statism watch

Let’s see the warmists explain that away. Now, when will the wider public realize how utterly they’ve been misled?

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Lawrence Solomon, The National Post
June 13, 2010

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia — the university of Climategate fame – is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.

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Funny, haven’t seen this in the Canadian media, at least not yet. But it merely confirms what we’ve known for some time, adding to a mounting pile of evidence that operations in Pakistan are not what they seem, not by a long shot. Read the report here.

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Press TV
June 13, 2010

A new report claims there are direct links between Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

A new report has suggested that Pakistan’s intelligence agency is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, providing them with funds and training.

The report released Sunday by the London School of Economics (LSE) says that support for the Taliban is the “official policy” of Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and the body provides funds and sanctuary for the militant group on a larger scale than previously thought.

LSE, which is deemed a leading British institution, also suggests that support for the Taliban “is approved at the highest level of Pakistan’s civilian government.”

“Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude,” said the report’s author, Matt Waldman, after allegedly speaking to several militants in Afghanistan as well as Western and Afghan security officials.

Almost all of the Taliban militants interviewed in the report believed that the ISI was represented on the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s supreme leadership council based in Pakistan.

“Interviews strongly suggest that the ISI has representatives on the (Quetta) Shura, either as participants or observers, and the agency is thus involved at the highest level of the movement,” the report said.

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Related: World Cup: Street kids rounded up and run out of town | Interpol heads to World Cup in record numbers

David Clarke and Nick Mulvenney, Reuters
June 13, 2010

DURBAN (Reuters) — South African police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at hundreds of workers protesting over pay in the early hours of Monday outside the stadium where Germany had just trounced Australia in their World Cup opener.

Riot police sporting body amour, helmets and guns chased stewards who had earlier been responsible for the security of 62,660 fans from the new Moses Mabhida stadium.

One woman was hit by a rubber bullet. She lay outside the stadium for nearly an hour before an ambulance took her away.

“We were mounting a peaceful protest because they were not paying us what we expected and we were surprised that the police started charging at us. They fired teargas at us,” said one of the workers, Sydney Nzoli.

Police blasted teargas as the disgruntled staff, bricks and rocks in hand, rampaged down a Durban highway. Scores of police corralled the protesters before they reached the city center. After a tense standoff, the workers dispersed.

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Here’s the other side of the water debate, which ought to be heard, given that the arguments against water export seem unclear. While obviously water is a common resource and the rights of those living downstream (if any) must be respected. Even from an enlightened laissez-faire markets perpective you can’t just set up shop at a headwaters and claim you own the river, poisoning it or extracting more than a share any more than you could deprive your neighbours of oxygen (were that possible) because you felt like bottling it. That would be a direct assault on their property rights, since it would deprive them of a commodity they’re using. Is that really what the nascent water export industry has in mind? That seems unlikely, and ought to be a criminal matter if it isn’t already. Likewise, mass diversion in unpopulated areas should be a matter of property rights as well – you’d better own the affected area, and that requirement would rapidly moderate extraction. Finally, ‘Water Day’ and some of these other Canada Council initiatives seem to ignore the fact of the water cycle raised by the author below. It evaporates, it goes up, and barring regional climate shifts it comes back to where you got it from. Any water buffs want to contest this?

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Gwyn Morgan, The Globe and Mail
June 13, 2010

A clear-headed comparison of the environmental impacts of carefully chosen water-export projects with that of leading resource industries would show water transfers to be one of the cleanest possible ways of creating new investment, jobs and deficit-reducing government revenues

A recent special report on water in The Economist offered a provocative comment: “The trouble with water is that it’s all politics, no economics.” How else to explain why a pro-free-trade government in one of the world’s most water-endowed countries would seek to ban bulk water exports? That’s what Canada’s proposed Transboundary Waters Protection Act, introduced by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon last month, would do. Driving the Conservative government’s proposed ban are opinion polls showing two-thirds of Canadians oppose water exports.

Politics do indeed make strange bedfellows. Mr. Cannon’s statement of the government’s “resolve to make sure there are no exports of bulk” resonated among left-wing, anti-free-trade groups, such as the Council of Canadians. But do the council’s arguments hold water?

The council’s website lists “five reasons to oppose bulk water exports,” drawn from a 2007 council publication. Let’s take a look at each of them.

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Like a piston in its downwards cycle, the intergenerational wealth pump turns again – get ready for your pocket to be picked now in the name of your own salvation. If what you want to do is benevolently unwind government services and encourage the growth of a thriving private sector that meets people’s needs without the use of state coercion funded by massive taxation – an outcome that’s desirable from a libertarian perspective – you do not start by first looting the public treasury, slashing the public sector to the bone, and handing public services and infrastructure over to cronies, corrupt banks, and public-private ‘partnerships’ in a sort of free-for-all fire sale. But this, unfortunately, is the approach to ‘austerity’ that you can likely expect to see in the coming years. So-called conservative governments are notorious for replacing the welfare state with corporate welfare, which if anything is worse.

But global economies have now painted themselves into a corner, and Merkel’s approach is to be favoured over Krugman’s. But only just barely. The moral thing to do would be to default on the public debts held by central banks, created as they were by fraudulent derivative securities in the Keynesian casino system. When the house has got the game rigged and they own all the chips, the only thing you can do is scotch the entire system and decentralize currency trading. Perhaps it could be done in a graduated series of steps. This, of course, would introduce a different kind of austerity as the virtual bubbles of Keynesian monetary policy deflated to a steady state. But at least it wouldn’t result in people being chained by debt and increased taxes in perpetuity to the financial system that created the problem in the first place. Further collapse and the attendant social upheaval are coming anyways, so we may as well get it over with in a way we can rebuild from as free peoples and free nations. Delaying the inevitable will only make it worse.

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Toby Helm, Ian Traynor, Paul Harris, The Observer
June 13, 2010

Eurozone finance ministers were still committed to spending their way to recovery only a few months ago. Then came the Greek debt crisis, which threatened to engulf the continent. Despite warnings from the US, Britain and its EU neighbours are braced for unprecedented public sector cuts

When Angela Merkel talks about budget cuts these days she likes to invoke the “Swabian housewife” — Germany’s equivalent of the parsimonious Scot. In that part of south-west Germany they have a reputation for scrimping and saving. Famously, Swabia’s cooks make hearty soups out of all the leftovers in the kitchen. To the German chancellor they are the embodiments of good housekeeping.

“You can’t keep living beyond your means,” says Merkel. “One should simply ask the Swabian housewife.”

By extolling the virtues of old-fashioned thrift, Merkel hoped last week to go some way towards explaining to ordinary Germans why they must suddenly swallow the most painful austerity pill administered by their government in generations. Last Monday, with some trepidation, she announced massive cuts of ¤11.2bn in 2011 and plans for a total of ¤80bn by 2014. Yesterday, in Stuttgart and elsewhere, the inevitable protests began on the streets.

Even for a country painfully aware, because of its history, of the danger of debt, the extent of corrective action came as a shock. “Germany has never agreed to an austerity package to this extent, but these cuts have to be made in order for the country to establish a stable economic future,” Merkel said.

Across Europe other governments, scared by the Greek debt crisis, the repercussions of which imperil the very existence of the euro, have been doing the same, raising the spectre of mass layoffs in public services in the name of European unity.

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