Jim’s Blog

Observe in this video the British police are as frightened and weak before Muslims, as the British police are terrifying and dominating over Britishers in other videos.  The British state is as contemptible to its enemies as it is terrifying to its subjects.

The fear and weakness we see in this video, we also saw when the Iranians over ran the British in the Persian gulf, and when the British fled before the Shia militias in Basra.

In this video, the Muslims rule the streets, and not only are the British frightened, weak, ashamed, and apologetic, but the British police, normally so arrogant, violent, and destructive, normally filled with brutal contempt for the merely law abiding middle class British civilians, are frightened, weak, ashamed, and apologetic.

The British state that has such contempt for Britishness, that it confidently will remake the British in its own image, in this video shows its true weakness and shame before Islam.

Bryan Caplan wonders if oil prices are a bubble.

When oil spikes abruptly, that means people made incorrect investment decisions - under invested in exploration, development, and gas to liquids conversion.

A simple back of the envelope calculation tells me they are still under investing. Exxon recently abandoned gas to liquids plant that would be profitable if oil remains above forty dollars to fifty dollars a barrel. But if everyone acts like that – and everyone is acting like that – oil is going to be way above fifty a barrel.

Do I hear someone saying “Hey. Do you think you are lot smarter than the guys running Exxon?”

It is quite simple.  For the price of oil to remain stable at present levels, we need to accommodate China’s industrialization by producing a lot more oil each year.  The planned increases in oil production add up to peanuts.  So the price of oil is heading up, and going to stay up.

“These days friends and enemies alike smell weakness at the heart of the Zionist Entity

…

“Arabs will soon be demanding one democratic state — Jews and Muslims — from Jordan to the sea. And even those who understand that this will mean the death of Israel will find themselves so confounded by the multicultural pieties of their own lands they’ll be unable to argue against it.”

Bush’s idea of exporting democracy to Muslim lands has turned out to be a disaster. World War II was against theoretically against nation state dictatorships. This war is a holy war. Our enemies can win elections, and frequently do.

The presidents that have done the most to smash capitalism have never been Democrats, because anti capitalist Democrat presidents have always found themselves paralyzed by gridlock – the pro capitalist faction unites along party lines, and the federal government system locks up, as it was designed to do. The founding fathers intentionally constructed the federal government so that it would be slow and inefficient at making large controversial changes.

The greatest catastrophes for capitalism have come from the anticapitalist Republican presidents, Nixon and Hoover, because they could get “bipartisan” anticapitalist measures through congress.

Environmentalists have always intended global warming as a justification installing a socialist command and control economy. McCain has just unveiled a global warming plan, theoretically market based, but in fact not in the slightest market based, a command and control plan which is the socialists wet dream. He calls it market based, but this merely means that bureaucrats will be able to blame markets for the chaos they create. The only role of the market in the plan is to be the guy that takes the fall. As Brutally Honest says, McCaine has drunk the koolaide

Maybe Obama is just as anti capitalist, or even more anti capitalist than McCain, but if he is, he will face gridlock.

Bryan Caplan writes

When someone says “There are too many Jews,” we suspect that he wants to kill Jews. Similarly, it turns out that at the root of Hitler’s propensity to kill people was his belief that there are too many people.

And if you’re tempted to say that Hitler proposed a barbaric solution for a real problem, take a look at how Germany actually did feed its population since 1945: increasing agricultural productivity and increasing exports. The two methods that Hitler dismissed out of hand transformed Germany into one of the richest nations in history.

Religions that command human sacrifice are good at providing power to their priesthood. Thus we see the first greenie famine being welcomed with delight by the true believers, much as they previously welcomed the return of malaria.

Environmentalists confidently state with immense confidence all sorts of “facts”, most of which are impossible to meaningfully test, some of which can be easily tested, and which test false – which test does not impair the confidence of the environmentalists in the slightest, just as the obviouse falsehood of the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation does not trouble those Christians who believe in it in the slightest.

Two obvious and extreme example are:

1. the much repeated “fact” that we are in the middle of a vast mass extinction, that ten thousand species go extinct every year. Ask any greenie to name a species that has recently gone extinct. He will not be able to answer, and will be entirely untroubled by his inability to answer.
2. the much repeated “fact” that the ice is melting, even though satellites show that the area of the world under ice has not changed significantly since satellites have been observing.

When environmentalist “scientists” report the disappearance of ice, they are not in fact reporting the disappearance of physical corporeal ice and snow, the stuff that causes your car to slide, and has to be shovelled off the path, the stuff that is apt to sink ships at sea. What they are really reporting is the disappearance of magic ice, the spirit of the ice, Gaia’s infusion of spirituality into a frozen wilderness that they contemplate from the comfort of Starbucks. Hence their total indifference to physical evidence. The holy ice, which is melted merely by man’s unholy gaze is disappearing, even though the merely physical ice continues to endanger shipping in pretty much the same places as it has for the last century or so.

Similarly when environmentalist “scientists” report that the polar bear is endangered, they are entirely indifferent to actual numbers of polar bears. Far from being endangered, polar bears, like deer, a pest and a hazard. Rather, because they raid garbage dumps, because they have become a pest and a hazard, the holy spirit of wild nature of which the holy bear is a manifestation, is in danger of going extinct.

One measure of world temperature that is relatively objective is the total amount of ice. It is hard to measure average world temperature precisely, hard even to say what such an average means, and those that claim to measure it with great precision over great periods of time are liars, but ice, ice is a fact.

And so, from time to time, one gets an anthropogenic warming story, “Oh no the ice is melting”.

Another Record Arctic Ice Melt Expected This Summer

Whenever you read such a story, check the total amount of ice. It does not change much, and has not changed much. Some times it goes up a bit, sometimes down a bit. When ice melts dramatically in one place at one time it usually freezes up in another place not very long afterwards. Today, it is pretty much the same as ever it was.

Which very much suggests that the world’s temperature has not changed much – that global warming, whether anthropogenic or not, is so small as to be unmeasurable compared to ordinary year to year and decade to decade fluctuations.

We have not had a really good direct measure of global temperature until the Aqua satellite was launched. And since the Aqua satellite was launched, we have had no “global warming”.

Before Aqua, the best way to estimate changes in global temperature was to look at proxies such as total ice coverage - and the proxies have been telling us that nothing much has changed.

Question:

How can you tell a Muslim moderate?

Answer:

His throat is cut from ear to ear.

“Iraq the model” reports a large bunch of moderates from Iraq, but a severe shortage of them from anywhere else. The question then is: is it safe to be a moderate in Iraq because US troops have created a democracy, or is it safe to be a moderate in Iraq because the country is still under US occupation and US troops are apt to arrest Iraqi leaders who misbehave?

“The Long War Journal” reports that the Iraqi government is corrupt, and that if the US were to withdraw tomorrow, there would be civil war, so I am inclined to bet on the latter – that it is possible for a Muslim to be a moderate in Iraq because the place is still substantially under US martial law.

“Financial Cryptography″ reports that use of the US$ as a medium of international exchange and as an international sttore of value has declined to about two thirds of what it was four years ago.

Changes in the way people use money are extremely slow. Because money is a store of value, people are profoundly reluctant to change. Such a change is cataclysmically rapid.

In my own personal experience, US banks and US financial institutions have suffered a cataclysmic decline in competence, honesty, reliability, and efficiency over the past decade or so, particularly in international transactions. Over the past several years I have been repeatedly astonished and disbelieving at basic failures of integrity and inability to perform the ordinary duties of a bank, such as simply making sure that money does indeed get from where it is, to where it is supposed to go, or to make reasonable and realistic assessments of credit worthiness and financial worth. The propensity of the Bush administration to print money, and the fact that the Iraq war is taking longer and costing more than expected is also having a severe impact. I have no idea which of these several causes is the more serious.

Paul Collier explains the famine.

In the modern era, famines are usually caused by war or socialism.  This time around, it is a bit different.  Collier lists four causes - one is Chinese prosperity, two are environmentalism - the ban on genetically modified food, and the American biofuel program, and one is social engineering – state intervention to preserve small (and thus ineffectual) farms as a voting block.

As I remarked earlier, the twentieth century was a time of socialist famines.  Let us hope the twenty first century is not a time of greenie famines.

To keep the price of oil from soaring even further the world needs to increase oil production three million barrels per day, each year, largely because large numbers of Chinese want to drive cars.

We cannot increase production except in those places where private property rights are reasonably secure, and there is no oil left in the ground in those places. So it has to be coal to liquids.

Most coal to liquids plants are being developed in China. Du Minghua, deputy director of the China Shenhua CTL research institute, said China could produce thirty million tonnes of liquid fuels each year by 2020.

That is six hundred thousand barrels per day. That is about one sixtieth the rate of increase we need.

In America greenies are taking the same approach to banning coal to liquids as they have taken to banning nuclear power. The proposed regulation is that Americans will not be allowed to convert coal to liquids on a large scale unless they can prove that the CO2 can be permanently disposed of – but of course nothing can ever be proven to those who choose to make themselves too stupid to understand the proof. Presidential candidate Obama goes one step further, and proposes to ban substitutes for oil unless they emit twenty percent less CO2 than oil, which bans any use of coal to substitute for oil

A coal to liquids plant needs to be fairly large scale to be economical, needs to produce at least three million tonnes per year, sixty thousand barrels per day. To stop the price of oil from rising further, the world needs to build one of these plants every week, for the next several decades, to meet the Chinese demand for cars.

Yet we see no political will to permit such developments, and not a lot of enthusiasm amongst developers to doing them. To the extent that developers are working on such projects, their primary focus is on assuaging greenie opposition, rather than the technological problems of converting vast amounts of coal to oil. If it is hard to get oil wells drilled off the coast of California or in Alaska, what are your prospects of getting a coal to oil plant approved?

People are starving yet we still treat energy developers as criminals, rather than heroes.