Hypocrisy rides the rails

Am I the only person who’s noticed the jeerleaders of the Blogosphere Right have gone completely silent about what they so derisorily call “the train set” since Transport Minister Steven Joyce announced National’s approval of $500 million worth of electric trains for Auckland ? Given this is close to what Michael Cullen paid directly for the country’s whole rail system after it was bled dry and asset-stripped by their mates (and more than what they abused Cullen for in total, when the entire $1 billion Joyce has committed to for the decades-overdue electrification of Auckland’s trains is counted), it’s obvious they have been stunned into silence, waiting for key lines, but Mr Farrar is overseas.

Cue Homepaddock, who always rises to the occasion at Mintie Moments like these.

Scandal of the century erupting on Copenhagen’s eve — leaked emails show climate scientists fabricated global warming data

Zealous global warmers bringing down their facade

Skeptics usually say that, if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. But the alleged hacking and release of thousands of damning emails revealing a cynical and deliberate exaggeration of climate change data by the high priests of global warming apparently is true.

The emails are from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and have been published on many sites across the internet late last week and over the weekend.

The CRU is one of the main contributors to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which promotes the claim that a global scientific consensus backs its theory that the world as we know it will be destroyed by human-caused global warming.

CRU has confirmed it was hacked and that at least some of the emails are genuine, including the most damning. So many have been made public that it has so far been unable to review them all.

The emails show, for example, that climate scientists got together to fudge figures to “hide” the fact that global warming actually stopped in 1998, despite their predictions that the increased carbon dioxide emissions since then should have sent temperatures soaring.

They show climate scientists gloated at the death of a skeptic, tried to stop skeptical scientists publishing peer-reviewed research, attempted to refute the fact of the Medieval Warm Period and expressed private concern at the inconvenient fact that the world was not heating as they publicly claimed.

This is the most embarrassing leak of information imaginable for the promoters of global warming as it comes on the eve of the Copenhagen Summit, where the very people who created these lamentable emails will attempt to scare the world into adopting the biggest ponzi scheme in history, the Emissions Trading Scam, that will enrich Al Gore as well as further enriching the very same money launderers who brought down the world’s financial system last year.

This could be the scandal of the century. It is already breaking into the mainstream news media, such as in the Telegraph (UK) and the Wall Street Journal (US) as well as on websites and blogs which first discovered this massive leak, such as Watts Up With That, and, yes, I have just seen (while researching this), our very own Ian Wishart, whose site says he got that first admission from CRU boss Phil Jones that CRU was hacked. That really is a journalistic scoop. Good one Ian.

The whole edifice the global warmers have built in support of their contention that the planet is being destroyed by cows, power stations, jet aircraft and SUVs is collapsing around them.

Even before the leak of these emails, they were ducking revelations that they had “accidentally” destroyed their closely guarded historical temperature data that was no longer available for anyone else to check (the same Phil Jones of CRU exposed in this scandal), and that a much promoted tree ring chart that claimed there had been no Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age (perfectly proven by the historical written records of those times) actually came from just 13 trees out of millions in Siberia that had rings different from all their neighbours.

The computer predictions these climate changers use for their campaign may be right. But it has long become obvious they are doing science an enormous disservice by their alarmist predictions, their accusing skeptics of being akin to pedophiles and Holocaust deniers, and their twisting, subversion and hiding of real climate data to promote their cause.

Well meaning these high priests might be. I accept they really believe their predictions and want to save the planet. But these emails show they are prepared cynically to hide and distort and manufacture information to cover up the inconvenient truth that the world is not warming according to their predictions, that glaciers and ice sheets are not melting on cue, and that the natural cycle of warming and cooling that causes ice ages and warm periods might just have something to do with observed temperature changes, now as in the past.

This does not mean humans do not affect the climate. Of course we do. The massive deforestation of so many countries has demonstrably altered climates in many places and increased the spread of deserts. The building of so many cities with so many millions of people in them creates a heat effect around those cities as sunlight soaks into their asphalt and concrete jungles.

But it has become very clear that the computer predictions being relied on to back alarmist Malthusian scare-fests like Copenhagen and Kyoto are not proving anything like correct.

The inconvenient truth is that the world stopped warming in 1998. The predictions were it would be much hotter by now. Instead there is a noted cooling that may be part of the natural cycle, but these fanatics deny there is any natural cycle.

The natural cycle means it will warm again, and cool again. There will one century even be another ice age, as the same climate scientists claimed in 1975 was then upon us, after decades of cooling from 1940. But temperatures began rising in 1976 until 1998. The world will almost certainly again become warmer than it was 1000 years ago in the Medieval Warm Period when grapes grew in the north of England and the Vikings settled the hospitable landscape of what is now icy Greenland.

Scientific debate is about testing theories and seeking the truth about observed and potential events, not using falsefied data and abuse to shut down questioning. Let alone ignoring the cyclical climate patterns that are in the lifetime and recent memory of billions of people alive today.

Enough is enough.

Hat tip: Jayman.

• Update:It took only a few minutes from my posting the above before the first desperate riposte arrived in the comments section, from a Peter Martin. As I have noticed before, these warmists sit on the Net 24/7 trying to damp down the heat their activities cause. The link he points to speaks (unintentionally) for itself about the extent of the coverup going on, and I heartily recommend you go to it. Thank you Peter Martin.

Large Hadron Collider raps again — stand by for time travellers from the future

If time travel from the future is possible, then visitors from the future might start materialising in Geneva one day very soon. Barring that, the Higgs Boson will be found. Or not. And likely some miniature black holes.

Yes, after a frustrating 14 months of delays, the Large Hadron Collider is powering up again at at CERN in Geneva (where the World Wide Web was invented) . Subatomic particles are zapping in both directions round the 27-kilometre circular tunnel beneath the city.

Soon, if all continues to work well, the scientists in charge of what is the most expensive scientific experiment in history will aim those particle beams at each other to smash them, endeavouring to recreate in miniature what the universe was like a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The Collider will do something essentially very simple: record what happens when protons are smashed together. Protons are a tiny part of atoms, for example they are the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. They were discovered by our very own Ernest Rutherford in 1918. Hadron is the technical name of the class of sub-atomic particles to which protons belong.

The huge magnets in the Collider will accelerate bursts of protons at each other in a vacuum colder than space at speeds just under that of light, to see what happens when they collide.

Many physicists hope to see the elusive “Higgs Boson,” which sounds a bit like the Patronus charm Harry Potter creates to ward off the Dementors but is theorised to be an elementary particle of matter, even smaller than a proton, that could bind together the various theories of physics.

The CERN scientists also hope to find other things not before seen but theorised upon, including micro black holes and “strangelets,” a form of quark, which could help to explain the “dark matter” believed to help hold the universe together, but never seen.

Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up 96 per cent of the volume of the universe, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert.

But time travel? Yes. Time travel into the future is perfectly possible under Einstein relativity. As is, in theory, time travel from our future to points in the past, but with a Big But.

Physicists who have studied the issue argue that somebody from our future could only travel backwards (possibly via a wormhole in the fabric of spacetime) to the moment of the creation of the first time machine, which the Collider theoretically is.

The fact that travellers from the future have not materialised among us has long been held as evidence that time travel from the future to the past is not in practice possible, but it is equally possible that they have not yet materialised because the primary condition for their arrival has not yet occurred. The operation of the Collider could fulfil the necessary conditions.

I discussed this subject in detail in a post last year that continues to attract many hits a day many days.

Should the Collider show time travel is a scientific reality, it will raise other issues, most importantly the paradox posed by what would happen if a visitor from the future comes to the present time and kills, say, the father of his as-yet unborn father. Some physicists believe the existence of many parallel universes, each with slightly different histories, would solve that paradox.

When the Collider broke down soon after its initial start in September last year, some physicists seriously considered whether people in our future had used time travel to sabotage it, perhaps to prevent some unintended consequence – maybe that Black Hole some doomsayers fear will swallow the Earth.

Meanwhile, make certain you go to the wonderful Large Hadron Rap by CERN publicist Katherine McAlpine (Alpine Kat). Her You Tube hit explains the Collider in accurate but colloquial terms and has so far had more than 5.4 million hits. It’s great fun and the beat is catchy.

Child-bashers’ $100-a-head march against democracy a fabulous flop

If there is a god, thank god he’s not the god of the mob

The child-bashing, democracy-despising, Laura Norder mob-raisers managed to get at most 5000 people in Queen St today despite businessman organiser Colin Craig paying $500,000 in multimedia publicity and free buses to bankroll what he boasted would be the biggest march ever seen.

The Herald claimed 4000 to 5000 people. Radio New Zealand claimed 1000. Stuff initially said hundreds but increased that to 5000. As late as midnight, RNZ was still saying the turnout was just 1000.

Whatever. Bishop Tamaki got a bigger crowd for his Enough is Enough parade in Wellington in 2004. The Springbok tour protests of 1981 drew many times more in cities all over New Zealand. The biggest march ever in Queen St was the anti-union parade led by Tania Harris in 1980, which got about 90,000 people (helped by employers giving their staff the day off to attend, and solid support from the union-bashing Muldoon government). Some 30,000 joined the 2004 hikoi against the Foreshore and Seabed Bill through Wellington – a demonstration powerful for its quiet solemnity.

Today’s utter flop of a protest against democracy and in favour of bashing children is welcome. It shows that money cannot be sure to buy support of an appalling cause.

Only 5000 Aucklanders at most came out in support of bashing children and establishing a dictatorship of the mob. In a city of 1.2 million people, that is insignificant by any count. Verily do the would-be emperors have no clothes.

Many of the marchers carried pre-printed signs saying JOHN KEY LISTEN TO ME.

While I’d be tempted to say the kind of people supporting the causes being espoused were more exemplified by banners that said such things as JFK—JOHN FUHRER KEY and HIT ME BABY ONE MORE TIME, it’s far too obvious such placards were held by anti-march infiltrators. After all, had I been in Auckland today (which sadly I wasn’t), I would have dragged my children along, with me carrying the placard I DEMAND THE RIGHT TO BEAT MY KIDS, while my three children would carry signs saying BEAT ME.

It cost the curious Mr Craig at least $100 for every person who attended his attempt to subvert democracy by mob rule. There is thus much hope yet that the millions of dollars that Peter Shirtcliffe and big business are lining up against MMP will not triumph despite their best laid plans.

If there is a god, he is not the god of the mob.

Democracy under attack! Another saintly mum jailed for smacking her wicked son! Praise the lord for Colin Craig!

Tomorrow is our chance to stand up for democracy, to stand up for the rights of two more state-oppressed parents dragged into court for disciplining their wicked son.

The little bastard wagged school, then ran wailing to neighbours after mum and dad gave him good parental correction with a length of garden hose. The ghastly neighbours called the police and the innocent, godly parents ended up in court, thanks to the evil Sue Bradford abolishing Section 59.

The saintly mother has been sent to jail for 10 months. Ten months for loving parental discipline!!! Thank god that jails are five-star hotels, at least she won’t want for luxury and turkey for Christmas.

The kindly father will be sentenced next month and may get home detention, according to the hideous judge, who should be sacked from the bench for ignoring the people’s will in the “we shall bash our kids” referendum. Home detention! Only horrible murderers, rapists and terrorist drug-making gang members get home detention! Why is an innocent father who did nothing other than give his bad son what he richly deserved being sentenced so heinously?

People of New Zealand. Enough is enough. Come Saturday morning, we will rise in our multitudes and storm Queen St to reclaim democracy, reclaim the right to bash our children and thump our wives, reinstate Sunday as the day of rest and worship of the Rightful One and restore the death penalty so communists like Sue Bradford and Helen Clark can swing for destroying New Zealand as god wants it.

Thank the lord for the blessed Mr Colin Craig, a man so righteous he has put forward $500,000 of what precious little money the vile state does not steal from him to fund the biggest march ever seen.

Praise the lord for Colin Craig! Praise the lord for Garth McVicar! Praise the lord for mothers brave enough to give their horrid children what for despite the unbiblical Bradford bill! Release the fatherly martyr Graham Capill now!

Praise the lord! Praise the lord! Praise the lord and pass the chequebook.

Serious question: Why does the Dalai Lama come here more than the Queen, the Pope, or almost anyone else of such importance?

The Nice Mr Key doesn’t want to meet the Dalai Lama. I can see the arguments for and against that. China is very important and it pisses off China’s authoritarian leaders if anyone of significance in a democratic country meets the Dalai Lama. On the other hand, why should we bow to that kind of political thuggery? After all, we stood up to the might of the USA over the nuclear ships issue.

But what I don’t understand, and I’d love to have it explained, is: Why does the Dalai Lama seemingly spend most of his time trundling around the world trying to meet prime ministers and other dignitaries? It’s only two years since he was last here. The Pope doesn’t turn up here every other year. The Queen hasn’t been here this century and she is our legal head of state. Why is the Dalai Lama such a frequent visitor always seeming to want to meet whoever is our prime minister?

Once again, Transparency International judges NZ the least corrupt country on Earth

Wingnuts in dilemma after change of government means they can no longer claim Transparency wrong

Once again, no ifs, no buts, no maybes, New Zealand is the least corrupt country on Earth in the independent agency Transparency International’s annual survey of the good, the bad and the disgraceful of bribery and corruption around the globe.

When the agency’s Corruption Perceptions Index was published last year, there was a roar of outrage from the rightest reaches of the blogosphere, whose denizens leapt to proclaim New Zealand was actually the most corrupt nation.

My article on the survey attracted dozens of vitriolic comments from the Right, claiming Transparency had got it completely wrong. They railedand ranted on their own blogs , with the most odious of them all, a Mr Darren Greenwood, who runs a misogynist, racist cesspit he laughingly calls Fairfacts Media, even going so far as emailing Transparency in Berlin to tell it we had a Labour government so New Zealand must be utterly corrupt. He was ignored.

Sarcasm on. This year, of course, we have a National government, so New Zealand is not corrupt and Transparency got it right this time. Sarcasm off.

The latest index, published overnight, is here. New Zealand is number one again, followed by Denmark, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Australia, Canada and Iceland in the top 10 places.

Given Iceland’s entire economy was destroyed last year by the activities of its bankers, its high placement seems somewhat strange. One can only assume Iceland’s banks bankrupted Iceland transparently and without demanding or paying bribes. Leaving cod its only means of trade. The fish, not cash-on-delivery.

The UK is 17th and the US 19th. Italy fell from 55 to 63 this year but was beaten as the pariah of western Europe by Greece, which fell from 57 to 71. Somalia at 180 remains at the very bottom, just below Afghanistan, that benighted land where so many young men and women of New Zealand, Australia, the US, the UK and other democracies are futilely fighting and dying in defence of the second-most corrupt regime on the face of the planet.

On a scale of a possible 10 points (highly clean) to 0 (highly corrupt), New Zealand scored 9.4 points, up from 9.3 last year. Somalia was 1.1. The score is based on perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts.

As I said last year, and let me re-emphasise it: You can’t possibly do better than be the least-corrupt country in the world in Transparency International’s list. We are not number two, we are not number three, four, five, six or seven. We are at the very top. No country scores better than New Zealand for being less corrupt. Not one.

New Zealand is a nation where corruption is virtually unknown, where it is unheard of to have to bribe public officials to do the jobs they are paid to do, where the judiciary and the public service are independent of the government of the day, where genuine wrongdoing is quickly exposed (usually by law enforcement agencies but also, in the best traditions of journalism, by the media) and offenders dealt with in open court under fair and transparent laws.

The rare events like the exposure, arrest and then jailing of former MP Taito Phillip Field for corruption do not make us corrupt – quite the opposite. They show corruption is not tolerated in New Zealand.

I look forward to the wingnuts squirming as they try to reconcile their abuse of Transparency last year with their adoration of it this year.

Vale Wellington’s Volvo trolley buses

Unmarked, and probably unnoticed, the last revenue trip of the last of Wellington’s Volvo trolley buses is likely to take place today.

A Volvo trolley is, barring problems, scheduled to leave Karori Park at 11.05am for Lyall Bay, then run into Kilbirnie depot at 12.06pm, ending 28 years of Volvo trolley operation in the capital.

This might seem unimportant. After all, trolley buses will keep running in Wellington. A fleet of some 60 new low-floor Designline trolleys has replaced the old Volvos, hence the retirement of those old high-floor rattlers.

But it is sad there will be no celebration, or even a wake, to mark the last Volvo in passenger service. Sad, because there was no celebration, or any marking at all, of the 60th birthday of Wellington trolley bus operation on June 20 this year. Sad because the 60th birthday of a trolley bus service is a rare event in the English-speaking world and the survival of Wellington’s trolleys was extraordinary. Sad because the noisy old Volvos were the workhorse of Wellington’s bus system for so many years, and their passing will go without a mention, other than here on this blog.

Trolley buses used to be an important part of the capital’s public transport system. They replaced the city’s trams between 1949 and 1964. By the latter year, there were 119 of them, compared with the 60 of today. Then, they ran all services on the wired routes from first bus to last, seven days a week.

The Volvos were ordered in 1979 to replace the oldest first-generation trolleys, and entered service between 1981 and 1986. There were 68 in all. In 1984, 20 Ansaldo trolleys began running, taking the modern trolley fleet to 88. But the Ansaldos lasted only five years before being converted to diesel buses. Sixty of the Volvos soldiered on, older and more decrepit, and used less and less in favour of diesel buses, until a decision was made in 2005 to buy the present new fleet of Designline trolleys to replace the Volvos.

The purchase of so few new trolleys was supposedly to keep Wellington’s streets green, but that is a farce. The real reason is to allow Infratil (owner of Go Wellington) to retain a monopoly of bus services on the wired routes, which are meant to be run solely by trolley buses, but which of course they are not.

Trolley buses now run only a minority of services on the wired routes (most are run by diesel buses), and trolleys do not run at all on weekends any more, and rarely after 7pm on weekdays. The powers that be prefer to run diesel buses, despite Wellington ratepayers and taxpayers paying $9 million for a seven-day trolley service that no longer happens.

That is rather sad, as it means Wellington’s streets are very noisy because of the roar of diesel buses, especially at nights and weekends when using trolley buses would make them a quieter, better place. Much of the opposition to turning Manners Mall into a bus lane would evaporate if full-time trolley operation resumed.

Farewell, Volvos. Lest we forget.

• Update 2pm: Volvo 227 made the last trip, leaving Karori Park at 11.05am and reaching Kilbirnie depot under tow at 12.08pm. It disgraced itself on its last journey by pulling down the overhead wires in Bowen St as it came into town, hence the need for it to be towed.

Hysterical media Roman circus a disturbing challenge to civil society

The increasingly hysterical mass media in English speaking countries has become a dangerous lynch mob, baying for blood like the crowds at Roman circuses, demanding no mercy for whoever be the unpopular figure in their quest for an inflammatory headline.

Today’s example is a particularly savage story in the once paper-of-reasonable-record The New Zealand Herald, winding the rest of the media, talkback and the blogosphere into a rage over murderer Mark Burton “getting ACC” to buy him a prosthetic leg to replace the one he lost when police shot him soon after he killed innocent bystander Karl Kuchenbecker and shot four others on a rampage in Wellington in January 2007.

“Double-murderer Graeme Burton received a free titanium artificial leg worth $10,000 from ACC to replace the right leg lost when he went on a lethal shooting rampage two years ago,” says this incitement to outrage by reporter Jared Savage.

Well, no. Burton did not get ACC to to buy him an artificial leg, and as a convicted criminal he is not entitled to accident compensation for his injuries.

Anyone who loses a leg in New Zealand, whether by accident, illness, or by having the police justifiably blast it off to protect innocent lives, is entitled to the same and the best medical and prosthetic treatment available.

The most appalling feature of this lazy piece of “journalism” is Savage going to Karl Kuchenbecker’s father, Paul, for comment. It is a credit to Mr Kuchenbecker that his moderate condemnation did not provide the outraged response being the Herald would have been seeking.

“We’ve helped him to hurt someone else,” Mr Kuchenbecker understandably and calmly said. “The taxpayers helped him to continue his rampage while inside. We’ve given him the mobility to do this.”

Thank god the Herald was unable to contact the Senseless Sentencing Trust before its deadline last night.

Ultimately, a society is judged by the way it treats its most unpopular members, be they the welfare recipients so despised by the Right, or unrepentant murderers like Burton, despised by many and feared by most.

It might enrage the Herald that Burton was fitted with an artificial leg that enabled him to chase gang member and fellow inmate Dwayne Marsh through Paremoremo prison to stab him in the heart, but what is their alternative? That Burton remain legless and hop about?

David Farrar wants that, of course, as does his hate brigade. What a frightening bunch.

Nobody, anywhere, could have sympathy for Burton. He is one of the most dangerous inmates in New Zealand, an inmate at huge risk to other prisoners, prison guards, and anyone who might come near him – witness the many prison officers needed to surround him in court to prevent him wreaking havoc there on his too frequent appearances.

He will never, ever, be released from prison, except in a coffin, and he is now rightly in solitary confinement where he should stay until he is too old and frail to do harm to another person. Let us all hope he does not manage to kill anyone else during the many years he will remain inside until his death.

But he should still not be denied the medical care available to everyone else. To deny him that would be a stain on our civilised society, however much that would reap cheers from the news media, the Insensible Sentencing Trust, talkbackland and the wastes of the blogosphere.

As media outlets continue their dive to the sewers in their quest to deliver audiences even more facile and inflammatory trash-pieces, this abandonment of any attempt at presenting serious news presented seriously will just keep getting worse.

By villifying everything and everyone who can be scapegoated, and by promoting hysteria and lynch mobs, the media is tearing down the very foundations of civil society. It is a disturbing trend and a challenge to civil society that will not be easy to overcome.

Courts declare Global Warming a protected religion, while crucifixes are banned in Italian schools

Sanity will prevail. One day. Perhaps.

It’s been obvious for a very long time that the fervent “belief” some people have in human-induced climate change is closer to religion than science. Now a court has ruled that climate change is indeed a religion with its believers able to claim legal protection for their faith.

In a landmark decision in London, Justice Sir Michael Burton has declared that redundant worker Tim Nicholson’s views on global warming are so deeply held that they are worthy of the same protection as religious beliefs.

“A belief in man-made climate change, and the alleged resulting moral imperatives, is capable if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations,” His Honour said in a written decision.

Nicholson claimed he was sacked by Grainger, the UK’s largest listed residential property company, because of his views on the company’s attitude to climate change. The company said he was made redundant because of the economic downturn.

Justice Burton’s decision will enable Nicholson to take Grainger to an employment tribunal to claim he was sacked because of his religious beliefs.

The case comes as the proponents of global warming are mounting a hysterical propaganda war around the world in the countdown to the UN’s climate change summit in Copenhagen next month.

Hysterical, because the “scientific” basis for their economy-wrecking cause collapses further by the week, leaving them to demand everyone “believe” their mantras.

The most-read post on this blog was the April 2008 revelation that average world temperatures had not increased since 1998 despite continued growth in carbon dioxide emissions. This post continues to get dozens of hits every day and has now been read twice as many times as the next most popular post.

The post was about a BBC news story that quoted temperature data from the UN’s very own World Meteorological Organisation. Both the BBC and the WMO are ardent believers in global warming. Until their revelation, I had actually believed the propaganda that temperatures were going constantly up. The BBC story was such dynamite that the Global Warming Thought Police put heavy pressure on the BBC to recant it.

It is becoming ever clearer that the inconvenient scientific truth is somewhat different from the shrill propaganda. The world’s climate is always changing. A thousand years ago, temperatures were warmer than now as the world basked in the Medieval Warm Period, during which the Vikings settled Greenland and grapes were grown in the north of England. But temperatures gradually fell again, until the Little Ice Age of the mid-1700s, in which the Thames froze, glaciers advanced across Europe and Greenland had become so covered in snow and ice that the Viking settlements lay long abandoned.

There were no SUVs in the Medieval Warm Period, nor for 200 years after the Little Ice Age, but after the latter, the world gradually began warming again, with ebbs and flows about every 40 or 50 years that led to the same alarmists who today claim we are going to cook claiming in 1975 that we were entering a new ice age, because of global cooling from 1940 and then.

Of course, once that claim was made, another warming cycle began.

The BBC recently updated last year’s story, again having to concede that average world temperatures have still not risen since 1998, in complete contravention of the computer climate models the warmists use to push their religious beliefs.

After 11 years now without global warming, and with temperatures actually falling in many places, it seems about time for the Warmers to confront the fact we just may be entering another cyclical cooling phase. That might allow time to conduct some actual rather than computerised work on the human effect on the climate before rushing in to Copenhagen’s religious indulgences, pardon, emissions trading scams, sorry, schemes, that will greatly enrich the same money merchants who wrecked the global economy last year, while doing nothing actually to reduce the supposedly dangerous emissions.

There are two delicious ironies to Justice Burton’s declaration that climate change is a religious belief.

First, Justice Burton is the very same High Court judge who ruled in 2007 that warmist cardinal Al Gore’s propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth included nine serious scientific errors, one of them that the South Pacific ocean was rising and island-dwellers had been forced to evacuate to New Zealand. The judge ruled this arch-work of mass deception could only be shown in schools if accompanied by a countering viewpoint.

The second irony is that it comes at the same time as the European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Italian schools must remove the crucifixes that have adorned their walls for decades, as crucifixes represent an ancient religion, Christianity, which is apparently now frowned upon by the courts in Europe just as the new religion, Climate Change, is welcomed.

Jesus wept.

Yesterday when the war begins

On the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month in 1918, World War II began.

Lest we forget.

Hypocrisy rampant

Well, well, well. Hone goes off for a love-fest in Paris (paid for by the white motherfuckers he so despises) while supposedly on an official trip to Brussels. Rodney gets himself an official trip to LA and London really to have a love-fest, and deliberately times it to be at the time of a family wedding. Oh, and another in Hawaii, too!

Now I, as a humble private sector scribe, was many times sent overseas for work. Many were the times I was away from my beloved for 10 days or even more. We survived. We used the telephone (at our expense).

The thought that my employer would pay for my beloved to travel with me never once entered my head and I bet that goes for almost everyone in the private sector.

In Parliament, however, they expect as of right — nay, ENTITLEMENT — that their other half will go with them for nookie and sightseeing, under the guise of an official visit. It’s all parties and almost all MPs.

None of them should be allowed to do this, with the exception of the prime minister, who should always be allowed to travel with his or her spouse/partner as it is expected they will meet other leaders who will have their other halves at such meetings. The spouse/partner/FB of a prime minister represents our country too on such official trips.

Good on the nice Mr Key for paying for his wife’s trips with him, following the precedent set by Peter Davis, who paid for himself when he travelled with Helen Clark (even to Wellington for official functions), despite being entitled to taxpayer-funded travel as an MP’s spouse.

I doubt Bronagh gets much sightseeing when she travels as the prime minister’s wife but she is effectively a representative of New Zealand on her husband’s official visits and should have such travel officially funded as of right.

A belated and shamefully unremarked 60th birthday greeting to Wellington’s darkest secret, its trolley buses

The 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin making the first Moon landing reminded me I’d completely overlooked another anniversary as close to my heart as that long ago great leap for mankind. Shamefully, it is not being celebrated and indeed has not even been mentioned anywhere except on this blog, belatedly, today .

I am speaking of the 60th anniversary of the opening of Wellington’s trolley bus system, which even I overlooked.

On June 20 1949, trolley buses began gliding through the city and along Oriental Parade then up the Carlton Gore Rd hill to Roseneath. Over the following 28 years, their wires were strung through the streets to Wadestown, Hataitai, Karori, Northland, Aro St, Miramar, Seatoun, Island Bay, Lyall Bay, Newtown Park and Kingston, the latter being the last expansion of the service, in 1987, when the Route 7 wires were extended from Mornington.

Wellington’s first trolley buses were painted silver and became known as the Silver Ghosts, on account of their quietness compared with diesel buses and with the clanking trams that most of the trolley bus routes replaced. The silver trolley pictured above is one of the ghosts from the early 1950s, now preserved by fanatical gunzels (transport enthusiasts) and stored at the Karori bus depot.

Shamefully, there will be no commemoration of what is one of the English speaking world’s longest lived trolley bus systems.

Absolutely nothing marked the June 20 anniversary.

The current owners of the trolleys, Infratil, had no interest and probably didn’t even know there was such an anniversary, despite the little-used trolleys being the main reason for the huge profits the company makes from its Go Wellington operation.

The gunzels who look after the Silver Ghost and other historic trolleys stored at Karori rejected my request earlier this year to stage an anniversary tour that day (there was such a tour on the 50th birthday in 1999, supported by the former owner, Stagecoach), saying they would commemorate it at Labour Weekend.

But last month, the powers that be who hate trolleybuses decided there will be no weekend trolley bus services. The gunzels have been told they will not be allowed to hold a trolley festival at Labour Weekend, or any weekend, as trolley buses have henceforth been forbidden to run at weekends, by decree of Greater Wellington Regional Council (which actually pays out $9 million a year in public money to have trolleys run seven days a week from dawn to midnight, but that’s a story you all know already, and GWRC does not like being reminded).

This is all shameful, as it was an anniversary worth celebrating. Few trolley bus systems in the English speaking world survived for 60 years. In many Anglo places, including all of Britain, all of Australia, all of the US and Canada (barring Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Dayton, Boston and Philadelphia, which still have them), and in Auckland, New Plymouth, Christchurch and Dunedin, trolley buses were just a footnote to transport history between the trams they replaced and the diesel buses that replaced the trolleys.

Some 340 cities in Europe, Asia and the Americas still operate trolley buses and they have returned to cities such as Rome that scrapped them many years ago. Currently, the world’s oldest trolley bus system is the one in Shanghai, where the first trolley rolled in 1914. The oldest system in North America is in Philadelphia, which started using trolley buses in 1923. The oldest system in western Europe is the large network of Lausanne in Switzerland, which opened in 1932. Britain’s last trolley buses ran in Bradford in 1972, though nearby Leeds looks set to be the first British city to reinstate them, as trolley buses are gaining a new popularity.

Despite the current costly purchase of some 60 new trolley buses for Wellington, this distinctive transport mode seems out of favour here, again. In 1964, the fleet reached its maximum of 119 vehicles, and though 88 new ones replaced the originals between 1981 and 1986, many of them (including 20 flash Ansaldo trolleys obtained in 1985) were scrapped after less than six years on the road, leaving about 60 of the original 68 familiar Volvos to soldier on from 1990, in a minor role in a network now dominated by diesel buses. Despite the purchase of new trolleys and the wiring of Taranaki St for trolleys in 1985 and the Kingston extension in 1987, several routes were closed, including the Northland line in 1972 and the original Roseneath and Wadestown routes in 1987.

There was a new trolley bus spring during the 1990s, when businessman Ross Martin became manager of the privatised system (bought by Stagecoach from the former owner, Wellington City Council). Ross was something of a gunzel himself. He seemed to have a boyish enthusiasm for trolley buses. During his tenure, night and weekend trolley services resumed after a 20-year absence and, in 2003 and 2005, he bought the three low-floor Designline prototypes, 301, 302 and 303, to demonstrate the abilities of modern trolley buses. I was on one of the demonstration rides provided for doubting regional councillors and he looked as happy as a pig in muck as he showed off the trolley’s features.

But though the new yellow three-axle Designline trolleys were eventually ordered as a result, they are rarely used, with most weeknight, all the weekend, and many of the weekday daytime trolley services being operated by diesel buses, many of them the oldest diesels in the fleet, just to give the fingers to passengers, and to the ratepayers and taxpayers who pay that $9 million a year for trolley buses that are hardly ever on the roads.

I put this lack of enthusiasm for trolleys down to the change of ownership in November 2005, when Stagecoach sold out to Infratil, which is happy to have the exclusive GWRC contracts for the wired routes, but finds it too much bother actually to run trolleys on them, especially as there are no penalties for running diesel buses on the wired routes, and many benefits to the company and its drivers for using diesels, the older the better.

Given Greater Wellington Regional Council’s lack of interest in requiring the use of trolley buses that its contract with Go Wellington legally demands, and given Go Wellington’s preference to run elderly, cheap diesel buses on the trolley routes, and given Wellington City Council’s sabotaging of the overhead wire maintenance contracts (used as the excuse not to run weekend trolleys) I very much doubt there will be a 70th anniversary of Wellington’s remarkable trolley buses.

But hey, as I say, predictions usually turn out to be wrong.

Bumblebee trams roll proudly through Melbourne while Wellington bumbles timidly on

This is what Wellington is missing out on, why it is not the world-class city it should be. This is a modern tram in Melbourne running on Route 96, the busiest of that city’s many tram routes.

Route 96 runs over a former short railway line (from St Kilda) then over street tracks through the city centre and on to East Brunswick on the other side of the CBD (where the photo above was taken).

Its Wellington equivalent would be running trams like the ones pictured from Johnsonville to the city via the existing railway line, then on-street through the Golden Mile to Newtown and beyond. Such a service would revolutionise transport in Wellington.

But we don’t have the imagination or the courage to build world-class infrastructure like this.

Melbourne keeps building new tram lines, and has been doing so continuously for decades. It also keeps buying new trams, always bigger, longer, faster and better than those that came before.

The trams pictured above are the latest model French Alsthom-built Citadis lowfloor trams, found all over Europe and now in Melbourne, where they are known as “Bumblebees” on account of their colourscheme.

They are articulated in five sections, are 32 metres long, and easily carry more than 200 passengers each.

Five Bumblebees, worth $5 million each, run on the 96 alongside similar sized German-built Siemens Combino trams (one is pictured below running on the former St Kilda railway alignment that makes this route so fast and popular, the way the Johnsonville line should be. Just imagine this tram, racing across the overbridge at Crofton Downs).

Melbourne has just gone out to tender for 50 more similar trams, needed to augment the 500 trams it already has, because patronage is growing constantly, so good is the service. Wellington can’t even run trolley buses properly, hiding them in their depots most of the time. Bah.

What’s sauce for the geese becomes sauce for the porker

What goes round comes around. During the Helen Clark years, right-wing bloggers delighted in regularly publishing a photo of Clark and Michael Cullen (above) that made the duo appear a pair of sneering snobs.

Left-wing blogs are now getting their own back, gleefully publishing a photo of Finance Minister Bill English (below) sporting a distinctly trough-snorting expression.