Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas

To one and all, a very happy, peaceful and blessed Christmas. May God bless you and the New Year bring you health and prosperity.

Doggerel Party HQ is alive with children scattering torn paper to the winds and corgis wondering what's hit them, particularly our latest recruit Amie, a 12 week old fluffy Cardigan Welsh corgi.




Blogging will resume in due course.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Flying Cats: A Rumour and a Bad Precedent

Rumour is swirling around Doggerel Party HQ that a new genetically engineered super race of flying cats is shortly to take to the skies. Now, this may be only a rumour, but that hasn't stopped Director of Cat Sequestration, Sam the Cardigan corgi, from issuing his opinion.

"In my view, this would be a bad precedent," he said. "Flight should be the prerogative of birds, and even then, should only be used by those that are too small to eat. Cats who take to the skies would be evading responsibility for their felinity. Not to mention the even greater damage to the song bird population that would result."

Editorials, op-eds and letter writers across the country have backed Sam's campaign against flying cats. In particular, the Globe and Mail has mounted a vocal response. Globe staff did not respond to a TDPC request to be interviewed for this post.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

Canadian Shame in Copenhagen

As the Copenhagen talks reach their dramatic climax, there is much talk of Canadian embarrassment and shame. Here, then, is the corgis' handy cut-out-and-keep guide to spotting Canadian embarrassment in Copenhagen.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The Great Al Gore Poetry Contest

Cross posted at Kate's place, this is the Corgis' entry in the Great Al Gore Poetry Contest.

Here's a quick effort, bearing in mind, we are the Doggerel Party of Canada:

Now hear ye the great Al Goracle,
For now's a time that's quite historical.
For every man, woman and youth,
To heed an Inconvenient Truth.

We've been burning fossil fuels,
On which there are no free renewals.
We filled the air with CO2,
which you can't see, but still it's true.

Listen to your new world's master.
You're heading for climate disaster.
There will be famine, drought and flood,
Wind and rain and streams of blood.

The seas will rise o'er seaside piers,
And coastal towns will disappear.
And all the streets y'all once walked on,
Will be inhabited by plankton.

There will be hotter, hotter days,
This is what the fruit fly says.
There will be killer bee attacks,
Unless you pay your carbon tax

Now this we know and you'll see later,
It's written in Phil Jones's data.
He reads the tree rings Briffa sees,
And extrapolates his prophecies.

But hidden from your eyes and mine,
There's tricks afoot to hide decline.
And we find in shock and awe,
A plot to circumvent the law.

So wait! can it be really true?
The planets baking me and you?
Or is it just a cunning scheme,
To realize socialisms dream?

And so we found out just in time,
The climate warmists dreadful crime.
So please don't sign that Danish treaty
But turn the heat up, there's a sweety.

Monday, December 07, 2009

Oh My God, Albertans Can Legally Think For Themselves Again

I missed this on Saturday as I was minding 21 dogs at a friend's boarding kennel and was thus in paradise.

Nothing I could add to the coverage at Kathy Shaidle's and BCF.

But it is nice to see Dr. Lund suitable chastened, especially given that his own propensity to bigotry is just as large as those he professes to despise.

Saturday, December 05, 2009

Doggerel Party Exclusive: Commander In Chief's Orders to New Afghan Troops

You will bring about the destruction of the Taliban war machine, the elimination of the mullah's tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Afganistan, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944. I mean, 2009. Much has happened since the Al Quaeda triumphs of 2001. The United Nations has inflicted upon the Taliban great defeat in open battle man to man. (Open dialogue, person to person, surely? - Ed)

Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned. The free men of the world are marching together to victory. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory. Good luck, and let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

And we'll be leaving again in 2011, so if it doesn't work out, it's no big deal.

- General Barry D. Eisenbama

*

Climategate Made Simplest

Everybody lies.
- Greg House, MD.

Climategate Made Simple

An excellent summary of the Climategate scandal, suitable for those whose media diet consists of the CBC or other AGW cheerleaders. Found in the comments to this Daily Telegraph column by Christopher Booker, also worth a read.
I hope that the following makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand and how only 20 – 30 paleoclimatologists and super computer programming specialists can create the entire “consensus” that man is causing global warming.

ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.

ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.

ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.

ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.

ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:

Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.

1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved to make the hockey stick graph. Look closely at the plot here where the hockey stick is one of the plots:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/cern_cloud_experiment/

2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas sensitivity coefficients in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.

3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.

4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.

5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of secondary effects / catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)
This results in massive amounts of government funding for the study of secondary effects, employing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers worldwide, thus the consensus.

Thursday, December 03, 2009

CBC's The Current Whitewashes Climategate

If you thought Bob McDonald's fence painting was good, he's merely Tom Sawyer, sitting and watching, compared to The Current on CBC radio this morning. (The podcast will show up here this afternoon.)

Here's the feedback I was moved to send them... Not that it will do any good of course.

I just listened to your interview with the 'expert' climate change historian regarding the CRU leaked emails and data. It was such an inaccurate, one-sided bundle of lies and half-truths, I hardly know where to start.

Firstly, the 'smoking gun' of the Climategate leak isn't in the emails, entertaining as they are. It's in the data and the source code of the programs used to build the climate models. Those aren't subject to interpretation in terms of frustration, or politicization. The comments in that source code and the programs themselves clearly show data tampering and manipulation.

Secondly, what the emails do show is evidence of a conspiracy to circumvent Freedom of Information laws. The UK's Information Commissioner is investigating what could become a criminal situation.

So much for the integrity of the scientists involved. Already all the raw data of the global temperature record has been deleted, leaving the world unable to duplicate or verify the CRUs 'quality controlled' temperature record.

Thirdly, the canard that there are other independent models and other independent scientists showing the same thing as the CRU. Do some reasearch. See how small the group of scientists working the *underlying* data really is, and how cosy they are with one another. See how they conspired to keep peer review to 'friendlies' and to even try to remove journal editors who didn't share their view. The scientific process was severely compromised and the scandal will in due course spread beyond East Anglia. Already Penn State is investigating Michael Mann, another leading light of the AGW movement.

If you were really journalists, you'd know this and you'd ask your guest about it - it's all been on the web for the last 10 days, after all. But instead you chose to serve the CBC's own pro-AGW agenda and to hell with the facts.

You should read this: http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012796.html. Forget that it's a partisan conservative blog for just one second and think about what you're doing, as dino-media people. You're going to have to start being truthful soon, or your industry will die.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

John Donne Might Have Thought Differently

John Donne famously expressed the sentiment that "any man's death diminishes me," (and for the benefit of any left-leaning readers, let it be understood that in those dark days 'man' meant 'woman' as well.)

But he'd never read Heather Mallick. If he had, I suspect he might have felt differently.

An Apology

The corgis would like to apologize for the spontaneous and uncontrolled appearance of a weimareiner puppy in the Daily Puppy Widget on this blog's sidebar. But readers are also advised to be thankful it wasn't another bloody chihuahua.

If You Thought Chihuahua Complaints Were Silly

Check this out: Yukon's HRC is crazier than crazy.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Corgis In A Kangaroo Court, Part 3

Having had some time to think over the events of the day, I do feel that the service chihuahua complaint may well be destined for the wrong side of history. However, it's hard to paint this as a good outcome for the Roubles, for natural justice or for common sense. Here's why:

First off, as Ezra Levant, Mark Steyn and others have repeatedly pointed out, the process is the punishment. Particularly in Ontario under the new Code, where complaints go straight to the tribunal and there is no filter to weed out the obviously bogus, defendants find themselves forced into hours of preparation, endless form filling, legal expenses, state sanctioned harassment and tremendous personal stress. (In a Kafka-esque moment in the hearing it became clear that despite submitting all documents to the Tribunal prior to the hearing, any document to be relied on at the hearing has to be submitted in hard copy again at the hearing itself. Of course, neither party had been made aware of this prior to the hearing).

Secondly, in this particular case, the issue has come down to Mr. Allarie's violent and aggressive behaviour and has nothing to do with the dog. On the plus side, this should make the 'least worst' outcome of a finding in the Roubles' favour more likely. On the downside, though, it does nothing to clarify the mish-mash of municipal and provincial regulations concerning what is or isn't a service animal. Ferrets on Ottawa buses, and chihuahuas hovering over the buffet in Carleton Place restaurants will continue, until some mechanism to sort out the mess is found. I love my corgis, but I wouldn't want to eat food they'd walked on. I know where they've been.

Thirdly, whatever the outcome of this hearing, that very failure to rule on the issue of the dog leaves every other business vulnerable to Mr. Allarie's whim. He can repeat exactly the same process with any new target he chooses, because there has been and will be no finding with respect to the pesky D-O-Gee. Mr. Allarie walks away knowing that the process is the punishment, that it doesn't cost him a dime to file and pursue a complaint, and that there is no consequence to filing unfounded complaints.

The tyranny of the Canadian Human Rights system gives Mr. Allarie and others like him a weapon they can turn at will on the unsuspecting, the innocent, the hard-working backbone of this country. You're paying for this, it's being done in your name and it has to stop.

Fire. Them. All.

Corgis In A Kangaroo Court, Part 2

Allarie vs. Rouble / The Granary before the OHRT : The Hearing

Having written a lot, and read a lot more - and better - writing over the last few years about Canada's Human Rights Industry, today was my time to experience it first hand - as close as I ever hope to get to a Human Rights complaint. In this post I'll try to briefly cover the hearing itself, with a few observations thrown in for good measure.

The hearing was held at a Best Western hotel in suburban Ottawa. The Roubles, along with their witnesses had arrived first and were there when I arrived, being interviewed for CBC TV in Ottawa. Both CBC TV and radio reporters were there to cover the hearing - which is I think good news overall. Ottawa Citizen columnist Kelly Egan was there. A local newspaper reporter was also present, from the Carleton Place Canadian Gazette. About ten members of the public, myself included, were there to observe proceedings - clearly unexpected since there were no chairs provided and the hotel had to be called upon to bring them in.

Ontario Human Rights Tribunal vice chair Leslie Reaume was next to arrive. She's a not unattractive woman, and arrived smiling and oozing charm - certainly the Tyranny of Nice put a very nice tyrant in front of us today. Ms. Reaume's resume is a perfect Human Rights Industry 10 - she studied at the University of Western Ontario under feminist law professors, and for the six years prior to landing the Tribunal gig, she was counsel for the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Indeed, Ms. Reaume already has her place in legal history - she was the lawyer for the CHRC in their intervention in the Supreme Court hearing on same-sex marriage. She is also mentioned in passing in another landmark case, but this is a family blog and so if you want details on that one, you'll have to email me.

Mr. Allarie was last to arrive and made an impressive entrance, a large bag over his shoulder and D-O-Gee, the famous chihuahua, cuddled tightly to his chest. No doubt used to being the centre of attention, D-O-Gee took exception to the guide dog already present in the room and had a little snarl and snap. Although I don't speak chihuahua, I have replayed the recording I took on my iPhone, and the corgis tell me that the translation was something along the lines of 'I want some fucking recognition.'

Ms. Reaume also explained that the hearing should take place in a fairly informal and free fashion - it not being a courtroom. This was immediately belied, when Mr. Allarie asked that the Roubles' witnesses be excluded from the room until called on to testify. Ms. Reaume concurred and in a slightly heated exchange with the Roubles suddenly came over all judicial. "I make the rules," she admonished before banishing the witnesses to the hotel corridors.

Hostile witnesses safely out of the way, Mr. Allarie presented his case. He explained that he had explored the idea of a service dog over some months in discussion with his doctor and had purchased D-O-Gee on 27th July, 2005. He stated that he is fearful of larger dogs and hence needed a small dog. He also explained that when D-O-Gee is working, the dog has to be on his lap to give him a focal point. He produced his doctor's letter stating that he 'has' a service dog - and even pointed out, helpfully, that the letter does not say 'needs' or 'requires'. A series of other letters followed - permission to take the dog into the Perth Courthouse - we never got to find out why Mr. Allarie needed to be there of all places, and a letter from the OPP confirming local officers would be made aware of his 'having' a service dog.

Mr. Allarie also testified that in 2005, psychiatric service dogs were not recognized, and even today it is not possible to get a small dog trained as a service dog - the best he could do was basic obedience training. D-O-Gee helps provide routine for him and helps with his claustrophobia and agoraphobia. (Editor's note: Isn't someone who has claustrophobia and agoraphobia kind of screwed? Is that even possible?)

He then moved on to present his complaint. In 2006, he had been to the Granary with D-O-Gee and was asked by Keith Rouble to leave the dog outside next time he visited. Subsequently he had returned to the store while someone else was working and had been served. On yet another occasion he came back to the store while Keith was again working and was asked to leave the dog outside. This caused him to have a panic attack and he left. He then filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

In their response to this complaint, the Roubles agreed that if he would provide evidence of the dog being a service animal and agree to keep the dog in his arms, rather then letting it run around the store, they would allow him to shop. Mr. Allarie then withdrew the complaint. Mr. Allarie was vague about the dates of all of these events.

When it came to the events triggering this new complaint, Mr. Allarie's story was that he went to the store, opened the door, asked if could be served and was 'waved off'. He testified that Keith Rouble told him to leave. This apparently caused Mr. Allarie to want to call the police, whereupon Keith handed him the telephone - yes, handed him the store telephone - and Mr. Allarie called the OPP - but left the store before they arrived.

The Roubles' recollection was, not surprisingly, rather different. Mr. Rouble and his witness both testified that Mr. Allarie entered the store that day and shouted "I want some fucking service," before approaching Mrs. Rouble at the cash, taking the salt and pepper he wanted and throwing a bunch of coins in her face. Mrs. Rouble testified that she was terrified, traumatized and shaking. Mr. Rouble called the police in light of this violent and abusive behaviour, and indeed, it was Mr. Allarie's aggressive and abusive behaviour that was the reason for his being barred from the store. It actually has nothing to do with the dog - indeed Mr. Allarie had never been denied service at any time, not even on the day in question. Where Mr. Allarie had no recollection of dates, the Roubles' had dates and times. Their testimony was as detailed as his was vague.

Another witness, visually impaired herself, testified that she has always been warmly welcomed with her guide dog at the Granary and that the Roubles had always gone the extra mile to accomodate her.

Ms. Reaume gave no indication of which version of events she was inclined to believe. She did observe that the burden of proof in a HRT case lies with the complainant. The key issue of who called the police was the only area she really questioned - and interestingly both parties were able to produce police reports. I'm sure it's too cynical of me to believe that Mr. Allarie had the presence of mind to make a 'cover my ass' phone call to the OPP immediately after his alleged assault on Leslie Rouble. Or is it?

And so the question for Ms. Reaume really hinges on who she believes. The decision is reserved and we won't know the disposition of the complaint for some months. In a little gem while she was summing things up, she did say that she was 'essentially a judge.' Sure. If judges didn't have those inconvenient rules of evidence and all that stuff.

Carleton Place locals, of course, know a lot more about this man, this dog, and this situation than could be presented at the hearing. I believe you'll see media coverage that also tends to substantiate the Roubles' case. But in the capricious world of the Human Rights Tribunals, we can't count on truth, or even on common sense to drive the process to the right conclusion.

That's the hearing in a (very small) nutshell. I'll have some reflections on what it all means in the final part of this mini series.

Corgis In A Kangaroo Court, Part 1

Today I attended my first quasi-judicial hearing before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, in the case of the infamous service chihuahua.

It was an interesting and revealing experience and I have lots of notes, from which a full account of the hearing will follow later.

By way of background, however, here's a pictorial summary of the story so far - as seen from the corgis' point of view.

Disclaimer: This post is not intended to expose chihuahuas or those that, unaccountably, love them to ridicule or hatred. We save that for the cats of the world.