Monday, December 22, 2014

Climate Alarmist Paper Retracted Due To Fake Peer Review

A favourite taunt of climate alarmists is that The Science has spoken and it's spoken in a decidedly alarmed and warmist fashion. But as we saw in the Climategate emails, subverting the process of peer review has been a key tactic of the warmists. Sometimes this subversion is through the process of pal review, sometimes it's through applying pressure to keep stray editors in line and sometimes, as in this case, it's outright dishonesty.

Pakistani economist Khalid Zaman has just has a tranche of publications retracted by Elsevier because of faked peer review. In all 16 papers have been withdrawn according to Retraction Watch, due to irregularities in the peer review process. In this case Zaman had set up fake email accounts which he then used to create fake peer reviewers. These fake peer reviewers, were surprisingly open to Zaman's work for some inexplicable reason.

Of the 16 papers retracted, one stands out in particular: Causal links between greenhouse gas emissions, economic growth and energy consumption in Pakistan: A fatal disorder of society. In this paper Zaman and co-authors set out to show that carbon emissions are destroying Pakistani society. The abstract concludes:

 ...emissions caused by consuming the energy [sic] is causing harm to the society by enlarge, and it reaches to the conclusion where we are heading toward a systematic fatal disorder of our society.
So, just to get the story right, according to the good Professor, it's not poverty, rampant corruption, military interference in politics, the Taliban, terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism or proxy war with India that is destroying Pakistan, it's too much CO2. No wonder he had to make up his own peer reviewers. No sane person would have let that one go...

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Peshawar School Massacre

The latest count of the dead shows 132 children and 12 adults. It's a massacre in true Islamist 'let God sort them out style'. Of course we can expect that there will be plenty out there assuring us that Islam is the religion of peace and that the slaughter of innocents is not approved of. And there will be those who will seek conspiracies to explain the massacre - it was a false flag operation to turn the Pakistanis against the Taliban, it was the CIA/Mossad etc.Or worse than the barking mad conspiracy theorists we can also expect those who will assign moral responsibility on the West. If we hadn't done x, y or z then this would never have happened.

It's bullshit, all of it. Anything but facing the fact that there are significant numbers of Islamists motivated and supported by their religious leaders to slaughter indiscriminately in the name of Allah. The problem is in Islam, and seeking excuses just shifts the blame away from those responsible.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Maoist Sex Slaves

It was just over a year ago that the story broke about the "Domestic Slavery" case in Brixton. I guessed at the time that the likely culprit was Ara Balakrishnan and his Workers Institue of Mao Tse Tung Thought. Well, the story is in the news again today when the police revealed that charges are to be brought. It turns out that Comrade Balakrishnan is being charged with:

...one count of cruelty to a person under 16, four counts of rape and 19 counts of indecent assault.

Of course there's plenty of precedence for this. Did not the Great Helmsman himself not have a little harem of young women to satisfy his need for dialectics? On a smaller scale there have also been well-publicised cases of sexual exploitation by comrade Gerald Healy (WRP), and lots of stuff going on the in the SWP.

Still, the court case should be interesting...

Friday, December 05, 2014

Scotland Lowers Drink-Drive Limit

According to the BBC this morning, Scotland is lowering the drink-drive level to below that of the rest of the UK. Well, this is the revenge of the SNP - pay-back time for not supporting Yes in the referendum. And they've reduced it not by a tiny bit but by a fairly big chunk (80mg to 50mg in every 100ml of blood).

Well, let's make some predictions then...

1. There will be a rise in the takings in pubs just south of the border.
2. In five years time there will be nobody in Scotland in possession of a valid driving licence except Muslim taxi drivers
3. This is will make practically no difference to death or accident rates on roads in Scotland
4. Activists in England will be demanding that we meet or exceed the lower Scottish limit
5. There will be a rise in the number of junk science 'public health' research papers that will seek to show that the Scots are healthier, wealthier and wiser because of the change