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Christians in MP Steve Baker’s seat pray for him to quit role on climate thinktank
Protesters gathered in High Wycombe on Friday to implore their MP, Steve Baker, to quit as a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank that has been accused of being one of the UK’s leading sources of climate scepticism.
When it says “protesters gathered”, we are not talking about the First Crusade. The gathering process probably took less than three seconds.
Those assembled, including local children and members of the local Lib Dem, Labour and Green parties,
I see something missing there.
said they hoped the MP would be voted out at the next election if he did not change his mind on net zero. Baker currently has a majority of 4,000, which means his seat could be marginal.
The MP, who is a member of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and has called for the government to rethink its policy of decarbonising the economy using renewable energy, came out to
Smite the idolaters?
join the gathered protesters in prayer and answer their questions.
All very civilised, and these doubtless well-meaning folk, all fifteen of them, have every right to make their protest, and I am glad that Mr Baker smote them not.
But if we’re gonna be doing political prayers, here’s mine. Oh Lord, open their eyes: we need fracking and nuclear power for the sake of the poor and the peace of the world.
As Andrew Neil writes in the Mail,
While Putin was making these painful preparations to withstand sanctions, what was Europe doing? Why, increasing its exposure to Russian energy, of course.
In 2013 the European Union bought 135 billion cubic metres of Russian natural gas. Six years later, despite indisputable evidence that a revanchist Russia was on the march, annexing Crimea — a 21st-century Anschluss — and occupying parts of Georgia and eastern Ukraine, the EU had managed to increase its purchase of Russian gas to 166 billion cubic metres.
Despite pouring billions of euros into wind and solar energy, the EU has also managed to import a lot more coal from Russia.
And, of course, it just can’t get enough Russian gas, hence the German enthusiasm for a new gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2, from Siberia through the Baltic Sea to Germany (currently suspended — but not abandoned — in the wake of the invasion).
In a very real sense, the EU has paid for Putin’s Fortress Russia defences. With oil prices spiking at over $100 a barrel, $700 million a day in oil revenues is pouring into Kremlin coffers. Germany’s dependence on Russian energy is close to complete: 50 per cent of its coal imports, 55 per cent of its gas, 35 per cent of its oil — all from Russia.
Added later: From Tipp Insights, “Anti-Fossil Madness Funds Putin’s Ukraine Aggression”
There is an article in today’s Guardian by Nesrine Malik called “Scared to be ‘woke’? It’s time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars”. The title is a fair summary of her argument.
As so often, the comments were more interesting than the article. The five most popular top-level comments were:
Wiretrip
14 hours ago
647
What is the point in winding everyone up about an empire that is long gone? Meanwhile China continues to exploit Africa and slavery is alive and well in Dubai.
Quaestor
14 hours ago
578
No one need be scared to be woke. The people who are threatened are those who are not woke, and who are abused and have their livelihoods attacked by the intolerant. Even when the woke have a point, the way they attack their opponents hardens opinion against them. I will support very nearly anyone attacked by the woke, and especially people like J K Rowling, Katharine Birbalsingh, Kathleen Stock and Howard Winstone. The only sensible response to cancellation tactics is to block the woke and let them scream and shout among themselves.
Lump
13 hours ago
478
The trouble with the woke is that they act as self appointed thought police in a land where policing is supposed to be by consent. Then they accuse any dissenters of having started a “culture war” and seek to have them ostracised, deplatformed, cancelled, fired, made to issue a grovelling apology. Is it any wonder they are disliked?
ServiusGalba
14 hours ago
428
I think this fails to understand just how toxic “woke” is. “Owing” and doubling down on narratives like “white privilege” and “critical race theory” and in particular using them in schools is likely to get you annihilated in the polls and rightly so. As has recently been seen in the gubernatorial elections in Virginia following the Loudoun county school incidents. The only way to deal with woke is to abandon it altogether and become true liberals again.
Giovanni1234
14 hours ago
373
Among the various diversity, the most important should be the diversity of opinion.
The days are long gone when the Guardian comment section was called “Comment is Free” and, true to its name, allowed readers to comment on practically every article. These days comments are rarely allowed except on those articles where most of the Guardian readership is likely to agree with the Guardian‘s own line. This article was an exception. Of course, the newspaper has every right to pursue whatever policy on comments it wishes, but the habit of not permitting people to talk back has costs. One loses the chance to feel the wind change. I think Nesrine Malik will have been surprised by the hostile reaction to her article, and many of the commenters will be surprised to find out how many of their fellow left wingers share their doubts.
“The draft Online Safety Bill delivers the government’s manifesto commitment to make the UK the safest place in the world to be online while defending free expression”, says the gov.uk website. It would be nice to think that meant that the Bill would make the UK the safest place in the world in which to defend free expression online.
The text of the draft Bill soon dispels that illusion. Today’s Times editorial says,
In the attempt to tackle pornography, criminality, the promotion of suicide and other obvious obscenities rampant on social media, the bill invents a new category titled “legal but harmful”. The implications, which even a former journalist such as the prime minister appears not to have seen, are worrying.
It is sweet to believe the best of people, but that “appears not to have seen” is either sweet enough to choke on, or sarcasm.
Could they give the censors in Silicon Valley power to remove anything that might land them with a massive fine? That would enshrine the pernicious doctrine of no-platforming into law.
Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, has expressed alarm at what he fears the wording could do to his publication. Any digital publisher who crossed the line might find an article on vaccine safety or on eugenics, or indeed any topic deemed controversial, removed without warning, without trace and without recourse to challenge or explanation. The decision would not be taken by human beings, but by bots using algorithms to pick up words or phrases that fell into a pre-programmed red list.
The editorial continues,
The bill specifically excludes from the category [of “legal but harmful”] existing media outlets. If Facebook or another platform took down an article from a British newspaper without explanation, Ofcom, the media regulator, could penalise the platform.
That’s us bloggers dealt with then. Notice how the article frames the threat to free expression almost entirely in terms of its effect on newspapers. Still, in the current climate I am grateful that the Times has come out against the Bill. If self-interest is what it takes to wake them, then good for self-interest.
However, social media giants operate on a global scale. In any market such as Britain, where they have a huge following and earn billions, they will not risk a fine of 10 per cent of their annual turnover. They will simply remove anything deemed “harmful”, or, to counter the bill, downgrade its visibility or add a warning label. Given that America’s litigious culture will influence those deciding what constitutes harm, this could include political assertions, opinions or anything the liberal left could insist constitutes “fake news”. If Donald Trump can be banned, so can others.
Little noticed in the UK media, reports from a financial vlogger Joe Blogs (that is his handle) on Turkey tells us that the government is ‘asking’ citizens to hand over their gold and foreign currency, at a time of 50% inflation, but citizens will get Lira in return. There are 30,000 gold shops in Turkey and five major refineries. Do not worry that Erdogan is a (not so) covert Islamist, he is first and foremost a Keynesian.
The Turkish government is not simply standing by and watching as the Lira inflates away, the government has cut tax on food from 8% to 1%, and this in the context of a currency crisis, the lira falling 44% in 2021 against foreign currencies. So they know that cutting taxes eases burdens on people. Unfortunately, Atatürk’s doctrine of ‘statism‘ lingers, with lots of Turks employed by the State.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Finance Minister has been in the UK and reported had a ‘fantastic‘ meeting with potential investors. And the goverment is determined to keep on down this path, telling the private banks to step up their efforts to help by handing over foreign currency deposits. (Doubtless this is all voluntary).
Here is a graph of recent Turkish inflation rates. Are we going to be seeing a ‘crack-up boom’ in real time any week now? Turkey is reportedly informally dollarising, with over 50% of transactions in Turkey in dollars (Why not the Euro?).
I can’t help thinking that in the UK, the government is looking at Turkey with envious eyes, dreaming of taking steps to inflate away what remains of our prosperity and to seize our assets.
And it is not all bad from the Turkish government, they have changed the name of the country in a re-branding exercise, changing it from ‘Turkey’ to ‘Türkiye’, apparently to avoid confusion with the bird of the same name.
Joe Blogs also has some interesting coverage on the Chinese property conglomerate Evergrande, and the efforts of a US Hedge Fund to take ownership of collateral in Hong Kong.
The deaths of those whom you have met and influenced you for the better is a kick in the gut, a punch on the nose and reminder that cancer really, really sucks. And that is the sort of sentence that the late P J O’ Rourke, literary jester, mocker of fashionable nostrums, lover of fast cars and travel to dangerous places, could have written.
I met Mr O’Rourke about a decade ago, in what was the aftermath of the 2008 financial smash. He was charming company (my wife was bowled over by him – you have to watch these silver-tongued Irishmen) and retained the fizz that I recall from his coruscating book, Republican Party Reptile. I read that, I think, in around 1989, and then got my hands on anything he wrote. When he became a traveling correspondent for RollingStone magazine (a fact that today strikes one as impossible, such is the tribalism of our culture), I followed his columns closely. Parliament of Whores, written in the early 1990s and on the cusp of the Bill Clinton decade, stands the test of time as a brilliantly funny takedown of Big Government. Then came classics such as Eat The Rich and All The Trouble In The World.
I don’t quite think he kept the standard of searing wit + commentary at that level into the later 90s and into the current century. He did “serious stuff” with an amusing turn, such as a fine book about Adam Smith (he discusses it here) and could turn on the brilliance, but I think some of the energy had fallen off. He was a Dad with all the responsibilities that brings, and younger and less funny and more aggressive voices began to dominate the noise level in the public square. (Or maybe that is a sign that I am getting old, ahem.) O’Rourke, to the anger of some, wasn’t a Trump fan, and said so. He moved quite more explicitly libertarian, having a gig at the CATO Institute think tank. By his early 70s, I did not read or hear much of his doings, and that was a shame in the age of Greta, Cancel Culture, “Save the NHS”, Great Resets, Chinese nastiness and the Keto Diet. (I am kidding slightly about the last point.)
P J O’Rourke’s death saddens me as much as did that of two other fine men whom I met over the years and who died from cancer over the past couple of years: Brian Micklethwait and Sir Roger Scruton. They were all very different men, but they shared a common love of liberty, a mischievous wit and a hatred of cant. (See an essay here by Brian about O’Rourke’s essay on the wonders of fast cars and how Brian saw some of the same lessons from the innovations around music tech.)
I will miss P J O’Rourke and his chuckling, optimistic and sane voice. And I will miss the chance to share another whisky and cigar with him too.
From the late 1960s until about 2010 the “liberal” media of the English-speaking world were ideally placed to propagate their values. Sources such as the BBC, the “Big Three” American TV networks, the Times of London and the New York Times were widely seen as scarcely having any ideology beyond apple-pie sentiments about liberal democracy and an endearing pride in their own role. Newcomers such as CNN upset the balance of power but did not upset this perception that what they were providing was “just the facts, ma’am”, albeit with snazzier graphics. Then along came social media, Facebook and Twitter and the rest – another eruption in terms of technique, but they still saw themselves and were seen by others as media platforms. The very word implies a level playing field. They were all blessed with something like invisibility. To be able to mix your message in with the news and spread it without being seen to do so, without being seen as an actor in your own right at all – propagandists of past eras would have sold their souls to be in that position.
Now, of course, as Glenn Greenwald put it,
…we’re on a path where we’re going to have two of everything, depending on one’s political ideology: segregated websites, financial systems, even charitable giving, the result of systematically banning non-liberals.
Edit: ‘Tony in London’ comments with an interesting parallel,
Greenwald’s observation looks [like] the pillarisation that used to define Dutch society. Almost everyone identified with one of three pillars (Catholic, Protestant, Social democrat) and this would determine which school or university they would attend, which newspaper they would read, which radio station they would listen to, which trade union and political party would represent them etc.
The Wikipedia article about verzuiling in the Netherlands and Belgium is here.
Full interview can be found here on Media Scum.
If it wasn’t so serious, we could just laugh. But green activists have been so successful over the last 30 years with their “settled” science propaganda that they have persuaded a Conservative Government in the U.K. to embrace the Net Zero agenda. A Marxist-inspired, control and rule agenda complete with reduced mass personal transport, higher energy costs, restricted diets and all the loss of personal freedoms that these entail. The Covid pandemic has shown just how many freedoms can be snatched away in a modern connected society by the spread of widespread fear, fuelled by selective state-sponsored science and, of course, made up models.
[…]
Meanwhile back in the real world, it is obvious that many green extremists are starting to think the unthinkable. Democracy is all very well but is falling short when decisions have to be made by self-proclaimed experts going about their important work of saving the planet. Writing in the American Political Science Review last month, Ross Mittiga, Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of Chile, noted that as the climate crisis deepens, “one can find a cautious but growing chorus of praise for ‘authoritarian environmentalism’”.
– Chris Morrison
Another reason for de-covidification otherwise the current totalitarianism will serve as a model for other ones.
“Telling people to ‘follow the science’ won’t save the planet. But they will fight for justice”, writes Amy Westervelt in the Guardian:
The climate emergency has clear themes with heroes and villains. Describing it this way is how to build a movement
The biggest success of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long campaign to push doubt about climate science is that it forced the conversation about the climate crisis to centre on science.
It’s not that we didn’t need scientific research into climate change, or that we don’t need plenty more of it. Or even that we don’t need to do a better job of explaining basic science to people, across the board (hello, Covid). But at this moment, “believe science” is too high a bar for something that demands urgent action. Believing science requires understanding it in the first place. In the US, the world’s second biggest carbon polluter, fewer than 40% of the population are college educated and in many states, schools in the public system don’t have climate science on the curriculum. So where should this belief – strong enough to push for large-scale social and behavioural change – be rooted exactly?
People don’t need to know anything at all about climate science to know that a profound injustice has occurred here that needs to be righted.
—
The most recommended comment was by someone called “Pilotchute”. It started by quoting Ms Westervelt’s claim that the the US entering the Second World War was an example of “social change driven by moral outrage at the power being wielded by the few over the many”.
Pilotchute responded:
?
OK, nothing to do with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines then.
Ironic misinterpretation really, given the underlying “ordinary folk are too stupid to understand . . .” thrust to the article.
I think that the people who operate Facebook and other social media are concerned about facts. That’s why they go out of their way to disappear them
– Shlomo Maistre
Doctors Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), have written an open letter from from the BMJ to Mark Zuckerberg:
Dear Mark Zuckerberg,
We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.
In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.
The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]
But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”
Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]
We find the “fact check” performed by Lead Stories to be inaccurate, incompetent and irresponsible.
— It fails to provide any assertions of fact that The BMJ article got wrong
— It has a nonsensical title: “Fact Check: The British Medical Journal Did NOT Reveal Disqualifying And Ignored Reports Of Flaws In Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Trials”
— The first paragraph inaccurately labels The BMJ a “news blog”
Do read the whole thing, which is quite an important step in both fighting censorship by social media and in fighting Covid-19. These aims are not in opposition. I stopped my excerpt there for what some may call a trivial reason: to leap to the defence of blogging. While I sympathise with the irritation felt by the editors of the BMJ at hearing their venerable journal, founded in 1840, described as a “news blog” I have to say that there are some blogs I would trust more than some newspapers, even some older than the BMJ. For instance I found out about this matter via Not the Bee.
Yes, that’s 2021, folks, when a link from the “truth is stranger than fiction” non-satirical spinoff of an American Christian satirical website (even as a Christian myself, those are weird words to put next to each other) takes me to an open letter from the editors of the august British Medical Journal in which they angrily respond to a so-called “fact checker” working for a social media site who thinks the best way to combat the conspiracy theory that “they” might be suppressing news about inadequacies in the testing of vaccines is to suppress news about inadequacies in the testing of vaccines.
Sometimes if one does an internet search for the headline of an article, one will find it in several different places on the internet.
For instance the article that Johnathan Pearce linked to in this post, a piece by Gerard Baker for the Wall Street Journal with the title “Biden Emerges as Progressive Government’s Mr. Bad Example” turned up in a site calling itself “Daily News 4 U” which offers “News for you all day” in English, German and Filipino. The headline seems to have lost the final word “example” but apart from that it is the same article.
It could be that the WSJ has a particularly active syndication sales department, I suppose. Though one would think they would get the headline right.
Whether or not the route by which an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on 20th December reappeared in Daily News 4 U on 21st December was entirely … homologated, there is no mystery about why a little-known news site would want to re-publish an article by an established columnist alongside lots and lots and lots of articles by columnists from all over the world.
But there is a related phenomenon which I do not understand.
On December 14th an opinion piece by Bret Stephens in the New York Times caused a stir. Its headline was “Biden Should Not Run Again — and He Should Say He Won’t.” The full article is behind a paywall, but here are the opening paragraphs:
Is it a good idea for Joe Biden to run for re-election in 2024? And, if he runs again and wins, would it be good for the United States to have a president who is 86 — the age Biden would be at the end of a second term?
I put these questions bluntly because they need to be discussed candidly, not just whispered constantly.
In the 1980s, it was fair game for reputable reporters to ask whether Ronald Reagan was too old for the presidency, at a time when he was several years younger than Biden is today. Donald Trump’s apparent difficulty holding a glass and his constricted vocabulary repeatedly prompted unflattering speculation about his health, mental and otherwise. And Joe Biden’s memory lapses were a source of mirth among his Democratic primary rivals, at least until he won the nomination.
Yet it’s now considered horrible manners to raise concerns about Biden’s age and health. As if doing so can only play into Trump’s hands. As if the president’s well-being is nobody’s business but his own. As if it doesn’t much matter whether he has the fortitude for the world’s most important job, so long as his aides can adroitly fill the gaps. As if accusations of ageism and a giant shushing sound from media elites can keep the issue off the public mind.
And here is the Uncanny Valley version from an outlet called “Lightlynews.com”:
Is it a good suggestion for Joe Biden to run for re-election in 2024? And, if he runs once more and wins, would it not be good for the United States to have a president who’s 86 — the age Biden can be on the finish of a second time period?
I put these questions bluntly as a result of they must be mentioned candidly, not simply whispered continuously.
In the 1980s, it was honest sport for respected reporters to ask whether or not Ronald Reagan was too previous for the presidency, at a time when he was a number of years youthful than Biden is in the present day. Donald Trump’s obvious issue holding a glass and his constricted vocabulary repeatedly prompted unflattering hypothesis about his well being, psychological and in any other case. And Joe Biden’s reminiscence lapses had been a supply of mirth amongst his Democratic major rivals, a minimum of till he received the nomination.
Yet it’s now thought-about horrible manners to lift considerations about Biden’s age and well being. As if doing so can solely play into Trump’s arms. As if the president’s well-being is no one’s enterprise however his personal. As if it doesn’t a lot matter whether or not he has the fortitude for the world’s most essential job, as long as his aides can adroitly fill the gaps. As if accusations of ageism and a large shushing sound from media elites can preserve the problem off the general public thoughts.
The level of similarity between this and the original is too great to save the publishers from a lawsuit, but let’s be real, the example of the Gerard Baker article and many others suggests that no lawsuit is likely. Why did someone bother to pass this article through the word-grinder, when it is clear they could have just copied the real thing with less trouble and no greater risk?
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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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