Showing posts with label Best of comments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Best of comments. Show all posts

Friday, November 25, 2011

Best of comments

From James Cameron at this page-

With the global-warming jolly about to open in Durban, the CRU whistle-blower released a second tranche of Climategate emails just as tawdry and demeaning as the first. Few outside the ranks of professional physicists consider they are able to adjudicate but most people are capable of recognizing when an investigative procedure is flawed.
It is clear the IPCC assessment process has so many serious material defects as to put into grave doubt the soundness and reliability of any of its heavily promoted claims. We know the IPCC report-writing teams are cherry-picked in an opaque process by a secretive bureau in Geneva with no effort to ensure representation of diverse viewpoints. Conflicts of interest abound in the report-writing process and favoured authors review both their own work and that of their critics, inevitably concluding in their own favour. Environmentalist campaign groups are ludicrously overrepresented among the authors who can overrule academic peer review procedures and subsequently rewrite the texts. It is this disreputable behaviour which has been exposed so damagingly by the e-mails and in files subsequently obtained under recent U.K. freedom of information rulings. They show that an IPCC chapter author recruits a contributing author not on the basis of his knowledge or past work but with cloying cronyism which decides if he is 'one of us'. The Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise has recently released her book 'The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert'. It is a classic exposé showing how the IPCC evolved into an activist organization bearing no resemblance to the picture of scientific probity painted by its promoters and its allies. The claim that the IPCC is made up of thousands of the world's top scientists with the most rigorous and exhaustive review processes in the history of science is totally risible. In fact, far from ensuring 'balance, transparency and accountability' the apathetic plenary panel made up from the 195 member governments is the greatest block to reform. Those countries truly seeking objective, balanced and rigorous information about climate science on which to base momentous policy decisions should simply withdraw. Like so much of the UN, the IPCC is irredeemably corrupt and a new assessment body is needed made up scientists rather than green zealots, political placemen and celebrities.
(bolding mine)

Now why can't all those environmental reporters scrambling feverishly like headless chickens put it as simply and precisely as this instead of copy pasting press releases from green groups? 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Best of comments

Razlon-

At the tail end of the Vietnam era, I served as an Air Force public affairs NCO. What was striking, even at the time, was the wide gulf between the Ernie Pyle and the David Halbertram generations of civilian journalists.

The former were overwhelmingly veterans themselves, never went to J school, had a wide variety of life experiences outside both the classroom and the newsroom, and regarded what they did as a trade learned on the job. The later were virtually all graduates J schools, regarded the military with open contempt,had little to no life experiences outside of journalism, felt they were on a mission to "improve" society, and considered themselves practitioners of a noble profession. Today they are the managing editors and publishers who, without any reflection or self-awareness, decide what the rest of us need to know.

No wonder the profession is dying.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Best of comments-
No one disputes the importance of inflation control. If the government has failed in fiscal control, should ordinary people be punished for it. Housing loan EMI has become unbearable. In addtion to increased prices for all consumer items from cooking gas to vegetables, we have to pay high EMIs. Should we sell our houses, repay the loans and shift to some unauthorised slum! There is a saying in my language'if you lose in the market, go and blame your mother for it'. Should government's failure be blamed on people.

By S.K.Nair at this article on the inability of the government or the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) to control rampant inflation and on the impending interest rate hikes.