Day: January 30, 2009

Good for him.

He’ll be pulled into line, of course, but he’s right.

No alternative to military tribunals is in place, so their shutdown could see cases like this being transferred to civil courts which are not equipped to deal with them, or delayed indefinitely.

Politically motivated delays won’t serve the cause of justice for the suspects, for families of the Cole or other terror victims, or for the American public.

About 20% of all cancers are caused by virus infections. For example, most cervical cancers are caused by the sexually transmitted HPV (Human Papilloma Virus). Gardasil, commonly but inaccurately called a cervical cancer vaccine, prevents infection with common forms of HPV.

Scientists in South Australia are hoping to develop ‘A viable platform technology that will form the basis of a vaccine that would not only prevent, but could cure a range of chronic viruses even after they’ve become established in the body.’

This would help to prevent not only HPV and cervical cancer, but other cancers such as liver cancer, which can be caused by hepatitis infection.

Let’s hope it works.

Andrew Bolt points out that while Climate Change Minister Penny Wong was claiming that the recent heatwave in southern Australia was proof of global warming, most of Australia actually had below average temperatures for this time of year.

I know a couple of months of cooler than average temperatures don’t prove the world is getting cooler. Nor do a couple of days of hotter than average temperatures prove the world is getting warmer.

See earlier entries for more on perky Penny’s panicky plans.

Might be better than the astonishing mess that is being rammed through the complexities of US legislative processes as I write.

Of course homeopathy is complete bunk. There is not a shred of reliable, tested evidence that it works. So how is it that in at least two instances, the Spanish Flu Epidemic of the early 1990s, and the London cholera epidemic of 1854, homeopathic hospitals had markedly better recovery rates than standard hospitals?

The answer is that many of the traditional treatments for those diseases, bleeding, purging, etc, were actively harmful. The homeopathic remedies did nothing. Nothing was better.

Ditto for economic stimulus proposals. The traditional treatment amongst liberals for a slowing economy is to take money from some people and give it to other people, and encourage them to spend it. This is actively harmful, because the people from whom the money is taken are in large part those who are employing others, making useful products, or providing useful services. Penalising these people and organisations is massively counter-productive, to the point of outright stupidity.

Like it or not, every working economy depends on profitable businesses. The way to stimulate economic activity is to encourage those who are productive through tax cuts, by making it easier to employ people, and by reducing the costs of doing business, including compliance costs. If governments can’t do something useful, they should at least have the decency to do nothing. Nothing would be better.

Roger Kimball reports some interesting stimulus (as opposed to porkulus) proposals from Rush Limbaugh. The difference is, his suggestions might actually work. 

It is hard not to share Jennifer Marohasy’s frustration at at the mainstream media’s failure to report this:

‘a wide-ranging survey of glacier conditions across south eastern Greenland, indicates that glacier melt has slowed significantly and that it would be wrong to attribute the higher rates of melt prior to 2005 to global warming or to extrapolate the higher melt rates of a few years ago into the future.’

But unlike Jennifer, while disappointed, I’m not surprised.

This is an important story because the whole ‘Oh my God, the ice is melting, the seas are rising, please give us lots of money’ campaign is based on the alleged melting of Greenland’s glaciers and ice sheet. Ice in the Arctic is floating, so even if that melts in an unusual way it will have no effect on sea level. As I have noted before, a rise from -45 degrees to -40 degrees in Antarctica is not going to melt a lot of ice, and anyway, except for the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctica is stable or even cooling. So the Greenland ice sheet melting story was vital to to the anthropogenic global warming scare campaign.

For the mainstream media to print such a story would be to acknowledge they had been wrong, and that there really was nothing to worry about. And they won’t do that. Alarming climate headlines will persist for a few more years.

Headlines like the one on this rankly dishonest story: Scientists Say Glaciers Melting Fast. This is based on studies by the grandly titled World Glacier Monitoring Service. They monitor 80 glaciers around the world. Cool. But there are about 160, 000 glaciers in the world, some two thirds of them in Antarctica. So this claim is based on a study over the last thirty years (nothing in geological time) of one half of one tenth of one percent of the world’s glaciers. And even then, the headline belies comments from one of the scientists involved that coastal glaciers in Norway thickened during the study, and that the overall rate of loss in studied glaciers had slowed from the previous year.

Eventually, when it is simply not possible to ignore the fact that the world is not getting any warmer, and that there never was any reason to believe the minor and perfectly normal variation in temperature over the last 100 years had any relation to human produced CO2, the mainstream media will find some new potential disaster, and begin demanding that politicians take immediate action to save us from it.