There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

I had a laugh out loud moment this Sunday night, flipping channels and stopping on the FX network showing (yet again) of The Day After Tomorrow, an apocalyptic global warming movie filled with gratuitous scenes of our destruction.

I imagine the folks at FX programming probably would never have guessed that this weekend one of the chief global warming proponents and researchers would be forced to admit that he “lost” all of the data he used to produce the infamous “hockey stick” computer model predicting global temperature increases due to carbon output. This comes after the professor, Phil Jones, stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in the wake of scandal over e-mails showing that researchers were manipulating climate change data (i.e., Climategate).

Whoopsie! I lost my data. Of course, a more skeptical person might say Jones “destroyed the data.” And an even more cynical person might say the good professor “made up” or “fabricated” the data.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Gosh… one would think that all scientists and policy makers, skeptics or not, would want to ensure that the facts and data were sound. One would think, that is, if this were really about science. But it’s really about control and social engineering by taxing and regulating the one thing that ensures a healthy and productive society: energy consumption.

Nonetheless, Professor Jones’ admissions are just more bad press for the global warming folks. What’s a social engineer who sucks on the government grant money tit to do? How will the likes of Duke Energy ever make billions off carbon trading now? How will the Congress ever institute a fraudulent VAT tax if there is no warming?

In just the last few weeks we’ve had: Climategate e-mails followed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was forced to admit that it relied on faulty science in a claim that Indian glaciers would disappear by 2035, that it was wrong about 1998 being the warmest year on record (1934); that it accidentally confused feet and inches in a report regarding sea level rise in Fl0rida (18 inches not feet).

Fear not, though, warming freaks!

The Obama administration isn’t going to let something as simple as the truth or facts get in the way of regulating the number of farts you make and miles you drive — they’re promising that the EPA, a gang of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats, will by totalitarian fiat force we American consumers to, well, consume less.

Following the ClimateGate scandal the global warming scaremongers couldn’t get more unhinged, could they? Get a load of these recent articles putting the warmers in the spotlight. You can’t make this stuff up, except, well, they did make it up.

UK Times: The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

… In its [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.

However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.

The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

Oh, it gets better. Honest mistake, one may say. Well, turns out the UN knew of the source issues prior to publishing their report, but they published it anyway. Just how stupid do they thing people are?

UK Times: The chairman of the leading climate change watchdog was informed that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were false before the Copenhagen summit, The Times has learnt.

Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists.

The IPCC’s report underpinned the proposals at Copenhagen for drastic cuts in global emissions.

Mr. Pachauri was sent several e-mails questioning the data as early as November of last year, but disregarded the critics saying, “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.” Perhaps because he’s received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money..?

Among some other errors by the IPCC:

[WSJ] … that 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States (it was 1934); that sea levels could soon rise by up to 20 feet and put Florida underwater (an 18-inch rise by the year 2100 is the more authoritative estimate); that polar bears are critically endangered by global warming (most polar bear populations appear to be stable or increasing); that—well, we could go on without even mentioning the climategate emails. For the record, most Himalayan glaciers do seem to be retreating, and they have been “since the earliest recordings began around the middle of the nineteenth century,” according to a report from India’s ministry of environment and forests.

Finally, you’ll never believe who’s become a global warming jihadist! Literally!

CAIRO (AP) – Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has called for the world to boycott American goods and the U.S. dollar, blaming the United States and other industrialized countries for global warming, according to a new audiotape released Friday.

In the tape, broadcast in part on Al-Jazeera television, bin Laden warned of the dangers of climate change and says that the way to stop it is to bring “the wheels of the American economy” to a halt.

Right, because Indians and Chinese don’t use a lot of energy… well, nobody ever accused bin Laden of being rational. Apparently, he values the lives of polar bears more than people. After all, he has no problem blowing people out of the sky or collapsing buildings upon them. Sounds like your everyday Earth Liberation Front sociopath to me. Maybe extreme leftists have more in common with jihadists than we first thought.

What’s remarkable about this article is just how unapologetic and brazen the UN is about making claims — and thus promoting expensive, uneconomic policies — that aren’t remotely based on science. This is precisely the pattern that was fortified from the ClimateGate e-mails.

[Wall Street Journal] An influential United Nations panel is facing growing criticism about its practices after acknowledging doubts about a 2007 statement that Himalayan glaciers were retreating faster than those anywhere else and would entirely disappear by 2035, if not sooner.Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said Monday that the U.N. body was studying how the 2007 report “derived” the information about glacier retreat, according to a spokesman at the Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi, where Dr. Pachauri is the director. Dr. Pachauri said glaciers were melting, but the 2035 date was in question, the spokesman said.

It was unlikely that these revelations about the IPCC report would overturn the scientific consensus on glacial retreat, but they raised questions for the IPCC about how the data on Himalayan glaciers were collected and reviewed.

“There’s a failure to review this data adequately by qualified experts,” said J. Graham Cogley, professor of geography at Trent University in Ontario, who is one of the first people to track down some of the apparent errors.

The IPCC report stated that the total area of Himalayan glaciers would likely shrink from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035. The report cited a 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental advocacy group. That study cited a 1999 article in New Scientist magazine that quoted Indian glacier expert Syed Hasnain as saying Himalayan glaciers could disappear “within forty years.”

Dr. Hasnain presented a report on Himalayan glaciers in the summer of 1999, but it made no reference to 2035.

Earlier this month, Dr. Hasnain said in another New Scientist article that his previous assertions were based on “speculation,” rather than firm science.

Environmentalism is about cash. We’ll start with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ridiculous press conference earlier this month that must have left people wondering if the Governator was preparing for his next action movie role. Mimicking the global warming doomsayers via afantasy Armageddon scenario (read: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, etc.)  Schwarzenegger presented his constituents a map of the future in which many notable San Francisco landmarks — such as the airport — were under water.

“Within a century, Treasure Island, this place where we are right now, could be totally under water,” the governor said. “It is technology in the end that will save us.”

The Governator becomes a warming scaremonger.

Not coincidentally, Schwarzenegger has been praising President Obama’s carbon trading agenda (read: new taxes). The rationale is simple — California has a $21 billion state budget deficit, and understanding the Chicago politics style of the new administration the Republican Schwarzenegger knows he has to suck up to have any chance of overcoming his disastrous left-leaning economic strategy of the past 5 years.

Which brings us to the point: This isn’t about the environment, it’s about money, and big money at that. As many of the ClimateGate e-mails showed, proponents of global warming/climate change are using the environment as a front to tax and redistribute wealth.

The Global Warm-mongers aren’t even trying to keep it a secret anymore, their agenda is brazen.

In clear and open language, written right in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (i.e., the Copenhagen treaty) were these gems (compilation courtesy of Counting Cats in Zanzibar):

Annex 1, paragraph 33: “By 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least USD 67 billion] [in the range of USD 70-140 billion] per year.”

Annex 3, E, paragraph 17: “[[Developed [and developing] countries] [Developed and developing country Parties] [All Parties] [shall] [should]:] (a)  Compensate for damage to the LDCs’ economy and also compensate for lost opportunities, resources, lives, land and dignity, as many will become environmental refugees; (b)  Africa, in the context of environmental justice, should be equitably compensated for environmental, social and economic losses arising from the implementation of response measures.”

Annex 1, C, paragraph 41: “[Financial resources of the Convention Adaptation Fund"] [may] [shall] include: (a) [Assessed contributions [of at least 0.7% of the annual GDP of developed country parties]“

Compensation for “dignity”? Could this be any less about environment and conservation and any more about collectivist, statist, socialist wealth redistribution and societal re-engineering? This isn’t planting trees and being a good steward, it’s extortion.

Worse, the Copenhagen treaty would have American taxpayers ships billions of dollars annually to an unelected board of climate change bureaucrats, who would then redistribute funds to unelected and undemocratic regimes in South America, Africa and Asia. Think a dictator in Africa might use those funds for something other than improving the environment?

People aren’t exaggerating when they say this is an attempt to sow the seeds of world government — just wrap any issue up in the cloth of “global crisis” or other such nonsense and an unelected board of bureaucrats get to decide where you should live, what kind of car you should drive, or how many miles you can drive it. Or what kind of toilet paper you should use (no joke, folks).

Tom Friedman’s most recent column (Going Cheney on Climate) seeks to champion action on (alleged) global warming on the basis of the “precautionary principle.” The idea behind precautionary principle is basically insurance — you make the investment not on the certainty of something adverse occurring, at least not right away, but on the likelihood that it may occur, particularly as time passes.

Put aside for a moment that Friedman breathlessly mimics the same fascist, strong-arm, brown-shirt tactics of the “consensus” scientists who promise “catastrophic” consequences for global warming, such as those consequences usually reserved for really, really poorly acted but special effects jaw-dropping movies like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, or Independence Day. Friedman has apparently learned nothing from ClimateGate except to double down.

Rather, consider that the precautionary principle’s most important aspect is economics.

That is, offer a population a life insurance policy for a few dollars a day and many or most will likely pay the cost. But offer them a policy like the TRILLION-DOLLAR price tags that such carbon-based treaties have had over the past decade and those same persons will wisely take their chances and use those funds for more pressing needs.

Friedman whiffs on that notion altogether. But it’s one that many smart people have attempted (while being vilified by the climate change scaremongers) to promote for many years.

Marlo Lewis wrote his great essay “Precautionary Foolishness” almost a decade ago.

Lewis actually uses the Precautionary principle against it’s proponents:

No one has demonstrated that the Kyoto Protocol [and other cap and trade schemes] won’t have harmful consequences. Therefore, we should oppose it.

Similarly, former Greenpeace activist Bjorn Lomborg frequently expresses his frustration that the cost of combating theoretical climate change is more deadly than the actual warming. Years ago he noted that for the price of the Kyoto treaty we could give every man, woman and child on the planet clean drinking water and proper sewage facilities.

But so long as we have Friedmans, Sontags, and other such well-intended liberal nincompoops with us, millions will continue to die for fear of what might be (cancer from DDT, climate change, FDA drug over-regulation) rather than what is (malaria, lack of energy, lack of drugs).

******************

P.S. — Another flaw with Friedman’s precautionary principle concept is that generally we adult consumers get to choose whether or not to buy insurance. In the case of climate change, however, our Nanny-state authoritarians on Capital Hill, or worse, unelected bureaucrats in the EPA force feed us insurance as though we were children. No thank you, Tom.

Courtesy of Prodicus:

The debate is over!

Having read many of the e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia writer James Delingpole summarizes six major categories, including: (1) Manipulation of evidence in favor of global warming, (2) Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, (3) Suppression of evidence contrary to their views, (4) Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Skeptic scientists, (5) Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and, (6) “how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.” [Although I think that latter one could be categorized into #3].

Indeed, it is the concerted effort to politicize and demonize any scientist with a contrary view that does the most damage to scientists — that’s right, if ideologically driven scientists can manipulate not just climate change data, but also the review of that data and even the debate itself — “The debate is over!” and other such circular reasoning — then we can suspect other scientists will attempt the same on, say, health care data [but more to that in a moment]. One would think scientists everywhere would be condemning the CRU, rather than becoming apologists and excuse-makers for them.

As National Review’s Iain Murray points out, not only was there a brazen conspiracy to remove contrarians from the peer-review process, but, “There was an organized attempt to circumvent or obstruct the legal requirements of the UK’s Freedom of Information Act 2000, which appears on its face to rise to the level of criminality.” These CRU “scientists” wrote of rather destroying the data before they allowed it to be available via information act lawsuits. (Speaking of, Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute is suing NASA to release its raw climate change data, on the basis that NASA has previously [in 2007] extrapolated inaccurate results which Washington bureaucrats and politicians would use to effect via regulation and taxation the lives of everyday Americans).

Ironically, I’m listening to National Public Radio on my radio in the background right now talk about the latest news from the Copenhagen climate talks, and, gosh, wouldn’t ya know it, they don’t mention a word about the CRU debacle! Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.

Which leads us to how the mainstream media has become a willing abettor to this climate scandal. Here’s Jonah Goldberg:

First, the climate-change industry is shot through with groupthink (or what climate scientist Judith Curry calls “climate tribalism”). Activists would have us believe that the overwhelming majority of “real” scientists agree with them while the few dissenters are all either crazed or greedy “deniers” akin to flat-earthers and creationists. These e-mails show that what’s really at work is a very large clique of scientists attempting to excommunicate perceived heretics for reasons that have more to do with psychology and sociology than physics or climatology.

Second, the climate industry really is an industry. Climate scientists make their money and careers from government, academia, the United Nations, and foundations. The grantors want the grantees to confirm the global-warming “consensus.” The tenure and peer-review processes likewise hinge on conformity. That doesn’t necessarily mean climate change isn’t happening, but it does mean sloppiness and bias are unavoidable.

How big a scandal this is for the scientific community is being hotly debated on the Internet. But in big newspapers and TV news, the story has gotten less attention. And that’s a scandal, too. The New York Times’s leading climate reporter, Andrew Revkin (whose name appears in some of the e-mails), won’t publish the contents of the e-mail on the grounds it would violate the scientists’ privacy. Can anyone imagine the Times being so prissy if such damning e-mails were from ExxonMobil, never mind Dick Cheney?

Exactly.

Today, the UK “Climate Change Secretary,” which is about as typical but useless as any government post could get, announced breathlessly that, “We have to beware of the climate saboteurs, the people who want to say this is somehow in doubt, and want to cast aspersions on the whole process.” By “process,” one supposes he means that very process that CRU personnel used, including lying, manipulation and obfuscation. You can’t make this stuff up! The academic elitists are shouting, “never mind that the data is fudged, just have faith we know what’s best for you.” Social engineering at its precipice.

Similarly, California Democrat Sen. Barbara Boxer was outraged — yes outraged! — over the CRU e-mails: not their content, mind you, but that they were allegedly hacked. “You call it ‘Climategate’; I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate,” said the senator.

Suddenly the liberals have discovered that leaks of private or classified information is bad? Like Goldberg above said, had the e-mails been from a Merck server and revealed that the pharma giant was hiding something about Vioxx, do you think Sen. Boxer would be so outraged?(Meanwhile, there’s equal reason to believe that the e-mails weren’t hacked but leaked by a whistle blower — something liberals used to be in favor of, but only when pertaining to the CIA or Abu Ghraib apparently).

Same old, same old selective outrage from hypocrites on the left.

Here’s what Phil Jones of the CRU [Climate Research Unit] and his colleague Michael Mann of Penn State mean by “peer review.” When Climate Research published a paper dissenting from the Jones-Mann “consensus,” Jones demanded that the journal “rid itself of this troublesome editor,” and Mann advised that “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.”

So much for Climate Research. When Geophysical Research Letters also showed signs of wandering off the “consensus” reservation, Dr. Tom Wigley (“one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change”) suggested they get the goods on its editor, Jim Saiers, and go to his bosses at the American Geophysical Union to “get him ousted.” When another pair of troublesome dissenters emerge, Dr. Jones assured Dr. Mann, “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

Which in essence is what they did. The more frantically they talked up “peer review” as the only legitimate basis for criticism, the more assiduously they turned the process into what James Lewis calls the Chicago machine politics of international science. The headline in the Wall Street Journal Europe is unimproveable: “How To Forge A Consensus.” Pressuring publishers, firing editors, blacklisting scientists: That’s “peer review,” climate-style.

– Mark Steyn.

For the first time, Anthropogenic Global Warming cranks are on the defensive, losing their cool and uttering desperate mantras such as “You can be sceptical, not denial.” Gee, thanks, guys. In fact we shall be whatever we want to be, without asking your permission.

– Gerald Warner, UK Telegraph.