Breaking news from Forbes:
Iran Is Not Nazi Germany And Mark Steyn Is Not Winston Churchill
~Hard to follow a headline like that but we'll do our best. Reacting to news that Charlie Hebdo is out of the Motoon business, Douglas Murray writes in The Spectator:
The reality is that intimidation and terrorism work. It is the reason why every major publication in the Western world failed to do what Charlie Hebdo had done. And it is the reason why, from Copenhagen to Texas, the people with guns keep making themselves felt and everyone else keeps backing down. Of course we all say that they won't win ('Je Suis Charlie'). But they are winning, and at this rate they will win.
This September Douglas and I will be in Copenhagen to join Flemming Rose, the commissioning editor of the original Mohammed cartoons, in marking their tenth anniversary. Douglas observes:
The event will be in the Danish Parliament apparently because it's the only place in Denmark sufficiently secure enough that – we hope – the now traditional gunmen won't be able to get in and shoot everyone.
Thanks for that, er, reassuring note.
Like Mark Steyn I've been doing these 'defend free speech' gigs for some years now and as Mark recently mordantly observed, I also sometimes wonder why I keep ascending up the running order only to realise that it's because everybody who used to be ahead of me is either in hiding or dead.
Indeed. This is one of those specialty genres where your name in lights is a mixed blessing. Nevertheless, Douglas and I will be in Copenhagen going, "But I thought you were top of the bill!" "No, no, it's definitely you, old boy..."
To go back to that Forbes headline, I don't know whether Douglas Murray is Winston Churchill, either. I think we're both trying to keep certain important topics of discussion alive until the Winston de nos jours shows up. But the way things are going, he may already have been killed or forced into hiding. More details on the Copenhagen event here.
~I still get asked why I'm funding my pushback against climate mullah Michael E Mann by selling books, souvenir mugs and gift certificates. Why oh why, moan readers, don't I just set up a legal defense fund or some such? Well, the short answer is this headline from a couple of days ago:
New Documents Show IRS Used Donor Lists to Target Audits
Americans seem to be less shocked than a wee little foreigner such as I that this republic has a corrupt tax collection agency that torments its ideological opponents. I must say the original revelations about the IRS - what is it now? two, three years ago? - did shock me, and the fact that all those people are still in place carrying on as usual shocks me even more. I'm old-fashioned enough to regard a nonpartisan civil service as a basic building block of a civilized society.
But the relevance of this to my own situation isn't hard to follow: Michael E Fraudpants' lawyers have already asked for my "donor list". Mann's fellow scientist Dr Peter Gleick burrowed his way into the Heartland Institute and leaked their donor list, and, when that didn't quite do the trick for his purposes, he faked up his own Heartland top-secret document. (Like Mann, Dr Gleick remains a respected figure in the world of climate science.)
So I could set up a 501(c)79(f) and have Mann demanding I cough up the names so that Lois Lerner's chums can audit them, and, if I stonewalled, I'd have to stay up all night to check whether that weird noise at three in the morning is Dr Gleick crawling down the ventilation shaft.
So I'd rather do things the old-fashioned way and sell our exclusive range of DC Superior Court trialwear.
~Now we have the additional problem of Dr John Cook, the Aussie alarmist and tireless promoter of that phony-baloney 97 per cent consensus, showing up on the front door and pretending to be the plumber. The Czech scientist and supposed "climate denier" Dr Luboš Motl recently discovered that John Cook had been passing himself off on the Internet as "Lubos Motl" (Cook's keyboard evidently doesn't do those groovy Czech accents). Hence, weird exchanges in the bowels of the "Skeptical Science" website like this:
JOHN COOK: ...I propose we go with the d-word [denier] issue, I'll have a crack at writing it over the next day.
Edit: sorry, accidentally posted this under my Lubos_Motl username, sorry for any confusion :-(
TIM CURTIS: would you please stop posting as Lubos Motl. There is reason to doubt his sanity, so I don't like seeing his name...
ROB HONEYCUTT: John... You freak me out every time Lubos Motl's name pops up!
JOHN COOK: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.
Why is John Cook, a notorious scourge of "deniers" such as Dr Motl, pretending to be Dr Motl all over the Internet? My old comrade James Delingpole gets out Occam's razor:
You Don't Have To Be Venal, Weird And Creepy To Work In Climate Science. But It Certainly Helps...
By the way, speaking of ways to help prop up my end of Mann vs Steyn, Dr Motl is quoted in my forthcoming book. I'm pretty sure it's the real Dr Motl, unless John Cook has secreted himself in the false bottom of my hard drive.
~Over at the Conservative Book Club, Marc Fitch is reviewing Climate Change: The Facts. He seems to like it:
The essays vary from the bogglingly scientific works by former MIT Meteorology professor, Richard Lindzen, and scientist Willie Soon, to the beloved snark and witticisms of Mark Steyn, who is currently engaged in a lawsuit against Michael Mann, creator of the "hockey stick" graph. Speaking of that hockey stick, there is a fabulous essay by Professor of Economics Ross McKitrick that breaks the hockey stick apart, and leaves it in splinters, as well as an illuminating piece by James Delingpole about what qualifies as an "expert" in the climate change debate in a world where credentials are appealed to rather than actual arguments.
You can order Climate Change: The Facts, personally autographed, direct from the SteynOnline bookstore - and, if you need it in the next 90 seconds, it's out in eBook via Kindle, Nook at Barnes & Noble, or Kobo at Indigo-Chapters in Canada and around the world.
~A quick update re my friend Ezra Levant being hauled up before the Alberta "Law" Society for calling the Alberta "Human Rights" Commission "crazy": Kate McMillan has an entertaining petition, which you can sign here.
~On Monday I'll be joining Sean Hannity on Fox News, coast to coast at 10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific. I hope you'll consider tuning in.
