22 Jan 2010

Obama Gets It Right, For Once

Credit to him, Obama's latest banking proposals to de-link commercial banks from investment banking is a step in the right direction and very much needed. The facts are that commercial banks are guaranteed with taxpayer's money - the FIDC deposit insurance being amongst the primary source of funds. But because banks have been allowed since the repeal of Glass-Steagall to take commercial deposits and speculate in investment banking, which they co-owned, they are effectivly paying themselves enormous bonuses on the taxpayer's dime.

Even the most ardent centre-right or libertrian thinker is aghast at the cluture of bonuses amongst bankers. Obama's porposals are a step in the right direction and should attract widespread bi-partisan support. lets hope Republicans do not oppose for oppositions sake.

Stocks have slid upon the news and we might end up with smaller banks if the reforms go through Congress, a big if, but they are absolutly needed in one form or another.

11 Jan 2010

William Shakespere, Climate Denier

"The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists", as one UK article is headlined..

Even members of the UN's notorious IPCC are jumping ship in inceasing numbers. The politicized "science" of the Warmists is dying. Copenhagen was the watch. Of course governments are sticking to the party line - think of all those taxes and controls they will have to rescind.

Expect the Obamessiah to do the same, How will Denocrats set up a new vote delivering machine based around "Cap and Trade" patronage (Better known as Cap n' Tax) if their main warmist narrative vanishes?. Warmism was nothing if not a neo-Marxist powergrab that stimulated the all left's political erogenous zones.

For the moment the Warmist hoax is fading. The world citizenry, led by the Anglophone common law nations (USA, Britain, India, Canada, Australia etc) etc have forefronted their citizenry in rejecting the claims of cranks and frauds. The deep roots of individual liberty in common law countries have made them more deaf to the siren songs of the politicians.

Europeans, in contrast, with their historical acceptance of tyranny, have bought the warmism, but even their faith is fading.

The Warmists' computer models are incapable of predicting the weather a year from now, yet claim to predict it 100 years hence. The citizens have also seen off the reptilian polticians of the left who would seek to strait-jacket our lives into some weird asylum of "ethical green living" that gives them complete power over us.

Blow blow, thou winter wind. Thou were not so unkind as a poltician's powerlust.

7 Jan 2010

Cheers for Chile

The good news for countries that enthusiatically embrace capitalism,free markets and globalization is that Chile today became the first South American country ever to move out of the developing world as the OECD has noted in granting it membership.

Not Cuba, or Venezuela nor the powerhouses of Brazil and Argentina but Chile, a country that was saved by the reviled General Pinochet in the 1980's from becoming a communist banana republic under the Marxist Salvador Allende. One shudders to think what Chile would look like economically today if he had been allowed to carry out the "revolution" he planned before it was stopped by force, which was the only argument Allende understood. Pinochet was a reluctant democrat and a flawed leader, but he did allow liberal capitalism to take root and once Allende and his communist thugs were swept aside, Chile rapidly began decades of expansion that has culminated in the historic move into the OECD.

Chile had a long democratic tradition which Allende tried to overthrow. Once this was restored after years of Pinochet's iron control, social democrats, rightists and leftists alike have rekindled this tradition and kept to the liberal market policies that Pinochet approved of.

These facts have not stopped Allende from being turned into a leftist hero-martyr and Pinochet into a fascist villain.The more successful Chile became, the more rabied the attacks on Pinochetl ending in his farcical arrest in Europe long after he retired. Tthe longer view of history may well reverse these positions.

6 Jan 2010

The Bright Line That Blinds

Writing in the NYT Op-Ed section, guest contributor Michael Kinsley gives valuable insight into the garbled reasoning behind attempts to downgrade the War on Terror into a police action against criminls. Opines Kinsley:

We have nothing to be ashamed of, little to fear and much to be proud of in choosing to err on the side of treating captured foreign terrorists as we would treat any upstanding American who tried to blow up an airplane full of people.

There we have it. The foreign terrorists in wartime is the same as an American citizen terrorist who is oddly "upstanding" unless, like Timothy McVeigh, he is thankfully strapped to a lethal gurney.

Showing an ability to mush issues into a kind of bland ideological porridge, Kinsey confusingly declares
...why not draw the line to put an Abdulmutallab or a Shaikh Mohammed on the “war” side and treat him as an enemy combatant?....... recognize that the national border is a “bright line,” and if people captured within the United States are going to be treated as if they were somewhere else — provided that they are certified terrorists — things are going to get complicated quickly.

They certainly are complicated, Michael. Khalid Sheik Mohammed was captured in Pakistan, not the USA. the only reason he is crossing the "bright line" into the USA is that Eric Holder and Obama have decided that Khalid is legally no different to say, John Gotti.

According to Kinsley's reasoning, the German saboteurs landed by submarine and caught on US soil in World War Two should have been lawyered up and given cit zens rights because they were caught on our side of the "bright line". Instead Rooseveldt ordered military tribunals that led to swift executions.

Kinsley perhaps has never read the US Constitution, despite having a law degree. Otherwise he could not fail to note it makes crystal clear that in times of war and even great public danger, military justice and tribunals that dispense with many protections afforded to US citizens are acceptable options. Indeed the Constitution only recognises two forms of justice in the USA. That of full rights for citizens and limited rights in military tribunals. It is Democrats who wish to triangulate this crystal clear position with a new layer of civilian-cum-wartime-semi-Mirandized-almost combatant-but-also-a-felon legal gibberish.

Damming arguments from a riposte to Kinsley in the National Review point out that combatants are launched by enemies of the state who also have external networks or even foreign powers either overtly or otherwise working with them, something that almost never occurs in simple criminality and which confounds normal law enforecement techniques.

We have a great deal to fear from the likes of Michael Kinsey and nothing to be proud of in the leftists' unremitting lawfare to overturn more than 200 years of US wartime justice. They are twisting what the Constitution intended, and until the ridiculous Boumedianne decision of 2009 and the vicious legal attacks on Bush's tribunal policies, had followed.

Still, this same confusion can be seen in the leftist approach to criminal justice in the USA itself. Usually, they blur the victim and the accused. Often the victim becomes the accused, an the perpetrator, like poor stressed Maj. Hasan at Ft. Hood, held up for examination as an object of pity and sympathy.

The ideas of the Robert Kinsey types, compared to the word of our Founding Fathers, make me worried.

Another Brick in The Warm


The problem with debating Warmers, those who believe in climate change caused by human industrial activity, is that for many it's a matter of faith and not of reason.

Indeed, getting them to agree to examine contrary evidence is like trying to discuss vegetables with a hyena.

So here is scant hope any will bother with the very interesting news that world CO2 atmospheric levels may have not risen at all in 100 years according to University of Bristol research summarized in Science Daily.

Only faith can explain why so many sensational untruths are clung to ( polar bears are decreasing, sea levels are quickly rising, the world is getting hotter every decade, the UN's laughable 'hockey stick' climate graph is true and so on).

A religious type of belief can acxcount for why so many otherwise intelligent, and often well-intentioned people fail to grasp that there is an inherent difference between alleged global warming and pullution or envirnnmental issues. It is possible to bve dedicated to the latter issues without embracing the former.

To point out that polar bears are healthily increasing, that there has been no overall global temperature rise for a decade, that the sea rise of about 3mm a year is in line with historical levels and that the 'hockey stick' was devastatingly demolished by experts in statistics years ago, brings to their faces a moment of puzzlement.

However this quizzical glance is the look of people who are questioning why you are an obvious nut case - not the expression of those hoping to chew over new facts.

Climategate, the emerging fact that the notorious UN Intergovernmental report was censored and doctored between the scientifically agreed draft and the final published document or evn the delightful debacle of Copenhagen 2009 will do nothing to dent the faith of the Warmers.