ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,109
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- Eblana
I'm hoping to get charitable status for The First Church of Richard Dawkins The Conciliator.
tonyblair11 said:If this is the case then shouldn't all churches lose their charity status?
ramonmercado said:[i:1xer45kd]The Independent[/i] said:It said it had suggested that parts of the website should be "separated from the charity and hosted by an independent organisation" and the GWPF had submitted its proposals to do this.
Cambridge professor claims three climate scientists assassinated
A Cambridge professor has claimed three scientists investigating the melting of Arctic ice may have been assassinated.
Professor Peter Wadhams, based at Polar Ocean Physics Group at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Wilberforce Road, said the trio could have been murdered and hinted the oil industry or government forces might be implicated.
Au contraire! Questioning science is done both frequently and volubly by plenty of politicians - albeit probably fewer on our side of the pond than yours - whose children are not obviously under-fed. I leave the question as to sadness as an exercise for the reader.Do not question science! or you may lose your job and your kids will starve in squalor. What a sad thought control world we have entered.
Isn't that the apposite question! I'd be more inclined to pay some - any - attention if I thought a politician might have at least some grounding in the subject. Mind you, as someone cleverer than me said, Ben Carson is staking a pretty good claim to being the first person to have operated on someone else's brain without obviously having one of his own, so...How many of those politicians are meteorologists and climatologists?
Emissions impossible: Did spies sink key climate deal?
Matt McGrath, Environment correspondent
The revelations of the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, are an ongoing embarrassment for the US government.
From Angry Birds to the mobile phone of Angela Merkel to the banal conversations of millions of people, the scale of the National Secutiry Agency's spying activities knew few boundaries.
But can the world's inability to fix the problem of global warming also be laid at the spooks' door?
Wind your mind back to December 2009, when world leaders converged on Copenhagen to cook up a global climate deal that would solve the problem of rising temperatures.
But it appears the US already knew what everyone else was thinking.
According to documents released to a Danish newspaper by Snowden, the NSA was ready, willing and able to provide "unique, timely and valuable" insights into the negotiating positions of the countries that attended the blockbuster summit.
By monitoring "signals intelligence", the spies would keep US negotiators "as well informed as possible" about "sidebar discussions", informal huddles and corridor conversations during the two week conference.
In other words, the sneaky buggers (well, they do install bugs, don't they?) were giving the US a major advantage in the negotiations.
"It is interesting to have your fears confirmed," says Kit Vaughan from climate campaigners Care International.
He was among those who attended the meeting, known as Cop 15, in the Danish capital.
"All of us thought that this was happening. To know that it was happening is even more worrying."
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service were supposedly in charge of making sure there was no obvious eavesdropping going on.
Known by the acronym PET, many climate campaigners believe these great Danes were, in reality, the lap dogs of the Americans.
"Greenpeace carried out an action. Forty minutes later we were in the pub, celebrating with a few of them. A few minutes later, the police arrested the guys out of the pub," says Mr Vaughan.
"The only way to follow them was to follow the phones and the email traffic coming from that group. It was all monitored." :shock:
I put this claim to a Danish source who was closely connected to the negotiations.
"Copenhagen is pretty small: if you suddenly have 15 activists celebrating in a bar, it's not going to be a secret for a very long time," he said.
"You don't need electronic surveillance for this!" 8)
The Danes didn't lend a hand to the Americans in their secret squirrel activities, he says.
In fact, he says, the Danes were a bit naive in this regard.
"We got some Chinese viruses on our computers which we thought was rather odd, but we didn't do that much about it," says the source.
"We didn't use encrypted emails which we probably should have done, but that was five years ago and no one knew about the NSA."
Not only were the US at it, and it would appear the Chinese, but the non-governmental organisations weren't going to be left out in cold either, says Kit Vaughan.
"There are people in the NGO and civil society movement who are very closely aligned with parts of intelligence groups of other agencies. That's the business and the game of climate, there's too much at stake for them not to be."
One element that really soured the atmosphere in Copenhagen was the so-called Danish draft: not one of the excellent local beers, but the text of a deal, drawn up by the home government in an effort to move the talks forward.
Many campaigners believe the US got hold of the document via email intercepts. My Danish source denies this. He points to the fact that wire agencies had a copy of the text two weeks before the conference began.
"All the spying in the world wouldn't have secured an agreement in Copenhagen," he says.
"We all knew the Gordian knot was that China wouldn't accept an agreement that omitted the Kyoto Protocol and the US wouldn't accept one that included it."
"This was impossible to cut through and everyone knew this beforehand."
And so it was that "Hopenhagen" rapidly became "Brokenhagen".
But despite the spies and the failure of the meeting, there's a quantum of solace for those who believe that a global, legally binding treaty is the only way to tackle climate change.
A deal, of one type or another, at Paris in 2015 remains on track.
Somehow, some way, the "zombie talks process" staggers forward.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25981242
More on the NSA spying on Merkel.
Denmark's secret service helped the US spy on European politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel from 2012 to 2014, Danish media say.
The Defence Intelligence Service (FE) collaborated with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to gather information, according to Danish public service broadcaster DR. Intelligence was allegedly collected on other officials from Germany, France, Sweden and Norway.
Similar allegations emerged in 2013. Then, secrets leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden alleged tapping of the German chancellor's phone by the NSA. When those allegations were made, the White House gave no outright denial but said Mrs Merkel's phone was not being bugged at the time and would not be in future.
Germany is a close ally of the US. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and a spokesperson for Angela Merkel have said they were not aware of Danish involvement until the DR report, which was shared with other European media over the weekend.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57302806