Warmist conspiracy exposed?

A friend and colleague sent me the following:

Subject: Fw: The great Hadley debacle

http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/hadley_hacked

All I can say is this: if these emails are fake, they represent a staggering amount of effort to "create";

If they are real, many AGW professionals should be professionally ruined, forever.

Robert

Read the news.com.au article if you must, but a few lines will give you the drift:
"So the 1079 emails and 72 documents seem indeed evidence of a scandal involving most of the most prominent scientists pushing the man-made warming theory - a scandal that is one of the greatest in modern science. I’ve been adding some of the most astonishing in updates below - emails suggesting conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more. If it is as it now seems, never again will “peer review” be used to shout down sceptics."
And on and on it goes in a similar vein.

Here is my response...

Mate, if the weather guy says it's a beautiful day and you put your hand out the window and it comes in wet, you're gonna think he's wrong, right?

Well put your hand out the window. Hottest November Day On Record, scream the headlines.

West Australian Sea Levels Rising at 1/2 cm Per Year. PER FUCKING YEAR!

Face it, Michael. The world as we know it is over. We are facing the greatest catastrophe the human race has ever known, and these idiotic recidivists representing Big Oil and other vested interests are worse than Neville Chamberlain proclaiming "Peace in Our Time".

I personally have been shouting this stuff at anyone who would listen for thirty years. Very few did. Now it's too late.

Enjoy what's left, Michael. We have lived in humanity's golden age. The future is bleak.

Australia's Shame

'Tide of human tragedy' affecting Aborigines headlines the ABC on Nov 18th. It continues

The Secretary-General of Amnesty International has criticised the Federal Government for its failure to lift Aboriginal people out of dire poverty.

Irene Khan says she is appalled by conditions in the remote Aboriginal communities she recently visited in the Northern Territory.

She says the human rights of Aboriginal people are being violated.

"[That] these violations occur on a continent of such privilege, it is not merely disheartening, it is deeply disturbing," she told the National Press Club today.

"And the longstanding failure of Australian governments to turn this tide of human tragedy demands much more than condemnation.

"It demands much more than commitment."

She says elements of the Northern Territory intervention, like compulsory income management, rob people of their dignity.

She has urged the Government to repeal such elements.

"To be brutally frank, I see here an enormous opportunity for change, but I fear that that opportunity for change may be squandered, unless and until there is a profound shift from consultations to engagement and onto empowerment of Indigenous people."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/18/2746678.htm?section=justin

Crop Circles - Latest Theory

I was having trouble deciphering email headers and ended up reading all sorts of geeky stuff about timestamps and routing etc which really made my head spin, but that's not the real story here. I came upon a really neat tool for analyzing said headers at http://headertool.apelord.com/ which led me to http://apelord.com/ who writes:

"Dear Apelord,

Are crop circles created by aliens? What is your opinion on the movie "Signs"?

Carl Blandford

Dearest Carl,

Your first question, however, demands a serious and thoughtful answer. There are many theories regarding crop circles. Some people, as you suggest, are firmly convinced that crop circles are created by extra-terrestrials in an attempt to communicate with humans. Some believe they are created by plasma vortexes. Skeptics argue that all crop circles are created by pranksters, pointing to numerous hoaxes and the absurdity of (the) idea that intelligent creatures choose to communicate through agricultural vandalism. A very small percentage of people believe that they are created by hideous mole men for their monstrous religious rituals. This turns out to be the correct theory. "

Bon Voyage, Monsieur Jean-Baptiste!

Why We Love Telstra

Telstra's original Directory Assistance number, 12456, is to be replaced with that of their subsidiary, Sensis, on 1234. But it ain't free!

A typical 1 minute call from a landline which results in a connection to the number you're after will cost ~

Call Fee: $1.40
1 minute talk time: $0.77
Connection Fee: $0.99
Total: $3.16

More if you're calling from a non-Telstra mobile, and more still if it takes over 1 minute to complete the call.

To find Auntie Maude's number in Bullemakanka could easily cost you $5.00!

Legally, Telstra is obliged to provide a free directory assistance number. You probably will have a hard time finding it though, so write it down:

Directory Assistance 1223

Woo Woo, Mondrian

Late night TV showed the wonderful deco credits for Poirot, surely one of the best TV intros ever. So I watched and was delighted with the plot, the acting and of course the delicious props. The episode was Four And Twenty Blackbirds - one scene was set in the most beautiful gallery with quite stunning artworks. And there he was again, just a corner but unmistakably Mondrian.

Woo Woo, Thetans

On Monday a court convicted the French branch of the Church of Scientology of organised fraud. The Scientology Celebrity Centre and a related bookshop in Paris were fined a total of €650,000 ($1 million). On the same day, Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis severed his ties with the Church of Scientology in protest against the sect's position on gays and its treatment of members. A few days earlier, on October 22nd, Tom Cruise, John Travolta and their partners joined 4000 others celebrating the 25th anniversary of the International Association of Scientologists in England.

One hesitates to comment due to the sect's use of litigation and "other methods" to silence critics.

The cult religion is based on the works of L. Ron Hubbard, one of whose Sci-Fi books sat on my bookshelf for some years when I was a teen. I'm not sure why it lived there - perhaps I thought one day I would finish it, but I'm sure I never did. It was terrible.

"According to the 1965 Report of the Board of Enquiry into Scientology in the Australian state of Victoria, Hubbard falsely claimed scientific and other credentials and his sanity was "to be gravely doubted".[143] The report concluded that while Hubbard's followers are taught that they are entitled to question the beliefs, they are conditioned to believe that the teachings are correct.[144] It also notes that Hubbard's claims of finding a cure for atomic radiation is unsupported by evidence.[145] The Scientologists' response was a pamphlet entitled Kangaroo Court, describing Victoria as "the riff-raff of London's slums [...] a very primitive community, somewhat barbaric".[143]"

Wikipedia on L. Ron Hubard, Dianetics and Scientology

A public face of Scientology currently, Tommy Davis, has had many intriquing interviews. They don't have the same barking quality as some of Tom's, but you will be entertained. (or would have been had Youtube not terminated the account - not under any pressure, of course)

Tommy 'footbullet man' Davis on Youtube (9 mins)

Nov 2010: I could not find the video, but I did find an interesting site which lists other Scientology interviews. Mark Bunker's Xenu TV