Betraying the betrayers

The City belatedly realizes that when they sold out the British people, they sold themselves too. Chancellor Darling’s desperate plea for Brussels to leave London’s financial sector alone has a distinct “please don’t hit me” tone to it and is certain to fall on stone-deaf Franco-German ears:

It is too simplistic to argue that financial centres in Europe are just competing among themselves. The reality is the real competition to Europe’s financial centres comes from outside our borders. And that London, whether others like it or not, is New York’s only rival as a truly global financial centre. No other centre in Europe offers the same range of services: banking, insurance, fund management, law and accountancy. It is in all of Europe’s interests that they prosper alongside their close European partners.

Oh, it is too simplistic? Yes, surely that sophisticated argument will convince the unelected EU ruling class, who are openly drooling at the thought of taking their cut of great river of money flowing through the City, to leave London’s financial firms untouched. Meanwhile, French President Nicolas Sarkozy lost no time in declaring what the end of British sovereignty yesterday would mean for the City: “Do you know what it means for me to see for the first time in 50 years a French European commissioner in charge of the internal market, including financial services, including the City [of London]? I want the world to see the victory of the European model, which has nothing to do with the excesses of financial capitalism.”

In every revolution and betrayal, there is that intriguing moment when the now-useless revolutionary or traitor suddenly realizes that he’s been used and is about to be discarded. I think there are more than a few staunchly Europhilic politicians and bankers who are astonished today at the realization that they are not to be included among the masters of Eutopia.

Addio Albion

The bankers and bureaucrats of Brussels have accomplished what Julius Caesar, Philip II, Napoleon, and Adolf Hitler could not do:

From today, as the Lisbon treaty comes into force, we are no longer masters in our own house. Our prime minister, as a member of the European Council, is obligated under this new treaty to promote the aims and objectives of the European Union, over and above those of the UK, and is bound by the rules of the Union.

Of course, this will make no immediate difference. It simply renders de jure what has been de facto for several decades, but the coming into force of the treaty marks an important symbolic turning point. We are no longer an independent country, de jure. Our prime minister and his government are now working for an alien government, based in Brussels.

Not only is the empire on which the sun never set long gone, Britain itself is no more than a conquered island and a subject people. This time, no Nelson, no Wellington, no Churchill arose to defend the British people. It is a tragic moment in history, and one that will cause more tragedy in the future. James Higham explains why even a belated version of the once-promised referendum is unlikely to accomplish anything.

The anti-Peanuts president

Obama doesn’t want to be president anymore. I don’t see how you can possibly interpret his decision to embark upon his own Vietnam any other way:

The address before the United States Military Academy at West Point on Tuesday night will not only be used to announce the immediate order to deploy roughly 30,000 more troops, but the administration will also use the occasion to convey how it intends to turn the fight over to the Kabul government, the New York Times reported.

And with their reliably impeccable judgment, his PR handlers actually scheduled the speech to preempt A Charlie Brown Christmas. Whether you see this as accidental or part of the Left’s ongoing War on Christmas, it’s just blatantly stupid. It’s bad enough to Vietnam your presidency, but allowing yourself to be identified as the anti-Peanuts president takes it to a whole new level. This guy is going to have non-black approval ratings in the single digits by the time 2012 rolls around.

If you’d like sophisticated military analysis of the decision to put an additional 30,000 troops in pointless peril, here it is in three words: never reinforce failure.

“Magnificent Failure”

Fred of Analytical Mind reviews Summa Elvetica on Amazon:

It is generally a good idea to read any Author’s Note one comes across, but in this case it is absolutely critical to understanding what you have just read, which turns out to be all that was salvaged from a planned epic philosophical trilogy that apparently couldn’t be made to work. Given such a genesis, it is amazing just how good it turns out to be!

Theodore Beale has arguably returned high fantasy to its origins, which was a medieval world dominated by a rich and powerful Roman Catholic Church. The utter separation of church from most modern fantasy has resulted in a number of idiocies that fail to withstand scrutiny: Divine Right of Kings without a Divine, priests without gods, etc. The result is one of the most fascinating fantasy worlds I’ve ever visited, and one I’d like to revisit again in future sequels. Mr. Beale has also given us a fascinating cast of characters that I’d like to hear more from: Marcus Valerius the still-wet-behind-the-ears scholar, Lodi the dwarf, Caitlys the Lady Shadowsong, Brother Grimfang the you-won’t-believe-it-until-you-read-it, and especially Bessarias the convert. One hopes that with time Mr. Beale will see his way to producing a sequel or two, perhaps with a bit less philosophy and a bit more adventure.

It has taken me a while and two false starts that will probably turn into short stories or novellas, but I finally have a handle on how the sequel to Summa Elvetica is going to go. I’m not going to rush it or commit to a publishing date before it’s complete, so I don’t know when it will be finished, but I have been scribbling away at it in a desultory manner. The main problem was figuring out who was going to be the protagonist and how that character would relate to Marcus’s continuing development.

But when I realized I was blithely following the model of the my previous books – something I tend to dislike in other authors – and that it would be pointless and unimaginative to repeat the Aquinas fireworks, the possibilities opened up and led to a concept that I think will work out better in the end.

Dubai cuts loose Dubai World

Since Dubai has announced it is going to blow off the Dubai World debt, it would seem rather obvious that Abu Dhabi isn’t about to volunteer to pay it either.

Dubai revealed last week that it would seek a standstill on debt repayments for Dubai World, a sprawling company that includes property developers, investment funds and a ports operation. Dubai had previously included Dubai World’s debts within its own total sovereign debt of $80 billion but it has said it has no obligation to the company’s lenders….

Abdulrahman al-Saleh, director-general of Dubai’s Department of Finance, said: “Creditors need to take part of the responsibility for their decision to lend to the companies. They think Dubai World is part of the Government, which is not true.”

That has sparked anger among some creditors, who believe that Dubai had given an implicit guarantee that its companies were state-backed.

But… but creditors are never supposed to take responsibility for anything! Don’t those backward sheikhs understand how a modern financial system works? It’s heads the banks win, tails the taxpayers lose! I imagine there are many people facing foreclosure that can recall promises and implicit guarantees they were made by their real estate agents and mortgage bankers too. Isn’t it interesting how banks always insist that it’s only the fine print on the contract that matters, right up until that fine print doesn’t serve their interests anymore. Dubai’s actions are particularly interesting in light of how the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury have repeatedly covered the non-guaranteed debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.

WND column

The Dire Sign of Dubai

In 2007, the international financial elite knew very well that there were serious problems with the world’s largest banks. Perfectly good loans were being called, long-standing corporate relationships were being cast aside for short-term benefit and there was a palpable perception of something wicked on its way. While news of the so-called credit crunch was duly reported by all the major newspapers, few outside the financial world had any idea that consequences such as the meltdown of 2008 were rapidly approaching.

But if you knew what to look for, it was fairly obvious that something big and ugly was developing, which was why I wrote that “the United States was fast approaching an interesting juncture” in my WND column published March 24, 2008. In a similar manner, what appears to be the minor matter of a Dubai-based corporation requesting a six-month moratorium on its debt payments looks very much like a warning that the next stage in the global financial crisis will be upon us soon.

UPDATE – Karl Denninger notes the irony of an Arab government being more free market-oriented than the USA:

Dubai’s government said it hasn’t guaranteed the debt of Dubai World, the state-controlled holding company struggling with $59 billion in liabilities, and that creditors must help it restructure.

“The company received financing based on its project schedule, not a government guarantee,” Abdulrahman Al Saleh, director general of the emirate’s Department of Finance, said in an interview with Dubai TV, when asked whether the government was backing the debt. “Lenders should bear part of the responsibility.”

NO evidence for global warming

Perhaps in part due to my respect for actual science, I find most scientists to be contemptible. But this news exceeds even my cynically low expectations of the charlatans. Is throwing out the original data really the scientific norm these days? Because I can testify that game developers, engineers, and computer programmers are all significantly more rigorous about protecting and saving their legacy information.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based. It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years. The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation….

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Hang on… until yesterday, weren’t the CRU scientists claiming they weren’t providing the data because they had obtained it from various governmental organizations who held the rights to it and they had no permission to release it to the public? Was Real Climate deceived by the CRU or was Real Climate lying when they wrote the following on November 23, 2009: “CRU data accessibility. From the date of the first FOI request to CRU (in 2007), it has been made abundantly clear that the main impediment to releasing the whole CRU archive is the small % of it that was given to CRU on the understanding it wouldn’t be passed on to third parties.”

This is more than a smoking howitzer, it’s a meganuke that would – in a rational world of genuine science – blow away the AGW/CC charade permanently. It also proves that scientists should always be regarded as shady con men unless and until the scientific evidence they produce in support of their hypotheses indicates otherwise. Needless to say, all of “the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data” should immediately join the original data in the trash Every so-called “scientist” at the CRU who was involved with this fraud should be immediately fired. And those who stole taxpayer money on the basis of the scam should be prosecuted, along with those who junked the data if they did so – as suggested in the CRU emails – in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.

Score yet another one for the scientific skeptic. Never place any trust in an expert who can’t explain himself to your satisfaction. Especially when he’s asking you for money.

VPFL Week 11

93 Judean Front (9-2)
35 Winston Reverends (5-6)

93 Alamo City Spartans (8-3)
51 Greenfield Grizzlies (4-7)

71 Bane Silvers (6-5)
48 Black Mouth Curs (4-7)

68 Mounds View Meerkats (6-5)
55 Burns Redbeards (3-8)

82 Masonville Marauders (5-6)
99 Valders Valkyries (5-6)

Vikes are a bit banged up, but this is when having the best backup RB in the league comes in handy. I hope Chilly has the good sense to keep AD on the bench, let him get healthy, and ride Chester Taylor to a win over a collapsing Chicago team.

“Hopelessly compromised”

The mainstream European media is finally getting around to covering Climategate and reaching the obvious conclusion: this is “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Being merely human, scientists merit no more inherent trust than anyone else… and rather less than most when their careers and wallets are on the line. Most scientists are useless, venal government-funded worker bees attempting to get along by trading on the accomplishments and reputations of the relatively small number of genuinely innovative scientists who have utilized the scientific method to make positive contributions to Mankind.

As for peer review, it is little more than an editorial charade that transforms science into a political exercise and should be eliminated entirely. As one observer inaccurately but aptly commented, Einstein began his career in science at the post office, not Princeton. (It was actually the patent office, but the point stands.) Science is too important to be left to scientists.

UPDATE – Even the NYT has been forced to cover the story outside of its usual self-appointed role as defense attorney:

“This whole concept of, ‘We’re the experts, trust us,’ has clearly gone by the wayside with these e-mails,” said Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Institute of Technology.

That is a succinct summary, yes.

RGD: a review from Norway

T. Tucker posts his thoughts on Amazon:

Vox Day’s latest book is both a refreshing and sobering look at the economy. Refreshing in that it throws off the straight-jacket of the Keynesian/Krugman lie that we can borrow our way out of a debt crisis and sobering as you realize that our politicos don’t have a clue about the right thing to do…. Interesting, well documented, and easy to read with points illustrated by easy to read graphs and charts, an excellent overview of the times we are in and the troubles to come.

I appreciate the review, especially because it’s always interesting to learn what aspects of the book appealed to different individuals. Since I created nearly all the graphs myself in OpenOffice Calc, it’s good to know they’re not completely illegible. And on a tangential note, behold the power of the basic economic concept known as price elasticity. Although today is only the second day since it was priced correctly, the Kindle version of RGD has already become the fifth-bestselling book in the Economics category at the Kindle store.

The conventionally priced hardcover, on the other hand, doesn’t rank in the top 100 in Economics and is #39 in Economic History compared to #3 for the ebook edition.