Δευτέρα 26 Σεπτεμβρίου 2011
Τρίτη 12 Απριλίου 2011
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Των Αννας Γριμάνη και Κώστα Δεληγιάννη
Από: Financial Post
Climate models go cold
Carbon warming too minor to be worth worrying about
By David Evans
The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic. Watching this issue unfold has been amusing but, lately, worrying. This issue is tearing society apart, making fools out of our politicians.
Let’s set a few things straight.
The whole idea that carbon dioxide is the main cause of the recent global warming is based on a guess that was proved false by empirical evidence during the 1990s. But the gravy train was too big, with too many jobs, industries, trading profits, political careers, and the possibility of world government and total control riding on the outcome. So rather than admit they were wrong, the governments, and their tame climate scientists, now outrageously maintain the fiction that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant.
Let’s be perfectly clear. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and other things being equal, the more carbon dioxide in the air, the warmer the planet. Every bit of carbon dioxide that we emit warms the planet. But the issue is not whether carbon dioxide warms the planet, but how much.
Most scientists, on both sides, also agree on how much a given increase in the level of carbon dioxide raises the planet’s temperature, if just the extra carbon dioxide is considered. These calculations come from laboratory experiments; the basic physics have been well known for a century.
The disagreement comes about what happens next.
The planet reacts to that extra carbon dioxide, which changes everything. Most critically, the extra warmth causes more water to evaporate from the oceans. But does the water hang around and increase the height of moist air in the atmosphere, or does it simply create more clouds and rain? Back in 1980, when the carbon dioxide theory started, no one knew. The alarmists guessed that it would increase the height of moist air around the planet, which would warm the planet even further, because the moist air is also a greenhouse gas.
This is the core idea of every official climate model: For each bit of warming due to carbon dioxide, they claim it ends up causing three bits of warming due to the extra moist air. The climate models amplify the carbon dioxide warming by a factor of three — so two-thirds of their projected warming is due to extra moist air (and other factors); only one-third is due to extra carbon dioxide.
That’s the core of the issue. All the disagreements and misunderstandings spring from this. The alarmist case is based on this guess about moisture in the atmosphere, and there is simply no evidence for the amplification that is at the core of their alarmism.
Weather balloons had been measuring the atmosphere since the 1960s, many thousands of them every year. The climate models all predict that as the planet warms, a hot spot of moist air will develop over the tropics about 10 kilometres up, as the layer of moist air expands upwards into the cool dry air above. During the warming of the late 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, the weather balloons found no hot spot. None at all. Not even a small one. This evidence proves that the climate models are fundamentally flawed, that they greatly overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide.
This evidence first became clear around the mid-1990s.
At this point, official “climate science” stopped being a science. In science, empirical evidence always trumps theory, no matter how much you are in love with the theory. If theory and evidence disagree, real scientists scrap the theory. But official climate science ignored the crucial weather balloon evidence, and other subsequent evidence that backs it up, and instead clung to their carbon dioxide theory — that just happens to keep them in well-paying jobs with lavish research grants, and gives great political power to their government masters.
There are now several independent pieces of evidence showing that the earth responds to the warming due to extra carbon dioxide by dampening the warming. Every long-lived natural system behaves this way, counteracting any disturbance. Otherwise the system would be unstable. The climate system is no exception, and now we can prove it.
But the alarmists say the exact opposite, that the climate system amplifies any warming due to extra carbon dioxide, and is potentially unstable. It is no surprise that their predictions of planetary temperature made in 1988 to the U.S. Congress, and again in 1990, 1995, and 2001, have all proved much higher than reality.
They keep lowering the temperature increases they expect, from 0.30C per decade in 1990, to 0.20C per decade in 2001, and now 0.15C per decade — yet they have the gall to tell us “it’s worse than expected.” These people are not scientists. They overestimate the temperature increases due to carbon dioxide, selectively deny evidence, and now they conceal the truth.
One way they conceal is in the way they measure temperature.
The official thermometers are often located in the warm exhaust of air conditioning outlets, over hot tarmac at airports where they get blasts of hot air from jet engines, at waste-water plants where they get warmth from decomposing sewage, or in hot cities choked with cars and buildings. Global warming is measured in 10ths of a degree, so any extra heating nudge is important. In the United States, nearly 90% of official thermometers surveyed by volunteers violate official siting requirements that they not be too close to an artificial heating source.
Global temperature is also measured by satellites, which measure nearly the whole planet 24/7 without bias. The satellites say the hottest recent year was 1998, and that since 2001 the global temperature has levelled off. Why does official science track only the surface thermometer results and not mention the satellite results?
The Earth has been in a warming trend since the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1680. Human emissions of carbon dioxide were negligible before 1850 and have nearly all come after the Second World War, so human carbon dioxide cannot possibly have caused the trend. Within the trend, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation causes alternating global warming and cooling for 25 to 30 years at a go in each direction. We have just finished a warming phase, so expect mild global cooling for the next two decades.
We are now at an extraordinary juncture. Official climate science, which is funded and directed entirely by government, promotes a theory that is based on a guess about moist air that is now a known falsehood. Governments gleefully accept their advice, because the only ways to curb emissions are to impose taxes and extend government control over all energy use. And to curb emissions on a world scale might even lead to world government — how exciting for the political class!
Even if we stopped emitting all carbon dioxide tomorrow, completely shut up shop and went back to the Stone Age, according to the official government climate models it would be cooler in 2050 by about 0.015 degrees. But their models exaggerate 10-fold — in fact our sacrifices would make the planet in 2050 a mere 0.0015 degrees cooler!
Finally, to those who still believe the planet is in danger from our carbon dioxide emissions: Sorry, but you’ve been had. Yes, carbon dioxide is a cause of global warming, but it’s so minor it’s not worth doing much about.
Financial Post
David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The comments above were made to the Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia, on March 23.
David Evans consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering. The comments above were made to the Anti-Carbon-Tax Rally in Perth, Australia, on March 23.
Παρασκευή 24 Απριλίου 2009
Life Beyond Earth in 10 Years or Less?
Από Universe Today:
Peter Smith feels pretty certain we’ll be finding life on Mars within the next decade.
Peter Smith feels pretty certain we’ll be finding life on Mars within the next decade.
Smith, the University of Arizona professor who led NASA’s Phoenix Mars Mission, made his predictions to a spellbound audience during a lecture at the University of Delaware earlier this month, and he discussed his ideas by phone on Thursday. He carries a “sense of optimism” about finding life on Mars, he said, because of the tantalizing clues Phoenix sent to Earth.
“Finding life on Mars would be one of the great discoveries of all time,” he said. “We’re not that far away. The next mission could be the one.”
Phoenix launched in August of 2007 and spent five months in one spot, controlled by Smith and his Tucson-based crew who directed it to dig and analyze soil samples from an area about the size of a couch.
Mars’ closest corollary on Earth is the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, Smith said. Although no life was discovered on Mars by Phoenix, tiny organisms inhabit the soils of Antarctica’s Dry Valleys, including a predatory nematode about a sixteenth of an inch long.
“Phoenix got me excited because it’s really the next step beyond the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. In the coldest places in the Dry Valleys … nobody thought anything would live there.”
Last week, scientists announced the discovery of a biological community living in dark, oxygen-deprived briny pool beneath a glacier near Dry Valleys.
“The idea is on Mars, it’s probably much too cold right now, but in the recent past, the climate has been different,” he said. “It might have been closer to the Dry Valleys during those times. We’re looking at a situation where this may be a periodically habitable zone.”
Some of the Phoenix team members believe liquid water was photographed on the lander’s legs, but Smith isn’t one of them. Still, he admits that Phoenix sent back hints of life that have him on the edge of his seat.
“Martian soil is really sticky and clumpy,” Smith said, noting that the probe would get a scoop of soil to pour into its ovens for chemistry experiments, but it would take four days of shaking to get the soil through the screens.
“Many times it takes liquid water to make the soils clumpy like that,” he said, adding the clumpiness could be a result of electrostatic forces.
Phoenix found calcium carbonate in the Martian soil, which typically requires liquid water in its formation process. It saw clouds and falling snow.
Another experiment, the HiRise camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, spotted near-surface ice as far as 40 degrees latitude, “whereas we thought it was cutting off around 60 degrees,” he said.
And Smith pointed out the recent discovery of methane on Mars. “Where in the heck does methane come from?” he mused. “On Earth, it’s linked with biological functions.”
Besides active volcanoes — which are not known to exist on Mars — another terrestrial source of methane is a mineralization process that happens at tectonic plate boundaries. But he said that doesn’t match what we know about Martian geology either.
On the other hand, “If you had fractures in the soil, and the fractures went down to a wet environment, you could have a biological community down there,” Smith said.
The Phoenix mission was a collaboration of numerous agencies and academic institutions besides the University of Arizona, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver and scientific institutes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Switzerland.
The mission outlasted its expected time limits by several months, but went into a possibly permanent “Sleeping Beauty” mode when Martian winter hit. It won’t awaken until October if it awakens at all.
Smith said the next mission, the Mars Science Laboratory, will include a large rover the size of a MINI-Cooper, with big tires, that would last at least five years and land near an area of high interest, such as the edge of a canyon.
“I think the next decade is a very active time for searching for signatures on Mars,” he said, “and my personal belief is we’ll find them.”
Sources: Eurekalert and an interview with Peter Smith
Can internal 'brain music' be used in therapy?
Από New Scientist:
17:07 24 April 2009 by Colin Barras
17:07 24 April 2009 by Colin Barras
Does the brain naturally compose melodies to rival those by Mozart or Chopin? Researchers at the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) think so. What's more, they suggest that piano renditions of an individual's cerebral music can help in dealing with insomnia and fatigue in the aftermath of a stressful experience. Psychologists, however, are sceptical of their claims.
The DHS researchers on the TechSolutions programme and in the Human Factors/Behavior Science Division hope to record the brain's natural activity during periods of calm or alertness. Human Bionics – a company specialising in neurotraining in Purcellville, Virginia – will convert the signal into an audible polyphonic melody. Individuals will be asked to listen to the tracks at various times during the day to either soothe the nerves or improve concentration levels.
Such technology was requested by local firefighters, coast guards, bomb squads and others working within the DHS, says DHS science spokesman John Verrico.
Listen to an alertness track, which DHS researchers suggest has a "Mozart sound", or try the "melodic, subdued Chopin sonata" relaxing track.
Lawrence Parsons, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield, UK, thinks the proposed work taps into a number of well-established research areas. "But I don't think they have a clue about what they're trying to do," he adds.
A little mood music
Biofeedback involves taking signals from the body and playing them back to individuals to affect their performance. "It's been used on and off for 20 years," says Parsons. In 2004 Fumiko Hoeft and colleagues at Stanford University showed that recording brain activity using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and then playing it back to volunteers helped them control pain. There are even proposals to use the biofeedback effect in the next generation of computer games.
"But the idea of making music from the brain and playing it back to an individual to recreate the original mood is crazy," Parsons says.
Instead, he thinks it's likely that the proposed mood-altering powers of the music are due not because the melodies emerge from the individual's brain, but simply because they are melodies in the first place. "If you're looking at music modulating someone's emotions, then lots of studies show that," he says. There is ongoing research to test the claims of music therapists.
Verrico thinks that underestimates personal taste in music. "Some people can listen to first chords of Pachelbel's Canon and feel their eyelids getting heavy, but others can listen to the whole thing without an impact," he says. "This study is more personalised that traditional music therapy because it's designed to sync up to what activates the individual's brain."
Key signatures
But Ulman Lindenberger, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, thinks that the brain is unlikely to respond particularly to its own music. Part of the problem is that converting the brain waves to an audible melody would likely strip the signal of its signature, leaving the individual unaware that the music is their own. That music might impact mood, but it's "highly questionable whether the effects would be any different if it was [from] the same person's brain or some other brain," says Lindenberger.
Parsons says that unless volunteers in the experiments are not told the provenance of the music they are played, yet another well-known phenomenon could be at work. "It sounds like a big fat placebo effect," he says. The placebo effect can produce powerful outcomes in treatment, and DHS researchers must be careful to guard against it influencing their studies, says Parsons.
While the study has some degree of coherency, "the researchers are mixing [a number of theoretical ideas] into a brood that makes no sense," says Parsons.
Bionic penguins take to the water – and the skies
Από New Scientist:
17:15 21 April 2009 by Colin Barras
The graceful robotic penguins in the video above were unveiled by German engineering firm Festo this week.
Using their flippers, the mechanical penguins can paddle through water just like real ones, while larger helium-filled designs can "swim" through the air. The penguins are on show at the Hannover Messe Trade Exhibition in Germany.
Each penguin carries 3D sonar developed by EvoLogics in Berlin, Germany, which is used to monitor its surroundings and avoid collisions with walls or other penguins.
Head turning
The bionic penguins can twist and turn almost as gracefully as their living counterparts because of the flexible glass fibre rods that control their heads.
The fibres are arranged around the side of each penguin's head, while motors inside the body pull on one or more of them to twist the penguin's neck in any direction and guide the swimmer, says Markus Fischer, who heads Festo's corporate design team.
That design has industrial applications, says Fischer. It has been adapted by Festo to make a flexible, trunk-like arm with a gripper on the end for use in industrial applications. The arm can twist up to 90° in any direction, giving it an unrivalled degree of dexterity.
Engineers are increasingly gaining inspiration from nature – earlier this year, a European-wide research group began work on a bionic octopus
A year ago, Festo used the same exhibition to unveil realistic swimming robot jellyfish.
Robots are narrowing the gap with humans
Από McClatchy:
By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Robots are gaining on us humans.
Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people.
Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.
Nevertheless, robots guided by their own computer "brains'' now can pick up and peel bananas, land jumbo jets, steer cars through city traffic, search human DNA for cancer genes, play soccer or the violin, find earthquake victims or explore craters on Mars.
At a "Robobusiness" conference in Boston last week, companies demonstrated a robot firefighter, gardener, receptionist, tour guide and security guard.
You name it, a high-tech wizard somewhere is trying to make a robot do it.
A Japanese housekeeping robot can move chairs, sweep the floor, load a tray of dirty dishes in a dishwasher and put dirty clothes in a washing machine.
Intel, the worldwide computer-chip maker, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed a self-controlled mobile robot called Herb, the Home Exploring Robotic Butler. Herb can recognize faces and carry out generalized commands such as "please clean this mess," according to Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer.
In a talk last year titled "Crossing the Chasm Between Humans and Machines: the Next 40 Years,'' the widely respected Rattner lent some credibility to the often-ridiculed effort to make machines as smart as people.
"The industry has taken much greater strides than anyone ever imagined 40 years ago," Rattner said. It's conceivable, he added, that "machines could even overtake humans in their ability to reason in the not-so-distant future.''
Programming a robot to perform household chores without breaking dishes or bumping into walls is hard enough, but creating a truly intelligent machine still remains far beyond human ability.
Artificial intelligence researchers have struggled for half a century to imitate the staggering complexity of the brain, even in creatures as lowly as a cockroach or fruit fly. Although computers can process data at lightning speeds, the trillions of ever-changing connections between animal and human brain cells surpass the capacity of even the largest supercomputers
"One day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence,'' wrote Rodney Brooks, a robot designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. "But how and when we will get there — and what will happen after we do — are now the subjects of fierce debate.''
"We're in a slow retreat in the face of the steady advance of our mind's children,'' agreed Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. "Eventually, we're going to reach the point where everybody's going to say, 'Of course machines are smarter than we are.' ''
"The truly interesting question is what happens after if we have truly intelligent robots,'' Saffo said. "If we're very lucky, they'll treat us as pets. If not, they'll treat us as food.''
Some far-out futurists, such as Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and technology evangelist in Wellesley Hills, a Boston suburb, predict that robots will match human intelligence by 2029, only 20 years from now. Other experts think that Kurzweil is wildly over-optimistic.
According to Kurzweil, robots will prove their cleverness by passing the so-called "Turing test.'' In the test, devised by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, a human judge chats casually with a concealed human and a hidden machine. If the judge can't tell which responses come from the human and which from the machine, the machine is said to show human-level intelligence.
"We can expect computers to pass the Turing test, indicating intelligence indistinguishable from that of biological humans, by the end of the 2020s,'' Kurzweil wrote in his 2005 book, "The Singularity Is Near.''
To Kurzweil, the "singularity'' is when a machine equals or exceeds human intelligence. It won't come in "one great leap,'' he said, "but lots of little steps to get us from here to there.''
Kurzweil has made a movie, also titled "The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future,'' that's due in theaters this summer.
Intel's Rattner is more conservative. He said that it would take at least until 2050 to close the mental gap between people and machines. Others say that it will take centuries, if it ever happens.
Some eminent thinkers, such as Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive scientist, Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel, and Mitch Kapor, a leading computer scientist in San Francisco, doubt that a robot can ever successfully impersonate a human being.
It's "extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation,'' Kapor said. "While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning 'Jeopardy' — since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them — it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or . . . have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do.''
Nevertheless, roboticists are working to make their mechanical creatures seem more human. The Japanese are particularly fascinated with "humanoid'' robots, with faces, movements and voices resembling their human masters.
A fetching female robot model from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology lab in Tsukuba, Japan, sashays down a runway, turns and bows when "she'' meets a real girl.
"People become emotionally attached'' to robots, Saffo said. Two-thirds of the people who own Roombas, the humble floor-sweeping robots, give them names, he said. One-third take their Roombas on vacation.
At a technology conference last October in San Jose, Calif., Cynthia Breazeal, an MIT robot developer, demonstrated her attempts to build robots that mimic human and social skills. She showed off "Leonardo,'' a rabbity creature that reacts appropriately when a person smiles or scowls.
"Robot sidekicks are coming,'' Breazeal said. "We already can see the first distant cousins of R2D2," the sociable little robot in the "Star Wars" movies.
Other MIT researchers have developed an autonomous wheelchair that understands and responds to commands to "go to my room'' or "take me to the cafeteria.''
So far, most robots are used primarily in factories, repeatedly performing single tasks. The Robotics Institute of America estimates that more than 186,000 industrial robots are being used in the United States, second only to Japan. It's estimated that more than a million robots are being used worldwide, with China and India rapidly expanding their investments in robotics.
Turkey’s dark intentions
Από το History of Macedonia
Christopher Hitchens | April 23, 2009
Christopher Hitchens | April 23, 2009
THE most underreported story of the month must surely be the announcement by French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner that he no longer supports the accession of Turkey as a full member of the European Union.
His reasoning was very simple and intelligible, and it has significant implications for the Barack Obama “make nice” school of diplomacy.
At a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, in the first week of April, it had been considered a formality that the alliance would vote to confirm Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former prime minister of Denmark, as its new secretary-general. But very suddenly, the Turkish delegation threatened to veto the appointment. The grounds of Turkey’s opposition were highly significant.
Most important, they had to do with the publication of some cartoons in a Danish newspaper in 2005 lampooning the Prophet Mohammed. In spite of an organised campaign of violence and boycott against his country, and in spite of a demand by a delegation of ambassadors from supposedly “Islamic” states, Rasmussen consistently maintained that Danish law did not allow him to interfere with the Danish press.
Years later, resentment at this position led Turkey - which is under its own constitution not an “Islamic” country - to use the occasion of a NATO meeting to try again to interfere with the internal affairs of a member state.
The second ground of Turkey’s objection is also worth noting: a television station on Danish soil broadcasts, in the Kurdish language, to Kurds in Turkey and elsewhere. The government in Ankara, which evidently believes that all European governments are as untrammelled as itself, brusquely insists that Denmark do what Turkey would do and simply shut the transmitter down.
Once again unclear on the concepts of the open society and the rule of law - if the station is sympathetic to terrorism, as Ankara alleges, there are procedures to be followed - the Turkish authorities attempt a fiat that simply demands that others do as they say.
The implications of all this, as Kouchner stated in an interview, are extremely serious. “I was very shocked by the pressure that was brought on us,” he said.
“Turkey’s evolution in, let’s say, a more religious direction, towards a less robust secularism, worries me.”
This is to put it in the mildest possible way. It’s not just a matter of a Turkish political party undermining Turkey’s own historic secularism. It is a question of Turkey trying to impose its Islamist and chauvinist policies on another European state, and indeed on the whole NATO alliance.
And if this is how it behaves before it has been admitted to the EU, has it not invited us all to guess how it would behave when it had a veto power in those councils?
For contrast, one might mention the example of re-united federal Germany, easily the strongest economic power in the EU, which painstakingly adjusted itself to its neighbours - to the extent of giving up even the deutsche mark for the euro - and adopted the slogan “not a Germanised Europe but a Europeanised Germany”.
With Turkey, it seems the reverse is the case. Its troops already occupy one-third of the territory of an EU member (Cyprus), and now it exploits its NATO membership to try to bully one of the smaller nations with which it is supposed to be conjoined in a common defence.
For good measure, it continues to be ambiguous about its recognition of the existence of another non-Turkish people - the Kurds - within its frontiers.
President Obama’s emollient gifts were on display at the NATO summit, where he eventually persuaded the Turks to withhold their veto on the appointment of Rasmussen. Accounts differ as to the price of this deal, but a number of plum jobs and positions now appear to have been awarded to Turkish nominees.
Much more important, however, the foreign minister of France has reversed his previous position and has now said: “It’s not for the Americans to decide who comes into Europe or not. We are in charge in our own house.”
Put it like this: Obama’s “quiet diplomacy” has temporarily conciliated the Turks while perhaps permanently alienating the French and has made it more, rather than less, likely that the American goal of Turkish EU membership will now never be reached. And this is the administration that staked so much on the idea of renewing our credit on the other side of the Atlantic.
This evidently can’t be done with sweetness alone.
On the question of Turkey’s accession, I used to be able to make either case. Admitting the Turks could lead to the modernisation of the country, whereas exclusion could breed resentment and instability and even a renewal of pseudo-Ataturkist military rule. On the other hand, admission would put the frontiers of Europe up against Iran and Iraq and the volatile Caucasus, so that instead of being a “bridge” between East and West (to use the unvarying cliche), Turkey would become a tunnel.
The Strasbourg crisis clarifies the entire picture and should make us grateful to have been warned in such a timely fashion. Turkey wants all the privileges of NATO and EU membership but also wishes to continue occupying Cyprus, denying Kurdish rights and lying about the Armenian genocide.
On top of this, it now desires to act as a proxy for Islamisation and dares to waste the time of a defensive alliance in trying to censor the press of another member state.
Kouchner was quite right to speak out as he did, and the Turkish authorities will now be able to blame the failure of their membership scheme not on the unsleeping plots of their enemies, but on the belated awakening of their former friends.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Source: The Australian
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