Pity US Commanders in Afghanistan

Strange, Yet Sadly True

Regular readers of this blog will know that we have taken the view that the US should not be fighting a war in Afghanistan. We have argued that such wars are neither just nor biblically sanctioned. We have also argued that the war is unwinnable, because wars do not change "hearts and minds"; Afghani culture is too deeply ingrained and sanctified by centuries of tradition to be dismissed in such a facile manner.

Nevertheless one cannot remain unmoved by the plight of American forces in that country. And we use the word "plight" deliberately. To their many challenges has now been added coping with political correctness gone mad--or, in a more sinister possibility, coping with a war where political strategists are starting to influence military tactics. Since American casualties lead to waning public support, let's make commanders responsible for any casualties. Expect morale to drop like a stone.

The Washington Post carried recently the following hard-to-believe story.

U.S. commanders in Afghanistan face tougher discipline for battlefield failures

By Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 5, 2010; A01

The U.S. military has reprimanded an unusually large number of commanders for battlefield failures in Afghanistan in recent weeks, reflecting a new push by the top brass to hold commanders responsible for major incidents in which troops are killed or wounded, said senior military officials.

The military does not release figures on disciplinary actions taken against field commanders. But officials familiar with recent investigations said letters of reprimand or other disciplinary action have been recommended for officers involved in three ambushes in which U.S. troops battled Taliban forces in remote villages in 2008 and 2009. Such administrative actions can scuttle chances for promotion and end a career if they are made part of an officer's permanent personnel file.

The investigations are a departure for the U.S. military, which until recently has been reluctant to second-guess commanders whose decisions might have played a role in the deaths of soldiers in enemy action. Disciplinary action has been more common in cases in which U.S. troops have injured or killed civilians.

OK. So you are a field commander and your command comes under fire. If you take casualties, it is increasingly likely that your career will be over. It will go down as a black mark on your performance record. This is so bizarre as to be relegated to the unbelievable.

In response to the recent reprimands, some military officials have argued that casualties are inevitable in war and that a culture of excessive investigations could make officers risk-averse.

Ya reckon?

"This is a war where the other side is trying, too," said one Army officer who commanded troops in Afghanistan and requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

As many as five battlefield commanders have received letters of reprimand in the past month or have been the subject of an investigation by a general who recommended disciplinary action. A sixth commander received a less-severe formal letter of admonishment. None of the investigations or letters of reprimand has been released publicly.

We predict that this will go down in the annals of shame for the US Army. The sad thing is that the top brass appears to be complicit to a significant degree.

The reprimands come amid growing political pressure from lawmakers who have pushed the military to assign greater accountability for incidents in which large numbers of U.S. troops are killed or wounded. The Pentagon's top leaders -- Adm. Mike Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates -- also have been quicker to dismiss senior officers, fostering a change in the overall culture. In 2009 they relieved the top commander in Afghanistan for his stewardship of the war. "The issue of holding people accountable is something Admiral Mullen watches very, very carefully," said a senior military official.

The problem is that war is always messy. Reviewing actions in hindsight with the luxury of full knowledge ex-post, and with twenty-twenty vision will always find errors and mistakes.

If you are a field commander, caught up in conflict, you will know that it will likely end up as a blot on your career if any one your soldiers are killed. Aggression will go out the window. Safety first will become the order of the day.

Here is how one "investigation" played out.

In the attack last fall in Kamdesh, in which eight U.S. soldiers were killed, senior Army officials quickly dispatched a three-star general from outside Afghanistan to investigate the battle. This was done at the request of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, officials said.
On Wednesday, the families of the soldiers killed at Kamdesh received a call from an Army casualty assistance officer. The officer read from a prepared script informing them that the investigation was completed and that members of Congress would be briefed on its findings as early as Thursday.

The script praised the bravery of the troops at the Kamdesh outpost, which was briefly overrun by the enemy. It also suggested that commanders should have focused more attention on improving the base's defenses and on analyzing intelligence reports that the enemy was planning a large-scale assault.

The final investigation recommended that the squadron commander overseeing the outpost receive a letter of reprimand. The brigade commander was given a less-severe letter of admonishment, said military officials.

Both the squadron and brigade commanders overseeing the Kamdesh outpost had been pressing to close it for months after they determined that it made no sense to keep troops in the area. But plans to close the outpost were regularly delayed because of pressure from Afghan officials, who did not want to cede territory to the Taliban, and because of other missions deemed a higher priority.

Some family members of the deceased soldiers in the Kamdesh ambush said the officers who postponed shuttering the base, know as Combat Outpost Keating, should also be held accountable. "Combat Outpost Keating was predisposed to fail and it did," said John Petro, grandfather of Spec. Stephan Mace, who was killed at Kamdesh.

So the local commanders were warning of the dangers of maintaining the outpost. Eventually it gets attacked: troops are killed. The same commanders are reprimanded in an ex-post review. Morale will disappear into a deep space Black Hole.

You've Got to Do Somthing

Praying to the Idol

Oh, no! Another calamity is coming. Climate change is now passe, deja vu. People have got over all the tingly feelings of apprehension and dread. Copenhagen was a blast, but the sceptics are now running the show. The party's over.

But, on cue Richard Branson and fellow concerned citizens have discovered another apocalyptic threat. Peak oil. The good old Guardian's headline gets the terror tingles going again: Branson warns that oil crunch is coming within five years.

Chief prophet Branson really gets our attention when he says that it is going to be worse than the credit crunch. And like all card carrying prophets, he then turns to the West's god and intercedes earnestly for its help.

Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an oil crunch within five years. . . .

"The next five years will see us face another crunch – the oil crunch. This time, we do have the chance to prepare. The challenge is to use that time well," Branson will say.

"Our message to government and businesses is clear: act," he says in a foreword to a new report on the crisis. "Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did."

Oh, goody. The gummint will save us. The prophet has prayed to the ministers of the idol. "Most glorious gummint--in the past when we have called upon you for help in our troubles, you have heard and answered. You have always delivered us from our desperate needs. Dearest lord, you have passed laws, made regulations, taxed, bestowed grants. You have always saved us. Now, we need your mercy again. Peak oil will overwhelm us. A short five years and it will be upon us. Oh, lord hear! Oh, lord, act! We beseech you, do not delay. Deliver us from our darkest enemies."

Those enemies are devious blasphemers: they serve another god. They conspire to hide the threat until it is too late.They are breeding an army in their caverns--and army which has but one purpose--to destroy our way of life.

Their call for urgent government action comes amid a wider debate on the issue and follows allegations by insiders at the International Energy Agency that the organisation had deliberately underplayed the threat of so-called "peak oil" to avoid panic on the stock markets.

Ministers have until now refused to take predictions of oil droughts seriously, preferring to side with oil companies such as BP and ExxonMobil and crude producers such as the Saudis, who insist there is nothing to worry about.

What on earth is "peak oil"? It is an artificially manufactured crisis. But it has its uses. It shows once again that the West has become a worshipper of governments while its peoples live in profound, self-willed ignorance. Ah, oil. The rumours of your death are greatly exaggerated, but they give us the willies, and we like that. And fears of your death give us a reason to evoke our god with passion, urgency, and great pride. We like that too.

The canard of peak oil compares daily world consumption with known oil reserves. Sooner or later the oil is all going to be used up. As that happens the price of oil will explode, leading to economic dislocations fearful to contemplate. Act, oh government. Act now. Save us.

The direction of the price of oil is a very useful thing. It tells us whether demand for oil is exceeding supply, or the reverse. But peak oil theories bring in another assumption: a freeze frame view, which declares that the amount of energy in the world is known, fixed, finite--and it is what we know now. So, according to this pagan world-view when the price of oil is rising, it tells us that its supply, which is fixed, is coming to an end.

Peak oil doomsaying is not new. Consider the following:

We don't just figure out how to use resources more efficiently. We discover, and create, fundamentlly different types of resources. A every stage, some doomster can do a little math and predict that the current resource will soon be depleted. And he will almost be right. In fact, people in every era of recorded history have worried about running out of whatever resource they're using at the time. England began to experience lumber shortages in the 1600's. They got so severe that in the 1700's that the island came close to being stripped of its forests. People feared a complete loss of wood. So what happened? Wood became too costly to use as fuel in most places. That encouraged innovation with other resources like coal. The English eventually switched to coal, and over time, English forests returned.

The process was hardly inevitable. It involved all manner of effort and ingenuity, usually brought on by rising scarcity, which led to rising prices. Because of the role of prices, scarcity and crativity conspire to get us to the next level, to the next resource, or the next technological breakthrough. . . .

So, after the switch to coal, did all of England rest easy and quit worrying about running out of resources? Hardly. In 1865, a prominent social scientist named W. Stanley Jevons wrote a book proving to his satisfaction that England would soon exhaust its coal, and the economy would grind to a halt. It didn't happen, and there's still plenty of coal available more than 140 years later. [Jay W. Richards, Money, Greed and God, (New York: HarperOne, 2009), p.190]

Richard Branson is channelling the ghost of W. Stanley Jevons. He will go the way of Jevons, being consigned to the dustbin of history, nothing more than an eccentric curio. Sadly, however, it is likely that his government god will endure for the foreseeable future and continue to do great damage,being dumb enough to respond to the intercessions of eccentric prophets like Branson.

Peak oil is a pseudo-threat, unless government "acts" in response to the wailings of chicken littles and makes it real. As Sheik Yamani astutely observed, "The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end, but not for a lack of oil."

And there is an additional, very important consideration. "Peak oil" dreads are always based upon known oil reserves. Peak oil is never based upon how much oil actually exists in the world. No-one knows how much oil actually exists. It is costly to find that out--very, very costly. As Thomas Sowell astutely observed, "How much of any given natural resource is know to exist depends on how much is costs to know." (Richards, p. 187) Crudely put, if the price of oil were to rise, we would soon discover more of it.

Long before oil is exhausted, superior sources of energy will have been exploited to take its place. The last thing we need is for governments to "act". But as the proverb says, never get between a fool and his folly; it would be better to hug a bear robbed of its cubs.

It's Now Fashionable to be Sceptical

Snowing on the Parade

The liberal-academic-media complex has been hastily recalibrating its stance in recent days on the issue of climate change. It now acknowledges that stupid mistakes have been made, whilst continuing to insist there is overwhelming scientific evidence of man-made global warming. We continue to ask, What evidence?

All purported evidence turns inevitably upon global temperature records which "show" rising temperatures. It is this which has the sceptical camp agreeing that the earth has been warming, whilst disputing that man-made emissions of carbon are the cause. But we now know that the temperature "evidence" has been manufactured (adjusted, is the "scientific" term). So, there ain't not "overwhelming scientific evidence" of global warming. Gradually this, too, will sink into the collective mind of the liberal-academic-media complex.

Meanwhile, Miranda Devine documents the recalibration that is now taking place daily.

Climate alarmists out in the cold

Miranda Devine
February 6, 2010

As the wheels keep falling off the climate alarmist bandwagon, it's suddenly become fashionable to be a sceptic. Out of the woodwork have crawled all sorts of fair-weather friends.

But where were they when the going was tough, when we were being hammered as Holocaust deniers, planet wreckers, in the pay of the "Big Polluters", bad parents, pariahs, equivalent to murderers? It was pure McCarthyism.

But now, even the most aggressive alarmists have gone quiet or softened their rhetoric and people who sat on the fence have morphed into wise owls.

They still think it's acceptable to mock touring British sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton's protruding eyes, a distressing symptom of his thyroid disease, in an effort to marginalise him as a lunatic, rather than address his criticisms. But, when even the British left-leaning, warmist-friendly Guardian newspaper has begun to investigate the fraud involved in "sexing up" climate change science, it's clear the collapse of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's credibility and the holes in the case for catastrophic man-made climate change can no longer be ignored.

We are witnessing an outbreak of neo-open-mindedness and face-saving from people who brooked no nuance.

The formerly alarmist British chief scientific adviser, John Beddington, has said: "I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism." Hallelujah.

Australia's Chief Scientist, Professor Penny Sackett, who just three months ago was telling us that we had only five years to stop catastrophic global warming, is similarly less gung-ho these days.

On ABC television's 7.30 Report this week she expressed concern about "a confusion" between the science and the politics of climate change.

"I think that we're seeing more and more a confusion between a political debate, a political debate that needs to happen, it's important to happen, and the discussion of the science. I feel that these two things are being confused and it worries me, actually."

Funny, proponents of the theory of catastrophic man-made climate change never expressed concern about the "confusion", aka politicisation of science, when it was running their way.

Blows to the climate alarm case keep coming, from fraudulent claims about melting glaciers, increased hurricanes and drought, dying Amazon rainforest, disappearing polar bears and the flooding of half of Holland.

The latest, most serious, blow was the revelation this week that an influential paper discounting the so-called urban heat island effect was based on vanished and perhaps fraudulent data from remote Chinese weather stations.

The 1990 paper was co-authored by the besieged director of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones and a US colleague, who are now accused of a "cover-up".

Jones, of course, and other leading scientists, have been exposed by their leaked "Climategate" emails, as political partisans who tried to suppress data, subvert freedom of information laws, and blackball journals and scientists who didn't toe the alarmist line.

Meanwhile, revelations pile up about shoddy references used to sex up the IPCC's Nobel Prize-winning Fourth Assessment Report of 2007.

Among them is the bogus claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, based on a speculative interview in a popular science magazine.

The IPCC lead author of the chapter that contained the reference, Murari Lal, told Britain's Mail on Sunday last week that he knew the glacier claim was wrong but included it to put political pressure on world leaders to cut emissions.

"We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."

Because it was in a good cause it was somehow OK for the United Nations' lead climate change body to slant science, cherry-pick data, and base claims on such flimsy references as Greenpeace and WWF propaganda, a student's master's thesis and anecdotes in Climber magazine.

This sort of ''noble cause'' corruption appears to have permeated climate change science, and set back the legitimate cause of fighting pollution. The dishonesty will have only ensured a generation of people will no longer trust environmental warnings.

One of the most significant recent revelations is how influential and embedded were environmental activists such as WWF and Greenpeace. Not only were their publications cited in the 2007 report in at last 24 instances as if they were proper peer-reviewed science, but their staffers were in familiar communication with East Anglia climate researchers, and were regarded apparently as "honest brokers" rather than political lobbyists.

In one email, Alan Markham from WWF writes to climate scientists urging a paper on climate change in Australia be "beefed up".

WWF "would like to see the section on a variability and extreme events beefed up, if possible," Markham wrote in 1999. "I guess the bottom line is that if they are going to go with a big public splash on this they need something that will get good support from CSIRO scientists."

In another email to East Anglia scientists, WWF's Stephan Singer offers "a few thousand euros" to write a paper about the economic cost of Europe's 2003 heatwave.

They got away with it for a very long time.

Today, the bankruptcy of the climate alarm cause is demonstrated by the fact its highest profile champion is Osama bin Laden. ''Boycott [America] to save yourselves … and your children from climate change", he said in an audiotape released last week.

Rising in the opinion polls, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, has found himself on the right side of history. He was even able this week to utter the former heresy that "carbon dioxide is an essential trace gas" and "these so-called nasty big polluters are the people who keep the lights on''.

But in the game of musical chairs that politics often is Kevin Rudd has found himself with no place to sit.

The Twilight Years, Part III

Condemned to Implacable Cycles of History

In this series of posts we are interacting with Richard Overy's history of the Inter-War years in Britain. [Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009)]. It was a period of profound social pessimism. It was widely believed that civilization was coming to an end. "The end of the world as we know it", was openly discusssed in newspapers and on radio. Studying this British Inter-War phenomenon is of particular interest and relevance in our day because it has once again become fashionable to prophesy that the end of civilization is nigh.

Of course the doomsayers in the thirties--which was just about everybody--were eventually proved wrong by the passage of time. But not before a great deal of damage was done--damage that is still with us to this day.

In tracing the major causes and pretexts for this pessimism during the Inter-War period, Overy points firstly to a new historical narrative. Until the time of World War One, the dominant narrative had been that history was moving forward and upward; progress was inevitable. However, after the War, new philosophies or theories of history emerged—well, actually they were old theories dusted off and reissued.

In particular ancient Greek and Eastern notions of human history being endlessly cyclical, repetitive, non-teleological, going nowhere once again took centre stage.
Specifically, it was advanced that no civilisation--however great or magnificent--could endure, but that in the past each had gone through a cycle of emergence, dominance, and then inevitable decline. These new (revived) theories of history changed the dominant eschatological outlook of Britain from an anticipated bright future to one of inevitable decline.

Historian Arnold Toynbee described the “bright outlook” that held sway before the War.

It was taken for granted by almost all Westerners . . . that the Western civilization had come to stay. Pre-1914 Westerners, and pre-1914 British Westerners above all, felt that they were not as other men were or ever had been. . . Other civilizations had risen and fallen, had come and gone, but Westerners did not doubt that their own civilization was invulnerable. (Cited by Overy, p.11.)

This dominant consensus was shattered by the War. The popular press, reflecting the national mood, in the twenties began to promote remorselessly the imminent threat of the collapse and extinction of Western civilization. This view was endorsed repeatedly by intellectuals, authors, playwrights, and philosophers.

Oswald Spengler, drawing upon Nietzsche, in The Decline of the West put forward the idea of history moving in cyclical patterns. His book had an enormous appeal in post-War Germany and was of significant influence in Britain. The argument was grounded in a particular variant of the naturalistic fallacy: that human history is necessarily bound to an organic pattern where living beings are born, grow to strength, then weakness, then death. The fatalistic optimism of the pre-War period was now being supplanted by a fatalistic pessimism in the post-War period. Declension was inevitable.

Spengler's views were taken up and made the dominant narrative of the period by Oxford historian, Arnold Toynbee, who spent all his professional academic career putting empirical historical flesh upon Spengler's idealist bones, attempted to trace out the endlessly repeated cyclical patterns in past civilisations. The pattern was: creative expansion, mechanistic consolidation, internal decay prompted by cultural stagnation, social division, and a final universal Caesarism. (Overy, p.40) Readers of Toynbee rapidly concluded that they were living in the days of stagnation, division, and were about to enter a time of state absolutist barbarity. The rise of Stalin and Hitler put empirical meat into this ideological lunchbox.

A growing belief in an inevitable, historically determined, circular decline of Western civilisation as part of a universal human pattern became the dominant narrative of history amongst intellectuals and the media in Britain in the twenties and thirties, which provided academic credence to the prediction of the coming collapse. The absolutism of inevitable progress was replaced by the absolutism of inevitable non-directional historical cycles. All Unbelieving thought tends to whipsaw between these two polar opposites.

The Christian view of history is profoundly different. Firstly, the final determined certainty of human history and of eschatology is indescribably and unimaginably good for His people because all human history (past, present, and future) now belongs to Christ. Secondly, as human history now moves ineluctably towards this glorious triumph and fulfilment there are many mini-risings and fallings. These are not organic, nor do they reflect an ultimate fate-driven cyclicality in history. Rather they reflect the blessings and curses of the covenantal structure that runs through all human history, and through which the Lord brings His Kingdom to pass. If a people honour, serve, and obey God they are blessed; if they turn away, they fall under the curses of the covenant.

But ultimately faithful love, service and obedience will be the norm universally, for such things depend not upon man who runs, nor upon he who wills, but upon the King of all kings Who is seated at the right hand of God. All enemies are gradually and ineluctably being placed under His feet.

Humanist man—that is the devotee of the West's current established religion—will continue to be racked by cycles of ridiculous vaunting optimism followed by decades of deep despair. As his most gilded idols fail and are crushed, dark demons emerge to taunt and to haunt. The two Inter-War decades in Britain provide a classic example of this religious syndrome. For puny man does not have Atlas-like shoulders to bear up the world. When his dreams of false greatness are dashed, nightmares of dark demons grow.

Dutch Hate Speech Trial To Proceed

Valuable Publicity

Al Jazeera is reporting that Geert Wilders is going to be tried for hate speech in Holland. This, we believe, will be a great boon for conservative causes in Holland, plus for the re-assertion of free speech rights in that country.

The Dutch tend to be a practical, live-and-let live people and are unlikely to favour attempts to suppress a politician who is speaking up out of conviction and genuinely held belief. Expect a significant electoral pick-up for Wilders.

UPDATED ON:
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
22:13 Mecca time, 19:13 GMT
News Europe

Dutch hate speech trial to proceed


A Dutch court has agreed to hear a case against a far-right politician accused of inciting racial hatred and discrimination against Muslims.

The court overruled objections by Geert Wilders that it did not have jurisdiction to hear his case, in which he cited parliamentary privilege.

"Parliamentary immunity does not extend to what a public representative says or writes outside of parliamentary gatherings," Jan Moors, judge at the Amsterdam court, said on Wednesday.

The 46-year-old politician faces five counts of religious insult and anti-Muslim incitement for describing Islam as a fascist religion and calling for the banning of the Quran, which he has likened to Hitler's Mein Kampf.

Freedom of speech

Wilders, who said he was "angry and disappointed" with Wednesday's ruling, has defended his remarks were within the limits of freedom of speech.

"I know that I spoke the truth and didn't say anything punishable," he said, vowing to "fight like a lion".


The politician's 17-minute film, Fitna, was called "offensively anti-Islamic" by UN chief Ban Ki-moon and its screening in The Netherlands in 2008 prompted protests in much of the Muslim world.

Prosecutors had initially declined to charge Wilders, citing freedom of speech in dismissing dozens of complaints.

But an appeals court last January ordered prosecutors to put the MP on trial, saying politicians could not make "statements which create hate and grief".

Wilders has become one of the Netherland's leading politicians, with his Freedom Party emerging last year as the country's second-largest in the European Parliament.

Recent polls have also indicated the party also stands a chance to become the largest in the Dutch Parliament in national elections due in May 2011.

Education Reforms, Aussie Style

Does CER Include Julia Gillard?

Miranda Devine, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, reveals that the Labour Government is hard nosed and gung ho when it comes to its new initiative to rank teachers and schools, and to publish the results on a national website.

The Australians have muscled up. Not only does the government think it is a good idea that schools be graded and ranked nationally, it has set up a website where all the information can be available to parents. Guess what? Within an hour of the site going live, it was crashed by traffic volumes. Parents want to know. They want to know not only how their own children are performing, but how their school is ranking alongside others.

Julia Gillard, Minister of Education has told the Aussie teacher unions to go take a running jump.
She has got a bunch of academics and educational experts behind her, backing her up. She actively encourages parents to place pressure on teachers and schools that are shown up at not performing. Contrast this with limp wristed New Zealand, where the Key Government insists that this is the last thing it wants to have happen with its standards testing reform.

The most valuable information standardised testing can provide is the difference good teaching makes, allowing the lucky child with a good teacher to improve at a greater rate than her contemporaries stuck with duds or mediocrities.

This kind of information is, of course, anathema to a union culture hell-bent on preserving a false "see-no-evil" egalitarianism among its membership, where longevity of service is rewarded over excellence, ingenuity is crushed, and children, especially those without involved, competent parents, suffer.

To her great credit, Gillard, the federal Education Minister, is determined to empower parents and policy makers with as much information as possible about the performance of schools and teachers. Her MySchool website, launched last week, includes the results of national numeracy and literacy tests for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 in each of the nation's almost 10,000 schools.

''We would expect parents to have robust conversations with teachers and principals,'' she said. ''This should put pressure on people."

As in New Zealand, the teacher unions have been resisting the Australian "testing and telling" reform.

The Australian Education Union, purportedly representing 180,000 teachers, under its militant federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, has been fighting the website on every front, and threatens to boycott supervision of this year's tests. Gillard, admirably, is standing her ground. "If they don't reconsider, we will get it done by whatever means it takes.''

The war is on, and Gillard has the bottle to wage it.

The war against teachers' unions is on - only this time it is not from their traditional conservative enemies, who have proved spectacularly unsuccessful over the past decade in breaking union control of education.

A new resolve from the unions' old allies and enablers, the Australian Labor Party, and in the US the Democrats, unable any longer to ignore the disastrous effect of progressive policies of the past 40 years, looks like finally breaking their destructive dominance.

At last we can prove that demography is not destiny

What are the lessons for New Zealand? Clearly, you need a government that is in no doubt that it will face a fight with teacher unions. "Softly, softly" simply will not work. It is a fight that has to be deliberately picked, fought comprehensively, and won. There has to be no quarter at the end of the day, for the unions will not give any. Gillard and the Labour Government is clearly way ahead of our government on this front.

However, to be fair, Gillard has three key advantages. Firstly, she is a personal zealot for the cause. Passion is compelling. Thus, she is not prepared to be mealy mouthed. Everyone knows that testing will end up with league tables in one way, shape or form. Gillard's passion and commitment has made her stance far more transparent and honest and upfront. Our government's stance has been confused and unconvincing. It has argued that standards will not lead to official league tables. It has sounded naive at best, disingenuous and untrustworthy at worst. What is should be saying is, "Of course it will lead to league tables, but to ensure that the information contained is accurate and fair, we will run them on a website that every parent and teacher can access."

Second, Gillard is a Labour politician. The upshot is that the Aussie teacher unions have few political allies. Apart from the Greens, there are no natural political parties to stand up and argue publicly for them. In our case there is little that can be done about that. Labour and the teacher unions on both side so the ditch have been "living together" for decades. Realpolitik says that the government here has to expect NZ Labour to trumpet the teacher union's arguments and cause in Parliament and in the media. Strategies to achieve an effective division of the two have to be executed.

Thirdly, Gillard has another card not held by the New Zealand government. The government education system in Australia has never held the effective total monopoly on schools and schooling that applies in New Zealand. Consequently, the teacher unions in Australia do not have the controlling grip over the state schools that applies in New Zealand. Successive Australian governments have encouraged private schools, thereby preventing an outright monopoly of government schools. This, in turn, has led to weaker teacher unions there than here.

Recent surveys in New Zealand show that the vast majority of parents approve of the national standards reform--at least in principle. But a Weekend Herald survey, conducted by Nielsen implies that the support is soft.

But almost half - 48.4 per cent - of those surveyed were concerned that national standards would lead to schools focusing on publicly reportable subjects, to the detriment of the wider curriculum.

The survey also found that a majority - 56.1 per cent - believed that many of the subjects not covered by national standards, including social sciences, art and technology, were as important as or more important than reading, writing and maths.

This is how the teacher unions will play the propaganda campaign. National testing, they are going to argue, undermines true, well balanced education. Therefore, national testing is bad for your child. The unions are standing up for your best interests.

Frances Nelson said that while learning the three Rs was "critical" for children, existing standards guidelines drew from a wider range of subjects.

"Parents are concerned," the union leader said. "They want more for their kids than reading and writing."

To succeed, John Key and his government needs to meet this challenge head on: if kids don't learn how to read, write, and computate they will end up locked in a mental dungeon, unable to learn anything else. It is precisely because other subjects are so important that reading and writing and maths are essential. The proposition is almost self-evident, so the Government has an opportunity to make the case powerfully. But sleep walking won't do it. Nor will leaning on polls which say that 75% of people support the National Standards reform.

Maybe the government could borrow Julia Gillard for a couple of months.

Nasty

Bosom Bombers

We don't know much about explosives but if the following report is accurate, then suicide bombing in airplanes is going to get much more difficult to counteract. Let's hope that the relevant authorities are preparing rapidly to counter this kind of threat.

It's pretty chilling that only five ounces of PETN, if exploded properly, would tear a hole in an aircraft.

Bosom bombers: Women have explosive breast implants
Authorities alarmed by possibility of surgically placed explosives
Posted: February 01, 2010
© 2010 WorldNetDaily

LONDON – Agents for Britain's MI5 intelligence service have discovered that Muslim doctors trained at some of Britain's leading teaching hospitals have returned to their own countries to fit surgical implants filled with explosives, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

Women suicide bombers recruited by al-Qaida are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery. The lethal explosives – usually PETN (pentaerythritol Tetrabitrate) – are inserted during the operation inside the plastic shapes. The breast is then sewn up.

Similar surgery has been performed on male suicide bombers. In their cases, the explosives are inserted in the appendix area or in a buttock. Both are parts of the body that diabetics use to inject themselves with their prescribed drugs.

The discovery of these methods was made after the London-educated Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab came close to blowing up an airliner on Christmas Day with explosives he had stuffed inside his underpants.

Hours after he had failed, GCHQ – Britain's worldwide eavesdropping "spy in the sky" agency – began to pick up "chatter" emanating from Pakistan and Yemen that alerted MI5 to the creation of the lethal implants.

A hand-picked team was appointed by Jonathan Evans, the head of MI5, to investigate the threat. He described it as "one that can circumvent our defense." Top surgeons who work in the National Health Service confirmed the feasibility of the explosive implants.

In a report to Evans, one said:

"Properly inserted the implant would be virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines. You would need to subject a suspect to a sophisticated X-ray. Given that the explosive would be inserted in a sealed plastic sachet, and would be a small amount, would make it all the more impossible to spot it with the usual body scanner."

Explosive experts at Britain's Porton Down biological and chemical warfare research center told MI5 that a sachet containing as little as five ounces of PETN when activated would blow "a considerable hole" in an airline's skin which would guarantee it would crash.

Pro-Choice is Anything But

Tebow, the Super Bowl and Hypocrisy Exposed

The following piece has been written by Sally Jenkins, a pro-choice, pro-abortion feminist, who is a staff writer for the Washington Post. However, she has been offended by the outpouring of criticism against CBS for accepting a Focus on the Family ad during the upcoming Super Bowl which celebrates life, the family, and implicit Christian beliefs. (We wish we could write as well as Jenkins.)

Tebow's Super Bowl ad isn't intolerant; its critics are

By Sally Jenkins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 2, 2010

I'll spit this out quick, before the armies of feminism try to gag me and strap electrodes to my forehead: Tim Tebow is one of the better things to happen to young women in some time. I realize this stance won't endear me to the "Dwindling Organizations of Ladies in Lockstep," otherwise known as DOLL, but I'll try to pick up the shards of my shattered feminist credentials and go on.

As statements at Super Bowls go, I prefer the idea of Tebow's pro-life ad to, say, Jim McMahon dropping his pants, as the former Chicago Bears quarterback once did in response to a question. We're always harping on athletes to be more responsible and engaged in the issues of their day, and less concerned with just cashing checks. It therefore seems more than a little hypocritical to insist on it only if it means criticizing sneaker companies, and to stifle them when they take a stance that might make us uncomfortable.

I'm pro-choice, and Tebow clearly is not. But based on what I've heard in the past week, I'll take his side against the group-think, elitism and condescension of the "National Organization of Fewer and Fewer Women All The Time." For one thing, Tebow seems smarter than they do.

Tebow's 30-second ad hasn't even run yet, but it already has provoked "The National Organization for Women Who Only Think Like Us" to reveal something important about themselves: They aren't actually "pro-choice" so much as they are pro-abortion. Pam Tebow has a genuine pro-choice story to tell. She got pregnant in 1987, post-Roe v. Wade, and while on a Christian mission in the Philippines, she contracted a tropical ailment. Doctors advised her the pregnancy could be dangerous, but she exercised her freedom of choice and now, 20-some years later, the outcome of that choice is her beauteous Heisman Trophy winner son, a chaste, proselytizing evangelical.

Pam Tebow and her son feel good enough about that choice to want to tell people about it. Only, NOW says they shouldn't be allowed to. Apparently NOW feels this commercial is an inappropriate message for America to see for 30 seconds, but women in bikinis selling beer is the right one. I would like to meet the genius at NOW who made that decision. On second thought, no, I wouldn't.

There's not enough space in the sports pages for the serious weighing of values that constitutes this debate, but surely everyone in both camps, pro-choice or pro-life, wishes the "need" for abortions wasn't so great. Which is precisely why NOW is so wrong to take aim at Tebow's ad.

Here's what we do need a lot more of: Tebows. Collegians who are selfless enough to choose not to spend summers poolside, but travel to impoverished countries to dispense medical care to children, as Tebow has every summer of his career. Athletes who believe in something other than themselves, and are willing to put their backbone where their mouth is. Celebrities who are self-possessed and self-controlled enough to use their wattage to advertise commitment over decadence.

You know what we really need more of? Famous guys who aren't embarrassed to practice sexual restraint, and to say it out loud. If we had more of those, women might have fewer abortions. See, the best way to deal with unwanted pregnancy is to not get the sperm in the egg and the egg implanted to begin with, and that is an issue for men, too -- and they should step up to that.

"Are you saving yourself for marriage?" Tebow was asked last summer during an SEC media day.

"Yes, I am," he replied.

The room fell into a hush, followed by tittering: The best college football player in the country had just announced he was a virgin. As Tebow gauged the reaction from the reporters in the room, he burst out laughing. They were a lot more embarrassed than he was.

"I think y'all are stunned right now!" he said. "You can't even ask a question!"

That's how far we've come from any kind of sane viewpoint about star athletes and sex. Promiscuity is so the norm that if a stud isn't shagging everything in sight, we feel faintly ashamed for him.

Obviously Tebow can make people uncomfortable, whether it's for advertising his chastity, or for wearing his faith on his face via biblical citations painted in his eye-black. Hebrews 12:12, his cheekbones read during the Florida State game: "Therefore strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees." His critics find this intrusive, and say the Super Bowl is no place for an argument of this nature. "Pull the ad," NOW President Terry O'Neill said. "Let's focus on the game."

Trouble is, you can't focus on the game without focusing on the individuals who play it -- and that is the genius of Tebow's ad. The Super Bowl is not some reality-free escape zone. Tebow himself is an inescapable fact: Abortion doesn't just involve serious issues of life, but of potential lives, Heisman trophy winners, scientists, doctors, artists, inventors, Little Leaguers -- who would never come to be if their birth mothers had not wrestled with the stakes and chosen to carry those lives to term. And their stories are every bit as real and valid as the stories preferred by NOW.

Let me be clear again: I couldn't disagree with Tebow more. It's my own belief that the state has no business putting its hand under skirts. But I don't care that we differ. Some people will care that the ad is paid for by Focus on the Family, a group whose former spokesman, James Dobson, says loathsome things about gays. Some will care that Tebow is a creationist. Some will care that CBS has rejected a gay dating service ad. None of this is the point. CBS owns its broadcast and can run whatever advertising it wants, and Tebow has a right to express his beliefs publicly. Just as I have the right to reject or accept them after listening -- or think a little more deeply about the issues. If the pro-choice stance is so precarious that a story about someone who chose to carry a risky pregnancy to term undermines it, then CBS is not the problem.

Tebow's ad, by the way, never mentions abortion; like the player himself, it's apparently soft-spoken. It simply has the theme "Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life." This is what NOW has labelled "extraordinarily offensive and demeaning." But if there is any demeaning here, it's coming from NOW, via the suggestion that these aren't real questions, and that we as a Super Bowl audience are too stupid or too disinterested to handle them on game day.

Statist Education's Royal Rumble

Testing Times

Over the past week we have been subjected to the unedifying spectacle of a Prime Minister engaged in political confrontation. This is not what we have come to expect. We find ourselves confused and bemused.

John Key has taken to the hustings (well, a press conference), flanked by his Education Minister to reassure parents that he is committed and resolute about introducing standards testing for reading, writing and arithmetic into government run primary schools. It turns out that government owned and operated schools don't like this idea--well, at least that's what we are told.

We are surprised that the Prime Minister has the mettle to front up. The cynical amongst us suspect he won't last the distance. The reason is that the government owned and operated schools have long been controlled by teacher and principal unions. Simple rubes may think that schools should be focused upon their precious charges--their pupils. But sadly, the government school system has for decades now, existed primarily for the interests and sinecures of teachers.

This, of course, is not surprising. It had to be this way. It would be this way in any other economic or social activity. The government education system is like no other enterprise or activity in the country insofar as it operates under a state run, state funded, compulsory monopoly. If, for example, the airline industry or any other activity were similarly structured and operated it would rapidly likewise devolve to the control of employee unions. Were the government to decree that airline travel was compulsory and that everyone were compelled to fly on airplanes owned by the State at least five times per year; and if the government used tax money to fund both its own airlines and pay fees of the compelled travellers so that they travelled "free", within two years the entire state owned and operated airline system would be controlled by airline unions. Not influenced by unions--controlled by them. The airline unions would have standover control of their employers, the government, and the public.

The same would be true in any other industry. In every monopoly control passes from the consumer to the enterprise operators. It becomes "my way, or the highway"; "take it or leave it". And there is no monopoly more tightly protected and enforced than the government owned and operated education system. The government is compelled to fund it; clients are required by law to use it. Therefore, union control of the government education system in New Zealand was always inevitable. Neither will it change whilst the current galactically stupid monopoly endures.

We were reminded of this hard reality yesterday by Colin Espiner. He has argued that the government is foolish to attempt a major change in the government owned and operated education monopoly without sign off and consent by the education unions.

. . . you can't bulldoze your way through a sector as highly unionised as teaching without taking the unions with you. . . . . Far better to take the union with him than try to bash it into submission.

Quite correctly (although expressed sotto voce) he implies that the government is not the master here, but the servant. Well, duh! Of course it is.

We believe that the only way Key can succeed under the present arrangements is to persuade the unions that it is in their best interests to support the policy. One way to deal with standover tactics is to buy people off--to pay the price. It works with Maori. Pay people off and they stop complaining. Offer to increase the unionists wages because of the extra "hurt and humiliation" of needing to measure how their precious charges are doing in literacy and numeracy and the opposition will fade as quickly as Bangladesh batsmen.

Espiner also reminds us of a little history. No government in recent decades has won a confrontation with the teacher unions in the state education system.

The history of the National Party in particular is littered with the corpses of education ministers who thought they could prevail - from Merv Wellington's ridiculous idea of making all school children salute the flag each morning to Wyatt Creech's opposition to pay parity for primary teachers, to Lockwood Smith's plan to bulk-fund secondary school teachers' salaries.

Smith's dream in particular should provide a salutary lesson to Key and Education Minister Anne Tolley as they declare war on the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), the primary teachers' union.

Like national standards, bulk funding was (in the opinion of the National Party) for the good of the country. It would lead to higher standards, more accountability, and more freedom of choice for schools in the way their allocated their staffing. Students would be the winners.

Except the unions didn't see it that way. Indeed, they were implacably opposed. Cue strikes, marches, communities divided, and angry parents and students. The row severely eroded relations between the education sector and the National Party - indeed the divisions have taken 15 years to (partly) heal.

Bulk funding was a great concept: it failed because the actual controllers of the system did not want it since it did not serve their vested interests. Interestingly, the Labour Government tossed bulk funding out, declaring how wicked and evil a policy it was--only to introduce and employ bulk funding in the public health system--at the very same time--where apparently it was not wicked at all.

They could get away with it in the state run health system, but not in the state run education system because the unions in the former do not control the government health system. And why not? Because the government health system is not a state enforced monopoly and the law does not force people to use the public system. Therefore union control has not been able to be achieved.

What is disappointing in all of this is the apparent naivety of the Prime Minister. He has stated many times that the introduction of measurement to discover the progress of each pupil in basic reading, writing and numeracy skills was the most important policy initiative of his government. But he apparently has failed to understand that the government does not control the state run education system.

So, there are three options. Either Key will fulminate and breathe fire and brimstone, but control will remain firmly in the hands of the teacher unions and the national standards will die an ignominious (albeit quietly shelved) death. Or, Key can face reality, and realise that he needs to get the approval of those who really control the government education system. He will then move to pay them off if they will stop their standover tactics. Or, he can decide that this is a fight the country absolutely needs to have and that he is going to win it, in which case he has to break the control of the education unions--which requires breaking their monopoly stranglehold over education.

In order to do this he would need to play chicken with the unions and with schools. He could threatened to remove the monopoly of government education if the teacher unions fail to co-operate in good faith. Needless to say we do not think he will take this route because we are convinced that Key wants to be seen as a nice guy and does not like confrontation. We also think is he naive about the monopolistic attributes of the government education system.

However, it would have been extremely easy to bring the unions to heel. Firstly, remind all government run primary schools that they are obligated to apply the National Standards programme.

Secondly, require a formal commitment to carry out the policy in good faith from each Board of Trustees, school Principal, and union representative in each primary school.

Third, where a school failed to commit to carrying out the policy the government would provide to all parents in that school an education voucher to the value of 75% of the annual cost of educating a child in the state monopoly system, to be redeemed at any registered private school of their choice. That's all. Nothing more. Effectively this would put parents back in control of their local (non-complying) school--as consumers.

It would be a standover threat in reverse which would raise the prospect of breaking the state education monopoly. It would almost certainly eventually bring the teacher unions into compliance--but even then it would be a bruising and bloody battle, where the government would have to stand publicly for parents' rights as opposed to teacher union control. We doubt that the Prime Minister has the stomach for the fight--even were he to understand the issues and political realities of the state education monopoly--which we suspect he does not.

Letter From America

The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama

By Mortimer B. Zuckerman

January 21, 2010

(This article was first published in USNews & World Report, which in itself is significant).


The air is seeping out of the Obama balloon. He has fallen to below 50 percent in the poll approval ratings, a decline punctuated by his party's shocking loss in the Massachusetts special election.

Why?

Barack Obama was undoubtedly sincere in what he promised, even if his promises were within the normal range of political exaggeration. The first trouble is that his gift for inspiration aroused expectations, stoked to unprecedented heights by his own staff, that he would solve the climate crisis on Monday, the jobs crisis on Tuesday, the financial crisis on Wednesday, the education crisis on Thursday, Afghanistan on Friday, Iraq on Saturday, and rest on Sunday. His oratorical skills were highlighted by the contrast with President Bush, who mangled words so much that his incoherence became, as Tina Brown wrote, "a metaphor for incompetence." Expectations were spurred, too, by Obama's recognition that Americans yearned for a new kind of politics, a rejection, as he put it, of "politics as usual."

Perhaps the inevitable outcome was disappointment—and on this Obama has not disappointed. Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave three times as many interviews as George W. Bush, four times as many prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton, and more interviews than both combined: 93 for Obama and 61 for his two immediate predecessors. He appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same morning, followed the next day by David Letterman, the first-ever presidential appearance on a nighttime comedy show. In another week, he squeezed in addresses to the U.S. Climate Change Summit, the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and a variety of press conferences.

His promiscuity on TV has made him seem as if he is still a candidate instead of president and commander in chief. He—and his advisers—have failed to appreciate that national TV speeches are best reserved for those moments when the country faces a major crisis or a war. Now he faces the iron law of diminishing novelty.

Despite this apparent accessibility, Obama's reliance on a teleprompter for flawless delivery made for boring and unemotional TV, compounding his cerebral and unemotional style. He has seemed not close but distant, not engaged but detached. Is it any wonder that the mystique of his presidency has eroded so that fewer people have listened to each successive foray? The columnist Richard Cohen wryly observed that he won the Pulitzer Prize for being the only syndicated columnist who did not have an exclusive interview with the president.

Poor results. But Obama's problems are more than a question of style. There is doubt aroused on substance. He sets deadlines and then lets too many pass. He announces a strategic review of Afghanistan, describing it as "a war of necessity," only to become less sure to the point that he didn't even seem committed to the policy that he finally announced. As for changing politics in Washington, he assigned the drafting of central legislative programs not to cabinet departments or White House staff but to the Democratic congressional leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the very people so mistrusted by the public. Who could be surprised that the critical bills—the stimulus program and healthcare—degenerated under a welter of pork and earmarks that had so outraged the American public in the past?

Pelosi benefited from $54 million to relocate a Bay Area wine train, not to speak of a secret deal with the drug industry lobby to preclude negotiations on Medicaid drug prices and exclude drug imports from Canada, concessions that had previously been strongly rejected by Obama. Reid favored the gambling industry by arranging an earmark for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas high-speed monorail, even though it won't be built for years. Some components of the stimulus did help soften the recession, yet only roughly a third of the $787 billion stimulus has been spent, and too much was spent on programs supported by liberal Democrats, which explains why so much of the stimulus money went toward education, health, energy conservation, and other activities, mostly worthy but not geared to achieving recovery and getting people back to work.

Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and healthcare plans were voted on so quickly that the lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama's chief of staff essentially asserting that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two Band-Aids and an aspirin.

Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country's anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to "boil the ocean" and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons ... and the beat goes on.

This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn't seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama's lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits.

Delayed stimulus. It is not as if the limited stimulus program has done the job either, since unemployment rates soared over 10 percent (compared with the 8 percent ceiling that was promised). Shelby Steele asked a good question in the Wall Street Journal: "Where is the economic logic behind a stimu­lus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years?" Yes, we might have just escaped a depression, but as the Econo­mist magazine observes, voters will not thank the president for averting a depression that did not come but are "more likely to blame him for the recession that did." On top of all this, and not all Obama's fault, a financial crisis usually produces weak recoveries in jobs, so a good number of Americans are likely to remain furious at the spectacle of the financial world doing well while so many ordinary folks lose their jobs and their savings. This anger will not subside while households see net worth slump to where it was 20 years ago and debt reach close to record highs at about 130 percent of disposable income, and while the residential real estate crisis continues unabated and the official jobless rate doesn't come close to reflecting the true extent of unemployment and ... and ... and ....

The White House might have at least demonstrated that it cares about fiscal restraint and independence from the leadership in Congress, but consistently Obama has failed to veto spending while centralizing power. A majority of Americans think it a mistake at this time of economic distress to embark on a costly healthcare program. As it was, the program's apparently stalled trip through Congress turned out to be another fiasco of political corruption, with millions of dollars allocated to buy votes, such as those of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. Anger with that process and the bill it produced helped fuel the stunning election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

The result is a widespread concern that progressive taxation to pay for the "nanny state" will snuff out future opportunities that Americans believe they deserve for themselves and their children. Obama misjudged the public's appetite for taxpayer-funded solutions; most people believe all the government does is waste money. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 23 percent said they "trusted the government just about always or most of the time"—the smallest proportion in 12 years, and the all-important independent swing voters who decide elections now favor Republicans by 52 percent, up from 30 percent.

Unfortunately, there is not much solace in international affairs either, where, again, expectations were so pumped up. America's image is better, no doubt, but uncertainty and procrastination prevail. One major international political leader recently put it well: "Not only does the leadership of this region not think that Obama is strong enough to confront his enemies; they aren't sure he is strong enough to support his friends." The administration seems "hopelessly naive," according to one Arab foreign minister, and unable to face the full truth about Islamic terrorism. The public frustration over the administration's mismanagement of the latest jihadist attempt to blow up a plane with all its innocent travelers (on Christmas Day) was captured in the New York Daily News headline "Mr. President, it's time to get a grip!"

The consequence is that there isn't a single critical problem on which the president has a positive public rating. Only a minority of Americans now believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. Nor can he any longer take refuge in the rejoinder that "we inherited a terrible situation." Or blame it on fat-cat bankers and insurance companies. Blaming others, including Bush, for the country's predicament is less and less persuasive. "At some point you own your presidency," wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. "At some point the American people tell you it's yours."

More worrying for the administration is that while Obama gets the approval of 76 percent of non-whites, his approval among whites is down to 41 percent, according to Gallup. This is a huge change that literally puts the Democratic control of Congress at risk. The Republicans have hardly been stellar either, but there is now a renewed openness in the country to hear what they have to say. Obama's political realignment of America is over. We no longer believe that he will "change the world" and "transform the country."

This brings to mind why an adviser to President Roosevelt in the 1930s, Bernard Baruch, told electors to vote for the person who promised them less. In this way, he said, "you would be less disappointed." There is still time for Obama to change and turn things around. But the first year is the critical year, one in which the public defines the president, and it has to be said that broad swaths of the country are deeply disappointed.

NIWA's Great Shrug

It's Gone Missing--Again.

Our official public tax payer funded climate research institute, NIWA has had to acknowledge under a Freedom of Information request that its adjusted historical temperature data series for New Zealand is a hopeless, unreconstructable, unrecoverable mess.

On February 1, 2010 the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) put out a press release in which it reported that NIWA has admitted that it not longer has data or records which would document and justify its adjustments to raw data. Our readers will recall that NIWA, along with its confabulators at NASA and the CRU, had admitted applying what is now known as the Renwick Coefficient to the raw long term temperature data in New Zealand. (The Renwick Coefficient is named after its public defender, Dr James Renwick, NIWA's spokesman for climate change. The Renwick Coefficient is highly technical, but in laymen's terms it is a mysterious multiplying factor which effectively lowers older temperature readings and adjusts more recent data upwards.) The application of the Renwick Coefficient to the raw data "proved" that over the past one hundred years, average temperatures in New Zealand had risen.

The NZCSC made a formal request under the Official Information Act for

copies of “the original worksheets and/or computer records used for the calculations”. On 29 January, NIWA responded that they no longer held any internal records, and merely referred to the scientific literature.

NZCSC offered the following commentary on this eloquent "scientific" shrug.

NIWA’s website carries the raw data collected from representative temperature stations, which disclose no measurable change in average temperature over a period of 150 years. But elsewhere on the same website, NIWA displays a graph of the same 150-year period showing a sharp warming trend. The difference between these two official records is a series of undisclosed NIWA-created ‘adjustments’.
“Late last year our coalition published a paper entitled ‘Are We Feeling Warmer Yet?’ and asked NIWA to disclose the schedule detailing the dates and reasons for the adjustments. The expressed purpose of NZCSC was to replicate the calculations, in the best traditions of peer-reviewed science.

When NIWA did not respond, Hon Rodney Hide asked Oral and Written Questions in Parliament, and attended a meeting with NIWA scientists. All to no avail, and the schedule of adjustments remained a secret. We now know why NIWA was being so evasive - the requested schedule did not exist.

So, now we know that the "official" temperature record for New Zealand is unreliable and cannot be used in any scientific analysis. This is because the conditions under which it has been produced are not repeatable. As even junior scientists know, repeatability is a core sine qua non for scientific research and analysis.

Where to from here? The NZCSC makes the following recommendation:

The only inference that can be drawn from this is that NIWA has casually altered its temperature series from time to time, without ever taking the trouble to maintain a continuous record. The result is that the official temperature record has been adjusted on unknown dates for unknown reasons, so that its probative value is little above that of guesswork. In such a case, the only appropriate action would be reversion to the raw data record, perhaps accompanied by a statement of any known issues,” said Terry Dunleavy, secretary of NZCSC.

We hope that Rodney Hide will continue to ask questions in the House seeking to get to the bottom of how such careless procedures and sloppy record keeping could have become insinuated into the procedures of an official science institute.

We also believe that the time has come when every pronouncement by any scientist or commentator on long term temperature trends and data in New Zealand must no longer be taken at face value. Each pronouncement needs to be challenged with the simple question, How do you know? The key thing is whether the protagonist's data set is raw or adjusted. If the latter, it must be discounted and discredited as being merely speculative guesswork, being based upon unaudited, unchecked, unverifiable manufactured data.

Banishing the Neo-Platonists, Part II

More From Sayers on the Holiness of Work

The official Church wastes time and energy, and moreover, commits sacrilege, in demanding that secular workers should neglect their proper vocation in order to do Christian work – by which She means ecclesiastical work. The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is church embroidery, or sewage farming. As Jacques Maritain says: “If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose.” He is right. And let the Church remember that the beauty of the work will be judged by its own, and not by ecclesiastical standards.

Let me give you an illustration of what I mean. When my play The Zeal of Thy House was produced in London, a dear old pious lady was much struck by the beauty of the four great archangels who stood throughout the play in their heavy, gold robes, eleven feet high from wingtip to sandaltip. She asked with great innocence whether I selected the actors who played the angels “for the excellence of their moral character.”

I replied that the angels were selected to begin with, not by me but by the producer, who had the technical qualifications for selecting suitable actors – for that was part of his vocation. And that he selected, in the first place, young men who were six feet tall so that they would match properly together. Secondly, angels had to be of good physique, so as to be able to stand stiff on the stage for two and a half hours, carrying the weight of their wings and costumes, without wobbling, or fidgeting, or fainting. Thirdly, they had to be able to speak verse well, in an agreeable voice and audibly. Fourthly, they had to be reasonable good actors. When all these technical conditions had been fulfilled, we might come to the moral qualities, of which the first would be the ability to arrive on stage punctually and in a sober condition, since the curtain must go up on time, and a drunken angel would be indecorous.

After that, and only after that, one might take character into consideration, but that, provided his behavior was not so scandalous as to cause dissension among the company, the right kind of actor with no morals would give a far more reverent and seemly performance than a saintly actor with the wrong technical qualifications. The worst religious films I ever saw were produced by a company which chose its staff exclusively for their piety. Bad photography, bad acting, and bad dialogue produced a result so grotesquely irreverent that the pictures could not have been shown in churches without bringing Christianity into contempt.

God is not served by technical incompetence; and incompetence and untruth always result when the secular vocation is treated as a thing alien to religion….

And conversely: when you find a man who is a Christian praising God by the excellence of his work – do not distract him and take him away from his proper vocation to address religious meetings and open church bazaars. Let him serve God in the way to which God has called him. If you take him away from that, he will exhaust himself in an alien technique and lose his capacity to do his dedicated work.

It is your business, you churchmen, to get what good you can from observing his work – not to take him away from it, so that he may do ecclesiastical work for you. But, if you have any power, see that he is set free to do this own work as well as it may be done. He is not there to serve you; he is there to serve God by serving his work.

The Twilight Years, Part II

The War That Killed False Hopes

Society has always had its “bears” or cassandras. But the significant factor of the Inter-War period in Britain was that a bleak view of the future was shared by so many. It became part of the popular discourse of the age. It is found, to be sure, most strongly amongst the intellectuals of the day. T.S.Eliot and the Bloomsbury group reflected the dour and bleak aspect. But, even deeply religious and socially conservative intellectuals such as J.R.R. Tolkien were depressed at the increasing mechanizing of society and the passing of a more kindly age.

But social depression was not just the preserve of the literary set. It captured professional economists, sociologists, physicians and the medical establishment; fear of what was believed to be coming—at least as the experts of the day foretold it-- motivated hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to mobilise, organise, and engage to try to prepare for, if not prevent the coming calamity.

It is striking that the language of menacing catastrophe surfaces in most areas of public debate and discussion and is not simply a literary trope. . . . The phenomenon was neither evidently reactionary nor exclusively avant-garde. For the generation living after the end of the First World War the prospect of imminent crisis, a new Dark Age, became a habitual way of looking at the world. Richard Overy, The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars (New York: Viking/Penguin, 2009), p.3.

What interests us here is not so much whether the cassandra spirit was correct—clearly, in many ways it was not, for Britain continues to this day, and a civilisation of a kind endures. But more interesting are the causes of this widespread apocalyptic belief of approaching end times. Equally interesting are the experts and academics who, out of their ivory towers, led the charge proclaiming that the end of the world was nigh—and the kinds of remedies and solutions they proposed. We confront their step-children every day in our world.

What becomes abundantly clear is that those experts and academics who believed darkly that civilization was coming to an end did so on spurious analysis or false premises. Moreover, faced with the prospect of a collapse of civilisation, the academic experts offered no solutions—at least, none that were remotely palatable or viable. Nevertheless, they remained highly respected as experts and as people to be listened to: academia in general and science in particular retained its unassailable position as the authoritative logos for the human condition and solution to the ills of society. This condition abides to this day as well.

As Overy points out:

A significant aspect of the explanation, . . . is to recognize that the human and natural sciences had an important part to play in generating anxiety once scientific discoveries had filtered into the public arena . . . . There existed a wide expectation that science could supply the truths that politics could not, though science was then, as today, only true for the time being. . . . (S)cience, despite its assumed role as the voice of material reason, played a key part . . . in creating the morbid culture that inhabited the Western world view in the 1920s and 1930s. Overy, p.4,5.

This phenomenon is eerily reminiscent of the role of “science” in our day whipping up morbid hysteria about the world facing a bleak future due to man-caused global warming.

In future posts we will trace some of the scientific “discoveries” that parlayed into “evidence” that a Dark Age was coming and that nothing could be done to prevent it. In the meantime, however, we should recall that the West was set up for these morbid “twilight years” in that in the previous decades Western society had been gripped by an overwhelming sense of optimism. Expectations of the dawning of a golden age had been very high in the US, the UK and Europe. The City of God was coming to earth, it was commonly and widely believed, and it was coming through the vast explosion of knowledge brought about by the application of the scientific method to the study of the natural world. Rationality was the redeemer of mankind. The West was advanced, prosperous, powerful and blessed precisely because it had laid aside myths and superstitions (particularly of religion in general and the Christian faith in particular) and had enthroned human reason as the final arbiter of truth and knowledge. The real was the rational and the rational was the real. It was setting mankind free.

Naturally, but fatuously, the triumph and advance of reason was applicable equally to human relations, society and activity as it was to discerning the laws of mathematics, chemistry and engineering. If reason solved the problems of constructing high rise buildings or of inventing and manufacturing the internal combustion engine, it would also solve the problems of how to construct advanced human communities, ridding the world of crime, or achieving peace between nations. Human reason would enable mankind to move easily and seamlessly between the “is” of the material world to the “ought” of human action, and in turn, reason would make the “ought” into the “is” of actual experience and existence.

The burgeoning optimism that characterised the first decade of the twentieth century was shattered by the First World War. It was hard to overstate the extent of dashed hopes—but it does provide one explanation of why the decades after the war were so racked with pessimism. If hope deferred makes the heart sick, hopes dashed must make it despair. Not only was World War One terrible bloody, it was fought between so-called rational civilised people. Moreover, it seemed utterly pointless, not just in the strategy and tactics of attrition which sought to win through grinding down the opponent to capitulation, but also in the reasons for which the war was fought. However much the Kaiser and German kultur was held up as an evil, rapacious enemy, every body knew that it was really little more than a mere family squabble.

How could such an enlightened people behave so badly, so brutishly? Cultural pride and vaunted self-aggrandizement was shattered. But notice—the War did not lead to repentance. It did not lead to the dethronement of human reason to its rightful place, nor to any breaking of the idols of rationalism and a return to the Lord Christ. Consequently, the judgement upon the West represented by World War One was not followed by hope and a new beginning because the old gods were still clung to. Human reason remained the inviolable authority—only now it was blighted with failure.

For the two decades after World War One the Western view of the world was essentially diagnostic: what went wrong; what caused the War; where did the disease lie; and would it prove fatal? It was the sheer number of the ostensible problems being faced that led the diagnostic temper into an acutely pessimistic frame of mind. The “solution” to one problem led to new maladies and threats.

The first explanation as to what was happening arose out of the study of history itself. From the Enlightenment to World War One the grand assumption of most historians was that history was linear and it was moving forward and upward. Progress was inevitable. After World War One this view ceased to be dominant and fell out of favour. It was replaced by a Greek view of history as endlessly circular, going nowhere. No civilisation survived. If it arose, it would be followed by an inevitable decline. The conviction grew that Western civilisation has reached its apogee; from this point it would inevitably decline and wane.

This new meta-narrative of human history made pessimism intellectually fashionable.

Monckton Calls Rudd's Bluff

The Prime Minister Was a No-Show

Every now and again the political arena throws up some ironies which evoke a hearty chuckle. About a week prior to the Copenhagen summit, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd waxed splenetic over the influence of Lord Monckton a tireless opponent against the pseudo-science of man-caused global warming.

Quite inappropriately, Rudd attacked Monckton personally six times in his speech in which he asserted that all climate warming sceptics were "in the pay" of special interests and were cravenly endangering the future of all our children. Quite undiplomatic behviour and an egregious slur to boot.

But Monckton is not so easily offended. Invited to Australia, he sent an open letter to Mr Rudd, offering to give him a personal briefing proving that anthropogenic global warming is a pyrrhic threat. Rudd, of course, had no idea that his cowardly attacks from his bully pulpit would be so publicly called out by Monckton himself. Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Rudd declined Monckton's invitation. One imagines Rudd in some dark cave somewhere licking his wounds, muttering imprecations.

But this interchange has only added spice to Monckton's visit. Whilst Rudd was too busy in his cave, plenty of Australians have taken the time to attend Monckton's public meetings. Paul Sheehan, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald provides an eyewitness report of one of Monckton's meetings in Sydney.

Facts conveniently brushed over by the global warming fanatics

Paul Sheehan
February 1, 2010 -

Here are 10 anti-commandments, 10 selected facts about global warming which have been largely ignored amid the orthodoxies to which we are subjected every day. All these anti-commandments are either true or backed by scientific opinion. All can also be hotly contested.

1. The pin-up species of global warming, the polar bear, is increasing in number, not decreasing.

2. The US President, Barack Obama, supports building nuclear power plants.

Last week, in his State of the Union address, he said: ''To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.''

3. The Copenhagen climate conference descended into farce.

The low point of the gridlock and posturing at Copenhagen came with the appearance by the socialist dictator of Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, whose anti-capitalist diatribe drew a cheering ovation from thousands of left-wing ideologues.

4. The reputation of the chief United Nations scientist on global warming is in disrepair.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is being investigated for financial irregularities, conflicts of interest and scientific distortion. He has already admitted publishing false data.

5. The supposed scientific consensus of the IPCC has been challenged by numerous distinguished scientists.

6. The politicisation of science leads to a heavy price being paid in poor countries.

After Western environmentalists succeeded in banning or suppressing the use of the pesticide DDT, the rate of death by malaria rose into the millions. Some scholars estimate the death toll at 20 million or more, most of them children.

7. The biofuels industry has exacerbated world hunger.

Diverting huge amounts of grain crops (as distinct from sugar cane) to biofuels has contributed to a rise in world food prices, felt acutely in the poorest nations.

8. The Kyoto Protocol has proved meaningless.

Global carbon emissions are significantly higher today than they were when the Kyoto Protocol was introduced.

9. The United Nations global carbon emissions reduction target is a massively costly mirage.

10. Kevin Rudd's political bluff on emissions trading has been exposed.

The Prime Minister intimated he would go to the people in an early election if his carbon emissions trading legislation was rejected. He won't. The electorate has shifted.

None of these anti-commandments question the salient negative link between humanity and the environment: that we are an omnivorous, rapacious species which has done enormous damage to the world's environment.

Nor do they question the warming of the planet.

What they do question is the morphing of science with ideology, the most pernicious byproduct of the global warming debate. All these anti-commandments were brought into focus this past week by the visit of the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, better known as Lord Christopher Monckton, journalist by trade, mathematician by training, provocateur by inclination.

Last Wednesday a conference room at the Sheraton on the Park was filled to overflowing, all 800 seats sold with a standing-room only crowd at the back, to see the Sydney public appearance of Monckton, a former science adviser to Margaret Thatcher. At the end of his presentation he received a sustained standing ovation.

Monckton is the embodiment of English aristocratic eccentricity. His presentations are a combination of stand-up comedy, evangelical preaching and fierce debating. Almost every argument he makes can be contested, but given the enormity of the multi-trillion-dollars that governments expect taxpayers to expend on combating global warming, the process needs to be subject to brutal interrogation, scrutiny and scepticism. And Monckton was brutal, especially about the media, referring to ''all this bed-wetting stuff on the ABC and the BBC''.

There has also been a monumental political failure surrounding the global warming debate. Those who would have to pay for most of the massive government expenditures proposed, the taxpayers of the West, are beginning to go into open revolt at the prospect.

Last week the Herald reported that Monckton told a large lie while in Sydney.

On Tuesday it reported: ''He said with a straight face on the Alan Jones radio program that he had been awarded the Nobel, a claim Jones did not question.''

The Herald repeated the accusation on Thursday. It was repeated a third time in a commentary in Saturday's Herald.

In 2007 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the former US vice-president Al Gore. The prize committee, in citing its selection of the IPCC, said: ''Through the IPCC … thousands of scientists and officials from over 100 countries have collaborated to achieve greater certainty as to the scale of [global] warming.''

Thousands of people were thus collectively and anonymously part of the prize process.

So what lie did Monckton tell about the prize? Despite the gravity of the accusation, the Herald never published the offending remark. Here, for the record, is what he actually said:

Monckton: ''I found out on the day of publication of the 2007 [IPCC report] that they'd multiplied, by 10, the observed contribution to sea-level rise of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet. By 10! I got in touch with them and said, 'You will correct this.' And two days later, furtively, on the website, no publicity, they simply relabelled, recalculated and corrected the table they'd got wrong.''

Alan Jones: ''But this report won a Nobel Prize!''

Monckton: ''Yes. Exactly. And I am also a Nobel Prize winner because I made a correction. I'm part of the process that got the Nobel Prize. Do I deserve it? No. Do they deserve it? No. The thing is a joke.''

Meditation on the Text of the Week

Streams of Mercy, Never Ceasing

But the lovingkindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children's children, to those who keep His covenant and who remember His precepts to do them.
Psalm 103: 17-18

Psalm 103 is one of the best loved Psalms amongst the faithful. It speaks of the mercies of God, the forgiveness of sins, His redemption of His people, and His pardon. It speaks of all of these in such exuberant terms. It declares that these wonderful blessings from God's hand are not rare, scarce or niggardly, but abundant, full, rich and overwhelming. God does not bestow His mercy or His favour as one might add a smidgin of spice to a meal. He pours it out in a profusion that overwhelms and astounds.

We are told that as high as the heavens are above the earth, so vast is His lovingkindness towards those who fear Him. As far removed as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our sins from us. His compassion is such that He always keeps in mind that we are as weak children, like ephemeral dust. He never forgets nor grows impatient with the frailty of our human condition. (Psalm 103: 12—14)

The profuse abundance of His mercies and goodness manifests itself in one particularly glorious way. The frailty of our lives means that they are soon over. We are little more than a temporary flowering of a wild plant. It blooms in beauty, but within hours is fading; the wind blows and there is suddenly nothing left. (Psalm 103: 15) But God's mercy upon us has not ceased, even though we have ceased to be upon earth. His mercies flow to our descendants who remain upon the earth after us, to our children and their children. The fact of God's grace overflowing also to one's children and to their grandchildren is a central part of the abundance and outpouring of overwhelming richness of God's mercy. It is so great that it cannot be contained or restrained to one generation—as our text declares.

We find this truth to be a “mouth-stopper”. The everlasting aspect of the mercies of God is not just that we as individuals depart this planet at death and are ushered into the presence of God. Now this is certainly true as Scripture elsewhere plainly declares. But that is not what the Psalmist has in view here. The “everlasting” nature of God's mercies has to do with their flowing down not just to me, but to children's children, to my descendants.

Now, of course, this necessitates that one's children and grandchildren in their day and generation are faithful, repentant believers, who fear God and keep His covenant, and who remember His precepts and commandments so as to keep them. (Psalm 103:18). For God's mercies and pardon and forgiveness flow only to those who believe upon Him and entrust themselves to Him. But such faithfulness and such responsiveness is also a gift from God. It comes about as children and grandchildren are first regenerated by the Holy Spirit, then are granted the gift of faith.

When God draws near to a people and overwhelms them with His goodness and love there are inevitable and indubitable signs of His presence. One of the clearest evidences is found in one's children and children's children walking faithfully before the Lord, keeping His covenant. It is a clear indication that we have been overwhelmed by His grace and lovingkindness.

Now, here is a strange thing. If parents believe God and receive with humility the promises contained in our text, it will affect everything they do with their children and grandchildren. They will always expect and require faithful and believing responses on the part of their offspring. They will not tolerate the works, attitudes, or fruits of unbelief. They will discipline their children unto fear and reverence of the Lord. These become the very streams and riverbeds created by God along which His mercies pour down upon our descendants.

And we, for our part, cry out with David, “Bless the Lord, O my soul—and all that is within me bless His holy name.”