Stalin's Songbird......Pete Seeger Dies !

Pete Seeger is dead at 94 years of age, and the flowing tributes will tend to ignore his long and weaselly record of support for communism and Stalinists. Most people don't know it, but Seeger was a card-carrying member of the American Communist party (CPUSA) from the 1930's through the 1950's. He left the party but never gave up the faith. He told the Washington Post in 1995, ''I am still a communist.'' Like his comrades and fellow travellers, Seeger twisted and turned with every pronouncement from Moscow. Seeger supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact, a curious position for a noted ''anti-fascist.''  In 1941 Seeger along with Millard Lampell, Lee Hayes and Woody Gutrie formed the Almanac Singers, a communist folk group (In Photo - Seeger in the middle). The group put out the anti-war album Songs from John Doe, containing songs that labelled Franklin Roosevelt a war monger. One of the songs had the following lyrics:

                                Franklin D, listen to me,
                                You ain't a-gonna send me 'cross the sea,
                                You may say it's for defense
                                That kinda talk ain't got no sense.

Of course when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Seeger and the Almanac Singer's literally changed their tune to get in lockstep with Stalin's new foreign policy. They pulled Songs from John Doe from the market and quickly replaced it with the pro-war song, pro-Roosevelt album Dear Mr. President:
                               Now, Mr President
                               You're commander-in-chief of our armed forces
                              The ships and the planes and the tanks and the horses,
                              I guess you know best just where I can fight....
                              So what I want is you to give me a gun
                              So we can hurry up and get the job done!

The Weavers (Seeger top left)

In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as the Weavers.  In the atmosphere of the 1950's ''red scare'', the Weaver's repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language - arguably rendering it even more powerful. After a string of hits the Weavers' performing career was abruptly derailed in 1953 as defamatory reviews appeared in New York newspapers whenever they performed. Throughout the 1950's and 1960's, Seeger called for peace, peaceful co-existence between the United States and the Soviet Union, singing songs like ''Put My Name Down Brother, Where Do I Sign?'' - a ballad in favour of the Soviet Union's phoney international peace petition that favoured unilateral disarmament by the West while leaving the Soviet atomic stockpile intact.

Seeger refusing to testify at HUAC

With ever-growing revelations of Joseph Stalin's atrocities and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, however, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet Communism. On August 18, 1955, Seeger was subpoenaed to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Seeger refused to plead the Fifth Amendment (which implied that his testimony might been self incriminating) ad refused to name personal and political associations on the grounds that is would violate his First Amendment rights. His refusal to testify led to a March 26, 1957 indictment for contempt of Congress and he faced 10 years in jail, but an appeals court 4 years later overturned his conviction. In the 1960's he would sing and give his support to peace rallies and anti-Vietnam marches covertly sponsored by the Soviet Union and its Western front groups and dupes -- while leaving his political criticism only for the United States and its defensive actions during the Cold War.

The Way I See It.....President Barack Obama's statement today on Seeger's death is beyond pathetic and needs translation. Let me help: The Marxist/Socialist Obama claims Seeger believed in ''community'' when he means ''communism'', and wielded a ''hammer'' when he means ''hammer and sickle'':



         Once called ''America's tuning fork,'' Pete Seeger believed deeply in the power of song.
         But more importantly, he believed in the power of community - to stand up for what's right,
         speak out against what's wrong, and move this country closer to the America he knew we
        could be. Over the years, Pete used his voice - and his hammer - to strike blows for worker's
        rights and civil rights; world peace and environmental conservation. And he always invited us to sing along. For reminding us whee we come from and showing us where we need to go, we will always be grateful to Pete Seeger. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to all those who loved him.

Seeger later in life made half-hearted apologies for being a propagandist of one of the deadliest totalitarian  regimes in history. ''I certainly should apologize for saying that Stalin was a hard driver rather than a very cruel leader. I don't speak out about a lot of things....only in my songs. Some may find them merely diverting melodies. Others may find them incitements to Red revolution. And who will say if either or both is wrong? Not I.  I usually quote Plato about this, who said : It is very dangerous to allow the wrong kind of music in the republic."  How right the old philosopher was!

We have a Problem With the Sudanese - #2 !

Major Brendan Nottle with his Team

Back in April 26, 2011, I wrote a blog outlining the increasing trouble in a number of Australian cities that Sudanese refugees are causing to our citizens and the problems our police department is facing everyday. Take for example the situation that Victoria police have been so vilified as racists that they no longer dare to describe a growing problem involving our latest refugee community.

Community workers claim police played down a violent New Year's brawl between more than 200 African youths in Melbourne's CBD for fear of being accused of racism. Salvation Army staff say Swanston Street was like a ''war zone'', with one man carrying a machete and another a knife, as bottles were thrown at police trying to break up rolling fights between two large groups early on New Year's Day.
 Major Brendan Nottle said what he saw indicate serious social problems within the African community. ''Rather than take the approach that we're not going to talk about this for fear of being branded racist or saying, 'why are these young people here, why don't they integrate', we actually need to say this is a problem and work out a strategic way to address it...screw Political Correctness.'' he said. Spewing the ''party line'', a police media spokesman said those involve ''were of varying ethnic backgrounds.'' But more truthfully, Anthony McEvoy, who heads the Salvos youth street team, which runs the ''chill-out'' zone on the lawns of St Paul's Cathedral, said the people he saw brawling were almost exclusively African.


As I said back in 2011, why in all things logical are our politicians importing people who they must know will struggle to fit in - at a cost to the rest of peace loving citizens? Take Awan Mading, a Sudanese volunteer with the Salvation Army, who said many young people from the African community had little education and poor job prospects, making them feel excluded. ''So they become frustrated, and some drop out of school, hoping they will find a job. But having no qualifications or work experience they can't get employment. So they end up in the street drinking and fighting.''  How on earth is an immigration system with these results in the national interest. An honest debate needs to be held, without shut-ups screams of ''racist'', before more people get hurt.

If police won't even tell the public the facts about a brawl this huge in the middle of Melbourne, what else are they not saying ''for our own good''? And where were the journalists that night? Incredible. I've searched news reports and so far cannot find a single contemporary reference by police or the news media to the brawl - one reportedly involving 200 African scum in the middle of Melbourne city. How on earth could that not be news. What else are we not being told?

An aboriginal Liaison Officer was visiting members of her tribe on the cathedral steps that day talking to police about the work they are doing in the aboriginal community when she said, ''the whole thing just took off'' as the Sudanese approached the children and adults sitting on the steps. The police tried to keep the groups apart but there were bottles and all sorts of missiles tossed at both the police and the aboriginals. She said, ''One African snuck up next to us and tossed a bottle through the window of the cathedral and the police took this piece of filth away.''  She added that the police escorted her and her people away from the area and one officer told her that no matter how they dealt with this they will be made out to be the bad guys.

The Way I See It.....saving one refugee is humane: saving a hundred thousand is almost certainly not. Large numbers of refugees, or migrants not carefully chosen, can change the nature of the host country, to its detriment. If Australia were to consist of a mix of Iraqs, Irans, Afghanistans, Syrias, Somalias and Sudanese, it would no longer be Australia.

Refugee advocates can never summon the courage to answer the question of how many is too many. Instead, they hide behind the particular instance, always ignoring the big picture...when Enough is Enough! An overly legalistic and generous refugee regimes, detached from its consequences, makes Australia vulnerable to large numbers of unsuitable refugees. The effect, if indeed not the object of refugee advocacy, is to disarm Australia. Australians must stand up, ignoring the howls of ''racist'', and tell our immigration department that too many immigrants from cultures too different from ours can and will, erode not just the concept of citizenship, but the sense of mutual obligation that underpins the social welfare of the state.

The Yin and Yang of the Energy Debate Today !

We are all environmentalists in some degree. Thankfully the Socialist/Marxist ideologues (watermelons) are a minority, though the most vocal, for now. It's obvious all of us desire to live in a world of clean air, clear water and uncontaminated food. It's also obvious that it's the Western countries that have the strictest environmental regulations and safeguards on these three life enhancing factors. And yet you get these ideologues holding up only the Western societies as the defilers of Mother Earth with greenhouse emissions and trying to force their pie-in-the-sky energy ''sustainability'' as the answer to clean energy. However, as the need for energy constantly grows, our methods for extracting, transporting and producing that energy must evolve as well.

Although nearly everyone agrees that we need an efficient, safe and economically sound method for producing electricity, our society is polarized by how to reach that end. However, our solution stares us in the face and has been awaiting the spotlight for almost a century. Nuclear fission, despite its potential for unparalleled production, continues to be abused by Hollywood, the media and, most importantly, the general public. This in spite of the fact that in 1955, the town of ARCO in Idaho, was the first to solely use nuclear power to supply its energy needs. Today, it stands as an example of the successful  and safe use of nuclear fission.

The New Improved Nuclear in the U.S.A.

It's disgusting that its opponents appeal primarily to emotions in order to justify their position, they typically avoid the fact surrounding fission and fail to address the current methods of extracting energy. Despite this rational alternative that is nuclear power, the leftist mainstream media in league with the Greenies continues to paint the industry with an apocalyptic brush while refusing to address the advantages it presents. Fission differs fundamentally from other energy sources because it yields power from splitting atoms rather than burning coal or gas; consequently, nuclear reactors emit zero carbon emissions. Which, I thought, was the main idea in building this useless, non-constant electricity production, from wind turbines and solar arrays. Nuclear plants operate constantly 24/7.

The wuss-factor is quite evident when anyone mentions radiation: all hell breaks loose! With biased news reports and videos of Homer Simpson aimlessly trying to operate a nuclear plant, it's no wonder why so many resent such a SIMPLE solution to energy demands. You hear that spill of radioactive waste can decimate a whole town, when it fact no deaths of serious illnesses have been directly attributed to fission in America's history. The reality is that as more new plants are being built in countries around the world the industry should brag about the significant improvements over the last 20 years. These improvements, besides making the nuclear buildings earthquake, tsunami and missile proof, include the amazing feature of being so self-contained that they are cooled internally without the need for external power to drive the pumping devices thereby excluding any possibility of a meltdown.

Now for the Yang part of our story. For all the talk about wind and solar, Germany's Energiewende is producing one big result - a return to COAL. For an entire week last December, Germany's 23,000 windmills stood perfectly still, Solar didn't produce much, either. Gas is still too expensive and so, unless the Germans are planning to shiver and to do without power for weeks at a time, they needed something to replace their nuclear reactors. These are the same nuclear reactors (still in their prime) that an ignorant Angela Merkel and her party allowed the powerful Green coalition to scare her panties off with visions of a German-style Japanese disaster, so she decided to close down all nuclear plants over the next 4 years. So now Germany's energy transition has been a transition back to coal.

Despite multi-billion subsidies for renewable energy sources, that has not done anything to lower the costs of electricity for the average German, there just might be a glimmer of hope that in the end the carbon guilt-trip has been dealt a reality-blow. Meanwhile, power generation from brown coal (lignite) has climbed to its highest level in Germany since 1990. It is especially the coal-fired power plants that are replacing the eight nuclear plants that are already shut down. While less CO2-intensive, but more expensive, gas-fired power plants are currently barely competitive. Energy expert Patrick Graichen speaks of Germany's ''energy transition paradox'' : the fanatical development of solar and wind farms, yet still rising carbon dioxide emissions.

The Way I See It.....extracting, containing and transporting energy is innately a dangerous and difficult task, but it is a necessary one. Transitioning to an economy that embraces nuclear fission with its safer, reliable containment vessels, and the use of Thorium to replace Uranium makes the clearest sense.  This will not just affect corporations needing cheap electricity, but will improve the lives of each and every one of us. This will result only if we, the consumers, demand a change in our energy policy; indeed, we posses that power. As we endeavour to met the increasing demands of this growing world, we must embrace the solution that has been sitting in front of us for decades.

Muslim Brotherhood's Inside Obama Administraton !

Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Tom McInerney (photo right), who served as both assistance vice chief to staff and commander in chief of U.S. Air Forces Europe, has surprised interviewers on a radio program by confirming the presence of Muslim Brotherhood members inside the U.S. government. He went on to say that ''there are a whole host of people in this government, at least 10 or 15 of these Islamic scum rubbing shoulders with Obama.''  McInerney was being interviewed last week by WMAL in Washington about a tell-all book by former Defence Secretary Robert Gates that strongly criticizes President Obama and Vice President Biden for making politically motivated decisions regarding national security.

The book documents that Obama aided the rise to power of Islamic extremist groups in the Middle East as members served on important national security advisory boards. The book confirms the Obama administration exposed national security information through Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff, who was deep personal and family associations with the Muslim Brotherhood. Another key figure with the Muslim Brotherhood ties is Mohamed Elibiary (photo) a member of the Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Council. Amazingly this fellow was re-appointed to the Council and elevated to a Senior Fellow position!


Actually, this appointment is downright stupefying in that Mohamed Elibiary has made clear his affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood and that his purpose is in stopping the prosecutions of people giving material support of terrorism in America. He sat in on a ''Countering Violent Extremism'' workshop, which is now the politically correct euphemism for terrorism and before that it was straight out jihad. This workshop proposed guidelines saying that if you are going to se federal funds training people how to handle and counter this ''violent extremist problem'' you must first consult with ''community partners'' like Elibiary.

Not withstanding that Mohamed Elibiary is the president of the largest Muslim Brotherhood Front group the Muslim Islamic Society of North America (MSNA). This issue was brought to the attention of Congress in July, 2012 by Republican Reps Michelle Bachmann, Trent Franks, Tom Rooney, Louie Gohmert and Lynn Westmoreland. They patriots were mercilessly pilloried by the leftist press and believe it or not, by members of the Republican leadership like John McKane, Mark Rubio, and John Boehner for having the audacity to question and investigate Abedin's ties with Islamic groups that want to destroy America from within. Yet, she and Elibiary still visit the White House for dinners with the Obamas. As Frank Gaffney, President and Founder of the Centre for Security Policy (CPA), states, ''Obama sits smack-dab in the middle of the Muslim Brotherhood.''

Obama Bows to Saudi King

Abedin worked for an organization founded by her family that is effectively at the forefront of a grand Saudi plan to mobilize U.S. Muslim minorities to transform America into a strict Wahhabi-style Islamic state, according to an Arabic-language manifesto issued by the Saudi monarchy. The internal memo, found on the Web at(http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/20.pdf) says the Brotherhood members ''must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions.''  Even President Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia showed his deference to the King with his shocking bow at their meeting.

Claire Lopez, a CPS senior fellow, wrote a revealing report at The Gatestone Institute website(http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3672/muslim:brotherhood-us-government)  ''The careful insinuation of Muslim Brothers into positions from which they can exercise influence on U.S. policy began long before the attacks of 9/ll, although their success has accelerated dramatically under the administration of President Barack Obama. This massive MB organization network in the U.S,, eventually gave it a prominence and (false) reputation of credibility that was unmatched by any other Islamic groups, moderate or otherwise and unannounced to the American public.'' She continued by saying, ''Not only did figures associated and identified with the Muslim Brotherhood achieve broad penetration at senior levels of U.S. policy making, but voices that warned of their true agenda (such as Stephen Coughlin's) were actively excluded.'' 



Robert  Gates

The Way I See It.....that information dominance has contributed to starling consequences, most evident in the U.S. policy toward the al-Qaida and Muslim Brotherhood-dominated revolutions that many call the ''Arab Spring'', but which in fact are more accurately termed an ''Islamic Awaking''. Under the Muslim Brotherhood influenced Obama administration, U.S. policy has undergone such a drastic shift in the direction of outright support for these jihadist movements -- from al-Qaida militias in Libya to the MB in Egypt, and both al-Qaida and MB-linked rebels in Syria -- that it is scarcely recognizable as American anymore. Robert Gates' book should alert Americans about what should be done to protect national security.

Columnist Diana West wrote, ''it likely wasn't by chance that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, reading from prepared notes, absurdly described the Muslim Brotherhood to the House Intelligence Committee last year as a LARGELY SECULAR organization.''  Also, ''Impeachable Offenses'' (http://wnd.com/?p=519253) also reported that then-CIA director John Brenan announced the Obama administration was calibrating polices in the fight against terrorism. His speech was arranged by a Muslim Brotherhood-tied group that has deep relations not only with other Brotherhood fronts but to the White House and national security agencies. Brennan's session was organized by the Muslim Islamic Society of North America which is one of the chief conduits through which the radical form of Islam passes into the United States.
NOTE: Frank Gaffney has 10 Lesson in-depth Course on www.muslimbrotherhoodinamerica.com

Warmist Snowed in a Room Full of Eco-Idiots !

It must be a tipping point in the climate debate when a senior Shell executive notices something odd about the green activists with whom he has been consorting. Two weeks ago, David Hone, (photo) Shell UK's Melbourne-born ''senior climate change adviser'', went to an academic conference on ''radical emission reduction strategies'' in London. He concluded on his blog that he had fallen among eco-idiots wanting to remould society from the ground up!

Hone, also a director of the Emissions Trading Association, has a background in oil and shipping-trade markets. One explanation for his blog outburst could be that he was still in shock from the collapse of carbon pricing and trading scheme at the Warsaw IPCC conference a few weeks before. Hone wrote: ''This was a room of catastrophists (as in 'catastrophic global warming'), with the prevailing view, at least to my ears, that the issue could only be addressed by the complete transformation of the global energy and political systems, with the latter moving to one of state control and regulated consumerism. There would be no room for 'ruthless individualism' in such a world.''

He continued: ''The posters that dotted the lecture theatre lobby area covered topics as diverse as vegan diets to an eventual return to low technology hunter-gather societies. Much to my surprise I was not really at an emission reduction conference (despite my nametag saying I was), but a political ideology conference.'' The conference, sadly, was no less unhinged than the UK government's legally mandated goal to cut CO2 emissions by at least 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Stand by, hardy Britons, for brown and black-outs. Australian national targets are 5% emission cuts but 2020, compared with 2000 levels.

UK climate blogger Andrew Montford (photo) noted: ''Hone's sudden realisation that many of his fellow travellers in the environmental movement are completely round the twist is rather comical and you can't help but wonder where he has been in the last 20 years.'' At this loopy conference, Australia's ideas on climate catastrophism were well represented. One weblink paper was from Laurence Delina and Dr Mark Diesendorf, of the Institute of Environmental Studies, University of NSW. The title? ''Is wartime mobilisation a suitable policy model for rapid climate mitigation?'' No wonder Shell's Hone felt trapped in a madhouse!

Another participant was Professor John Wiseman, of Melbourne University's Sustainable Society Institute, whose weblink talk was titled: ''Winning the climate war; removing political roadblocks to radical emissions reductions.''  I particularly like a photo of Professor Un-Wiseman at an Australian Conference last October shown alongside a slide projection quoting excitable green activist Miriam Lyons: ''The highest priority action for achieving a rapid transition to a resilient post-carbon future is to sculpt visions of the future that are beautiful, and lifelike enough to fall in love with.'' Wow....that'll surely wet her panty liner!  It goes without saying that this twit is a regular guest on the biased ABC programs....gushing forth her warmist religion.

Among Wiseman's authorships is ''Hope, Despair and Transformation: Climate Change and the Promotion of Mental Health and Wellbeing.'' Hopefully the absence of global warming since 1997 has restored to sanity the victims of climate scare campaigns. And let's not forget about this inane person, Dr Jane O'Sullivan, (photo) of the University of Queensland, whose topic was; ''Reducing emissions through family planning and women's empowerment." I wonder how much she screwed us taxpayers for a grant to write this asinine paper?  I hear she's a gung-ho person on carbon taxes. Dr O'Sullivan shows symptoms of Life of Brian's People's Front of Judea divisiveness, being ''frustrated by the tangled web of misconceptions and the determination of environmental activists to regard any criticism of the cap and trade proposal as climate change denial.''

The Way I See It.....the UK still has some level heads that are influential like Matt Ridley, a member of the House of Lords and a science writer, whose latest bestseller is ''The Rational Optimist''. In it he finds the Greens exploiting Typhoon Haiyan as a sign of a great global warming catastrophe awaiting us as ridiculous. He says, ''Storms and weather events happen, they've always happened. There've been much stronger typhoons in the past and to blame this on climate change is a bit like shamanism. It's witchdoctory. It's going back 10,000 years to try and blame every weather event on mankind. So the idea that you can stop typhoons happening by cutting carbon dioxide emissions is just absurd.''

''Also I think rolling out immature and 14th-century technologies like wind power all around the world -- which are extremely expensive, don't cut carbon emissions very much, and on the whole it's disastrously bad for people's living standards. We should put a lot of money into research into new energy technologies. If we can get cheap fusion energy, or cheap thorium nuclear power, or even cheap ordinary nuclear power, then by the end of the century we probably won't need fossils fuels much. Here in Britain there is huge growing disquiet about energy prices, and they're about to go up even more, because of green levies, and that I think is beginning to make politicians rethink this agenda. David Cameron will have swallow his dream of a totally green England by 2030, the people and the government will be bankrupt!''

Ship of Fools: Doomed by Wishful Thinking !

Today, once the weather cleared over Antarctica, 52 passengers (made up of one-third tourists) of the ice bound Russian ship, MV Akademic Shokalskiy,  were rescued by a Chinese helicopter. The Russian crew will stay on board to wait for the ice to free their ship. But strangely, 98 per cent of the U.S. media didn't mention that mostly the ice-trapped passengers were global warmists, not tourists.

The farce: warmist scientists and reporters sail to Antarctica to find signs of global warming they claim has changed that continent since Douglas Mawson explored it a century ago. Instead, they find sea ice when Mawson didn't and their ship is locked in. Be clear about the joke here. This Australasian Antarctica Expedition (AAE) was meant to scare us about global warming changing Antarctica, causing melting instead of all this damn ice. As the expedition leader Chris Turney, a publicity-hungry professor, said on their website: ''....there is an increasing body of evidence, including by the AAE members, that have identified parts of the East Antarctic which are susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming....We are going there to determine the extent to which human activity and pollution has directly impacted on this remote region...''

A month ago the mission of the $1.5 million expedition was ''to answer questions about climate change''. Now the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC) describes the expedition as ''a Russian ship stuck in the sea ice in Antarctica....''  Let there by no doubt, the mission was to document and record scientific changes in Antarctica to broadcast to the world. Most scientific missions don't have a dedicated media team, but this one had a staff of FIVE journalists! There is a journalist and documentary maker from the leftist Guardian as well as a senior producer from the Science Unit at the BBC world service. Boy...if they'd discovered less sea ice, fewer penguins, or big cracks, we know the images would be all over the mass media and it would be evidence for ''climate change.''

But having their ship trapped by thick sea ice, the mission changed quickly to call it a tourist boat that only wanted ''to follow the route explorer Douglas Mawson travelled a century ago'', don't mention the climate.... The spin was that the team has ''met heavy ice.'' Not ''been trapped by unprecedently thick sea ice, unlike anything Mawson ever saw, and in record levels''. If they had met thin sea ice, would it have been described as a dangerously thin layer, a risk for penguins, and a stark reminder of how much the climate is changing? Would it have been an undeniable factoid? It's not what the ABC says, it's what it doesn't say (a.k.a ''lying by omission''). The headlines could read ''Global warming scientists trapped in  Antartica by record sea ice they didn't predict''. As if. Of course that would be against ''the religion''.

Penguins coming for a ''sticky beak''

Instead, there are bullshit reports from the ABC like this, with no mention of climate change or what the ''passengers'' on the ''cruise ship'' were actually up to: ''The Australian operation to rescue passengers from a Russian cruise ship stick in thick sea ice, is continuing this morning, but it's slow going. The Aurora Australis ice-breaker is the third vessel to try to help the stricken ship which has been trapped since Christmas Eve with 74 people on board. The ship is named The Spirit of Mawson in honour of Douglas Mawson who spent two years on Antarctica during which he lost two colleagues on the trek.'' Unfortunately, even the Aurora was stopped in its tracks and had to return to Casey base to finally finish unloading the coming year's supplies for the station as well as a number of researchers and their science gear.

The Way I See It.....this expense expedition was doomed by wishful thinking and cost-cutting. The first error the expedition leaders made was under-estimating the prevailing sea ice conditions at Mawson station, their destination. The scientists seemed to be convinced that Antarctica was a warmer place today than it had been 100 years earlier, and thus perhaps they could expect less sea ice there. This in turn would allow them to charter a lighter, cheaper vessel. This preconceived idea seems to be the case by their choice of vessel. It is only an ice-strengthened ship built in Finland in 1982.

What made the expedition even more dubious is that Turney and his team brought on paying tourists in what appears to have been an attempt to help defer the expedition's costs and to be a source of cheap labor with prices starting at $8000 a berth. It seems 26 paying tourists and 4 journalists got suckered in joining this ship-of-fools. Here it seems that the obvious risks and hazards of bringing tourists to the world's harshest environment in a budget-priced vessel unable to handle ice-breaking may have been played down or worse, brushed aside. Was this reckless on the part of Chris Turney? (photo) He was quoted on the website: ''In the Antarctic the conditions are so extreme that you can never make forecasts.''  Really Chris, is this an environment you'd want to bring unfamiliar tourists in (along with your wife and two youngsters) -- on a vessel that cannot even brake ice???  How much did this fiasco cost? Who's paying for the rescue?  The hubris of many warmists is amazingly stupid!

UPDATE:  The rescue will cost Australian taxpayers $400,000 !  The rescued people are on the Aurora Australis heading back to be dropped off in Tasmania costs at least $30,000 a day aside from the lost research time it had intended to do while down at Casey station. Officials say this mis-adventure has blown the Antarctic Research budget for this year. Just heard that the Chinese ice breaker that tried to help initially  but was thwarted by the dense sea ice is now also stuck fast.