Des Moore

A snapshot of the NetLogo Global Climate Change model.

“Today’s debate about global warming is essentially a debate about freedom. The environmentalists would like to mastermind each and every possible (and impossible) aspect of our lives.” ~Vaclav Klaus

What State of Climate do we really have?

Over the past six months or so there has been a remarkable change at both official agencies and research institutions in attitudes of the believers in the dangerous warming thesis. Reflecting the Copenhagen flop and the Climategate exposure of uncertainties within research bodies, the previous out of hand dismissals of sceptical views have moved to an acknowledgement that those views should not be ignored and that uncertainty does exist. It has now become almost respectable to be a sceptic. Mind you the warmists are still quick to assure us either that the “basic” science remains valid or that we are now in an era of supposed Post-Normal science where the uncertainties are so great and the issues so important that conventional methods of first obtaining all relevant information before taking preventative action cannot wait but must rely on assessments by “knowledgeable” experts.

A major difficulty with either of the latter assurances is that whichever science is used is now showing marked problems in public (which many knew about but were not previously heard). The IPCC (which itself undertakes no scientific research) is now under an independent review instituted by the United Nations (for what that may be worth) and increasing numbers of individual scientists and groups of scientists are publicly revealing numerous possible explanations of the increase in temperatures other than increased greenhouse gas emissions. Evidence has also emerged suggesting that official agencies have made inappropriate additions to “raw” temperature data and have omitted to explain that some of the increase in temperatures is obviously due to natural causes. In short, claims of a scientific consensus behind the dangerous warming thesis are even less convincing than they were. Even a major supplier of analysis to the IPCC – Dr Jones, the (now suspended) head of the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit - recently acknowledged that the science is not settled.

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Stephen Lendman

NY Police attacking peaceful demonstrators.

On March 11, the US State Department issued its "2009 Human Rights Report: China (includes Tibet, Hong Kong, and Macau)," calling the People's Republic of China (PRC) "an authoritarian state in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constitutionally is the paramount source of power," practicing:

-- "cultural and religious repression;"
-- harassment of human rights activists;
-- harassment and disbarment of lawyers who defend them;
-- control of free expression, the Internet, and access to it;
-- extrajudicial killings;
-- torture and coerced confessions of prisoners;
-- use of forced labor, including prison labor;
-- monitoring, harassing, detaining, arresting, and imprisoning "journalists, writers, dissidents, activists, petitioners, and defense lawyers and their families;"
-- denial of due process;
-- political control of courts and judges;
-- administrative detentions and prolonged illegal ones;
-- "tight restriction (on) freedom to assemble, practice religion, and travel;"
-- failure "to protect refugees and asylum-seekers adequately;"
-- forced repatriations of North Koreans;
-- pressure on other countries to repatriate Chinese citizens;
-- monitoring and restricting local and international NGOs;
-- "endemic corruption;
-- trafficking in persons;
-- discrimination against women, minorities, and persons with disabilities;
-- forced abortion(s and) sterilization(s);"
-- no choice of independent union representation or legal right to strike;
-- "arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life;"
-- harsh and degrading treatment in prisons;
-- arbitrary arrests and detentions;
-- "arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, or correspondence;" and more.

While China is no model human rights champion, America is guilty of far worse crimes as well as all of the above abuses, yet rarely do major media reports reveal them.

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Matt Taibbi

How the nation's biggest banks are ripping off American cities with the same predatory deals that brought down Greece

If you want to know what life in the Third World is like, just ask Lisa Pack, an administrative assistant who works in the roads and transportation department in Jefferson County, Alabama. Pack got rudely introduced to life in post-crisis America last August, when word came down that she and 1,000 of her fellow public employees would have to take a little unpaid vacation for a while. The county, it turned out, was more than $5 billion in debt — meaning that courthouses, jails and sheriff's precincts had to be closed so that Wall Street banks could be paid.

As public services in and around Birmingham were stripped to the bone, Pack struggled to support her family on a weekly unemployment check of $260. Nearly a fourth of that went to pay for her health insurance, which the county no longer covered. She also fielded calls from laid-off co-workers who had it even tougher. "I'd be on the phone sometimes until two in the morning," she says. "I had to talk more than one person out of suicide. For some of the men supporting families, it was so hard — foreclosure, bankruptcy. I'd go to bed at night, and I'd be in tears."

Homes stood empty, businesses were boarded up, and parts of already-blighted Birmingham began to take on the feel of a ghost town. There were also a few bills that were unique to the area — like the $64 sewer bill that Pack and her family paid each month. "Yeah, it went up about 400 percent just over the past few years," she says.

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Noam Chomsky

International Erich Fromm Society in cooperation with the Educational Center Hospital of Stuttgart, Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010, 6 p.m., ”White Hall“ at Stuttgart’s New Castle

The president could not have been more justified when he condemned “the evil scourge of terrorism.” I am quoting Ronald Reagan, who came into office in 1981 declaring that a focus of his foreign policy would be state-directed international terrorism, “the plague of the modern age” and “a return to barbarism in our time,” to sample some of the rhetoric of his administration. When George W. Bush declared a “war on terror” 20 years later, he was re-declaring the war, an important fact that is worth exhuming from Orwell’s memory hole if we hope to understand the nature of the evil scourge of terrorism, or more importantly, if we hope to understand ourselves. We do not need the famous Delphi inscription to recognize that there can be no more important task. Just as a personal aside, that critical necessity was forcefully brought home to me almost 70 years ago in my first encounter with Erich Fromm’s work, in his classic essay on the escape to freedom in the modern world, and the grim paths that the modern free individual was tempted to choose in the effort to escape the loneliness and anguish that accompanied the newly-discovered freedom – matters all too pertinent today, unfortunately.

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