Mission creep

The government's trust schools policy has its latest outing today with the news that a further 115 trust schools are to be launched with sponsors from both the private sector and charities.

The government yesterday announced 115 new trust schools, including the first co-operative trust school where pupils, parents and teachers will have a say in how it is run. Trust schools are paired with businesses or charities giving them powers to appoint staff, own their buildings and set their admissions policies. Sponsors announced today include the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, Barnardo's, Microsoft and Unilever.

We know that the whole trust schools thing is a bit of sham - it's a manifestation of the wrong-headed idea that the problems with UK schools are a failure of management; that all we need to do is get the right people steering the boat and it will be miraculously transformed from a leaking tub to a sleek ship-of-the-line. But it will take many more years of failure before people realise this, and only then might they deduce that the problem is lack of competition rather than lack of management.

The eye-catching thing about this announcement is the identity of some of the sponsors. I mean, the RSPB? Money is going to be diverted from twitchers to teachers? One wonders what the members will make of that. You thought you were handing over your membership fee to run nature reserves and twitching courses, but actually you were paying for a futile attempt to address education policy failures. You've paid your taxes, you've made your contribution to state education, and now you can pay all over again. Charity becomes a voluntary tax.

We can see where this will lead. If people see their charitable contributions being diverted to fund state activity, they will quickly stop giving to charity at all. That would be sad, but I can't help feeling a certain sense of inevitability about it. 

The EU and biofuels

The prime minister has urged the G8 to take action on food prices and to stem the upward pressure from biofuels. In a letter to the Japanese PM he says:

"There is a growing consensus that we need urgently to examine the impact on food prices of different kinds and production methods of biofuels, and ensure that their use is responsible and sustainable."

In the face of further criticism from aid officials and with the World Bank now adding its voice to the chorus of warnings, it's become clear that food price inflation is being driven mainly by biofuels production. The problem for Mr Brown is that he is can't actually address the root causes of the problem directly. Biofuels usage in the UK is mandated by the EU and Brussels is digging its heels in and refusing to change its policy. This being the case, Brown is powerless to act and is forced to hide behind the fig leaf of an international aid package. The futility of this kind of gesture becomes clear with even a moment's consideration of the number of people who are affected by price rises. There is no way that an package with any prospect of being realised could make any difference to the millions affected.

Once again, the EU has shown that it puts "the project" ahead of any other considerations, including humanitarian ones. Why we should remain a member of a body which treats poor people with such contempt is something that Europhiles will have to explain. 

Olympic detachment

Gordon Brown will not be attending the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olmpics, according to the BBC.

Why not? Does he expect to be kicked out that quickly? 

Jo Abbess's fifteen minutes of fame

The Harrabin/Abbess story continues to reverberate. It's now crossed the Atlantic and has been picked up by Instapundit and a TV programme called the Glen Beck show, as well as a host of online commentators.

There's an interesting point at towards the end, where Beck reveals that the BBC is refusing to comment on the story, which I suppose is entirely understandable, if not forgiveable.

Benny Peiser's CCNet email newsletter is still digging away at the story too (and even includes my story about the BBC stealth editing guidelines as its headline - thanks for the mention!).  

Meanwhile Peter Risdon has a whole new BBC climate story, with environment correspondent Richard Black lining up scientists to criticise Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark's cosmic ray theory of climate change, but failing to include Svensmark's reponse (if he asked for one at all). And intriguingly, Black has demanded that all of his correspondence with Risdon be kept confidential. What can he possibly have said?

Shut the NHS

This is simply amazing -

Less than half of NHS staff (46%) believe patient care is the top priority at their health trust, a survey has showed.One in four do not think their trust sees it as most important, while a further 29% neither agree or disagree.

Will anyone now stand up and argue that the NHS is of any benefit to the British people whatsoever. It's the same as every other bureaucracy - run for the benefit of its staff and the politicians who run it. 

Time to close it down. 

More food riots

There have been more riots triggered by food price rises driven by biofuels policy and crop failures due to the cold.

Haiti

Hédi Annabi told the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council that recent deadly riots in parts of Haiti over rising food prices also appear to have a political dimension, and could undermine the government as well as the public's confidence.

Egypt

Ahmed Ali Hammad, 15, died from gun shot wounds Tuesday morning in the Mahalla hospital, said a security official on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The gritty industrial city has been the scene of two days of violent clashes between police and residents angered over rising food prices.

The Times fears that unrest will spread to the Far East. 

The Peak Oil issue just went away

America is sitting on top of a super massive 200 billion barrel Oil Field that could potentially make America Energy Independent and until now has largely gone unnoticed. Thanks to new technology the Bakken Formation in North Dakota could boost America’s Oil reserves by an incredible 10 times, giving western economies the trump card against OPEC’s short squeeze on oil supply and making Iranian and Venezuelan threats of disrupted supply irrelevant.

To put this in perspective, Saudi reserves are put here at 260 bn barrels.  

Full article here.

(H/T NC Media Watch.)

BBC stealth edit policy

Nature's general science blog, The Great Beyond, rounds up the Harrabin/Abbess story for its readers and adds a little titbit that shows the BBC in a pretty poor light. Author Daniel Cressey points to a BBC editor's blog post which outlines the corporation's approach to stealth edits:

When we make a major change or revision to a story we republish it with a new timestamp, indicating it’s a new version of the story. If there’s been a change to a key point in the story we will often point this out in the later version (saying something like "earlier reports had said...").

But lesser changes - including minor factual errors, corrected spellings and reworded paragraphs - go through with no new timestamp because in substance the story has not actually progressed any further. This has led to accusations we are "stealth editing" - a sinister-sounding term that implies we are actively trying to hide what we are doing. We’re not. It’s just that continually updating the timestamp risks making it meaningless, and pages of notes about when and where minor revisions are made do not make for a riveting read.

Cressey helpfully shows us some of the revisions made so we can judge for ourselves how well Roger Harrabin is adhering to this policy. Here's one of them:

Old version

This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts say we are still clearly in a long-term warming trend - and they forecast a new record high temperature within five years.

New version 

But this year's temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming  induced by greenhouse gases.

Now I don't know about you, but to me, this doesn't look to me like "minor factual errors, corrected spellings and reworded paragraphs". It's a complete change to the meaning. So as well as caving in to minor threats from a slightly loopy environmentalist, Roger Harrabin appears to be in breach of BBC policy on revising his articles.

Cold weather due to global warming

Economist Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times, has a bizarre position on the recent cold weather around the world.

[B]ad weather, especially the Australian drought, is probably related to climate change. So politicians and governments that have stood in the way of action on greenhouse gases bear some responsibility for food shortages.

Except that a lot of the crop failures have been due to cold weather. And anybody who has looked at the climate change issue for longer than thirty seconds knows you can't blame short-term weather fluctuations on climate change anyway. He's really just showing that he's a talking head rather than someone who has looked at the issues.

Jeepers. This is supposed to be one of the great American eminences grises.
 

More on Jo Abbess

A commenter on the previous post suggests that climate activist Jo Abbess is a "fascist bitch". I don't think so, actually. If you Google her name she makes some revealing contributions to a thread on Comment is Free which show that she is something much less sinister.

Like this one 

The new thinking has to be something like this :-
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
The only way we make it out of here alive is if we believe, and act as if
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies
There are no enemies.

 Or this one

Love, children, love. It's not *all* you need, but it's a start 

I mean, far out man! But is our Jo a complete space cadet or has she got some more earth-bound opinions? Of course she has - she does political opinion too. Here's her opinions on Tony Blair:

he is in reality a sensitive, spiritual family man, navigating the tightrope of public presence with a skill that should make you marvel. he hit the water running, remember.

One can but wonder what it was that our Jo hit, but I think we can be sure that it's not the water. It seems plain to me that "misguided space cadet" is probably a better description than "fascist bitch".

All the same, it's a remarkable set of comments, revealing of the deep, incisive intelligence that was able to get the logical colossus that is the BBC's Roger Harrabin to roll over and beg to have his tummy tickled. 

Harrabin gotcha!

My favourite BBC environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, seems to have been caught napping. A green activist called Jo Abbess wrote an email to Harrabin asking him to change an article he wrote to make it more acceptable to green opinion. Harrabin promptly wrote back to see if his changes were acceptable to her! Abbess doesn't seem to be the sharpest tool in the box, because she promptly posted the correspondence up on a website. The full correspondence is here.

Click to read more ...

Hansen the hysterical

Hansen the hysterical is at it again, his latest pronouncement of doom getting full play on the pages of the Guardian.

One of the world's leading climate scientists warns today that the EU and its international partners must urgently rethink targets for cutting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because of fears they have grossly underestimated the scale of the problem.

There is nothing new here, just a need to counter recent stories about global temperatures flatlining and a growing public awareness that the facts and the rhetoric are out of kilter with each other.

The only useful bit of apocalyptic news for the alarmists in recent weeks has been a bit of the West Antarctic peninsula breaking off, so the story is wheeled out, yet again.

Satellite technology available over the past three years has shown that the ice sheets are melting much faster than expected, with Greenland and west Antarctica both losing mass.

As many people now realise, West Antarctica is a pensinsula which sticks out from the continent - it's not representative of the region as a whole. In fact the continent as a whole has been cooling for years, and it has been putting on mass rather than losing it. This NASA picture shows the cooling trend for 1982 to 2003 over the continent. Blue is cooling:

 

I do wonder when they are going to start being straight with us.

A Dunning resolution

John Redwood is inviting readers to suggest the wording for a new Dunning resolution. And if, like me, you'd never heard of one of these before it's probably worth your reading it on those grounds alone.

First victims of the greens

Media attention is finally starting to focus on the implications of the drive for biofuels.

The Observer worries if food riots will be sparked by the continuing rises in rice prices.

Food riots fear after rice price hits a high

Shortages of the staple crop of half the world's people could bring unrest across Asia and Africa, reports foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont

Mr Beaumont clearly has his finger somewhere other than on the pulse because AFP is reporting that the trouble has already started:

Forty people died during price riots in Cameroon in February, there has also been deadly troubles in Ivory Coast and Mauritania and other violent demonstrations in Senegal and Burkina Faso -- where a nationwide strike against price rises is to start Tuesday.

The trouble is not limited to these countries either. In Egypt, there have been outbreaks of violence in bread queues, with as many as seven people dying. We've also seen unrest in Mexico and Argentina.

The deaths of so many poor people is sad enough, but when it's all so unnecessary it's doubly depressing. Whatever your views on global warming, grain-based ethanol was never going to be part of the answer. Using all of your agricultural land to provide a fraction of your fuel needs is so plainly barmy that anyone except an green or a politician would reject it out of hand.

It's unforgiveable. The fact of the deaths caused by their religion should be rammed down the throats of green activists and politicians every time they dare to put their heads above the parapet.     

Freedom of expression

There's a rather important article at the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

For the past eleven years the organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), representing the 57 Islamic States, has been tightening its grip on the throat of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yesterday, 28 March 2008, they finally killed it.

Found via the UK Libertarian Party Forums.