“Regulatory Czar wants to use copyright protection mechanisms to shut down rumors and conspiracy theories“ (2012-01-20). Anthony Watts loves to give a platform to libertarian crackpots. Wild incendiary ideas get promoted, people Anthony doesn’t like get slandered, but he can stand back with his hands clean.
Here we have Alex Rawls, a climate change denier who’s also obsessed with, for example, the Flight 93 memorial (it is, of course, a “terrorist memorial mosque”), how the Beijing Olympics Closing Ceremony depicted an orgasm, and of course “Republicanism’. He tells us that Obama wants to suppress rumors and conspiracy theories such as claims that global warming is a deliberate fraud or that Barack Obama “pals around with terrorists.”
Strangely, these are precisely the wild claims that Alex, a “simple public-spirited blogger”, likes to shout from the rooftop.
Sorry Anthony, who you pass the megaphone to says a lot about you.
Wott's Up With That? 
Bizarroo! I took a look at the blog postings on WUWT for this entry. One might hope that such a bizarre post would be too much for even the WUWT faithful. A few objected, but the major seem to be hard right wing conspiracy theorists who would make Rush Limbaugh look like a “left of center” moderate. Even more than in postings about climate, the posters on WUWT seem ready to believe just about any bad about Obama and Democrats, no matter how far fetched and unsupported the claim..
Guilt by association?
[It says something about the audience Anthony’s trying to appeal to, and about the judgement he exercises. – Ben]
Remember that Watts decides what’s posted on his blog. That’s not guilt by association, that is guilt, period.
Not really. It just shows that you judge people based on those factors. That’s all.
Anthony has a very wide audience, and with his hit rate does not need to try to appeal to anybody. His judgement is sound. What about the characters in the Climate gate emails? Were they exercising good judgement? By the way, did you read all of the Climate Gate II emails yet?
[I love how you tell a joke! – Ben]
Also gotta love how Chris tries to move the goalposts. “Oh, but they’re bad, too!”
Wow, WUWT seems to have gotten a lot crazier recently. Not only was the conspiracy-mongering in that thread pretty extreme, but then there’s the article “satirically” misunderstanding the term “alien” (haha it’s a polyseme geddit), the article all about a typo in a private email, and so forth.
Defending the deletion of data (as long as done in the service of denial) is just BAU, though.
Did this guy say anything about lizard people ruling the world, ala David Icke?
A Ron Paul follower I know was talking about climate change being something to do with contrails and HARP. Right. It couldn’t be those 30 Gigatons of CO2 we’re putting in the atmosphere every year, of course.
Those links!!!
Whatever he’s smoking, I want some.
Is this the very same mononeuron character who ranted much ado about absolutely nothing about the evil Europeans, in November 2011 on WUWT here :- http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/19/dehydration-story-wrong/
PS A list of very questionable fuzzy logic posts by Alec, at WUWT can be found here ;- http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/alecrawls/
It also appeared that he sued the State of California in 1987, as he didn’t meet the state’s legal minimum requirement to be an elected Sheriff.
I do believe, those who suffer from fixed delusions, to them, their perceptions and interpretations of events make perfect sense, and everyone else is crazy, irrational, ignorantly unconcerned or part of the conspiracy.
Oh well, the crazies are truly crawling out of the woodwork at Anthony’s place, that be for sure!
Epic Face Palm first class
I’m not sure how anyone can justify reverting to the sorts of filtering and censorship that has manifested in the worst situations for human dignity, freedom and right to self determination. This is prevalent in religious dogma and indoctrination but will organize itself around any self centered belief structure which wishes to abolish alternate thinking because it is a social taboo. To control information is to possess a mental prison which can be used against the general population in a one sided manner. In blocking the internet of specific kinds of information by Orwellian ‘truth police’ allowable under the thin veil of the fight against ‘conspiracy’ we realize that some people are not acceptable for others which is definitely a problem — but of what kind we find out by asking the individual. By fighting between false dichotomies, the aristocratic class is allowed to enforce, and condoned by the public to enforce direct policy interventions of whatever philosophy of anyone who controls politics. This in some cases I’m sure you believe to be justified. However, It won’t be long until you find you are the one labelled to possess a conspiracy-like idea, and the filtering will begin against you… and only when it is a threat to your own existence do you realize your liberty is threatened and that it is wrong to diminish the right to free exchange of ideas. It is up to the listener to adequately filter those ideas and for society to bring together their desires to frame those ideas into something that we all can at least talk about.
Briggs schools the “Bad Astronomer” on statistics WUWT,Feb1,2012
The Bad Astronomer…….Phil Plait, in his Jan 30th blogpost [“While temperatures rise, denialists reach lower”] challenged the Jan 27 WSJ op ed: “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”
He cites Skeptical Science’s Escalator graph blogpost to refute the “lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”
He includes the static part of the dynamic Escalator graph, apparently for another reason:
“In my post about the WSJ and [Daily Mail] I included a graph. It pretty clearly shows temperature rising from 1973 to the present. And this is where the fun begins” Phil Plait, Feb2nd
Bill Briggs……….is the originator of this WUWT embarrassment. He was unsuccessful (on a large scale) in criticizing an irrelevancy, the graph.
Greg Laden has the best overall coverage of this story.
Tamino provides reassurance for those of us who generally speed read statistical details. Yet balk when Briggs describes an average of temperature data as a ‘model’. And brings error bars into such a discussion.
Anyone who spends time on the WUWT watch will soon develop the ability, and confidence, to recognize when somethin is wrong. But we still want an expert’s confirmation when we wonder if something is really as looney as it seems.
Anthony Watts’…….contribution is to use this sad blogpost as his refutation of the 19+ challenges to the WSJ op ed.
Even though it’s readily obvious that Phil Plait’s text never refers to the graph.
Phil Plait deserves the last word (from Feb 2nd).
More evidence of Anthropogenic Global Warming:
Power cuts in Serbia as Europe’s deep freeze threatens national grid
Bet those Serbs are extremely worried about the prospect of a 1 degree C rise in the global temperature, perhaps, maybe, 50 years from now!
[Who’d a thunk that you, of all people, would be unable to extract your record needle brain from that deep and comfortable “cold weather, somewhere, means no global warming ever” groove. I’ll see your dunce cap insight and raise it: Walking in a warmest-winter wonderland. – Ben]
Well, it wasn’t me who published articles in the newspapers claiming that UK children might never see snow again. I just had to read them. I just had to listen to the public swallowing the line… whilst they shivered in some of the coldest winters. There are three lights. There are, shiver, shiver, three… lights.
Fact is that the alarmists have been saying that global warming catastrophe is just around the corner all through the 1990’s and the 2000’s. When we see record snow and cold, after having been told that we can expect mild winters and no snow due to AGW, we do have to wonder… when is it coming? Don’t you? Do you ever wonder whether you might be wrong? The alarmist predictions are being pushed further out, simulations to 2100 recently.
“Mild winters with no/very little snow in the UK” has been a part of the prediction that the alarmists have been making and talking about in the press for decades. Therefore, it is not strange for us to state that extremely cold winters with lots of snow goes against their hypothesis. It’s not as though this is an isolated cold winter either. If they did not want us to mention extreme winters with snow as a point against their hypothesis then perhaps they should not have published articles stating that such is in line with their hypothesis.
It is a fair point you make though, about my needle brain. It is comforted by out-of-sample empirical evidence which backs my view point. Guess I should stop looking at the empirical facts and focus on reconstructed temperatures from an arbitrary blend of ice-core, tree ring, thermometer and satellite data, all adjusted to suit my investments in Carbon Trading related enterprises?
[So you’re digging through random media articles for something to confirm your biases and choosing to treat actual scientific research as corrupt? Time to pat you on the head and send you back to the padded room. – Ben]
…dissuading teachers from teaching science… ($100K)
…undermine the United Nations IPCC reports …($388K)
…important to keep opposing voices out …. ($?)
One of these is the new ‘Hide the Decline’. But which one?
[Astounding. What hypocrisy, what deceit. I’ll post on this one. – Ben]