Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.
Now youse all know that I am a skeptic about pretty much everything (except nanotechnology, AI, and the ability - coming soon - of humans to shrug off their badly-designed meatbags).
So you will not be surprised that anytime a law is imposed to stifle dissent and or discussion of a topic (like laws criminalising dissent about the Holocaust, for example), you will always find me on the side of the dissenters. Folks ought to be allowed to ask how 6-3=6 (in reference to the numbers on some plaque at Auschwitz); if they are nutters, then their argument will be nutty and they will look silly. But if you go about persecuting them, then folks like me commence to wondering why it's so all-fired important that questions not be asked... it reminds me far too much of now-defunct law against questioning Holy Writ (basically, laws against pointing out that religion is a form of mental illness).
I have no idea what transpired between 1942 and 1945 in parts of Europe that subsequently came under Soviet occupation (everybody now accepts that somehow no Vernichtungslageren existed in the bits that fell into Allied hands). Furthermore I don't really care, since State-authored butchery was nothing new then, and it still isn't.
No doubt it was highly unpleasant for a lot of people, but that's got bugger-all to do with me given that in my ideal world politicians would not be able to start slaughtering people for any reason whatsoever. Any death that results from a politician's desire for self-aggrandisement is infinitely unacceptable; be it an elderly Polish Jew, an Iraqi child, or Saddam Hussein.
However anybody who says that questioning the 'correct line' ought to result in imprisonment, shares an ideology with Stalin and Hitler and ought not be listened to. Let nuttery bloom forth like kudzu, I say - to do otherwise is to put Historical Revisionists in the same historical situation as Galileo, Giordano Bruno and other heretics. It may well be that the revisionists are utterly wrong, and so hey do not deserve the reflected glory of having Galileo for company: let them reveal their nuttery (if it be nuttery) and the market for ideas will price them at zero.
But that's not why I'm here - the historicity or otherwise of some entirely avoidable politically-generated unpleasantness more than half a century ago, is less important to me than the Chappell Underarm incident or whether the ball was out of bounds when Wayne Harmes knocked it towards the square in 1979 (of course it was - Collingwood ought to have won).
Here's what this is about...I am also a global warming skeptic - based on my reading of the evidence, I think that to the extent that 'climate change' exists, the odds against anthropogenicity are very large indeed. (And that is entirely independent of my firm belief that once politicians get involved they will make matters much worse, and at a much higher cost than a market solution).
And now, if definitive evidence against human-made global warming was necessary, we have the absolute incontrovertible evidence.
I know what you're thinking, Dearest Reader... "What's that you say? Incontrovertible? That's a big call, O Beloved GT, but we await justification thereof (not that we doubt you, of course)..."
Yes, Dear Reader - incontrovertible.
And it's not the fact that Mars and Venus warmed by the same amount as Earth during the 1980s and 1990s, despite the absence of logging, SUVs and factories on those other planets.
And it's not the fact that carbon dioxide concentrations lag rather than lead temperature variations in the historic record.
And its not that there has been a significant cooling trend since 1999.
And it's not the fact that 'The Day After' was perhaps the worst piece of schlock ever to have been produced by an industry that specialises in schlock; nor that the parasites that clustered around Y2K are the same people who are currently clustering around 'climate change'... politicians and soi-disant consultants.
So what is this evidence? I hear you muse.
One word. Greenspan.
Our erstwhile target of ridicule and calumny - Mr Magoo his very self - is a True Believer.
Like he was a believer in Y2K.
Like he was a Housing Holocaust Denier.
And what is more, this erstwhile fawner-over-Ayn Rand (herself a complete fraud - a correct line ideologue who expelled people who disagreed with her, and who worshipped the United States)... as I say, this erstwhile libertarian - who couldn't make a living in the private sector because he was so hopeless as a forecaster - he now wants even more massive taxation of energy use, whether we serfs like it or not. From his thousand-page attempt to exculpate himself from his lamentable tenure as head of the Central Planning of US Monetary Policy...
there can be little doubt that global warming is real and manmade.and
I consider the argument that gasoline tax hikes are politically infeasible irrelevant. Sometimes the duty of political leadership is to convince constituencies that they are just plain wrong.
Now almost everybody in politics has some element of their past that they would like to disappear - for US politicians that is usually in the form of photos of the pol in flagrante delicto with young boys; these are usually held by some of the cleverer of the world's intelligence agencies. But Greenspan's past sins are actually forgivable - a supposed set of free-market principles, and a belief in the unsustainability of fiat money.
In short, he turned his back on those principles once he discovered that the free market priced his services at their actual value (less than zero). Townsend, Greenspan went bust, and Greenspan had to suckle at the public teat for the rest of his life.
And now he joins Gore and the rest of the parasite class, calling for another lurch upwards in the tax grab (which currently exceeds 50% in all western economies once you count all taxes, fees and charges).
If this trend is not stopped, we will eventually be working three days in five in order to pay the leeches that can't make a living by producing a service that is purchased voluntarily.
