He denies faking any material but whether or not you believe that from a person, who is now a self-confessed criminal, I’ll leave up to you. In my personal view, anyone who’s got no qualms in committing identity theft would be unlikely to have any problem with faking material.

I would remind you though, that it’s common for criminals to admit to acts which they know can be proved but deny everything else they think can’t be proved. As any cop can tell you, it’s like peeling and onion.

As always, when trying to make sense of the actions of other people, the vital question to ask is why.

Why did he do it? It’s become obvious to even the most rabid believer in global warming, that the war has been going increasingly badly for the last two years. In their secret nightmares, I think they actually know it’s already lost. Despite a lot of massaging, the numbers are still nose diving. They’ve been cut loose by the politicians and the mainstream media (MSM) - apart from the more rabid organs of the latter.

Their reaction to this decline has been to spur them on to make progressively more extreme gestures and statements, in an attempt to win back the mob. It simply isn’t having any effect on broader public opinion and you can see their frustration over the lack of impact building. The numbers are still inexorably going south.

They needed something desperately and a big propaganda splash might just do the trick. He took it on himself to provide one and in doing so, has probably delivered a mortal blow to the credibility of those remaining elements in the MSM, who were the last committed allies of the movement.

The other part of answering the why question is that in my assessment, Peter Gleick is quite simply a fanatic. In a previous article on fanatics and how to fight them, I said “A fanatic’s real strength is that they’ll never give up, never rethink their position, are not proportionate and above all; don’t know when to stop.” It’s the “don’t know when to stop” bit that always delivers the self-inflicted mortal wound in the end. As their belief system crumbles, increasingly, any sense of proportion is lost. They’re no longer even thinking rationally.

When you actually think it through, as he should have done, it was inevitable that Fakegate would be exposed as bogus but that was bound to happen some time after the whole of the alarmist propaganda machine had committed itself to supporting what was going to be an easily exposed fiction. The big damage was always going to be to their credibility, if not their wallets.

What effect does this confession have on the wider Fakegate proceedings? None, I’d suspect, although it should simplify Heartland’s legal suits. The elements of the MSM already in the libel zone are still there and still piling up their liability too. I’m afraid the “don’t know when to stop” bit applies to them too. It’ll take a savage amount of financial bloodletting before they see sense, but that will happen in the end.

If there’s one thing the global warming movement has never done, it’s to tie off a liability. Predictably, they’ll defend him heroically all the way to the gates of the penitentiary and damn the reputation damage. It springs from that essential self-righteous arrogance that has always plagued them. Their whole movement is by now crippled by assorted Albatrosses like Gleick, Pachauri, Hansen and Jones hanging around its neck.

What ultimately makes Gleick a truly pathetic figure is that what he did, even if it had been successful, would have had no discernible effect on the final outcome of the war, except possibly hastening it. There’s simply no way that a vitriolic squabble between a cabal of activists and an institute the ordinary person had never heard of, was going to reverse the declining belief in the threat of global warming. The Heartland Institute extracting huge sums of money in punitive damages from prominent media outlets will however, have a huge propaganda impact.

He’s lost his integrity, his career and will ultimately lose his personal freedom because of a criminal act that was doomed to be futile, whatever happened.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Some thoughts on fanatics and how to fight them.

The death of the AGW belief system.

Fakegate and post-modern journalism.

Click for a list of other articles.

It is now about the absence of journalistic standards, rather than anything else and the situation viewed from that perspective has got worse as the story has developed. It has never been permissible to publish uncorroborated accusations nor to base editorials on them. If you wanted to publish something controversial, it was up to you to first check out the facts before going to press. Without this “check your facts first” approach, nobody would bother reading a newspaper because at the end of the day, the readership have to be able to trust that it is being presented with facts, not wild imaginings.

If a paper could freely publish uncorroborated anonymous material and sermonise on it, the readership would quickly cease to trust it and fade away, as the paper itself disappeared under an avalanche of libel suits. Most quality papers used to operate a two source rule on any story that was likely to have a big impact. The reporter had to find two independent sources with the same basic story. The more controversial the story, the harder it had to be verified.

It simply doesn’t cut it if you look at material delivered to you anonymously and come to the judgement that it looks authentic, so it’s okay to publish it. That’s journalism lite or in this day and age, I suppose it should more appropriately be called post-normal journalism. You don’t have to check sources at all or even verify material. Because the story accords with your personal opinions or politics, get it out quick and worry about proving it later.

This new approach is endemic to online journalism because so many of its practitioners are nothing more than cottage-industry propagandists masquerading as serious journalists. They’re amateurs, so clueless they simply don’t know the rules and what’s more, they don’t give a damn about the rules either. They’re driven by their own sense of self-importance and soap-box arrogance.

There’s not a professional journalist alive, who didn’t get a story badly wrong at some point in their career. Sometimes it was a genuine error on their part and sometimes they were misled by another party who had their own agenda but the honourable and less expensive way out, has always been to admit your mistake publicly, apologise for any distress caused and hope the injured party accepts the apology. In most cases, where no serious reputational or financial damage was done, the apology was accepted and it ended there.

Civil courts do not like having their time wasted on open and shut cases which should have been settled long ago without ending up in a court of law. They like to see that the injured party has exhausted all other means to obtain redress before being forced into litigation as a last resort. The classic first step is for the injured party to request a clarification or retraction from the publisher. If that isn’t complied with, then the next one is a letter from their lawyer. This will usually be replied to by the publisher’s legal representative. If nothing satisfactory can be agreed after an extensive exchange of letters, then it finally goes to court. All of this can take months.

Defendants who lose a libel action that plainly should have been settled out of court, usually attract a heavier financial penalty for wasting everyone’s time. Pride, pig-headedness and arrogance can be very expensive luxuries. I’ve gone to the trouble of outlining this process because I believe certain parties are ignorant of it.

The Heartland Institute have just taken that first step in their comment on the publication of the material, by asking for it to be taken down and advising publishers not to use it as a source for any articles.

Incredible as it may seem, the two reactions by the potentially libelous parties to this polite request are quite honestly childish.

The first one is pure post-modern journalism. Somehow they actually think that until the Heartland Institute can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the material is fake, they can not only leave allegedly libelous content up but can also continue publishing new articles based on the material. Indeed as I write this, I see extremely injudicious articles appearing.

The second one seems to run along the lines of; go on then, sue us if the material is fake. Well, yes. Put that way, you are now obliging them to sue you since to do otherwise, would be implicitly admitting the material is genuine. So they will sue you. The downside of this brilliant strategy is that in a court of law, they don’t have to prove the material is fake, it’s up to you to prove it’s genuine, as justification for any libelous articles you based on it.

These immature reactions are in the main prompted by a combination of ignorance and arrogance but there’s a more subtle cultural difference at work. The online world works at a fast tempo. When someone writes an article that someone else objects to, then they knock out a quick rebuttal piece. It’s a cut and thrust, parry and riposte, a wham bam thank you Mam world. No reaction on a piece within a few hours or days is somehow seen as confirmation of the correctness of the original article and the online world moves quickly on.

The legal process simply doesn’t work at that pace. As explained above, it grinds along slowly and inexorably towards a resolution. It may take months before it happens but that magic phrase “you have been served” will eventually be heard.

As a climate realist, I consider the Dan Rather like reactions of those organisations and individuals, who’ve put themselves firmly in the libel zone over Fakegate, will turn what was a PR blunder into a gruelling long-running PR disaster. I can’t help but be in favour of that. 

©Pointman

Related articles :

Click for a list of other articles.

What is apparent when the handful of documents are examined, is that there’s not actually much juicy scandal in them at all except for one, and that document is a rather clumsy fake. However, neither the anonymous provenance nor the dubious veracity of the material, prevented it being splashed across the internet; seemingly within an hour of its receipt in the case of the Desmog blog, if accounts are to be believed.

There seems to be a curious disconnect between prudent journalism, as exercised online, and in the more traditional media of newspapers and television. Patently, the faked material and its release were designed to damage the reputation of an institution and its members but that doesn’t seem to have been a consideration when it came to verifying, publishing or editorialising on it.

Imagine if you will, the news desk of a major newspaper receiving an anonymous package of documents and going to press immediately, without checking into their authenticity or indeed, even contacting the persons named in them. That would never happen in the real world because losing a libel suit is not only very expensive but very damaging to a newspaper’s reputation. That sort of common sense seems to be lacking in the alarmist online world. It’s interesting to note that most of the major papers did not run with the story, the Guardian being one of the exceptions. I do find it amusing that they immediately spun it as a leak rather than a hack.

I think there is a popular delusion that the libel laws that every country has on its statute books, somehow don’t apply to the online world but I’m afraid they do. This delusion is reinforced by another common one, which is that when you’re online, you’re anonymous and can therefore get away with saying or writing anything about anybody. That as well, is simply not true. It’s a digital environment, everything is logged, everything is recorded and everything is traceable if one is persistent.

When examined from an infowar aspect, Fakegate is actually a bad mistake which I think is going to be capitalised on. The climate alarmists have an ingrained habit of grabbing headlines by misrepresenting or excessively exaggerating the facts of a story. A sensational story will always get some attention and if some qualification or indeed retraction of it has to be done, it won’t be on page one and not for a long time after. It’s a consequence free method of implanting a false message into the public psyche. I imagine people think Fakegate falls into the same category.

Unfortunately for some journalists, it doesn’t. This won’t be a storm in a teacup which will be allowed to blow over. It’s going to drag on for a long time. In their response to Fakegate, the Heartland Institute have signalled their intention, in no uncertain terms, to seek financial damages in the law courts from those persons who used the fake documents to sully its reputation.

Someone at the Heartland Institute has correctly identified this as a major opportunity to get some ongoing publicity for the next year or so and also teach the more irresponsible elements of what’s laughably called environmental journalism, a very expensive lesson. Sure, this will take up some management time but not a lot and judging by some of the articles I’ve read, you’ve certainly got a few slam dunk libel actions, which can safely be handed off to a capable law firm. Make a few examples; us poor climate realists will enjoy that.

From a propaganda angle, it works okay too. Journalism is going through a bad phase at the moment and a series of actions, pitched as the diminutive David fighting against the slings and arrows of outrageous journalism should play very well. It’s an easy sell, your PR people will love it.

To certain journalists and bloggers out there, I’d advise them to re-read very carefully what the wrote about the Heartland Institute, based on false documents and perhaps get a quick retraction out, as well as consulting with their professional liability insurance provider. You do have that insurance, don’t you? I think you’ll find that recklessly trashing reputations using bogus documents isn’t covered. It’s your responsibility to check the facts before publishing. While it’s relatively easy to prove an electronic document is a fake, that’s not the problem you have. You’re going to be asked to prove it’s genuine. That’s a lot harder to do, especially when you’re in a court of law on the receiving end of a libel suit. That’s your only defense - good luck with that one.

A rather ominous sign is typing “fakegate” into google news and only getting one result. When you click on “All results for fakegate”, it magically produces over 5000 results. They’ve obviously had a word with their legal eagles.

You wanted your very own contra-climategate so badly, you could taste it. When you got it, you immediately rushed to publish it without a moment’s checking or thought. The second of the two golden rules of journalism applies; when handed a story on a plate by someone, ask yourself what’s in it for them. The thought does arise that whoever sent you the material, had a fair idea of what you’d probably do with it and the long-term consequences of running a story based on faked evidence.

Perhaps they weren’t a friend after all …

©Pointman

Related articles :

The death of journalism and the irresistible rise of the blogosphere.

The MSM and Climate Alarmism.

Oh, what a wonderful MSM.

Click for a list of other articles.

Then you hit the teens. Show me someone who didn’t have difficulties there and I’ll show you a world-class bore or someone who’s definitely headed for the mega mid-life crisis, because they’ve never kicked out. Your teens are the transition part of your life, where dependant on the phases of the moon, which way the wind is blowing, how big your latest acne spot is, how short you are, how tall you want to be, how fat you think you are, how thin you are, how big or how small your tits are – you’re a stick of sweating dynamite nobody wants to be near for too long. The whole thing varies from day-to-day and even from minute to minute.

I suppose a lot of that teenage angst comes from a subconscious realisation that you’re inescapably leaving that comfort zone of a protected childhood and having to strike out on your own into that big frightening world of the grownups. It’s a sort of second birth into the real world, so a bit of kicking and screaming is to be expected.

You get through your teens somehow but looking back on it, it was always a bit touch and go. You survived some serious scrapes, some only you knew about and some which were painfully public. Your Pa and Ma knew when to diplomatically not notice when you were totally being a transparent embarrassment to yourself and everyone in a five-mile radius, although you didn’t even know it at the time. With apologies to John Osborne, you do look back and cringe.

When you get out of the teens and leave home, that imperative to “fit in” is still there but you start questioning what exactly it is you want to fit into. The easy reflex, that everyone else is doing, is to somehow condemn everything of their parent’s generation and most especially them. Whatever sort of mixed-up dork you are, it’s all their fault somehow. The problem is, you actually have a regard for your parents and are beginning to have some inkling of how hard their lives were and latterly, how easier it might have been if they hadn’t had you or had to put up with the likes of you. It’s the beginning of a wider understanding of what love actually is.

You look around your peers and realise you all come from different places. I did come from a different country but over and above that, I came from a different level of prosperity and expectation. I finally came to recognise that compared to them, my family was poor. There was a boy’s room and a girl’s room and if it was a particularly cold night, the girls got my Dad’s heavy overcoat as an extra blanket. I’d never realised that didn’t happen with everyone’s family.

In some other ways though, I came from a much richer background than they did. I grew up in a big family, surrounded and immersed in books, ideas, art and music, all of which were discussed passionately, because we were all finding out about them for the first time. The new world, novy mir, terra nova. Any book that came into the house went through the harrowing experience of being read and pulled apart by nearly everyone in it. I lost count of the number of times I sat in a lecture hall listening to someone expounding on some brilliant and supposedly novel idea that I’d first heard punted around the dinner table by a family member years ago. The discussion of the idea was usually a lot more robust too.

Don’t get the wrong impression here, we were not a family of Einsteins. A quirky but enthusiastic lot would be a better description. Gregarious, a bit sports mad but a bit bookish too or maybe a bit too bookish. We’d absorbed the value systems of our parents, together with their interests, while developing our own ones. More importantly, we’d also absorbed their independent approach to life.

My father had played many roles on life’s stage but he was essentially a car mechanic. He did his apprenticeship so long ago, it was on steam engines. He taught me stuff like how to hold a screwdriver in your teeth against the rocker cover of an engine, blipping the revs of the carburetor so you could pick out which tappets needed adjusting, just from the “off” vibrations. He also taught me why the FitzGerald translation of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was the best one; which it certainly is.

I was a grown man, whatever that is, before I recognised they really weren’t too concerned about fitting in, so it helped me to relax about not being a great fitter inner as well. You can be a car mechanic who also has an intimate knowledge and love of the poetry of William Blake or a canteen worker, like my mother, who knew exactly how to cross over if you’re going to play the piano seriously and could impart that knowledge to her grandchild. No messing around either; she kept at it with him until he got it right. With that dame, nobody got a free pass. If you were gonna do it, you had to do it right.

It’s actually okay to be you because while everyone else is rushing to conform to something called normality, there is of course, no such thing. There is no spoon. Sure, that isn’t to say it’s okay to be the local axe murderer or something but you can be yourself. All that’s required is that you pursue whatever things catch your interest, which are perhaps outside the parameters of your nominal class or socio-economic catchment area, but you should never let that stop you.

The thing about being you is you’ll never have some consensus of people around you saying you were right all along. That’s never going to happen, I’m afraid. You’ve just got to get on with your life as you see fit and let the chips fall where they may. Take the less travelled road, if that’s what you honestly believe and you’re strong enough.

This is not some argument to be automatically contrarian. It’s more an argument to take a course through life that feels better to you. I’m not talking some childish “I can prove I’m right and you’re all wrong” thing, which nobody can do, but about feeling free to select a way that more closely matches who you are.

There are benefits to being a free range person. Because you don’t automatically do the groupthink thing, you’ll usually be the one able to look at problems from a different perspective and more often than not, be the one to suggest a way around it, under it, over it or through it. You’re not quite in the same groove that everyone else is in, so you’ll tend to look at things with new eyes and in a slightly different way.

In the areas where your thoughts and opinions differ from those commonly held, you’ll have been obliged to think through why that is, because inevitably you’ll have been asked that question. You can supply reasons for your opinions, rather than just falling back on the lazy excuse of some unthinking consensus or simply believing authority figures.

None of this means you’ll necessarily be a better person but you’ll probably be a happier one and dare I say it, more interesting company. You’ll be a break from that boring predictable uniformity of viewpoint which plagues most social groupings. It actually doesn’t matter what anybody else thinks; mostly, they’re just saying you shouldn’t be as you are because it’d be a bit too chancy for their own liking.

Just be you.

©Pointman

Click for a list of other articles.

When the economy is prosperous and the employment rate is high, the electorate’s concerns tend to be more nebulous since, by and large, they’re doing well. They really don’t have anything major to worry about so politicians have to seize on any issue, no matter how trivial or illusory it might be, to whip up a bit of interest in their election campaign. In local politics, there is nearly always a real local issue which can be campaigned on. In the good times and at a national level, substantial issues of any importance to the electorate tend to be hard to find.

In an extraordinarily long upswing in the economic cycle, the emerging threat of global warming was a godsend for the politicians. Saving the planet was seen as a noble endeavour and made everyone feel good and righteous. They didn’t have to sell their commitment to this noble task to many people for a number of reasons. When times are good, the middle classes tend to take little interest in national elections, since they’re busy making a buck and enjoying spending it. The poorer elements of society never vote anyway and as there will always be roughly equal numbers of committed left and right-wing voters, this just leaves the floating voter and the first-time voter to sell the idea to. Essentially, the small segment of people they had to convince the threat was real were the politically fickle and the politically innocent.

What made using the notion of catastrophic global warming particularly attractive was not just the willing authority figures, in the shape of alarmist climate scientists quite happy to scare people with their dire predictions, but the fact that it would require very little expenditure of money by the political machines. The mainstream media (MSM) were wholly supportive of the idea, because the hoped for side effect of addressing the problem involved a global redistribution of wealth, which appealed to its overwhelmingly liberal sentiments.

There were also a significant number of powerful campaigning organisations, such as Greenpeace, already in place and for their own selfish interests, were more than willing to stoke the fires of alarmism.

Once carbon trading became part of the proposed solution to the threat, the moneymen got involved, since it represented a huge opportunity to make a lot of money. Purely as a matter of sound investment, they started funding the politicians, the scientists and the activists who were pushing the alarm buttons.

The stage was set. The politicians would make use of the scientists and the green organisations to hype the hysteria, so they could use the momentum to help gain office. It worked. Once there, they implemented a raft of green policies which, while they generally made no financial or environmental sense, satisfied their supporters and anyway, there was apparently lots of government money to burn, even for such delusional policies as subsidised windmills, which would always require conventional backup generating facilities.

Then came the recession and the attendant crash of the financial system.

Policy changes in a different fashion when an economy, and therefore the electorate, is in trouble. As the job losses mount, people’s demands become quite simple. They want policies in place to create jobs and bring back the good times. The usual pattern tends to be the previous administration, of whatever political stripe, voted out of office when the crash comes, a new administration opening the books and finding all the money is gone, steadily rising welfare costs, steadily dropping taxation income and an electorate who are in no mood for any shilly-shallying around. They want real action and they want it now.

Globally, the economies of most countries are now in this situation and we’re just heading into the second dip of a double dip recession. Things are not going to get better any time soon.

There has only ever been one set of policies to get a country out of recession. They correspond exactly to what you as an individual must do if you find yourself in financially straightened circumstances. You cut back on all non-essential spending, get a second job to increase your income and try to get some bridging loans to tide you over until times get better. In government terms, these correspond to savage cutbacks in public spending on anything that isn’t creating jobs, higher taxes to raise more revenue and the flotation of a lot of public debt on the international bond markets. The degree to which each of these steps is used is a matter of judgement but none of them are optional. The usual procedure is to apply all of these policies for the first two years of the administration and then, assuming things are getting better, start backing them off for the next two years, which will give you some chance of being re-elected.

If these policies, or their equivalent, are not implemented and the government essentially goes into denial about the true state of the economy and what changes must be made, then the pressure builds inexorably until you finally get complete economic collapse. This extreme scenario is the explanation for the sudden implosion of the USSR. The economy eventually collapsed and therefore the whole political entity followed suit.

To get through a recession, most of the outlandish promises made in the good times will have to be broken. The trick here is not to just announce that fact but rather to gradually change policy, as you must by the transition from good to bad times. The politicians have two things on their side that aid them in this transition.

The first one is that it’s invariably a new administration, so most of the economic ills can safely be blamed on the previous one but you can only get so much mileage out of that ploy before you have to start showing some improvement. The new broom sweeping away the old administration’s policy excesses plays well and anyway, people no longer care about imaginary threats, because they’re by now having to contend with some pretty concrete ones.

The second one is rather more subtle. When people are hurting, they’re focused on what you’re saying you’re going to do right now to fix things, not what you were saying three or four years ago. Think of it as the electorate’s poor short-term memory. Politicians use it to ditch policies which are no longer financially tenable or have ceased to have any appeal to the electorate. Quite simply, you just gradually stop mentioning your former policy and people don’t notice.

Of course, the people who will notice are the ones who originally campaigned for the policy. This is usually handled by telling them that we promised a policy, delivered it, so what more do you want? Since the policy is now safely seen as a slightly historical done deed, the business of quietly defunding it can continue apace. It may take years for it to finally make its way off the statute books but pretty soon, everyone knows it’s a toothless policy shell, which will always be at the end of the priority queue. In ten year’s time, all those rusted and derelict windmills, dotted over the landscape of Europe, will be a visible reminder of this.

Spotting the use of this tactic in everyday politics is a bit like Sherlock Holmes’ remark about the dog barking being curious. On cue, Dr. Watson reminds him that the dog wasn’t barking. Exactly, replies Sherlock. Over the last two years, so many politicians, who used the global warming scare to help them get elected, barely mention it any more, if at all. The only ones who do, tend to be political has-beens like Al Gore or the true believers, who allowed themselves to become too publicly identified with an idea, which is now perceived as passé. They’re now by default stranded on the political margins because the political centre has moved away from global warming.

In last week’s State of the Union Address, Barack Obama didn’t mention global warming once. Contrast that to his grandiose promises of combating it just three years ago in his election rallies. Then he was campaigning on a low Carbon America ticket as well as the chimera of all those wonderful green jobs, which signally failed to materialise as the real jobs market contracted. Indeed, after wasting half a billion dollars in loan guarantees on a single company like Solyndra, he’s keeping very quiet about the whole green economy thing. Instead, he decided to sing the virtues of energy independence, created by his sudden discovery of the massive shale gas deposits across America. He even went on to give his backing to the fuller exploitation of all domestic oil and gas reserves.

All this would have been pure heresy a few years ago and if his former green backers are still in need of any confirmation of his abandoning them in favour of improving his re-election chances, that was it.

While it’s always useful to listen to what politicians are saying, it’s so often what you no longer hear them talking about that tells you the policy has changed. In America, as in most other countries, the green dream is over because they’ve lost the support of the political establishment. Without that, nothing but political oblivion awaits you.

©Pointman

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The power of dreams and the power of nightmares.

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I’m not sufficiently versed in the law to answer these questions but my feeling is there would be some sort of case to answer here. Certainly, given a person’s full name and place of work, it’s a trivial exercise to find out where they and their families live.

This is not a theoretical scenario, since the direct equivalent of the above has just been done by a group calling itself Forecast the Facts (FtF). Their new site names these “denier” (their word) TV Meteorologists, together with their place of work and a selected quote. I wonder how long it’ll take before the FtF demands they wear a star of a certain colour sewn onto their jacket, when they’re on the air and not backing up the global warming meme?

The TV weathermen have always been a highly visible part of the mainstream media (MSM), which embarrassingly was lukewarm about the whole idea of man-made global warming. They appear daily on TV screens across the world and manage to predict the short-term weather without needing to link it to global warming. Their professional association in the States, the American Meteorological Society (AMS), has always maintained a vaguely noncommittal position on the issue, because this reflected the thinking of the vast majority of its members, two-thirds of whom do not support the theory.

Weathermen and women, know something from years of practical experience that climate modellers appear to be ignorant of; the weather, like the climate, is inherently unpredictable more than a few days into the future. This is why the majority of them have never believed in the climate models (GCMs) and their predictions of what the climate was going to be like hundreds of years hence.

They and their association, have now been targeted by this newly created campaign group. It’s appeared out of nowhere but a little research has revealed it’s being bankrolled by some of the usual suspects, George Soros being one. It’s a two-pronged attack.

Firstly, they want the AMS to come out with a strong statement supporting the theory of man-made global warming and they’ve even helpfully supplied a statement drafted by some unnamed experts as a basis for it.

Secondly, they’re exerting pressure on its grass-roots membership to either shut them up or force them to broadcast the alarmist line with their weather reports. This is intimidation, plain and simple.

From a certain viewpoint, the AMS is a labour union. A basic function of any union, is to protect its individual members from victimisation by forces greater than any one of them could resist. There is no chance of the AMS issuing the new statement demanded by FtF, since it’s not even an agenda item at their annual meeting, which is occurring in New Orleans at this moment. However, I think it should go a lot further than that.

The issue here is not whether they should bow down and publish the demanded statement or not, but that they should be protecting their membership from raw naked intimidation by an ad hoc extremist political group.

The only statement it should issue, is a robust defense of its members’ democratic and scientific right to damn well come to their own conclusions about the validity or not of global warming.

©Pointman

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On murderous madmen.

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The big lie that they’re trying to pull off is that it was only happening in one country, at one down market newspaper and by a few rogue reporters using a few shady hackers but the truth is that the practices were widespread and not just confined to the gutter press of the UK. After all, the owner of the News of the World also owns both the Times newspapers as well as considerable media interests in America and I have little faith in Chinese walls when it comes to such a competitive industry. There’s nothing more vicious than a group of news hounds fighting for an exclusive. If you think it wasn’t happening in your country’s MSM, whatever its high moral tone or political stripe, then you’re living in a fool’s paradise.

The other bit of the big lie we’re supposed to swallow is nobody ever asked over the years, where all these wonderful scoops were coming from. Not the fellow journalists, sub-editors, editors, managers or even the owners. Well, I’m sorry but I simply don’t believe that. Journalism of all professions, depends totally on curiosity and ferreting out facts. Every one of them knew exactly the source of these scoops or they should never have been working in journalism in the first place.

Containment and minimisation of damage is now the name of the game but none of the hackers worked for free, so following the money trail would provide all the answers but that does not appear to be an avenue of investigation that’s being pursued very strongly. You can draw your own conclusions from that.

All these abuses are not the problem; they’re just the symptoms of a much bigger problem. We have an institution which has a lot of power that it exercises with little or no responsibility. Yes, there are a few complaints procedures and if you’ve got the patience of a saint and stubbornness of a mule, you might be lucky and get a retraction printed at the bottom of page fifty-eight, in a few year’s time. It’s only when they’ve been caught out doing something totally beyond the pale, like breaking into the mobile phones of a murdered girl and her grieving family for a story, that they seem to be held to account for anything.

They don’t appear to care about how a story was obtained, whether it’s accurate or not and the possible effect it might have on ordinary people. Sell the scare irrespective of whether it’s true or not because it’ll bump up the circulation.

I’ll give you a classic and disgusting example of this “publish and be damned” attitude that really harmed and continues to harm ordinary people. A few journalists started a scare story about the safety of the MMR inoculation, based on the work of a single doctor, who was subsequently struck off the medical register for fraudulent research. Because of the seed of doubt planted by it, a lot of parents decided not to run the risk of that injection or any other immunisation, so now some of their children are dead or permanently damaged or wobbling around on crutches, because things like measles, mumps and poliomyelitis are all doing the big comeback tour. Nearly all these scourges of childhood had become virtually extinct in the developed world but now they’re back. In any other profession, acting like that would be termed reckless endangerment or negligent homicide but no journalist has ever stood trial over it or ever will either. They got an up blip in the circulation and that’s all that counted.

They played on that understandable fear of every parent never to take a risk you don’t have to with your child and having introduced a perceived new risk, where there was none before, they got their circulation boost, so that was okay. Everyone was happy because their career and the circulation numbers were so important, much more important than any possible consideration of a few dead or damaged kids or a bunch of spastics with leg braces and those weirdly shaped aluminium crutches. Yes, the parents made a bad decision and yes, their children paid the price for it, but the responsibility lies with the MSM and those journalists.

The next lie that’s going to be foisted on us at the end of all these investigations, is that any new proposed restrictions on the MSM must be resisted. It is the notion that freedom of the press is something so vital that it must be defended at all costs but it’s the widespread abuses by the MSM itself that have placed it into that danger zone. The question I have to ask is, if restrictions are to be placed on it, so what? It no longer reports on anything of substance and its methods and practices are now on a par with the lowest of the low. If I’m going to fight for the freedom of anything, it won’t be the MSM but the freedom of the internet, especially as I know that particular fight is coming at us.

They simply won’t put their own house in order, even when the worse excesses are uncovered. A typical example of this is the treatment of the award-winning and high-profile journalist Johann Hari of the Independent newspaper, which prides itself on its high moral tone on pretty much every issue it covers. An internal investigation found him guilty of plagiarism and other, even more dubious practices but instead of firing him, he was sent on a journalism course, presumably to teach him good journalistic practise, if not some integrity. The day that he was not fired and frog marched out of that newspaper with his things in a cardboard box, was the same day that any integrity left the Independent newspaper. It didn’t come as any surprise that his plagiarism was discovered and broadcast by the blogosphere, rather than the MSM itself. The MSM no longer does any significant investigative reporting; that’s all moved online because that’s the only home left for it.

Every organ of the MSM is owned by someone and in this modern deregulated age, that someone tends to own whole swathes of it; newspaper groups, portfolios of magazines, chains of syndicated radio stations and whole TV networks. No matter what’s said about journalistic independence, that person or corporation exercises their influence when required to suit their own interests. Nobody owns or can own the internet, so all they can do is try to exercise control of it under various pretexts, all of which will be presented to us as being for our own interests or protection. This they will try to do. You can bet the house on that one.

There are journalists of integrity and independence in the MSM but they’re simply too few and far between. Even then, there is a vague sense that they’re only just tolerated because they provide an illusion of diverse opinion within it.

I do not think there was ever a golden age of unimpeachable journalism but I do know it used to be a damn sight better and by a long chalk. At some point, the MSM left behind the idea of reporting the news and instead moved into the area of presenting the news. The distinction, though subtle, is vital. The facts of a story are now sifted through and only the ones which support the particular desired spin are used, with the rest being ignored. Journalists are nowadays more about PR than news reporting.

If you doubt this, have an honest read through the climategate emails and then try to tell me they were acting as impartial reporters, rather than advocates. All too often, they’re hand in glove with what can only realistically be termed vested interests, because they share a certain approved worldview with those interests. Nobody ever goes near the business interests of the owners or big advertisers, which is why there are so many comfortable cartels and monopolies that nobody ever asks any awkward questions about. As an example, the next time you buy a new ink cartridge for your printer, ask yourself how much it actually cost to mass produce compared to the retail price and how come it’s impossible to buy its equivalent at any significant discount.

The MSM is in decline. I stopped reading newspapers and watching television some years ago and I notice most young people doing the same. I, like them, get my news from the internet, as well as my entertainment. Nobody, except the very young or the very old, bothers with it any more. All the numbers are going south and newsrooms are being relentlessly culled, as the advertising money moves online, where its target audience is or has decamped to.

It hasn’t moved with the times. Indeed, in an age where the internet provides unprecedented plurality of political and social opinion, it has become a monolith pushing a single and not too subtle viewpoint on any significant issue. It’s more about telling people how they should feel about an issue rather than reporting on what people actually think and dissent is simply not tolerated.

Increasingly, the MSM looks like a tired and broken down old dinosaur, limping towards extinction, while that new and nimble species, the internet, looks to be taking over its niche. You’re watching natural selection in action.

©Pointman

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Angela Merkel was talking about the Euro crisis and while she made some superficial sense, it wasn’t exactly an inspirational speech. She’s really a very traditional centrist politician who knows how to say a few hundred inoffensive words guaranteed not to ruffle any feathers. Personally, I always preferred Chancellors like Helmut Kohl, an old-fashioned free-range Jerry. When the big rivers in Germany were flooding and there were rumours flying around that low bits of Deutschland were to be abandoned to the waters and a journo dared to pose the question to him, all 18 stone of Helmut rounded on him ferociously and thundered; “Wir werden jeden Meter verteidigen” – We will defend every metre and you could see he meant it too. If you can find a clip of it on youtube, it’s worth the search just to see them leap backwards in case he bit their heads off. Now, that’s what I call a bloody Chancellor of Germany.

David Cameron was up next and I’d have to give him the same mediocre score as Merkel on the middle management scale. They’re both capable politicians and have got to the top of the greasy pole in their own political backyards but you can’t help feeling they’re what we’ve come to settle for and to be fair to them, their speeches were all they thought we expected of them; middle management blowing a bit of sunshine up our butts. The same ole, same ole. I can’t see the press making something big about anything they said but no doubt, they’ll have to give it a go. We kind of expect that too.

Obama is not much better, though he’s obviously had a lot more coaching on how to deliver a speech because he’s not a natural orator and it shows. He doesn’t have a feel for it and is prone to putting too many pauses of excessive length in his speeches and at the wrong points, which can lead to embarrassing gaffes like this but the actual content of his speeches is just as banal as the others. However, his stilted delivery and a few catchy phrases were still good enough to get him elected but as the American people of all political persuasions have found out to their cost, he’s not much good as a President. They, like us, need someone a lot better in charge of things.

These are not good times and everyone is working hard to keep some money coming in. The working man and woman are chasing fewer and fewer poorly paid jobs to keep themselves and their families afloat. Most of the young people, irrespective of their qualifications, are either not working, working part-time or on minimum wages. It’s all a bit basic needy but you see the good side too; people helping people. Heard of a job going over there, sure I’ll help you with your CV, I’ll put in a good word for you, of course you can use my computer for email, use me as a referee, whatever you need mate. Little things but this is how we all get by.

People like Cameron, Merkel and Obama are simply not helping because when you’re down to basic needs and you look towards them for a bit of help and listen to what they’re saying, you can see they’re just making sounds, meaningless sounds coming out of the mouths of well-scrubbed faces and there’s nothing there. Nothing, zilch, nada. rien, nichts, überhaupt nichts. Our nada, who art in nada, nada.

I suppose they’re what we’ve selected as politicians after an extraordinarily long 15 years of prosperity. In those good days, we didn’t need the hope of better days so any middle of the road anodyne politico would do, just as long as they didn’t rock the prosperity boat. We need something better nowadays but I’m afraid the political establishment is afraid to offer us the choice of a politician of conviction; someone who, while they may not be televisual or too politically well-groomed, will speak to us directly, rationally and honestly and dare I say it; show some inspirational leadership.

We’ve given up hope in them but they’ve given up hope in us too. They’re convinced that if they were honest with the ordinary man, he wouldn’t understand or would simply panic. That is the patrician attitude of the rich professional politicians who are currently in charge of things. None of them have ever held a job down because that stupid and boring job was simply the only thing between you and your family affording the groceries that week, losing your house or being forced into taking a state handout. They’re afraid too, afraid those irrelevant arbiters of good taste, the political media, might deride them for being honest and daring to be courageous with us. What cowards they are. That’s what I find most disappointing about them and why their speeches are just safe content-free noise.

The policies that need to be put in place to get the economies of the world back on their feet are obvious but would be very unpopular, so instead they fiddle at the fringes of the problem and thereby prolong the economic agony of the common man. They’re putting their parties and their re-election chances before the greater good of the countries they’ve been entrusted to lead. Do the right thing for the country, even if it means you’ll lose the next election, because I think you’re all going to lose your next elections anyway.

Beyond politics and policies, I want to talk about oratory here, the skill of communicating effectively to a group of people. It was taught in schools and universities for a few hundred years but nobody’s heard of it nowadays; seemingly, it ceased to be relevant at some point. I stumbled upon it as a young man because it was explained in books that were cheap enough for me to afford, because nobody else wanted them. Gems hidden in plain view. Quite literally, it’s as old as the Greeks, so let’s listen to this wisdom of those ancients.

There’s a lot more to it but essentially, they believed a good piece of oratory must have an appropriate mix of three elements; logos, pathos and ethos.

Taking those elements in turn, logos is, as you might have guessed, logic. I’m not talking about mathematical logic here but a clean line of everyday reasoning that anyone can follow. It’s just pointing out the common sense of why something should be done or not be done.

Pathos is not so much pity but a better nuanced translation would be appealing to the listener to get a feeling of what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes. It’s empathy with the situation of those less fortunate than you.

Ethos is appealing to your best image of yourself, to the better angels of your nature. It’s an appeal to the finer traditions of whatever group you naturally feel you belong to or want to belong to. Your country, your race, your regiment or whatever higher thing you aspire to in your heart.

It all sounds a bit dry, doesn’t it? I’m going to try to make it come alive by discussing a piece of English I love for a number of reasons. It’s short, just ten sentences and less than three hundred words but you need a bit of context first.

It was written by Abraham Lincoln and delivered by him on the afternoon of the 19th of November 1863 at the dedication ceremony of the Gettysburg National Cemetery and of course is the Gettysburg Address. It is just over four months after a three-day battle in which each side suffered losses of nearly 25,000 men and was the bloodiest engagement of the American Civil War. Lee’s Army of Northern Virgina had been prevented from pushing further into the North at Gettysburg but the cost had been horrific. Nobody knew it at this point, but this was the high water mark of the Confederacy’s fortunes. As far as anyone could tell, there was nothing ahead of them but more of the same terrible bloodshed.

The speech was to be the final one of the day; a sort of wrap up speech after all the others. Great orators were like pop stars back then and people flocked to see a good one. Edward Everett, a noted orator of the era, gave a two-hour speech, which had been well received by the assembled crowd. In contrast, Lincoln’s speech was so short, that he’d delivered it and left the platform before any of the photographers had time to set up and take a photograph of him.

Please take the time to read it slowly at a speaking pace.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It’s a speech by a sad man, a man who’s only too aware of the continuing human cost of the conflict, an exhausted man and as it turned out, a man already very sick with smallpox. Both he and his wife, by all accounts loving and doting parents, are still coming to terms with the sudden death of their own twelve-year-old child the previous year. He’s tired of death and a dreadful bloodbath of a war that appears to have no end in sight. And yet, there’s a strength and resolve in it as well. You feel he can’t hurt any worse but you somehow know he’ll never give up because he believes the blood sacrifice is for something important. There’s a strength in the thing.

In his very first sentence, he catapults himself straight into the political danger zone that the slavery issue was at that time, but he does it anyway. Both his party and the opposition Democratic Party, were still deeply divided on the issue, even though the proclamation of emancipation had already come into effect in January of that year. Publically and in the legislature, he’d never come down on the side of the abolitionists or the slave owners but he’d always fought the expansion of the right to own slaves within the Union. He was acute enough to realise he could go further if he didn’t totally alienate one camp or the other, which would shatter the fragile political alliances he depended on. The phrase “all men are created equal” is him putting his cards face up on the table and in public. All men means all men, irrespective of their colour. From now on, there can be no doubt about his position on the issue of slavery. With one sentence, all the bridges have just been burned. Being that candid takes political courage.

He reminds his listeners that it was their parent’s generation who had fought and sacrificed for their freedom in the War of Independence, which was equally touch and go at times and whose eventual outcome was just as problematic. He’s telling them to live up to that because the torch has now been passed to their generation. The struggle is that important.

The words he’s saying and those already spoken by other dignitaries will not be “long remembered.” Their words aren’t but ironically, his two-minute speech still reverberates down the years powerfully. We, the bigwigs, are not going to matter in the long-term; what’s important here is the service already rendered to the nation by the people being buried here. It’s up to you to make sure that the sacrifice by those others is not in vain.

He gives them a sense that America is not just a new nation but an ambitious experiment, a whole new concept of what a nation might be and it’s a fragile thing and under danger. If they do not rally around and defend it, then it will “perish from the earth.” There is a prescience in his vision of what America might become that’s so long term, it’s almost frightening. Very few people can imagine that far ahead politically or dare to be that optimistic about anything in the midst of the carnage of war.

If you’re a bloodless grammarian, there’s a good debate here as to exactly how many sentences are in the speech and which ones might not fail the test of being a proper sentence but that’s totally irrelevant because at times, it’s just poetry masquerading as prose. How often have you seen phrases from this speech being used in other contexts? It’s a use of English by a master of it, who’s quite prepared to drive a horse and carriage straight through its rules and conventions when it suits his purposes and you as a listener, don’t even notice.

It’s an honest speech. There’s no big deal being offered here, no political inducement, no sunshine being blown. Nobody listening to it can have been in any doubt. It’s bad, I won’t tell you it’s going to get better and I can’t tell you with any certainly that we’re going to win this terrible war. All I’m doing is appealing to you for your support and help. This is the brutally direct aspect of the thing. He’s not offering you much in return for the suffering, just that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” With those simple words, he encapsulates every single one of my political beliefs.

Depending on which partisan accounts you believe of how the speech was received by those present, it was greeted either by a muted scattering of applause or an awkward silence. My money is on the latter. He told it to them like it was and they were all a bit stunned by it.

Everett wrote in a letter to Lincoln the next day ”I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Though from a poor background and entirely self-educated, Lincoln was a well-read man and I’ve no doubt was aware of the rules of what was thought of as good oratory, and you can usefully go over the speech again, picking out which bits of it used one or more of the three recommended elements but the thing is though, you can’t learn to be that brilliant at anything unless you’ve got that innate talent. He spoke what was in his head and his heart and he spoke it well. Oratory simply does not get any better. It is not just happenstance that Churchill, a great orator in his own right, knew all of Lincoln’s major speeches by heart. If you want to get good at something, then study the best.

Far, far beyond any aesthetic consideration of how good it was as oratory, the speech was politically a seismic event, both in the immediate terms of the Civil War and the enduring view of America as a new sort of nation. Before it, the single stated rationale for fighting the war was always the preservation of the Union. After it, though preserving the Union was still an aim, the war now had the higher moral purpose of abolishing the institution of slavery in America. It totally reframed the whole conflict to be a simple struggle between right and wrong. It was now about fighting for basic humanity.

Slavery was the big issue that the founding fathers had deliberately chosen to walk around and for reasons Lincoln would have understood only too well. To borrow a phrase of his, when he was being encouraged to declare war on England over a maritime incident during the Civil War, he simply replied, “one war at a time.” It had festered poisonously for too long at the heart of American politics and was now to be tackled head on, which would indeed bring about “a new birth of freedom.”

The issue was finally going to be addressed, the war would eventually be won and Lincoln was going to be murdered within six days of its end.

-<o>-

I want you to take the time to have a leisurely look at this, one of the last photographs of him, taken days before he was assassinated. For the times, it’s highly unusual for important people to look so relaxed in a formal photograph. Highly unusual. No rigid upright posture with shoulders thrown back or phony grimace of dignity. He’s actually at ease and appears to be smiling at the camera, also unusual for the times. That bow tie could do with some straightening and that hair with a quick comb through it. He’s just came in and plunked himself down on the seat without bothering to arrange himself; the left hand side of his jacket is still hanging over the arm of the chair. He’s fiddling with something, possibly a pen or spectacles. It’s hard to see what.

Take a moment to move back from the screen and look at it from a distance of three feet. Take your time, get an impression of the man from that distance. Do it now and when you think you’ve got everything you can from it, read on.

Now I want you to look at it again but this time from a distance of six inches from the screen. Go on, get your nose up against the screen and take a real hard look at him close up. Do it.

Yes, it’s the eyes; there’s something in them, though whether it’s sadness, resignation or cold steel, I’ll leave you to decide. Perhaps he has an intuition of what’s about to happen to him. The face is deeply lined and those deep sunken eyes stare out at you but his mind appears to be somewhere else entirely. This is not the face of a victor. Whoever took the photograph, must have wondered if he was even actually in the room with them.

©Pointman

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If you have thought through your acceptance or rejection of a supreme being, there are a number of commonalities about all the different religious persuasions. The one that I’ve always found objectionable is the basic axiom that there’s something essentially bad about us which only practising a religion can save us from; original sin in the christian context. We’re somehow born cursed and need saving from ourselves.

I do not and never will accept that proposition.

While a religious person has faith that they’re right, I can see, rather than have faith, that humans are basically good. If you have children, you’d have to be pretty strange to look at them and detect any sort of inherent evil in them from the word go. Sure, they’re all going to have some positive and negative character traits but that’s because they’re human beings. People are fundamentally decent. I see it all around me on a day-to-day basis. It’s so pervasive that it’s nearly invisible and on the occasions we really notice it, it can still come as a surprise, even to an optimist like me.

An example that occurred before Christmas springs to mind. I have a few friends who don’t do computers, email or even phones, so I write a Christmas card and post it to them. Cards in hand, I was walking down a long straight road to the nearest post box, when I saw a gaggle of children coming towards me. There were about half a dozen of them, all in the seven to nine-year old range with a couple of them riding bicycles while the rest trotted along with them. A little girl riding a bicycle in front took a tumble and went down in a classic knees and elbows tangle with her bike. It looked awkward but not too bad. There is no such thing as a graceful upset with a bicycle.

It was about four hundred yards away from me and I waited for her to get up. She didn’t move at all, not a muscle. I started walking faster, all the while thinking get up kid, get up. She still didn’t move. I quickly moved through a jog to the full sprint. I got to a hundred yards of them, when she suddenly got to her feet, dusted herself off, got back on the bicycle and they all resumed their progress.

They hadn’t even noticed me tearing in their direction and as I stopped and caught my breath, I felt a bit embarrassed. I looked around to see if anyone had seen me make a fool of myself and noticed that two cars, coming from opposite directions on the road, had also pulled over. The drivers and I all exchanged sheepish grins before they slowly drove off. They’d seen what I’d seen and just as naturally did the decent thing. Like I said, it’s all around us and it’s there for good and practical reasons.

We need to be good to each other not from some inbuilt morality but because if we’re not, then we couldn’t survive as a person, never mind as a species. We all get by because we work with each other, cooperate with each other and do small favours for each other. This is all predicated on a judgement we make several times a day every day, to trust other people are fundamentally decent rather than innately evil. Sure, there are occasionally people you meet that you don’t trust and usually your instincts are correct, but in the main, that’s the basis of how you’ll live your life. No other way is possible. If nobody trusted anyone else, civilisation around the world would crash in a day.

The times you’ll see the goodness in people are usually the most terrible of times. The worse it gets, the harder people have to work together to survive and the more the kindness to each other comes out. This is why the veterans of every war have a closeness to each other that simply can’t be shared with anyone else who wasn’t there.

There is good and evil in the world and although I’ve met a handful of people I’d truly classify as evil, it’s my experience that the majority of evil deeds done are by ordinary people who think they’re somehow acting on behalf of a higher good or bringing a brighter future closer. It’s the old mantra of the end justifying the means and is the characteristic trait of extremist politics and extremist religions.

Environmentalism has over the last two decades perverted itself to the point where it’s become a pseudo religion, a cult worshipping the almighty god Gaia, who must be protected from the innate evil of humanity. When it comes down to a choice between us and Gaia, the cultists are quite prepared to sacrifice us on the altar of their beliefs. Let malaria kill millions of people yearly in the developing world, even though we could eradicate it there, like we did in our world, with DDT. Let people die of starvation because we’ve switched from growing staples to bio fuel crops; it’s to protect Gaia after all. Let other human beings live in the cold and darkness because we don’t think they should have electricity generation plants, though we do. Let them starve and die because we don’t think they should have disease resistant bioengineered crops, though we do.

It’s all about returning the Kingdom of Gaia, that’s to say the Earth, to some ideal balanced state that actually never was but it’s the cult’s version of Heaven. This steady state has never existed anywhere in the universe, never mind on the Earth but that’s what’s in their heads. To achieve it, the whole of humanity is ultimately seen as expendable.

As religions go, it reminds me inescapably of the industrial scale bloodbaths of human sacrifice that the pre-Colombian civilisations of South America indulged in; and it’s just as pointless and ineffective. It didn’t matter a scrap how many thousands they butchered or how much blood ran down the sides of the ziggurats, their non-existent gods were equally indifferent to their pleas for salvation but that never stopped them. Two decades ago I was an environmentalist but not today. Today I hate it and believe that fighting it should be the moral imperative of our generation. What little good it now does is far outweighed by its crimes against humanity. It kills the most vulnerable of us, so we must kill it stone dead.

If the more brutal periods of history teach us anything, it’s that the only people we ever need saving from are those self-appointed people determined to save us from something.

©Pointman

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