Obama, the Man of the Masses...of Cash, That Is...

Obama is telling everyone how he got lots and lots of money "from the little guys".

What he isn't saying is that he got nearly as much from the rich.

Look here.

Look at this:

An analysis of campaign finance records shows that about two-thirds of his bundlers are concentrated in four major industries: law, securities and investments, real estate and entertainment. Lawyers make up the largest group at about 130, with many working for firms that also have lobbying arms. At least 100 Obama bundlers are top executives or brokers from investment businesses - nearly two dozen work for financial titans like Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. About 40 others come from the real-estate industry.

The biggest fund-raisers include people like Julius Genachowski, a former senior official at the Federal Communications Commission and a technology executive who is new to big-time political fund-raising; Robert Wolf, president and chief operating officer of UBS Investment Bank; James Torrey, a New York hedge fund investor; and Charles Rivkin, an animation studio head in Los Angeles.

In other words, these are the groups to whom Obama is going to be beholden to, and looking at them ... it ain't gonna be pretty if he gets elected. Investment banking bailouts galore, along with loopholes for the rich in the tax code...

Obama has pledged not to accept donations from federally registered lobbyists or political action committees. But some top donors clearly have policy and political agendas. Hedge fund executives, for example, have bundled large sums for Obama at a time their industry has been looking to increase its clout in Washington.

So he continues to say one thing and pretty much do the opposite. Mr. Flip-Flop indeed...

Acorn, the Democrats and Putting Things Together...

I've covered the cause of the Subprime crisis before: without subprimes, there'd be no crisis.

Read here, here and here.

The activist group ACORN is one of the key causes of the subprime crisis.


Now, in a normal world, we'd stop listening to the folks of ACORN, who have had some monumentally bad ideas that have led to the current problem.


Now, the President has signed into law legislation aimed at helping those caught in the Subprime crisis in order to avoid worse effects. It's not the greatest policy, but it should help things from becoming worse.

The problem?

This.

Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a Harley. I know that politics is the art of compromise, but this one really reeks.

ACORN is going to get $16mn from the Democrats to register voters.

To quote:

What most riles Republicans about the bill is the symbiotic relationship between the Democratic Party and the housing advocacy groups, of which Acorn is among the biggest. Groups such as the National Council of La Raza and the National Urban League also lobby to secure government-funded services for their members and seek to move them to the voting booth. Acorn has been singled out for criticism because of its reach, its endorsements of Democrats, and past flaws in its bookkeeping and voter-registration efforts that its detractors in Congress have seized upon.
...
Democrats on Capitol Hill have helped to steer millions of dollars in housing and other grants from the federal government toward Acorn and groups like it. The groups must qualify and compete for the money, which is typically doled out from the federal government to states and municipalities. The housing package includes a new, permanent source of affordable-housing money that congressional Democrats and grass-roots groups have sought for years. The Affordable Housing Trust Fund and the Capital Magnet Fund will be funded by a tax on mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage titans.

That tax eventually will channel upwards of $600 million annually in grants for developing and restoring housing, mostly as low-income rentals, available to Acorn and other groups. Democrats on Capitol Hill and housing groups say the housing-assistance money is vital to helping Americans hit hardest by what some call the largest drop in home values since the Great Depression. But they acknowledge the perception of political conflict in giving federal funds to an organization that does political work.

They acknowledge the perception???

Good lord, this is rewarding the very folks responsible for the idiocy of subprimes.

But it gets worse:

It's difficult to track Acorn's finances because of its group of legally separate offshoots, nearly all of which use an address in New Orleans in their tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service. Project Vote, with which Acorn has a "joint-effort agreement" to do voter registration, also uses the New Orleans address on its IRS forms. Acorn is providing one-quarter of the effort's budget for this election, and the canvassers are members of Acorn's staff.

Acorn Housing Corporation, the group's housing-aid arm, has released a copy of its 2007 tax form, but the main group, National Acorn, won't release financial statements and isn't required to. Unlike several Acorn subsidiaries, it doesn't seek tax-exempt status. "We're a private organization; it's our members' business, basically," Mr. Jackson said.

Overall, the main national Acorn entities for which tax information is available -- including its Housing Corporation -- spent $14.7 million in 2006. That information is gathered from IRS filings submitted by a half-dozen separate entities. The filings show that Acorn Housing raised $6.9 million for its activities in 2006, of which $1.7 million, or nearly 25%, came from government grants.

I believe it was Lenin who said that capitalists would sell the communists the rope that they would use to hang the capitalists with.

The lunatics here are running the asylum:

Acorn has had a number of missteps. This month its founder, Wayne Rathke, resigned after news emerged that his brother Dale had embezzled nearly $1 million from Acorn and affiliated groups eight years ago -- information the group kept from law-enforcement authorities and most members. Dale Rathke left the organization only last month.

Late last year, a handful of Acorn canvassers in Washington state admitted that they had falsified voter registrations by illegally filling out hundreds of forms with names such as Dennis Hastert, Leon Spinks and Fruito Boy Crispila. In April, eight Acorn workers pleaded guilty to similar charges in Missouri for falsifying forms.

Good lord, doesn't that fundamentally disqualify them for ANY federal aid or financing??? The founder's brother embezzles $1mn and all he does is resign because it leaked? Convenient that this was kept from the authorities until AFTER the statute of limitations ran out.

What isn't mentioned in the story is that the group has been implicated in at least 12 other states for the same kind of voter fraud.

So let's put this together: Acorn, the advocacy group whose policies led to the Subprime Crisis, is an activist group that the Democrats are now using for voter registration, and who are going to profit from the very crisis that they created...

The lunatics are running the asylum...

On Choosing A President...

When choosing a President, looking at who the candidate's Economic Advisor is gives you a pretty good idea of what their economic policy will be.

Obama? A law professor with no formal economic training.

McCain? A Stanford PhD in economics who taught economics nine years at Yale.



This isn't even a choice.

Models, Climate Change and Credibility...

A number of the AGW crowd insist that all the evidence is on their side, and that none of the skeptics can get anything published in a refereed journal, proving that they have science on their side.

Nice try, fellows.

If you go here, you can find this.

Hydrological Science Journal, Aug 2008.

On the Credibility of Climate Predictions

From a team of authors from Greece.

D. KOUTSOYIANNIS, A. EFSTRATIADIS, N. MAMASSIS & A. CHRISTOFIDES
Department of Water Resources, Faculty of Civil Engineering, National Technical University of Athens, Heroon Polytechneiou 5, GR-157 80 Zographou, Greece

Here from the Abstract:

Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.

This is a critical paper: not merely critical in the sense of asking questions, but also critical in the sense of being a peer-reviewed paper that is being published.

In other words, it can't be ignored by the AGW crowd: they can say that the writers of the paper have things wrong, but they're going to have to show how that is so.

The key point here is: there have been no reliability assessments. None.

Ouch.

What else do they say?

In all examined cases, GCMs generally reproduce the broad climatic behaviours at different geographical locations and the sequence of wet/dry or warm/cold periods at a monthly scale. Specifically, the correlation of modelled time series with historical ones is fair and the resulting coefficient of efficiency seems satisfactory. However, where tested, replacement of the modelled time series with a series of monthly averages (same for all years) resulted in higher efficiency.

This means that the GCMs do a good job at what they were originally supposed to do: model changes on a monthly scale. But with a slight problem: when they replaced the original time series with a series of monthly averages, the same for all years, the models were more efficient.

Ouch.

You know what this means?

That the model results are, generally speaking, the result of the models, rather than the data: the models were more efficient with made-up data than with the original data. Tthis can only mean that the results of the models were programmed into the models themselves.

In other words, the data is irrelevant: you will always get the same results. Anyone remember the Hockey Stick, that lovely model that reported the same results when fed with ... noise?

At the annual and the climatic (30-year) scales, GCM interpolated series are irrelevant to reality. GCMs do not reproduce natural over-year fluctuations and, generally, underestimate the variance and the Hurst coefficient of the observed series. Even worse, when the GCM time series imply a Hurst coefficient greater than 0.5, this results from a monotonic trend, whereas in historical data the high values of the Hurst coefficient are a result of large-scale over-year fluctua-tions (i.e. successions of upward and downward "trends"). The huge negative values of coefficients of efficiency show that model predictions are much poorer than an elementary prediction based on the time average. This makes future climate projections at the examined locations not credible. ... However, the poor GCM performance in all eight locations examined in this study allows little hope, if any. An argument that the poor performance applies merely to the point basis of our comparison, whereas aggregation at large spatial scales would show that GCM outputs are credible, is an unproved conjecture and, in our opinion, a false one.

Double ouch: the model results, when run with historical data (GCM interpolated series), are irrelevant to reality.

The implications of the Hurst coefficient greater than 0.5 reflects on the results being built into the model: this means that the models themselves have a monotonic trend, i.e. produce the desired upwards trend regardless of the data.

Such modelled results are the result of scientific fraud on a grand scale: we're not talking a single GCM model, but six of them: CGCM3-A2, PCM-20C3M, ECHAM5-20C3M, CGCM2-A2, HadCM3-A2 and ECHAM4-GG.

These are, from what I can tell, the core of the current set of deterministic GCM models in place.

Ouch.

Let's condense the above: the models have a built-in trend and a time-trend average gives better results.


Orchids to the authors and those who peer-reviewed and to the publisher for their commitment to scientifc research. This is how the science should work: onions galore to those who haven't bothered to check the reliability (and hence plausability) of the models that gave them the results that have been in use, ideologically, for years to try and force political and economic changes in the world economy.

When Fair Value Isn't...

I've posted on IFRS and fair value before.

Today's FT - link here - has an article by three rather senior accountants that is spot-on.


The current world financial woes have been made worse by what is called "fair-market" valuation of assets, as opposed to purchased value or book value (i.e. depreciated). This "fair-market" valuation is pro-cyclical, increasing volatility, and is anything but fair: many, if not most, accountants have failed to understand what fair-market valuation is really all about.

First of all, it's not about assigning a value to an asset based on what that asset would currently bring in the market today. That is what many think it means, but that's a mistake: fair value is, instead, the value of an asset when that asset is purchased at a price that can be financed out of the cash flow of the asset. I worked for a while assessing the fair value of radio and TV stations, and while it is a simple concept, it's not one that can be simply assigned to various kinds of assets held by companies.

What the accountants wrote in the article I link to call for is, quasi, a mechanism where a sharp rise in the risk and discount rates would lead to a change in the way assets were valued.

While the idea has some merit, it ignores the fundamental fact that IFRS and the fair value concept ignores a fundamental concept of accounting: that the company for which the books are being prepared is an ongoing company and is not being liquidated. Fair value assumes the exact opposite, and remains a really bad idea.

For all the warts and bumps and problems that it has, the standard valuations of the past have one truly positive aspect: they don't force companies to write off billions in assets because there is a market downturn.


But the inmates appear to be firmly in control of the asylum, and it will take a monumental effort to break them. Shame that it will cost the world economy so much to do so.

Idiots.
 

Well, Isn't That Special II

Sigh.

Let's see: you go to one of the absolute top religious sites of the world to pay your respects and get some footage for a campaign spot (well, they call it the news, but we know better...).

So what do you do to ensure that no one misses who you are?

Right: plaster the place with campaign posters.


What idiot thought up that one? Putting up campaign posters on police barricades?

The only thing that Obama and his people - or should I say Soros and the other plutocrats, who are financing this newest attempt at stealing an election - are interested in is being elected. Nothing else matters.


Nothing like piety for the sacred. Heck, screw that, put up a campaign poster instead!


And no, it's not traditional to do so.



You know, I think that Obama and his people are giving new meaning to the phrase "Ugly American".

Well Isn't That Special...

This an aside during from Spiegel's sycophantic fawning over Obama:

1:42 p.m.: SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that Obama has cancelled a planned short visit to the Rammstein and Landstuhl US military bases in the southwest German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The visits were planned for Friday. "Barack Obama will not be coming to us," a spokesperson for the US military hospital in Landstuhl announced. "I don't know why." Shortly before the same spokeswoman had announced a planned visit by Obama.

Add to that the fact that Obama snubbed the troops in Afghanistan, ignoring those who waited to see him - who deserve the utmost respect - and I think a certain pattern is emerging...


That Obama really doesn't give a shit about the troops. Duh. They're not his electorate.


But to deliberately snub them is just plain rude. Probably plays well in the Kos Universe and makes George Soros feel all warm and mushy inside.



Despicable.

Oh, and that Maliki interview with Spiegel that had him supporting Obama? Interesting, that one...

Poorly translated and completely re-written to make it what Spiegel wanted him to say, rather than what he actually said.

But about par for the course. The Big Lie lives...

This Is Getting Tedious...

The film reviewer of the FT, Nigel Andrews, hasn't always been the best reviewer, allowing his politics to sharply taint his reviews.


Well, he's done it again.

This is by far the silliest review I have ever read, and I've read quite a few.

Here it is, in all of its ... glory.

"Landlord of England art thou now, not king," said John of Gaunt to Richard II, in the words of William Shakespeare. What does The Dark Knight say to those ruling the US? It surely says, as foreign interests and investments creep across the land from Hollywood to New York: "Tenants of America are ye now, not owners."

A greater ignorance of American history, both political and economic, cannot be shown from these three sentences.

First: the US has been, historically, a land which doesn't merely provide a safe haven for foreign investors, but also greater opportunities than they are allowed at home: the US rail system was built with European money, which those investors largely then lost because they had been sold a bill of goods that did not deliver (each railroad was a whopping success as long as no others were built, but this success meant that others would be built, reducing profits and creating competition).

Second: when foreign investors buy land and companies in the US, they can't simply take it with them. Sure, an investor could, theoretically, pack up plant and equipment and move to East Anglia or, more profitably, Outer Mongolia, but they can't force the workforce there, and that is what makes the US interesting for foreign investors: high labor productivity.

Third: no one "rules" the US: at best, and scarcely at that, the US is governed. But a Brit simply wouldn't be able to comprehend that, now, would he?

Sadly, the ideological bias and the sheer ignorance of the reviewer does not cease there...

This must be why the new Batman epic is the biggest opener in US filmgoing history. The blast of truth, giddied up with fun and fantasy, has a morbid irresistibility. The Dark Knight is about America losing America. Its narrative starting point is a Hong Kong mastermind's scheme to hijack Gotham City's business empire, with help from a teeming Slavic and European Mafia.

Um, perhaps the reason that the Batman film has done so well is that it is, quite simply, a smashingly good film?Much like the season's earlier Iron Man?

The puerile fantasy of Andrews gets seriously in the way of reporting: a "blast of truth"? The Dark Knight has nothing to do with "America losing America": this is where Andrews truly fails to understand the country that he is lambasting. The US specializes in one thing particularly: re-inventing itself. How can you "lose" yourself when you are really in the process of changing the way the country works? The US has gone through periods of economic change and re-orientation that would have gutted and deranged a lesser nation: the collapse of the South after the Civil War; the collapse of old, heavy industry in the 1970s; the financial difficulties of the 2000s. The key to understanding the US is the unrelenting willingness to change and adapt: of course, a Brit would have trouble understanding that.

And the villains of the film? Rather simple: they are real and already out there. Here film, the pioneer of fake reality, borrows heavily from reality, the reality of Chinese Triads, the oldest organized crime gangs, and of the brutality of Eastern European organized crime. Here Hollywood needed no help: these are villains. But rather than complaining about stereotypes out of some sort of embarassment that the oh-so-civilized Europeans cannot deal with - and the continues expansion of organized crime, of forced prostitution and drugs - Andrews instead indulges in his fantasy world, a world that itself has bright colors and marquees, but one that only exists outside of reality.

We already know the real, pre-movie facts about the US. China owns the mortgage on its economy. Militant Islam holds to ransom its security. And Britain has a controlling share in its popular culture, or at least its big-money movie fare (Rowling, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, Pullman, Fleming). Now, even in the US-originated Batman franchise, the UK rules. The Dark Knight writer-director is a Limey, Christopher Nolan. Three main actors are British: Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, Michael Caine. Even the Joker is a Commonwealth interloper, one Heath Ledger, a deceased Australian managing to outact the living Americans.

Sigh. Ask any banker: they are dependent on mortgagees, and not the other way around. Of course, that takes some actual knowledge of finances to understand. Security ransomed to militant Islam? Quite the other way around, Nigel: not a penny, thank you very much, that's been a constant of US foreign policy since 1780 or so. Britain a controlling share of popular culture?

Excuse me, I had to stop at that one because it simply so funny.

And it seems to me that Andrews really, really doesn't understand what is going on here, and actually really doesn't understand the film industry much at all.

What the makers of Batman did was to get the best talent for the movie. Those folks were chosen for their talent, nothing less, nothing more. They've been paid, as hired help, by the people who are making, apparently, a huge amount of money from the hired help, thank you very much.

Of course, Andrews, once again in one of his rather pathetic anti-US modes, fails to understand what makes the US work so well: the ability to take the best of everywhere else ... and make it better.

And I find it rather appealing appalling that someone with such an obvious leftist slant, such an obviously oh-so-chic anti-American slant, is really criticizing the film based on something like ... nationalism? That the Dark Knight film isn't all that good because Americans didn't make it? Now that's ironic, don't you think?

A nation in panic? Quite possibly. Like lambs going to a preview of their slaughter, America paid $155m for an opening weekend's peep. The film – let us be honest – is less interesting than the resonances of its doomsaying. It bangs about for two and a half hours in shades of black, smashing cars, torching buildings, hurtling from high roofs, cackling, chasing, and getting in your face with sudden, perspective-changing, histrionic close-ups.

It goes on from there, but I shan't bore you with the rest. Simply not worth it.

Nigel, this is one of the more ... interesting slants on the film: if it weren't simply so blitherlingly wrong...

Iran, the Soviets and Rationality...

Gideon Rachman of the FT is, sorry to say, rather consistently either terribly misinformed or cannot see his biases and confuses wishful thinking for consistent argument.

If you read here you can see what I mean.

Here are the key words:

The US has already had to learn to live with nuclear weapons in the hands of countries that are far more oppressive and irrational than Iran: North Korea, Mao's China, the Soviet Union.

One of the great lessons of international relations since 1945 is that nuclear deterrence has worked. Mr Obama respects that lesson. Mr McCain does not.

This is where Gideon is completely incorrect, terribly misinformed and blind to his own bias.

Iran's record as a country of oppression is very close to that of Mao's China and the Soviet Union: the structure of the Iranian state resembles both of these states fairly closely, characterized by multiple security systems that watch each other. Iran, however lacks the bloodthirstiness of internal repression that both China and Mao and the Soviets under Stalin had: while women and minorities are suppressed and sanctions against key behavior remain in effect (clothing, sexual orientation), more often than not with deadly effect, Iran has yet to undergo the same kind of blood-letting that both China and the Soviet Union went through.

So I'll be happy to agree with Gideon that Iran isn't as oppressive as those other countries.


But neither Korea, China or the Soviets were anywhere near irrational when it came to nuclear weapons. Iran is, and to deny that is an indication of lack of understanding.


Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons were nothing more than a political bargaining chip. They knew that the weapons alone weren't enough, and hence acquired delivery systems that were theoretically capable of threatening their neighbors: the US reaction to the Korean tests was muted, as the US knew that Korea couldn't actually deliver. There is a huge, huge difference between making a nuclear weapon and making one that fits on top of a missile, especially the type of missiles that Korea builds and exports (which have a very, very limited warhead capacity.

To repeat: building a nuclear weapon and testing it is different from making one that fits on the top of a missile. The first is basic physics, which is nowadays extremely well known, coupled with the kind of engineering abilities that even a Third-World country, given some imported technology, can manage, albeit with difficulties (like losing your mechanics to plutonium poisoning and production that is rather inefficient).

Korea built a working nuclear weapon to get attention, to have it taken seriously. It lacks, almost literally, everything else. The North Korean state is a shambles, the economy, such as it is, moribund and inefficient at best. Political and economic isolation was working and had contained North Korea, but largely because North Korea itself wanted to be contained: the entire philosophy of North Korea is based on preventing foreign influences to set any challenge to the State.

Hence Korea was rational in acquiring the bomb: the US and its partners knew that as well.

Both the Chinese and the Soviets were eminently rational when it came to nuclear weapons: they knew their political usage, but also that the failure of deterrence - in whatever form - meant the destruction of their ways of life, the destruction of everything that they had murdered so many tens and hundreds of millions for, the Destruction of History, as it were. Nuclear war was never an option for the Soviets or the Chinese under Mao: they knew that they had far too much to lose.

Not so Iran.

Iran has clearly and repeatedly demonstrated its intention in acquiring one: it is the destruction of Israel.

That is irrational: the Iranians, as does the rest of the Middle East, must know that if Israel is attacked with nuclear weapons, or indeed any weapons of mass destruction, will lead to a massive retaliation, be it Israeli or US. The estimates of the number of Israeli nuclear weapons range from a few dozen to over 200. If Israel were to be attacked in such a way that it would be destroyed, retaliation would see the destruction of cities and infrastructure that would destroy any and most likely all aggressors (and aggressors they are).

That makes no difference to the chiliastic state religion of Iran: it is, after all, God's will if such were to happen.

That is where Rachman is plain and simple wrong: nuclear deterrence has worked for rational actors. Iran is not a rational actor: it rejects, as Rachman also notes, the idea that it shouldn't destabilize it neighbors, that it should respect borders. Iran, as a rational actor, should make peace with its neighbors and work on improving the lot of its people: instead, it actively destabilizes them and has abysmally failed to improve the lot of its people. The mullahs in Iran may be theological geniuses within Islam, but are secular fools and idiots, making decisions based on complete ignorance of international relations, the international community and the international economy. They are in that sense irrational: rationality has little to do with Islam, which has everything to do with belief, unwavering belief and fanaticism in its service.

Iran broke with the rest of the world when it occupied the US embassy and kept diplomats as hostages: that was a crime against the international order that Iran has not only consistently failed to acknowledge, but rather trumpets as one of its finest hours. It wants the US to acknowledge its failings, but absolutely and steadfastly refuses to see the beam in their own eye. That is irrational: they could have so much if they weren't so absolutely set on being so self-destructive, so set in their beliefs that the world works in a way that it patently does not.

Iran is an irrational state, full of contradictions that will indeed bring about its collapse. For that reason specifically the worst thing that the world can expect is a nuclear-armed Iran: the Iranians have a long and well-documented history of choosing to be irrational when it fitted their own purposes.

To deny that is worse than folly, worse than misunderstanding Iran's intentions: it is a mistake with the most horrendous consequences for Middle East peace.

Hence I must say, in the starkest contrast to Gideon Rachman: Obama would not make the better commander-in-chief. If elected, his administration would be that of Carter II, full of idealists whose introduction to reality would be just as painful now as it was back then.

And The Physicists Disagree With The Climatologists...

Go and pop the popcorn.

This is the shot across the bows of the anthropogenic global warming industry.

In extremely stark contrast to the AGW folks, who we have seen have refused many times to release their data and models, the APS article linked to shows the math and defines the models and methodologies: they take the scientific method seriously, it seems.

Here is where it gets interesting:

The fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing is a distinctive "hot-spot" in the tropical mid-troposphere.

This is the claim of the AGW community.

The APS query points out this:

...the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming in the tropical mid-troposphere is not observed in reality.

In other words, the models do not fit reality. Really? Which reality?

None of the temperature datasets for the tropical surface and mid-troposphere shows the strong differential warming rate predicted by the IPCC's models. Thorne et al. (2007) suggested that the absence of the mid-tropospheric warming might be attributable to uncertainties in the observed record: however, Douglass et al. (2007) responded with a detailed statistical analysis demonstrating that the absence of the projected degree of warming is significant in all observational datasets.

That reality. Absence is significant in ALL observational datasets. All of them.

What went wrong?

There are two principal reasons why the models appear to be misrepresenting the tropical atmosphere so starkly. First, the concentration of water vapor in the tropical lower troposphere is already so great that there is little scope for additional greenhouse-gas forcing. Secondly, though the models assume that the concentration of water vapor will increase in the tropical mid-troposphere as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, advection transports much of the additional water vapor poleward from the tropics at that altitude.

In other words, the models were designed to double-count, counting on a infinite scaling in a saturated environment, which, of course, is a serious error.

Serious error can be forgiven: contradicting the laws of thermodynamics is not something that can be forgiven:

With these assumptions, κ is shown to be less, and perhaps considerably less, than the value implicit in IPCC (2007). The method of finding κ shown in Eqn. (24), which yields a value very close to that of IPCC (2007), is such that progressively smaller forcing increments would deliver progressively larger temperature increases at all levels of the atmosphere, contrary to the laws of thermodynamics and to the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation (Eqn. 18), which mandate the opposite.

In other words, the models were designed in such a way that they could only function by contradicting the laws of thermodynamics. As inputs increased slightly, temperatures increased at a greater rate of increase: entropy reversed. That only occurs in living organisms and over a very moderate time period: entropy cannot be reversed otherwise.

In other words, the AGW climatologists did not do their physics homework.

What does this mean?

The IPCC's methodology relies unduly � indeed, almost exclusively � upon numerical analysis, even where the outputs of the models upon which it so heavily relies are manifestly and significantly at variance with theory or observation or both. Modeled projections such as those upon which the IPCC's entire case rests have long been proven impossible when applied to mathematically-chaotic objects, such as the climate, whose initial state can never be determined to a sufficient precision. For a similar reason, those of the IPCC's conclusions that are founded on probability distributions in the chaotic climate object are unsafe.

Not merely inaccurate: unsafe.

And I will close with this:

In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong.

Nothing more needs to be said: the policy to curb AGW is clearly wrong.

This is how science is done: see if you can poke holes in methodology, poke holes in the data, and poke holes in the logic that glues it all together.

Consider those holes poked.


Post-edit:

After perusing the edition of Physics and Society, where the article I just linked to was posted, I see that it is a scientific article, but not the position of the APS as such: in the interest of clarity, let that be established. There is another article in that same journal that discusses the physics behind warming, but that article is not a redress or rebuttal to the one I linked to, but should be seen as a useful article that lays out the equations.

But doesn't change the fundamental discussion presented here.

A "Scientific" Consensus...

Those enamored of global warming - who have spent some $50 bn of our tax monies world-wide to try to prove that it is indeed happening - have some explaining to do.

This is the problem.

But it doesn't stop there.

The link above connects to an article written by someone who spent 6 years working on Carbon Accounting, working out the detailed effects of the carbon chain backwards and forwards.

According to him - and you can't discount the man, he did the work - he started out on the precautionary principle, i.e. the evidence was enough for him to start working on identifying the effects.

His problem today?


Simple.

Very simple.

There are no effects.

No hot spot in the troposphere at 10km height. If CO2 were heating things up, that is where it would appear. There is zilch, none, nada: if there is no effect, there is no cause.

Models are that: models. They are what the modeler makes them: an honest modeler does the hard work: the statistical analysis of empirical data; the correlations that lead to causality tests; the reproduction of historical effects from the empirically derived causal relationships; the approximate construction of causal effects for the future; the back-testing; the testing with pseudo-noise to eliminate model bias. This is hard and at many times very, very tedious work.

There are the modelers who know their field so well and who work with inherently poor data to construct models that make the best out of a bad thing, models which can be extremely accurate, but are based on expert knowledge, rather than purely on empirical evidence.

Then the are the dishonest modelers, who construct models to prove a point. If you put deterministic equations into your models, you will always get the results you want. If you are really determined to get the results you have decided on, construct the model such that it makes no difference what data is put in: you end up with Mann's Hockey Stick model, which at this point should serve as the prime example of what not to do (in his model, you got very similar results simply by feeding in pink or white noise: the model always gave you similar results).

The global warming alarmists want to spend, literally, hundreds of billions of dollars and want to force radical changes in human behavior.


But it doesn't stop there.

What if you were to approach those who are making the claims of global disaster and ask to see their work? What if the answer was "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

I'd call for that person to be stripped of their title as scientist. Hasn't happened, of course: he is too well protected, politically, for him to suffer any consequences.

Think that this doesn't happen? See this here. You have to scroll down a bit to see that quote.

It makes no difference if someone has worked 25 or 125 years on the subject: the scientific method is one of testing hypotheses to find if they work: scientists should aim to try and find something wrong with the work.

Unless, of course, "science" here is meant to be dogma. Dogma can't be challenged: it is a belief.

The Hockey Stick is dead, dead, dead, and anyone who worked on that should be drummed out of the academic world. They used methods that led to fundamentally the same results - within a 99% confidence realm - when fed with random numbers.

I guess I'm flogging a dead horse. There is significant evidence that the "science" of global warming is nothing less than a fraud, despite billions having been spent: if anything, spending that money has created a Global Warming Industry that claims consensus by ignoring scientific methods and by condoning outright fraud: if the same group of "scientists" peer-review each others' papers in the journals that they themselves run, how can dissent make its voice heard if ears are plugged?

And this is the basis on which governments, in massively misplaced trust, plan to spend hundreds of billions of your dollars.

Misperception and War...

One of the reasons that wars happen is misperceptions of intents and capabilities. The Korean War started because the North believed that the US had effectively abandoned South Korea because it forgot to list it in some protocols, and they misjudged the ability of the US to get fighting troops to the front in time. Misjudgments of intents and capabilities.

The same was true in Iraq's attack on Kuwait: a certain State Department employee delivered what she thought was a non-committal message, diplomatically stated, that problems between Iraq and Kuwait should be solved between these two countries; what Saddam Hussein understood was that the US didn't care about how those two resolved conflicts, do what you please. The Iraqis didn't believe that the US could get fighting troops to the front in time. Misjudgment of intents and capabilities.

Now, how does one end up misjudging, of having faulty perception?

By listening to what you want to hear, rather than finding out the truth.


Like listening to someone like Gore Vidal rant and rave about how the US has been turned into a fascist state by the Bush family.

Read what Vidal says:

We are no longer a country we are a framework for crooks to go in and steal money. Knowing that they'll never be caught and they'll be admired for it. Americans always take everybody on his own evaluation. You say I'm a state and they say "oh, yeah yeah yeah, he's a state, isn't that great." And you accuse the other people of your crimes before you commit them. It's an old trick which was known to Machiavelli who wrote about it in his handbook, the Prince.

What is fascinating is that this may well be what Tehran wants to see: a mirror image of themselves. If anything, this description fits Teheran, rather than Washington, but if it is an accurate reading of what Tehran wants to see, i.e. that the US government is nothing more than a mirror image of themselves, then war is probably inevitable.

What people like Gore Vidal don't realize - or perhaps they do, but simply couldn't be bothered to care - is that their statements read vastly different outside of the US than for their intended audience. In the US, I can see people nodding their head in ditto unison, following the party line on "How Horrible Things Are Under The Bushies", but in Tehran (and elsewhere) this changes and warps perceptions of the US from reality.

Such perceptions lead to miscalculations. Such fundamental mistakes lead to war.

But Vidal and similar sycophants don't really care that they are part of the problem...not of the solution.

Your Taxes At Work...

Well, at least my taxes.

Seems that there was a conference over the weekend, the Third Trans-Atlantic Conference.

Paid for by the German government, it seems. Bit of a toss-up who exactly paid for it, but if you google on "Third Trans-Atlantic Conference" you find... virtually nothing. There's a couple of links to the German Peace Forum, but their pages lead to ... nothing.

Consider what is being said here, it doesn't surprise me at all.

Apparently someone really, really didn't do their homework, or were so naive (or craven, bit of a toss-up there) to believe that inviting Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to talk about Israel was a great idea, one that would foster better understanding.


Well, that didn't work out well, did it?

Instead, those illustrious countries mentioned above used the forum to bash Israel (duh) and there was nary a voice of opposition to be heard.



Well, isn't that special. What were the dimwits who put the conference together thinking? That inviting those countries that have the greatest investment, not merely political, but also financial, in seeing that Israel is destroyed would be one happy love fest that would bring greater understanding and further dialogue?

I would hope that Germany learns at least this one lesson: world peace is not served by pandering to fascists (Syria), thugs (Lebanon, Iran) and religious fanatics (Saudi Arabia), unless you want their true intentions revealed for all to see.

I would hope that some eyes have been opened. Apparently the German foreign ministry was there, but nothing was said. That'd have been poor form, I suppose. Don't want to jeopardize selling them the makings for bombs and the like, right? Can't have them canceling machinery orders for centrifuges, that'd be right foolish, nicht wahr?




Cowards.

Hat tip: PowerLine.

Udo, Criticism and Intolerance...

One of the guys I studied with is Udo Ulfkotte. He's a professor at a German university and teaches security studies: not just political, but also how companies can ensure that what is supposed to stay secret actually does stay secret.

He is, bluntly, one of the good guys. Really. I've known him for over 20 years, and this is not some goofball. He points out that the emperor wears no clothes: that is his sin, nothing more, nothing less.

He spent quite a bit if time in the Middle East, as one the editors of one the premier German newspapers, the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). He's walked the walk, spent more time than anyone realizes in countries like Iran, Syria, Lebanon, the Gulf States. He knows the people there, he knows their societies, he knows their culture and above all he knows their religion. He's been pressured, at times almost at gunpoint, to convert to Islam, but he hasn't. He is a confessing Christian.

He's an uncomfortable guy for a lot of people. He's smart, much more than many are comfortable with, and he isn't afraid to speak his mind. He has steadfastly been the thorn in people's side, he's written books that not only embarassed people in high places and politicians, he simply sees problems as they are, rather than the official white-washing and the nice corporate and political PR that covers up severe problems in the sincere hope that no one notices how badly things are really going.

You see, there is a world of denial going on right now in Europe and in the liberal (in the US sense of the word) areas of the US. The denial is that radical islam is not an existential threat, and that all you need is to let the police handle the problem. This is the standard rhetoric that you hear everywhere in Europe: that radical Islam is not a threat, that even if it were the police can handle it, that since it isn't we need to respect others' religion, that rhetorical calls for death and destruction is just talk and doesn't mean anything. In other words: denial, appeasement, and sometimes outright fear, subtly expressed, that saying the truth will just make things worse, leading to self-censorship and at the end of the day a fundamental cowardice to face the truth.

Some people can't take criticism.

Not Udo: if anything, the opposite.

There are three groups of people who can't take criticism in Europe.

The first group is those who are in charge, those who make the policy, those who enforce the policies. Criticize them and you are criticizing the technocratic elite in Europe, those who vastly prefer to run things according to their desires, who neither accept criticism nor appreciate it: if anything, they reject criticism, attacking those who dare question authority.

The second group is those who are in collusion with the first: the media in Europe - critical reporting is as strange a concept to them as computers and the internet would be to a 12th century monk - and the oh-so-cool journalists who earn their money by ensuring that there are no critical voices heard. There are critical voices out there, but the key to ensuring that they are not heard is to make them look ridiculous, to make them marginal, to ensure that the lies of European society are not exposed (lies such as how pensions are secure, how high taxes ensures that the poor are taken care of, that ties between the state and big corporations are fair and that the politicians represent the will of the people: hah!).

The third group that does not take criticism is the disenfranchised immigrant youth of Europe: all they have, literally, is their pride, pride in simple and mean things, pride in petty crime and humiliation, pride in a cultural heritage that has little or nothing to show in modernity.

This last group is the problem here, but it ties in with the other two.

Udo is married to Doris.

Somebody, somewhere, in Germany, decided to have fun with Udo and Doris.

They made a video. Claiming to be Udo and Doris.

I'm going to put in English what Udo has written: this is my translation, on the fly, and I've taken the one or the other liberty. But the core message remains...

What would you do, if your telephone rang and someone said that thousands of Turks wanted to kill your wife? You probably wouldn't take them seriously. As you are reading these lines, more and more Turks are looking for a single German, who put up a video on YouTube and insulted not only Turks, but the founder of the religion of Islam, Mohammed. This spread like a wildfire within the Turkish community, and now they are trying to find Doris Ulfkotte and are threatening her with death. Doris Ulfkotte is the wife of the author of these words - and she neither knows the people who made the video for YouTube, nor does she have anything to do with them. The police know this as well. Nonetheless, literally thousands of Turks have called for the death of Doris Ulfkotte. Several District Attorneys have started investigating, the authorities have been notified and the German equivalent of the FBI has started to investigate. A pogrom has started, and the victim cannot defend herself.

On Sunday, 22 June 2008, at 3:56 in the afternoon, my wife's mobile rang. She was called by someone from Berlin, who wanted to tell her that she was in danger. According to the caller, my wife's murder was being organized. On a sunny Sunday afternoon, no one takes something like that seriously. At first. You think it's some sort of bad joke. However, the caller insisted that we take it seriously. And there was proof: a video on YouTube. This was the first time that my wife had ever watched a video on YouTube: we found the link, and found a horrible video, one that called for racial anger (it's been removed from YouTube in the meantime), during which a young German for more than 5 minutes lets loose a tirade of insults against Muslims, Turks and Mohammed. The woman shown in the video - not even half as old as my wife - calls herself "Doris Ulfkotte".

That was the first blow. The caller showed us that at that point no fewer than 4500 comments had been posted, after less than a few hours, and that the video had been called up no less  than 140 000 times. A video calling for racial anger was suddenly the second-most viewed video in Germany on YouTube. Among the comments were no less than dozens of threats to murder "Doris Ulfkotte". New comments were flowing in, and the death threats did not disappear. And just a few minutes later, for the first time, we saw a previous address appear in a comment, with the appeal to meet and go to that address to murder "Doris Ulfkotte". And videos of this address have now appeared on the Internet.

It was at that pint that we realized that this wasn't just a video sliming my wife, but rather was an event that could lead to all sorts of consequences. We called the police, called government lawyers.

In the meantime, under the name of the video (Türken gewinnen gegen Kroatien, Turkey wins against Croatia), the comments section now shows over one hundred death threats, such as:

"I'm about to leave, whoever gets their first take some video, Doris you bitch you are dead and your fag husband as well"

"I sent the video to every Turk every Arab Albanian Kurd Moslem believe me that is your death sentence bitch and somewhere sometime oh shit what will happen to you and I hope that the police don't get there first, you fat cow you can't hide, you son of a thousand fathers"

"You bitch I am not Turkish I am Croat but Muslim reply to me you damned little nazis let's meet I will kill you and your little slut, you have to regret saying this, all muslims of the world, our beloved prophet is being insulted and our religion"

Now, these are only a few examples of the thousands of death threats that were posted before the video was removed; more than 10 000 comments were made and over 200 000 people viewed the video. Our company number has been now posted in the Internet, and the first death threats have already been caled in, others arriving per email. That neither my wife nor I knew of the video, that we find the content just as terrible as our German and Turkish countrymen, is of absolutely no interest whatsoever.

In the mean time, there is a chain SMS with the call to find us and to kill us. No one appears to be interested in the fact that we have nothing to do with this. Other sites have put the videos up, and the people who made the videos have made new ones, and continue to call themselves "Ulfkotte".

Please help the police, please help my family. If you have any information on the existence of any other site on the internet showing this video, let us know or the nearest police. We have to find who has made this video and who is behind it: the calls for our deaths have reached the Arab world as well.

Everyone making such death threats will be prosecuted, and the makers of the video will hopefully be found and punished. They have probably no idea how many police are now involved in dealing with this racial hatred video and the acute problems that it created.

We were the first who filed charges against the maker of the videos, as well as those making death threats. We hope that we can catch them. Please help!

Now, Udo has written more on this:

Have you seen pictures of refugees? People, fleeing from an enraged mob? A mob, that wants to lynch people? We've seen such pictures from the Third World, but such pogroms also exist in Germany. The media is politically correct and turns away, as long as the victims are German.

According to a study of the German interior ministry, every fourth young muslim is willing to use violence against unbelievers. We're talking about Germany here, not in some Third World country. When (and if) such numbers are reported, they are largely ignored. Now, in Germany there are between 3.6 and 4 mn muslims (depending on whether you take the numbers of the government or muslim groups), and if you can do math, you have a good idea of how many muslims are fundamentally prepared to do violence against non muslims. Once you've been impacted by such readiness to do violence, these numbers appear in a completely different light.

This auther has already shown how fast this population group can be brought to make death threats per SMS, in the Internet and by mouth-to-mouth propaganda. It just happens to be that the death threats have been made against my wife and myself. The State Attorney for Koblenz has publically stated that we - those chosen to be the mob's victims - are innocent. First of all the positive: many Turks have gone to the police to help them, and they have helped to identify those making death threats. They've also taken the initiative to make it clear in forums that my wife and I are mistakenly the object of the anger of the mob. Let me explicitly thank all the Turks that have helped!

However, there are also other stories.

Two Germans, who started this whole thing with their racial-hatred video on YouTube, have repeated themselves. They put up another video on the internet, whereby they do admit that they are not my wife and myself, but they've just added fuel to the fire. Instead of admitting they had done something stupid and to ask for forgiveness, they continued their rants of racial hatred. Let's be clear: we don't have anything to do with them. YouTube has also deleted the video, but that also means that their disclaimer, that they are not us, has also been deleted.

More than 200 000 internet users saw the first video; thousands called for our deaths. It is impossible to tell everyone involved that we have nothing to do with this: in the meantime, a bounty of 1000 Euors has been placed on the head of my wife. If we were in a joking mood, we'd be insulted that it is such a small sum.

We've tried to talk to the media about what has happened and to make sure that this multi-cultural pogrom with thousands of death threats is aimed at the wrong people. Our experience saddened us: with the exception of one radio station and the blog Politically Incorrect, no one wanted to talk to us. "If the situation was reversed: that a Dr. Udo Ulfkotte called for Turkish deaths - that'd be a great headline! But so? No thanks, no interest". That is what a large Berlin publisher said. We tried to get in touch with the widely-read German boulevard press, both by email (with copies of the death threats!) and we called them, but we have not received a single asnwer.

It hurt us even more, that the author of these words on 19 June 2008 was named in an article in a left-wing Berlin newspaper that was titled "The Opinion Terrorist". The author - a woman from an islamic Cultural group - wrote about islam critics, who she libelled. However, you can't find this article if you search for it online with my family name and the title of the article: however, those making the death threats against us are using this article to try and find us. Posts in some Internet forums seem to think that it is right and proper for someone, named as an Islam critic by such an author in such a newspaper, for that person to be the target of the mob's fury.

Thanks, editors of that paper, for giving the mob additional fuel for their fire of hatred.

There was a time when journalists had ethics and morals: this newspaper continues to call me an "Opinion Terrorist", as if nothing had ever happened (see note 2 below).

There are also Germans who are using what is happening to us. Just go to the German internet search machine Technorati and enter the name "Ulfkotte" (see note 1 below), and read the article "Die Verfolgung der Doris Ulfkotte" (The prosecution of Doris Ulfkotte). The writer of that article was recently sentenced by the Berlin count to pay me 10 000 Euros, his sentencing hasn't happened yet: no German blogger has ever been taken to a German civil counrt and been fined as much, let alone facing prison time. Can you imagine what it was he said?

You'd have a hard time doing so, since the German media did not report on this case at all. Not a single report. If you read the newest article of this convicted Berlin writer, and view the videos, you can imagine what sort of libel was invovled. The State Attorney has started a new investigation against this "journalist", but that takes time and in extremely unpleasant.

Now, my wife and I are refugees in our own country, based on what is happening to us. We've already been under police protection, for 18 months. We don't want that. We've left our apartment, and cannot return. That is our decision regardless of what the police say. There are simply too many people in Germany who live like refugees in their own country. This includes the author "Doris Glück", who publishes under that pseudonym. There are many of us, and our number is increasing: do you know the philosopher Robert Redeker in France? Or the student Ehoud J. in the Netherlands? We are grateful that the state has helped us escape the mob.

And we thank all who have offered us help and who have worked so that at least a number of those making death threats now know that we have nothing to do with this. As Christians we will continue. As Christians we will also politely point out, that one quarter of the Muslims living in Germany are willing to use violence against anyone who isn't muslim, and that this is a not a good thing. We know what the reality of the situation is.

So, now you know the current situation. If you read in the "quality" German press about death threats made against turkish soccer fans, you now know the true story.

PS: If you are shocked about the behavior of the German press, read this about my life: this author has, on connection with reporting about radical muslims in Germany, had his house searched a number of times under suspicion of passing on secrets. The problem wasn't what I wrote, but rather that this was to be kept a secret. However, Udo Ulfkotte is not a government official, and can't pass on secrets: he was working as a journalist. The media bias was clearly visible, and the media speculated on how many years of jail could be expected: TV and newspapers reported. What was surprising, though, was that no one - as far as the author knows - reported that all charges were dropped. A lot of mud was slung, and the clean up was the job of the one aimed at...

Even worse: After the charges were all dropped in September 2006, the German radio station HR3 reported, in the main news section of their broadcasts (and not just once, but rather a number of times!) in October 2006 that the author Udo Ulfkotte was facing up to 5 years in jail. This was a plain, bald-faced lie. Of course, those living around us believed the news, and we were pariah. We've moved since. We know the game now: so much for "quality journalism". There was one exception: the journalist Klaus R. at least was able to stop the further broadcast. Thanks!

Note 1: The links on the Internet were removed a few hours after this was posted. Whether they have been removed by the authorities or by the authors, I can't say. Sometimes they're there, someine not, but the investigating authorities know the links.

Note 2: Telepolis reports: this whole thing is more curious, as the woman in the video isn't Doris Ulfkotte. And apparently the Ulfkottes didn't know anything about this film. Who is actually behind the story? The police are investigating. Anything is possible". Aha, then we could actually be behind the whole story, behind the thousands of death threats? That is the politically correct view for these "supposed death threats". Thanks, dear Telepolis editors, thanks for your empathy!

This is the face of intolerance: that a critic be dragged through a living hell for something he didn't even do - and it's not him who has been targeted, but rather his wife.

Intolerance at its best.

Now there has been, of course, speculation as to who is behind this: Udo is not that well known for him to be an accidental victim. My guess is that this is a classic "black" libel action by political opponents who are deliberately interested in seeing Udo suffer for his "Burgerwehr" or civil courage.

Yet More Unintended Consequences...

If you read here, you should know that the subprime crisis was a politically-made crisis, driven by the legal requirement to make sub-prime loans in the name of that mythical beast, Fairness.

Thank you, ACORN, thank you...

What is particularly galling is that ACORN is using the beast that they created to ride to greater glory. Here they rail about the predatory financiers and about the massive upswing in subprime loans - the beast that they themselves created - that "unfairly" impact minorities, the elderly and po' folks.

But this wasn't the original point...

This link shows that the real problem facing the mortgage originators, when they are banks, is that they may enter into non-compliance in terms of their sub-prime responsibilties (see this for what I mean here), as the number of sub-prime loans has declined significantly:

Subprime loans fell to 3.1% of originations in the fourth quarter of 2007, from 20% in 2005 and 2006.

3.1%?

Lots of banks not gonna be making subprime loans for the near-term, and that means, theoretically, that in three years these banks will be in non-compliance, driving them effectively out of the mortgage business.

Unintended consequences from a bunch of activists who are now using the monster that they themselves created - from an ignorance of rather basic economics and financing - to further their own cause.

How often do these folks meet themselves coming around a corner?

Unintended Consequences ... and Union Stupidity...

Whilst perusing various other things, I ran across this:

Between approximately 1967 and 1978, large amounts of material stored in the BBC's videotape and film libraries were destroyed or wiped to make way for newer programmes. This happened for a number of reasons, the primary one being that agreements with the actors' union Equity and other trade bodies limited the number of times a single programme could be broadcast. These showings were also limited to within a set time period. This was due to the unions' fear that if the channels filled their schedules with repeats, it could lead to lower levels of production, putting actors and other staff out of work. This attitude by the unions had the unintentional side effect of causing many programmes to be junked after their repeat rights had expired, as they were considered to be of no further use to the broadcasters.

As a result, most of the early Dr. Who is simply gone, never to be seen again.

But this mind-set didn't end there: the same thing, basically, happened with many other early TV shows.

Hence the unintended consequence of the union obsession with protetcting their rank and file was to deny the rank and file income from something called ... residuals.


Star Trek, the great breakthrough TV series, was largely a failure during the original broadcast season, and only fan intervention meant that there was a third season at all: the lacklustre ratings of the third season, largely due to poor placement of the time slot - 10 pm on Fridays, do you know how I had to lobby my folks to let me stay up that late back when? - led to the final demise.

The enormous success of the Star Trek franchise is that TV stations took it into syndication and broadcast it to death. Which created the fan base that led to the success of the latter series: even the late Enterprise did better in the ratings than the original series did in that third season.

Of course, if the unions had their way, we'd probably only be able to remember the series, rather than have Paramount be able to earn hundreds of millions of dollars based on residual rights. Everyone in the original series - the main characters - earned multiples of their original pay.


But noooo, the unions didn't want that in England. Hence union stupidity: the episodes are gone, gone, gone, gone.

Unions have their place, but the moment when power becomes the driving principal and short-sighted stupidity reigns, their influence can be downright destructive.

Isn't It Ironic...

..that the "Candidate of the People" is the one who is going to try to buy the election, flooding the airwaves (he's already got the press in his pocket) and outspending McCain by deciding not to accept public money and hence a spending limit?

...that the party that truly, fervently believes that it is the party of the blue-collar voter and the middle class is instead the party who sucks up to the fat cats of Wall Street with the explicit aim of being bought and paid for?

...that the party that truly, fervently believes that the best way to help those in need, to help "the little guy", is government help, is the same party that has blocked cheap energy (causing prices to rise and hitting the poorest the hardest), that has blocked tort reform aimed at preventing abuse of the legal system, which results in health costs being so high that millions can't afford proper insurance?

...that many of his supporters, those who believe in the message of Martin Luther King, of the day to come where people will be judged on their character and not on the color of their skin, believe that they have a right to the office not because of who Obama is, not because of his character, but because of the color of his skin?

...that the party who believes itself to be so progressive and forward-looking is, instead, reactionary and obsessed with the past?


Oh, isn't it ironic.


The first point is the worst hypocrisy: see this.

The key quote is:

Obama committed publicly to pursuing an agreement with McCain that would involve both of them taking public dollars, only to abandon it less than two weeks after he became the presumptive Democratic nominee, with Clinton's exit.

Commitment, then abandonment. This appears to be a recurring meme. I wonder how George Soros will react when his bought candidate - Obama - abandons him when it's no longer opportune? How will MoveOn react when he doesn't toe their line?

Of course, he doesn't care: it's all about getting elected. Nothing more, nothing less: the problem is, we don't know who the fuck he is.

And the Democrats are doing their best to pull a PT Barnum on the American people.


Isn't it ironic...

Watermelons, Climate "Change" and Wealth...

This article here is a must-read.

Put simply - and please do read the full article - the forces of darkness are still amongst us. This sounds terribly melodramatic, but I can't see any other way of putting it adequately.

The world is facing a period of unrivaled opportunity, coupled with unrivaled threat.

The opportunity is the fact that the emerging Indian and Chinese middle class will bring massive prosperity to the world, unlike any we've ever seen before. In the next 30 years the world will change, economically, to something we've never seen: traditional western countries will decline - their citizens will be wealthier than ever - but in a good way, while more people will be lifted out of poverty than even lived 100 years ago.

This opportunity is, put simply, what will happen when business as usual proceeds. We're talking wealth beyond our dreams, or more exactly, wealth beyond the dreams of the vast majority of people, starting with the simple things - not having your children die, living to see grandchildren - and moving to the more complex, of huge agrarian societies moving into the industrial age, with all the wonders, trials and tribulations that this will bring.

It's the story of wealth, of earnings saved, of literally hundreds of millions of people who will be wondering what to do on Saturday night, rather than wondering where their next meal will come from or whether their daughter will die before the week is out.

But there are those who have dedicated their lives to ensuring that this wealth never happens. It can't be allowed, they say: our models prove that if this happens, then the world ends.

It's the watermelon people, green outside, red inside. They want their share of the wealth - of course they do, they've never worked a proper lick in their lives, or if they have, they've hated it and scheme against having to repeat it - and they'll be damned if they will let anyone have it unless it's under their control.

But being under their control means that no one will ever have it.


For me it is inconceivable that one could argue with a straight face that hundreds of millions must continue to live in poverty in order to ensure that a few may revel in nature's bounty, that a few may enjoy a pristine and unspoiled nature that, if you look more closely, only exists in the fevered minds of romantic naturalists.


Read the link and understand what really is planned for the future: deprivation, control and poverty.

You'd think that decades of experience with the fundamental contradictions of Marxism would have tricked down to even the densest, but I guess that I am a hopeless optimist...

Trust

These two op-eds in the WSJ belong together.

This one, on the Torture Gambit of the Democrats, should be read in conjunction with The Supreme Court Goes To War.

Both go to show why the Democratic Party cannot be trusted, not in a time of war and fundamentally not at all.

The Democrats cannot afford to attack the President and his war policies directly: they know that the ice here is much too thin to support them. So rather than that, they are dedicating significant resources to go after the people who implemented these policies, fully aware that they - the congressional members of the Democratic Party - were instrumental in approving those policies.

This is the height of hypocrisy.

What this is designed to do is not stop the President's policies, but rather it is nothing less than a venal act of revenge. Revenge, perhaps, for their own failings and their own lack of backbone - if they were truly opposed back then, they lacked the backbone to stand up and oppose - but it is nothing less than that.

Once proposed by the President and approved by Congress, laws become the parameters under which people work. If the laws are changed, then policies must perforce change, but if the law is that - the law - then you cannot reasonably expect anyone to second-guess whether the law will be changed and hence policies that were lawful then become unlawful. You cannot run a political and legal system on the basis of retroactive laws, laws aimed at punishing those who carry out policy (and did not decide it). Or, rather, you can try to run such a system, and get a system that will not do anything, literally, because those charged with carrying out the policy will not dare act because the chilling effect that retroactive jurisprudence would have.

This isn't law, this is a travesty of law.

And it is being done to placate groups like MoveOn and the other crypto-fascist left-wing groups that are now apparently the core of the Democratic Party.

I first registered as a Democrat, and to my eternal shame I voted for Carter the first time I ever voted.


The Democratic Party has long abrogated its trust with the American people, subservient as it is to moneyed interests and its self-destructive policies. The Democratic Party has blocked oil exploration and refineries because they want gas prices to go up to appease their watermelon faction (green outside, red inside); they want the US to be humiliated by failing in Iraq; they want Iran to be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf; they want Chavez to be able to export his revolution, especially to Columbia (why else would Pelosi block the trade agreement with that country?).

And the Democratic Party is also the party of judicial activism, of which we have now seen the worst of its kind in a long, long, long time. Giving enemy combatants civil rights in war time is, in its idiocy,  tantamount to disbanding the police in a major city and replacing them with therapists who counsel criminals how to better get in touch with their feelings and why they break the law. Anarchy and chaos is the theme here, and once this percolates down to the troops, there will be changes as to how any war is fought.

If the law is stated that prisoners must be read Miranda rights, that evidence must be gathered and documented, that no lethal force be used without documentation of the need therefore, then there will be no prisoners, there will be no wounded, the troops will manufacture the evidence and will grow contemptuous of their officers and those who are so foolish as to send them into battle.

Or there will be no battles: this makes military operations impossible, for any officer ordering his troops into battle who then fails to provide the necessary documentation for each and every enemy casualty will then be prosecuted for failing to uphold the law.


The law is, in this case, an ass. Of course, that is the mascot of the Democratic Party, and rarely, rarely has it been so well deserved.


Let me repeat: The Democratic Party cannot be trusted. Any attempt to change the law in order to retroactively punish your political opponents is reprehensible and vile. It is aimed at destroying the rule of law, not upholding it, and for that the Democratic Party richly deserves its fate.

Gitmo and the Supremes...and Unlawful Combatants

Without going into great and pedantic detail, the decision of the Supreme Court regarding the detainees at Guantanamo Bay will have several unintended and, fundamentally, several very undesirable results.

First and foremost, the decision is flawed, as the dissenting opinions make clear.

The Geneva Conventions are clear on this matter: unlawful combatants, those who deliberately hide amongst civilians with the intent of making it impossible for military and police to combat them, do not enjoy any of the rights of the Geneva Conventions. Zilch, nada. There is an admonition to nonetheless treat such folks fairly as if they were combatants, but unlawful combatants may not use the Geneva Conventions to hide behind.

Under such circumstances, any signatory to the convention may, if deemed necessary by that signatory, summarily execute such unlawful combatants. All that is required is that a legal instance be convened to make that decision, and the legal instance may take whatever form the signatory may choose (commissariat, tribunal, field court, whatever).

What the Supremes have done here is to extend unlawful combatants the same fundamental rights as US citizens (habeas corpus), with the right to have their cases enter the US legal system.

What does this mean? Well, besides giving all sorts of left-wingers enormous hard-ons (and really, this decision does exactly that), it means that there will no longer be any unlawful combatant detainees within a legal framework such as Guantanamo Bay was: in the future, unlawful combatants, when captured, will be interrogated and then, in all likelihood, summarily executed. Or they may well be summarily executed on the battlefield.

As they should be.

This is where the Supreme Court has made its mistake: by giving unlawful combatants rights that they do not deserve.

Does this sound harsh?

Of course it is harsh. But think about it: there is a reason why unlawful combatants do not have the rights granted to lawful combatants. It is because unlawful combatants break the rules of warfare. If the rules of warfare can be broken with impunity, then what is the use of the Geneva Conventions?

The use of the Geneva Conventions is that warfare has become so destructive - the mass armies of the 18th century were destructive enough to push for these conventions - that war was tending to mass slaughter and bordered on genocide. We're not talking about soldiers shooting a couple of civilians, but rather the ways armies behaved during the Thirty Year War and the Hundred Year War: killing all and any in their way, of looting, pillaging and raping their way through the countryside, all in order to support themselves in the field and to devastate the enemy's ability to wage war.

This is so destructive that parts of central Europe never really recovered from those days. Brandenburg's population was halved, estimates places the loss of life during that period in the German states at 30%, and the mercenary armies were infamous for their lawlessness and systematic use of real torture (Schwedentrunk). The city of Magdeburg had 25000 people in 1618, but a grand total of 2464 in 1644, a decline of over 90%.

War had become so destructive that the laws of warfare became a necessity, and this is what led to the Geneva Conventions (not immediately, of course, but it was the driving force).

The reason for treating anyone who breaks the Geneva Conventions with such draconian measures is that the Geneva Conventions exist to protect civilians, to protect those who are not involved in fighting, and to ensure that man's mortal sin, of his ability to so ruthlessly and mercilessly pursue his fellow men and to aim at their destruction, be controlled and limited.

Because wars have been with us always and no amount of "ain't gonna study war no more" is going to change that.

Wars are caused by population pressures, by religions, by those wanting power and are willing to take it. Population pressure wars are about resources; religious wars about control and salvation; power wars are the political wars. This is not going to change. Wars will, on one form or another, be a part of the human experience as long as populations grow, as long as people believe fervently in anything, and as long as disenfranchised believe that political power grows out of the barrel of the gun.

Given human nature, it is best to govern how wars are fought.

Sherman's March destroyed the heart of the South, and it took decades to recover from. A modern Sherman's March, even without using nuclear weapons or even air power, could and would gut any industrialized country, reducing it to a state of abject poverty. Warfare like the Thirty Year's War in a modern society would so devastate a countryside that we would call it a deserted land. It's not a meaningful thing to do: that is why we have the Geneva Conventions, to stop it.


And yet...the Supremes say otherwise.



Unlawful combatants should be the ultimate pariahs amongst the peoples, should be publicly executed as deviants and sinners against their fellows, because they bring indeed the apocalypse: give them the ability to fight the way they want to, and it's not the military who suffers, it is the poor bystander, the helpless and those who cannot or will not defend themselves.

Guerrilla wars and asymmetric war fighting have become "popular" with those whose grievances are too trivial and whose support is too small to otherwise gain power. It has been glorified by the left, is aided and abetted by countries wanting to interfere in secret with their neighbors, and is the only way for many to even contemplate fighting, given the professionalism of a right and proper military.


What the Supreme Court and those who support the idea of treating unlawful combatants as anything but the cowards and fools that they are ignore is exactly this: their decision doesn't support the rule of law and the sanctity of the legal system, but rather undermines the fundamental way that wars are fought.


There are two ways out of this. One way, the better way, is to change the laws and the Geneva Convention so that there are clear rules for dealing with unlawful combatants, one that takes into account their special meaning and has clear and proper penalties (you don't have to execute them, but one can deny them rights as the ultimate pariahs amongst the people). This is the right and proper path, but one that will take, literally, decades to work out.

The other way is for unlawful combatants to simply disappear. This is what will happen. They will be questioned, they will be abused, they will be executed forthwith. We will lose the ability to aggressively interrogate - not torture, despite what the bleed-hearts say, as torture is something completely different - by losing the willingness to treat unlawful combatants as being worth taking alive.

The Supreme Court decision is fundamentally flawed. It is going to make things worse, rather than better, and it is going to result in more deaths and more violations of rights, rather than fewer.

And If You Don't Think Obama Is A Party Machinist...

...then why is he spending 4.5 times as much as McCain on people, twice as much on rent, and 25 times as much on broadcast advertising? (HT: Here and here)

Why does he have 700 employees in 19 States, while McCain has around 100 in a few states? Why is his burn rate - the rate of expenditures to incoming money - at 114%?

What is also interesting is the differing state of finances: McCain has $31.5mn and Obama has $46.5mn, but the RNC has $53.6mn and the DNC has a mere $4.4mn, meaning that the Republicans right now have over $85mn, while the Democrats have not quite $51mn. That's a huge difference at this stage of the campaign, and more importantly, this also means that Obama's got a huge amount of fundraising to do.

Or, vastly more likely, Obama is expecting the 527s to do a lot of work for him. The problem there is that the 527s can't come out and say "Vote for Obama" without having the FEC come down on them like a ton of bricks: hence expect the 527s to be strictly attack dogs (which, considering who they are, is exactly what their role will be).

The error that the Democrats are making is that their base, fired up as it might be, isn't the electorate. The electorate is that great spread in the middle, far from either the left or the right. The 527s will produce lovely attack ads that basically do nothing but attack someone who isn't even running, and who will ultimately alienate the middle with their negativeness. That's gonna make a lot of BDS sufferers very, very happy, but will lose them the general election if that is the case.

What McCain has to do is to gain the Clinton Democrats and take the center. This is where the greatest conservative criticism of McCain - that he's far too centrist - is really his advantage.

At this point, I think it'll be McCain by 10% or less in the popular vote and around 30% in the electoral college (over Obama, of course). Obama will be his own worst enemy, the Democratic machine will devour itself before the campaign is over, and McCain will not so much win by being the obviously better candidate, but rather by failing to make nearly the number of plain and stupid errors that Obama will make.

Why do I say this? Because, fundamentally, Obama is now, for the very first time, going to face a true political opponent that has not just talked the talk, but has walked the walk. As my grandmother would say: Obama sure does talk pretty.

Obama will have to explain his political shift from extreme liberal (for the US) to moderate to an electorate who has consistently rejected Presidential candidates who have done so in the past (George McGovern, John Kerry): McCain doesn't have to do that. He is who he is, and he's not running as someone else.


That makes the difference.

Obama - The Reform Candidate

Well, this confirms something that I've suspected, but wasn't sure of.

Barack Obama is the politician who is trumpeting his reformist character of "Change we can believe in" to the high heavens.



When in reality he is a) a machine politician from that most machine political city in the US, Chicago, where he is part and parcel of the system and b) he has consistently lied and deceived not only the public, but more criminally his enthusiastic voters, about what he really stands for.

Barack Obama isn't about change: rather than being progressive, he is deeply reactionary, deeply committed to restoring the Democratic Party to a purported glorious time (that never existed) in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Machine - the deeply corrupt financing of political activity, with ties to organized crime from the get-go - controlled who became the candidates, controlled how the elections were run, and in areas of importance, would also conspire to ensure that the machine candidates also won (voting the graveyard was invented in Chicago).

Rather than be what his image claims, the candidate of the downtrodden and ignored lower and middle class, he is in fact indebted to Big Money, indebted to the highly dangerous "liberal" orthodoxy that passes for thought in the upper middle and upper class "liberals" that have made careers out of exploiting racial differences and making sure that inequalities continue and worsen.

He is, if anything, the antithesis of what he claims to be, as fundamentally dishonest as the Clintons at their heyday, and as such not worthy of the attention of any true liberal, liberal in the classic sense that has ceased to have any meaning whatsoever.

Elect Obama, and you will elect exactly the opposite of what you think he is.

Point and Counterpoint, or Understanding a Scientific Fascism...

Reality intrudes here, as so often is the case...


But here are two links to ponder.

The first is a glimpse of the kind of scientific fascism that the environmental movement has become.

The second reminds us why you don't give political power to scientists (unless, of course, they are duly elected as politicians...at which point they are no longer scientists...).



The first link is here. Bill McKibben, described as a "scholar in residence" - if you know what that really means in the academic world, let me know - is really a political activist and has been one for decades.

I'm not going to fisk the whole thing - that'd be tedious - but rather just a few items. Read the article yourself: I'm not taking things our of context.

So that's the science. And from it must now flow the politics. Forget the plans we've laid so far, which see us slowly easing up on the use of coal, and ratcheting up the use of renewables, mostly by gradual shifts in the price of carbon. That might get us to 550, and it might possibly even get us somewhere near 450. But 350 — well, that means in essence that we have to leave most of the carbon underground that's now there.


First of all, the "science" he is referring to isn't that at all: it's conjecture and speculation. Second of all, he wants science to drive politics, which displays two things: his absolute ignorance of how politics really works - even though he is a political activist, that doesn't mean he knows how politics really works, but rather that he is, for whatever reasons, dedicated to achieving a political goal - and what I would call scientific fascism.

Ooooooh, I called someone a fascist. Well, if it walks and talks like one, it is one. Fascism is, simply put, when all aspects of life, political and non-political, are subsumed in the service of the State, which is in turn run by enlightened ones who know what is best for the State (and hence society as a whole, since the State Is Everything. The enlightened ones include, of course, the pet scientists who thought up Eugenics and other "sciences" that dealt with weeding out the bad genes in society.

Anyone who tells you that science must determine politics is the spiritual grandchild of those who sterilized "undesirables" and who shipped off the "subhumans" to the gas chambers. Plain and simple. Politics is the art of the possible: what Bill here wants is the impossible: the stoppage of the American economy (which is all about control: he who can stop something controls it).

But it goes further:

There's only one possible way to make change on that scale: an all-out World War II style effort to convert our economy away from carbon and towards — well, towards conservation, towards buses and bikes, towards wind and sun. We might even have to consider currently far-fetched schemes to pull CO₂ out of the atmosphere (at the very least, we'd need to spend big to see if they're a real possibility). We'd need to do it with a truly aggressive price on carbon (which, to keep from impoverishing everyone, you'd need to rebate back to individuals through some scheme like the increasingly crucial Sky Trust proposed by Peter Barnes). We couldn't have a nice, seamless transition; we'd need a Saul-on-the-Damascus-road conversion, where the scales fell from our eyes and we set to work.

The "arsenal of democracy" efforts in WW2 saw the economy taken control of by resource boards and the like to best use industrial assets for the war effort. It was a total and complete control: it was the closest thing that we have ever had to a command economy. And Bill and his friends want to be in control. They've decided what's bad for you, they've decided "What Must Be Done", and they're the only ones who can bring salvation.

Right. Arbeit macht frei, I suppose.

And he goes on:

And that would be the easy part. We'd then need to figure out how to finance the same transition in the developing world. The Chinese still have a low standard of living, most of them. They're not going to forego heat and light; they're going to need something like a global Marshall Plan-equivalent to help them develop without burning their coal. Massive transfer of technology would be required — which means, in truth, pretty massive transfer of resources. Which just maybe is not what the American voter is ready for right now.

He's got two things right here: the goal of forcing to the rest of the world to do our bidding - nothing less is implied here - would mean massive costs, massive transfer of resources; further, the American voter is not ready for that.

Well, no shit Sherlock.

He's not even considering persuading the Chinese and Indian governments: his only question is how to finance this. He wants to impoverish the American voter in order to do this, and he knows that they won't go for that.

His solution? Get rid of democracy. No ifs, ands or buts: there is, for him, a higher reality, a greater truth that trumps any political system that fails to do as he demands:

So far, the method has been to ask what's going to work economically and politically and then work from there — that is to say, the "reality" of what you can persuade senators, or Fortune 500 companies, or taxpayers to support has set the tempo. And that is one important definition of reality — in a democracy, in fact, it's usually the most crucial one.

But in this case physics and chemistry increasingly impose a reality of their own. We find ourselves out of the safety zone in which human civilization has developed and flourished, a safety zone limited by the automatic reaction of the planet's climate system to an increase in the amount of solar radiation trapped in our atmosphere. That is, almost literally, a higher reality. If we've got a chance, the science now has to drive the politics — not the other way round.

This isn't a case of "vote for me and I'll set you free", but rather "give me power or you will all die".

And that is the core of scientific fascism.

Now, given the above - quietly packaged, but there nonetheless - the second should give pause to understand why it is so critical that the claim of "scientific consensus" and "the science can't be denied" must be so strongly opposed.

Solar Cycle 24 is upon us, and it doesn't look good.

There are no sunspots on the sun right now, and it doesn't look like they are going to appear soon. The longer they don't appear, the greater the likelihood that we are entering a Solar Minimum. The Maunder Minimum caused - causal link, folks, not speculation - the "Little Ice Age", and heavy sunspot activity led to the Medieval Warming Period.

Neither can be explained via anthropogenic warming, nor can the causal relationship between sunspot activity (sunspots are basically glimpses into an inner layer of fusion reactions in the sun, which run at higher temperatures and hence "shine" more brightly, albeit in the infrared, which ... warms the planet).


Ouch. Too bad for Bill and his buddies: their argument for total control over the economy and hence society and personal choices are moot, as their models and arguments are so faulty in their premises to ensure that they get the results they want and need.