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586 [lbo-talk] climate change -- rank: 1000

Les, In 2004, John Finn challenged Michael Mann, the 'Mike' in the email: 'Whatever the reason for the divergence, it would seem to suggest that the practice of grafting the thermometer record onto a proxy temperature record - as I believe was done in the case of the 'hockey stick' - is dubious to say the least.' He replied: 'No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, "grafted the thermometer record onto" any reconstrution.' And yet in 1999, Phil Jones wrote (to Michael ...

Document Size:	5312
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 21 10:17:48 PST 2009

587 [lbo-talk] climate change -- rank: 1000

Phil Jones of the Hadley Climate Research Unit explains how he rigged the 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.'

Document Size:	4659
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 21 09:55:41 PST 2009

588 [lbo-talk] climate change -- rank: 1000

Phil Jones, of the Hadley Climate Research Unit, owns up to the fact that the world is nt warming '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.'

Document Size:	4831
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sat Nov 21 08:00:38 PST 2009

589 [lbo-talk] More on why movies suck -- rank: 1000

Chris: 'Unconscious self-parody is awesome' Isn't it just

Document Size:	4660
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Fri Nov 20 06:34:51 PST 2009

590 [lbo-talk] More on why movies suck -- rank: 1000

Anyone can see that Lord of the Rings is a Heideggero-Facistic metaphor, the They of the Orcs, the lost authenticity of the Shire, the being-towards-death of the heroic rush to battle... Or maybe it is a gay sub-text, all those manly knight-types heartily looking after the laddish hobbits, with Sir Ian McKellan desperate to finger Frodo's ring... Note that the evil eye of Sauron is a great vagina dentata in the film version

Document Size:	5168
Author:	heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Date:	Fri Nov 20 06:04:57 PST 2009

591 [lbo-talk] JMK the dark side -- rank: 1000

Keynes' circle were certainly snobby, and keen to defend the status quo against revolution, but they were also champions of a revolution in manners and thinking that, if strangely lacking a moral centre, was nonetheless creative and open. Here is Keynes, as painted by his lover, Duncan Grant http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4103774&l=ed78871bd4&id=756513153

Document Size:	5058
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 19 02:09:23 PST 2009

592 [lbo-talk] Marx and Engels in their own words, was Re: Churchill, in his own words -- rank: 1000

Chris has lost perspective. Marx and Engels were members of the Democratic League, then the International Working Men's Association, and in later life, Engels was advisor to William Morris' Socialist League. Martin Heidegger was a member of the NSDAP from 1933 to 1945. Winston Churchill was Home Secretary and then later Prime Minister of Britain at a time when its Empire covered a quarter of the globe. Marx and Engels' IWMA, at their insistence, championed Irish independence, and supported the F ...

Document Size:	7452
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Thu Nov 19 01:43:10 PST 2009

593 [lbo-talk] The Dark Side of JMK -- rank: 1000

Alan Rudy > Today's Mises Institute daily is a longish essay on the personality of > Keynes. It is not flattering, but it's a good read: Yes, it is quite good. there is a book about the Cambridge Apostles by Paul Levy. The Trotskyist-turned-catholic Alasdair MacIntyre used G.E. Moore as a backdrop to his After Virtue. Someone once said that modernism began when Lytton Strachey pointed at a stain on Virginia Woolf's dress at a dinner party and asked 'is it semen?'

Document Size:	4967
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Wed Nov 18 16:44:44 PST 2009

594 [lbo-talk] funeral fund -- rank: 1000

Speaking ill of the dead, Chris Harman was in fact a philistine hack. His main contribution was to write the Socialist Workers' Party (UK)'s theory of capitalist growth and crisis. This was a thankless task since the group had saddled themselves with an opportunistic adaptation to capitalist expansion post war, the theory of the 'permanent arms economy', which underneath its angry denunciation of the arms industry was a Keynes-style add-on to Marx's theory of accumulation that claimed that grow ...

Document Size:	6797
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 16 16:28:45 PST 2009

595 [lbo-talk] Churchill in his own words -- rank: 1000

Chris writes 'given my definition'. Like Humpty Dumpty when Chris uses a word it means what he says it means. "The aerial bombardment of Germany had no strategic purpose in hindsight, or as it appeared at the time?" Chris asks. Not the aerial bombardment of Germany per se, but Bomber Harris' targetting of civilian - or in his words 'working class' - districts was challenged at the time. It was challenged in Bomber Command itself, it was challenged in Parliament, and was widely understo ...

Document Size:	5600
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 16 06:35:37 PST 2009

596 [lbo-talk] Churchill, in his own words -- rank: 1000

Chris writes 'None of which is evidence that he was a "mass murderer." ' No, there never will be evidence that he was a mass murdered, because he was acting as a minister and then head of state in a properly constituted government. Even with Hitler you can say rhetorically that he was a 'mass murderer' but what you really mean is that his government's policies amounted to mass murder. Churchill's aerial bombardment of Germany had no strategic purpose other than to give the British air ...

Document Size:	5352
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 16 04:55:14 PST 2009

597 [lbo-talk] Churchill, in his own words -- rank: 1000

* On Bolshevism: For Churchill, the Soviet Union was a 'tyrannic government of these Jew Commisars', a 'worldwide communistic state under Jewish domination', 'the international Soviet of the Russian and Polish Jew', or just 'these Semitic conspirators'. (2) * On race: Churchill said 'the Indians in East Africa are mainly of a very low class of coolies, and the idea that they should be put on an equality with the Europeans is revolting to every white man throughout British Africa' (3). In Februar ...

Document Size:	7391
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 16 01:33:39 PST 2009

598 [lbo-talk] politics of food -- rank: 1000

Brad Bauerly writes "the fact that some here probably know alot about food consumption but were under the false assumption that most US farms were capitalist (wage labour dependent) " Forgive me, but I missed that conclusion in this thread. Can it be true? Numerically, their might be more independent farmers (though even the family farm runs on capitalist lines), but in terms of the mass of output, wouldn't Cargill, Philip Morris and the other large agri-businesses account for most of ...

Document Size:	5858
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Mon Nov 16 00:19:23 PST 2009

599 [lbo-talk] politics of food -- rank: 1000

"the British Empire did starve at least 2 million Bengalis to death in 1943. No, it wasn't intentional," Depends what you mean by intentional. The British refused to allow the food out of the stores to feed the starving villages because they feared that these same villages would fall into Japanese hands. Withholding the surplus was a 'scorched earth' policy. They intended to withhold the food, not because they were dead set on killing off the Bengalis, but because they valued their liv ...

Document Size:	5011
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Sun Nov 15 08:50:42 PST 2009

600 [lbo-talk] Politics of food -- rank: 1000

"Well it is, to some degree. I know this annoys James Heartfield, but population density is a very good predictor of voting behavior in the U.S. - the denser, the bluer. " That's not what annoys me. What annoys me is when it seems that the left gives up on trying to convince the suburbs, small towns and exurbs, as it often does, suggesting that suburbanites are natural voting fodder for the right. That is why we have a Tory administration in London now - because Boris Johnson used the ...

Document Size:	5370
Author:	James Heartfield
Date:	Fri Nov 13 03:43:54 PST 2009