Showing posts with label Peter Foster. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Peter Foster. Show all posts
Donna Laframboise strikes a nerve
Peter Foster: WWF’s tainted ‘witnesses’:
... Ms. Laframboise’s book claims that the WWF — along with other environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace — has “infiltrated” the IPCC. The WWF subsequently issued a press release describing the assertion as “ludicrous.” Her “sole evidence” was “some overlap between some of the thousands of scientists who have worked for the IPCC and members of a scientific advisory panel to WWF’s climate witness scheme.”
Funny how even the most tenuous link between any individual skeptic and Big Oil or Big Coal is considered to taint all skepticism, and yet to point out the implications of the very significant “overlap” between a radical activist organization and the IPCC is “ludicrous.” ...
Greeks despair
Reuters:
But we shouldn't be too smug. Peter Foster says we're all headed that way:
Greeks watched the latest political drama unfolding in their capital with a mixture of despair and disbelief."Looks bad"? "This week"? What's happening in Greece is bad. It's a disgrace, and has been for a lot longer than a week.
... "What happened this week was a disgrace. We looked bad and Europeans are already sick of paying for us."
But we shouldn't be too smug. Peter Foster says we're all headed that way:
... Greece is the result of mixing fundamentally Marxist principles with democratic governance (which the philosopher Karl Popper pointed out had happened by the middle of the last century in all Western countries), and then giving it a credit card with no limit. The anti-principle of “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” inevitably deteriorated into “From each productive sucker to each unionized public servant and policy wonk.”
This is a crisis not just of Greece, not just of the eurozone, but of nothing less than the dominant version of modern democracy itself. As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out 60 years ago, this is not the rule of “the people” but of politicians who compete to buy votes in order to wield power. Milton Friedman noted after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the collapse of Communism did not represent some kind of victory for Western forms of democratic economic management. It was just that, since they had capitalism to feed on, they were collapsing more slowly. Prof. Friedman also noted the shift in power from politicians to bureaucrats. “The government has become a self-generating monstrosity,” he said. “We don’t have government of the people, by the people, for the people. We have government of the people, by the bureaucracy, for the bureaucracy.” ...
Atlas Shrugged, the movie - a plot rewrite
Peter Foster’s review of Atlas Shrugged (Part 1), the movie, criticizes its implausible plot lines and suggests a re-write:
... its slightly off-kilter, futuristic, film noir look does capture - at least to some degree - the wonderful weirdness of the book on which it is based.
... The movie is set in today's not-too-distant future, but has kept Dagny in railroads and Hank in metals by positing a massive oil crisis due to the implosion of the Middle East. The Dow at 4,000 we can believe, but oil at $37.50 a gallon? At that price, a Chevy Volt might actually not be such a bad deal. Domestic oil is once again king (despite being utterly unaffordable) but is being carried by train. Whatever happened to pipelines?
None of this makes much sense. ... it should have been thoroughly reformulated to reflect statism's new threats.
... How's this for a rewrite? Dagny now runs a pipeline company trying to build a huge new system for a form of oil previously uneconomic but now made available by wonderful advances in capitalist technology. Let's say this oil is located in Alberta and her line is to go to the U.S. refineries of the Gulf Coast, to replace imports from dictatorships.
... Hank is still in the steel industry but his new wonder metal is now to be used to build a cheaper, stronger and safer type of pipe. However, he is opposed not by other steel or pipe makers, but by [new villains:] ... a pack of meretricious, politically savvy environmental NGOs ... fronted by naive chanting muddle-heads, who have no idea where their rich lifestyles originate, and backed by capitalist foundations (the irony!) that have been hijacked by socialists, and by CEOs either too cowardly or stupid to say no (or by those who seek to take advantage of government handouts to produce throwback technologies). These NGOs claim that the oil is "dirty" and destroying the climate and that Hank Rearden's new and better steel in unsafe, and threatens aquifers and environmentally sensitive areas. Their hysterical claims are eagerly swallowed by gullible liberal media. Meanwhile politicians, despite high unemployment, are prepared to sacrifice tens of thousands of jobs because they, too, are cowed by the ENGOs, and in any case attracted by the unparalleled power prospects of aspiring to control the weather.
... I know this is all a bit farfetched, but we are talking a movie plot here. ... [:-)]Works for me!
UN IPCC corruption, incompetence exposed, again!
"... In a meticulously referenced and deservedly praised page-turner, Ms. Laframboise ... demonstrates how the IPCC is a thoroughly political organization. ... Far from objectively weighing the best available science, it cherry-picks egregiously to support its main objective: to serve its government masters. ... The organization, Ms. Laframboise demonstrates, has also been thoroughly infiltrated by environmental NGOs, in particular the World Wildlife Fund.
The book elucidates how the panel’s much-vaunted “peer review” amounts to a “circular, incestuous process. ..."
Book excerpt. Buy the book.
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Yet Environment Canada is a participant in this charade and continues to publish this kind of crap:
"Climate change is one of the most important environmental issues of our time, requiring urgent action on the part of all governments and citizens."
Jeremy Rifkin - Maurice Strong on stilts
Peter Foster:
... Mr. Rifkin is the archetype of that creature known as the policy entrepreneur. He is a consistent generator of bad ideas, and it is bad ideas, more than anything, that help governments grow.
... For decades, he has been exploiting technophobia, junk science, postmodern psychobabble and folk economics to peddle a long list of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate scares, along with matching Big Government “solutions.”
... Mr. Rifkin, like his predecessors since Karl Marx, is very keen to “retire Adam Smith,” which in fact amounts to the continued rejection of a bunch of ideas that Smith never promoted, such as an alleged “conventional, top-down, centralized approach to organizing economic activity.”
... He teaches in the executive education program at the Wharton School of Business, and is an advisor not just to Chancellor Merkel but to the whole European Union. He is likely to get an enthusiastic hearing tomorrow from all those Queen’s Parkers supervising Ontario’s Green Energy Act.Rifkin sounds like Maurice ("Mo") Strong on stilts, big stilts. Given that list of "buyers" he's unquestionably a master "visionary" snake-oil salesman.
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