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Mainstream Media Picks Up CRU Email Story

This article in the Wall Street Journal Hacked Emails Show Climate Science Ridden with Rancor may be the beginning of some very reluctant coverage by the commercial media.

They were always going to be a bit slow. After all, disastrous global warming has been one of their major headline grabbers for the last decade.

Higher sales of papers, higher number of viewers and listeners, mean more advertising revenue.

So the media are not going to give up on global warming until either it is clearly a scam, and they look like hypocrites if they continue to support it, or some other story comes along which will sell as many papers as AGW (anthropogenic global warming).

It has been clear for several years to anyone who examined the evidence that the anthropogenic global warming scare was a scam.

It has been clear for several years that there is no ‘consensus’ on the nature and causes of climate change.

But just how carefully and successfully this has been kept from ordinary people is demonstrated in the comment by Donna on this story by Miranda Devine Science Cooks the Books, in which Miranda mentions the book Global Warming False Alarm by Ralph Alexander.

Donna says: If your one scientist and his one book are right and the rest of the scientists are wrong, well, then our world would still benefit from less pollution, but if the scientists are RIGHT and Mr Alexander and his book are WRONG, then we may be destroying a world’s health and the health of all our future children. Now, I don’t think I’m prepared to take that gamble. Are you?

There are two things to note here.

First that Donna, who seems an intelligent and concerned person, has bought completely the line that CO2 is a pollutant.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is a natural part of the atmosphere that is essential for all life on Earth, and which is at very low levels compared with most of Earth’s history. Increases in CO2 reduce desertification and increase crop production. More CO2 is a good thing.

Secondly, Donna seems completely unaware that a large number of scientists have not fallen for the IPCC view.

See previous posts for 450 peer reviewed articles questioning the fundamental science of AGW, or visit the Petition Project site to view the petition signed by over 30,000 US scientists rejecting the claim that human activity is causing harmful climate change.

An objective look at the evidence shows very minor warming of less than 1 degreee over the last 100 years, warming that occurred over the same period on Mars and other bodies in our solar system, and which matches perfectly the natural cycles of climate change which have been part of Earth’s history from the beginning.

But there were vast amounts of  money to be made, so evidence was manufactured, graphs were faked, opposing opinions were shut out. See the Hadley emails.

The emails and documents apparently released from the Hadley CRU by a disgrunted insider do not prove that AGW is a scam – there was already plenty of evidence for that.

But they may be turning point at which the mainstream media is finally forced to acknowledge that the science of global warming is very thin indeed.

And that may just be enough to give courage to the sceptics on both sides of the Australian parliament. Which might just be enough prevent the implementation of the devastatingly stupid wealth-of-the-nation-destroying ETS proposed by the current government.

Bishop Hill has a summary of some of the key Hadley CRU emails and their implications.

Sarah Palin Is An Idiot – Not

Look up ‘Sarah Palin is an idiot’ in Google and you’ll get 26,200,000 results.

She’s an idiot I would be proud to have as a friend.

‘George Bush is an idiot’ used to be the standard left-wing joke.

‘George Bush is an idiot.’ Ha, ha, ha. Then five minutes later ‘George Bush is an idiot.’ Ha, ha, ha, as if they had never heard this before, and it was so, you know, hilarious.

I guess it made it easier to avoid talking about policies and stuff.

It looks like ‘Sarah Palin is an idiot’ is the new left-wing joke de jour. Or joke de year.

But calling Palin an idiot won’t alter the fact that she is vastly more qualified to be president than the present incumbent.

In the video below Newt Gingrich responds to a derogatory comment about Sarah Palin’s resume by MSNBC interviewer Ron Allen.

‘It’s stronger than Barack Obama’s. I don’t know why you guys walk around saying this baloney. She has a stronger resume than Obama. She’s been a real mayor, he hasn’t. She has been a real governor, he hasn’t. She’s been in charge of the Alaskan National Guard, he hasn’t. She was a whistleblower who defeated an incumbent mayor. He has never once shown that kind of courage. She’s a whistleblower who turned in the chairman of her own party and got him fined $12,000. I’ve never seen Obama do one thing like that. She took on the incumbent governor of her own party and beat him, and then she beat a former Democratic governor in the general election. I don’t know of a single thing Obama’s done except talk and write.’

Then Gingrich asks Allen:

‘I’d like you to tell me one thing Sen. Obama’s done.’

No response. Allen clearly can’t think of anything, because Gingrich is right.

That hasn’t changed.

Backseat Bonking Backfires

Well, it was either that or ‘Big Banana Bonks Barmaid.’

I am no fan of Mike Rann. His is a government that has achieved very little at great expense.

But I am less than impressed by suggestions his term as Premier should be brought to an end by revelations about his relationship with parliament house waitress and barmaid Michelle Chantelois.

Rann and Chantelois had been friends for some before the relationship became sexual. He has been consistently polite and supportive in his comments about her, describing her as a ‘terrific person, great mother, and … a friend.’

It seems likely the relationship was sexual in nature, although at this stage there is only Ms Chantelois’ word for that – and she has apparently been paid $200,000 to say so.

It used to be the case that not commenting about one’s sexual exploits was considered a good thing. I am not sure why Rann’s unwillingness to comment about or confirm the nature of his relationship with Chantelois is being painted as something negative.

As far as I can see, if her claims are true, he and she had a long standing friendship which became a sexual relationship. She was married, he was not.

Both are adults. Both behaved badly. Despite her present complaints, there is no reason to believe her claims that she was simply his puppet.

The affair stopped before Rann married in 2006. Rann claims his wife knows about the relationship.

This is a matter for Rann, Chantelois and their spouses.

I hope the Labor government in SA comes to an end. The sooner the better for the people of South Australia

But the hapless State Liberal Party will be making another major bungle if they try force Rann out on the basis of his relationship with Chantelois.

There is no electoral ground to be made in sleazy accusations which have nothing to do with political performance.

There is plenty of electoral ground to be made in positive leadership and in policies which are clearly differentiated from those of Labor.

Karma Neutral – Somebody Would Fall For it

He, he. This is hilarious.

The first street guy interviewed has no idea how indulgences work – they are not about buying the right to sin, which is exactly what Karma Neutral and carbon neutral trading schemes are all about. But hey, that’s a small point.

Watch and enjoy:

And here’s another labour saving, conscience saving, get the poor people to do it scheme:

UN Official – Be Like Cuba, For Children’s Sake

Jose Juan Ortiz, UNICEF’s representative in Cuba, clearly knows what side his bread is buttered on.

In ceremonies in Cuba yesterday to celebrate Universal Children’s Day, Mr Ortiz said:

Cuba is among the countries that have best implemented the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Countries in the world should learn from Cuba on the protection of children’s rights. All countries in the world should follow Cuba’s example and strive to provide better conditions for children in judicial and social welfare fields. In this way most countries will be able to meet the targets set by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Despite the nasty Norte Americanos and their nasty president, or at least their nasty former president, and their nasty trade embargo, Cuba has won! Yay! Cuba’s children are all happy and healthy and Cuba is an example to the rest of the world! Yay!

Cuba is certainly an example, but it is hard to see how any rational person could regard it as a positive example.

Just a couple of links to check before joining in the UN celebrations.

The Children of Cuba.

Cuba and Michael Moore’s Sicko.

Cuba is the North Korea of the Americas, and the UN is run by ideologically driven bureaucrats to whom the gospel of socialism is more important than truth.

Telling Lies For God, Sorry, Cash

It is looking more like the email and document files taken from the Hadley Cimate research Centre, and now confirmed as genuine, were leaked by an insider rather than hacked.

This link will download the complete zipped file of Hadley documents – FOI2009.zip. It is a 61MB file, so if you are on dial-up, don’t bother!

If you don’t want all the files, but want to have a look through, An Elegant Chaos has entered the emails (not the other documents) into a searchable database.

Interesting that the BBCs story about the leak of the Hadley CRU emails and documents is about how naughty those darned hackers are, and how unfair it all is.

This story from the Telegraphs’ James Delingpole asked what the leaked documents mean for the global warming crusaders:

One of the alleged emails has a gentle gloat over the death in 2004 of John L Daly (one of the first climate change sceptics, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site), commenting:

“In an odd way this is cheering news.”

But perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.

Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing:

How best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”

Hadley CRU has form in this regard. In September – I wrote the story up here as “How the global warming industry is based on a massive lie” – Hadley CRU’s researchers were exposed as having “cherry-picked” data in order to support their untrue claim that global temperatures had risen higher at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the last millenium. Hadley CRU was also the organisation which – in contravention of all acceptable behaviour in the international scientific community – spent years withholding data from researchers it deemed unhelpful to its cause. This matters because Hadley CRU, established in 1990 by the Met Office, is a government-funded body which is supposed to be a model of rectitude. Its HadCrut record is one of the four official sources of global temperature data used by the IPCC.

The leaked documents show a high level of contempt by Hadley researchers for anyone who disagrees with them, and a willingness to ‘enhance’ their reporting of temperature data to make it agree with their throries about what should be happening.

Anthropogenic global warming is zombie science. Even though it is dead it will contiunue to thrash around annoyingly for a few more years. But it is dead.

Time to start looking for a new catastrophic, world-ending, terrifying scare that will sell papers and generate grant money.

Mohler Men Could Have Ruled Over A House Of Horrors

But I seriously doubt it.

Six male members of the Mohler family in Missouri have been charged with various sexual offences after being accused of raping and sodomising a group of children over many years.

Such things do happen.

But in this case, the accusations rested initially on ‘recovered memories.’ In other words, likely fantasies.

I have seen people severely psychologically damaged after being told by therapists that people with eating disorders (depression, forgetfulness, diffculty sleeping, etc, etc) have often suffered sexual abuse as children, and that if the client does not remember being abused he or she (usually she) probably was anyway, and should try to recover those memories, and that doing so will help her find the cause of her illness, and then recover.

Rubbish.

The only things we know for certain about ‘recovered memory therapy’ is that the memories recovered rarely have any basis in reality, and that the longer a client stays in such ‘therapy’ the worse his or her mental health will become, for example:

Suicidal ideation or attempts by patients increased by a factor of 6.7 during therapy, from 10% to 67%.

Hospitalization of patients increased by a factor of 5.5 during therapy, from 7% to 37%.

Self-mutilation increased by a factor of 8, from 3% to 27%.

Other people have since come forward to support the first complainant’s story in the Mohler case. They have told stories which, if true, would be able to be confirmed by clear physical evidence.

But so far, despite a week of intensive searching around the Mohler house and yard, no phyiscal evidence has been found.

The police must investigate, of course. But the media focus on this story has all the hallmarks of Salem type, Azaria Chamberlain type, witch hunt hysteria.

Parents’ Jury Demonstrates Remarkable Dumbness

The Parents’ Jury, whoever the heck they are, take a shot at McDonalds in dishing out their inaugural Fame and Shame Awards.

McDonalds won the Techno Hack category for their Maths Online programme – a free (and very good) online maths tuition available at no charge to every Australian teacher and student. Well, we certainly don’t want businesses providing high quality educational resources to just anyone, now do we?

McDonalds won the Pester Power award for Happy Meal ads which showed kids actually, you know, being happy and active and stuff. Well, we certainly don’t want businesses encouraging children to be happy and active, now do we?

McDonalds won the Bad Sport category for its sponsorship of Little Athletics. Darn those McDonalds restaurants for encouraging children to participate in athletics. What devious plans will they come up with next?

I assume that all this vitriol is based on the idea that McDonalds sells unhealthy food and therefore anything they do is evil.

But there are all sorts of healthy choices at McDonalds, which is also one of Australia’s leading employers of young people.

The Parents Jury (which seems to have no idea of the proper use of apostrophes) needs to get a life.

It’s a Bit Warm in Australia

So there must be a global climate crisis.

That’s the argument of the Labor nitwits trying to foist on the nation what is almost certainly the worst piece of legislation in Australia’s history, the ‘Destroy Our Economy And Cause Massive Unemployment Because We Have To Follow The Latest Lunatic Media Scare Scheme,’ or ETS for short.

Boys and girls, two weeks of warm weather in Australia, or two weeks of any sort of weather anywhere, do not amount to a global climate anything.

It isn’t warm everywhere.

Meanwhile, for those who still claim no reputable scientists doubt AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming), and there is no peer reviewed research which questions AGW, here is a list of 450 such peer reviewed journal articles:

450 Peer Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of Man-Made Global Warming

via Watts Up With That

Climate Alarm is an International Multi-Billion Dollar Business

A clear and well-written article titled Ideology and Money Drive Global Warming Religion by physicist and engineer Andrew Kenny, in South Africa’s Business Day (which, incidentally, reports unseasonable cold weather).

I don’t usually simply copy and paste whole articles, but this is such a good summary of some of the problems with global warming alarmism that it is worth reading in its entirety:

LESS than a month before the Climate Conference in Copenhagen there is fierce competition to see who can produce the most absurd global warming scare. Hence the hysterical warnings of disappearing ice caps and temperatures rising 2°C. The winner must be President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, who held a cabinet meeting underwater to warn about rising sea levels.

In reality, the Maldive Islands are not threatened. Dr Nils-Axel Mörner, a world expert, points out that sea levels there are now lower than they were in 1970. Like other climate horror stories, it is nonsense.

From about 1850 to now, carbon dioxide (CO² ) ) in the air has risen from about 280ppm (parts per million) to 390ppm. Global temperatures have also risen modestly — about 0,6°C in the 20th century. This is the flimsy basis of the scare that rising CO² is causing harmful global warming. Overwhelming scientific evidence shows it is not.

CO² is not a pollutant. It is a harmless, life- giving gas on which green plants depend. Over the past half-billion years, CO² levels have averaged more than 2000ppm. Present levels are low, way below optimum for green plants. CO² has never been seen to affect temperatures (although they affect it, as cooling oceans dissolve more of it). It is a feeble greenhouse gas (by far the most important is water vapour) and its only significant absorption band is already saturated.

The climate is always changing. From about 900 to 1200 was the worldwide Mediaeval Warm Period, when temperatures were rather higher than now. This is confirmed by hundreds of scientific studies and historical record. It saw booming agriculture, good health and great advances in Europe, and a doubling of the Chinese population. The Vikings colonised Greenland and grew crops, where it is now too cold.

Then temperatures dropped to the Little Ice Age from about 1400 to 1850. The Thames used to freeze over. The Vikings abandoned Greenland. It was a time of crop failures and ill health. In the bitter cold of Shakespeare’s time, malaria (known as the ague) decimated the European population.

Since about 1850, temperatures have been rising in a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. They peaked in 1998. All the years of the 21st century have been cooler.

What causes these ups and downs? Certainly not CO² . . Mounting evidence points to the sun. There are variations in the sun’s emission of charged particles, known as “the solar wind”. Sunspots give a measure of this. There was high solar activity in the Mediaeval Warm Period and the 20th century, and low activity in the Little Ice Age. In the coldest period, or Maunder Minimum (1645- 1715), there were no sunspots at all.

Clouds are the most important determinant of the climate on earth, especially low clouds (cumulus), which cause cooling by reflecting away sunlight. A theory, developed by physicist Henrik Svensmark, is that cosmic rays from outside our solar system induce clouds by providing sites for droplet condensation. The solar wind wards off the cosmic rays. The more active the sun, the fewer cosmic rays, the fewer low clouds, and the warmer the earth.

Science says that the present climate change is natural. But a great international clamour, from politicians, activists, journalists and academics, cries out that it is caused by wicked mankind. Why? There are two reasons: ideology and money.

Climate alarm is the new religion of the rich. In the climate religion, the sin is industrialisation and damnation is the over- heating of the planet. Redemption lies in forsaking fossil fuels and returning to a simpler, purer life.

Climate alarm is also an international multibillion-dollar business, providing jobs, careers, funding, travel and conferences to a multitude. Any questioning of the alarm threatens their livelihoods. The more alarm, the more funding they get and the more secure their jobs.

The high church of global warming is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It is funded by governments to promote the belief that mankind is changing the climate dangerously. Its “technical summaries” select evidence for global warming and reject counter-evidence. Its “summaries for policy makers”, couched in scientific language, are expressions of dogma, telling the faithful what to believe.

In 2001, the IPCC was guilty of one of the worst travesties of science. The Mediaeval Warm Period was a huge embarrassment for the warmers. So they set out to eliminate it. In its third assessment report of 2001, the IPCC brandished before the world the infamous Hockey Stick curve. This graph showed temperatures in the northern hemisphere steady from 1000 to 1900 (like the handle of a hockey stick) and then suddenly shooting up to unparalleled highs (like the blade), so that the end of the 20th century was the warmest period of the past thousand years. The hateful Mediaeval Warm Period had been abolished.

After facing much prevarication and obstruction, two mathematical experts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, finally managed to get hold of the data and methods on which the Hockey Stick was based, and swiftly showed it was nonsense. It relied on bad data, wrong selection and contrived statistical methods. Using proper data and methods, the Hockey Stick disappeared and the Mediaeval Warm Period reappeared.

Still trying to rewrite climate history, an IPCC insider group produced new Hockey Stick curves, which depended on the work of British scientist Keith Briffa. McIntyre asked to see Briffa’s data. Briffa refused, and scientific journals in which his papers were published backed his refusal. Such is the perversion of science under climate change. A few months ago, McIntyre got the data, and found the same nonsense.

Current computer climate models are useless for prediction. This is because we do not understand many climate mechanisms and modellers deliberately use assumptions to get the result they want: global warming.

An example is climate feedback. Standard methods of radiant heat transfer give you a temperature rise of 1°C as a direct result of CO² doubling. However, there will be “feedback”. The modellers assume “positive feedback”, which amplifies change.

But all the evidence is for “negative feedback”, which counters the change (for example, by more evaporation and more cooling clouds). Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT reckons negative feedback makes CO² insignificant. Predictions of temperatures rising 2°C or more have no scientific basis. The only consequence of rising CO² will be that crops and forests grow better.

The sun became ominously quiet recently. Global temperatures have been falling since about 2004 (contrary to climate model predictions). The Antarctic has been getting colder and its ice growing since 1978, when satellite measurements began. The Arctic is now colder than it was in 1940; in recent years its ice extent decreased until 2007, and is now increasing again. All of this information, including satellite measurements, the most accurate we have, is freely available.

Politicians and activists will converge on Copenhagen next month looking for more control over our lives and more money. They will urge governments to damage their economies by restricting the use of fossil fuels. The greater their failure, the better it will be for the world.

Interesting that the comments, mostly from warming collaborators, attack (as usual) the man and not the arguments. Not one referenced counter-point is made to any of Kenny’s arguments.

The Endless Empty Sea of Media Irresponsibility

Thousands of examples to choose from, but this MSNBC headline caught my eye today:

Teen suffers rare illness after swine flu shot – Boy diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, but CDC says no clear link.

The headline suggests the CDC thinks there might be a link, just not a clear one. Or they just don’t want to admit there is a link. Or something.

Actually, the CDC and other medical scientists say there is no link, for the very good reason that there is no link.

Many journalists are people of courage and integrity, who genuinely want to make a difference to the world by telling the truth, and thereby helping to find real solutions to real problems.

Then there are people like John Pilger and Michael Moore, who get awards and money for a career of spectacular distortions.

Somewhere in between are journalists like MSNBC medical reporter JoNel Aleccia, who can get a good headline, and either don’t think or don’t care about the impact of what they write.

JoNel’s story will make parents think the H1N1 vaccine is dangerous. Some children will not be vaccinated who otherwise would have been. Some of those children may become seriously ill when that illness could have been avoided. Some may die.

This article Nerve Disease from H1N1 Vaccine from cheap and nasty ‘news’ site examiner.com is even worse.

One thing following another does not mean the two are connected. The rooster crowing does not cause the sun to rise.

This Telegraph article – People will die after swine flu vaccine – but it’s just coincidence – explains how that coincidence works:

Dr Steven Black and colleagues calculated that if 10 million people in Britain were vaccinated, around 22 cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome and six cases of sudden death would be expected to occur within six weeks of vaccination as coincident background cases.

In other words, the same number of people would have been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome or suffered sudden death whether they had been vaccinated or not – they just wouldn’t have the vaccination to blame it on.

.. research also suggested that 397 per one million vaccinated pregnant women would be predicted to have a spontaneous abortion within one day of vaccination.

But this is the rate of spontaneous abortion that would occur on any given day out of a group of one million pregnant women during a vaccination campaign or not.

As the article points out, a headline reading ‘Man wins lottery after swine flu jab’ would make just as much sense as the MSNBC headline.

High Commissioner Surprised Australians Still Thinking

Britain’s new high commissioner, Baroness Valerie Amos, has expressed surprise that Australians are still debating whether humans cause climate change and says other nations have long since ”moved on”.

Not only have we stopped thinking, she says, but you should stop thinking too.

Maybe political leaders in other countries believe thoughtful examination of the evidence is an unneccessary inconvenience, but polls show most ordinary people, and most scientists, disagree.

Politicians who allow the media to drag them along by their snouts should not be surprised when their constituents demand an explanation for the billions of wasted dollars, the lost jobs, the suppression of industry and employment, for a scare with as much substance as the Jupiter Effect.

Israel Is An Amazing Country

News yesterday that an Israeli judge refused to sentence an Arab teenager to jail for throwing stones at a police car.

The judge disqualified the youth from driving for two years, ordered that he pay approximately $1300 in damages, and sentenced him to 200 hours of community service.

The judge refused the jail time requested by the prosecution because he said he believed there was a double standard in the way Arab and Jewish youths would have been treated by police in the same situation.

I am not in a position to know whether this is true or not, whether it is fair to the police concerned, or whether Jewish youths throwing stones at Israeli police cars is a major problem.

But ask yourself this:

Is there any Arab country in which a young Jew throwing stones at state offcials and property would be released because the court found that that his arrest was probably a result of anti-semitism and double standards in law enforcement?

Paragon Hard Disk Manager

I have many years experience using partition management software. I have four MCTS qualifications, am an MCITP and an A+Certified IT Technician.

I frequently have clients who want disk partitions copied, extended, etc.

I have used Paragon software before with good results. Or at least, without major disasters.

I recently upgraded to the latest version of Paragon Hard Disk Manager. The disasters began immediately.

Moving partitions is always risky. I always save or image user data before any partition operations. About one out every four times the operation will fail, because of file errors, or a full moon, or the day of the week having a ‘y’ in it, or whatever. It is never a problem, because I always make a complete back up of target disks beforehand.

The first time I used the new Paragon Hard Disk Manager the operation failed. No problem, I thought. A minor inconvenience at most.

Until I tried to restart my computer. I got a message saying there were interrupted operations, and I should insert my recovery CD.

Paragon Hard Disk Manager had no business making any changes to my C: drive at all – that was not one of the drives I was operating on – let alone making changes to critical boot files or records.

No recovery CD would let me restart Windows, nor could the repair utility on the Windows CD get the system working.

Now I had a problem, because the user’s data was no longer accessible from his drive, and my C: drive, where I had saved his disk image, was also inaccessible.

I recovered my and my user’s data from the disk, reinstalled Windows, and tried again. Same problem – the partition operation failed. Windows would not start. Same error message.

I had just upgraded to Windows 7, and thought perhaps there might be an incompatibility, though there was nothing to suggest this on Paragon’s website.

I wiped the disk, went back to Vista Business, and tried again, ths time with a different partition operation on a different disk. Exactly the same result. The operation failed, and Windows would not restart, even though there was no reason for Partition Manager to have made any changes to my primary drive at all.

This is a dog’s breakfast of a programme. There is no excuse for releasing to market a piece of software that repeatedly causes such disastrous disk and sytem errors.

Until Paragon fix this, anyone who uses Hard Disk Manager is at serious risk, not only of wasting several hours of time, as I did, but of losing any or all information from their hard disks.

Tough Love Breeds Smart Kids

You could quibble about the headline.

By tough love, the ABC reporter means parents setting boundaries and sticking to them. Children don’t seem to be smarter, just more resilient, more confident, more capable. And setting consistent rules is raising children, not breeding them.

But it is an interesting story.

9,000 families were studied over eight years.

Children treated with warmth, and given clear consistent guidelines, followed up by clear, consistent discipline, were much better at developing life skills including self-control and empathy.

Before you start thinking that this is as much of a headline as Britney’s lip-synching, let me tell you what I think is interesting.

The study claims that clear rules and firm discipline are more important to a child’s self-esteem and future success than any other factor, including household wealth, single or both parents, etc.

But it also notes that discipline is likely to be firmer and more consistent in families with average or better income, and in families where both parents are involved in raising children.

Why might this be?

Raising children is emotionally exhausting. Children are hungry, energetic, rude, thoughtless, constantly testing the boundaries. It is often tempting to give in. Having a loving and supportive partner makes it easier to say no, to stay in charge and in control.

But why should a good income make it easier? The answer, I think, is that it is not the income that makes it easier, but the skills and self-discipline that are the usual pre-requisites to earning a good income.

If you are capable of saying no to yourself, capable of making sacrifices, capable of managing your time, and see the value of work and study, you are more likely to take the harder road of firm, fair discipline in raising your children.

Teacher friends have frequently confirmed this, telling me it is generally (but not always, obviously!) the children from two parent families on reasonable incomes who are more considerate, more creative, better workers, with more confidence in themselves and the world, and consequently more chance to succeed.

But if all of that is true, and I think it is, how do we in Australia begin to address the huge problems facing young people from groups where confidence in the world around, and consistent, positive, active parenting have been lost?

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