My thoughts on Obama and Socialism

Obama's Neo-soviet poster lampooned...

my little satire on Socialism:

Our Father who is in the democrat party,
Protect us from the great Ecopalypse of the prophet Gore (he who hath a private jet and many mansions).
And stop the rising of the seas with your charm and presence,
Cleanse us of our sins of Wealth and Success
of Clean streets and Mc Donalds
of low infant mortality
and opportunity to improve ourselves and rise from the gutter

Pray, let us all be equal in mediocrity and low pay
in underachievement and simmering resentment of those who remain still richer,
more gifted or hard-working than us
And lead us not into wealth or self-love
Help us surrender to our enemies,
domestic and international
And flagellate ourselves for being imperfect
and bow before wonderfully sordid and cruel dictators
who have the courage of our lack of convictions.

And let us not liberate nations from cruel despots,
but let us celebrate them as examples of diversity,
cruelty and death,
misogyny, feudalism and hatred.
and lead us not into light and truth and joy
but into murkiness and relativism and cynisism
And may our death-wish be realised
and all of us be equal
in an amorphous mass of misery for All !
Amen

If you consider yourself a socialist, don't take this personally - I differentiate between people and ideas. I attack the idea, not the person. Feel free to shoot down the free-market - I can take it.

It's a bit strange that Obama is blaming the Financial crisis on the Bush administration, when in fact Bush and others warned about Fannie & Freddie undercapitalization back in 2003; And it was groups such as Obama's ACORN which pressured banks into dangerous lending. He's a smooth talker and at times a blatant liar (eg above) ...

If he ever does realize his dream of being the New Messiah (says Oprah) and changing murdering dictators into reasonable and civilized people by sheer force of his charm and divinity over a cup of tea and a biscuit;

They will take him for a fool (just as Hitler took Chamberlain for a fool and was emboldened to invade Poland, and Stalin deceived FDRoosevelt) and run circles around him. Diplomacy is more about leverage (military power and the will to use it) than empty talk and charm. most of the world is rather less civilized than a Chicago coffee shop or a Harvard debate.

An electrician, supermarket executive or similar would be better suited to the job of presidency given the haughty narcissism and ethereal ungrounded naivete of the Harvard crowd (and sadly, most of Academia these days).
he is also an messianic idol, worshipped by pagans who are filling a need they have for the Divine, which they have thrown out with the bathwater in their Brave New Secular anti-Jesus World. Problem is, he is beholden to no superior divine power – he is a God unto himself (We are the change we’ve been waiting for – goes the motto of his followers).

A bit like in France where the State has replaced God and is supposed to be all-wise and infallible, when in fact French technocrats know bugger-all about market economics and big state firms regularly go bankrupt.

Change ? tax and spend Socialism isn’t change – it’s a well-established social and economic failure, compared to low tax and regulations states, everywhere it’s been established. And the more “pure” it is, the worse the results (see Zimbabwe for the result of redistributing properties to the poor and Mugabe’s friends).

If he does get in, I hope he's a fast learner, and that not too many countries have to be invaded by ambitious dictators before he realises the true rough and tumble nature of world politics.

May he apply his socialism to the full so that it fails dismally, so that we can be rid of the idea once and for all (until the next group amnesia), that state-coerced utopianism and state-driven economies have anything to offer us.

Sub-prime Mortgages foisted on banks by Clinton

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was pushed hard by Bill Clinton, although it originated under Jimmy Carter. Asked about it the other day on one of the morning TV talk shows, Clinton said times back then were different. Fannie and Freddie had lots of money and he (in his infinite wisdom) decided that the money should not go to share holders or to executive compensation, but should be used to put the poor into homes.

As you can imagine, wonderful things happen when the government strong arms corporations as to how they should spend their money and, better yet, how they should assess the qualifications of home buyers. So the country's biggest buyers of mortgages were pressured into lowering the qualifications of applicants, in order to increase the percentage of poor that got mortgages. By 2006, 30% of all mortgages went to people who in any other circumstances wouldn't qualify.

The Bush administration in 2003 tried to change the system, to no avail. Congressman Barney Frank, (D, MA ) was in the forefront of stopping the Bush proposal to take control out of Fannie and Freddie and put it into a third overseeing organization. Frank too has emerged in the current crisis as one of the major critics of the administration.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan continued to raise the alarm over Fannie's and Freddie's weak capitalization. His concerns were ignored.

The best thing that can emerge from the current financial crisis is the realization that the government needs to stop directing economic decision making. In a sense, the government is putting out a fire it started when it both created the CRA and assessed lending institutions by how well they were doing in response to the program. When Clinton decided, in his usual arrogance, that he knew better than the market how banks should lend money, the seeds were sown for the current financial disaster.

full article here

Europe the Sinking Titanic V. Putin the Poisoner

I post these things in the hope that my drop in the ocean may contribute to the waking up of Europeans... and those who naively wish to Europeanise Australia or their own country. massive welfare, no guiding moral compass and no understanding of the dangerousness of the world (Putin, Saddam etc) is a recipe for suicide.
As it was in the 1930s when Hitler rose to power confronted with pacifist European nations.

Those of you who live in Europe (you know who you are) be warned - if drastic attitude changes are not made, the future of Europe in a decade will be about as attractive as the present of Beirut.
I would advise those who can to immigrate, en masse... maybe this will wake up the Elites and useful idiots like John Le Carre and Chirac. But I doubt it. They will continue with the same tired old slogans "war is not the answer", "all cultures are equal" , "If the US unilaterally withdraws from (fill the gap -south Korea, Irak, supporting Israel, protecting international sea lanes, protecting Taiwan and the rest of free asia and Australasia...) then the opposition will drop their arms and walk home" . And Rome will burn while they play their violins.

All of former Soviet colonies are under barrel of the gun again, and they can feel that old familiar chill going up their spines. The peoples of Poland, the Ukraine and Georgia are not looking to France, Germany or Britain for help. There is no help to be found there. They are just looking to the United States. Europe's failure to grow up as a responsible power, able and willing to protect its own Eastern neighbors, is a profound betrayal of its own best values, not to mention its own self-destructive history.

President Saakashvili of Georgia said it: "Who else can stand up for liberty in the world?" He was talking about the United States. But that's giving Europe a pass they don't deserve. Europe has all the means to stand up for liberty in the world. What they lack is the guts, the crucial will to defend themselves and their fellow members of the European Union. The welfare state has siphoned off the money needed for a working European military. It has also sapped the will to survive. Britain's supine surrender to Iran's kidnapping of half a dozen sailors under the very guns of a British warship tells the whole story. Queen Victoria would be rightly ashamed. (...)

Now Putin is a classic bully, who keeps testing the limits of his power. So he started with killing his domestic opponents, assassinating journalists, nationalizing industries, and chilling the Russian media. Small stuff. Then he proceeded to poison KGB traitors in London and Ireland, trying to kill the Ukraine's President Yushchenko, and invading Georgia. Those are only the high points; behind the scenes you can bet there's a lot more.

After every Russian shove Europe backs down. Worse than that, it let itself to be bought off. The worst example is our friend former Chancellor Herr Gerhardt Schroeder, who got himself a top job with Russia's Gazprom energy company right after he passed a sell-out energy treaty through the German parliament. That'll teach Putin how to deal with Europe. ( I thought it was Bush who was after money - silly me).

Whatever Europe does it does partly out of fear, partly out of calculation, and partly out of vanity. The vanity part burst out at the United States after the Cold War --- which, remember, crunched all those imperial egos in Paris and Berlin, London, Stockholm and Brussels. European capitals have been the center of an empire; they cherish an imperial past and indulge in sheer self-puffery. Moscow, London, Berlin, Paris -- Europe's grandiosity is amazing. So they secretly hated being dominated by the dumb Americans for the whole Cold War, even if it saved their necks. If you doubt it, just read British spy novelists like Graham Greene and John Le Carre, both seething leftie America-haters who used to work in the Brit government.

Our media and Democrats may not remember this, but seven years ago the United States was attacked by Islamofascist terrorists, who killed nearly 3,000 people in NYC and DC. NATO is a mutual defense pact, which translates as "we help you and you help us." NATO has kept Europe secure for sixty years. But it's all been one-way -- we've defended them with the Berlin Airlift, by building up European armies, in proxy wars in the Middle East, Korea and Vietnam, and in finally by getting the Soviets to let go of their European colonies, when Ronald Reagan gently pushed them into a nervous breakdown. We've done our share. What did Europe do after 9/11? Other than raging at the victim?

Well, here's an honest European's opinion, Matthias Doepfner, the CEO of the Axel-Springer publishing group:

"These days, Europe reminds me of an old woman who, with shaking hands, frantically hides her last pieces of jewellery when she notices a robber breaking into a neighbour's house. Appeasement? That is just the start of it. Europe, thy name is Cowardice."

source for these extracts.

Links between Nazism, Marxism and Islam

posters:

1: dutch NAzi poster: " with Germany against Capitalism"

2: The British Nazi Mosley, talking about "peace"... ie surrender to fascist Germany ... mmmm - reminds me of the current "peace" protesters who are against the fight against islamo-fascism.

NAZI party:
National Socialist German Workers' Party

note the use of "Socialist" - also present in Stalin's hellhole USSR, Fidel Castro's failed utopia,
and recently, Saddam Hussein's Bath party - the nazis of the middle east.

Could this explain the sympathy of leftists with Saddam ? ... Socialism, by other means...

I wonder how many greens and left wingers today realise how close their ideas are to that of the Nazis ?....most would be horrified to see that they have many points in common.

The greens in particular have several points in common with Nazism: hatred of the USA, anti-capitalism, a desire to use eugenics to kill of "undesirables", a pagan worshipping of nature, a desire to impose utopian collectivism , by force if necessary; a belief in top-down totalitarian control imposed by a so-called "elite" (ie not democracy).

The last quality is becomming evident in Europe, with the attempt to impose the "EUSSR" (a book exists comparing the EU to the USSR).

The recent moral alliance of islamic terrorists and leftists around the world, against their common enemy, the USA and normal societies everywhere, says a lot about left-wingers these days. There was a time they were humanitarian (Truman, JFK) not anymore. The party of death, I call them.

Although Hitler and the other Nazis waged relentless war on Christianity, required that members of the SS formally renounce their Christian faith, mocked not just the tenets of Christianity but Jesus himself, Hitler and the Nazis had no problem with Islam. Hitler said in 1943 that Nazis could be Moslems and could be Nazis.

Himmler hated Christianity but he liked Islam. He met and liked the Grand Mufti. Hitler met that Moslem leader as well. Obergruppenfuhrer Gottlob Berger boasted: “A link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East.” When Hitler came to power, Jajj Amin el-Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem called for jihad to eliminate all the Jews in Palestine. Moslems were recruited and volunteered to serve in the SS Handzar Division. Moslems even helped run the ghastly Jasenovac concentration camp, where over 10,000 Jews and over 40,000 Christians were murdered by the Nazis and their Islamic allies. Persian Shiite Moslems speculated that Hitler might be the Twelfth Prophet of Islam.

(...)

The Nazis viewed Islam with sympathy but viewed Christianity and Judaism with hatred. The Nazi attitude was the totalitarian attitude of other evil empires. Leninist Russia and later Stalinist Russia did not view Islam so much as a religion as a liberating revolutionary political movement. While the Cheka, OGPU and odious descendants (KGB) raided, harassed and closed churches and synagogues, these secret police organs left mosques alone.

read more here.

Technocracy versus "blossoming of many Flowers"

Virginia Postrel has an interesting book - above.
She argues that the old "left" and "right" politcal divisions are becoming divisions between "stasists" and "Dynamists". Ie the greens, anti-free traders etc versus people (like me) who see great benefits from unregulated spontaneous experimentation and creation, with the market (ie the aggregate decisions of the public) deciding which methods, companies and products stay and which are discarded.

Examples of technocracy: The minitel in France - govmt organized. Quickly overtaken by the superior unplanned Internet and WWW.
Also : France's "plan informatique" in the 90s to subsidies local computer manufacturers versus
Toshiba - launching dozens of laptops and keeping on manufacturing the ones that were successful.

French style technocratic planning sucks, big time. Nothing exciting or groundbreaking has ever come from it, that I know of.

Imagine having a technocrat deciding for you which slimming diet was "best", or which laptop design was "best". How pompous, elitist and unrealistic.

That we are stuck with bad public education is not surprising given the massive centralization of that effort.

True to its Progressive Era origins, the pure technocratic vision combines the frisson of futurism—a combination of excitement and fear—with the reassurance that some authority will make everything turn out right. In 1984, amid the personal computer revolution, Newt Gingrich marveled at its creativity, but he worried that such uncoordinated enterprise lacked the focus necessary for national greatness. "These developments are individually striking," he wrote. "Taken together, they form a kaleidoscope that is difficult to develop into a coherent picture. Yet it is by sweeping dreams that societies shape themselves."

For technocrats, a kaleidoscope of trial-and-error innovation is not enough; decentralized experiments lack coherence. "Today, we have an opportunity to shape technology," wrote Gingrich in classic technocratic style (emphasis added). His message was that computer technology is too important to be left to hackers, hobbyists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and computer buyers. "We" must shape it into a "coherent picture." That is the technocratic notion of progress: Decide on the one best way, make a plan, and stick to it. Looking for a model, Gingrich had kind words for the French Minitel system of terminals run by the state phone company—a centrally administered system whose rigidity has stifled Internet development in France.

In recent years, Gingrich has become more skeptical—and so has the rest of the country. In 1984, he expressed his enthusiasm for space exploration in demands for new heroic technocratic programs like the moon landing. By 1995, he was musing about the great things that could happen "if we got the government out of the business of designing space shuttles and space stations....The challenge for us is to get government and bureaucracy out of the way and put scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and adventurers back into the business of exploration and discovery." Far from creating a promising future, technocracy had stifled its spontaneous evolution.

full article:

http://www.dynamist.com/tfaie/index-excerptB.html

"Irak the model" on Nuclear weapons

From "Irak the Model" - a blog by an Iraki dentist - an inside view into Irak from an educated Iraki:

Irakis comment on the idea of an arab country acquiring Nuclear weapons:

"Besides the fact that nuclear programs place a heavy burden on the weak economies of Arab countries, harming the poor day in and day out…I indeed do not feel safe when I know that an Arab regime possesses such weapons because these weapons would be commanded by the desires and impulses of rulers who have been proven incompetent in anything except for repressing and impoverishing their peoples.Mo'ammar Qaddafi has been sitting on the chest of his people for 40 years, so can you imagine figure what it's going to be like when he acquires nuclear bombs? Not to mention our horrible experience with Saddam Hussein who used WMDs against his own people."Lateef Baghdadi. Baghdad/Iraq

"I wish from all my heart that Arabs get to build nuclear weapons because they will use them against one another and against their peoples-what Saddam did is the best example. Consequently this would lead to the extinction of Arabs and by that Arabs would be giving a free service to the civilized western world by ridding the world of themselves and their terror. The world will become safer."Ammar Rahmatallah. Baghdad"

,
My name is Haider Mousawi from Arabic Basra. I absolutely refuse that Arabs acquire nuclear weapons, at least for the time being, for several reasons. First, it's dangerous for them before others, as Arab rulers are not wise and might use them against one another or against themselves (just like the former rulers of my country did to their people and the region's peoples). Second, nuclear weapons could not save super powers like the USSR from collapse. Third, they are very expensive, so it's better to [spend money] fighting poverty and unemployment. Fourth, those weapons are going to be a burden on their producers in the future and fifth, a peaceful program makes more sense."Haider Mousawi. Basra,

http://iraqthemodel.blogspot.com/

Czech president on Marxist Greenies

I love nature and National Parks, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that Environmentalism today is "Marxism by other means".

And Marxism sucks death - just ask any Pole, Czech, Cuban, Vietnamese etc who has actually lived under Marxist rule, rather than played with it's ideas in a Chicago coffee-shop.

In his book, the Czech president Vaclav Klaus argues that environmentalism seeks to restrict human activities no matter the cost:

The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is no longer socialism,'' Klaus writes. ``It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.

He has written a book on the subject (click to see Amazon website on the book):

Blue Planet in Green Shackles

The EU sucks

In my opinion, the EU is death ... death of variety of economic systems in Europe, and worse, death of pride and identity and free choice in being .. British, or Greek, or Spanish..
And also a smothering extremely undemocratic and unaccountable (and corrupt) Brussels aristocracy of statist gas-bags with much too much money to spend on wasteful projects.

The vapidity of Europe also leads to extremists (eg radical Islam, le Pen) being successful in European countries, as a reaction to the anemic non-entity that is "Europe".
What does Europe stand for ? kissing Saddam Hussein's and other dictators' asses... while being corrupted by his oil for food program. And selling him tech. to make chemical weapons, and even Nuclear weapons (France).
or "everyone on some sort of welfare", strikes, I have "rights" (but no duties), reflexive and infantile and irresponsible anti-Americanism (particularly in Germany). And a complete abandonment of : securing trade routes, and thwarting saber-rattling Dictators to the US.

Let's play, renovate our churches, have art museums, pretend socialism can make people happy and prosperous, while free-loading on the US as far as defence is concerned.


If there is one place where all the people are living for today, it is the European Union. The EU has deliberately set about trying to smother the identities of its 27 member states (including Lithuania) in a set of common laws, common regulations, common ethics, a common approach to problem solving, a common view of the rest of the world. It has sought to suppress the identities of its component parts in the name of a higher identity – Europe – which turns out to be no identity at all.

No surprise, then, that Europe today increasingly finds itself troubled by a Muslim minority within its midst – now perhaps 50 million strong – that draws confidence and growing power from the sureness of its identity. Does Europe, like America, offer a higher identity to which this minority might adapt itself – even die for? It does not.

Instead, it either pretends that no problem exists, or it attacks outward manifestations of identity, like Muslim headscarves, without making any real effort to integrate Muslims into a genuine European identity that means something more than the absence of identity. Meanwhile, frank discussions of the identity issue are pushed to the neo-fascistic fringe.

full article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121305349075558959.html?mod=todays_columnists

Chinese Quake teaches Compassion ?

I was thinking when I watched the footage on TV... maybe this tragedy will make the Chinese less harsh to each other... I have heard from tourists that it was a very materialistic society, with low levels of kindness.. So this event could be transformational, like a Cancer for a high-flying businessman.

From the extract below, it seems it may even revive spirituality - extirpated violently by communism which hates religion with a vengeance (torturing Tibetan monks as an example of this). Communism aims to be the religion - the State is God, all your efforts are to please and glorify the state (or that asshole Mao).
European Socialism is not all that different in it's desires to be worshiped and to do away with religion and private initiative - just less violent.

The Sichuan earthquake not only energized him, but led to a step that, after our two decades of friendship, came as a surprise. Never before one to talk about religion, he told me he organized a private Christian service, over dinner, with eight relatives and staff members at a restaurant in Shenzhen. "We sang hymns, took turns reading from the Scriptures, and prayed for the lost people. No beer or wine on this occasion. We felt better afterwards."

"It's been 30 years of chasing after money in China," he said, striking another new note. "And people haven't paid enough attention to spiritual life. Now we Chinese have money; we must also have care and trust in each other. Because China has improved, there's a real private realm where action may be taken--we took it." This businessman in his 40s, briefly a civil servant in Beijing before coming to Harvard, links his self-reliance to a wariness of the Beijing government, frustration at its lack of transparency, and disgust at its corruption.

"If the Sichuan earthquake happened in Japan or USA, there would have been many more survivors," he said with agitation. "Our rescue rate of less than 1 in 10 was very low."In China some matters are strictly for the government. Politics is for the Communist party-state. Ordinary folk may pursue private goals. Beijing trusts the people with their money, but not with their minds. But the Sichuan earthquake, throwing everyone naked into the air, momentarily bridged the divide.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/194pzaio.asp


also from Guy Sorman:

Numerous on-site reports make it clear that the quake victims are for the most part migrant workers. That is, they are people from the countryside who had taken to the road to find jobs in workshops or small industrial plants, finding makeshift lodgings in uninhabitable and heretofore uninhabited regions. These deaths are not to be explained by supernatural causes, but by the political exploitation of impoverished peasants who have been despised and neglected by the Communist Party.Journalists on location, as well as survivors, likewise observe that the buildings first to crumble, and that killed the most victims, were public edifices – schools and hospitals. Everyone in China knows that a common form of corruption in the ranks of the Communist Party consists in economizing on materials and construction standards

.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121097707834199753.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Bush's Victories against Al-Quaeda

By aggressively denying them of safe havens (Afghanistan, Irak), by engaging them in full-on warfare when they tried to take over Irak, Bush's doctrine has worked.
Muslims are increasingly less enamoured with al-q :

Sheikh Salman al-Awdah, author of an open letter attacking bin Laden and violent jihad that has caused shockwaves across the Muslim world. The sheikhs of Anbar Province in Iraq lead a national, transsectarian movement preparing for provincial elections by the end of the year. Polling shows a widespread decline in support among Muslims for suicide bombing and for bin Laden. Fareed Zakaria observed that the number of Islamist attacks worldwide has declined precipitously since 2004.


Don't look now, but evidence of progress in the war on terror is just about everywhere. Last week CIA director Michael Hayden noted some U.S. accomplishments for the Washington Post: "Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally." USA Today: Attacks in Iraq are "down 70 percent since President Bush ordered a U.S. troop increase, or 'surge,' early last year."

The left's analysis of jihadism has been proved incorrect at every turn. It argued military power would be ineffective against the terrorists. Wrong. It argued that intervention in Iraq would energize bin Laden's movement. That movement is in shambles. The left argued Iraq was a lost cause. It isn't. The left argues that a "war on terrorism" is futile, that defeat is inevitable, because terrorism is a "tactic," not an enemy. Nonsense. President Bush has demonstrated through perseverance and (more often than not) sound policy that the war on terror can be won. And right now we're winning it.

full article here.

What Islamic Terrorists Want

A common view is that If Israel dissapeared, or Western nations got out of the middle East, Terrorism would stop. Not so - their ambitions are much larger than that, as is proven by their statements, and their actions in nations not involved in the ME or supporters of Israel.

small list of Islamofascist terror attacks:

• Buddhist monks and Christian Schoolgirls killed in Southern Thailand.
• Attacks in the Philipines
• An attempted takeover of a TV station and killing of the PM in Canada
• Attempt on the Supreme Court in Spain, after troops were withdrawn from Irak

(note that the Madrid bombing which killed 300 and were meant to kill 10 000, was planned years before Irak became an issue)

This quote from a swedish blog illustrates the real motivations of islamofascists very clearly: create the dar-al-Islam (house of Islam) : Islamic Law : in as many countries as possible, by whatever means.

Countries not yet under islamic law are the Dar-al-Harb (the house of war).

However, Fjordman has documented that Swedish Muslims called for terror attacks against Sweden even before this incident happened. This text was posted on a large Swedish Muslim forum in February 2005: "Wallahi I pray that Allah will severely punish all those who are involved in this war against Islam. And that Sweden will feel the punishment of the Mujahdiin that the USA and Spain and other countries have done for their involvement in Iraq. May Allah punish this hypocrite government, Ameen. Please give me evidence that kuffar (infidels) should NOT be allowed to kill. Why should you not be allowed to call Sweden Darul Harb (the House of War)? Ulama have stated many times that every state that does not judge according to sharia, and does not have a pact with the Muslims or is paying the Jiziya is a part of Dar ul-Harb, which is allowed to attack and their wealth permitted for all Muslims. Why not follow the example of what our Mujahid brother in Holland did with that pig Theo van Gogh? That brother's action really made a difference in the world, and because of it the Muslims now enjoy some respect and eminence among the kuffar. Sure, Muslims enjoy "protection" in Sweden as citizens. So what? There are Muslims in the USA and Israel, too, getting "protection". What difference does it make? Allah made Jihad compulsory. A Muslim has to enter fully into Islam, not just ignore issues as he feels like. This is Islam, not a lunch buffet."

see full article:

http://fjordman.blogspot.com/2005/05/is-swedish-democracy-collapsing.html

Global Warming or Global Wanking ?

graph: Global Temperature Since 900 AD. Source: UN Panel on Climate Change, 1995

picture: Headlines from the 70s warning of global cooling....

Various cuts and pastes from the net, with my comments sometimes added:

A couple questions... 1. Why were the 1930's a warmer decade that today if the planet is now warming? Might that indicate some sort of natural cycle?2. Why in the 1970's did Time warn us of entering the next ice age? 3. How do we explain previous ice ages and the warming causing the melting of the ice if it's a man-made issue? 4. Can you really call carbon a pollutant being that it's a natural element and the plant life of the earth depend on it for its very survival?!

an interview with a professor emeritus of meteorology, Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin:

Climate’s always been changing and it’s been changing rapidly at various times, and so something was making it change in the past. Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, OK?
All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.

British Channel 4 which produced the excellent film, The Global Warming Swindle, which you can view or download . . . here

ISIL's Kenyan Rep James Shikwati was featured in this documentary. He stated that attempts by the West to saddle developing countries with pathetically inadequate "green" technology like solar and wind power amounted to an attempt to block industrialization. The left's mantra he stated is: "Don't touch your oil, don't touch your coal." He went on to say that you can't operate a steel plant with solar collectors. In the same program Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, who resigned because of the outlandish demands and claims of green extremists, said that depriving developing countries of essential energies was "anti-human."

Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park author) - The case for Skeptism on global warming:

http://www.michaelcrichton.com/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html

Let's keep it scientific then: Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a theory. It is an unproven theory. What you do with theories is put them to the test with scientific observations. Let's see what data points we now have:

1) Temperatures have not surpassed 1998 (NOAA)

2) Temperatures are now trending downward since 1998 (NOAA)

3) Ocean temperatures have not risen since 2000 when the Argo buoys were launched. The buoys even show a slight decrease in ocean temperatures

4) The Arctic ice froze to February levels by December, there are 1mm more sq km than before (previous was 13mm sq km)

5) The Arctic ice is 20cm thicker than "normal"

6) All polar bear pods are stable or growing (NOAA/PBS)

7) Mount Kilimanjaro is not melting because of global warming, rather "sublimation"

8) The Antarctic is not "melting", it is growing in most places, the sloughing off at the edges is normal as the ice mass grows

9) The majority of the Antarctic is 8 degrees below "normal"

10) The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below "normal" temperatures

11) Al Gores film was just deemed "propaganda" in a court of law in the UK as many points could not be substantiated by scientists

12) It was also just reveled that some of the footage in Al's film was CGI. The ice shelf collapse was from the movie "The Day After" (ABC)

13) One of the scientists that originally thought that CO2 preceded the warming has now found with new data that the CO2 rise follows the warming (Dr David Evans)
(ie Co2 may not be a driving factor of warming).

14) Storms have become less frequent and less severe (many GW alarmists are now backtracking these earlier "theories")

15) Droughts have always happened and always will

16) The greenhouse effect is real, our small contribution to it cannot even be measured

17) Several publications, including those that are "warmist" have recently written that the "natural" cycles of the earth may "mask" AGW. Give me a break.

18) 31,000 scientist have signed a petition against AGW!

With China (1 new coal fired plant coming on line each week) and India spewing millions of tons of CO2 in to the atmosphere, along with the rest of the world increasing their CO2 "production" over the last ten years, these results should be impossible.

My comment: any efforts done in Aus. are a total waste of time and effort - given the scale of aus population compared to the 1.2 billion in China and more in India, and their rise in industrialsation, australia could dissapear of the map and it would have no effect whatsoever on GW. From the data above, all of humanity could go back to the stone age , climate change (up or down , would still occur) . WAter vapor , methane from cows and naturally occuring Co2 (94 % of atmospheric co2) are greenhouse gases.... so man-made co2 at 6% of total co2 levels is almost insignificant, and it is possible co2 isn't even a greenhouse gas (see above).

however, global warming alarmism is not neutral and falls heavily on the poor- in the west, and in developing countries who sell products to us. At one stage new house prices in Sydney were said to be going up 20% if strict legislation re warming was passed.

Solomon, author of The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud**And those who are too fearful to do so, reminds us that 32,000 scientists have now signed the "Oregon petition," which states that

"We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

As a petition signer, I would point out that science is not about debate or consensus, nor is it about provable facts. It is based on a cycle of hypotheses or theories and the experiments designed to test them. Technically, a hypothesis is never "proven" in science, a body of experimental evidence and data accumulates to strongly suggest that it is true, but all hypotheses and theories remain subject to occasional review and revision. In the case of global warming we have an apparent rise in both temperature and carbon dioxide levels, and a hypothesis that connects them. The fact that the two do not correspond well does not seem to bother the adherents of the hypothesis. In fact, they have circularly taken to citing the computer models, which are actually part of the hypothesis, as evidence for the hypothesis. The real science in this farce is scant indeed.

The public has been misled by agenda-driven activists who have helped create an apparent belief that science is like a season of American Idol, with an idea becoming truth because it is popular. Nothing could be further from the truth, and history has shown that false ideas have, on occasion, been very popular and it was due to skepticism, and a persistent lack of consensus, that better ideas eventually emerged. Charlatans have attempted to hijack science to push an agenda in the past, and they were always exposed. Unfortunately, the public's understanding of the nature of science is always a victim in these episodes.

Environmentalist David Bellamy does not believe global warming alarmists:

Ah, ice ages... those absolutely massive changes in global climate that environmentalists don't like to talk about because they provide such strong evidence that climate change is an entirely natural phenomenon.
It was round about the end of the last ice age, some 13,000 years ago, that a global warming process did undoubtedly begin.
Not because of all those Stone age folk roasting mammoth meat on fossil fuel camp fires but because of something called the 'Milankovitch Cycles,' an entirely natural fact of planetary life that depends on the tilt of the Earth's axis and its orbit around the sun.
The glaciers melted, the ice cap retreated and Stone Age man could begin hunting again. But a couple of millennia later, it got very cold again and everyone headed south. Then it warmed up so much that water from melted ice filled the English Channel and we became an island.
The truth is that the climate has been yo-yo-ing up and down ever since. Whereas it was warm enough for Romans to produce good wine in York, on the other hand, King Canute had to dig up peat to warm his people. And then it started getting warm again.
The real truth is that the main greenhouse gas - the one that has the most direct effect on land temperature - is water vapour, 99 per cent of which is entirely natural.

If all the water vapour was removed from the atmosphere, the temperature would fall by 33 degrees Celsius. But, remove all the carbon dioxide and the temperature might fall by just 0.3 per cent.

If we signed up to these scaremongers, we could be about to waste a gargantuan amount of money on a problem that doesn't exist - money that could be used in umpteen better ways: fighting world hunger, providing clean water, developing alternative energy sources, improving our environment, creating jobs.
The link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming is a myth. It is time the world's leaders, their scientific advisers and many environmental pressure groups woke up to the fact.
From:

http://www.junkscience.com/july04/Daily_Mail-Bellamy.htm

A Canadian blogger

This fellow calls his blog "I am also canadian":

extract below, plus has a big list of other Canadian bloggers.

You Might Be A Jedi CANADIAN If...

All your spacecraft have all been grounded due to the KYOTO agreement.
-You were refused a position on the Jedi council because weren't fluently bilingual.
-You believe the Death Star is only destroying planets because of its history of poverty, and if you are nice to it, it will go away.
- You decide to never use the Force in public because some people don't believe in the Force and you don't want to risk offending their unbelief.
- You see your role primarily as a peacekeeper between warring, morally equivalent, factions.

click here for the blog:

http://alsocanadian.blogspot.com/

Re-instating the Male's Warrior energy

The male principle needs to be re-established in western society, if we are to fight crime, terrorism and other ills successfully. Also so that men can be happy.... too many men are out of sync with their male archetype, not allowing themselves to be all they can be.
And so that women can be happy as well.... which woman is not attracted, openly or not to the warrior energy in a man?

You can be sure that Islamic terrorists are in contact with the shadow side of the warrior: destructive, perverse, nihilistic, misogynistic. So in the absence of warriors fighting for the good of civilization, they will succeed.
Thankfully, we have the US, which is openly a warrior nation, much to the chagrin of Europeans, academics and others who would prefer to raise the white flag to any form of fascism than to risk themselves in the dirty and dangerous business of actual fighting. Note that intellectuals have in the past, fought in the armed forces: such as George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil war in the 30s. Or the Harvard graduates who volunteered for the 101st airborne (WWII).

as OneCosmos blogger says (don't feel I'm aiming at greenies, I'm just trying to re-instate the soldier/warrior) :

In the absence of the male principle, you end up with Time Magazine conflating masculine heroism with idiot compassion for mother earth, so that feminized men may imagine that they are actually brave heroes:

Time Fights Carbon Emissions; Military Fights Evil.

It is much easier to fight global warming than to fight human evil. You will be celebrated at Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, the BBC and throughout the media world, no one will threaten your life, there are huge grants available to scientists and others who fight real or exaggerated environmental problems, and you may even receive an Academy Award and the Nobel Peace Prize. Individuals who fight Islamists get fatwas."The Time cover is cheap heroism. It is a liberal attempt to depict as equally heroic those who fight carbon emissions and those who fought Japanese fascists and Nazis.

Check out "OneCosmos"

A very well-read US shrink who blogs on philosophy, spirituality; and sometimes their connections to politics. (watch out for his withering critique of the left if you are of that temperament). I speed read his stuff as some of it is quite esoteric, but he has quite a few striking ideas. he quotes from the indian vedas, buddhism, christianity, gnostics and many others.

quotes:

Pride is to overestimate oneself and to underestimate others; and this is what the cynic does just as much as the hypocrite, in a blatant or a subtle way as the case may be.

In both cases, the outward and horizontal ego displaces the vertical spirit and the inner light, thereby misappropriating “what belongs to the spiritual soul.” Nature abhors a vacuum, while Spirit requires one. If God does not fill our existential void, then pride (among other things) necessarily rushes in to take its place. After all, it is what came before the fall -- it is what the ego tripped & felon. It was ineveateapple.

Where then the proper place for self-confidence as opposed to its faux substitutes, pride and the dreaded self-esteem? Self-confidence is faith that we can succeed and achieve a deiform excellence that transcends us, while self-esteem is the self-satisfied attitude that we already have. Confidence results from perfecting one’s God-given talents, while pride results from inflating and overestimating their value, and then claiming them for our own.

His blog:

http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/

Solar Cycle leading us towards Global Cooling ?

I've read about solar activity cycles being correlated with global ave. temps before, with a low in the 17th century (called the little ice age) - this article talks about this.
I'll be talking more about global warming (or the lack of it) in a future post.

Last December, Dr David Whitehouse noted that the apex of solar activity at the end of last century corresponded with the period's unusually high temperatures, and that temps have been flat since activity abated. He suggested we were entering a new solar cycle which would begin a period of global cooling. The Sun expert reminded readers that a similar sunspot holiday in the 17th Century (The Maunder Minimum) corresponded with the coldest and most damaging temperatures of that millennium (The Little Ice Age).

read more here.

Article on US crime rates

A detailed analysis of the US's lower crime rates:

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.13948/pub_detail.asp


Extract:

America's streets are becoming safer, even as crime has exploded in Europe. Decentralized control of policing efforts has enabled the United States to catch more criminals, while long prison sentences prevent them from striking again. European law enforcement agencies would do well to emulate those practices.

After he beat an eighty-year-old grandmother, took a mother with a stroller hostage, and robbed eleven London banks in broad daylight, Michael Wheatley was finally nabbed by British police in late April. Dubbed the Skull Cracker for his habit of pistol-whipping victims, Wheatley had transfixed the London tabloid press with a series of dramatic, violent crimes. Scared Londoners, however, had more to worry about than just the Skull Cracker: In April alone, one gang used a battering ram to steal $14,500 of merchandise from a jewelry store near the city's commercial center, another took to ramming cars into storefronts, and teenage thugs robbed pedestrians of their mobile phones all over the city. Last year, London saw more serious assaults, armed robberies, and car thefts than New York; 2002 could see London's murder rate exceed the Big Apple's.

The same pattern can be seen throughout Europe-indeed, in much of the developed world. Crime has recently hit record highs in Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Toronto, and a host of other major cities. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office (the equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice) found violent and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. American property crime rates have been lower than those in Britain, Canada, and France since the early 1990s, and violent crime rates throughout the European Union, Australia, and Canada have recently begun to equal and even surpass those in the United States. Even Sweden, once the epitome of cosmopolitan socialist prosperity, now has a crime victimization rate 20 percent higher than that of the United States.

Decreasing crime: The US model

(click on image for larger version)

I have heard people in the UK and elsewhere say "crime is getting worse, and there's nothing we can do" . Well that's bollocks - The USA is now much safer than either the UK or Australia, as the above graph shows. Many learned articles have analyzed the reasons , and they are due to a combination of factors.

Components of the US solution :

1. Gun ownership and the right to use it in self-defence, for home invasion, serious assault, car robbery etc

2. longer sentences for crimes

3. Death sentences for murderers in some states (avoids repeat murders - not uncommon in Australia)

4 . ability to elect some judges and police chiefs

5. "3 strikes and you're out" (for 20 years) to deal with people for whom prison is a temporary holiday between offences - in some states.

6. A More effective Police force: apprehension rates of 300 per 1000 crimes commited, compared to 30 per 1000 in Australia.

This article is quite revealing:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/low/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7359513.stm

extracts:

A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up."

Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.
Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.
They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.
It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.

What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.
Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.
One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.
I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.
It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.
Virginia Tech had the headlines in the last few days and reminded us of the violence for which the US is well known.
But most American lives were as peaceful on this anniversary as they are every day.

see also:

detailed analysis of the US's lower crime rates:

http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.13948/pub_detail.asp

I've always thought of gun ownership and the legal right to use them against assault or home invasion as like a Nuclear deterrent - the mere fact you can use them makes violence much less common. This is partly born out by robbery statistics in the USA - less than half of those in Australia and the UK.

Tougher sentences and 10 times higher apprehension rates (of criminals) also play a part.

Mark Steyn remarks how residents of New Hampshire leave their home doors unlocked, as well as their cars, a fact he believes is as result of gun ownership in that State.

interesting article on Brits visiting the US and being surprised by the peacefulness and lack of threat there - it's more family-friendly than either the UK or Australia... The lack of serious consequences for vicious or death-causing assaults , or home invasions in both countries is quite frightening and contributes to the creation of brash criminal class who know they can get away with anything...:

The US is the only western country to have had crime decrease in the last 10 years..

New York is a case study that could be replicated in NZ or western Sydney: in 10 years assault decreased by 70 %, homicide by 60%
....

John Hawkins: I'm hearing all sorts of horror stories about law enforcement in Britain. People are being locked up for defending their homes, the police are no longer even investigating burglaries that aren't easy to solve, & the crime rate is exploding. What is causing British law enforcement to fall apart like this?

Mark Steyn: Crime in Britain is terrible, and the worse it gets the more adamant the police are that you should be able to do nothing about it yourself. The British are different from the French and the Russians and almost every other European power in that their revolution - the British Revolution - took place overseas, in the American colonies. The British subjects who were interested in liberty won the day in the American colonies. At home, the view that "public order" should take precedence prevails to this day. When I bought my home in New Hampshire, I asked the local police chief (it's a one-man department) about what I should do in the event of an attempted break-in. He said, "Well, you could call me at home. But it'd be better if you dealt with it. You're there and I'm not." The British police would rather die than admit that. So, instead of prosecuting the burglar, they prosecute the homeowner for "disproportionate response". You're supposed to wait until the burglar has revealed his weapon before picking yours. "Ah, forgive me, old boy, for reaching for the kitchen knife. I see you've brought not a machete but a blunt instrument. Be a good sport and allow me a moment to retrieve my cricket bat from under the bed, there's a good egg." This is insane, but, despite the visible deterioration of civic life in even the leafiest suburbs and villages, the British show no sign of rousing themselves to do anything about it.

Pacifism enables thugs

thuglist: Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, The current Chinese communist party, Hezbollah....
The Mafia, your neighbourhood thug.

A good article about the illusory nature of pacifism:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/imagine_a_free_tibet.html

extract:

To all those out there with the "Free Tibet!" stickers, here are a few facts that will help the world make sense:

• There will always be bad people.
• Bad people don't care about hurting good people. Appeals to shame, empathy and guilt don't work on them. That's why they're bad people.
• Bad people respond to force. They don't like it and will change their behavior to avoid it.
• Good people need to use force to stop the bad people from hurting other good people.
  It's not the same when a good person uses force to stop a bad person as when the bad person uses it to harm a good person.
• Not letting good people use force against bad people encourages more bad behavior.
• Good people using force against bad people should be encouraged. This will make the world a better place.

To all the pacifists out there who think guns are the problem, all the moral lightweights harping about the "cycle of violence", please remember:
Guns liberated Auschwitz and violence ended slavery. The world you "imagine" is not here on Earth but in the next life, and you're really gumming things up for the rest of us by confusing the two.

Free Tibet - Hell yes! But to whom do we send the weapons?