dark age

One small suppression of free speech in Australia, one giant leap towards the coming dark age.

Gillard's tame ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) is threatening businesses with million dollar fines if they have pre-carbon tax sales, or blame price increases on the carbon tax.

A few things: First, to non-Australians, the ACCC used to be a service to the country, but I have seen nothing useful done by them since their former chairman Professor Allan Fels retired. Time and again they seem to be refusing to act for the consumer and making lame excuses for not doing so. They aren't anybody's servant, just another tame bureaucracy doing the biddings of their political masters.

Next, this might seem petty. It is far from petty. When this story was reported on Wattsupwiththat.com, a commenter got the entire thing backwards:

The Chairman was quite clear about the organisations’s position in his presentation, which is no different than it has been in the past about any other misleading advertising ... “Business costs increase all the time, and businesses are free to set their own prices. However, if a business chooses to raise their prices they should not misrepresent this as a result of the carbon price when it is not the case.”

Baloney. The cause of a price increase is not a misrepresentation of the same kind as pretending prices have gone down when they went up, for example (which has been happening in Australia with the ACCC as usual doing nothing). And everyone, yes everyone, should have special leeway in commenting on government policy simply because governments are so much more powerful than individuals, or even businesses. If you can't risk being wrong when talking about a government, then you can't risk saying anything. As the writer of the story, Willis Eschenbach, explained to the above commenter:

Anyone who is still in doubt that the era of freedom and tolerance is rapidly drawing to a close, please note this week's shocking news. From Menzies House, we hear of this behaviour completely unbecoming a government of any free people:

Four thousand, five hundred Australians have just been censored by the Gillard-Brown regime.

I thought I had seen everything. I thought after all the attacks on freedom of speech I have written to you about before, that nothing could surprise me.

I was wrong.

In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression and abuse of democracy, 4,500 Aussies - all opposed to this unnecessary and destructive tax on carbon dioxide - have just been told that they don't count. That their opinions don't matter. That their thoughts are not allowed to be heard.

The background: As you will remember, last month, the Joint Select Committee on Australia's Clean Energy Future Legislation asked for submissions about the carbon dioxide tax legislation. They specifically stated that they "encourage submissions to its inquiry from a wide range of individuals and organisations". There were no terms of reference.

Although they only gave us one week, four thousand five hundred of us took the time to write to the committee. Four thousand five hundred Australians took the time to read the over 1000 page legislation. Four thousand five hundred Australians wrote in depth submissions detailing the flaws in this proposed legislation.

Yesterday we discovered that their work will be suppressed. Will be silenced. Will be censored and stripped from the record without a trace.

The New York Times published a 'map' of 'organised climate change denial', which is supposed to be 'winning' because of the deep pockets and superior organisation of the hidden movers and shakers in the fossil fuel industry. As I showed before, the Australian fossil fuel industry alone is funding the climate alarmists to the tune of a billion dollars. I would be very much surprised if Andrew C. Revkin, author of the latest piece of work at NYT, can identify even a tenth of that much money spent worldwide on the skeptic side of the argument. In other words, pot - kettle - black.

But in the comments, this neat summary of the whole scare appeared:

The following message is from Viscount Monckton about the evil doings at the pretend 'climate' conference at Cancun. Every person on Earth who values his or her freedom, safety, and economic well-being needs to take this message firmly on board.

I have previously written about a new dark age that might soon engulf us. Germans in the early 1930s wrote terrible predictions about the future if Hitler came to power, and they were roundly and soundly ridiculed by the 'smart thinkers' in Germany at the time - many of whom lived (or didn't live!) to regret their carelessness in ignoring the warnings. Such an evil time is upon us now. Here is Christopher Monckton's opinion, from WUWT:

The abdication of the West

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Cancun, Mexico, Dec 9th, 2010

I usually add some gentle humor to these reports. Not today. Read this and weep. Notwithstanding the carefully-orchestrated propaganda to the effect that nothing much will be decided at the UN climate conference here in Cancun, the decisions to be made here this week signal nothing less than the abdication of the West. The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself. No one in the mainstream media will tell you this, not so much because they do not see as because they do not bl**dy care.

Postgraduate Diploma in Energy and Environment (Global Warming & Climate Science)

Contribute Towards the Demise of Learning and Scholarship

Reading my favourite websites today, I stumbled upon an ad. for this educational experience at Murdoch University:

What's wrong with this picture?