Fitzgerald: Howard's End (Predicted And Explained)

Howard is a great leader.

So was Winston turned out.

The argument that he was turned out by the tarbaby syndrome is less than helpful and is special pleading (the fallacy of seeing the world through monomania).

It makes the same argument that now that we are winning in Iraq, those suffering from BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) will suddenly vote for him if he could stand again for election.

Changing governments is usually a sign of health in Western democracies.

Australia has been well served by Howard, especially by his domestic economic policies.

As for the alternative, even the best of socialists are hardly adequate.

This is the appropriate thread on which to draw visitors' attention to the new feature, "Jihad Watch Interludes." It can be found discreetly -- possibly too discreetly -- on the left-hand side, tucked away just above "WHY JIHAD WATCH" and just below the lines under the photograph of Oriana Fallaci.

The last Musical Interlude put up is "Black Coffee" which is sung by Marjorie Stedeford, an Australian who sang in London, and the next one that I had long ago planned to put up today includes, as one of its singers, Anona Winn, who was also a singer in London from Australia.

So there it is. Australia, Australia, Australia, as they used to say in Monte Python. The theme of Botany Bay, and Tench Watkins, proleptically foreshadowing in song the article about Howard's End.

"Well, I never!" you exclaim? We echo that sentiment. We of the Never Never.

"The argument that he was turned out by the tarbaby syndrome is less than helpful and is special pleading..."
-- from a posting above

Don't misunderstand me. I am perfectly aware that there were many other things that affected the election. Howard wanted an unprecedented fifth term. There was a small scandal or two. Rudd was very attractive to many people. And so on. But the economy was, and will continue to boom (thanks to China's inexhaustible appetite)-- which means that Rudd will be the leader for a long time. For all I know, Rudd will be fine on Islam. I don't object to but would be delighted if he were to combine removing Australian troops from Iraq with continuing, or even hardening, Australian policy at home, and in connection with neighboring Indoneisa, toward Islam. That would be a perfect combination: presenting a withdrawal from Iraq not as appeasement, but as part of a much more calculating, less Bush-loyal, policy to weaken the Camp of Islam.

I still think that had the Iraq matter not remained, as a symbol of obstinate adherence to a policy of following Bush when it made, it makes, no sense, had it been gotten out of the way months ago, had the Howard government recognized the folly of staying in Iraq -- damaging the larger anti-Jihad effort -- the election could have come out differently. Whether it should have or not, from the viewpoint of those most concerned about that question, is a matter that will is not yet clear. Will Rudd say the kind of things Costello and Howard did about Jihad threats, and about the aggressive behavior and statements and demands of Muslims in Australia? I hope he does.

Let's see.

Nope...self-admitted priority #1 tells the tale.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071125/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_election
The MSM did their job...'nuf sed.
rosie o'donnel would be proud.

If a friend foolishly gets into a fight in a bar you don't abandon him to the attacks of criminal thugs just because he was indiscreet enough to tangle with them. You help him fight his way out, and then tell him what an idiot you think he was.

Leaving friends in the lurch only weakens the entire fight against the Jihad by making the allies look fragmented and indecisive. Australia may win some little moral molehill, but undermines the global effort against Islam's militants by failing to say:

"This may not be the best example of Western intelligence or warmaking, but we are friends with America, come hell or high water, since they helped us survive as a people in past fights, therefore we will stick with them in this battle, because Iraq helps highlight the cruelty of the enemy we now face in Islamofasicsm, and we will help them oppose it wherever this retrograde force rears its diseased and intolerant head."

You take a bad situation and twist it, with cunning and brute force, to your own ends, or you demonstrate to your opponent that you do not have the will to defeat them.

Because 90% of the "faults" of Iraq is a psyops propaganda campaign, played cleverly against the sentimentality and naivete of the infidel public, by the enemy and their useful idiots (NY Times, World Can't Wait!, et al) in the West.

Compare slicing someone's head off in a triumphalistic p.r. video for Al-Qaeda to putting panties on someone's head in Abu Ghraib (and having the guards arrested and jailed for doing it) to judge the moral inequivalency of the two sides.

Howard appears to have lasted longer than expected in Australia, and may his successor now have the brains to know who his enemies and friends are.

Remember, Oz, the Bali bombing was just a calling card.

All those who are most worried about global warming whatever they think about Islam, will be -- insofar as they encourage a diminished use of oil and gas, and a switch to non-fossil fuels through the increased use of nuclear power, wind and solar energy, and other means, including subsidies to mass transit and to railroads -- objectively doing a great deal to remove or diminish the Money Weapon of the Jihad. They should not be mocked, but regarded as useful allies, even by those who persist in believing, despite all the evidence, that global warming is either a hoax (preferably left-wing), or greatly exaggerated, or can simply be easily accommodated (in fact, Lonborg, who for years minimized or ridiculed the problem, has without the slightest embarrassment now accepted the idea of anthropogenic climate change, and now blandly goes on, lecturing us on how it is inevitable, and we must now plan for that fact, making sure of course not to do anything to "harm our economies" as he defines such harm. He's got a lot of nerve).

And the reverse is true. Suppose what consumed you was the threat of rapid climactic change, change taking place over a few centuries, or even one, that in the past took 400,000 years. Suppose you believed, or understood, that the key problem was not the change, but the rate of change, and that this rate had to be slowed down, so that proper accommodation could be made. And that accommodation would include saving, in some way, as many of the 90% of the world's species likely to disappear in that time. Since we are all condemned, in this matter, to rounding up as much support as you could, wouldn't you, even if you were indifferent to the menace of Islam but alert to the menace of anthropogenic climate change, wish to appeal to your enantiomorphic opposites, politically speaking, so that those who declare that their No. 1 issue is the response to Islam and those who declare that their No. 1 issue is anthropogenic climate change can join in an alliance possibly described as one merely of convenience but which, in the end, is or should be inevitable, and makes all kinds of sense, an alliance that frightens the Saudis to death.

"If a friend foolishly gets into a fight in a bar you don't abandon him to the attacks of criminal thugs just because he was indiscreet enough to tangle with them. You help him fight his way out, and then tell him what an idiot you think he was."
-- from a poster above

Let me borrow the same saloon metaphor, to accurately describe the situation in Iraq. Two men are in a bar already. They both hate each other, and if they could they are likely to try to kill each other. Under those circumstances, one would be foolish to enter that bar to try to keep them apart. One would be still more foolish to go into that bar, and, having figured out that not only do both of those men want to kill each other, but they are murderously hostile to you as well, to remain and try to keep them apart.

That is what the Americans are now doing in Iraq. They are trying to keep the Sunnis and the Shi'a together, in some kind of harmony, in some kind of unified state, instead of allowing them to be, permanently, jostling with each other, even at each other's throats. And furthermore the American government keeps swallowing the line fed it by Sunni governments that "chaos" and "catastrophe" would follow if the Americans leave, and that they have a "responsibility" to stay. Nonsense.

I repeat. If there are two men in a bar who hate each other, and are likely to fight, but who also hate you, don't go into that bar, or most certainly don't remain in that bar, to keep them apart. Get out, and listen from outside at the ruckus within. If you are lucky, each man will have his pals join in the free-for-all and if you are really lucky, all the frightened townsfolk, who have been cowering in the general store and the sheriff's office and in other houses in the frontier town, will slowly emerge, and join you, as the ruckus continues and then, possibly dies down, with all of those inside, one hopes, having taken exhausted each other -- or worse, for better.

I'll drink to that!!!

More on the FNG...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article2937052.ece

I prefer the domestic violence metaphor. I have known three police officers (one a deputy sheriff)they have told me of their real fear of the domestic dispute call. Sometimes a family member will turn on the police. The offices had rather be sent to arrest an ordinary violent criminal.

Iraq has now turned into that prototypical domestic dispute that cops hate.

The big question is how will this FNG in Australia handle the jihad on his own soil. How will he react to the next batch of deaths in one of Australia's favorite foreign watering holes? Remember Bali. I think Australians are in for a period filled with attempts to placate the jihaders.

Rudd's immigration policies will be of great interest. Howard shifted away from Muslim immigration and more toward non-Muslim Asian immigrants. Even so, newly-released census data shows that Australia's Muslim youth (14-and-under) population has doubled since 1996, and now approaches 4%. Australians exhibit the same fertility pattern seen in Europe, a pattern which the Muslim population does not share.

Australia is headed toward a 10% Muslim population, even in the absence of increased Muslim immigration. If large numbers of Muslims are permitted to come, a 25% Muslim population by mid-century is possible. That's why Rudd's policies in this area are so important.

Howard was a staunch ally of the United States and didn't ever fall for what so many do, i.e., the belief that if there's something wrong in the world, it must be America's fault. He also clearly understood that America leaving Iraq will create even more problems than America remaining there has and will, not that this is appreciated by all those who think American withdrawal from Iraq will essentially be costless. I'll miss the guy to be sure.

It sure seems like the world is slipping, maybe running, towards an 'Atlas Shrugged' situation. England has pulled out of Iraq and will be a muslim majority country soon. Now the Aussies, not only pulling out, but going the way of the Goracle(A. Gore) and his false teachings of global warming and looking to go the England muslim route. Is America becoming, slowly but surely, the last free country in the world? Of course we can still count on Japan, South Korea and maybe the Czechs as allies. What happened to the righteous Christian majority in the World? Are we to continue 'turning the other cheek' until we're all killed as infidels? This next 'general election' becomes more and more important every day, doesn't it.

Personally I view this event as another nail in the coffin of western society.

It's my belief that Mr. Howard showed courage to speak his mind, and say things that offended peoples sensibilities as the truth is more important than political correctness.

I'll miss Mr. Howard simply because he he represented the possibility of a courageous politician, a very rare occurrence indeed.

Those who are worried about Rudd's immigration policy, and who will miss Peter Costello's (and Howard's) no-nonsene approach to outrageous Muslim behavior and demands, should ask themselves this: was keeping 500 or a 1000 trooops in Iraq so important, of such great value? Would it not have been more sensible to take them out, and to increase other, much more effective and ruthless means, of dealing with the Muslim threat. Is it not important to husband rather than squander resources, including the resource of political capital that needs to be retained for other, more important, expenditures?

Aznar, Blair (not much of a loss), now Howard. Will the Republican candidate, assuming he has a better policy otherwise on the matter of Islam, allow himself to lose because he can think of no way to distance himself from the folly of Iraq that will not, he thinks, be seen as appasement? We won, we won everything we could have won, by late January or February 2004. Saddam Hussein had been captured. His two heirs had been killed. The game of Fifty-Two Pickup had been successful. The country had been scoured for those weapons of mass destruction, to the satisfaction of David Kay, who is not to be confused with Mohammed el Baradei. The removal of the thinly-disguised Sunni Arab despotism had already made inevitable the Kurdish demand for autonomy and more, had already made inevitale the transfer of most power to the Shi'a, a power only ratified, for American satisfaction, by the purple-thumbed election, not of citizens but of members of ethnic and sectarian groups, an election which the 60-65% of the population that is Shi'a Arab of course won.

Why should the Americans have stayed longer? To "rebuild" Iraq? To hand out more pallets stacked high with hundred-dollar bills, so that even more Iraqis could make off not only like gangbusters, but leave the country, for Paris and London and Arab capitals, where they now live with their billions taken from not-very-well-off American taxpayers, who, if they knew the full extent of the grand theft, the product of American negligence and bottomless naivete, would march on Washington like Coxey's Army.

Yes, that's what is needed. A Coxey's Army of the disgruntled, furious at the squandering of American resources in Iraq, but an armyconsisting not of those who wish to appease Islam, or who dismiss the world-wide menace, but of those who want, wherever possible, the pre-existing divisions within Islam to be recognized, and exploited: Arab vs. non-Arab Muslim (the theme of Arab imperialism, Arab supremacism that must be sounded, to the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs, on every possible occasion) and the sectarian division, more obviously pronounced and important, in Iraq than anywhere else, and in Iraq, more than anywhere else, more likely to draw in Shi'a and Sunnis from outside Iraq to support co-religionists, and also likely to affect Sunni-Shi'a relations in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Lebanon, Bahrain, Yemen, even further afield, in Afghanistan, and in the Muslim communities of the West.

The rule should be: let Muslims weaken Islam. No invasions, no boots-on-the-ground. Keep them from getting, or keep them from being able to produce, the kind of weapons shorthandedly known as WMD. And end any further Muslim immigration -- if possible not only halting, but reversing the flow -- to the Lands of the Infidels. For no one who is truly an adherent of Islam can possibly offer loyalty to the legal and political instituitons of the advanced West. The American Constitution and the Shari'a are in flat contradiction, not merely mild disagreement. And nothing will end, or diminish, that contradiction. It makes no sense to allow into your country those who do not wish your country to remain as it is, but are hostile to its principles, and for that matter, hostile to you, and to your very existence as a free, unyielding citizen, undhimmified and undimmed.

Looks like the Aussies fell for the MSM's lies. Cut and run is NEVER the way to victory. People are too short sighted, the war against terrorism in Iraq may take 5 or even 10 years. Almost everyone sees now that the SURGE IS WORKING and President Bush's policies are finally being recognized as correct. We won't be electing a cowardly leader like the Aussues did, thank God.

More Hughbris from Hugh as he plants another kick into the belly of his "Iraq is a tarbaby" tarbaby. Perhaps he could dredge up a self serving "prediction and explanation" of Sarkozy and Merkel who represent political moves in the pro-American and pro-Bush direction. He should stop reading moveon.org on global warming and look at junkscience.com. He should take a look at the newly released files on WMDs as John Loftus has. Until then he should restrict his remarks to what he knows, namely Islam and Islamic history.

I agree with Hugh about Iraq.

By 2004, the U.S. had achieved all of the objectives outlined in the original October 2002 war resolution passed by Congress. Iraq was no longer a military threat and Saddam and his two sons were neutralized.

In fact, what we have been doing in Iraq since then--building an "Islamic democracy" (whatever that means) there--has been stuff that was NOT included in the original October 2002 war resolution. There is nothing about nation-building in that war resolution.

One can truly argue that President Bush is using that war resolution as a license to conduct a wholly different military operation with wholly different objectives now. That could be considered an impeachable offense.

"He should stop reading moveon.org on global warming.."

I have never, not once, gone to this "moveon.org" though I am aware, from other sources, of the general nature of that hysterical site.

When I look on-line for information on anthropogenic climate change I certainly don't rely on what can be found only on the web. I rely much more on those who are academic specialists on that very subject, people whom I have known, and therefore whose temperate presentation of the evidence, and ability to make sense of that evidence for a layman (I am that layman), can be gaued by a number of things, including their statements and attitudes about other matters. I have discovered not hysterical chicken-littles, but sober people, who wish they had not had to come to the conclusions that they have come to and that have had to be revised, with new evidence, only in one direction, that of being more alarmed, more disturbed. Some of these people describe themselves as having started out, years ago, as "skeptics" or "agnostics" on the matter. But what they learned forced them to concede that the problem was real.

But there are some web-sites on anthropogenic climate change, run by those who have been trained, trained in science, and trained in mathematics and statistics, and trained in the very fields, and specialties, most relevant to anthropogenic global warmng.

I doubt if the poster above, Whose Mind Is Made Up, and who knows, just knows, that that all that stuff about climate change is merely a left-wing plot by all those left-wing scientists -- we all know, don't we, that its the scientists and mathematicians in universities who are all on the left, while its all those people who teach literature and history who are true-blue "conservatives" (whatever that word now means). And of course, I'm especially suspect, because my opposition to American forces remaining in Iraq, which was openly declared at this site in February 2004, and then elaborated upopn -- an opposition that I cunningly offered as based entirely on a desire to weaken the Camp of Islam) surely must mean that I am an Al-Qaeda sympathizer or even a deliberate Al Qaeda plant, burrowed right into the middle of Jihad Watch.

Those who, on the other hand, are open to evidence, logic, stuff like that, and are not conspiracy-theorists muttering darkly, may wish to go to this site:

www.realclimate.org.

Start there, anyway.

"...could dredge up a self serving "prediction and explanation" of Sarkozy and Merkel who represent political moves in the pro-American and pro-Bush direction."
-- from the same flailing poster above

Merkel has never countenanced sending German troops to Iraq. Why? And Sarkozy has said he is against the Iraq venture from the start, has repeated even in his recent famouslly pro-American performance in Washington, when Rochambeau, the inevitable Lafayette, and possibly even J. J. Jusserand, a former, long-running French ambassador who was also a keen student of American culture, were invoked to proclaim a new, pro-American policy on the part of the French government, which "pro-American" policy still, pointedly, does not include the slightest endorsement or approval of the Iraq folly.

Howard may be the latest casualty of the iraq war, but more important ones have preceded it. The loss of American credibility resulting from the perceived failure to find WMD in iraq has made it very easy for an usually balky Europe to resist our aggressive efforts to check iran's march toward nuclear weapons. Plus, the tremendous unpopularity of the war in Europe makes it harder for the U.S. & Europe to work together to halt & then reverse the demographic conquest of Europe by muslims. Granted, Europe has to take the first concrete steps in this effort, & so far they haven't shown much willingness to do so outside the election of Sarkozy. Granted further that bush hasn't shown the slightest indication that he understands the muslim threat to Europe. But the next U.S. president might grasp the threat. And the war's unpopularity in Europe & the loss of American credibility make it less likely that the 2 once-staunch allies can discuss the threat & plan strategies for dealing with it.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/55404746-7DA0-410F-8573-386D631E60E2.htm

Just because some writers like Hugh (and the notorious Fjordman and Gates of Vienna) write long windy comments and use big words doesn't mean they know what they are talking about. Who has the patience to wade through all that yada yada? Brevity is the soul of wit. Charles Johnson and his commentators have it down pat- information and facts.

"Just because some writers like Hugh (and the notorious Fjordman and Gates of Vienna) write long windy comments and use big words doesn't mean they know what they are talking about."
-- from a posting just above

The Voice of the People? Akin to Flann O'Brien's The Plain People of Ireland? God, I hope not.

How good that Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson and George Mason and John Quincy Adams aren't around to see how it all turned out. The fury about those "long windy comments" and those "big words." Glenn Beck and similar pied pipers. The adoration and at the same time resentment of the rich. The hatred of anything smacking of an intellectual elite, the only kind of "elite" that seems to arouse fury. The deep baseless belief that we are all most assuredly equal, and equal about everything. We know where that kind of thing leads. One writer once called that the party of "the Ekwilists."

Unlike Jefferson, Adams et al., Jacques Barzun is around, but he's also 100 years old, possibly 100 years old this week, and besides, he's living in San Antonio.

So who's minding the store?

Hugh, with respect, I think you are completely wrong on Rudd. He will not be hard on Islam, particularly the Islam in Indonesia. I think this now takes our country into a chapter of renewed dhimmitude and tolerance of intolerance and weakened borders.

At least it will give you another leader to gloat about as far as showing weakness in the face of aggressive Islam, which you didn't have under Howard.

Sad days ahead for us down here.

I have not once said I was happy with Rudd, not once gloated here or anywhere over Howard's end. Nor have I predicted that Rudd would be just as firm on Islam inside Australia. I hope he will be, but that is different from saying that he will be. Why does an article that suggests that keeping 500 troops in Iraq was a bad idea, if one agreed that keeping Howard in power, in order to keep Australia on the same course in dealing with Islam outside of Iraq, keep getting misinterpreted as gloating, as taking delight? I don't know anything about Rudd, but I was despondent at the news because I thought it important for anti-Jihad purposes to have Howard, and then Costello, in power in order to deal properly with Muslim aggression and Muslim demands inside Australia.
Of course I'm apprehensive. Among the world's so-called leaders, those in high office, Howard and Costello were the two who sounded the right note, or closest to it, about Islam.

And I'm furious that he was brought down, at least in large part, by his wrong-headed loyalty, not to the Western alliance or the United States -- I'm all for that -- but to an American administration pursuing a policy that, from the viewpoint of American national interests, and Infdiel interests in what is not a "long war" but an endless conflict, requiring an intelligent husbanding rather than squandering of resources, and cunning deployment of those resources, including that which locates, recognizes, and exploits weaknesses in the enemy camp. Iraq is not about that. Iraq is about naivete (great faith in those plausible Shi'a in exile -- Ahmad Chalabi would take over, and we could all get out)) , ignorance about Islam and about Iraq("I thought there were Muslims in Iraq [Bush, upon hearing mention of "the Sunnis and the Shi'a"), sentimentalism ("bringing freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads in the Middle East") , arrogant messianism (everyone wants "free markets" and everyone wants to be just like America), and a failure of mind and of will to see that the problem with Iraq and other Muslim countries is not the absence of "democracy." The problem is Islam.

"now that we are winning in Iraq"

...we are?

Time, obviously, in order to win back some of the needlessly disgruntled, to renew my vows.

Here goes, from a posting long ago:

"Australia, a mysterious yet comforting place about which I know only the following:

There are kangaroos.

There is the book with the green cover, by Mrs. Aeneas Gunn, called "We of the Never Never" which I have on my bookshelf.

There is Les Murray.

There was Henry Handel Richardson.

There are Blue Mountains.

There was a famous Australian explorer whose first name was Lachlan, just like the son of Mr. Murdoch.

There is an excellent magazine called Quadrant, and Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) writes for them, or has written for them, and may even now be living in Australia.

English convicts were transported there. Think of Pip's friend in "Great Expectations."

Clive James comes from there.

Barry Humphreys comes from there.

The last scene in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" when Glen Headly has ensnared a group of Australians about to be parted from their money by Glen, and the con-men played by Michael Caine and Steve Martin, reinforces the cliche about Australians and barbecues.

There was "Muriel's Wedding" with that catchy tune sung by Muriel and her thin friend.

There was a coelecanth caught in 1936 off the shores of Austral....oops, that was the Union of South Africa. Sorry, wrong country. Skip that -- sorry, the eraser on the pencil is too hard and won't do the trick.

There was a famous movie about a World War I deserter and he wore an Australian bush-hat.
There was ANZAC. There was Gallipoli. There were Australian troops everywhere and anywhere they should have been, in every war, and their attitude was always right.

There is the most beautiful and variegated fauna and flora, and the macrolepidoptera aren't bad either.

There are Aborigines, and fake-aborigine poets dreamed up so that they could have prizes lavished on them for their authentic poetic voice and then the scheme was revealed and many Australians had egg on their faces -- well-deserved egg.

There are large cities called Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane.

There is the Outback, with Alice Springs. There are lambs to be shorn.

At night tourists are taken spotlighting for wombats.

The country is altother wonderful and I have hardly scratched the surface -- all I have scratched is that shallow part of my pre-caffeinated brain which is called "What I Know About Australia."

There is Robert Hughes, whose book on the country is very long.

There may be an Oxford Book of Australian Verse but I don't own it.

There was Patrick White.

There is Van Diemen's Land. There is Tasmania.

There is the Tasmanian Devil.

There are many marsupials. There is the monitor. There is the duck-billed platypus.

There are large crocodiles in Queensland.

There is Keith Windschuttle.

The botanist Joseph Banks had a field-day in Australia, and there is a genus of plants known as Banksia.

New Zealanders like to make sure that everyone knows they are not Australians, the way Canadians like to make sure that everyone knows they are not Americans.

There are a lot of big mining companies in Australia. Broken Hill is one of them.

Australia was discovered now on this coast, now on that. One of the earliest of its discoverers was William Dampier, whose "Voyages" became famous. Another was Captain James Cook, whose report of his voyages is accompanied by a very nice atlas.

Australia is one of my favorite countries. I like the sound of its name. The very idea of Australia comforts me.

Yes, Terminator, hold some of the O'Brien for me, and we will toast Botany Bay, and Watkins Tench, and what's past, and passing, and to come.

I love Australia."

[Posted by: Hugh at August 1, 2005 08:28 AM]

Will that do, as a way of saying "I Do"?

If one goes over to the left, and clicks on "Jihad Watch Interludes" one will find that two of the first six links put up yield not one but two Australian singers. To wit, Marjorie Stedeford ("Black Coffee") and Anona Winn ("Sittin' in the Dark"). Why don't we all go over there, listen to those two songs, by way of taking a break from Islam, then renew whatever conversational thread has been dropped here. Barkis is willin'. And Parcas can wait.

Lil Green Lizard
You are lost & disorientated in the undergrowth,alas. There will be NO victory in Iraq
despite propaganda daily piped out by Care Bear Bush's minions.[At this moment,U.S is paying Sunni
Militias-previously killing Americans-TO FIGHT AL
QUAEDA ,MILITIAS ARE ETHNICALLY CLEANSING THE AREA OF ORDINARY
SHI-ITE CIVILIANS AT THE SAME TIME!] Like yourself,Bush
is desperate to justify the Horror of Iraq. Despite all the smokescreens and mirrors waffle re: DE
MOCRACY-all U.S cares about is securing the BLACK GOLD-OIL!!
Nor will there be any victory in Afghanistan of
Karzai's U.S propped 'DEMOCRACY'. Natty Hatted Hamid's goverment is & has been mired in huge corruption which includes the police,judicary,Hamid's bro and very probably fast
talking,slick Mr Karzai, himself. Also, Karzai is
rushing through with legislation to tighten up
Islamic laws in this ISALAMIC REPUBLIC after a visit from a Columbian female singer who dared to
appear without wearing a tent on television...
'What's it all about Alfie?'Obviously Oil & U.S's
desire to reshape the world according to its disastrous Foreign Policies. It got away with breaking up Yugoslavia so emboldened by this decided to attack bigger countries like Iraq-Iran
is probably next on the hegemony agenda...
'Those whom the Gods destroy, they first drive mad'.
In America's case-it is DEMONIZATION -for decades
Saddam Husseins's shortcomings were ignored by the
West as they poured money & supplies into the dictator's hands. Then, his usefulness gone, Saddam is revealed as a MONSTER but no less so than the 'civilised 'governments which supported him for so many years.

On WMD and Iraq: I think Gore, given his speeches from 98 to 02 would also have taken out Saddam. If not, by now Saddam would have defeated the sanctions, and would be processing those mountains of yellowcake that were found. The newly released documents are being ignored by the "Bush lied" crowd. I do think that most of the reasons for going into Iraq have been accomplished and that our presence will decline over the next few years. History will treat Bush well on this issue.

On global warming: Our sensor networks and the software that calibrates them are a mess. One indication of this was the recent "adjustment" showing 1934, not 1998 as the warmest year of the 20th century. Temperatures declined from 34 to 75 while C02 rose, they declined since 98 while C02 rose. Mars is warming. I tend to respect the research showing that increased solar activity heats the earth more than expected by increasing the shielding of cosmic rays, thus reducing cloud formation, thus reflecting less heat. Ethanol produces more nitrous oxide than gasoline. Corn ethanol subsidies are misguided as is the tarif on Brazil's sugar cane ethanol.
The greatest impediment to US becoming independent of MidE oil is litigation funding by environmentalists. Fast breeders which would have reduced the waste disposal problem were banned and nuclear was stopped. Even clean coal is restricted. ANWR, gulf oil, oil shale, tar sands, pebble bed, cellulosics, stirling solar, bioeng enzyme solar, clean coal, conservation; the list of solutions that the market will bring is huge. If the lawyers don't stop us we will claw our way out of our dependency. Hugh's idea on taxing HCs is not bad but I think is unnecessary. Many if not most of the "Climate Scientists" on RealClimate are funded by only one side of this sadly politicized issue.
Sorry for my tone of voice Hugh, sometimes you set me off. And BTW, I am more highly educated than you are. :)

Global climate change? Yes.

Caused by humans? No.

The instruments that register such things as temperature were, before the last few decades, unreliable and furthermore, were not distributed around the globe properly. Great glee accompanied the news that a single reading -- that of 1934 -- had been "off" even though no one knows exactly how accurate the readings were in 1934, or 1924, or 1944 -- which according to what are called, wrongly, "global warming skeptics," practically brought the whole house of anthropogencic-climate-change cards down.

Oh no it didn't. And you can find more about this 1934 reading, and about instrumentation and accuracy of measurement and distribution of registering devices, on various websites, including www.realclimate.org.

The word "skeptic" in the phrase "global warming skeptic" does not fully convey the eagerness to believe, to believe despite the evidence, that anthropogenic climate change surely cannot be occurring, or if occuring, can easily be slowed down or ended, or if it cannot be slowed down or ended, it must surely be a good thing because God would have wanted it, or something. Unfortunately, such people are numerous and it is they, like the frightened and confused passengers on a lurching ship, who may if they prevail by sheer numbers, cause all of us, including those with clearer heads, to go down, alas, in the same damn ship. I'm not prepared to do that.

And I don't like the appropriation of the word "skeptic" by those who are in fact True Believers that nothing can go wrong with God's Earth and that, their coueism updated fir the time, Every Day In Every Way Things Get Better And Better, or at least, We Can Handle Everything. Iraq, Mother Nature -- you name it. We'll just roll up our sleeves and take care of it. While-U-Wait.

With this kind of attitude, and with the attendant problems of demogoguery, and demography, and mass democracy (and how they overlap) we are going to hell in our vehicle of choice: a handbasket.

How good that Washington, and Adams, and Jefferson and George Mason and John Quincy Adams aren't around to see how it all turned out.

Who’s minding the store? The store is just fine.

Washington is still kicking Madison for not codifying voter eligibility. But he’s probably happy with the events of the last forty years. Equalizing political rights throughout the population will bankrupt our government, but not America, hopefully getting the Country back to business.

Our generation has had the ‘all men are created equal’ parts pounded into our skulls. History says that two generations from now children will be taught the ‘voting Citizen vs. non-voting Citizen vs. non-Citizen’ implications of the Constitution. Only 12% of American Citizens were eligible to vote in 1789. That would translate to 36 million Americans minding the store today, which seems about right to me.

Even the environmentalist socialists are working to strengthen America’s strategic future. By blocking the drilling of oil Stateside, they are accelerating the correction and are effectively saving our resources for a time in the future where they will be much more valuable.

And we’ll have lots of interesting stories about how the ‘end of history’ was a bad prediction. A good time to be alive, in my opinion.

"All men are created equal" was a bit of rhetorical enthusiasm, a hopeful optative mood, expressive of an attitude of Christian or, even better, Christ-like charity. Brotherhood of Man, Fatherhood of God. They didn't mean it.

I concur with Hugh.

Getting out of Iraq makes sense - no use wasting the lives of ANY non-Muslim citizen soldiers, trying to herd Kilkenny cats who are determined, because of their insane religion, to claw each other to pieces.

THAT is the point that we Australians here should be making in letters of commendation to the new Defence Minister and other appropriate persons. Let the new government, as it prepares to end our involvement in Iraq, hear expressions of approval backed up by surprising reasons, reasons different from those it will be hearing anywhere else - and, over and over, mention of Masjid Khadduri's Law of War and Peace in Islam, and citations of the Quran, and Robert Spencer's Onward Muslim Soldiers, or The Truth About Muhammad, and Mr Malik's horrifying The Quranic Way of War.

As the government prepares ways of cutting carbon emissions, let them be congratulated on thus reducing the 'money weapon' available to the plotters of Jihad.

Let it hear, over and over, that the long Arab MUSLIM siege of Israel is all about Jihad and the traditional Muslim politico-theological imperative to enslave, absorb or destroy all non-Muslim polities. Let it hear loud and clear from those of us who - like me - disliked Howard for all kinds of reasons that are entirely about domestic politics, did not in fact vote for him, yet heartily agreed with one thing and one thing only: that Australia voted No to a number of disgusting Muslim-initiated 'let's hate Israel' resolutions in the UN.

I think Rudd is educable. He DOES identify himself as a churchgoing Christian and has done so for a long time. In a Q and A session that was held by both Rudd and Howard, before the election, with Australian Christian leaders, Rudd did make sympathetic mention of the persecuted Christians of Iraq. ALL sitting members of the Australian Parliament who are known to be Christian, have to be confronted, repeatedly, with the facts about contemporary Muslim persecution and harassment of Christians, everywhere in the Ummah.

The immigration minister and his shadow should be inundated with letters and emails urging that we give absolute priority, in our immigration policy, to the persecuted CHRISTIANS from Muslim countries (subject to due checking, of course), e.g. Copts, Sudanese Christian refugees, Assyrian Christians from Iraq; while severely curtailing or halting Muslim immigration. I for one will be hammering on the point that the one and only red flag is Islam - that the racial background of immigrants or their English language competency is irrelevant to me.

We have GOT to keep hammering, to ALL our politicians, whatever their party, on the fact that Islam - Islam-on-the-ground in every Muslim-majority country on earth - actively, violently, suppresses freedom of religion and freedom of speech. We have GOT to educate all our politicians - especially the many women among them - on all the nasty details of Shariah law, especially as it pertains to the treatment of women.

To all Australians reading or posting here - don't give up. No party's policy is set in stone. I suspect that the vast majority of our politicians, whatever their background, are abysmally ignorant of the nature and history of Islam.

Electorate by electorate, sitting members and their shadows, they all have to be educated. Start with the women, and the known Christians, and the two Jewish MPs.

In the end, resistance to the Jihad has to be bipartisan, a solid national consensus established from the ground up. No party would abolish our infant vaccination program, or free and compulsory primary schooling. Ideally, a steadfast resistance to Jihad and rejection of Shariah would be the same: something that every politician, Labor or Liberal, never even thought of arguing about.

There are only 20 million Australians - far, far fewer than there are Americans. It's easier to turn around a tugboat than it is to turn an ocean liner.

yes I said yes I will -- oh, you know the rest.

On the subject of what to like about Australia: Hugh forgot to mention the beer. An unforgivable omission, in my opinion.

I don't know why environmentalists are the bogeyman in the energy debate. After all, it wasn't environmentalists that caused Three Mile Island, without which nuclear power would undoubtedly be much more widespread than at present. It wasn't environmentalists that caused the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which together with the innumerable safety lapses, cover-ups & threats against whistle-blowers concerning maintenance of the Alaskan pipeline, have increased public opposition to ANWR drilling. And, despite what the oil refining companies claim, it most likely isn't environmentalists who are preventing them from building new refineries. Oh, I know those companies are blaming environmentalists for the absence of a single new refinery in, what?, 25 years. But they're earning near-monopoly profits that they never would have dreamed of, say, 10 or 15 years ago, and want to keep it that way. Keep supply down, drive up the price of gasoline, & rake in those profits. Only one problem. How to address the public outcry over high gas prices? Blame it on the environmentalists! They won't let us build a new refinery. Oh, really? 3 million sq. miles in the continental U.S. & they can't find 1 sq. mile for a new refinery? I don't buy it.

Not that environmentalists aren't part of the problem. But let's be fair. For decades they have been advocating higher energy efficiency & conservation. I'm not talking about keeping-the-house-at-60-during-the-winter conservation, but stuff that most people can easily do without inconvenience. And I'll bet they would be willing to do it if our politicians correctly explained that reducing dependence on ME oil was a matter of national security. Unlike developing new sources of energy, which can take years, if not decades, the payoff from EE & C is almost immediate & permanent.

No, the bigger bogeyman is industry -- specifically the O&G, auto & utility industries, among others -- that have prevented EE&C from becoming a national priority. I am opposed to ANWR drilling, not b/c I'm an environmental wacko, but b/c it's only 1 small part of the answer. The total answer is to both reduce total energy demand through EE&C & to increase domestic energy sources. If the gov't developed a credible & permanent EE&C program, I would gladly back ANWR, expanded drilling off our coasts, etc.

Sheik
I agree with "The total answer is to both reduce total energy demand through EE&C & to increase domestic energy sources." I switched to fluorescents and look forward to LEDs. We haven't yet turned our house furnaces on for the winter. I'll buy a hybrid when the energy required to make the battery no longer exceeds the lifetime energy saved on MPG. As to who is the biggest bogeyman, I'll pass. Congress? However, anthropogenic global warming is mostly a hoax. Michael Mann, one of the key "scientists" on RealClimate, has been, IMHO, totally discredited; his hockey stick is nonsense. He is owned by his grant money. Now Gore wants to force taxpayers to subsidize energy startup companies to enrich the venture capital firm (Kleiner Perkins) that he recently joined. Plenty of bogeymen to choose from, including the enviros.

Hugh, another good site on Global Warming, that every Climate Skeptic should at least look at, is this:

How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

If the Global Warming crowd is truly willing to "partner" with the anti-jihadists, all they need to do is strongly back nuclear power. If they do that, I and many others will look to what units us and make the country stronger. However, the failure of the environmental movement to support nuclear power suggests to me that the movement is really about shackling the U.S.---economically and politically. Socialism by another name.

We are not going to satisfy this countries energy needs by relying on windmills and solar panels. EVERYTHING needs to be on the table. Both parties should be happy with a primarily nuclear solution---if the environmentalists really believe that CO2 is the most significant threat to the viability of the planet.

There will come a day, maybe not too far in the future, when the US launches a massive nuclear power plant building program. You just cannot get one permitted in today’s regulatory environment. Bush’s plan calls for three new nuclear power plants, but they are all on existing Federal nuclear facilities where the permitting can be grandfathered in.

Three Mile Island was a non-event, Chernobyl was an old Russian design where when the core got hotter it became more reactive (alas the boom), and the radiation given off by a modern plant would be manageable even if somebody blew it up (the ‘fuel’ is a metal and the primary coolant, water, would flash to steam, but is relatively clean). Nuclear power is cheap, gives off no pollution, and can be produced domestically.

The people who bitch about the potential of a spent fuel container cracking 10,000 years in the future and the metal waste magically leaking out tend to forget that WE USED TO BLOW UP NUCLEAR BOMBS UNDERGROUND.

You can tell the difference between a true environmentalist, and a socialist who is trying to weaken the West through stupid environmental regulations, by his stance on nuclear power.

Nothing wrong with true environmentalists.

Excellent points JSobieski :)

Lil Green Lizard

"Just because some writers like Hugh (and the notorious Fjordman and Gates of Vienna) write long windy comments and use big words doesn't mean they know what they are talking about. Who has the patience to wade through all that yada yada? Brevity is the soul of wit. Charles Johnson and his commentators have it down pat- information and facts."

It is nice to see the lizard army still ignores the history of warfare and the history of Islam in relation to Iraq.

Go ahead and keep up the folly and see where it gets you.

Depressing....

"nuclear power..."

If it is good enough for Hans Bethe and Andrey Sakharov, it is good enough for me. And France went ahead, without hysteria and without pandering to the hysterical, with government-funded, government-insured, government-maintained nuclear reactors that provide, I believe, something like 70-80% of the country's electricity. The X's, or polytechnicians, in the government were not about to allow things to be slowed down by those who think that the word "nuclear" is scary all by itself. Furthermore, not only was the insurance problem solved by the necessarily deep-pocketed government, but in France, as elsewhere except the United States, there are a few models that are re-used again and again, which has not been the practice in this country. It's a practice that might be emulated to cut costs.

I really do doubt that Islam, Iraq and global warming had anything to do with Howard's defeat.

Rudd won because :

1) the Liberal party's recently introduced industrial legislation, which(to a degree) undermined job security for many australians, had become an electoral minefield for their campaign, and rightly so;

2) Howard made the mistake of admitting that he was resigning in the near future and no one wanted Costello as prime mininster as he has the personality of a dead fish. thus removing totally the personal vote for Howard which has always been quite considerable.

It was LOCAL issues which drowned Howard. All other issues had their leverage but all were minor by comparison. In addition, Australia regularly changes goverment roughly once/decade anyway so not unexpected once we knew that Howard was retiring.

Question for the global warming skeptics/deniers.

At what probability of the existence of CO2-induced global warming would you agree to CO2-reducing measures? You can't demand 95-100% certainty. For by the time we achieve that level of certainty, we very possibly will be unable to avert major economic, social & environmental consequences on a scale perhaps never seen before. Would you agree to CO2 curbs above 80% certainty? 60%? As for me, I'm not sure, but it would probably be around 40%-50% certainty. I haven't followed the issue closely enough to say whether we're there yet.

The fractures within Islam would not be as prnounced as they are today had Bush done nothing after 9/11. Somewhere along the way about half the country woke up to the Islamic Threat and manages to stay that way as a result of continuing conflict. Iraq itself keeps the American awake to the problem at a time where the MSM wants them so desperately to go back to sleep. If one sleeps soundly enough, you never have to hear the the Robber cleaning out your House.

The Bush Policy of confronting Islam, the worst part of it I might add, in a limited killing enviroment, festers the Fisures within Islam. Considerably more than any previous US Foreign policy.

President Bush is handing everything Hugh wants on a Silver Platter. Because everyone who ever learned anything from comming here knows Islam will declare Victory, Kiss and make up, and then they will really come after us.

How Hugh expects half of the Multi-Culturalists to do a 180 at the Ballot Box to alter American National and Domestic Policy is beyond Me. We all know that closing the border, halting Muslim Immigration, Screenning the ones here... are very much at odds with "Inclusive Ideology". Without these Political changes, we all know that there will be nothing to hinder Islam from putting their differences aside to attend to the higher purpose.

We can run away, making it far more likely and difficult to pound the crap out of them some time in the Future, or we can stick it out long enough to let reason be birthed in Islam. Expose it's Violent nature to the World and force them to confront it. Falling back to sleep is no longer an option.

Global warming??? 40 years ago I considered a course in Igloo making based upon the certincy of Science.

The Carbon that is here, has always been here, and always will be here. The Science of Global Warming makes about the same sence as allowing Abortion while spending Hundreds of Millions of dollars trying to make Baby's in a Test Tube.

Hi,

Long time reader, first time poster.

It's worth mentioning that the main issue of this election was about Industrial Relations and not the WoT or Howard's support of Bush and America.

"Work Choices" legislation introduced by the Howard government after the last election was the main factor of his losing this election.

Secondary is the fact that he admitted that he would retire sometime during his next term if re- elected. There was a feeling that why vote for Howard if Peter Costello (Treasurer and heir apparent)inherits the job without being elected.

The fact is barely a peep was mentioned about Terorism or support for George Bush. It was all about Industrial Relations reform, Howard's retirement and to a lesser extent interest rates.

I dare say that had Work Choices legislation not gone so far to emasculate the unions and indivdual workers then John Howard would still be PM.

Sorry, MisIslamist beat me to it. I agree, this election had little to do with the WoT or Global warming.

Temperature measurement is rather easy. Instruments are very easily calibrated.

The instrument Society of America was founded in 1945, but engineers and scientists understood calibration long before then.

What I am concerned with is the possible mis-location of weather instruments. A presentation on TV showed that many weather instruments are located in places where local conditions produce the wrong readings. As an example, a temperature sensor was shown to be located where an airconditioning unit's condenser cooling air was directed in the direction of the instrument house. Another example was an instrument house located next to a black asphalt parking lot.

With car bombs and environmental instrumentation, it's location. location, location.

The next time one of these is seen

http://www.rickly.com/MI/InstrumentShelter.htm

pay attention to it's location. Look for a busy street nearby, A/C units, parking lots, or something alse that might give a misleading temperature reading.

Before the NWS will give the "official" temperature designation, the instruments must have calibration certificates that are in accordance with and traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

That made in China thermometer from WalMart hanging on a bracket near your window could be off as much as three to five degrees.

Insane wars: Bush built Taliban-lite in Afghanistan - fueled with millions of new heroin money - and Basij-heavy in Iraq.

The Vietnam experience revealed that public support for unwinnable wars is unsustainable. Whatever success has been achieved in Afghanistan is attributable to indulgence of Pakistan harborage. In Iraq, Shiite cleansing has removed belligerents from the theater.

As long as Bush indulges grants license to jihad ideologues and financiers - under the cover of his perverse concept of "freedom" - Islamofascism will advance. America is retreating, and the American people will understand that when Iranian and Pakistan troops replace them, and create the Islamic tyrannies that Bush's policies have been feeding.

"Looks like the Aussies fell for the MSM's lies. Cut and run is NEVER the way to victory. People are too short sighted, the war against terrorism in Iraq may take 5 or even 10 years. Almost everyone sees now that the SURGE IS WORKING and President Bush's policies are finally being recognized as correct. We won't be electing a cowardly leader like the Aussues did, thank God."
Posted by: Lil Green Lizar

Typical lizaroid thinking.

I will admit you are correct on the point that "cut and run is not the way to victory". But who said anything here about cutting and running? Hugh as stated many, many times in his essays that packing up and leaving Iraq should be accompanied by other steps that would signal that the west is not surrendering to the jihad, but that we have decided to fight it in a more intelligent way. Go tell the kos kids about the perils of "cut and run". Not needed here. Read Hugh's other articles if you dare, that is, if you can possibly get through all those B-I-G words and l-o-n-g sentences.

Yes the surge is working. How could anyone expect it not to with the addition of 20,000-30,000 additional troops, who are being asked to perform more like armed peace corps volunteers rather than soldiers at war. The surge is a band-aid. It is covering the wound well, and letting the scab form underneath. And this surge has somehow, miracuosly, healed all the wounds between sunni, shia, and kurds, so that when the surge troops are removed, the hatred that has lasted 1300 years between the sunni and shia will just poof! disappear? Not likely. And because this surge is working we are now winning? What will we win? Same question as - what will "victory look like" but no one answers.

You say the war on terrorism may last 5 or even 10 years. Is that who we are fighting in Iraq, those "terrorists"? Because when all those "terrorists" are killed or driven out, they will leave behind a population chock full of wonderfully peaceful moderate muslims, "ordinary moms and dads", just waiting to vote again, this time to remove the sharia law from the constitution? Do you believe that when all the terrorist are killed or driven out, we can feel secure that all remaining "sons of the mesopotamia" will be ardent defenders of western democracy and rejectors of the jihad, and as such will never again pose a threat to the west?

Your erroneous identification of the enemy as only "terrorists" is as delusional as shoeless George Bush is about the peacefulness of Islam and the universalism of liberal democracy.

What is it that will transpire within 5-10 years that will allow us all to say it was a worthwhile endeavor? What is Iraq supposed to look so that we will know within 5 to 10 years that it is safe to leave? What will be the test?

For those who support the Iraq misadventure and insist we must stay until we are victorious you owe at least a description of that victory. It is a question often asked when this debate arises and no one answers satisfactorily. The standard answer is a description of what one speculates will occur in the region if we do leave. An opinion about what will happen if we leave is not the same as identifying what conditions should exist that will allow us to leave. Without identifying "victory" you are saying that we should plan on staying in Iraq indefinitely.

Whether we leave next week or next decade, what we leave behind will be no different. But if we leave in ten years will it be after many more lives have been sacrificed for a worthless cause. And while we attempt to attain the unattainable, the forces of jihad grow stronger, in Terhan, in Pakistan, Afghanistan ( read this article on the resurgence of the Taliban there http://www.usorthemonline.com/wordpress/?p=83#respond ) Londonstan and Malmo.

Hugh Hewitt, talk show host and author, proudly proclaims that he would rather lose the White House to Hillary Clinton than give up and leave Iraq. It seems that several here think that there is some hope in this fellow Rudd. I do not have the same hope for either Hillary, Obama or Edwards. They hardly discuss "terrorism" in their debates, let alone such concepts as "jihad" or "islamofascism". The global jihad is not even on their radar. The republican candidates have NEVER once, in anything I have read or heard, mentioned the immigration problems in Europe. Once again. Not on their radar. How can they when they, like Howard, so willingly accept the Bush vision that there is global war on terrorism that must be won and must be fought first within the unfriendly confines of the Islamic Republic of Iraq.

Would supporters of the Iraq misadventure from the U.S. be as dogmatic as Hewitt? are you willing to stand by your man Bush and tarbaby Iraq even if it leads to our national security being turned over to the likes of Hillary Clinton? You'll have about a year to think about that one.

MisIslamist and SharpeFan:

Howard's defeat may not have been the result of his policies on Iraq (wasn't Aznar also defeated for other reasons?) but what do the results portend for Australia's future participation in the GWOT?

Do Australians believe getting out of Iraq will prevent future Balis?

USorThem,

I see little difference between Bush and Clinton. She and other Dems who call for a pullout from Iraq keep talking about withdrawing to nearby positions. So that means they'll stay in Kuwait or Qatar, ready to ride to the rescue once again. They won't pull out of the Middle East any more than Bush would. The Dems are so two-faced it's not funny. They complain about a "war for oil" but you don't see them turning their backs on the oil potentates. They need to fuel their campaign planes and SUVs.

As for "standing by Bush" even if it means Clinton in the White House, what does it matter? Bush isn't running again. The Republican candidates have their own tongues and they are perfectly capable of articulating what they would do in Iraq. They'll give us their alternative to Hillary or Barak and we can decide which candidate will make us throw up less. What do you suggest we do? Impeach Bush? Then what? He won't be convicted in the Senate, so it's another useless exercise, just like with Bill Clinton. Nancy Pelosi gets that.

Iraq isn't even on my list of issues. Illegal immigration and offshore outsourcing and their many related issues took up the whole page. No room left for Iraq.

Hugh is right on global warming. It is a real and growing problem. Hugh's reason for not backing off from his position appears to have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with a stubborn insistence on looking at the facts and calling a spade a spade.

Before anyone continues to poo-poo global warming, I would ask them to check and see the following:

1. What was the total molecular weight of carbon in the atmosphere as a whole 75 years ago (i.e. what was the mass of the carbon in the carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere)?

2. What is it now?

3. What is the total molecular weight of carbon currently tied up in known reserves of usable coal, oil, and natural gas?

4. If those reserves are all oxidized (burned as fuel), what will the total molecular weight of carbon in the atmosphere be?

5. What percentage increase of carbon dioxide does that represent?

6. Is there any commercially feasible way to remove that extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere once it is there? (Remember, the carbon weight going into biomass comes back out into the atmosphere as soon as the biomass burns or otherwise oxidizes, so for every growing plant taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, there is a rotting or burning plant putting oxygen back in. The only way to use plants to permanently take carbon out of the atmosphere is for those plants to leave the cycle by conversion back into fossil fuels, a process that took a very long time the first time it happened.)

7. Assuming that carbon dioxide is not removed, what is the effect on global climate, and global sea levels, based on the most sophisticated global weather modeling currently available?

8. Once we have burned all of our fossil fuels, we will need to look to plan B for our energy needs. Is there any reason we should not start looking to plan B right now, such as by increased taxing hydrocarbon emissions and using the proceeds to encourage other energy alternatives?

9. If we do tax the consumption of fossil fuels, including petroleum, and drive down demand for petroleum, what does that do to the economic leverage of the house of Islam, a house where nothing of practical use has been manufactured or invented for over a millenia? (Assume that IED's, RPG's, AK-47's, and beheading videos lack a practical use and that the components used to make those items are not manufactured in the house of Islam, but rather are imported in exchange for -- you guessed it -- oil.)

It is frustrating to see someone ranting against the possibility of global warming without citing any facts but merely stating that someone somewhere has an advanced degree and is not yet convinced. It just reminds me too much of the cigarette industry continuing to deny that cigarettes had anything to do with cancer, supported by scientific studies and degreed professionals we all knew were either paid off or idiots.

It is even more frustrating when a person who advocates a good point concerning the dangers of jihadism or open borders unnecessarily takes on an argument against global warming, and by so doing undercuts his or her effectiveness as a spokesperson. It is not necessary to argue, for example, whether jihadism is a greater threat, or whether global warming is. They are both real threats to our civilization, and anyone denying that is living in denial.

One more thing lizard,

Note that your comment is directly opposite the position of Hugh Fitzgerald and Robert Spencer, persons with the authority to decide that your post is so disagreeable to them, and puts them in such a bad light, that is not worthy of continued exposure to the readership of Jihadwatch. They could if they wanted, as another so called conservative anti-jihad blogger puts it, decide that you have taken the "last crap on their carpet".

But my bet is they won't. You can disagree with them all day and night, as long as it is within the posting rules. It's called freedom of speech, to which they assign great value, and prove that by words, and action (or inaction) by having , in my opinion, a quite liberal posting policy.

I hope you do post and disagree, but you should think about that distinction next post you make in lizardom.

But if you do come back and disagree with
something Hugh has written, you will have to endure his expansive vocabulary. So bookmark this to help you wade through all that yada yada.

http://dictionary.reference.com/

PMK
We need more of your logic and parsimony.
Misislamist and Sharpefan: Thanks for helping us yanks to resist the temptation to jam everything that happens in the world into one of our local political extremes. OMG, you mean Rudd wasn't running against Bush!?

Karl2
I've followed this as well as I can and have concluded that James Hanson, Michael Mann, and Al Gore are not credible. These are your big guns and they have cried wolf too many times. I know CO2 is increasing. Please read
http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm
and tell me where Roy Spencer is wrong without just ad-hominems. At least he is not dependent on research funding from the environmental money. I like to think I have a great respect for the truth. I'm not getting it from Hanson, Mann, and Gore.

Now, isn't it time to end the evening with a song? Of course it is. Simply click on "Jihad Watch Interludes" to your left, and choose something -- Jessie Matthews, Annette Hanshaw, possibly Al Bowlly. You can save the longer things, such as Irene Dunne, or Chaplin, or Ian McKellen in the opening scene of Richard III, for another day, when you have more time. Go ahead.

Think of this site as a Chatauqua of the Air, but with a nightclub attached. I've always wanted to run a nightclub.

PMK,

The presumtion of this thread was that the election was won and lost on the issue of WoT and support of the US which was clearly not the case.

As for the election results being an indicator of Australia's potential withdrawal from the GWOT it may be so, although I wouldn't be surprised if Rudd continues Australia's troop commitment in the middle east to continue our traditional good relations with the US.

As for John Howard he parroted the "Islam is a religion of Peace, small minority of extremists" schtick so as far as i'm concerned, whether it is Howard or Rudd, so long as the majority of world leaders fail to grasp that Islam is the root cause of terrorism and the Koran provides jihadists their "legitimate right" to rule the world then it doesn't matter who leads Australia.

Our leaders need grow some cojones and stop taking all this crap from jihadists and their supporters.

" As for "standing by Bush" even if it means Clinton in the White House, what does it matter? Bush isn't running again. The Republican candidates have their own tongues and they are perfectly capable of articulating what they would do in Iraq. They'll give us their alternative to Hillary or Barak and we can decide which candidate will make us throw up less. What do you suggest we do?"

All of the republican candidates ,except Tancredo and Paul, say nothing and do nothing, to indicate they disagree with the Bush doctrine. They are no better than Bush. In fact, the leader of the pack, Guiliani, has the loudest cheerleader for the Bush doctrine, N, Podorhetz, as a chief adviser. These candidates should stop repeating the Bush mantra. Hewitt is wrong, losing the White House to Hillary IS more dangerous to our national security than trying to achieve "victory" in Iraq. Iran is more important than Iraq. EUROPE is more important than Iraq. There is a whole damn list of things more important than Iraq and things that can be done to dispel any notion that we are "cutting and running".

But Hugh's recommendations are worth another read
The best I could find was a post of a Hugh's essay was re-posted by him:

To repeat what has been posted several hundred times, and in several dozen articles:

1) Withdraw completely from Iraq and instead of fearing whatever chaos may result from warfare between Sunni and Shi'a within Iraq, hope that such a fight is fairly even, as I think it would be despite the Shi'a advantage in population, and also hope that men, money, and materiel are sent by the co-religionists in neighboring countries, especially Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two countries that were most threatened by Saddam Hussein's regime and that were, at least initially (the Saudis are horrified at the way the Americans actually let power be transferred to the Shi'a; they never thought that would happen), pleased by his removal, and beneficiaries of it.

2) Accompany such a withdrawal by a series of measures that will show that far from this being some kind of admission of defeat, it will show instead a much harder and harsher response to the Jihad that is a duty of Muslims everywhere.

Among those measures should be the following:

a) Emphasis on the obtaining not of obtain that false goal, "energy independence," but rather the real goal of diminishing the use of oil and gas and so also diminishing the money available for the world-wide Jihad.

For that, the government should impose a constantly rising tax on gasoline and on other uses of oil 2) an energy policy that will have the government spend large sums on the building of nuclear plants and subsidies for mass transit, and that will, through tax benefits, encourage hybrid cars, solar energy for homes, and wind farms.

b) Military intervention in the southern Sudan and Darfur, mainly through the destruction of the Sudanese planes and helicopters, and threats to bring the war to the government in Khartoum, through the use of seveal thousand men and the air force. Black African forces from mainly Christian countries could also be used. The territory taken should be held until such time as a referendum on independence from the Arabs of the north can be held.

c) New measures to end Muslim immigraton.

d) Meetings of NATO to discuss future security threats that may result from a larger Muslim population within NATO countries, and ways to diminish that threat.

e) Widespread study of the texts of Islam -- Qur'an, Hadith, Sira -- by members of the military and in the upper reaches of the government, and all members of the security services (CIA, FBI) to be taught not by apologists but by those who, like some associated with this site, have no stake in making Islam palatable, but only in telling the truth about it. That textual study should be supplemented by a study of the history of Islamic Jihad-conquest, and of the subjugation of non-Muslims under Muslim rule.

f) An end to the aid, which has become nothig more than a disgusied Jizyah to all Muslim polities and peoples, but mainly to Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and the "Palestinian" territories. None of these is or could ever be, given the tenets of Islam, a true friend to the United States or its people, even if the odd Western-educated leader, such as Abdullah of Jordan, may as an individual harbor pleasant memories of his stay here, but whose country is to be judged not by him and his limited power, but by the masses in that country. Make sure that a great deal of attention is focussed on the fantastic wealth of the rich Arabs, of Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Kuwait, Qatar, Libya, and so on, and that the public in this country and elsewhere learns the size of the revenues from OPEC that have gone to Muslim oil states since 1973 -- about ten trillion dollars. Make clear to the former recipients of Infidel aid that they are encouraged to seek aid from those rich Arabs, those fellow members of the Umma, but that the Americans and other Infidels have expenses -- such as much greater security needs and energy projects -- that will require all of our discretionary income, and besides, those fellow members of the Umma surely will come through.

g) Support those in Kurdistan willing to fight for an independent state, offering to intervene diplomatically to ensure that Turkey does not oppose but sees the wisdom of supporting such an independent state. Assurances must be extracted from Kurdish leaders that they will never make territorial demands on Turkey, and those assurances need to be relayed to the Turkish government. In return, the United States will, alone in the area, support a free Kurdistan and will also work with the Kurds to ensure that they can make claims on the Kurdish-populated regions of both Syria and Iran.

h) Use the example of Kurdistan -- well-publicized -- to begin a campaign directed at non-Arab Muslims, such as the Berbers, to encourage them to emulate the Kurds in throwing off the Arab yoke, and make a constant theme the use of Islam as a vehicle for Arab linguistic, cultural, and political impreialism -- which, of course, it is and always has been.

i) With the potential American victims of Iranian retaliation removed from Iraq,make and execute plans to damage or destroy Iran's nuclear project. There is no need to destroy Iran's conventional forces. In fact, they should be left largely intact so as to serve as a continuing threat to the Sunnis in Iraq, and by extension, to Sunnis elsewhere. But the nuclear weapons are a threat to Infidel states and peoples, and it should not be left up to tiny Israel to deal with the matter (even if it could, which is not clear).

Measures a) through i) are just a brief list of somoe of things to be done initially in this war which has no end (and when Blair says it will last "a generation" and Cheney says it will last "30 or 40 years" they are both being silly; this is a war, between Islam and the rest, that has no end, that is containable but will go on forever).

The only "victory" that makes sense in Iraq is that which results in the Camp of Islam being weakened. The only way to do that is to use the pre-existing fissures, ethnic and sectarian, within Iraq, to the advantage of the world's Infidels, and the only way to take such advantage is for American troops to go rather than to stay, for a stated goal (a secure, united, even prosperous Iraq) that is not the right one, that is in fact the opposite of the right one.
Posted by: Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 24, 2007 1:44 AM

Mislamist sez:

'the Liberal party's recently introduced industrial legislation, which(to a degree) undermined job security for many australians, had become an electoral minefield for their campaign, and rightly so;'

No. The LDP removed some of the excesses that were left over from the former labor government, that made it almost impossible to hire and fire anyone without getting sued which added on average $ 15.000.00 dollars to whatever the sacked worker was demanding.

Costello is very capable although he may not be the charmer and sweet-talking empty suit that KRudd pretends to be. His sarcasm if not cysicism was not well received by many, but he is the most capable left or right and he could never be accused of any wrong doing. But the guy who tells children that Santa, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy are all fairies is always the most hated, don't you know?

That's all.

sheik yer'mami:

Those two things are the same.

Obviously a $15,000 extra cost to firing someone is going to make you less likely to fire them. That's extra job security. Removing that will hence reduce job security.

That it also makes it less likely that you'll hire anyone in the first place, does not affect job security, since job security only cares about when you already have a job. Sure it pushed unemployment up, but that's irrelevant to job security.

Justask:
As mentioned in my post, I am not interested in comparing "experts" but would rather look at some facts first. In visiting the website you posted, I do not see any answers to the 8 questions I posted, but only some opinions and speculation set out by one Roy Spencer Ph.D. Another "expert" without answers to the questions I asked.

If either you or Dr. Spencer can answer my questions concerning how much additional carbon dioxide we will have in our atmosphere after burning all known hydrocarbon reserves, I am sure we could go on and have an interesting discussion about why Dr. Spencer or you believe that such an input into our atmosphere will produce no adverse climatic results.

By the way, I know that some of that carbon dioxide will leave the atmosphere and dissolve into the ocean. (CO2 + H2O creates H2CO3 which is carbonic acid, like the fizz in soda pop.) However, only a portion of the additional CO2 goes into the ocean, and there is a limit to how much carbonic acid the ocean can absorb. If you are going to go down that road, please also tell me when that saturation limit would be reached, and whether sea life with a calcium carbonate structure would be adversely affected by the increased acidity well before then.

One more point. I never said Gore is a "big gun" or even a "little gun" on global warming. He is merely a narrator of a movie I never saw. If you want to look for guns, I would suggest that you go to a half dozen highly ranked universities in the geological sciences, like MIT, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and others, and randomly ask the professors there whether burning all of our known hydrocarbon reserves will have NO adverse impact on the atmosphere, oceans, and temperatures of our planet.

Even if you could prove there would be zero impact from burning all of our hydrocarbons, where does our civilization go once we run out of commercially recoverable hydrocarbon energy?

sheik yer'mami writes:
"No. The LDP removed some of the excesses that were left over from the former labor government, that made it almost impossible to hire and fire anyone without getting sued which added on average $ 15.000.00 dollars to whatever the sacked worker was demanding."

I agree that employers should be able to sack employees for bad work habits but this legislation went a lot further than that with many conditions up for "negotiation" between employer and employee.

Being locked out of your workplace, as I was, until you sign a new agreement is not much of a "work choice" as this legislation was so ironically named.

Sorry, Sam but I'm not prepared to follow that line of reasoning.

For an employer this kind of thing is a big deterrent to put more people on, or it results in hiring people only as casual workers, which was indeed the result in this case.

There is no such thing as 'job security'- just as a business cannot rely on the same level of trade or increasing revenue over the years, things change and change is the only thing that's permanent. Keeping a business afloat has become ever more challenging and to replace staff with people who perform better or meet the needs of the changing environment better works both ways: it helps to keep the staff on their toes and it forces the business to meet the needs of the marketplace. There are always those who fall off this carrousel, which results in businesses going bankrupt and people being losing their jobs.
But security?

Most employers or small business owners, who put their life, their existence at risk, never had it.

Why should you, the hired hand have it? Some governments seem to love the idea that if only they could burden employers totally with the responsibility for their employees that they would be off the hook and everything just swell.

Doesn't work.

In order to flourish, a business has to be able to hire and fire, any administration or system that tries to corrupt this iron rule will pay the ultimate price for this folly in the end.

Socialism doesn't work. Overregulated workplace-union shops don't work either.

Every time Hugh mentions global warming, if one listens carefully, one can hear the clickety-click of hundreds of intelligent and curious- about-Islam readers deleting Jihad Watch from their favorites list or closing their browsers.

As a "hired hand" i'm not looking for job security guaranteed for life, nothing of the sort. I just want a safe work environment and fair treatment in my job.

I want my employers to act responsibly by running their business the best they can to ensure that there will still be a business in years to come. It's too bad that my employer actually does treat me and my workmates as hired hands rather than valuble employees worthy of consultation perhaps then we would be a more successful business.

Well, regardless of the bantering, looks like his first *ahem* priority is evident...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071125/ap_on_re_au_an/australia_election
...that says it all.

We fell for the Labour spin in 1997 in the UK and look at what it has done to our country. Just watch what happens in Australia now.

Well, it could be worse, ya know...
they coulda been the greens...
http://www.rathergood.com/moon_song/
kumbaya, anyone?
lol

I dunno.

I'm beginning to think of global warming as something positive.

I, for one, do believe that global warming is quite real...But hey, they say that the countries that will suffer the most from it happen to have lots of jihadists in them. So it might not be a bad thing.

*goes outside, sprays aerosol can*

"Do Australians believe getting out of Iraq will prevent future Balis? Posted by: PMK"

No.

Question for you: Do you believe that by staying in Iraq will prevent future Balis?

The answer again is obviously no, so what would be gained by staying there?

Fascinating discussion about the repercussions of walking away from Iraq.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=A0DB2FFE-E3E8-4AD3-8C48-84773E6FF95D

"Every time Hugh mentions global warming, if one listens carefully, one can hear the clickety-click of hundreds of intelligent and curious- about-Islam readers deleting Jihad Watch from their favorites list or closing their browsers."
-- from a posting above

Really? Would it be better if I never discussed the problem of global warming, and of now those who wish to diminish the use of fossil fuels for reasons having nothing to do with Islam are in fact the natural allies of, those who wish to diminish the use of fossil fuels because they recognize that at the moment the Money Weapon is the most effective instrument of the Jihad?

And if those "hundreds of intelligent and curious-about-Islam" readers are incapable of studying the matter of anthropogenic global warning from authorities rather than the odd cranks who continue to tell them that it is all fantasy, or exaggerated, then the more fools they. Many of them simply strike attitudes without investigating, at all, the matter of anthropogenic climate change; they behave, that is, with this topic, exactly in the way that infuriates them when others do the very same thing about Islam: simply assume that it "cannot" possibly be so bad, or it's all exaggerated for political reasons, or something. I have taken the trouble to study this matter; taken the trouble to talk to those very professors in the fields most relevant; and not wishing to believe what I came to believe, hoping it was not true or that I and they, were wrong -- came to that conclusion.

Would it be better if this site were like all the other sites that are called "conservative"? Would it be better if a subject of such moment were never mentioned, or if mentioned, that the whole thing were to be scoffed at, Glenn-Beck or Rush-Limbaugh style? The usual slyness, snideness, attacks on "liberals" or "socialists"(!) who of course must be behind all this fake concern. Meanwhile, the carbon dioxide spews out, the Arctic ice continues to melt, the temperature rises, the hurricanes gain in average intensity, and those trained in the field, those who have spent decades monitoring and gathering evidence, and offering various explanations, and carefully re-measuring, and carefully modifying those explanations, and being just as modest, as tip-toe cautiously sober in their assessments as they can possibly be (let me add that I think the real story is even worse, far worse, than scientists have generally permitted themselves to discuss openly, because they cannot risk frightening the public, and they also do not want, are themselves deeply conscious of the need, not to overstate or to conceivably be seen as overstating) , as the ice continues to melt, and the temperature rises, and the hurricanes gain in intensity, and those in the field knows what's what .

If one starts with the assumption that scientists, by and large, are not out to fool us or themselves, and that, if over time, those scientists, many of them reluctantly, have come to conclusions almost universally shared, and if furthermore one believes that the recoerding and collection of data has become more accurate over time, and if the evidence, as it accumulates all over the world, gathered by scientists in all kinds of countries with different economic interests, leads to certain conclusions:

1) there is global warming and
2) human activity has contributed substantially to this global warming and
3) this global warming has, in turn, caused observable, measurable changes in the climate, hence the phrase "anthropogenic climate change"

If one starts as a deliberate agnostic, someone not intent on finding fault or seekiing to locate a conspiracy, but simply starts reading, reading above all the detailed (and often amusing) rebuttals to the arguments (often merely statements designed to undermine confidence in the evidence gathered, and explanatory models produced, by tens of thousands of scientists who have both trained and work in the relevant fields) of the credulous "global warming skeptics." I like www.realclimate.org but there are other sites.

There are those, not enough, who have a keen sense of the nature and menace of Islam, and who are infuriated by those who presume to make bland assumptions about Islam, becausee it is a "religion" (and therefore a Good Thing) or deny the evidence because it is simply too troubling in its implications. But some of those same people, for reasons hard to fathom (fear of the implications of taxation of fuels? fear of a larger government? worry about their own short-term economic interests? an assumptiion that if "liberals," those bogey-men, are alarmed about something then of course there is no conceivably sensible reason to be alarmed?) exhibit the same attitudes and behavior that they deplore about Islam, on the subject of global warning. They "know" and therefore exempt themselves from the need to find out, to do any further research or thinking.

Well, if such people do not come to the site, if they would prefer that one of the Two Big Subjects of the present and the future not be mentioned here, or if mentioned be mentioned only to be dismissed, when I am trying deliberately to note, again and again, how those who are most worried about Global Warming, and those who are most concerned about Islam, should be natural allies, as they work toward the same objective for different reasons: a reduction in the use of fossil fuels.

If that discussion offends them, and they decide not to come to the site, it will simply be the old case of cutting off noses, to spite assorted faces.

Hugh,
Why run the risk of alienating many readers who otherwise might become active in the fight against Islamic supremacism and jihad?

Also, you are assuming that there IS a "problem of global warming".

Why is it necessary to appeal to others for the reduction of oil dependency through global warming hysterics rather than the far more compelling(to me) argument that the use of fossil fuels is fueling global jihad?
One panic at a time please.

Regarding your use of the term "cranks" to describe skeptics of the Great Global Warming Scam™, well there are many very respected and intelligent people belong to that club, including Melanie Phillips, Michael Crichton, Czech President Vaclav Klaus among a host of others;
whereas, from what I've read, most of the "scientists" on Gore's(himself a failed politician, rather than a scientist) list of the Great Scientific Consensus™ have no scientific qualifications whatsoever.

In fact, if anyone is a crank it is likely Al Gore himself, whose "An Inconvenient Truth" was recently exposed as containing numerous inaccuracies and in my opinion is rather more like fear propaganda, intended to terrify children, than even an attempt at truth.
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/09/court-identifies-eleven-inaccuracies-al-gore-s-inconvenient-truth

http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2007-03-04-1.html
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1544
http://www.michaelcrichton.com/index.html

There's a million other essays by "cranks" skeptical of global warming out there.

You know, I don't know if there is or isn't global warming but anything that reduces polution and petroleum dependence intuitively sounds good to me.

Hugh, why do you mention only the ice melt in the Arctic and not the current ice buildup in the Antarctic?

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2005/05/27/antarctic-ice-a-global-warming-snow-job/

Mike_W, please read these two links about Antarctic ice:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/7/192721/175
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/4/211834/644

eoim,

I would never trust an article from that site to be concerned with the truth.

Gristmill - A blogful of leafy green commentary

Personally, I've got zero respect for the Greens. There is no more morally rudderless, misanthropic, Godless group of people on the planet in my opinion.
According to many in the Greens, humanity is a scourge on earth mother Gaia, to be cleansed at any cost in human misery.
Brainwashed and physically broken people like Toni Vernelli are the result,

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet," says Toni, 35.
"Every person who is born uses more food, more water, more land, more fossil fuels, more trees and produces more rubbish, more pollution, more greenhouse gases, and adds to the problem of over-population."
While most parents view their children as the ultimate miracle of nature, Toni seems to see them as a sinister threat to the future.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=495495&in_page_id=1879&in_page_id=1879&expand=true#StartComments

Some groups such as the The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement(with the motto: "May we live long and die out") want to see an end too mankind.
Their aim : "Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth's biosphere to return to good health. Crowded conditions and resource shortages will improve as we become less dense."
http://www.vhemt.org/

Then of course there's our very own Australian Peter Singer, a founding member of the Victorian Greens, who supports legalizing Bestiality.

In 2001 Peter Singer stated:

that mutually satisfying activities of a sexual nature may sometimes occur between humans and animals.. Singer states that Dekkers believes that zoophilia should remain illegal if it involves what he sees as cruelty, but otherwise is no cause for shock or horror. Singer believes that although sex between species is not normal or natural, it does not constitute a transgression of our status as human beings, because human beings are animals or, more specifically, we are great apes. Religious groups, animal rights groups, and others.. have condemned this view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#_note-heavy
(don't follow and read the references, unless you have a strong stomach).

What does Peter Singer, bestiality, and all the rest of the stuff in your untasty olla-podrida have to do with presenting a convincing rebuttal of the evidence supporting the thesis of anthropogenic global warming? An attempt to whip up some imagined crowd prepared to denounce Singer and those promoting sex with animals and the looniest conceivable "Greens" in order to distract from the matter of scientific measurements and the accumulation of vast amounts of data, and the hypotheses that both best explain the data already accumulated, and that have predictive value about the future? No distractions, please, from that.

Karl2
If all the hydrocarbons on the planet were burned and the CO2 injected into the atmosphere, I think everyone agrees that would be bad. The real issue is how long do we reasonably have to convert to solar/nuclear etc. As Roy Spencer points out, the current computer climate models assume a global precipitation model which gives positive feedback to the small warming (~1degree/century) due to human CO2. It is this amplification of the human effect that causes alarm. The direct effect of HC burning would take hundreds of years to cause problems. Roy Spencer makes the case that the climate models are wrong, that the precipitation system gives negative feedback to any impulse toward warming, ie. acts as earth's thermostat. I think that with the new satellite sensing coming on line, he will soon be proven correct. And this will give us several hundred years to fully transition to solar. It is not going to take nearly that long.

If all of the uranium xxx were burned in nuclear plants and the excess heat injected into the atmosphere, we would probably also have a big problem.

http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm

This is related to jihad because anthropogenic warming fears constrain our solutions to energy independence and thus pump more petro dollars to jihadis.

Hugh,
the point I was making is that the environmental movement(Greens) tends to attract a group of people who pick and present questionable data to support an agenda that seems very much anti-humanity.
As for the climate modelling: well, data can be made to do all sorts of tricks, depending on the desired outcome.
There is a saying in the IT industry, "Garbage in, garbage out":
meaning a computer program will produce nonsense if the input data is incorrect. Of course, it will also produce garbage if the data is processed incorrectly.

What "vast amounts of data" are you referring to Hugh?
I do not trust the data presented by the website linked by eoim.

Data and arguments I've seen elsewhere suggests that variations in solar activity create fluctuations in global temperature and that such variations have a long history and are entirely natural.

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/cause.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.htm
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html

I have referred to that website (http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics) because it's one of the few I know. I'm not claiming that it is the ultimate truth. If I were more knowledgeable about global warming, I would instead have quoted some book or publication.

Incidentally, the same site has also an article about this solar activity, with a couple of links:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/28/090/30666

Here is yet another example of a path out of energy dependence. Safe nuclear.

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

lol...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw
ah, sometimes ya just gotta laugh.
lol

hy Guy wrote : "You know, I don't know if there is or isn't global warming but anything that reduces pollution and petroleum dependence intuitively sounds good to me."

Seconded.

I'm with you, Hugh, for all the reasons you yourself give, and also for the same reasons Shy Guy posted.

I would add that ALL the life style changes that are suggested by many in order to reduce CO2 emissions - for example, walking more, improving public transport - have spin-off benefits that have nothing to do with climate.

For example. My husband has always commuted by bicycle. It is his primary form of exercise. He saves money on 1. petrol and 2. inner city parking fees. Money that he can spend on our family.

Indeed, for the first fifteen years of our married life, we lived in a small, inner city terrace and had no car. We walked, and used public transport. The money we saved from not having to buy, fuel and maintain a car, went into our mortgage. And we had four children - because four kids fit on the bus or the train just as easily as three. Whereas for car owners, these days, four kids mean you have to buy at least a six-seater, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than the traditional five-seater.

We now live in a suburban area, but we bought within walking distance of a school. That walk to and from helps keep me and the children fit. That fifteen minutes in the morning, fifteen in the afternoon, that I walk with them, is 'down time' - time to talk about the day, say hello to a neighbour and the school crossing lady, admire birds and butterflies.

Now: if all of us in 'western' countries who were able-bodied walked just a little more, yes, our petrol consumption goes down, we save money to use on other things, the Mid-East oil sellers get less money for jihad and daawa...and guess what, our waistlines get smaller and our blood pressure and blood sugar go down and our GP tells us we're likely to live longer.

I could continue in this vein for much longer. But I'll leave it at that.

good idea

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/25/nbook125.xml

As regards Labor: they need to be reminded of possibly their greatest politician, and where he stood on the subject of Israel.

In the Jerusalem Post 'Letters' I read the following, today.
"Sir, - Tomorrow will be the 60th anniversary of the historic United Nations vote in favor of partition which brought Israel into existence.
Every year at this time we hear the recording of this vote - Afghanistan - no, Australia - yes, etc. - without doing justice to the abrasive [actually, downright cranky and sneaky] Australian who chaired the UN committee: Herbert V. Evatt. For months before the vote, Evatt had maneuvered among the delegates to obtain their support for partition, which only just received the necessary two-thirds majority - 31 for,13 against and 10 abstentions.

Daniel Mandel [Australian Jewish scholar: Melbourne University], in his book "The Undercover Zionist", as he calls Evatt, notes the opinion of the Polish delegate to the UN at the time: "Dr.Evatt - now there's a great man for you. Without him the Israelis would never have got in. He bullied, pleaded, cajoled and coaxed until he got the right number for them. He made himself their advocate and but for him the victory of their soldiers would have been taken away again."

For an interview with Mandel, see Frontpage archives, March 3 2006. One may note also that Kim Beasley, who was then Leader of the Opposition (and who, I should mention, was a student of military history) launched Mandel's book when it appeared.

You may be sure I will be drawing Mr Rudd's attention to these details, and urging him to honour the legacy of Dr Evatt, and of the (then governed by Labor) Australia that voted YES for Israel in 1947 when it would have been so terribly, terribly easy to vote NO or to abstain. I will be urging him to continue that aspect of Howard's foreign policy that I wholeheartedly agreed with: support for Israel's right to exist and to defend itself against the Jihad. I recommend that all other Australians here, do likewise.

Australians have always had a soft spot for the underdog. Once enough of us get our heads straight and realize that the 'Poor Palestinians' are NOT the underdog - once we know again, as we once knew instinctively, that the 'Palestian' Arabs are merely the shock troops of millions of murderous Muslims, looking hungrily at tiny Israel and plotting a second Shoah, we should be able to muster the same courage that fired the Light Horse in 1917, together with the sneaky smarts of Dr Evatt in 1947.

It's ok...nukes are in place if needed...
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/24/152943.shtml
...and the mOslems know it, too.

Australians aren't moving "forward" with the election of Rudd, who reminds one a good deal of the UK's Gordon Brown.

Australians are burying their heads in the sand, like most of the world. Apparently, they think moving closer to a military dictatorship like China is going to save them.

The problem of Islamic insurgency is now global--al Qaeda operates in about 100 countries including Australia. Nukes alone are NOT going to get the world out of this nightmare. And neither is blaming the United States for this (which is what the Aussies have apparently been doing behind our backs).

If Australians really had such a soft spot for the underdog, why do they continue to NOT realize that democracy and liberty are under siege globally and that China (which the Australians treat as a great ally of theirs) is one of the biggest villains in this issue? Hugo Chavez and his Communist "revolution" across much of Latin America, for example, has been underwritten by China, ad so have for that matter the Mullahs of Iran and the genocidal Sudanese government in Khartoum. China is benefiting from the global jihad at the expense of the rest of the world--that can't be conincidental. And as Communism and Islam made common cause in the twentieth century, we can deduce see that this is not.

Certainly Australians are fully cognizant of most of these facts about the Chinese government which they nonetheless hold in a better light than the US government. It looks to me like Australia has simply changed--and not for the better.

My prediction: Australia will completely cease being an ally of the United States of America and western civilization in about the span of one generation.

pythagoras,

Unfortunately, the Marxists have thoroughly infiltrated our media and education systems; you might well be right about the next generation.
The brainwashing of the Australian masses is nearly complete.

One of our popular current affairs presenters on the ABC, Kerry O'Brien(nickname "Red Kezza" O'Brien, host of "The 7:30 Report"), made a telling slip on the night of the election,
Kerry O’Brien: “With 60% of the vote counted, the swing to the ABC is …”.

But don't blame me; I didn't vote for the KRudd.
On the bright side, Australians might have better access to all those cheap Chinese organ transplants,

http://organharvestinvestigation.net/

Those Chinese convicts are good sports.
Thankfully, our new Prime Minister speaks fluent Mandarin.

Just to throw my two bobs' worth into the ring on the election and how it will affect (or not) the global jihad and associated detritus.

I believe we will see a return to 'asylum seekers' now that KRudd and his ALP cohorts are in.

The ALP (Australian Labor Party) are one of the last bastions on union power in this country, and one of their primary aims is reversing the WorkChoices legislation.

Personally, I liked the new laws and will miss them when they go. So will plenty of other people when they find that the job market shrinks drastically.

When it comes to minorities, and particularly the muslim voting bloc, Labor pander to them shamelessly.

Let us not forget that the Catmeat Sheikh was allowed to remain in this country by Paul Keating, who as Labor PM overruled his own foreign minister's attempts to remove him. Hilaly was found to be of unsavoury character and had also overstayed his visa, yet because he could deliver the muslim vote, we have been stuck with him.

I believe that the voters weren't so much as against Howard or for Rudd; more that they felt it was time for a change. After 11 years, someone else should get a go, and Rudd played the game by pretending to be Howard-lite with the added bonus of rewinding the workplace laws and ratifying
Kyoto.

With respect to Iraq, I doubt much will change in the short term - the Party is more concerned about things at home like getting Kevin out of the picture and letting Julia Gillard take the reins.

One thing to note is that the voters do not choose the leader of the parties here. The party chooses the leader, and the people vote.