Turkey's Islamic Bus Rolls On. EU applauds Islamist Victory.

Turkey's Islamist party the AKP, that declares democracy is the bus to Islam ( You use democracy to install an Islamic tyranny ) narrowly avoided loosing its wheels yesterday when six out of eleven judges on Turkey's constitutional court voted for it and its leaders to be banned. Seven votes were needed. All the court could do was cut some funding for the party and warn it to show more respect for Turkey's secular traditions. No doubt a lot of pressure was applied to the judges to leave the AKP to go its merry way not least by the simpering cloud cuckooland Eurocrats who cant wait for an Islamist Turkey to be the most populous member of the EU.

Having arrested a number of its prominent opponents last week,  accusing them of belonging to the Ergenekon secularist grouping supposedly plotting to overthrow their government, the AKP can now quietly get on with removing the rest of the secularists from the armed forces, the bureaucracy and judiciary. What does it mean? Well, the AKP can then proceed to "reform" Kemal Ataturk's obstructively secular constitution. Also, the AKP model, already taken up by Morocco's Islamists, will spread to all those Muslim countries that are not  yet Total Islamic Nutter States.  Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt etc. In the short term for Turkey what it means is that if being a woman there was never great its going to get a lot worse double fast.

Bravo Moreno-Ocampo.

Well Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC's prosecutor, has done it. He has presented his court with the evidence of El Bashir's genocidal activities and is now waiting for the three presiding judges to agree to issue an arrest warrant. They will be under a lot of pressure from the usual villains not to do so. Lets hope they don't cave in. Luis and us will have to wait a few months for their decision. Meanwhile, well done Ocampo.

China and the Sudan, and Zimbabwe and Tibet.

Right now China is hysterically trying to organise a UN obstruction of the richly deserved crimes against humanity indictment that the International Criminal Court will hopefully slap on the leaders of the Khartoum regime. China has two good reasons for trying to save El "Smiling Boy" Bashir and his cronies from the ICC. It has invested in Khartoum's petrol field development and it is of course an old hand at genocide. Clearing the Sudanese petrol fields of non-Muslims and Black Muslims in favour of Arab Muslims is the perfect project for Khartoum's blood thirsty, money grabbing, racist bigots ( Yes, all of that) and not something the Chinese loose a wink of sleep over. In any case can't have your mates done up for genocide. A bit to close to home for comfort as it were.
Snuffing Tibet, saving Mugabe Inc. and now this. All very predictable and rather depressing.

Global Cooling.

Here is an interesting report that suggests that sun spot activity is a much greater global temperature controller than our fossil fuel burning. Low sun spot activity, what we have been having of late, means cool planet earth.

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here. The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (below), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data. The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program. Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column. The views and comments are those of the author only.

We might need to burn more fossil fuels to try and avert a new mini ice age. Now there's a thought.

The Inspiration of the Iranian Ayatollahs.

Let's not forget who's memory the ruling Iranian clerics most venerate. Khomeni's of course. Here is what he had to say about sex with " youngish" females.

"A man can marry a girl younger than nine years of age, even if the girl is still a baby being breastfed. A man, however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual acts such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not comitted a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged. If the girl, however, is permanently damaged, the man must provide for her all her life. But this girl will not count as one of the man's four permanent wives. He also is not permitted to marry the girl's sister."

What a guy!

Church of England and Women. Congratulations!

Although I am an atheist, I am proud of a lot of my Christian inheritance and in particular the Protestant side of it. My Dutch mother was brought up a Lutheran and my French father a Roman Catholic. Puritans notwithstanding, the West would not have embraced the Enlightenment and the Emancipation of Women as much as it did without Protestantism. Again, I have  a weak spot for the more liberal Protestant flowerings  like the Methodists, the Quakers and yes the Church of England. A few days ago, the C of E voted for an uncompromising bill that will allow women to be ordained as bishops. Well done. I can almost, but not quite, forgive Rowan his unrelenting appeasement of Islam.

Let those in the C of E who can't bear the idea of women's equality crawl off to the darkness of Catholicism.
     
        

Lord Phillips, Sharia and Donut Worshipping Courts.

On the face of it, there's no reason why there should not be Sharia courts in Britain. I've changed my mind. As is the case already for the existing British Jewish and Christian courts and for that matter the Supreme Court of Donut-Worshippers, the rulings of Sharia courts would not be enforceable. If a Muslim man were to tell his wife three times " I divorce you " she might well be out on her arse on the pavement minus her kids under Sharia Law but the Muslim patriarch would not be able to call on the bobbies to put her there. If she objected that is. In theory she could go to the true courts of the land and get a humane divorce settlement where in all probability she would get guardianship of her children and it would be the male chauvinist pig who ends up bare arsed on the street. This is of course where the real problem lies. In most Muslim communities, unlike what goes on in say Jewish or Donut Worshipping ones, women are severely repressed and sometimes not even able to speak English. This means that they are unlikely to fight back against the injustices of Sharia.

What does one do ? I guess you have in fairness to let the Sharia courts be but mount massive educative programs to make it clear that their rulings have absolutely no binding value and will, if iniquitous, as understood by the true law of the land, or disputed be always overruled by the true law of the land.

Happy Birthday America!

Still, and lets hope hope for a long while yet, Democracy's Arsenal.