Major climate denial group says global warming is a JEWISH conspiracy

The Australian-based Galileo Movement is one of the world's biggest climate change denier groups , with a list of scientific advisors that reads like an international Who's Who of the world's best known climate deniers.

Galileo's  managing director Malcolm Roberts recently told Ben Cubby of Australia's leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald , that climate change science has been captured by "some of the major banking families of the world" who form a "tight-knit cabal".

Dog Whistling to call all the old school Holocaust deniers to join the new climate denier movement

In Australia they call terms like that "dog whistle words" because you have to have the mind of a paranoid and the ears of a dog to sense their real meaning.

But I think most of the world already knows these particularly shopworn dog whistle words already.

We haven't watched a lifetime of war movies set in Nazi Germany for nothing.

This was Nazi code too - and also code words for many of their anti-semetic fellow travellers all over the world.

The Zion Protocols - a fake book - supposedly laid it all out : a Jewish banker plot to take over the world.

We all wondered when the professional deniers of climate change would smear this red herring all over the trail : now we know .....

Beltway higher food price DENIERS face angry housewives : Tumbrils to follow

Can you see global warming and global climate change with your own naked eyeballs ?

Most of us can't.

 Oh yes, we can sometimes see with our own eyes some short term extreme weather events in our own local community.

The databases don't lie : its global warming

But ultimately we rely upon the public databases of thousands of observers all over the world and going back 50 years or longer which clearly show the overall global trend, as the reason we believe in global warming.

However when the global impact of extreme weather events all over the world (droughts AND floods) affect the food prices at our local supermarket, we can definitely see and experience global warming as manifest in rising food prices.

My advice to the libertarian think tank bureaucrats - every last one a man ( its the law) :

 Continue to deny climate change at your peril to your necks.

(Cue: roll 'em tumbrils !)

Ignoring rising food prices kills more males than drinking or driving : angry housewife alert !

I was door-to-door campaigning in the UK (Wandsworth) in the early Spring of 1970.

I heard lots and lots and lots of housewives, all strong Labor supporters, moaning about rising food prices.

 But I totally failed to read the signals correctly.

I was a male - and I wasn't alone in my failure.

A few months later, in June , those same Labor housewives rebelled - failed to vote or voted Tory.

 Wilson's 100% certain re-election prospects were instantly deader than dead.

If only he had listened to his wife, instead of  the think tankers of his day......

new HORROR : Rip Van Winkle awakes and PASSES 2012 high school science exam with flying colours

Rip Van Winkle awakes from long sleep and wins big science scholarship to famous university

There is absolutely nothing in most 21st century high school physical science courses that the average smart lad or gal from the Victorian Era couldn't pass with flying colours.

And that curriculum is killing our planet.

One hundred and twenty five years of science - all the new science discoveries since the 1890s - the science we need to save this planet - has been deliberately ignored in the world of popular education.

 And need I add that most of the science done in the millions of years of human existence has been done very very recently, ie in those last 125 years ?

Unbelievably but true that most of humanity's body of science is not taught - by deliberate design - to most high school and even most university students.

Instead they learn the science of George Babbitt and the science known by the man who knew Coolidge, the science of mid-west Lions and Rotary Clubs, the science of small town boosters in loud checkered suits : the science of the Holy Anglo Saxon Trinity of Newton , Dalton and Darwin.

It is the self confident, arrogant,  science of Babbittry and it is killing this planet ; the science that fuels the certitudes and hubris of the climate deniers and of the vast majority of ordinary people wavering in the middle of that debate.

I - jokingly - argue sometimes we need to do an Admiral Byng every now and then : pick one or two high school science teachers, high school principals and school board curriculum directors at random and put them before a firing squad " pour encourager les autres".

It basically boils down to this ; how do you set and mark an exam question on determining the position and speed of a quantum particle ?

Public - compulsory - Education was birthed in the high Victorian Era and was deliberately designed to convince the doubting working class that Reality was an easily controlled and manipulative object for the greater profit of Man.

Education deliberately designed ideologically, from the ground up, to teach certitudes, not "Indeterminacy".

But un-certitude-ism is the real grain of reality - never more so than in the area of weather and climate.

The best that our best scientists can currently say is that  Airliner Earth has a 60% chance of crashing and burning fatally , if we don't quickly reduce the carbon pollution we pour into the skies.

That is not 19th century science's 100% certainty certitudes of the  libertarian bureaucrat think tank deniers - but it is real science, the science of today.

More to the point, would you not avoid flying a airline company that said its planes crash and burn 60% of the time, every time they take off?

Indeterminacy as the fundamental core of reality needs to be taught not just to bright-eyed 15 year olds : we senior citizens need to learn it too and apply it to our lives.

If only for the sake of the future lives of those bright-eyed 15 year olds.....

grampa's SUNNY science vs today's GRIM realities

Grampa's science is still judged only one safe enough for kids

If you want to build the world's longest, straightest, airport runway all you need to succeed , on time and under budget, is still just GRAMPA's SCIENCE.

The science from back before the 1890s , the kind of science 21st century high school administrators still think is the only one safe enough to teach children.

Good old, solid, commonsensical, white protestant ANGLO SAXON science : the Holy Trinity of Newton, Dalton and Darwin.

Science when Science, by God ! , was like a religion, a faith.

A positive, outwardly-looking, optimist, can-do, religious fervour, type of science.

Science so intuitive and commonsensical you almost didn't need some fancy-assed professor to teach it , merely have a fellow from your own church, with a BSc and a great game of golf .

Someone who could confirm your childhood scientific insights for you.

None of that dour, new-fangled, complicated, so called "jew boy" science.

The science so tough that high school principals think it should only be used by adults : science rated PG-18.

That counter-intutitive science of relativity cum quantum physics, green chemistry and horizontal gene transfer oriented biology.

Yep, science like grampa's can still build great runways.

But - if you let it build your GPS for you --- by using good old newton's laws --- your airplane would crash and burn about 15 yards beyond the runway.

New science does many things much more accurately than the old science of 150 or more years back.

That is only natural : we don't much use horse and buggies to get people to emergency departments anymore : we use helicopters.

Today we face new - unparalleled - problems, a whole new reality and we must use the newest and the best science to help prevent the airliner Earth from crashing and burning 15 yards beyond the runway.

Grampa's science is simple enough for kids - yes , it truly is simple.

Libertarian bureaucrats in advocacy think tanks, the ones that are "skeptic"   big deniers of climate change, are along with high school principals, among the world's most strident believers in the comfortable old simple science from back before the 1890s and the "Great Schism in Science".

Bu, unfortunately, our problems today are complicated and like it or not, we need complicated science to help solve them.

Child-like problems (designing yet another routine runway) only require the sweet, gentle medicine intended for children.

But grown-up sized problems requires grown-up science, bitter-tasting as that might be .....

Profs who can, PEER-REVIEW ; those who can't , THINK TANK : revenge of the second raters !

If the climate denial scam succeeds, the "second rate" , not the Meek, will inherit the Earth --- or what will be left of it

Think of today's thousands of advocacy think tanks as a "pollution by-product", cast off by the rapid expansion of the world's universities in the 1970s.

By the 1980s we had a huge population of second raters with pass grade degrees who had been burned by the parents' firm belief that anyone  ---anyone--- with a university degree had a job for life, regardless of their individual talent and drive.

Which was true - in their parents' 1940s and 1950s.

But by 1980, the market was flooded and once more talent and drive weighted more than a mere diploma : businesses had been burned too often with MBAs with no eye for business, newspapers with BJs with no ear for a great lead sentence.

And to be frank, too many universities, in their rush to expand, had hired too many profs with no talent for real teaching, real research or - most importantly - no real ability to get along in what is a very collegiate atmosphere.

Second rate minds combined with prickly personalities --- truly the bane of every university department.

Everybody it seemed - society and the university -  would be better off if has-bin profs joined their pass grade BA grads at the new libertarian think tanks springing up like, well like redbrick universities had in the previous decades.

These think tanks had lots of money, but could only flourish if they could lure a certain type of had-been academic to them.

They were needed to give a fig leaf of credibility to what, by all other measures, was just another lobbyist-group-for-hire.

The libertarian philosophy is very very attractive to people with second rate minds, but without the matching insight to realize and accept that fact.

I have a second rate mind but I hope my life shows I have accepted and adjusted to that fact : no life in the peer-reviewed fast-lane for me.

The chief characteristic of the other type of second rater is that, against all evidence, they still think they are right and it is mere jealousy by all the world's academic elites that has kept their work outside the best journals.

Finally the think tanks provide an attractive alternative : a bureaucratic sinecure for life .

Because the hurly-burly of the real business world is all very nice to write about for most libertarians; but in practise, as unattractive to the second rate as the peer-review fast-lane was.

Libertarian bureaucrats, (avoid the ironic obvious, dear reader !)  managing budgets of a cool $ 100 million a year.

 "Research" institutions, albeit in fancy big skyscrapers next to the White House, that let them say whatever they want for as long as they want.

Without the need for painstakingly long pesky original research or for enduring the formality of passing through the peer review portal for work that is, after all , self-evidently first rate.

But let us play the Devil's Advocate and ask if these institutions are not the peer-review equivalent of diploma mills .

 Four decades of huge budgets ( by most research institution standards)in some cases ----- and yet never an article published in a journal covered by The Web of Science or similar indices of quality research.

That is why I believe that advocacy think tanks are a scam : gullible senile billionaires being bilked out of hundreds of millions to support 'research' that has no credibility outside the think tank echo chamber.

The billionaires could have better spent this money on commissioning tenured, peer-reviewed, professors with libertarian views to produce nuanced libertarian-oriented articles in peer-reviewed journals.

These articles would have been far less strident, admittedly, but in the end, in the long term, far more credible......

end CLIMATE DENIAL SCAM : bring back BERLIN WALL !

Let us not be unkind : libertarian bureaucrats NEED the "climate denial scam" to secure their pensions

We earthlings need, on the other hand, to reduce our carbon output NOW and in fact we also need urgently find ways to put much of what carbon we already have into green trees and out of our atmosphere.

So we need to end the Climate Denial Scam - NOW.

But we can't let the tankers starve and face it, as second-raters they're too inept to find real work.

Even fat, frackin'-lazy, libertarian bureaucrat lifers in think tanks in Canberra and Washington need to eat (at swanky expense-account restaurants) and drink (at fancy nightclubs).

So let's throw them a bone : convince our German allies to re-erect the Berlin Wall and install a communist government in Saxony.

That ought to be enough incentive for middle-aged libertarian bureaucrats ("the lifers") to find new ways to con and swindle senile billionaires (with too much paranoia and not enough brains) to fund a war against the RED TERROR.

I am sure the Germans will help out, when they realize that the alternative is thousands of strident advocacy think tanks braying at climate change until the Earth crashes and burns.

Either that, or until the money for libertarian bureaucrat pay cheques runs out.

Failing this re-inventing "new reds under every beds" scheme , we could move to PLAN B : the libertarian battle to save salt , sugar , fat and "fast food" billionaires from the medical doctors.

Think of all the food billionaires worried to the point of hysteria about the threats to their profits and their waistlines.

 Surely the libertarian bureaucrats are capable of dreaming up new variants on Stalin's "Doctors' Plot",  to make lots of money from.

Just leave the rest of the world alone, go play in your profitable sandbox, and let us get on with healing all the harm your former marks , clients, have already done....

Erroneous common sense vs nonsensical Reality : Sciences, solid vs quantum

quantum-modernity

Modernists such as think tank climate deniers pride themselves on their side's "solid science" , their "common sense" science developed from that reliably Anglo Saxon trio of Newton, Dalton & Darwin .

They dismiss the other side's (quantum-based) science as "nonsensical".

On both counts they are correct but unfortunately, also in error.

(Rather like a quantum particle which can be shown by experiment to be in two places at once and also both a particle and a wave.)

Nineteen Century science - the only sort of science that 21st century university undergraduates and high school seniors are ever taught, is indeed solid and commonsensical.

Unfortunately, starting in the 1890s it was also shown to be fundamentally wrong (more accurately : wrong at fundamental scales) and only apparently semi-accurate over a limited (but very common) scale of activities.

Up until about 1947, nothing we had ever built in the Age of Modernity (except perhaps natural penicillin antibiotics) reflected the new quantum sciences of physics,chemistry and biology.

Not even the A-Bomb.

But starting with transistors and other semi conductors, almost everything truly major invented since then has been only possible by understanding and accepting quantum science's take on reality.

We can still safely build huge bridges and dams using only old Newton's rules, but I won't want to land a plane using a GPS system built by Newtonian Science : crash ,boom, dead !

What we take to be solid actually isn't fundamentally solid - not from those little hard elastic balls we thought were atoms, right down to the smallest possible sub atomic building block, sorry random vacuum energy flux.

And a great deal of quantum science is indeed non-intutitive and nonsensical but the measurements do not lie ; to parts per million they are real, they are reality.

Our sense impressions are at fault : not Reality.

By contrast much of Newton's & Maxwell's most fundamental laws fail embarrassingly at crucial points.

Nineteenth century science convinced engineers, at least, that feathers fell as fast as lead ball (in a vacuum) and that the sun's gravity "force" affected the earth via "spooky action at a distance" : neither ideas seem on the surface to be commonsensical.

But they were (and are) wildly popular notions among modernists and deniers despite all that.

Why ?

I would argue this is because Nineteenth Century Science promised us that while our macro (Man-sized) world of volcano and weather sized objects and events seemed complex, dynamic and uncertain, it reassured us that underneath - at the most fundamental level - Reality was actually solid, simple, certain, regular.

 Fundamentally Reality was knowable, controllable and manipulatable by Man.

A libertarian capitalist or socialist's dream : in Isaiah Berlin's formulation : Liberty for Man and Slavery for Atoms.

What quantum science revealed was exactly the reverse: a man sized rock was solid - particularly if your car hit it - but neither its fundamental atoms or their tinier components were solid - really just flickering bits of energy : altogether the wrong sort of eternally shifting sand to set the foundations of an ideology of certitudes upon.

Quantum science and Solid science of modernity / libertarianism / climate denial are fundamentally opposed - only one can be true.

No science experiment - even at the high school level - shows that solid science beats quantum science ; always solid science is a subset of quantum science, a useful subset that sometimes works - and then embarrassingly - sometimes does not.

But quantum science's revealing of the reality at its most fundamental has split over into post-modernity ; in fact helped create it and sustain it.

Post-modernity is quantum-modernity ......

Russian oil barons: Commie Red on the outside, Republican Red on the inside

The Red-Red Terror

Russian oil barons, secretly denying climate change because it threatens their profits are only Commie Red on the outside --- inside they are as Republican Red as any mid-western state GOP lifer.

Ironic isn't it that those former supposed enemies-to-the-death, the American libertarian think tank bureaucrats and the Communist oil barons of Russia, are actually more united than anyone else in world in denying the reality of climate change ?

"Reds always stick together", my mom said whenever she sorted clothes for the wash - how right you are Mom !

As a teenager in the late 1940s, Mom had had friends among America's super rich auto barons in Detroit's suburbs AND spent a terrible six months in Budapest at the height of that country's Stalinist state of terror : so she knew red staters of both varieties.

She never liked either of them and always lived by the principle that 'there are no pockets on a shroud' .....

climate denial scam : COMMUNIST oil barons secretly funding LIBERTARIAN think tank bureaucrats ?

Russia economy has by far the most to lose if world rejects CLIMATE DENIAL ...

Because fatcat think tank bureaucrats only want others, never themselves, to display  "transparency in governance" , we will never know the true originators of all the money laundered into the libertarian think tanks that most stridently deny climate change.

But whether via tax-free Cayman Islands or secret Swiss bank accounts, money can weave a long, hidden, trail between the first giver and the last spender.

But no economy in the world would be as heavily hit - with dire, perhaps fatal, consequences for its rulers - than Russia if the world reduces hydrocarbon use.

It is the top producer of oil and top exporter, eighth in oil reserves.  Russia is second  in coal reserves. First in natural gas reserves and top gas exporter. 

And it wastes energy like nobody's business -third biggest energy user in the world.

Russia fails to export much services and in fact fails to export much goods, nothing at all equal to its export of these raw materials.

Russians have no plan B - unlike for example in countries like Canada or America who can up non-raw-material exports, by currency devaluation, if hydrocarbon sales fell.

In my opinion, the battle over climate change will be won or lost in just four countries : The Gang of Four Anglo Saxons : America, Australia, Canada and Britain, in that order of importance.

Russia needs to have its own pony in this race,  but can't publicly tip its hand since the most strident climate deniers are also the most strident Russia haters.

But no organization - not even the KGB , is half as secretive as the many strident advocacy libertarian think tanks that led the climate denial scam ----- at great profit to themselves.

I can imagine the Russian communist oil barons' grim satisfaction thinking that it is their petro-roubles that are funding their erstwhile arch-enemies, the American libertarians, in their mutual battle to deny climate change .

As my fellow Hungarian, Alanis , likes to sing : " isn't it ironic...."

denier think tank BUREAUCRATS & billionaires: who is the con artist and who 'the mark' ?

billionaires bribing think tank bureaucrats or tanker bureaucrats scamming billionaires ?

Most denier fighters hint (libel alert) that it is billionaires that have led the battle over climate denial .

Via their family foundations or the big corporations they control, these rich guys have supposedly discreetly 'bribed' libertarian advocacy think tank bureaucrats to work up credible denial efforts.

All to combat current attacks by government and environmentalists on the products that have made these billionaires wealthy.

Denier-fighters hint at this process by (A) noting that this think tank did a one time major denial effort on tobacco in 2003. And (B) one or two paragraphs later, when they drily note the only year this think tank got money from Big Tobacco was...... 2003.

You are led to - sorry left to - draw the conclusion that Big Tobacco was the instigator in this process .

And that supposedly the process works in the exact same way, in the current case of climate denial and the hydrocarbon producing or using industries.

But how true is this narrative ?

Students of how lobbyists work or how election fund-raising works are not so naive.

When the senior majority or minority member on an American House committee faces a fierce, expensive, primary or re-election fight, they often do "The Abramoff Manoeuvre" .

The politician suddenly lets (or encourage others to let) dozens of intrusive new regulations become attached to a bill affecting, let's say the potato farmers in Idaho.

Working closely - and profitably - with a lobbyist for the potato farmers of that state, he and the lobbyist convince enough gullible farmers that these regulatory threats are real, real enough to spend some very heavy money to squash them before they get to the formal vote.

The lobbyists tells the farmers , 2000 long kms away from the Beltway, that "old Joe is right dead set on seeing these regulations pass - but you may have heard he is in a bad battle to win his primary, back in New Jersey."

" I just bet X dollars for his campaign might move him our way - and he is the lead minority congressman on this issue you know..."

Old Joe gets his money, the regulations disappear and the potato lobbyist gets his percent of the money flowing from Idaho to New Jersey.

Its a win:win scam !!

Think tank bureaucrats of the cold war advocacy variety are pros at this sort of game: ever seeing new reds under new beds to scare gullible paranoid billionaires ---- or today, ever seeing new greens under new protest banners.

Let me hint , just as the other denier fighters have.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall slash Commie scam was over - so over.

Now most cold war advocacy think tank bureaucrats had to unexpectedly find new money cows to feed their salaries, expense accounts (don't get me started !) and fat pensions.

Suddenly climate change, a science news story about thirty years old by that point, became an overnight global threat to every free market company .. that had lots of money.

Ending the cold war was supposed to provide a peace bonus to many different people ---- firms might take the money that they had wasted for 40 years donating to cold war think tank bureaucrats and put it into something truly useful for them and society ------ like R & D.

But no --- a new, worser , terror lay on the horizon : the Green Terror.

"I'm a telling ya : way worse than the Red Terror : cause at least the commies also had their smoke polluting power plants, just like us free marketeers, but these greenies are truly scary - they got horns !"

"Thanky  , thanky  ,thanky  : you just keep 'em silver dollars coming in, and God Bless your continuing Prayers for our Holy Crusade."

Fundamentalist tele-evangelicals, politicians seeking re-election, think tank bureaucrats or 'discreet' lobbyists : they all have the same quasi-religious spiel .

That's why I say we are looking at gullible billionaires and cynical think tank bureaucrats milking them for all they are worth --- NOT the other way around.....

if BERLIN WALL still existed, would DENIER INDUSTRY exist ?

climate denial is a SCAM by unscrupulous think tank BUREAUCRATS to con money from naive Corporate executives

When first the Berlin Wall and then the Kremlin went tumbling down, the communist bureaucrats inside were not half as terrified as were their exact bureaucratic counterparts in the free world's thousands of COLD WAR think tanks.

FACT : 97% (note the neat symmetry with you know what) of the world's strident advocacy libertarian think tanks were created between 1945 and 1992 , IE during the Cold War.

They got their money from gullible government politicians, paranoid billionaires and big corporations executives by always seeing ever new reds under ever new beds.

Students of lobbying might recognize this as a variant on the classic Jack Abramoff  move of deliberately ratcheting up your own client's fears, to scam more out of them.

When unexpectedly (well stoking anti-communism had seem a secure job-for-life) the red terror self-imploded, these well-paid bureaucrats had to cast about for a new scam.

It is not a coincidence that the very same year that the Berlin Wall fell, that a new terror threat arose to afflict those who are conveniently both easily scared and very wealthy : The Green Terror and Climate Change.

Even if global climate change goes away as a profit centre for evil tankers inside the Beltway, because voters of all parties say it is real , ever new terrors will be dreamed up to scare the rich and gullible.

Perhaps strong medical evidence that fat, salt and sugar now kill far more than bacteria and viruses do today in the rich countries will become something new to deny : like the 1950s "commie fluoride in our water" panic.

Rest assured that wherever thousands of fat lazy bureaucrats gather in an attempt to avoid a real job, think tanks and scams of denial will flourish....

Tankin' Globalcide : how to get a lifelong sinecure lying about the climate

In this recession the only industry growing new jobs are the lying, denying think tanks ... 

                  10 rules for success :

1. Do NOT take a single physical science course in university.

2. Get a BA (bare pass grade) in economics or political science and call education a day - it makes your head hurt.

3. Get ye inside the Beltway (Washington) , Whitehall (London) , the Triangle (Canberra) or up on the Hill (Ottawa).

4. Become an employee of a big strident advocacy think tank (#1 Libertarian grade) .

5. After taking 100 mg of Atarax , resign yourself  to faithfully listen to Glen Beck or Andrew Boltz or Lawrence Solomon or Viscount Ridley,  for a few months.

6. Self-declare yourself an expert on Climate Science.

7. Lie, lie, lie.

8. By the time you get your pension, watch the world's populations begin to :

die, die, die.

9. Go to church whenever it will help you at work and pretend to profess a belief in Heaven and Hell.

10. Because Hell , brother and sister, is definitely, where you are going to end up !

denier THINK TANKS face specter of "The Dirty Teens" & the neo Dust Bowl

Deniers face a drought of new lies to combat the dry truth

Libertarian think tanks have cancelled all leave and put all hands on deck to fight off the worse specter the DENIER INDUSTRY  ("Doubt is Good - good for our paycheques anyway") has yet had to face.

The Denier heartland, now as it was from September 1939 to December 1941, is the American Mid-West.

And the Mid-West is on fire, facing the biggest, deepest drought since "The Dirty Thirties" and the Dust Bowl.

Denier supporters are starting to wonder, sotto voce, whether there really is something to this Global Warming that all their secular church fathers warned them against.

Inside the Beltway, inside Whitehall, inside the Triangle, even way up on the Hill, the tankers are trying to spin doctor their oleaginous way out of this climatic bind.

I can imagine that Bell's long distance revenue plunge will reverse itself this quarter as Canberra, Washington, London and Ottawa denier spinners try to come up with common alibis when the voters come around.

Big Oil's profits soar with the temperature, because AC use way up in sweltering drought - let them fund the new denier lies

 Big Oil is making bigger than expected profits as more petro  is used to create the Air Conditioning cool (and more CO2) to beat this "not-global-warming"-warming -trend.

 Maybe they can cough up a few readies to combat this summer of
of 2012 threat to the Denier "endless summer sinecure" for so many second rate scientists, academics and journalist hacks....

dear think tanks : I will DENY Higgs Particle for cash - no marked bills please ....

Political science BAs are like old school nuclear physicists , we think we can talk about everything like an expert

Why not ?

If Marc Morano is qualified to be an expert on climate change, than so am I on the Higgs particle.

Like Marc, I have a BA in political science, hold strong opinions and am at times very partisan.

On the other side, it too is a similar story : teams made up of thousands of scientists at universities and institutions all over the world have laboured for decades before coming up with a a cautious scientific consensus.

(A) Humans are causing the atmosphere to heat up  (B) we have located evidence that the predicted Higgs particle exists, to Sigma 5 level of probability.

So on one side, high level tenure & repeated high level peer-review has qualified about one earthling in a million to truly be regarded as experts on a technical scientific matter.

These 7,000 experts have divided themselves into two big world-wide groups to look for the Higgs by two totally different methods and each big group has now separately decided, by general consensus, that the Higgs does exist.

One the other side, amateurs in the academic world's second oldest profession : not pros but game - on the game in fact.

Now all we need is a pimp and a john.

Strident advocacy think tanks die without constant infusions of hot cash --- they'll know who has some readies available.

Maybe Big Asbestos - they under the gun lately - seems at least 100,000 people die annually thanks to this killer mineral.

But how would proof of the existence of the Higgs particle damage the libertarian-capitalist world view enough to waste money refuting it ?

SOLID science is threatened, like never before, by Higgs

Well, I guess I would begin - strictly as a Devil's Advocate - to argue that what all of the various denier efforts have really been fighting is the notion that erroneous common sense (solid) science has been losing a century long battle with nonsensical but accurate quantum science.

The Higgs particle is the missing keystone to the Standard Model of how ultimate fundamental reality actually works.

How it works is in a manner totally in conflict with the 19th century commonsense positivist science that all deniers and corporate CEOs expouse.

Basically what we take to be a solid reality, based on a solid science, turns out to be neither.

Solidity is a vivid illusion - but illusion nevertheless.

But who can blame the deniers & CEOs - it is what they were taught and what 21st high school teachers still teach kids, (in part, because it is easy to teach and easy to write exams for) .

Solid - Newtonian - science is a BLACK BOX - it gets more less accurate results at a certain limited but common scale of events, but it is not a true explanation of the world.

But it is this old fashioned newtonian and daltonian and darwinian science that we spoon-fed high school and yes university kids with.

Rather than teach their trusting charges science that is difficult and unsettling but also happens to be true : quantum physics, quantum chemistry and yes, quantum biology.

By no coincidence, High School teachers teach this crap because because politicians in school boards and departments of education force them to.

Politicians and their corporate handlers sense that if quantum science was taught to all of the population, in a lay manner, it would unsettle the current human belief that we are the only smart and rational beings in a stupid but stable and simple world.

This belief is what lies behind libertarian skygod-ism and the denial of human climate pollution.

Attack Higgs, you attack the quantum theory and thus you attack the quantum (earthling) way of looking at the world.

So gentlemen, when do I get my money ......

Blogger LUX EX UMBRA embarrasses CSE and mainstream media : a lesson for denier-fighters

Bill points 'the way ahead' for denier-fighters

Rarely does Reality confirm Theory as quickly as it did for me between yesterday evening and this morning !

This morning Bill Robinson (and his blog LUX EX UMBRA) is the toast of the Canadian blog-o-sphere and he is being quoted in all of the Canadian media thanks to Canadian Press's Jim Bronskill.

But, he did not do it by fighting another blogger on the other side of Bill's position of greater transparency in governance.

Instead Bill exposing a big change in transparency at Canada's most secretive spy agency CSE, which is part of a shadowy world wide network of establishments that spy on all the rest of us.

If Bill had chosen to focus on exposing errors in transparency-shy fellow bloggers, the media would have dismissed the posts of both sides in this slagging war as "juvenilia" .

But by focusing on someone much bigger than himself (the CSE) and uncovering something other bigger organizations (ie the mainstream media) had missed, he got two david vs GOLIATH stories in one.

let's agree not to give any more oxygen to Watt's up the ass et al

So, fellow denier-fighters, please re-read last night's post in SVE (Denier blogs ; read 'em but don't write about 'em) in light of Bill's success.

And ponder whether we should be ignoring Watts up the ass and focusing on CATO's denying think tankers libertarians instead.....

denier BLOGS ; read 'em, but don't write about 'em : focus on THINK TANK deniers

We are handing deniers a winning narrative - how can we be so dense ?

I love to read the blogs of the denier-fighters in the morning, none more so than Mike at Watching the Deniers, a denier-fighter from down under in Van Denier's Land  .

He's an ordinary guy like me, with a day job and all, trying to find out the time to peck out his assaults on the deniers and offer his support for the climate believers.

And I try and find time occasionally, very occasionally, to read the blogs of the deniers.

But I don't ever - EVER - write about the denier bloggers.

He does - I don't.  Mike & Mike : yes, we disagree.

But not on climate change, but rather on the tactics we bloggers might use if we really want the world to take some action on global warming as soon as possible.

I save my small poisoned penmanship to poke at the big guns of denial : those key hired hands of denial , aka the libertarian advocacy think tanks.

Here is why.

We already have the ordinary public (ie the unsophisticated), all be it weakly, on our side.

In Nova Scotia, even the most rural illiterate have heard about global warming and are always ready to half-seriously blame any heat or storm event upon it.

We have public science on our side - the peer-reviewable active climate scientists are 97% (or better) for us.

(True, weathermen-cum-climatologists are frequently against these newly visible basic research type of climate scientists, because until recently even an ugly guy could always get laid in a small town, if a woman recognized him from his TV weatherman job : he was a Star !

Sheer envy, over this transfer of status to new climate experts, lies behind 99% of the bile against climate change among the significant percentage of old fashioned weathermen who claim to disbelieve climate change.)

But this aside, we have public science as well as voters on our side.

We have TV on our side - here I disagree profoundly with Jim
Hoggan of DeSmogBlog. In his chapter , Manipulated Media in his great book Climate Cover-Up, Jim says the shift from a reading culture to an visual and oral culture has hurt us denier fighters.

I, by contrast, think that the relatively small percentage in the past who actually enjoyed reading are still around, still reading, still enjoying it.

The others prefer TV, yes, but we must recognize that TV in  2012 is not the TV of 1952.

The growth in cheap, light video camera equipment, satellite transmission, the internet's YouTube, the growth of national TV news networks in every third world nation - all this means any and every storm in the world is likely to flash before our eyes and ears rather than be something only an astute reader of the New York Times used to read on page 53 , paragraph 12.

We do have more and more powerful storms than we did 60 years ago - but we can only demonstrate this truthfully in some long complex journal article that only scientists in that area could understand and believe.

Lucky for our side, we don't have to.

Because those same denier-oriented TV networks we love to hate, in an increasingly competitive news market, hype any and every bit of dramatic news video ---- and storm disasters top that list.

So - ironically - the Murdochs of this world are converting voters into believers on their companies' TV news, regardless of how many unread OP ED columns in their newspapers claim its all baloney !

What we don't have on our side is popular science (and about half of the educated classes: the rich half.)

Only one group among the many people that makes up the denier
classes can provide credibility in that area of popular science for deniers.

Big corporations and the super rich have no credibility, nor do industry lobby groups, nor do denier politicians. Not on science, for sure.

Frankly, nor do denier bloggers.

Peer-reviewed scientists who blog are respected - as peer-reviewed scientists, academic historians who blog are respected - as academic historians, professional journalists who blog are respected - as professional journalists.

Blogging is something we all feel we can do and about half of us have seemed to have tried it at least once : it gets no respect.

Denier bloggers get no respect when they blog, either, even if they were once well known scientists before they went off the rails.

It is only when big money hand-delivers them a lot of cherry-picked snippets of facts and a bundle of money and asks them to write a book around those snippets and assuring them it will get a real publisher, a round-the-world book tour, guest speaker talks-at-seminars and interviews with the biggest media, do they become respected --- as "authors".

When we ordinary (non-expert) people with day jobs and no hidden funder become denier-fighter bloggers and then proceed to engage only other bloggers (who happen to be deniers), outsiders see us both as just typical hot-air-driven loudmouths.

We are momentarily equal to the much richer/full-time deniers - yes.

Yes, momentarily equals in outsiders' eyes - equal loudmouths: denier bloggers and their blogger opponents.

But our bun fight with the denier bloggers is irrelevant to our main aim.

 That main aim is taking down the only credible group the deniers have in the real war, which is always over popular science.

 (Popular Science I define as the whole world wrestling over the meaning of published science's results: in this case, the meaning of their results regarding global warming.)

That group is the libertarian advocacy think tanks.

Only they stand at the nexus between (A) the super rich foundations together with the big corporations and their industry lobby groups and (B) the individual bent scientists who happen to blog, but who are mainly useful when trotted out at think tank seminars and conferences - not as hand-to-hand bloggers fighting us out in the blogosphere.

We bloggers-cum-denier-fighters need new tactics.

We need to highlight, not hide, how unfunded we are, how we work elsewhere unrelated to climate change and only blog in our spare hours.

In our spare bedroom. That we are not experts. That we don't live inside the Beltway or inside the Triangle- that we are nobodies from nowhere.

And that we are davids, in a tremendously unequal fight with well funded, well connected, huge think tanks located in Snottyville and just filled with snotty Yale and Harvard grads.

But - but - despite that, in our spare time and in our spare bedroom we checked the math on their latest glossy report damning climate change - and the math is wrong .

Wrong, wrong, wrong - there on page 17 !

Because while bloggers are dissed as bloggers, we are respected as people who can sometimes scoop the world media on facts and stories.

Now we have a narrative the mainstream media reporters can run with, over the bodies of the people who actually own their outlets:

Little david brings down rich snotty GOLIATH with a tiny slingshot filled with inconvenient facts.....

Denier, denier : heartland on fire : Romney's heartland burns while Greenland threatens to , well , become a GREEN land

This week it was announced that Greenland's icecape is melting like the bejesus.

That continent-sized island may soon be green in appearance, as well as in name.

The amount of water sitting on top of it , if it leaps into the water and melts will do two things very quickly : raise ocean water levels worldwide and leave a huge hunk of land that now absorbs sunlight rather than reflect it.

This land warming will couple to the atmosphere instantly and will greatly strengthen our weather's energy reserves --- our deadly weather bombs will move from the A-bomb to the H-bomb variety.

I may soon have to move inland and upcountry quicker than I had expected.

Sea levels don't need to rise much higher before where I live (coastal Nova Scotia) will only houses lobsters and clams, rather than earthlings and SkyGods.

I don't know what The SkyGods Of The Universe, perched in their eeries, high up in the glass and concrete towers of Wall Street and Threadneedle Street, are making of all this.

That is assuming that these latter-day Harry Limes even care what is happening to the "dots" (earthlings), way down at sea level aka ground zero.

I am sure that their astro-turfing think tankers don't care.

I gather most deniers  - at least in America and probably in Australia as well - don't live by the coast but in the high interior.

Republicans and Australia's Libertarian party both speak of the outback as their heartland for voters.

So today Libertarians and Republicans will continue to deny that the world is getting hotter, from among the hottest hellholes on earth - while watching their crops fry......

KUSI-TV to S FRED SINGER : do you think the climate changes, when moving from Earth to HELL ?

This is a question that KUSI-TV will probably never have the guts to ask.


Which is a real pity.

Because that is about the only climate change question that quasi independent/ think tanker /senior citizen S Fred Singer will ever be fully qualified to answer......

(And don't forget to cast your guess on the S Fred Singer deathwatch, below)

new POLL : 70% of Aussies dislike "The Nasty" abbott : Drought in USA hits deniers in the gonads

Romney-the-denier's election hopes wilt in republican mid-west drought

I bring you good news, fellow bloggers, albeit perversely good news.

New evidence is emerging (er, re-emerging) that since more CO2 inevitably comes with more heat, global warming beyond what we already have will not be good news for our main calorie-producing crops like corn and soybean.

Deniers read up, carefully : yep, global warming will NOT be good for the corn and soybean crops of the Republican-Libertarian-Denier heartland of the American Mid-West.

I bet  Mittster-the-denier is wilting along with potential ex-voters' crops .

Apparently all the denier think tankers are not baking on a vacation beach but are back in their air-conditioned beltway offices - sweating the bejesus.

Thomas Homer-Dixon in Canada's Globe & Mail ( you can tell there is a real crisis when even a denier rag like the godawful G&M is willing to give a climate change believer an Op-Ed spot ) says corn and soybean can't stand even short bouts of really high temperatures ---- temperatures that are just beyond the high temperatures they normally demand to flourish.

In denier-speak, that means their response to heat is not linear but dose-dependent.

Ironic what - deniers bitten by their own rhetoric !

The news from America has apparently hit even the shores of  VAN DENIER'S LAND itself.

Aussie voters know one or two things about The Nasty abbott - in particular that he is a big climate change denier.

A  new poll  in the Australian says that 70% of Aussies don't like
him.

I don't like him myself.

I mean I am a Catholic ,like our Tony, and I actually even like some of his social conservative views ( others I hate).

So the man does not want to directly kill the unborn -- he merely wants to promote the slow and indirect killing of all life on this Earth.

  I don't recall seeing that anywhere in my pre-Vatican II daily missal, while growing up RC....

why earthlings should leave Think Tanks to the libertarian SkyGods

Helping others murder our planet - with our own tax dollars !

For every one dollar in annual income that earthling oriented (aka green,steady state, perhaps a few of the left) think tanks have, the SkyGod libertarians have $1000.

There are about 10,000 think tanks world wide and most of the ones we could even begin to call earthling (and Earth) friendly are small in income, small in numbers, in uncertain health or already effectively moribund.

The vast number that are both very rich and very active in their strident advocacy are the libertarian denier tankers.

We earthlings only add our considerable credibility ( precious and scarce) to the alleged legitimacy of the thousands of denier tanks by supporting the idea of think tanks in general.

If instead, we steered totally clear of them - instead of trying to feebly compete within their world - we could then strongly denounce them and all of their works as that of the Devil.

This is because all advocacy think tanks are but a money laundering scheme.

Albeit the sort of money laundering Yale and Oxfords grads would get into : morally dubious but perfectly legal (who writes the laws after all ?) and highly profitable for all concerned.

Life was so much more straight forward in the 1940s.

Just before election day, the boss put a little piece of paper in your pay packet, telling you that if you voted for Party X on Tuesday, you could kiss your job good bye on Friday - and then he signed it.

He ran ads in the newspaper saying the same thing - and he signed it.

Flash forward to today.

Now the super rich 1% have their tax free family foundations donate to tax free charities called strident advocacy libertarian think tanks.

The think tank then pays an unknown denier with just enough degrees to be called "a scientist" or "an academic" to "author" a "book" and then do a "book tour" of the world denying climate change at think tank sponsored "seminars".

Since the super rich own or control all the big media, they ensure their employees "cover" these meetings like the dew, and then splash the contents on their front pages and TV screens for all of us to endure.

Just imagine how ineffective a denial would be that insists burning coal does not cause smoke pollution , if delivered by a coal mining heiress  in all of her newspaper chain ?

Even Stephen Harper might see through that gauze !

Now imagine if our obese heiress choose instead to launder her money through foundations to think tanks and tame publishing firms and tame newspapers.

So now it appears that a 'disinterested, objective' academic had delivered this 'balanced review' of the evidence for and against coal's atmospheric effects and rendered a reasonable verdict in favour of the innocent coal mines.

All are opinions but not all opinions are EQUAL

Look there is already a place for people who claim to be either (or both) academics and scientists : it is called inside peer-reviewed papers.

The best science and academic journals demand so much transparency on your data, funding and conflict of interest that 99.999999999999999% of advocacy think tank research would never make it past this first hurdle.

Next your toughest critics are asked to tear your actual data apart and if the editor doesn't feel you answered them effectively, you're dead.

Pass these two stages and the hardest by far still remains : "is what you are saying truly new and if so is it global enough in IMPACT to make other people outside your narrow field waste their time to read it ?"

Getting a paper into NATURE or SCIENCE or about 10 to 20 others is rather like how a Patent Office should work - but rarely does - patents then would only be issued for truly new and workable processes.

The advantage of a paper in NATURE for over-busy  journalists is obvious : it has been pre-vetted, you don't have to read it or think about it, merely act as a public steno and paraphrase its abstract to your readers.

Journalists who are over-busy and under-intellectualized dig themselves even deeper into the quicksand : they don't bother to check to see if the paper they are being pitched has seen a peer-review, they don't read the paper.

They read the author's CV , if it is more impressive than the journalist's, then they are regarded as an expert and even an academic and a scientist.

So an economist whose life work has been Iowa pork belly futures is allowed to spout off opinions about climate changes effects on the ocean currents of the  South Pacific.

I spout off opinions - all the time, I am a blogger - but I never claim to be an expert/scientist or an academic on the subject : just a blogger with an opinion.

And, by design, I have no CV full of  expert credentials .

Most journalists trying to assess the value of my opinion need both time and the ability to contrast it with the widely held scientific or academic consensus on the subject, before they could tell if it is worth them passing on to their readers.

My blog opinion then is in the same position as a big think tank's new policy paper : it is merely a bucket of spit until conventional peer review or a bunch of smart competitive journalists or perhaps the entire blog-o-sphere has assessed it thoroughly.

All this takes much time, thinking , researching, reflecting , re-reading and reflecting again.

It is a process, not an event ; it is ongoing and never stops.

It is all just opinions or hunches.

Sometime those hunches come in fancy dress : theories or hypotheses.

But all - from dashed-off blogger rant to cover article in NATURE - are just opinions.

But some opinions, like reports from NATURE or SCIENCE or LANCET or the IPPC have a much bigger and deeper consensus around them than others : thoroughly peer-reviewed articles from the biggest journals and the biggest international panels.

Think tank funders - the greedy libertarians - crave that sort of prestige and credibility.

But being lazy as well as greedy, libertarians want all of that  without going through all the rigour and dreaded transparency of peer-review.

Libertarianism ( and think tanks) is the natural home of the hard-to-get-along-with academics who tank in the world of collegiality.

the poet Longfellow had great advice

If we earthlings let them, they will fall back on the pseudo academic halo of the think tanks.

But we shouldn't let them ; we should abandon all of our side's feeble think tanks and denounce the entire concept of think tanks as intellectual money laundering.

To paraphrase the poet Longfellow:  if Gina loves Priscilla of the Desert, great - but she should tell Priscilla herself - not pay some john inside Canberra's The Triangle to do it for her.

Gina, go pimp your own opinions ......

Beltway, Whitehall, the Hill, the Triangle : home of the DENIER think tanks

Their air-brushed world of magical thinking

Every national capitol soon develops a widely use nickname for its tight little world of national politicians with their staffers and bureaucrats,  married up to lobbyists and think tankers and topped off by the capitol's political journalist elite.

In Washington they call it working "within" The Beltway, in London it is known as being "within" in the corridors of  Whitehall.

Lesser known, Ottawa has its political elite centred "on" The Hill and in Canberra the elite is found "within" The Triangle.

Now I realize that claiming that Nature is changing under humanity's influence is probably a moot point inside the Beltway,Whitehall,the Hill or The Triangle.

For in each of them , it might be more accurately said that Nature is long dead and replaced by a concrete jungle.

True these four relatively small areas are among the prettiest green areas in the entire world - a virtually artificial simulacra of Nature - the finest fake that lots of taxpayers' money can buy.

But here, the real human activity all takes place inside concrete and glass towers and inside that glassed-in world, few signs of a changing-for-the-worse Nature are visible.

Here is the true home of the world's biggest and most influential think tanks, the brains and the money behind global climate change DENIAL efforts.

By contrast, most believers in climate change are like me - and maybe you - living in smaller communities much closer to Nature and hence much more sensitive to its new reality.

My garden of joy is in a nearby rural seaside village, a place where I like to say I grew up in, though as always it is a bit more complicated than that.

In the 57 years that I have "lived" there, (well all right, off and on, annually) its summer weather in particular has permanently changed from reliably cold and foggy to very hot and very muggy.

I find it too hard to lift a shovel from June to September these days - its just too damned humid.

And I resent being told by some snotty-voiced ideologue in a Yale tie sitting in an air-conditioned inside The Beltway (or inside The Triangle) that my climate hasn't changed - it has, you bastard, it has.

So if you too are a nobody blogger from nowhere who sees the signs of climate change occurring right before your eyes - don't just despair about it - blog about it.

Let those guys in those big city glass and concrete towers that there is a real world out there in trouble - a real world outside The Beltway....

dear DONNA LAFRAMBOISE , if you are going to play 'little david' at least do it right

Dear Donna :

I feel that since you and I are in the same 'game' and because I am so much older than you, perhaps I might be permitted to offer you some fatherly advice.

If you are going to play at being little david to the great big bad Goliath (in this case, of the IPCC) at least try to do it right.

I too claim to be a solo blogger, albeit on the other side of the climate change debate.

But I have a real job, totally unconnected to my passion about climate change, that supports me and my passion modestly (my annual income is about $8,000) .

I do not accept any financial support, I do not copyright my climate change writings and I wouldn't cross promote my other money making ventures on my climate blog, even if I had any commercial ventures to promote.

My passion is entirely my own, not paid by others and not a loss leader cum CV/RESUME to promote my other money-making ventures.

I am a genuinely low income blogger from a genuine backwater , Nova Scotia, thousands of kilometres from the well-funded Libertarian-denier think tanks of Washington or London --- and so when I rail against them, I do so credibly.

But you, Donna : you are just astro-turf .......

Being LIONIZED sure beats having to WORK for a living doesn't it ?

Just think "tankers" and you understand the scam....

One minute you're an under-employed Canadian nobody, the next minute you are much feted denier-author, plucked from obscurity to burn lots and lots of greenhouse gases promoting your new book in far off Australia.

Some cynics might think it is because you have taken up a profitable (but definitely minority) opinion to espouse.

But they would be wrong , wrong , wrong.

It is in fact precisely because you are publicly regarded as a nobody, that you have become so lionized.

You have just been (profitably)  "astro-turfed" .

little david versus the big bad IPCC ???????

All the fossil media journalists will see (only because that is all their employer has told them to see)  is that you are a solo blogger and so they can pull out cliche #13   and pitch you as little david against great big bad Goliath : the IPCC.

No fossil-journalist will ask how 'little david' can afford the airfare and hotel bills to fly from Canada to all the big cities of Australia.

No fossil-journalist will look beyond their noses to see that this is really Libertarian Think Tank astro-turfing , 2012 style.

Denier-fighters - please ! - ignore the solo blogger - focus on the big city think tanks that fund the astro-turfing bloggers.

Don't 'intellectually kill the messenger' : go after the funders instead....

Why the fighters of Climate Denial are sometimes their own worst enemy

No politician sets themself up as Goliath and their opponent as David, but scientists *ALWAYS* do

If we are ever to defeat the evil forces of Climate Denial, we need to take a page out of their book and keep our Boffins "on tap, not on top".

Nice guys, but no political smarts.

I cringe every time I see another denier fighter start off with the claim that 97% of our smartest, best educated , best paid, best pensioned scientists at all the big universities back East know a lot more about climate change than some unknown with a BA from Hamburger U, operating out of Dubuque, in little old tennis shoes and a blog.

Oh yes, and doesn't he believe in Creationism and a Flat Earth as well ?

(All this is what football fans call The New Yorker Magazine Defense ---- a play that they say very rarely works.)

True it might knock 'em dead in the Faculty Lounge, but outside - in the real world - it is just setting yourself up for a political fall.

 There are always a lot more populist-minded plebs from the hinterlands than there are elitists from the Big Cities in the East.

I have friends and acquaintances who are mildly denier-istic and they always enjoy reading about an unknown blogger taking on those smart asses at the big universities.

True, none of these friends have graduate school level degrees, but then that is true of 97% of the world.

Solo denier bloggers..... with big corporate funding

I try and point out this "lone blogger" actually gets a lot of funding from big bad fossil fuel corporations but it cuts no ice.

The optics just aren't right in their mind's eye.

But when I say all this controversy is caused by the big lobbyists and big think tanks inside Washington's Beltway, they listen up.

Most people wouldn't vote for Christ Himself, if He came back to Earth and got an apartment "Inside the Beltway" .

So here's the deal : I set myself up as the nobody from nowhere blogging on the reality of climate change from my bedroom, while all my opponents are the big city Think Tanks, just stuffed with snotty guys and gals with snotty accents from Yale and Oxford.

So Jane,  please get it right : me david - you Goliath ....

Comments, denier-fighters ?

'Tankers' have the money , bloggers have the brains

Asymmetrical journalism : bloggers besting 'tankers'

A red broadband and three cords , located somewhere in a bedroom in the hinterland backwaters , may not seem equal to all the corporate firepower concentrated in the Think Tank phalanxes of  Washington, London, Canberra and Ottawa.

But didn't Mr Bono also evoke having "The Truth" in his definition of asymmetrical "punk" journalism ?

I am sure he did.

The battle ground is Climate Change, the stakes (a big cliche, but still true) "The Fate of the Earth" .

Libertarian Think Tanks

There are hundreds of wealthy libertarian Think Tanks world wide that deny that "Man"  has caused potentially irreversible Climate Change, indeed deny any limits on "Man's" ability to quickly get out any jam He or nature might have... temporarily ...created.

It will probably take tens of thousands of part-time bloggers, in tens of thousands of bedrooms,  to successfully combat this Life-killing philosophy -- but I am sure we can do it.

They have the money true ; but after all , we have the beauty and the brains....

Greens lead in Melbourne by-election because Australian socialists are to the right of Canada's Stephen Harper

Socialists unite with Libertarians to defeat Greens, again

Australia's PM Julia Gillard is from the Labor Party  (Labor = NDP in Canadian terms, supposedly) and she is opposed to gay marriage.

So she says, in public. Has to say in public (or get slaughtered by enough of the voters to render her party practically seatless).

In a state-level by-election today in inner city Melbourne, the Greens lead the pack at 38% - winning the seat in Canadian FPP terms.

But in Australia, it is proportional voting and so the Green candidate will lose on second round preferences.

The Libertarian opposition coalition is not running a candidate and told all their voters to vote Labor --- they may different sometimes on some economic issues but they are both equally death on gay rights.

The Aussie Greens do well because the local left wingers are almost as right wing, well almost as right wing,  as the Nova Scotia left wingers.

Nova Scotia Greens fail to seize "green opportunity"

But in Nova Scotia, the Greens have totally failed to seize this opportunity opening up for them as the NDP here shed many long time supporters.

Dead skunks in the middle of road would get more votes than the Greens in Nova Scotia , if an election was held right now.

I might add that the Green national leader is from Nova Scotia but still no lift under the local Greens sails ---- even the combo of Darrell Dexter and Elizabeth May can't Viagratize the flaccid Green members....

DeSmogBlog : "the blog as a think tank or the think tank as a blog ?", worries CATO from KANSAS

Packaging Passion can take a dozen forms

Look, way up, up in the ether: is it a bird, a plane, a blog, a virtual think tank , a dog ?

A dog ?

How would you ever know who is or isn't a dog on the Internet?

Who is or isn't a blog or a virtual think tank on the Internet?

Enough virtual reality - let's get concrete - or better still, let's get solar.

You want passionately, as a single individual - to promote solar energy - NOW !!!!

But how ?

At first, there often appears to be many different ways to promote a vision.

But if you've done about all of them as I have, the differences between all the various choices can end up appearing more apparent than real.

So here is what you will do, for sure - in all of the different approaches :

you produce a mission statement, recruit supporters, seek out advisers and donations, co-sponsor conferences, publish a periodical, occasionally publish reports or even a 'book' , make submissions to public bodies in the world of politics, lobby politicians and the media directly and via press releases.

 you do some original field research, publish some review articles. Speak at some others' conferences, occasionally getting interviewed as an expert by Radio and TV.

And now for the real difficult issue :

picking a name.

 Because, right away, your name defines you and limits how you will be perceived, for ever and ever ---- despite the fact that your main purpose and most of your operating procedures will NOT fundamentally change regardless of which name you happen to pick.

You could call yourself  The Society for the Study of Solar Power Initiatives (SSSPI) and appear to be (quasi-) academic society in nature.

A bit more aggressive , you call yourself Solar Energy Now !  (SEN !) , an NGO cum environmental protest/action movement.

More aggressively still, you could form a single issue political party , the Solar Energy Now Party (SENP) .

Or maybe back off a good bit - become, or appear to become, an industry lobby group, Solar Energy Advancement Canada (SEAC).

Why not a think tank ? The Solar Energy Initiative Institute (SEII).

Or claim to be a business consultant ( that is what all the other middle class unemployed do - or sell real estate or insurance.)

Solar Energy Initiative Consulting (SEIC)  makes almost no money but it allows you to approach and appeal to business interests turned off by environmentally oriented movements and parties , as well as anything reeking of 'academia' .

Let's go back to the think tank idea and flesh it out - but the others' histories are not that dissimilar.

There are documented, fully credible, think tanks with the founder as executive director and only full time employee, with their friend cum lawyer advisor and friend cum accountant advisor filling the other two directors chairs to meet minimal legal requirements.

The Board meets briefly once a year, again to fulfill minimum legal requirements.

 No members with ownership & voting rights (and legal liabilities).

Instead only paid-up supporters who are glad to get the publications and  attend conferences at sharp discounts for a very minimal membership fee.

Supporters who are glad not have to bear legal and financial responsibilities for law suits against the controversial organization that being a member-owner would entail.

Two major donors and much of the director's joint family income fund the organization's annual $100,000 cost.

 All monies received from other donations and from publication and conference income is far less than the cost incurred.

 (because while think tanks typically espouse "user-payer" for others , none has ever been observed actually applying it to themselves -- no one would read their policy papers, if sold at their true cost !)

But here is the rub : the new digital rules greatly lower the cost of becoming a think tanks (or lobby group et al) and this as destroyed their major advantage for the forces of wealth and greed : high entry costs made them the domain of the rich.

True, successful think tanks of all political stripes usually set up in the major government , university and conference centres :  big metropolitan cities .

This applies equally to rich think tanks of the greedy 1% as to the poor think tanks trying to help the 99%.

The overall costs are rarely much higher than locating in a smaller big city.

The cost of being in Washington DC or New York  (or Canberra or Sydney) is rarely much higher than doing it all out of St Louis or Adelaide.

But the rent, the rent !

Yes, but consider that many prominent think tank directors can humbly walk from their office to their conference's meeting hall or to the legislature or to the opposition leaders' press conference - saving much time, airfares and hotel bills.

For the rich think tanks, the main consideration is the extra time they can have mingling with the powerful in informal settings , by living in the powerfuls' home town.

But think tanks used to require incomes of millions a year to be even minimally successful.

Everything they said or did involved printing and mailing out thousands of pieces of  impressive-looking, heavy, colorful paper : most of their costs were here - not in office space or salaries.

(Many of the think tank Fellows merely need a credible hitching post between real jobs, more than they needed a real big income right now : a Fellowship at a big think tank acted like a highly visible CV and Resume .)

But free email,  free YouTube access and tiny costs for video cameras and video editing software, free or nearly free static-free long distance phone calls, free blogs and websites has made for a totally virtual global presence at virtually no cost.

But you still need to be in the centre of the action in big capitol cities.

But I have personally seen recently, ( in cities like New York, London, Toronto and Ottawa)  some truly, ahem, modest accommodations, within walking distance of the powerful, and carrying relatively modest monthly rents .

Bachelor apartments, lofts and the like over shops --- probably occupied by student types and ethnic immigrants.

Now think tanks - even today in these digital times - still require impressive offices to appear and be impressive.

Receptionist in a visually attractive outer office with plenty of flashy, expensive, paper publications for take away, a nicely wood panelled executive director's sanctum ; you know the total look, even at its bare minimum.

True, other than the director and office manager-cum-receptionist , the fellows of the think tank can be mere 'adjunct scholars' , all  employed-for-money elsewhere, but glad to hang their intellectual hat at a credible institution to spread their individual take on the world and modestly self-promote themselves at the same time.

They stay in touch by phone and email and a few (free) video conferences.

This still keeps the very minimal costs for a credible think tanks to about $200,000 a year - and among the 99% there are not enough well to do to offer up cost-free large donations on that scale on an annual basis.

We all know - or should know - that it literally cost millions in set up work before seeking small donations becomes profitable - and this only applies to a few large organizations with a unique appeal to a large subset of the population.

Among the 99%, only a large collection of small foundations, bequests and labour unions can fund a credible think tank of the conventional sort - which is why they are so rare.

Some digital aggregators are well on their way to becoming highly effective quasi-think tanks cum lobby groups cum everything.

I am thinking of digital efforts like Canada's Rabble.ca , potentially more effective than all of the other of Canada's Left-leaning organizations, baring only a few big unions, the NDP social democratic party itself, and one or two of the conventional (having an Ottawa office)  think tanks that are of the Left.

(I am here deliberately excluding the environmental type organizations from this description of the Canadian Left.)

It suggests another model for a successful modern day think tank : the personal blog.

Yes, the personal blog !

The personal blog suggests several highly attractive attributes that don't actually have to be true ---- to remain highly attractive.

If I tell you that I am typing this blog post on my bed in only my PJ bottoms because Halifax this July is unusually hot and muggy, you wouldn't likely be surprised.

Aren't all blogs - or most all blogs - done that way ?

No they are not . Take the example of James Hoggan, titular head of the blog deSmogBlog.

In the world, on the subject of climate change, this blog is very very powerful - far more listened to than anything else Canada can produce on the subject with the exception of the Fraser Institute think tank, the two national papers and a few Canadian climate change deniers' own blog efforts .

Yes I am saying that no one in the rest of the world listens to the current Canadian Government or the Official Opposition on this subject : their views are known around the world but seen as static.

In his book, Climate Cover-Up, Hoggan explains he had very humble intentions at first : merely to add a community service element to the website of his small Vancouver PR firm.

He stumbled upon climate change as the subject of that community service section: because it seemed so polarized, he thought he could offer the community an objective look at both sides.

As he researched he found no scientific controversy, only a scientific consensus combating a secretive PR  assault against it.

PR being his bread and butter, he was now hooked ; he's show how PR should be done and remain honest, versus how how bad , evil, PR was done.

He found his senior writer at his small PR firm had made a similar discovery when called upon to do just another freelance writing assignment - for David Suziki.

 A well to do friend had money and that rarity among the wealthy, a healthy conscience.

A blog was born, a blog with a difference.

Most blogs - most think tanks - most political parties - most newspapers spend most of their time reporting upon, reviewing, collating and assessing others' original date collecting.

DeSmogBlog would be different : Jim's senior writer/employee/friend Richard Littlemore would be mostly a researcher, collecting hard data the old fashioned hard way using elbow grease, contact lists and brains.

Soon other employees came on board, along with a raft of semi paid researchers and writers and a pile of pure volunteers, all driven by a passionate concern for the state of the planet.

"Greedy" think tanks, oriented to defending the right to be greedy and wealthy find far fewer staffers willing to take vows of poverty to write about becoming wealthy : these think tanks have large incomes because - frankly - they need large incomes to pay to hold credible "greed-oriented" staffers.

Now what, in fact, is a blog ?

Look at most blogs today and you will see a very cluttered Home Page, like any other active website's Home Page, (once beyond the dignified Splash Page that sometime still exists on some sites).

Yes, the centre will usually be a single column news story - so separating a blog right away from the internet newspaper or magazine's multi new column format.

But the sides are cluttered with other colums filled with gadgets or widgets : each acting as portals to dozens or hundreds of other web pages.

Join, donate, comment, read archival material, join a supporter forum, find out the purpose of this website and who is behind it, sign up for a conference, buy a paper-copy book, download a lengthy PDF ebook position paper. Find who else supports this website and who else the website itself supports.

On and on and on.

Almost anything a political party, think tank, academic society, lobby group or NGO does today (except hold face to face conferences) can be hung off a blog - in beautiful fonts and vivid color - free.

Yet because it is a blog (ie proverbially produced in a bedroom in PJs) it has no need for an expensive office and in fact I believe the large office suite HQ greatly harms the street cred of any blog that is stupid enough to show off them off.

When James Fallows and The Atlantic were permitted by GAWKER to do a long cover story on the inside operation of this blog empire in April 2011, I don't think GAWKER-the-blogger ever recovered.

Blogs that aim to be big, best look to the successful models of the past where a single individual became the public face and personality of the brand but the superstructure of editors and researchers and office managers who kept them afloat remained largely hidden.

Canada's Pierre Berton was a hard working, clever writer and researcher but he upped even his prodigious output once he added a lot of fact checkers, researchers and TV show producers etc.

Drew Pearson, an American muckraking syndicated columnist from the 1950s era, also had his back room helpers.

I am guessing that Drew Pearson-the-journalist had to have a formal office but Berton, once he more or less left regular journalism and became a writer did not.

We suspect and dislike writers with formal, public office suites and a public business plan of writing 3000 words a day without fail.

We call this sort of writer "genre" writers or "hacks".

This means we expect writers to be untutored geniuses of the sort the Romantic Era so admired - and I suspect blogger writers, to be fully successful, need to appear to be the same.

Bedroom offices, PJs, may be just the louche image required.

Yet off that tiny 'bedsit' , one can- and maybe should - hang an entire institutional empire.

Don't hire employees to write - ask fellow bloggers who bring a lot of expertise in areas you don't have, to write guest blog posts for free - because they need the visibility your blog has, that their blog does not, yet.

If you aren't making any money and don't plan to, they will not get paid either - in money - yet feel it is a fair exchange.

They could guest blog about the long research paper they just wrote and link to the entire PDF - who wants to work a year on something and watch it die virtually unread ?

Step by step, you could become a quasi-think tank - without needing millions in annual revenue - and finally we the 99% would be able to match the greedy 1%'s think tanks in quantity of  institutions and written output.

I welcome your comments and suggestions on these thoughts....

PhDs who can, teach ; PhDs who can't, 'TANK' in Washington, the original 'tank town'

There is new hope for all those kids who got a pass-level PhD but can't find work at a real university: they can find work at the ever growing number of 'tanks' that fill the Washington Beltway and cluster around every national political capital world wide.

(Before 1941, many reporters from bigger cities used to regard Washington DC as a 'tank town' : in many ways, it still is.)

If Libertarian Governments continue to cut science research and universities grow ever smaller as a result , soon there will be more people with PhDs working in the think tanks than at universities.

Those PhDs capable of teaching and doing research will be in the universities while those PhDs only capable of offering opinions will 'tank' out of  academia and into the warm financial embrace of those libertarian stalking horses, the partisan think tanks.

Better to teach at Hamburger U than tank in  'tank town'

At least at Hamburger University, the teachers engage in real world activities : flipping burgers.

The partisan think tanks merely engage in magical thinking and conspiracy theories : they are the Roswell Area 51s for guys in suspenders and bow ties whose daddies went to Yale : academia for mouth-breathers.....

rise of THINK TANKs closely followed rise of rigorous PEER-REVIEW

Junk Science is the Think Tank's raison d'etre

If you got away with JUNK SCIENCE before 1945 - and many academics did because rigorous peer-review before publication was not actually all that common back then - increasingly you couldn't so after 1945.

Second rate and lazy scientists and academics who couldn't cut the mustard, cut classes - bailed out of academic life after they had established a few credentials and swam - like rats - to the rising ships of the anti-peer-review-oriented think tanks.

The post-1945 rise of the think tanks were also industry's and the wealthiest families's response to that fact it was getting harder and harder to find real university professors willing to be their denier-liars  for hire.

The two trends met in the middle : both needed each other.

Think tanks thus do serve an useful role for society after all ; providing the first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of scholar....

"Wrong said Fred" : how two guys named Fred killed more people than Hitler

Soon to be a blockbuster movie --- or a few more years off ?

I have said before, "just what is it about the sight of smoke that makes certain rigid personality types go so absolutely snakey ?"

(You know : all those serial deniers of Holocaust smoke, acid rain, cigarette smoke, ozone holes, global warming ,industrial pollution, on and on and on.)

I have to come think that it is because, in even in their cases where they have spent a lifetime successfully and rigidly throttled all conscious thought of their individual guilt, smoke is "sin made all too visible".

Ie, it functions as a kind of  industrial stigmata , that severely threatens their normally secure sense of selfness in ways they can't handle - so they lash out in all directions.....

The WICKED Rev Whewell and how the denier Skygods might just be doing us Earthlings a big favour

Breaking Up : for the Sake of the (human) Family...

"Boring" alert : I have been doing some heavy thinking. 

(The result of reading (via the ever-alert Mike at Watching the Deniers) of Graham Readfearn's account of how the deniers will soon be taking over Australia's government and education, from top to bottom.)

Yep,the deniers are breaking up Science: dividing it up into their science and our science.

And yet, in a strange sort of way, that is exactly as it should be - and as it as it should always have been.

The fact that it not, can be laid at the feet of that versatile, if wicked, polymath the Reverend William Whewell.

One of the many privileges of being a minister in the Established Church of England was to the ability to yoke two together, forever.

Between 1833 and 1840, the beastly Whewell did just that : forcing the unholy marriage between Natural Philosophy and Natural History and calling the spawn of this un-natural union by one word : Scientist.

Natural Philosophy goes under many names today, because all these names ( and sciences) contain bits of the core values of natural philosophy.

Theory-oriented science, lab/experimental science, production science, K-selected science , two-bodied science, Newtonian classical science, science of the First Law ( of Thermodynamics), linear (machine) science.

Natural History actually lives on, weakly, but many sciences also contains bits of its original values in their core.

Observation-oriented science, real world science, impact science, r-selected science, three (or multi) bodied science, Quantum science, science of the Second Law (of Thermodynamics), chaotic (garden) science.

Using Leo Marx's extremely useful metaphor of "The Machine in the Garden", we can see how these two original sciences should have worked against each other, for our and Nature's greater good.

Theory science is very good at creating new "machines"  in the laboratory for the betterment of humanity.

They do so at great ultimate cost, though.

By strictly, narrowly, focusing on only the new machine's invention and excluding all thought of the unexpected consequences when it is introduced into a chaotic, dynamic, resource-restrained real world, they merely postpone the inevitable.

Call them eternally cock-eyed optimists..... or deniers*.

(Albeit, only as deniers of material limits to human invention.)

Other kinds of personalities - call them worriers, doubters and yes, even, sceptics and cynics - are needed to discover and warn us about what happens when the shiny new machine leaves the Lily-white walled laboratory and heads out into the great big dirty, noisy, untidy, unpredictable, real world, aka the garden.

Skygod science and Earthling science are meant to clash - we only get their full benefit when they do clash.

Now, I will argue and you are free to disagree, that we earthlings do accept the right of production science to exist (pardon me while I check to see if my latest i-pod touch 4 is fully charged !)

But as well , we fully support the right of impact scientists to fully interrogate production science's impact upon the real world, for good or bad.

Reality ate my homework....

(Think of it this way : we earthlings think every teenage student should have the right to spout off whatever they want on the exam paper. But we also fully support the right of their teachers and parents to fact-check their work afterwards.)

Skygods do not : intellectually they are still the same 16 year old boys at the very back of the classroom who already know everything, and are bored beyond reason with futher schooling --- they see themselves as doers, not thinkers.

Despite this, they paradoxically take their old (pre-1970s) high school science teachers at their word (!).

  That word being there is only one kind of science and it's job is to produce and produce and produce an ever growing cornucopia of stuff : from biological food stuff to nuclear radioactivity stuff.

Deniers tell us that production scientists and their kindly employers can be fully trusted, by us the voter and consumer, to make sure nothing bad ever happens ; we promise -- this is why we are firing all those unnecessary interfering (impact) scientists that work for the government.

Deniers, very much against their own ultimate wishes (be very careful of what you ask for !), are busy taking us back to a pre-Whewell era when two sciences duked it out, with two opposing, alternative, visions of this single planet : skygod vs earthling.

Consider it my life's work to help the deniers tear Science apart : for the betterment of the world......

Modernity's star turn was impoverished Prussia ,not Manhattan's skyscrapers

Historical consensus to the contrary, America, Russia, Canada, China, Brazil, Australia were never full members of Modernity.

At best, they could only be hybrid members.

Modernity and the Enlightenment Project was premised upon Man's mind triumphing over matter ---- more importantly, "lack of matter".

Mind hardly gets a fair workout in vast lands rich in natural resources and with relatively small populations.

In America, it seemed you only had to trace a line in the Ohio soil and up would come corn and pigs.

By contrast, Germany  (Prussia really) and Japan - Germany in particular before WWII and Japan in the 1970s to 1990s - were small, natural resource poor, lands with large hungry populations and no vast overseas colonies ----- unlike the equally small British and French homelands.

Their initial triumph was a tribute to the power of Modernity's thesis.

Their subsequent failure, equally, marked its absolute failure....

CATO vs CASSE : skygod vs earthling , battling thinktanks

Duelling think tanks, on a flatlining planet....

The CATO Institute, spawner of the denier movement and of all mean things Koch-able, is a powerhouse in the think tank business worldwide.

(And man oh man is it ever a business.

 In most think tanks it provides steady, pensionable, profitable employment for wannabe academics who can't get tenure or peer-reviewed publication. A first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of thinker....)

And I can't think of an organization more worthy of being called the skygod of all skygods - the denier of deniers on all the biological and material limits that humanity must face up to and deal with.

By contrast,Brian Czech's  CASSE ,  the Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy ,is virtually unknown outside a relatively small circle of friends and supporters ( albeit friends like David Suzuki and Herman Daly !)

I couldn't even seem to find it on Wikipedia, normally a fount of information on all things obscure.

(I might try seeing it I can edit a token bit about CASSE for Wikipedia and rely on the good will and bad bile of regular wikipedia editors to do it up right.)

But CASSE would seem the natural choice for becoming the planet's leading green think tank.

This is because the advocating a steady state economy is the ONLY thing that truly divides real Green parties from the pro-environment 'greenish' wings of the other parties who remain stubbornly and foolheartedly pro-bloat.

Any party or individual that advocates perpetual growth is really preparing mentally to abandon the Earth, once it is raped to resource-exhaustion, for other worlds.

But CASSE really seems to deserve the title of Earthling of the Earthlings.

Please support it - sign its petition and live and think and talk up a steady state economy.

Be 100% green - not 1% green.

Because 1% of anything might make you rich, but it won't make you happy....