Quotulatiousness

November 1, 2024

“[H]er plan will mean the obliteration of your savings, the end of banks and even the destruction of ‘money as we know it'”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Germany, Government, Politics, Railways — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s astonishing how many highly placed bureaucrats, NGO functionaries, and the very, very wealthy are super gung-ho for reducing the rest of us to the status (and living conditions) of medieval serfs:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

This week, VW announced plans to cut tens of thousands of jobs and to close three factories. That is a very big deal, because they have never closed a single German factory before. I try to avoid economic topics, but this story is so much bigger than economics. As Daniel Gräber wrote in Cicero last month, “the VW crisis has become a symbol for the decline of our entire country“.

The Green leftoid establishment are eagerly blaming management for these failures, which is on the one hand not entirely wrong, but on the other hand not nearly an absolution. The German state of Lower Saxony holds a 20% stake in Volkswagen, and so they also manage the company. Recently, in a fit of virtue, they placed a Green politician – Julia Willie Hamburg – on its supervisory board. Hamburg does not even own a car and has used her position to argue that Volkswagen should regard itself not as an automobile manufacturer but as a “mobility services provider” and shift its focus away from “individual transport”.

The absurdly named Julia Willie Hamburg is merely symptomatic of a broader phenomenon. Germany has succumbed to political forces that have nothing but indifference and disdain for the industries that have made us prosperous. Our sitting Economics Minister, Robert Habeck, gave an interview to taz in 2011 in which he said that “fewer cars will not lead to less economic growth, but to new industries”, and attacked “the old growth theory, based on gross domestic product“. And behind Green politicians like Habeck are even more radical forces, like Ulrike Herrmann, the editor of taz, for many years a member of the Green Party and also an open advocate of wide-scale deindustrialisation. Because I am going to quote Herrmann saying some very crazy things, you need to know that she is in no way a fringe figure. She appears regularly on all the respectable evening talkshows and every politically informed person in the Federal Republic knows who she is.

Herrmann has outlined her political views in various books like The End of Capitalism: Why Growth and Climate Protection Are Not Compatible – and How We Will Live in the Future. From these monographs, we learn that Herrmann sees climatism as a means of imposing a centrally planned economy in which we will own nothing and be happy. Happily, Herrmann also talks a lot, and in her various speeches and interviews she states her vision for decarbonising Germany in very radical terms. I am grateful to this twitter user for highlighting typical remarks that Herrmann delivered in April of this year before a sympathetic audience of climate lunatics.

There, Herrmann elaborated on her vision for a future economy in which all major goods would have to be rationed:

    Talking about rationing: It’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.

    The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.

    Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.

At this point Herrmann begins to cackle manically, ecstatic at the thought that millions of Germans will be stuck riding rationed kilometres on slow local public transit.

October 26, 2024

Our solar energy future – “In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Checking in with what’s been happening in Germany, eugyppius explains why solar power is far from the cost-free energy source that politicians and scam artists try to claim:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

Climatism in Germany is attended by all manner of naive ideas and bright pink fairytale slogans. Among the latter is a dubious proverb proclaiming that “The sun doesn’t send any bills” (in German: “Die Sonne schickt keine Rechnung“). Such proverbs always seem initially plausible (is there anything freer and more democratic than sunshine?) while proving to be basically the opposite of the truth. In fact, the energy transition has landed German taxpayers in the position of paying billions of Euros for the sun to shine. It is becoming an unmitigated disaster, and what is worse, the more we expand solar capacity, the more we will have to pay. For something that does not send any bills, sunshine has sure become very expensive here in the Federal Republic.

Welt calls it “the solar trap,” and it works like this: Our Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) pledges to pay renewables producers fixed tariffs for every kilowatt hour of electricity their installations feed into the grid. Whether you are an ordinary climate-conscious person with solar panels on your house or you run massive solar farms, the EEG entitles you to receive these fixed “feed-in tariffs” for a period of twenty years. The EEG also requires grid operators to accept your electricity regardless of demand and to sell it on the electricity exchange.

Now the sun, although it may not charge for its services, turns out to have this naughty habit of shining in many places all at once. When this happens, electricity supply often exceeds electricity demand and exchange prices fall. They can fall all the way to zero, or in extreme situations of excessive sunshine they can even go negative. Negative prices mean that you have to actually pay “buyers” to take the excess power off your hands. Whether the prices are merely very low, or zero, or negative, the German taxpayer has obligated himself, via the EEG, to pay these producers of unwanted if extremely green and climate-friendly electricity their fixed feed-in tariffs anyway. That is, we are on the hook for the difference between the actual exchange value of excess electricity and the feed-in tariffs promised to producers. In this way we have ended up literally paying for the sun to shine.

In September alone, Germany paid 2.6 billion Euro to renewables producers for electricity that had a market value of a mere 145 million Euro. Our sunny autumn is destroying our already-fragile government budget. Federal number-crunchers had originally allocated 10.6 billion Euros for feed-in tariffs in 2024, but already the government owes 15 billion and the year is not yet over. Scholz’s cabinet are thus trying to allocate an additional 8.8 billion Euro for the rest of the year. The parliament have yet to approve the additional funds, though, and also the damned sun will just not stop fucking shining, and so probably even this supplementary allocation won’t be enough. We’re bleeding money, all for a sun that doesn’t send any bills.

This problem will get worse before it gets better. The more solar panels we install, the greater oversupply we’ll face when the sun shines, and the larger the spread between the fixed feed-in tariffs and the actual market value of this green electricity. In 2024, as I said, the government projected that feed-in tariffs would cost 10.6 billion Euros, but they’ll probably end up costing 20 billion at least. Next year, the costs are projected to be even higher, and the year after that, they will be higher still. As Welt report, the German government plans to triple our solar capacity to 215 gigawatts over the next six years – “the equivalent of 215 nuclear power plants” every time the sun emerges from behind a blessed cloud.

The energy transitioners know they messed up. The new plan is to change the rules for solar subsidies. When prices go negative, larger producers won’t receive their fixed tariffs, and they’ll also have to sell their electricity themselves. In this way, they will become newly sensitive to market demand and stop overproducing electricity when nobody wants it. It is almost like creating a blind system totally oblivious to market incentives was a bad idea. Unfortunately, the new rules will apply only to new solar installations. The German government will still have to honour its insane agreement to pay the operators of older solar plants for years to come. We will light billions on fire for nothing.

October 14, 2024

The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think

Filed under: China, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:

The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.

Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.

But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.

The plot thickens

The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.

Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.

Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.

The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.

The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.

It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.

It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.

The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.

The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.

After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.

There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.

Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.

Now it is China.

Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.

At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.

Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.

Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.

But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.

This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.

September 28, 2024

QotD: Doom! Doom! And more Doom!

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.

What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)

Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for … no reason really.

Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)

By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.

Sarah Hoyt, “Doom Doom Doom!”, According to Hoyt, 2024-06-26.

September 19, 2024

“This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action”

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Environment, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Knighton provides a wonderful example of “be careful what you wish for”, especially in the rich virtue-signal territory of the “green transformation”:

“Artisanal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo” by The International Institute for Environment and Development is licensed under CC BY 2.5 .

… it seems our glorious green future now comes with more child labor!

    A new report from the Department of Labor raises tough questions about whether and to what extent forced labor and child labor are intertwined with climate-friendly technology.

    The department released a report this month finding that several minerals that are key components of electric vehicles and solar panels may be produced through these unethical labor practices.

    The findings point to major ethical quandaries surrounding the ongoing energy transition. Climate change, if not addressed, endangers many of the world’s most vulnerable people. At the same time, the report raises serious human rights concerns about the technology being used to address it.

[…]
Whoops.

Here’s the thing, cobalt and nickel are kind of important for this sort of thing, so we have to get them from somewhere and the one attempt to mine cobalt here in the United States fell flat. Why? The price of cobalt dropped. It was no longer profitable to try to mine it in the United States.

But in poor countries, it was still plenty viable.

Yet while we view child labor as unethical, we have to remember that our society is rich enough that we can afford to hold that belief. Now, I share it and I’d rather kids be kids, and worry about things like school, video games, television, and that sort of thing, but the truth is that when you’re barely able to feed yourself, you need every penny you can get.

That means kids going out to work.

That means doing some grueling, back-breaking, nasty work like mining stuff like cobalt.

It means paying for dirty, nasty strip mining so you can convince yourself and your friends that you’re better than those of us who still prefer a gasoline- or diesel-powered car.

All around us, we tend to be oblivious to the reality of the rest of the world. We simply think something should be so and then just act like they are. We ignore what all might be required to make that something so.

This is the Law of Unintended Consequences in action.

QotD: “Solutions” to climate change

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Everyone who isn’t an idiot knows the climate change hoax was never about “science”. That’s a hack lie they use to shut you up when you point out that the ice age, floods, and mass polar bear die-offs they are always promising never, ever seem to happen. It’s a deliberate scam that blends leftism, hysterical hyperbole, and outright fraud into a gooey pudding designed to fill the spiritual void in empty-souled western suckers while providing a tool for our global leftist establishment to steal more of our money and freedom.

Quick: name a climate change remedy that does not result in you being less free and/or paying more money. It’s actually remarkable. Every single thing that we absolutely must do right now no time to wait how dare you pause to think how dare you is something leftists always wanted but could never talk people into doing until the threat of weather vengeance started lurking around the corner.

You can’t name any. There aren’t any, because the weird climate cult is not about weather but about separating you from your liberty and loot. And, apparently, your life if you won’t obey.

Kurt Schlicter, “TIME’s Commie Nag of the Year Can Go Pound Sand”, Townhall.com, 2019-12-15.

September 6, 2024

Climate catastrophism in a phrase – “The sky gods are angry and we’re all gonna pay”

Filed under: Environment, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Relax, weather-panic true believers — this is a post from Jim Treacher who gets paid to write funny stuff. This means you can mock everything in it as “fake news”:

I’m pretty old at this point, and for my whole life, the media has been predicting the weather will kill us all.

When I was a kid, the news was all about the coming Ice Age.

Brrrrr! Iran was a bunch of terrorist assholes even back in the ’70s, but the existential threat to America hadn’t been updated yet. They thought the cold was gonna get us.

And that dumb magazine was only $1.25 an issue! Everything might be more expensive 45 years later, but at least we haven’t all frozen to death.

Then the big threat became “global warming”. But when people noticed it wasn’t getting any warmer outside, despite the climate models that were supposed to horrify us, the scare tactic became “climate change”. They didn’t think we’d notice, I guess.

And through it all, there was one constant refrain: The sky gods are angry and we’re all gonna pay.

Do you leave your phone charger plugged in when you’re not using it? Do you drive a gas-powered car because it actually works? Then you’re destroying the planet, according to a pack of millionaires with yachts and private jets.

But now the celebrities and other climate supplicants are in dismay. The weather is letting them down again! Yet another of their predictions hasn’t come true, and they want to know why their climate deities have abandoned them.

Judson Jones, NYT:

    Halfway through an Atlantic hurricane season that forecasters expected would be one of the most active on record, there has been a considerable interlude in storms during what is typically the busiest portion of the season, leaving observers to wonder if the forecast was a bust — or if the worst may be yet to come.

    Often, at this time of the year, it isn’t uncommon to see two, three or even four named storms occurring simultaneously. But on Wednesday there were no current storms, and there hasn’t been one since Hurricane Ernesto formed, beginning as a tropical storm, on Aug. 12 …

    Despite the reprieve in recent weeks, though, “it is too early to dismiss the seasonal hurricane outlook as a bust,” said Dan Harnos, a meteorologist at the NOAA Climate Prediction Center.

You got that? We haven’t endured as many deadly, destructive hurricanes as the scientists predicted. And they’re worried about it. They want people to suffer and die, but they’re hopeful that nature will still unleash its fury on us.

There’s still time for the worst to happen. Fingers crossed!

September 2, 2024

There’s no limit to how progressive politicians want to control your life

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post a couple of days ago, Carson Jerema provided many examples of how the Canadian federal government — despite failing and fumbling so many of its existing responsibilities — still wants to increase control over the daily lives of Canadians:

After a decade or so, progressives are on the defensive in Canada and elsewhere because regular people, as in those who are not activist weirdos, are tired of the agenda to control every aspect of our lives. Point this out to a progressive, and they will deny that anyone’s life is being interfered with and claim only some far-right monster would think otherwise. They can’t believe there are people out there who share a different view. They don’t understand how this could be.

But progressive governments are trying to control our lives in ways big and small, and in ways that range from subtle to a punch in the face.

In Canada, the federal government’s environmental policies are the most obvious example of this interference. The Liberals have banned plastic straws and plastic bags; even compostable bags are banned in grocery stores because they resemble plastic. Such bans are pointless irritants that make shopping more expensive, and life slightly less enjoyable as paper straws dissolve in one’s drink. People might dismiss these concerns as simply minor inconveniences, but this is how most people experience government policy, by being forced to replace their bag of plastic bags that they were already reusing, with more expensive, less useful options.

Next up, the Liberals are exploring options to bring in environmental regulations for clothing. The cost of clothes has actually gone down in recent years, so leave it to Ottawa to look for ways to bring the cost back up and to limit options.

There is also the plan to essentially force Canadians to purchase electric vehicles, that nobody would otherwise want, through government mandates to phase out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.

On a larger scale, the government is attempting to restrict the kind of work people do, specifically work in the oil and gas industry, through steep emissions targets, which will close off lucrative job opportunities in western oilfields. It will also limit the kinds of fuels people will be able to use to heat their homes.

There are also policies that the Canadian government hasn’t implemented, but which green activists have endorsed, such as the banning of gas stoves and the ludicrous suggestion from some academics that “climate lockdowns” be implemented to help cut emissions.

It is possible to be supportive of all these policies, despite their paternalistic and job-killing nature, but pretending that no one is trying to, or that no one wants to, interfere with our liberty is not a credible position to take.

August 13, 2024

Feelings … nothing more than (climate) feelings …

Filed under: Books, Environment, Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Have you been metaphorically beaten over the head about your climate sins? Your carbon buttprint? You know your very existence is a threat to Mother Gaia, right? Well, Katharina van Bronswijk is worried that you’ll stop listening to the neverending lectures about you and your evil externalities:

Climatism is a political programme bound to a broad social movement. Most of its momentum comes not from The Science or The Experts, but from diffuse cultural forces that we should probably try to understand, if only because they are driving our entire civilisation straight into the ground. Against all advice, I will therefore steer the plague chronicle into this ridiculous quagmire of leftoid green babble, with a look at our first lesson in Unlearnings, namely “Unlearn Repression”.

This superficial and disorganised essay is the work of an infuriating young woman named Katharina van Bronswijk. She’s a psychotherapist best known for her 2022 book, Climate in Our Heads. Fear, Anger, Hope: What the Ecological Crisis is Doing to Us. It belongs to that genre of inevitably unreadable monographs, in which the author herself appears on the cover, looking windswept, pioneering and undaunted:

“Climate feelings” are van Bronswijk’s niche in the extremely crowded enterprise of CO2-bothering. In “Unlearn Repression”, she argues that we should not suppress our negative feelings about climate change, but rather embrace them in constructive ways on behalf of the planet.

Now, van Bronswijk is the kind of deeply unoriginal person who just says the same things over and over. Everything she writes in “Unlearn Repression” flows directly from Climate in our Heads; she’s been digesting, reheating and reworking this same overboiled intellectual artichoke for almost two years now, through various media interviews and even in this English-language TEDx Talk. Throughout this woman’s work is the vague anxiety that the climatists have perhaps overdone it with doom and gloom, and that a lot of people have had enough of hearing about a climate apocalypse that never quite happens.

Van Bronswijk is naturally very dumb, but more than that she is painfully condescending, oblivious, verbose and just awash in litres of estrogen. I defy anyone to read her work and not come away from it a raging misogynist. This odious overpromoted schoolmarm belongs out of sight in a childcare centre teaching young children the alphabet. Perhaps she should also be in a choir, or part of a local environmental club dedicated to collecting litter in parks. That our society has denied van Bronswijk and so many others like her these proper outlets for their instincts and instead pushed them into public activism and intellectual production itself explains a great deal of what is wrong with the world.

“Unlearn Repression” opens with some autobiographical details, because of course everything van Bronswijk talks about is all about van Bronswijk. Like so many Germans of her generation, she was radicalised by school climate propaganda – specifically, by her teacher’s fateful screening of that classic propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth:

    Back then … I was happy for the welcome distraction of watching a film instead of doing normal lessons. But afterwards I was shocked and asked my mum for answers to all the questions and challenges. She didn’t have any solutions for me, how could she? I was alarmed and started to think about the impending consequences of climate change and what could be done about it. I found approaches in newsletters from NGOs and by reading up on animal and environmental protection … That was when my dream bubble burst and I realised: the world is unfair and, unlike all the Disney stories of my childhood, there will be no single hero*ine who saves the world. And there is no magical or technical miracle solution either.

Al Gore’s film so terrified the young van Bronswijk, that for a while she retreated into conspiratorial theories about why climate change is not happening, which qualifies our crayon psychotherapist to pronounce upon the psychology of those who deny the climate. This deeply evil and irrational movement is driven primarily by “white men”, because they “still enjoy most of the privileges in our society, and therefore have the most to lose”.

July 10, 2024

After 1177 B.C.

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jane Psmith reviews the follow-on book from Eric Kline’s bestseller about the Bronze Age Collapse, After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations:

Sometime around 1150 BC, the dense network of politically, economically, and culturally interdependent states around the eastern Mediterranean collapsed. In 2014, GWU archaeologist Eric Cline wrote a book about it. And then, surprisingly, it became a bestseller.

Okay, maybe it’s not that much of a surprise: most people can recognize an obvious historical analogy when it hits them over the head, and the globalized1 state system of the Late Bronze Age has extremely clear parallels to the modern day. An interconnected and cosmopolitan world? Centralized state bureaucracy? High-level diplomacy between ruling elites? A technologically complex civilization enabled by extensive international trade along lengthy and elaborate supply chains? Well, gosh, that seems remarkably familiar. An audience that had just weathered a global financial crisis (and, later, a global pandemic) was perfectly poised to appreciate Cline’s exploration of the fragility of complex systems. No wonder it sold! (A copy entered the Psmith household in early 2020 for, uh, obvious reasons.)

Cline’s basic argument in the book was that the Collapse was due not to any single cause but to a “perfect storm” of calamities: drought and accompanying famine, earthquake, internal rebellion, external invasion. These were all problems that the civilizations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean had faced and survived in the past, but under their combined onslaught the most fragile parts of the system at last began buckle. When one society disintegrated, its sudden absence from the interconnected global economy became a new stressor on its surviving neighbors — until at last, domino-like, the whole thing came down.2 It would be decades, or in some places centuries, before the standard of living returned to anything like its previous level, and it would be nearly five hundred years before an international system as complex and sophisticated as the world of the Late Bronze Age emerged.

Now, a decade after his original book, Cline has a sequel exploring what happened after the Collapse. Which civilizations were able to rebound to something approaching their former glory, which barely managed to limp along into the Iron Age, and which vanished into the sands of time? And, more importantly, why?

This is a much more difficult story to tell. The original 1177 B.C. spent much of its page count on the zenith of Bronze Age civilization, the 15th through 13th centuries BC, to explain what it was that did the collapsing. It’s a sweeping tale, full of wonderful stories and fascinating digressions into the historicity of the Trojan War (yes) and the Exodus (not archeologically substantiated) as well as being a compelling portrait of a complicated set of societies. Cline’s narrative darts from Egypt to Assyria to the Aegean to the Hittites, treating each in turn as he moves forward through time towards what we all know is coming.

But chronological framing is impossible for the sequel. There is, definitionally — there can be — no grand narrative of regional divergence after the fall of a “world-system“. The fate of Mesopotamia is no longer linked to that of Greece; there are no more Cretan envoys in New Kingdom tomb reliefs, no more battles between the Hittite Great King and the wanax of a Mycenaean palatial center, no more Uzbek tin shipwrecked off the coast of Anatolia. Once the ties are cut, each story must stand alone, and accordingly Cline gives each region its own chapter.

Alas, this is a lot less fun to read.

    1. For sufficiently small values of “globe”. But larger than you might expect!

    2. The revised 2021 edition apparently gives a larger role to climate factors, especially the 3.2kya megadrought, but that’s not the one I read and anyway the other elements were still present.

July 8, 2024

All the conspiracists seem to find room for the Rockefellers in their theories

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson on a new book by Jacob Nordangård that illustrates just how important Rockefeller funding is to so many activists and the environmental pressure groups that deploy them:

In the climate change arena, the Rockefellers call the shots. The whole thing was their idea, they took a silly but interesting theory and amped it up with hundreds and hundreds of million of dollars. They founded institutions and linked the survival of those institutions to promoting climate change and population reduction. They adopted one likely politician after another.

The Rockefellers have created 990 Climate Change activist organizations. They give them directions, financing, and launch them on the world. The Green Movement was started, financed, organized, and militarized by the Rockefellers. By the late 40’s the family was all in, on the same page. In the 50’s they began to stand up countless institutions, committees, university departments, university institutes, foundations, and policy shops gathered around this one idea, as below:

Let’s just pause here and recognize that the United States and Canada are 5% developed. If it were 50%, then maybe we would have reason to worry about the effects of trace gas that takes up .04% of the atmosphere, of which 3% is currently contributed to by humans. But were we to have that level of development, our science would have long ago solved the problem. Our sense of proportion, size and consequence has been twisted, propagandized via hundreds of billions of purposed dollars. And all of it is exaggerated science done by scientists compromised by Rockefeller money.

By 1998, the Rockefeller family had swept the table clean of any opposition to this one idea. Any scientist not on board with the agenda was imperiled. Any university department not working towards this one artificial goal, was in danger of being marginalized. Infiltration had begun into every media organization, every entertainment division of every major corporation. This, as stated below, would be a generational goal. For everyone. Or get off the bus.

What is evidentiary, what can be proved in a court of law, rather than opinion, however, is that the Fabians started the idea of this whole one-world, no nation state. It is clear too that after the First World War, the Fabians roped in the second generation of Rockefellers. It was a major catch. It meant they had America. And it was spiritual. It was meant to change mankind, to kill off Homo Sapiens and turn us to Homo Universalis.

The New Man would be not-Christian, quietist, and self-obsessed. The economy would trend towards zero-growth if not de-growth. There is a preponderance of data, many many publications that laid out their plans. They twisted education away from practical science, engineering and building things towards social movements, the humanities, the arts, and pleasure. And via Laurance Rockefeller’s money and organizational skill, they devised and invented the discipline of cybernetics from which the internet flows.

June 29, 2024

“So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Terry Etam on the totalitarian controls being imposed on citizens in Canada where under yet another censorship bill being pushed out to ensure that nobody says anything that contravenes some yet-to-be-determined “internationally recognized methodology”:

And then, as a final but impressive gasp of inept state control, witness Canada’s frantic flailing to control the situation by …

Send in the goons: Canada cracks down on any speech it doesn’t like, with sweeping rules measured against undefined regulations, and enters the historical pantheon of legendarily badly run states

We’ve all heard about bill C-59 by now, the government of Canada’s crackdown on any comments related to emissions reduction mitigation efforts that do not adhere to “internationally recognized methodology”. It’s a Soviet-style attempt to crack down on any talk about what companies are doing to reduce emissions, or anything they do that is an attempt to reduce “the environmental, social and ecological causes or effects of climate change”.

The apes in charge, and their sycophants, say hey, it’s not censorship at all, you can talk about emissions reduction all day long, so long as it meets some undefined international standard, and the onus of proof is on anyone making the statement to show that they are not violating some “internationally recognized methodology” that does not exist.

This whole fiasco is of course a one way street; the freedom to say anything that cements the climate emergency narrative remains gloriously unchecked. For example, energy commentator David Blackmon recently catalogued on LinkedIn the number of countries/regions that claim to be warming faster than the global average: Canada, Mexico, Latin America and Caribbean, Arctic, Asia, Africa, the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, China, and Finland all claim to be warming faster than the global average. The high priest of modern politicized science, Scientific American, says that oceans are also warming 40 percent faster than expected, and that oceans absorb up to 90 percent of the warming caused by human carbon emissions, and SA also notes that the South Pole is warming “three times faster than the global average”. So, as the pundits say, everywhere is warming faster than everywhere else.

Extrapolating from this, in keeping with necessary mathematical precedents such as how averages work, then the few remaining regions not mentioned must be plummeting in temperature, because that’s how averages work. And I mean plummeting, if it alone is offsetting the above-average gains in the rest of the world. Strange indeed how not a single headline can be found to that effect.

The speech police have no problem with such math crimes, because the asinine claims are put forth under the banner of “science”. It must be concluded then that math is not one of the “internationally recognized methodologies”.

No matter. The point is, as always, to silence discussions and ram through whatever ideological junk they can while still clinging to power like a bee holding onto an accelerating windshield.

Welcome to Canada, where if global embarrassment were an Olympic sport we’d be wearing perma-gold. Joke’s on us though; we elected these people. We should now clearly understand why Canada’s status as an investment haven is plummeting like a shot duck. (Do not point me towards legendary genius Warren Buffett who says he is comfortable investing in Canada; Buffett buys existing businesses, with moats, and the government of Canada is working to build those moats as fast as it can. Remember this investing rule for the foreseeable future: existing infrastructure is getting more valuable, because building anything gets harder by the day.)

It is probably unfair to single out Canada for such withering criticism when other western countries are on similar energy suicide missions. Australia, England, Germany … all under the spell of radicals that will accept nothing other than total nihilistic energy “victory”, a crown that seems to mean de-industrialization and subjugation of citizens in autos they don’t want, doing things they don’t want to, and not being permitted to say what they want to. (New Zealand was in that club as well, but has recently repealed a ban on oil & gas exploration when it dawned on them that fields decline, and do not produce at flat levels in perpetuity without investment. Yes, western governments really have enacted such legislation while simultaneously holding an astonishing ignorance about how energy really works.)

As far as Canada’s hydrocarbon sector goes, the most important thing to do at this stage is to keep our heads [down] and carry on providing the energy the world desperately needs. And that means every single person, right down to Guilbeault’s Greenpeace and the soup throwing fools of Just Stop Oil. If the feds are going to outlaw emissions talk, let them … the rotten foundations of their world can’t stand for much longer.

No one should stand taller than one that provides reliable and affordable energy for the globe’s citizens. Go back to work, and patiently wait until the inevitable happens, the day when governments are no longer able to pretend they can’t see reality. It’s going to be epic.

June 21, 2024

“Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tim Worstall responds to a recent Medium essay by Julia Steinberger which illustrates that “neoliberal” has joined “fascist” as a generic term to indicate strong disapproval of a person, organization, or idea:

The idea that an adult woman can believe these things is just amazeballs. But here we are. A tweet from Julia Steinberger leads to her Medium essay about what’s wrong with the world.

An upheaval in 10 chapters:

    1. The cause. We know the climate crisis is brought to us by highly unequal and undemocratic economic systems.

Err, no? Emissions are emissions. 100 people emitting one tonne each is exactly the same as 1 person emitting 100 tonnes. Sure, it’s true that a more unequal society will have more people emitting those 100 tonne personal amounts. But a more equal society will have more people able to emit another 1 tonne each. For, more equality is by definition the movement of some of those assets of the richer to those poorer — the economic assets which either allow or do the emitting. Sure, Jim Ratcliffe’s £50,000 private jet flight emits more than my £100 Easyjet one. But if we take the £50k off Jim and give it to 500 folk like me then all 500 of us might spend the marginal income on an Easyjet flight each — which would be more emissions than Jim’s spending of the money.

It simply is not true that economic inequality is the heart, the core or the cause of climate change. It’s idiocy to think it is too.

Of course, we know what’s happening here. Climate Change is Bad, M’Kay? Which it is, obviously. Economic inequality is Bad, M’Kay? Well, there the evidence is a great deal more mixed but whatever. But in the minds of the stupid all bad things have the same cause. So, if inequality is bad, climate change is bad, then they must be the same thing because they’re Bad, M’Kay?

    2. The rise. The recent history of these economic systems, in the Americas and Eurasia, is dominated by the ascendance of neoliberal ideology.

Oh, that is good. Given that I am a neoliberal — a fully paid up one, Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute and all — that’s very good. Given HS2, looming wealth taxation, the increased bite of idiot regulation and all that I can’t say that I see neoliberalism as winning right now but that might depend upon your starting point. If you’re a socialist — or an idiot but I repeat myself — you might well regard the plenitude of bananas in the supermarket as neoliberal. After all, that is something that socialism never did achieve.

    3. The threat. Neoliberal ideology is antidemocratic at its very core. Its aim is to give free-reign over our societies to corporations, not citizens.

And, well, you know, bollocks. The very beating heart of neoliberalism is that corporations need to be controlled and they’re best controlled by the citizens. In the form of free markets rather than voting on which bureaucrats get the gold plated pension, true. But neoliberals are between indifferent and actually against capitalist power. The whole nub of the idea is that markets do the job of controlling capitalists better than bureaucrats, politicians or, obviously, capitalists.

There’s not really any way for her thesis to survive after getting so much of the basics wrong, is there?

But just one more tidbit:

    Hayek and his neoliberal colleagues now needed another, antidemocratic way, to organise society. They didn’t want democracy, but they wanted some kind of self-maintaining organisation — by which they meant hierarchy. Organisation was supposed to be supplied by the market, and hierarchy by competition within markets. (It’s worth noting that neoliberals in the 1950s did not, although they should have, predict that unfettered markets lead to concentrations in monopolies or cartels. They would arguably disapprove of the vast corporations running our current economies, even though their market-above-democracy policies predictably brought them into being.)

Well, that wasn’t actually the last tidbit. But the idea that Friedman, Mises, Menger, Hayek and the rest didn’t worry about monopolies? Jesu C is really bouncin’ on that pogo stick right now. And then the idea that democracy will be better bulwark against monopolies than markets? Can you actually do backflips on a pogo stick?

June 15, 2024

The Ford Foundation and the far left

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:

It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.

It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.

It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.

These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.

Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.

In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.

The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.

June 8, 2024

Eco-terrorism – it’s all over Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the strong likelihood of any given wildfire in Canada being not just man-made but deliberately set for political reasons:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die.

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs. The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods“. They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education — forestry — their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. “Climate Change” was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon”, or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates’ climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

His “work” turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive “green” has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not “climate change” burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

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