Eating Climate Propaganda

A good example of the unsubstantiated claims of global warming hysterics is found at the very well read BBC News. What looks like a straight news piece "Clashes at Nairobi Food Protest" includes at the end the mandatory, and totally unsubstantiated, "climate change" mantra so beloved of the soft-left social controllers that totally dominate the BBC.

"World population growth, increased food consumption in emerging economies such as China, climate change and increased land being given over for biofuel production are all having an impact on the price of food." says Aunty Beeb.

Of course,there is little evidence that "climate change" a.k.a. "weather" is responsible. The excellent page on Wikipedia here does note "climate change" as one of the debatable reasons for food shortages, but assigns it last on the list and in the follow up data, provides almost no evidence for the assertion, even in the exhaustive footnotes and quoted scientific papers.

The Beeb of course has it has as number 3 in their list, that also includes the beloved leftist Malthusianism , "world population growth" is the primary cause. Translation? Abort the little brown buggers and we will be fine.

What the Beeb does not have in their list are factors like: the effect of the anti-free market OPEC cartel on oil and fertilizer prices, the frantic resistance to GMO foods displayed by the grossly overweight European Union populations and their blackmail of developing countries that want to employ GMO crops, the anti-capitalist subsidizing of food prices in especially the EU but also the USA, the role of anti-democratic misgovernment in Asia ( North Korea) and Africa (Kenya included) in producing artificial famines and other factors.

Wikipedia notes quite correctly that "Systemic causes for the world-wide food price increase continue to be the subject of debate." but not amongst the leftists at the BBC, where the matter is cut and dried. Wikipedia experts say:

"Initial causes of the late 2006 price spikes included unseasonable droughts in grain producing nations and rising oil prices. Oil prices further heightened the costs of fertilizers, food transport, and industrial agriculture. Other causes may be the increasing use of biofuels in developed countries (see also Food vs fuel),^[1] and an increasing demand for a more varied diet (especially meat) across the expanding middle-class populations of Asia.^[2][3] These factors, coupled with falling world food stockpiles have all contributed to the dramatic world-wide rise in food prices.^[4] Longterm causes remain a topic of debate. These may include structural changes in trade and agricultural production, agricultural price supports and subsidies in developed nations, diversions of food commodities to high input foods and fuel, commodity market speculation, and climate change."

One factor for sure is the lunatic insistence of the climate dogmatists on bio-fuel production. Whereas the production of bio-diesel in arid climates using the jojoba plant would, for example, be of enormous benefit to poor countries in Africa, instead we have the world's rain forests being cut down ( with a huge loss of bio-diversity) to plant palm oil or large food areas being put over to corn based ethanol, as just one example of the unintended effects of the climate control freaks agitprop.

A conservative perspective starts with the idea that perfect human socio-political or economic institutions are impossible, and that something like "global warming" will always involve trade-offs and systemic solutions, many of which will be imperfect and flawed, and always subject to continuous review and adjustment based on human priorities and freedoms. This is absolutly not what the Beeb wants to hear or broadcast.

The Pit Beckons

I often write with tongue firmly in cheek, with an eye to the satirical. After all, my childhood hero was Swift. Sometimes things are not a laughing matter, however.

Yet yesterdays decisions by the UK parliament to allow human-animal hybrid embryos, to allow the breeding of "saviour siblings" simply to provide donor matches, to do away with any "right to a father" by those who use insemination or fertility clinics and to stick with killing 6 month old babies in late abortions has made me deeply ashamed of my citizenship in that country.

The founder of the left, Rousseau, was the first to demand the destruction of the family - he even gave away his only child for adoption for "political reasons" and broke his wife's heart for life. He was a monster. The left has continued openly, quietly or even surreptitiously to believe in the next 250 years that we can only have "new humans" when the family, as we know it, is pulverised and remade in a political image.

We truly enter a brave new world of Frankenstein creations with Britain's new legislation.

Anyone who has worked with fatherless children would see that encouraging society to raise the same is utterly irresponsible and costly. Indeed it is the left's own social studies that show those with two stable parents do better in every measure than those from single parent families - social policy cannot guarantee that, but it should aim for it. Breakthroughs last year mean that any human cells can now be used for creating stem-cells and the need for using human embryos no longer exists. The idea of breeding simply to provide spare parts for another human needs no comment. Finally, advances in medicine mean premature children born at 6 months are quite viable and many thousands are today growing into healthy adults, making abortion at 6 months nothing less than infanticide, unless one wishes to argue a 6 month old is just a "fetus" which to me seems utterly unsupported by science or evidence.

Countries like Britain wonder why their core is rapidly being overwhelmed by brown immigrants with a strong sense of family life and spiritual belief and who detest the "values" of their hosts on many levels. Hurry up, is all one can say.

Obamamania Pt 4

A remarkable piece by respected veteran black political scientist and left wing activist Prof Adolf Reed Jr in The Progressive, which is hardly my normal reading, takes issue with the vacuous nature of Obamania and, from a leftist perspective, the shammery and hollowness of his aspirations. Excerpt:

I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

Read the whole thing.

This is an extraordinarily prescient piece that, coming as it does from someone who is a black leftist, all the more likely to be true. It is fascinating that both right wing commentators and Mr. Reed seem to say almost the same things about the Obamessiah and therefore they are both right or both wrong. I happen to believe the former more likely.

Let Them Eat Strawberries

It's an odd time when millionaire greenies in the developed world hit out a semi-starving Africans in the name of climate change. Celebrity chef Gordon Ramasay wants his namesake, the Fat Controller, to arrange legislation to ban all out of season foods in UK, a move that would devastate hundreds of thousands of workers in developing countries.

"I don’t want to see asparagus on in the middle of December. I don’t want to see strawberries from Kenya in the middle of March. I want to see it home grown."

Perhaps in a few hundred square miles worth of ecologically friendly heated winter greenhouses?

A much better suggestion would be to close down British agriculture totally so that Ramsay and his fellow New Labour trendies can use the country for what they really want anyway: a vast picnic site where entertaining yokels will doff their hats and tug their forelocks as they watch Gordon and his pals rock up in his Ferrari ( great choice of green car, except it's red and has 12 cylinders) to eat Kiwi Fruit and Foie Gras canapes all washed down with a 1968 Le Mernot de Petites Villages.

"He says it would cut carbon emissions as less food would be imported and also lead to improved standards of cooking. "

Yes, the Brits can't wait to go back to a traditional winter dish of pureed parsnips with a slice of deep fried blood pudding. These people are simply hilarious.

Blogging Laos

A splendid day. First a trip to Laos across the immense, lazy Mekong River. Laos an expected and excellent time warp , with super cute Laoettes. all in their tribal costumes of black sarongs with silk borders, French colonial buildings and almost no ATMs. The local currency is the "kip", worth 1/270th of the Thai money and 1/8000th of a dollar. People accept it like you are offering them used toilet paper. Capitalism rocks.

I get to ride vile Tuk-Tuks that keep breaking down ( it took a relay to get me back to the bridge later on). Am interviwed by a Uni student on his "English Languarge" (as the check sheet says) practise assignment - complete amazement from this hardened travel warrior that there is no come-on or rip-off. His Task? " Interwiev One Forgneir in One Day".

Usual and expected Communist poverty - spot a Merc 230 SL obviously driven by the relative of a Politburo member. Who else could possibly afford one in Laos?

Stop in at the East-West Restaurant for lunch to discover Sri Lankan lady owner and her quasi-European partner ( all the white folks in this part of the world are so utterly wasted by Indo-China you can't tell their ages or nationalities - suffice to say they are always florid, perspiring, unkempt and more than a little mad) going through the wringer with a People's Workers Party of Laos grande dame. For a Lao she is enormous, well over 5 ft 8, with a beehive hairdo, pancake make-up and an assortment of Party insignia. Am not quite sure what a Sri Lankan is doing running a resto this far up the Mekong, but through the interpreter I can here her pleading ,
" But this man my husband he is not allowed to verking here", as she unfolds endless permits and documents.

The Laoettes are so utterly sweet. I fall in love every time I talk to one. I simply have not met any women like this in 20 years. They seem not from another planet but an entirely different galaxy.

Back to Nong Khai in the late afternoon of my final day. I attend the "Western Cowboy Club" where acres of Thaiboppers jump up and down to the bizarre strains of a Thai rock band, whilst waiters with bowties dump huge ice-cubes into your beer.

To Brendan's Place for the mandatory drunken local Irish publican's visit. I bump into Teak Pete, the pony-tailed ex Vietnam vet who has lived here since 1970. We have a great chat and afterwards I end up across the road (I should point out Nong Khai is a very conservative city with zero of Bangkok's glittering nightlife) at "Nongs Place." In this tiny pub I fall into animated conversation with a public school educated Burmese lad and Mark, a raving drunk who spent 6 years in the 4th Batallion, Kings African Rifles based in Jinja, Uganda.

Meanwhile Dao, a singularly worn out ladyboy, attaches herself to me with the subtltey of a giant squid in feeding mode. After a full discussion of the Greek influence on Afghan architecture, the U.S. Marine and Japanese army casualty rates on Saipan and if Speke the Nile explorer was undone by spending a month in the Queen Mother of Buganda's school for sex slaves, Dao unwinds herself to retire rebuffed and the rest of us stagger off to our hotels.

It's taken two weeks. This is why I came here, this is why I return. I honestly wonder if I should be leaving tomorrow and feel vaguely sad.

P R of China,perfect fascists?

An interesting debate kicked of by Far Eastern Economic Review where Michael Leeden asks if we are not witnessing a mature fascist state in existance?

Mr.Leeden is immediatly accused of heing brutally unfair, a hegemon and more. Furious reaction from Asiaphiles are all noted in the responses, but here is my own reaction to their mostly angry comments.

"This hurt response is mostly by people who think that "fascism" is a general insult and not a political situation with certain clear features.

These include hypernationalism (with or without various filters of racial purity), private enterprise rigidly controlled by the state (privatized socialism) and severe abscence of, and hostility to, democracy. One might also add the worship of a mythical and deeply "wronged" past which, if allowed to bloom anew, would prove the superiority that has always been inherent in the genius of the people in question. Looks like China, sounds like China, tastes like China, though of course I may be wrong.

Miss Nguyen needs to be asked, if China possessed democratic insitutions, would the Chinese people allow the forms of abuse they are hidden from at present in Tibet, in the Chinese non-response to the Burma cyclone, Dafur and other events where even the humanitarian instinct is masked in the obsessive need to make primary the national interest, as seen by the ruling clique?

If the answer is yes, they would allow these abuses, then we surely do not understand "Asians" ( whoever those are in that broad canvas) as Ms. Nguyen means them and I am not sure that, on those terms, one would want to.

However I believe that is not the case and giants like China, when they have broad access to denocratic rights, will be forced by their masses to act differently to the loud drum of their current nationalist frenzy."

Obamamania Continues

Four years ago, Evan Thomas of Newsweek famously said:

Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win… They’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there’s going to be this glow about them… that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.

The attempts to polish the absurd flawed rhinestone that was John Kerry famously failed, but the media is wetting itself at the prospect of helping Obama win the 2008 Presidential race. McCain, once their hero when he seemed to be the anti-Bush in the 2000 primaries, is already being recast as an old, out-of-touch warmonger who is clueless on the economy. Every point McCain tries to make will be relentlessly skewered whilst St.Barry is given a completely free pass. If Kerry and the lizard-like Edwards were given a "glow" in 2004, expect Obama to receive the 1 gigawatt halo effect.

The hidden subtext is already emerging: criticism of Obama is...whisper whisper....racism! Personally, I would have given a black candidate my vote all other things being equal. For their history, they need an extra shake of the dice and had Colin Powell run in 1992, he would have had mine, and everyone else's.

If Obama were a green man from the galaxy, he would never get my vote for many good reasons: he would be the most inexperienced US President in 100 years and is Jimmy Carter re-born, a quasi-religious figure who promises to talk to our enemies and ignore our friends. His international trade policies could set the world economy back "decades", and that is New Labour's Peter Mandelson talking over in Europe, no less. He firmly believes that judges should be left-wing and pre-empt democracy by making new laws from the bench, not interpreting the ones the people we elect actually draft and thinks anything that a citizen can do, government should tax you more to do it better themselves.

He has consorted with homegrown terrorists like Ayers and Dorn, the crackpot Rev Wright and the convicted racketeer Tony Rezko, for all his talk of "new politics" and his wife is an moaner who whines about how hard life is on $500,000 a year and thinks that "they" have always been out to get her and Obama. Who are "they"? Presumably the same typical Americans who arranged for her to get affirmed placements in Americaa's top universities as a black women from a modest background - the shamelessness of "them".

Obama would be the most left-wing President ever elected, a template of the radical "victimolgy" concept of modern identity politics. For all that he remains a supremely gifted and talented young man and perhaps the most perfect politician of the last 50 years - if oratory, sharpness and style over substance is everything, and maybe in 2008, it is.

He will probably win, for not only does he have the media breathlessly behind him (Oh, the new stories, the spins, the angles, the Big Narrative! How their sales will soar.) but Americans have come to believe that their economy is in a severe recession ( it isn't yet), everyone hates them ( they do, and that won't change unless the USA is prepared to give away the store and the keys to the safe) and that unconditional talks with our enemies will make everything fine again. In this, Obama resembles Chamberlain more than Churchill, Carter more than Reagan and blind wishful thinking over reality. Roll on 2012.

Roosting Chicken Pie

Therewith a hastily published note from Rightspeak in todays N.Y. Times comments section. This is in regard to the uproar that's breaking in the blogs about Clinton's new remarks that she has the majority support "among the hard working voters of America, the white voters" and a furious bust up live between two MSN hacks (Brazile and Begala) who comment for the Democrat's softball network, CNN:

I love all this. If any party has built 4 decades of power grabs and policies around low grade identity politics, it’s the Democrats. The Democrats have tried to divide Americans into an eternally splitting series of groups, each of whom “are what we say we are” and no more questions please. Feminists, hispanics, blacks, native Americans, immigrants, gays,straights, trans-gendered and so on.

Now it’s all coming home to roost as if the Rev Wright was not enough. Please give the Republicans some credit. You were told the Clinton’s were a pair of political lizards 15 or more years ago. How you cheered them on breathlessly. Your own identity politics, the cheapest route to power, has come back to bite you hard and I’m opening another beer!