“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment
...continue On the joys of climate change conferences]]> James Delingpole has a nice posting about a recent excellent performance by Peter Lilley, the Tory MP who seems, unlike many of them, to have retained a large measure of common sense. This is what Mr Lilley said recently about the constant run of conferences held to discuss environmental issues:

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. One of the early signs of madness is an indulgence in compulsive displacement activity, which could not be a better description of the whole COP process. Tens of thousands of people are displaced across the globe to an environment where they are cut off from reality and the rest of the world, where they can indulge themselves in demonstrating their lack of realism and reality, and where the original objective of obtaining a legally binding agreement between nations to reduce worldwide emissions has itself been displaced by the alternative objective of reaching an agreement to meet again—and to agree to reach an agreement at some distant future time. That is displacement activity on a massive scale, and it involves a massive degree of hypocrisy, given the huge emissions incurred by these eco-warriors as they swan across the globe in jets and hire fleets of limousines, so emitting more CO2 than a small African country.”

It is Earth Day today, by the way.

Under the departed Dear Leader, there was at least some measure of balance. The Songun military-first principle held sway then as now, of course, and the level of vitriolic rhetoric aimed at South Korea and the US and Japan was constant and unrelenting, but there was some sense of a cunning plan; of a canny political operator at work.

Now, though, with the new Fat Controller Kim Jong-Un, there’s a strong feeling that it’s all getting out
...continue What the new Fat Controller might now do]]> Mick Hartley, who has been watching North Korea closely for years, senses that things may be about to explode, sooner rather than later:

Under the departed Dear Leader, there was at least some measure of balance. The Songun military-first principle held sway then as now, of course, and the level of vitriolic rhetoric aimed at South Korea and the US and Japan was constant and unrelenting, but there was some sense of a cunning plan; of a canny political operator at work.

Now, though, with the new Fat Controller Kim Jong-Un, there’s a strong feeling that it’s all getting out of control. As a sign of his weakness and insecurity, and doubtless under all kinds of internal pressures, and in-fighting within the top brass which we don’t know about, he just keeps pressing the same buttons that worked for his father, but he has to press them harder and harder. Up with the militarisation; up with the vicious rhetoric; up with the provocations and the bluster. He doesn’t know what else to do. Now the whole country’s on a war footing, the economy – such as it was – is imploding, and maybe for the first time in the history of the DPRK there’s a sense that the suffering people may not be prepared to tolerate this increased hardship much longer.

The logic of his position, then, may force him into some reckless action. He’s backed himself into a corner. South Korea’s western islands are looking increasingly vulnerable. If he doesn’t do something he’s going to look weak, and all that hardship is going to look like it was all for nothing to the wretched populace. And, as the economy tanks, he has to do something sooner rather than later….

I recommend also reading Hartley’s earlier piece, linked back to there, which does indeed link in its turn to reports about the vulnerability of some South Korean islands, but which is itself a copy-and-paste posting about what China is preparing to do about all this. Preparing to invade North Korea, basically, and racing against time. As always, when states like China build railways (in fact when almost any state has ever built a railway), the thinking is not just economic; it is also military.

China was and remains content to sponsor a North Korea that is vicious and strong. But a North Korea that is vicious and weak, to the point of recklessness, is a serious threat to China’s interests.

It says everything about the state of life for regular people in North Korea that if and when the Chinese do invade, the Chinese may well be greeted as liberators rather than as another bunch of predators.

This year, two of the game’s developers visited the island and ended up in prison for allegedly taking photographs of military installations there. Perhaps they had not heard of what happens to plane spotters in Greece. They are having to wait in jail for their trial
...continue Game developers jailed]]> ARMA III is a realistic first person military simulation game set on an accurate, high-definition rendering of the Greek Island of Lemnos which is close to Turkey. Last year the mayor of Lemnos expressed his displeasure at this, citing the Island’s peaceful reputation, while the head of the town council worried about national security.

This year, two of the game’s developers visited the island and ended up in prison for allegedly taking photographs of military installations there. Perhaps they had not heard of what happens to plane spotters in Greece. They are having to wait in jail for their trial for a long time because Greek judges have gone on strike in protest against austerity measures.

I am not sure what all this means but I will be considering other holiday destinations. Hat tip to Reddit.

For better or worse, there’s a world of difference between international and internal politics. Heads of state are like in-laws: obliged by their position to meet each other and smile about it no matter how they may feel about it. Their subjects are more like neighbours: they can pick and choose which ones to socialise with, and report the psychotic ones to the police.

That, which I only just noticed, was posted on June 23rd. But some things will keep.

Time was when lots of heads of states were, literally,
...continue Squander Two on the difference between international and internal politics]]> I like this (the second paragraph (of two) of this):

For better or worse, there’s a world of difference between international and internal politics. Heads of state are like in-laws: obliged by their position to meet each other and smile about it no matter how they may feel about it. Their subjects are more like neighbours: they can pick and choose which ones to socialise with, and report the psychotic ones to the police.

That, which I only just noticed, was posted on June 23rd. But some things will keep.

Time was when lots of heads of states were, literally, in-laws.

The New Zealand police simply did the FBI’s bidding. The indictment states that, due to various workings of MegaUpload such as the way users
...continue It is becoming normal for websites to disappear]]> One minute Kim Dotcom is running a successful file sharing website, renovating his mansion, driving his luxury cars and sailing on a superyacht surrounded by topless girls. The next, his birthday party is being raided by New Zealand police with helicopters and automatic rifles. Living in New Zealand, hosting his website in Hong Kong, and running the site as a file storage service similar in many ways to DropBox or Microsoft’s SkyDrive did not help him.

The New Zealand police simply did the FBI’s bidding. The indictment states that, due to various workings of MegaUpload such as the way users could get paid for hosting popular files and unpopular files would get deleted, it is not just a file storage service like DropBox. This is not unreasonable.

But it is, perhaps, surprising that the assertions of the FBI are enough to remove a well known web site from the Internet. It turns out they can already do that, even the day after the anti-SOPA protests during which everyone complained that the government would be able to take down websites if this scary new bill passed.

Meanwhile in the UK it looks likely that ISPs will be told to block access to PirateBay.

I’m not necessarily arguing that Dotcom and PirateBay are good guys, although their copying of bits of information is arguably peaceful while states’ reactions are violent.

But there is a trend here I don’t like. There was a time when you could host your web site in the right jurisdiction and it would not be touched. Now governments are learning how to apply various laws to remove them. Forcing ISPs to block access makes life less pleasant for ISPs, and it is likely to be somewhat effective. I expect more websites to disappear, and I expect this to become more commonplace. Eventually it will be normal and no longer newsworthy.

- Overheard by Damian Thompson at the unveiling of the Ronald Reagan statue in London this morning. Someone was explaining why David Cameron gave the event a miss.

I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.

When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of
...continue Is the globe now ready to start thinking seriously about its elite?]]> I see that my fourth (approximately, I think) cousin John Micklethwait, Editor of the Economist, whom our own Paul Marks disapproves of so severely, is this weekend attending a meeting of the Bilderberg Group.

I learned about this list of potentates thanks to a link to it from Guido Fawkes, and I consider it rather significant that such an august media personage as Guido should be positively drawing our attention to this gathering.

When the internet got seriously into its stride, and particularly blogging, at or around the year 2000, you would have thought that observation and analysis of the global elite would have exploded. After all, detailed analysis of these persons and their thinkings and their doings was the quintessential Story They Don’t Want Us To Know, in other words, a story that was ready-made for the internet.

Yet, actually, very little was said about these persons and their meetings and their secret thinkings aloud, by regular people as opposed to the people who were already fascinated by such things. Oh, I’m sure that the people who had been banging on about the evil Bilderbergers for the previous quarter of a century immediately started publishing vast screeds about these persons on the internet. But, or so it seems to me, very few other people paid such talk very much attention. And so, pretty much, it has continued.

Why? Was it because bloggers who dipped their toes into these hitherto forbidden waters were visited by sinister people in sinister raincoats at sinister times of the night? Did those who mentioned the Bilderberg Group on the internet suffer mysteriously fatal road accidents?

I can’t speak for others, but the thing that kept me away from talking about Bilderberg meetings and similar things was not the fear of Them, but the desire not to be thought completely mad, by people generally. The thing is, if you ranted on about the Bilderberg Group in about 1980 or thenabouts, what you said might just be true. Ish. A bit. But if you said such things at any length you would be kissing any sort of life as a respectable political communicator goodnight, and those were the only political communicating lives then available. If you wrote letters about Bilderbergers to the mainstream media, or to the media as we used to call them, or if you tried to get on the radio to talk about such things, then you really were bonkers. After all, the whole point of the Bilderberg conspiracy was that it was a conspiracy of, among other things, absolute media silence. (And before anyone tries to say anything different, getting libertarianism into newspapers and onto the radio during the 1980s and 1990s was an absolute doddle compared to getting any sort of newspaper space or air time for Bilderberg speculations.)

So it was that, for the half century or so before the internet came amongst us, talking about such things as Bilderberg meetings with anything but brevity and levity meant that you might as well have put a big sign around your neck saying: I AM A MAD LOSER. Sane people didn’t waste their lives trying to spread such ideas, which meant that, actually, sane people didn’t even waste their time thinking about such things. What the hell was the point? If you spent any significant portion of your life even thinking about the Bilderberg Group, then you really were mad.

So then, enter the internet. Chocks away. All restrictions on freedom of expression gone. Say whatever you like. Right? Right indeed, pretty much. But if you were sane, you actually knew very little about the Bilderberg Group, unless you were a participant. If you wrote too effusively and too knowledgeably about Bilderberglery around, say, 2002, people were bound to suspect that this was not the first time you had ever pondered these matters. You would look like: one of those people, one of the paranoid losers who ranted on pointlessly about global conspiracies instead of getting on with life, during all those decades when ranting pointlessly about such things was the only way to talk about them.

If you did later do some Bilderberg blogging, around 2005 say, and even if you yourself were totally sane, you immediately risked the loonies crawling out from their personal loonybins and commenting at tedious, paranoid, screw loose length. Which wasn’t the solution to anything. That was the problem.

This is why I think it is so significant that Guido (who is the total opposite of such loony tunes communicational incompetence) now regularly alludes to the activities of these globally elite people. (This is not the first time he has done this, and I bet that isn’t either.) Guido may be a bit of a chancer, a bit of a tilter at windmills, a man who risks and therefore is, but he is absolutely not mad. He is a fully functioning member of society. He is not, in a word, a loser. In fact, I would say, he has been one of the winners of the last decade of British life. And where he has for some years now been pointing, others may eventually follow.

Especially when you consider what a mess these would-be global guardians are now making of the world.

Another star of the new media, James Delingpole, also deserves more than a passing mention in this regard, although a passing mention is all he will get here. He, like Guido, has been willing to mention the Bilderberg Group by name, in connection with the right royal mess that the global elite are making of the whole climate change thing. Unless of course you think it was all a deliberate fraud from the start, as I am at present inclined not to. To all the other fully paid up, fully functioning human beings who definitely think about lots of other things as well, but who have started to feel their way into such Bilderbergish thinking and who have ventured forth with such thoughts onto the internet, but whom I have not mentioned here, and in many cases do not even know about: my apologies! As our own Paul Marks would say.

The point is, time. A decade has now passed during which it has not been an early indicator of insanity to have given at least some thought to the global elite and their habits and meetings and watering holes and blunders and subterfuges and dilemmas. New methods of communication are often spoken of as having their impact just the once and straight away, but it’s almost always more complicated than that. Often, their impact takes years, sometimes even decades or even centuries, to materialise. Now that several years have already passed with something very like total freedom of expression about anything, it has become slowly but surely more possible for you (a) to write and publish some quite well thought through opinions about Bilderbergers and their ilk, while (b) not being regarded by everyone who reads these thoughts as an obsessive freak loser who needs to get out more, so that you can be killed by a passing delivery van.

By the way, my attitude towards gatherings like the one referred to at the beginning of this posting is by no means one of total hostility. My objection to these people is not so much that they exist, as that they are doing what they are doing so damned incompetently. Unless that is, their objective was always private plunder for themselves and nothing else, in which case they’re doing a very capable (albeit morally repugnant) job. My libertarianism doesn’t mean abolishing such meetings, still less massacring all those who participate in them, even if some analysis of their financial arrangements and of how these arrangements relate to their Big Decisions (in the manner of this classic piece of Guidology) would absolutely not come amiss. It means getting libertarians and libertarianism (approximately speaking) well and truly in among them, and totally changing what gets said and what gets decided at these global gatherings. And I actually think there is a far better chance of accomplishing that than in trying to spread libertarianism only through local political methods, like doing libertarian party politics, or trying to foist libertarianism on existing political parties. (Don’t let me stop you if you are attempting these things. But good luck. You’ll need it.)

A few years back, I recall suggesting to Guido that when he had got bored with tormenting our merely local rulers, he might like to take a crack at the global elite. Alas, it appeared that he had other plans. I wonder if he might now be changing his mind.

That may just be wishful thinking on my part, but whatever Guido himself does next, the time might now be just about right for someone like Guido, if not the man himself, to have a serious, world changing go at these people.

The war on drugs is proving an even bigger disaster than libertarians typically state.

I am an agnostic about Western intervention in foreign parts rather than an outright atheist, but I respect the atheist position and deeply fear the true believer, “nation building” idea. Governments are good at destroying stuff, but tend to be shambolic at any kind of creativity. The
...continue Regime smashing in Libya]]> Others have been complaining about how long it has taken, but I have been surprised at the speed with which the West has responded to events in Libya, and have been unable to shake the feeling, until today actually, that the reports I was reading were send-ups for comic purposes of some kind.

I am an agnostic about Western intervention in foreign parts rather than an outright atheist, but I respect the atheist position and deeply fear the true believer, “nation building” idea. Governments are good at destroying stuff, but tend to be shambolic at any kind of creativity. The more creative they try to be, the more destructive they typically end up being. People do creative, not governments.

This operation seems to be mostly destructive, which is all to the good. I think it reasonable to hope that it accomplishes some good, rather than only fearful that it will all go horribly wrong.

The West’s leaders are telling Gadaffi that maybe he can rule his country, but not the way he has been for the last fortnight or so. Bombing it and shelling it into submission is not allowed. Do that and we’ll do the same to you. Govern your country with riot police. Maybe arrange some elections, and then fix them. Bribe people into supporting you, rather than just killing them like they are armed soldiers. Above all, and now I’m going by what David Cameron said this afternoon, don’t announce ceasefires and promise them to your fellow members of the Head of Government Club, but then not deliver them.

This was one of the big things that Saddam Hussein did wrong, as I understand that earlier story. He didn’t just invade Kuwait. He told other members of the Head of Government Club that he wouldn’t. Lying to your people is okay. They all do that. That’s business as usual. But lying to fellow members of the Head of Government Club is not the done thing. Do it and you get blackballed, by which is meant that your armed underlings, the basis of your power, get slaughtered. Provided, that is, you are not bossing a serious power, and Westerners slaughtering your underlings would start a serious war, as opposed to an “asymmetric” war (i.e. a slaughter of your slaughterers).

LOL!!!: Just watched a British military talking-head-in-a-suit on the BBC, when asked to say what success for this operation would mean, say: “removing Saddam”, and then hurriedly correct himself.

According to the Guardian (!): Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a
...continue Well, well, well]]> WikiLeaks: Cuba banned Sicko for depicting ‘mythical’ healthcare system.

According to the Guardian (!):

Cuba banned Michael Moore’s 2007 documentary, Sicko, because it painted such a “mythically” favourable picture of Cuba’s healthcare system that the authorities feared it could lead to a “popular backlash”, according to US diplomats in Havana.

The revelation, contained in a confidential US embassy cable released by WikiLeaks , is surprising, given that the film attempted to discredit the US healthcare system by highlighting what it claimed was the excellence of the Cuban system.

But the memo reveals that when the film was shown to a group of Cuban doctors, some became so “disturbed at the blatant misrepresentation of healthcare in Cuba that they left the room”.

Castro’s government apparently went on to ban the film because, the leaked cable claims, it “knows the film is a myth and does not want to risk a popular backlash by showing to Cubans facilities that are clearly not available to the vast majority of them.”

Back in 2007 I mentioned a milder version of the same reaction among British people to Moore’s depiction of “empty waiting rooms and happy, care-free health workers” in the NHS.

UPDATE: Hat tips to commenters Jock and Alisa. The Guardian story has now been corrected to say that Sicko was shown in Cuba, confirmed on Michael Moore’s own website. Pity. That was a fun meme while it lasted, but truth must prevail. Moore says that the cable was purely a lie. Not necessarily: indecision as to the “line to take” is not exactly unknown in totalitarian regimes. Both showing the film and forbidding it have their dangers from the point of view of the Cuban rulers.

This round to Michael Moore, but I shall defiantly repeat something I said in 2008:

When the history of Fidel Castro’s rule in Cuba comes to be written all that stuff about the excellence of the healthcare system will turn out to be lies but the claim of high literacy rates will be more or less true.

Communist education gets results because force is near to the surface. I acknowledge but do not approve … A further advantage of communist education is that the wishes of the teachers are given almost as short a shrift as those of the pupils.

Force works well in education because the forcers can look at the forcees all the time they are doing the forcing. It works less well in healthcare and very badly indeed in agriculture.

Torpedo ‘only possible explanation’ for Chon An sinking, says report. A torpedo attack led by North Korea is the only possible explanation behind the sinking of the South Korean corvette Chon An, argues the final joint investigation report released by Seoul on 13 September. The 305 page-long report, seen by Jane’s , rules out any other possibility – such as a sea mine – to explain the disaster that killed 46 sailors in the Yellow Sea (West Sea) on 26 March