If you were hesitating about whether to get involved in Cap and Trade, hesitate no longer:
I have become a convert on the Cap And Trade thing. I am all in; pedal to the metal; go for broke; shoot the moon; a true fracking believer now.
This C&T shit has more revenue generating potential than prohibition ever did. You’ll generally be dealing with a better class of people who aren’t as inclined to settle their differences with machine guns, which is a big plus. Another big advantage over bootlegging is there’s no actual product involved, so all the usual logistics and end point sales issues involved with smuggling vanish.
It is truly a beautiful beautiful thing; even better than selling lots on the moon or mars, because the government doesn’t force people to buy real estate on the moon and mars.
If Al Capone were alive today, he’d be a carbon trader.
I was just down in the convenience store in my clients’ office building in downtown Toronto and heard from the store owner that there are lots of counterfeit bills appearing today. She showed me an example $10 bill, which looked fine except it was missing the metallic strip on the left side of the bill.
Here’s a guide to recognizing the differences between real and counterfeit Canadian bills from the Bank of Canada:
Gerard Van der Leun has been to one too many “Farmers” market, and he’s reached his bullshit tolerance limit:
Everybody loves “Farmers” markets in America. They are everywhere now. They metastasize in our urban cores like eczema in a teenager’s armpits. Every snoburbia has to have one or more in order to be a bona-fide snoburbia. Where else, I ask you, can white people go to be reassured of the proposition that small, local, “sustainable,” and oh-so-organic farms can feed a nation of more than 300 million people for only three times to cost of current farming methods? Farmers Markets are malls for morons and we all love them. Pass the drool cup and the goat cheese samples, thank you.
I’m primed for the ordinary and established catechism of the Church of Eternal American Bullshit whenever I go to the “Farmers” markets, but I was unprepared for this fresh sign in an empty storefront on the hip Ballard side-street that supports merchants selling nut-butters at $50 a pound every Sunday. It promised levels of bullshit previously thought impossible [. . .]
Go read the whole thing. It’s worth the visit.
Back? Well, I’ve always had my doubts about “Farmers” markets . . . they all seem to sell a suspiciously large variety of foods that aren’t in season (yet are far too often advertised as “locally grown”). They’re not just selling lettuce and carrots, they’re selling modern-day indulgences: allowing city folks to buy themselves a bit of spiritual connection with the countryside. Except it’s usually not the countryside the buyers are thinking of . . .
I still remember the shocked look on the face of a co-worker, when Elizabeth pointed out to her that driving out to some farm gate and buying fruit and vegetables meant you were (usually) buying Californian or Mexican or even Chilean produce (except during those brief weeks when the local produce was in season). Most city and suburban dwellers have no idea about growing seasons.
I’d heard the term “phishing” before, and I’ve reported at least a dozen various attempts to the appropriate parties (companies and organizations who are used in phishing attempts often have a reporting address set up so you can just forward the message to them). “Spear phishing” was new to me, and apparently it was also new to a large number of US Air Force personnel:
Offers to hire American airmen, stationed at an airbase on the Central Pacific island of Guam, as extras in the Transformers 3 movie, turned out to be an unexpectedly scary training exercise. First, keep in mind that there is no Transformers 3 filming scheduled for Guam. The email was a fake, used to test how well airmen could detect a hacker attempts to deceive military Internet users to give up valuable information.
The Transformers 3 email was a test to see how many airmen would fall for a “spear phishing” offensive. “Phishing” (pronounced “fishing”) is when a hacker sends out thousands, or millions, of emails that look like warnings from banks, eBay or PayPal, asking for you to log in (thus revealing your password to the hackers, who have set up a false website for this purpose) to take care of some administrative matter. The hacker then uses your password to loot your account. “Spear phishing” is when the emails are prepared with specific individuals in mind. The purpose here is to get specific information from, say, a bank manager, or someone known to be working on a secret project. In the Guam case, the targets of the spear phishing test were asked to go to a web site and fill out an application form to be eligible to be an extra. That form asked for information that would have enabled hostile hackers to gain more access to air force networks. A lot of the airmen who received the Transformers 3 email, responded. The air force won’t say how many, but it was more than expected. A lot more.
I doubt that many readers need to be told this, but no legitimate bank or financial institution should ever be sending you an email requesting you to follow an embedded link and log in to your account. If you get such an email, forward it to the bank’s security folks. If it’s legitimate, they can confirm it for you, but in 2010, no sensible bank should be communicating with you in this way.
Kathy Shaidle is exactly right in her analysis of the key weakness of the Tea Party movement:
The Tea party movement contains the seed of its own failure
It preaches self-reliance and small government, but old people still want their pittance of gubmit cheese, ie Social Security.
If they/we were intellectually honest, we would be calling on the raising of the eligibility age to 90, which is more in line with Bismark’s original plan: a little pension for those who were never expected to live long enough to ever get it.
It was meant to be a “look how generous I am” gesture with no real impact; the original designers never thought we’d live long enough to cash the checks.
Older Tea Partiers (and all of us) should be petitioning the government to write everyone a one time check for the exact amount they were forced to contribute, plus maybe 5% interest if that is do-able.
And then the program should be abolished.
I hope most of my readers are not depending on their “government benefits” to get them through in their retirement years: the economics of the situation almost certainly won’t allow it. There are several problems with government-run retirement schemes, starting with the fact that most of them are not in any sense of the word “funded”. Most governments have been using the contributions as a giant low-interest revolving fund: you contribute, they withdraw and leave a promissary note in the kitty. The promissary note is drawn on you and your children. There is, technically speaking, no money in the kitty.
The people who will be worst hurt by the necessary changes to government pension schemes are the ones who earned too little (or spent too much) during their working lives and didn’t make any private provision for retirement. As Kathy points out, the first government pensions were designed so that most potential recipients would be unable to collect, because the start date of the pension income was set beyond the average lifespan of the population. Looking forward to a pension would be much less realistic today if the official “retirement age” was set to 90!
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The Cato Institute’s Richard W. Rahn speculates about some very disturbing notions:
Politicians in developed countries have found that their citizens often get upset when inflation reaches high levels and then tend to vote out the culprits. You may recall that the less-than-astute Jimmy Carter lost his re-election campaign, in part, because inflation at one point reached 14 percent and the prime interest rate hit 21 percent.
An insightful European banker suggested to me over breakfast a couple of weeks ago that the European political class would use selective expropriation, rather than inflation, to avoid paying back all of the debt. The way this would be done would be that the political leaders would announce they would only pay back those bonds with full interest that were held by labor unions and other “politically correct” interest groups but not the bonds held by “greedy bankers” and rich people. Maturities would be extended and promised interest rates lowered – effectively reducing the value of the bonds.
My initial reaction was that, yes, such a selective expropriation might work in Europe, but not in the United States. As I thought more about it, however, looked at what was happening and heard President Obama’s rhetoric attacking “greedy” bankers and insurance companies, I began to think that not only was my European friend right about Europe, but his scenario was equally valid here.
The Obama administration has already indicated that it’s quite comfortable with protecting unions at the expense of other contracting parties (in the Government Motors case, at the very least), so it’s not much of a stretch to see this as a possibility in larger matters.
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link on a subject I’ve blogged about before: detecting fakery and fraud in the fine and vintage wine market:
Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think “vintage fraud” is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from — its vintage.
[. . .]
“The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine from a famous winery with a great year listed on the label, that isn’t the right vintage year,” Jones said.
“Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared with ‘investment wines’ selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars a case at auction,” he said.
I read Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar which was rather an eye-opener about both the rare wine trade and the potential for fraud in that market (posts here and here). It’s nice to see that technology is coming to the rescue in cases where this kind of fraud is suspected.
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Michael Fumento looks at the public details about the “runaway” Prius:
Now let’s recap just one of my findings in the Forbes.com piece that the CHP report doesn’t deal with because it concerns later events.
The 911 dispatcher, as you can hear on the Web, repeatedly begs Sikes to either stop the engine with the ignition button or put the gear into neutral. Sikes refused to do either, later giving various bizarre reasons. “I was afraid to try to [reach] over there and put it in neutral, he told CNN. “I was holding onto the steering wheel with both hands — 94 miles an hour in a Toyota Prius is fast.”
Yet:
# We know Sikes spent most of the ride with a cell phone in one hand.
# Sikes claimed at a press conference that he reached under the dash and yanked on the floored accelerator. I’m thin with arms the average American length, but fell three inches short. Sikes almost certainly can’t do what he claims, but nobody’s asked him to repeat the motion. In any event, it can hardly be done with both hands on the wheel.
# Finally in the 2008 Prius the shift knob is mounted on the dash expressly to allow shifting by merely reaching out with a finger.
Just what exactly does it take to convince the press?
Personally, I found the timing of the event to be a little too perfect for a certain narrative: exactly as the Toyota CEO was being subjected to the Star Chamber treatment by US lawmakers. A few days before or after that, I might have been willing to believe it was a genuine event, rather than (as it certainly appears now) a staged hoax.
Full disclosure: I’ve owned several Toyota vehicles, currently including my own Tacoma pickup truck and (as of last Wednesday) Elizabeth’s Matrix sedan.
. . . this news story is a warning to all scientists: if you don’t want creationists to get traction, you can’t just treat this as someone else’s problem. You have to clean house. You have tolerated liars and rascals like Phil Jones and Rajendra Pachauri in your midst too long; you need to throw them out.
A diplomatic way for any random professional society to do this would be to demand that all climate science must be held to the strictest standards of methodological scrutiny. All data, including primary un-”corrected” datasets, must be available for auditing by third parties. All modeling code must be published. The assumptions made in data reduction and smoothing must be an explicitly documented part of the work product.
These requirements would kill off AGW alarmism as surely as a bullet through the head. But its credibility is already collapsing; the rising issue, now, is to prevent collateral damage from the scientific community’s failure to insist on them sooner. Every day you delay will strengthen the creationists and the flat-earthers and all the other monsters begotten from the sleep of reason.
More than 150 years of global temperature records are to be re-examined by scientists in an attempt to regain public trust in climate science after revelations about errors and suppression of data.
The Met Office has submitted proposals for the reassessment by an independent panel in a tacit admission that its previous reports have been marred by their reliance on analysis by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
Two separate inquiries are being held into allegations that the CRU tried to hide its raw data from critics and that it exaggerated the extent of global warming.
In a document entitled Proposal for a New International Analysis of Land Surface Air Temperature Data, the Met Office says: “We feel it is timely to propose an international effort to reanalyse surface temperature data in collaboration with the World Meteorological Organisation.”
As I’ve said several times, we may actually have a global problem with rising temperatures, and if so we need to consider the potential impact and possible ways to address it. However, the science is far from settled — in fact, it’s more unsettled now than it was at any time in the last fifteen years. Without reliable data, we can’t pretend to make any predictions or recommend any course of action because we don’t know whether global temperatures are rising or not.
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A dozen French winemakers and traders have been found guilty of a massive scam to sell 18 million bottles of fake Pinot Noir to a leading US buyer.
The judge in Carcassonne, south-west France, said the producers and traders had severely damaged the reputation of the Langedoc region.
The 12 more than doubled profits passing off the wine to E and J Gallo under its Red Bicyclette brand.
The case came to light when French Customs noticed that the winemakers were selling more Pinot Noir to Gallo than was grown within the Langedoc region. Don’t feel sorry for the fraudsters: along with suspended sentences ranging from 1-6 months and fines from $2,000 to $156,000. The swindle netted over $10 million. It’s not clear whether they had to repay those profits.
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Brian Micklethwait goes all gung ho and everything, trying to encapsulate the current situation in Climatestan:
Are you bored with Climategate? And bored with me writing about it, again and again? Yesterday, fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings told me he is. I understand the feeling, and would be interested to hear if any of our commentariat shares it, but as for me, I can’t leave this thing alone. I mean, this is now the biggest single battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, and the forces of darkness are now in definite, headlong, ignominious retreat. I for one do not feel inclined to stop shouting about that any time soon.
However, I do agree that things are now moving on, and that is what this posting is about.
[. . .]
If you don’t think you have any position to retreat to, then you stand and fight to the death. The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied. This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all. The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians. And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri.
[. . .]
Don’t get me wrong. Crushing Michael Mann and his Hockey Team, sending Pachauri packing, making the letters I, P, C and C spell L, I, E and S in the minds of all thinking people, getting the Met Office to stick to short-term weather forecasting, ripping the panda pants off the WWF – these are very important tasks. When pursuing your enemies after you have won a battle against them, it is important to ensure that as many as possible of the defeated ones do not keep any undeserved shreds of reputation with which to fight again. This is not an either/or thing. The climate skeptic blogosphere is big enough and clever enough to do it all, pushing the old media along with it (UK), or not and just replacing the old media for the duration of the battle (USA) — or the war, or for ever, for everything — as the case may be. But in among sneering at the disgraced Hockey Team, chuckling over the multiple lies and lavish living arrangements of the rascal Pachauri, and gags about how many inches of global warming have just descended upon this or that American city, we should also be getting stuck into the next fight.
I’ve done my best to include a sprinkling of decent links, to reports and to celebratory whoops from this last battlefield, but these are now potentially infinite. A few weeks ago I went on a foreign trip and was largely disconnected from the internet for the best part of a week. Since then, I have been trying and failing to catch up with Climategate. Last weekend, the story pretty much escaped from anyone’s single purview, so large and so complicated has it now become. Basically, a huge retreat in multiple directions is going on, and a huge pursuit, ditto, with CAGW defensive position after CAGW defensive position being overrun by advancing Skeptics. The IPCC citadel, its outer walls having crumbled when Climategate first broke, is now being comprehensively sacked.
Go read the whole thing, which is liberally studded with links to follow. Should keep you busy for a bit, anyway.
At least, for Canadians watching the game on CTV, we didn’t get to see most of these ads, including Audi’s brief trip into the very near future:
Audi’s effort won both best and worst titles from the readers at the Wall Street Journal.
Update: Nick Gillespie also thought this ad to be quite noteworthy:
. . . the great ad in last night’s game was, IMO, the Audi “Green Police” spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don’t know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves . . . minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
Some interesting comments to Nick’s post:
grrizzly|2.8.10 @ 9:04AM|# Imagine a Holocaust movie. Jews are in concentration camps. Regularly sent to gas chambers. Suddenly one man receives documents proving he is not a jew. He’s set free. He walks away. Happy End. This is what the ad is.
iowahawk|2.8.10 @ 9:10AM|# I thought it was the best Super Bowl ad of all time, and not for the reasons Audi was hoping for. Hilarious, creepy and upbeat all at the same time. And the punchline: The sponsor (Audi) merrily approves of the dystopian fascism. My jaw hit the ground.
Enjoy Every Sandwich|2.8.10 @ 9:16AM|# When I saw the ad I was thinking “this will give Al Gore a hard-on, assuming he still gets those”. It’s a left-wing dream world.
PM770|2.8.10 @ 11:20AM|# Right. I think Audi probably owes Al one clean television.
Tulpa|2.8.10 @ 11:28AM|# It’s called extremely skilled advertising. Give different messages to different target audiences, hopefully a message that makes them want to buy your product. I looked at it and liked the (obviously ironic) portrayal of the Green Police, while your average lefty is saying “Yeah man, they should totally send swat teams to people’s houses looking for light bulbs!”
Update, 9 February: Added the tag GreenGestapo, as this appears to be trending in the blogosphere . . . I expect to have further use for the tag in the future.
Update, 2 February 2014: The original video has been removed, so here’s another link instead:
And Mark Steyn‘s original comments, recently republished:
A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find … a battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green has never felt so right.”
So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man. Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure. … To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
Update, 9 February, 2017: The original and revised video links have all gone sour, so here’s a current version of the ad, triggered by Audi’s latest Super Bowl ad fiasco.
Amusingly, the tag line shown at the end of the commercial, Audi: Truth in Engineering, is proven to be false by the company’s systematic cheating on emission testing software in their cars (being part of the Volkswagon group, where the cheating was first discovered in their diesel models).
In late 2015, Volkswagen Group became embroiled in an emissions cheating scandal that also involved its Audi brand. Delicious irony — here was a brand that had touted itself a leader in environmental stewardship only to be unmasked as a fraud of epic proportions.
As late as November 2016, new revelations about the extent of Audi’s emissions scam were still coming to light. It was revealed that the scandal was not limited to diesel-engine cars, as previously thought, but included gasoline-powered Audi models as well.
So it was a curious choice for Audi to pat itself on the shoulder for yet another politically correct stand — pay equality for women — when its credibility was torn to shreds in its core competency: automobile manufacturing. Perhaps Audi thought this would provide good cover from their credibility woes, or perhaps they banked on an inattentive public with amnesia. A pretty good bet, I admit. But I have a long memory and a nose for hypocrisy.
So what is the answer to George Clooney’s questions? What should he tell his daughter?
I would tell her (and mine) that once a person has lied to you, then you can no longer trust that person. That if the person is truly repentant, they will find a way to make it up to you and rebuild the trust. But if they they try to distract from the extent of their dishonesty, you might as well put that relationship in the junkyard.
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ESR calls for even more naming and shaming of the climate fraudsters:
I too long to see the frauds and the fellow-travellers in the hell they’ve earned for themselves. But revenge, while it’s a tasty dish that long-time public “deniers” like Delingpole and myself are now thoroughly enjoying, isn’t the best reason to hound them and their enabling organizations out of public life. The best reason not to relent, to name and shame the fraudsters and shatter their reputations and humilate them — ideally, to the point where there’s a rash of prominent suicides as a result — is this:
If we don’t destroy them, they’ll surely ramp up yet another colossal, politicized eco-fraud to plague us all.
He’s quite right, many of the people deeply involved in the swindle would have been just as happy in another pseudo-scientific attempt to wrest control of the economy in order to “protect us” from ourselves.
Any conspiracies in sight? Yes, actually . . .
Conspiracy #1: Most of the environmental movement is composed of innocent Gaianists, but not all of it. There’s a hard core that’s sort of a zombie remnant of Soviet psyops. Their goals are political: trash capitalism, resurrect socialism from the dustbin of history. They’re actually more like what I have elsewhere called a prospiracy, having lost their proper conspiratorial armature when KGB Department V folded up in 1992. There aren’t a lot of them, but they’re very, very good at co-opting others and they drive the Gaianists like sheep. I don’t think there’s significant overlap with the scientists here; the zombies are concentrated in universities, all right, but mostly in the humanities and grievance-studies departments.
Conspiracy #2: The hockey team itself. Read the emails. Small, tight-knit, cooperating through covert channels, very focused on destroying its enemies, using false fronts like realclimate.org. There’s your classic conspiracy profile.
My model of what’s been going on is basically this: The hockey team starts an error cascade that sweeps up a lot of scientists. The AGW meme awakens chiliastic emotional responses in a lot of Gaianists. The zombies and the green-shirts grab onto that quasi-religious wave as a political strategem (the difference is that the zombies actively want to trash capitalism, while the green-shirts just want to hobble and milk it). Pro-AGW scientists get more funding from the green-shirts within governments, which reinforces the error cascade — it’s easier not to question when your grant money would be at risk for doing so. After a few times around this cycle, the hockey team notices it’s riding a tiger and starts on the criminal-conspiracy stuff so it will never have to risk getting off.
It’s been a long-standing — and safe — practice for members of the royal family to avoid controversy (at least, controversy in topics not actually involving members of the royal family). Prince Charles apparently didn’t get the memo recently:
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia is under government investigation for fraud, data manipulation and withholding or destroying scientific data in defiance of freedom of information requests. Many of the disgraced scientists working at the CRU were closely involved in putting together the now ferociously suspect Fourth Assessment Report for the notoriously unreliable Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) headed by the lethally compromised Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
Is this really the best time, you might wonder, for the future King of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to praise the CRU for the “quality” of its work and to dismiss the Climategate scandal as a “little blip”? (Hat tip: Roddy Campbell)
Well the Prince of Wales clearly thinks so or he wouldn’t have paid a visit to Norwich yesterday to deliver a jolly little fillip to the beleaguered scientists. In his sublime wisdom, Prince Charles clearly believes they have done no wrong at all.
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