Harold Lewis, eminent American physicist, resigns from learned society which has helped stifle the scientific debate over global warming

The physicist Harold Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society over the learned group’s efforts to suppress scientific inquiry and debate into global warming and climate change. Prof. Lewis, who is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of California Santa Barbara, cited the leaked ‘ClimateGate’ e-mails as proof of scientific fraud. His resignation letter (reproduced below) speaks of ‘the money flood’ and alludes to President Eisenhower’s warning in his farewell address of 1961 to guard against ‘the unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, [of] the military-industrial complex’.

While he has refrained from coining the phrase, Prof. Lewis’s remarks suggests the massive amount of funding available for climate research has created a climate-industrial complex pressuring and perverting the scientific profession and leading it away from an environment of free inquiry.

“[T]he global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it,” Prof. Lewis wrote, “has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.” (more…)

A long-time reader suggests “If your readers could put any question to you, what do you think they would ask?” Well, I have no clue, but it seemed like an intriguing idea to find out. If you have a question — any question, on any subject from breakfast to boomerangs, so long as it’s decent — send along an email to the address given in the right-hand column, making sure to have ‘QUESTION FOR CUSACK’ in the subject line. The best, most interesting, illuminating, simplest, and strangest questions will be chosen and answered in due course.

In the mean time, this blog is going on a temporary hiatus (UPDATE: or rather, by the end of this week). I have made use of my gradually accumulated hoard of frequent-flyer miles and in just over a week I will be fleeing to Britain for a fortnight, hoping to advance somewhat on the job front, or at the very least lay the foundations for such an advance. I should return within the octave of Saint Valentine, and I hope the various blogs, sites, and journals in our sidebar will provide some stimulation and interest for you until that point.

The reader will be happy to note that he owes this blog absolutely nothing. We provide no services nor supply any goods. We merely, like the creatures of old, exist and (God willing) will continue to exist. Nonetheless, little corners of the web such as our own do require some small monetary resources to make up for the cost of maintenance, and the frightening “domain-renewal” warnings from “service providers” have already reached our electronic pigeonhole. I should be rather embarrassed if the forces of subversion and revolution take hold of our precious andrewcusack.com, and you & I both be forced to flee for some other pasture, but this can easily be prevented should those few amongst you who are not beset by perils in “the current economic climate” send a shekel or two towards the maintenance fund. A little token of appreciation for all our munificent benefactors is currently in the planning stages.

P.S.: If exigencies do force this little corner of the web to close, rest assured that most of its information has been downloaded and saved, so that it can be uploaded again should the time come when that is appropriate.

Readers will by now have doubtless heard of the immense devastation that has been wreaked upon Haiti by yesterday’s earthquake. There may be as many as hundreds of thousands of dead and the level of destruction is appalling. Among the many buildings destroyed is the Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, and its archbishop, Joseph Serge Miot, has been confirmed as dead. The first of Malteser International’s medical teams will arrive tomorrow (Thursday) to provide emergency relief to the people in Haiti. Donations towards the Order of Malta’s earthquake relief efforts can be made here.

Bienvenue, baie welkom, and whatnot to the latest version of andrewcusack.com. Changes here are usually quite slow and evolutionary, but I got bitten by the redesign bug and this latest incarnation of our little corner of the web is what I came up with. There might be some kinks yet to be worked out with it, as time will shortly tell. The new WordPress theme I have designed, for those who are interested in such mundane things, is named “Göteborg” (the previous one I rather boringly named “ALPHA”), and there are few (though we hate the word) “improvements” perhaps worth mentioning. (more…)

Mes camarades! Unfortunately my precious MacBook — the technological device by which we keep you informed of russet-cheeked peasantry, hearty, cheerful nobles, and anything generally old-school and interesting — is steadily decreasing in functionality. I feel like an Indian colonial official discovering that the telegraph workers are about to go on strike and cut off the Jewel in the Crown from contact with the rest of the civilised world.

Fear not for me, my friends! This nifty book arrived in the post the other day, and I’m in the middle of Kristin Lavransdatter, the 1,200-page Norwegian masterpiece of Nobel laureate Sigrid Unset. It will likely be some months before I can scrap together the oojah for a new Mac, and these books will help me bide the time. As for you, dear readers, I hope the links in the sidebar will keep you at least partly entertained during my absence, and I apologise for any inconvenience to your lunch-break internet wanderings this period of absence may cause.

E-mail and Facebook communication will be exceptionally sparse, so friends are recommended to get in touch via telephone, carrier pigeon, or the sidewalk of 43rd Street in front of St. Agnes after the 11:00am Latin Mass on Sundays.

Until next time, whenever that might be, over and out.

Little known fact: when this website is accessed from German-speaking countries, it appears in an old-fashioned fraktur typeface. (more…)

Finally got around to reorganising the sidebar. It had been a bit chaotic and disorganised before, but I’ve managed to shape it up a bit, deleting a few links while adding others. Take a gander, you might find something you didn’t have a chance to stumble upon before.

My computer, a splendid little MacBook, circa 2006 (and thus past its warranty), has started falling apart. I’m not joking! A little corner of the lower right-hand corner plastic casing has fallen off.

What’s more of a bother is that the click-button is malfunctioning. Half the times I single-click it, it interprets it as a double-, or sometimes even triple-click. This is getting REALLY REALLY irritating, and interfering in my general operations in countless ways. Imagine something that a single-click opens or closes: you single-click it, but the computer double-clicks it. So it’s opened for a nanosecond and then closed. Repeat six times until it decides to single-click. Molto molto irritante!

If there are any Apple genii who can solve this disconcerting click-problem, please let me know. Or, alternatively, some generous soul can purchase a new machine for me, and guarantee techno-happiness for your humble and obedient servant.

Please pray for the repose of the soul of Kevin Sinnott who died on Monday evening. Kevin, a former pupil at Chavagnes (the British Catholic school in the Vendée), was swimming with a group of friends on Monday night near Southern Catholic College in Georgia when he tragically drowned.

Kevin was the son of Kathy Sinnott, the Chicago-born disability rights campaigner and former independent Member of the European Parliament for Munster in Ireland. He had just begun his final year at Southern Catholic College in Dawsonville, Georgia. According to his friends, Kevin had gone to confession earlier that day, which is no doubt a source of consolation for his mother, his three sisters, and his five brothers.

Posting will be light for the rest of August, as I will be in Edinburgh for next week and in London for the remainder of the month. I can be contacted, as per usual, at andrewcusack@yahoo.com.

FOR G. K CHESTERTON to claim that poets have been “silent” on the subject of cheese is not quite accurate, as, while they have by no means been particularly vocal, one does occasionally stumble upon cheesely verse. I only cite one such example from The Farmer’s Boy of Robert Bloomfield (n. 1766, m. 1823).

Just a brief missive to note that the entry below is Post No. 1,000 on andrewcusack.com, and that this month just ending marks the completion of the fifth year of this little corner of the web.

JUST A BRIEF note to say that we’ve slightly redesigned our category & tag archives. They now have a different header than on the home page or individual post pages, which looks a bit snappier. Readers can use our category and tag archives to browse andrewcusack.com by subject, rather than chronologically through the archives page. The tags tend to date only from April 2008 onwards, when this site changed its “content management system”, as it’s called in computerese. (more…)

HAS IT BEEN four years already since the death of the late child of scorn, Otto Clemson Hiss? I understand a missa cantata will be offered at altar of the Hiss family chapel in the Church of the Holy Indolents, for the repose of his soul.

Anyone for bidding on a piece of history? This set of six rubber stamps from the old East 35th Street offices of the once-great National Review is up for grabs on eBay. Less than two days left for bidding.

Watch this splendidly dated television advertisement for The European from 1991. In that year, the Soviet Union still existed, Eastern Airlines closed after sixty-two years in aviation, the IRA was still bombing London, Archbishop Lefebvre went on to his eternal reward, Édith Cresson became premier of France, and the Dow Jones closed above 3,000 for the first time — today it closed at 11,532.88.

As you can see, we’ve adopted a new appearance at andrewcusack.com. Actually, it is not just a change of appearance but a roots-up wholesale change of web architecture — to use the pedantic jargon of the internauts. You are not seeing the andrewcusack.com that you once saw (and which you can actually still see at http://www.andrewcusack.com/blog/), but an entirely new set-up using WordPress instead of Movable Type, and combining the old contents of andrewcusack.com with the newer contents of cusack.norumbega.co.uk. All boring techno-stuff, I assure you.

But wither, you ask, the splendid shield depicting the arms of the Empire State and the scroll beneath proclaiming New York’s proud motto of “Excelsior”? Well, I thought we needed something a bit different, but there’s always a possibility the New York arms might return, or that I get bored with the chap-eating-his-brekkers. I have given thought to assuming (as is the heraldic terminology) arms of my own, and have two or three designs lodged in my archives that I have never come to a decision upon. The traditional arms of the Cusacks can be seen at right, as depicted in the book Archives généalogiques et historiques de la noblesse de France (which a friend found in the Bodleian and kindly scanned for me). In the language of heraldry, the arms can be described as: Shield: Per pale, or and azure, a fess countercharged. Supporters: Two mermen with scimitars. Crest: A mermaid, holding in the dexter hand a sword, in the sinister a sceptre. Motto: “En Dieu est mon espoir” (sometimes “Ave Maria Plena Gratia”).

Part of my reason for never coming around to assuming arms was that for four years I spent most of my time in Scotland where the use of assumed arms is still illegal — as a fellow New Yorker who does business there found, to his chagrin. Still, if I get around to it, I doubt I’d keep you in the dark about it.

Anyhow, I hope you like the new look of the place. Bits and pieces are still under construction, as you can tell. The page of “tags” which you can access from the menubar applies only to the blog posts from when I started blogging at Norumbega to the present. While only some posts are tagged, all posts (or nearly all) are categorized, so once I have the category index up and running that’ll probably be a good way of poking one’s head about. And there is, of course, the handy search function in the right-hand column.

Readers might be interested in a new blog called Rabbiting On, by one V. Narayan Swami from Madras in the ancient land of India. Incidentally, the city council of Madras (known as the Chennai Corporation) is reputed to be the oldest municipal body in the Commonwealth of Nations outside the British Isles, its charter being granted by King James II (c.f. here & here) in 1687. The governor of Madras at that time was one Elihu Yale, who was subsequently removed in a corruption scandal and later became the patron of an academy in Connecticut which know proudly bears his name.

Have a look at the latest issue of Norumbega: Knights of Malta, Hungarian intellectuals, and a trip to Ulaanbaatar by London cab!

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