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Mar 15, 2010

Review: Finkelstein's transformation to victim hero in "American Radical"

 


Review: Finkelstein's transformation to victim hero in "American Radical"

aletho | March 15, 2010 at 12:59 pm | Categories: Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-1Mf
Max Blumenthal, The Electronic Intifada, 15 March 2010
In a scene from American Radical, Norman Finkelstein and Alan Dershowitz debate at the studio of Democracy Now!.

One night about two weeks ago, while I was walking down Bleecker Street in New York City's West Village, I crossed paths with Norman Finkelstein. He was wearing a light jacket and eating a banana, seemingly impervious to the bitter wind and heavy snowfall pouring from the sky. I told Finkelstein that a YouTube clip of him parrying attacks from Zionist student activists during a speech he gave at the University of Waterloo was gaining popularity online. "Well, that scene hasn't been very good for me," he remarked in a near whisper.

The YouTube clip was an excerpt from American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, a riveting 2009 documentary that has just opened in US theaters. In the scene, a female student tells Finkelstein that his comparisons of the Israeli government to the Nazis are "extremely hurtful" before she breaks down in tears. Instead of offering the demonstrative young woman a token gesture of empathy, Finkelstein grows indignant, angrily dismissing what he called her "crocodile tears." He then launches into a stentorian tirade about "the lessons of the Holocaust" he learned from his Holocaust survivor parents, booming above a chorus of heckles from pro-Israel students, "If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians!" While the young woman holds her head in hands as though she was bracing for an air raid, a substantial portion of the crowd leaps to its feet with wild cheers. Finkelstein may have regretted the spectacle he generates later on, but he seemed to be enjoying himself at the time.

With unfettered access to Finkelstein during the most dramatic stage of his career, American Radical directors David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier provide a compelling look at one of the most roundly vilified academics in recent American history. If the film had simply rehashed the tale of Finkelstein as a rabble-rousing iconoclast who defied the Jewish-American consensus to agitate for Palestinian civil rights, it would have been prosaic at best. But by giving equal time to Finkelstein's critics, who proved unable to conceal their visceral disdain for him even though they have succeeded in isolating him from the intellectual mainstream, the film offers a devastating portrait of an academic establishment that will go to extraordinary lengths not only to rebut but destroy potent critics of Israel, even obviously idiosyncratic characters like Finkelstein. Even with his excessive tendencies and strident style on bold display, when seen in the shadow of his adversaries, Finkelstein appears more than odd -- he becomes utterly sympathetic.

Finkelstein was raised in post-war Borough Park, Brooklyn, a community settled by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe whose sense of ambition and intellectual intensity far outweighed their interest in assimilating to American middle class cultural sensibilities. From her experience in the Warsaw Ghetto, Finkelstein's mother, Mayla, developed ardently pacifist convictions -- "with the first killing, you've already lost," she stated. According to a family friend interviewed in the film, Finkelstein "was influenced by his mother to an unhealthy extent," a critique even he acknowledged.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, Finkelstein began to see the Palestinian refugees as victims of the same sort of brutality his mother endured. He is seen in American Radical protesting Israel's occupation of Lebanon outside the Israeli consulate in New York City, holding a sign denouncing "Israeli Nazis" and invoking his parents' enslavement in concentration camps. The film then detours to the West Bank, where Finkelstein made enduring friendships with several families in Hebron, deepening his commitment to the Palestinian cause in the process.

Finkelstein's closest Palestinian friend, a pensive middle aged man named Musa Abu Hashhash, recalls being startled when Finkelstein cried openly after watching Israel troops shoot a boy to death for burning a tire. Another friend confesses on camera that Israel's brutal actions against the Palestinians had caused her to hate Jews. But after Finkelstein befriended her, her perspective on Jews broadened, forcing her to rethink her resentment. She added with admiration that Finkelstein never attempted to disguise his Jewish identity while traveling through the West Bank. By presenting frank recollections from everyday Palestinians about their encounters with Finkelstein, American Radical subtly interweaves their struggle with his own.

While pursuing his PhD at Princeton, Finkelstein was mentored by his intellectual hero Noam Chomsky. Chomsky encouraged Finkelstein as he composed his thesis, which was intended to expose Joan Peters' book, From Time Immemorial, as a hoax. Peters boasted that her work revealed the Palestinian cause as "a scam." She claimed to have proven that Palestine was relatively unpopulated -- "a land without a people," as the saying goes -- until Arabs flocked there from other regions during the 19th century. Cultural icons from Elie Wiesel to Barbara Tuchman hailed Peters' book as a great revelation. "It was the book American Jews wanted to have because it whitewashed Israel," the Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim recalls in American Radical.

While Immemorial shot to the top of the bestseller list, a few small left-wing journals published articles poking holes in Peters' claims. But it was not until Finkelstein's dissertation was published (over the strident objections of Princeton faculty members) that mainstream intellectuals were forced to reckon with Peters' shoddy research and ideological zealotry. Chomsky told Finkelstein that by dismantling Peters, he would inadvertently expose the "American intellectual community as a gang of frauds."

He warned, "They're going to destroy you."

As Finkelstein's public profile grew, he sought out rancorous conflicts with increasing intensity. In 2000, he published the work that would inflame his adversaries to the point of blind rage: The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. Finkelstein argued that American Jewish groups and an assortment of venal "hoaxers and hucksters" were using the Holocaust "as an ideological weapon" to stifle criticism of Israel and line their own pockets. He skewered Wiesel for his insistence that the Holocaust was a quasi-religious event that could not possibly be understood and for downplaying the Armenian genocide. Though the renowned Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg called Finkelstein's conclusions "moderate," Finkelstein incited his critics through characteristically strident presentations.

Finkelstein's book was lambasted by an array of distinguished scholars. More predictably, he was condemned as a "disgusting self-hating Jew" by Leon Wieseltier, the literary critic of The New Republic. ("We're the cops," Wieseltier told journalist Eric Alterman regarding the magazine's role in suppressing criticism of Israel ("Semites and Anti-Semites," The Nation, 25 February 2010).) Finally, Finkelstein's employers at Hunter College reduced his course load and salary without explanation, forcing him to leave his hometown for Chicago, where he took a teaching position at DePaul University.

While providing a forum to Finkelstein's most malevolent critics, American Radical suffers from the absence of Peter Novick, the University of Chicago professor who Finkelstein credited with providing "the initial stimulus" for The Holocaust Industry with the release in 1999 of his book The Holocaust in American Life. Novick had arrived at many of the same conclusions as Finkelstein would, however, when Finkelstein's book appeared Novick dismissed it as "trash," accusing its author of fabricating some of his findings. Pro-Israel "enforcers" like Alan Dershowitz of the Harvard Law School immediately appropriated Novick's criticisms to undermine Finkelstein, praising Novick as a voice of moderation when they might have attacked him had Finkelstein's book never appeared.

Why was Finkelstein targeted when Novick was not? Perhaps Finkelstein, the unabashed radical, was the more convenient target. Or perhaps his book was judged to be a greater threat to the Zionist narrative. The film could have benefited by wrestling with this issue rather than glossing over it as though Finkelstein was the first to publicly accuse anyone of exploiting the Holocaust for political gain.

None of Finkelstein's conflicts disrupted his career as much as his apocalyptic battle with Dershowitz. Dershowitz first appears in American Radical seated beside Finkelstein in a studio of the progressive radio program Democracy Now!, looking like a deer in the headlights as Finkelstein accuses him of plagiarizing large portions of his book The Case For Israel from Peters' Immemorial. Later on in the film, Dershowitz pontificates on what he sees as Finkelstein's hidden motivations, charging him and other anti-Zionist Jews with "struggling with identity problems." The plagiarism accusation had clearly shaken Dershowitz to his core, challenging his sense of inviolability by forcing him to defend his scholarship down to the last footnote.

However, some of Finkelstein's friends were rightly concerned that he had underestimated his foe's vengeful propensity. Chomsky had warned his former understudy not to attack Dershowitz's book on the basis of plagiarism, but to dismantle his propagandistic portrait of Israel as an unfairly persecuted bastion of democratic tolerance instead. And John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago political scientist who was falsely accused by Dershowitz of quoting neo-Nazi sources in his book The Israel Lobby (see the scholar's response in the London Review of Books, 11 May 2006), urged Finkelstein to "get all the hot rhetoric out of there." Meanwhile, an Israeli friend of Finkelstein was convinced he had signed away his future. "He called Dershowitz a plagiarist and a liar," she remarks in the film. "What did he expect him to do? Doesn't he know the kind of connections he has?"

When Finkelstein was rejected for tenure at DePaul after a long and stormy battle that marshaled much of the faculty behind him in the name of academic freedom, the dean of the college, Charles Suchar, wrote a revealing letter blaming Finkelstein's "personal and reputation demeaning attacks on Alan Dershowitz" and other Zionist intellectual figures. Having lost confidence in his public case against Finkelstein, Dershowitz had resorted to skullduggery, apparently tapping his connections to deliver the coup de grace to Finkelstein's career as a professor. But as American Radical shows, antagonists like Dershowitz ultimately transformed Finkelstein from a gadfly into a victim hero, ensuring him an international platform for as long as the Israel-Palestine conflict continues.

For more information about American Radical: the trials of Norman Finkelstein visit http://www.americanradicalthefilm.com/

Max Blumenthal (http://www.maxblumenthal.com/) is a senior writer for The Daily Beast.

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NOT FAKE= Here's the real story=Creveld not Kreveld

 

March 15, 2010

Commentary from a reader name John and quotes from Wikipedia:

Barking mad Jew state threatens to destroy the world.

 

In a September 2003 interview in Elsevier (Dutch weekly) on Israel and the dangers it faces from Iran, the Palestinians and world opinion van Creveld stated:

"We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force…. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.[4]"

In the August 21, 2004 edition of the International Herald Tribune van Creveld wrote, "Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy."[5]

________________________-

And now they have German built nuclear armed submarines roaming the oceans and capable of destroying EVERY COUNTRY ON EARTH!

I recall remarking on Creveld's (above) statement at the time, and since- the most evil and psychopathic nation on the planet possessing nuclear, bio, chemical weapons, and now- submarines- Note; classed as a 'purely offensive weapon'.

Up until now, Americans could sit back and relax, content in the belief that problems in the Middle East could not affect them. If the Jews killed a heap of Arabs, so what? Even if they decided to obliterate England, well, pity but.

Well now those days are past, each and every American town is within range of an atomic missile fired from a Jewish submarine 200 miles off the American shore.

  It is simply mind blowing that political commentators of all hues, together with all politicians have not been jumping up and down to demand an end to this insane escalation. It may be a matter of debate as to whether the so-called 'Cold War' was ever a reality, while others claim that the idea of M.A.D.-Mutually assured destruction kept the peace because at least the Russians are sane, whereas these fanatics clearly are not, since what Creveld advocates is no less than a terrorist threat to the world by a whole nation acting as one, world terrorist state, prepared to be a collective, atomic suicide bomber.

Mabe this is the inevitable end of the nation that claims to have invented terrorism and the car bomb?

We, the people of the world have tolerated and cosseted this bully in the schoolyard, this cowardly spoilt brat, and now the bully has appeared in the school armed with a .50cal machine gun and is threatening the whole school with it- the consequences for us-humanity, of this will be as disastrous as it is inevitable. 

Have no doubt about it; this is the greatest threat to our existence, ever.

JB

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_van_Creveld

 




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Learn From Brazil?

 




Brazil's president refuses visit to Herzl's grave

March 15, 2010

JERUSALEM (JTA) -- Brazil's president said he would not visit the grave of Theodor Herzl during his first official visit to Israel.

President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, who arrived in Israel on Sunday, refused to visit Herzl's grave, which is part of the itinerary for visiting foreign officials this year in honor of the 150th anniversary of the father of Zionism. The Brazilian president is reportedly scheduled to visit the grave of Yasir Arafat during a visit to Ramallah.

"It is an insult to Israel's citizens and to Zionist communities around the world," World Zionist Organization head Hagai Merom said Monday. "Avoiding putting a wreath at Herzl's grave is the same as refusing to visit the graves of Mustafa Kemal Ata Turk in Turkey or the tomb of Mahatma Ghandi in India."

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden visited the grave last week.

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman boycotted Lula's address to the Knesset Monday afternoon, to protest his refusal to visit Herzl's grave. The Foreign Ministry said that Lieberman wanted to show the Brazilian leader that Israel takes seriously his dismissal of diplomatic protocols, Haaretz reported.

Lula said prior to his trip that new countries should help mediate between Israel and the Palestinians.
 

http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2009/June/brazils-economy.html


Best Economy in the Americas – Brazil

Tony Daltorio, The Investment U Research Team

Wall Street tends to take a very myopic view of the world – the view that the entire financial universe revolves around them and the United States. And that what goes on in other countries is unimportant.

It's why many Wall Streeters have missed one of the greatest rags-to-riches stories in global economic history – Brazil. Brazil's economy has gone from a "basket case" to being as solid as a Brick.

Brazil has made huge strides from the very debt-ridden, bureaucratic country of the past. Years ago, the country restructured its finances and has resisted the temptation to use economic crises, such as in neighboring Argentina, as an excuse to default on its obligations.

Yet, many on Wall Street still think of Brazil as a backwards "third-world" country that goes crazy every year, four days before Ash Wednesday for Carnival.

Perhaps Wall Street could use someone like Nicholas Copernicus. Copernicus was the famous Polish astronomer who – in 1543 – showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe.

Until Wall Street adopts a Copernican view of the financial universe and realizes that they are not the center of the financial cosmos, informed investors can take advantage of the many international opportunities they've ignored. Here is what you need to know about Brazil's economy and some easy ways to invest in it.

Brazil's Economy: A Success Story

Brazil has made great strides under current President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula. Lula took office on January 1, 2003 and he has, since being in office, run a very orthodox fiscal policy. The country has maintained fiscal and trade surpluses for the better part of his presidency.

Brazil's highly capable central bank has followed a very strong monetary policy. They have maintained high levels of real interest rates, which prevented the economy from overheating and creating an over-expansion of credit – unlike the policies of others like the Federal Reserve.

In late April, the Brazilian central bank cut their interest rate from 11.25% to 10.25%. This leaves them plenty of room to cut interest rates further, if necessary, to stimulate Brazil's economy. Again, this distinguishes the Brazilian central bank from the Federal Reserve and others, who have left themselves virtually no room to cut interest rates further.

Also, Brazil has long pursued a strategy of achieving energy independence from foreign oil. Brazil started its own ethanol program – based on its rich sugar crop, and offshore oil exploration using deep-sea drilling methods. It's achieved a remarkable degree of energy self-sufficiency – again setting it apart from much of the rest of the world.

Brazil, unlike the United States and other economies, is not over-levered – It has a prudent fiscal and monetary policies, balanced and diversified trade, along with a coherent energy policy.

It leaves the country well positioned for the future.

Another factor working in Brazil's favor is the huge amount of money that the Federal Reserve is pumping into the U.S. financial system. Whether you agree or disagree with the Federal Reserve's corrective procedures, one thing is certain – eventually this money printing will result in lower purchasing power for the U.S. Dollar.

This lower purchasing power for the dollar has already begun to fuel a rally in commodity prices. And Brazil – a major producer and exporter of many commodities – is perfectly positioned to take advantage of it.

Easy Ways to Profit From Brazil

There are several easy ways for American investors to participate in the Brazilian growth story. Some of my favorite methods are purchasing Brazilian ETFs. Here are two ETFs that focus exclusively on Brazil:

iShares MSCI Brazil Index Fund (NYSE: EWZ) contains 72 of Brazil's largest companies. I am a fan of this fund because of the heavy weighting given to two of my favorite commodities companies – oil giant Petrobras (over 24%) and mining giant Vale de Rio (over 16%). It provides an easy way to play two of my major themes – emerging markets and commodities – with one investment.

Van Eck Brazil Small Cap ETF (NYSE: BRF) provides exposure to small-cap companies that are domiciled in Brazil and that generate at least 50% of their revenues in Brazil. This fund gives investors a concentrated play (52 components) on domestic Brazilian investment themes such as consumer goods. However, it does not offer the concentration on commodity plays like EWZ. This fund is relatively new and began trading on May 12, 2009.

More aggressive investors can opt to purchase individual Brazilian stocks that trade here in the U.S. as ADRs, or American Depositary Receipts. There are many Brazilian stocks in various sectors available to American investors. Some of the sectors include:

Commodities

  • Petrobras ADR both common (NYSE: PBR) and preferred (NYSE: PBR.A), Vale de Rio ADR, both common (NYSE: VALE) and preferred (NYSE: VALE.P); and steel giant CSN ADR (NYSE: SID).

Consumer Companies

  • There's Beverage giant AmBev ADR common (NYSE: ABV.C) and preferred (NYSE: ABV) and food giant Perdigao ADR (NYSE: PDA) – which will soon change its name to Brasil Foods after it completes the takeover of its smaller rival Sadia ADR (NYSE: SDA).

Utility Companies

  • Includes electricity provider Electrobras SA ADR common (NYSE: EBR) and preferred (NYSE: EBR.B); Companhia Energetica Minas Gerais ADR (NYSE: CIG), CPFL Energia ADR (NYSE: CPL), and water company Companhia de Saneamento Basico ADR (NYSE:SBS).

Financial Companies

  • Brazilian banking firms Banco Bradesco SA ADR (NYSE: BBD) and the merged Itau Unibanco Banco Multiplo SA (NYSE: ITUB).

There are also many other Brazilian ADRs that trade here in the US.

Unlike many on Wall Street, investors would be wise to adopt a Copernican view of investing and include exposure to Brazil in their portfolio. And, perhaps with the gains made by investing in the Brazilian growth story, investors could visit Rio de Janeiro during Carnival, and have a great time.

Good investing,

Tony Daltorio

P.S. If you'd like to find out more on uncovering some of the best foreign investments around the world, take a look at the Oxford Club's New Frontier Trader Service.

More on this topic (What's this?)
6 reasons to buy Brazilian stocks. (Emerging Index, 2/3/10)

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The case against the hockey stick

 


The case against the hockey stick

aletho | March 15, 2010 at 2:29 pm | Categories: Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | URL: http://wp.me/pIUmC-1Mo
Matt Ridley | 10th March 2010 | Prospect Issue 168
The "hockey stick" temperature graph is a mainstay of global warming science. A new book tells of one man's efforts to dismantle it—and deserves to win prizes!

Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion is one of the best science books in years. It exposes in delicious detail, datum by datum, how a great scientific mistake of immense political weight was perpetrated, defended and camouflaged by a scientific establishment that should now be red with shame. It is a book about principal components, data mining and confidence intervals—subjects that have never before been made thrilling. It is the biography of a graph.

I can remember when I first paid attention to the "hockey stick" graph at a conference in Cambridge. The temperature line trundled along with little change for centuries, then shot through the roof in the 20th century, like the blade of an ice-hockey stick. I had become somewhat of a sceptic about the science of climate change, but here was emphatic proof that the world was much warmer today; and warming much faster than at any time in a thousand years. I resolved to shed my doubts. I assumed that since it had been published in Nature—the Canterbury Cathedral of scientific literature—it was true.

I was not the only one who was impressed. The graph appeared six times in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s third report in 2001. It was on display as a backdrop at the press conference to launch that report. James Lovelock pinned it to his wall. Al Gore used it in his film (though describing it as something else and with the Y axis upside down). Its author shot to scientific stardom. "It is hard to overestimate how influential this study has been," said the BBC. The hockey stick is to global warming what St Paul was to Christianity.

Of course, there is other evidence for global warming, but none of it proves that the recent warming is unprecedented. Indeed, quite the reverse: surface temperatures, sea levels, tree lines, glacier retreats, summer sea ice extent in the Arctic, early spring flowers, bird migration, droughts, floods, storms—they all show change that is no different in speed or magnitude from other periods, like 1910-1940, at least as far as can be measured. There may be something unprecedented going on in temperature, but the only piece of empirical evidence that actually says so—yes, the only one—is the hockey stick.

And the hockey stick is wrong. The emails that were leaked from the University of East Anglia late last year are not proof of this; they are merely the icing on the lake, proof that some of the scientists closest to the hockey stick knew all along that it was problematic. Andrew Montford's book, despite its subtitle, is not about the emails, which are tagged on as a last chapter. It is instead built around the long, lonely struggle of one man— Stephen McIntyre—to understand how the hockey stick was made, with what data and what programs.

A retired mining entrepreneur with a mathematical bent, McIntyre asked the senior author of the hockey stick graph, Michael Mann, for the data and the programs in 2003, so he could check it himself. This was five years after the graph had been published, but Mann had never been asked for them before. McIntyre quickly found errors: mislocated series, infilled gaps, truncated records, old data extrapolated forwards where new was available, and so on.

Not all the data showed a 20th century uptick either. In fact just 20 series out of 159 did, and these were nearly all based on tree rings. In some cases, the same tree ring sets had been used in different series. In the end the entire graph got its shape from a few bristlecone and foxtail pines in the western United States; a messy tree-ring data set from the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada; another Canadian set that had been truncated 17 years too early called, splendidly, Twisted Tree Heartrot Hill; and a superseded series from Siberian larch trees. There were problems with all these series: for example, the bristlecone pines were probably growing faster in the 20th century because of more carbon dioxide in the air, or recovery after "strip bark" damage, not because of temperature change.

This was bad enough; worse was to come. Mann soon stopped cooperating, yet, after a long struggle, McIntyre found out enough about Mann's programs to work out what he had done. The result was shocking. He had standardised the data by "short-centering" them—essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis "mined" the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.

Well, it happens. People make mistakes in science. Corrections get made. That's how it works, is it not? Few papers get such scrutiny as this had. But that is an even more worrying thought: how much dodgy science is being published without the benefit of an audit by Mcintyre's ilk? As a long-time champion of science, I find the reaction of the scientific establishment more shocking than anything. The reaction was not even a shrug: it was shut-eyed denial.

If this had been a drug trial done by a pharmaceutical company, the scientific journals, the learned academies and the press would have soon have rushed to discredit it—and rightly so. Instead, they did not want to know. Nature magazine, which had published the original study, went out of its way to close its ears to McIntyre's criticisms, even though they were upheld by the reviewers it appointed. So did the National Academy of Sciences in the US, even when two reports commissioned by Congress upheld McIntyre. So, of course, did the IPCC, which tied itself in knots changing its deadlines so it could include flawed references to refutations of McIntyre while ignoring complaints that it had misquoted him.

The IPCC has taken refuge in saying that other recent studies confirm the hockey stick but, if you take those studies apart, the same old bad data sets keep popping out: bristlecone pines and all. A new Siberian data series from a place called Yamal showed a lovely hockey stick but, after ten years of asking, McIntyre finally got hold of the data last autumn and found that it relied heavily on just one of just twelve trees, when far larger samples from the same area were available showing no uptick. Another series from Finnish lake sediments also showed a gorgeous hockey stick, but only if used upside down. McIntyre just keeps on exposing scandal after scandal in the way these data were analysed and presented.

Montford's book is written with grace and flair. Like all the best science writers, he knows that the secret is not to leave out the details (because this just results in platitudes and leaps of faith), but rather to make the details delicious, even to the most unmathematical reader. I never thought I would find myself unable to put a book down because—sad, but true—I wanted to know what happened next in an r-squared calculation. This book deserves to win prizes.

Oh, and by the way, I have a financial interest in coal mining, though not as big as Al Gore has in carbon trading. Maybe you think it makes me biased. Read the book and judge for yourself.

The Hockey Stick Illusion is published by Stacey International, 482 pages, £10.99

Read what James Lovelock, Bjorn Lomborg, Ed Miliband and many other experts have to say about climate change in Prospect's Copenhagen special

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