Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

The ice age cometh

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ice age

The stupidity of policies to counter global warming may yet turn out to be one of the most lethal set of policies ever devised by the human race. We found ourselves able after a million years of primitive existence to harness various forms of energy to keep us warm, power our businesses, cook our food and transport us from place to place. For this, we have been using various forms of carbon-based fossil fuels that, because they have defied the leftist fools who predicted capitalist misery, have decided to bring on this misery on their own. They are despicable in their worm-eaten destructive impulse. But in this particular episode, may yet contribute to a catastrophic future of such immense misfortune, that there are no words to describe how misbegotten their effects will be.

Maurice Newman has a review of David Archibald’s The Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short in today’s Australian, a book that I have a much longer review of coming out in the September Quadrant. But Newman, whose piece begins by asking What if David Archibald is Right?, spells out what ought to be part of our communal conversation.

Russian scientists at the Pulkovo Observatory are convinced the world is in for a cooling period that will last for 200-250 years. Respected Norwegian solar physicist Pal Brekke warns temperatures may actually fall for the next 50 years. Leading British climate scientist Mike Lockwood, of Reading University, found 24 occasions in the past 10,000 years when the sun was declining as it is now, but could find none where the decline was as fast. He says a return of the Dalton Minimum (1790-1830), which included “the year without summer”, is “more likely than not”. In their book The Neglected Sun, Sebastian Luning and Fritz Varen­holt think that temperatures could be two-tenths of a degree Celsius cooler by 2030 because of a predicted anaemic sun. They say it would mean “warming getting postponed far into the future”.

What worries me even in this review is that it merely suggests that AGW may be wrong. It doesn’t set out what happens if there is an actual global cooling. The effects, if Archibald is anywhere near right, are the deaths of tens of millions of people in a world that can no longer feed, clothe and house its population where energy supplies are lower while growing seasons are cut short. If you think it’s science fiction, the Great Plague wiped out between one-third and half of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. This is a future we can actually prepare for if we start thinking that we might have to. In the meantime, we are savaging our energy industries and raising the cost of all forms of production, including farm production. Human stupidity knows no upper bounds. If this is yet another instance, well that’s how it will be. But we have been warned, and if you are still of a mind to side with the likes of Obama and Julia Gillard, you may yourself be complicit in one of the greatest crimes in human history.

Judaism and England

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Daniel Hannan has an exceptionally interesting article on the English and the Jews. I liked the whole article but this was nicely put as well.

I’ve written this blog as a lengthy reply to those of my fellow-countrymen – by no means only Muslim Britons – who ask why Britain so often seems to give Israel the benefit of the doubt. If we’re honest, we do sometimes apply a double standard. It’s true, for example, as anti-Israel campaigners like to point out, that we are agitated about Iran acquiring nuclear technology while making no fuss about Israel doing so. But there is a pretty obvious reason for such inconsistency: we can’t imagine that Israel would ever aim its missiles at us.

When we look at Israel, we see a free-market, law-based, individualist democracy which has retained many Anglosphere characteristics – parliamentary rule, the common law and, at least when it comes to intellectual and commercial life, the English language. These things are bound to create, in the literal sense, sympathy: fellow-feeling rooted in common experience.

The evolving nature of the history of economic thought

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An email to a colleague in Europe who is going off to the Congress on J.-B. Say and the entrepreneur at the end of August.

I am very pleased to hear from you and to find you are heading off to this Congress. It seems exceptionally interesting and the focus on the entrepreneur has been for too long ignored within economic theory and policy. There was some interest expressed to me about my going there as well but it has unfortunately come to nothing. It would have been a quite long journey and as I also have a conference in Hong Kong just after may have been too much of an excursion. But whatever might have been the original interest in my attendance, nothing has come of it so I am off to Hong Kong which will be a bit easier than the 20,000 mile round trip going to France would have required. Still, I would have liked to have gone but that’s life.

The seriously interesting part for me, but probably of little interest to anyone looking at what Say was writing in 1803, is that I have written what amounts to Say’s Treatise for the 21st century. I will attach a blog post I did on the book, but it is about nothing less than the crucial role of the entrepreneur combined with an understanding of Say’s Law as expressed by Say, Ricardo, James Mill and John Stuart Mill. I am the living embodiment of those values but probably 150 years behind the times, but in my view, also about 15-20 years before my time. The fact of this conference is a sign of the subterranean changes going on. But it is hard for anyone who has grown up on aggregate demand and math ec to understand what’s required if you remove AD from within macro and start treating the future as genuinely uncertain. What happens then is you end up with the classical theory of the cycle which no one any longer understands. You should be able to read the back cover of the text in the blog post attached which explains all this in more detail.

I should also mention one other reason I was pleased to hear from you. Had you not written, I would not have known that my post to the SHOE website had actually been posted since it drew not a single response and google mail doesn’t post returned emails that one has sent out oneself. My campaign to save HET from the historians and philosophers of science seems to fall on deaf ears, but the more I engage in this debate, the most astonished I am at how misconceived their ideas are. Sure certain aspects of HET are HaPoS but that is not anywhere near HET’s core significance. I really do believe that HET has been overrun by philosophers and sociologists who have almost no interest in economic issues other than as a peripheral matter upon which they can contemplate everything else under the sun aside from the way an economy works. I think that because HET in Australia retains its original essence almost entirely, that the shifts that are going on elsewhere were almost invisible to us when they came to try to remove HET from economics which is why we all rose up as one. Now with conferences such as this in Boulogne-sur-Mer, where the central interest is mainly in understanding how economies function but using past economists as a vehicle, there may be a shift back coming into play. My intervention to preserve HET, however much it seems to have been resented by some of our American and European colleagues, was just in time. Had HET gone to HaPoS, it would have died within the decade within departments of economics. It would have become as relevant to economics as the history of physics is to physicists.

Finally, I am going to copy into this email my young colleague from Auchy so he can know what’s going on. I hope you enjoy the conference which I hope will be a great success and please do keep me informed.

Kind regards

And what if the planet is cooling?

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There is so much evidence of global cooling at the moment so that given the preoccupation with AGW, the consequences could be more catastrophic than anything anyone is remotely contemplating precisely because no one is thinking about this at all. Here’s how the article starts:

We may be witnessing the sun’s last dying gasps before entering into a long slumber. The impact of that slumber on Earth’s climate remains the subject of growing scientific speculation.

In 2008 William Livingston and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, in a controversial paper that contradicted conventional wisdom and upset global warming theorists, predicted that sunspots could more or less disappear after 2015, possibly indicating the onset of another Little Ice Age. They stated, “The occurrence of prolonged periods with no sunspots is important to climate studies, since the Maunder Minimum was shown to correspond with the reduced average global temperatures on the Earth.” The Maunder Minimum lasted for approximately 70 years from about 1645 to 1715, and was marked by bitter cold, widespread crop failures, and severe human privation.

And this is how the article ends:

The upshot for scientists and world leaders should be clear, particularly since other scientists in recent years have published analyses that also indicate that global cooling could be on its way. Climate can and does change toward colder periods as well as warmer ones. Over the last 20 years, some $80 billion has been spent on research dominated by the assumption that global temperatures will rise. Very little research has investigated the consequences of the very live possibility that temperatures will plummet. Research into global cooling and its implications for the globe is long overdue.

Make hay while the sun shines is a concept a bit out of fashion. But there may come a time not that far off that we will deeply regret our attempts to keep the planet from warming by killing off our carbon-based energy production. If the planet is about to cool we will find what “severe human privation” really means in practice.

Free speech and racist abuse

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I think of myself as a free speech absolutist. There is no point of view that is not open for debate and all perspectives are invited to join. Jews are descended from apes and pigs. Well, that’s one way of looking at things. Jews are murderers of Gazan children and use their blood to make matzohs. Speak the truth as you see it. There was no holocaust but if there were one we would do it right this time round. Interesting, please tell me more.

In its way, I am outraged by each of these but the principle is more important than the abuse that some make of the principle. Public discourse is very dangerous, but hidden beliefs are perhaps more dangerous than those made in public. Bring them out into the light. Go on, discredit yourself, because if there comes a time when saying such things in public does not make you a social leper, then things have already gone too far. It is genuinely useful information. It’s good to know what can and cannot be said in public without consequence, but there should be nothing to stop you from saying what you want.

But racist rants in public amongst total strangers, people abused on the streets by others they do not know, are out of bounds in a civilised community. It is just not on, rightly illegal.

Ordinary people are not political philosophers. They are not social theorists who have read, absorbed and contemplated the arguments of John Start Mill. They are not people who are immune to abuse for their religion, skin colour, gender or anything else. Most people are prepared to debate all issues but they are not prepared to have to deal with some idiot shouting abuse at them on the street.

If the government cannot distinguish between free speech in a civilised community and a racist rant individually one-on-one in a public place, then it should not have gotten into this debate in the first place. And had they made this distinction, they could have presented their aim in terms of stopping racists and not protecting the rights of bigots. What a loser argument that was! Why didn’t the government show they were providing something that will aid comity in the community, not taking something useful away. They have damaged the cause of free speech in this country.

Reflections on World War I

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When I was young I would go to the Armistice parade which were just around the corner from where I lived, and there I would see the elderly veterans from the first World War. And as I grew up, I would meet the same elderly veterans, except they were by then from the second World War. And now I meet the same elderly veterans but this time from the War in Vietnam who are, of course, my own contemporaries. No reason to mention it other than that sense of personal connection to the war that began this month a hundred years ago.

But what is remarkable is that the country each of these defended was a different country, and each of these was very different from the country we live in now and no doubt very different from the country as it will be thirty years or more hence. Amongst the many things that I read as a university student very few have stuck with me as active memories, but one was the statement made somewhere by someone that every social theorist and revolutionary, had they returned to earth a hundred years after they had written, would have hated the world they had helped to create. Maybe part of getting old is that sense of alienation from the present. Things look crazy, and I speak as someone who was not only contemporary with the hippies and the new left but was actually one amongst them. No one since has been as crazy as we were and I continue to feel my generation has a very great deal to answer for. But perhaps I am just one more of those theorists who would find the world they helped to create more awful than they could possibly have imagined, but there are still fifty more years before the hundred years has gone by. But it will not surprise me that I would not like the world I will never see but have helped to create. It was perhaps ever thus.

My contribution to the mass of discussion on the outbreak of WWI is to mention my own favourite book on the war which is Frank Furedi’s World War One: Still No End in Sight. He makes the point that The Great War presented one of the great discontinuities in history from which the world we are in is still experiencing major aftershocks. But he reviewed the way things evolved decade by decade so that there is almost a geological stratification of the various periods. My hippy/era-of-the-new-left foundation period has its own ways of marking individuals. And if you see the 1960s against the 1950s, the 1940s, the 1930s and of course back through to the 1920s, you cannot help noticing how different each period was from each other, and of course from the present. Part of it is the technology but there is something else too. The mood shifts and the temper of the times changes. The only time I ever remember my mother being outraged by something I said – and she was a woman of the left – was when I quoted a friend of mine who said, “better a sexual revolution than no revolution at all”. I see my mother’s point, but to tell the truth, the 1960s were as puritanical compared with today, as Edwardians were in comparison with we 1960s types. Such sweet innocence but it was very heaven to be young. I suppose it always is.

That World War I broke up ancient empires and created new ones is not in doubt. That we would be as different as different could be had WWI been somehow prevented I have no doubt. But such is the way of the world. Major historical events happen as they will continue to do. What the book does is remind you that things change, nothing stays as it is, there is no permanence, and that everything you think really matters, down to the core values that you set your moral compass by, are but windblown ephemera whose existence a century from now cannot be even remotely guaranteed. We all live in the present, but the present keeps moving along into that unknown future which holds horrors one cannot even begin to imagine. And great pleasures too, of course, so we must just battle on.

Totally contrived opportunistic sensationalism

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That’s global warming we’re talking about. The people who peddle these kinds of scams take no responsibility for the immense harm they cause. I just went by the Trades Hall Council building and there was a sign outside advertising “Solidarity with Venezuela – Chavez Photo Exhibition”. Do they know Venezuela post-Chavez is a wreck? Of course they do, but they seem as callous and indifferent so far as other people’s lives are concerned as they wander off to the next problem their solutions will only make worse. As the video points out, if we actually got rid of carbon-based fuels, there would not be a tree left on earth as they were all pulled down to provide heat and fuel.

Obama – the dismissal

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It has always seemed a plausible idea that Gough Whitlam sought his own dismissal in 1975. Overseeing a government that by then in virtually every respect was making economic conditions an absolute shambles – rapidly rising unemployment combined with rapidly rising inflation – while being caught up in the preposterous Khemlani Loans Affair, Whitlam’s was a government that was certain to enter history as amongst the worst if not the worst in Australian history. But having been dismissed by the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, and then gone before the press to declare, “Well may we say ‘God Save the Queen’ – because nothing will save the Governor-General”, he then went home and had a hearty lunch, reportedly in the best possible spirits.

Who now thinks of the Whitlam Government in the way it needs to be, as a massive failure, and a failure specifically because of the various aspects of socialist ideology that were the causes of the economic havoc that occurred? Whitlam’s name has been redeemed as a great martyr, rather than as a major political catastrophe.

I now think Obama wishes to take the same approach as Whitlam, to replace his reputation in history as an incompetent fool and see in its place his role as a martyr to impeachment and the forces of the right. That he deserves to be flung from office is obvious. If competence and results were the only issues then he would be. But since the issues would shift from competence to defying democracy, with major discussions of racism as the cause, he won’t be impeached, even though this may be his own dearest wish.

Here is an article that sees Obama in the same light as Whitlam: Obama wants to be impeached. I think myself this is true, not just because even if impeached he would never be removed from office, but because it would raise his standing in the polls. The Democrats could only wish the other side was stupid enough to do it. Although on this occasion no Congressional leader would go near any such action, it may be enough for others merely to raise the possibility for this to achieve its aim. And it does seem to be his aim.

President Obama insists on flirting with impeachment even as House Republican leaders insist there’s no such possibility.

Obama uses a passive-aggressive strategy that can be judged as a political maneuver, a personality disorder, or both.

Secure in the knowledge that impeachment is not the same as removal from office, Mr. Obama brings up the topic on his own and with bold defiance. Martyrdom goes well with a Messiah complex and Mr. Obama’s speeches are a non-stop litany of depicting himself as a victim of Republicans.

This for him would be political gold. Since the process would go on endlessly and divert attention from the more significant issues, it would be an act of political suicide. The article however delves into the psychological underpinnings of Obama’s character to explain his motives in daring others to impeach him:

His behavior matches the American Psychiatric Association’s definition of passive-aggressive behavior, “a habitual pattern of passive resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, stubbornness, and negativistic attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected of others.” Often, such persons see themselves as blameless victims, projecting fault onto others. Commonly, they follow erratic paths and cause constant conflicts.

Be that as it may, the politics of impeachment are clear. Any such move would help only Obama and the Democrats. Best to leave him where he is, a human wrecking-ball though he is. If after eight years of such governance the American constituency seeks to elect an Obama-clone of some kind, well them’s the facts. In the meantime we out here in the rest of the world will have to work out what to do when America has rolled itself up into an ungovernable socialist ball with little desire to assist its fellow democracies dealing with the various forms of tyranny we see at every turn.

Barbarism against Western civilization

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Phyllis Chesler is by a long long way my favourite feminist. She has written an article on the traison de clercs which she has titled, J’Accuse whose significance and historical roots will be missed by the dumbed down members of the academy today. This is how it begins:

J’accuse every single Western academic, each intellectual and journalist who has ever circulated and signed a Resolution against Israel and in favor of Hamas is a supporter of Islamist barbarism against Western civilization.

They are the West’s equivalent of suicide (or really, homicide) bombers.

These are the professors and activists who are, essentially, anti-American in their point of view and who, like President Obama (who studied with them), want a de-militarized and diminished America. The 21st century manifestation of this sentiment in academia is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, whose aim is to starve the Israeli government by bullying even further already indoctrinated academics, artists, and businessmen into not working in Israel and/or into covering the news in only a pro-Hamas and pro-Palestinian way.

Support for Hamas is merely a particular instance of this hatred of our civilisation, not just the most prosperous in history but also the kindest and most open. That others hate us is how things happen. That so many within the citadel hate us as well may yet doom us, but if they are successful they will be responsible for the dark age that will be the successor civilisation to what we have now.