Climate etc.

This is shaping up to be a very interesting little bunfight.

Also interesting to see will be the Australian Senate vote on the Carbon Tax, that filthy abomination of a plan which oozed its way (just) past the guardians at the gate thanks to a bunch of people who are either incredibly misinformed, incredibly stupid, incredibly greedy, or a combination of the above.

The Opposition will of course block it - fruitlessly, because Labor and the Greens have the numbers to pass it. But the Greens are now of two sorts - the ones we are used to, and an extremely disturbed fringe that got in at the last half-Senate election, with which Bob Brown does not see completely eye to eye. I foresee a slim possibility that they will somehow contrive to wreck it as not being severe or ideologically pure enough for them. And with the Opposition now standing firm, there's no way for Gillard to get it through if the Greens in the Senate go mad and renege.

If they push it through, they will be cutting their own political throats. The damage this will do to the Australian economy and the pain it will put ordinary working men and women through, for no measurable good, will ensure their electoral annihilation. Some of those ordinary working men and women may (probably will) lose their jobs. And unlike, for example, the British in the Blitz - who had the defeat of Germany as the fixed end goal to which they could aspire - these ordinary working men and women have been informed that the measured endpoint for their efforts is sometime in the middle or even the end of this century. By the latter date, most of them and even most of their currently living children will either be elderly or dead.

The British in the Second World War individually knew that there might not be a chance they would see victory, but they knew they would see it if they lived long enough. The Australians who must suffer under the damage that the Carbon Tax must inevitably cause will suffer in the knowledge they will never see the victory, never reap the gains... and never know if the idiots who inflicted this misery on them were right. At the next election, they will rob those idiots of their jobs.

It is said that Kevin Rudd is the only Labor MP who will survive in Queensland if current polling is reflected across the board. Let him - he can sit in opposition till the end of his parliamentary days and preside over the wreckage he unleashed on his country and his party, despised along with his successor (and if rumors of Gillard's dispensability are true, also his predecessor) as the worst Prime Ministers Australia has ever had.

"Occupy Wall Street"

The whole business just gets more and more bizarre (second link is definitely not suitable for children and the audio is possibly not worksafe).

I suspect the movement (such as it is) is eventually going to collapse under the weight of its own unsustainable idiocy. Sure, the protesters can stay out there for as long as they can feed, clothe and (hopefully) wash themselves; but as the second link shows and Matt Labash's excellent (though tongue-in-cheek) article describes, the thing seems to have become a magnet for all sorts of crackpots demanding, advocating or promising that which is variously illegal, immoral or impossible (or at the very least inadvisable).

In addition, this article at Catallaxy Files has (or had - there seems to be a problem with it as I type this) a picture showing just how many of the protesters were sporting items manufactured by the greedy corporations they claim to loathe. (EDIT: it can also be found here, and at somewhat greater resolution to boot.)

Ultimately there is no single coherent message being sent and no coherent solution being proposed, and - it seems to me at least - nobody in this movement who is either willing or able to propose one. If I were one of the people this movement claims to champion, I wouldn't be wasting my time there - or I might give it the barest whiff of support in between filling out job applications, attending interviews where possible, and beating on every conceivable door that might offer me gainful employment. And as a last resort, if I were young and medically fit and no more desirable option presented itself, I would be approaching the armed services.

Roundup

News not long in from Menzies House - with only a week to go before the uselessness which is the Carbon Tax vote, the government threw open the gates to public submissions "without terms of reference", which meant that anyone who had any opinion was welcome to contribute.

OR WERE THEY? It seems something's gone seriously wrong with that process, and numerous people not happy with the government's proposal (about 4500 according to the link) had their submissions quietly junked.

The ragers against the machine continue to occupy Wall Street, and show that they are ill-organised and ill-disciplined. Some of them may not even be genuine. Mark Steyn talks here about the hypocrisy of people who scream about "corporate greed" while receiving tributes to Steve Jobs on their iPhones.  I recall reading these anti-corporate persons are using the toilets in McDonald's, which is probably a good thing, or the sanitation problem detailed above would be even worse than it is now.

 Elsewhere, the Australian Greens continue to show that it isn't just the environment which motivates them. Envirofascists indeed. This sort of conversation should not even be thinkable in any nation which fought in the Second World War, less so one on the winning side. Nor is he the only one to want to call in the authorities whenever a journalist disagrees with him, regarding which behaviour the editorial team at The Australian makes its point succinctly.

Meanwhile, some people seem never to suffer for their gaffes.

And speaking of those who stretch the truth and get it wrong, Jo Nova has a neat little article showing where the whole Climate Change debate is going - and where the money truly is (hint - it's not on the side of the doubters!). And while we're on the topic of money,  UK MEP Daniel Hannan continues to beat his head (futilely, I fear) against the brick wall of Europe's financial woes. The sooner the UK walks away from that shemozzle, the better. In fact, the sooner the entirety of Europe walks away from the whole EU shemozzle, the better.

Growth and its obstacles.

From Andrew Bolt's blog: a plan to green the North of Australia. By which the Federal Opposition means "turn it into a food bowl" as opposed to the Australian Greens' idea of locking it up and preventing anyone from doing anything with it, including, it must be said, the Aboriginal population - which was regularly and repeatedly fetishised and fawned over whenever the loony left wanted a stick with which to beat the Howard Government.

Unfortunately for them, Howard is now gone and their usefulness to the "environmental" cause is at an end, to the point where Aborigines who voted in favour of a huge ($30bn) natural gas export infrastructure development have been the targets of racial slurs. Of course some people will resort to extraordinary lengths to cripple or delay development and get this thing shut down, to the point of asking inane questions in Parliament and not accepting reasonable answers. If there are bilbies there, pick the bloody things up and move them - we have enough experience with raising the things in semi-captivity to do this.

10 years since Sept 11 2001...

Those who carried out the attacks have, of course, been screaming in hell from the moment they did the deed.

He who commanded it has since joined them, and good riddance to him.

However, they still have many admirers in certain well-known parts of the globe, who have not felt the West's lash - and for that omission the West deserves to feel eternally ashamed.

Also deserving of eternal shame are the Western apologists for that outrage. They would do very poorly under the rule of the individuals whose cause they defend - in fact, they would probably not last a week alive and free.

If Islam has an image problem, it's because of the outrages committed in its name - 9/11; suicide bombings using mentally retarded people, disgraced rape victims and little children; the beheading of unarmed aid workers; the stoning of raped little girls in Africa (and the gunning down of people who try to help them); the flogging of raped women in Saudi Arabia; female genital mutilation; and the judicial execution of homosexuals just to name a few.

It's not hard to see where the "Islamophobia" is coming from when people who identify themselves as Muslims do unspeakable things in the name of their religion and their god. If that's really Islam, then there's nothing wrong with Islamophobia - we've every right to fear it.

On my mind today.

Much was said about Sarah Palin's "responsibility" for the shooting (by an unhinged psychopath) of Gabrielle Giffords, inasmuch as she advised that opposing members of the US Govt be "targeted" electorally; advice which was associated with a map bearing crosshairs in the relevant areas. Much was also said about the need for less inflammatory language from both sides of politics.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like Jimmy Hoffa Jr heard that message, nor did the inventors of the videogame described here.  The poison continues outside of the United States, with conservative (which in the Australian context means secular centre-right) female politicians coming in for their fair share of abuse, to quote the Rolling Stones.

Let's get one thing straight - politics is not a pretty game, and anyone who enters it should go in with a fairly thick skin and the expectation of being called some pretty vile things. I can accept that. What I do NOT like is when the left-wing side of politics screams and rants and raves whenever "hate speech" is used (whether that be sexism, racism, etc. or just really poorly-worded advice of the sort Palin gave), but then proceeds to dish out the exact same thing against its opponents - and not a word is spoken.

A similar bit of hypocrisy raises its head whenever Palestinian rocket attacks "threaten the fragile peace", whereas the peace is only "ended" when the Israelis (rightly) shoot back. And speaking of Israel, it's nice to see people standing up against anti-Semitic crap from a Left that really should know better. The only reason Max Brenner chocolate shops should be obstructed by crowds is because they're all desperate for the chance to go in and buy Brenner's goods. As for John Zelig (see the link), he should know better.

In the meantime, things continue to look grim for the Australian Prime Minister. Negative media coverage suddenly being pulled doesn't help her cause. Nor does this story, which strongly suggests that the government really is in zugzwang, that unenviable point in the game from which all roads lead downwards.

Links of interest

1. The Australian Labor Party - the gift that keeps on giving.

THE federal government has come under unprecedented attack from one of its biggest union allies over the failure to bail out hundreds of family businesses owed more than $7 million from collapsed Building the Education Revolution (BER) projects.

A sordid tale of unintended consequences, some of which have already devolved upon the public school system (late completion, shoddy workmanship, schools forced to accept buildings that didn't match their needs, and so forth). "Unintended consequences" seems to be what this government does best. Unfortunately, all of those consequences are bad. From the link:

A spokesman for Workplace Relations Minister Chris Evans said last night the government sympathised with sub-contractors who worked for builder Project Kendall. "It is, however, the state and territory governments and non-government education authorities who are responsible for managing the implementation of BER projects in their schools including tendering, contracting and procurement," he said.

He can 'shift the blame all he likes, but this was the Federal Government's baby and the ultimate responsibility rests there. Specifically it was the current Prime Minister's baby - this was her ministerial portfolio at the time. In retrospect, that should have been a warning sign. It's a bad sign for a Labor government when the unions take up the cudgel against it.

2. It's a bad sign anyway, because in related news...

Hard-working Federal MP for Chisholm Anna Burke, popular lefty Bendigo MP Steve Gibbons, painful and Ruddite Daryl Melham, grumpy teddy bear Laurie Ferguson, NSW Right patriot John Murphy, and former Minister and Left factional titan Alan Griffin have all decided not to re-contest their seats.

There was a lot of this sort of thing in the lead-up to the New South Wales state election, an event which saw NSW Labor utterly routed after a long string of scandals, screw-ups, and more leadership changes than you can poke a stick at. The rats are deserting the sinking ship. (I use the phrase metaphorically; there is every possibility that these are honest men and women who are despairing of their chances and would rather retire than face inevitable defeat - the political equivalent of tipping over one's king in chess.)

3. When your position is under siege, when the 'facts' you spruik are eroded by observations, and when the science suddenly isn't all that settled any more, there's always ad-hominem attack:

One day climate change skeptics will be seen in the same negative light as racists, or so says former Vice President Al Gore.

Um, no. From the article:

When Bogusky questioned the analogy, asking if the scientific reasoning behind climate change skeptics might throw a wrench into the good and evil comparison with racism, Gore did not back down.
“I think it’s the same where the moral component is concerned and where the facts are concerned I think it is important to get that out there, absolutely,” Gore said.

The most fascinating part of this is that Gore is trying to reframe the debate as a moral one. It isn't - it's firmly scientific. The thing about science is that it's very rarely "settled", and those parts of it that are settled are the ones which can be subject to rigorous analysis - shifting one variable at a time while the others are held constant and seeing where theory and observation diverge. The other problem I find with "settled" climate science is that we have detailed historical records of massive climate shifts with no human input at all, which suggests that the science either isn't really all that well understood or that the models have massive holes in them, or possibly both. As for Gore's assertion that...

This is an organized effort to attack the reputation of the scientific community as a whole, to attack their integrity, and to slander them with the lie that they are making up the science in order to make money,

I would point him to this and this and this as evidence of the sort of money there is to be made. In addition, this is by no means an attempt to attack "the scientific community as a whole", which is not a monolith on the topic of climate change and never has been. When those who question a majority opinion in science are vilified and have their ethics and morality called into question for doing so, especially by public figures who are not themselves scientists, we have stopped doing science and started doing dogma. The way you "beat the climate denialists" is by repudiating their opinions scientifically, not by attributing dubious motivations in the first instance.

The other big problem I have with the whole carbon-trading business is that it is an invitation to a South Sea Bubble of enormous proportions, mostly because it's a trade in toxic intangibles - and that should remind you of something.