The Wilders Trial (I): the Expert Witness

Next Wednesday January 20 marks the beginning of a political show trial the likes of which have not been seen in the Netherlands in living memory.

While the Public Prosecution Service studied the case at length and declined to act on it, some postmodern zealots managed to get a minor Amsterdam Court to take up their miguided "anti-fascist" crusade.

Some have detected the insidious hand of the Organization of Islamic Congress (IOC) in the text of the indictment. Others stick to an ideological cabal in the governing coalition in which some have an interest in curbing free speech.

The Charges brought against Wilders are, "insult of a religious group, inciting hatred and discrimination". The text specifically states:

"(...) the Court of Appeal considers criminal prosecution obvious for the insult of Islamic worshippers because of the comparisons made by Wilders of the Islam with the Nazism."

Regrettably the law has abandoned objective principle, and instead decided to review complaints in "context" on a case by case basis. So we are assured that present spectable will be repeated numbers of times, which in itself will have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression.

Self censorship among pundits and artists has already become common practice. No one considers the use of the politically correct Index for the media an intolerable infringement on the freedom of the press. But then, that is how incremental nudging works.

Klein Verzet Blog elaborates on a legal precedent involving "group insult" and the all important differentiation between man and his ideas. Catholics, usually good philosophers, have always understood the difference between sin and sinner.

Prof. Afshin Ellian has had a bright idea. On Friday on his blog on Elsevier (in English) he proposed as follows:

Those in power in Islamist Iran represent a pure form of political Islam. It is a unapologetic form of Islamofascism, which includes antisemitism. The self-appointed President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often expresses himself in antisemitic terms. (Iran's ruler) Ayatollah Khamenei is supported by other antisemitic clerics holding an ideology that is apocalyptic in nature. They believe that the appearance of the 12th Imam must be triggered through strife and mayhem (like all other collectivist, Utopian narrative, CT).

Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi is Khamenei's most important supporter. He's a member of various bodies of Government. In an address on January 5 he elaborated at length on the Jewish question. (...)  Geert Wilders MP should subpoena Mesbah Yazdi as an expert witness. Mesbah Yazdi must be questioned about his views on Jews. Are they rooted in the Koran?

The proceedings must be broadcast live. Islam will be on trial.(...) Let defending council Abraham Moszkowicz question him about the Jews and their tragic fate. Wilders should show him historical material and videos of murdered Iranians. Then the parallel between Nazism and Islamism will become apparent.

There are indeed philosophical parallels between Islam(ism) and Western totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism, National Socialism and Communism. The evil only differs in detail and in degree. Reduced to the root these are the common basics:

• anti realist metaphysics;
  
• socialist and anti free market capitalism in economics;
• an anti reason, relativist and subjectivist epistemology; 
• a view of man as a socially constructed victim. 

But it gets at its most problematic when it comes to ethics: i.e.

• collectivism and anti individual rights.

To date in world history there has never been any benign collective, ever. And therein lies the clash of the ummah with liberal-democracy: the former is a collective, the latter rests on individual rights. These cannot be conciliated without laying the ax at the root of Western civilization.

Muslims must be given to understand that the price for living in freedom, is mutual toleration. Westerners must learn that the price of tolerating intolerance, is freedom. And freedom is the ground on which common prosperity rests. These are not vague abstractions, but very real concepts.

We shall be reporting throughout on the Wilders trial. One commentator has detected a certain tension at the Court: these people are "scared to death!" Last Wednesday during Wilders' appeal against the indictment, journalists were shut out of Court House, ostensibly for his safety. But as the pundit remarked, since when do journalists pose a security risk? The actual reason is - and this is our conclusion, not the pundit's - the Court is not only fearful of offering Wilders a platform from which to proclaim his 'abject ideas' - they're also terrified the presence of the press would reveal the event for what it is, a political show trial.

Continued on Part II

Related:

- PVV information on planned demos at the Court (Dutch)
- Wilders' Freedom Party website (English)

Earlier on the Wilders Trial:

- "Team Wilders Versus Pomo Law"
- "Wilders is Fighting Back"

Related articles:

- NRO: "Bat Yeor: Geert Wilders and the fight for Europe - Does defending Western values constitute “inciting hatred”?"
- NRO: "Lights Out on Liberty", by Mark Steyn
- Politeia: "The Roots of the Unholy Alliance"
- Politeia: "The Mdina Precedent for Holocaust and Genocide"

Related dossiers:

- "Ellian Blogs" (compilation)
- "In Defense of Liberty"
- "Legal Jihad"
- "The Unholy Alliance"
- "Antisemitism"
- "Eurabia"

912DC: Which New America, Which New World?

This memorable day, September 12, 2009 thousands and thousands of Americans - a coalition of grassroots, non-partisan movement of ordinary citizens - will be descending upon the capital of their nation, Washington D.C. They will be protesting against the covert sea-change revolution called "change" that is taking place in their country. Few outside the US may know it, but all is not well in the land since We the People was replaced with Hope&Change.

The conceptless label "change" probably originates in the relativist, progressivist philosophy of Pragmatism, but it certainly appears on the terminology index of Neuro Linguistic Programming (or Hypnosis 2.0). NLP is a rather hip, unscientific discipline used primarily in alternative therapies, the counselling industry and in the world of motivational training and coaching.

The Left embraced it as a great opportunity to manipulate others into conforming with their ethics program (the aim justifies the means!). Political correctness is but one branch of that school. Other applications of NLP are less obvious.


The all powerful Cass Sunstein, Obama's Regulatory Czar (since confirmed: 57-40) and author of NLP copybook "The Nudge", has hugely contributed to Obama's "voodoo" campaign (do go to the nudge blog for further ideas, suggestions and interactivity). The "hope&change" brand label may have been his baby, or the King of Astroturf's, David Axelrod. It is beside the point.

If "change" is to become a concept in lieu of a nominal label meaning "transition", it needs further specification: what is the status quo and what is the final goal; how is it reached and why is it desirable? Nobody offered specifics and nobody asked. An entire nation was seduced by a brand label presented by an elegant young black man with a smooth-working teleprompter.

America is no ordinary nation either but the sole country on the face of the earth based on a philosophy! Guess what "change" means for a nation that embodies individualism and personal autonomy? America may not be perfect in practice (who is?), but it is only based upon the best idea conceived by man since the Epiphany of the great Constantine?

Ayn Rand teaches us this about ethics: most choices in every day life play out in a spectrum of greys, but in times of moral stress clear choices become an imperative: good and evil become a zero sum game in which evil has nothing to contribute to the good and good has nothing to gain from evil: every compromise becomes a concession to and the negotiator an accomplice of evil. 

Increasingly Americans (and others as well) shall be facing the stark choice, not between the status quo or change, but more basically answer the question if their country is based on a philosophy that reflects human nature, or if they will follow into the footsteps of the Utopists that have gone before us, and whose legacies are filling the history books.

Much as opponents will spin and portray the protestors - often middle aged novices to bull horns and placards - as mobs of racist mercenaries of corporate interests, anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear will recognize the fairness of their goals and merits. Accusations uttered by the opponents are already sounding shrill and are becoming ever giving subject of ridicule.
Few people understand the momentous nature of the brink on which humanity currently stands. But these Americans are the vanguard of a groundswell waking up to reality! Will individual rights and freedom prevail, or do we follow the enslavers who lure us with tales of victimhood and entitlement - ficticious injury to be redressed solely by a  increasingly fascististic state, a vicious alignment of corporatism in the service of total government?


Related:

- Today on The Lighthouse: ""A New America", the Movie"

Updating throughout:

- Twitcaps: live #912dc pics
- Covertress: "Photos (and vids) From 9/12 Tea Party in DC"
- YouTube: "912 DC by Frank Strategies"
- Fox News Livestream
- YouTube: "Demint "More Comfortable" At Tea Party Than Congress"
- YouTube: "Tea Partyers Drown Out CNN Reporter During Live Report"
- Fox News: "Sensus Bureau Severs Ties With ACORN"
- Politico: "A march today, but is it a movement?

Live Tweet Stream:



Post 912 Updates:

- Jeff Head.com: "912: America Awakes in 2009" (great pix: here's one)
- Conservative Feminist: "Up to 2 Million March on Washington DC to protest Spending and Policy – Largest Protest In DC History"
- Mail Online (UK): "Up to two million march to US Capitol to protest against Obama's spending in 'tea-party' demonstration"

Related sites:

- The 912 Project official site
- Glenn Beck's 912 Project
- The Tea Party Express Official Tour Blog
- American Liberty Alliance

The Fine Art of Agitation and Community Organizing

We've been collecting all these posts and publications over the last few days pertaining to the pseudo civil war currently being fought out in the US over health care reform; but on watching the last two broadcasts of the B Cast on Breitbart TV it all became obsolete. If you've missed what has occurred on the continent of Liberty, the next two Breitbart videos provide a pretty comprehensive overview.

While we've been commenting and updating on the Articles blog in "Ruled by the Mob", on second thought what is going on is even more nefarious than initial analysis warranted. We've got only this to add on the reflexes emanating from the White House.

Folks, we don't need to go down that path again - not in the nation that embodies the philosophy of Liberty. It's been well documented over the last two centuries how Utopias always turn into dystopias, always and without exception. That is because they are build on the principle that individuals have the dire duty to exist for the improvement of everyone else, instead of the other way around.

Christian Democrats and their ilk need to stop vilifying individualism, also in Europe: they need to understand that respect for the individual is our sole guarantee against tyranny!

Here' the White House's assault on Liberty again in its full, neototalitarian glory:

The WH Blog: "Facts Are Stubborn Things" (note: you'll be hard pressed to even find one "fact", apart of the present)

It occurred to me only this morning that there's a quote circulating from one of Orwell's books, asserting that it is just not possible to control an entire nation ("we can't catch all that breathless 'dizinformation' that's percolating on the Internet, all by ourselves"). Therefore what you need to do as Big Brother is find a way for the people to control themselves (help us flag our enemies and report to us).

The devil is in the moral twist - the narrative goes like this: dissent is a deliberate lie per definition; it is therefore unethical, yes -- even evil; therefore dissenters are the enemy of the good (their own intentions are above suspicion, indeed are "all for our own good")! The enemy - not grassroots, but vile "insurance companies, lobbyists, pharmaceuticals, Republican Party activists" etc. - must be flagged and reported.

It was a common experience in all Communist countries before the fall of the Berlin Wall, but it took the thoroughness of the Germans to take it to perfection in the German Democratic Republic (the GDR, or DDR, also known as East Germany). People suffer from it to this very day, as you can read in this article in Der Spiegel.

What you do is you take a great number of party members who're in some way beholden to it in some capacity, and you set them up as spies and informers. These spy and snitch on all the others for "ideologicial dissent", and since no one knows precisely who they are - they may be your best friend, or your son, or your own mother for that matter - nobody's trusting any one any more - the walls have ears ... As a result you have a self sustaining mechanism of perpetual and total control.

You can judge for yourselves how that might work. The 0-team may not have that intention for the moment, but neither do they have the moral compass that tells them that such activities are totalitarian and have no place in a liberal democracy. And that is perhaps the most worrying aspect.

"Democrats Rachet Up Rhetoric Against 'angry' Republican 'Mobs'"



"Rush and Rove Respond to GOP 'mob' Allegations"



Here are a few links for your reference:

• The Weekly Standard: "Think Progress, MSNBC 'Manufacture' a Story With Putative Smoking Gun 'Mob' Memo"
  
  
• Bob MacGuffie of a newly invigorated Libertarian "Right Principles" joins B Cast to discuss the DNC ad that ripped up and abused their webpage - follow them on Twitter and Facebook

Glenn Beck worked out months ago how manufactured news works:

• Glenn Beck: "Libs attacking Glenn"

On a lighter note:

• Iowahawk: "Know Your Town Hall Mob Agitators!", by Linda Douglass - Deputy Assistant Under-Minister of Truth, White House Health Care Task Force
  
  
• Michelle Malkin: "How to dress like an “authentic” grass-roots activist"
  

• New to the Mob? Generate your own Mafia name - Hat Tip: The Lonely Conservative, alias Sarina Gunindapants. Pleased to meet ... I'm Carlotta Gallo.
  
  
• On Twitter? Support #iamthemob, add a #twibbon to your avatar now! -http://twibbon.com/join/iamthemob
  

Need a tune?

• Muse - "The Uprising"
  
  
• Johnny Cash: "I Won't Back Down" - Hat Tip : "Blatherings"

Know your unaccountable czars (the Supreme Soviet, or would that be the Politbureau?) and their ethics system in which people are numbers and statistics (note: group think, and the myths that sustain them). Figures and quotas have taken the place of individual human lives, ditched the notion that each live is of equal intrinsic value and moral dignity.

• Glenn Beck: "America Senses Something's Not Right"
  

The "reasonable" alternative ... collective insurance:

• "Coop Health Care"
  

The Bill (PDF of all 1017 pages of it) and here's a summary of some of the most contentious parts:

• H. R. 3200 - To provide affordable, quality health care for all Americans and reduce the growth in health care spending, and for other purposes.

A few edifying quotes:

• Freedom Works: "Quotes of the Month (C.S Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien)", by Rossputin

Just in case you're wondering whatever happened to our liberals, sorry - over the last eight years the Democratic Party kicked out that foreign implant and reverted back to the original school of collectivist postmodernism (read almost every other post in this blog).

Oh and just in case you believe you're safe with the WH's assurances, know that the Regulation czar is author of "The Nudge". This is what we jotted down in "The Pomo White House" just after his appointment:

Mr Nudge - Cass Sunstein - married to National Security Council Director of Multilateral Affairs, Samantha Power - has been nominated as Regulation Czar, but ... how to put this? ... there seems to be some controversy, but in the wrong department. The appointment of the "prolific writer" and inventor of "The Nudge" would place him eminently to do at which he excels: making people act in accordance with the politically correct ethics of the day.

Sunstein is an expert at inducing obedience in the unwashed with the use of psychological trickery - some generation of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP, also known as hypnosis 2.0). The Obama campaign had Mr Nudge's signature all over it. In a later pamphlet he describes his latest thesis on group polarization (see also a number of entries on the file of "Big Brother's Smoke and Mirrors"). The relativist, hyper subjective mass manipulator would indeed come into his own as Obama's Regulation Czar - an amoral witch doctor on steroids. If appointed (and there's no doubt he will) his wishes to "litigate on behalf of animals" may well prove to be the least of our worries.

And for good measure, there's more where that came from! On the "Science Czar", another postmodern, anti human nihilist:

President Obama's Science Czar, John Holdren, took a controversial and amoral approach to the science of population by recommending mass compulsory sterilization and even forced abortion (and/or forced marriages) under certain circumstances. His 1977 tome, Ecoscience, which he co-authored with Paul and Anne Ehrlich, also displays a revealing disregard for the institution of the traditional human family. (...) >>>

Congrats, Obama voters, the real coup didn't happen in Honduras but in the US, right under your own adoring noses!

Update: breaking news on an agent provocateur ...

Breitbart: "FBI trained NJ blogger to incite others"

Here's the rest of what's on file on Articles in "The Pomo White House" -

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Facing Evil

“Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle.” --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Actually, it started with a lie and the war on existence. The comments section to following article contains some wonderful personal anecdotes ...

BBC: "Alexander Solzhenitsyn dies at 89 "

Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who exposed Stalin's prison system in his novels and spent 20 years in exile, has died near Moscow at the age of 89. The author of The Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, who returned to Russia in 1994, died of either a stroke or heart failure.The Nobel laureate (...) (a)fter returning to Russia, (...) wrote several polemics on Russian history and identity. (...) >>>

The Obituary includes video material: "... an old-fashioned moralist who saw the world in black and white" - relativists, being stripped of ethics as a philosophical field, fail to understand that a compromise between good and evil does not exist: a compromise in this case would be a mere 55 million victims of Left and Right totalitarian experiments instead of the full 110 million. Any concession - even the smallest - would still be evil.

"The good has nothing to gain from evil, evil has everything to gain from the good." --Ayn Rand

Bryan Caplan at Econ Blog has an excerpt worth quoting in full:

Econ Blog: "The Best of Solzhenitsyn"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's passing reminds me of my favorite passage from his writings:

"But let us be generous. We will not shoot them. We will not pour salt water into them, nor bury them in bedbugs, nor bridle them up into a "swan dive," nor keep them on sleepless "stand-up" for a week, nor kick them with jackboots, nor beat them with rubber truncheons, nor squeeze their skulls with iron rings, nor push them into a cell so that they lie atop one another like pieces of baggage - we will not do any of the things they did! But for the sake of our country and our children we have the duty to seek them all out and bring them all to trial! Not to put them on trial so much as their crimes. And to compel each one of them to announce loudly:
"Yes, I was an executioner and a murderer." --The Gulag Archipelago

If you can read this aloud without tearing up, you're made of sterner stuff than me. Alas, three and a half decades after the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, it looks like we'll never see the Russian analog of the Nuremberg trials. (...) >>>

More excerpts of Solzhenitsyn's brilliant work in the comments section >>>

- Filed on Articles in "Communist Crimes in Trial" -

The Primacy of Politics

The author Douglas Murray wrote the book on neoconservatism. In his 2006 illumination "Neoconservatism, why we need it" he writes that the intellectual father of this philosophy, Leo Strauss posited in his work "On Tyranny" - a commentary on Xenophon's Hiero (or Tyrannicus) - that he (Strauss) ...

"maintains that in his own time, 'when we were brought face to face with tyranny - with a kind of tyranny that surpassed the boldest imagination of the most powerful thinkers of the past - our political science failed to recognize it', (...) one of the clearest allusions (...) to the early lessons observed by the philosopher in Weimar Germany."

Political scientists may not have been particularly observant, neither is humanity as a whole. After having past a century of great wars and tribulations resulting in the deaths of over 100 million lives sacrificed upon the altars of relativist ideologies, they still appear not to have learnt the lesson that Murray puts forward: that relativism is democracy's disintegrating component..

But then, the result of relativism is invariably a (deliberate) confusion of ideas and definitions, imprecision and fallacies against reason; revisionism and the erasure from the collective memory of pre World War II history, coupled with the debilitating influence emanating from generations of people rendered permanent wards-of-state: they would not recognize an ukase if they were to fall over one.

As a consequence we fail to see the ominous signs that are taking place before our very eyes: people being made subservient to ideas, legislation casting surrogate morality into law at the expense of freedom and true equality, resulting in the criminalization of the most unlikely categories of persons: grannies taking an offence at bare gay posteriors, clergy refusing to perform same sex marriages with an appeal on the freedom of conscience, which is increasingly seen as second class liberty, the list goes on.

Groups of people are emerging whose ends are so vile they must be stopped whatever the means, justifying even violence against them. To be specific, against rightists of various hue: neocons, Classical Libertarians, neo Nazis, nationalists (often no more than good patriots), Stop Islamization activists, what have you, they are equivalenced to the same subhuman level. Where did we hear that again?

Good intent producing bad results, the absurdity and injustice of it all, nothing sets off the alarms bells! This is happening while bullying and intimidation, repeated threats and (minor) acts of terrorism against private citizens, officials and scholars go with impunity. The police seem to be unwilling or unable to guarantee safety. The result is toleration of the intolerant: a message that in Strauss' book equals nihilism. Indeed cynicism and nihilism are enshrined today. The mad man never recognizes his own folly.

The political Left have reverted to the radical mode, only selectively defending freedoms and rights when at the expense of the 'Power Structure': the classical Marxist dialectic expressed in repressive tolerance. Just in the nick of time they've restored contact with their totalitarian memes, triggering the realisation of the roots they share with a theist branch of relativist thinking, Islam; timely bringing to semi subconsciousness the recollection that the unremittant promotion of permissiveness and self-indulgence was just part of the same strategy to undermine Western civilization's hegemony.

Through the remarkable rationale that is the Left's pecking order of victimhood, they have managed to throw overboard without hesitation or any cognitive dissonance the former position of serving the minority interests of women, blacks and gays. That is because the victimhood detection apparatus is minutely fine-tuned to recognize the superior social mileage that can be sqeezed out of the new gays: Muslims. Every prior held conviction and moral highground has by now been jilted in favour of furthering the causes of the intolerant.

That it is proving increasingly difficult to distinguish the well-willing innocents from the radical bullies is through another pernicious peculiarity that calls relativism home. On the basis that it isn't fair to lump the innocents with the radicals, the moral choice between the two has been abdicated: the terrorists have now become lumped with the innocent. As a consequence they don't get the support they need to distance themselves from Islamist influence: not a gratuit process by any means, but one wrought with personal danger and hard choices. They are left behind, caught in the multicultural ghetto. Perhaps even more importantly, any chance there is of reforming Islam from within may hence been forfeited.

The refusal to make the moral choice for the good has the effect of getting the radicals a free pass: the Left's abdication of passing judgment even extents to blatant evil. In fact, all things being equivalent evil isn't even recognized when at stares them in the face, let alone that it is condemned for what it is! And so we are left defenseless in the face of present danger. At this point the hammer on moral bankruptcy finally falls.

Westerners who take an opposing stance, taking up their duty to defend the values of liberal democracy against encroaching Sharia type laws and Muslim privileges, are harassed by the radical elements as well as criminalised by their own political representatives. In Europe the pernicious peculiarity has been cast into law, thus insulating terrorists and radicals even from verbal critique. Like innocent Muslims lumped with the radical camp, the defenders of Western values are cast into the Right-wing asylum for the ultimately vile.

The current tendency is blaming the victim. The reasoning goes along lines like "as it is well known that Muslims are a temperamental lot, why speak your mind and offend them?" The next position will be that freedom of expression must be punitively curtailed to prevent provocation! From the looks of it, far from conducting a war on terrorists, Europe has unleashed a wave of repression on the critics of the Third Jihad!

The theme of this assignment is, why should we care about politics and involve ourselves in the political process. I would say that the preservation of the state of liberty is about as good as it gets. We must realise that freedom isn't free, that ideas have consequences (especially bad ones), and that liberty requires a permanent state of vigilance against forced and unforced error.

America waits a difficult task. On her shoulders rests the responsibility to choose a new leader of the free world. His is not an ordinary job. It takes a person of outstanding character to perform this task with dignity, wisdom and courage. The world is facing some tough choices. He may be facing crises of importance and magnitude not seen since 1962. Please choose wisely.

- This article was first published on All American Blogger on 17th January 2008, and picked up on even date by 2nd Amendment blogger Concealed. It was seeded by Daweb on Newsvine. -

- Filed on Articles in "Postmoderism", cat. Philosophy

The Good News: for Truth, Science and the Environment

Not a week has passed since the posting of "101 Scientists: Stop Fighting Climate Change" or our correspondent Theo Richel at De Klimatosoof (Dutch) is reporting as follows:

"What consensus? 400 scientists declare against climate panic"

It was a lie from the get go, but it was nevertheless a masterful propaganda trick (Ed.: a.k.a. Third Way politics by spin) - the statement that "all scientists are in agreement over the seriousness of climate problems." Masterful, because if all scientists agree, there's no need for lay people to make further enquiries into the scientifically complicated matter of climate change. Thus everyone could partake in the discourse without having to know anything about it, since ... scientists agree!

But the propaganda trick has now been exposed by a US Senate Report which lists more than four hundred prominent scientists from all over the world who - in the course of 2007 - have explicitly cast doubt if the phenomenon of global warming exists, if human activities are to blame, and if the present is the time for action.

The report has come as a terrific blow, especially in the US; Al Gore has also commented. 2007 Was supposed to be the year of "An Inconvenient Truth", but in view of Bali's deficit and the increasing number of skeptics (according to the Washington Post), and with the present report, another course seems indicated.

Senator Inhofe's report is accessible at the site of the Environment & Public Works Senate Committee in two parts: the introduction, and the full Senate Report.

The Report calls the scientists by name, country, university or institute, and offers links to their peer reviewed studies. Several of the four hundred take part in the IPCC, but apparently remain unheard, or are ignored. A great many communicated to be persuaded that many colleagues agree with them, but keep silent for fear of reprisals.

Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor Dynamic Meteorology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of almost seventy peer reviewed studies, indicated that many of his colleagues felt intimidated. (In the scientific world this is something unheard of, but the IPCC being 'intergovernmental, it ís something of a scientific-political hybrid).

A regular commentator in bulletins that have appeared world-wide as a result of the Senate Report, is Dutch scholar Hendrik Tennekes, former Scientific Director of the Royal Meteorological Institute KNMI. In the report he states: "I think the disaster scenario painted by Gore, the rising of sea levels by six meters - fifteen times the IPCC assumption - is without any value. I strongly protest against the idea that the climate reacts as the central heating thermostat at home: turn it up and you get the correct temperature. Of course I agree that the earth is going through cycles of heating up and cooling down, part of the natural history of the earth over billions of years."

"This is caused by periodic changes in solar flare activity", says physicist John W. Brosnahan, who develops remote-sensing equipment for NOAA and NASA. I have seen poor computer models that suggest that CO2 is responsible for the current reheating, but no scientific proof."

Mrs Kalee Kreider, spokesperson for Al Gore has suggested - without identifying them - that 25-30 of the scientists mentioned in the Report have worked for oil giant Exxon-Mobil. In response a representative of that company asserted that Exxon Mobil is concerned about climate change and does not engage scientists to refute the theory. The recycling of outdated conspiracy theories only deflect from the real challenge which is, how do we ensure the availability of sufficient fuel to continued economic and social development without producing gases that contribute to global warming".

It would appear that Exxon Mobil is still buying into the Hottest Hoax Around! Part of the new "sustainable" corporate marketing communication strategy, driven by "social responsibility"? Get me a baggy!

A commentator in Theo Richel's blog is suggesting that a German former Nazi scientist, H. Flohn was a member of the IPCC. It would appear that Flohn in 1941 already published tracts, indicating humans as a climatic factor. The fact that he was a Nazi doesn't mean he was necessarily a bad scientist, comments another. The Communists produced awesome inventions!

It does however suggest two other things: 1. that a variety of the Stalin test wouldn't be a bad idea: would Hitler have found it useful? And 2. that coincidentally, anti capitalist and anti human positions do not produce cognitive dissonance in any of the mentioned ideologies (i.e. environmentalism, National Socialism and Communism), all being the result of Counter-Enlightenment thought based on Rousseau's Noble Savage nonsense: nature is good, culture is bad.

Further reading:

- The Science and Public Policy Institute: "“Consensus”? What “Consensus”?Among Climate Scientists, The Debate Is Not Over", by Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Here's a video sample of the type of 'debate' that is going on.

- Filed in Articles on "The Science of Global Warming: Case Closed", cat. Environmentalism and Control -

Freedom's Birth Certificate: sold to the gentleman in the back ...

Sotheby's New York today auctioned an original copy of the Magna Carta Libertatum, or The Great Charter of Freedoms. It was sold for well over twenty one million dollars (£10.6 million) to David Rubenstein, the founder of the Carlyle Group. More details here.

In sharp contrast to the recently signed "Treaty of Lisbon" - dubbed here "Leviathan's birth certificate" - the Magna Carta is known as the "birth certificate of freedom"*. From the Introduction:

"(...) It (the copy) comes from an issue, that of 1297, which for the first time accompanied demands that there be no taxation without representation: a momentous challenge to royal authority and the origin of much that it is of significance in later history, not least in the history of the American Revolution."

It is shocking to realise that a matter of basic right thought to have been settled by a political revolution in England in 1215 - the principle of "no taxation, without representation" - is actually An Issue in Europe Anno Domini 2007! Wait, it gets worse ...

"From the constitutional principles embodied in Magna Carta emerged the concept of the liberty of the individual citizen, a proper and permanent challenge to the feudal tyranny of England’s medieval kings, and the very origins of the common law." ... and ...

"(...) like the Declaration of Independence, it was nothing less than a public proclamation of a new political order, in this instance of negotiations conducted between the barons and King John of England* nearly eight hundred years ago."

Speaking of which, in today's England the trend is pointing in the opposite direction. EURSOC in a posting yesterday "Fighting Big Brother" detailed a discourse raging within the Left wing. Mouthpiece Al Guardian's journalist Henry Porter apparently had the misfortune to critique the way in which the current government has chipped away at liberties, and was heavily castigated!

His colleague Polly Toynbee reacted as might be expected from one thoroughly versed in the workings of the glorified victimhood of the Marxist dialectic:

"Worries about a nascent police state are, she wrote, "fashionable because it allows the middle classes to pretend to be victims, too. But it is decadence for mainly privileged people to obsess over imaginary Big Brother attacks on themselves, when others all around them are suffering badly from neglect by the state - or sometimes from real aggression by government. Indignation is
precious, not to be squandered on illusory threats, but saved for real injustices."

Tut tut ...! The erroneously aligned, liberty loving Porter may well react by speaking of "breathtaking dishonesty of her argument (...) to describe anyone who opposes Labour on these grounds as a being a right-winger" - Porter is still Leftist enough to consider such an insult - personally I shudder at the realisation that neototals like Toynbee represent today's intelligentsia, calling the shots in politics and in the corridors of power!

That we may long be neglected by the state, in the absence of which, I'd rather have the Middle Ages as a more enlightened period ... I wouldn't be surprised, if at some point in the near future we'd not all prefer the rule of John, an awful king as explained by Messrs Sellar and Yeatman in "1066 and all that, a memorable history of England" (Methuen & Co., 16th October 1930):

"When John came to the throne he lost his temper and flung himself on the floor, foaming at the mouth and biting the rushes. (...) John was so bad that the Pope decided to put the whole country under an Interdict, i.e. he gave orders that no one was to be born or die or marry (except in Church porches)."

* "There also happened in this reign the memorable Charta known as the Magna Charter (...) and was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede. By congregating there, armed to the teeth, the Barons compelled John to sign the Magna Charter, which said:

- That no one was to be put to death, save for some reason - (except the Common People).

- That everyone should be free - (except the Common People).

- That everyone should be of the same weight and measure throughout the Realm - (except the Common People).

- That the Courts should be stationary, instead of following a very tiresome medieval official known as the King's Person all over the country.

- That 'no person should be fined to his utter ruin' - (except the King's Person).

- That the Barons should not be tried except by a special jury of other Barons who would understand.

Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England and thus a Good Thing for everyone - (except the Common People).

- Filed on Articles in "The Post Democratic Preferences of the Neotots", cat. Neo Totalitarianism -