“think climate change is probably happening,
but wonder if there may not be at least some concomitant benefits,

“go on to suggest that there may be a significant non-anthropogenic component;

“and, consequently, wonder to what extent horrendously expensive measures to combat it are necessary or desirable”

I wonder which part of that I need to prove.

Incidentally, I’m intrigued by Brendan’s assertion that:

“ he argues that the commemoration of the death of John Lennon is part of the Western cult of death (or something) because Lennon supported ‘murderous terrorists’.”

Here’s the only thing I said about Lennon and terrorists:

“I couldn’t bear to think or write about John Lennon – who expressed his support for murderous terrorists at around the same time Imagine was released – nor about Harold Pinter. As those two individuals dominate the media today”

That’s it. Where did I “argue” anything, Brendan?

While your impressive name-calling may amuse some, your distortion of my position on global warming, and your fabrication of the “argument” concerning Lennon seem rather amateurish.

I don’t understand relativity or quantum mechanics either, but I know that anyone without a degree in physics, preferably a post-graduate, and a tenured position at a respectable universit who claims to have gone ‘beyond Einstein’ or something like that is probably barking.

The fact is that to the best of my knowledge there is not one serious climate scientist (i.e. who meets the criteria of phd and tenured position at a renowned university) who doubts anthropogenic climate change. I also know from reading Scott Burgess that he is an imbecile. Not only do I know this: i also know that he is an extremist right winger with a taste for absurd conspiracy theories who takes for granted that truth should be subject to political expediency (and not just anyone’s political expediency either, but solely the expediencey of the rich and powerful). Given the other fact that Mr Burgess has no qualifications in climate science, or statistics, and in fact, no (so far as I know) qualifications of any sort, then the onus is on him to prove his case, not for me to prove mine.

True that around the corner sit lonesome souls staring out to sea but there’s a beauty in this melancholy. And the bbq’s on the beach and music strummed on the pier is a chance to breath in a hectic world.

Borth is trickier to defend but it’s still lovely.

As for the other more important comments I haven’t currently got time to dive in. The Influencing Machine and the air loom gang are an interesting take on early mind control conspiracy theories though:

His patient’s name was James Tilly Matthews, and his view of the world had by this point become one of the strangest ever recorded in the annals of psychiatry. Haslam’s account is still acknowledged as the first example in history of the now-familiar notion of mind control by an ‘influencing machine’. For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them through fillings, mysterious implants or TV sets, or via hi-tech surveillance, MI5, Masonic lodges or UFOs, James Tilly Matthews is Patient Zero.
Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. They were using a machine called an ‘Air Loom’, of which Matthews was able to draw immaculate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. It incorporated keys, levers, barrels, batteries, sails, brass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by directing and modulating magnetically charged air currents, rather as the stops of an organ modulate its tones. It ran on a mixture of foul substances, including ‘spermatic-animal-seminal rays’, ‘effluvia of dogs’ and ‘putrid human breath’, and its discharges of magnetic fluid were focused to deliver thoughts, feelings and sensations directly into Matthews’ brain. There were many of these mind-control settings, all classified by vivid names: ‘fluid locking’, ‘stone making’, ‘thigh talking’, ‘lobster-cracking’, ‘bomb-bursting’, and the dreaded ‘brain-saying’, whereby thoughts were forced into his brain against his will. To facilitate this process, the gang had implanted a magnet into his head. As a result of the Air Loom, Matthews was tormented constantly by delusions, physical agonies, fits of laughter and being forced to parrot whatever nonsense they chose to feed into his head. No wonder some people thought he was mad.
The Air Loom was being run by a gang of undercover Jacobin revolutionaries, bent on forcing Britain into a disastrous war with Revolutionary France. These characters, too, Matthews could describe with haunting precision. They were led by a puppet-master named ‘Bill the King’; all details were recorded by his second-in-command, ‘Jack the Schoolmaster’. The French liaison was accomplished by a woman called Charlotte, who seemed to Matthews to be as much a prisoner as himself, and was often chained up near-naked. ‘Sir Archy’ was a woman who dressed as a man and spoke in obscenities; the machine itself was operated by the sinister, pockmarked and nameless ‘Glove Woman’. If Matthews were to see any of these characters in the street, they would grasp batons of magnetic metal which would cause them to disappear.
But all this activity wasn’t directed solely at Matthews. There were many Air Loom gangs all over London, influencing the minds of politicians and public figures, and with a particularly firm grasp of the Prime Minister, William Pitt. They were lurking in streets, theatres and coffee-houses, where they tricked the unsuspecting into inhaling the magnetic fluid which would place them under the control of the Air Loom. By poisoning the minds of politicians on both sides of the Channel with paranoid ‘brain-sayings’, they were threatening national and international catastrophe.
Matthews had originally been committed to Bedlam after standing up in the public gallery of the House of Commons and accusing the Home Secretary, Lord Liverpool, of treason. When examined, he insisted that he had been involved in top secret peace negotiations between the British and French governments, but had been betrayed by the Pitt administration and left to rot in a Paris dungeon. At the time, his convoluted narrative of plot, counter-plot and conspiracy had been seen as a symptom of his grandiose madness. But a great deal of it was true.
Matthews had been a well-to-do tea broker, originally from Wales, who had strong Republican sympathies and, after the French Revolution, began travelling between London and Paris as a self-appointed peacemaker, trying to head off the looming war between France and England. Initially, he had spectacular success in persuading the moderate Republican faction that Britain would sooner be at peace than at war with a stable and constitutional French nation, and met several times with Pitt, Lord Liverpool and others to attempt to sell them on his secret proposal. But the moderate leaders with whom Matthews was negotiating had lost power to the hard-line Jacobins, and Matthews had been arrested on suspicion of being an English double agent. He was imprisoned for three years during the height of the Terror; when he was released and returned to England, and began accusing the cabinet of washing their hands of him, they denied all knowledge of his mission.
So Matthews may have been delusional, but his wild conspiracy theories held more than a grain of truth. Furthermore, when he wasn’t under assault from the Air Loom, he appears to have been extremely lucid and articulate. Certainly his family didn’t believe that he was mad; their view was that he was a good-natured man, a peacemaker, who had become eccentric as a result of his misfortunes and had developed cranky views on politics.

But seriously though…I do think that people who have such a depth of ignorance of science and the scientific method that they question things that really no sane person should question should have their other views judged ‘guilty until proven innocent.’

For all that it’s fashionable to prattle on about the Enlightenment project and so forth, this doesn’t really mean very much unless you talk about individual cases. The fact is that the three key contemporary touchstones of anti-enlightenent contempt for science (or to be more specific, the anti-enlightenment belief that political expediency should take priority over scientific truth) are global warming ‘skepticism’, ‘Intelligent’ Design, and the incoherent and statistically illiterate attacks on the Lancet Study. Another classic example of pre-scientific thinking is a fondnes for conspiracy theories, and I think Mr Burgess’s uninteresting views on the Moslem Brotherhood should be considered in this light.

In any case, I think the Blackadder quote shows how mad Mr Burgess is. And as for stupid, another quote will have to suffice:

Scott Burgess: He’s got a brain the size of a weasel’s wedding tackle.

It’s from The Yankee and Cowboy War, by Carl Oglesby, p.25.

“Clandestinism is not the usage of a handful of rogues, it is the formalized process of an entire class in which a thousand hands spontaneously join.” – Carl Oglesby, The Yankee and Cowboy War

If the arguments in the post are ‘not of much interest’ then why did you read the three pages of text that come before the vulgarity?

It is one thing to complain about expletives when they are used in the manner of a rapper, when every fourth word is an expletive they lose all effect. In this case the author used a single vulgarity and did so very plainly for calculated effect which Jim Miller recognizes.

What we see here is the inner workings of the Republican brain: essentially a list processing algorithm that churns through text until it sees something that matches a pre-canned response. The arguments were recognized by the matching algorithm as the type of left wing propaganda that has to be rigorously excluded to avoid the risk of puncturing the world view. When the expletive comes along the pattern match picks it up and instructs the fingers to type in a response.

I knew a Jim Miller once, he was a total toss-pot.

About Dilpazier Aslam: remember that his HT connections became an issue when he wrote that piece after the 7th July bombings about feisty Yorksire Muslim lads or whatever. The Shabina Begum interview became an issue then, not at the time, and I think it only mattered to the people to whom the “feisty” piece mattered. His place in both HT and the Guardian got the Guardian a scoop: a sympathetic interviewer to whom Shabina could speak comfortably.

Muslims may not be on course for another set of gas chambers as some seem to think (see this entry), but Islamophobia in Europe is taking on yet another of the characteristics of traditional European anti-Semitism: the conspiracy theory. We’ve…

If newspapers are deeply involved in the work of the various parties and have party identifications, then it is strange to expect them to hire anyone and everyone. Since it was found that Aslam was directly opposed to the ethos and goals of the Guardian, which are explicitly a requirement of the position, I don’t see why they can’t fire him.

On the other hand, if they can employ anyone, then they most definitely should not put reporters on who are strongly affiliated with one of the two parties to a legal case in the position of providing free propaganda for said legal case. That’s pretty clearly what happened in the case of the Guardian.

I always find that it bolsters the credibility of an academic argument when the proponent swears at his interrogators, don’t you?

It seems to me the complained-of vulgarity was used to express the speakers’ emotional reaction to the towns in question, rather than to disguise any weakness in the underlying argument, but whatevs.