Planet of the Conspiracy Nuts

Say what you like about Russell T Davis, but at least his latest effusions are thought-provoking, even if the thought is 'hey, I never knew his stuff was ghost-written by a drunk, homeless guy'.

Second thought: how come whenever ones of the staff at the ever-unbiased BBC goes feral, they all go feral in the self-same way? They never suddenly announce that Cast Iron Dave should slash housing benefit and use the savings to bolster the RAF, or that we should have our own Second Amendment. No, it's always some guy who think the right is, like, totally evil.

Where's the diversity?

On the plus side, at least he is unusually candid about how he reached his diagnosis: he thinks the right is too harsh on media luvvies. Yep, these people are all about the hospitals & schools & long lunches at chintzy restaurants. He probably thinks the right are selfish too, all poncing round Barnsley with their coal-mining friends.

But that's not it. Liberals have always been leeches. No, the real question is this: in so far as the head honcho has now outed himself as an off-the-scale loon, are you still a tin-foil hatted kook if you complain about liberal bias in his shows?

PC And The Shrunken Mandate

NNW isn't too impressed by the left's response - or lack thereof - to Weinergate.

Indeed, it's not just Weiner that's been left exposed. It's hard not to notice that the left's conception of freedom looks a little... shrunken? Flaccid? Inadequate?

Libs think anyone who has issues with the Honourable Member's Honourable Member appearing in in-boxes across America is, like, a total square but if he had used a felt tip to write 'Islam Sucks' on his junk beforehand, they'd have demanded the death sentence.

Of course, we've been here before. Hell, after years spent defending Clinton, Weiner flashing his majority to all and sundry probably seems refreshingly normal to them.

Liberals are proverbial for turning into Bernard Manning once one of their guys falls foul of PC, but the corollary is often missed. Professional conservatives endlessly jibber-jabber about the need to ditch the embarrassing bumpkins in the base, get with the PC program and reach out to all those groovy youngsters who were just waiting to vote conservative, but were put off by the lack of tackle twittering. But how does that work exactly?

In so far as leftists in both the US and Britain ditch their PC principles faster than a speeding e-mail once one of their guys is in the frame, why even pretend it's anything other than a stick to beat conservatives with? Criticising Cherie Blair's sleazy dealing is The Sexism, but John Prescott can use his private office like a harem, and that's 'just John' as Tony helpfully explained. Why even bother to play in a rigged game?

Professor Dawkins Was Not Available For Comment

Uber geek Paul Nurse has decided that the real problem with British science is that the public won't just shut up and take it all on faith.

Curiously enough, FoI requests and all, they still manage to bang in plenty of requests for taxpayers' money and press releases announcing that school vouchers cause cancer.

On the plus side, at least his complaints about 'FoI Aggression' have neatly laid to rest the myth that scientists are a bunch of whiny wimps. Maybe we need some research into why people don't trust geeks? After all, what could possibly be wrong with this:

Nurse said that scientists were not blameless. At the University of East Anglia, they were too defensive in their responses to freedom of information requests over climate change, but their experience was one among many that highlighted a need for better training for scientists in the most appropriate way to respond to information requests.

Curiously though, it takes a commenter called randstead to point out the problem with that little theory:

One small but not important point , Phil Jones planned to avoid FOI requests , BEFORE he got a single one...

Now lets talk numbers UEA received just six FOI requests between January 2005 when the act was introduced, and January 2009, while in 2009 it received 97 FOI requests 59 from people asking or information on contracts between the UEA and the foreign met offices they said were preventing publication of the data, remember CRU's claims on this front mostly fall apart once investigated.
These number are tiny in real terms , while its only from FOI requests that we learned that the research papers reviewed in the investigation of CRU where not selected by the RS as claimed but by UEA , that the head of the one review never actual did any interviews , that for one review there is no accurate record of what question where asked nor what the answers are...

Another commenter, conflation, includes the full text of one e-mail:

Phil Jones wrote: Mike, I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc ! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who’ll say we must adhere to it !

In other words, geek face card Paul Nurse writes an article calling for people to take scientist's public pronouncements on faith, while utterly misrepresenting his opponents in the self-same article.

That's Clue Number Two right there. For all the talk of diversity, there's apparently no one around to tell Nurse that his point is absurd. Scientists are disinterested seekers after truth, but it just so happens that their personnel rosters are exactly the same as you get if they were enforcing an ideological blacklist.

All of which is the real message of Climategate. What's wrong with British science isn't just that there's a lot of corruption, it's that corruption has become the new normal, with supposed thought leaders like Nurse on hand to denounce anyone who doesn't accept senior scientists threatening to delete inconvenient data as a perfectly normal practice.

Up, Down... Who Cares? Just Give Us Your Money!

Yes, indeed: the new Big Bad is Global Cooling which, being the opposite of Global Warming, obviously means that we need the opposite policies, so say hello to tax cuts, rolling back red tape and all pigs to the trough capitalism....right?

Richard Dawkins' New Book: 'Hey, This God Thing Is Pretty Neat, After All'

In so far as the Archbishop of Canterbury's attack on the Ayatollah Khameron has succeeded in making The Dave look good, it counts as a miracle all on its own.

Not everyone can make Lord Snooty look statesmanlike, but having a too crazy for the Guardian leftist whose organisation is Britain's largest landowner wax lyrical about poverty and democratic mandates certainly qualifies.

On the plus side, we now know what the Pope was doing over here last year: sneaking into Lambeth Palace with a false moustache on to convince Archbishop Weirdo that the way back for the Anglican Church was to go over das edgen like a fruitenloopengaggle.

It's that German humour again.

Either that, or the Archbishop really thinks people turn to religion to answer the central mysteries of human existence, like whether or not giving greater autonomy to low-level business units will lead to a more responsive health service.

Apparently, when Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, he was actually referring to fully paid-up members of the National Union of Pacifistic Trades. On the other hand, at least the Archbishop accepts that the Ten Commandments are still valid, even if he thinks they're not exactly set in stone.

Still, there's a certain irony here. The Archbishop is trying to curry favour with the left by adopting their idiotic worldview wholesale, and never mind that the people he's trying to pander to just plain don't like Christianity in the first place. He ought not to be criticising Cameron, he ought to be learning from his example. The Dave was a heroic reformer just as long as he was sliming the right, but as soon as circumstances forced him to threaten the supply of £40K pa non-jobs, that Strange New Respect disappeared faster than you can say 'worse than Fatcha'!

So it always is: you can get into bed with liberals, but they won't respect you in the morning.

On the Other Hand...

On the plus side, in so far as the Sharon Shoesmith case featured the Supreme Court attacking Ed Balls from the left, I think that pretty much closes out the debate on our independent judiciary.

Not that there isn't a certain rough justice in seeing Balls get the shaft. After all, not only does his government introduce all this nonsense, they also presided over the infiltration of the public services by freaks like Shoesmith in the first place. On the other, other hand, the Nu Tories have predictably jumped on this case like a vampire jumping on a sun bed. As ever, there's no one there who can see that this is an example of Labour's stealthiest, and most destructive, tax.

All across the country, there are Sharon Shoesmiths: lazy, arrogant, entitled idiots, free to cause organisational chaos in the sure and certain knowledge that the worst they'll face is double secret probation.

Never mind cutting taxes, or streamlining government departments. Being able to fire deadbeats again would revive the economy overnight.

She's Not Erin Brockovch, She's The Plant Owner

There is no better barometer of how utterly liberalism has hollowed out the British left than that so many soi-dissant socialists have chosen to elect Sharon Shoesmith as Baby Seal D'Jour.

These people claim to be the modern avatars of the poor but proud union members who took on and beat ruthless pit owners. Now they're rallying around someone who got paid more than a cabinet minister but still presided over a department in such a state of chaos that a young child could be tortured to death with no one noticing.

Add in Shoesmith's sneering one-liners like 'I don't do blame', and what we have here is the perfect pin-up girl for the unaccountable elitists who dominate the modern left. If the EdMilliband Unit wants to work out why the Earthlings don't trust Labour, he may want to think about not allowing his party to offer aid and sanctuary to smug, overpaid trash like this.