DUFF & NONSENSE!

Don't mess with 'The Donald'!

My only surprise at the news that President Trump had, in effect, just assassinated the Deputy 'President' of Iran was how long it took him to act!  For the last three years we have been under an endless stream of 'meeja agit-prop' to the effect that Trump was a trigger-happy looney who would start WWIII.  During those three years America has been the target for endless direct or indirect attacks of various kinds from Iran and its Islamic fanatical leadership.  The assault on the American embassy in Iraq was the final straw.

One immediate effect will be to concentrate what passes for the minds of those Iranian 'loonies' who 'strut their hour upon the stage' seemingly in the belief that they are invulnerable.  Not, of course, that that will change their ambitions but in future they will be wise to pick their targets more carefully - US embassies are best avoided!  Of course, what they are likely to do is switch their venom from America to friends of America.  Israel, of course, is well able to look after itself and the Iranians have never had any doubts as to the sort of response they can expect from that direction.  I just hope Boris and his acolytes are able to grip what passes these days for the British military(!) and ensure a suitably swift and murderous response to any future Iranian excesses.

In the meantime, I will congratulate 'The Donald' on an immaculate action which would have reduced his predecessor to tears and trembles had he - God forfend! - been in command!  Yes, there will be troubles ahead - so no change there then!

 

 

Another good reason to privatise the BBC

Well, the number of good reasons to privatise the BBC grows exponentially but Matt Ridley adds a few more.  Did you know, for example, that there is a BBC rule that if anyone on air suggests that global warming is tosh then a global warming mouth-dribbler MUST be given a following slot.  In Mr. Ridley's example, he was invited on to the Today programme when Charles Moore was guest editor for one day.  Mr. Ridley's well-supported scorn for global warming nonsense is well known so he was followed on air by Sir David King, former government chief science advisor. As Mr. Ridley points out, Sir David is a qualified chemist, while he is a qualified biologist!

I sat there open-mouthed as he beautifully demonstrated my point with one exaggeration after another. He said that Europe’s dash for diesel had nothing to do with greens, when green pressure groups pushed actively for it. He said that we will see 1-2 metres of sea level rise this century, when the current rate of rise is 3.4 millimetres a year with no acceleration (or 0.3 metres per century). He said that all of Greenland’s ice cap might melt and could cause 5-6 metres of sea level rise, though at current rates of melting, Greenland’s ice cap will be 99% intact in 2100. He said that wild fires were being caused by trees dying out because of rising temperatures, rather than a failure to manage increasingly luxuriant vegetation in fire-risk areas leading to a build up of tinder. He said scientists are agreed that Calcutta will have to be moved, when the Ganges delta is actually expanding in area, not shrinking.

And so on and on and on and it is not confined just to Sir David and the BBC:

What readers of newspapers and listeners to the radio do not see is the sustained and deliberate pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line on climate change. Take Bob Ward, who works at the London School of Economics, where his salary is paid by a billionaire, Jeremy Grantham. Ward is not employed to do research, but to “communicate” climate science. He chooses to interpret this as a duty to put pressure on the media to censor people like me. He complains to the Times almost every time I mention climate change, often getting his facts wrong, and kicked up a huge fuss when the Times, after publishing half a dozen of his letters declined to publish another one.

I am shocked, I tell you, shocked that the Maldives have the effrontery to continue to exist years and years after the 'experts' told them they were doomed.  Then there was that total prat, Paul R. Erhlich, who used to feature constantly in these, er, distinguished columns, who warned, with my emphasis:

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He later went on to forecast that hundreds of millions would starve to death in the 1970s, that 65 million of them would be Americans, that crowded India was essentially doomed, that odds were fair “England will not exist in the year 2000.” Dr. Ehrlich was so sure of himself that he warned in 1970 that “sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.” By “the end,” he meant “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

Well, England is still here and, amazingly, so is Dr. Erhlich!  Mind you, for a full-on 'gloomster-doomster' of the first order, he did provide us all with a huge laugh when he accepted a bet with Julian Simon which you can read about on Erhlich's Wiki entry and which he lost - BIG TIME!

The real threat to all of us are 'experts'!