Monthly Archives: December 2009

Political Correctness in Sodding Sudbury Bingo

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Posted by JJ on December 31, 2009 – 6:19 pm
Filed under Random Grumps & Raves, The Demise of Democracy and Freedom, Things to Consider
Tagged as ,

The cancer of Political Correctness is now affecting the popular English game of Bingo – believe it or not!  In the town of Suffolk town of Sudbury, England, the local officials have banned bingo-callers from using the traditional number identifiers “Legs Eleven” (for the number eleven) and “Two fat Ladies” (for the number eighty-eight), on the grounds that they are politically incorrect and may spark lawsuits against the council from outraged portly persons, or from women who might deem them sexist!

Oh, good grumping grief!  Are the Poms going mad?  Bingo calling is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game for the players – the rhythm, pitch and cadence of the caller’s voice, the traditional embellishments that globally identify the numbers.  These are as old as the game itself, as instantly recognisable as a market fishmonger’s patter, square-dance calls or a running joke in a sitcom.

The bingo call “Two fat Ladies” is so much a part of the English bingo tradition that it was adopted by two gifted female chefs as the very name of their highly successful television cooking show.  Get this – the two lady chefs were indeed fat, cheerful, entertaining and talented.  And obviously unabashed by being two fat ladies and happy to adopt the term as their own.

If a caller used the platform of the bingo hall to make gratuitous racist or derogatory jokes, then I would expect lawsuits to be a likely consequence.  Not to mention a black eye.  But bingo calls are not gratuitous insults like racist jokes.  They are the traditional fabric of bingo, part of it’s colour and ambiance, giving pleasure to the players.  What court of law would uphold such a lawsuit?  Or are English jurists as bonkers as some English local officials?

P.S. Bingo is a Pommie tradition that has even found its way to some of England’s former colonies.  The harmless group gambling game attracts faithful followers, who revel in the company, the cheerfulness, the excitement, the chance to make some extra cash for the price of an outlay so small that it has no more significance than the cost of a movie ticket.  And given the low quality of the average cinematic pot-boiler, bingo can be more entertaining.

Players each draw bingo cards, that have rows of numbers.  No two are alike.  The players pay a small fee for each game.  The pot of their fees is the jackpot for the game, and the winner takes all.

The game is led by the bingo caller, who has a sheet for each game, for which he calls the numbers in turn.  Players mark off each called number on their own card (if it is on the card).  The first player to have marked off all the numbers calls out “Bingo!” and subject to a quick check by the caller, the game is won.

P.P.S. “Pom” is an antipodean colloquialism for an Englishman.  When used without any other qualifier, it is a fond term, not a derogatory one.

The Nobel Used-Car Sales Award

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Posted by JJ on December 29, 2009 – 12:20 pm
Filed under Global Warming
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In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

Eh?  The promoters of the greatest scientific scam since Piltdown Man are awarded a Nobel Peace Prize?  Anthropogenic climate change is at best a speculative theory, and Al Gore and the IPCC have cynically disseminated it as knowledge.  The truth is, scientists have not been able to validate the theory.  They have not demonstrated a causal connection between CO2 produced by mankind and global warming.  Moreover, the IPCC have cherry-picked and manipulated proxy and temperature records to provide a picture consistent with the theory,  failed to provide open access to the raw data they have used to record global temperatures, and relied on computer models for their “evidence” of man-made climate change.  In effect, they have perpetrated a sales job.  And Al Gore has taken a travelling slide show presentation as sales collateral on his mission to convince world leaders.  A presentation that promoted IPCC-manipulated data and conclusions as hard fact, glossed over the real temporal relationship between historical warm periods and atmospheric CO2, blasted scientific skepticism as bias, appealed to scientific “consensus” and “authority”, cast aspersions on all who would disagree with its message, and warned of catastrophe if we don’t accept this tenuous idea as the truth and take immediate disruptive action to cut CO2.

For that, he and the IPCC were awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.  It’s time to rename that prize.  This occurrence of it is nothing but a sales award.

P.S.  I have formally nominated Al Gore for the forthcoming Ig Nobel awards.  Two, in fact:

Nomination for the Ig Nobel Prize for History:

Citation – by using his presentation to show conclusively that there was no Middle-Age Warm Period, Al Gore has set the historic record straight again, exposing Chaucer and the Doomsday Book as frauds for incorrectly recording the presence of orange groves and black grape vineyards in England in the Middle Ages.

Nomination for the Ig Nobel Prize for Scientific Methodology:

Citation – By citing glacial records of rises in atmospheric CO2 that follow each rise in the temperature of the earth as proof that CO2 concentrations caused the rises, Al Gore redefines causality and demonstrates that our intuitive sense that causes precede their effects is fundamentally wrong.

For his chicken-licken successes, Al Gore may well become the first man in history to be awarded both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel award for the same piece of work.

Tree Rings as Temperature Proxies

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Posted by JJ on December 22, 2009 – 10:40 pm
Filed under Endangered Environmentalism, Global Warming
Tagged as , , , , , , , ,

The IPCC uses proxy temperature calculations based on studies of tree rings, to provide a long-term record of global temperature changes.  And the resulting graph showed global temperatures declining since 1998.   This was the subject of the now-infamous email about “Hiding the decline” in the proxy picture of temperature global temperature changes.   They substituted selected thermometer-measured temperatures for the proxy-calculated ones from 1980 onward.   After the emails from the East Anglia University’s Climate research Unit were leaked by the hackers, their justification was that the proxy data are invalid after 1980, because of a localised drought that caused a lessening of tree growth, resulting in an artificial decline in the temperature estimates.  And of course, the substituted temperature data showed the temperatures continuing to rise.  What would Penn & Teller make of that explanation?

There’s a big, big problem with it.  Tree growth rates are influenced by temperature, availability of water and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, among other things.  If comparisons of tree-ring proxy-calculated temperatures and measured temperatures show the former to be unreliable since 1980, does that not throw all tree-ring proxy-calculated temperatures into doubt?  Including the ones that “prove” conclusively that there was no middle-ages warm period?  How do we know how many localised droughts have occurred in the past, let alone when they occurred?  There are historical records of a sharp decline on temperature in medieval times in Europe.  There is also anthropological evidence of a marked shift in the majority of the New Zealand Maori population from the fertile South Island to the North Island, closer to the tropics, at the same time as the recorded drop in temperature in Europe.  Given that the Maori at the time wore grass skirts and did not have shoes or tailored clothing like shirts, jackets and trousers, such a move could well be explained by a drop in temperature.  Is it not possible that tree-ring proxies are inherently unreliable as a temperature record?  A record that the IPCC and all of the noisy chicken-lickens want us to believe shows conclusively that we are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise?

Bloody hell!  We all know, without needing to reference proxy records, that temperatures rose in the twentieth century, that ice-caps declined and glaciers retreated during that time.  That’s bleeding obvious!  It has happened many times before – there have been many warm periods in the history of the earth, always followed by cool periods.  We have not found any evidence that the rise in the twentieth century was caused by man, or by CO2 or methane from our livestock.  There is also no evidence that this is a disaster and that we are headed for a runaway greenhouse effect of Venusian proportions.  At various times in the glacial records, we have found evidence of much higher temperatures than we have today,  and much higher levels of CO2 than at present.  Has anybody actually noticed that the earlier occurrences did not cause runaway greenhouse effects?  Nope- what they did was fuel the carbon cycle until the next downward temperature trend.  (Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect because its solar proximity and period of rotation make it impossible for it to support a carbon cycle.  Click here for more information about Venus.)

Interestingly, glacial records show that the rises in CO2 have always followed global temperature rises, not preceded them.  They certainly do not support the hypothesis that rising CO2 levels cause temperature rise.  But they sure could support the opposite!