James DeMeo's OBRL-News Blog

# dies ist der letzte NACHRICHTENBRIEF, der per Email

versandt wird. Zukünftige Nachrichtenbriefe werden nur noch

online veröffentlicht auf dem Blog:

http://nachrichtenbrief.wordpress.com/

// posted by James DeMeo @ Monday, December 29, 2008 2 comments

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html

2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.

By Christopher Booker

Last Updated: 5:51PM GMT 27 Dec 2008

The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free - as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now fast approaching from the fact that - unless we get on very soon with building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap" - within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is high time our politicians - along with those of the EU and President Obama's US - were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.

// posted by James DeMeo @ Saturday, December 27, 2008 0 comments

Colleagues: I believe the issue of the Story of V was raised in the  past.  Finally, this November, I wrote a letter to the author's publishing house in London. Here it is:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
November 6, 2008

Editorial Staff
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
The Orion Publishing Group
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane
London, WC2H 9EA

To whom it may concern:

I would appreciate your passing this letter on to your author, Catherine Blackledge, and to whoever on your staff served as her editor for the book, The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, which you published in 2003.  Thank you. PB

    ***

In The Story of V: A Natural History of Female Sexuality, your author, Catherine Blackledge, entitles her final chapter, "The Function of the Orgasm," an obvious nod towards Wilhelm Reich, whose most famous book has that title.  And in keeping with the title of the chapter, Blackledge does discuss Reich's ideas, but the discussion is riddled through with inaccuracies, one of which is totally scandalous.

       
First, Blackledge refers to Reich's book, The Function of the Orgasm, as having been published in 1927.  The full citation in her end-notes to this chapter is "Reich, Wilhelm (1927), The Function of the Orgasm-sex-economic problems of biological energy, London: Souvenir Press, 1983" (p. 307 of the Rutgers University Press edition).  While Reich did publish a book entitled Die Funktion des Orgasmus in 1927, the book that your author cites is a very different one, having very little in common with the 1927 text.  The Souvenir Press edition of 1983 is a translation of a book written by Reich in 1940 and originally published in English in 1942.

One wonders how Blackledge could have possibly read the book in question, and have come away thinking it had been written in 1927.  Even a casual perusal of the text makes it completely clear that the book was written much later, with references to Hitler and his rise to power in 1933, references to Reich's other writings, like Die Bione, published in 1938, and Reich's discussion of orgone energy, which he didn't claim to discover until 1939.  Indeed, the passage she quotes is from the "General Survey" that precedes the text and is clearly dated 1940. Did she read past page seven, where this passage occurs?

Misdating a book is minor and understandable, in one sense, since Reich did write a book in 1927 entitled Die Funktion des Orgasmus.  But what follows the reference to this text is absolutely outrageous.

I quote Blackledge:

    Reich's views of the importance of sexual pleasure were not shared by everyone, perhaps because of his controversial exhortations to fuck freely. A propaganda film he made in his youth, Mysteries of the Organism, promoting what he called  orgasmatherapy, declares:

    "The human being averages 4,000 orgasms in a lifetime. Do not turn off this pulsating motor of joy and life forceŠ The biological charge and discharge produced by the genital embrace causes the  orgasmic reflex, supremely pleasurable muscle contractions. Subjection to social disciplines may cause gastric ulcers, respiratory, coronary and vascular diseases. Comrade lovers, for your health's sake:  fuck freely" (p. 264).

What Blackledge is referring to is a film entitled, WR: Mysteries of the Organism, made by Dusan Makavejev in 1971, long after Reich's death.  While the film does include some footage from Reich's early days, no one who has seen the film could possibly think that it was made by Reich himself.  Indeed, the film begins with the words, "This film is in part a personal response to the life and teachings of Dr. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)." Just as there is evidence that Blackledge didn't read the  Function of the Orgasm, I also think it rather obvious that she didn't watch Makavejev's film. Like all too many young scholars these days, she was probably relying on some third source.   

Reich never called his therapy "orgasmatherapy," though that term does occur in the film.  It is said by the lead character, Milena.  The passage quoted above that begins "The human being averages 4,000 orgasms in a lifetime..." nowhere occurs in Reich's writings but was written by Makavejev, piecing together fragments of things Reich did in fact say. Nor did Reich ever advocate that one should "fuck freely."  This too is Makavejev.  Indeed, Reich contrasts what he refers to as the "genital embrace" with fucking.  From Reich's The Murder of Christ:

    The longing for the fusion with another organism in the genital embrace is just as strong in the armored organism as it is in the unarmored one. It will most of the time be even stronger, since the full satisfaction is blocked. Where Life simply loves, armored life "fucks." Where Life functions freely in its love relations... so Life also lets its love relationships grow slowly from a first comprehensive glance to the fullest yielding during the quivering embrace.  Life does not rush toward the embrace. It is in no hurry... Armored man, on the other hand, confined in his organismic prison, rushes at the fuck (p. 26). 

What is truly sad about all this is that many people's only contact with Reich is through Majavejev's film, and those of us who have studied Reich's work seriously are appalled by this film and its distortions.  That the film should be attributed to Reich himself is beyond the pale.  And this is not some academic quibble: I remind you that Reich died in prison, due to the gross misunderstandings of his work.  Blackledge's totally inaccurate treatment of his ideas and work only contributes more to such misunderstanding.

Sincerely,

Philip W. Bennett, PhD

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

I sent a copy of this letter to Rutgers Press, the American distributor for this travesty of a book.  Yesterday I received a hand-written reply from the Director of the Press:

"Dear Dr. Bennett:

Thank you for your note of 7 December regarding The Story of V.  We did indeed reply on Orion to certify that the information in that book was correct.  In our license with them, they are the responsible party.  These days, we don't have the funds to fact check books we originate, let alone books we import.  We certainly regret the inaccuracies. Cordially, Marlie Wasserman, Director."

No fact checking?  Rely on an author's integrity?  As if academics never invent stuff!  The author of the Story of V has a doctorate but more: This from her publisher:

"Cath Blackledge has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Birkbeck College, London. She has worked as a reporter, news editor and editor for numerous specialist publications, including European Chemical News and Pharmaceutical Business News, and is a former science and medical correspondent for The European. Now a freelance science writer and broadcaster, she was shortlisted for the prestigious Glaxo Science Writer's Prize in 1999."

http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/7353-5/Author-Catherine-Blackledge.htm

See also Jim DeMeo's comments on Amazon about the book.

Philip Bennett, PhD

// posted by James DeMeo @ Saturday, December 27, 2008 5 comments

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/32235_The_Great_Global_Warming_Swindle_Debate

The Great Global Warming Swindle Debate

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/18/AR2008121803640.html

Obama's Science Advisors:  Advocates for "Action"... as in "drop those incandescent light bulbs and put your hands in the air"!!

// posted by James DeMeo @ Monday, December 22, 2008 0 comments

http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20081218205953.aspx

CNN Meteorologist: Manmade Global Warming Theory 'Arrogant'

Network's second meteorologist to challenge notion man can alter climate.

By Jeff Poor

Business & Media Institute

12/18/2008 11:02:44 PM

Unprecedented snow in Las Vegas has some scratching their heads - how can there be global warming with this unusual cold and snowy weather?

CNN Meteorologist Chad Myers had never bought into the notion that man can alter the climate and the Vegas snowstorm didn't impact his opinion. Myers, an American Meteorological Society certified meteorologist, explained on CNN's Dec. 18 "Lou Dobbs Tonight" that the whole idea is arrogant and mankind was in danger of dying from other natural events more so than global warming.

"You know, to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant," Myers said. "Mother Nature is so big, the world is so big, the oceans are so big - I think we're going to die from a lack of fresh water or we're going to die from ocean acidification before we die from global warming, for sure."

Myers is the second CNN meteorologist to challenge the global warming conventions common in the media. He also said trying to determine patterns occurring in the climate would be difficult based on such a short span.

Global Warming Censored

How the Major Networks Silence the Debate on Climate Change

http://businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2008/GlobalWarmingCensored/GlobalWarmingCensored_execsum.asp

Climate of Bias

Media Quotes about Global Warming

http://businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2007/globalwarming/ClimateOfBias.asp

// posted by James DeMeo @ Friday, December 19, 2008 0 comments

http://www.hudsonny.org/2008/12/contemplating-islam.php

December 15, 2008 | Wafa Sultan

Contemplating Islam

If we consider the Islamic texts, their content and the devotion that so many Muslims - including in America - attach to them; if we consider the tragic upshot of these teachings in terms of our current world's security, is it not a duty for each one of us to view Islam not frivolously but in a most serious manner?

There was an episode during the current Presidential election that greatly disturbed me. It was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's interview on "Meet the Press." For me this interview was a defining moment. He expressed his displeasure at some of his colleagues' accusations that Obama might be a Muslim, and stated: "And what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim?"

Mr. Powell's admonition at others who dare questioning Muslims, or Islam and its implications, in particular, people like me, who suffered immensely precisely because there is "something wrong with being a Muslim," would indeed be disheartened. If Powell doesn't understand what may be the dire consequences for being a Muslim, then who should understand? The man, who once held the post of American Secretary of State, asserts categorically that there is nothing wrong with being a Muslim, even though the country he led has been suffering immensely from Muslim terrorism and has paid a high price because of it.

I appreciate that Powell, who has been nurtured by the American moral code, refuses to judge people on the basis of their religious affiliation. That is his right. But he does not have the right to nonchalantly disregard people's apprehensions of Muslims, especially at those of us who have lived in Muslim countries. We have risked our lives to escape from them, and are now risking our lives again to speak up against the harm they cause, induced by Islamic theology and culture.

In order to understand my perspective one would have to be a woman, living in Syria, my birthplace, or any other Arab Muslim country.

...

*snip*

Read the whole item.

// posted by James DeMeo @ Tuesday, December 16, 2008 0 comments

http://counterknowledge.com/?p=1370

(15) Finally, if the US government is institutionally ruthless enough to organise the massacre of thousands of its own citizens in a series of "false flag" attacks, then why is it too squeamish to arrange for the deaths of the supposed "truth-seekers" (David Griffin, Kevin Barrett, Steven Jones, Richard Gage, the Loose Change team, Alex Jones, etc.) who have exposed their complicity in one of the most heinous crimes a government can commit against its own people? Why are these people still alive and well, and in a position to publicise their "theories" on radio, television, in print and online?

// posted by James DeMeo @ Tuesday, December 16, 2008 0 comments

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/899uarzx.asp?pg=2

Human Rights at 60

They aren't what they used to be.

by Joseph Loconte

12/10/2008 12:00:00 AM

Sixty years ago, Eleanor Roosevelt, then head of the UN Human Rights Commission, said: "Democracy, freedom, human rights have come to have a definite meaning to the people of the world, which we must not allow to so change that they are made synonymous with suppression and dictatorship." Today, the world's dictators and terrorists are no doubt celebrating the prostitution of human rights - often at the encouragement of UN policies and protocols. More than half of the 47 members of the UN Human Rights Council fail to uphold basic democratic freedoms in their own countries. Some of the most egregious offenders of human rights - including China, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe - typically evade censure.

...

*snip*

// posted by James DeMeo @ Friday, December 12, 2008 0 comments

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=83323

Scientists abandon global warming 'lie'

650 to dissent at U.N. climate change conference

Posted: December 11, 2008

WASHINGTON - A United Nations climate change conference in Poland is about to get a surprise from 650 leading scientists who scoff at doomsday reports of man-made global warming - labeling them variously a lie, a hoax and part of a new religion.

Later today, their voices will be heard in a U.S. Senate minority report quoting the scientists, many of whom are current and former members of the U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

About 250 of the scientists quoted in the report have joined the dissenting scientists in the last year alone.

In fact, the total number of scientists represented in the report is 12 times the number of U.N. scientists who authored the official IPCC 2007 report.

Here are some choice excerpts from the report:

        *       "I am a skeptic ... . Global warming has become a new religion." -- Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

        *       "Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly ... . As a scientist I remain skeptical." -- Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology  and formerly of NASA who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called "among the most pre-eminent scientists of the last 100 years."

        *       Warming fears are the "worst scientific scandal in the history ... . When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists." -- U.N. IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning Ph.D. environmental physical chemist.

        *       "The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn't listen to others. It doesn't have open minds ... . I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists." -- Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the U.N.-supported International Year of the Planet.

        *       "The models and forecasts of the U.N. IPCC "are incorrect because they only are based on mathematical models and presented results at scenarios that do not include, for example, solar activity." -- Victor Manuel Velasco Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Geophysics of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

        *       "It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don't buy into anthropogenic global warming." -- U.S. Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

        *       "Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapor and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will." -- Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

        *       "After reading [U.N. IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet." -- Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an associate editor of Monthly Weather Review.

        *       "For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?" -- Geologist Dr. David Gee, the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer-reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

        *       "Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp ... . Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact." -- Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch U.N. IPCC committee.

        *       "Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined." -- Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

        *       "Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense ... . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning." -- Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

        *       "CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another ... . Every scientist knows this, but it doesn't pay to say so ... . Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver's seat and developing nations walking barefoot." -- Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

        *       "The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds." -- Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

The report also includes new peer-reviewed scientific studies and analyses refuting man-made warming fears and a climate developments that contradict the theory.

It is 4 degrees Celsius (39 Fahrenheit) today in Poznan, Poland, where the U.N. conference is being held.

// posted by James DeMeo @ Thursday, December 11, 2008 0 comments

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather

2008 will be coolest year of the decade
Global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, but cooler temperature is not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0823/p02s01-wogi.html

Change in hottest year fuels global warming skeptics

A tweak to NASA's record shows that 4 of the 10 warmest years in the USoccurred during in the 1930s, not more recently. Climate change deniers say this points out that concern over global warming is unfounded.

// posted by James DeMeo @ Saturday, December 06, 2008 0 comments