Moderate Unicorns

A_Plague_on_Both_Houses replied to comment from Alarmed Pig Farmer | February 26, 2010 1:17 PM | Reply

Moderate Unicorns
In medieval times, people created fairy tales and magical creatures to make sense of their world. One of the most endearing is the unicorn, a horse with a single horn that symbolized purity and wholesomeness. In our modern times, people in Europe and the United States consider themselves more sophisticated and rational than people from the Middle Ages, but we still create myths, albeit more subtle ones.

Daily we hear reports of violent acts committed by Islamic terrorists on every inhabited continent. We try to wish it away with the myth of the ‘Moderate Muslim’, telling ourselves the Islamic agenda has been’ hijacked’ by a ‘tiny minority of extremists’ and that soon the huge, silent, moderate majority of Muslims will take charge and change things. However, post 9/11 very few authoritative Muslims have condemned terrorist actions. We are still waiting for moderates to stand and deliver, identifying and removing extremist thugs from their mosques and their communities. Waiting for this self-correction is our modern version of unicorn hunting.


Moderate Muslims will not be able to wrest control of the agenda for several reasons. First of all, Mohammed, the Messenger of Allah’s eternal word, was not moderate. Since Mohammed is 'The Perfect Example for Men in all times and places', ( Qur'an 33.21), moderates have no legitimacy when admonishing other Muslims to stop the extremist acts Mohammed himself did. Also, the Qur’an condones violence and coercion to further the Islamic agenda. People whom we call moderates are labeled hypocrites by Allah Himself in the Qur’an. Moderates will always lose the argument because, as ex-Muslim author Ibn Warraq says, “There may be moderates in Islam but Islam itself is not moderate.”
That is why we must remain firm in talking about islam, so as to learn, and allow muslims to debate with in them selves, and if they want to leave Islam, then a people who in part will understand and support where the apostates come from

Islamic expert Daniel Pipes and others estimate ten percent of the Islamic world to be militant. In 1933 when the Nazi party took control of Germany it had 2 million members, comprising only three percent of Germany’s sixty-six million citizens. A tiny minority of extremists can control a vast number of moderates, making them irrelevant.

Placing hope in ‘The Moderate Muslim’ is like searching for unicorns in the forest.

Zack Highstreet - A Plague on Both Houses

Nothing became Everything

Kiwiblog
Scott (490) Says:
February 24th, 2010 at 11:18 am

The theory of evolution boils down to this — in the beginning for no particular reason, nothing exploded and became everything. For no particular reason everything became planets and stars and became an orderly universe with laws we can understand. For no particular reason intelligent life evolved, with thinking and morals. But thinking and morals is really all just a joke. We are the products of a heartless universe who does not care about us. The universe is one giant killing machine that allows only the fittest to survive. There is no moral code, love is but a figment of our imagination, there is no free will, no afterlife, nothing of any value whatsoever.

But here we are — thinking, feeling, loving, caring. Darwinism makes no sense. It does not explain the human condition nor can it form the basis of a workable moral society.

Neither can it be scientifically proved. How was the gap from nonlife to life bridged? How did nothing explode? Where is even one good example of evolution in action? I don’t know of any.

Evolution is a fairytale resting on a fantasy. The fantasy is we can escape from moral responsibility towards God by believing he isn’t there.

Genesis 1:31 God looked over all He had made and He saw that it was very good.

Social Gospel Redistrilbution

I Have Some Questions for Jim Wallis, the American Evangelical Community's Most Famous Promoter (There Are Very Few) of the Left-Wing Social Gospel Movement. He Never Answers These Questions. He Pretends I Do Not Exist. But I Do Exist, Unlike His Answers.
Gary North

"Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote." (Exodus 20:15, as modified by the Social Gospel)
Jim Wallis supports the economic conclusions of the Social Gospel. This is the #1 fact of his ministry and activism.

The Social Gospel is a theological defense of the welfare state. The welfare state relies on a system of compulsory taxation that is backed up by the threat of government violence against taxpaying residents within its jurisdiction.

The welfare state threatens residents and citizens with the following penalties for resisting the tax collector: (1) the confiscation of their assets, (2) fines, and (3) imprisonment. The welfare state's law-enforcement agents are armed and are empowered by law to shoot anyone who physically resists the tax collector.

The welfare state exists only because voters have authorized the confiscation of private property through violence by the state. In the name of helping the poor, middle-class voters extract most of the money: tax-funded education, Social Security, and Medicare. The welfare state is therefore the implementation of covetousness by politics.

Humorist P. J. O'Rourke has described the ethics of welfare state.


There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as "caring" and "sensitive" because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money. Well, who isn't? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he'll do good with his own money -- if a gun is held to his head.
The Social Gospel defends this system of compulsory wealth-redistribution in the name of Jesus. It teaches that Jesus implicitly favored economic aid to the poor in the form of government policies that can be enforced only by the threat of systematic violence.

No New Testament account of Jesus offers evidence that He recommended such a view of Christian civil government. This inconvenient fact is regarded as a slight impediment by Social Gospelers, but nothing too serious. They insist that this is what Jesus really meant to say, even though He never actually said it, and despite the fact that the Old Testament adamantly denies such a view of civil justice. God through Moses warned:


Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment: thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor honour the person of the mighty: but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbour. (Leviticus 19:15)
When you hear the words Social Gospel, immediately think "Pastors' justification of armed government agents acting on behalf of certain special-interest voting blocs to take wealth away from other groups of citizens in order to benefit these special interests." This is exactly what the Social Gospel has always been. The central moral, judicial, and political issue of the Social Gospel is compulsion.

The Social Gospel movement is committed to guns and butter: the government's guns and your butter. The more guns the government has, the less butter you will have.

The Social Gospel's version of Jesus is a long-haired guy in sandals leading a mob of newly registered voters. He is packing a .44 magnum. His motto: "Go ahead, taxpayer. Make my day."

The Social Gospel asks this question: What Would Jesus Steal? Its answer: "As much as He can convince politicians to vote for."

The Social Gospel first began getting a hearing in the United States in the 1880s. It was adopted in 1908 by the newly created, Rockefeller-funded Federal Council of Churches. It came to prominence in the mainline churches in the 1920s, and it was adopted as gospel by most younger pastors of the mainline Protestant churches during the Great Depression of the 1930s. These denominations all began to lose members in the 1960s, a process that continues today.

The Social Gospel for decades was given lip-service by non-church attending politicians who sought support for their tax-and-spend policies. With the visible decline in membership of the mainline Protestant denominations after 1960, whose leadership and seminaries had gone modernist (anti-biblical) theologically, the secular humanists who dominate American politics began to ignore the (now-renamed) National Council of Churches. The Social Gospel lost influence politically and intellectually.




Fundamentalists' Adolescent Rebellion

After 1960, a small percentage of fundamentalist high school graduates who went off to college went through a late-teen rebellion against their parents. Their peers had begun this rebellion two years earlier, while they were still in high school. The late-comers rebelled, conveniently, at their parents' (and often taxpayers') expense. At numerous little denominational colleges, they were exposed to the Social Gospel. In large tax-funded universities, they were exposed to Keynesianism, Fabian socialism, and (after 1965) Marxism.

They wanted to discover a moral justification for their adolescent rebellion against their parents' social outlook. They soon decided that these new-found philosophies of coercive taxation and endless government expansion offered them what they perceived as the high moral ground. They absorbed, temporarily, the slogans of the political Left.

Ten years after graduation, most of them lived in the suburbs, worked for corporations, went to church in seeker-sensitive middle-class independent churches, and voted Republican.

Nevertheless, a few of them remained true to the ideals of their collegiate indoctrination. They announced as "morally Christian" the political demand that all levels of government send out revenue agents to put either a metaphorical or literal gun in your belly and tell you to hand over your wallet. The preachers advocate this in the name of the poor, but in fact they are acting on behalf of the careers of a growing army of college-educated, upper-middle-class bureaucrats, who administer every modern welfare state and extract close to half of the tax money allocated to the poor. This policy, pastors insist, is an inescapable implication of the teachings of Jesus.

There are very few of these people today. They rarely have enough adherents in any city to form even a single evangelical church whose pastor preaches the Social Gospel from the pulpit. They are distrusted in fundamentalist churches, regarded as eccentrics in evangelical churches, and almost the only members under age 60 in liberal churches.

A series of spokesmen have come forward to represent this tiny, politically impotent special-interest group. Ron Sider arrived in 1977 with Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. He faded rapidly in the mid-1980s, to be replaced by sociologist Tony Campolo. Campolo's close connection with President Clinton as one of his spiritual counselors backfired during the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998. Campolo then rapidly disappeared from the evangelical scene. Today, Jim Wallis is the best-known representative.




Jim Wallis: Evangelist

In his book, God's Politics (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), he describes his adolescent rebellion against his parents' fundamentalism (pp. 34-35). He went to college and got involved in the civil rights movement. This transformed his thinking, as he readily admits. He says that he later returned to the faith of his youth. It would be far more accurate to say that he came back as a self-conscious agent of the Social Gospel radicals who created the civil rights movement, in order to do "evangelism" work among the still-alienated children of fundamentalism.

Wallis is a part-time instructor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (p. 21). Harper published his book -- one of the major mainstream media publishers. It is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Jim Wallis is in fact an Establishment insider who is playing the role of a prophetic outsider. He is to "prophetic Christianity" what Jimmy Carter was to "prophetic politics." A man can make a career of this if he is skilled at positional marketing. (For more information, click here.) Jim Wallis is a highly skilled practitioner of positional marketing.

Wallis is editor of Sojourners, a magazine of considerable prominence in liberal political circles. Don't get me wrong. Political liberals do not actually read Sojourners, but they know it is out there, softening up the hearts and minds of an ecclesiastically isolated and politically marginal group of evangelicals. To do what? To vote for the next Democratic candidate for President.

Sojourners was not always called Sojourners. It was called Post-American. For a detailed history of his extreme left wing activities in the 1970s, click here.

Jim Wallis still holds to Ron Sider's original vision, which Sider modified into a vague moralism in the 1997 edition of his book. (On Ron Sider, see David Chilton's book, Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators, which is available free on-line.)

Jim Wallis totally misunderstands at least two things: economic theory and what the Bible specifically teaches about economics. I say this as someone who has published over 9,000 pages of verse-by-verse commentaries on the economics of the Bible. I have done my homework. Jim Wallis has not done his.

In God's Politics, Mr. Wallis says that he is getting invitations to be interviewed by evangelical radio talk show hosts, which he says is a new phenomenon for him (pp. 225-26). I have therefore prepared a series of questions for these talk show hosts to ask Mr. Wallis when they get the opportunity.

Jim Wallis lectures and teaches at Harvard, which appreciates his message in God's Politics. This is understandable. Mr. Wallis' politics and economics match the conclusions of the liberal political establishment. This is why he has great difficulty getting a hearing among Bible-believing Christians. No one can successfully play the role of John the Baptist for both Harvard and the Bible Belt, but he tries.

Christian economist William Anderson, once a big Jim Wallis fan, has exposed the fallacies of his economics and his ethical position on property rights: here and here.



In September, 2006, Jim Wallis began a blog dialog on his positions. His challenger? None other than Ralph Reed, a former $30,000 per month adviser for bankrupt Enron and a former co-lobbyist with convicted felon Jack Abramoff. How could anyone lose any debate with a political activist with Reed's reputation? The moral high ground is ten feet below sea level.



In February 2009, his ship finally came in: a boatload of taxpayers' money to hand out to the Democrats' constituents. He will be the guy in charge of the screening system. (It would be unfair to call him a bag man. Or would it?) The story is here.

You may not be a talk show host. Nevertheless, you may find these questions relevant. They will give you an introduction to the Social Gospel, as well as to what the Bible actually teaches about economics, which is radically opposed to the Social Gospel.

Why Is It God's Way to Allow the Government Control Over Health Care -- Life or Death -- by Taxing and Rationing?
Gary North
Here is Sojourners' proposed letter to be sent to Congressmen to get them to vote for Obama's health insurance bill. . . . keep reading

What Is the Common Ground Between Murdered Babies and Live Babies?
Gary North
When two things cannot both exist at the same time, we must choose. . . . keep reading

Why Is It Kingdom Work to Get Congress to Take Money from Other Groups and Give It to Your Group?
Gary North
There was a rally of pressure groups for wealth redistribution in Washington, D.C. in the first week of May. Jim Wallis was there. . . . keep reading

How Do You Determine What Is a Person's Fair Share of Taxes, Other Than by the Ballot Box and a Gun?
Gary North
Protestant evangelical Jim Wallis, the Social Gospel's #1 advocate today, says it's only fair that the rich should pay more -- as if they haven't since 1914. He is now advising Obama. . . . keep reading

Isn't It Risky to Become a Cheerleader for a New President Based on His First Major Speech?
Gary North
Aren't you making the same mistake that Reaganites made with Reagan in 1981? What if the same problems remain in 2012, the national debt rises by 50%, and double-digit price inflation returns? . . . keep reading

Why Is an Additional $787 Billion Federal Government Deficit the Christian Way of Helping the Poor?
Gary North
It comes as no surprise that Jim Wallis favors the proposed $787 billion economic stimulus law. It also comes as no surprise that he does not approve of the tax cuts in the bill. . . . keep reading

Why Are You, Rather Than James Dobson or Jerry Falwell, the Most Representative Spokesman for "The Religious Community"?
Gary North
Jim Wallis speaks of the "Religious Community" -- capitalized -- but he never defines it. There is a reason for this: What he calls "The Religious Community" is not the enormous group that is represented by Dobson and Falwell. It is a tiny Left-wing political action group. . . . keep reading

Why Is It Immoral for the Government to Cut Taxes for the Rich When the Rich Pay Most of the Taxes?
Gary North
Jim Wallis promotes the myth that tax cuts for the rich are unfair to the poor. The fact is, the poor pay almost no taxes. Cutting taxes for the rich does not hurt the poor. . . . keep reading

Why Is the Social Security Tax (FICA) a Biblical Requirement, When the Bible Speaks of Taking Care of Our Own Parents?
Gary North
Jim Wallis takes the commandment regarding taking care of our parents and turns it into a moral justification for taxing strangers to take care of our parents. Paul even forbids the church to care for widows who have relatives to pay for them. The State has no legitimate role here. . . . keep reading

Why Do You Invoke the Jubilee Year Law, When That Law Rested on Israel's Genocide of Canaan?
Gary North
Of all Mosaic economic laws for a liberal not to invoke, it is the Jubilee law. Not only did it rest judicially on genocide, it authorized inter-generational slavery. It was annulled by Jesus. Yet the evangelical Social Gospel crowd always invokes the Jubilee Year to defend wealth-redistribution. . . . keep reading

Why Do You Keep Hoping that Federal Money Won't Undermine the Independence of Every Private Agency That Takes It?
Gary North
There is no more reliable slogan than this one: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Welfare State liberals have never believed this. They always believe that their constituents can take taxpayers' money and not be called to dance to the government's tune. . . . keep reading

Why Don't You Trust the Poor and Private Charities to Provide an Escape Hatch from Poverty Without Government Money?
Gary North
Welfare State liberals do not trust the poor to find solutions on their own without the helping hand of a government bureaucrat, preferably Federal. They define "family" as "a parent, a child, and a government bureaucrat." . . . keep reading

Why Didn't Clinton's 1997 Reductions in Federal Welfare Funding Cause the Predicted "Hurricane" for the Poor?
Gary North
In 1997, Jim Wallis warned of a "hurricane": a looming reduction of Federal welfare money. The sky was about to fall. Of course, it didn't. Poor people are resourceful, contrary to welfare State liberals. They adjusted. Welfare State liberals have yet to adjust. . . . keep reading

Why Do You Confuse the State, an Agency of Violence, With Society, the Product of Voluntary Activities and Liberty?
Gary North
Jim Wallis, like all Social Gospel welfare statists, confuses the State with society. He calls on the State to improve society by taking money from the rich and give it to the poor (minus 50% for handling). . . . keep reading

Which Evangelical Leaders Have Joined With You in Your Social Gospel Crusades?
Gary North
Jim Wallis lives in a fantasy world. He actually believes that American evangelicals are showing moral leadership in the fight against global poverty, HIV/AIDS, human trafficking, and sustainability of God's earth. Has he ever watched Trinity Broadcasting Network? . . . keep reading

If You Are Opposed to War, Why Did You Call on the United Nations to Invade Iraq?
Gary North
Basic to Jim Wallis's positional marketing strategy is to identify himself as a peace-loving man who is opposed to war. But his commitment to economic coercion always trumps his position as a peace activist. The man is committed to organized violence. . . . keep reading


More Headlines

Truth or Dare ?

Zenster said...
As I noted in GoV’s “The Would-Be Witnesses” article:

If the truth can't be told, then it's not much of a defense now, is it?.

Pat Condell takes this idea and rips away any pretense or obfuscation.

[00:44] They’ve accused him [Wilders] of being divisive and inflammatory and, yes, sometimes the truth can be divisive and inflammatory if its been suppressed for long enough and has become sufficiently taboo as it clearly has in the Netherlands.

Because according to the prosecution, it doesn’t even matter that what he says is true what matters is that it’s illegal. Well, when the truth is against the law then there’s something seriously wrong with the law.

Because when the truth is no defense then there is no defense and the law has no anchor so it will drift wherever the wind of political expedience blows and this week it blew straight into a crooked courtroom in Amsterdam where justice will now be made to fight for its life, starved of the oxygen of truth that gives it life.

Condell, in his usual succinct manner sums it up even more tersely when he says, “… let’s be clear, this is a heresy trial by any other name.”

Just how pathetic is it when the vanguards of supposedly “progressive”, post-modern idealists instead fall back upon the weakest elements found in the sort of religious traditions they have so vigorously sought to vilify and belittle?

The Dutch judges and most modern Liberals all display a pseudo-religious belief in their most sacred cow of cows, Multiculturalism. Even as this warped ideology demands that their children be slain upon the blood-stained altar of Politically Correctness, they grimly march forth, determined to act like the most superstitious and barely post-pagan believers that they presume to mock.

In such a milieu, Wilders is quite the heretic, his words are the very worst sort of blasphemy and the truth a long-forgotten echo of the reality they have unanimously resolved to ignore. For a moment, let’s forget this sort of willful blindness and examine the disconnection from reality required to achieve the pseudo-religious mentality displayed by these Dutch judges.

Their behavior consists of Magical Thinking™. As if, through acceptance and appeasement, all Muslims will suddenly abandon their jihadist imperative and somehow disregard the ease with which such a contemptible foe could be subjugated. These budding social engineers delude themselves into thinking that modern technological society can uplift even the most barbaric savages. All the while neglecting how it is an enlightened and civilized culture that gave birth to the very tools they think these Neanderthals will abruptly wield with deft precision. For fear of denying this basic fact, they are prepared to commit actual suicide by falling upon Islam’s sword of their own volition.

They’re like somebody who’s prepared to chop off their own hand to avoid being seen scratching their @ss in public.

2/05/2010 3:25 PM

cult of indiscriminateness

Why is discrimination bad?

Have you watched

Evan Sayet's “Regurgitating the Apple: How Modern Liberals “Think”"?

Here is a brief snippet from Sayet's enormously entertaining lecture which captures the essence of this issue :

What happens is, they are indoctrinated into what I call a “cult of indiscriminateness.” The way the elite does this is by teaching our children, start­ing with the very young, that rational and moral thought is an act of bigotry; that no matter how sin­cerely you may seek to gather the facts, no matter how earnestly you may look at the evidence, no matter how disciplined you may try to be in your reasoning, your conclusion is going to be so tainted by your personal bigotries, by your upbringing, by your religion, by the color of your skin, by the nation of your great-great-great-great-great grandfa­ther’s birth; that no matter what your conclusion, it is useless. It is nothing other than the reflection of your bigotries, and the only way to eliminate bigot­ry is to eliminate rational thought. There’s a brilliant book out there called The Clos­ing of the American Mind by Professor Allan Bloom. Professor Bloom was trying to figure out in the 1980s why his students were suddenly so stupid, and what he came to was the realization, the recog­nition, that they’d been raised to believe that indis­criminateness is a moral imperative because its opposite is the evil of having discriminated. I para­phrase this in my own works: “In order to eliminate discrimination, the Modern Liberal has opted to become utterly indiscriminate.”

Lord Monckton

Lord Monckton in Australia

(Please spread this message widely) 12 Jan. 2010

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (Christopher Lord Monckton) has agreed to come on a lecture tour in Australia in late January 2010. In addition to the lunch at 6/112 Millswyn St, South Yarra he will be lecturing as follows:

• Sydney January 27th, Sheraton on the Park, 5:30 pm
• Newcastle January 28th, Banquet Room, City Hall, 12:30 pm
• Brisbane January 29th, Irish Club, 3:00 pm
• Noosa January 30th, The J , 2:00 pm
• Melbourne February 1st, Sofitel Hotel, 5:30 pm
• Canberra Feb. 3rd, program yet to be determined
• Adelaide Feb. 4th, Intercontinental Hotel, 7:30 pm
• Perth Feb. 8th, Parmelia Hilton, 5:30 pm

There has so far been an almost overwhelming response to this tour. This doubtless reflects the Copenhagen fiasco and the revelations of manipulations of data and attacks on sceptics by the Hadley Centre. Already, the “believers” are undertaking ad hominen attacks on Monckton.

The sponsors, Messrs Smit and Smeed, are seeking to get as many “agnostics” and “true believers” along to Monckton’s lectures. So if you have any such friends, please persuade them to come along.

As you can understand, the cost of this exercise will be very substantial and if you have not as yet made a donation and wish to do so, your donations should be directed to:

Westpac Bank – Lord Monckton Tour account Bank BSB: 035612
Account: 253068

The sponsors can be contacted as follows:

Case Smit BSc CIH(ret) CP(Env) FAusIMM
John Smeed D.MechE FIEAust CPEng RPEQ Noosaville Qld. 4566 (currently in Melbourne) Noosa Heads, Qld. 4567
0418 521 304 0417 269 216
case.smit@gmail.com johnsmeed@adna.com.au

Attached below is a presentation Monkton delivered in the UK:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0&feature=player_embedded

Attached below is an interview with a Greenpeace protester:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzkB5DuveDE

His response to Rudd re his criticisms of him and the “junket” party that attended Copenhagen.

Climate change: Lord Monkton’s Personal Briefing to Australia’s Prime Minister (Debunks Copenhagen)

Posted on Monday, 4 January 2010 1:00:47 PM by Robert A. Cook, PE
A letter sent from: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
1 January 2010
His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,
Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.
Prime Minister,
Climate change: proposed personal briefing
Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.

Your speech mentioned my remarks about the proposal for world “government” in the early drafts of what had been intended as a binding Copenhagen Treaty. These proposals were not, as you suggested, a “conspiracy theory” from the “far right” with “zero basis in evidence”. Your staff will find them in paragraphs 36-38 of the main text of Annex 1 to the 15 September draft of the Treaty. The word “government” appears twice at paragraph 38. After much adverse publicity in democratic countries, including Australia, the proposals were reluctantly dropped before Copenhagen.

You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.

You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.

You say I was one of “those who argue that somehow the market will magically solve the problem”. In fact I have never argued that, though in general the market is better at solving problems than the habitual but repeatedly-failed dirigisme of the etatistes predominant in the classe politique today.

The questions I address are a) whether there is a climate problem at all; and b) even if there is one, and even if per impossibile it is of the hilariously-overblown magnitude imagined by the IPCC, whether waiting and adapting as and if necessary is more cost-effective than attempting to mitigate the supposed problem by trying to reduce the carbon dioxide our industries and enterprises emit.

Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum, that a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration causes the maximum warming imagined by the IPCC. The IPCC’s bureaucrats are careful not to derive a function that will convert changes in CO2 concentration directly to equilibrium changes in temperature. I shall do it for them.

We derive the necessary implicit function from the IPCC’s statement to the effect that equilibrium surface warming ΔT at CO2 doubling will be (3.26 ± ln 2) C°. Since the IPCC, in compliance with Beer’s Law, defines the radiative forcing effect of CO2 as logarithmic rather than linear, our implicit function can be derived at once. The coefficient is the predicted warming at CO2 doubling divided by the logarithm of 2, and the term (C/C0) is the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Thus,

ΔT = (4.7 ± 1) ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
We are looking at the IPCC’s maximum imagined warming rate, so we simply write –
ΔT = 5.7 ln(C/C0) | Celsius degrees
Armed with this function telling us the maximum equilibrium warming that the IPCC predicts from any given change in CO2 concentration, we can now determine, robustly, the maximum equilibrium warming that is likely to be forestalled by any proposed cut in the current upward path of CO2 emissions. Let me demonstrate.

By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30% by 2020, or 15% on average in the decade between now and 2020.

Thus, if and only if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today’s emissions will be reduced by around half of that 15%, namely 7.5%, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 ppmv/year, or 20 ppmv over the decade, to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Now, 7.5% of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv.

We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv –

Business as usual: ΔT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C°
– Copenhagen Accord: ΔT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C°
= “Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020: 0.02 C°
One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars. Do your Treasury models demonstrate that this calculation is in any way erroneous? If they do, junk them.

You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. You ask for my “equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change”. I respond that the rigorous calculation that I have described, which your officials may verify for themselves, shows that whatever costs may be imagined to flow from anthropogenic “global warming” will scarcely be mitigated at all, even by trillions of dollars of expenditure over the coming decade.

Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money as the trillions which today’s scientifically-illiterate governments propose to spend on attempting – with all the plausibility of King Canute – to stop the tide from coming in.

Remember that I have done this calculation on the basis that everyone who should comply with the Copenhagen Accord actually does comply. Precedent does not look promising. The Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord’s predecessor, has been in operation for more than a decade, and it was supposed to reduce global CO2 emissions by 2012. So far, after billions spent on global implementation of Kyoto, global CO2 emissions have risen compared with when Kyoto was first signed.

Remember too that we have assumed the maximum warming that the CO2 imagines might occur in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree.

Now ask yourself this. Are you, personally, and your advisers, personally, and your administration’s officials, personally, willing to make the heroically pointless sacrifices that you so insouciantly demand of others in the name of Saving The Planet For Future Generations? I beg leave to think not. At Flag 1 I have attached what I have reason to believe is a generally accurate list of the names and titles of the delegation that you led to Copenhagen to bring back the non-result whose paltriness, pointlessness and futility we have now rigorously demonstrated. There are 114 names on the list. One hundred and fourteen. Enough to fill a mid-sized passenger jet. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary – and perhaps one from each State in Australia. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts when a tempting foreign junket at taxpayers’ expense is in prospect, why, pray, should the taxpayers tighten theirs?

You say that climate-change “deniers” – nasty word, that, and you should really have known better than to use it – are “small in number but too dangerous to be ignored”, and “well resourced”. In fact, governments, taxpayer-funded organizations, taxpayer-funded teachers, and taxpayer-funded environmental groups have spent something like 50,000 times as much on “global warming” propaganda as their opponents have spent on debunking this new and cruel superstition. And that is before we take account of the relentless prejudice of the majority of the mainstream news media.

How, then, it is that we, the supposed minority who will not admit that the emperor of “global warming” is adequately clad, are somehow prevailing? How is it that we are convincing more and more of the population not to place any more trust in the “global warming” theory? The answer is that the “global warming” theory is not true, and no amount of bluster or braggadocio, ranting or rodomontade will make it true.

You say that our aim, in daring to oppose the transient fashion for apocalypticism, is “to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible”. No. Our aim is simply to ensure that the truth is widely enough understood to prevent the squandering of precious resources on addressing the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. No interventionist likes to do nothing. Nevertheless, the do-nothing option, scientifically and economically speaking, is the right option.

You say that I and others like me base our thinking on the notion that “the cost of not acting is nothing”. Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically-significant “global warming”, and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN’s climate panel, that notion has certainly not been disproven in reality.

However, the question I address is not that but this. Is the cost of taking action many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer to this question is Yes.

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million.

You say my logic “belongs in a casino, not a science lab”. Yet it is you who are gambling with poor people’s lives, and it is you – or, rather, they – who are losing: and losing not merely their substance but their very existence. The biofuel scam is born of the idiotic notion – a notion you uncritically espouse – that increasing by less than 1/2000 this century the proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere occupied by CO2 may prove catastrophic. At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has roundly and rightly condemned the biofuel scam as nothing less than “a crime against humanity”.

The scale of the slaughter is monstrous, with food riots (largely unreported in the Western news media, and certainly not mentioned by you in your recent speech) in a dozen regions of the Third World over the past two years. Yet this cruel, unheeded slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90% certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is manmade. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably, self-servingly false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades – changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration – show that it was this largely-natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.

Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie. If you will allow me to brief you and your advisers, I will show you lie after lie after lie after lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.

However, if you will not make the time to hear me for half an hour before you commit your working people to the futile indignity of excessive taxation and pointless over-regulation without the slightest scientific or economic justification, and to outright confiscation of their farmland without compensation on the fatuous pretext that the land is a “carbon sink”, then I hope that you will at least nominate one of the scientists on your staff to address the two central issues that I have raised in this letter: namely, the egregious cost-ineffectiveness of attempting to mitigate “global warming” by emissions reduction, and the measured fact, well demonstrated in the scientific literature, that a largely-natural change in cloud cover in recent decades caused five times as much “global warming” as CO2. It is also a measured fact that, while those of the UN’s computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase. In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause “global warming” is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than around one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.

My list of the Copenhagen junketers from Australia’s governing class is attached. All those taxpayer dollars squandered, just to forestall 0.02 C° of “global warming” in ten years. Yet, in the past decade and a half, there has been no “global warming” at all. Can you not see that it would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02 C° of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It’s a no-brainer.

Yours faithfully,
VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

These are the people – including one “Gaia” who went as an official “political advisor” to the Australian Climate Change Committee delegation – who spent roughly 15,000.00 per person to stand in the dark blizzard freezing because the UN IPCC spent two years planning an international conference for 45,000 delegates in a room capable of holding only 15,000 people.

No wonder they can’t stand real science. Math. Or algebra. Economics ….
THE RUDD GOVERNMENT’S COPENHAGEN JUNKET LIST
December 2009
The following 114 officials or representatives of the Australian Government and of State administrations attended the UN climate conference at Copenhagen in December 2009 –

1. Kevin Michael Rudd, Prime Minister
2. Penelope Wong, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Water
3. Louise Helen Hand, Ambassador for Clim. Chg.
4. David Fredericks, Dep. Chf. of Staff, Dept. of the Prime Minister
5. Philip Green Oam, Sen. Policy Advr., Foreign Affairs Dept.
6. Andrew Charlton, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Dept.
7. Lachlan Harris, Sen. Press Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
8. Scott Dewar, Sen. Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
9. Clare Penrose, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
10. Fiona Sugden, Media Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
11. Lisa French, Prime Minister’s Office12. Jeremy Hilman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
13. Tarah Barzanji, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office
14. Kate Shaw, Exec. Sec., Prime Minister’s Office
15. Gaile Barnes, Exec. Asst., Prime Minister’s Office
16. Gordon de Brouwer, Dep. Sec. Prime Minister’s Dept.
17. Patrick Suckling, 1st Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Prime Minister’s Office\
18. Rebecca Christie, Prime Minister’s Office
19. Michael Jones, Official Photographer, Prime Minister & Cabinet
20. Stephan Rudzki
21. David Bell, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
22. Kym Baillie, Aus. Federal Police
23. David Champion, Aus. Federal Police
24. Matt Jebb, Federal Agent Aus. Federal Police
25. Craig Kendall, Federal Agent, Aus. Federal Police
26. Squadron Leader Ian Lane, Staff Offr., VIP Operations
27. John Olenich, Media Advr., to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
28. Kristina Hickey, Advr. to Minister Wong, Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
29. Martin Parkinson, Sec., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
30. Howard Bamsey, Special Envoy for Clim. Chg., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
31. Robert Owen-Jones, Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
32. Clare Walsh Asst. Sec., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
33. Jenny Elizabeth Wilkinson, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
34. Elizabeth Peak, Princ. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
35. Kristin Tilley, Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
36. Andrew Ure, Actg. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
37. Annemarie Watt, Dir., Land Sector Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
38. Kushla Munro, Dir., Intl. Forest Carbon Sectn. Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
39. Kathleen Annette Rowley, Dir., Strategic & Tech. Analysis, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
40. Anitra Cowan Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
41. Sally Truong, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div. Dept. of Clim. Chg.
42. Jane Wilkinson, Asst. Dir., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
43. Tracey Mackay, Asst. Dir., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
44. Laura Brown, Asst. Dir., Multilat. Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
45. Tracey-Anne Leahey, Delegation Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
46. Nicola Loffler, Sen. Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
47. Tamara Curll, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
48. Jessica Allen, Legal Support Offr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
49. Sanjiva de Silva, Legal Advr., Intl. Clim. Law, Dept. of Clim. Chg.
50. Gaia Puleston, Political Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
51. Penelope Morton, Policy Advr., UNFCCC Negots., Intl. Div., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
52. Claire Elizabeth Watt, Policy Advr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
53. Amanda Walker, Policy Offr., Multilat. Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
54. Alan David Lee, Policy Advr., Land Sector Negots., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
55. Erika Kate Oord, Aus. Stakeholder Mgr., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
56. Jahda Kirian Swanborough, Comms. Mgr., Ministerial Comms., Dept. of Clim. Chg.
57. H.E. Sharyn Minahan, Ambassador, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
58. Julia Feeney, Dir., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
59. Chester Geoffrey Cunningham, 2nd Sec., DFAT, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to Germany
60. Rachael Cooper, Exec. Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
61. Rachael Grivas, Exec. Offr., Envir. Branch, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
62. Moya Collett, Desk Offr., Clim. Chg. & Envir. Sectn., Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
63. Rob Law, Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
64. Robin Davies, Asst. Dir. Gen., Sustainable Devel. Gp., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
65. Deborah Fulton, Dir., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
66. Katherine Vaughn, Policy Advr., Policy & Global Envir., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
67. Brian Dawson, Policy Advr., Aus. Agency for Intl. Devel.
68. Andrew Leigh Clarke, Dep. Sec., Dept. of Res. Devel., Western Aus.
69. Bruce Wilson, Gen. Mgr., Envir. Energy & Envir. Div., Dept. of Resrc. Devel., W. Aus.
70. Jill McCarthy, Policy Advr., Dept. of Resrc., Energy & Tourism
71. Simon French, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
72. Ian Michael Ruscoe, Policy Advr., Dept. of Agriculture, Fisheries & Forestry
73. David Walland, Acting Supt., Nat. Clim. Centre, Bureau of Meteorology
74. Damien Dunn Sen. Policy Advr., Aus. Treasury
75. Helen Hawka Fuhrman, Policy Offr., Renewable Energy Policy & Partnerships
76. Scott Vivian Davenport, Chf., Economics, NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
77. Graham Julian Levitt, Policy Mgr., Clim. Chg., NSW Dept. of Industry & Invest.
78. Kate Jennifer Jones, Minister, Clim. Chg. & Sustainability, Qld. Govt.
79. Michael William Dart, Princ. Policy Advr., Office of Kate Jones, MP, Qld. Govt.
80. Matthew Anthony Jamie Skoien, Sen. Dir., Office of Clim. Chg. Qld. Govt.
81. Michael David Rann, Premier, S. Aus. Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
82. Suzanne Kay Harter, Advr., Dept. of Premier & Cabinet, S. Aus.
83. Paul David Flanagan, Mgr., Comms., Govt. of S. Aus.
84. Timothy O’Loughlin, Dep. Chf. Exec., Sust. & Wkfc. Mgmt., S. Aus. Dept. of Premier
85. Nyla Sarwar M.Sc, student, Linacre College, University of Oxford
86. Gavin Jennings, Minister, Envir. & Clim. Chg. & Innovation, Victorian Govt.
87. Sarah Broadbent, Sustainability Advr.
88. Rebecca Falkingham, Sen. Advr., Victoria Govt./Office of Clim. Chg.
89. Simon Camroux, Policy Advr., Energy Supply Ass. of Aus. Ltd.
90. Geoff Lake, Advr., Aus. Local Govt. Ass.
91. Sridhar Ayyalaraju, Post Visit Controller, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
92. Tegan Brink Dep. Visit Controller & Security Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
93. Melissa Eu Suan Goh, Trspt. Liaison Offr. & Consul, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
94. Lauren Henschke, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
95. Maree Fay, Accommodation Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
96. Patricia McKinnon, Comms. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
97. Eugene Olim, Passport/Baggage Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
98. Belinda Lee Adams
99. Jacqui Ashworth, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
100. Patricia Smith, Media Liaison Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
101. Martin Bo Jensen, Research & Public Dipl. Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
102. Mauro Kolobaric, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
103. Susan Flanagan, Consular Support, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
104. Stephen Kanaridis, IT Support Offr., Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
105. George Reid, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
106. Ashley Wright, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
107. Jodie Littlewood, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
108. Thomas Millhouse, Support Staff, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
109. Timothy Whittley, Support Staff Driver, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
110. Julia Thomson, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
111. Donald Frater, Chf. of Staff to Minister Wong Office of Clim. Chg. & Water
112. Jacqui Smith, Media Liaison, Dipl. Miss. of Aus. to DK
113. Greg French, Sen. Legal Advr. (Envir.), Dept. of Foreign Affairs & Trade
114. Jeremy Hillman, Advr., Prime Minister’s Office

From The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley in Copenhagen at the SPPI blog:
Today the gloves came off and the true purpose of the “global warming” scare became nakedly visible. Hugo Chavez, the Socialist president of Venezuela, blamed “global warming” on capitalism – and received a standing ovation from very nearly all of the delegates, lamentably including those from those of the capitalist nations of the West that are on the far Left – and that means too many of them.

Previously Robert Mugabe, dictator of Rhodesia, who had refused to leave office when he had been soundly defeated in a recent election, had also won plaudits at the conference for saying that the West ought to pay him plenty of money in reparation of our supposed “climate debt”.

Inside the conference center, “world leader” after “world leader” got up and postured about the need to Save The Planet, the imperative to do a deal, the necessity to save the small island nations from drowning, etc., etc., etc.

Outside, in the real world, it was snowing, and a foretaste of the Brave New World being cooked up by “world leaders” in their fantasy-land was already evident. Some 20,000 observers from non-governmental organizations – nearly all of them true-believing Green groups funded by taxpayers – had been accredited to the conference.

However, without warning the UN had capriciously decided that all but 300 of them were to be excluded from the conference today, and all but 90 would be excluded on the final day.

Of course, this being the inept UN, no one had bothered to notify those of the NGOs that were not true-believers in the UN’s camp. So Senator Steve Fielding of Australia and I turned up with a few dozen other delegates, to be left standing in the cold for a couple of hours while the UN laboriously worked out what to do with us.

In the end, they decided to turn us away, which they did with an ill grace and in a bad-tempered manner. As soon as the decision was final, the Danish police moved in. One of them began the now familiar technique of manhandling me, in the same fashion as one of his colleagues had done the previous day.

Once again, conscious that a police helicopter with a high-resolution camera was hovering overhead, I thrust my hands into my pockets in accordance with the St. John Ambulance crowd-control training, looked my assailant in the eye and told him, quietly but firmly, to take his hands off me.

He complied, but then decided to have another go. I told him a second time, and he let go a second time. I turned to go and, after I had turned my back, he gave me a mighty shove that flung me to the ground and knocked me out.

I came to some time later (not sure exactly how long), to find my head being cradled by my friends, some of whom were doing their best to keep the police thugs at bay while the volunteer ambulance-men attended to me.

I was picked up and dusted me off. I could not remember where I had left my telephone, which had been in my hand at the time when I was assaulted. I rather fuzzily asked where it was, and one of the police goons shouted, “He alleges he had a mobile phone.”

In fact, the phone was in my coat pocket, where my hand had been at the time of the assault. The ambulance crew led me away and laid me down under a blanket for 20 minutes to get warm, plying me with water and keeping me amused with some colorfully colloquial English that they had learned.

I thanked them for their kindness, left them a donation for their splendid service, and rejoined my friends. A very senior police officer then came up and asked if I was all right. Yes, I said, but no thanks to one of his officers, who had pushed me hard from behind when my back was turned and had sent me flying.

The police chief said that none of his officers would have done such a thing. I said that several witnesses had seen the incident, which I intended to report. I said I had hoped to receive an apology but had not received one, and would include that in my report. The policeman went off looking glum, and with good reason.

To assault an accredited representative of a conference your nation is hosting, and to do it while your own police cameramen are filming from above, and to do it without any provocation except my polite, non-threatening request that I should not be manhandled, is not a career-enhancing move, as that police chief is about to discover to his cost.

Nor does this incident, and far too many like it, reflect the slightest credit on Denmark. We must make reasonable allowance for the fact that the unspeakable security service of the UN, which is universally detested by those at this conference, was ordering the Danish police about. The tension between the alien force and the indigenous men on the ground had grown throughout the conference.

However, the Danish police were far too free with their hands when pushing us around, and that is not acceptable in a free society. But then, Europe is no longer a free society. It is, in effect, a tyranny ruled by the unelected Kommissars of the European Union. That is perhaps one reason why police forces throughout Europe, including that in the UK, have become far more brutal than was once acceptable in their treatment of the citizens they are sworn to serve.

It is exactly this species of tyranny that the UN would like to impose upon the entire planet, in the name of saving us from ourselves – or, as Ugo Chavez would put it, saving us from Western capitalist democracy.

A few weeks ago, at a major conference in New York, I spoke about this tendency towards tyranny with Dr. Vaclav Klaus, the distinguished economist and doughty fighter for freedom and democracy who is President of the Czech Republic.

While we still have one or two statesmen of his caliber, there is hope for Europe and the world. Unfortunately, he refused to come to Copenhagen, telling me that there was no point, now that the lunatics were firmly in control of the asylum.

However, I asked him whether the draft Copenhagen Treaty’s proposal for what amounted to a communistic world government reminded him of the Communism under which he and his country had suffered for so long.

He thought for a moment – as statesmen always do before answering an unusual question – and said, “Maybe it is not brutal. But in all other respects, what it proposes is far too close to Communism for comfort.”

Today, as I lay in the snow with a cut knee, a bruised back, a banged head, a ruined suit, and a written-off coat, I wondered whether the brutality of the New World Order was moving closer than President Klaus – or any of us – had realized.

Victm Fear or Criminal Fear

Let all heed the words of the late great Jeff Cooper, father of the Modern Technique of the Pistol (emphases original):

"Apart from the odds that you will be killed anyway if you submit to threats of violence, it would seem – espcially in today’s world of permissive atrocity – that it may be your social duty to resist. ... If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim. ...

"George Patton told his officers, ‘Don’t worry about your flanks. Let the enemy worry about his flanks. It is high time for society to stop worrying about the criminal, and to let the criminal start worrying about society. And by society I mean you."

Transmission Gulley Bypass

Libertyscott
20-12-09
reply to this
I spent most of my life in Wellington.

Quite simply, I support efficient road building. Projects with a good benefit cost ratio should go ahead. From this package I can observe the only good projects are bypassing Paraparaumu and Waikanae, and four laning from Peka Peka to Otaki. Kapiti has been appalingly served by its councils and a safer state highway is positive, but…
1. There is no capacity problem between Pukerua Bay and Mackays Crossing worth addressing. Paekakariki has an intersection problem, but that should be addressed specifically.
2. Pukerua Bay ought to be bypassed on its own.
3. Mana/Paremata has no real congestion issues anymore with the recent upgrades. The case for a bypass is modest, but would be so expensive as to be a low priority.
4. Aotea Quay-Ngauranga Gorge hard shoulder running would be cheap and worth considering, but perhaps best as toll lanes. That’s too innovative for New Zealand today.
5. A second Terrace Tunnel and second Mt Victoria Tunnel are only worth proceeding with if the old Tunnellink Urban Motorway extension is built. Frankly I’d do all of that ONLY if congestion pricing is also introduced to finance it, to significantly pedestrianise the CBD and narrow Jervois Quay.
6. Basin Reserve flyover should be part of a proper bypass, until then it’s a small patch up job.

I hoped for far better from the Nats.

I know there are far better road projects in Wellington with the Petone-Grenada link road and in eliminating all traffic light based intersections on SH2 from Upper Hutt to Melling, but that’s what you get when a “road of national significance” is announced.

The solution of the Greens is naive and makes no better sense, the real solution is to have a peak time only cordon around Wellington’s CBD and to make progressive upgrades to SH1 as the cost/benefit analysis justifies. The congestion charge would substantially boost the viability of public transport.
Time to go back to BCR thresholds of 2.5/1 for roads, sadly the Nats (and Labour before them) threw away economic efficiency.

An Essence of ClimateGate

The introduction of the poster is reproduced here:

CLIMATEGATE: A STORY OF DECEPTION AND INTRIGUE
On November 19, 2009 some 3,000 e-mails, files of software and other documents from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit were covertly released onto the Internet. In his November 28, 2009 telegraph.co.uk article “Climate change:This is the Worst Scientific Scandal of Our Generation”, Christopher Booker summarized the far-reaching ramifications of what was exposed in those documents:

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself. [16]
As the leaked documents were analysed, three threads emerged that sent a shockwave through informed observers across the world. As explained in “Global WarmingGate: What Does It Mean” [17], the e-mails suggested:

… the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO2-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.
… the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO2-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.
… the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is ‘conspired’) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.
THE CLIMATEGATE TIMELINE AND THE TICKING TIME BOMB
To better appreciate these themes and for ease of reference, the time-line chart attempts to consolidate and chronologically organize the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers (see references), along with some related contextual events. There is far more information than can be assembled in one place (see in particular [124], but hopefully the key material uncovered to-date has been included.

Though many event boxes are important, perhaps two are most critical: one from 1981 and another from October 12, 2009 (with the bomb icons). The first sets out the shaky foundation underpinning the AGW enterprise, and the second an admission of its failure. Together, they help explain why everything that occurred in between (as revealed by the CRU documents and independent researchers like Steven McIntyre) was inevitable to plug the holes in the leaky boat and keep up appearances. Consequently, as Terence
Corcoran sets out in “A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism”, disagreement and skepticism ran strife throughout the 13 years of e-mails [124].

The story that emerges is not of a smoking gun, but of a 30-year time-bomb whose fuse was lit in 1981, when — despite only a handful of scientists supporting it — the AGW theory was championed, without question, by the Press.

However, due to AGW’s shaky foundation, it was only a matter of time before the growing divergence between real-world data and the AGW climate models, which had been considered beyond reproach, became self-evident and problematic.

Offending data was massaged to fit the models to stave off questions and the losses they might reveal.

The data manipulation became so extreme that a CRU programmer tasked in 2006 with reproducing CRU’s own published results using its own models and data was unable to do so after three years. Releasing the data and computer codes behind the models for others to review and verify was out of the question. Though FOI requests are redundant for peer-reviewed research, the CRU’s refusal to release data and methods used for papers published in respected peer-reviewed journals, despite journal rules prohibiting such refusals, inevitably led to legal FOI requests, if for no other reason than that some scientists were insisting that the world commit trillions of dollars to economic policies based on what they claimed their research showed.

Lest there be any doubt that these scientists did anything wrong, Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explains what the CRU documents reveal: “They are unambiguously dealing with things that are unethical and in many cases illegal. … We have scientists manipulating raw temperature data. … The willingness to destroy data rather than release it. The avoidance of Freedom of Information requests.” [66] Consequently while, the UEA and Pennsylvania State University said they were investigating the matter, the UK Met Office (which works closely with the CRU and relies heavily on its product) announced a three-year project to re-examine 160 years of temperature data, signalling its own lack of confidence in the CRU-based temperature record.

What about the “other temperature records”: NASA’s GISS and NOAA’s GHCN? CRU and GISS get most of their raw data from the GHCN. Serious irregularities and questionable adjustments are starting to surface with the source GHCN data itself (see [50], [60], [62], [67]). And so, like the Three Musketeers, the CRU, GISS and NOAA’s temperature records stand or fall together.

Data fudging and secrecy aside, by 1998 the Earth had stopped warming and begun cooling, despite record levels of CO2. This divergence between AGW theory and reality grew so enormous that by October 12, 2009, Kevin Trenberth, in a fit of frustration, e-mailed his colleagues: “Where the heck is global warming? … The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” The reason he gave for their inability to account for the cooling was that “the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.” In other words, the data showing cooling were wrong, but the climate models, predicting warming, were correct. This, arguably, is the key revelation of ClimateGate. It makes self-evident that blind faith and bankrupt logic are now masquerading as rational science. No matter how much techno-babble is used to make today’s predictive climate models sound impressive, they have all proved fatally wrong. The hockey team scientists admit they have no clue why this is so, although other scientists do.

These problems would have been publicized years ago if the AGW theorists didn’t have powerful allies: policy makers in virtually every professional scientific body, editors of virtually major every scientific journal, and reporters and editors at virtually all mainstream media outlets. Few provided unbiased, impartial forums where alternate views and evidence were aired and debated. Instead, most spared no effort to ensure voices against the artificial consensus were quashed by editorial fiat and a persistent campaign of vilification, intimidation, and ridicule.

Science has come full-circle, taking a page from the medieval Church by using fear and persecution to silence sceptics. The oppressed have become the oppressors. Given that most professional scientific bodies and peer-reviewed journals have been active accomplices in this scandal, one wonders how many other so called scientific consensuses have been similarly engineered and waiting for their own ClimateGates before truth is known.

JoNova
A freelance science presenter & writer: Professional speaker, author, and former TV host. The Skeptics Handbook: 164,000 copies printed.


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university economics

Wondering why young people spout Marxist claptrap? Look no further than the universities

Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 21 December 2009

If Copenhagen reveals anything at all — apart from the stupidity of politicians — it is that the cult of socialism is alive and is as intolerant and as ignorant as ever. So where do young people get this socialist drivel from? Unfortunately much of it comes from our universities. This brings to mind Frank Stilwell, a socialist professor of economics at the University of Sydney and another example of the left's total inability to learn from history, particularly economic history. In Why bother about economic inequality (OnlineOpinion, 15 July 2002) he slagged, the name of equality, "economic rationalism, economic fundamentalism and neoliberalism", leftwing codenames for free market economics.

In support of his argument for greater equality of incomes he deferred to John Stuart Mill. In keeping with the long-discredited Ricardian system Mill made the dreadful error of divorcing 'distribution' (income) from production, which led him to conclude that "The Distribution of Wealth depend on the laws and customs of society". (John Stuart Mill. Principles of Political Economy, University of Toronto Press, 1965, p. 200.) One has only to think of the late and unlamented — unlamented among those who love liberty, that is — Soviet Union to realise how incredibly stupid Mill's view is, especially in the light of his own nascent view of imputation. (Ibid. p. 31.)

In a free market the vast majority of incomes are not 'distributed' but earned. Marginal productivity theory is the means by which economists explain market outcomes. Now in The Australian Financial Review (17 December 1998) Stilwell regurgitated the same socialist crap. This time he claimed capitalist countries had traditionally tried to ameliorate the economic inequalities that free labor markets generated. Complete nonsense. First, it has always been the tradition in Christian countries to try and alleviate the conditions of the poor. One of the great achievements of capitalism was not only to eliminate mass poverty but even poverty as it was traditionally understood. Not a hint of this from the Marxist Stilwell.

Now for a few historical facts, those things that Marxist's prefer not to debate in public forums, that will cast considerable light on the matter of living standards and wages. Nineteenth century Britain saw real wages quadruple even though the population rose by nearly 300 per cent. This was an unprecedented event. Yet Stillwell clearly insinuated, as he did in a later article, that free labour markets, meaning capitalism, had, in his own words, created "major casualties". (I wonder what he calls the100 million people killed in the last century by Marxist regimes?)

Social polices to alleviate distress were not initially designed as a means to address the phony issue of market inequalities, even though leftists eventually perverted them to that end. Stillwell pointed out that Australia's arbitration system has endeavoured to ensure that wages do not fall below the "social minimum . . . [and] prevent the emergence of a 'working poor'". He then claimed labor market deregulation "undermines these arrangements." In other words, free markets, despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, cause poverty. This is complete and utter left-wing bilge. The very thought that the state, any state, can guarantee its citizens a specified living standard is absurd, as a moment's reflection on the appalling living conditions that prevailed in former communist states proves.

Real wages are basically determined by the ratio of labour to the capital structure, not by posturing politicians, bullying unioncrats and their Marxist allies in academia — and certainly not by the "customs of society". Therefore, as a country expands its capital structure, adding to it more and more complex stages of production embodying new technology, it raises living standards. Moreover, as Stillwell knows, or should, marginal productivity theory explains why there is a tendency in the free market for workers to receive the full value of their labor, which in turn is paid by consumers and not employers.

One of the roles of a businessman is to act as an intermediary between consumers and the factors of production. This renders absurd Stillwell's claim that companies should keep up wages to avert poverty. Any attempt to raise wages above market rates will raise unemployment. The obverse is that any attempt to keep wages below market rates will cause labor shortages.

What really nails Stillwell is the fact that the "distributional hierarchy" is a socialist myth. Most incomes, as I have already pointed out, are not distributed, but earned (with the exception, perhaps, of some academics). Marxist attempts to demonstrate that labour was exploited by having part of its income (surplus value) confiscated by capitalists were completely demolished by the "marginalist revolution," and especially by the brilliant work of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (Capital and Interest, three volumes,1884 - 1912).

Stillwell is too shrewd a propagandist to directly use Marx's discredited exploitation theory of labor to attack free labor markets, so what he could not achieve by open debate he hoped to gain by stealth. Hence his insinuation that there is something unjust about market income disparities even though market participants tend to be paid in accordance with the value of their work.

This enabled him to confidently assert that a deregulated labor market "could certainly swell the ranks of those classified as living in poverty" despite the fact that the greatest cause of poverty in Australia was the unemployment that his beloved unions and arbitration commission created. But then again, Marxists are not generally noted for heeding inconvenient facts.

(In his brilliant seminar at the University of Vienna in the 1890s Böhm-Bawerk utterly demolished Marx's economics. Böhm-Bawerk's analysis was published in English in 1898 under the title Karl Marx and the Close of His System)

Stilwell's attack on the idea that the real wages of the lower-paid should be allowed to fall so that the market will clear is totally misconceived. It ignores the economic fact that if this group's income were excessive in relation to the value of its members' product then this involves a forcible transfer of income from displaced workers. Although he indirectly admitted this by conceding that lower wage rates could lead to more people being employed, he ignored the ramifications. Stillwell's most appalling argument against market-rate wage adjustments was the fallacy of demand deficiency. It is so bad that if I do not quote him in full readers might think I misrepresented him:

If total wage payments fall, this may lead to lower consumption levels. Unless the goods and services being produced are for export markets, this would lead to a tendency towards over-production.

(Incidentally, it is ironic that one of the most brilliant refutations of the demand-deficiency fallacy was penned by John Stuart Mill in his essay Of the Influence of Consumption on Production. Although written in 1829 or 1830 it was not published until 1844. As an aside, I'm inclined to think that Mill's reputation as an economist has — like Kenneth Galbraith's — more to do with his literary flair rather than a gift for economic analysis).

Firstly, what has "total wage payments" to do with anything? Market economists only call for cuts in wage rates that are above market clearing levels. Only Keynesians and Marxists seem to harp on about en bloc wage cuts. Even if, for example, the state was able to enforce a general wage cut the effect would not be to lower aggregate demand but to create labor shortages and encourage firms to find ways of raising incomes above the maximum to attract workers. (This phenomenon is called "wage drift" and was even documented in fourteenth century England.)

If reducing real wage rates in general caused 'demand deficiency' then Keynesian policies would never have initially succeeded because they only work by using inflation to cut real wage rates in relation to the demand for the marginal product. Secondly, raising wage rates above market clearing levels leads to withheld capacity by causing unemployment. This is just another way of saying that it reduces demand, the opposite of Stillwell's argument which is clearly based on the discredited purchasing-power theory of wages. (See W. H. Hutt's The Keynesian Episode: A Reassessment, LibertyPress, 1979.)

Now we can either express demand in terms of supplies or in terms of money, as do most economists. It follows that even if cutting wage rates did not reduce unemployment it would still not reduce monetary demand but only change its composition, which also means that demand in terms of supplies would not change either. Thirdly, by implying that by letting wage rates adjust to market clearing values the demand for labor would not increase, Stilwell, without any justification, slipped indeterminacy into his argument, thus sidestepping marginal productivity theory.

But even if these wage rates were indeterminate over a given range unemployment would still emerge if wage rates were pushed above their market rates. Thirdly, as Josiah Tucker pointed out about 250 years ago: "One man's work is another man's employment." This neatly summed up the economic truism (Say's Law) that supplies are demands; thus, pricing people back into work increases the demand for other products and restores the flow of incomes.

This is why total demand rises in these circumstances instead of falling. And this is why total payrolls (total wage payments) rise. Once again, let us turn to history. Hoover's belief in the purchasing-power theory of wages was behind his policy of maintaining money wage rates even as prices were falling. The results were tragic: by March 1933 total payrolls had fallen by about 70 per cent and unemployment had leapt to 25 per cent. So much for Stillwell's purchasing-power theory of wages. (Any wonder I consider the term Marxist economist to be an oxymoron).

In his final paragraph Stillwell impugned market economics by referring to "neo-liberal ideologies" — and this from an unrepentant Marxist ideologue. If free market economics is an ideology, as this Marxist hack claims, then I challenge him to prove it. As the 'Duke' said: "That'll be the day."

Of course, Stillwell made the usual left-wing genuflection toward "distributional equity". He did the same thing in his online article when he said that in his "view . . . there should be ceilings as well as floors in relation to income distribution, but we could reasonably debate whether the ratio of ceiling to floor should be 3:1, 10:1 or whatever". Really? I have five questions for him:

1. Why is the present pattern of 'distribution' inequitable? 2. What is an equitable 'distribution' of income? 3. Why is a pattern of 'distribution' designed by the likes of you economically and morally superior to one produced by the market place? 4. By what scientific means did you arrive at your conclusion? 5. What the devil do you mean by "whatever"?

Stilwell's casual approach to economics brings to mind S. G. Strumilin, one of Stalin's 'economists', who announced: "Our task is not to study economics but to change it. We are bound by no laws". (Cited in Robert Coquest's Harvest of Sorrow, Pimlico, 2002, p. 112.) Well we all know how that little experiment ended up.

Unfortunately, it seems Professor Stilwell's views on income differences are highly contagious. Tony Featherstone (or is that Featherbrain?), Business Review Weekly's then-managing editor, led one of his articles with this inanity: "Nearly everyone wants to be wealthier but the relationship between income and happiness is weakening." The subheading contained this dim-witted gem: "But can they [the rich] go on increasing their wealth at this rate, and what about the poor?" (14 July 2004). This journalist has no idea what the hell he is really talking about.

Note: The mark of any ideologue is a refusal to consider evidence that contradicts his position. This is why Marxists can claim that the collapse of the Marxist states and the failure of socialist 'experiments' do not prove socialism cannot succeed. And these people have got the gall to call free-marketeers ideologues.

Leftwing history v. economic theory. This is another example of the anti-capitalist bigotry that is spoonfed to students by leftwing activists.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor