While we wait for the testimony on Benghazi, I found the intentional irony of this vignette from James Taranto too good to pass on without posting:
Antigun nuts are taking aim at moderate Democrats, Politico.com reports:
Ads from the [Michael] Bloomberg-funded Mayors Against Illegal Guns are going up soon in Alaska, Arkansas and North Dakota--three states with Democratic senators who broke with the White House on last month's background checks vote. . . .
It's all got Democrats nervous about keeping their hold on the Senate, if they are under attack from not only Republicans but pro-gun control forces as well.
The Dems are most nervous about Pryor. "Radio spots in Arkansas will target the state's African-American community, 'without which Mark Pryor doesn't have a prayer of getting reelected,' said Mark Glaze, director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns."
Obama and his allies somehow convinced themselves the gun issue would hurt conservatives and Republicans. Instead the left is forming a circular firing squad.
IF there is any doubt that greens are true watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside, listen to Hugo Chavez condemn capitalism to great applause at the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.
While outside, it was a reverse watermelon, with the red being worn on the outside.
Meanwhile, if you want proof of the existence of God, just look to Copenhagen. As the IPCC conference goes into its final day while Gore et al try to convince us that global warming is real and a hot catastrophe is just around the corner, a blizzard is going on outside:
World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.” . . .
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years . . . and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as . . . 25 Fahrenheit.
Ace of Spades ponders whether God may be trying to give all of us - and in particular the Goracle - a message? Could it be that bit about "Thou shall have no other God . . ."
At any rate, this led Ace to do a riff on the arguments for and against the existence of God from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. . .
The only thing standing in the way of a binding deal to soak the West and regulate carbon world-wide, all in the name of world socialism anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is, in what has to be the world's greatest irony in all of recorded history, communist China. The fact that the Chinese realize world socialism isin't such a great idea - since they practiced it in their own country until the death of Mao - ought to tell us all something. Amazing, isin't it, that the last stalwart defender of capitalism - and perhaps the savior of it if they remain firm - will be a communist country.
Interestingly enough, it was recently leaked that the UN IPCC's call for carbon reduction targets are insufficient to ward off their own most likely scenarios for catastrophe. If that is the case, then the primary motivaters at the Copenhagen conference must be something other than saving Gaia at all costs.
There are certainly many vested interests driving Copenhagen - and their motivations all boild down to power and money. As to the latter, the rent-seekers stand to profit immensely from carbon regulation and the global carbon trading scheme. That scheme is threatened if a new deal is not put in place tomorrow. At least one outlet is saying that the grand bargain today will be a deal to keep Kyoto in place amongst the signatories and add a non-binding agreement for non-signatories, such as the U.S. As EU Referendum points out, such a deal will keep the carbon trading scheme alive:
[T]he deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change - you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of "carbon" to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway ... except the greenies, and they don't matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.
If one wanted to truly regulate carbon, then there would be a simple carbon tax, perhaps varied by industry and based on the ease with which the particular industry could regulate carbon output. Instead, there is the carbon trading scheme that is, one a massive distortion of free markets, and two, an invitation to fraud, corruption, and gamesmanship.
According to a recent PJM article, the Europeant carbon trading scheme (ETS) that went into effect five years ago has driven up energy prices in Europe by as much as 20% for the rank and file. It has proven a cesspool of fraud, with organized crime exploiting the interplay between carbon credits and the EU VAT tax system. And indeed, "Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent." But probably the worst aspect of the ETS is how it has distorted the marketplace. This from PJM:
. . . For example, European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of up to 90,000 European workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of euros. As a result, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has gained windfall profits in the form of carbon credits worth nearly €1 billion, for which it paid nothing. By 2012, ArcelorMittal will have accumulated surplus permits for 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the pollution generated annually by all of Denmark.
ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus carbon credits on the market or to hoard them for future use. If it hangs on to them, the company will be able to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions possibly for decades, effectively undermining the ETS. According to Sandbag, a British NGO that campaigns to improve carbon trading, the EU’s ETS has been turned into “a system for generating free subsidies.”
Even Rajendra K Pachauri, who has been the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has been suspected of having a role in gaming the EU system to profit from the trade in carbon credits. The Mumbai-based Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate which has business ties to Pachauri (who accepted the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the IPCC (which it shared with Al Gore in 2007) for its work on global warming), may stand to make several hundred million euros in EU carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain. . . .
The WSJ expounds on the plant closing discussed in the above paragraph. That closing saw 1700 British workers loose their job and saw the plant moved to India - meaning that there was no reduction in carbon released into the atmosphere. Tata made a windfall. It would be hard to find any better example with which to indict the entire carbon trading morass. As the WSJ concludes:
To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.
If that is not market distortion on steroids, nothing is. And the people paying for it, in higher energy bills and lost jobs, are the rank and file.
The rent seekers won't be the only one's walking away from Copenhagen with their gravy train intact. The third world kleptocrats have a friend in the Obama administration, which, through Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the U.S. will take part in sending $100 billion a year to either the World Bank or the UN to distribute as they see fit to further the third world's fight against AGW. My ability to state all of the above without a single vulgarity has reduced to zero my reserve of self discipline. I will go Galt before I see a penny of my taxes to this socialist insanity.
Charlie Martin, writing at PJM, notes that, as more data is made public - even beyond the bombshell Russian reveleations of the other day - the more we are finding inexplicable anecdotes wherein AGW scientists have made large upward adjustments to raw temperatures that could not possibly be justified. These include:
- The Keenan study comparing raw temperature data for Alaska to the "corrected, homogenized and cooked IPCC data the IPCC is using for Alaska
- Nashville, where Anthony Watts finds a slight 130 year cooling trend from the raw data that the IPCC has somehow turned into a warming trend.
- Antarctica, where the GHCN has removed inconvienient data points. Digging into it further, it became apparent that the GHCN based its homogonized and cooked warming ternd on a single station in Antarctica - Rothra Station - the one in a heat island that shows anamolous warming.
And as Joseph D'Aleo points out at PJM, it would appear that the adjusted data used by the CRA - that we now learn was cherry picked in Russia and, as we see in the examples above, tortured above - is virtually the exact same figures used by Hadley, NASA, amd GHCN. Further, he points out all the difficulties apparent in trying to determine "global" temperatures, not the least of which are major declines in the number of monitoring stations, incomplete data sets, and the use of the remaining stations to extrapolate temperatures of locations at great distance away - indeed, 1000 kilometers and more.
Bishop Hill looks at the revelations from Russia yesterday - that the IPCC and Hadley have cooked the Russian books to show AGW in that country where the data indicates none exists - from the standpoint of "gatekeeping. As he notes:
. . .at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.
And lastly, perhaps the most criminal aspect of AGW science has been how they have committed a fraud on the public while stonewalling, refusing to provide their raw data, meta-data, computer programs to allow others to verify their work. Thank God for Steve McIntyre, the brilliant Canadian who has persevered for over a decade to correct this situation and set the records straight. Bishop Hill has a post detailing Steve's efforts to verify the fraudulent Yamal tree ring study for nearly a decade while the author, Briffa, stonewalled. It makes fascinating reading.
Today, we have the brilliant Jewish columnist, Charles Krauthammer, turning to syncretism, the modern label for ancient Catholicism's method to convert Jews and pagans to Christianisty, and suggesting it for use as a strategy to convert Islamic and other countries to secular democracy. There is an elegant historical symmetry to that thought.
Syncretism was the early Church's custom, during the process of conversion, of initially adapting, as much as possible of the local pagan customs into the overlay of Christianity. Indeed, our recent celebration of Christmas is itself very much a creature of syncretism, adapting the ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia into a celebraton of the birth of Christ. And the Celtic Cross, with its overlay of a sun symbol, is yet another result of syncretism.
Probably the most famous memorialization of a papal order to use the process of syncretism comes from the writings of the Venerable Bede, who notes that in 601 A.D., Pope Gregory sent a letter to his missionaries instructing them to adapt local customs and places of worship as part of the conversion process whenever possible:
For there is no doubt that it is impossible to efface every thing at once from [the pagan's] obdurate minds., because he who endeavors to ascend to the highest place rises by degrees or steps and not by leaps. This the Lord made himself known to the people of Israel in Egypt: and yet he allowed them to use the sacrifices which they were wont to offer to the devil in his own worship, commanding them in his sacrifice to kill beasts to the end that, changing their hearts they mad lay aside one part of the sacrifice whilst retained another: that whilest they offered the same beasts which they were wont to offer, they should offer them to God, and not to idols, and thus they would no longer be the same sacrifices.
Now it is Krauthammer's turn to suggest to Americans that we use this proven process as we attempt to spread Democracy throughout the world:
"My mother always said, democracy is the best revenge."
-- Bilawal Bhutto Zardari,
son of the late Benazir Bhutto
Of all the understandings of the democratic idea, none could be more wrong than this one. Democracy at its very core is an antidote to the kind of dynastic revenge young Bhutto was suggesting. For the Bhuttos, elections are a means for the family to regain power. . .
Democracy was meant to be the antithesis of feudalism. Popular sovereignty was to supplant divine right; free elections to supplant dynastic succession (a progression Americans have not completely mastered either). It is clear that Bilawal meant to put the best gloss on his mother's dictum. He, like she, would avenge the political murder of a parent not with violence but through the ballot box. Nonetheless, his unmistakable assumption of aristocratic entitlement clangs against his professed fealty to democratic means.
His mother was the same. In more than one journalistic profile, she was characterized as "a democrat who appeals to feudal loyalties." Part of the reason for the precariousness of Pakistan's democracy is precisely that it remains a largely feudal society practicing democratic forms.
But Pakistan is hardly alone. The very same week Pakistan nearly imploded, a close and disputed election sent Kenya, heretofore one of the more stable democracies in Africa, into a convulsion of tribal violence. These bloody eruptions come against a background of less dramatic but equally important defeats for the democratic idea. Russia acquiesces cravenly as its nascent democracy is systematically dismantled in return for a bit of great-power posturing and a measure of oil-fueled pottage doled out by Czar Vladimir. China even more apathetically continues to concede stewardship of its market economy and modernizing society to a Leninist dictatorship. How many decades will it take before we acknowledge that the axiom that economic liberalization leads to political liberalization may not be axiomatic?
This comes after the Palestinians, in their first post-Arafat parliamentary election, give the mandate to a terrorist group. And as Lebanon, the leader of the Arab Spring of 2005, watches Syrian proxies systematically kill one member of parliament after another to deny the democrats the quorum they need to elect a like-minded president.
These defeats, marking the cresting of the 30-year democratic wave that had swept through Latin America, Eastern Europe, East Asia and even parts of Africa, raise more than theoretical questions. They challenge the core Bush notion that American foreign policy should be predicated on trying to spread democracy. Six years after Sept. 11 there still is no remotely plausible alternative to the Bush Doctrine for ultimately changing the culture from which jihadism arises. But while spreading democracy may be necessary, can it, in fact, be done?
We know that it can, of course, as demonstrated by our success in turning Germany, Japan and South Korea into important democratic allies. But there we had the rare advantage of the near total control that came with uncontested postwar occupation.
What is required in conditions of far less control? A healthy respect for the enduring power of local political primitivism and a willingness to adapt to it.
In Afghanistan, that means accepting radical decentralization and the power of warlords. In Iraq, that means letting centralized, top-down governance give way, at least temporarily, to provincial and tribal autonomy as the best means of producing effective representative institutions.
And in Pakistan, that means accepting both the enduring presence of feudal politics and the preeminent role of the military, Pakistan's one functioning national institution, as a guarantor of the state -- even (as in another secular Islamic country, Turkey) at the cost of giving it extra-constitutional authority. It also means accepting the reality that Pervez Musharraf, however dubious his democratic credentials, is not to be abandoned because his fall would unleash the deluge.
These are hard days for democracy. That is not a reason for giving up on it. It is a reason for the prudent acceptance and nurturing of local variants, however imperfect.
The Roman Church learned that spreading the creed required tolerance for the incorporation of certain pre-Christian practices as a way of strengthening the new faith and giving it local roots. For the spread of democracy today, we need to practice our own brand of syncretism and learn not to abandon the field when forced to settle for regional adaptations that fall short of the Jeffersonian ideal.
Read the entire article here. I think Krauthammer is hitting the nail on the head, though it may appear as heresy to the utopian perfectionists on the left. At any rate, if one likes a bit of historical irony with their political opinions and coffee in the morning, here it is.
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