Victoria is burning. 36 dead. Please donate if you can.

Victoria is burning.

36 people are already confirmed dead and the number is expected to rise (update: the toll is now 106 and rising)

Two towns have been razed to the ground.

Marysville north of Melbourne has been all but wiped off the map and ambulance authorities say there are not enough vehicles to reach all the injured in nearby Kinglake, a town which is also feared to have been destroyed.

It is unclear how many homes have been destroyed in the fires, but tens of thousands of hectares have been razed and the army has been called in to assist exhausted firefighters.

The number of destroyed homes will be in the hundreds.

This morning there were also unconfirmed reports of bodies being found in cars overtaken by the fires in Gippsland in the state's east.

Six of the confirmed dead have been found at Kinglake, six at Kinglake West and four each at St Andrews and Wandong, all north of Melbourne.

Five people are dead in Callignee, three in Hazelwood and one in Jeeralang. More bodies have been found at Humevale, Bendigo, and Arthurs Creek.

Victoria's deputy police commissioner Kieran Walshe says the death toll will rise and it is expected to include children.

Please help in any way you can.

Donations can be made to the Victorian Bushfire Relief Fund via any National Australia Branch or via internet banking. BSB: 082-001. Account number: 860 046 797.

(Nothing Follows)

A bunch of graphs of the US economy

Thanks to Mark Perry, Calculatedrisk and others here are some graphs of the US economy.

Some are quite revealing...and concerning.

(Nothing Follows)

Hollywood's history of supporting the worst people and ideas in the world

Gerard Jackson may well qualify as a curmudgeon but he's also someone who understands completely why the world is in the financial mess it's in.

He also understands why the world is also in a cultural mess.

On one hand there's been a bubble created in financial markets due to rapid expansion of the money supply and availability of artificially low interest rates.

On the other hand there's been a bad ideas bubble created in Hollywood, the institutions of the cultural elites, especially universities, and the mainstream media.

The term 'McCarthyism' is one that has come to be reviled due to McCarthy's zeal for tracking down communists in Hollywood.

What's never acknowledged is that Hollywood was indeed infested with communist agents at the time, as Jackson points out.

Digging through some old magazines I came across an attack on Elia Kazan by the author of the Culture Vulture column (The Australian Magazine 19-20 September 1998) in which he used the word "odious" to describe Kazan whose crime was to reveal the names of Hollywood Stalinists. Now the left is very hot on free speech, especially for the left. But having a totalitarian mindset means that they define 'free speech' as complete agreement with their current 'party line'.

I know that many of us have heard or read about the fiendish Senator McCarthy and his Hollywood blacklist that denied work to patriotic American actors, producers, writers and directors because they had allegedly been associated with the CPUSA (Communist Party of the United States of America). Because of this infamy the mere mention of his name causes 'progressives' to turn apoplectic, even as they defend — as does Steven Soderbergh, Ed Asner, Benicio Del Toro, Robert Rederford, Sean Penn, etc. — sadistic leftwing killers like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

While Hollywood’s celluloid intellectuals blame McCarthy for the blacklisting and excoriate HUAC (House of Un-American Activities Committee) they overlook the simple historical fact that McCarthy was a Senator and was not elected until 1947 while HUAC had been set up in 1934 by Democrats.

At the time of the HUAC hearings McCarthy was running his own investigation into communist infiltration of the State Department and the military. He had nothing at all to do with any hearings on communism in the film industry which were conducted in the House of Representatives. Moreover, these investigations started in the 1940s and were requested by actors and studio executives, mainly as a reaction to the Communist Party's own blacklist, something the likes of Redford, Soderbergh, and the truly hateful Clooney would never think of mentioning.

The American left assiduously cultivate the myth that the CPUSA was never a threat to America anyway and that those associated with it were honest people motivated by idealism and a love of liberty. (Our left has used the same tactic to defend the treasonable activities of the Australian Communist Party). It follows that it is both absurd, as well as slanderous, to suggest that these people would use their positions in Hollywood to promote tyranny.

But the collapse of the Soviet empire and the subsequent opening of some the KGB's intelligence archives revealed the real story, the one the left is still trying to suppress by ignoring it. We now have the evidence that the CPUSA was, like the Australian Communist Party, fully controlled and financed by the Kremlin. In short, it was just a branch of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union). This is one story that you can bet your last dollar on that neither Soderbergh or Clooney will ever film. After all, that would be the patriotic thing to do.

There is also the little matter of the Hollywood left-wing blacklist, the one we never hear about. Those who were on this list were anti-communists who suffered for their beliefs because they identified Stalinist toadies. Morrie Ryskind was one such person. He was an award-winning film writer until he told a congressional committee the truth about communists in the film industry. Suddenly he was unemployable.

And just in case you think this blacklist is dead, some years ago two young leftwing writers on the Sony Studio Lot had Robert Montgomery’s name taken off a building because he had been a "friendly witness" for HUAC. Needless to say, Clooney and the rest of the Hollywood left remained unmoved by this intolerant act of leftwing bastardry. Their silence is not surprising considering the degree of leftwing intimidation that comes from the Hollywood elite.

(This reminds of a very revealing complaint by Clooney: "There used to be three networks. Now there's hundreds and hundreds." He believes that news broadcasting should be restricted to three networks controlled entirely by people who agree with him. Tom Hanks is another example of Tinseltown's political intolerance. He called Mormons who support California’s Proposition 8 of being "un-American". It logically follows from this that conservatives are also "un-American").

Now one might say that it is all history now, water under the bridge and all that. But then such a person would have no idea of the left's capacity for hatred and revenge, specially the Hollywood left and its fellow travelling media mates, even those in Australia. This was made sickeningly clear when the Hollywood left blocked the distinguished director Elia Kazan's nomination by colleagues for the lifetime achievement award given each year by the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

Kazan who had directed such masterpieces as On the Waterfront, East of Eden and A Streetcar Named Desire and who had won two Oscars as a director was ignored in favour of the left-wing Norman Corman who won lasting fame for Attack of the Crab Monsters, Swamp Women and other masterpieces of schlock. So heavy was the stench of hypocrisy that even The New York Times felt impelled to comment on Hollywood's vindictiveness.

The famed then 87-year-old Kazan's unforgivable crime was to have truthfully told the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952 that he and eight of his friends had been fellow members of the communist party, from which he had resigned in disgust. Some of these men later admitted that Kazan told the truth. Nevertheless, until his death in 2003 at the age of 94 Kazan remained a political leper among Hollywood's politically correct.

These are same people who in October 1997 streamed into the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berverly Hills to see Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist, a film glorifying unrepentant Stalinists who wanted to turn the US into another Gulag. Needless to say, these are also same celluloid intellectuals who support cop-killers and murderous dictators – but only so long as they are socialists.

What is worthy of note here is the hypocrisy, political stupidity and moral baseness of these leftists. No wonder they feel comfortable supporting the Democrats.

It was Otto Katz who bragged: "I discovered Hollwood". Katz was a Comintern agent sent by Stalin to turn Hollywood into an instrument of Soviet policy. He arrived in 1934 and was a great success with Hollywood leftists who fell over themselves to do his bidding. Some of those Stalinists lived long enough to attend the Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist love-in where they were enthusiastically greeted by the glitterati.

As proof that there is a divine providence, Katz (who was said to be implicated in the murder of Willi Münzenberg) was arrested in Prague in 1948 and became a victim of the Rajk-Slansky purges. He was tortured for months before being tried. He was convicted of treason and hanged the next day, His body was burnt and the remains put in a sack which was later dumped on the roadside. Not a tear seems to have been shed by his Hollywood pals. This would make a terrific film. It’s a great pity it will never be made.

The double standard of the elites can also be shown in how they treat Castro versus how they treated Pinochet.

(Nothing Follows)

Climate models and why they don't work

If the topic wasn't climate change then prominent scientists such as James Hansen, Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt et al would never have been heard of, as they are scientifically mediocre in the grand scheme of things.

Henk Tennekes, a proper scientist, enters the debate between Gavin Schmidt and Roger Pielke Sr.

Roger Pielke Sr. has graciously invited me to add my perspective to his discussion with Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate. If this were not such a serious matter, I would have been amused by Gavin’s lack of knowledge of the differences between weather models and climate models. As it stands, I am appalled. Back to graduate school, Gavin!

A weather model deals with the atmosphere. Slow processes in the oceans, the biosphere, and human activities can be ignored or crudely parameterized. This strategy has been very successful. The dominant fraternity in the meteorological modeling community has appropriated this advantage, and made itself the lead community for climate modeling. Backed by an observational system much more advanced than those in oceanography or other parts of the climate system, they have exploited their lead position for all they can. For them, it is a fortunate coincidence that the dominant synoptic systems in the atmosphere have scales on the order of many hundreds of kilometers, so that the shortcomings of the parameterizations and the observation network, including weather satellite coverage, do not prevent skillful predictions several days ahead.

A climate model, however, has to deal with the entire climate system, which does include the world’s oceans. The oceans constitute a crucial slow component of the climate system. Crucial, because this is where most of the accessible heat in the system is stored. Meteorologists tend to forget that just a few meters of water contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere. Also, the oceans are the main source of the water vapor that makes atmospheric dynamics on our planet both interesting and exceedingly complicated. For these and other reasons, an explicit representation of the oceans should be the core of any self-respecting climate model.

However, the observational systems for the oceans are primitive in comparison with their atmospheric counterparts. Satellites that can keep track of what happens below the surface of the ocean have limited spatial and temporalresolution. Also, the scale of synoptic motions in the ocean is much smaller than that of cyclones in the atmosphere, requiring a spatial resolution in numerical models and in the observation network beyond the capabilities of present observational systems and supercomputers. We cannot observe, for example, the vertical and horizontal structure of temperature, salinity and motion of eddies in the Gulf Stream in real time with sufficient detail, and cannot model them at the detail that is needed because of computer limitations. How, for goodness’ sake, can we then reliably compute their contribution to multi-decadal changes in the meridional transport of heat? Are the crude parameterizations used in practice up to the task of skillfully predicting the physical processes in the ocean several tens of years ahead? I submit they are not.

Since heat storage and heat transport in the oceans are crucial to the dynamics of the climate system, yet cannot be properly observed or modeled, one has to admit that claims about the predictive performance of climate models are built on quicksand. Climate modelers claiming predictive skill decades into the future operate in a fantasy world, where they have to fiddle with the numerous knobs of the parameterizations to produce results that have some semblance of veracity. Firm footing? Forget it!

Gavin Schmidt is not the only meteorologist with an inadequate grasp of the role of the oceans in the climate system. In my weblog of June 24, 2008, I addressed the limited perception that at least one other climate modeler appears to have. A few lines from that essay deserve repeating here. In response to a paper by Tim Palmer of ECMWF, I wrote: “Palmer et al. seem to forget that, though weather forecasting is focused on the rapid succession of atmospheric events, climate forecasting has to focus on the slow evolution of the circulation in the world ocean and slow changes in land use and natural vegetation. In the evolution of the Slow Manifold (to borrow a term coined by Ed Lorenz) the atmosphere acts primarily as stochastic high-frequency noise. If I were still young, I would attempt to build a conceptual climate model based on a deterministic representation of the world ocean and a stochastic representation of synoptic activity in the atmosphere.”

From my perspective it is not a little bit alarming that the current generation of climate models cannot simulate such fundamental phenomena as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I will not trust any climate model until and unless it can accurately represent the PDO and other slow features of the world ocean circulation. Even then, I would remain skeptical about the potential predictive skill of such a model many tens of years into the future.

As good a summary as you will see as to why climate models have a zero percent predictive track record.

His wikipedia entry states:

Hendrik (Henk) Tennekes (born December 13, 1936, Kampen) was the director of research at the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, or KNMI), and was a professor of aeronautical engineering at Pennsylvania State University. Tennekes pioneered methods of multi-modal forecasting. He authored The Simple Science of Flight and A First Course in Turbulence. Tennekes was a strong proponent of scientific modeling, and he challenged the use of incomplete or unproven scientific models by those trying to explain complex phenomena such as global warming.

So he uses models to explain things but reckons climate models are not worth a cracker.

That's because they're all back-fitted, of course, which makes it a statistical impossibility for them to have any predictive power.

(Nothing Follows)

Australia's Old Fresh Thinking

I wonder how long it will be before your average Australian voter wakes up to the fact that Kevin Rudd is the new Gough Whitlam?

Of course, there are millions of voters who either weren't born yet or politically aware during Whiltam's reign of chaos and who still think that Rudd is doing a good job by throwing tens of billions of dollars at the economy in order to stimulate it and get past the Global Financial Crisis.

Parenthetically, have you noticed that you never hear the government talk about Working Families anymore? It's all Global Financial Crisis.

Rudd is selling out Australia's future and when voters work it out there'll be carnage at the ballot box like there was when Whitlam was swept from office by Malcolm Fraser (who turned out to be a Grade A clot himself).

Do you remember Rudd's address to the ALP's National Conference?

Here's a reminder:



Fresh thinking?

How fresh are the views of this bloke...



...John Maynard Keynes?

Apparently, fresh thinking means trying economic measures that have the same success as climate models - zero - in achieving their goals.

How the heck does spending billions on school infrastructure create sustainable jobs?

It doesn't, of course, which is the problem with Labor's bill.

It has very little stimulative effect.

The opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull, who has squibbed it on climate change, at least has the common sense to block the bill from passing the Senate.

Whether the government can get the minor parties on board remains to be seen.

(Nothing Follows)

Economy in trouble? Call in the Keynesian Cops...

The more dire the financial situation the worse the plan emanating from what passes for political leadership in Canberra.

Hot off the back of yesterday's grim news that:

THE global recession will cost Australia $115 billion in tax revenue and plunge the Budget futher into deficit, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd revealed today.

"The truth is the global recession in general and the collapse in China's growth in particular has produced a $115 billion fall in Australian tax receipts to the Government," Mr Rudd said.

"That means an impact directly on our budget, that means, therefore, of course, a temporary budget deficit."

Mr Rudd said the Government would do anything it could to protect economic growth and jobs but did not outline any new measures to stimulate the economy.

"We are going to move heaven and earth to try and support growth in the economy," he said.

So what did he do to try to 'move heaven and earth to try and support growth in the economy'?

Did he order that Treasurer Wayne Swan, Reserve Bank Governor Glenn Stevens, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry and anyone else involved in running Australia's economy read a copy of Milton Friedman's Free To Choose?

No.

Instead he called in...



...the Keynesian Cops.

Having pissed $10 billion of taxpayers' money up against the wall in December in a Keynsian bid to avoid recession the prime minister now takes another crack at spending our way out of trouble:

KEVIN Rudd has framed the deterioration in the nation's bottom line amid the global financial crisis as the deficit Australia has to have.

Announcing the Government's decision to pump $42 billion into the economy, the Prime Minister said nobody liked being in deficit.

But, he added: “This is not a question of choice. This is what we are required to do.”

No, Mr Rudd.

What you are required to do is ensure that Australia's economy rebounds as quickly as possible.

Putting another $42 billion into the economy on top of the $10 billion already frittered away is a travesty.

The remedy is simple. Always has been. Always will be.

Reduce business taxes and then allow the market to right itself.

The problem with that solution, of course, is it means that the government doesn't look like it is 'doing something'. It's important for governments to be seen doing things when the economy is in trouble, which is why Keynesian pump priming is such a popular solution, especially among left wing governments that don't understand where money comes from and don't mind borrowing from future generations to pay for today's populist politics.

Keynesian economic theory is, unfortunately, being put into place all over the globe. President Obama has a huge 'stimulus' bill and Gordon Brown is trying the same thing.

All that will happen in that the agony will be prolonged.

Australian voters' minds, like all voters' minds the world over, do not retain important information for very long. That's how a disaster like Rudd can get elected in the first place.

Back in 2005-6, then PM John Howard was trying to get agreement from the states for his $10 billion plan to rescue the Murray-Darling.

Unfortunately the states, which were all run by Labor governments, wanted to make sure that Howard did not get a win in the lead up to the federal election and therefore this much needed infrastructure plan didn't go ahead.

If it had then the bulk of the stimulus effect would have been hitting the economy by now. Not that I'm claiming Howard could see what was coming but it is worth contrasting Howard's responsible plan with Rudd's $10 billion December debacle that resulted in licensed clubs booming with huge increases in poker machine revenues.

Tax cuts for business and not handouts for pokie players are what is urgently needed right now.

(Nothing Follows)

Beware of inexpensive office shredders

So a colleague at work decides that we need a paper shredder in our new office.

It's true.

Our office was sans shredder and thus incomplete and unfulfilled in its officeness.

He sees one in the local ALDI store at the quite reasonable price of $69. It's sold under the brand OfficePro. We don't need to shred heaps of stuff and it looks OK what with terrific features like confetti cut and separate slot for CDs and credit cards so he buys it.

Here's the front cover of the box:

(click to embiggen)

He takes it out of the box, sets it up as per the instructions and places it on the floor next to the fax machine.

Wanting to test his new toy he turns it on, grabs a bit of paper and sticks it in the top.

The noise that emanated from the thing sounded like this:

Actually, it sounded much like a duck, having pissed off Saddam Hussein, being fed through a tree shredder at Abu Ghraib.

It certainly was unexpected, especially given what is clearly stated on the side of the box:

Having not read the instructions he then decided to see how many bits of paper it could handle so he grabbed 10 or 12 and stuck them in at which point it became necessary to work out how to use the reverse function.

A quick perusal of what passed for a user manual indicated a maximum of 7 pages at a time.

Clearly, in China they have much thinner paper than the 80gsm of standard office paper. 5 pages is more like the limit.

Well, at least the motor is durable if not quiet. Right?

Not according to the separate piece of paper found in the instruction manual.

How good is that, eh?

A whole two minutes of shredding before getting a 30 minute break.

It must have a labour agreement with the auto unions.

So a shredder sold under the brand OfficePro and featuring a "durable quiet motor" turns out not to be suitable for an office and has neither a durable nor a quiet motor.

I wonder how long it will last?

(Nothing Follows)

Sunday night rock 'n' roll covers

"My Way" is a song with lyrics written by Paul Anka and popularized by Frank Sinatra. The melody is based on a French song "Comme d'habitude" composed by Claude François and Jacques Revaux. Anka's English lyrics are unrelated to the original French by Claude François and Gilles Thibaut and Anka is credited as a co-composer of "My Way" because he largely re-wrote the song. The lyrics of "My Way" tell the story of a man who is nearing death. As he reflects on his life, he has no regrets for how he lived his life, saying that, until the end, he did things his way.

Paul Anka heard the original 1967 French pop song, Comme d'habitude performed by Claude Francois with music by Jacques Revaux and lyrics by Gilles Thibault, while on holiday in the south of France. He flew to Paris to negotiate the rights to the song. In a 2007 interview, he said: "I thought it was a shitty record, but there was something in it." He acquired publishing rights at no cost and, two years later, had a dinner in Florida with Frank Sinatra and "a couple of Mob guys" at which Sinatra said he was "quitting the business. I'm sick of it, I'm getting the hell out".

Back in New York, Anka re-wrote the original French song for Sinatra, subtly altering the melodic structure and changing the lyrics: "At one o'clock in the morning, I sat down at an old IBM electric typewriter and said, 'If Frank were writing this, what would he say?' And I started, metaphorically, 'And now the end is near.' I read a lot of periodicals, and I noticed everything was 'my this' and 'my that'. We were in the 'me generation' and Frank became the guy for me to use to say that. I used words I would never use: 'I ate it up and spit it out.' But that's the way he talked. I used to be around steam rooms with the Rat Pack guys - they liked to talk like Mob guys, even though they would have been scared of their own shadows." Anka finished the song at 5am. "I called Frank up in Nevada - he was at Caesar's Palace - and said, 'I've got something really special for you.'"Anka claimed: "When my record company caught wind of it, they were very pissed that I didn't keep it for myself. I said, 'Hey, I can write it, but I'm not the guy to sing it.' It was for Frank, no one else."

The Original - Frank Sinatra



The Cover - Sid Vicious



(Nothing Follows)

Australian Prime Minister Rudd reaches back to the 1920s for economic inspiration

I tell you who is sleeping more soundly tonight and that's former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.

Why?

Well, Whitlam's government was a shambles that wrought chaos upon Australia's economy that took many years to overcome.

Whitlam himself has long been viewed as the worst PM we've ever had (for the Seppos - think of him as an Aussie Jimmy Carter) and for good reason.

But with the current Labor PM Kevin Rudd's 8,000+ word socialist screed published in the leftist The Monthly this week Whitlam can let out as big a sigh of relief as his 92 year old body will allow now that the mantle of Australia's worst ever PM has been lifted from him by Rudd's unbelievable incompetence.

Andrew Bolt pointed out that when Kevin Rudd was wooing the Australian public in the run up to the federal election of 2007 he described himself as an 'economic conservative'.

So how's this for economic conservatism?

KEVIN RUDD has denounced the unfettered capitalism of the past three decades and called for a new era of "social capitalism" in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily.

In an essay to be published next week, the Prime Minister is scathing of the neo-liberals who began refashioning the market system in the 1970s, and ultimately brought about the global financial crisis.

"The time has come, off the back of the current crisis, to proclaim that the great neo-liberal experiment of the past 30 years has failed, that the emperor has no clothes," he writes of those who placed their faith in the corrective powers of the market.

"Neo-liberalism and the free-market fundamentalism it has produced has been revealed as little more than personal greed dressed up as an economic philosophy. And, ironically, it now falls to social democracy to prevent liberal capitalism from cannibalising itself."

Mr Rudd writes in The Monthly that just as Franklin Roosevelt rebuilt US capitalism after the Great Depression, modern-day "social democrats" such as himself and the US President, Barack Obama, must do the same again. But he argues that "minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do" and advocates a new system that reaches beyond the 70-year-old interventionist principles of John Maynard Keynes.

"A system of open markets, unambiguously regulated by an activist state, and one in which the state intervenes to reduce the greater inequalities that competitive markets will inevitably generate," he writes.

"Social Capitalism in which government intervention and regulation feature heavily"... well that's something to look forward to. Imagine being so clueless as to refer to FDR as the man who rebuilt capitalism after the Great Depression? That beggars belief.

Rudd has hardly covered himself in glory by sacrificing $10 billion of taxpayers' money on the altar of Keynsian economics less than a couple of months ago in order to ensure the Australian economy didn't follow the rest of the world into recession.

The result?

Australia is headed for an unavoidable recession and Rudd's $10 billion giveaway has been destroyed. That's what consumption does to money.

Good work, Kev.

If Kevin Rudd wants to go back just a few years before Keynes then there was a fellow who was lionized around the world for his success in balancing the public and government need, for intervening in the economy in just the right way so as to create national prosperity that hadn't been seen before and for creating a 'model society'.

Who was this man, this giant who Churchill dubbed 'the world's greatest living lawgiver', who was lauded by Freud and Einstein, and who earned the praise of leading Fabian Socialists of the time such as H.G. Wells?

In 1927 the Literary Digest conducted an editorial survey posing the question: "Is there a dearth of great men?"

The person who topped the list, ahead of Lenin, Edison, Marconi, Orville Wright, Henry Ford and George Bernard Shaw was...

...Benito Mussolini.

I wonder whether Kevin Rudd would appreciate, intellectually, the comparison?

The way that he struts the world stage like a peacock on heat would suggest that rising to the level of 'great man' is one of his aspirations.

It was only after Italy's invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and alliance with Hitler that Mussolini's name lost its lustre.

Is Kevin Rudd a fascist?

Obviously not...or not yet.

However, fascism can only ever be implemented by the left and for two major reasons.

Firstly, fascism is simply another form of socialism.

Secondly, only the left believes that more government is the answer to society's problems.

Every time a new law is enacted citizens lose a little bit of liberty. The left has government expansion and enacting of laws built into its DNA, which it justifies on the grounds of fairness and equality of outcome. On the other hand the right values small government, individual liberty and equality of opportunity. It's a bit hard to end up with a fascist state if those are one's principles.

It's easy to see why Keynesian economics has not withered on the vine of historical failure. Keynes' remedy to a slowing economy is government spending and if there's one thing that left wing governments don't need any encouragement to do it's increasing spending.

When the real remedy is to give tax cuts, reduce government and then wait for the market to correct itself it's easy to see why populist leaders reach for the Gospel According to Keynes when the economy slows.

With the world heading into deeply troubled waters that most of the population have never experienced, the call for governments to 'do something' is going to become a deafening roar as unemployment and inflation head towards, or above, 10%.

Who among Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and Kevin Rudd has the backbone to do what is right rather than what is popular?

None of them, as far as I can see.

(Nothing Follows)

Gitmo detainees. What would Che do?

The left has been bleating on for years about the 'shocking' treatment and 'illegal' detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

Never mind that Alain Grignard, deputy head of Brussels' federal police anti-terrorism unit, said "At the level of the detention facilities, it is a model prison, where people are better treated than in Belgian prisons."

There is a reason that terrorists enter looking like they've caught a serious dose of anorexia and leave looking like the Michelin Man.

Now that Obama is president and has order the closure of Guantanamo within 12 months the question is what should be done with them?

The left wants to give the terrorists the same rights as US citizens and moving them to the US mainland.

Leaving aside that extraordinary position, what is a very possible outcome of doing so?

Let's imagine for a moment that one of the masterminds of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is moved to somewhere like Fort Leavenworth.

Let's suppose that his lawyer appeals that his client has been denied fair justice because he wasn't read his Miranda rights.

Then let's suppose that the court upholds the appeal and orders KSM released into the community. You'd think there'd be a heap of Americans who'd want to do him some physical damage and perhaps continue his waterboarded simulated drowning except this time without the board and without the simulation. No doubt there'd be hundreds of liberal organisations who would be prepared to protect him. Columbia University would be a good place to try if the United Nations turned him away.

Naturally, KSM would fear for his life if he were returned to his homeland.

So what does he do?

He claims political asylum...

Farfetched? Maybe, but it just goes to show that people haven't thought this whole issue through very hard.

But back to the main question.

Given that the left wants to shut down Gitmo then what should be done with the prisoners.

Is there someone who has shown the way previously on what to do to prisoners?

Someone who the left looks to for inspiration?

Someone lionized by Hollywood?

Of course there is...



...Ernesto Che Guevara.

What would Che do?

Oh, yeah.

He'd have them shot.



And then want to make sure they were dead.



Which just goes to show how leftwing positions tend to clash with themselves.

Mind you, it's worth remembering that under the Geneva Conventions the US had every right to execute them rather than send them to Gitmo.

How would China or Russia have treated them?

Or even France or Germany?

Not anywhere near as well as the United States has, that's for sure.

(Nothing Follows)

Climate Faithful made from 100% pure hypocrite

Has there ever been a crowd more in the do-as-I-say-and-not-as-I-do camp than the pack of hypocrites known as the Climate Faithful?

Seriously, Al Gore is somehow hailed as an oracle while at the same time consuming more energy than most outback towns.

Leaders all around the world preach abstinence while practising indulgence and yet are not called on it by a mainstream media apparently completely in the tank with the idea of socialising Western economies.

How, then, does one recognise a Climate Hypocrite, someone who is not prepared to lead by example by reducing their own ‘carbon footprint’?

Here are some signs:

• They partake of carbonated drinks – soda pop, soft drinks, beer – all release CO2 into the atmosphere.
• They drive a car instead of walking, riding a bike or taking public transport when they can. Cars are big, gassy things and even Climate Bling like the Prius still have a negative impact on the environment.
• They travel on aircraft while whining on that we must all cut back on our overseas trips.
• They eat imported food. Oh, dear, how could they? How could they buy food that has needed large
• amounts of oil to transport it from a faraway place?
• They turn on the heater or air-conditioner. I don’t care how hot or cold it is; if you’re going to be true to your climate beliefs heating and air-conditioning is out.
• They use plastic shopping bags.

Remember, these are the same type of people for whom Chickenhawk became the insult du jour to refer to anyone who agreed with the war in Iraq but hadn’t joined the military.

So what term do we apply to this lot?

Weather hawk?

Climate rat?

Oh, that’s right, plain old hypocrite will do just fine.

(Nothing Follows)

Australian culture blamed for African's killing of Asian man

I have been giving the UK a decent bollocking over the last few months because of its cultural capitulation to the violent, racist, misogynist terrorism supporters and perpetrators in its midst known as the Muslim community.

However, here in Australia we have our own problems, as exhibited by the following ridiculous story...

An African migrant who viciously bashed a father to death with a full bottle of wine in a random attack has been jailed for eight years.

Leong Lim, 45, was walking home from a pokies venue when he was attacked in a Springvale park and repeatedly hit over the head with a bottle of Passion Pop on March 3 2007.

A Victorian Supreme Court judge said on Wednesday that Australian culture was partly to blame for the attack.

The court was told the 16-year-old attacker, identified only as AO, had been drinking in the park with his friends in the lead-up to the bashing.

Mr Lim, a Malaysian father-of-four who was in Australia to make money to send to his family, died of a severe head injury.

AO also stole Mr Lim's wallet and mobile phone.

He was originally charged with murder, but pleaded guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery.

On Wednesday, he was ordered to serve a minimum of four years in prison.

The court was told AO came to Australia from Ethiopia at the age of 12 to flee violence between troops from his homeland and Somalia.

He witnessed people being killed and his family lived in extreme poverty, the court was told.

But Victorian Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan said it was a culture of drinking alcohol AO learnt after he arrived in Australia that led to him being in the park that night.

"Drinking of this kind is more a product of our culture than the culture and background from which you come," Justice Coghlan said.

"It is imperative that our community take a stand.

"It needs to become clear to our young men and women that enjoyment of life and position in society is not to be measured or driven by ever-increasing consumption of alcohol."

Justice Coghlan described the attack on Mr Lim as "vicious and sustained".

He said AO bent over Mr Lim's body and shook it.

But Justice Coghlan said AO, who was tried as a child in the Supreme Court, had shown some remorse.

The court was told AO was convicted and fined last year in the Children's Court over a similar attack in which he seriously injured his victim. That attack happened just six days after Mr Lim's killing.

Although he ordered AO to serve a minimum of four years in prison, he will be eligible to serve the sentence in a Youth Justice Centre.

It's terrific that the piece of human excrement showed 'some' remorse, isn't it?

What has happened to society when a clearly violent individual is able to get away with murder by receiving such as short sentence?

How is it that someone who had supposedly fled violence and death should take advantage of the free society he now finds himself in to commit murder?

Why is it that when an African kills an Asian a Victorian Supreme Court Justice can still find a way to blame the attack on Australian culture?

That says far more about the culture of the court than of Australia.

The Somali and Ethiopian communities have made quite a name for themselves in Victoria for the level of violence attributed to their members, a fact that has been scandalously covered up by the Victoria Police but has come to light due to the good work of a few journalists.

And talking of communities, the fact is that these groups stick together like glue and hardly interact outside their group (apart from driving cabs, as they seem to have taken most of those jobs).

So how does it come about that in just 4 years an Ethiopian lad can be so corrupted by the Australian culture of enjoying a drink?

Where are his parents in all of this?

Why am I and my fellow law abiding, decent Australians having our names dragged through the mud for the actions of one piece of murderous crap like AO?

AO needs to be put away for the rest of his life and Justice Paul Coghlan needs a good kick in the arse.

(Nothing Follows)

How can there even be climate change skeptics?

There's been a mild kerfuffle in the climate change interested blogosphere due to retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon's statements on serial Climate Fraudster James Hansen and NASA's climate models.

NASA warming scientist James Hansen, one of former Vice-President Al Gore’s closest allies in the promotion of man-made global warming fears, is being publicly rebuked by his former supervisor at NASA.

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen, NASA’s vocal man-made global warming fear soothsayer, has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen “embarrassed NASA” with his alarming climate claims and said Hansen was “was never muzzled.” Theon joins the rapidly growing ranks of international scientists abandoning the promotion of man-made global warming fears.

“I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. “I was, in effect, Hansen’s supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results,”

“Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress,”

Theon declared “climate models are useless.” “My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit,” Theon explained. “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy,” he added.

etc etc

Now, if you are one of those promoting the whole climate change scam then the onus is on you to definitively prove your position.

"Assertions without proof can be dismissed without proof" - Christopher Hitchens.

With each passing day the climate change scam is being revealed for all to see and, critically, the so called evidence is crumbling faster than the Larsen Ice Shelf isn't.

For climate change to be something worth spending trillions of dollars of the world's formerly strong economy on three conditions must be proven (not theorised):

1) temperatures are rising;
2) the rise is caused primarily by man made CO2 emissions; and
3) the consequences for the planet will be catastrophic.

Nearly everyone accepts 1) but 2) and 3) are far from proven. Luckily for Climate Astrologers at NASA and elsewhere else that the Democrats have porked up the non-stimulus bill with hundreds of millions of dollars for climate models so they can be back-fitted and tweaked into proving exactly what politicians, envirofascists and financial industry players who'll make millions from trading carbon credits want to see.

But that's not the point of this post.

The point is this.

How can John Theon, a well regarded atmospheric scientist, not believe in global warming?

How is it that highly, highly qualified scientists (with higher academic qualifications than most of the Hokey Stick team, for example) do not believe in catastrophic global warming?

How is it that Roy Spencer is a skeptic?

Or Bob Carter?

Or Tim Ball?

Or John Christy?

If 'the science is settled' and the proof is so definitive then how does it come about that people such as Christy who have been involved in the collection of climate data via satellites do not believe that there's a problems?

If a spokesman for the Climate Industry would like to let me know how that's possible then I'd be most appreciative.

(Nothing Follows)