Wednesday
Mar202013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Bishop Hill, Guardian blogger?
Mar 20, 2013 Climate: Parliament Economics Energy: gas I have been invited to comment on science policy aspects of the budget for the Guardian's Political Science blog; my thoughts can be seen here.
My big oil funders will never forgive me.
Reader Comments (47)
Like erm... wow.
Is Rusbridger on holiday and somebody soon to be redundant having some fun?
Rebecca Willis spouts the same nonsense that she did when she was vice chair (to Jonathon Porritt) of the SCD (Sustainable Development Commission), which fortunately was scrapped in the bonfire of the QUANGOs (more like a little smoulder than a fire).
Prepare for the slings and arrows of the outraged fortunate.
It will do the Grauniad good to have someone other than a rabid eco-loon contribute something.
Bob Ward in...3..2..
Lol!
And a plug for the HSL is sitting on the Guardian servers too now! That'll please Bob Ward :)
I wonder how long it will be before the grauniad moderators are alerted to your heresies and you are banned for life.
This in particular should ensure that you are burnt at the stake (in a low carbon way of course)
'but the budget signalled that the government is looking to the private sector rather than the universities to innovate us out of our financial quagmire. This is surely a sensible choice'
Do you not appreciate that in guardian land, 'private' = bad, capitalist, planet-destroying, blood-sucking devils inacarnate, while public = good, sweet, selfless, virtuous, saving the planet. And universities are the bestest of all possible public institutions (after the BBC) because they have so many places to order the grauniad every day.........
Rusbridger on holiday...No still playing his Piano .Tickling the ivories or the ovaries.
It's a good job that you're a holy man Bish'.
Thus, maybe you could take some holy water and a crucifix with you and perform a great public service, with and through an exorcism [in Guardian News & Media Kings Place] and drive out some obnoxious, evil, green banshees.
For, it is a common known fact that, all left leaning vacuous organs - need cleansing and the best astringent - is the truth.
;^)
I gather the government is to pile more of our money into CC&S. No doubt this will be welcomed by Rushbridger and his followers. At least fracking is to be supported. I bet Huhne choked on his porridge.
Sitting here like a stunned mullet!
PW
Note...Oz and NZ expression
That is a great piece, Andrew, from which I learned quite a bit even after the efforts of Stephanie Flanders, Robert Peston and co. Congratulations on being asked. And if your big oil funders are now looking for alternative options, this South East London software consultant is only an email away. :)
Surely a portent that the end-times are upon us.
To what cometh the World?
Your Grace was very restrained ... still, mustn't frighten the horses, what?
Felicitations.
You're a good looking man for a commie.
I can almost hear the alter signals from hear , Bob 'fast fingers ' Ward and the Guardains happy little band of environmental jokers , or journalist , will be on the case before you know it.
No idea what the alter signal looks like but given that Batman has is Bat signal , you can't help but feel it will look something like a pair of buttocks.
Latimer- I seem to recall the Bish has already been a long time banned by the Guardian moderators on CiF so it was probably all a ghastly mistake by someone who didn't realise that his bishopness was anathema to the faithful.
From my perspective here in California, it looks like the dam has broken in the UK. While the UK economy has probably suffered far more harm than the US from the climate change nutters, the movement of scepticism from back to front burner seems surprisingly fast. Good job BH! Perhaps you could share the secret to breaking down climate bigotry with those of us across the pond!
PS are the pictures on that website incredibly blurry to anyone else??
The panel had a very nice email from Alice Bell asking us, if willing, to get stuck into the comments. I have emailed back expressing a willingness to do so, but explaining my little difficulty with the Guardian mods.
James
Yes, they don't seem to have optimised for the web very well.
Prepare for the onslaught from Komment Macht Frei (© James Delingpole).
Well fair play to the Guardian.
And a good analysis Andrew - well done.
As an aside I would applaud Osborne for introducing the up to £5000 compensation package for those Equitable Life With Profits Annuitants that took out the plans prior to Sept 2002 who were shamefully barred from any compensation by the last Labour Government. Given the age of the policyholders I cannot think of a more cynical act by politicians than that which was perpetrated by the last UK (labour) Government.
Apologies for a specific point in the budget - but it does show that this Coalition Government has gone some way to right an horrendous wrong by the last Labour Government.
So as I say, Well done to the Guardian (Bob Ward must be suffering apoplexy :0) ..............!!!!)
And also well done to Osbourne for righting an ever decreasing wrong (the annuitants die)
How much government R&D did it take for Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to create the modern world?
Isn't politics and sums out of Bob's comfort zone? Second thoughts, cancel that.
His Grace says:
'The panel had a very nice email from Alice Bell asking us, if willing, to get stuck into the comments. I have emailed back expressing a willingness to do so, but explaining my little difficulty with the Guardian mods.'
Since we were repeatedly assured by a previous guardianista (Hickman?, Lynas?) that journalists had absolutely nothing to do with The Moderators - who they portrayed as God-like incommunicado beings living in splendid isolation in a House Upon a Shining Hill inaccessible to any mere mortal - and so could never influence a moderator's decision, then I fear the newspaper faces an unhappy conundrum.
If they allow His Grace to reply to the commentary, they give the lie to the Moderator myth. But if they don't, they just look incredibly foolish. How could a paper that knows its arse from its elbow request an 'outsider' to contribute editorial material, only to discover (post hoc) that he has been banned from replying to the consequent comments?
Are your big oil funders like the ones I have that supply me oodles of nothing?
Regards
How much government R&D did it take for Bill Gates or Steve Jobs to create the modern world?
Mar 20, 2013 at 9:18 PM | Pathway
Quite a lot of government R&D actually. Do you think that the American computer industry sprang from nowhere? How much money has the US Department of Defense pumped into research in electronics and computing over the last 50 or 60 years? Even Cobol, a very old programming language that for many years was by far the most important one in business, was designed by someone who held the rank of Rear Admiral in the US Navy. Why did President Eisenhower warn against the dangers of the "military and industrial complex?"
One of the impulses in leading to vast strides in miniaturisation in electronics in the 1960s and 1970s was the need to ensure that the equipment in satellites and manned space vehicles was light and compact enough to be put into orbit by the available rockets.
I could go on. Who financed the research that led to the creation of the Internet? This blog would not exist if it were not for the World Wide Web. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN which is financed by the tax payers of many European countries.
The guardian are scum. You should have had some class and turned them down.
"My big oil funders will never forgive me"
Always bear in mind that the Guardian (circulation now dropping below 200,000) is helped to stay afloat by money from BAE systems ie by the arms industry (as Private Eye revealed a year or so back).
BH: "My big oil funders will never forgive me."
Actually The Guardian exists because of Big Oil without which there would be no need for Autotrader who's profits keeps it and The Observer afloat :-)
More white smoke!
This time a broadsheet Bish!
Well at least an "ich bin ein Berliner" Bish?
Did they try to correct your spelling?
Latimer Alder you have to be totally mad to believe the Guardains mods are anything but part of the Guardains editorial stance , of which is fully behind 'the cause' has they said a number of times . Its a running joke that somehow their is no influence over the mods , yet certain writers peoples get post pulled very soon they been made to look fools by their own BS
Evil Denier
“Komment Macht Frei” is © me, (it got me banned from CiF) but all’s fair in war and scepticism.
Bish
Get stuck into what comments? Their formatting has changed, and I can’t see any.
Nice to see Alice being welcoming. A lot of us BH boys have been harrassing Alice at New Left Project. At first she spurned our advances and told us to go back up the Hill, but hits are hits...
So here’s a plug:
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/blog_comments/climate_change_and_the_left
and those old enough to remember Arlo Guthrie’s anti-Vietnam War can sing along..
You can get anything you want
At Alice’s Hyster-rant..
Maybe Alice is presently doing a guest appearance at "unthreaded"?
geoffchambers
The Bishop's hotlink goes to the abbreviated Guardian smartphone/tablet version. Load up the normal Guardian main page and find it under the Science tab. Its got one or two comments.
Pharos:
Thanks for the tip.
If you drop the "m." from the beginning of the provided link, you go directly to the page without the modifications for mobile:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/political-science/2013/mar/20/budget-2013-science-innovation
Geoff: Komment Macht Frei was you? The world transforms before my eyes. Sorry to hear about the sciatica and for the disjointed conversation.
Is it just me or is BH becoming more surreal than usual?
Shout outs on this thread for
and
and
If Lewandowsky only knew where to look for the really crazy stuff ... :)
Humph! A very odd turnaround. Either a trap (fools they be) or some poor innocent is getting shredded for an intelligent invite.
I hope all of the numbers add rationally; (beware if anyone mentions their budget model)!
I'd just about given up on Private Eye but in the latest edition there was a story about Monbiot demanding meetings with high ups at the Guardian/Observer with the aim of banning food writers on the papers from writing recipes for fish he considered to be endangered. (Notice the Grilled Coelacanth? Me neither.)
After numerous rebuffs including from Rusbridger, Nigel Slater and pretty much everyone else Monbiot was finally torn a new one by a couple of Food Editors who told him he was talking rubbish and asked him who the **** he thought he was.
Apart from the deliciousness of the scene, any sign that Monbiot is outstaying his welcome/self destructing has to be good news.
"Well at least an "ich bin ein Berliner" Bish?" --Green Sand
Why would anyone say, "I am a jelly donut?"
turn coat
although I hear BIG GREEN pays a lot more than big oil
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/02/14/rockefellers-behind-scruffy-little-outfit/
artwest: don't give up on the Eye. It's a key barometer. The great Grilled Coelacanth story about George Monbiot has to be significant, because Ian Hislop once told Chris Booker that Monbiot knew far more than either of them did about the science of global warming - and that the issue was settled in his mind. Any cracks in that mental model - and mental always seemed the right word - will prove important. Thank you for reading the Eye during the dark years, so that we didn't have to. :)
(I have in fact read it from time to time myself and even enjoyed doing so. Hold fast to that which is good and spit out the bones, as the man said - or roughly so.)
" It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN which is financed by the tax payers of many European countries."
I've always wondered where the notion that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet came from. He made an important contribution for sure in developing the HTML language, but the "invention" of the internet began in 1969 when the US DoD set up the D'Arpanet project. This progressed into Arpanet and many important protocols, just as important as HTML were designed to carry the data over the network from one end to the other, TCP/IP being one of them. When it was realised all applications could be seperated from the network it meant that voice and video had to be handled in a different way than data because they're time critical. The actual invention was, if anything, this realisation that all forms of communication could go over the internet and many, many people made huge contributions to bringing us the internet. I know, I was there.
It's worse than we thought (journalism, that is):
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/385006/Proof-David-Bellamy-is-right-to-be-global-warming-sceptic
I used to write there too but quit when practically every comment I made below the line was deleted. I just wasn't comfortable with working for a paper that censored dissent to such a degree. Shame, as it was fun enraging the Lefties.
Richard Drake sorry but if the Eye has half of what of what it claims to be it would have been all over 'investigations' into CRU has these where classic fodder for it . But it showed that in reality it is what it attacks other for being , two faced on the honesty and mortality when it comes to issues they support.
@ geronimo
I've always wondered where the notion that Tim Berners-Lee invented the internet came from.
Why didn't you read what I read before commenting on it? I did not say that Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet and know perfectly well that it, like some of the other things I mentioned, was developed with money from the US defence budget. I mentioned Tim Berners-Lee and CERN to draw attention to the fact that European tax payers also made an important contribution to the development of modern information technology.