Czech president Václav Klaus will celebrate his 70th birthday in two weeks. If you need some contacts to the Prague Castle where he works, for example because you wanted to send a gift, here they are.(The photograph is genuine, not edited. Klaus wanted to provide the people with some data to decide whether he and Santa Claus are the same person.)
Our leader, a well-known climate skeptic, has previously recommended Australian prime minister Julia Gillard to listen to the true climate change experts who live in her country, e.g. Bob Carter in particular.
The Australian and Monsters and Critics have already figured out what her reaction will be. Dear Australian readers, your prime minister won't meet our president after he completes his 16,000-kilometer flight! Her obsession with the global warming hoax is so intense that she is going to put the Australian-Czech relationships at risk.
(But calculate how many pounds of CO2 will be emitted by the aircraft - and no results!)
And she is not the only one in the land of kangaroos. Even though, with all due respect, Australia probably doesn't have any politician of Klaus' caliber, they will obey what the group think requires. And when it comes to questions such as the hypothetical global warming threat, the group think is controlling much of the Australian nation. Gold Coast Mail have reported that global warming skeptics are an endangered species in Australia, perhaps more so than the polar bears (in Australia). ;-)
Unlike polar bears, the global warming skeptics won't make the Australian politically correct activists abandon their wealth and jobs in order to save the species a from extinction: after all, it's just a human species so why should they care? Humans are just a waste so their species may go extinct, right? Only brave Australian citizens may openly admit the obvious - that they would like to meet Klaus themselves.
The article in the Australian above has also quoted your humble correspondent's translation of a noted statement by Klaus (from a 2007 interview) in which he explains why politicians are afraid to say what they really think about the global warming: it's because the whip of political correctness strangles their voices. Well, some of them have already become genuine global warming proponents because the whip of political correctness has stopped the inflow of fresh blood into their brains.
Andrew Bolt explains why he thinks that Gillard is terrified by the idea that she would meet Klaus.
Things are very different in Czechia where only 28 percent of the population think that global warming is a problem worth talking about. While President Klaus is special - and deviates from the average - in many respects, usually in the direction that may be interpreted as "up" :-), basic attitudes such as the global warming skepticism are actually echoed by the bulk of our society.
But should one admit that people have different opinions that should be confronted before the direction of the society and the conditions of the citizens' co-existence is re-adjusted? I think that Klaus himself would never create tension with another problem-free country just because he disagrees with their leader about something. After all, if it were the case, he would probably never meet (almost) any foreign politician. ;-) But of course, Klaus enjoys meetings with Obama and many others who can't exactly be classified as Klaus' natural ideological soulmates. Because almost all of my countrymates think that he is doing a great job in these "formal" parts of his job, but also because of other reasons, his approval rate remains high.
What the Australian politicians are doing is wrong, wrong, and wrong, and it constitutes some indirect evidence that Australia is gradually ceasing to be a free democratic society. It is a society where politicians and citizens are expected to pay lip service to any myth that becomes fashionable at a given moment, otherwise they face troubles that makes their lives measurably constrained and they are being threatened with extinction. In this sense, I think that the unpopular comparison with Germany of the mid 1930s is completely legitimate and important. Climate non-conformist recalls some other brutal stories about "how they don't really like us".
The speech codes are being imposed publicly. In anonymous polls, things are less obvious. For example, 3/4 of the Australians realize that Gillard's carbon tax would reduce their living standards. However, a slight majority thinks that the Australian carbon tax would have some impact on the environment. Well, about a few millidegrees of cooling per century - while it's unclear whether it's a good or bad thing even in Australia.
