why more of us should set up nodes. TOR was started by the US Navy. It’s Free software, ie. all the source code has to be published, so it shouldn’t be possible to hide anything nasty in the code. Having said that, I think there’s some literature on Cryptome site that suggests that there might be some vulnerabilities.
Whatever, TOR is the best we have, so far as I know. But you need to anonymise your browser, and turn off JavaScript, or your own machine will give you away. Really, you need a fully Free system at your end, and you need to know how to act anonymously.
http://cryptome.org/
Clark; TOR tells me ‘your IP ‘appears’ to be…..XXXXXXXXXXXX. That’s not sufficient?