The Bewilderness

2052 - state capitalists everywhere?

I have just started J Randers "2052": a futurist forecast of the next forty (now thirty-nine years) from one of the academics associated with the Club of Rome. After an odd paean to nature and old-growth forests out of place in an academic work, we come to an analysis based solidly on the work of the IPCC and climate change. The future is hellish and hot, sometime after 2075.

Yet, the book jarred when I read of China's "benevolent authoritarianism". This was a powerful entry into the world of green policymaking. Randers criticises liberal democracy for its slow processes in making decisions and its need to use debate and compromise to achieve results. China is more attractive beacuse they can decide without such decadent obstacles to get things done. State capitalism in pursuit of green credentials is a preferred option.

Such preferences feed into the value sof the greens: the collective needs must override individual rights and this can be achieved more rapidly if all liberties are curtailed. (The calls for critics of climate change to suffer the same laws as holocaust denial sums this attitude up very nicely). Their arrogant belief in being right justifies the destruction of parliamentary democracy and its supplanting by a Platonic dictatorship (whether by party or by bureaucracy) to see that greening is achieved.

What a shame that the outcome of such management would be the misallocation of resources and rampant corruption (sounds like a large communist country to me). If we do face a crisis of such proportions, the political preferences of the Greens would condemn us to the prolongation and exacerbation of the crisis.

Never visited, always mist

It is an irony that Essex as a county improves when approaching its northern borders. The Villages become prettier; the paths more remote; and the claustrophic pressure of suburbia that suffocates its southern towns peters out. This could be called the 'London influence'. 

We have had a good summer. For walking in England, this translates as a lack of rain. Yesterday made up for that absence. We may stoically walk through the rain (and will be better prepared than a daytripper). And once it starts coming down, the rain is bearable if there is little wind and it is warm. Both of these conditions were fulfilled yesterday. Then eyes can lift and enjoy the joys of the English landscape in rain. Was it the enduring play of light and mist that allowed Constable to suffuse Suffolk onto canvas? 

Some countries may have spectacle and breathtaking scenery. So strange and different that even photos strike a poise. Yet, seek such uniqueness all the time and a modest mist arising with a church steeple rising above will be set aside, forever available at one's door. And as such: never visited, always mist.

Miliband's Conference hokey cokey

Ed Miliband is under growing pressure to offer an In-Out referendum on the European Union. He could outflank Cameron, show leadership and prevent votes defecting to UKIP, his advisers whisper to him. They can say whatever so like as long as the fool makes a manifesto promise. Mandelson calls it "clinically insane"...must be the rational course of action then!

Single MP cites democratic deficit as they won't listen to her

The Greens mounted a day of reaction against the fracking industry by blockading the operations of Cuadrilla in Balcombe, London and Lichfield. The motives of the protestors became clear with the statement of Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton. She stated that a democratic deficit had forced her and fellow protestors, because their views had been rejected by the government of the day. Hmmm.

A deomcratically elected government, with members picked from the House of Commons, rejected the views of the single Green Party MP. This is Caroline Lucas's democratic deficit: the millions of voters who don't vote Green, forcing her to Balcombe and jail, because they just don't care enough about the environment (which can only be deomnstrated, of course, by voting Green).

The agenda of these rich protestors becomes clearer: they set up a small wind turbine (that well known efficient source of energy) and the Disabled People Against Cuts turned up to prevent the poor from enjoying cheaper energy.

The user of the wheelchair, 38-year-old Paddy Murphy from north London, said there was a connection between Dpac and anti-fracking activities. He said many disabled people were living in fuel poverty: "We want an energy policy devoted to the needs of people, not the needs of corporations. Fracking is all about profits."

I am not sure if he was against fracking or corporations. Perhaps if this was condoned by the Green Party and run by the National Fracking "Meet the People's Need" Corporation, then Paddy Murphy would be quite happy. The people living in fuel poverty and dying in winter: a mere detail.

That is the consequence of these unthinking, self-righteous, ideological, sanctimonious moral monopolists. Their view of the public good brooks no other view, and if opposed, they state that this is a 'democratic deficit'. If only the people really knew...whilst the poor face more expensive energy and choose to heat or eat! Bastards!

 

BBC nears climate change saturation

Drifting across the BBC website, looking for references to "independent" think tanks, I read the curious title: European forests bear 'carbon saturation point'. This title implied that European forests would no longer be able to absorb carbon. A curiosity which, at first glance, refuted the known processes by which plants feed themselves. A closer examination of the article revealed that this was a cursory summary of a science article released in Nature Climate Change. The authors warned that the European carbon sink may prove less absorbent than anticipated due to changes in human land-use increasing deforestation, an increase in wildfires and a change in tree demography with older stands predominating with a reduced ability to soak up carbon.

This may or may not be true, but some of the projections appear highly speculative. This is another article extrapolating what could be, and we all know how those tend to be disproved as the years pass. There was little or no criticism of the article included. And Mark Kinver concluded with a reference to teh proposed solution: a pan-European legally binding treaty on forest management which would force property owners to deal with forests as the state saw fit in the name of climate change. 

This does tick the boxes: climate change problem, BBC article, proposed European solution forcing everyone to obey some fiat law from on high without any real scientific evidence. Just one article: hardly a consensus - which is the cited requirement for policy, except when it doesn't suit the requirements.

Central bankers: the mad scientists of money

Now we know the extent of the Carneyval: the new spectacle centred in the City that decides to experiment with an advanced industrial economy. Or in central bank plagiarism: copy the Fed! Prudentia rejected, morality inverted; as these know it all neanderthals drag us back to the Stone Age.

Dress them up in glam and we would have a rock band. No offence intended for Queens of the Stone Age 

Zimwatch 2013: Another free and fair election

Robert Mugabe is confident of victory for Zanu-PF in his "free and fair" elections. Let's be fair. All Zimbabwean voters were free to vote for whomever they liked, but it was only fair that if they voted for the MDC, then their vote was not counted by the unbiased Zanu-PF supervisors or unaccountably got lost in the fire out in the bush.

The storyteller is confident in his own victory because everyone feely voted for him. Of course.