Monthly Archives: November 2014

Obama knows so little about so much

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This is what you don’t get in the mainstream press in the United States:

THE Queensland government, as host of last weekend’s G20 ­summit, is incensed over what it sees as an ill-informed, insulting speech from Barack Obama about climate change, the Great Barrier Reef and coal.

The idea that there might be an ounce of honesty in what Obama says or does is one of those myths that will not die. He has only one ambition, which is to do down our way of life and wreck it as comprehensively as he can. His mentor was Saul Alinski, his closest associate was the “weatherman” Bill Ayers, and he sat in the front pew of Reverend Wright’s church for twenty years. And if that doesn’t convince you, why don’t you just look at his economic, immigration, defence and foreign policies. Is it just chance, do you think, that every single thing he has done has made matters worse?

I only wish that being insulting and ill-informed was the worst of it. It is also interesting to see the issue of climate change and energy come up in this same story.

Tony Abbott told the G20 session that the “four-fifths” of the ­developed world that had used fossil fuels for economic growth could not now deny “the other fifth” ­access to coal to generate electricity for the hundred million people who were without it.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi picked up on the theme yesterday in his speech to federal parliament, calling for new-generation energy “that does not cause our glaciers to melt”. . . .

French President Francois Hollande, the host of the Paris climate change conference next year, spoke for eight minutes exclusively on climate change. Mr Modi talked of the need for access to electricity for the world’s poor.

Meanwhile the ill-informed President of the United States brought this message with him:

Mr Obama said on Saturday that climate change “here in ­Australia” means “longer droughts, more wildfires” and “the incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened”.

He knows so little about so much.

The consequences of a Keynesian stimulus

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These are really 15 consequences of using a Keynesian stimulus to turn your economy around. Wasteful spending blows your productivity on useless junk while passing purchasing power over to the people on the receiving end of government payments who almost never create value with the funds they receive. The genius is that while our political elites help out their friends, they can pretend they are doing it all to help the people who they harm the most. This is a depressing list, which the linked article goes into with some depth.

1: Wage Stagnation.

2: Most people still haven’t recouped what they lost in the crash: Typical Household Wealth Has Plunged 36% Since 2003.

3: Most working people are still living hand-to-mouth.

4: Millennials are Drowning in Red Ink.

5: Downward mobility is the new reality.

6: People are more vulnerable than ever.

7: Working people are getting poorer: The Typical Household, Now Worth a Third.

8: Most people can’t even afford to get their teeth fixed.

9: The good, high-paying jobs have vanished.

10: More workers are throwing in the towel: Labor Participation Rate Drops To 36 Year Low.

11: Nearly twice as many people still rely on Food Stamps than before the recession.

12: The ocean of red ink continues to grow.

13: No Recovery for working people.

14: Most people will work until they die.

15: Americans are more pessimistic about the future.

It is astonishing to see how rapidly the deterioration has overtaken even so strong an economy as the United States. But at the centre of this disaster is the Keynesian theory that has allowed it to happen with virtually no one any longer able to understand the nature of the problem.

Magic thinking

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We have all kinds of innovation and we have them all the time, but you cannot decide on what will be invented next. The magical thinking of the global warming crowd who believe that if you make fossil fuels really expensive that a cheaper alternative will simply materialise is so bordering on the insane that I actually don’t know what can be done about it. Making energy more expensive will certainly mean that some of us will use less of it, with the less well off the ones who will suffer the most. And those who live in genuinely poor communities will find their standard of living falling below where it now is. This is not a matter of theory but is an absolute arithmetical necessity. If you have less of something, some people who used to have a particular quantity will have less and some may even have none at all.

Tonight I went along to hear Sinclair Davidson on the great moral question of our time: is coal on its way out as a source of energy. The audience was what I suspect a Q&A audience must be like, all well meaning and quite comfortable, thank you very much, but oh so concerned about the future about a hundred years from now when the oceans have risen and our farmlands have all turned to desert. We must therefore get rid of fossil fuels, and coal in particular, immediately. The replacement technologies are already available; its only the lack of will that prevents us from taking the steps we need to take.

Bob Brown led the offence for the yeas, while Professor Davidson played anchor for the nays stressing the moral case for fossil fuels. Every one of the five speakers except one agreed that global warming and greenhouse gases was the greatest issue of our time. The sixth made the hilarious point that no one really cares about people who will be inhabiting the planet a hundred years from now, evidenced by the fact that they don’t seem to care all that much about people who are inhabiting the planet right at the moment. This brought a strong round of applause from at least one member of the audience, but if there was anyone else applauding at the same time, I think I may have missed it.

800 proposals and hardly a good idea to be seen

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First there’s Cameron: world facing second economic crash and then there’s Japan slides into recession as tax hike takes toll. First Cameron:

David Cameron has said that “red warning lights are flashing on the dashboard of the global economy” and a second global crash could be looming.

And then Japan:

Japan’s economy unexpectedly shrank in the third quarter as housing and business investment declined following a tax hike, dragging the country into a recession and further clouding the outlook for the global economy.

But really, for me the most incredible news today was this in the AFR:

The growth agenda involved the G20 members submitting more than 800 proposals to grow their economies by 2.1 per cent over five years.

I suppose the 2.1 per cent is per annum, but even so, this is pathetic. I don’t recall a single one of any of these leaders saying anything along the lines of we need to get the government out of the way of the private sector. Nothing about making it easier for businesses to turn a dollar.

Instead, there’s plenty of more government spending – infrastructure is the new mantra – more taxation and still more unfunded welfare payments. We truly are heading for a fall. But unlike during the Great Depression, where other than in the US, every government successfully embraced classical principles to forge recovery, today I would not think there is a Treasury or a government, even in the so-called capitalist world, that is even thinking of using capitalists to get us out of the deep waters we are in. Truly we are going to go over the falls for a second time with not a single lesson learned.

What’s the right word for people dumb enough to believe the planet is warming?

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There is about as much evidence that the planet is warming because of human activity as there is that Yuri Geller can bend spoons with the power of his mind. This, too, has been validated by scientists and here is a not untypical example:

Professor Victor Weisskopf physicist who studied under Niels Bohr worked on the A bomb and over saw the development of European atom smashers.

“I was shocked and amazed how Mr Geller bent my office key at MIT while I was holding it. The sturdy key kept bending in my hand; I can not explain this phenomenon I can only assume that it could relate could relate to quantum chromo dynamics”.

The credulous stupidity of half the population on AGW is something that those of us who have not succumbed to this mania can merely observe but find almost impossible to explain. But like Professor Weisskopf, Professor Michael Mann, the notorious fraud and inventor of the hockey schtick, remains an authority to those with the will to believe.

What we therefore need is a term of abuse for those who help to perpetuate this fraud.

If people who refuse to accept the planet is warming are called “deniers” by those ill-informed enough to be certain about something that still seems very unlikely, then what should we call those who accept climate change in the face of all evidence to the contrary? I will open this for debate, but at the moment “gullibles” is the word I have come up with which I admit is not perfect. Nevertheless, the concept seems accurate even if the word does not. Here is the online definition of “gullible” which includes the synonyms found in bold below so there is something to the concept and it does seem to fit. The example of its usage, shown in italics, is also just as found on the net which also seems to be a perfect fit.

gullible
ˈɡʌlɪb(ə)l/
adjective
easily persuaded to believe something; credulous.
“an attempt to persuade a gullible public to spend their money”
synonyms: credulous, over-trusting, over-trustful, trustful, easily deceived/led, easily taken in, exploitable, dupable, deceivable, impressionable, unsuspecting, unsuspicious, unwary, unguarded, unsceptical, ingenuous, naive, innocent, simple, inexperienced, unworldly, green, as green as grass, childlike, ignorant

.

As it says here, by definition if you are gullible you are “easily deceived or cheated” and also “easily taken in or tricked”. That is therefore no doubt why such people persistently vote for the parties of the left.

As bad as it is there is worse to come

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Depending on America since the retreat of Britain has had its imperfections but we are in a whole new world since the coming of the Age of Obama. The article opens with a listing of the horrors of American foreign policy under Obama before coming to this:

Is there a pattern or unifying conviction that underlies such disarray?

Yes says Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist. In “America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder,” he argues that the many debacles of the last six years — with the striking exception of the White House’s dogged intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are tied together by Obama’s determination to scale back America’s global responsibilities. “America’s retreat — or what the Obama administration prefers to call ‘retrenchment’ — is the central fact of this decade, just as the war on terror was the central fact of the last decade,” contends Stephens. It is setting the stage for far worse.

I don’t think America has become more isolationist but it is willing to elect an incompetent and ignorant chief executive who has left wreckage everywhere he has turned. If an open borders policy doesn’t frighten the electorate enough to abandon the Democrats, I am at a loss to imagine what now will. The world map in 2114 will look nothing like the one we see today.

On Tim Flannery – Australian though he may be still a loyal and faithful servant of his German masters

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This is a blog about our very own Tim Flannery, Faulty Turbines Sending Siemen’s Wind Power Division Broke as Samsung Cuts & Runs from Europe. And what might this have to do with Tim? Here’s how it starts:

German fan maker, Siemens has been running a huge propaganda campaign in South Australia over the last couple of weeks, surrounding the opening of the extension of the Snowtown wind farm – wheeling in Australia’s 2011 Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans as their pet-pedal-powered mascot.

And its highly paid wind farm ambassador, Tim Flannery – Australia’s world-renowned (but self-appointed) long-range weather forecaster – has been on the front foot in the press in recent weeks screaming about imminent “global incineration”. Tim’s “solution”? Why more giant (Siemens) fans, of course!

Not that he makes much noise about it, but Tim sits on Siemen’s Sustainability Advisory Board and – true to the title – has been working flat-out to “sustain” Siemen’s ability to flog its fans in Australia – with a mix of hysterical hectoring and overweening political pressure – all built around the mystical ability of wind turbines to suck CO2 out of the sky and drop world temperatures on a made-to-measure basis. A bit like a heavenly thermostat, apparently.

Although, being a loyal and faithful servant of his German masters Tim hasn’t limited himself to just being Siemen’s top fan salesman. Oh no – Siemens is in the Carbon Capture & Storage business – so Tim took to spruiking the merits of CCS as only a recent “covert” could.

This little “switcheroo” required Tim to bury his hitherto well-publicised revulsion to coal.

It’s sad to see a fellow Australian being treated in such a disdainful way.

Found at SmallDeadAnimals.

Bernard Natan

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One of the most spooky and unexpected documentaries I have ever come across. Natan was the Sam Goldwyn of French cinema but as forgotten today as it is possible to be.

It is easy to see how the French might wish to see his story left untold. But you will have to see the film to understand why since it unfolds in a series of revelations that fill in the details as Natan’s life one by one. I was hooked by the opening sequence and narration more completely than I can think of any such film having previously succeeded in doing, with the opening sequence used as the trailer shown above. The makers of the film also understood what a mystery they have constructed and neither they nor I would wish to give you a single hint about what you will discover if you get to see it for yourself.