The Ice Age Cometh

As you’d expect with apocolyptic forecasts, the Ice Age has started in Jerusalem!

A heavy snowfall blanketed Jerusalem and the surrounding areas Tuesday night and was continuing to fall Wednesday. As expected, the Jerusalem Municipality decided to cancel school in the capital for the day due to the slippery streets…

The inclement weather swept across not only Jerusalem, as the Golan Heights saw an accumulation of dozens of centimeters of snow.

Actually, Jerusalem is about half a mile high and it usually snows there this time of year. And the Golan Heights are, well, high.

Still, using this as evidence for the Ice Age is no more dishonest than the warmenists grabbing at every heat wave to justify their predictions, or their reactions to unconvenient truths:

Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the U.N. Panel that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, said he would look into the apparent temperature plateau so far this century.

“One would really have to see on the basis of some analysis what this really represents,” he told Reuters, adding “are there natural factors compensating?” for increases in greenhouse gases from human activities.

He added that sceptics about a human role in climate change delighted in hints that temperatures might not be rising. “There are some people who would want to find every single excuse to say that this is all hogwash,” he said.

The gent is infected by confirmation bias:

…a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions and avoids information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs…

Confirmation bias is of interest in the teaching of critical thinking, as the skill is misused if rigorous critical scrutiny is applied only to evidence challenging a preconceived idea but not to evidence supporting it.

Still, now we have the name of another Loser.

Winners And Losers From Global Cooling

If, as is likely, the world is entering a Little Ice Age, proponents of man-made Global Warning have a rough future – here’s a forecast.

What warming we have experienced is almost certainly due to fluctuations in the sun (PDF), which is about to tank:

…in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.

By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years…

But it’ll take time for the tanker to turn – after all, we’ve had no warming for 8 years, and the warmensists are still in full cry. But as 2008, 2009, and 2010 trend colder, and the extra taxes and energy rationing start hurting people, politicians of the Thatcher/Reagan variety will emerge to speak truth to power.

The President and Prime Minister after next will be climate realists who will pull the plug on the whole scam. They’ll probably keep the expanded nuclear power programs since these cut dependence on Russia and Islam, but will get elected on promises to dump all Green taxes and rationing.

So around 2011, things will look as follows.

Winners

Poor People

The world’s poor start getting richer:

- The billions on curbing CO2 will be switched to giving them clean water, medical care, and education.

- Poor nations will no longer be blackmailed to cut back on power production.

- The world’s farms will switch back from biofuels to food, so less people will starve.

Rich People

They’ll escape the curbs on personal autonomy (rationed air and car travel), and the deaths caused by power rationing. French pensioners (if any survive) will rejoice.

The Environment

The forests of expensive and ugly wind turbines will be retired, and within a generation the rusting survivors will be tools for school kids to learn about the Age of Unreason (or whatever future historians call the period 1990 to 2010).

World Peace

The impositions needed to keep poor people poor and make rich people poorer will vanish, reducing the chances of insurrections and civil wars.

Losers

Science

People will remember the “Scientific Consensus” canard for generations. Institutional science will rank lower than politics, and smart kids will disdain it. That will not be a bad thing, since science will revert to honest amateurs like Ben Franklin and the 19th Century Brit clergymen.

The UN

The UN has wriggled out of many crimes, including Oil For Food and its assault in Israel. But this time it will have harmed every person in the world. So like the League of Nations it will quickly vanish, probably to be replaced by groups of like-minded nations.

The Leaders

Gore and Blair (now a lucrative “Climate Change Adviser”), and other warmenist pols will become pariahs, rather like Nazis at the end of WW2. Their thousands of accomplices in the MSM, science, and politics will have terminally damaged reputations.

The Climate Change Industry

The outfits that trade carbon credits, build and run subsidized “sustainable” power plants, give CO2 footprint assessments, and sell CO2 offsets will become the Enrons of 2011, blighting the careers of their managers and employees.

The Greens

The Sierra Club, the Brit Royal Society and all the other Green shills will be stigmatized, like Nazi collaborators after WW2.

The Color Green

Will become the universal color of bereavement – the new Black.

Letter From Italy

The Italian political system is screwed, but it would be even worse if it weren’t.

There’s a good summary of the mess here:

Italy is exhausted with its politicians, exhausted with their easy piety, chronic cronyism and interminable lawsuits, their permanent, quarrelsome presence on TV and sepulchral absence from Parliament, exhausted with the parties they form one day and break up the next, with the coalitions, and the coalitions within coalitions, or across coalitions, or between coalitions, the countless aggregations and desertions, the coteries, caucuses and cliques…

But the essentials of the state are OK – the cops (Carabinieri) are respected as brave and effective, and we feel much safer in their machine gun toting presence than with the invisible and PC Brit cops.

Italy is a Low Trust state, which means its economy has a few giant enterprises mostly assisted by the state, lots of small family companies, and not much in between. That can be frustrating – I spent the weekend failing to find an on-line Italian vegetable seed outlet – they all sell through distributors.

But that means lots of local stores – in our rural neighborhood we’re 15 minutes drive from eight butchers shops, plus a plethora of greengrocers and bakers. The result is food of much higher quality than our central London neighborhood with its fashionable Farmers Market and fancy supermarts.

And when I did find my lettuce seeds (in the hardware store), the packet not only told me the best month the sow, but what phase the moon had to be!

So if Italy’s government became more effective, it would inflict on its citizens the same misery as the Brit government does on its subjects – mass DNA profiling, poor healthcare, bad roads and airports, lousy policing, appeasement of homicidal immigrants, and so on.

Hence there’s zero chance the Italians will give up their way of life to Islam, whereas the Brits just might.

Vindication

The WSJ belatedly agrees with our statement of the obvious on the sub-prime shock-horror.

Beneath every dollar of counterparty risk, and every swap, derivative, or leveraged loan, is a real economic asset. The only way credit troubles could spread to take down the entire system is if the economy completely fell apart.

The MSM will have to find another reason to panic.

It’s The Duty To Be Healthy, Stupid

This might be HillaryCare’s campaign mantra. But Brits know the state can’t run markets and has to artificially rations health care, so deliberately killing people.

Clinton’s other policy errors are probably self-correcting – if she raises taxes, the economy will tank, and if she retreats from Iraq, AQ will take another crack at NYC and Washington – in both cases she’ll smartly change policy.

But the Brit experience shows socialized health care, once installed, is hard to remove – the Brit NHS was introduced 60 years ago, and in spite of many inadequacies is still deeply entrenched.

That’s because it provides more power and money to state healthcare suppliers than they’d get in a free market.

Every US doctor I’ve used has been totally focused on my welfare, compared with about half those I’d used in the UK state system.

The cause is despotism – a Brit state doctor has a job for life, no financial connection with the people he serves, and is well paid (my ellipsis):

The average GP (family doctor) earned more than £110,000 (over $210,000)…

Hence this report:

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Fertility treatment and “social” abortions are also on the list of procedures that many doctors say should not be funded by the state.

About one in 10 hospitals already deny some surgery to obese patients and smokers, with restrictions most common in hospitals battling debt.

This isn’t official Brit state policy, but you can bet these opinions influence clinical decisions.

These doctors are being illogical but not irrational.

Logically, if you don’t operate on fat people, you should deny treatment to homosexuals with AIDS, perform no abortions, and leave drunk drivers to die by the side of the road.

Rationally however, homosexuals have good political cover, abortion is state dogma, and obvious cruelty might cause the populace to rise up.

So they go for the weak targets – the old, the addicted, and the demonized.

That’s the worldview that produced the world’s biggest serial killer, the Brit state doctor who killed 250 of his patients, mostly old women.

The Brit system could be easily fixed by co-pays, as used in the rest of Europe, where healthcare consumers pay part of their bills, motivating doctors to treat them well (or at least not to kill them).

That simple fix hasn’t happened in the UK for the same reason the Soviet Union didn’t reform – the suppliers want to hang on to absolute power.

The Brit doctors’ opinions mirror these (my ellipsis):

The year 1939 was designated by the Nazis as the year of “the duty to be healthy.” (The) historical accounting of how the lives of children and elderly were decided is chilling.

It’s sad to see this malign philosophy reappearing just 60 years after the Nuremberg Trials.

Open Borders, UK Style

A minor political scandal throws a revealing light on Brit immigration policy.

The story:

THE health secretary Alan Johnson became the latest cabinet minister to be embroiled in a scandal over donors last night after he was accused of accepting cash through a proxy.

A student, Waseem Siddiqui, said he was asked by his brother, a local Labour party official, to write a cheque for £3,334 towards Johnson’s failed bid to become deputy leader…

Siddiqui, 50, from Pakistan, who has lived in Croydon, south London, on a student visa for the past three years, said his brother Ahmed Yar Mohammed, who is treasurer of Croydon Central Labour party, told him to write the cheque in June and then gave him the money.

“He said, ‘You write a cheque, I write a cheque for that, for the Labour party,” Siddiqui is said to have told the Sunday Mirror newspaper. “That time I have no money, no job.”

…Johnson’s camp said last night that Siddiqui was known by volunteers in his campaign and lives near the minister’s south London home. He is named on the electoral register and is eligible to make political donations.

If this report is accurate, then:

1. Brit immigration allows 50 year olds to enter the country on student visas.

2. Immigrants to the UK on student visas can take jobs.

3. Immigrants to the UK on student visas can vote, (unlike Mrs G and myself – we’re non-resident British citizens).

4. There are lots of Pakistanis in the governing Labour party.

This explains why Brit natives are getting upset with their government’s immigration polices.

But it doesn’t explain why two guys called Waseem Siddiqui and Ahmed Yar Mohammed can be brothers.

Clinton/Obama = Iran/Iraq

As with the Iran/Iraq war, the civilized world must must pray both parties lose – Clinton would hand Iraq to Iran, Obama would keep on killing new borns.

Here’s an AP factcheck on Obama (my ellipsis):

(In the Illinois legislature) several of Obama’s “present” votes (equivalent to abstention) involve abortion: a ban on certain late pregnancy abortions, a requirement that a minor’s parents be notified and restrictions on a type of abortion where the fetus sometimes survives for short periods…

(A supporter of these practices says) she convinced Obama to vote “present” (since)…a “present” was as good as an outright “no” because it kept the bills (banning these practices) from reaching the majority need to pass.

From which it follows that Obama supports “certain late term abortions”, wants to hide kids’ abortions from their parents, and favors abortions in which (my ellipsis)

….the fetus is extracted “past the navel [of the fetus]…outside the body of the mother,” or “in the case of head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother,” in order to cause death of the fetus.

…a doctor may extract a (living) fetus past the navel and then decapitate it.

Obama’s use 0f procedural tricks to hide his support for these acts makes him a coward and monster.

The AP’s use of Nazi euphemisms to protect this man confirm its own depravity.

Brit Elite Rules

Members of the Brit elite are struggling to protect themselves from their own failures, and that’s dishonorable. The good news for Brit revolutionaries is this makes the elite an easy target.

The latest:

The security of the online computer system used by more than three million people to file tax returns is in doubt after HM Revenue and Customs admitted it was not secure enough to be used by MPs, celebrities and the Royal Family.

Thousands of “high profile” people have been secretly barred from using the online tax return system amid concerns that their confidential details would be put at risk…

Their details are thought to be stored on a highly-restricted database with extra levels of security.

There’s no such thing as a secure database, so putting all the high-value targets in one place simplifies the task of revolutionary hackers.

A safer arrangement would be to remove the elite’s obligation to file tax returns, as in its database of Brit kids, which doesn’t include the elite’s progeny.

The elite also has its own rules when it gets caught:

Mr Brown accepted the Work and Pensions Secretary’s resignation “without hesitation” in a telephone call only minutes after the Metropolitan Police announced an investigation had begun into Mr Hain’s failure to declare £103,000 in donations to his failed deputy leadership campaign.

Senior Whitehall sources said they expected Mr Hain to be interviewed under caution by the detectives from Scotland Yard’s Economic and Specialist Crimes Command within a matter of weeks. He is unlikely to be arrested.

That contrasts with their treatment of ordinary citizens like Lionheart:

The offence that I need to arrest you for is “Stir up Racial Hatred by displaying written material” contrary to sections 18(1) and 27(3) of the Public Order Act 1986.

You will be arrested on SUSPICION of the offence. You would only be charged following a full investigation based on all the relevant facts and CPS consent.

The pol just gets an “interview” for alleged payola, while Lionheart is arrested, DNA profiled and fingerprinted for allegedly objecting to Muslim nasties.

Elites throughout history have avoided obeying their own laws, but the strategy bites them when they’re deposed.

Then its easy for the deposers to use the special databases, or absence from databases, to identify and track down their erstwhile oppressors.

Here’s the example of the East German elite:

During the regime’s final days, Stasi officials shredded documents with paper shredders and by hand. As people heard of this, they quickly formed a committee of citizen on December 4th, 1989. In a public demonstration they gained access to the Stasi headquarters on January 15th, 1990 and halted the destruction.

Some day, that will happen in the UK.

The President Bites

President Bush has nailed his appeasing Secretary of State and her honchos at State by dropping Paul Wolfowitz on them.

Last year, State proudly announced it had bribed the North Korean dictator to abandon his nuclear weapons programs (he has two – one using Uranium and one Plutonium).

Subsequently the Israelis whacked a nuclear weapons reactor he was building for his fellow-dictator in Syria, and he welshed on his deal with State after pocketing their bribes.

Recently a rare brave man at State denounced this charade:

…Jay Lefkowitz, special envoy for human rights in North Korea (in) a speech delivered Thursday at the American Enterprise Institute…spelled out that after four years of Six-Party talks, we’ve got pretty much nothing. Meanwhile, North Korea has conducted an intercontinental ballistic missile test, a nuclear test, and continued brutalizing its own people in ways “deeply offensive to us,” which “should also offend free people around the world.”

Staking out a position not attempted in the Condi Rice State Department since John Bolton left in 2006, Lefkowitz suggested that “Policy should rest on assumptions that correlate with recent facts and events.” He went on to spell out (without mentioning Chris Hill) the ways in which Chris-Hill diplomacy and the Six-Party talks have been a horrifying flop.

…Lefkowitz warned that “It is increasingly likely that North Korea will have the same nuclear status one year from now that it has today.”

Ms Rice rushed to defend the dictator:

…Mr. Lefkowitz, growled Condoleezza Rice at a Tuesday press conference in Europe, “doesn’t work on the six-party talks [on North Korea], he doesn’t know what’s going on in the six-party talks and he certainly has no say in what American policy will be in the six-party talks.”

To reinforce her point, State then deleted Lefkowitz’s speech from its website.

It seemed Rice and dictator had won, until today the president announced:

Paul Wolfowitz has been appointed a high-level adviser on arms control to the Bush administration, dealing with issues such as Iran and North Korea.

The appointment of the former head of the World Bank to the International Security Advisory Board will once again give one of Mr Bush’s hawkish proponents of the Iraq war an official channel to the administration.

The panel’s duty is to supply independent advice on arms control, disarmament, non-proliferation and related subjects…

For Mr Wolfowitz the appointment is a huge vindication after his protracted and controversial departure from the World Bank, where Mr Bush had sent him after he had served five years as deputy secretary of defence.

This is excellent – the president confirms he has no confidence in Ms Rice, puts her dictator in the cross-hairs, adds the Mullahs for good measure, shows he cares about the wretched North Korean people, and tells the corrupt creeps at the World Bank what he thinks of them.

As a postscript, one of said corrupt creeps is now in Brown’s (also corrupt) cabinet, so that sends a message to him too.

Nice shooting.

Pity And Islam

A poll reports Europeans, uniquely among Westerners, find Islam abhorrent. That’s probably because the pandering of European elites to Muslim immigrants has convincing the natives that Islam violates a core Western value – a sense of pity.

The survey was conducted by Gallup on behalf of the lefty World Economic Forum and its Saudi partners. The conclusions are the expected combination of transi-speak (” the role of decision-makers”, “the need for media leadership”), and propaganda (Islamic terrorism is the West’s fault!).

Brussels Journal has this link to the full report, and its odd finding:

Clear majorities in all European countries surveyed see greater interaction between the West and Muslim worlds as a threat. This is true of 79% of the population in Denmark, 67% in Italy, 67% in the Netherlands, 68% in Spain, 65% in Sweden and 59% in Belgium. This corresponds to a growing fear among Europeans of a perceived “Islamic threat” to their cultural identities, driven in part by rising immigration from predominantly Muslim regions. [...]

Although some might expect the United States, Israel and the Middle East to be more likely than Europe to feel threatened by the “other,” the opposite is the case. In the United States (70%), Canada (72%) and Israel (56%) majorities say that greater interaction is a benefit.

The US (Muslim 1%) and Israel (Muslim 16%) are easy to explain – both require immigrants to integrate or ship out. Canada (Muslim 1.9%) has an elite that panders to Islam and yet the natives aren’t yet restless – probably just a timing issue, since the pandering is recent.

Europeans’ distaste distaste for Muslims isn’t related to numbers – Denmark’s (Muslim 2%) are not that different from the US and Canada.

The difference seems to be the European elites – here’s an example of why the Dutch (Muslim 5.5%) don’t like their guests:

Geert Wilders, 44, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, who compares the Muslim holy book to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, sparked government panic after saying the anti-Islam film would be released tomorrow.

As Dutch police prepared for a weekend of riots and Mr Wilders was told by the authorities that he would have to leave (the) country, he launched a new attack on “intolerant” Islam while announcing that his 10-minute film attacking the Muslim faith would be postponed for two weeks.

Still, European elites oppress their population in many other ways (currently by transferring power to the EU against their explicit wishes) without triggering a 70% backlash .

So it seems likely that’s occurring because Europeans consider a core value of their civilization is violated by Islam, and that’s probably the sense of of pity:

…a feeling of sorrow for the troubles and sufferings of others; compassion.

Pity has been a core of Western civilization for over 2,000 years – here’s how the Romans reacted to a circus act (Abacus paperback, page 284):

When 20 elephants…were attacked by spearmen, their trumpetings of distress so harrowed the spectators that everyone in the theatre began to weep…At the end of the games, rather than cheering…they rose to their feet, and, through their tears, called down curses upon (the sponsor’s) head.

These same Romans were quite happy to see lions, tigers, gladiators, and captive enemies put to death, but those could (in Roman terms) be considered threatening. They wept because the elephant threatens no man, and killing them was pitiless.

And that’s what the Europeans we know hate about Islam – its lack of pity. In particular its oppression of women.

Of course there a plenty of decent Muslims in Europe, but the abused women are a constant presence to Europeans.

Europeans won’t discard their core values, and Islam has 1700 years of hardwiring, so something has to give.

Again, there’s historical precedent. In WW2, the hyper-civilized Brits morphed from dropping leaflets on Germany to burning its cities – by then mostly full of women, kids, and old men. That was a selective withdrawal of pity against an enemy that itself showed no pity.

With 70% of Europeans now saying they’re withdrawing pity from Islam, this will get ugly.