Christmas Day 2009 - Rene Girard

And so it's Christmas... and what do I have to say?

Previously, I had always found the arguments of Christian intellectuals to be weak whenever I paid them any attention (how arrogant, I know!), yet, upon watching Peter Robinson's interviews with Rene Girard recently (which I came across via Martin McPhillips), I was left stunned.

Girard not only has an account of social conflict, its' resolution and the origin of political institutions, but that account suddenly throws Christianity in a very, very strange light. I found myself looking at Christianity from a much higher elevation than any I've had before. That doesn't mean I have now "got religion", but I am intrigued. I very much recommend these five interviews to anyone with an intellectual interest in either religion or politics.

Pass

As I knew they would, the editorial staff at the Taipei Times hit the 'pass' button to my challenge below. They did however, publish this letter by one Bruce Higgins.

Diamonds

The pressures will be tremendous on all to conform, to go along, to join the concensus. At such times, it is well to remember that it is unbearable pressure which transforms ordinary, base carbon into diamonds.

- commenter "Veryretired".

On The Ministry Of Foreign Affairs

Sirs,

Contrary to the Ministry Of Foreign Affairs, the Copenhagen summit on climate change is not a "non-political" global body (as claimed in Saturday's headline article). It is essentially political. The Copenhagen summit is an attempt to organize and direct the growth of the State upon society to tackle a vastly exaggerated phenomenon of uncertain cause (see Climategate scandal). Copenhagen is pure politics in that what is being discussed is the use of force to impose the values of some upon the many. That no deal seems to be emerging from this summit testifies to the nature of the people involved. Polticians - all of them - are merely gangsters dressed as emperors. That they cannot agree with one another is not surprising. Nor is it surprising that one group of them wants to keep another group of them out for reasons of status. The people at the Ministry Of Foreign Affairs have been so concerned, for such a long time, with raising awareness of their attempts to gain access to international meetings that they no longer bother to direct any critical attention to the political value of such meetings above their tiny diplomatic horizons.

The people of Taiwan, in as much as they may value their own personal freedom to direct their own lives, really ought to want nothing to do with the Copenhagen summit. The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus (who fought against the communists in the 1980s) has refused to attend the conference on the grounds that "what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.” Comprende? The communism we are all supposed to be so afraid of in China! Is this what the Ministry Of Foreign Affairs wants for the people of Taiwan??? It is insufferable to me that you, and other papers like yours, do not report on this aspect of the story.


Yours sincerely,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent: Saturday 19th December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

From Russia With Truth

Sirs

Are you not aware that the Russians have confirmed that the British Met Office "probably tampered with Russian climate-data"? Is this not a very serious accusation of great import to current world events?

Throughout this island there are millions of ordinary people, working in nightmarkets, fruit and vegetable stalls and convenience stores, who struggle to make ends meet and who aspire to flying abroad for a holiday once every three years or so. The global warming fantasists are working flat out not only to tax such meagre aspirations out of their hands, but to vastly increase the scope of government regulation over trade and private life more generally.

Such an increase will greatly accelerate the disintegration of civil society into a world of total politics. This is a terrifying prospect since the entire realm of politics rests upon nothing more than the controlling party's monopoly on violence.

Yours as ever,
Michael Fagan.

(Sent Friday 18th December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Issue non grata...

This is what happens to journalists who ask the scientific "authorities" questions about Climategate. You get kicked out by United Nations security. The United Nations is the wrong direction for Taiwan's international relations to take, and the sooner the political opposition realize this the better.

Taking A Break

Both me and my girlfriend had muscle pain all day Tuesday from spending Sunday afternoon and Monday morning swimming around the coral at Sail Rock in Kenting. Note the colour of my arms - sunburn in December! Fantastic. If only it had been summer rather than winter, my girlfriend would have had more difficulty dragging me away. I absolutely love that place. My soundtrack made, as usual, by these guys.

Climategate Impact Beginning To Be Felt

Sirs

There are signs that the man-made global warming fantasists are now losing the public debate, if such it can be called. Recent mention of the Climategate Scandal in your pages (sans defence of Phil Jones et al) is perhaps one such timid sign given your previous determination to ignore it and just wish it away. Lord Monckton was quite right to say that the scientists at the CRU were in fact criminals. Your paper has backed the wrong horse in this race from the start.

As regards to the watermelon's fallback position of "oh well there may be no global warming, but we need renewables anyway" - this is disingenuous nonsense. The entire State supported renewable energies industry is a massive economic bubble waiting to be pricked. Both solar and wind energy in particular are so ridiculously inefficient (10% or less) that they cannot be seriously considered options for any long-term energy policy. I say what needs to be done, as only a first baby-step, is a stripping away of the laws, bureaucracy, and regulatory planning commissions that currently prevent private capital from constructing cleaner, safer and more efficient nuclear power plants on private property. The renewables are, like the banks, yet another state-supported bubble, which, when it bursts are going to ruin many people's lives.

Yours
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Wednesday 16th December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Climategate (ad nauseum, I know)

Sirs

Your refusal to cover the Climategate scandal at any proper length is contemptible.

Consider that the FOIA2009.zip file was most likely leaked by a whistleblower from within the CRU, rather than hacked by horrible skeptic bastards like me. Think about it - if only for two quiet minutes on your own.

This story is huge. Who can say it had no bearing on last week's political events in Australia, or of the Japanese JSER scientists recent rebuke to the IPCC? You might ignore Climategate all you want, but there are serious people in positions of power who most likely are carefully weighing the implications of this scandal, even as you seek to bury it.

You are condemning your publication to widespread contempt and eventual irrelevance with this stupid decision to ignore a major international story. What good will that do your standing on other issues with more direct relevance to Taiwanese independence?

Shame on you.

As ever,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Thursday 10th December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Yet Another Body Blow To The AGW Hypothesis...

And now the Japanese have apparently rejected the IPCC's AGW hypothesis as tantamount to "ancient astrology". This story just keeps getting bigger, whilst the Taipei Times just keep trying to ignore it. Intellectual and political cowardice.

Civilization: The Control Of Power

Sirs,

Tuesday's report by Vincent Y. Chao on the reaction of so called environmental groups to the EPA's proposed carbon trading system draws attention to the purported benefits of the system to speculative investors and its' likely ineffectiveness at reducing carbon emissions. Good job!

I also applaud Mr Chao's alternate emphasis on the views of one Herlin Hsieh to the effect that the government in Taipei must impose itself more heavily upon domestic industry for, although I hold such views in contempt, Mr Chao's reporting does help to turn the flashlight upon them. Now let me give you the batteries you need to switch it on:

The State - whether it be the one in Taipei, Beijing, Washington, London or Tokyo - is nothing but the monopoly on legal force. It acts upon a single premise: the power of violence. This is the starting point, and ultimate conclusion, for all State action - violence. People such as Herlin Hsieh, who advocate greater regulation and taxation of private property, are, most essentially, hyperventilating for the use of violence (in this case theft and blackmail) against the one institution - private property - which alone provides for the freedom of the individual human being. For the Taipei Times, a paper which is quite rightly opposed to any future annexation of Taiwan by the State in Beijing, to give air to such views as these is, to put it sweetly, ironic.

Perhaps the wise sages on your editorial board could reflect for a moment upon the words of a very odd man in the history of European philosophy:

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Intransigently yours,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Tuesday 8th December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Where Do You Go To Measure CO2?

My god - this just keeps getting better. Across the Pacific in what used to be the land of the free, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Mauna Loa Observatory proudly proclaims:

The undisturbed air, remote location, and minimal influences of vegetation and human activity at MLO are ideal for monitoring constituents in the atmosphere that can cause climate change.

Despite the fact that:

Just thirty miles from the observatory, Kilauea's Pu`u O`o vent sends 3.3 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That's enough to change local CO2 concentrations without producing the kind of SO2 volumes needed to have worldwide temperature effects. Pu`u O`o has been erupting continuously since 1983. Since 2008 it has been joined by a second eruption even closer to the Observatory -- from Halema`uma`u Crater at the top of Kilauea.

Can anybody explain to me why this Observatory's measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration can be taken as evidence that large concentrations are a consequence of industrial activity?

Thank you Brian Micklethwait.

James Hansen

Sirs,

"Intensification of struggle". James Hansen's response to the Climategate scandal (over which you seem to have gone in to "la la la we can't hear you!" mode), published in the UK's Guardian newspaper and reprinted in your own today, bears the tactical hallmark of one of history's most successful opponents of capitalist exploitation.

So Hansen claims that the Copenhagen conference must fail to produce a political agreement - not because it is all based on a combination of scientific corruption, political rent-seeking and anti-liberty sentiment - but because it doesn't go so far as to recognize that economic production is akin to slavery. (How can anyone fail to have an "Oh my god" moment upon reading that monstrous comparison?)

Just as the Climategate scandal revealed that the threat of global warming has been significantly exaggerated, Hansen's thought follows the line of one of history's giants. Admittance of errors and repentance for misleading public perception is of course a price too high to pay for those soldiers of science dedicated to the noble aim of saving the planet from capitalist exploitation. Instead, Hansen throws down this principle - minus its' echoes in forgotten, ignored and covered-up 20th Century events of course - as an example to all lesser eco-warriors: "intensification of struggle".

I'll say it if nobody else will: that man - just like the historical figure from whom he has borrowed his principle of political action - is a monster.

As ever,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Monday 7th Decemer 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

Intransigence

Sirs

This week's events in Australian politics, in which the passage of carbon-trading legislation has not proved as smooth as its proponents had hoped, indicate the depth of outrage felt by many so-called climate change "deniers" at what is an abuse of science for the political end of furthering heretofore unprecedented global extensions to the apparatus of governance.

The global surface temperature is, for the greater part, merely a consequence of atmospheric pressure and convection - the postulated feedback mechanisms by which carbon dioxide is hypothesized to affect temperature are very complicated and in any case, the total proportion of global atmospheric carbon dioxide produced by industry alone is impossible to measure. Given those basic facts - which even the scientists at the IPCC do not themselves deny! - the rush by developed countries to pass carbon trading bills and to agree on other such policy measures for the future at Copenhagen seems rather more than premature.

And how much more so when we consider the news that the IPCC's leading climate change research institution destroyed the original raw data for their global temperature record more than twenty years ago? Or when we consider the revelation that they deliberately attempted to massage the kurtosis on their temperature graphs to hide the recent decline in global temperatures? Or that they made a concerted effort to prevent publication of scientific articles casting the light of doubt upon their claims of catastrophic global warming? Or that they deliberately deleted both data and code that had been requested by other researchers under the UK's Freedom of Information Act (2000)?

Since when did scientists in the pay of socialist-leaning governments seek to hide their work and prevent it from being scrutinized by their peers? Since when did journalists cower in disgrace from their duty to pursue the truth? And since when did politicians, whatever their colour, delight in finding yet more excuses to increase their control over us?

Yours sincerely,
Michael Fagan

(Sent: Thursday 3rd December 2009. Unpublished by the Taipei Times)

President Ma's choice of vehicle

Sirs,

In response to your headline piece of Tuesday 1st December, I have a suggestion: why doesn't President Ma set a green example and demand that he be driven around in a cute little Toyota Prius? Or is it that only the lives of everyday people must be turned upside down to save the planet from the hide-the-change algorithm?

Yours as always,

Michael Fagan

Update: Yes you published this, but you deleted my smart-alec, which was the entire point of the thing. This is one of the reasons I blog my letters - here's what my letter originally looked like, and here is how you deliberately altered it:

In response to your headline piece on Tuesday (“DPP slams Ma’s campaigning expenses,” page 1), I have a suggestion: Why doesn’t President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) set a green example and demand that he be driven around in a cute little Toyota Prius? Or is it that only the lives of everyday people must be turned upside down to save the planet?

You can evade me and you can evade your own conscience but you can't evade reality, it will always come to kick your ass.

(Sent: Tuesday 1st December 2009. Published in the Taipei Times Thursday 3rd December 2009)

Failure - It Is What It Is

It is now well over an entire week since the Climategate story broke, and, despite three letters urging them to report on the story, the Taipei Times has shamefully evaded it. It is not as though they couldn't have reported on the simple facts but with a bit of left-wing spin thrown in either - no they couldn't do anything less than simply ignore it. I wouldn't mind if I had been addressing my complaint to another blogger with no other responsibility than to himself - but a newspaper is different. A newspaper is an institution whose most basic purpose is to keep its' readers informed on the unfolding of world events; particularly those events of major political import. At least, that is the naive view. The editorial staff at the Taipei Times are not acting with integrity to that purpose. The alternative can only be...

At any rate, my question to them: if you will not even inform your readers of the basic facts, however uncomfortable they may be to you, then where can I draw the boundary line for the contempt in which I hold you?

Where does this leave my project?

The essential value to me, in all of this - and however seemingly small and insignificant my efforts are, is the attempt to erode the grip of collectivist principles of political action in Taiwanese culture. My letters to the Taipei Times are just the principle method. Of the twenty seven letters I have written them so far since the beginning of 2009, they have published just ten. Translating into Mandarin and sending them to the Mandarin dailies has long been the obvious next step. Until the practical difficulties with that are out of the way (i.e. getting my Mandarin up to the required standard), I will just keep plugging the Taipei Times.