Sunday night rock 'n' roll

Motörhead are a British heavy metal band formed in 1975 by bassist, singer and songwriter Lemmy, who has remained the sole constant member. Usually a power trio, Motörhead had particular success in the early 1980s with several successful singles in the UK Top 40 chart. The albums Overkill, its follow on, Bomber, Ace of Spades, and particularly No Sleep 'til Hammersmith, cemented Motörhead's reputation as one of Britain's foremost heavy metal groups. More recent exposure has included providing wrestler Triple H's entrance music, and performing live at WrestleMania events; and in 2004, contributing the song, "You Better Swim", to the soundtrack of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. In 2005 the band received their first Grammy.

While Motörhead are typically classified as heavy metal, speed metal or thrash metal (and often regarded as a foundational influence on the latter two styles); Lemmy dislikes such labels, preferring to describe the band's music simply as "rock and roll". Motörhead's approach has remained the same over the band's career, preferring to play what they enjoy and do best, their like for the early rock and roll is reflected in some of their occasional cover songs. Motörhead's lyrics typically cover such topics as war, good versus evil, abuse of power, promiscuous sex, substance abuse, and "life on the road".

The band's distinctive fanged face logo was created by artist Joe Petagno in 1977 for the cover of the Motörhead album and has appeared in many variations on covers of ensuing albums.

I am embarrassed to admit that I bought tickets to see Motley Crue when they toured Australia a few years ago. Why, do you ask, would a man with my obvious high quality taste in music do such a thing? Because the great Motorhead was the support act. They were great - and loud - easily outdoing Motley Crue in the music department but losing the flamboyant stakes.

Killed By Death is, in my opinion, the greatest heavy metal song ever written so here it is, with some of their other great numbers.

Killed By Death



Ace Of Spades



Overkill



(Nothing Follows)

Saddam lied, people died

To the truth-averse left - a tautology if ever there was one - the 'Bush lied, people died' meme has been a major part of what passes for intellectual analysis.

CBS's 60 Minutes turned left some years ago and has become more and more loopy, a demonstrated in recent times with the inane Save The Planet series. For them to broadcast an interview demonstrating what really was going on with Iraq is quite remarkable.

NEW YORK — Saddam Hussein allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction to deter rival Iran and did not think the United States would stage a major invasion, according to an FBI interrogator who questioned the Iraqi leader after his capture.

Saddam believed that the oil deals he had done with UN Security Council members China, France and Germany, as well as bribes paid to representatives from those countries would protect him from any US action.

Saddam expected only a limited aerial attack by the United States and thought he could remain in control, the FBI special agent, George Piro, told CBS's "60 Minutes" program in an interview to be broadcast Sunday.

"He told me he initially miscalculated ... President Bush's intentions," said Piro. "He thought the United States would retaliate with the same type of attack as we did in 1998 ... a four-day aerial attack."

"He survived that one and he was willing to accept that type of attack," Piro said.

The Associated Press spoke to a close aide of Saddam's in August 2003, who said that Saddam did not expect a U.S. invasion and deliberately kept the world guessing about his weapons program, although he already had gotten rid of it.

Saddam publicly denied having unconventional weapons before the U.S. invasion, but prevented U.N. inspectors from working in the country from 1998 until 2002 and when they finally returned in November 2002, they often complained that Iraq wasn't fully cooperating.

Piro, a Lebanese-American who speaks Arabic, debriefed Saddam after he was found hiding in an underground hideout near his home city north of Baghdad in December 2003, nine months after the U.S. invasion.

Piro said Saddam also said that he wanted to keep up the illusion that he had the program in part because he thought it would deter a likely Iranian invasion.

Anyone with half a brain understood that this must be true when it became clear Saddam had been lying about his weapons program. It's also possible that Iran is playing the same game in reverse. They are now militarily much weaker than Iraq and want to both deter any plans that country might have post-stabilisation, as well as presenting itself as the strong horse in the region.

"For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that (faking having the weapons) would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq," Piro told Scott Pelley of "60 Minutes."

Piro added that Saddam had the intention of restarting an Iraqi weapons program at the time, and had engineers available for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

I'm sure that the Daily Kos, Huffington Post etc crowd will deny this one all ways 'til Tuesday.

Piro also mentioned Saddam's revelation during questioning that what pushed him to invade Kuwait in 1990 was a dishonorable swipe at Iraqi women made by the Kuwaiti leader, Sheik Jaber Al Ahmed Al Sabah.

During the buildup to the invasion, Iraq had accused Kuwait of flooding the world market with oil and demanded compensation for oil produced from a disputed area on the border of the two countries.

Piro said that Al Sabah told the foreign minister of Iraq during a discussion aimed at resolving some of those conflicts that "he would not stop doing what he was doing until he turned every Iraqi woman into a $10 prostitute. And that really sealed it for him, to invade Kuwait," said Piro.

Such are the petty things that people go to war for...

(Nothing Follows)

More nails in the CO2 as primary forcing agent coffin

Joseph D'Aleo has some interesting graphs that should make any of the Climate Faithful reconsider the reality of the CO2 as bogeyman 'consensus'. I say 'should' but I doubt they will, as truth is not a primary value of these people.

First up, a graph of CO2 against US temperature. Note the low r-squared correlation of 0.44.



That is quite a profound non-correlation. How's CO2 looking over the last 10 years or so?



An r-squared of 0.02? Oops. Random noise has a higher correlation than that!

Of course, the unscientific loons who buy into climate change propaganda will start by bashing D'Aleo and then follow up by stating that correlation with the US record is irrelevant - that's why it's called global warming.

So, let's have a look at CO2 vs the CRU global and MSU lower tropospheric monthlies over the same period:



CO2 is meant to be the primary
forcing agent accounting for more than 60% of all forcing agents. For that to be the case then the above graph is impossible.

Is there anything that does have a good correlation?



The sun has a higher correlation than CO2. Imagine that.

D'Aleo then hit upon an idea:

Since the warm modes of the PDO and AMO both favor warming and their cold modes cooling, I though the sum of the two may provide a useful index of ocean induced warming for the hemisphere (and US). I standardized the two data bases and summed them and correlated with the USHCN data, again using a 11 point smoothing as with the CO2 and TSI. This was the jackpot correlation with the highest value of r-squared (0.83!!!).

In summary:



Definitive? No. Interesting? Yep.

However, does it kill the idea that CO2 is the primary forcing agent of climate? Pretty much.

(Nothing Follows)

Let's hope London's Red Ken loses the May election

I assume that most people have heard of Ken Livingstone, mayor of London, who has long carried the nickname Red Ken.

For over 20 years he has worked assiduously to weaken British society by limiting free speech, promoting extremist causes and associating with the worst types of populist, leftist, totalitarian world figures.

Check out his Wikipedia entry to get a full understanding of his anti-Semitic, socialist views.

People like Livingstone are a major reason that organisations such as the BNP are gaining increasing support.

From the UK's socialist rag, The Guardian, comes this amazing defence of Red Ken, which shows just how much The Guardian lives in a parallel universe.

It's as if the last 25 years had never happened. For the past week we've been back in the days of Margaret Thatcher's war on Red Ken and the Greater London Council. Every morning, the media have brought new revelations of the horrors at City Hall and Ken Livingstone's manifest unfitness to be re-elected mayor of London. Just as in the time of the GLC, Livingstone is denounced for consorting with dangerous leftists and terrorist apologists. Only the details have changed: for lesbian workers' cooperatives, read the Arab women's network, and for Sinn Féin and the Irish community, substitute Islamist groups and London's Muslims.

Livingstone not only cavorts with those obnoxious, anti-progressive groups but believes, and promotes, their causes to the detriment and against the opposition of the huge majority of proper thinking people.

Leading the charge until now has been the capital's only paid-for daily newspaper, the Evening Standard, which is to all intents and purposes running the Tory candidate Boris Johnson's campaign for the mayoral election in May. But now most of the national press has fallen in behind, as stories have multiplied of Livingstone's whisky tippling, alleged dodgy grants to black businesses and a "secret Marxist cell" of advisers intent on turning London into a "socialist city state", or maybe fomenting a "bourgeois democratic revolution" - the specifics were never quite clear.

Good on the Evening Standard for exposing the little fraud.

The trigger for this retro onslaught was Monday's almost comically slanted Channel 4 Dispatches programme on Livingstone, presented by the New Statesman's Martin Bright, who wrote that he felt it his "duty to warn the London electorate that a vote for Livingstone is a vote for a bully and a coward who is not worthy to lead this great city of ours". Quite how Channel 4 managed to describe an hour of primetime vilification as a "fair and balanced investigation" with a straight face will be a mystery to most of those who watched a programme without a single supportive interview. Instead, we were treated to a hotchpotch of allegations and denunciations from disgruntled ex-employees and political opponents, ranging from the bizarre and sub-McCarthyite to the more serious but unproven.

Livingstone most certainly is "a bully and a coward" not worthy to lead a chook raffle let alone the great city of London.

Among them was an attack on Livingstone's deal with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez to subsidise half-price travel for London's unemployed, his dialogue with non-violent Islamist groups, the use of public funds to commission research for his dispute over multiculturalism with the then head of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, and the well-aired fact that several aides have been members of the one-time Trotskyist group Socialist Action - though since they have been working happily with the police and City grandees for the past eight years, that might seem to be of somewhat specialist interest. Most of the real issues that will dominate the mayoral elections - housing, transport, crime, the environment - barely got a walk-on part. But the programme was certainly an effective party political broadcast on behalf of Johnson.

Finally, people are sick of Livingstone and are 'attacking' him. Why pointing out reality is an attack is beyond me but I presume it's because The Guardian supports his disgusting positions.

What has given this latest assault on Livingstone a special edge is that the people driving it trade as being on the left: Bright as a representative of Britain's main centre-left political weekly and Nick Cohen, who has more openly lined up behind Johnson, as an Observer columnist. In reality, both writers share a broadly neoconservative agenda on Islamism and the "war on terror" - though Bright opposed the Iraq invasion - and that is the central issue that has turned them and their allies against Livingstone. Bright wrote a pamphlet for the rightwing thinktank Policy Exchange attacking government dialogue with Islamists, warmly praised by the leading US neocon Richard Perle. Cohen famously declared after meeting Iraq war architect Paul Wolfowitz for drinks at the Mayfair nightclub Annabel's: "I was in the presence of a politician committed to extending human freedom."

Ahhh, it's the neocons; part of the Bushitler cabal that seeks to control the world. The article's author, Seumas Milne, is a lunatic.

As the most powerful British politician to have opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars and supported engagement with mainstream political Islam, Livingstone has naturally attracted the enmity of the neocons. After hearing Bright dismiss Chávez's administration as a "government with links to Iran and cocaine-smuggling guerrillas and accused of human rights abuses", it should come as no surprise that he, Cohen and their friends prefer to see a high Tory elected mayor of London rather than the radical Labour incumbent.

Venezuela is slowly heading down the same path as Zimbabwe. Will Seumas Milne defend Chavez when the place runs out of oil and ends up as a clone of Cuba?

To the rest of London, it's scarcely news that London's mayor has his faults, or controversial that he should be held to account. It's right that the less than 1% of the London Development Agency's budget that went on grants to failed business startups should be properly investigated, even if that isn't a bad record compared with the private sector. You'd never know it from all the chatter about Bolshevik cabals, but there's also a strong left critique of Livingstone: for his embrace of the City and property developers, for example, and defence of the Metropolitan police commissioner over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.

But that's not what will be at stake in May's election. The choice will be between two candidates: one who has pioneered congestion charging and cut traffic by 70,000 cars a day, pushed up the supply of affordable housing, boosted bus ridership by one and a half million journeys a day, abolished fares for under-18s, is preparing to introduce emissions charging and free public transport for pensioners and has played a key role in cutting crime and maintaining community relations during a tense and dangerous period. On the other hand, you have a Thatcherite who thinks it's witty to refer to Africans as "piccaninnies" and regrets the end of colonialism, is an enthusiastic Bush and Iraq war supporter, opposed the Kyoto treaty, and is against the welfare state and the "teaching" of homosexuality in schools.

Seumas Milne lives in a different world. Crime rates in London are soaring and it's one of the least safe cities in the world. The police have had to rig the statistics and invent meaningless categories to show they're making any impact at all.

The choice could hardly be starker. No other candidate is in with a shout. Despite his record, Johnson's media profile and geniality mean he is the first serious challenge the mayor has had to face. With Livingstone and Johnson only one point apart in the latest opinion poll, the Tories have scented blood. Johnson's decision to hire the ruthless Lynton Crosby, who masterminded four election victories for John Howard in Australia, should be a warning. The Tory candidate knows he'll make little headway among the non-white third of London's electorate, so expect some dog-whistle appeals to white voters, perhaps dressed up as broadsides against political correctness. A defeat for Livingstone would not just be a blow to the broadly defined left, working-class Londoners, women, ethnic minorities and greens. It would represent a wider defeat for progressive politics, in Britain and beyond.

Hopefully, our own 'ruthless' Lynton Crosby can engineer a win for Johnson. Why it's a 'dog whistle' to appeal to white voters but not 'the non-white third' is a mystery.

It's amazing that people think the left is progressive. Backward economic policies, totalitarian instincts, limits on free speech - and thought - are not normally associated with progression. But for the left, believing in good is better than actually doing any good.

People like Livingstone ruin the world. Let's hope he loses the upcoming mayoral election.

(Nothing Follows)

The UK's impending Islamic doom

From the UK's Telegraph comes a disturbing article about UK's Muslims ongoing attempts to introduce Sharia Law in that country. When Joe Public decides he's had enough the backlash is going to be swift and violent.

Islamic courts meet every week in the UK to rule on divorces and financial disputes. Clare Dwyer Hogg and Jonathan Wynne-Jones report on demands by senior Muslims that sharia be given legal authority

Amnah is a modern British Muslim. She is dressed in a denim skirt and her head is covered in a hijab. Poised and self-assured, she has come to meet Dr Suhaib Hasan, a silver-bearded sheikh who sits behind his desk, surrounded by religious books.

"But why would I have to observe the waiting period?" she asks him. "What are the reasons?" There is an urgency to her questions.

"These reasons don't apply to me, that's what I'm very confused about. If you could give me the reasons why I have to wait three months, then I'll understand."

Amnah is going through a divorce and is baffled at being told that she must wait for three months to remarry, considering that she hasn't seen her estranged husband for two years.

She twists her sock-clad toes into the carpet, grasping one hand with the other in her lap, and fixes Dr Hasan with an intense look. He meets this with a simple reply: "These rulings are all in the Koran. The rulings are made for all."

Amnah has little choice but to comply: Dr Hasan is a judge, and this is a sharia court - in east London. It sits, innocuously, at the end of a row of terrace houses in Leyton: a converted corner shop, with blinds on the windows, office- style partitions and a makeshift reception area.

"Amnah has little choice but to comply..." Of course she has a choice; she lives in a free society.

It is one of dozens of sharia courts - also known as councils - that have been set up in mosques, Islamic centres and even schools across Britain. The number of British Muslims using the courts is increasing.

To many in the West, talk of sharia law conjures up images of the floggings, stonings, amputations and beheadings carried out in hardline Islamic states such as Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, the form practised in Britain is more mundane, focusing mainly on marriage, divorce and financial disputes.

Heh. If Muslim leaders had their way then they'd be happy to see floggings, stoning, amputations and beheadings in the West.

The judgments of the courts have no basis in British law, and are therefore technically illegitimate - they are binding only in that those involved agree to comply. For British Muslims who are keen to follow Islam, this poses a dilemma. An Islamic marriage is not recognised by British law, and therefore many couples will have two ceremonies - civil for the state, and Islamic for their faith.

If they wish to divorce, they must then seek both a civil and an Islamic divorce.

Oh, boo bloody hoo...if they want to live in an Islamic society then they should leave the UK. Simple as that.

Dr Hasan, who has been presiding over sharia courts in Britain for more than 25 years, argues that British law would benefit from integrating aspects of Islamic personal law into the civil system, so that divorces could be rubber-stamped in the same way, for example, that Jewish couples who go to the Beth Din court have their divorce recognised in secular courts.

He points out that the Islamic Sharia Council, of which he is the general secretary, is flooded with work. It hears about 50 divorce cases every month, and responds to as many as 10 requests every day by email and phone for a fatwa - a religious verdict on a religious matter.

Dr Hasan, who is also a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain on issues of sharia law, says there is great misunderstanding of the issue in the West.

"Whenever people associate the word 'sharia' with Muslims, they think it is flogging and stoning to death and cutting off the hand," he says with a smile.

Funny, that, as it's what Sharia Law actually dictates.

He makes the distinction between the aspects of law that sharia covers: worship, penal law, and personal law. Muslim leaders in Britain are interested only in integrating personal law, he says.

If you believe this statement then you are in for a serious shock down the track.

"Penal law is the duty of the Muslim state - it is not in the hands of any public institution like us to handle it. Only a Muslim government that believes in Islam is going to implement it. So there is no question of asking for penal law to be introduced here in the UK - that is out of the question."

He's a good stalking horse, isn't he, in the style of Tariq Ramadan?

Despite this, Dr Hasan is open in supporting the severe punishments meted out in countries where sharia law governs the country.

"Even though cutting off the hands and feet, or flogging the drunkard and fornicator, seem to be very abhorrent, once they are implemented, they become a deterrent for the whole society.

"This is why in Saudi Arabia, for example, where these measures are implemented, the crime rate is very, very, low," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

Ahhhhhhhh, OK.

In a documentary to be screened on Channel 4 next month, entitled Divorce: Sharia Style, Dr Hasan goes further, advocating a sharia system for Britain. "If sharia law is implemented, then you can turn this country into a haven of peace because once a thief's hand is cut off nobody is going to steal," he says.

"Once, just only once, if an adulterer is stoned nobody is going to commit this crime at all.

"We want to offer it to the British society. If they accept it, it is for their good and if they don't accept it they'll need more and more prisons."

"...it is for their good...", sounds like socialism to me.

These sentiments, and the vast cultural gulf they expose, alarm many in the West and go to the heart of the debate about the level of integration among Muslims living in Britain and their acceptance of British values.

Dr Hasan's cause is not helped by the fact that, last December, he was named by the Policy Exchange think tank as being linked to a mosque, the Al-Tawhid in Leyton, east London, which was accused of propagating extremist literature - although the evidence for this has since been challenged.

Many are uncomfortable with the idea of linking sharia to civil law in Britain. In The Sunday Telegraph earlier this month, Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester, wrote: "Attempts have been made to impose an "Islamic" character on certain areas? There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered?"

No. The Law of Unintended Consequences will be prosecuted to its fullest extent.

There are also issues around the Islamic approach to equality and human rights that make integration with British law problematic and contentious.

No! But all of those countries are members of the United Nations and have signed up to the UN Charter.

Sharia judges in this country deal mainly with divorce - khula. In Islamic law, a husband can divorce his wife in the presence of two witnesses without having to go through an official system.

He can even merely utter the word "talaq" - meaning "to release" - to gain a divorce, whether or not the wife accepts it. She has no such right and must go through the processes of sharia, entreating judges to grant her divorce.

Never let it be said that there are not some attractive ideas in Islam!

"The introduction of sharia law in Britain raises complex questions, as some of its basic tenets are incompatible with the fundamental principles of our liberal democracy and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," says Baroness Cox, a leading human rights campaigner.

"There is no equality before the law between men and women and between Muslims and non-Muslims; and there is no freedom to choose and change religion."

That's a pretty amazing statement coming from a human rights campaigner given they spend almost all of their time bagging the US, Israel, capitalism and big business.

Ibrahim Mogra, chairman of the Muslim Council of Britain's inter-faith committee, admits that to non-Muslims some laws may seem harsh on women. Those who are married to a man with a number of wives can be treated badly, for instance. But he insists that sharia is an equitable system.

"It may mean that a woman married under Islamic law has no legal rights, but the husband is required to pay for everything in marriage and in the case of a divorce all the woman's belongings are hers to keep."

She has no rights but he has to pay? Well that's OK then. Not.

In fact, Sheikh Mogra argues that sharia in Britain would give rights to women. "A Muslim man can take a second wife under sharia law and treat her as he wants, knowing that she has no legal rights in Britain. It means that she is regarded as no more than a mistress and he can walk out on her when he wants."

Critics warn, however, that in giving even parts of sharia law official status, Britain would be associating itself with a system that in many ways was intolerable according to Western values.

Professor John Marks, author of The West, Islam and Islamism, points out that apostates from Islam can suffer severe punishment, even honour killings.

"There are more violent cases that are being related to people who choose to convert from Islam," he says.

A survey by Policy Exchange found that 36 per cent of young British Muslims believed that a Muslim who converted to another religion should be "punished by death".

I reckon the other 64 percent didn't answer honestly.

"This clearly goes against the laws of our country. If they come to live in this country they should live by our laws," says Prof Marks.

Haras Rafiq, the executive director of the Sufi Muslim Council, points out that Muslims are anyway divided on the correct interpretation of sharia law. He is particularly critical of those who support the strict penal law.

"Things like stoning are being used as a deterrent, but this is reinterpreting the Koran in a rigid and extreme way that misses the spirit of what is being said."

Perhaps the strongest argument in favour of some form of recognition of sharia in Britain is that it would help to regulate a system that operates beyond the law.

The Government has expressed concern about imams who may be using the Koran to justify fatwas that clash with British law.

Leaders of four major British Muslim groups published a government-backed report in 2006 that accepted that many imams were not qualified to give guidance to alienated young people.

They agreed to set up a watchdog aimed at tackling extremism and monitoring mosques, but Yunes Teinaz, a former adviser to the London Central Mosque, warns that one of the greatest problems is the imams who arrive in Britain unable to speak English, and with no regard for British law.

"The absence of anyone regulating the mosques and sharia courts means that they can act as a law unto themselves, issuing fatwas that breach people's human rights because they have no knowledge of the law," he says. "They can take people's money despite having no proper qualifications, but worse they can harm the communities that they are in."

Zareen Roohi Ahmed, the chief executive of the British Muslim Forum - one of the four groups on the Mosques and Imams National Advisory Body - concedes that sharia courts in Britain are still poorly organised.

"They need development - the government should be supporting them to deliver their service more effectively," she says.

"If sharia courts can be supported to be more professionally run and to have female involvement as well on the decision-making panels, then I think they can work quite effectively and meet the needs of Muslims."

She suggests that existing systems need to be supported and a wider range of scholars and academics involved to put more thought into making the rules and regulations applicable to today's society.

Dr Muhammad Abdul Bari, the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, points out that during British rule in India, Muslim personal law was allowed to operate and sees no reason why it wouldn't work now.

I do. The genius of the British Empire was its ability to get a good balance between letting the indigenous cultures continue while at the same time applying British law and justice. In the UK these days they seem to run as far away as they can from making judgements and kow tow to foreign cultures and standards.

"Sharia encompasses all aspects of Muslim life including personal law," he says. "In tolerant, inclusive societies all faith groups enjoy some acceptance of their religious rules in matters of their personal life.

"I am sure some day our society here will also be more at ease with its Muslim community and see the benefit of allowing such rights to those who prefer this."

Back in the court in Leyton, the plight of Amnah is typical of the challenges facing Muslim women in Britain who are seeking to abide by the traditional Islamic teaching, but find themselves victims of the system as a result.

The husband she seeks to divorce is untraceable, but she married him in a purely Islamic ceremony so now she must fight to gain her freedom.

She met him on an Islamic matrimonial website, then discovered that he wasn't everything he had claimed to be.

"I found out he was stealing money from me," she says, adding that her husband had lied about having a job and a visa for the UK.

"So how come you married such a person who is not of your standard?" Dr Hasan asks quietly, leafing through the notes of her case.

"I made a mistake," Amnah says, simply. "Basically this man lied to me from the beginning until the end. Not only did he fool me, he fooled my family."

Despite Amnah's protestations and questioning, Dr Hasan goes on to explain that the methods and rules set out in the Koran are for very practical reasons.

A recently divorced wife must wait three months to remarry to give enough time for her ex-husband to know that she is not carrying his child. "This is for all," he says.

"There is no exception to this rule, in the sharia there is no exception, you have to accept it."

He takes down a copy of the Koran from a shelf and points to the chapter and verse that spells out the lengths of iddat - the waiting period - in detailed terms.

There are different lengths for widows, for wives whose husbands have authorised the divorce and for wives whose husbands have not. There is even a rule for pre-pubescent girls.

For Amnah, it is clear that the answer has thrown up further problems for her. "Another quick question," she says. "Because I'm going through a divorce now, is it right for me to have found someone or should I have waited?"

The man may not, Dr Hasan replies, clearly state his wish to marry her - he may subtly make his intentions known, as in "once you are free from marriage, remember me", but no, not propose. That is not allowed in the Koran.

Amnah thanks him with deference, and leaves. Coming through this religious court is the only way she will be truly at liberty to remarry but, for now, she must wait.

She has true liberty now but chooses to be chained to Islamic rules.

There are fair comparisons to be made between Islamic divorce laws and those of the Catholic church. However, Islam can only be judged by the actions of its advocates and practitioners and on that level it's no surprise that reasonable, thinking people in the West would reject any attempts to integrate Islamic law into their own.

(Nothing Follows)

On capitalism, environmentalism and a bit on California

John Robson from The Ottawa Citizen has a nice piece, Capitalists saving the planet, in which he describes the many ways that capitalism is really the main driver of environmental advancement.

This will come as a surprise to many committed greenies who see capitalism as the cause of all of the world's evils and especially the current Climate Change Bogeyman. The mistake they make is to see capitalism and Big Business as one and the same thing rather than understanding capitalism as being the enabler of not only business but also the advancer of society, as well.

In a recent post I described how anti-progress economic systems such as socialism cannot innovate, as there are no venture capitalists willing to risk their money on developing new products. A Sony Playstation or your mobile phone or your wide-screen TV or the myriad of other products are all the result of the investment evolution enabled by capitalist economics.

So back to the main point. Capitalism creates a competitive environment in which the company that can bring a product to market at the lowest cost survives while the others either die or lower their own cost. A major cost of manufacturing comes in the form of energy. If companies can lower the amount of energy consumed in either the manufacturing of the product and/or the operating of the product (in the case of electronic devices) then they have a competitive advantage. In the process, any impact on the environment in the manufacture or use of the product is reduced.

It's opera. My wife is listening to opera while jogging. The heroine will, one assumes, come to a tragic end. But the batteries won't, because she's using a digital player. On which, I trust, I can record the sound of environmentalists applauding the technological advances capitalism brings.

...Permit me, then, to wipe it off deftly by pointing out that self-interest is what's driving this greener technology. Most of us value the environmental benefits to some extent. But for all of us, digital technology means going green without suffering. Which will displease some in the organic-hair-shirt crowd.

It will upset others that companies are succeeding where governments often fail. The European Union's environment commissioner just admitted that biofuels promote rainforest destruction. Legally mandated efficient light bulbs may give some people skin problems. The failure of governments to build nuclear plants has contributed massively to greenhouse-gas production. But over there in the private sector, it's just progress progress progress. Wretched, isn't it?

Continuing the theme is Glenn Milne in The Australian:

The great thing about visiting California is that it gives you a sense of where Australia is probably headed. In the context of the climate change debate, this assertion stands, only more so.

So to come here and see some of the political and economic hurdles that are emerging out of the market forces unleashed by global warming, and the political response to it, is to understand that while Kevin Rudd still basks in the warm afterglow of ratifying Kyoto, just a little way down the track substantial domestic challenges loom.

Remember, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is something of an environmental pin-up boy for Rudd. During the election campaign, Rudd repeatedly used Schwarzenegger's embrace of an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 to justify his own approach to target-based policy.

The thrust of Rudd's argument was that if California, one of the biggest and most successful economies in the world, could adopt such an approach, why couldn't Australia?

...Schwarzenegger's thinking is crudely simple and effective. He believes that Californians want urgent action on the climate-change front and he feels compelled to respond to this democratic impulse.

The strategy is to set mandated targets and then for the Government to simply get out of the way.

In other words, Schwarzenegger is using the sheer mass of the Californian economy and, critically, its venture capital base to crash through any resistance on the climate change front.

Again, the key point is that governments can't achieve the same level of positive progress as private enterprise and financial incentive.

Milne does get a bit carried away, though, in his description of California's economy. Its liberal policies have seen it go through completely unnecessary financial difficulties and it is currently many billions of dollars in debt. That doesn't seem like much of a model for new Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd to aspire to.

As usual, the great Victor Davis Hanson gets it right:

Our poor state is $14 billion plus now in the red, and the Governator has promised no new taxes, wise inasmuch as our sales and income taxes are already among the highest in the country. The University of California system is panicking and sending out emails to us alums, to march en masse on Sacramento for redress!

But lost in the furor is any self-reflection, such as why would UC Davis recently pay John Edwards, multimillionaire trial lawyer, $50,000 plus to give a brief lecture on poverty? Such questions are never answered, much less raised, since the problem is always framed as a matter of a shortage of income, never a surfeit of unnecessary expenditure.

We in California, given the past budget implosions, know the script to follow. We expect that police, fire, prisons, parks, etc. will be threatened with cut-backs and closure while the state-funded "Center for this" and the "Department of that" will remain untouched, since cutting the essential while protecting the politically-correct superfluous is the only way to scare the voter and achieve higher taxes.

At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace — and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.

(Nothing Follows)

Sunday night rock 'n' roll

Slade are an English glam rock and hard rock band. Slade were one of the most recognisable acts of the glam rock movement and were, at their peak, the most commercially popular band in the UK. They are well known for the deliberate misspelling of their song titles and for the song "Merry Xmas Everybody" (released December 1973), now one of the most iconic Christmas pop songs in the United Kingdom.

One of the most acclaimed British Rock bands of the 1970s, Slade are especially remembered for their brash songwriting and energetic live performances. Today, the band is often regarded as an obvious pre-cursor to late 1970s British Punk (Sex Pistols, The Clash).

The group dominated the British charts during the early 1970s. During the height of their success, Slade out-performed their chart rivals Wizzard, Sweet, T.Rex, Suzi Quatro, Mud, Smokie, Gary Glitter, Roxy Music and David Bowie. In the UK, they achieved 12 top five hits from 1971 to 1974, six of which topped the charts. In total, Slade had 17 top 20 hits between 1971 and 1976 including six #1s, three #2s and two #3s. No other UK act of the period enjoyed such consistency in the UK top 40 and Slade actually came the closest to emulating The Beatles' 22 top ten records in a single decade (1960s). Three of their singles entered the charts at #1 and they sold more singles in the UK than any other group of the 1970s.

The very first album I owned was Sladest. I pestered my mother until she bought it for me and she actually bet me $10 that I wouldn't like the album in 10 years. I collected. I still rate Slade Alive as one of the top 10 live rock 'n' roll albums ever made.

Cum on Feel the Noize



Get Down and Get With It



Mama We're All Crazy Now



(Nothing Follows)

The ACLU hits moral rock bottom, digs

We in Australia are extremely lucky that we do not have an equivalent to the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU. If I put together a top 10 list of organisations that hurt America in a similar format to my top 10 institutions that ruin the world then I'd be hard pressed to come up with one to beat the ACLU for top spot, though their education unions would be a contender.

The main reason that the US has such a litigious society - one that imposes a burden equivalent to a tax on the economy of about 8% - is that it does not have a loser pays law such as we have in Australia and other countries like the UK have. This allows motivated organisations with deep pockets to undertake frivolous action against individuals and small companies in order to intimidate and/or financially destroy them with no fear of being sued for damages.

The largest contributor to the Democratic Party is the union movement followed by trial lawyers. The Republicans favour a move to user pays. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats favour the status quo.

You may recall US Senator Larry Craig who was caught soliciting sex in a men's toilet at the Minneapolis Airport. His hilarious defence for his right foot touching the foot of the man in the cubicle next to him - who turned out, inconveniently, to be an undercover federal agent - was that he had a "wide stance" when sitting on the can.

If you've ever been in a public facility at the same time as people are having sex then you know it's quite confronting. To the ACLU, though, sex in public toilets is apparently quite OK. These guys must have run out of things to sue people for.

Extremism: The latest in the endless series of outrages from the ACLU is its claim that anonymous sex in public bathrooms enjoys constitutional protection. What we need protection from are cunning ACLU lawyers.

Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig has an unlikely new friend in his fight against charges of lewd conduct in a Minneapolis Airport men's room last summer. The American Civil Liberties Union came to his defense this week, arguing that "the Minnesota law under which he was arrested is unconstitutionally broad."

The organization characterizes solicitation for sex as "constitutionally protected free speech" and cites court rulings concluding that "a closed bathroom stall is a private location."

At the same time, the ACLU claims it "is in no way advocating sex in public bathrooms." But "sex in public restrooms" is what ends up being protected in the world according to the ACLU.

The ACLU may also be "in no way advocating" terrorist attacks, but it is fighting the U.S. government's terrorist surveillance program and the CIA's terrorist interrogation program in the federal courts, both of which have prevented terrorist attacks. Those lawsuits, in fact, aid and abet terrorists.

If you're a parent taking your child into a public restroom, the ACLU says tough luck: You just have to put up with the "free speech" taking place in the "private location" of "a closed bathroom stall" because "the police have no business spying on people in places where there is an expectation of privacy."

Even the federal government's advance planning in the case of a bird flu pandemic, an attempt to save as many lives as possible, is now subject to ACLU attack.

Its extremist lawyers are alarmed by an executive order in October directing the Department of Health and Human Services to set up a task force to plan for terrorism, disease outbreaks or natural disasters, utilizing Pentagon medical research resources.

"Pandemic planning today tends to emphasize mandatory vaccination and forced treatment," the ACLU complained at a press conference on Monday.

The ACLU is so wrapped up in its crazed, false notions about the Constitution that lifesaving common sense gets lost — and its lawyers will stop at nothing to impose their radical views on the American people.

(Nothing Follows)

Mr Gloom Boom Doom's views on bubbles

Marc Faber is one of the most miserable, curmudgeonly market analysts in the world. He publishes the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, which has a strong track record at predicting downturns.

It's interesting to look back a year and review what his thoughts were.

In this discussion on bubbles he points out that credit expansion is potentially a problem...which the sub prime mortgage situation proves.

My view is that the Fed will probably reduce interest rates by 0.75% and that will prop up failing loan providers for a while. I expect there to be a market correction of about 20% and that the US dollar will weaken by about that amount also over the next couple of years.

Part 1



Part 2



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Climate models still fail to predict real world observation

Here's a new study showing that climate models really are a massive failure in spite of the billions of dollars pumped at them and the 'debate is over' support they get from the Climate Faithful.

An extremely important and challenging paper, ‘Coupling of water and carbon fluxes via the terrestrial biosphere and its significance to the Earth’s climate system’, has just been published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Vol. 112, 2007: doi:10.1029/2007JD008431). The paper is by Paul R. Ferguson and the eminent, Professor Ján Veizer, of the Department of Earth Sciences and Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada. The ‘Abstract’ is as follows:

“Terrestrial water vapor fluxes represent one of the largest movements of mass and energy in the Earth’s outer spheres, yet the relative contributions of abiotic water vapor fluxes and those that are regulated solely by the physiology of plants remain poorly constrained. By interpreting differences in the oxygen-18 and deuterium content of precipitation and river water, a methodology was developed to partition plant transpiration (T) from the evaporative flux that occurs directly from soils and water bodies (E d) and plant surfaces (I n). The methodology was applied to fifteen large watersheds in North America, South America, Africa, Australia, and New Guinea, and results indicated that approximately two thirds of the annual water flux from the ‘water-limited’ ecosystems that are typical of higher-latitude regions could be attributed to T. In contrast to ‘water-limited’ watersheds, where T comprised 55% of annual precipitation, T in high-rainfall, densely vegetated regions of the tropics represented a smaller proportion of precipitation and was relatively constant, defining a plateau beyond which additional water input by precipitation did not correspond to higher T values. In response to variable water input by precipitation, estimates of T behaved similarly to net primary productivity, suggesting that in conformity with small-scale measurements, the terrestrial water and carbon cycles are inherently coupled via the biosphere. Although the estimates of T are admittedly first-order, they offer a conceptual perspective on the dynamics of energy exchange between terrestrial systems and the atmosphere, where the carbon cycle is essentially driven by solar energy via the water cycle intermediary.”

“Given the close correspondence between T and NPP and the disparity in terms of mass exchange between these fluxes, it seems probable that the larger water cycle controls the much smaller carbon cycle, not vice versa, and other limitations to plant growth, such as atmospheric carbon dioxide, nutrients, and temperature are likely superimposed phenomena. Intuitively, the validity of this assertion should be apparent and cannot be considered novel, as biological studies have established the connection between the water and carbon cycles at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. Nonetheless, few regional estimates of T are available and despite the limitations inherent to this methodology, results are informative and emphasize the inter-dependency between solar radiation, water vapor, and carbon dioxide in determining the interaction between the terrestrial biosphere and the atmosphere, and ultimately, the Earth’s climate.”

Apparently, Hansen's Scenario B 'success' (wrong assumptions, not bad forecast) is enough to convince Climate Babblers that models work. One thing that amazes me with these people's faith in models is their lack of understanding of back-fitting, what it means and the statistical no-no that it is.

(Nothing Follows)

Turkish women drivers

Mustafa Akyol from the Turkish Daily News writes an article that if it were printed in Western Europe, the USA, Australia or New Zealand etc then there'd be a massive outcry from feminist groups and other politically correct do gooders.

What's interesting is that Akyol understands that while what he's writing is not politically correct it's not going to get him sacked from the paper.

This might not be the most politically correct thing to say, but I cannot resist the temptation to proclaim the truth: Most Turkish women are horrible drivers. You will see what I mean if you spend a couple of years, or even months, in Turkish streets. If there is a car in front of you which is too slow, too undecided, and too paralyzed, there is 95 percent change that a lady will be sitting in its driver seat. Indeed, it is a truism among Turkish men that “women can't drive.”

Of course, there are exceptions. I have a friend who defies most clichés about Turkish females, including this driving problem. Her car has a sticker which reads, “Beware the mare,” and she masters all the highways and narrow streets of Istanbul with great skill. Once in a while, I see more of such ladies who have developed the talent to survive and triumph in the Social Darwinistic driving culture of this frantic city. Yet they remain exceptions.

Not much decision making:

In the distant past, I used to think that there was some genetic reason behind women's failure to handle the steering wheel. But I started change my mind as I spent time in the roads of America. Here, many females were — and I am sure still are — pretty skillful in driving their huge jeeps, trucks and SUVs. “It is not that women can't drive,” I said to mself. “It is the Turkish women which have a problem with that.”

Let me speculate a bit on the origins of that phenomenon. One thing about driving is that it is a very individualistic experience. While moving on four fast rotating wheels, you can't ask anybody whether to take or not to take the next exit. You have to decide it for yourself. You have to be independent.

Of course such an individualistic experience can be very dangerous if it is combined with irresponsibility. That explains why quite many Turkish men are horrible drivers, too: Actually they are the ones who are generally reckless and aggressive. They see their cars as embodiments of their egos, and try to satisfy them by intimidating other vehicles.

As for most Turkish women, however, the problem is just the opposite: Generally they are very cautious, but they lack the talent to respond to challenges. A common joke about a Turkish female driver is that she crashed into a roadblock because she couldn't decide to take whether the detour to the right or to the left. The problem is the lack of a talent for independent and quick decision making.

A sociologist would easily see the link between this driving problem and the role given to women in Turkish society. The lack of independence is precisely what our society suggests as a feature of the ideal woman. In popular Turkish imagination, women are perceived as girlfriends, spouses, and wives. They are not self-made human beings who master their lives. They need to be protected, financed, and tutored by men.

I bet some readers would rush to blame religion, and in particular Islam, for this passive female attitude. They would be partly right. It is true that there are elements in the Islamic tradition which make women subservient to men. One just needs to look at Saudi Arabia to see how tyrannical those teaching can be on the feminine side of the society.

Yet the Turks who have distanced themselves completely from Islamic teachings and who have rather become zealous secularists can be very similar in the way they see gender relations. Go to upscale bars in Istanbul and you will see drones of stylish girls looking out for “rich husbands.” Their career plan is based on not their intellectual merits, but their physical assets that will attract males who will, if they are dumb enough, pay for and take care of their lives. These “provider” guys will probably buy these girls fancy cars, too — and the latter will probably soon crash them into some roadblock.

Who is to blame?:

On the other side of Turkish society, one can find “Islamic feminists” who criticize the “chauvinism” in the Islamic tradition, which they see as a post-Koranic deviation, and who argue for a comprehensive reinterpretation of religion. These women might be journalists, doctors or academics who earn their living and make up their own minds. Despite the clichés, there is no sign of a dominating male under their veil.

In other words, the culture of the passive female is something that stands alone, and it can dominate both the secular and the religious mindsets. Similarly, both of those mindsets can be liberated from the attitudes that prevent the flourishing of a decision-making, independently thinking personality.

The thriving of that individualism — which is often, and quite mistakenly, confused by selfishness — is the key to the progress of Turkish society. It will definitely help our women find more meaning in their lives. I believe it will even make them better drivers.

(Nothing Follows)

Europe's white army of terror

Richard Elias from Scotland On Sunday has written a piece titled Al-Qaeda's white army of terror in which he reports on the increasing number of whites who are converting to Islam under the guidance of radical imams and the security threat they present.

The rise in popularity of nationalist groups throughout Europe is being driven by one thing - rampant Muslim immigration - which wouldn't be an issue if Muslims integrated into their host societies in the same manner as the myriad of other peoples who have emigrated to Europe, but they don't. Demands for Sharia Law, support for terrorism (both tacit and implicit) and sucking at the public teat don't go down well with anyone other than the elitist, multi-culti apologists who provide moral support for this new 'victim' group.

It will be interesting to see what happens when the Average Joes or Klauses or Jeans work out that the cosy retirements they're all working toward are under threat and that those people blowing up innocent Londoners and Berliners and Parisians are actually driven by something other than supposedly being victims of some capitalist and/or American policy.

HUNDREDS of British non-Muslims have been recruited by al-Qaeda to wage war against the West, senior security sources warned last night.

As many as 1,500 white Britons are believed to have converted to Islam for the purpose of funding, planning and carrying out surprise terror attacks inside the UK, according to one MI5 source.

Lord Carlile, the Government's independent reviewer of anti-terrorism legislation, said many of the converts had been targeted by radical Muslims while serving prison terms.

Security experts say the growing secret army of white terrorists poses a particularly serious threat as they are far less likely to be detected than members of the Asian community.

Which poses the question - if racial profiling is taboo then why are white terrorists going to be harder to detect? It's a tricky one for the multi-culti-relativists to deal with. Luckily, they find comfort in cognitive dissonance.

Since the 7/7 and 21/7 London bombings, police and intelligence services have had considerable success in identifying, disrupting and stopping extremist plots. As a result, groups such as al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen have been forced to change tack. Converting white non-Muslims has been one response.

Which supports my previous point that racial profiling is going on even if it's formally denied.

The trend is well established in the United States. American-born Adam Gadahn is one of the FBI's top 10 most-wanted terrorists after converting to Islam and rising through al-Qaeda's ranks to become a prominent spokesman.

One British security source last night told Scotland on Sunday: "There could be anything up to 1,500 converts to the fundamentalist cause across Britain. They pose a real potential danger to our domestic security because, obviously, these people blend in and do not raise any flags.

"The exact figure of those who have converted to Islam and turned to terror is not precisely known. Not everyone who converts becomes radicalised and it may be that just two-fifths go down that path, but it remains a significant and dangerous problem."

'Just' two-fifths? 40%? What other religion do people convert to and become radicalised? Christianity? Nope. Buddhism? Nope. Hinduism? Nope.

Carlile said he was not aware of specific numbers, but confirmed to Scotland on Sunday that Whitehall was aware of the new threat and was actively tackling it. He said: "These people are an issue and are potentially very dangerous. There have been cases of non-Muslims converting before, and of these, Richard Reid, the so-called Shoebomber, is the most obvious example.

"They are more difficult to detect and the security services are right to place some focus on this issue."

Carlile said the majority of converts were targeted when they were in prison: "These (converts] are outside the standard type of profile which most police forces would have of a terrorist, which is male, young, and of Middle Eastern or Asian appearance. That is why they are so potentially dangerous."

Carlile added: "The Home Office has a lot of money, millions of pounds, which is being put forward for communities and fighting radicalisation. There is no question how tackling this issue is best achieved: it is achieved at a community level."

When this fails, which it surely will, then Average Joe, Klaus and Jean will call for some other way to solve the problem. Politicians that support this position will get increasing support as is already being seen with the BNP and Vlaams-Belang.

Security experts say radical Muslims in prison have become adept at identifying potential new recruits to their cause. Those in custody for the first time, the young and the lonely are particularly susceptible.

Initially, the approach is made to comfort, console and support, with very little reference, if any, to religion.

However, after several 'chats', the conversation will be turned towards the subject and, gradually, over a period of weeks or months, it is possible to complete the conversion.

Soooooo, a separate prison for Muslims?

Robert Leiken, director of the Immigration and National Security Programme and a specialist on European Muslims based at the Nixon Centre in Washington DC, said: "To me, the figure of 1,500 seems reasonable as many, perhaps less than a third, will actually go on to become radicals.

"New religious recruits always tend to be more zealous than those who have grown up with that specific religion."

Edwin Bakker, a Dutch-based security specialist, has studied at length the issue of radical conversions. He said: "The question is relevant and timely. Newcomers to Islam are extra-sensitive to perceived discrimination of Muslims and Islam-bashing.

"They feel they have to defend Islam – one of the essential concepts of Jihad – and they feel they have to prove themselves as newcomers."

But one of Scotland's leading Muslims disputed the claims of radicalisation, saying Islam's strict moral code made it unattractive to many westerners.

Bashir Maan added: "I do not know of any Islamist terror group in Scotland and, considering as a Muslim a person must pray five times daily, abstain from drinking (and] sex outside marriage, adhere to strict dietary and many other rules, it is impossible to convert to Islam a young person brought up in this very liberal society.

"I agree that the security services must be vigilant and keep their eye on everybody, but I think in this case they seem to be over-reacting."

If I had to bet my house on wheter Bashir Maan was a supporter of radical Islam then I'd take short odds that he is. To say that Islam is unattractive to many westerners dodges the issue. It sounds like a page right out of the Tariq Ramadan playbook.

Religions should not be judged on scripture or laws but on the actions of its followers. In this regard Islam has a lot of problems and Muslims are the only ones who can clean it up.

As a follow on, a plot has been uncovered in France to blow up the Eiffel Tower and in Germany they're wetting their pants over fears of terror attacks on judicial buildings.

Clearly, blowing up the Eiffel Tower is a rational response to American foreign policy or the great Zionist conspiracy.

The populations of Western Europe look increasingly likely to reap the full consequences of the multi-culti, kumbaya seed they have sown.

(Nothing Follows)

Sunday night rock 'n' roll

Golden Earring is a Dutch Hard rock/pop/Heavy metal band, founded in 1961 in The Hague as the Golden Earrings (the 's' was later dropped). They had international chart success with the songs Eight Miles High in 1969, Radar Love in 1973, and Twilight Zone in 1982. In their home country, they had over 40 hits and made over 30 gold and platinum albums. Current members of Golden Earring are Barry Hay (vocals, guitar, flute and saxophone, member since 1968), George Kooymans (vocals and guitar, founder of band), Rinus Gerritsen (bass and keyboard, founding member), and Cesar Zuiderwijk (drums and percussion, member since 1970).

Golden Earring has released music worldwide and enjoyed brief international superstar status in the Seventies when the single version of Radar Love, from the album Moontan became a hit in both Europe and the USA. A non-nude album cover was distributed for the North American release. Moontan itself was awarded a gold record in the US. Radar Love has its own website http://www.radar-love.net listing hundreds of covers of the song, voted "best car song ever" by readers of USA Today in 2005 and second best "greatest driving song" in a poll of BBC's program Top Gear, after Don't Stop Me Now from Queen. The Twilight Zone, written by Kooymans in 1982, brought Golden Earring a second international round of success. The song was accompanied by one of the first rock videos, directed by Dick Maas. As MTV had just launched their music television channel in 1981, the airplay helped The Twilight Zone secure a Top Ten hit in the States.

Everyone knows Radar Love. A lot may know Twilight Zone. To get an idea of how big a songbook these guys have listen to the other two, both great songs.

Radar Love



She Flies On Strange Wings



Mad Love Is Comin'



Twilight Zone



(Nothing Follows)

Mathematical models and their climate change reliability

American Thinker's Jerome J. Schmitt has as much trouble with climate models as I do.

I've asked this question before - If someone built a financial model that was the result of massive back-fitting and had never been accurate in forecasting then would you entrust the nation's economy to its predictions?

Modelling climate is akin to modelling the human mind and trying to work out what someone is thinking in 2050. This stuff is complex.

I just don't understand American liberals and their attitude toward mathematical models. The left places an inordinate amount of faith in untested models predicting man-made warming of the global climate, while ignoring time-tested mathematical models in another important field important to all Americans.

Embracing Untested Models

Global warmists place unquestioning faith mathematical models of anthropogenic global warming, declaring their predictions to be settled science, as if the models completely and flawlessly took account of all significant variables in one of the most complex systems ever studied, the earth's atmosphere.

Yet experience teaches us that modeling atmospheric phenomena is an uncertain business, even in atmospheres much less complex than the planetary system. Far simpler artificial atmospheres or "climates" are routinely created and modeled in the semiconductor industry. Working in sealed vessels within which chemical vapor deposition (CVD) forms nanometer-scale thin solid films on silicon wafer surfaces, in order to produce integrated circuits and many other semiconductor products. Last year I wrote about the many difficulties these simple atmospheric models encounter:

Closed systems are also much easier to model as compared to systems open to the atmosphere (that should tell us something already). Computer models are used to inform the engineering team as the design the shape, temperature ramp, flow rates, etc, etc, (i.e. the thermodynamics) of the new reactor.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that 1) the chemical reactions are highly studied, 2) there exists extensive experience with similar reactors, much of it recorded in the open literature, 3) the input gases and materials are of high and known purity, and 4) the process is controlled with incredible precision, the predictions of the models are often wrong, requiring that the reactor be adjusted empirically to produce the desired product with quality and reliability.

The fact that these artificial "climates" are closed systems far simpler than the global climate, have the advantage of the experimental method, and are subject to precise controls, and yet are frequently wrong, should lend some humility to those who make grand predictions about the future of the earth's atmosphere.

So serious are the problems, sometimes, that it is not unheard of for an experimental reactor to be scrapped entirely in favor of starting from scratch in designing the process and equipment. Often a design adjustment predicted to improve performance actually does the opposite. This does not mean that process models are useless, for they undergird the engineer's understanding of what is happening in the process and help him or her make adjustments to fix the problem. But it means that they cannot be relied upon by themselves to predict results. These new adjustments and related information are then used to improve the models for future use in a step by step process tested time and again against experimental reality.

Although there is no record of accurate prediction for the totally unproven and skepticism-worthy models of the warmist climatologists, liberals are convinced that there is a "scientific consensus" over an impending Anthropogenic Global Warming Crisis that requires undertaking immediate extreme measures including increased carbon taxes as well as new "private sector" solutions such as carbon-trading and selling of carbon-credits.

Ignoring Time-Tested Models

Actuaries are mathematical professionals who build statistical models of human populations in order to plan for life-insurance, health-insurance and pension benefits. The accuracy of their models can have far reaching consequences. Errors might cost their private sector employers' millions and even billions of dollars. Fortunately, the actuarial profession's record in accurate prediction is quite good, particularly since their relatively simple statistical models are informed with reliable data collected from census figures as well as hospital and mortuary records. While predicting one individual's healthcare needs and time-of-death is impossible, when averaged across millions of people, such statistics can be quite reliable.

Today, a consensus of actuaries agrees that the Social Security system is in need of major overhaul otherwise it will experience debilitating financial shortfalls in a few decades as more and more "baby-boomers" retire with full benefits. In the face of this consensus however, liberals demur and minimize the importance of this crisis, undercutting President Bush's attempts to draw attention the problem as his prelude to proposing reforms. Unpopular measures such as cutting benefits, needs-based benefits, raising retirement ages or increasing payroll taxes are not to even discussed according to liberals. Furthermore, President Bush's proposals to increase investment returns on the Social Security trust fund are met with universal derision by liberals as unholy "privatization" unworthy of this New Deal institution, although one glance at the incredible returns being achieved with professional management of university endowments shows the enormous potential of this approach to solving the actuarial "crisis". Al Gore famously said the Social Security Trust Fund should be kept in a "lock-box", the financial equivalent of stuffing cash in a mattress for safe-keeping.

Do not attempt to understand the inconsistency over when liberals will heed a professional "consensus". It will only give you a headache.

(Nothing Follows)