Jennifer Mcbride

[Ida B. Wells has been described as a crusader for justice, and as a defender of democracy. Wells was characterized as a militant and uncompromising leader for her efforts to abolish lynching and establish racial equality. Wells challenged segregation decades before Rosa Parks, ran for Congress and attended suffrage meetings with the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Jane Addams, yet most of her efforts are largely unknown due to the fact that she is African American and female.]

Ida B. Wells was born July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the second year of the Civil War (Sterling 61). Her parents, James and Elizabeth Wells, were slaves, and thus Wells, a woman who devoted her life to promoting racial equality, was born a slave. It was from her parents that Wells developed an interest in politics and her unwavering dedication to achieving set goals. After emancipation, Jim Wells became heavily involved in politics. He was a member of the Loyal League (a local black political organization), he attended public "speakings" on the steps of the courthouse, and campaigned for local black political candidates (Sterling 65). Jim Wells' fervent interest in racial justice and political activism no doubt inspired his daughter's later interest in these same issues. Elizabeth Wells was a religious woman and a strict disciplinarian who dictated a strong work ethic. Both Jim and Elizabeth Wells emphasized the importance of education. After the Civil War, 90% of blacks were illiterate. Emancipation brought about the legalization of Negro education, and shortly thereafter, Negro schools were established throughout the south. Shaw University was established in Holly Springs in 1866 to provide education for the large, rural black community of the area (Duster 9). Wells along with her siblings and her mother (who wanted to learn to read the bible) attended Shaw University. She notes in her autobiography that "our job was to go to school and learn all we could" (Duster 9). During her years at Shaw, Wells developed an intense love of words. She reportedly read every book in the school library, from the novels of Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens to the Oliver Optic stores, a series of popular books for boys (Sterling 65). Early on in her education, Wells discovered a bias. At Shaw she learned mainly European history, and Wells notes in her autobiography that "I had read the bible and Shakespeare through, but I had never read a Negro book or anything about Negroes" (Duster 22).

More »

Steve McIntyre

[Click on image to enlarge.] [Figure 1. IPCC Third Assessment Report Zero-Order Draft Figure 2.3.3a Comparison of millennial Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature reconstructions from different investigators (Briffa et al, 1998; Jones et al, 1998; Mann et al, 1998;1999a)… All the series were filtered with a 40 year Gaussian filter. The problematic Briffa reconstruction is the yellow series.]

Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.

Relevant Climategate correspondence in the period (September-October 1999) leading up to the trick email is incomplete, but, in context, is highly revealing. There was a meeting of IPCC lead authors between Sept 1-3, 1999 to consider the “zero-order draft” of the Third Assessment Report. The emails provide clear evidence that IPCC had already decided to include a proxy diagram reconstructing temperature for the past 1000 years and that a version of the proxy diagram was presented at the Tanzania meeting showing the late twentieth century decline. I now have a copy of the proxy diagram presented at this meeting (see below).

The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”.

More »

William Blum

Yeswecanistan

All the crying from the left about how Obama "the peace candidate" has now become "a war president"...

Whatever are they talking about? Here's what I wrote in this report in August 2008, during the election campaign:

We find Obama threatening, several times, to attack Iran if they don't do what the United States wants them to do nuclear-wise; threatening more than once to attack Pakistan if their anti-terrorist policies are not tough enough or if there would be a regime change in the nuclear-armed country not to his liking; calling for a large increase in US troops and tougher policies for Afghanistan; wholly and unequivocally embracing Israel as if it were the 51st state.

Why should anyone be surprised at Obama's foreign policy in the White House? He has not even banned torture, contrary to what his supporters would fervently have us believe. If further evidence were needed, we have the November 28 report in the Washington Post: "Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban." This is but the latest example of the continuance of torture under the new administration.

More »

John Pilger / Douglas Miller

Mark Higson in memoriam

The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media so that the only issue that matters, that of prosecution, is never raised.

I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day only to learn he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.

“Everyone knows,” he said, “except parliament and the public.”

“And the media?”

“The media – the big names – have been invited to King Charles Street (the Foreign Office) and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.”

As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the British Government was not arming Saddam Hussein. “This was a downright lie”, he said. “I couldn’t bear it”.

More »

Friends Of Science

MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate.
FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects"). Two science teams have shown that correcting the surface temperature record for the effects of urban development would reduce the warming trend over land from 1980 by half. There has been no catastrophic warming recorded.

MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.
FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

More »

Walter Ewing

Understanding poverty as a racial issue, as some anti-immigration advocates do, is to ignore a host of other problems (and successes).

As a front-page story in today’s Washington Post reminds us: "Not since the last great wave of immigration to the United States around 1900 has the country’s economic future been so closely entwined with the generational progress of an immigrant group." The story highlights the degree to which the children of immigrants from Latin America have become crucial to sustaining the working-age population and tax base of the nation -- particularly as more and more of the 75 million Baby Boomers retire. Moreover, the parents of these children most likely would not have even come to this country if not for the U.S. economy’s past demand for workers to fill less-skilled jobs -- demand which was not being adequately met by the rapidly aging and better-educated native-born labor force. The Post story also casts a spotlight on the insecurities and anxieties of commentators who feel that Latino immigrants and their descendants aren’t integrating into U.S. society and moving up the socio-economic ladder "fast enough." Although these concerns are certainly understandable, they are as unjustified now as they were a century ago when they were directed at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe.

More »

David Swallow, Jr., Wowitan Yuha Mani
Traditional Lakota Spiritual Leader and a Head Man of the Lakota Nation.

The white man calls me David Swallow, Jr. but my real name is Wowitan Yuha Mani. I am a TetohLakota of the Wa Naweg’a Band and I live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

This is the way my Grandpa Najutala told me, a long time ago. He was a teenager when the 1868 Treaty was signed. He’s gone now but this is how he told me about the sacred Black Hills.

More »

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

It might take a while to sink in, but the global warming cause is on the skids. Two issues are taking the whole project down: it is getting cooler not warmer (and hence the change of the rhetoric to a vague concern over "climate change"), and the email scandal of a few weeks back proved that this really is an opinion cartel with preset views not driven by science.

Oh sure, people are saying that climategate is not really very serious and is only being exploited by Fox News and the like. And it's true that not all measures of global temperature show cooling and that the science can be complex.

On that basis, the New York Times urges us to ignore the outpouring. "It is also important not to let one set of purloined e-mail messages undermine the science and the clear case for action, in Washington and in Copenhagen."

Yes, a clear case. Come on. The whole political agenda of these people is now being seriously questioned. It is no longer a slam-dunk case that we are going to have world central planning in order to control the climate and protect the holy earth from the effects of industrialization. Oh, and tax us good and hard in the process.

But you know what is most tragic to me about this? This whole hysteria led to a fantastic diversion of energy on the left side of the political spectrum. Instead of working against war and the police state, issues on which the left tends to be pretty good, instincts were diverted to the preposterous cause of creating a statist system for global thermometer management.

More »

Marco Villa

[Please click on image to enlarge.] So it has come to this: lying. Climate change fanatics have revealed themselves to be not honest scientists actuated only by the facts, but only by a desire to control humans and remake the world in their image. These Marxists Utopians want to regulate our energy use and to do so they have propagated the non-sense of dangerous global warming. It is all bullshit:

■ Al Gore and his ilk like to arrogantly state that “the science is beyond dispute” and the threat “urgant” - to quote President Obama - but is false. Not everyone was jumped on the “global warming” bandwagon, and those who disagree are not employees of the oil industry. Respected scientists, hundreds of them; including MIT’s Richard Lindzen have stated that “the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.” This is not to say that these individuals claim that “global warming” doesn’t exist, but that hysteria has taken over and not for the first time amongst scientists [back in the 1970s many where talking about a new Ice Age]. We need a rational and reasonable discussion about what climate change actually entails, not scare tactics in order to frighten people in to giving politicians more power.

■ Even if global warming exist, so what? Environmentalists adhere to the doctrine of “No Change.” But just because there is an ice sheet over a plain does not mean that it is bad if it melts. In fact, many would argue it is good by allowing for more arable land and extending the harvest season. It is arrogant to state that the current condition of the world is the most ideal. Global warmed has warmed the coldest parts, and has not made the warmer past any more so. The melting of ice sheets opens up more land for people and animals and that should be welcomed. The world has always been changing, and there was no Copenhagen summit to stop it before and humanity is still doing well.

■ Global warming, if it exists, does not threaten life on Earth. Scientist Freeman Dyson has previously written that “most of the evolution of life occurred on a plant substantially warmer than it is now, and substantially richer in carbon dioxide.” Do not buy the alarmist hype that global warming will mean an awful world to live. Humans and animals have evolved through a warmer plant, and a rise in 2-6C is not going to alter much our existence.

■ But the most important point is that: Global warming does not exist. And the scaremongers know this. Recently disclosed documents show the shame that global warming is.

More »

Bruce E. Levine

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes? NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing -- it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions.

More »

Yaniv Reich

We have all heard it a million times: Israel does not target civilians; it only attacks military targets. I can barely count the number of times I have heard this argument from my family and friends. When all evidence of the Israeli destruction of Beirut or Gaza or wherever comes to light, this is the pillar to which uncritical Israel-supporters cling. As if the destruction of entire neighborhoods is justified through the assertion that civilians weren’t targeted, they just got in the way.

There is just one big problem with the argument: It is patently false. Moreover, Israeli leaders know its false, which therefore means this argument, when heard from Netanyahu/Livni/Olmert/Barak/Peres and all other Israeli leaders, is also a conscious lie.

Next time you hear this naive and propagandistic assertion, you should respond with a single, emphatic point: “That’s not what the Dahiya Doctrine says.”

More »

Jaisal Noor

A BIG SLICE OF PROFIT: A Huesitos de Wilde employee slices
sheets of cured leather into strips that will be dyed, rolled and baked
into dog treats. Workers have direct control of their profits.

Maria Alejendra, a factory worker in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina, spends her days cutting pieces of rawhide at the Huesitos de Wilde Cooperative. Along with the 33 other original workers at the dog treat factory, Alejandra now makes twice as much money — 2,000 pesos a month — as she did under her former boss. Alejandra, 41, who has worked at the factory for 14 years, is now able to listen to music and drink maté, a South American herbal tea, while she works.

The Huesitos de Wilde Cooperative is just one of more than 250 worker-recovered businesses in Argentina, which employ a total of 13,000 workers. Part of a broader effort to recover factories, which started after the country’s economic collapse in 2001, the workers at Huesitos de Wilde first occupied the factory and took over production in January 2007. Though Argentina’s economy has improved since the crash, the current economic downturn has caused a recent increase in factory take overs, with a significant uptick since February.

More »

Rehaviya Berman

[Rehaviya Berman conducted an interview with Ali Abunimah, for Ha’aretz, a few weeks ago. The Interview was never published. Berman decided to publish it on his blog [Hebrew] and I decided to translate it, for your reading pleasure. The Interview before you was commissioned by one of the the big newspapers. For a reason that has yet to be clarified, this paper decided not to publish the interview. It’s published here, because it’s the opinion of the editor that it’s important that this be read by the Israeli public.]

Exclusive: One On One with the Leader of the Electronic Intifada

Meet Ali Abunimah, the son of a Jordanian diplomat, a Palestinian activist, and the man who brings the hottest news of the struggle to thousands of people. His message: Forget two states, one will be tough enough to get it right.

"First of all, it’s important for me to clarify that I’m not a leader, and I’m not interested in being a leader." That’s how Ali Abunimah, 38, opens our two and a half hour interview. A Washington D.C. Born Palestinian, son of Palestinian parents of different villages in the Jeruusalem area, his mother a native of Lifta, a 1948 refugee, and his father, a native of of Battir, a 1967 refugee. Abunimah (@avinunu on Twitter) may renounce the label of a leader, but in the history that will one day be written, it’s probable that he’ll be described as the "harbinger of electronic revolution", as the Electronic Intifada- the name of the website that Abunimah is of his founders and active members. There are Twitter users with many more "followers", but there are very few who seriously deal with the Isreli-Palestinian issue, feeds voraciously on the web and doesn’t follow "@avinunu" and "E-Intifada". He’s also a sought after and articulate interviewee on news networks such as CNN and MSNBC, for his consistent representation of the Palestinian position.

More »

Wendy McElroy

[Illustration: The Frozen Thames, 1677. A cold series of winters led to the Thames freezing over above London Bridge, and this led to the first Frost Fair in 1607, complete with a tent city set up on the river itself and offering a number of amusements, including ice bowling. One of the earliest accounts of the Thames freezing comes from AD 250, when it was frozen solid for nine weeks. As long ago as 923 the river was open to wheeled traffic for trade and the transport of goods for thirteen weeks; in 1410, it lasted for fourteen weeks. The period from the mid-14th century to the 19th century in Europe is called the Little Ice Age because of the severity of the climate, especially the winters. In England, when the ice was thick enough and lasted long enough, Londoners would take to the river for travel, trade and entertainment, the latter eventually taking the form of public festivals and fairs.]

Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) proponent Kevin Trenberth says "It is incontrovertible" that the world is warming as a result of human actions. -Those are not the words of a scientist. By definition, the conclusions of science are always controvertible, and open to refutation or revision. That's how science works. Scientific method demands three things of a theory: that it be verifiable, falsifiable, and predictive.

More »

Mervyn F. Bendle

High Priest of the Eco-Apocalypse

As I pointed out in a recent article on Quadrant Online, apocalypticism has a firm grip on Western Civilization, reaching fever-pitch on many occasions over the last 2500 years. Critically, in the 20th century, apocalypticism assumed a secular guise, as various cultural historians have observed, “evoking world destruction and transformation through ecological disaster … and technological breakdown”, with both religious and secular versions “converging upon the belief that the [world] is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed” (Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 1992, p.336).

As a further example of such doom-laden prophecy, here is the latest sermon on the impending eco-apocalypse, according to James Lovelock, “the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet”, as the Sunday Times observed in its review (19 February 2009) of his latest Jeremiad, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009). According to Lovelock, in the next few years we will face an abrupt leap in average global temperatures of 9 degrees Celsius, leading to the collapse of global civilization and the virtual extinction of humanity in an orgy of violence that Lovelock gloatingly dismisses as a “massive natural cull of humanity”.

More »

Geoffrey Miller

Some awkward news ahead

Human geneticists have reached a private crisis of conscience, and it will become public knowledge in 2010. The crisis has depressing health implications and alarming political ones. In a nutshell: the new genetics will reveal much less than hoped about how to cure disease, and much more than feared about human evolution and inequality, including genetic differences between classes, ethnicities and races.

About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for “genome-wide association studies” (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them. Companies such as Illumina and Affymetrix produced DNA chips that allowed researchers to test up to 1m genetic variants for their statistical association with specific traits. America’s National Institutes of Health and Britain’s Wellcome Trust gave huge research grants for gene-hunting. Thousands of researchers jumped on the GWAS bandwagon. Lab groups formed and international research consortia congealed. The quantity of published GWAS research has soared.

More »

Ergo Rodrerich

Polvo eres. Fotografías de Juan Rulfo

Enfoca

Se ha dicho repetidas veces que el genio de un artista no es un producto enteramente personal. Las llamadas influencias históricas o culturales se concretan en el sencillo espacio regional donde transcurre la vida del escritor, pintor, etcétera.

Juan Rulfo no escapa de esta aseveración y, más aún, se le ha tomado como ejemplo y como escuela (generando productos no siempre certeros). Los antecedentes de Rulfo nutren sus ambas obras: la literaria (multipremiada y reconocida) y la fotográfica (no del todo descubierta por las mayorías).

Es indudable que en Rulfo se alza constante y generadora la imagen de la tierra, así lo evidencian los nombres de algunos de sus cuentos: El llano en llamas (título de unos de sus libros), la Cuesta de las Comadres, Nos han dado la tierra, Luvina (nombre de un cerro), Paso del Norte.

More »

Thunder Horse

When the earth was created, a great thundercloud appeared on the horizon. Flashing lightening and thundering it descended toward the treetops. As the mists cleared, there was an eagle perched on the highest branch. He took flight and flew slowly down to the ground. As he approached the earth, he put forward his foot, and as he stepped upon the ground, he became a man. For this reason we recognize the eagle as a messenger of the creator, and rely upon him to carry word of our actions to the creator.

When an eagle comes to where we are working, we know that someone cares about us and is watching over us. Eagles assume a role in numerous legends involving Native American culture. The legend of the Thunderbird is familiar to most of us. It is usually depicted in the form of a huge eagle, or at times, a vulture. It was believed to cause thunder when it flew, hence its name. Some Indian nations or tribes considered the eagle to be the persona of the Great Spirit, and believed the raptor carried ceremonial prayers to the Creator.

More »

Richard S. Lindzen

Abstract

For a variety of inter-related cultural, organizational, and political reasons, progress in climate science and the actual solution of scientific problems in this field have moved at a much slower rate than would normally be possible. Not all these factors are unique to climate science, but the heavy influence of politics has served to amplify the role of the other factors. By cultural factors, I primarily refer to the change in the scientific paradigm from a dialectic opposition between theory and observation to an emphasis on simulation and observational programs. The latter serves to almost eliminate the dialectical focus of the former. Whereas the former had the potential for convergence, the latter is much less effective. The institutional factor has many components. One is the inordinate growth of administration in universities and the consequent increase in importance of grant overhead. This leads to an emphasis on large programs that never end. Another is the hierarchical nature of formal scientific organizations whereby a small executive council can speak on behalf of thousands of scientists as well as govern the distribution of ‘carrots and sticks’ whereby reputations are made and broken. The above factors are all amplified by the need for government funding. When an issue becomes a vital part of a political agenda, as is the case with climate, then the politically desired position becomes a goal rather than a consequence of scientific research. This paper will deal with the origin of the cultural changes and with specific examples of the operation and interaction of these factors. In particular, we will show how political bodies act to control scientific institutions, how scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions, and how opposition to these positions is disposed of.

More »

Glenn Greenwald

Detainees in orange jumpsuits sit in a holding area in
Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in
2002. Salon composite/Reuters photo.

Ronald Reagan, May 20, 1988, transmitting the Convention Against Torture to the Senate for ratification:

The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of the Convention. . . . Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.

The core provisions of the Convention establish a regime for international cooperation in the criminal prosecution of torturers relying on so-called "universal jurisdiction." Each State Party is required either to prosecute torturers who are found in its territory or to extradite them to other countries for prosecution.

Convention Against Torture, signed and championed by Ronald Reagan, Article II/IV:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture. . . Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law.

Pew Poll, today:

Public opinion about the use of torture remains divided, though the share saying it can at least sometimes be justified has edged upward over the past year. Currently just over half of Americans say that the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can either often (19%) or sometimes (35%) be justified. This is the first time in over five years of Pew Research polling on this question that a majority has expressed these views. Another 16% say torture can rarely be justified, while 25% say it can never be justified.

More »