We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
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“Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood” “They each knowingly made a false statement of fact to the Court and Dr. Mann knowingly participated in the falsehood, endeavoring to make the strongest case possible even if it required using erroneous and misleading information.”
– Judge Alfred S. Irving, Jr., regarding the case of Michael E. Mann, Ph.D., v. National Review, Inc., et al in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia Civil Division 2012 CA 008263 B.
Hat tips to John in the comments to yesterday’s post and to John Hinderaker of Powerline via Instapundit.
As Mr Hinderaker says, the facts of this case are rather complicated but the judge’s conclusions are unequivocal – and the conclusion of the court that Dr Michael E Mann, maker of the famous “Hockey Stick Graph”, knowingly participated in a falsehood has a certain… resonance.
Related post: “Samizdata quote of the day – unfortunately the high-status fraudster won.” I am happy to say that the injustice done a year ago has been partially undone by this latest ruling.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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Did the spirit of Trump’s new era influence this ruling in any way?
I wonder how this will affect Mark Steyn? The climate grifter initially got a judgment in his favour for $1 million, reduced to $5000 on appeal.
Jacob – I do not know. But the pathetic Chief Justice Roberts is still allowing rogue judges to issue injunctions to cover up and demand-continuation-of waste and corruption (yes corruption) in government spending. Chief Justice Roberts also allowed Obamacare to stay – in spite of admitting it was unconstitutional. Roberts is like Chief Justice Hughes in the 1930s, who admitted that the mass stealing of privately owned gold by the Administration of Franklin Roosevelt, and their violation of all contracts – public and private, was unconstitutional – but-allowed-it-to-happen-anyway. With scum (and the word is well deserved) like Roberts and Hughes as establishment “conservative Republicans” no wonder everything goes to Hell.
JohnK = the jury in D.C. was totally corrupt, that is why the people behind the corrupt Michael Mann (the puppet does not fund his own legal cases) “venue shopped” to have he case heard in D.C. (in spite of the fact that Mark Steyn does not live there).
D.C. is not just more leftist than any State – it is more leftist than any COUNTY (check the 2024 voting figures – D.C. was the most Harris/Walz voting place in the United States).
No conservative can expect a fair trial (civil or criminal) in a place like D.C.
Sadly that is true in many other cities – where juries (not just corrupt judges – but also juries) decide verdicts on political grounds – again in both civil and criminal cases. All (all) a jury in such a place tends to care about is showing their leftist political and cultural loyalties – a conservative (or someone they think is a conservative) they will tent to find guilty before they even know what the charges are. It is a great mistake to think that such leftists are well meaning people who are misguided – on the contrary, they are often wicked people eager to do injustice – as their behaviour on so many juries shows.
By the way…. the stuff that Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann came out with was a pack of lies, a fraud – as Mark Steyn correctly pointed out.
Of course the document argues that knowingly false evidence was placed before the jury – and no doubt it was (which is a crime in-its-self), but I doubt it would have made any difference if it had not been placed before the jury – as the jury were totally biased before the trial even started. But we shall have to see.
John K, this judgement does relate to Mark Steyn, in that he, alongside Rand Simberg, was one of the defendants against whom Michael Mann launched and won a claim of defamation. Steyn was going to have to pay more than $1M in punitive damages to Mann. For some reason the amount Simberg was going to have to pay was much less, only $1k. (Confusingly the same trial awarded Mann only one dollar of compensatory damages from each writer. In the British courts I believe it is still true that to be awarded the smallest possible* amount of damages in a defamation case is effectively a statement that the person winning them, though technically vindicated, has no reputation to lose, but that certainly doesn’t seem to be the way that the US media reported this case.)
Anyway, ten days ago, the same judge as we are talking about now, Judge Alfred S. Irving, greatly reduced the punitive damages against Mr Steyn, from $1M to $5k. I am not clear on whether the judgment against Dr Mann for misleading the court that I link to in the post above, dated 12th March, is a separate matter from the reduction in damages (“remittitur”) against Mr Steyn ordered on 3rd March.
*An award for damages of the smallest coin of the realm used to be called “contemptuous damages” for that reason. Maybe it still is. IANAL.
Natalie – quite so.
Paul Marks, you are right about the gold confiscation episode as a stain on US jurisprudence. Even today, almost a century on, it is hard to credit how a supposedly constitutional republic can ban private ownership of hunks of metal because it might upset an economic policy.
The Hockey Stick Graph itself was pretty shonky from the start. It was never established that tree rings could be used as a proxy for temperature records, tree rings followed the instrumental record for part of the calibration period but then diverged. The Roman and Medieval warm periods were airbrushed out despite being well supported by historical and archaeological records. Once the graph had been completely discredited the climate alarmists tried to distance themselves from it but it was all over their propaganda up to that point. There were several attempts to revive the graph even after it had become an embarrassment, I don’t think that Michael Mann ever stopped believing in it.
Yes Johnathan Pearce – and violate all contracts public and private.
The “hunks of metal” were the money and always had been – the “Dollar” was (and is) just a name.
The dissenting opinions are well worth reading – written by some of the 4 Justices who dissented.
But my point was also that Chief Justice Hughes knew that what was being done was unconstitutional – but let it happen.
In this he is like Chief Justice Roberts.
Roberts knew, for example, that Obamacare was unconstitutional – but he let it happen.
He also knew that “Covid” was not a magic word that made election laws (of various States) against unchecked mass (millions) of mail-in ballots, vanish – but Roberts let that happen as well. Refusing to deal with the cases both before and after the election (using different excuses each time).
President Trump has personal experience that tells him that when the establishment say they care about democracy – they are lying. And when they say they care about the rule-of-law they are lying.
Not just the Democrats – but also “conservative Republicans” such as the late Chief Justice Hughes and Chief Justice Roberts.
Stonyground – Dr Mann never “believed in it”, he is not an honest scientist who made a mistake, he is a fraudster.
Scientific truth is of no concern to the establishment forces that Dr Mann serves, and who finance his court cases, only their political and cultural agenda matters to them – an agenda of power and control, of tyranny.
That judge is just catching up with the insights that scientists had about Mann years ago. Read Steyn’s blockbuster collection of comments about Mann in ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’. The title itself is from one of the comments.
Yet somehow we are being hit by the Net Zero lunacy today. Do government actors never have time to read for themselves. They seem to acquire strong convictions as some kind of contagious disease carried by eco-fanatics and extremist agitators.
Frank – politicians are alert to the political implications of any issue. Net Zero is attractive politically, the truth of it is neither here nor there. Any issue that offers the opportunity to direct vast sums of money throughout the economy (and in so doing enrich themselves and their allies) is attractive for that reason alone.
It is worth pointing out that one of the first political uses of CO2 was by Margaret Thatcher, who used it in her justification of the “Dash for Gas”. The main purpose was to break the coal miners unions, but being able to pitch the change as an environmental one was certainly useful politically.
The issue of coal mines is one of those that has left wingers believing in two contradictory things at the same time. Closing coal mines is bad, though not if a Labour government does it, but keeping mines open to fuel coal fired power stations is also bad.
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Can I get that on a T-Shirt?