John C. Wright's Journal

I am in this place reprinting, without comment or ellipsis, an article by Christopher Booker of the London Telegraph. For some reason Google search engines no longer found it after it had been near the top of any searches related to ‘Climategate’. I offer it in this spot both for its own sake, and just in case it gets lost again, and you want to reread it.

Added Later (hattip to Lubu): an article on where the money went.

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Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation

By

Christopher Booker
28 Nov 2009

A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

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I am not sure if non-writers will feel the same sensation of bile rising in the throat as writers when reading the following, but it should disgust and disgruntle any professional writer to hear of a large and well-established imprint like Harlequin stooping to the level of plucking money from the naive and unwary.

Harlequin is offering its services as a vanity press and vanity editor. In other words, you pay them to edit & print your manuscript, they do not pay you. And it is a healthy fee to boot — I have seen rip offs that were far less expensive. It is not under their imprint, and they do not distribute. But they advertise their service with each rejection letter, so that young writers with their hopes crushed underfoot, will be more easily led astray, because the ad will come just at the moment of maximum crushage. I am not exaggerating, you have to read it to believe it:

http://www.jackiekessler.com/blog/2009/11/20/the-day-after-harlequin-blinks/

A blessing on the various writer’s guilds, including my own beloved SWFA, who unambiguously condemned the practice.

A tenderfoot writer is about as sound and sober a judge of his own work and its merits as a newlywed of his new-met bride: in other words, they are easy to fool.

Greenhorns beware! You can avoid falling into these kind of traps by adhering to a simple rule: money goes toward the writers, it never goes from the writer. This means anyone charging a reading fee or a manuscript-doctoring fee or any such is to be avoided. You are a professional. Professionals do not do vanity press.

Just in case anyone reading these words is a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America (known, more formally, as the Ancient and Honorable Guild of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence) the stories from the anthology Federations (John Joseph Adams, ed) are currently eligible for the Nebula Award.

My novelette TWILIGHT OF THE GODS had the honor to appear in that anthology.

Now that the nomination period is open, my editor John Joseph Adams has made the anthology available to SFWA members in PDF format to encourage folks to read the stories and nominate them. (The forum is private, for SFWA members only, and the file itself is password-protected, so only SFWA members will have access to the anthology.) Mr. Adams posted a note about it on his blog, here:

http://www.johnjosephadams.com/2009/11/stories-eligible-for-the-nebula-award/

The SWFA site itself is here.

At last a few words of sanity:

http://manhattandeclaration.org/

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/11/manhattan-declaration58-a-call-of-christian-conscience

I urge all good Christian ladies and gentlemen to read and sign, or men of goodwill no matter their faith, virtuous pagans and atheist men of reason–the votaries of any god I urge to sign, so long as they vow no fealty to

• Moloch (who stands for abortion and euthanasia) or to
• Hermaphroditus or Ganymede (who stand for perversion, for hatred of marriage) or to
• Mammon and Caesar (who stands for worldly wealth and power, rarely the friends of those whose hope rests beyond the shores of Earth), or to
• those numberless Gnostic aeons and emminations, who must stand for the esoteric and convoluted falsehoods called political correctness, as I can find no classical god or devil who stands for mere gibberish, unless it might be Chaos himself, mother of Night.

One need not be a Christian to oppose the Culture of Death. Sons of Abraham, does not Samuel the Prophet warn to put no trust in kings, but to take the Lord as your only king? Sons of Ismael, does not your Prophet (peace be on him!) condemn fornication and bless the bands of marriage? Servants of Odin, did not the Lord of the Ravens straightly charge you not to die the straw death–but what is euthanasia, what is infanticide, if not sending souls to Garm, with no chance to perish weapon in hand, in battle, to join the heroes in Valhalla? Celebrants of Hellenic and Latin dieties, do not the inscriptions at Delphi command, with the voice of the god of light, to know thyself and to seek nothing in excess?

Turn your eye through all of history, O reader, East as well as West, classical as well as Christian. Seek through the writings of Confucious and Lao Tzu. Read the riddles and staves propounded by druids and barbarians. Study the stern saying of Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, the complexities of Aristotle, the sublimnities of Plato. Ponder the purity practiced by the Shinto of Japan, meditate on the meditations of the Enlightened One. Read the laws of jurists and the dreams of poets.

Nowhere will you find in the pre-Christian or the non-Christian world what is found in the post-Christian world: the combination of pride, despair, deadliness, joylessness, selfishness, indifference to honor, hatred of truthfulness, delight in unwholesomeness for the sake of its dreary ugliness, hatred of life and love and family, and the sactification of nothing and nonbeing as the goal and asperation of human existance–nowhere, in other words, in any civilized world will you find the culture of death, except here, and except now.

You will have to seek out the studied horrors of the Aztecs, the inhumanity of cannibals, the mis-shapen idolatries of Carthage and Phoenicia to find a similar contempt for human life as the Post-Christians profess, and even in their dark pyramids stained with human blood, you will not find such glorification of self-centered self-will for its own sake: even Aztec braves were brave enough to fight. Even the Philistines were not such philistines. Even the cold-eyed Spartans who threw unwanted children into the pit at Apothetae did not abort them by the millions and tens of millions and scores of millions. Even cannibals know man is not merely an animal, merely a machine made of meat, merely a random collection of lifeless chemicals suffering an illusion of consciousness. Our society has dipped below the level of these savages and their relatively innocent and relatively honest evil. Our evils are more corrupt, more thoughtful, more scientific, more arrogant, and fell from a higher pedistal.

We are dying of political correctness as if from a venereal disease. Already it has made our leaders blind, tongueless, strengthless, and nearly witless. No one can prosper by the rules of the culture of death, no one can follow the laws of chaos; no one can live by them.

The Word of God and the voice of reason and the psalms of prophets and songs of poets can agree on very few things. The sanctity of human life, of purity and marriage, and of liberty and conscience should be counted among them.

A few days ago in this space, I lamented that, from the under-reaction and sheer PC nonsense coming from our political leaders and mainstream media in re the Fort Hood shootings, it was clear that modern America had descended into a psychopathology which I will call ‘The Carter Syndrome’ where one mistakes friends for enemies, and cannot see enemies at all. Basically, I asked the question along these lines: if the Jihadists were an international totalitarian political party, like the Communists, and not an international totalitarian political party that calls itself a Church, would we be allowed to take seriously, even (if the war escalated) drastic steps against it? If so, why treat an international totalitarian political party that calls itself a Church like a Church, as sacrosanct, such that we can be attacked, but we are not allowed to name the enemy, discriminate against them, take special precautions against them, or subject them to any particular legal scrutiny.

The consensus of at least two readers, perhaps more, was that to define Islam as being worthy of particular scrutiny, or take any defensive steps, serious or drastic, would be to have a chilling effect on the free exercise of religion, which would be tantamount to the destruction of the First Amendment. Since the First Amendment was the only significant part of the Constitution, this would be tantamount to destroying the Constitution. Since the US Constitution was the only significant part of Western Civilization, this would be tantamount to the destruction of Western Civilization. Therefore, Islam, which has the oft-stated and publicly stated goal of the destruction of Western Civilization, and the imposition of totalitarian Sharia theocratic law on us all, cannot be recognized as an enemy. Only each individual act as it is perpetrated can be punished, but no acts of gathering or training troops, planning suicide bombings, increased security at airports, etc. (unless this is done in as neutral manner as possible, so that Episcopalians are under as much scrutiny as young men named Mohammad.)

The argument, in other words, to define Islam as being worthy of particular scrutiny, or take any defensive steps, was tantamount to the destruction of the Constitution (therefore of the Republic therefore of the West) therefore no steps should or could be taken. The war cannot be fought: our Constitution forbids us to fight anyone shooting at us from the steeple of a church.

Let us grant, for a moment, this stupid interpretation of Constitutional law, which says the US of A may not fight against the Jihadists, so that I may ask a simple question to anyone of this line of thought:

May England?
May France?
What about Russia, China, Spain or India?

None of these nations has our Constitution. Some of them, indeed, have an established Church. They are certainly allowed, by their laws, to discriminate between enemies and non-enemies, and (I assume) enemies and non-enemy churches. May they fight the war against the Jihad? Obviously OUR Constitution will not be affected.

As a follow up to my last post, another exhibit of the growing insanity and inanity of the West.

A remake was made of Patrick McGoohan’s iconic and unforgettable THE PRISONER. If you are of my generation, you remember this show.

In the remake, the Village turns out to be the good guys. I kid you not.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2009/11/imprisoned

Remind me when I have time to write an article on why Leftism/Political Correctness/Gnosticism/Modernism, while it can from time to time turn out a good tale on a certain limited number of themes (rebellion against a father-figure) it is inherently undramatic therefore unable to sustain drama, even when (as here) rebellion is the theme.

Submitted for your consideration
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Someone hacked into the emails at University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (a major think tank for the Anthropogenic Climate Change theory). The scientist discussed how to falsify data to prop up Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, because the data did not support the theory.

If these reports are true, I will expect a statue erected to me in the Agora.

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2009/11/20/climategate-heats-up-global-warming-debate/

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100017393/climategate-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-anthropogenic-global-warming/

http://www.ecofactory.com/news/climategate-leaked-climate-scientist-emails-expose-manipulation-112009

I came across this information when I was looking up, for my latest science fiction novel, a way of expressing the difference between a million, a billion and a trillion.

My current novel takes place at several different levels, on several different orders of magnitude. To keep my dates straight, I have to use

I wanted a way of visualizing the differences in orders of magnitude, to make it clear to my readers. I was planning my curtain scene to take place some five hundred billion years in the future. Half a Trillion. Think that is a big number?

By way of comparison:

A million seconds is 12 days.
A billion seconds is 31 years.
A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

A million minutes ago was – 1 year, 329 days, 10 hours and 40 minutes ago.
A billion minutes ago was just after the time of Christ.

A million hours ago was in 1885.
A billion hours ago man had not yet walked on earth.

A million dollars ago was five (5) seconds ago at the U.S. Treasury.
A billion dollars ago was late yesterday afternoon at the U.S. Treasury. [Note: this was pre-Obama]
A trillion dollars is so large a number that only politicians can use the term in conversation.
Here is some perspective on TRILLION:
Trillion = 1,000,000,000,000.

The country has not existed for a trillion seconds.
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds.
One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.

By way of comparison: This is the national debt of the United States. Eleven TRILLION and climbing. This is more debt than all previous debt in history combined.

That is how much you owe, O Taxpayer. Look at your income, your last year’s taxes, and multiply that by the population of the United State (divided in half, since roughly half our population pays no income tax). How many generations of your children and grandchildren will be paying?

Now do the same calculation again, but this time (1) compound the interest on the debt and (2) subtract the national budget for each year, and assume spending will continue with more medicare, social security, medicaid, bail-outs, overseas wars, major acts of terror in major cities, and government purchases of banks, housing markets, and medical industries — all these things are expensive (and all but two are government actions not permitted by our written Constitution).

Repudiation of the debt means collapse of the money and credit system.

Please note that National Debt of this type cannot be contracted by any government which ties its currency to a hard metal money standard, as God and the laws of nature discovered by Adam Smith ordained. This debt is insane: but why it is that politicians who talk about the Gold Standard are dismisses as far from the mainstream? Why is it that politicians who talk about restricting the federal government to its enumerated powers (as it is clearly written and promised by our supreme laws) as regarded as crackpots and dreamers?

I have a question for Uncle Sam and the press and opinion makers who speak for him — You run up a debt like this and you have the effrontery to call Ron Paul insane? I wonder what your basis of comparison is.

To any science fiction readers reading these words: did you actually wonder why we do not have the flying cars, the moon bases, the manned Mars landing, the O’Neil colony, the Orion drive, the rocketships to Jupiter, maybe even the beginnings of an interstellar ship, not to mention the medical advances in geriatrics and prosthetics, cell regeneration, even the eternal youth envisioned by our optimistic fathers when they wrote SF? That is because those books were written, by and large, before 1968, before the Baby Boomers, before the Flower Children and the Me Generation and Generation X.

Where is my moonbase? Sorry, kids. Your parents, the Boomers, spent all their money. Then they spent all your money. Then they spent all your children’s money, and your grandchildren’s.

Moonbase? Mars landing? Can’t afford it. Count yourself lucky was have a Hubble Telescope. At least we can see what we will never reach.

Today I had a unique experience: I actually heard from a lawyer who is less knowledgeable and skilled—less lawyerly— than I.

This is remarkable (indeed, I am even now remarking on it) because I graduated third to last in my class of 145 after being kept back a semester. The school team mascot (which I think was a stalk of Asparagus named Ebrit), got a better grade on its final in Police Procedural class than I did.

So where, in all of this great land, did I actually find a lawyer who knew less about law than yours truly? I heard him on the radio. His name is Eric Holder, and he is your Attorney General, yes, your very own, Mr. & Mrs. America.

http://www.thefoxnation.com/911/2009/11/18/holder-shattered-graham-ksm-hearing

Most of my readers have probably never had the dubious pleasure of being in Law School, but you may have seen the movie or television show a few years back called THE PAPER CHASE, where the crusty old professor Kingsfield announces “You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” One of the ways crusty old professors ladle out the mush from the skulls of students, and train them to think like lawyers, is by means of hypotheticals. Of course, we have no time to say the whole word “hypothetical” in Law School so we call them “hypos” a word similar to what you call a needle that pierces your flesh.

The classrooms (at least in my Alma Mater at William and Mary’s Marshall-Wythe School of Law) are large semicircular lecture halls shaped something like a gladiatorial arena cut in half. To cut the students in half, the crusty old professors will call upon a student at random. The student must stand. A dread silence fills the arena. The “hypo” is uttered, and the student must, on his feet, analyze the facts, apply the law, and support his conclusion with any case law he can recall without looking at his notes. To fail at answering a hypo is to fail before the eyes of your fellow students, who will one day be your colleagues.

Nothing is worse than standing before the eyes of all and having nothing to say to the hypo. Nothing is better than lounging in your seat, not called on, and knowing the answer, and the case law, and having the argument to support either position ready on your lips. Ah! The Germans have a word for that: schadenfreude. Pleasure at another man’s distress.

Well, on the radio today, I suffered a ‘Nam style foxhole-flashback to my law student days, and felt once more that sickly-sweet yet fiendish pleasure of schadenfreude when I heard another student of the law being grilled. And toasted. And deep fat fried. And turned over on the griddle to sizzle on the other side.

But it was not law school. It was a senate hearing. Mr. Holder the Attorney General was being cross-examined by Senator Graham of the Judiciary Committee, who posed a simple question.

The hypo was this: “If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?”

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In a recent discussion in this space, I waxed indignant over the inability of our popular leaders, both political leaders and opinion makers, to admit that the Jihadists with whom we are currently at war are Islamic and not Christian. They regard it as impolite, nay, as hateful, for anyone to mention the religion and the religious motives of the Fort Hood mass assassin, for example. This provoked a remarkable reaction — roughly half the comments in my comments box not only affirmed the Politically Correct position, that we are not at war and dare not admit we are at war, but expressed the fear that the Christians were about to shred the Constitution and impose a theocratic dictatorship on the United States. (In all fairness, 1. the other half of the comments were sane; 2. most comments came from the pen of one or two readers.)

Because I was writing a screed, and not a reasoned philosophical position, I did not even try to qualify my statements, or to be all that clear. I sort of assumed the kind readers would know what I meant. The unkind readers would not understand me even if I qualified my statements, so I saw no reason to try. But this cavalier attitude of mine caused me to offend unwittingly more people than I meant to offend.

Upon reflection, when I doff the robe and beard of a philosopher to don the hairshirt and rope-belt of a prophet on a Jeremiad, I should actually make it clear where I myself stand on the issue.

Let me, Socrates like, ask any reader willing to answer a set of questions:
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Cross posted to Visions of Arhyelon, here is this week’s column on writing from the lovely and talented Mrs.

http://arhyalon.livejournal.com/91474.html

P.S. I also recommend the Donald Maass book. It is the only book on writing I ever recommend.

John Ottinger III of Grasping for the Wind has asked several authors for their favorite SF endings. By no coincidence, John De Nardo over at SfSignal asked about both the best and the worst endings.

Well, clearly there is a trend. Since my name is John, I also must answer the question.
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I found to my surprise that I never posted by Amazon.com review of Ted Chiang’s brilliant (but to my taste too nihilistic) STORY OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS here on my livejournal. Let me rectify that oversight at once. Read the remainder of this entry »

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6564304/Nasas-LCROSS-mission-proves-once-and-for-all-there-is-water-on-the-Moon.html

I love this headline:

Any headline that contains the phrase "NASA confirmed their mission to BOMB THE MOON had found…" is a winner.

While this does not necessarily mean that the Va-Gas are roaming the interior seas of the Moon, it does mean that a moonbase, should one ever be constructed, would have some local naturresources to draw upon.