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A former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, wrote in May 2009 about how depressingly similar the US problems are to emerging economies he has worked with. It’s a provocative article: The Quiet Coup (a few excerpts posted here).
“Anything that is too big to fail is too big to exist.”
The Quiet Coup
The problem is oligarchs who overborrow, become too powerful, and gain too much influence:
Click the chart above for a larger view
“Wall Street ran with these opportunities [lightweight regulation, cheap money, securitization, interest rate swaps, and I would add, high frequency trading]. From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. Pay rose just as dramatically. From 1948 to 1982, average compensation in the financial sector ranged between 99 percent and 108 percent of the average for all domestic private industries. From 1983, it shot upward, reaching 181 percent in 2007.
“The great […]
Lucky the BEST* project is here to save us from the lying thermometers of the past. Apparently people in the 1960’s and 1970’s were clever enough to get man on the moon, but too stupid to measure the temperature. Millions of people were fooled into thinking the world was cooling for three decades by erroneous thermometer readings. Who would have guessed?
Back then, everyone was sure that the 1970’s was a lot colder than the 1940’s, as Steven Goddard reminds us:
Newsweek April 1975
See the original Newsweek report at Denis Dutton‘s site.
The Global Bermuda-Triangle Effect: Thermometer Weirding
The performance of global thermometers is baffling. The technology is nearly 300 years old. The first thermometers were produced in 1724 by Daniel Fahrenheit, and by 1742 Anders Celsius had invented its main competitor. This simple, reliable instrument spread throughout the world and worked well. So far so good. But from 1920 we see the first signs of worldwide systematic errors (first too high, and then too low?!).
The strange “Wierding” effect struck both mercury and alcohol thermometers and was most savage between 1945 and 1975. Frank Lansner compared the BEST projects result with his Rural Unadjusted Temperature […]
In the UK, gargantuan (as in wow!#$) amounts of cheap energy were discovered a month ago, yet it seemingly hasn’t changed the political landscape. (Or, then again, maybe it did? I gather no one in the UK government seems to be admitting it, but from afar, it looks like a lot of clunker UK policies have not-coincidentally got the boot in the last month.) Overtly, it’s been the gift no one wanted to open… but possibly a few in power are well aware of what’s under wraps and it is influencing policies?
Back in August 2011, the experts at the The British Geological Survey team thought the country only had 150bn cubic meters of shale gas. Then on Sept 22 a group called Cuadrilla announced that they’d found the odd 5,660 bn cubic metres under Lancashire.
Right about then, a sea-change ought to have come over ministers and corporate leaders in the UK. Here was a get out of jail free card, with lots of cash-cow potential, not to mention 50+ years of gas for the whole nation. It ought to have been time for large parties, champers, and the dumping of the competing energy sources. Instead a month later, […]
I need to do some testing, so odd things may come or go… but hopefully it will all be working properly soon. 🙂
Thanks for your patience, but do keep commenting!
Jo
PS: New star ratings added for blog articles. Thanks for your enthusiastic clicking, but seriously, surely I need to do more than write two lines to earn eight stars!
8.9 out of 10 based on 29 ratings
We want evidence, reason, and well informed opinions from all sides on important topics. Instead we’re coerced into paying for propaganda, character assassination, and the personal views of journalists.
The ABC has been outdoing itself lately. It doesn’t just ignore skeptics, it’s been actively working to denigrate them. No ad hom is too low, no fabrication too far fetched. Could it be complete fiction? Why not? Could it be the most expensive high profile ABC programs, costing tax-payers hundreds of thousands an episode? Yes sir.
It’s not a conspiracy, it’s a culture. When comedians and scriptwriters live off a diet of dogma at the ABC (it starts with the science unit), why would we be surprised that they’d churn out the same half-truths, deceit, and sloppy reasoning in their fictional work?
The ABC Chairman — Maurice Newman — recently worried about the poor intellectual quality of ABC “investigations” in The Australian, “Ad hominem attacks substitute for logical and evidence-based discourse that would otherwise allow viewers and listeners the opportunity to decide for themselves where they stand on the issues.”
Our billion-dollar ABC is supposed to represent the diverse views of the country:
The ABC editorial policy tells us the ABC […]
Good news: signs are coming in from all over the non-Australian-and-New-Zealand world. Hints of sanity are spreading. Everywhere Green schemes are being slashed, junked and rethought.
I’m heartened. There are reasons to be optimistic, (even if, in the end, the good news was not because politicians got rational, but because the money ran out).
For those that missed it, Delingpole reported the beginning of the October good-news shift with ‘Let’s commit suicide more slowly,’ suggests Osborne.
George Osborne has vowed that the UK will not lead the rest of Europe in its efforts to cut carbon emissions, raising the prospect that the country’s carbon targets could be watered down if the EU does not agree to more ambitious emission reduction goals.
EU referendum reports on the collapse of the UK’s largest Carbon Capture Scheme and what it means for the Green Agenda
It has come to pass that Longannet, the flagship scheme for carbon capture in the UK, has been junked, despite the availability of £1 billion funding from this moronic administration. And since it is the only remaining project in the running for CCS funding, that makes it about thirty months from inception […]
I thought the Canadians had gotten over this type of insanity. Environment Canada apparently wants to cut the coal industry in half. (At least that’s as much as they’ll admit too. Presumably they’d feel like they’d completed their life’s work if they could only wipe it out completely.)
Christopher Monckton has analyzed the Canadian regulatory action on “Coal Emissions” and finds that, as usual, legislators are choosing the most expensive option possible with other people’s money. Environment Canada wants to spend $6 billion to reduce the atmospheric concentration of a trace molecule by 0.01 ppmv, and assuming there is any advantage in doing so, it would still cost one-eighteenth as much to just do nothing, suck it and see, and pay for all the theoretical damage that could ensue.
Like so many other Western Nations, there is not even the pretense that the legislation makes sense judged by any numerical outcome, yet Canadian citizens may have to pay thousands in tithe to witchdoctors and carpetbaggers in a futile attempt to change the weather. It’s as if the highest echelons of Western leadership are stone-age innumerate.
As per usual with these type of posts, I expect no real challenge to Monckton’s […]
If you are in Sydney, I recommend dropping in to meet David Archibald and hear him speak!
6.30pm, Club Five Dock, 66 Great North Road, Five Dock
Details below… Jim Simpson runs a model group of skeptics 🙂
9.2 out of 10 based on 11 ratings […]
La Nina is here. But how big will it get?
The NCEP NOAA forecasts suggest it might be so big, it’s historic — stronger and colder than anything since possibly 1917. (Then again, the Australian BOM are saying it’ll be a bit weaker than the last one.) But as Frank Lansner points out, the NCEP model got it right last year when many others were not even close.
Lansner has spotted the uber cold forecasts of NCEP. By March next year their models are telling them the Pacific Ocean (section Nino 3.4) will be 2.5 degrees below average. The forecasts are so unusually cold, some of the model runs don’t even fit on the graph. (Warmistas must be quaking at the thought of a blockbuster cold northern winter. Bring out your “warming causes cooling” memos.)
If conditions do reach 2.6 degrees below average, that would make the ocean surface temperatures in that zone, colder than anytime in the last 60 years. It would be the La Nina to almost match the strength of the 1998 El Nino anomaly (2.8K) that set records all over the world.
7.9 out of 10 based on 18 ratings […]
Pickering has it in a picture 🙂
Let’s applaud the brilliant Larry Pickering.
It says a lot about the state of our nation, that after retiring 30 years ago, the esteemed cartoonist felt the inescapable urge to come back now.
The Australian government and the Big Climate Scare are both achieving once-in-a-generation status. They are both ideas so preposterously absurd, they are Fertilizer for Funnies.
When a government is so bad, that it brings long retired cartoonists out of retirement, you know this era is the end-game stage of a historic low.
Cartoons like this are exactly why the Big Scare Campaign is scared to death of free speech.
Pickering uses comedic exaggeration to the full, but people don’t need to take this literally. It cuts through. This captures a dangerous idea. What if the government was milking the scientific system? Imagine if they treated some scientists different (what, you mean like calling them names?).
Gillard may control the Army but we skeptics have the best cartoonists. It’s no match. The Tax is temporary.
9.4 out of 10 based on 36 ratings […]
Have you wondered what the global raw rural data tells us?
What did those thermometers say before the adjustments, smoothing, selection, and averaging?
This just might be the first time anyone has publicly compared the global raw data to published adjusted data sets in this way.
Frank Lansner has been dedicated in the extreme, and has developed a comprehensive Rural Unadjusted Temperature Index, or RUTI. One of the most interesting points to come out of this extensive work is the striking difference between coastal stations and inland stations. Frank kept noticing that the trend of the inland stations was markedly different from coastal stations and island stations.
Fig1. Red-Blue lines mark regions where there was a different coastal to inland trend. In green areas the two trends were similar.
What he finds is perhaps not so unusual: The coastal areas are heavily influenced by the sea surface temperature. Inland stations record larger rises and falls in temperature, which is hardly surprising. But, the implications are potentially large. When records from some stations are smoothed over vast distances (as in 1200 km smoothing), results can be heavily skewed by allowing coastal trends to be smoothed across inland areas. What Lansner […]
Bountiful Joy! The Australian Labor Party have discovered the endless free lunch, and they’re going to feed the Nation!
All this time we’ve been wondering how to make the pie bigger, save the world, and live to be 105, and the answer was staring us in the face!
The Diabolical Choice
Box One: Cheap Electricity
Box Two: Same electricity — Costs a lot more!
Labor chooses Box 2!
Why? Look at the benefits:
1) For $11 billion dollars a year you get almost as much electricity (except at night time, early morning, late afternoon, and on cloudy, windless or extra windy days.)
2) You are providing a guaranteed market for a product no one in their right mind would buy! (This is the Labor “free market solution”.)
3) You give people “Hope”! Hope that someday, the people profiting from selling you a product that isn’t very good, will pay for the research to figure out how to make it worth buying!
4) Then whoever that smarty pants country is, will sell this back to us, making even more profit because they own the patents. Good […]
The End Game of the Great Global Warming Myth draws closer
With impeccable timing the Australian Government is snatching defeat from the jaws of what could have been a glorious victory. Just as Gore, activists and then Hansen admit they lost, the infighting among the big scare campaign begins, the EU pulls the pin on Kyoto, and UK news outlets are asking if a Little Ice Age is on the way…
No one in officialdom is admitting the science has changed, or that they got it wrong, but the world is behaving as though it no longer believes.
What are the odds? Today the Australian Government is voting on the “Clean Energy Bill” (which will henceforth be known as the “Costly Energy Bill”) and at the same time the EU is saying: Enough! The big boys have to play or we are out. Which means the impossible trio of USA, China and India need to sign up to Kyoto II.
They might as well have said: “It’s all over for us. Kyoto II is dead”.
EU sets conditions for signing up to Kyoto II
LUXEMBOURG – European Union environment ministers — responsible for only 11 percent of global carbon emissions […]
What’s the worst thing you could call a scientist? Apparently, a “climate change denier” and “a fraud”.
Even scientists who are hunting Yetis are not suspected of being as evil, unscrupulous and deranged as skeptics-of-the-extent-of the-UN-committee’s-projections-of-man-made-global-warming, aka, “climate-change-deniers”. I mean, who would dare question the UN, eh? It is a collective God, it can’t be wrong — like, say, the Pope in 1633. If they say it’s 3 degrees / 2 degrees /3.3 degrees, whatever, they must be right (even if they do keep changing their mind).
Scientists who are hunting Yetis have no credentials, poor sods and are ripe for a whack.
Who are these “international scientists” who are going to find his Yeti for him? We have been given no names, nor credentials, nor institutions they belong to. I suspect, like so many of the so-called climate-change deniers, they are frauds.
But here’s the thing, I know the author, Darren Curnoe (though it’s been a while), and he’s a really nice guy. We shared a group house once, when I was on the way from science to TV, and he was on the way from TV to science. We had avid conversations about the evolution […]
For those commenters who are following the news and proceedings in detail as it travels through the cogs and gates of parliament, please share your thoughts on this thread as it unfolds. Thanks to those who have the time to follow the details.
I’ve moved relevant comments from other threads to here.
7.8 out of 10 based on 4 ratings
The Australian government asks for submissions, gets around 4500, mostly against the tax, then ignores almost all of them. It’s just another form of suppression and censorship, a sign that the elites don’t give a fig what we think.
Menzies House is calling it an utter disgrace.
“In a shocking and historically unprecedented suppression of political expression, a staggering four thousand five hundred Australians have had their voices silenced by Australia’s political elite in the Labor-dominated Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Clean Energy Future Legislation.”
It shows what we all knew all along: the submission process was a merely legal formality, a scent of democracy.
This is a new low, and based on current performance, is just what we’d expect. They can’t justify this tax, they can’t debate the science, but they can ram it through. The only way “forward” is with whitewash, erasers, and the all-purpose delete key.
So figure what was going on in the minds of the chief censors:
a/ Abject desperation: We’re doomed! (Never let the plebs know that we got thousands of well written, detailed submissions that were against the tax, so find any half-baked pathetic excuse to not publish or count most […]
I‘m peppered with emails asking me if articles like this one (which claims there is no Greenhouse Effect at all on Venus) could be right.
Michael Hammer has some 20 patents in spectroscopy, and he explains why the Greenhouse Effect — where CO2 and other gases absorb and emit infra red — is very real, and backed by empirical evidence. The calculations using the Stefan-Boltzmann Law on the atmosphere of Earth and Venus, argue that the Greenhouse Effect is not-detectable. But not-detectable (by that method) does not “prove” the effect is zero. Other methods — like satellite observations of Earth’s atmosphere, and countless lab experiments, tell us that the Greenhouse Effect is real. (The Stefan-Boltzmann Law is used to create the first graph below). Huffman’s calculations suggest other factors are more important than greenhouse gases (with which we heartily agree) and that Hansen et al were barking up the wrong tree by pretending that Venus “shows” us anything much about the Greenhouse Effect. (Indeed, the IPCC mention “Venus” in their first Assessment Report back in 1990 as one of the three key reasons.)
So here in middle-of-the-road centrist land, the people who claim Earth could become more like Venus are […]
Yesterday I wrote that the media is a rubber stamp for government and green propaganda, and today, the perfect example of certified nonsense appeared.
Not only is the headline 100% incorrect, “Why conservative white men are more likely to deny climate change”, the body of the story barely tries to add a caveat. The poorly designed study used the ambiguous phrase “global warming” instead of “climate change”, which is not much better. Ask me if I believe in global warming, and I’ll ask you — warming since when?
The journalist, Adriana Barton, has dutifully repeated Orwellian newspeak, and wins today’s award for The Destruction of the English Language.
Can anyone name a single white guy who denies the climate changes? (And more to the point, for pedantic trolls, is that a person who is a well known skeptic, i.e. do they matter?)
8.6 out of 10 based on 7 ratings […]
Two professors of sociology think they can explain why “Climate Deniers” are winning. But Riley E. Dunlap and Aaron M. McCright start from the wrong assumption and miss the bleeding obvious: the theory was wrong, the evidence has changed, and thousands of volunteers have exposed it.
The real question sociologists will be studying for years to come is: how was an exaggerated scare, based on so little evidence, poor reasoning and petty namecalling, kept alive for two whole decades?
Climate Change Scare Machine Cycle: see how your tax dollars are converted into alarming messages
See your tax dollars converted into their scare. Click for a larger image. Reference: Climate Money, Science and Public Policy Institute, 2009.
….
The Full PDF version The key points
1. The money and vested interests on the pro-scare side is vastly larger, more influential, and more powerful than that on the skeptical side. Fossil fuel and conservative-think-tanks are competing against most of the world financial houses, the nuclear and renewable energy industry, large well financed green activists (WWF revenue was $700m last year), not to mention whole government departments, major political parties, universities dependent on government funding, the BBC (there is no debate), the […]
Perhaps this insurance costs too much?
Between Jan 2010 and March 2011, allegedly, 23 Honduran farmers have been murdered by the owners of a UN-accredited palm oil plantation.
“EU carbon trading rocked by mass killings”
At issue are the reported murders of 23 local farmers who tried to recover land, which they say was illegally sold to big palm oil plantations, such as Grupo Dinant, in a country scarred by widespread human rights abuses.
In July, a report by an International Fact Finding Mission was presented to the European Parliament’s Human Rights Sub-committee, alleging that 23 peasants, one journalist and his partner, had all been murdered in the Bajo Aguán region, between January 2010 and March 2011.
The deaths were facilitated by the “direct involvement of private security guards from some of the local companies who are complicit with police and military officials,” the report said.
In some cases it cited “feigned accidents” in which peasants were run over by security guards working for two named palm oil businessmen. In other cases, the farmers were simply shot, or “disappeared”.
Strangely, though the report was released in July, it’s become news now that a Green MEP and EU policy makers announced […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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