We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
People (like Anatole Kaletsky) who have the view that large quantities of government debt somehow don’t matter and are are not potentially damaging would do well to listen to this talk given by Professor Kevin Dowd, that I was fortunate enough to attend at the Libertarian International conference in Paris last September.
An audio only version is here.
The whole talk is good, but the first half (mainly about sound ways of recapitalising banks) is drier than the second. The really good stuff gets going at about the 20 minute mark.
Update: For the first few minutes of this lecture, it seems that Professor Dowd is giving the same talk he gave at the Chris Tame lecture earlier in the year. However, this is not the case. He gets through that in the first half of the talk. It is in the second half of this that he really says exactly what he thinks, and it is refreshing to hear someone just come out and say these things. If you heard the earlier lecture, it is still worth listening to at least the second half of this one.
This headline and lead paragraph in the Times (of London) deserves a sort of award:
Thrifty families accused of prolonging the recession –
Anxious families are repaying debts instead of spending in the shops, amid concern over the uncertain economic outlook. The share of income saved in banks and building societies has risen to its highest level in more than a decade, heightening fears that faltering consumer demand could prolong the recession.
This is a sort of reflexive crude Keynesian message at work; the laziness of the assumption that recessions are ended by people spending more – never mind where the money comes from – continues to hold a grip on the MSM. In fairness, maybe what the writer is trying to say is that saving is a good thing but if everyone saves “too much” (however one can define that), then in the aggregate, it drags everything down. But that does rather ignore the situation that has built up over the years, and the disruption to the economic system caused by excessively cheap credit. People who try to reduce their debt, save more and decide to forgo spending money they haven’t got are not “prolonging the recession” beyond some point that can be marked down on a graph. The current economic Snafu was caused – as the author of this newspaper item must be dimly aware – by a country hooked on the drug of cheap credit, beguiled by the idiotic notion that whenever the drug wore off and the hangover kicked in, that that nice Dr Greenspan and friends would administer yet more of the drug, to get yet another high. That way lies the equivalent of liver poisoning.
It may seem a Scrooge-like message for this time of year to point out that you cannot spend money that you don’t have; businesses cannot invest money that has not been already saved, and that interest rates must reflect the balance of supply and demand for savings. The “Austrian” economic insight that money is a claim on resources, and that two people cannot hold the same claim on a resource at the same time, needs to be relentlessly rammed home.
The best way to end a recession is to unravel the massive misallocation of resources caused by printing money as soon as possible, to let labour markets clear, to cut public spending and cut taxes, and where necessary, recapitalise banks speedily. (Check out this paper for a good course to steer). Such a process is inevitably painful. In the short run, the pain is worse than the sort of dragged out situation we have now. But ask yourself this question, dear reader: what is the more compassionate policy – a short, sharp recession and closure of failed banks, followed by a rapid 1921-like recovery, or a Japanese-style multi-decade of stagnation?
On that note, this makes a good Christmas present for those interested in economic affairs, if you still have the time to get it shipped.
When you read this passionate denunciation of the sheer intellectual cowardice of the Conservative Party over the issues of tax, public spending and the banking sector, ask yourself again: who gives a brass farthing as to whether David Cameron and friends win power next year? Who?
I’ve just been watching this video, of Lord Monkton laying into the Climategate gang. What makes it so potent is that he is quite bluntly calling them crooks, and calling anyone who still follows their fraudulent prophecies dupes and fools. He names names, and crimes. Yes, crimes. And yes, criminals. Criminals with names. Monkton does all this in his posh British public school voice. Nevertheless, you can almost see him doing that thing that fist fighters do, but with their beckoning hands rather than with their mouths, and pointing at their own chins. Come and get me! Give me your best shot! I say you are a pack of scoundrels. Prove me wrong! I say that the logical thing to do about “climate change” is: nothing. Nothing. Why on earth do you still have the damned nerve to think anything else? Such pugilistic vulgarities are not to be found in the text of the talk. Monkton is too canny, too cool, to get that excited. But that is the subtext.
Here is some other evidence that those with the job of chasing crooks are now getting interested in this.
I agree with Johnathan Pearce in the previous posting that the old-school media are definitely, albeit belatedly and with much embarrassment and confusion, starting to notice all this. You can feel that most crucial of propaganda processes happening with Climategate: the reversing of the burden of proof. Unfair to all the fraud detectives (Watts, McIntyre, and the rest of them, including Monkton himself) though it undoubtedly was, those noble toilers, until the Climategate revelations erupted, had to prove everything, in defiance of the default position. Their every tiny blemish was jumped upon. Their major claims were ignored. Now the default position is slowly mutating into: It’s all made-up nonsense. And the burden of proof is shifting onto the shoulders of all those who want to go on believing in such ever more discredited alarmism. In short, our side is winning this argument, big time.
And it turns out that the rich countries do indeed wish to remain rich, as I merely hoped was the case a week ago. The underlying point being: nobody is actually as scared about climate change as they were a few months back. Doubters who feared that there might have been “something in it”, “no smoke without fire”, etc., now doubt far more completely. All but the craziest warmists are now going rather quieter. The people who matter no longer feel deep in their guts, those of them who ever did, that there has to be a deal, or the earth will fry. All potential parties to it are now more willing than they were to walk away from Copenhagen with no deal, because the fear of being blamed for not reaching a deal is now (in the nick of time) being replaced by the fear of being accused of having reached a bad deal.
In other good news: Gordon Brown is backing the Copenhagen Conference to be a success.
And yes, I know, a huge amount of institutional infrastructure remains in place, created partly by means of these climatic lies, before people had to justify believing in them and when critics of that apparent scientific consensus (Monkton has interesting things to say about that) had to justify believing in anything else. The Copenhagen Conference, for all that it now looks like being a huge disappointment to the more incurable of the AGW alarmists, will still do quite a lot of harm. The war isn’t over, to put it mildly.
But winning arguments is no small thing. During the 1980s I vividly recall being told, by people whose pessimism about the Cold War was so profound that they might as well have been Soviet agents of influence for all the use they were to the side they claimed to be on, that merely proving that despotic state centralism was an economic disaster would make no difference. Those wicked Soviet Communists – who were, they claimed, so very much cleverer than any of us – would still eat us all alive, and all the more horribly on account of having run out of stuff to eat in Russia and surrounding parts. Well, it turned out that winning that argument counted for quite a lot. And winning this one will count for a lot too.
My good friend Rob Fisher recently wrote the following on his own blog.
I listen to Radio One in the morning. Chris Moyles and a bunch of other celebrities walked up Kilamanjaro to raise money for charity. Now Moyles has just got back from a trip to Uganda to give out malaria nets with the money raised.
He said that two things surprised him about Uganda. It’s very green and lush; and everyone has mobile phones.
I think part of the reason everyone thinks Africa is brown and dry is Live Aid. “Where nothing ever grows; no rain or rivers flow.” Never mind forced relocation. Looking around on loc.alize.us, Uganda is a bit greener than Ethiopia.
Yes, but Bob Geldof and Midge Ure wrote those lyrics, and they had this British preconception already. Another factor might be that the places in Africa that British people are most likely to visit are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco and South Africa: the Sahara, and the arid south. There is plenty of fertile land in the middle. A tragedy is that some of the most fertile parts of Africa tend to be some of the most troubled: the vast Congo basin is prime land, essentially, and yet its history has been unspeakable, at least since the arrival of King Leopold’s privateers in 1877. As Chris Moyles discovered, Uganda is green and fertile, but its history is not the happiest either.
People who attempt to raise awareness of malaria in Africa and elsewhere, and to raise money for its prevention deserve praise, of course, but what I am struck by is that the story about mobile phones becoming ubiquitous in poor countries has only just reached these people. This story is at least five years old now in the sense that most people have access to one and probably closer to ten in the sense that mobile phones existed in these countries and networks have been quite comprehensive, in many cases as comprehensive or more so than in rich countries.
A related story: about three years ago I was walking along the Thames path on a Sunday afternoon. and I passed City Hall. Outside the building was some kind of “Here is how bad things are in the third world and why we should fell guilty” kind of exhibition provided for us by Ken Livingstone’s lackeys using our money. Amongst the factoids of information in this display was the statement that “90% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”.
The “x% of the world’s population have never made a phone call” meme has been around for a while. 90% is obviously ridiculous and shows intense innumeracy from whoever made it up. (About 15% of the world’s population lives in rich countries, and if you add “rich parts of middle income countries, you can increase this number to 20 or 25%). The meme seems to usually be stated as “50% of the world’s population have never made a phone call”. Clay Shirky attempted to investigate where the meme came from, and the first recorded statement of it appears to be from engineer Greg LeVert of telephone company MCI in 1994. However, he said it in the context of “.. but oh boy is this going to change with all the great new technology that’s in the pipeline”. Nobody knows where he got the factoid from though: he may have just made it up. However, the Al Gores and Michael Moores and Kofi Annans and the like (and even people like Melinda Gates and Carly Fiorina who should know better) have repeated it endlessly since – or at least were doing so until only a few years ago.
It is, of course, just not true. It is extraordinary that people should repeat out of context a ten year old view of what the poor world is like, as if the ten years between 1995 and 2005 were static in the development of telecommunications.
At the time I encountered that exhibition outside City Hall, there were around 3 billion active mobile phones in the world: so therefore, although 90% of the world’s population had never made a phone call, about 50% of the world’s population owned a mobile phone. (They were all big texters, apparently). Since then, the number of mobiles in the world has increased by a further 50% to around 4.5 billion. The number of people with multiple phones per person or separate voice and data accounts and such has now reached the point where you cannot go directly from this to “4.5 billion people have mobile phones”, but the number of people who do is clearly greater than 50% of the world’s population. Given phones shared between families and friends, and the interesting third world concept of the cellular payphone, the percentage of the world’s population that is old enough to have made a phone call and has never done so must be in the low single figures.
The use of this meme by the internationally prominent seems to have finally died over the last couple of years: even someone as dim as Al Gore can figure out from his occasional views out of windows of five star hotels or between the gaps between members of his entourage on his occasional trips to the third world that something has changed, I suspect. Finance and business folk get this completely and got it long ago: fortunes have already been made selling mobile phones to people in poor countries.
But the well intentioned who seldom leave rich cities other than to visit Mediterranean beaches still don’t generally get it. At best, people who see Africa as a problem to be addressed through benevolence, charity and aid have made small differences in a few places. The capitalists who have built mobile phone networks have transformed the continent utterly. The logistical networks that go with them have facilitated all kinds of other changes, too, in terms of logistics and markets. All kinds of consumer goods are available that were not before. (Many people cannot afford them on an everyday basis, but they are there, and this matters). Just as in the west, food is better, and there is more variety. There are lots of under the radar small businesses that were not there before either. Access to information and to the outside world is much greater.
As it happens, my first trip to Africa was to Kenya and Tanzania, and a main aim of that trip was to climb Kilimanjaro, too. → Continue reading: Mobile phones are only part of the story in Africa
In an earlier posting today, I expressed the fear that this Copenhagen nonsense would lead to quite a few more stupid laws. But the news right now seems to be rather better than that:
The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.
If this shindig can be a total fiasco I really do not care why (for his own idiot reasons this guy agrees). Sadly, I fear that this leak may just be negotiation as usual. The bodge that results will still probably be pretty terrible.
On the other hand, maybe the rich countries do not actually want a deal. Reading that Guardian report, you can almost hear the rich country negotiators muttering amongst themselves that they would prefer to stay rich. But maybe that is a step too far towards being sensible, and too much to hope for.
Fingers crossed.
Here is an interesting discussion – of the sort likely to send parts of the redistributionist left over the edge – pointing out that in certain respects, the poorest in the US have become better off and that by some yardsticks, inequality has also shrunk. For what it is worth, inequality per se is not an issue that I regard as one raising any injustice whatsoever so long as the economic pie expands. If the economy was a fixed pie, then there might be some presumption that a large slice for Mr X came at the expense, possibly, of Mr Y. It is, however, worth noting, I think, that support for the free market order tends to be more robust when there is a large, entrepreneurial middle class into which anyone, given sufficient hard work and a pinch of luck, can enter and where the chance to escape poverty is high.
All in all, the stats I refer to in the link are encouraging news, and worth spreading around.
Peter Schiff, as ever, has a nice take on an argument that I have heard expressed from various commentators in recent years and months: China saves “too much” and its “excessive” savings are the source for all this Western borrowing – and now the financial SNAFU – so Chinese folk need to get their wallets out, spend more, be less frugal, so that this “imbalance” in the world economy can be corrected.
Schiff gives this line of thinking fairly brutal treatment, but as he says, there is also some truth in it. Because China’s exchange rate is kept artificially low against the dollar and other currencies, Chinese exports are cheaper in Western markets than they would otherwise be; this means that in turn, China earns large amounts of foreign exchange, which in turn get invested in things like Western government debt securities, such as US Treasuries. This buying of Western debt like Treasuries has enabled Western consumers to enjoy credit for cheaper than otherwise would have been the case, fuelling the credit boom, etc. Of course, what this line of thinking tends to overlook is that if Chinese savings are based on real earnings, and those earnings are being invested in Western productive assets, then how is this a problem? Consider: part of the 19th Century, the UK invested enormous sums of its capital in places such as Argentina, the US, Canada, Australia, India, and so on. This export of capital was entirely benign as it generated long term returns based on real investments. Would it have been better had this process not happened?
I agree with Mr Schiff that the Chinese yuan will float freely eventually; when it does so, Chinese exports will be more expensive in Western markets, while Chinese consumers will be able to buy more Western goods, and so the “problem” of all this surplus capital will disappear or be less pronounced. The “imbalance” will begin to rectify itself, given the chance. And that means the West will have to rely more on its own savings to generate investment in the future. The question, of course, is whether the tax and regulatory climate makes that process happen smoothly or not.
There have been many different explanations of what has gone awry in the world economy in recent years, and of course any search for an explanation cannot ignore China and the impact of its own policies. But it strikes me as unjust to put China in the dock. The prime driver of the crisis has been Western monetary incontinence, a largely home-grown force.
The name of Hunter Lewis’ book says it all: Where Keynes went wrong – and why world governments keep creating inflation, bubbles and busts.
What Mr Lewis has done is to update Henry Hazlitt’s “The Failure of the New Economics” – the classic line by line refutation of Lord Keynes that the older ones among us read as undergraduates (before such works were purged from university libraries). Of course Hunter Lewis uses work on Keynes that was not available to Hazlitt in the 1950’s and he explains the terrible effects that the influence of Keynesian ideas on the policies of modern governments (especially in the United States), but basically Hunter Lewis is a Hazlitt for our time.
To say this is not to diminish the achievement of Mr Lewis – which is a considerable one. Many people when the first come upon Keynesian doctrines at school and then at university spot some of the absurdities (such as the idea that the government spending more money makes a nation more wealthy), and when not satisfied by textbooks and by the explanations of teachers and lecturers, we go on to seek out J.M. Keynes’ “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936) but then we are confronted with a tested mess. Not just a very badly written book (so different from the witty paragraphs that are quoted in the textbooks), but such a complex mass of absurdities and contradictions that one despairs (or let me be honest “one despairs” means “I despaired”) of writing a full refutation of the work that was actually readable.
For example, the use of mathematics. It was obvious even to someone as ignorant of mathematics as me that Keynes used mathematics improperly – he used mathematical means that assumed, in their very structure, the very things the mathematics were supposed to “prove”. Yet Keynes also downplayed the importance of mathematics in the “General Theory…” and in other works – so what was the point of trying to explain his misuse of mathematics? Hunter Lewis deals with this problem (as he deals with all the other problems that trying to seriously examine Keynes presents), by using enough words to fully explain what Keynes is doing – whilst not falling into the trap of making the language so complex that his book becomes unreadable. The great strength of Keynes’ “General Theory…” is that it is almost unreadable – the nature of the writing is not an accident (Keynes could write perfectly clearly if he wanted to), it is deliberate – in order to obscure the line of “argument” and intimidate the reader into thinking “I can not follow this – Keynes must be a genius”. Paul Samuelson (the main American spreader of the ideas to undergraduates in the post World War II world) admits all of the above, but then (without irony) takes it as proof of the ‘genius’ of Keynes – as Hunter Lewis explains in chapter 20 of his work, especially on pages 267 to 268. → Continue reading: “Where Keynes went wrong : and why world governments keep creating inflation, bubbles and busts” by Hunter Lewis
A few weeks ago, we were having one of many conversations on this blog about the subject of climate change. In the comments, I said the following
The climate is clearly changing. There is nothing unusual about this. The climate is always changing. I’m happy to concede that the trend in recent decades has been to hotter temperatures. Again, nothing unprecedented about that. The world has hot periods and cold periods. The trend seems to have slowed or reversed over the last few years. This is not a short enough period of time to prove anything, but it does make you wonder how strong the trend is. Some of the data analysis that purports to show the trend has been presented in ways that deliberately or otherwise state the data in such ways that appear to indicate the trend is stronger than it is, and/or choose starting points and data series lengths that appear to show the trend as more abnormal than it is, in my opinion.
Again, with the impact of human activity, I am happy to concede an impact exists. There is a lot of human activity – it must have some impact on the climate. Whether it is a significant impact is another question.
Having those two thoughts, you look for a correlation, and find one between CO2 in the atmosphere and average temperature. One can be found, although it is not clear whether it is a causal relationship (CO2 levels vary historically before significant human activity existed, and a lot of the time CO2 increases seem to trail temperature changes rather than the other way round).
So how much are higher temperatures caused by higher CO2 levels, and how much of the increased CO2 level caused by human activity? The answer to the last question is clearly “quite a lot”, but that is not an answer to the question “How much?” Is it “70%? 90%? 100%? 120%? To be able to come up with a meaningful model, we have to have a good numerical answer, and we don’t remotely.
As to what impact increased CO2 levels have on average temperatures, there is much greater uncertainty. Basically you have to enter a fudge factor into your model, see how well it models the past, and hope you can then model the future successfully. A few people have created models that can just about model the past, but that doesn’t mean you have the mechanism right – it just means you have found a mathematical function that fits the points on your curve.
As it is, we have a few extremely crude mathematical / computer models that suppose mechanisms that go from human activity to CO2 release to global warming. They don’t agree with one another, and they are incredibly crude. (The Earth’s atmosphere is an extremely complex system. These models only have a tiny fraction of its complexity). They have a poor record of predicting the future.
The science of global warming ultimately boils down to saying that “The level of warming is unprecedented”. “Human releases of CO2 into the atmosphere are unprecedented”. “Therefore, the second causes the first”. This isn’t an inherently ridiculous thing to say. If climate change really is unprecedented then we would look for other unprecedented things as likely causes and human activity would be the likely one. We could then look for mechanisms and solutions, but we would largely be doing so with our eyes closed.
I will listen to somebody who more or less says this and that the risks of global warming are so great that we must do something about them, but somebody who simply states that the science is settled and beyond discussion is frankly not even worth arguing with.
In response, I received a mocking reply from a true believer, saying more or less that if I knew so much about it, why didn’t I publish papers in a refereed journal myself, and he was sure that a Nobel Prize would be beckoning. There was no attempt to address anything I said – merely an observation that what I was saying did not have the approval of the clique controlling the argument.
In a way this was odd, because I was not actually claiming to know anything about the workings of the climate: only about the likely limitations of the methodology of climate scientists.
As it happens, once, in another life, I was a research scientist. → Continue reading: A few thoughts on Climategate.
Alice Thompson is a bit of an economic dunce, isn’t she?
“Their private polling shows that the public loathe bankers more than politicians, so the Conservatives are desperate to disassociate themselves from the City. Voters are furious that the gap between the yachts and have-nots has grown rather than diminished in the past few months. While City high-flyers are once again buying £10,000 stocking fillers, eBay crashed last weekend under the weight of people trying to sell goods to get extra cash for Christmas. The more distance the Tories can put between themselves and the City the better. Even Boris Johnson, always a reliable guide to the prevailing political wind, has dumped his “monstrous” pinstriped friends. Instead, the Tories are courting the CBI and business, emphasising tax cuts for companies and promising to be “unashamedly pro-enterprise”. The message is clear: real businesses matter; the City doesn’t.”
Let’s unpack this. I read the entire, dreadful piece and it occured to me that Ms Thompson is wedded to the notion that if an activity – such as hedge fund arbitrage – cannot be immediately explained in terms of some physical good or easily understood service – like laundry – then it must be suspect in some way. She does not necessarily endorse all of the anti-market sentiment expressed by others she quotes in her article, but the overall tone is unmistakable. It is also a reminder that there is much hostility to banking, finance and the market on parts of what I might call the Right as among the Left, crude though such terms are in terms of political mapping.
Of course, it is true that the size of the financial services industry has been arguably swelled beyond what is healthy by decades of ultra-low interest rates, which have caused an increasingly manic hunt for yield, leading to the whole alphabet soup of acronym products associated with the credit crunch. But that is not the point that Ms Thompson is making. She seems to be saying that banking per se, when set against other kinds of economic activity, is wrong or morally dubious, and that we’d be better off without it. But whether “we” (who?) would be “better off” with a different mix of economic activities is something of a subjective judgement, not something that can be modelled according to some sort of utilitarian calculus. For instance, should banking make up 5%, 10%, or 20% of an economy’s gross domestic product? How much is too big or too small? Surely, in a proper market without artificial barriers to entry and without the distortions of central bank rates, regulations and the like, the size of banking as a sector will vary depending on the shifting sands of consumer preferences. That is all.
I am not suggesting that Ms Thompson take in all these points in a brief column for a newspaper, even if she had a clue about economics. But frankly, when I read yet another version of the centuries-old slur against speculators and “middlemen”, even if dressed up in the slightly “gosh how awful” tones of a rightwing female columnist, I think it is necessary to kick the offending author in a sensitive part of the anatomy. If Britain loses its edge in financial services due to a rash of bad legislation, heavy taxes and the rest, this nation is in trouble. The exodus is already well under way.
I want to say more about this massive story. And yes, the general opinion now seems to be that this was not a hack, but rather an inside leak.
First point, this is indeed massive. As Devil’s Kitchen in particular has been repeating, both in comments here and at his own blog, this is not just a few maverick scientists gone bad, off the edge of the central enterprise. The idea that a few little scientific baddies can be sacked, thereby allowing the main, big, uncorrupted fleet of Global Warmist truth seekers to sail on with their dignity unsullied, is delusional. These guys, the so-called “Hockey Team”, are at the very centre of the whole AGW-based global taxation, global command-and-control system that we are about to be severely threatened with at the forthcoming Copenhagen Conference. That process has slowed at bit recently, but it is still very much still in motion. This drama is now being described by blogger after blogger, and by blog commenter after blog commenter, as “the biggest scientific fraud in history”.
Indeed. Said DK, commenting here on that earlier piece of mine:
The point is that this relatively small group of “scientists” control the entirety of the alarmist agenda.
That is why this is significant.
These people control the scientific arm of the IPCC, all of the major journals, etc. and the emails show that they have actively conspired to prevent any view other than theirs from being put across.
Exactly. A major exercise in World Government, no less, is being made to look like the dodgy little racket that it has long been believed to be by the few critics who have been scrutinising it carefully, and suspected of being by many more, me included. The great horde of politicians and bureaucrats and lobbyists and ecofascists (basically an entire generation of politicians and political activists) are being made to look like credulous idiots.
With every hour that passes without a coherent argument emerging from the Hockey Team to the effect that these emails – any of these emails – are fake, then their genuineness looks that much more real. And now, the process has already begun of analysing other material that has been leaked too, which looks now like being even more significant. As I said in my earlier piece here, all the anti-AGW bloggers I read during the first hours when the story broke began their reactions by saying “This stuff could be fake and it could certainly include fake stuff.” Indeed. But as the hours and days of stunned silence or stuttering evasion go by, from the skewered scientists and their bewildered allies in the media, the chances of any of these emails or any of this other stuff being bogus is becoming vanishingly small, to the point where if it is eventually claimed that some of it is faked, the response will probably be either: you forgot about that; or: you’re lying. Again.
Many scientists, commenting in recent days on blog postings, have been declaring themselves baffled. Why all the fuss? Is it some kind of big scandal that scientists are – shock – human? They sometimes use less than noble methods in their fights with one another, making their own opinions seems more solidly justified than they really are, their own data seem more precisely in accordance with their theories than they perhaps should, or would in a morally perfect world. And especially in what they thought were private emails to one another. So? That’s science. It’s a tough old world, and sometimes, yes, they do fight a bit dirty. As do we all. So, why this huge blogo-fuss about pretty nearly damn all?
Why the fuss is because of the vast, globe-spanning policy conclusions that have been plucked from these in themselves rather minor deceptions. The fraud revealed isn’t just in the fiddling of some numbers. There is also the faking of that precious scientific consensus that has so dominated public and official thinking about climate and climate policy during the last decade. The world is being sold a gigantic economic and political upheaval, backed by the claim that all this scientific rough-and-tumble, this slightly dodgy infighting, was in fact a blandly uniform scientific consensus. And the “scientists” (who more and more now look like politicos who have barged their way into science) are the engineers of this political fraud, not just the contrivers of the scientific opinions around which they have assembled their bogus consensus. → Continue reading: More about the CRU leak – how big arguments are won and lost and how the mainstream media are already responding
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
