Lord Falconer on Question Time

Last night Lord Falconer appeared on BBC's Question Time.

Iain Dale describes Lord Falconer's as generally quite impressive. The exception is that he spoke of the Iraq War, as described by Iain Dale, with "Forked Tongue". I generally like Iain's writing (even if he is a Tory who toes the social democratic line) and in this post he highlights the "Noble" Lord's grasp of the truth pretty well.

However, I think Iain is far too polite to desrcibe Lord Falconer for what he really is - a fucking liar!!

Here is what Falconer said on Question Time last night...

The British government never at any time suggested there was a link between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

... and here is what the lying grinning twat Blair said in the House of Commons in his speech of 18th March 2003 supporting military action...

Those two threats [terrorism and states with NBC weapons] have, of course, different motives and different origins, but they share one basic common view: they detest the freedom, democracy and tolerance that are the hallmarks of our way of life. At the moment, I accept fully that the association between the two is loose, but it is hardening. The possibility of the two coming together of terrorist groups in possession of weapons of mass destruction or even of a socalled dirty radiological bomb is now, in my judgment, a real and present danger to Britain and its national security.

Pretty easy to spot the difference eh?

Falconer is lying through his teeth and trying, as Labour have always done, to re-write history.

He is a Labour apparatchik who owes his position to Blair's patronage and nothing more. Never elected and not accountable.

Unless he can learn to tell the truth he should keep his fucking mouth shut.

Cunt.

Gordon Brown is...

... not very popular it seems.

Click image for a larger version.

Ah hahahahahaha!!!!

You have no right to silence

Last week I posted about how the end result of the DNA database means we are now Guilty until proven innocent.

Now it seems that not only has our right to silence has also been taken away, but that you can now be imprisoned simply for keeping quiet. From Old Holborn - posted by Anna Racoon.

Computer programmers and software engineers tend to score highly on the autistic spectrum. They are not actually all mad as hatters, but those that are do well in that introspective and highly focussed career.

Little surprise then to find that one of their number is ever so slightly odd. Gary McKinnon odd. Interested in peculiar things, like model rockets.

'J' ran true to course, had his own software business and a model rocket making hobby. Declared himself to be a Libertarian. Moved to the Netherlands because he thought the UK was becoming a police state. Obviously certifiable.

He had at one point attempted to go to Canada without the required visa. Further evidence of his increasing mental instability was that he then took a train back to England to keep an appointment with HM Customs in respect of this offence - an offence for which no charges have been laid..

The authorities needed little more. The new French/English customs/anti-terrorism/passport control at the Eurostar terminal in Paris detected by cunning use of an x-ray machine that he had a model rocket about his person. No fuel, no explosives, nothing else, just a model rocket still in its packaging. Fool that he was.

They promptly radioed ahead to operation headquarters in England, and by the time our friend landed at St Pancreas, a full complement of our friendly local anti-terror Gestapo were waiting for him.

They broke into his hotel room and impounded his computer. Being a software developer he had a considerable amount of open source software code on his machine, as you do, and he had taken the precaution of encrypting his work. The police demanded the encryption key, they gave him one hour to hand it over under the UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers act (RIPA). Our friendly computer programmer, already believing the UK to be a police state, and having left the country to escape this sort of treatment, remained silent for the entire hour.

The police charged him with 'remaining silent', when he tried to get another passport to escape this hell hole, they also charged him with trying to obtain a new passport whilst they were still holding his old one. At no point have they charged him with anything to do with his model rocket, nor with anything found on his computer, nor with his earlier transgression regarding his attempted entry into Canada.

His crime was refusing to speak during that hour.

"There could be child pornography, there could be bomb-making recipes," said one detective.
"Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?"

He was sentenced to 13 months in Winchester Jail.

In his judgment, Judge Hetherington accepted 'J' was no threat to national security and noted his outsider lifestyle. "You... wished to involve yourself in a world which was largely based upon the access to the internet and using computers and not really interacting with other people in the ordinary outside world to any great extent," he said. "It is said on your behalf that you lead an existence rather akin to that of a monk, and that there is nothing sinister in any of this but it is essentially private matters and you do not see why you should have to disclose anything to the authorities."

Despite referencing his solitary existence, Judge Hetherington appeared not to know about 'J's mental health problems and criticised him for not speaking to authorities.

Abandoning normal court procedures, he said: "It was because I was satisfied you would not tell the Probation Service anything significant further that I saw no purpose in obtaining a pre-sentence report which is normally a prerequisite for someone of no previous convictions who has not previously received a prison sentence," he said.

Originally sentenced to 13 months for ten separate charges relating to ten separate requests of provide encryption keys, he was subsequently interviewed by a police psychiatrist.

"Do you think they are out to get you?"

Indeed he did. Little wonder! He says he felt harassed by authority and helpless against police he believed were determined to pin a crime on him.

The psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, and he is now held at a secure hospital, where his release date is subject to approval by his Doctors that he no longer thinks 'they are out to get him'.

As Giolla comments in OH's/Anna's original post:

that's he's being held in such a manner might rather prove his point though as they have indeed got him.

There is nothing more that I can add to describe the horror of this law.

Facebook funny

Whenever I share one of my posts to Facebook I'm asked to complete a security check by entering random words - a bit like captcha.

Now I'm not so sure it's random...

These were the security words I had to enter as I shared my recent post commenting on Gordon Brown's pronouncements about the UK being best placed to weather the recession.

Ah hahahahaha!!!! Thank you Facebook for a good laugh this morning.

More data manipulation

One of the greatest problems with the GCMs (General Circulation Models/Global Climate Models - take your pick) is that over the last decade they have not predicted what has actually happened with global temperatures.

While the models were predicting that Earth would get consistently warmer, the actual temperatures recorded (real data as opposed to modelled predictions) have not been playing ball.

The Earth's measured temperature has neither increased nor decreased.

This has typically been attributed to factors such as natural variation - that Global Warming was on hold and would start again at some point. A tenuous argument at best.

However, in New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research (NIWA) have, according to their data, been seeing a consistently rising temperature trend over the last 150 years - see graph below:

Well that looks pretty conclusive. Global Warming is happening and we're all a bunch of bastards for killing the planet.

Or maybe not!

It seems that much like our 'friends' at UEA CRU have been adjusting their data to fit the theory, so have NIWA.

The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition downloaded the raw measured unadjusted temperature data from the NIWA website to do some further analysis. And here are the results:

Now call me old fashioned, but that doesn't look much like a temperature rise to me.

As quoted by NZ Climate Science Coalition:

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

At least NIWA make their raw data available for others to check - unlike the shysters at UEA CRU who spent years trying every trick in the book to ensure their data wasn't released.

Hat-tip to Anthony at Watts Up With That for picking up on this.

You can download the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition report here.

Best placed to get through the recession

Remember how Gordon Brown and the Labour Party were so insistent that the UK was placed to weather the recession? How alone amongst developed economies we had the right economic conditions and Government to ride the storm and come out ahead?

We were told this over and over and over again. So many times it became boring.

Remember Gordon saying in PMQs that he had saved the world? Even if it was a slip of the tongue I'm sure in his deluded head he believed that is what he was doing.

So how are we doing then compared to these other developed economies?

Ah! Oh dear..... not so great then!

This is the revised GDP for Q3 2009 - revised downwards by the Office of National Statistics. It's difficult to spin that really.

You can see the full story summarised nicely by Mark Bathgate over at the Spectator Coffee House. Mark seems to have taken over the reins from Fraser in producing these great posts that show very clearly how, once again, Labour have fucked the British economy.

50/50

So today the Met Office wound up their hugely expensive super computers, crunched all the numbers to come up with this stunning forecast (via The Times):

The weather forecaster said there is a 50 per cent chance that the world average temperature in 2010 will be warmer than in 1998, which is the warmest on record in the Met Office’s 160 years of data.

Of course, it could also be 50% cooler. Who knows?

What we do know is that at least some of the data used to create this magnificent forecast was from CRU at University of East Anglia.

And how good is that data? Well, I leave that to a chap called Asimov who's being doing a lot of analysis on Harry's readme file - as blogged here by me and here by DK (emphasis mine):

My god people, have you just been skipping over everything I've posted from that HARRY_READ_ME.txt file!?!?

The data itself is a HUGE unknown, even to the researchers themselves as they attempt to decode what's gone before.

Sure, the emails indicate the possibility (and certainty in some cases) of fraud. That one file PROVES HOW UNRELIABLE THE DATA ITSELF IS!!

They "lost" the original data?? I believe it now. v2.10 was run with a ****ton of code that was undocumented, made no sense and was FULL of bugs. Is v3.0 better when half the data from 1980 on is SYNTHETIC?!? Or when it used the output from the buggy 2.10 version (which is all they had) to produce NEW data?!?!

This is a ****ing joke. The emails are FAR from the most damning thing in this. I can't wait for somebody familiar with the code to start going over it and seeing how many "So we'll just gloss over that entirely ;0)" instances exist.

So the data is a huge unknown, the original data was lost and the data they did have has been adjusted and manipulated so much that it's a complete cluster fuck anyway.

And we're expected to give the Government millions of pounds in taxes to sort a problem based on a prediction that could have been made with the toss of coin.

As Old Holborn succinctly puts it:

They really are taking the piss now.