That’s the sort of prologue or connective phrase a stand-up comedian will use to move his set onto a bit of topical comedy about something, which if accurate and well observed, is always the best kind. It was Saturday and I was busy chiseling the next blog out of a particularly big and bastardly recalcitrant block of dimensionally-fuzzy granite I just knew a decent piece was somewhere entombed in, when I clocked a curious news item.

Some minor talk radio jockey had asked Julia Gillard, the Australian PM, if her live-in boyfriend was gay. Without being too judgemental, there have always been some rumours swirling about whether Julia was AC or DC and there’s always been a cynical view that having a live-in hairdresser partner was just a bit of salacious window dressing using him. The jock’s questioning wasn’t too aggressive but the initial reaction to him actually raising the question was him being suspended, and as if that wasn’t punishment enough for showing such temerity to his elders and betters, he was quickly fired within the next twenty-four hours.

I listened distractedly as I blunted another chisel and waited for the inevitable reaction. The admittedly limp dick journos of Oz would surely rally around, no worries mate. I waited and nothing happened. I waited a bit more. It was probably the time lag thingy kicking in, a reaction was surely going to happen. Well, guess what, it’s twenty-four hours later and the tarts of the mainstream media haven’t said a word. Not one. Not even a boo. In point of fact, Julia’s been on TV being quite queen-like and gracious about the terrible ordeal she’d been put through and getting a lot of sympathetic coverage. Lick lick, slurp slurp, bow bow. Even the BBC is running an apology piece.

What little remained of independent mainstream Australian journalism has just compliantly bent over and silently grabbed its ankles. If you won’t at least try to protect one of your own, you’re no better than a pack of feral animals.

I’m an independent blogger who’d rather take it up the rear from a Viagra-engorged Incredible Hulk, whose piece had been dipped in axle grease and then liberally sprinkled with the rusty metal shavings from an old Russian lathe than let a prominent politician zap a journalist for asking an awkward question, and I don’t particularly bloody-well like MSM journos either. That’s what Australian journalism has just done. It’s now a cojones-free zone but no worries mate, we’re still picking up a pay check. In the meantime, you want another tinnie before we go ask the government commissar what we should write today?

Try getting me fired Julia. Though I’m not Australian, I’m beginning to think I’m the offshore shape of any independence when it comes to Australian journalism. You guys and gals in Oz will soon be tuning into sites in New Guinea or Manchuria to find out what’s actually going on in your own country. Of course, you’ll only be able to do that until the Finkelstein legislation kicks in, and the Great Firewall of Australia is built. From then on, it’s welcome to the People’s Democratic Republic of Australistan.

I’m a reader and a listener to other people’s stories. The last thing I do is yap. By now, I know so many tales and they’re all the real material of life which I plunder shamelessly when I write. That’s the needed betrayal of the storytellers you have to do, if you want to write with a simplicity that people can actually connect to. There’s one story which I’m not sure I read somewhere or heard first hand or perhaps third. Perhaps both, there are so many stories.

This one was someone’s early childhood memory which concerned Elvis Presley of all people, and one of those dreadfully lurid birth of Technicolor epics called Blue Hawaii, if memory serves. His first appearance in the film was being paddled around a bend in the river on a raft by a half-dozen garland-bedecked Polynesian girls wearing bikinis as he warbled something that should have died a merciful death in an elevator up to an obscure ninth floor cat house in downtown Duluth or somewhere equally as dire.

It was a tiny local cinema and the storyteller recalled a massive giant of a biker standing up at the front and blotting out half the screen. In a stunned and distraught voice he asked out loud ”What the fuck have they done to Elvis?” before stomping out.

Have a care Australia, you’re now on dangerous ground and right on the edge of the abyss. Push back now or in not too many years, you’ll one day find yourself standing up in shock after watching something and asking yourself, what the fuck have they done to Australia?

©Pointman

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There is a substantial school of thought that these studies were nothing more than crass propaganda mixed up with a substantial helping of hate catharsis, all of which was wrapped up in pseudo academic respectability, rather like a turd artfully concealed inside what looks to be a decent take out chili dog. Such studies were christened Lewpapers by the wits of the skeptic community, after one of their early pioneers, and as the saying goes, many a true word is spoken in jest.

When it comes to anything to do with climate science, academic rigour is very much going through one of its more sordid episodes.

In that great tradition of geese, ganders and sauce, I initially thought it time the favour should be returned, if only to show them how to do a real hatchet job on the reputation of the opposition, but on reflection, it’s not my style and realised a more useful service might possibly be rendered to the skeptic community, by giving some insight into the opposition, or at least my thoughts about them. It’s also much more fun.

I won’t be conducting mysterious snark-like surveys that nobody can quite find a definitive trace of. I won’t be selectively pre-processing, post-processing or mugging the numbers supposedly derived from any surveys. I won’t be running the choicest and fittest cherubic numbers through wholly inappropriate statistical methods and I won’t be drawing totally unwarranted conclusions from the hardy numerical survivors of all the aforesaid methods, all of which means my non-existent survey will be 100% more honest than any one of theirs, and Mac the Knife can sit this one out.

Unlike the bizarrely childish approach taken by the Cook the Books or Lewpaper brigades, I won’t be trying to shoehorn them all into a single lumpy profile; they’re too rich and sumptuous a feast of biodiverse loonies to do anything so rushed and gauche. We’ll enjoy them course by course, tasting the sweet with the sour, the piquant with the bland, the outright insane with the just mildly deranged. Perhaps all washed down with a nice Chianti and a side order of fava beans. It’s a bit like that classic conundrum of how one eats an elephant, and to avail myself of the classic solution, I’ll be tackling it one mouthful at a time.

We’ll start with the foot soldiers of the movement, and though I’ll be covering all the rest of the sub-groupings in turn, it should be borne in mind that none of the various categories are mutually exclusive, as significant overlaps can occur. Also, a particular individual could for instance fall into the scientist category but in reality is more a pure political activist. James Hansen would, in my estimation, be an exemplar of that particular variation. He’s actually worthy of his own unique category, something like mega-loon, not to be confused with Megaluth, though he’d probably get arrested there as well, but anyway that’s a level of taxonomic detail I don’t intend to go down to.

They’re mainly young with not much in the way of thought out politics except a youthful altruism that sees the complex problems of the world in simple ways. In terms of political consciousness, they’re black and white thinkers with no grey shades in between – that’d be seen as selling out. Given such an innocent world view, they are the most easily exploited and are therefore ruthlessly exploited. All youth is, just ask anyone in advertising. All that’s needed is to assure them the science, which is terra incognito to most of them anyway, is rock solid and then take cynical advantage of their youthful enthusiasm by playing on their emotions and appealing to the better angels of their nature.

It is natural for young people to rebel and that need is also being exploited. They get to go on slightly unruly demonstrations, do a bit of chanting, wave a few placards around and get ejected from various premises by security or the cops, who really can’t be arsed going through the whole tiresome procedure of arresting them with a serious view to dragging them up in front of some court. A couple of hours in the holding cells till they calm down and then sling them back out onto the street.

Everyone is happy. The legal eagles are glad the courts aren’t log jammed with misdemeanours, the cops don’t have to do tons of paperwork and the kids have had their very own martyrdom experience saving the planet, which thank goodness won’t appear permanently on their unblemished record. Everyone has a jolly time, even the cops, who occasionally like to dress up like Robocop and always appreciate a bit of overtime.

Mostly it’s harmless fun. A good PR statement has been made for the cause and the foot soldiers are enjoying for once being naughty with the full approval of older more authoritative figures. Most of them are the white offspring of the economic middle to upper classes, many of whom are working through some really heartfelt problems with Memmy or Deddy. It’s a way of swapping them out for more “with it” parental figures, and boy do those new age parental figures get high on that opiate of adulation. Reading over the Facebook pages and tweets of people like Mann, it’s easy to see we are as dust beneath their carbon-free chariot wheels. You do have to wonder how such walnut-sized brains could possibly contain such planetary-sized egos.

The foot soldiers have successfully been sold the romantic dream of a grand mission to save the planet and a coming pastoral living in tune with nature fantasy, and the only thing stopping that happening is some vast pervasive but never quite defined conspiracy by big business, money, right-wing politics, and most especially those well-funded and overwhelmingly powerful Panzer divisions of that evil skeptic Wehrmacht. They’re all totally prepared to hurl their pink little bods into the path of advancing but frankly non-existent Tiger tanks.

When you look around the skeptic blogs, you can see how devilishly well they’re camouflaged. It’s all a cover and that impression of a game rooster, flailing away against overwhelming odds and that fiendishly clever touch of them looking like it’s all a Boulting Brothers Ealing comedy amateur lash up kept going by nothing more than the odd nail, a few elastic bands, spit and a judiciously placed wad of chewing gum. Any fool can see through that, except of course revolting youth, to use that ambiguous adjective, because their sentience is still in so many ways a work in progress.

Youth, of course, is always the prized demographic to capture, hence so many environmental projects in junior schools, which in a number of cases are in reality nothing more than touchy feely political indoctrination programs. The none too subtle message being hammered home into formative minds, is that we’re harming the planet, which means we humans are somehow innately evil, but we can be saved by giving ourselves to Mother Gaia. Given the absence of not much in the way of any religious education in so many schools these days, it’s their first brush with the green version of original sin. Vacuums always get filled.

If it sounds like a youthful fashion thing, that’s because it is. Like all fashions and crazes, it builds up to a frenzied peak and then disappears just as quickly as it appeared. They’re on to the next fashionable thing. It’s like a massive flock of starlings spontaneously coming together to make those strange attractor shapes in the evening sky, before splitting up and going their separate ways. The gigunda flocks broke up in the aftermath of the Copenhagen fiasco and nowadays there’s only the hard-core flockers left.

And speaking of them, a small but significant sub-demographic of the foot soldier is the personality defective. In the real world, they’re the ones working out their issues at the front of demonstrations, who’ll make sure it ends in some sort of civil disorder. They’re just into relieving their frustrations by doing a bit of smash and burn, with the adrenalin rush thrown in as a bonus. Irrespective of the issue, they’d be using it to the same end. If I were looking for a Luca Brasi or two as shock troops, I’d be recruiting a few of the more stable ones, but I would be very selective.

In the cyber world, they manifest themselves as trolls. Essentially, the supposed anonymity of the internet allows them to be personally offensive to people in a manner they’d be too afraid to do in real life. The classic advice is don’t feed the trolls and it’s very true. Ignore them and they give up, like a petulant and badly behaving child seeking attention who’s being ignored. In practical terms though, they specialise in giving real offense to people, who run out of patience trying to ignore their often tasteless and juvenile comments. Around here, I just drop the ban hammer on them, because I’ve seen too many good debates and even discussion forums destroyed by a single pathological troll. They can be someone else’s problem.

They’re the lineal descendants of those anonymous grubby people who used to make life miserable for women with their heavy breathing phone calls. They disappeared as soon as the phone system became digital, which meant all calls were immediately traceable. The internet is also digital. I used to track them down but so often what I found was some really pathetic cheese dick creature hunched over their keyboard who really needed to get a life, so I usually don’t do it anymore.

The one remaining significant segment of the cannon fodder, would be the grassroots political activist, but I’ll cover them in a few paragraphs in the piece about the higher-level political activists, who’re much more interesting beasties.

Given the heavily depleted numbers of climate foot soldiers nowadays, the alarmist propaganda machine is working hard to big up the numbers on the internet, with the low-level activists wearing their stubby little fingers to the bone commenting everywhere under multiple handles and even trying to auto spam blogs, but after a succession of climate conference attendance flops and big Al’s climate events turning into what can only be termed non-events, it’s all looking distinctly last days of Disco.

Perception is always important in politics, and around the time of Copenhagen in 2009, it was the foot soldiers who saw themselves making an important though in retrospect an ineffectual move to protest against the climatic end of the world. The current but same youthful demographic now looks at all that sort of hysterical saving the planet stuff with indulgent derision.

Personally, I always grudgingly admired their enthusiasm to actually do something for what they felt strongly about, despite my deep loathing of the causes they thought they were espousing. I suppose there are too many echoes of my own youth for me to dislike them. For one or two of them, there’s now a sense of betrayal and the feeling they should have achieved something more lasting. It all turned out to be a silly waste of youthful energy. They were just being exploited, as we all were as young people, but we all grow up. It was just a shadow we were chasing.

As Private Murphy, the poor man’s Marcus Aurelius of military life observed, it’s not the guys shooting at you that you have to worry about, it’s the maniacs on your side giving the orders.

©Pointman

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The alarmists, like all compulsive fanatics, simply could not abide any opposition, no matter how small, sciency or obscure it was, and let’s be frank here, in the early years, those three adjectives described the skeptic community quite accurately. Innocuous though it was, they just couldn’t leave it be and had to go after it, because that’s the elemental nature of fanatics.

Though a lone and solitary voice in the wilderness, it was still opposition and therefore had to be closed down. They felt obliged to crush the last one percent of resistance but in seeking to eliminate it, simply gave it a heightened profile, which it otherwise might never have had. Every attack led potential dissenters to skeptic sites, and nowadays the skeptic sites have grown and matured, eclipsing and burning brighter than the alarmist ones, who despite desperately talking up their falling hit numbers, are slowly shrivelling down into burnt out brown dwarves.

On one side you had the alarmists, who had all the politicians in their pocket, a massive PR budget which was usually and still is replenished by governments grants, all the mainstream media including the crypto-state television channels like ABC, CBC, PBS and BBC, pretty much the whole of the journalistic establishment, all the activist prominenti of climate science, the EU, NASA, NOAA, BOM, EPA, IPCC, pretty much anything you can think of which has an acronym, the seamier side of the investment industry, every environmental organisation right down to the smallest fruit loop loony tune outfit, all the major science journals, presidents, prime ministers, the world, his brother, his sister, their dawg and even the frigging cat, never mind their bloody hamster.

On the other side you had us and we had, umm, well, as a matter of fact we’d bugger all beyond the wit to point out the teensy-weensy cracks, nay yawning crevasses, in the science, and in a political sense, sound the alarm bell about the sort of Armageddon the hysterical bandwagon was slouching towards.

Given that match up, the obvious question has to be – how the hell did they ever manage to lose and why are we doing so well, while their once soaring ambitions now lay in smoking ruins?

I had a go a couple of years back at explaining why I thought a combination of things and they themselves had already brought about the downfall of climate alarmism, and last year restated those reasons in different terms here and again here. We’re now well down the time line, and looking around at how events are panning out, I see no reason to disagree with those assessments in any substantial way. The whole alarmist movement is majestically spiralling inwards ever more quickly towards that event horizon around the black hole of political oblivion. The skeptics have certainly had an influence, which is remarkable, given that the only outlet medium that wasn’t closed to them was the internet, which is not as yet a mass opinion former.

What I’d like to examine here is why, given their superior resources in pretty every much category, the alarmists never managed to close down the skeptic resistance to them in the blogosphere, nor to prevent it growing. They certainly tried but assessing their strategy in dealing with the skeptic community, it’s been a three-pronged disaster.

The first prong of that trident was to sneer at it without ever deigning to engage in any direct debate with it. The opposition was always to be denied any platform – standard infowar procedure. Pour scorn down from on high, while safely ensconced behind the battlements of establishment authority. However, by refusing to engage with the skeptic community, they effectively handed it a free run to slowly take the Manny Mouse science to pieces, which it proceeded to do with growing expertise.

What’s more, the skeptics could pick and choose their targets, while the alarmists were obliged to defend everything, because of the compulsion to support the science is settled meme. Not one weakness was ever to be conceded nor one pawn sacrificed. As Frederick the Great said, you can’t be strong everywhere, or to restate that in terms of asymmetric warfare, a small guerrilla force has the choice of attacking anywhere, which means everywhere has to be defended against them, especially if you’re not prepared to do pawn sacrifices.

That defend everything to the last bullet mentality, has often led to them making frankly laughable excuses as to why even the most indefensible papers were somehow actually good science. The growing disconnect between their predictions and everyday reality, is drawing them deeper and deeper into their own inward-looking world, which has a mad interior logic all of its own. We’re currently going through a propaganda phase telling us freezing winters and cold springs, as well as tepid summers, are all actually caused by global warming, which is going down as well as you’d expect with an increasingly incredulous general public. With spectacularly dumb moves like that, the damage they do to their own credibility far exceeds the impact of our own more modest efforts.

That wide open Serengeti of the skeptic blogosphere is by now strewn with the rotting corpses of the scientific reputations of people like Hansen, Mann, Shakun, Marcott, Lewandowsky, Gergis, Cook and many others. A fair few of them have received their Purple Hearts from Retraction Watch.

In the early years of the skeptic blogosphere, the axis of attack on climate alarmism was solely directed at the science. In the years that followed and as it matured, both in terms of diversity and experience gained in infowar, it now appeals to a much wider demographic base and poses multiple threats on a variety of fronts.

It’s a sign of the times that the no engagement policy is starting to fray at the edges. Nowadays there are opening moves by some of the alarmists wanting to try a bit of engagement, but that looks to be them simply edging towards some sort of accommodation with us. Whether they consciously realise it or not, it’s actually the stage three bargaining phase in the death of their belief system. They’re looking for a way to save something, anything from the wreckage. They’re losing ground and know it.

As far as I can see, there’s no advantageous deal to be made there for the skeptics, and anyway, irrespective of the result of any debate, it’s way too late in the day, even if they should perchance win it. Nowadays, very few ordinary people would even bother to tune in to such a debate, which is why it would be politically irrelevant, which means totally irrelevant. They’re now an egg shell in the path of a steamroller being driven by a largely indifferent popular sentiment.

The logical consequence of a no platform for skeptics policy, was not only to close off the mainstream media to sceptical articles, as the BBC did, but also the ordinary person raising awkward points. People who couldn’t get their questions answered or their opinions heard without being brutally censored, simply decamped to the skeptic sites, which of course helped them grow.

The second, and equally disastrous prong, was choosing to misrepresent the skeptic community as some simple monolithic force, orchestrated and financed by dark and shadowy forces behind the scenes. Again, that was standard infowar procedure, a way of isolating, marginalising and alienating the opposition as hate objects. It was the infowar equivalent of sewing yellow Stars of David onto a small segment of the population. Essentially, climate realists were accused of being part of some massive evil covert conspiracy to derail the righteous people’s coming green utopia. I may be wrong, but I think that’s what has come to be termed conspiracy ideation, by the psycho babble academic prostitutes of an alarmist persuasion.

Again, this policy helped the skeptic sites grow, since ordinary people doing nothing more than raising some reasonable questions, resented being portrayed by such ugly, and at times viciously presented caricatures.

By the way, they think of us skeptics, and only us skeptics, as being the root cause for the ass dropping out from underneath any popular belief in their cult, so it looks like our grand conspiracy worked out in the end. All you naughty skeptical boys and girls out there take note, it’s all your fault. You did a bad bad thing …

The third, more subtle, but to my mind the most disastrous mistake, was a direct consequence of allowing the propaganda representation of skeptics to become the operational basis of shaping plans to neutralise them. While it’s okay and in some ways desirable for your unthinking foot soldiers to believe in simplistic stereotypes of the enemy, the policy setting leadership should know better. They actually began to believe in their own caricatures of us. They allowed what has to be clearly recognised as their hatred of us to cloud their judgement. He who loses control, loses.

By following counter strategies aimed at simplistic cardboard cut out stereotypes of skeptics, they were shooting at illusory phantoms, and therefore obviously failing to do any real damage, which yet again allowed the skeptic community to grow unhindered. It’s hard to expose a gigantic conspiracy when there simply isn’t one, which was yet another infowar boomerang, that increasingly left them looking like paranoid conspiracy nuts.

Over and above that, by failing to acknowledge the growing diversity and sophistication of the threat facing them, they persisted in applying the same strategy to neutralise all flavours of opposition, and that was never going to work. I compared the skeptic community to a guerrilla force on a previous occasion, and in real terms, that is actually a very apt comparison. They all fight in their own distinct ways, and only rarely if ever work together, though they would be a much more effective force if they did.

Interestingly, that disunited vulnerability was never exploited by the alarmists but at the same time, it gave the skeptics what would be termed in military circles, more than one axis of attack; political, scientific, economic, cybernetic, statistical, engineering and infowar, to name but a few. If you look carefully at some of the more notable coups of the skeptics, many were simply pulling up a supposed expert, who through arrogance at never having any of their pronouncements questioned by their devoted following, was making very definitive but very silly statements in areas well outside their domain of expertise.

The most cursory glance at comments under some skeptic articles, points to a diversity of specialist expertise in the sceptic community that far exceeds anything to be found in the alarmist camp.

Even at home in areas of their own supposed expertise, the alarmists weren’t safe. The solid job of statistical work that Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntyre did to debunk Mann’s paper, which derived the iconic hockey stick, is a notable case in point. Using nothing more than statistical numeracy and an admirable degree of persistence, they took a hard look at what was supposed to be a landmark paper, and ended up with Mann’s head mounted atop his own hockey stick. When it comes down to anything to do with hockey, and two Canadians versus a slightly rotund little fellow from Massachusetts, my money’s on the two Canucks.

The infowar blunders in dealing with the skeptic blogosphere were multiple; failing to strangle it at birth before it could grow, actually promoting its existence while intending to kill it off, handing it the initiative by refusing to engage with it and an unbelievably massive failure to honestly profile it in anything other than childish terms. The grand error was then to proceed to fight such an imaginary chimera.

Not only did these strategies fail, they actually helped the skeptic community grow by acting as recruiting sergeants, funnelling and concentrating the scattered opposition around the globe towards the obscure skeptic sites. That trend was aided and abetted by a complete and utter failure to provide a meaty alternative blogosphere in which the science was being honestly discussed, as opposed to acting as an obsequious mouthpiece for science by propagandist press hand-outs. It was all too blatantly fashionable science lite, so they lost the unaligned professional science demographic.

What has been the result of failing to initially suppress and then to constrain the growth of the skeptic blogosphere?

The first is that it has undeniably become a major influence in the world of climate science. Given how truly dysfunctional the peer review process has become in that area, effectively it’s now the skeptic blogosphere which is doing that job and it’s doing it in public. Gaia help any activist scientist caught trying to slip past the sort of slipshod rubbish that used to be waved through the pal review process a few years ago. Nowadays, they’re like little school children, fearfully eyeing a stern teacher, who they know will really mark their homework very severely. It’s all a bit scary for the poor little darlings.

Every year, it’s become almost routine for skeptic sites to make a clean sweep of the Bloggie Awards in the science category. This year, the one alarmist “science” site in contention, insisted its nomination be withdrawn from the contest, deeply afraid of how the voting judgement of the online science community would make it look.

A second emergent phenomenon is that as resistance to climate alarmism is now appearing in the mainstream media, many of the arguments advanced by the online skeptics are providing the intellectual basis for the political, economic and scientific objections to climate orthodoxy. That trend will grow, and although climate skepticism will eventually edge climate alarmism toward the political fringe in the mainstream media, the future for scepticism is, as for all infowar campaigns, on the internet.

In the coming years, the organs of the legacy media will wither on the vine and movements like the skeptic blogosphere will increasingly start to have a direct influence on the broad mass of public opinion. If you doubt that trend exists, ask yourself how many twenty somethings you know who regularly buy newspapers or watch television news. Those young people are the future and already their prime information source is the net.

The third and much more fundamental effect is a lesson to be learnt, which is as old as political dissent itself; any small group of people determined to resist what they consider to be a bad thing, can make a difference. They may have no representation politically, or any voice in the media, or anybody prepared to speak for them, but nowadays they can go to the mattresses by heading off into the blogosphere and doing it for themselves.

Yes, they’ll have to learn a few new techy things, find out how to effectively present their views, put up with being slandered, libelled and generally be prepared to take a few drubbings, but if their cause has merit and above all truth, they know it can eventually win, because they’ll have already seen it done.

The climate skeptic community was the first to blaze that online trail.

©Pointman

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Pretty much everyone in the circles they operate in is highly ambitious and also seeking power, so the only way forward is to do some horse trading with each other. Such necessary compromises make it all too easy to be cynical about politicians, but given the power thirsty dynamics of their peer group, there’s simply no other way if you want to get anything done. Politics, being the art of the possible, really does come down to doing the best for as many people as possible. The first lesson you learn in politics, is that you’ll only rarely get everything you wanted.

All politicians, without exception, are obliged to make compromises but the acid test of any politician’s integrity, is where they draw the line in terms of what is not up for negotiation. They never forget where it is and everyone who knows them is aware they’ll defend it to the last, because they’re what’s known as conviction politicians. Ronald Regan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, amongst a few others in the last century, would fall into that category. I can think of only two or three such people in modern politics, only one of whom is currently leading their party but conceivably the others might one day do the same.

At the other extreme, there are a few who don’t have any idea of where that line is, nor do they see that as a problem. They actually don’t have any line. Frankly, they’re in politics for nothing more than to accumulate power and most especially money, and to hell with those plebs who were stupid enough to vote for them.

They pad their expense claims. They take under the table cash payments from shadowy lobby groups to actively promote a particular cause. They arrange their slice of the take in companies they’re shilling for by appointing spouses or close family as board members or holders in name only of equity instruments and very much in the money stock options. If is all gets a bit too hot for them to operate any more or they decide they’ve had enough of politics, they’ll retire as non-executive directors onto the boards of their client companies.

It’s just outright theft and they’re nothing better than common thieves.

Unlike most thieves, they’re usually invulnerable to prosecution, because although their own party and the opposition have a pretty good idea of what they’re up to, blowing the whistle on them to outsiders is seen as being disloyal to your party by causing it reputational damage. The opposition know they’ve got similar thieves in their own ranks, so they are in no position to start throwing stones.

Nobody wants that kind of tit for tat war, because everyone would inevitably be a loser. Given such political protection, anyone going after them needs a high level of proof, which is never an easy thing to assemble, since everyone involved in the particular scam is not only powerful but also has good reason to keep their mouth shut.

Historically, what kept some sort of control over the excesses of such people was independent journalism, more specifically the investigative branch of it, but in any practical sense, that mechanism is no longer in place. The relationship between the latter-day barons of the sprawling media conglomerates and politicians is altogether too cosy. The untrammelled power of those barons nowadays would put William Randolph Hearst to shame

It doesn’t help the situation that around the world, the majority of most news organisation’s output has a distinct left-wing spin, which means half the politicians in the world have a guaranteed get out of jail free card with the denizens of the mainstream media. God help any right winger caught with his hand in the till or down the knickers of the wrong kiss and tell type.

The only time such thieves are brought to book is when they’ve become so arrogant at getting away with nearly anything, they go too far, even for the sickeningly compliant bend over and take it like a man harlots of the journalistic establishment. Putting in a parliamentary expense claim for having had the moat around your castle dredged is a prime example of such shameless piggery. Mainstream journalists might be obliged to suck by the powers that be, but just once in a while, even some of them refuse to swallow.

Increasingly, investigative journalists who want to break such stories, have to strike out into the veldt and establish an independent platform for themselves in the blogosphere, which is why in some countries such as Australia, what I call Finkelstein legislation is being proposed to regulate it. It’s basically an attempt at indirect control by a government through a pseudo regulatory body, whose membership they totally control, and after you strip away the tattered fig leaf, is government censorship in all but name. There’s not even a proposed right of appeal against its diktats.

It’s in such eminently reasonable ways, a free country, through indifference, allows itself to sleepwalk into a totalitarian state.

Any such measures are doomed to failure, since even if they were to be enacted and were even practicable, the blogosphere will simply retreat like an unaccountable guerrilla force into the Undernet, where absolutely no control on it could be exercised, never mind the self-control currently exercised by the more influential sections of it.

If that ever happens, free responsible journalistic comment would quickly be replaced by bald denouncement, anonymous accusation and unsubstantiated libel, and as all us grownups know, dirt like that has a habit of sticking. Winston Churchill said “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” In this electronic information age and given the raw speed of internet rumour mongering, the truth might as well hit the snooze button and stay in bed, especially if the lie being disseminated is widely perceived as being subject to suppression by a government appointed body.

If you sow it, you will reap it.

Between the above two extremes of the political spectrum, most politicians are reasonable honest people, but there are exceptions. I’m thinking here of people who for instance chair influential committees in government and at the same time stand to make or are already making hundreds of thousands, depending on which way their committee decides to steer policy.

They’ve declared their financial interest and yet, despite what is obviously a massive conflict of interest, seem quite content to continue on in that vein. Curiously, nobody else in the political establishment is voicing any concerns publically. I suppose it’s one of those things honourable men do in the name of party loyalty, but at some point, they’re becoming culpable. Integrity, unlike virginity, you tend to lose degree by slow degree. It can slip away from you unnoticed, but if you haven’t had the wit to realised that, you’re already lost

People in politically influential positions who personally stand to gain financially, dependent on the direction policy takes, is quite simply unacceptable. Either resign from the post or liquidate all such deeply compromising financial interests. I find such behaviour to be morally repulsive and it should be a bigger cause for concern by their political parties. In the most basic way, it brings politics into disrepute.

The same classifications of people occur around the world, with nothing more than the local name or phrase for it changing. I’m thinking here specifically of what American cops call a criminal’s criminal and British bobbies an ODC, which is an acronym for ordinary decent criminal. The criminals tend to use the same terms. It denotes someone who is a career criminal but doesn’t prey on the defenceless. To stay in those two respective vernaculars, they’re neither skels nor scumbags, who’re the bottom feeders of the criminal world.

Thieving rather than violence is their way of life. They do things like take down banks or businesses, rather than murderous house invasions for small change. They may be thieves and bad guys, but they do have some basic sense of decency, which means they refuse to share prison space with the likes of child murderers or kid molesters. Even in hell, there’s a pecking order, as John Milton observed.

I may not like the out-and-out thieves in government, but at worst I consider them to be just another type of ODC. At least the dirty money they’re getting their hands on is coming from business interests, who can well afford it.

It’s the ones actively involved in setting policy, and who are benefitting massively from it financially, that I reserve my complete contempt for. They’re actually somewhere beneath contempt, if such a thing is possible. In the UK, it’s estimated by various charities that there were between three to five thousand extra deaths from cold related causes last March. A goodly proportion of those deaths can be directly attributed to the poor and elderly, who can no longer afford to heat their homes, because of green taxes lumped onto their heating bills to subsidise the renewables gravy train.

For them, March was heat or eat, fuel or food decision time, with the inevitable tragic result. In brutal environmental conditions, it’s always the very young and the very old who die first, because they’ve got no reserves. Such money earned in such a fashion has blood all over it, and it’s the blood of our most vulnerable and defenceless citizens. The poor are being stripped of what little money they have, to make the already rich even richer, and the swine don’t give a damn about the misery and death caused by that.

Protected by both a yellow cloak of political protectiveness and a Teflon cloak of green righteousness, they’re above criticism but to my mind, those greedy pigs are no better than vicious muggers, beating an elderly pensioner to death in the street for her pennies.

©Pointman

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

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Well, at least one of the bastards is behind bars.

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A lot of people have never actually seen the dawn come up. There is such a thing as the dawn chorus. The birds really do sing to greet it and if you’ve never experienced that, you really should; at least once in your life. You do owe yourself that simple wonder. Why birds do that, I’ve no idea, and from some of the explanations I’ve heard, no one else appears to have either. Quite frankly, some things really don’t have a logical explanation Mr. Spock.

For months, people in the locale have been hoarding their own decent pieces of wood for the bonfire but the good stuff, in the shape of smoke-free pallets, arrives discreetly in the back of battered vans. Every year and for reasons known only to herself, my wife tries in vain to limit the size of the fuel for the bonfire, and knowing that, my pallet pushers always text ahead before a delivery to confirm the coast is clear. My beloved darling and doxy is up against an almost military level of planning by a bunch of committed pyromaniacs and never really stands a chance. If they had to, they’d airdrop them in.

I recall showing those men when they were kids, how to toast marshmallows on the end of long sticks I’d freshly cut and whittled for them. The heat from the bonfire was so intense, they hid behind makeshift cardboard heat shields but still got their mallows done, even at the risk of third degree burns. Great risky fun for a young kid, but of course, we watched them like hawks.

When they were becoming young bucks, I also showed them it was okay to piss on the bonfire at five am and watch the steam rise, though it’s probably not one of my more notable accomplishments. That’s the sort of disgraceful mad bad Dad stuff I’m occasionally prone to. We watch the flames through the night, discuss the shapes and colours we see dancing in them and talk sobering up philosophy and bullshit between cat naps. The guitar of Ry Cooder slides hauntingly across the night, from out of the workshop where an old battered XP computer is working its way through the playlist.

It’s a gathering of the clan but in a wider sense, it’s bigger than immediate family. It’s an opportunity to renew old friendships with people you value but rarely get to see. It’s the young people I saw growing up with our kids who feel at home in our house. Blood relation or not, I have a fond regard for them all. It’s always been an easy open house and they were always great kids you could have a laugh with. They’ve grown up to be fine young men and women. I’m proud and glad to know them and by now, it’s more their thrash than mine. They’re starting to bring their own kids along to it and showing them how to toast a marshmallow in front of a bonfire. They watch them like hawks. The big circles of life.

It’s been running that long, everyone knows the routines and the rituals. I’ll sit back and take pleasure watching them enjoying themselves. It runs itself by now, or should I say, I let them run it. They’re making their own new legends of the BBQ and it makes me happy. I’m an older lion now, content to lay across a warm rock in the sun and watch the young creatures of the savanna at play. It’s all ahead of them and I slightly envy them. They’ll of course have their own struggles with life but I think they’ll be okay.

A  year’s worth of ash in the burning pit I dry stone-walled so long ago, has been dug out for a fresh burn, the lawn has had a short back and sides and I’m putting together this year’s playlist. This time around, I think I’ll go heavy on Tom Waits and Joe Cocker, with a bit of Radiohead and the usual standbys. I load in a mix of familiar popular stuff which will resonate with an age demographic that runs from single digits into the late seventies. They’re all up for a laugh and a bit of fun.

The numbers vary from year to year. They’re mainly relations, friends or neighbours, who can leave the car at home for once and walk to the thrash with their family, carrying bags of their favourite booze and some dishes for the community table. More than a few tend to rely on the muscle memory in their legs to get them home at the end of the night. A few people drive to it and either leave sometime in the evening or stay over, finding a bed, couch, chair or if all else fails, a piece of floor to crash on. Some are supposed to be leaving at the end of night but decide to stay over. I think the record stands at twenty-eight sleep over guests. That time, I couldn’t get into the upstairs bathroom because the floor of it was covered by three exhausted and slightly smoke blackened rugrats in sleeping bags.

The informal rule we have about when the bonfire gets lit, is that it has to be dark enough to see a star. A bonfire in daytime is truly a waste of a good carbon footprint. If it’s a cold or rainy day, we relent and light it early. As the day slowly turns to evening, what I call the fire people start checking out the sky for a star – they just can’t wait. The burning pit is round with a crescent-shaped wall, which is built up high at the back to throw out the heat. A horseshoe shape.

It radiates the heat out through the open front. A teepee, carefully constructed from a smashed up pallet has been built, with a mixture of kindling, plastic bags and newspaper inside it. It was all done well in advance and in daylight. When it comes to their pleasures, the fire people, like all addicts, leave nothing to chance. I keep a careful eye on them. The maniacs would use napalm given half the chance …

Having spent years teaching my kids how to barbecue food properly, as opposed to just burning the outside of it, I’ve now relinquished barbecuing duties to them. They, like so many of their friends, like to cook and in general most people tend to bring along large quantities of homemade things like pasta salads, spicy chicken fillets, tender pork cuts, tiny marinated minted lamb chops (totally bloody delicious btw), shish kebabs, burgers and selected desserts. The burgers with Brie inside them are good, but what’ve come to be called the weird burgers take some beating, and the Serb who makes them is more than a little coy about the exact recipe. I’m pretty sure he adds in some pork to the beef but beyond that, I think it’d take waterboarding to get his secret recipe out of him.

So many people bring along their own homemade versions of burgers, that we’re always planning in intricate double-blind detail how to have a cook off, but every year the whole damn lot gets eaten before any contest could ever take place. Food comes straight off the grill and onto the plate of one of the gang crowding the grill and hustling the cook for grub. As far as the cook is concerned, he’s fending off a massed shark attack and I can’t blame him. It’s understandable of course; being at a barbecue with a beer in one hand and no burger in the other would somehow feel so unnatural. One year, I’ll surround the brick BBQ with shotgun-toting US Marshals to do some crowd control, and then we might actually have a contest.

My wife is the sergeant major on the food front. As dishes arrive throughout the afternoon, she manages it all and sees it’s all laid out for people to get at. Nothing will get left to waste. She’s busy but enjoying herself, exchanging banter with her mates and easily multitasking en passant, which means anyone who comes within hearing distance of her gets something to do. Everyone gets a mission but she does it in a light way, so nobody resents it - they want to help out anyway. There’s always a million things to be attended to. How she can keep juggling them all, I’ll never know.

I’ve travelled a lot and have worked in many countries and for no particular reason, started collecting hats as souvenirs. At a party here years ago, someone started handing out the hats (most probably me) and that tradition has now been rolled into any party we have, never mind the BBQ. At some point in the evening, the hats get handed out. Like a lot of silly but fun things, it’s caught on and now we have people turning up to the bash wearing anything from a Homburg to a Kevlar helmet.

It becomes a Mad Hatter’s party with everyone wandering around sporting kepis, fishing hats, baseball peaks, russian fur hats, fezes, Luftwaffe forage caps, Aussie hats, berets, VoPo hats and various cop hats from around the world. People bump into each other and exchange hats until they settle on one they like. Strangely enough, what they eventually stick with usually suits them. There was even a Darth Vader helmet one year. I was seriously impressed by that. It even had a built-in frigging microphone so you could do the voice and the asthmatic breathing. Great stuff. If I ever visit the forest moon of Endor, I’m gonna get myself one of those.

My youngest son has been in amateur rock bands for years, with all the expected hassles, egos, hissy fits and bizarre behaviours associated with that particular area of artistic endeavour; think Spinal Tap meets the Commitments, with the usual amp 11 explosion at the end. That sort of crap is nearly de rigueur by now. This new band finally looks to be the one; four talented, committed and motivated people who want to make music, rather than just have the bragging rights of being in a band.

They’re all holding down fulltime jobs but they’re still squeezing in one or two writing or practise sessions every week and coming up with a decent product. It’s their first public performance. They play five numbers they’ve written and one cover. Leaving aside the expected ragging from their friends, the set gets a good reception from a musically knowledgeable crowd.

The bonfire gets lit using a few trowels of coal from the BBQ, which are carefully placed inside the teepee of wood. Up it goes and pretty soon half of the crowd – the fire people - drag their garden chairs towards it and form a semicircle, settling in and getting good position around the fire. They’ll spend the evening, and some of them the whole night, feeding pallets to the fire, watching them burning, sipping their drinks and talking. They take turns for each other doing booze resupply runs to the kitchen, where cans, bottles and wine boxes are all piled up on every flat surface, including the floor.

Over the years, they’ve learnt to feed it one pallet at a time, rather than in the bad old days when they stacked them five deep, producing a towering inferno of such epic proportions, it could easily have been mistaken by a satellite for what those NORAD guys under Cheyenne mountain call a launch bloom.

A fire for them is a kind of wilderness TV, endlessly looping a seductive and hypnotic program, which only they can see or hear and it whispers seductively to them of primordial times in a deep and mystical way the other half simply can’t understand. It gives rise to vague, primal and vestigial racial memories which cannot be resisted but it provokes nothing more than blank stares of incomprehension from the non-mesmerised at the lotus eaters. It’s another one of those things Mr. Spock would struggle with.

Throughout the day, I do the meeting and greeting of friends as they arrive and introductions of newcomers to people I think they’ll get on with. They may be old-fashioned host duties, but I think those social pleasantries are important, especially when you’re a new face amongst strangers. Somewhere in the late evening, my duties as a host wind down and I wedge myself somewhere into the semicircle in front of the fire. From then on, I won’t be moving. I am, of course, a fire person myself. Who else would be deranged enough to build a stone-walled burning pit in their garden?

I sit there through the night sipping Jamesons and water with the usual suspects, listening to and telling a few stories of my own as we watch the flames dancing and the sparks spiralling upwards into the firmament and winking out. We judge the burn rate of the pallets and make sure we don’t run out before the dawn comes up. Eventually poor doomed Phaëton lashes the horses of his chariot, the dawn creeps over the horizon, and after listening to the chorus, I head for the sack and a few hours sleep.

The next day, people get up at various times but rarely before noon. We wander through the house and about the garden and the outhouses doing the first clear up, collecting bottles, tins and various bits of rubbish, and chatting about things that happened yesterday which we missed. It’s all a bit zombie autopilot mode, comfortable simple displacement activity until the higher brain functions seep back. A few new legends of the BBQ are born. Knowing the individuals concerned as well as I do, some are beyond a doubt true, some less so. Even for my place, they’re a touch too salacious Sodom and Gomorrah but sometimes the people concerned like the undenied legend growing. Liberty Valance – when the legend becomes fact etc etc.

By mid afternoon, a more leisurely BBQ begins and since in my capacity as a host, I don’t have to do any meeting, greeting or saying goodbye and walking people out to their car, I can finally relax. It’s a good way of winding down.

It’s been fun but it does take a year to recover from it. By then, we’ll be looking forward to doing it all over again.

©Pointman

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The afternoon drags on. It’s a long, hot, sweaty patrol that just sucks all the energy out of you. Without any warning, the jaws of the ambush suddenly snap shut around you. The leader and his radio man behind him, are the very first ones to get cut down. You go to cover and try to establish a perimeter. Everyone is shouting and screaming and doing some outgoing, but there just isn’t any decent cover; you start taking casualties. It’s all red and green streaks flying through the evening air, but pretty soon the RPGs start raining in as well.

The casualties begin to mount up all around you. Man, this is bad. Please Lord, get me through this one. You might be able to make your escape but that simply ain’t gonna happen. When you’ve got men down, everyone mans up, because they’re your buddies. No way you’ll di di mau the hell out of there.

The crap rains in on you. Nobody is going to ride to the rescue, because nobody knows you’re in trouble. There’s no chance of anyone calling in some fire support, because nobody knows for sure their exact position, even if there was a radio man left alive or even a radio intact. Nobody even knows the fucking call signs. You start dragging the bodies of your dead friends over the wounded, to protect them from further harm; it’s got that bad already and it’s just the start of what’s going to be a long night’s dying, and you know that for sure. You think about your Mom and your Pop and your family, but all around you are your immediate family, and they’re hurting badly, so you dig in deep fucking deep, burying your own fear to do your best for them.

The thing grinds on mercilessly through the night. As the dawn approaches, the defensive fire gradually peters out. The ambushers carefully move in. They lob a few grenades in ahead of them, just to make sure. Anyone left alive is too badly wounded to offer any real resistance. They shoot them. The bodies are stripped of anything useful, fitting boots and cigarettes being especially prized, and they move out. You stayed with them right down to the bitter end, so that’s okay.

That’s how brave young men can die stupidly.

Let’s rerun it.

You’re moving through hostile territory. You’re with a good team, so you can do it right. There’s a man walking point, which is always rotated until you start moving into a piece of terrain which looks exactly like somewhere you’d lay an ambush, then your best man quietly takes over. You sorta asked him, but you know he was already getting twitchy anyway. He walks thirty or so steps in front. Some distance behind him, you have the slack. He’ll be carrying a lot of grease, because, if it all comes raining down, his job is to lay down a shit load of fire, to give the point a chance of getting out alive. Some way behind the slack, is the main body of the unit and trailing behind them, is what’s called the drag. He basically spends most of his time walking backwards and trying not to fall over, because he’s watching their six. Depending on the territory and the number of men you have, you put a flanker out on each side, walking in line with the slack.

It’s a very basic formation, that ensures the main body of troopers don’t walk into any ambushes, just the guys on the periphery of it. It makes them concentrate.

It interlocks. The point knows they’re relying on him not to walk them into death but at the same time, he knows his life depends on them. The slack knows his life depends on how good the point is, but he also knows the point is totally reliant on him to keep him alive if the cookie starts to crumble. The troopers rely on the guys on the edges, but they know if it all turns to shit, those same guys will need them rushing to their support. Everybody is working for each other, because that’s the one way everyone stands a chance of getting home alive.

If you want to execute the perfect murderous ambush on that formation, you have to let the point and slack walk straight through it, just so you can get the main body of troops into the kill zone, before snapping the trap shut around them. If you’re the point, your job is to watch for that and make sure it’ll never happen, because if it does, you’ve just let all your friends die. When you do it right, you become the nearest thing to a bit of meat on the chopping block. It’s one of those comradeship things that are difficult to communicate.

You have to work with the slack, because no matter how good you are, you sometimes spot the thing just that few footsteps too late, and now your life more than ever depends on him. Little signals. Signals the watchers won’t notice. A fist up in the air will get you killed. You pause to take a slow swig from your canteen, which you’d never do up front. Sometimes you can’t even see them, but you just know they’re there; you can nearly taste their need to kill you. You can feel the pressure of all those intent eyeballs on you. The slack picks up the signal and lets the company know there’s trouble up ahead, which means you’ve done your job. They won’t be walking into the meat grinder.

You’ve done your duty for them and now you can afford to get selfish; all that’s left is that tricky problem of getting your ass out of there in one piece. There’s still that little bit of the normal human being left in you, who is terrified, which is what makes you a good point, but at the same time, the soldier you’ve become is still fully functioning and riding high on that big electric bitch of contact.

You’re thinking about cover now and a way back to safety, but the thing you never do, is look behind you for the route back to it. You do that and they’ll know you know, and let rip straight away. On they way along, you’ve been spotting every decent piece of cover and know exactly where the nearest piece is.

If it’s an X ambush and you’ve walked into the centre of it, with fire going to come at you from four directions, you’re going to die, and you’ve probably got the slack killed as well. If you didn’t get too far in, you dive to cover and they immediately start blasting.

You wait. Your head is down, you can’t see a damn thing, you’re doing some blind return of fire, but you know exactly what’s going on around you. At the very first shot, a lot of things happen simultaneously.

The slack went to cover and is laying down an arc of fire from side to side over you, to keep their heads down and give you a chance. The flankers have also started laying down enfilade fire on the sides of the ambush, even if they can’t see a damn anything. At the same time, the team who’ve got the heavy machine gun are charging forward, to join the slack and flankers putting out fire. Soon, the rooster crows and the ambusher’s heads are very definitely down now. Firepower baby, raw naked firepower. If you’re on the receiving end of it, it’s totally fucking impressive.

The main body has herring boned, with alternate guns covering each flank of the advance and a react platoon has split off from each side. They’ll get far enough out, well beyond the flankers but in line with them, find good cover and wait.

The leadership, who is safely tucked away in the main body, is already on the radio, and he’s calling in an arty fire mission, which will lay a curtain of explosions perpendicular to the line of march but behind the ambushers, cutting off their natural line of retreat. He can do this immediately, because he doesn’t have to look up the co-ordinates. Before the patrol had even started out, he’d identified all the likely locations of ambushes, marked the fire mission co-ordinates against them on the map and has also been marking on it, exactly where they are as the patrol advanced. Dot, dot and boring dot in guaranteed water erasable marker.

He’s planning for the eventuality of himself becoming combat ineffective, which is a nice way of saying he’s badly wounded or dead. If he goes down, he’s made sure every man in the unit knows all they have to do, is pick up the map and they’ll know exactly where they are, what the call signs are and the exact co-ordinates for the fire mission.

As elements of the main body move forward to pour even more fire on them, the ambushers realise that it hasn’t worked out, so it’s time to get out of there while they still can. If they won’t disengage, the leadership will gradually creep the barrage towards them. If that makes life difficult for the point, it’s the classic imperative of first the mission, then the men. Hard days. Their choices are by this stage limited. There’s no way they’re going to run through a screen of exploding artillery fire or charge the main body, so they’ll use the only two lines of retreat left.

They’ll retreat under fire, and just when they think they’re in the clear, they’ll run into the ambushes set by the two waiting react platoons, who’ll kill most of them. Those who were intent on killing you, have just been killed themselves, and the whole action has barely lasted five minutes.

They’re just stories, simple stories, but the lesson to be drawn from them is as old as humanity. Any group of people working together in a coordinated fashion, will always do better than a group which does not. More succinctly expressed, united we stand, divided we fall.

In the year 9 AD, a Roman nobleman called Publius Quinctilius Varus, led a force consisting of three full legions, six cohorts of auxiliaries and three companies of cavalry, eastward of the Rhein and into a territory known only by the vague name of Germania. It wouldn’t actually become a country for another eighteen centuries or so. He had about thirty thousand men under his command and although there were various propaganda justifications for the invasion, everyone knew exactly what it was all about.

The Roman empire was expanding eastwards from its toeholds across the Rhein. The scattered tribes who lived there and who might be unwise enough to resist the invasion, were going to be butchered, and all for the expansion of the empire and greater glory of Rome. Of course, everyone also knew the tribes were going to defend their lands because they had no choice, but pit a large well-equipped full-time professional army up against a bunch of farmers, who only fight occasionally at the behest of their tribal leader, and you know what the result is going to be – a slaughter. The Romans had done exactly that so many times before and Varus had a well deserved reputation for the barbarity with which he dealt with defeated enemies. He was renowned for crucifying them.

Things did not look good for the tribes. Although their numbers are hard to estimate, they were most probably outnumbered but their problems ran a lot deeper than that. It was farmers up against three legions of battle-hardened veterans. The tribesmen were drawn from dozens of different tribes who had never fought together, and even if they could be persuaded to do so, would simply be no match for three legions in a set piece battle. Varus, no doubt aware of all those considerations, didn’t appear to have deployed much in the way of a reconnaissance screen around his force.

Comes the day, comes the man, and for the tribesmen, that man was Arminius of the Cherusci tribe. He did two things, both of which most onlookers assumed were quite simply impossible. He not only put together a secret alliance of nearly all the bickering tribes to fight the roman invaders but also came up with a strategy, which would allow each tribe to fight in its own way that would still beat the Romans, without engaging in the type of formal pitched battle they’d certainly lose. Like all effective planners, he worked imaginatively with what few assets he actually had to hand.

He offered nothing but light resistance to Varus’ advance, just enough to draw him deeper and deeper into the area of Germania he wanted him to reach, stretch his supply lines and put him well beyond the range of any possible relief force. Eventually the Romans reached the vast Teutoburg forest, the way through which was so muddy and narrow, the Roman column had to break formation and straggle to get through it. The column eventually stretched out for nearly ten miles as it squeezed its way through.

That was exactly what Arminius was waiting for and he was prepared.

On command, one tribe attacked the middle of the column, and having massive local superiority and fighting on their own turf and in their own style rather than the Roman style, easily cut it in two. Liabilities, intelligently utilised, can become assets. Progressively, the same thing happened along the entire length of the column. Irresistible and massive local superiority, guaranteed a win every time. Like a snake, they chopped it into easily handled pieces, and then annihilated the isolated pieces.

A few survivors tried to break out but ran into heavily defended barricades erected in advance to stop exactly that. It was a complete massacre, with an estimated twenty-five thousand Romans killed. The last person who’d given the legion a hammering like that was Hannibal of Carthage, and that was two hundred years earlier.

In the shocked aftermath of what came to be known as the Varian disaster, the Romans, ever practical, evacuated all settlements east of the Rhein, burned them to the ground, and having got everyone across the Rhein bridges, burnt every bridge behind them. Apart from a few punitive expeditions across the river, the Roman’s seemingly irresistible advance eastwards across Europe stopped there for good.

Imagine if you will, George Armstrong Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn by the hand of Crazy Horse and the Sioux, freezing the present day USA’s western border in Montana rather than the Pacific, and you’re in the picture. For once and almost uniquely, the natives permanently stopped a more technologically advanced culture devouring them.

The outcome of the battle of the Teutoburg forest had a massive impact on European history but in the context of the current discussion, that’s not an aspect I wish to pursue. It is the strategy employed by Arminius which is pertinent. The Saxon tribes, from any aspect, were the smaller less powerful force but they were deployed in ways to maximise their strengths and in areas the Roman invaders were weak. They could fight in forests, whereas the legions had been trained to fight in open ground.

You can easily overwhelm a much stronger force which has been spread out, by concentrating your own weaker forces on a narrow front, achieving local numerical superiority. Two millenia later, a distant son of Germania called Heinz Guderian, did precisely the same thing in the Ardennes, but the tactic was named schwerpunkt und aufrollen; hard point and rollout, which was at the cutting edge of the Blitzkrieg or lightning war.

The three things which carried the day at Teutoburg were; the different tribes acting in a concerted manner, concentrating forces to achieve irresistible local superiority and then deploying them in ways that played to their strengths against areas in which the enemy was weak. They picked the time, the place and the manner in which they’d fight – and that’s why they won. Basically, they seized the initiative.

The tide of the climate war is now turning in our favour. Hitherto, climate realists have played an essentially reactive role to whatever the alarmists were doing. As each harebrained scheme or science paper was floated by the alarmists, we pointed out the flaws in it or just shot it down. We’ve nearly always allowed them the first move but now I think the time is right for us to start seizing the initiative in areas of our own choosing.

In terms of finance and any support from the political, media or scientific establishment, we are still heavily disadvantaged but the public opinion numbers are slowly turning our way. We are in the same situation as those Saxon tribes facing the might of Rome, but by using similar tactics, I believe we can dish out the equivalent of more than a few Teutoburgs to the alarmists.

Working together, we can accomplish more. One way or another, we all can get in touch with each other and talk through some options. Think about it in your quiet moments. We in the developed world are the lucky ones, who enjoy the privilege of voicing our concerns. There are people out there with no voice, suffering because of bad policies and nobody will ever know they existed or note their passing. Their names will be gone and their graves will be unmarked and while the wind of history may perhaps cry Mary, it’ll blow over their graves without ever recording or knowing their names – but we’ll know they lived.

We owe them our best shot.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Some thoughts about policy for the aftermath of the climate wars.

Intentions, profiles and predictability.

An assessment of current alarmist propaganda.

Click for a list of other articles.

The global warming craze is dying down. People, as Mackay noted, are coming out of it one by one and that process is accelerating with every passing day. Governments are cutting subsidies for green technologies not only because they don’t work, but because government coffers are empty. They’re broke. The politicians no longer mention it because it no longer gets votes and indeed just attracts a baleful hostility from a cash-strapped electorate, worried about paying their soaring power bills in the midst of the worst recession in living memory.

The reputation of climate science has taken a terrible beating, with one iconic symbol after another brought down by the skeptic blogosphere. The arrogant and at times criminal behaviour of some of the alarmist scientists involved, such as Peter Gleick, has further eroded any respect for it. Within the field and in related ones, researchers are now emboldened to question the supposedly “settled” science. Across the world, the carbon trading market is dead. The journalists specialising on the environment are finding their jobs disappearing or under threat, and are consequently moving on to other more viable niches. Basically, the popular media are deserting the party. High principles about saving the planet are all okay, but one’s livelihood is so much more important, isn’t it?

The whole political movement has already made too many poor inward-looking decisions and from any conceivable strategic viewpoint, their position is by now unrecoverable. The mainstream politicians are avoiding them like the plague or keeping them in the waiting room for a change, and there’s an emergent pattern of alarmists being released from hitherto safe sinecures like NASA, the BBC and certain prestigious news outlets in places like Washington, amongst others. The embarrassment factor has just got too big and the establishment is, as they euphemistically say, reconfiguring its posture.

The only people, who will be left on the burning deck of the sinking ship when all else have fled, will be the political activists and the committed climate scientists, who aren’t all that clued up politically.

That’s a wall, look at it, and read the writing on it. You’re being flushed.

Their reaction to that message is to scream ever more loudly, ever more dire warnings of the increasingly terrible things about to crash down on us. With such extreme behaviour, they’re rapidly pushing themselves towards the political fringe, which is exactly where we want them to be. They’re not thinking too straight. It’s like watching a manifestation of that definition of insanity; persistently and single-mindedly doing exactly the same thing over and over and somehow expecting a different result.

Even the science wing of the cause is trapped in that same obsessive compulsive loop. No matter how many times they try to rehabilitate things like the hockey stick, it’s by now irrelevant. Even if they could get it to successfully run the length of the skeptic gauntlet, it would still be irrelevant. Crying wolf louder and louder, results in people not listening, harder and harder. That’s the basic syndrome and they’re by now already well into diminishing returns.

As they say on all the wrassling programs; there’s no way out, you’re going down Dude. It’s just a matter of time and time, as I’ve said before, is on our side.

If you agree that’s a reasonable assessment of the current state of play, the “let’s get ahead of the game” question has to be – where do we go from here?

Now that it’s in retreat, we have to start the push to get much of the environmentally justified policy scrapped or reversed. However, there’s two decades worth of policy and regulation in place, so it’s consequently difficult to see where one should start. There’s so much of  it.

Stepping back from the problem, I think we should be guided by a complete reversal of the current environmental priority. From now on, we should save people first and then the Earth, rather than the other way around. If any policy injures people in favour of the name of the environment, it gets scrapped. People first, planet second. A nice simple mantra.

Some environmentalists actually do think that’s already the priority but the boots on the ground reality is the other way around. Environmental policy is pushing the poor of the developed world into things like fuel poverty and butchering its way through the defenseless in the developing world. The victims know that too. As a typical example, read the article on VAD below, but there are lots of other instances.

Replace food staples with biofuel crops and let the food riots begin. Refuse to let the developing world have access to better GM seeds, and let the crops fail. Let them starve. Don’t allow them funds to build power plants, leave them without light and heat. Don’t let them have access to DDT, let millions die needlessly of malaria every year. The list is endless but the common denominator of them all, is spending lives to save the Earth from various perceived but illusory threats.

Explicitly and publically swapping the priority in this way is not some sort of optimistic stab at a solution on my part. If you really want to protect the environment, then that’s actually the only way of achieving it, especially if you want to get the developing world on board. One of the key reasons why the whole green project failed, was that the developing world not only distrusted it, but always despised it for its rank hypocrisy. It’s the people of the developing world who are on the bleeding edge of environmental policies. That’s why they torpedoed Copenhagen and every annual climate clam bake since. They’ll do the same to any future ones too, unless there’s a sea change in the politics of the environment.

When the ordinary person is prosperous and feeling good, it gives them the time, the leisure and the disposable wealth to care about things beyond life’s essentials. It’s not difficult to get them interested in the environmental fundamentals such as clean air and water, and conservation of endangered flora or fauna.

Conversely, when people are hungry, desperate or under economic stress, care for the environment drops to the very bottom of their list of concerns. Every honest opinion poll in the developed world has been showing this since the recession began. In the developing world, if desperate people need heat and light, they’ll keep doing things like burning every tree in sight until there isn’t a single one left, Haiti being an extreme and terrible example of the latter.

If what people in poverty need to do to get by, is trash the environment, that’s exactly what they’ll do and they’ll be right as well. People first, planet second. If you are seriously expecting them to do anything else, you really need to park your ideological baggage on one side for a moment and really think – this argument is a no brainer. When you stress people, they go back to basics – they’ll look after themselves and their dependents and to hell with you and your tender environmental concerns. You’re the one living in cloud cuckoo land, not them.

Using that simple change in priority, there are many obvious quick win policy changes which could easily be put in place. Simply abolishing the lavish subsidies enjoyed by the renewables gravy train, would stop the money transfer from the poor to the already rich, and lift hundreds of thousands out of fuel poverty in the developed world. When you’ve been backed up against the wall and can no longer afford to heat your home, you don’t much care about the environment.

In the developing world, the changes are mainly in the area of food and health. In the short-term, we can quickly implement policy changes, which while they may result in a lot of professionally offended people being knee-deep in the blood of sacred cows, will save a lot of lives.

We need to give real help in fixing the root causes of problems rather than just mitigating their effects. They need access to cheap GM seeds that are drought and disease resistant. We need to stop growing bio fuels, to bring back down the price of food staples. They need access to things like DDT, so they can get rid of malaria, like we did half a century ago.

The big thing which is needed, and will bring on prosperity, is electricity. So much of the developing world is rich in minerals and ores. Africa, for instance, has 4% of the world’s coal. Let’s help them build generation plants. Whatever your view on that, what is obvious is they will build those plants in the end, because renewables are a laughably inadequate option for the developing world. It’s only by building real infrastructure that prosperity can come about.

When people are lifted out of grinding poverty, then they’ll be inclined to consider the environment, never mind the planet.

Longer term, we have two other problems closer to home facing us, neither of which have any simple solutions, but both will have to be addressed at some point. The commonality they share is rehabilitation.

The first one is rehabilitating environmentalism. Like every global warming skeptic out there whom I’ve ever talked with, I was and still am an old-fashioned environmentalist. Like a surprising number of them, I was there at the start, doing my part in preventing the needless and wanton destruction of nature, because I loved it.

We human beings are not some new suddenly discovered strange creature living outside the food chain, we’re part of it and always have been, part of nature and that’s what every true hunter celebrates with every kill. Everyone in the whole chain has to eat. We all have to get by. Believing anything else is a dangerous and decadent self-indulgence, which only people fundamentally out of touch with nature could have come up with it. That’s how we got into this situation in the first place.

The political monstrosity environmentalism mutated into now threatens to lose some of the ground that was gained in the seventies and eighties. I’m not sure what can be done to mitigate that damage except rebranding it to something new like stewardship of nature, but I fear the damage runs deep. It’s by now a tainted brand. People are deeply cynical nowadays about anything to do with the word environmental. Two decades worth of damage in the popular psyche, I’m afraid.

The environmental movement has only itself to blame, and like a lot of people who actively supported its genesis, I must take my fair share of blame. We took our eye off it and allowed it to be hijacked by the gangrenous and rotting stump of left of centre western political extremism in the aftermath of the collapse of soviet communism. Once they’d done that, it was easy to suck in the fashionable but feckless sons and daughters of the well-to-do middle classes, especially in the midst of an unusually long economic boom. Just dangle a righteous cause in front of their noses, in just the right way, to give their lives some shadow of a grand mission, and leave the rest to their youthful enthusiasm and entitled nature.

The coming battle for the real soul of environmentalism, I leave to my children and their’s, because that’s what I see as the timeframe of that particular struggle. But, by the time they walk onto the field, what will constitute what’s left of the environmental establishment will be institutionalised, moribund and I think, fairly easy to knock off its perch. It’s already looking distinctly shell-shocked.

The next one that’s going to need some rehabilitating is science, but fortunately the position on that one isn’t so dire. This may come as a bit of a shock to all you scientific lads and lassies out there, but the common person has always taken what any scientist says with a pinch of salt, and that’s even if they can be bothered to listen. As soon as they hear that magic opening phrase – scientists have said that – they tend to switch off. It’s a real tribute to the standard of science education around the world.

It’s not actually as strong a brand as its adherents like to believe. Amongst the self-declared intelligentsia – yes, among ordinary people – no. That’s why it was always the sons of the well-to-do middle classes saying they’d lay down their life to save Mother Earth, never a son of the working classes. It was that hidden stripe of retro class politics running through the whole thing.

That was always a flaw in the idea of hijacking science, or to be more exact, hijacking climate science, in the name of doing some re-engineering of society. Despite what people might think, science isn’t actually too important to the common person. A major facet of the climate wars was the vicious dog fights over the science, but what you’ve really got to take on board is that the vast majority of people never had a dog in those fights. They didn’t even watch them. You know, it was just bebop Jazz to them, some modern composers making terrible diatonic noises, crashes they couldn’t hear any damn point in, Kraftwerk at their inexplicable worst. You just can’t dance to the stuff.

Sorry about that, but scientists are actually not that significant to the ordinary man in the street.

If there was a single effective result from those fights, it was wresting the scientific heights out of the hands of the alarmists, which gives the politicians the authority to say the science is far from settled. It simply created that crack in the establishment consensus, that room for manoeuvre, which they will use. The alarmists signally never ever came close to proving their case, and for me that was science at its glorious best. It’s pure Missouri – show me. Proof talks, bullshit walks. Science is a harsh mistress, as the alarmist scientists have found out.

The one thing we must not allow to happen, is to win this war, and by default leave a policy vacuum there. Let it drift without direction and leadership, and it’ll be taken over by the same sort of venial creatures we’ve just beaten. It’s obviously not over, but it’s undoubtably heading in that direction and now is the time for what few real policy leaders we have, to start thinking about what comes next and make some sound proposals.

Too much damage has already been done. What we need now is a confident and timely take up of the policy initiative.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The decline of the environmental lobby’s political influence.

How environmentalism turned to the dark side.

The big green killing machine: What is VAD?

Time, our secret weapon.

Click for a list of other articles.

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Starvation and heat will do that to you. They both slowly grind you down. As each family eventually arrived at the table, the girl stamped their hands with indelible ink and gave them a food voucher, which they took over to the relief lorries. There it would be exchanged for a small bag of rice, enough to keep them going for a day or two. Squeeze it, mebbe three.

They were starving. The rains had come too late to prevent what pitiful crops they grew withering away. They still grew the same shit poor varieties that came out of Mesopotamia thousands of years ago; none of your GM drought resistant seeds for them. That stuff wouldn’t be in their best interests, their betters in far away foreign lands had decided for them.

They all had their children with them, so they could get extra rice for each one. No kid, no extra voucher, no excuses. Show me the kid, then you get the rice. The children, even the babies, got their hands stamped too. It was a nice simple system that quickly portioned out the food, while making sure nobody got more than their fair share. They’d warned them in advance, anyone with a severed hand would get nothing.

A particularly gaunt woman carrying a swaddled up baby in her arms, arrived at the table. There was something in her manner that alerted Mac straight away. She seemed to be calm, happy and totally disconnected from the whole situation. He’d seen that before; the walking dead. It was a sort of final outward burst of light before the candle winked out forever; the last spark of the soul. She smiled serenely at the Danish girl as her hand got stamped. The Danish girl reached over for the baby’s hand to stamp it too. The mother unwrapped the baby’s arm and leaning over the table, offered it for stamping. The woman smiled, proud as any mother is to show off their baby.

The whole arm was starting to decompose, you could already see tiny white bones. Lovely white bright bones really. Miniatures.

The Danish girl froze, unable to react. The woman said something and held the baby’s hand out a bit more urgently; she was getting ready to fight for her baby’s bag of rice. Mac reached across the Danish girl and picking up the stamp, held the baby’s hand and stamped it gently, very gently and carefully. It was as light as the most tender lover’s kiss. He gave the mother two food vouchers and pointed her towards the trucks. She wrapped up her baby again and walked off slightly huffed. She, like her baby, would be dead before the sun came up and the hungry would soon find the two bags of rice. That’s just the everyday brutality of famine.

The Danish girl turned to look up at him. She still looked to be in shock. Before she could say anything, he smiled at her, rubbed her cheek with the back of his curled fingers and nodded at the line of people still waiting. Mac knew simply touching, tapping and sometimes just hitting people hard, snapped them out of shock. With her, just a touch would do. His forefinger extended across her cheek and onto her lips sealing them, giving her an out from having to talk, to having to come out with an explanation right this very minute. They’d talk about it later. ‘You’ve got a lot more customers, just keep going’ he said. She gave him that trusting look he’d grown to know, and got back to stamping hands and handing out vouchers. Good for you, girl. The routine soon settled her back down.

The afternoon wore on and more and more people drifted in, to take their place at the end of the line. Pretty soon, the tension started to build. Mac could see them doing the calculation as the line shuffled forward. Would there be any rice left for them by the time their turn came? As the numbers swelled, he knew the answer to that one and so did they.

He could hear the voices starting to be raised as the fights broke out in the distance and could see the back of the line starting to splinter and disintegrate, as people fought each other to get nearer to the front. The end of what used to be a line, became a growing black triangle moving inexorably in their direction. The wave of desperation was coming towards them like a burning fuse. People nearer the front turned to look back over their shoulder to see what was going on.

He watched it developing for a few moments before making up his mind. Mac casually unslung the weapon from around his shoulder and seemed to be idly fiddling with it but he was really just getting it into his hands, flicking the safety off and turning the fire selector over to fully automatic – putting it on crowd control. Rock and roll mode.

He leaned over and spoke quietly into her ear. ‘We’re out of here. Just stand up quietly and walk to the trucks. Don’t run.’ She didn’t understand, turning to look at him quizzically. He repeated it in German, a language he knew she was far more comfortable with than English. She didn’t appear to understand and went back to processing the next one.

He squeezed her shoulder just hard enough to hurt her, to feel her bones, to get her attention and hissed ‘We have to get out of here.’ She was a lovely kid but simply didn’t have the awareness to see what was happening right in front of her. He grabbed her upper arm firmly and dragged her forcibly to her feet.

Just get up girl. She finally saw the riot exploding towards them but reacted by going into shock, stiffening up and refusing to do anything. She fell over but he needed one hand on the gun, so he grabbed at whatever he could get at, which was her hair and dragged her along. Come on girl, help me fucking out here. Get up, kick your legs or at least get angry. Come on, come on. He shouted and pleaded at her as he tried to get her upright and moving.

The crowd surged at them and he opened up with some careful bursts over their heads. Nobody was going to get killed. He wasn’t here to do anything like that. Just back out of there and share the threat around to keep them at bay. Show them the eye contact and show them you will very definitely kill them. It’ll all be okay. You can control this thing.

No, you had what was left of the food and you looked to be running away – they had to make a try for it and you were just someone between them and it.

It all went rapidly to shit.

He was zapping people just to keep them back but while their frustration couldn’t get to him, it got to the trailing edges of her. Christ help me here. Please. Slowly but surely, in the ferocious slowmo fashion of all truly nightmarish things, they chopped her to pieces. They got to the bits he couldn’t protect. Too many people, not enough bullets, too much fright, even on Mac’s part. She began to do a lot of screaming but even then, wouldn’t struggle for her life and now it was down to personal survival. His survival. Fight girl, please God, please God, please just fucking fight. In the end, she called out to him just once using his name, but it was only her way of giving up and saying goodbye to him and whether she knew it or not, releasing him out of there to live.

Silence. White silence.

Some decisions are simple and they’re shit. He let go of that hunk of hair, backed for the truck and hoped it was still there. It was, and letting go of her distracted them just long enough. They fell on her like avenging wolves and ripped her to pieces, because she was a lot easier than you to work out some rage on. He saw that, and it would be chiseled into the granite of his memory forever. While they chopped her up as a distraction, he got away.

Mac simply murdered his way to safety and out of there. Come near me, I will fucking kill you. Guaranteed. And he killed all comers, killed them indiscriminately.

It’s the morning of the next day and there’s a lot of people running around. And that’s all they’re doing. They’re just running around. There’s not much sense to the activity and Mac’s just been sitting there on the bench, looking at various people flashing by and talking very seriously about “our” people. One of them even comes up to him and Mac thinks he’s so young and earnest, he should be out there somewhere delivering newspapers or offering you investment advice, which you know you can safely ignore.

A muscle in Mac’s right thigh starts to twitch uncontrollably and he resists the impulse to hammer his heel up and down like a mad drummer in a rock group. He puts his hand on it and presses down hard. It seems to help.

The kid’s got some great job title and he’s talking at Mac ever more stridently to get his attention, as if to make some big grandstand point at head office and Mac watches his mouth open and close silently, like an unusually fast-talking goldfish, but Mac’s thinking about a binary option. If he wasn’t so tired, he could just simply reach out and snap his entire fucking head off. The kid suddenly realises option one is just Mac going postal, which starts with Mac ending him, just to shut him the fuck up.

A wonder to behold, he does have some sort of rudimentary survival instinct. He suddenly goes quiet and buggers off, so Mac gets left alone to stew and they all walk around him very carefully until they need him in for the inevitable meeting. Mac’s waiting patiently, because he’s exhausted, got nowhere better to go to, and knows why in the end, they’ll want him in there too. We all have to do penance for our sins and Mac feels he deserves his nose rubbed in the terrible consequences of his actions. Well in.

It’s been a disaster and they all know it. He was the one person who argued from the start that it couldn’t be anything other than a bad idea to go in unarmed and understrength and yet, and yet he rigged up for the gig, because he thought he might still be the one who could keep control of the whole damn thing. What an arrogant fool he’d been. The sin of pride. He got them all killed. He’d known in his heart that this one was going to go all over the joint, but he’d gone along with it.

They’d still trusted him to look after them and now they’re all dead. He should have held a gun on them, rather than giving them a false sense of security by going along with the bloody stupid madness. His mouth should have reflected exactly what was in his head – I will shoot anyone who’s stupid enough to try trucking into this spectacularly bad idea. He’d ended up shooting innocent people anyway. Men, women and probably a few children. When you blast away, who counts the hits? He’d need some fucking satellite imagery to sort out his exact share of the body count. Mebbe he could get an independent number from Amnesty International.

His mind was all over the place but he no longer cared.

They do the emergency meeting and it’s all about rescuing people but Mac’s the only one in the room sitting there with dried blood spatters on him. They talk on and on, and eventually he leans back on the chair, and it’s somehow an act of God, that he tilts his head over the back of the thing and stares at the ceiling. It releases him. There’s no sky, ciel or himmel there but the message is writ large across it. It’s an acceptance that this is the last meeting, the last round table and the last of anything he’ll ever do with any of these people, because their best intentions are just as lethal as their worst. God save us from our friends.

From now on, he’ll do his own thing but they’re still yapping on about a rescue mission. Shit, what do they think this is, some fucking Hollywood movie? They’re magically going to find people alive after hundreds of starving people have worked off all that rage about their impending death on a few well-fed whites?

It’s not that they’re stupid or ignorant, it’s just that they’re in that middle channel between both those faults, and won’t get out of it. They simply have no idea what desperation can do to people. As the one person in the room who didn’t have their thumb up their arse in terms of organizing a “rescue” mission, he started putting it together. He was tired, exhausted but he knew he’d do it. One more whack, once more into the breach, one more carry for the Gipper, but this is definitely the last hop with these people, with any people. It’s going to be Mac by himself from now on.

They got back there, and this time around, Mac got as many guns as he wanted, carried by as many bodies as they could scrape together and put out into the field. No swinging dicks carrying lots of firepower, no rescue mission. They arrived in force. Of course, by the time they got back there, everyone had run away. It’s natural, nobody wants to be punished, whether they did anything or not.

No Siree Bob, there are no survivors. They started humping what’s left of the bits of them up onto the trucks. There’s a man and he’s talking at Mac. At a guess, Mac thinks he’s Swedish from the cadence and speaks their usual excellent but stilted English. His mouth is going at a rate of knots but his eyes look at Mac desperately. He still wants to believe in his comfort blanket fantasy of some innate third world superior decency. You know, that usual bollocks about the ennobling effect of grinding poverty and the delusion of calmly accepting death by something as brutal as slow starvation, without ever kicking back. Oh to live in his lovely little world.

Most people do not go gladly into that good night; they fight tooth and nail every damn inch of the way. He’s learning what hunger and desperation can really do to ordinary human beings. Both of those things are probably outlawed in Sweden. It’s such a wonderfully civilised country.

It’s really just a fucker for him that this ain’t Sweden.

He tells Mac the bodies are showing an extraordinary amount of predation and he’s looking to him for assurance it was animals which did it. Mac can see he needs him to do that. No, Mac simply refuses to help out with that one. You can’t confuse cut marks with bite marks, and they both know that. Mac looks at the poor bastard but can’t bring myself to do that final betrayal of her. She deserved so much better. They all did but they didn’t get it.

No more fudging, no more lies. From now on, everyone gets the unvarnished truth. It gets told like it is and screw everyone’s tender sensitivities.

He thinks of that Danish girl and no more half measures. She had dark hazel eyes, to match her hair, and he keeps seeing the trusting gaze of them resting on him. He can’t take it and turns his face away and resolves to get drunk to somewhere way beyond the marches of oblivion that night, before he gets out of there for good.

Never again.

From now on, he’ll do things his own way. No more toned-down, well-intentioned team player. He’s now a made man. A heavily motivated man, locked in way too tight to ever disengage. Just cauterise the stump, tie this bad operation off and get the hell out of there. He’s going to have to take a long time out to think it all through, but one thing he already knows, a whole new approach is required.

What happened was the end result of good intentions and ignorant policies, supposed to help out the most needy human beings. It was an incident, a moment, a misjudgment, a fading memory, something long forgotten, and it actually doesn’t matter any more. It now means nothing. They’re all gone. Pretty much, everyone involved is dead, and not long after it all occurred. A bag of rice can only keep a person alive for so long. Mostly, they all sit now with God in paradise, like that nice but cruel song says.

As terrible as it sounds, they were becoming part of Mac’s learning curve. He thought about it. No more treating the wounds. From now on, he’d go after the shooters, and he was a shooter himself, but a different kind of one.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Is there a moral dimension to being anti-environmental?

The big green killing machine: What is VAD?

The real doh! about Doha.

Click for a list of other articles.

—-<0>—

Electricity is available to many people at the touch of a button, so more people live in greater comfort and security than ever before in mankind’s time on earth.  Without electricity life is very basic, and then your life resembles that of a medieval peasant.  Despite this boon, people have started to yearn for ‘the simple life of the past’.

This nostalgia is played on by self-appointed “prophets”, some of whom may be sane, making various doomsday predictions and impossible demands.  Decarbonize the Earth! Renewable energy! Sustainable buildings! Local food supplies!  Many of these phrases are incapable of definition, yet the response is Pavlovian, although drooling is optional.

These self-appointed prophets claim that sunlight and the wind can generate “clean, green and sustainable” energy.  The methods that have worked to make electricity for over 100 years are unacceptable. Coal and oil-fired plants emit carbon dioxide, and while nuclear and hydroelectric don’t, they get ruled out because they’re too cheap and affordable.

The basis on which these dreams depend is wind power.  Used in Denmark, Spain, Germany and increasingly in the UK.  A number of claims are made about cheapness, reliability etc. designed to mislead the gullible and the unwary.

Wind power is claimed to be the cheapest method to build, usually with figures showing the same capacity of wind as a coal-fired power station is cheaper.  The trick is in the word, or as Humpty Dumpty put it, “it means whatever I want it to mean”.  A coal-fired power station can run at 100% capacity, as and when wanted, whereas wind turbines deliver only 20-25% of their claimed capacity on average.  So you need 4 or 5 thousand to ‘replace’ a conventional power station, yet you still won’t get that power when you want it.

Why is their output so low?  Firstly, they don’t operate all the time, as can easily be seen if there is a wind farm within view.  Turbines don’t work in soft winds, nor in high winds, when they are shut down, if not blown down. They only make a noticeable amount of electricity about 35% of the time.  To counter this, the advocates claim we just have to add more wind farms, because the wind will be blowing somewhere.  Study after study has refuted this, although none with the wind farms spaced more than 1500km. apart.  So assume the UK will have a smooth supply once it is connected to Mongolia.

Then there is the claim that wind doesn’t use fuel, so must be cheap.  This relies on people not knowing that coal is only 10-12% of the costs of a normal power station.  Elementary economics says that those turbines have to pay for themselves, and their very high maintenance costs, by the amount of electricity generated. If the cost to build a wind farm is 4 times that of similar output in a conventional plant, then free fuel makes little difference.  The real cost of wind power is 3-4 times that from coal, as can be seen by the rise in electricity prices as it is introduced.

Every so often some zealot rises to his hind feet and claims that wind is cheaper than coal or gas.  Does it mean that subsidies for wind are no longer needed? Apparently the zealot, like St. Augustine, would prefer the divine gift to be delayed.  Spain has discovered that when the subsidies are higher than the cost of diesel fuel, solar cells will generate electricity at midnight.   Another renewable miracle!

Consumers are starting to realize that the more wind farms, the more their power bill rises.  Denmark led the race to the highest prices in the world, and Germany, which used to have cheap electricity from coal, now has wind and equally expensive power.

Then there is the no CO2 emissions claim, but this too is a “Humpty Dumpty”. The problems of varying supply are all loaded onto the conventional generators.  When wind isn’t working (most of the time) conventional plants have to supply.  When wind is working some of them have to be shut down rapidly to avoid oversupply and blackouts.  The usual  way of responding to changes in the wind output is Open Cycle Gas Turbines which are fast enough to come ‘on line’ as the wind drops, and quick enough to stop when the wind blows, so maintaining a smooth supply.   They are cheap to build, expensive to run, and give off lots of CO2.   Since they cover for the 75% that wind farms don’t supply, their emissions should be, but aren’t counted as caused by wind.  If by some impossibility, the UK relied exclusively on wind farms and OCGT, there would be very little cut in CO2 emissions. 12,000 wind turbines haven’t enabled Germany to close one coal-fired power station, rather they are building more.

The Danish wind farms can only operate because they are connected to Norway, Sweden and Germany.  Surplus electricity can be exported and shortages covered with imports, like hydro, or nuclear from Sweden or coal-fired and nuclear from Germany, so claims that Denmark is “nuclear free” are nonsense.  The CO2 emissions from those imports aren’t counted, yet despite its large wind industry Denmark has one of the highest emission rates per head in Europe.   The Danes are facing difficulties; the increasing number of wind farms is straining the system, so at times some wind farm operators (with older turbines) have to pay to have their electricity used.  Newer turbines come with a shut down feature to prevent that destabilization happening.

The trouble with renewable sources is that they are variable and unpredictable.  You don’t know what they will deliver at some future time.  How much electricity will all the wind farms in the UK deliver on, say, January 12^TH or February 5^TH 2014?  Very little, if the last 5 years in the UK are any guide.  Anyway, wind farms can’t do without the grid; they must be connected at all times or they stop working.  The turbines need a small supply of electricity to act as a standard reference, and use electricity to rotate the nacelles into the wind.  In light conditions wind farms can actually use more electricity than they generate.

Renewables are an addition not a substitute.  To ensure continuous supply means that there has to be enough capacity in conventional generation to supply demand if the wind isn’t blowing.  So why build wind farms if all they do is push up the cost, and make the system unstable?  In the UK wind farm companies are paid for NOT making electricity, a measure of how much a sudden surplus of wind power can destabilize the system.

A little bit of wind power is bearable, if expensive. More, and the grid becomes unstable and blackouts occur ‘in the blink of an eye’.  Few consumers like their heater, TV, lights and computer not working for 3 days or so, yet some morons has come up with a “solution” for too much wind – deliberate blackouts using ‘smart meters’.  When that day comes, they should be connected to the terminals, wondering when the power will come back on.

That and the higher cost affects the less well-off; hundreds of thousands of germans have had their power cut off because they can’t afford it.  In the UK the grim statistic was 4,000 excess deaths in March among those who couldn’t afford to keep their home warm.  When General Pinochet was in charge in Chile the official death toll was 3,090.  Pinochet was excoriated by the Left.  Will there be the same outrage from the Left about these deaths?

Will the architects of this murderous policy,  Ed Millibrand or Chris Huhne, be called “many times worse than Pinochet”?  Both are wealthy and obviously care not for “the little people”.  Will there even be an official Inquiry?  Put in place by another millionaire M.P. like David Cameron?  The answer is blowing in the wind.

Those who are nostalgic for the past, should learn rather from Charles Mackay in 1841.

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”

©Graeme No.3

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They’re the distracted ones either living unwittingly on an unusually extended oxygen line of protective parental love or despite but because of parental stupidity, just about hanging on to the frayed tatters of their sometimes ruined childhoods. It can be a difficult row to hoe at times. I couldn’t do it.

She has that intuitive ability to get in touch with them and slowly inveigle them back into some sort of coping with the real world as it is. She gently brings them out of themselves, and gives them the confidence to re-engage with the grown up struggles of their lives. It’s the sort of emotional seduction that only a true empath can do.

Somehow, she breaks through and gets across to them that they’re okay, and everything will work out fine in the end, but in the meantime, let’s us work together on these squiggly letters. Sometimes that prediction is not likely to be true, and she knows that, but if it perhaps turns out to be wrong, it’s giving them a little shard of feel good about themselves, that the child needs to get them through the rough times ahead. Where there’s scant love about, sometimes children just need the hope of it. Some kids tear your heart open. Like I said, I couldn’t do her job.

It actually took a while for me to realise that all along, I was in some ways another one of her long-term but more exasperating projects and boy was that a bit of a surprise. So much for me being actually in control of anything. Subtlety wouldn’t be my natural strong suit, but while it takes a while, I do get there in the end. Because she cared for me, she was quietly centering me and to put it quite bluntly, civilising me.

She’s taught me innumerable useful things; pleases and thank youse, dragging a comb through my hair once in a while, it’s mebbe okay sitting with your back to the door when you’re at home, and a knife and fork were actually there to eat meals with, rather than just being casual weapons of opportunity you automatically clocked the locations of.

She is the huge factor in my life and our children’s lives, but while she’s helped me get along through some of the more difficult situations of a life, there are aspects of my personality that I choose not to have mediated, mollified or mitigated. They’re the essential me, whether good or bad. They’re the bits that got me through some shadowed valleys and I really don’t want fiddled with. She’s accepted that and it’s a part of the respect we pay each other, who even though we’re married, are still individuals.

You see, it’s actually okay to be a bit awkward, to be different. It’s your nature, and as you mature, you learn it can be an asset rather than a hindrance. It’s not as if you’re some sort of homicidal maniac, but you do take your own view on things, whether right or wrong. That’s the one sneaking doubt I’ve got about my woman’s work – it’s that strange oddness in perhaps one or two of the special needs kid which might produce the grand unified theory and she might be inadvertently hoovering that out of them. Some of their topsy turvey daydreams might just prove to be useful.

Nice people do nice things, and while I like them for that kind aspect of their nature, I also know I’m not one of them. At times when being nice simply won’t cut it – what’s needed is a necessary type of person. Sure, I’d always prefer to be as nice as pie, but when circumstances merit it, I’m prepared to be not so nice.

It’s the first reaction of nice people to discuss things, to sit down and talk things through with a someone who’s being totally unreasonable. They’re certain a workable accommodation can be reached. That’s nearly always a good thing except when you’re dealing with an elemental aggressor, because that’s exactly what they’re relying on you to do.

It’s the common failing of nice people to realise too late that they were all along dealing with someone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about reasoned discussion – they just want to win and they’re not choosy about which means or methods they’ll use to achieve that simple end. While all the well-intentioned discussions were going on, you were just being played and what’s worse, you’ve probably given away the whole damn shop.

But, let’s be more honest here and admit why such civilised discussions are initiated with people whom everyone can plainly see are nothing better than jumped up street corner thugs with soaring ambitions – it was supposed to be the nice people seizing the higher rational ground and consequently feeling better about themselves for having made that effort. Your hands are washed clean and you’ve weaseled out of any unsightly slugging matches with them.

I’m sorry but we all know that on too many occasions, that’s just a certain lack of backbone dressed up as an intellectually defensible position. A cojones-free zone. It’s covering your ass for posterity, but where does that leave the people you were supposed to be talking for, or the ones you appointed yourself to speak for? 

You see, it’s the awkward and edgy nature of not so nice people, which produces stuff that gives people pause for thought. That’s the nature of the beast and some things can’t be tamed, no matter how many times you zap them hard with your cattle prod, but even more tellingly, no matter how hard you love them. It’s in their nature, it’s welded deep down into their primeval DNA. If you could possibly take that out of them, they’d just waste away in front of your eyes. You’d lose them. Put an Apache in a prison cell, they just die.

We’re not particularly smarter than anyone else, usually not as stylish, rarely much richer, but we do tend to be making moves. If there’s something we think is wrong, we’ll not only say that, but take the next step from bitching on about it from the sidelines – we’ll try to do something about it, irrespective of the odds. This blog is a move. There’s too much restless spirit and way too many questions you can’t get anything other than a slippery answer to.

GB Shaw noted that the reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself, the corollary being that without unreasonable men, no progress would be made. Once you get past how slick it sounds, there’s a lot of truth in it. So much of what now passes for orthodoxy usually started off as heresy, and as we all know as climate heretics, it’s never a populist position, but we were right all along.

If you want peace, prepare for war, because that’s how you prevent wars from ever breaking out in the first place – a saying commonly attributed to Julius Caesar but just as true today as it was two millenia ago.

Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Saddam Hussein – you stand up to them and you save lives. You don’t, you’re staring down into that big ole megadeaths pit. One hundred and fifty million lives lost in the wars of the last century, and in nearly every case, for lack of the backbone to stand up to and face down a megolomaniac lunatic.

It’s that basic lesson we’ve all learnt dealing with the local school bully, with any bully. You give in to them, they always hustle you harder and take more. You stand up to them, they run away and look for an easier pushover they can prey on.

In exactly the same way, the massive failure or should I say the outright cowardice, on the part of too many people whose real job it was to question the whole global warming bandwagon, has inflicted pain and suffering on the most vulnerable people, both here and in the developing world. There’s real blood on hands.

Around the world, the whole global warming scare is imploding and it’s happening at an increasing pace. We skeptics played a supporting role in that, but it is the economics of hard times, rather than us bit players, that is actually killing it off.

Across the whole spectrum of the thing, people are repositioning themselves furiously to get away from the craze, the love that no longer dares speak its name. Politicians, moneymen, establishment science, journalistic integrity-free tarts and pretty much all the various stripes of carpetbagger. The instruments carbon markets were trading have collapsed below junk bond status. Everyone is bailing out, because the gravy train has just derailed off the bridge and is dropping down into the gorge.

Everyone that is, except the big environmental organisations like Greenpeace or the WWF, but when their income stream dries up, they’ll wither on the vine to shadows of their former selves. Reputational damage and loss of political influence can do that sort of thing to you. They’ll deserve it too, because they betrayed their founding principles.

What we must not do now is have an attack of the nicey nices with them. They’re in the killing jar, they’re finally seeing that now and are going to start desperately flinging olive branches in our direction. They’re moving into stage three, the bargaining phase of the death rattle of their belief system. Work any offer ruthlessly, but don’t even dream of meeting them on some fabled middle ground. That doesn’t exist.

The bargaining scam, which they will get around to offering in the end, is some phony recognition of you, which is all they’ve got left to barter with, in the hope of appealing to your vanity, so you’ll hop into bed with them – at last, some recognition and respectability after all these years.

Every time you deal with them, develop the habit of looking hard at them and thinking back a few years to when you were being routinely compared to a holocaust denier. That’ll get your head right.

This is not the time to be nice with them.

©Pointman

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I’d considered very briefly a white water rafting type of break but when sanity prevailed and my woman, who I think should take me a little bit more seriously, had stopped slapping her sides at what I didn’t consider to be such an enormously big joke, my natural inclination towards indolence when relaxing won out in the end. Sitting out in the open air, putting in those hard final yards of drinking a few leisurely glasses of chilled wine, waving off the occasional beggar, or giving them a cigarette if they looked especially beaten down by life, is an equitable way to spend a few hours out in the square, with the sunshine whacking down from the heavens and splitting the trees asunder.

It’s bastard work, but someone’s got to do it.

Unlike a lot of people who work hard at things, I actually do know how to relax and have no guilty feelings about doing absolutely nothing for a few days. I enjoy doing bugger all and although I say it myself, I do it rather well as it happens. There’s even a touch of decadent but tattered elegance about the way I can slob around. We all have our little hidden talents.

Faint memories of my long dead Spanish are floating upward from the grave and in an attempt to get back into a Spanish mood, I’ve reread Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, after too long a passage of years. I tend to confuse Spanish with Catalan, Texmex, Franglais and Italian, any one of which could probably land me in some serious hot water around here at this time in my life, but for a host of different reasons. After all these years, the book reads a bit silly stilted English, which sounds these days so phony, to use his own ultimately condemnatory term, but it was as good and as sad as I remembered. It’s a fine old wine best drunk in your youth.

Hemingway comes with all the writer’s dreadful sins but he’s the sort of one you have to be fearful of and ration yourself to if you write yourself. He’d all too easily steamroller your own style if you weren’t careful. The bugger is that good when he’s on his game. I’ve moved on to John Coffey and his progress down the Green Mile. John could also break your heart if you weren’t careful. My wife has already fallen in love with the fable. Stephen King can write wonderfully well any time he chooses and he does have more hopeful stories than Hemingway, who it must be said wouldn’t recognise an upbeat ending if it wandered up and bit him on the arse in passing.

King can write the socks off pretty much all of his contemporaries but it plays to mediocre literary sensitivities to write him off as America’s latest but gross version of Edgar Alan. It doesn’t help his case that ordinary people don’t know any better and just buy his books by the cart load anyway. The no hopers and never wozzers of the literary world feel they have to sneer at good writers who can also make a handsome living at it – go figure. His own personal disaster is that he writes for the average reader, not the Literati, but then again, he’ll still be read when they’re long forgotten. You don’t need to have done the Lit Crit course to enjoy his work, which the average punter surely does. Anyway, back to Spain.

This is very much old Spain in terms of attitude, as my woman reminds me, and she can be a bit school marmy at times, probably because she is and I’m getting used to her reddening my wrists when I get out of line. Not sure I like it. I’m as usual a very norty boy and working my way up towards being a real badass. She’s right though, Spain is relaxed and easy. She’s the Spana veteran who’s actually lived and worked here and for a change, I’m just the dumb tourist blundering through the joint with eyes working away at twenty-four frames a second. The food is good, honest, fresh and unprocessed, which accounts for all these skinny Spaniards -  the obesity epidemic that everyone else in Europe is supposed to be worried about would starve to death in Spain, if the people in Andalusia are anything to go by.

I’m an eat to live type, rather than some sort of live to eat foodie, and when push comes to shove, I can usually get by on the occasional bit of roadkill if I have to, but even I have to admit I like the grub around here. Apart from the tapas from hell, they do the best Texmex outside the lone star state. It’s the one damn type of food I’m really partial to, which nobody born outside of Beaumont Texas can even cook properly anyway. That’s my own particular washed ashore geographic tragedy.

Some of the menus start with a section entitled, while you’re waiting, which is the hint hammer to visitors like myself – the service, like the food, isn’t fast and you soon get used to a more measured pace to life. There’s not much you can do in the way of hurrying things up, so you’ve just got to park your Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic or whatever frenzied work ethic you’re cursed with. Once you start to factor in more of a lead time for most, if not all activities, you’re getting into the swing of things.

The only other downside about the place is that everything here’s either broke or never quite worked properly in the first place. You name it, it’s either kaput or walking wounded. Pavements, cars, showers, anything electronic or anything silly enough to rely on a steady flow of electrons, people, most signposts with letters which could conceivably fall off, buildings, gravitrons, absolutely anything with marble cladding and even the trees. Strangely enough, some of them look like all scarred up heavyweight bruisers more than ready to finish the bout and you wouldn’t fancy getting in the ring with them either. They’re the sort of gnarly trees I respect.

It’s been here a long time, an old city, founded if rumour is to be believed by Hercules himself, well before that fricking new guy Jesus Christ appeared on the block. I’m writing this in a large, old, rectangular and uneven cobbled square delineated by four massive Doric columns, two of which are at each end, and all of which were old when my people weren’t even a tribe, never mind a nation. With the complete blissful disrespect of youth, the children know they make great goal posts for the eight or ten football games that are always going on with gangs of assorted nine-year olds – it’s no wonder they’re handy at soccer. The city’s been occupied for century after century by successive waves of conquerors, Roman, Moorish, Christian and more recently Borussia-Dortmund, Real-Madrid, ManU and pretty much every animal in between, so you’d naturally expect some degree of wear and tear. It’s a helluva city.

I’m going to genuinely miss the place when we leave.

I’m a lean burn sort of person. Once in a blue moon, I treat myself to some sort of folly and the most recent one is a pad computer. It’s about the size and weight of a paperback, fits into the back pocket of my knapsack and I’m pecking this piece out on it. There’s the usual old dogs and new tricks hurdle to get over with the thing but by this stage of my life I’m positively feeling like a magician. Once I turn off the useless predictive text, it’s actually quite easy to use.

Apart from loading it with free books courtesy of the Project Gutenberg site, music and a few movies courtesy of a few legally ambivalent sites, it’s been really useful turning around a few emails and doing some surfing. Having some leisure time, I’ve managed to read a lot more of both the sceptic and alarmist sites than I normally would. When you’re in a timeout zone from the routine of life, it gives you a chance to look at things afresh and some new thoughts occur about both of them. I’ll do the alarmists first.

Leaving aside the true believer alarmist sites for a moment, who are anyway incapable of evolving to address changing circumstances, the mainstream media alarmists in Europe are definitely repositioning themselves towards the middle ground. Even dear old Private Godfrey aka Geoffrey Lean at the London Daily Telegraph, is carefully airing his new-found doubts. I’ve never agreed with a single word he’s ever written, but I do get the distinct impression he’s got a kind if albeit silly heart.

As the illusory scientific consensus has crumbled, so has their second-hand authority to not only magnify the predicted Armageddons but also the ease with which they could dismiss any dissent from the one true path to Gaia’s salvation. It’s perhaps uncharitable of me, but I think those rumblings from the circulation bean counters are starting to get to them – Joe Punter is bored with climate scares, change the record or run the risk of getting zapped.

Instead of being committed eco journalists, they’re turning out to be fast five dollar floozies of negotiable virtue and climate alarmism, having just about used up its five spot with them, is by now well into its last ten cents. It’s a case of cheerio and thanks for all the fish, time to move on to the next little earner. That looks to be commenting with suitable gravitas on absolutely crucial but currently trending things like food shows or C list celebs betting their stalled careers on their ability to learn the pasa dobles.

It all sells I suppose but when it comes to that sort of inanity, I’m inescapably reminded of Oscar Wilde’s acidic comment about the sight of a dog walking on its hind legs, which while being interesting in itself, as he remarked, was hardly what one could term tasteful. It’s probably just me being snippy about celebrity culture, which if I’m to believe the mainstream media, the whole world appears to be crazy about, but thankfully, I’m not a part of their whole world. You’re the usual bad boy Pointy.

As for the extremist propaganda outlets, they’re exploding in the other direction at an increasing rate of knots. It’s all red shift. They’re ramping up the alarmism to unheard of heights and it’s very much the anger phase in the death of their belief system. They’re so busy shooting themselves in the foot, I think we can leave them to it for a spell and take what used to be called a Spanish pause. Relax, have a beer, smoke them if you’ve got them. They’re shouting evermore louder to get people’s attention back again but all that’s happening is they’re looking more and more extreme, which brings me round quite nicely to what I think is the change in tenor of the skeptic blogs.

Mostly, they’re laughing at the alarmists, or to put it more bluntly, taking the piss out of them. Sure, the usual bedrock stream of articles debunking the Manny Mouse science is there but increasingly there’s a feeling of flogging a dead horse – the science is so laughably crap, what the hell, you might as well have a lark and poke some fun at it. It’s not exactly us occupying the higher moral high ground but then they’re in such a shambolic situation, it’s in some ways a little bit more humane. However, finish up that beer, stub out that smoke, and let’s get back to work. We will have to harden our hearts and finish them off in the end.

At some point, that magic sea change in perception has come about, and increasingly they’re the ones not being taken seriously, rather than us skeptics. This new world is going to take a bit of getting used to, I can tell you.

In a deeper sense, the science isn’t just bad, it’s predictably and venially bad. It’s the sort of aberration one wouldn’t have thought could have occurred post the enlightenment centuries, but there you go. We’ve already had Eugenics and Lysenkoism, global warming wasn’t actually much different from them and was just a continuation of that same ignoble tradition. It’s just science prostituting itself for politics yet again.

Things like the hockey stick are thoroughly broken but they’re in a sad obsessive compulsive loop to get them reinstated, as if that’ll somehow magically bring back the good old pre-Copenhagen glory days. Patently, it can never do that, but you can see that’s exactly what’s in their head. They don’t seem to realise Elvis has left the building. He’s gone. He’s already back in Graceland and chawing on a burger.

As each successive and desperate Marcott or Gergis paper comes out, it’s just a matter of spotting which they’ve mugged; the data, the methods or both. To adapt a phrase from that baldy kid in the Matrix, there is no hockey stick. Once you know it’s all hokum, it’s just a matter of keeping your eye on the pea. They don’t appear to realise that, so they quite obligingly keep on rolling out papers we can shoot down in flames, to our own propaganda advantage. If they were actually as smart as they think they are, our task as skeptics would be a lot harder.

Humour is the weapon of choice every time when confronting fanatics, which is why the sceptics do it so well and the alarmists don’t even have the first clue about it. They’ve got a better chance of finding their butt blindfolded with both hands. The nearest they can get to it tends to be inadvertently saying funny things like global warming is actually manifesting itself as global freezing. Cold is the new hot, hot is the new cold, the sky is green and the grass is blue and so on. We’re deep, deep, into ye olde all of the people all of the time disaster.

I’ve just looked up the weather report for home, because we’re supposed to be heading back today. It says rain but the good news according to them is that temperatures should stay above zero for the next week. Jesus H bloody Christ on a chariot. It was April that Eliot called the cruelest month, wasn’t it? If I can’t get political asylum, I might try flinging a piece of the dropped off cladding through the front window of the Policia Local’s HQ.

There’s lots of it to hand and I can probably swing a repair deal about the window. I’ve this strange mutant talent of being able to hammer a nail in straight without losing a finger or an eye, which I figure could earn me a handsome living around here. At a push, I can even repair things.

I’ll just have to be careful not to hit any cops with my masonic green card though.

©Pointman

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Over and above that reason, I prefer to make my own moves. I did my time as a compliant victim of circumstances and have long ago chosen never to play that role again. I don’t do victim no more. In reality, that means I’m too antsy to wait and react to other people’s moves.

More importantly, I think that if you can express an honest idea in a way that finds a real resonance with the ordinary person, it’ll travel on its own steam out into the world and will either grow or perish on its own merits.

It’s my nature to strike out on my own and I’m not really too concerned about where a line of thought will take me. Writing it down is part of the rigour of exploring it. It’s part of a formal discipline of analysing and developing an idea in the direction it’ll most reasonably head towards. Sequential but simple rationality. That’s part of the adventure, a winding path into that undiscovered country from whose bourn I usually return.

After people have read enough of your output, they get to know you rather well, sometimes I’m afeared uncomfortably too well. I’m a lucky blogger in the sense that I don’t get two thousand comments on a piece, which cuts down on the moderation workload. Sure, I get my fair share of what can only be termed “interesting” comments, but mostly they’re witty or meaty, usually the latter.

I enjoy reading and thinking about them nearly as much as I enjoy writing the article. So often, they touch on an aspect or angle that should’ve perhaps been in the piece in the first place. They’re very much the reward for writing a decent article and in some ways round it off. In a larger sense, the original article and the commenters’ thoughts about it become the complete piece.

It helps the quality of the commentary that I operate a zero tolerance policy towards the trolls, maniacs, assorted personality defectives and attention deficit dunderheads who plague the blogosphere. I look hard at people on the way in but from then on, as long as their contributions are lucid, polite and hopefully fun, they can comment away. The economic dynamics of my life and the time it takes to write something decent, means that this blog will only ever be a once a week publication, which gives commenters that extra amount of time to mull over an article before adding their own thoughts.

To my mind, this place is just your local café or bar, where you can pop in on your way home from work for a coffee or a wind down drink, somewhere to spend ten minutes of your spare time at the weekend, and perhaps rather than just listening to the conversation, join in if the mood takes you, and have a laugh with the other regulars. That’s as much as I ask of any reader or commenter here.

I’m the barkeep and if someone insists on becoming a high-maintenance pain in the butt to me or the regulars, I just simply ban them. No games. I’ve neither the time nor inclination to play class prefect, so they can toddle along and be someone else’s problem. It saves a lot of messing around and anyway, they’re used to being chucked out of places in the end. It just happens to them sooner rather than later in Pointy’s Bar and Grill.

A thing that comes through in the comments on a regular basis, is people chiding me for my optimism with regard to exactly where we are in the climate wars and reminding me it’s not all over yet or indeed, that it’s possibly far from settled.

Before kicking around the question of my optimism, I have to mention a decision I made up front about this blog which has a bearing on this area. Because climate alarmism is a global phenomenon, I decided not to base the commentary in this blog solely from the viewpoint of the country I happened to have ended up in. I was born in a different country anyway. One of the main purposes of this blog is to identify and analyse global trends, but such trends obviously cannot be happening at the same pace or have reached the same stage in all countries.

Public sentiment can change very quickly. For instance, within the space of a year, the average German has gone from being arguably the biggest European believer in the green dream, to the most bitterly disenchanted. The idea of a number one best-selling book by a climate skeptic, would have been unbelievable not so long ago. What’s key is that while most countries of the developed world are at different points on that journey, they are all travelling on that same road, albeit at different rates.

On the charge of being an optimist, I’d have to put my hand up and say yes. Guilty as charged, M’Lud. Given any subject, one can be optimistic, pessimistic or neutral but on balance, I’d say I lean to the optimistic side on the majority of things, most notably in some areas where most people don’t commonly hold out much hope for any positive developments.

I’m an optimist for a number of reasons but before justifying why I am, I’d like to run over the reasons why I think being overly pessimistic is a worse way to view the world. More than anything, they justify my optimism.

Being pessimistic about most things is too easy a cop-out. It’s so often an excuse to sit on the sidelines carping away and doing absolutely nothing. At its best, it’s nothing more than the occidental version of eastern fatalism, and at its worst, a form of lazy cowardice.

If you don’t try, you’ll never run the risk of losing, or getting hurt. Well, newsflash, life is always about some measure of risk, and there’s simply no way of avoiding that reality. It’s not a case of nothing ventured, nothing gained, but rather by refusing to venture anything, there’s never any hope of ever gaining a damn thing. You’ll always be going backwards.

It’ll never topple that dictator, get bad policy reversed, an unfair law repealed, free an unjustly convicted person or simply lift that sports trophy, which will forever mean something to you and only you and your teammates who gave everything you had to win it. That’s the real trophy, not the piece of silvery covered plastic sitting on your book shelf. Once you decide the fight is lost, it’s not even worth taking the field against them, then they’ve won. You should be so much better than that. It often masquerades as realism, but to mind, it’s just passively accepting the status quo. When Darwin subtitled the Origin of Species as the Struggle for Existence, he was right on the damn money.

I’m afraid that struggle doesn’t take days off just for you, no matter how sophisticated or exacting your philosophy is. It’s not a matter of fairness or natural justice. There are no time outs, which are going to last your entire lifetime. There is no safe zone. No green zone. Sorry. Everything changes, always and forever. You will in the end have to ask some deep questions of yourself, struggle and fight for those you love and the things you love. It’s never been any different and it’s what we all do in the end for simple love of others and somehow paradoxically that very human frailty makes us immensely and frighteningly strong, so we thrive as human beings.

Pessimists need to look on the world with a better pair of eyes, if only because their view is a denial of that rough and ready spirit that’s got us through the worst that could be thrown at us for the best part of the last two hundred thousand years. We’ve looked after each other and survived through thick and thin. None of that was a spectator sport for decadents sitting on the sidelines.

Of course, you’ll meet someone or encounter a situation, and that primitive sixth-sense deep inside you starts ringing an alarm bell. You should never ignore that primordial warning signal, because it’s nearly always right.

Anyway, time for reasons to be cheerful.

Firstly I suppose it’s because I consider myself a realist. I see people and the world as they are, and don’t try to shoehorn them into some sort of doom and gloom, everything is bad, view of the world. Neither do I hold them to account against some impossibly high standard I’ve set for them, and condemn them when they inevitably fail to measure up to it. We all sweat, fart and belch, and we all like a game of hide the salami, and what on Earth is wrong with any of those activities? We’re human beings after all, not bloodless cyborgs.

At the same time, we’re all capable of great thoughtfulness, generosity, care and unselfish love. I’ve seen all those qualities come out in people when things were at their very worst, and sometimes from the ones I’d least expected it of.

I approach life on a basis of that simple reality, what I see in front of me every day, rather than some grand unified theory about people and life. Living your life according to one rigid standard or one view of everyone and everything is a simplistic cop-out. Taking the time to try to honestly understand someone or something is key, whether you like or not the conclusion you come to. It is what it is and that’s what you’ve got to work with. Pet theories get skewered by data every day – just ask any climate scientist. Deal with it Kiddo, and move on.

By now, it’s become obvious to even the most fervent true believer that the mass opinion of the world is changing its view fundamentally about things like the credibility of the science underpinning global warming, the self-proclaimed superior morality of environmentalism and the whole political subtext. Increasingly, people are not only resentful and suspicious of the whole package but idly wondering if it even has any relevance to anything that actually matters to them.

Cast your mind back a few years. There was not a single dissenting voice in the mainstream media. There was nowhere the ordinary person could go, just to get some answers to those nagging doubts about the whole damn proposition. Here’s the handcart, Hell’s thatta way, let’s all just push it along.

The only place where the issues were really being discussed, and perhaps some balanced answers could be found, was in some obscure backwaters of something called the blogosphere, which had these strange things called blogs. They all started with a zero budget, which remarkably they’re still working with. Big Oil was so busy financing Big Green, they wouldn’t even give the skeptics the steam off their piss. Even without the benefit of any advertising revenue, the skeptic blogs slowly grew on nothing more than the ordinary surfer posting links to them on other sites. We are talking your much fabled viral growth here.

They went from nothing a few years ago, to making a clean sweep of all the Science Blogging Awards last year and the breaking news is they’ve just grand slammed the science Bloggies for this year as well. Not one of those sites would ever have come into existence except for a streak of stubborn optimism in the individuals concerned. Give up and they always win; fight and you might just succeed, no matter how hopeless it looks at the start. They all soldiered on through some pretty bleak days, when there was little or nothing to encourage them, to these better ones and they continue to fight on now.

As an optimist, what I find truly offensive about climate alarmist is that unquestioned idea which underpins the whole murderous mindset; people are inherently evil and somehow despoiling Mother Earth. Environmentalism will somehow purify and cleanse the plague that we are. Like all the great obscene lies, the reverse is actually true; environmental policies in reality kill the most vulnerable people on the planet to save some nebulous future Nth generation of green children of Gaia. They’re essentially casting themselves as new age priests who can save us from killing the Earth. They play on people’s guilt over having a full belly and a decent life, the new age version of original sin, as all shamans and witch doctors have done from time immemorial, and as usual, it gives them status, power and money.

Get to know the true nature of your enemy, because most of the ones we have to take down are fighting for nothing more than to preserve those perks, not the good Earth. The dumb footsoldiers are totally irrelevant. As Darth said, stay on the leader. Get the headshots in, and the body will drop.

But it’s not just because of my person dislike of their nihilistic view of humanity that they cannot be allowed to exercise power and must be fought.

The big blood-letting is in the developing world, where things like the effective ban on DDT kills millions, the ban on GM crops slowly starves to death yet more millions, the use of land to grow biofuels rather than food staples ramps up the starvation, children go blind and die for lack of one bowl of golden rice. The list, like the numbers, is endless. It’s unforgivable genocide on an industrial scale.

Climate alarmism has killed millions of people across the globe and continues to do so every year, every month and every day but because it’s a slow motion genocide happening to faceless individuals living undocumented lives in hellholes on the other side of the world, the whole thing is invisible.

This brutal winter, and rampant fuel poverty in Europe driven by nothing more than greed and the stealth taxes of green energy policies, has brought the killing fields a measure closer to home. That particular type of killing I’d never foreseen nor expected to happen on our own doorstep but monsters have a habit of growing.

I and all the others who choose to fight that genocidal madness, know we won’t stop it in its tracks next Tuesday or next year or the one after that. Tick tock, tick tock, another needless death, and another, and another one. Tick tock, tickety bloody tock.

What optimism really means is never giving up. For me, the abiding and very optimistic point of blogging, if it means anything at all, is about introducing new ideas and viewpoints into the community of humankind, which will perhaps slowly change opinions, and that’s the slim hope you cling to and believe in.

What I’ve come to terms with, is what resistance you can do by blogging may perhaps stop it or at least blunt it a few weeks or a few days sooner – and that’s as good as it’ll ever get. It’s what I can do to mitigate the preventable tragedy and it drives me on ever harder. Blog it better, blog it harder and you may just pull it back by another single day or even an hour.

Perhaps a minute, but even that is a gain.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

The big green killing machine: What is VAD?

Our secret weapon.

Why hasn’t there been a real debate on climate science?

Is climate science just a belief?

Click for a list of other articles.

Incidentally, in the aftermath of the long drawn out and seemingly unquenchable PR disaster that climategate keeps turning out to be for UEA, there are rumours of them working hard on repairing their academic credibility. Given the alarums and excursions of the last few years, big donors have been noticeably gun-shy of the place. They’re sprucing up their academic credentials by trying to recruit some scholastic heavy hitters like Gergis, Marcott, Shakun and Lewandowsky. Apparently the University of Western Australia are actually very keen to let UEA have the advantage of the latter’s full-time services, and as quickly as humanly possible. It’s all going extremely well, but I do think them having to break the fait accompli to Lew will be the tricky bit.

In case you don’t know, the previous or second release contained another batch of emails in plaintext as well as all of the remainder, but in an encrypted archive. The third release is FOIA supplying the decrypt key for the archive to certain bloggers.

Why concentrate on the key’s recipients? There appear to be a number of reasons. The first would be that looking for FOIA would seem to be a fruitless exercise. The official police search for FOIA has been closed down and the statute of limitations applicable to any supposed criminal act in connection with the leak has run out. In the light of even what little whistleblower legislation exists in the UK, it’s actually highly debatable whether there’s a basis in law to proceed with a criminal charge in any case. At the end of the day, FOIA on trial would have been a disaster for the “cause” and still would be.

Having not been able to stop the release of the key, the point solution appears to be simply bringing in a legal goon squad to try to intimidate people who were sent the decryption key by FOIA. I’ve seen one of the goon squad’s communications with a blogger and I’d have to say, it’s marvelously vague, in the matter of all empty threats. The blogger is ominously warned against doing something which is never quite spelt out. The dire consequences of doing so, also not spelt out, appear somehow, well, mysteriously dire without actually being specific in any way. It’s all truly terrifying stuff, yawn.

As bluffs go, I’d caution the university against ever playing poker against anyone who doesn’t cycle around furiously delivering newspapers bright and early in the morning.

In terms of a response to a move by FOIA, when you take it apart, it’s pretty ineffectual, if not outright dumb. Even if it did actually succeed in silencing the bloggers, it would turn out to be a disastrous move, for reasons I’ll get to. Patently, the intention is to frighten bloggers out of publishing material from the decrypted emails. Let’s look at the range of responses to them resorting to the legal blunt hockey stick to bludgeon people into silence.

At a practical level, there are some quite intractable cross-jurisdictional problems about even bringing a legal suit. If the blogger is working out of a country strongly protective of the equivalent of First Amendment rights, otherwise known as free speech, then beyond some nuisance value, any case is a non-starter. Let’s just say for instance, they happened to be a blogger operating out of the US state of California, any decision to prosecute would have to be seen in the context of the failure to even indict the self-confessed identity thief and therefore a criminal, Peter Gleick.

The only thing worse for your reputation than being laughed out of court is being laughed at in court, and for one excruciating day after another.

You may not even have their real name, and while you’re trying to bully it out of their free blog provider and you’re getting the sort of co-operation you’d expect from someone, whose whole business model totally depends on big draw blogs exactly like the one you’re trying to get shut down, the blogger is busy replicating the piece across the entirety of the blogosphere, thereby putting it squarely into the fair comment arena for other bloggers. Your low-key but heavy-handed attempt to do a bit of intimidation has now itself become the big story.

You’re buggered at that stage, or given that we’re in the cyber space of the twenty-first century, why don’t we coin version 2.0 of that noble word - bloggered? Sort of suits, don’t it? Every time you come after a blogger, we’d just band together and make sure you got bloggered, as happened in the Tallbloke debacle.

If a blogger decides to publish in a fireproof way, whether anonymously or not, they hold all the cards because they have a huge number of ways of doing so. For instance, it’s the work of a few minutes to set up a free blog and upload it with your article. At your leisure, you can set up a further twenty or thirty duplicate blogs scattered geographically all over the world. Different blog providers, on different servers, in different countries with different laws. All you need to do then is pull the trigger, which is a single group email from a one-time email address to as many people as possible, giving them all the links to the blog article. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle and by that stage, there’s simply no way of getting it back in.

Even if you could get a blogger to trial, there’s the huge public interest angle, which you’ll have to find some way to deal with. A blogger publishes, UEA sues and a trial ensues. It’d be the Dreyfuss trial of the twenty-first century but it’d be that blogger rather than FOIA in the dock. Politically, it wouldn’t be the blogger on trial though, but rather the very integrity of climate science, and irrespective of a win, lose or draw verdict, I’ve got a pretty shrewd idea of which one would be found guilty in the court of public opinion, which is the only one that matters in an infowar.

Oh what a cause célèbre that would be. Blogger martyrdom in the name of free speech. The whole of the worldwide skeptic blogosphere rallying around to defend the poor blogger from the highly paid legal thugs of a supposedly pristine academic institution, the libertarians fighting for free speech and interesting groups like the nihilists or syndicalist-anarchists just getting stuck in for the chaotic hell of it. Appeals for a fighting fund, petitions, mugs, articles, blogs, T-shirts. Merchandise, merchandise, bring it on. Hit me with your rhythm stick. Hit me, hit me. Counter demonstrations outside the court with the inevitable clashes making the news, and we’re off. We’d make sure to take you on that trip, every damn embarrassing step of the way. Not a mud hole on the way to the final Circus Ludicrous would be missed.

That scenario can get even worse though. Having decided to make a cost-effective example of a single blogger to deter the others, what do you do if fifty more bloggers scattered all over the world decide to go with exactly the same material or even more material? You going to sue them all? An internet version of the I-am-Sparacus ploy. I think you’ll find that no matter how bullish you are about beating a single penniless blogger, the people charged with the university’s financial oversight might have a slight problem with the whole budget for the next five years disappearing into a multi-national legal black hole, from which any recompense, even in the very best case of a Pyrrhic win, would be negligible. I can assure you, a subsidised, never mind a rich skeptic blogger, is rarer than hen’s teeth.

There is only one single way in which that scenario could possibly play out biblically worse, and that’s if FOIA themselves decided to appear as a witness for the defense, and I wouldn’t put any money up against that eventuality – it’s the ace of spades in a greenie’s nightmare.

Not even UEA are thick enough to hand us a club like that, but you never know. Hope springs eternal, as Milton observed. It wouldn’t be the first time the climate clots have let hubris lead them by the nose into the self-inflicted wound zone.

One of the very few advantages we have is the usual guerrilla fighter’s nimbleness and when it comes to the climate wars, the internet is our jungle. By the time you’ve scheduled an emergency meet with the legal goon squad, got everyone with some sort of poodle in the fight into one room, listened to all the stoopid ideas, fought for the few decent ones against the bureaucratic and legal ass covering ones, we’ve already let the cat out of the bag, given it a saucer of milk and are patiently second guessing your response and making our dispositions accordingly. Your lumbering panzer divisions are simply of no use in the Teutoburg forest.

Patently, there are a number of issues with regard to exposing personal and private information from the email archive, which have no bearing on the ongoing climate non-debate. FOIA themselves in the two previous releases, never needlessly exposed personal information but as we all know, even official work emails will contain personal and sensitive information, if only from things like HR issues being dealt with.

However, it’s an Information Security truism that email is a postcard, which is to say it’s open and anyone can read it. You should never be sending anything sensitive via it en clair. You do that, then you’d better be prepared to live with the results, and that’s perhaps fated to be the resolution of the climategate archive in the end.

It’s purely an intuitive thing but I get a sense from the email that accompanied the release of the key, that after three and a half years of stress and tension, FOIA is exhausted and just wants to hand it all over to other people, so they can take it forward. Those people are the ones who’re now under some degree of pressure and the big blowtorch. The bouncing ball has now landed in their court. Welcome to FOIA’s world.

I said some time ago that FOIA is the one actually running this game, and when you consider the situation post CG3, they’ve still got all the important cards. Nothing much has changed. When you have the power to destroy something, you own it, irrespective of whose name is on it.

If FOIA comes to think the people he supplied the key to have been cowered into inaction and silence by the legal threats of the goon squad, he’ll be left with nothing but the nuclear option, and that very fatigue, which in the end drove him to pass out the key, will kick in, so he will press that big red launch everything button. Duck and cover UEA, because out of the blue, the whole situation will go straight to DEFCON one.

The nuclear option is brutally simple. The encrypted archive is already out there on the internet, so just release the decryption key to the world. Everyone would have access to everything. The key not only decrypts the emails, but the fact that it does so, authenticates FOIA. The moment the first plaintext email comes out of the archive, everyone will know the key is genuine. An internet publishing equivalent of a feeding frenzy begins. The unexpurgated, unabridged and unredacted everything would get published far and wide, and with absolutely no regard to anyone’s privacy or sensitivities. The chips will fall where they will.

Publish everything, let Gaia sort it out.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Climategate, a crisis of conscience.

Climategate 3. FOIA’s accompanying email.

Why Climategate was not a computer hack.

Profile of the Climategate Whistleblower.

Click for a list of other articles.

Pointman.

**************************************************************************

Subject:  FOIA 2013: the password

It’s time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.

Indeed, it’s singular “I” this time.  After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural

If this email seems slightly disjointed it’s probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven’t decided yet on).

The “all.7z” password is [redacted]

DO NOT PUBLISH THE PASSWORD.  Quote other parts if you like.

Releasing the encrypted archive was a mere practicality.  I didn’t want to keep the emails lying around.

I prepared CG1 & 2 alone.  Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.

Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort.  Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.

To get the remaining scientifically (or otherwise) relevant emails out,  I ask you to pass this on to any motivated and responsible individuals who could volunteer some time to sift through the material for eventual release.

Filtering\redacting personally sensitive emails doesn’t require special expertise.

I’m not entirely comfortable sending the password around unsolicited, but haven’t got better ideas at the moment.  If you feel this makes you seemingly “complicit” in a way you don’t like, don’t take action.

I don’t expect these remaining emails to hold big surprises.  Yet it’s possible that the most important pieces are among them.  Nobody on the planet has held the archive in plaintext since CG2.

That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil.  The Republicans didn’t plot this.  USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK.  There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to  garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary.  I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.

It was me or nobody, now or never.  Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future.  The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen.  Later on it could be too late.

Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”.  The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script.  We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.

Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life.  It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc.  deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit.  No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.

Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc.  don’t have that luxury.  The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.

Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.

If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try.  I couldn’t morally afford inaction.  Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.

I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations — trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan .

Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.

Big thanks to Steve and Anthony and many others.  My contribution would never have happened without your work (whether or not you agree with the views stated).

Oh, one more thing.  I was surprised to learn from a “progressive” blog, corroborated by a renowned “scientist”, that the releases were part of a coordinated campaign receiving vast amounts of secret funding from shady energy industry groups.

I wasn’t aware of the arrangement but warmly welcome their decision to support my project.  For that end I opened a bitcoin address: 1HHQ36qbsgGZWLPmiUjYHxQUPJ6EQXVJFS.

More seriously speaking, I accept, with gratitude, modest donations to support The (other) Cause.  The address can also serve as a digital signature to ward off those identity thefts which are part of climate scientists’ repertoire of tricks these days.

Keep on the good work.  I won’t be able to use this email address for long so if you reply, I can’t guarantee reading or answering.  I will several batches, to anyone I can think of.

Over and out.

Mr. FOIA

Watching the jaws of Steve McIntyre and others ripping into the corpse is interesting in a gruesome sort of way, but what I find fascinating about this latest debacle is the alarmist’s reaction to the destruction of what looks to be a freshman paper, which is rapidly turning into yet another propaganda disaster.

Everyone, and that very much includes the alarmists, knows that paper is going down but their response appears to be just sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “La, la, la. I can’t hear you, I’m not listening.” And they have the temerity to call us deniers …

The hard data quite simply doesn’t support the theory of global warming. The theory and all the models are wrong. There hasn’t been any of the predicted warming in nearly two decades but that doesn’t matter if you can get your fingers in your ears quick enough and do a bit of chanting. For supposedly scientific people, what they don’t appear to understand is actually quite simple. If you try to positively test a fundamentally wrong theory, then it’s easy for someone to pick out the flaw in your supposed proof. It’s for that simple reason, we win every time, Buster, every time.

The scientific method works on a blindingly simple basis. You make a conjecture about how something works, which is a fancy way of saying you’re taking a guess, and then you test it in the real world. You think up experiments, which will check if the results predicted by your guess actually occur in the real world. If the results from the experiments match what your conjecture predicts, then your conjecture gradually tiptoes forward to being crowned Miss Scientific Theory of the year. The band strikes up. There’s a diamante tiara, applause, lots of tears, cheers, a tiny bouquet of pink flowers and a heartfelt thank you to Mum and Dad, without whom etc etc. I’m sure you get the idea by now.

However, if experimental results differ from predicted results, your pet theory goes the way of deely boppers, culottes and the Dodo. A different sort of tears. Big Al the jerry jewboy Einstein nutshelled the whole idea in his usual succinct fashion – a thousand experiments can’t prove I’m right but it takes just one to prove I’m wrong. His crack about God not playing dice still worries me, but I’m in danger of digressing.

If there’s no earthly way anyone can test your guess, never mind disprove it, then it cannot be termed a scientific theory. It’s therefore just an unverifiable belief, like alien abduction, crop circles, children not knowing what snow is, predictions of searing Summers and mild Winters, the complete melting of the North Pole by 2013, or what the weather is going to be like in a hundred years time. By the way, spot the Al Gore prediction in that lot.

When you’ve got a really great theory, and the only snag with it is that Mr. Scientific Method keeps saying no, you’ve still got some ways forward but they’re all a little bit shady. Numero uno is just to lie your head off. You tell them you’ve done the experiments and the theory checks out. Of course, you’ve been frigging around with the data or the results, perhaps even both. The downside of that wheeze is replication.

Other tedious sciency types want to repeat the experiment using your data and methods, so you really have to work bloody hard to think up reasons why they simply can’t have what they need to reproduce your results. It’s propriety data, it’d be a breach of non-disclosure agreements, it’s been deleted, I can’t find it, it’d be a mortal sin, I left it on the school bus, my Granny’s just died, the dog ate it, it’s down in Missouri having an inappropriate relationship with a nun – take your pick. In the end, some of the suspicious types even resort to serving you with Freedom of Information notices. Bastards. What a bunch of ungrateful swine they are. After the usual legal delaying tactics, they’ll eventually get their hands on the data and your ass is pretty much grass from that point on.

Another way forward is to insist your theory is so crucial and pressing, it doesn’t need that old fuddy duddy scientific method straitjacket proof. Mann, that’s all so out of date nowadays. You invent something called post-normal science (stop sniggering you gang of real scientists at the back of the room), which basically says if your theory is morally or politically virtuous, you shouldn’t be expected to actually do something so boring and yesterday as to prove it; it’s a shoo in.

Okay, I’ll admit it’s not a good out, nobody can seriously discuss post-normal science with a straight face or without pissing themselves. You’d have to be a complete idiot.

The last, and silliest resort, which they’ll eventually be driven to arrive at, is throwing it back at the skeptics and demanding that they disprove a negative. What on Earth does that mean, you might ask?

Let’s skip the formal logic explanation and go with an example. You meet someone and they tell you they have an invisible golden Wombat floating 3.145 feet over their head. You look and of course there’s no Wombat there, golden or otherwise. You tell them there’s nothing there. They absolutely insist there is. Perhaps it’s not only the Wombat who’s high. After a bit of debate, they come back with their killer argument – well, prove it isn’t there. Silence. Of course, there’s no possible way you can do that, which is somehow and inexplicably taken by them as a clincher that the golden invisible Wombat does actually in fact exist. Yup, I know, brainless, but let’s just move it along here.

You see, you can’t disprove a negative. There’s simply no way, Jose. That simple abuse of logic is so often the essential reason, if I could risk using that word in this line of argument, for the longevity of all blatantly ludicrous conspiracy theories.

They are advancing a conjecture, which they insist is a scientific theory, and that means they’ve got to play the science game. They try to positively test it and we shoot the tests down every time. No matter what “tricks” they pull in the name of the “cause”, the real world data, no matter how much they torture it, simply doesn’t conform to the theory’s predictions. For them, going down the avenue of asking us to disprove the theory isn’t correct, would be an explicit admission we’re talking about a belief rather than science, though they’ve unconsciously edged towards that disaster a few times. That escape route is closed for them. The irony is that them even asking a skeptical scientist to disprove the theory of global warming would probably involve giving him some significant funding, which as far as I’m aware, would be a first.

There are very few options left to them. They can either concede the science is wrong, which they can’t do, admit it’s nothing more than a belief, which would remove the respectable scientific imprimatur that’s been used to justify the policy ramifications or try to pull a golden Wombat, which would put them at our complete mercy. They’ve been forced into that dilemma and simply can’t make their mind up, hence all the fingers in ears and chanting that’s going on. It’s displacement activity in the face of the growing crisis, which is bearing down on them like an iron meteorite.

They keep offering proofs of the existence of the golden Wombat and by publically debunking each one, we use each and every one of them as another nail in the coffin lid of climate alarmism. Marcott et al is just another Gergis, Lewandowsky or Shakun paper, which as it crashes and burns, serves our infowar purposes so much better than theirs. They’ve become figures of fun. It’s possibly not too charitable, but nowadays people in the science community are actually highly amused at the desperate twists and turns of their latest paper. They can’t wait for the next one.

You don’t often see such colourful shenanigans like that in science and there’s a definite sense of chickens finally coming home to roost. Anyone who can provoke such gales of laughter, should be on the stage and of late, there’s not been enough fig leaves left to go around and cover up their embarrassments. We’re talking headless chickens running in circles and now starting to bump into each other. Cue the Benny Hill chase music.

It’s like watching yet another particularly bad piece of homework, brimming with elementary errors, which is being corrected by a tired and increasingly exasperated teacher. Another score of F minus, I’m afraid. Time for a concerned word with young Jimmy’s parents.

It’s a science game they can’t win but somehow they can’t help themselves either. At this stage, such brainless and repetitive behaviour has very distinctly strayed into the obsessive compulsive zone. Keep handing us those nails and we’ll keep hammering them home.

Anyway, can we have another Warmist for the arena please? There wasn’t much meat on the last one and the lions are still a bit peckish.

©Pointman

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Why hasn’t there been a real debate on climate science?

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Given such excitement, it’s easy to understand why the other big news event of the week barely got a mention.

That was Mr. Chris Huhne, starting a prison sentence. If you perhaps don’t know his name, he was the UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. Under his direction, the UK adopted massively expensive renewable energy policies, which have pushed nearly a third of households into fuel poverty. Just recently, pensioner organisations have estimated this Winter’s death toll among the elderly will top 26,000 people by the end of March, simply because they can no longer afford heating or are self-rationing it down to dangerous levels.

Of course, there will be other cold-related deaths, mainly amongst the sickly and the young. It’s always the young, sickly and old who die first. Even though we’re living in the twenty-first century, it’s all a bit medieval retro.

In addition to the preventable deaths, there’s the misery and suffering being endured by families, because the choice between food or fuel is a no brainer. Lives, especially young ones, are being blighted across the whole country.

The government, with Mr. Huhne personally leading the charge, were and are still determined to save the planet, and in the face of that great and noble goal, killing their most vulnerable citizens can be safely ignored. It must have been nice to grow up rich and to have never seen the needy day.

Given the stark brutality of what can only be termed his crimes against humanity, you’d be forgiven in thinking that was the reason for him going to jail. You’d be disappointed.

He’s in prison because he was found guilty of a charge of perverting the course of justice. He’d browbeaten his wife at the time into taking his penalty points, when he’d been caught by a speed camera. It didn’t help their subsequent relationship much, when he dumped her after 25 years of marriage and four children, to shack up with some apparently reformed lesbian half his age. You couldn’t make this sort of stuff up. They live in their very own very privileged bubble.

Right up until the first day of his trial, he’d lied to his party, supporters and the country; protesting his innocence and blaming it all on a vindictive wife. He entered a plea of guilty straight away. True hypocrisy in action.

The green alarmists causing deaths and misery all over the world, will get away without any punishment. There will never be any Nuremberg trials or dragging them up before tribunals in the Hague, but there should, because they have real blood on their hands.

Nearly every man jack of them will never see the inside of a court of law, but I do not intend to let them rewrite history in arrears. I won’t let them slide away so easily. Some stuff is unforgivable and should never be allowed to be forgotten either.

©Pointman

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The real bastards.

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That’s where you are.

Everyone is talking about the big picture but all you can see is a different big picture, and your picture has faces to it, lots of them; silly human family faces. Everyone around you is fixated on some new Jerusalem on the oh so nearly reachable horizon or another similarly beguiling but distant mirage, but you’re looking at the human cost of achieving it.

Decision time.

Stay on the train, stay safe, fat, dumb and happy and screw anyone else who didn’t get aboard; or do something. You did something and by putting your life voluntarily into the danger zone, you’ve saved lives.

You are in crisis and a personal one, I can see that; there are just too many red flags in that email. There’s a limit to how much any man can take and how much can reasonably be asked of him. All the love, determination, courage and sheer guts run out in the end. There’s only so much of any of them in any one human being. The only honour is in how long you last.

You Sir, have given great service and you’ve done it uncommonly well. Look after yourself, time to rest now.

©Pointman

Click for a list of other articles.

In general terms, it happens because there has been a change in their environment, which they can’t adapt to fast enough. They’ve been pushed out of their nice warm home and into the bitter cold of Winter and it’s a cruel old world out there when you’re alone and homeless in nature. It’s mercilessly red in tooth and claw, so it’s goodnight Vienna, I’m afraid.

It’s been obvious for some time, that the writing is on the wall for climate alarmism. People are just sick to death of one scare after another and that has been compounded by economic woes closer to home. Staying in work and making ends meet is the priority now, and all those green taxes are doing more to undermine the cause than anything us skeptics could ever do. When you’re struggling to pay ever spiraling power bills, you start to ask questions, and the answers emerging are really starting to piss people off. They’re beginning to realise it’s all about a bunch of fat cats lining their pockets at the expense of the ordinary person, and those cats couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the environment or pushing the small people into fuel poverty. It’s about the love of money.

A couple of opinion polls of late, put worries about a global warming end of the world right at the bottom of the common person’s concerns. That sort of nonsense, like the good times that engendered it, is now gone. It’s been back to basics for some time. With every passing day, our secret weapon, is cutting ever bigger swathes through the alarmist ranks.

If you want to sell papers or get people to visit your site, you need to bag that big scoop on a regular basis. Mostly, there aren’t that many scoops around, or at least ones you can report on, so you spice up fairly mundane stories. It’s a tendency as old as print journalism and to a large extent, the readership is aware of it and makes an appropriate allowance for it. The alternative approach is to concentrate on producing high quality articles and opinion pieces on topics, which you’ve carefully selected to attract an audience demographic of interest to your particular advertisers. It’s a slower but surer way of building up a habitual readership.

What pays the wages of journalism is advertising, and unless a significant number of people are consuming your product, that advertising moves away to a more popular provider. Your continued existence now depends on the bean counters, and they simply don’t care about how noble your intentions are. Get more readers, get more viewers or get more hits because otherwise, you’re about to become history.

If you look at the numbers for what used to be the popular alarmist websites, they’ve been heading steadily downwards for the last few years. I’ve no doubt that trend is reflected in the print and other mediums; it’s what has come to be known as climate fatigue in the news business.

The bean counters are now at work and wielding their budget chopping axes on what used to be some of the mainstream propaganda outlets for the climate alarmists.

The New York Times closed its environmental desk and probably because there wasn’t much of an outcry about that decision, within a fortnight decided to make a clean sweep and close all its environmental blogs as well. If you look, the internet numbers for their product were simply miserable anyway. Just this week, the Washington Post decided to follow suit and “redeploy” some journalists specialising on the environment, into other areas. As it happens, it was a tidy solution to more than a few nagging personnel problems. They’re all of course still totally committed to saving the planet, but not at the expense of their bottom line. It’s as graceful a retreat from what used to be a very fashionable cause as they can manage, but make no mistake, they’re all leaving the party.

Newsrooms around the world are being culled, but I think it’s significant that it’s the environmental area which is now taking the brunt of the cuts and seen as surplus to profitable requirements. It can safely be given the chop. That would have been unthinkable four or five years ago. Of course, the quasi-state television channels will continue to push the alarmist line, simply because they have no commercial pressures they’re obliged to respond to. In the long term though, that doesn’t matter in their particular case, as the advent of internet television stations will ultimately push them into extinction as well. In passing though, it’s interesting to note that the BBC have over the past few months, dispensed with the services of a number of so-called reporters, whom any reasonable person would have to class as nothing better than climate activists.

This slow demise of so-called environmental journalism is actually an act of euthanasia, a mercy killing. To my mind, it always embodied the very worst aspects of journalism. All the grubby professional sins were there; advocacy dressed up as balanced reportage, an intolerant moral arrogance, totally one-sided reporting, knee-jerk churnalism, absolutely no distinction between opinion and factual pieces, suppression of stories that didn’t square with an approved set of viewpoints, selective misinformation, hit pieces dressed up as respectable journalism directed at their pet hate figures, a crusading willingness to sacrifice truth, by both omission and commission, in the name of a higher cause and a basic dishonesty to both the reader and their profession.

The environmental niche in which such dire journalistic practices could flourish, is on the way out and they’re simply not adapting to that new situation. Beyond a large amount of denial and what frequently looks to be plain displacement activity, their solution appears to be to try and repackage the product, but that simply doesn’t address the fundamental problem – the product no longer has any mass appeal. It’s not selling. Read it. That’s the writing on the wall.

Things like Climategate, along with a cascade of other gates and a stream of failed predictions, have undermined and destroyed the credibility of the science on which the whole house of cards stood. It’s toast. Because of the easy ingrained habits of churnalism, passively reproducing press handouts and never doing much more than commenting on other people’s articles and papers, they failed in general to produce outlets publishing a steady stream of original and quality content. Their volume audience was essentially a transitory fashion demographic, and the fashion has now changed. When that happened, they lost their mass audience.

Ordinary people, struggling through the worst recession in living memory, see environmentalism as just another financial overhead they’re having to contend with. They simply haven’t got time for it any more. No time and no interest at all.

It was a type of journalism which was never really about the environment, never mind science, but rather it was about the idea of a single correct political viewpoint on any topic. It was a vital element of a failed social re-engineering project, which now lies in ruins. They rode a hysterical fashion wave far up the shore in the mistaken belief that it was somehow permanent, but that wave is now receding, never to return.

People have by now gone through the stage of tiredly shrugging off your latest efforts to continue scaring them and are just plain ignoring you at this stage, which is why all the cuts. You’re being culled, because the bean counters are perceptive enough to know there won’t be any blowback these days from any significant quarter.

Like all species who are no longer fit for purpose, the environmental journalist is facing extinction.

©Pointman

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If I were in their position, then I’d do what I always do to size up the opposition; I’d learn about it. If that means getting a bit close, even to the point of hopping into the sack with them for a while, well, that’s not a problem. A little bit of recreational rumpty pumpty never hurts, especially with one of those bad bad girls your Momma warned you all about. No offence intended to those nice girl next door elements out there, but sin as we all know has a certain delicious tinge of pure badness about it.

So, let’s put that other hat on and learn about their elemental enemy. The thing is, I’ve found the alarmists actually don’t do science but like all good scenario explorations, we’ll lose that little detail as part of simplifying the exercise. Let’s get down and boogie up real close to her sexy satanic majesty, Ms. Kickass Carbon. She has a certain ballsy attitude I kinda like.

If you collected up all the atoms in the universe, and believe you me there’s a lot of the little buggers floating around the joint, you’d find that unlike Mr Heinz’s meager 57, there’s actually 92 naturally occurring varieties of them. Each of those varieties of atom is what we call an element.

They’ve all got names like Hydrogen, Helium, Carbon, Vegemitium, Strontium and many others ending in various ums, ons and ens. Yes, I know, the names are pretty boring but then, they were all named or most interestingly sometimes predicted by various scientists, and while they were seriously clever chappies, imagination wouldn’t be their strong suit, never mind whimsy or a bit of romance. That’s the explanation for the absence of more imaginative names like Prudencium, Margaretion or Flutterflyum.

Obviously, the first question has to be where does carbon come from. The answer to that might come as a shock to a lot of people valiantly battling to save the planet but I’ll have to say something in advance, because I don’t want to cause too many palpitations – we don’t make it. Try as we might, we can’t create a single atom of the stuff. Not even the biggest, dirtiest, feck off, in your face, black smoke-belching, evil, dark, sonuva bitch from hell SUV in the world can create carbon. Seriously.

I’ve had the discussion with several environmentalists and was stunned to realise that they thought we evil humans actually create carbon. It’s one of those rapidly blinking jaw-dropping moments when you realise you’re dealing with an intelligent and supposedly well-educated person, who knows absolutely nothing about what they’re going on about so passionately. They’ve actually told me that carbon should be banned, usually to the accompaniment of a few heads nodding in agreement. There should be a law passed. More nodding. The government should do something about it. Even more vigorous nodding.

The answer, which they initially seize on and find comforting, is that it’s produced from a nuclear reaction. Of course, it could only be nasty nuclear which produces something so vile as carbon.

Whoah, whoah I say. I know I used the N word there but there’s no need to panic. It’s a sorta natural nuclear thingy, so that’s got to be okay, hasn’t it? They’re not used to the use of the words nuclear and natural in a single sentence, but at the same time, they’ve begun to suspect you might know some boringly hard sciency things. You’re intimidating the poor little darlings. How very unfair of you to actually go to the trouble of informing yourself.

Carbon atoms are manufactured in the burning nuclear heart of stars. The fusion process initially cooks on hydrogen, conceptually producing helium as a sort of ash. When the star starts to run low on hydrogen fuel, it starts to burn the helium, which produces its own sort of ash, atoms of our old mate carbon. Carbon in turn will be consumed to produce the heavier elements. That iterative burning and transmutation process continues until the star is burnt out or explodes in something called a nova. The effect of the explosion, is to scatter all the newly manufactured atoms of each element out into the cosmos.

The Earth, like everything else in our solar system, is made from the atoms of long ago exploded stars. Conceptually, and leaving aside the occasional cosmic blow in, we’ve got roughly the same number of carbon atoms that we started with when the Earth was formed and stabilised. Carbon atoms are everywhere around us, dug into the very fabric of us and our world. They’re in deeper than any Alabama tick and I’ll explain to you why that is.

When atoms get it together, they clump up to form things called molecules. Most elements are very picky about which other elements they’ll bond with, but carbon is different. Carbon has the equivalent of a free love, free electron outlook on life and will bond very easily with other carbon atoms and pretty much any one of the other elements. In terms of the periodic table, carbon is by far and away a real bondage tart, the whore of Babylon, the village bicycle of the periodic table that everyone can get a ride on.

It get’s worse than that though. When several carbon atoms bond together, they act as a sort of spine to which an amazing variety of other atoms can bond to, producing all the interesting long chain molecules such as the proteins and enzymes, out of which all living things on Earth are constructed. You see – you, me, every living thing you’ve ever seen, and every living thing on the Earth is constructed from complex molecules, invariably built on a long spine of carbon atoms.

Carbon from a basic life chemistry viewpoint, is the circuit board that all those chips get plugged into, the foundation on which a house is built, the drummer who keeps that rock steady beat which the whole band builds on, that generous splash of olive oil the construction of every great spagbol needs to kick off with.

That’s why we’re termed a carbon-based life form. No carbon would mean no long chain molecules, no us, no living things at all actually.

When they blather on about carbon, what they actually mean is carbon dioxide, which is just one carbon atom doing a ménage à trois with two hunky oxygen atoms. Such a complete tart. As trace gases go and as the name suggests, there’s not a lot of it around but plant life thrives on it, which is why farmers pump vast quantities of it into greenhouses to produce bumper crops.

The alarmists believe there’s a so-called forcing mechanism initiated at a certain theoretical threshold level of carbon dioxide, which will magnify the Earth’s temperature. Nobody’s ever proved such a physical mechanism exists and indeed, nobody’s ever even demonstrated it either. Despite nearly two decades of increasing carbon dioxide levels, the global thermometer has stubbornly refused to move upwards and if anything, looks to be heading in the other direction. The demonisation of carbon is all about belief, which is religion, rather than science, which is about prove it or hit the road Jack.

When they picked on carbon as being the root of all evil, they were mounting an attack on the elemental basis of all life on Earth. If you’ve come to believe as I do that environmentalism has become anti-life, it was somehow inevitable that carbon absolutely had to become their hate object.

Good luck with banning it, by the way.

©Pointman

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My wife has finally gone to bed because I insisted, I bloody insisted, and she really needs to crash. Some stuff is hard on her. I quickly rub her cheek and I assure her it’s all going to be okay. It really is Kiddo, trust me, it’ll all be good. She looks at me hard for a moment and knows me well enough to believe. The ordinaire stuff I’m a bit iffy wobbly on but when it comes down to the real important life-threatening shit, I’m a bloody guaranteed pipe-hard ninja bastard from hell. We exchange a pecky kiss and she starts to disappear upstairs; I tell her I’ll be up in a bit and she knows me well enough to know it’s one of those little white lies that don’t really matter, because she’s worn out. She’s truly exhausted and needs to hand over the baton. She wants to believe.

She’s had enough but turns around anyway to come back down to me; that’s my lovely gutsy gal. Jesus Christ. She can’t find any words. To hell with words. I cradle her head in both of my hands in a sort of squint vee and kiss her lips oh so tenderly. Lordy. A moment of silence. Go on, get your rest Babe, it’s all going to be good, it really is. I swear to God. She goes. I can feel her warmth in my hands slipping away and never want to lose it. I’m a lucky bastard.

The paramedics have left, my youngest kid is laying on the couch, under several layers of blankets and I’ll stay through the night in the living room and I’ll watch him like a hawk and check him out every few minutes and in between, I’m scribbling and listening to some quiet Radiohead and Carl Orff in his gentler Gassenhauer moments. I compulsively watch the rise and fall of blankets moving, just to make sure he’s still breathing. I know he’s going to be okay but that doesn’t help.

For God’s sake, he’s in his early twenties and very much his own man; we’d not have it any other way. The last one, momentarily taking refuge back in the nest, as they all did a few times. I watch and worry. Parenthood makes such damn fools of us all I suppose.

It’s the quiet aftermath of things and I’m waiting for my body to react like it used to after events like today; stomach cramps, the shaking of my hands, watching that repeating movie as it loops around and around in the compulsive shock loop. The usual bollocks; buy the popcorn, watch the movie repeating, run away somewhere and find something to hide behind. It isn’t and I wonder whether that complete physiological thing has just been long ago burnt out of me. I got so used to functioning without ever showing any acknowledgment of all that shit until long afterwards, perhaps I burnt out that circuit. I killed those emotions, they’re no longer there. We all lost something in the fire.

It’s a genuine concern that I don’t seem to be reacting to something so close to home. I suspect something important got broke in me. I wonder whether I’m a smaller human being because of it and know that might be true. It’s not that I’m numb, it’s just that I’m still waiting patiently to be numbed. I’m the stupid dork waiting for a date who was never going to turn up and knew that all along. What a sad bastard I am. I’m not numb and know I won’t be and feel that’s somehow a deep betrayal of them all. It is too.

Learning self-control and calmness in frightening situations is always a good thing but you find out what the cost has been. You took a step back from the situation because that was what was needed but have now learnt how far back a step it was. There’s a little normal bit of you which has gone walkabout and you wonder what it took with it, but that sort of crap is a bit too philosophical for this time of night. That’s all something to park and think about later because for the moment, you’re watching their pulse. Philosophy later, just handle the situation. You stare hard for a paranoid moment, that blanket is definitely still moving up and down, so that’s okay. Fools of us all, complete bloody fools.

Your kid has a stupid wisdom tooth out, they’re sleeping off the drugs and all seems to be going well, and that night they’re suddenly awake and vomiting blood down the toilet. A lot of blood. Boys always call for their Mom first. It’s part of the price you pay for being a decent Dad and it’s one of those things you have to get used to. Your woman wakes you up and you struggle there half-naked, half-awake and frozen and you see them turn white as a sheet as the reaction hits them.

You kneel beside them and knead the back of their neck and tell them it’s all going to be okay, but you’ve seen what shock and reaction can do to people, so you quietly ask her to do the emergency call. This sort of stuff, you never wanted any of them to be near. None of them. What a fool you were. What a bloody fool. You kiss the top of his head, because you can’t help yourself. He’s lovely and at this moment in time, you’re fucking useless. There’s not much else you can do.

The whole toilet and the floor around it is spattered with blood. It’s even on the back of your hands and the top of your thighs. That’s my kid’s blood drying on me, so he’s a checkout. Fuck that. Scary stuff but you hold it together. The spray on the floor is very finely distributed, in the good old coughing blood tradition, but the stuff down the toilet is pure concentrated red. Lots of old-fashioned vomiting red and too much of it. It’s a technical observation but the good news is it’s all black.

Inside your head, you’re raging. You want to shake them hard; be a man, be a fucking man, nobody dies over a fucking tooth for Christ’s sake, come on, fight. Fight you fucker, fight. You get them downstairs with a bowl in their hands and pretty soon, it’s full of red shit too. There’s too much of it. This is getting serious. Where are those fucking medics? Move it, you dipshits.

You want to keep him good until the backup arrives. He’s too quiet and they’re the ones you gotta worry about. The nasty bastard in you starts to come out. Gimme your eyes bitch, gimme your fucking eyes. You do the first two fingers jabbing at your own eyes as you slap him hard around the chops, harder and harder with your other hand until you get his  attention. He finally looks up and you see into his baleful eyes and in that fleeting moment, you can see he’s hanging in there, and your heart swells with pride at his unexpected toughness.

It’s that awkward hunkered down bastard I’m still here look you were hoping for. It’s all a bit new for him but he’s a tough kid rising to the occasion. Some shit, you just can’t teach. It’s there inside them or it ain’t. The good news is you can see it’s there, glaring back at you and wanting to kick your ass for being a prick disturbing them while they’re busy digging in.

Shit, how come I could ever have had a great kid like him. He heaves another big gush of Rhenish. You dab his mouth with the disintegrating remains of a grabbed hunk of tissues and notice how the blood outlines his teeth against his gums. It’s outlining your fingernails too and that comes with too many bad memories. Please God, none down his nose. It’s just a detail but for the first time, the fear begins and suddenly, its icy hands squeeze your heart. The fear, the fear, no way, not my kid, not him. Ain’t never going to happen to one of mine. Not over something as fucking stupid as a tooth. Hell will freeze over first. We will fight every fucking damn inch of the way.

This sort of stuff, she don’t handle well, so she’s glad of something to do. It’s drama, which she likes, but this one is way too close to home. I give her a few immediate missions, just to keep her busy. What a cold bastard you’ve ended up as. She strips the ruined quilt cover from his bed and starts cleaning up the blood in the bathroom. I know she feels guilty about running away from it. We’re a good team and this sort of grief is where she needs me to step up to the plate and do the swinging and that’s okay by me.

Shite like this is too hard on her and she looks to me, because she knows about the cold and hard side of me that we choose not to talk about. She gives me that waiting and deliberately nano-second too long look. She needs what she thinks of as Mr. Edward Hyde to appear. He’s always there and we both know that’s supposed to be my particular tragedy. I’ll take that unfair bullet. No complaints.

It’s the necessary roughness that’s sometimes needed to get everybody home. They’re her babies and although they’re my babies as well, it just don’t count, the emotional connection is so much more intense for her, so she’s hopelessly distressed if they’re doing things like vomiting blood. That she can’t handle and I can, but when she hurts, I hurt. She’s a fine woman and I’m the lucky man she chose to take an interest in. Convent school girls, they’re always trying to save the sinners and I’m very defo a sinner on pretty much all fronts you can imagine and believe me, when it comes to sin, I’ve got a much better imagination than you.

In such circumstances, all her veneer of being a calm serene calm personality flees, all the intellectualism flees, and I know that because I’m a primitive sort of person, which is why she relies on me in these extreme occasions. Subtleties I struggle with, but I do gritty basics very well, it’s the daily stuff I can’t be arsed about. I don’t feel things too deeply but I’m brilliant at functioning in brutish ways when things get really ugly, so it’s so much easier for simple people like me. I work a lot better in a broken play situation rather than a plan that’s running as expected. That’s probably why I was never interested in turning up for practise. Depending on the game, I was a player but in general, never was much of a joiner.

I’m a backs to the wall contingency, a very practical and basically insensitive person, I’m not supposed to really feel or empathise much. I’ve become everyone’s desperate plan B, which is why people choose to walk around me and I let that happen. It’s one of the mutually understood and easy betrayals of each other we all share, and that’s just the way every good man-woman partnership works. In different circumstances, she does the same for me and I love and depend on her totally for that. She’s the well-intentioned Dr. Jekyll in a loving but symbiotic relationship.

It’s my turn at bat and I will very definitely hit that ball at the first go. When it comes to family, I don’t need a second or third strike. I will hit that fucker hard the first time around.

The Medics ring because they can’t find the damn house. I guide them in and tell them I’ll be standing out in the road with a flashlight waving, just to get them here. Pop the smoke. Every month, I make sure that flashlight works and the batteries are good. That’s one of my routine jobs I’ve been doing for years. They finally get here and it’s all flashing lights, and two guys humping suitcases of equipment into my home.

Emergency medics are the same the world over. They all have the commitment of good doctors without the territorial arrogance so many doctors feel they’ve got to bring to the job. They know their task is to patch people up if they can, but pack them off to hospital when that’s needed. The ground zero of that job is all about making that vital decision.

These two are good. There’s the lead man, a ten years up veteran I instinctively understand, and his number two, who looks like he’s going to be pretty good as well. He just needs a bit more toasting. I watch them working, strapping him into the techno and oh so casually keeping an eye on the numbers as they start to appear on the LCD display, while they’re doing the reassurance thing. Even I can see his blood pressure is doing the boogie woogie. He’s just panicking, the numbers are all over the damn place. I’m working hard to keep my distance. Don’t be a civvie when you can be a helper.

I join the show and lead the conversation in a rock music direction and they take the hint, because they ain’t that many years ahead of him. Those two guys are sharper than snake shit and pretty soon, they’re swapping bands with him and even discovering they’ve been to the same concert recently. His vitals start to stabilise and he’s calming down. Like I said, they are good.

We watch him sitting at the kitchen table and I see those eyes begin to roll back as his head drops and we all dive forward to support him at the same time; no crashes of his noggin against the table or on the floor. I got to his head before they even reacted, at the cost of knocking one of them sideways. It’s not a problem, because by this stage, we’re all old pals anyway. They shoot him up with a bit of chemical rush but we agree he doesn’t need the hospital trip, he was just emptying his stomach of a lot of accumulated blood. It’s old and dark blood, all the oxy is ancient history. Even I know that. Blood always dries to black. What he needs now is to get stabilised, which means horizontal.

They suggest getting him laying down somewhere but the stairs might be a big ask. I suggest the couch in the living room, so we get on all sides of him and help him out there and get him comfortable. I pack him with cushions, rustle up a few blankets, he sleeps and we all watch for fifteen minutes.

It’s a slow night for them so they’ve got the time. That can all change with one call, and we all know it. They’re just watching him to be sure. He sleeps and I exchange some stories with the medics as we keep an eye on him. The lead man has noticed all the computer kit. I sort out a pirate copy of a movie he really wants to watch. When you work animal shifts, it’s all too easy to miss a good movie you just wanted to get to.

He looks stable to us, so they start packing up all their kit. I walk them out to their bus and after a handshake, they get in and the engine turns over but it won’t start. A few tries later, when the battery starts to give up by slowing down, the decision is made to call their boss and tell him to bring some jump leads. We go back inside and I brew them another couple of coffees as we wait. It’s not their usual bus, an old one that they’re not very familiar with. The number two man bitches on about it.

The boss drives twenty miles and noses his wagon up against their bus. Jump leads connect the two batteries, the engine turns over but still the bus won’t start. It turns but it just won’t damn catch. In the ensuing what-do-we-do-now silence, I mention I once had a car with an anti-theft ignition kill switch; is there one like that fitted on the bus? After a moment of silence, we all hear a distinct click from inside the cab, where number two man is doing the driving, followed by a turn of the ignition key and the engine roaring into life.

Nobody says anything, but we exchange rueful shakes of the head. Boy, is number two going to take some heavy shit over the next few days. To adapt a quote of Marx, it’s life rather than history which starts as near tragedy and ends in comedy. We say the goodbyes and disappear out of each other’s lives, in the nicest way, but hopefully forever. I head back into the house.

Suddenly, it’s Thursday morning and I wake up with a start in the chair with the first light of dawn coming through the curtains. I’m stiff and achy and shocked I fell asleep. I find it hard to see a man’s bony face in the child sleeping before me, but it’s still of course there; he sleeps but like all of them, my love for them is hopeless and helpless but always a bit hard; that’s the duty I do owe them as a father. He’s going through that obscured patch where they’ve got to find themselves as an adult and we’ll meet again when they come out of the other side of that forest of finally growing up, which we all have to work our way through.

I’m a patient man and have many times sat on a log and smoked a pipe and waited in a clearing for each of them to appear out of the other side of their own particular forest. It’s the penultimate rite of passage. That I’ve always resisted the need to go in and mount any rescue missions, is an expression of my abiding faith in each of them. Scrub faith and just let’s say I trust in the buggers. I know that simple thing, with the deep and abiding conviction of a very much imperfect and deeply flawed man. They’ll all make it, because while I know they’ve inherited my feet of clay, they all have a certain cussedness, which is the final act of love. Nothing else gets you through. In the end, we all have to struggle on when there’s no particular reason to do so.

They’ve worried and scared the hell out of us on so many occasions but the important stuff they have to work their way through themselves. I would never deprive them of that challenge. It’s what in the end makes them all growed up people.

When they emerge, they think that’s the final thing, but it ain’t. You’ve known them from helpless lovely infants all the way to lumpy adulthood, but now they’ve got to start learning about that stranger in the clearing they’ve just encountered, who in their childishly me-centric world, they’ve never actually got to know. That would be you. Finally. It’s one of the great circles of life we all have to go through.

I hope they will recognise and recall that loop fondly with their own children.

©Pointman

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