In light of these recent ugly FOI revelations uncovered by the Associated Press, it makes the recent FOIA issues paper by our friend Dr. Jennifer Marohasy and the subsequent scathing Washington Times editorial about science and disclosure (see below the Continue reading line) even more relevant. Clearly governments and government sponsored institutions like CRU don’t give a care about complying with the FOIA laws. CRU skated on a statute of limitations technicality. This WUWT story from the British ICO:
…the ICO has been alerted by the complainant and by information already in the public domain via the media, to a potential offence under section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act. The prima facie evidence from the published emails indicate an attempt to defeat disclosure by deleting information. It is hard to imagine more cogent prima facie evidence…In the event, the matter cannot be taken forward because of the statutory time limit.
And now we find not only did Homeland Security stonewall FOIA requests, they actively investigated the people making them:
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Playing politics with public records requests
For at least a year, the Homeland Security Department detoured requests for federal records to senior political advisers for highly unusual scrutiny, probing for information about the requesters and delaying disclosures deemed too politically sensitive, according to nearly 1,000 pages of internal e-mails obtained by The Associated Press.
The department abandoned the practice after AP investigated. Inspectors from the department’s Office of Inspector General quietly conducted interviews last week to determine whether political advisers acted improperly.
…
Career employees were ordered to provide Secretary Janet Napolitano’s political staff with information about the people who asked for records — such as where they lived, whether they were private citizens or reporters — and about the organizations where they worked.
Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38350993/ns/politics-more_politics/
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Excerpts from
EDITORIAL: Global warming’s unscientific attitude
By THE WASHINGTON TIMES
7:17 p.m., Wednesday, July 21, 2010
What separates a scientific claim from mere opinion is its ability to be tested by experiment. No true scientist objects to having his theories verified; the charlatan is the one with something to hide. Not surprisingly, purveyors of global warming have proved anything but open.
In the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Law and Management, Australian researchers evaluated the community of so-called climate scientists and found them to be “antagonistic toward the disclosure of information.”
Professor John Abbot of Central Queensland University, a chemist and lawyer, and biologist Jennifer Marohasy studied the response of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU) and the Met Office – Britain’s national weather service – to various information requests. The most noteworthy of these was United Kingdom resident David Holland’s demand for the raw data underlying the infamous “hockey stick” graph that was published in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. This chart was the centerpiece of the claim that the 20th century was the hottest in a thousand years. The stir that Mr. Holland’s request triggered among the scientists who worked on the report was captured in the Climategate e-mails
…
Mr. Abbot and Ms. Marohasy wrote:
“Of concern is evidence of a predisposition towards uncooperativeness on the part of the Met Office, which also used spurious claims of deleted correspondence and personal information in attempts to block the release of information,”
…
None of these simple requests should have been denied or delayed. Many of those involved in purported climate science seem more preoccupied with advancing a leftist, anti-business legislative agenda than respecting the integrity of the scientific method. It’s obvious why. Their cataclysmic scare stories are unable to withstand scrutiny. By deleting e-mails and using tricks to hide the inconvenient decline in global temperatures, the climate alarmists prove to be not men of science, but ordinary frauds.
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Here is the full paper,
(Environmental Law and Management, Volume 22, Issue 1, pp. 3-12, 2010)
– John Abbot, Jennifer Marohasy
h/t to poptech
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My two cents? Exercise your freedom of vote: Throw the bums out in November.
Things got away from us when we stopped hanging horse thieves. The Congress is the biggest bunch of horse thieves this nation has ever seen. They have plenty of help from the UNIONIZED bureaucracy/”Civil Service”, but starting from the top and working down (like skinning a catfish) is definitely the way to go. There has to be suitable punishment for generational theft and wealth destruction as practiced by both political parties. Swinging from a half-inch hemp rope is suitable, in my opinion. There is no recidivism following a necktie party. We have a person sitting in Congress today that was impeached as a judge for bribery. Unbelievable!
The same goes for politicized science: if someone like Mann, Briffa, Schmidt or Hansen were fired and NEVER AGAIN ALLOWED TO WORK IN ANY POSITION OF RESPONSIBILITY, in any field, for the rest of their lives would probably be enough to keep others from straying.
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 22, 2010 at 4:21 pm
My two cents? Exercise your freedom of vote: Throw the bums out in November.
They will just be replaced by other bums,
______________________________________________________________
That is true Leif, but they will be piglets instead of full grown hogs and will take a bit of time to find the public tit. The best thing we can do is keep voting who ever is in office out unless there is a very very good reason not to.
Did you realize we have Congress Critters who have been in office for as long as almost 57 years!!! That is obscene
What’s the opposite of “progress”?
Getting rid of the so-called ‘federal reserve’ –which is neither, blessing the debt, and arresting the entire cadre of bankers, corporatists, and their fellow travelers for the treasonous acts to which they have been a party, will be a firm move in the right direction.
And as Pamela Gray has said: Getting rid of every department and agency NOT SPECIFICALLY authorized by the federal Constitution would solve most of our problems.
The rest follows.
@ur momisugly Leif
Throwing them out works, as long as we remember the second part of that injunction: Repeat as needed.
An excellent article about America’s ruling class got linked on Jeff Id’s blog last night:
http://www.filejumbo.com/Download/AA67EE319238FE34
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/07/20/
Leif, when you lose a friend, others rally round. Take it easy.
bubbagyro says: July 22, 2010 at 9:09 pm
“A 3rd party is a disaster, leading to the statists continuing in power. A 3-party system? You mean like Britain or France? God forbid.”
Neither France nor Britain has Three-Party System, their both Multi-Party;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_France
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_the_United_Kingdom
and if you’d like to argue strawmen, perhaps you’d care to share your thoughts on how well served Honduras, Nicaragua, Jamaica and Malta have been with their Two-Party Systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-party_system
For those of you with open minds, here is some good information on America’s historical use of a Three-Party System:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Party_System
I think this quote within is interesting:
“Throughout the nineteenth century, third parties such as the Prohibition Party, Greenback Party and the Populist Party evolved from widespread antiparty sentiment and a belief that governance should attend to the public good rather than partisan agendas.”
At present the Republican and Democratic parties appear to be too corrupt, too beholden to the people who have funded them and too satisfied with the status quo, to make any significant changes to our broken political system. We might need to establish a third party in order to remove the current political sclerosis.
Just The Facts says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:14 pm (Edit)
We might need to establish a third party in order to remove the current political sclerosis.
Be careful what you wish for. We now have a hung parliament in th UK with no overall majority for one party. This leads to paralysis too.
The only “democratic” answer is to vote them out in November by voting 3rd party/independent.
Democrats and Republicans are both owned and controlled by the same corporatist interests and both parties represent those interests instead of the people who elect them.
There are decent men and women of integrity and honour who stand in almost every election. Men and women who are NOT owned and controlled by the corporatocracy and who genuinely want to serve their constituents. They never seem to get elected because they do not have a democrat or republican badge on.
If only the massed population could wake up to that and everyone boycott the democrats AND the republicans.
[sarc] But, all the inquiries found everyone acted properly and were paragons of honour, honesty and integrity. There cannot possibly be any prima facie evidence of unlawfully trying to evade a FOIA request….
Surely they looked into this in the recent open, honest, public investigations…. didn’t they??? [/sarc]
Even a whitewash looks honest compared to these investigations.
Pamela Gray’s note above (July 22, 2010 at 7:54 pm) reminded me of an old black and white cartoon of ten men in hospital beds. Nine of them were dedicated to weaving baskets; the tenth was as equally dedicated to pulling them to pieces.
One of the two nurses in the ward sighed,
“Thank God for Mr Jones.”
The view from this side of the river is that Obama was ‘lent’ huge sums of money and McCain wasn’t. However, neither candidate looked like they were going to be much use either. So, what do you do? Two idiot candidates, one with lots of rich backers and the other so stupid that no-one wanted to back him.
Sadly, those who commit white collar crime rarely get prosecuted.
Official whitewashes, bureaucratic fudges, “inconclusive evidence”, expired deadlines, political machinations, mislaid or destroyed evidence, the list goes on and on – there always seems to be something that gets in the way of justice.
Climate ‘scientists’ are unlikely to ever receive their just deserves for manipulating and distorting data in support of unsupported theories which somehow have morphed into facts and “the science is settled’.
First I want to thank Anthony Watts for WUWT! I became aware of it last fall, when I began to look more closely into matters “AGW”. WUWT has become one of my favourite sources of information. I have learned a lot here, from the articles and the comments.
From what I gather in the comments here, there are similar problems in the USA, GB, and certainly in Germany, where I live: Too much government, leaders and bureaucracy show a serious lack of responsibility and established a system which makes it easy for them to cover each other , and last not least a massive lack of influence for the ordinary people. I think it would be a good idea to notice the swiss experience. They do have a very powerful tool to influece their political elite and stop at least the worst blunders: Direct democracy, i.e. voting on issues. Imagine an US wide vote on the finacial rescue plan (or other relevant issue), or, in the german context, a vote on the EURO (before it was introduced) respectively on the EURO bail-out plan. Neither would have passed the peoples vote.
The way to improve our complex political systems is along the line of more direct influence/control (i.e. direct democracy), plus such things as ombudsmen, laws that re-establish responsibility, etc. The number of political parties is not important. Any political party (or other organisation) can and will eventually become corrupt. More parties/organisations only mean a greater variety of corruption. Look at all these NGOs, Panels, etc. …
I don´t believe in “benevolent dictators” either: We´ve had our share of them here in Germany, and even the meanest one – the crazy painter with his stupid beard – promised to be benevolent, to do only the very best for the country and the people. No, if it is hard to stop government that goes in the wrong direction under the conditions of the present democracy, what would the chances be under a dictatorship?
I think there is something to be learned from the swiss example. They seem to be doing quite well, so something might be in it.
The fact that after the vote new bums will replace the old one proves that climate change science is best left to scientists; the populace cannot understand it anyway.
My dad was born a couple of years before the end of the 19th century and having fought in two World Wars both as a boy and as a man he witnessed much that attests to the worst in Man’s nature, which made him a strong advocate of voting as a democratic obligation, but didn’t stop there; he insisted that every political system desperately needs the people who seek the truth and will consequently ask awkward questions of the politicians in public sight where there is no place to hide.
He would have loved the internet as the force for good that it has become as exemplified by WUWT and similar sites, and the swelling ranks of truth-seekers and sayers, of whom Dr Jennifer Marohasy and Dr John Abbot are the most recent to acheive very effective exposure by asking their ‘awkward questions’.
Vote, and vote passionately, whatever party you support, but don’t vote then leave the politicians to pull the levers of government – that’s our job; the politicians are mere servant, our placemen. Never let them forget that.
For anyone interested, here is one of the sessions at the ‘Convention on Modern Liberty’ from January last year:
http://www.modernliberty.net/programme/morning-sessions/3-business-gets-personal
The UK deputy Information Commissioner is there (far left) and gets quite a lot of flack from a few of us (myself included) for the ICO’s complete cluelessness when it comes to civil liberties and computing technology issues.
noaaprogrammer says:
July 22, 2010 at 10:14 pm
‘What’s the opposite of “progress”?’
Regress?
” RR Kampen says:
July 23, 2010 at 2:01 am
The fact that after the vote new bums will replace the old one proves that climate change science is best left to scientists; the populace cannot understand it anyway.”
It is just that the current group of scientists in power are bums, too. But you people in Holland are lucky: Your politicians are unable to form any governement at all.
Thomas says:
July 23, 2010 at 1:58 am
Too much such direct democracy, and what you’ll get are inconsistent decisions and politicians that have no freedom to their jobs properly.
I regard being a politician such a thankless task, that is to try to do common good and receive little but abuse in return, so I’m willing to accept that the ones I vote for will make some bad moves, and accept that mostly idiots will sign up for this thankless task. So I for one am thankful that there are people doing this so the rest of us don’t have to, and for that I’ll grant them some freedom.
Jennifer Marohasy: July 22, 2010 at 6:02 pm
They really have no pride!
They have plenty of that, ma’am.
It’s *integrity* they lack.
‘Leif Svalgaard says:
July 22, 2010 at 4:21 pm
They will just be replaced by other bums –
REPLY: Saying then “don’t bother to vote”? – Anthony
There are other reasons to throw them out. I’, afraid the new bums won’t be much better when it comes to open government…’
This website may be of interest to all.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/
The good news is that it’s a good editorial. The bad news is that it’s in the Washington Times, so a large number of people will dismiss it as the ravings of a bunch of extreme right-wing Moonie dingbats. Pity.
for Pamela Gray – Again I agree with you!
politicians all seem to take office with a list of things they want to get done. They think that is the only way they can ever be evaluated.
I want someone who is dedicated to doing nothing besides thwarting all the plans of those other guys who need to “get something done”! At the end of his term, I want him (or her) to be able to say “I made sure that this Congress DIDN’T DO SQUAT!!!!”
I’ve had enough of empowered know it alls trying to fix things for a lifetime, thank you very much. Just leave me and everyone else alone!!!
tallbloke says: July 23, 2010 at 12:08 am
“Be careful what you wish for. We now have a hung parliament in th UK with no overall majority for one party. This leads to paralysis too.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072204028.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
“In his passion for fiscal austerity, Cameron resembles the new breed of Republican governors for whom the art of governing begins with the discipline of accounting.”
“Cameron’s June 22 emergency budget proposed the deepest, most sustained reductions in British spending since World War II. Health programs and foreign assistance are fenced off from cuts. But other government departments will see an average of 25 percent reductions over the next five years.”
“Cameron’s austerity measures have succeeded (so far) in the context of a coalition government with Liberal Democrats — Britain’s centrist third party. This alliance of the middle has made Cameron’s government less dependent for support on the extremes of either party, resulting in a truce on divisive issues such as immigration and European integration.”
“A formal coalition government is not an option in America, which lacks a viable third party eager for power. ”
If that is what paralysis looks like, then we could use a big dose of it on our side of the pond…