Death of John Talbot—Charles-Philippe Larivière, La bataille de Castillon, 1838, Galerie des batailles, Château de Versailles.

In Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans, when the enchantress Joan of Arc preaching her visions and prophesies, inspires the French Army to heroic efforts and panics the English into flight, the dying English commander Talbot complains:

TALBOT.

Folly, thou conquerest, and I must yield!
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain. Exalted reason,
Resplendent daughter of the head divine,
Wise foundress of the system of the world,
Guide of the stars, who art thou then if thou,
Bound to the tail of folly’s uncurbed steed,
Must, vainly shrieking with the drunken crowd,
Eyes open, plunge down headlong in the abyss.
Accursed, who striveth after noble ends,
And with deliberate wisdom forms his plans!
To the fool-king belongs the world.
————————————————————-

James Delingpole is feeling a lot like John Talbot these days, listening to the leaders of the world spouting nonsense about Climate Change.

As regular readers will know I’m in such a continual state of foaming fury about the idiocies of the world that I sometimes go over the top. “Truly, there aren’t enough bullets”, I’m wont to cry in exasperation. ...

[T]hat’s me, completely buggered then. Maybe, since words are my stock in trade I should end it all now.

Problem is, every time I look at the internet or read the newspapers or watch something on TV I’m yet again reminded by just how right I am to feel the way I do. Truly, there really aren’t enough bullets.

By way of further proof, I give you two speeches made by politicians this week: Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey’s speech to the Royal Society; President Obama’s State of the Union Address.

Both were on the subject I try to mention as little as possible on Bogpaper because I don’t want to sound like a one-trick pony. Suffice to say that in both cases, both men were talking unutterable bollocks on a subject on which I know quite a bit: certainly a hell of lot more than they do.

And it wasn’t just disputable bollocks. It was unquestionably, demonstrably wrong bollocks. Almost every statement each of these politicians made was a flat-out untruth. They made scientific claims which were not remotely backed up by hard evidence.

Now whether they were themselves deliberately lying or whether they were merely badly misinformed we shall never be able to prove. But it really doesn’t matter, the more important point is this: this week two politicians in positions of enormous power made keynote speeches which will have a major impact on people’s lives. What they said was wrong in almost every way: yet serious public policy is going to be based on it.

Stupidity doesn’t always win, of course. It just wins most of the time.

James Delingpole is not only sound on Anthropogenic Global Warming pseudo-scientific fraud, he is able to articulate the fundamental moral problem with drug prohibition quite succinctly.

VANCOUVER, Wash. (AP) — Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul decried the “war on drugs” Thursday night, telling supporters in Washington state that people should be able to make their own decisions on such matters.

Voters in Washington are likely to decide this year whether to legalize the recreational use of marijuana

“If we are allowed to deal with our eternity and all that we believe in spiritually, and if we’re allowed to read any book that we want under freedom of speech, why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?” Paul told more than 1,000 people at a rally in Vancouver, a suburb of Portland, Ore.

Yep. Go on… friends. Tell me: why not???

In a follow-up post, Peter Robinson quotes Milton Friedman in support of Delingpole.

British skeptic James Delingpole discusses why Warmism is so difficult to stop, despite the Climategate scandal.

7:46 video

The thing about both the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany was that the enemy was plain in view. We knew these guys were bad, they had black uniforms, they had swastikas, they had tanks – they were obviously the bad guys, they wanted to destroy us. What makes the modern environmental movement so dangerous is that it masks its intentions behind this cloak of cuddly, touchy feely, polar bear-hugging, Nobel Prize-winning righteousness. ...

What could be nicer than trying to save those cuddly little polar bears from melting due to our wanton greed and selfishness? It gels with a sense that I think grew in the affluent ‘90s, when people began asking themselves questions like, Shouldn’t there be limits to growth? You know, isn’t there more to life than consumption?

So, you have this alliance of ordinary people, of kids who’ve been brainwashed at school, of the big corporations which wanted to get in on the act by greenwashing their image, of powerful NGOs like Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund, of politicians wanting to be seen to take action in matters of public concerned. So what you have is this unstoppable bandwagon, all pushing this agenda based on the flimsiest of junk science.