Finis

After two years I’ve decided to end my blogging activities. It has become far too time-consuming and I’m running out of things to say, or my efforts are said better elsewhere.

There are other things I want to pick up again, other avenues to explore. I may take up blogging again, possibly with a new blog, but not for quite a while.

Please accept my heartfelt thanks for all your comments and if you don’t leave comments, many thanks for stopping by. I'd mention names but I'm afraid of forgetting someone, so thanks - you know who you are!

It’s been a highly enjoyable and enlightening experience. I've learned more from bloggers and blog commenters than ever I learned from the mainstream media. I've also gained a small inkling of just how many decent, knowledgeable people there are out there and that's something I'll never forget. 

All the very best to everyone

Mike ( aka  A K Haart )

Royal climate claque

The Guardian tells us :- 

The Prince of Wales has criticised "corporate lobbyists" and climate change sceptics for turning the earth into a "dying patient", in his most outspoken attack yet on the world's failure to tackle global warming, made shortly before he is to take over from the Queen at the forthcoming meeting of the Commonwealth.

It seems to me that Charles gives too much away when he promulgates his royal views on climate change. As heir to the throne, he has blundered his way into a situation he could so easily have avoided. We know for some time that isn't up to snuff when it comes to teasing apart the strands of propaganda surrounding this issue.

He has no need to remind us.

It's a huge pity because it would be delightfully refreshing is someone of the nob persuasion finally got a grip on these matters, but that's another issue for another day.

I don't mean to imply that Charles should be a sceptic, but it is surely not be beyond his capabilities to work out that sceptics have a point. There has been no global warming for about fifteen years and it's pretty easy to discover that this rather important temperature hiatus has become an accepted fact on both sides of the climate fence.

One side is scratching its collective head over this temperature standstill, the side Charles favours with his support. At the very least he should know that now is a time for head-scratching rather than bleating yesterday's words like a lost sheep. 

Maybe his royal crap-detector wasn't triggered by the shift from global warming to the rather less precise climate change. Clearly his suspicions were not aroused by this switch and it never occurred to him that climate terminology had thereby become less precise. One is left wondering what else the guy doesn't get. 

It's a mistake his mother never made and never would have made. Presumably she is somewhat smarter than he is. 

Early learning centre

From PaulR

A mug's game

A while back I finished Ford Maddox Ford's tetralogy Parade's End - a superb read. The four novels are set mainly in England and the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer. He vividly brings back to life the dirty, routine, mechanical ghastliness of trench warfare. 

Here his main character Christopher Tietjens reflects with a peculiarly grim irony on the grisly inefficiency of it all :-

This was the war of attrition...A mug’s game! A mug’s game as far as killing men was concerned, but not an uninteresting occupation if you considered it as a struggle of various minds spread all over the broad landscape in the sunlight. 

They did not kill many men and they expended an infinite number of missiles and a vast amount of thought. If you took six million men armed with loaded canes and stockings containing bricks or knives and set them against another six million men similarly armed, at the end of three hours four million on the one side and the entire six million on the other would be dead. So, as far as killing went, it really was a mug’s game. 

That was what happened if you let yourself get into the hands of the applied scientist. For all these things were the products not of the soldier but of hirsute, bespectacled creatures who peered through magnifying glasses. 

Or of course, on our side, they would be shaven-cheeked and less abstracted. They were efficient as slaughterers in that they enabled the millions of men to be moved. When you had only knives you could not move very fast. On the other hand, your knife killed at every stroke: you would set a million men firing at each other with rifles from eighteen hundred yards. But few rifles ever registered a hit. So the invention was relatively inefficient. And it dragged things out!

Ford Maddox Ford - Parade's End

Put the kettle on

From PaulR

Pundit Lite

I’d never read the Guardian columnist George Monbiot until some recent dabbling which I won't be pursuing, although inevitably I’ve often seen him quoted in climate change pieces.

He is or was a bête noire of climate sceptics, but not a particularly serious one. From the quotes I’ve seen, his forte on climate and wider environmental issues leans more towards aggressive polemics than anything worth taking seriously.

However, from an early stage he seems to have seen what a disaster climategate was in terms of the credibility of climate scientists, so that's something.

Of somewhat wider interest is how people such as Monbiot get into the pundit line. Having a monied background seems to help. Presumably it helps financially, but as always in life it helps to be well-connected.

Monbiot has had his adventures and dodgy moments too and I don’t doubt his personal courage. I’m also sure he is genuinely committed to his environmental causes, but of course he can afford to be and in his line of work it pays to be strident, well-known, well-connected and ruthlessly simplistic. 

From Wikipedia:-

Working as an investigative journalist, he travelled in Indonesia, Brazil, and East Africa. His activities led to his being made persona non grata in seven countries and being sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Indonesia. In these places, he was also shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a poisoned coma by hornets. He came back to work in Britain after being pronounced clinically dead in Lodwar General Hospital in north-western Kenya, having contracted cerebral malaria. 

I’m reminded here of a story by Theodore Dalrymple who was once thrown into an Albanian jail merely for watching a demonstration. However, the previous evening Dalrymple had been dining with a senior Albanian government official and after half an hour in jail he was abruptly released with a servile apology.

  

As Dalrymple found, there is a considerable degree of safety to be found both in being well-connected and a prominent journalist. There is a peculiar sense of a courageous dilettante about the exploits of such people. While one admires the courage, the dilettante suspicions undoubtedly spoil the overall effect.

It adds a certain doubtful aura to their stories, blurring the line between commitment and grandstanding. Not as bad as the TV reporter pretending to hack their way through the Amazon jungle, but it still doesn’t quite convince or persuade even if apparently genuine.

At least Dalrymple’s life as a prison psychiatrist gave him a keen insight into human nature; if rather a bleak one at times. He also comes across as far more nuanced in his thinking - and better read too. I’m altogether more wary of Monbiot and not at all clear what he brings to public debates.

Unfortunately, one cannot wholly ignore widely quoted pundits even in the internet age. They seize a platform and know very well how to keep hold of their chosen audience by relentlessly hammering the right buttons. 

Monbiot comes across to me as a Boswell with no Johnson to restrain his fancies. Nobody to set him right with - Sir, clear your mind of cant.

Habit