Barack Obama: Gulf of Mexico oil spill an ‘environmental 9/11’
He’s going to milk this to try to push through a carbon cap and trade bill that will cripple American industry and businesses, reduce standards of living for American people, and export jobs in ever larger numbers to China, India and other places that are rubbing their hands in glee at the arrant stupidity of Western politicians.
What might have been had the Romans developed the steam engine? By the late 3rd century AD, all of the essential elements for constructing a steam engine were known to Roman engineers: steam power – Hero’s aeolipile, the crank and connecting rod mechanism in the sawmills and marble quarries, the cylinder and piston in metal force pumps, non-return valves in water pumps and gearing in water mills and clocks. Suppose that the Roman Empire emerged, as it did, from the crisis of the third century with all its administrative and military institutions changed, bureaucratic, rigid, and constantly geared for war, with its capital no longer in Rome but in Constantinople – and with steam power. (Such a development might have occurred not in Italy, but in the Eastern Empire – the stirrup was first put into wide use there, and reserves of coal and other minerals are available without deep mining in, for example, Dacia, Moesia and Thracia – present-day Romania and Bulgaria.)
David Benatar, author of: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” One of Benatar’s arguments:
To bring into existence someone who will suffer is to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her. Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely. Hence continued reproduction will harm some children severely, and benefit none.
Quoted in this article in the NYT, which also contains this:
Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.
Note the artful ‘Most thoughtful people,’ in other words, people who share my views.
Sigh.
Mind, the English rose is drooping a bit after another awful display against Oz this afternoon 😦
This looks pretty damn impressive:
Go Bafana!
On my way back from Bucharest to Moscow I had to transit through Munich. Since it was a short trip, I was travelling with hand-carried luggage only. In my washing kit I had a bottle of moisturiser. (After 25 years of running around in the open, the first seven in a semi-permanent haze of diesel smoke, if I don’t moisturise regularly I turn into a remarkably good stand-in for the amazing Lizard Man.)
Class actions in the offing?
A cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics has concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fail to stand up to scrutiny.
…found that the climate establishment does not follow the scientific method. Instead, it “seems overall to comprise an effort to marshal evidence in favor of a predetermined policy preference.”
Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School
on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.
Now that US tort lawyers have been shown the way, watch for a deluge of class action suits against the AGW deceivers.
My comment about facebook on Araminta’s blog set me off on a bit of a reverie. (Slow day at work. Finished one project, bit of admin, trying to psyche up for the next substantive bit of work, failing at the moment.)
The second school I attended* was St Andrews C of E Primary School in Uxbridge. My father was in the Royal Air Force and the church and school was just across the road from the main gate of RAF Uxbridge. (The road there has since been rebuilt and the school is now behind a block of rather boring flats.) Because we were a service family, the list of schools I attended never fits in the spaces on forms where you have to ‘list schools attended – not that I fill those out these days. Apart from the odd stand-out detail, most of my recollections of school days are fairly hazy – I wasn’t really that interested, bright but lazy, that’s me, and the friends of my childhood and youth were drawn from the ranks of the other service brats marooned with me on various RAF bases in the wilds of different parts of England. Interested in any more?
Have I missed something?
I don’t do anodyne, nor politically correct…do I have to head for the door?
International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell who is to give 19 million hard-earned taxpayers pounds to UNRWA.
The UNRWA was founded in 1949 to deal with the refugee crisis caused by the invasion of the new State of Israel by five Arab armies. 61 years and billions upon billions of pounds later, it has demonstrably failed. The Arab refugees of Palestine have been kept in misery by the neglect of the states in the region, the intransigence of Arab States in refusing to recognise the State of Israel and the pouring of billions of pounds into armed attacks on that State, instead of into the provision of basic necessities for refugees and the means for them to remedy their own misfortunes by their own efforts. I present the example of Cyprus, a small country burdened with a huge refugee problem by an Invasion by a foreign Country in 1974. Find a refugee camp in Cyprus. Find refugees from Famagusta or other areas occupied by Turkey still living in squalor and poverty. Hint. You can’t.
Another 19 million pounds of British tax-payers’ cash flushed down the toilet.
Boadicea's Chariot 
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