GREENIE OIL SPILL NEGLIGENCE

Ketchikan District Court Judge Kevin Miller has denied motions to dismiss state charges that Greenpeace and ship agent Willem Beekman violated oil spill prevention laws last year. A trial is set for March 29. Greenpeace denied responsibility, saying it never owned, operated or had crew members aboard the Arctic Sunrise. State prosecutors replied that Greenpeace's motion amounted to "a corporate shell game designed to avoid the consequences of their actions."

Judge Miller said it would be for a jury to decide. "The court finds that the State of Alaska has produced sufficient evidence such that the court cannot conclude as a matter of law that the State has improperly charged Greenpeace Inc.," Miller wrote in papers filed Thursday.

Greenpeace and Arctic Sunrise Capt. Arne Sorenson were each charged with two counts of operating in state waters without an oil discharge prevention and contingency plan. They also were charged with two counts of operating without proof of financial responsibility for oil spill damages.

In its motion to dismiss the charges, Greenpeace claimed it was not the party responsible for operating the motor yacht Arctic Sunrise or for filing its required paperwork. Greenpeace attorney Sidney Billingslea claimed that the ship's owner, Stichting Phoenix, chartered the vessel to Stichting Marine Services. "Greenpeace International painted the hull and funnel with Greenpeace colors and flew the house flag as permitted under the charter between Stichting Phoenix and Stichting Marine Services," Billingslea wrote. "Greenpeace Inc. had no ownership or operational involvement with the charter of the Arctic Sunrise."

Prosecutors said Greenpeace's attempts to distance itself from the crimes were disingenuous. "The defendant acts in conjunction with all other entities named in the information under the generic name 'Greenpeace' whenever it suits their purpose, but disavows the relationships when liability and convenience dictates."

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THE GLOBAL WARMING PRIESTHOOD

United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) sponsors adoption of the Kyoto Protocol by most industrialized nations around the world, with estimated costs of legally binding compliance estimated at over $150 billion per year. The chief promotional artifact in the proceedings, the "hockey stick" historical temperature chart of IPCC Third Scientific Assessment Chapter Lead Author Michael Mann , is shown to be based on a computer program that produces hockey sticks from over 99 percent of ten thousand samples of random noise fed to it. Stephen McIntyre, retired Canadian minerals consultant, demonstrates numerous other defects and distortions in both the data and statistical methodology, ultimately the subject of a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal of February 14 and a follow-up editorial on February 18.....

Scientists, like the rest of us, have among their number many members of a certain very dangerous group: those who would govern. And like the governing class everywhere, they seek to govern without the encumbrance of having to tolerate dissent from those who pay their salaries and experience the consequences of the policies they emplace.

Indeed, they resist inquiries from the unannointed into the bases of their pronouncements and, while feeding on the tithes exacted from the unwashed, insist on handing their pronouncements down as dicta that may not be questioned. The flavor of this may be discerned palpably in a visit to realclimate.org, a Web site launched early this year by climatologists and other "scientists" (today's codeword for priest).

This Web site expresses the "frustration" felt by "real scientists" who have to contend with the inquiries and ignorance of non-scientists who are inflamed by their petty suspicions that they are being oppressed in the name of bogus theories. As well, it provides an eight-point set of standards for article comments (which are required to be "constructive" among other things). In "language your parents could understand," the Web site provides a "Dummies' Guides" to its subject, and the impression that they truly regard their audience (and parents) as dummies is irresistible.

What the site does not provide in its Links section is a link to the Web site of the opposition, the more-modestly named climateaudit.org, set up about the same time to publicize flaws detected in the data and mathematics of the "hockey stick" found by semi-retired minerals consultant Stephen McIntyre of Toronto. Yes, this site does provide a link to realclimate, and doesn't seem to qualify comments or commenters. Some of the comments on climateaudit are hostile to articles and comments on the site, while over at realclimate, things are eerily more-harmonious. I'm always grateful when the propagandist's hand is so easily discerned.

Actually, as described in the Wall Street Journal editorial of February 18, two climatologists, Willie Soon and Sallie L. Baliunas, had the temerity to advance criticism of Mann's article in 2003. The tsunami of protest from the academy against this suggestion that man may not be warming up his planet after all would have made Trofim Lysenko , the Soviet Union's quack official geneticist of the 1930s, proud.

The "fact" of global warming is today as entrenched in the government-sponsored academy as ever was Lysenko's theory that acquired traits, such as selfless devotion to the common good, could be inherited by the children of parents so indoctrinated. In the abject retraction by the journal that carried Soon and Baliunas's heresy, Climate Research, they announce the resignations of their editor-in-chief and two other editors.

Peer review, the overrated orthodoxy-dominated system by which journal articles are supposedly vetted, has turned into a mechanism for enforcement of the ruling paradigm, if it was ever anything else. Among other things, it did not catch the errors in Mann's seminal article. But peer review, which is not only unpaid, but highly political as well, has as a matter of practice never entailed what McIntyre calls an "audit" of the data and mathematics involved in developing the conclusions arrived at in an article.

Because of this, not only do journals not make a practice of publishing the data and algorithms behind the development of the conclusions, but peer reviewers virtually never have occasion to request the information either. A few exceptions such as the journals of the American Economic Association, have begun to appear.

Michael Crichton, whose current novel State of Fear describes a vast hoax perpetrated on a fearful world by rogue climatologists, is predictably excoriated on realclimate. Crichton stands to make a very large amount of money from acting on the skeptical side of this controversy.

But the greatest credit must go to the unpaid Stephen McIntyre and his partner in this quest, Ross McKitrick. They are the ones who first blurted out: "The professor has no clothes!"

More here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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