Napoleon and the French Revolution

A bit of an odd monologue today, but it has a point.

I heard some time ago of the Khan Academy, a great resource for autodidacts. At the time the only history available there was the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, so I watched the whole lot; what a horrifying series that was. What a barbaric forerunner of the 20th-century communist revolutions, what terrible conflicts for the grandiose ambitions of one man.

What is more worrying, and certainly more current, is the French attitude to both the Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte. They are both openly revered. The French motto is the motto of the Revolution; the French National Anthem is the Anthem of the Revolution, schools are named after its violent leaders (I went on exchange to École Robbespierre). Although the French are a little more ambivalent towards him, Napoleon Bonaparte is still widely considered a French hero, or else considered to have helped France or Europe in some ways; Metro stops are still named for his generals. The pupil I exchanged with at École Robbespierre was utterly adamant that Napoleon had ended his wars victorious; he would not believe otherwise.

Violence of the French Revolution: this time, ironically, the execution of Robbespierre

Why do I consider these things today, and why are they important?

Here I have a confession: I was reading the Daily Mail. I usually refuse, for personal reasons, but I was in a coffee shop awaiting my wife, and that was all that was available. In it A.N. Wilson has an article on the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo (for those educated in Britain, that will be in 2015) and the lack of official plans for celebrations.

Yet this was a victory every bit as important for modern Europe as the victory over Nazism and Fascism and the victory over Communism. We celebrate these victories in some official way. We honour the great figures in these victories, with a statue to Ronald Reagan having been unveiled today, Independence Day.

The Communist Parties and Nazi Parties are widely reviled today, most importantly in their own countries (with the possible exception of Russia). People recognise that these were evil regimes. People would not wish to be associated with the political ideals of these regimes (even when their views happen to coincide).

Yet in France it is not so, and it is just accepted that victory over Napoleon and post-Revolutionary France are something to keep quiet about, not to be triumphalist, as if the violent, repressive, French dominance of Europe was something that could have been allowed to remain, the victory in these terrible wars something to be ashamed of as we are now allied to France.

Napoleon Bonaparte was an egotistical bastard. He set a continent ablaze, killed on a scale never seen before, not to be seen again for a century. He did so for his own personal satisfaction.

A.N. Wilson puts it well, in comparing the two opposing commanders that day.

When told he risked his life by riding to and fro on his horse, [Wellington]replied: 'The battle's won. My life's of no consequence now.'

Napoleon would never have said that. To such a megalomaniac, his own life was all-important; those of the people he killed and enslaved were of no consequence whatever.

It is about time France recognised the horrors of the Revolution and the subsequent wars, as the Germans did with the Nazi regime, and that French honour for the Revolution and Bonaparte is challenged. This attitude is at the core of an unhealthy French nationalism, that leads directly to some of the most damaging aspects of the EU and of French dealings with the world.

On a final note – what do the three evil regimes compared here have in common? The French Revolutionaries, the Communists and the Nazis all started out as socialists.

Edit: just to add a comment to any that seriously doubt that the French revere the monstrous post-revolutionary regime. 25 years ago I was on a school exchange in southern France, to a modern secondary school. It's name? Ecole Robespierre.. Named after Maximilien Robbespierre. I doubt the name has been changed.

Hollywood Was Not Always Socialist

That Hollywood is, despite itself consisting of businesses that aim to make a profit, a part of the socialist anti-business movement is beyond reasonable argument. Pointing to the numerous films where absurd plots make businesses and their senior executives the antagonist is a fairly weak argument, albeit true, but there is now a book detailing evidence, Primetime Propaganda and of course a whole website of news about Big Hollywood from right-wing commentators which documents left-wing foolishness.

I am a great fan of Audrey Hepburn, so am watching Sabrina, where Hepburn plays the eponymous heroine, and her (eventual) love interest, played by Humphrey Bogart is a senior executive of a large, family-run conglomerate. At one point his wastrel, playboy brother he asks what his “urge to go into plastics” will prove. His answer is something a socialist could never write

“Prove? Nothing much.

A new product has been found, something of use to the world, so a new industry moves into an undeveloped area. Factories go up, machines are brought in, a harbor is dug and you're in business.

It’s purely coincidental of course that people who never saw a dime before suddenly have a dollar, and bare-footed kids wear shoes and have their teeth fixed and their faces washed.

What’s wrong with the kind of an urge that gives people libraries, hospitals, baseball diamonds and uh, movies on a Saturday night?”

This is one of the best rebuttals I have ever heard of socialism, a succinct explanation of why business should be encouraged, and not opposed.

What Is The Effect of Big Government?

This is another video I found on ReasonTV that i think needs wider distribution. In principle it needs to be answered before anyone can argue for more government intervention and a larger role for the state.

On The Subject of Education …

This is the response of parents in LA to poor schools, on Reason TV. Demand choice, demand ‘charter schools’, self-administered state schools. These sound identical to official Conservative Party policy, the policy that convinced me I could support Cameron despite other reservations.

Note that the teachers’ unions just don’t get it. They simply do not understand why this is popular, why it has worked in other places, nor do they understand that the choice is not theirs to make. They have no legitimate say, apart from their say as parents if they have children in school. Their choice is where they are willing to work and on what terms after this decision has been made.

Notice also the disingenuous debate. One person, I can only assume in the teaching union, criticises the idea of freedom of choice because the term was used by segregationists. What possible relevance does that have, apart from dishonestly linking demands for freedom to oppression? Really sickening.

Update: I have just noticed that one of the signs held by a protesting teachers’ union member says “Our Schools No Privatization”. Well actually they are not your schools are they? They belong legally to the state, and morally to the mass of parents reliant on the schools. I am glad these are taking back control.

Why Demand More Regulation?

There have been many demands, especially from the left, for more regulation of the world’s banks after the catastrophe that started last year. In addition to regulation other forms of coercion, from government threats to protest have been used to subvert the banks.

However this seems to be a knee-jerk reaction. I have not seen anywhere a considered argument to show that lack of regulation in the banks was a major factor; many arguments have been advanced for regulatory failure, but due to excessive or incorrect regulation.

Indeed I have seen many mentions of regulations that actually helped to both set up the underlying high-risk mortgages and to pass the crisis through the banking system in the USA. Banks were chastised for ‘racism’ when it was realised that a higher proportion of blacks were turned down for mortgages than other groups in the USA, and threatened with the law. This was backed of course by political action by the left, including ACORN who bullied banks with demonstrations and by Clinton’s administration.

So at least to some of the cause was the regulation itself and non-regulatory coercion by the government, regulators and even campaigning bodies politically connected with many of those currently demanding more regulation and trying to tell the banks how to operate.

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University has published an interesting paper by Arnold Kling detailing some of the regulatory failings that led to the collapse. The main thesis is that regulations intended to deal with previous banking problems from the 1930s to 1980s set up a series of conditions necessary for the recent crisis to occur and to have such widespread effects. In the process it has gained my grudging approval for the initial government financial support for financial institutions in the USA (although I am rather less certain about those in this country, and think that the banks should now be allowed to pay the money back, which Obama has resisted).

However what I found far more interesting is that actually the banks were subverting the regulations then in place with the tacit agreement of the regulators. Those banks were moving risk off balance sheets, and circling risk around the markets and buying back more. So-called NRSROs (agencies approved by the government to rate the risk on credit instruments) had an incentive to play down risks and so upgrade credit ratings, and followed that incentive.

All this meant that by the rules of international banking agreements reached in Basel the banks cut the capital holdings they were required to keep to back their debts from about 8% to about 4.5%. That effectively increased their exposure, their leverage, by over 75%. This was great, because they were making money on these deals, so to increase the amount they could buy into by 75% meant they made 75% more profit.

The articles quoted by Kling written by regulators at the time show that they not only knew about the banks subverting the rules, but approved of it, for the same reason as the banks. The regulators approved because it allowed the banks to do more business, by higher leveraging.

Of course when it all started to fail it was the high leveraging, the low capitalisation and use of over-rated instruments to capitalise that caused the domino effect and a run on the banks and insurance institutions. Had the spirit of the rules been followed then they would have been able to meet immediate obligations, and would not have had to offload poor assets in a great hurry, further suppressing prices and triggering capitalisation problems at other banks whose supposedly safe assets used as capital had just been devalued and who themselves were insufficiently liquid, so had to sell the same poor products that no-one wanted any more and further collapse the price.

So if the regulators are not capable of holding the banks to account, in fact they agree with the banks, all the regulation in the world will simply be circumvented. Huge amounts of money can be made by getting around regulation others follow, so a lot of sharp, innovative people are paid a lot to do so, and regulators’ vigilance must be equally sharp or they are worse than useless.

Now I don’t advocate an unregulated market. However regulation should be as light, simple and intelligently-designed as possible, and then firmly enforced.

In this case capitalisation rules were in place. They were over-complicated and poorly enforced to set up the situation where the crisis could occur. They then became part of the crisis, spreading it from bank to bank as each was forced to sell assets as prices of those assets collapsed, forcing prices further down.

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals for the article and video.

Update: Lisa has provided a link in the comments to an interesting video.

Although it does suggest talk several years ago of more regulation, this only applied to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which as Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) did not fall under the same rules as independent institutions. However they were subverting the rules that did apply, by buying political influence to attack the regulator when he found the problems.

Note that while I suggested there should have been concern at capital reserves of 4.5% in the commercial banks, Freddie Mac was down at 3% with Franklin Raines claiming this was so secure they should be able to drop to “…under 2%”.

This video is partisan, only showing Democrats defending Freddie Mac and Republicans talking of concerns and of more regulation, whereas some Republicans were taking money from the two GSEs. However the vast majority of money went to Democrats, and there is far more evidence of defence of GSEs malpractices by Democrats many of whom now work closely with Obama. Note that one of he reasons given in the video for defending Fannie and Freddie is that they allowed ‘innovative’ mortgages – exactly what caused the crisis, but important to ACORN and the Democrats.

Update: and evidence suggests it probably wasn't executive bonus culture that caused the crisis either.

Post Racial America

Seeing the silver lining

There was not a lot for ACORN to be proud of in the last week. They very quickly lost a lot of money and influence that there is a strong argument they should never have had in the first place, let alone after evidence of vote rigging last year.

However the Weasel Times and Stoat Intelligencer has a great take on the story, the positive side for ACORN’s public image. So Obama’s supporters are finally embracing his claims to a post-racial America!

Corruption in Left-Wing Pseudo Charity (updated 11:30 16/9)

There has been an undercurrent of grumbling about pseudo charities (non-profit organisations which are largely funded by government and use a significant proportion of those funds for political lobbying and campaigning) in the right-wing and especially in the libertarian blogosphere. Mostly the complaints are about political influence and the waste of tax-payers’ money.

In America they appear to have a problem that is at least a couple of orders of magnitude beyond that. ACORN (Association of Community Organisations for Reform Now) has been shown to have been willing to assist importation of children for the purpose of sexual slavery, for profit with the aim of political campaigning. Assistance went as far as advising how to buy a brothel and to cheat the taxes on the money earned, by claiming the child prostitutes as dependents. ACORN then requested a donation.

Really. I am not kidding. Tax evasion. Mortgage fraud. Children. Slavery. Sex. Selling actual children for sexual gratification. Then claiming tax benefits because they are children. Then using the money for a political campaign.

This happened in three different states. It could possibly be worse if they start advising on how to hide the bodies once they are too old to work, but I am not sure how else it could be. Yet there are rumours that the people exposing this have something devastating to release today. WTF?

To paraphrase the article linked above, once is a bad apple, twice is an unfortunate coincidence, thrice is systematic corruption resulting from policy.

There are two things that really strike me about the response to this.

Seven senators, six Democrat and one independent, voted to carry on funding ACORN.

This has not been a huge international news story; even in the US it has been remarkably quiet. Below is what the BBC considers to be world news and Americas news at 14:00 today (click to enlarge World News).

ACORN is an organisation that has strong connections with Barack Obama which looked like having significant political influence with the Democrats in power. They were at one-time a client of Obama’s. They helped elect him, in many cases breaking electoral law, in other alleged cases breaking employment law. He had arranged for them to work on the national census (risking a constitutional challenge, which should be a big deal to a former constitutional law professor). He had arranged for them to be in the stream for government funding that was potentially to total several billion dollars.

Is Patrick Swayze’s sad but not unexpected demise really more newsworthy? Is the entirely predictable anger of Islamic fascists really more important for us to know about than a charity supporting child sexual slavery in the USA? Can you imagine the headlines if Halliburton or any other organisation with real or alleged connections with Bush had been caught on tape giving illegal advice? Three times.

Update: note I did not mention which party’s candidate ACORN thought would gain from political donations they were advising on the laundering of. Do I need to?

Update: a fourth video has been released, of a similar nature, filmed in California. It’s a good one though, naming politicians, ACORN employee offering to kill anyone exposing the brothel, suggesting violence against the underage girl, admitting killing her husband. It’s … wow, just watch it.

One ellipsis here hints at more videos to come …

Oh, and it appears that Acorn was breaking the law even operating in Maryland where the first video was shot.

Update: Hot Air has more on the embarrassed silence of the media.

Update: The co-founder of ACORN Wade Rathke, has responded, claiming that this is a “…fake issue”. My response warranted a new post …

Thanks to Instapundit for some of the links.

Is Climate Catastrophism Harming the Environment?

“We can’t save everything, but we have to save the richest places, and the richest places on Earth are forests like this”

This is a quote from the documentary programme about New Guinea, “Lost land of the Volcano”. Obviously it is a point that I think can be debated, but I think it has as good a claim to a valid environmental concern as any. Personally I would argue that it has a greater claim than most.

So what is the best way to protect rainforests? There have been many methods tried, with mixed results at best. However there are some ideas to consider that might point to a long-term strategy that might be of great indirect benefit to the rainforests.

Rainforest destruction is usually connected to economic activity. Logging, slash-and-burn agriculture and crude mineral extraction is primitive economic activity, of a kind that tends to reduce importance to the community as the economy develops.

Environmentalists’ claims that economic development increases environmental destruction is not as obvious as they claim. Vaclav Klaus has pointed out that the Czech environment, destroyed by the Communist economy, only improved with the developments in the economy of a free Czech Republic and Slovakia. Developing economies not only allow resources for clean technology, but also for activities not essential to everyday survival, such as the leisure to take interest in long-term environmental protection.

In the UK, and I believe other western economies, the number of trees has increased in the last few decades. Outside areas with direct population pressure the forest land has all but stopped retreating, and in many areas is being managed to either keep its extent or even spread. This is after massive destruction of forests for centuries. In Britain continuous forests once stretched from the south coast to the Scottish Highlands.

Economic development also tends to lead very quickly to population stability and even reduction, reducing environmental pressure. Human populations explode when they have western medicine available and food aid or improved agricultural technology but not education and other cultural changes which lead to family planning. The most economically-developed nations are almost all suffering from reducing populations.

Is the solution to the preservation of the rainforests as simple as economic development? I doubt it. Rule of law and property rights will be essential both for that economic development, but also for ensuring that someone has an interest in the forests beyond short-term gain, and that those guardians are able to protect their wards.

Unfortunately environmentalists seem to have a knee-jerk reaction against economic development. There are many connections with communism, with many former communists and fellow travellers prominent in the environmental movement. They have a dislike of economic independence and also of property rights and the strict rule of law.

I would argue then that for many years the environmental movement has opposed development that might have helped protect the environment. However without authority they brought attention to important issues, but struggled to make a great impact until a few years ago. A weak hypothesis, supported by models that skated over the most critical issues using fudge factors made up by true believers, was trumpeted as The Great New Truth.

Politicians with little understanding of the science or of scientific process used this claim to their own ends, to take power over people, and to keep themselves in office. The science is uncertain; the politicians bought the certainty of scientists, and distorted the channels of communication until they only heard what they wanted to hear. That might just seriously damage some of the wonders of nature, not just in parallel with but because of condemning billions to poverty.

Socialist Blind Spot

It has always seemed to me that many socialists don’t just dispute that a free market works to benefit all involved, but that they are incapable of understanding that it might, or even that some rational people believe it does.

As far as I can see that is why a significant proportion actually think that to be capitalist, libertarian or worst of all Conservative is to be evil, is to be utterly selfish. They don’t believe it is actually possible for the free market to help people, anything without altruistic motives cannot have a positive result. Of course nurses, doctors and fire crews are never selfish in working for pay or even in demanding higher pay, they are altruistic whether they work hard or not, and whatever their pay.

I watch little television, and on the BBC it is strictly QI, Top Gear or Have I Got News, but I am visiting my parents. On Thursday night Hard Talk was on, and Stephen Sackur was interviewing Steve Forbes, CEO of a major magazine publisher and editor-in-chief of Business magazine.

Sackur just could not understand that Forbes could lay responsibility for the financial collapse on government rather than bankers; it was not that he disagreed, he just seemed unable to accept that someone could hold that opinion. Forbes made a case that monetary indiscipline and regulations, especially the unpredictability of government intervention, were the root cause, but Sackur just kept asking Forbes to condemn bankers and accept that capitalism was dead. He was obsessed by it, and showed little sign of listening to Forbes’s arguments and no sign at all of understanding them.

OK so the BBC should not show this sort of naked socialism in its interviewers, nor have a non-entity who cannot understand basic economics interview a man like Steve Forbes on that topic. However what struck me was a classic case of a leftie assuming that evil capitalists, and the evils of free markets must be to blame, and government must have a role in recovery but did not have any responsibility, and utterly incapable of understanding that a very knowledgeable person might disagree.

Ed Balls Was Right

Stop the presses, I agree with something Ed Balls said, and history is on his side. It is just a pity he said it in 1991, then became a member of the government that did exactly the reverse of what he recommended.

Guido Fawkes always has an excellent quote of the day. The current one from Balls is

“The allure of a minimum wage is deceptive and should be resisted … Fostering a high wage, high skill economy is the only way to reverse Britain’s relative economic decline and to generate the resources to eradicate poverty. But the minimum wage is not the answer. If anything the minimum wage will make it even harder to achieve these ends”

Unfortunately he has proved prescient.

I never trusted Balls because he is not stupid yet is on Brown’s coat tails.

Most of what the Labour government has done in twelve years, and almost everything Brown has done in that time has had the aim of furthering the Labour Party, and in the latter case furthering Brown within the Party. I think Balls knew quite well that much government policy would not have the effect proclaimed, even have the reverse effect. However that would not be obvious in a simplistic reading, by the BBC and the parts of the population the policy was targeted towards.

These policies were intended to give a good impression while making ever more people beholden to the Labour Government. This is government for the purpose of gerrymandering, with no other aim.

Orwell’s Forgotten Predictions

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book from which most people only know one concept, that of being under constant surveillance. It is far from the most important concept in the book.

Not a Sheep highlights today a satirical comparison of 1984 and Brave New World, Aldous Huxley’s idea of socialist Utopia. The cartoon goes much further than that shallow idea of being watched, but does not address what I always felt to be the most important themes in 1984, Newspeak and corruption of history. It is too long since I read Brave New World, and I cannot remember if or how Huxley addressed these issues.

In 1984 language was changed to control thought. Words were not to be used, others no longer had all the same meanings and others still had their meanings reversed. In that way it was intended to control thought, because abstract thought without language is very difficult (and all but impossible to communicate) and control of language allowed control of what could be thought in that language.

While I agree with the cartoon that Huxley’s vision is closer in many ways to developing reality, Orwell did get the language concept right. The authoritarian left is quite literally doing what Orwell predicted.

There are words we cannot say, concepts we cannot express without being the object of contempt or hatred. Other words and concepts have been twisted to the reverse of their original meanings. Words such as 'liberal', 'tolerant' and 'progressive', concepts such as anti-racism, anti-fascism and diversity are used to mean exactly the opposite.

An important slogan in 1984 is “Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past”. Winston Smith, the protagonist, works is the Ministry of Truth changing the records of history, the control of the past.

The left has altered history, in a wide variety of ways. We are told that European culture is solely responsible for slavery, when the truth is that until European culture developed to ban slavery it was almost universal. We are told that FDR saved the world from depression with his ‘Keynesian’ and other socialist policies, when they actually deepened recession into depression, and Keynes later disavowed them. We are told that racism is historically right-wing, when from the Democrat Party and unions in the Southern USA to Nazis and Communists it has been far more a factor in the left.

Unless we wish to succumb to shrill left-wing authoritarianism we must take back our history and take back our language. In order to do so we need to challenge bias in government, education and the media, especially powerful, influential special interest groups like the NUT and the BBC.

Be Thankful For Bickering Nations

We can only hope that the G20 group will reach no substantive agreement as they argue for different measures, and so will not further damage their economies.

Gordon Brown has argued that nations must keep on overspending. This is the tactic that has failed to work in Britain and the USA, as the economies of France and Germany, which conspicuously did not try to spend their way out of recession, start to recover. Since Britain was best placed to weather the recession according to one G. Brown of Westminster and Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, the massive increase in already bloated public spending cannot have done much good.

A massive splurge of public spending during recession does not work to help recovery. It can create artificial growth (or of slow-down in contraction of the economy) in the same way as spending on your credit card can artificially increase your spending power. It does so at the expense of the future and also at the expense of private-sector growth. In the meantime it damages the free market as government interferes, intervenes and distorts the labour market.

If Britain is ever to recover we need other economies to be successful. Let us hope that other governments do not heed Brown, and continue to reduce their 'stimulus' spending.

Why Should We Protect The Environment?

We are told to protect the environment, but first we need to ask why

I did say after a discussion on the science that I would discuss the politics of climate change. However first I want to take issue with the rational basis of environmentalism, which strengthens the case that the whole idea is political.

The Earth is one planet in a universe probably populated with many millions of billions, roughly 4.65 billion years old. There is evidence of life in rocks older than 3.8 billion years. During that time there has been one dominant form of life, prokaryotes, basically bacteria. They make up most of the Earth’s biodiversity and even biomass. Eukaryotes evolved much later, and form everything else, including some single-cell organisms more complicated than bacteria.

Macro-organisms, larger creatures, evolved much later still, perhaps about 650 million years ago. Since then different forms appear and disappear in the fossil record. The greatest mass extinction known (the end Permian, since you ask) seems to have wiped out perhaps 95% of all species identified by fossils. Other times creatures just evolve to be something distinct, or die out.

The point I am trying to make is that we can split life into small, simple but vastly abundant things that we could not wipe out if we tried (with the exception of those that are dependent upon us, like smallpox, or on another organism that we wiped out) and large organisms that go extinct as a normal part of the changes in the world. More importantly new creatures evolve, and biodiversity is always different but it is always there.

So what is the point of environmentalism? To ‘save the Earth’ many would say, but the Earth is not under threat. The Earth is 6000 billion billion tons of rock that has been here for over 4 billion years, not a kitten we are drowning. Gaians might believe differently, but then Gaian hypothesis was just made up from very little, it makes no sense, and the truth might be the very opposite.

Other environmentalists would say that they are trying to save animals and plants, keep biodiversity. The fact that they tend to save the cute and the majestic animals before the rest is suspect. In fact once humans have gone then whatever damage has been done the Earth will recover. That process will take a trivial time, in terms of the Earth’s history.

Cruelty and stress to animals is another answer given, but that is the way of nature. Life in the wild is harsh, and basic ecology tells us that species will expand to fill their range to the limit of available resources. Breeding will always put pressure on range and resources, and individuals will suffer and die. Human activity simply changes the size of the range and available resources, not the fact of a limit. Species cannot feel suffering.

None of this says that we should not protect the environment, or protect species, but simple pat answers don’t tell us why, and ‘why’ turns out to be critical. The rational reason for protecting the environment is human needs and human morality, as nothing else on Earth has needs that we should rationally put above our own.

We are occupying an infinitesimal amount of time in an infinitesimal amount of space in the universe. The only reason we believe Earth is special and should be preserved is that we occupy it.

This turns environmentalism on its head. We should be working for a good human environment. It does not excuse us stewardship of the Earth, but it means that we are looking after the environment for humanity and for human morality. So any higher imperative for human existence or of human morality must take preference. Whereas traditional ‘greens’ put animals and nature on a par with or more often above humanity.

The most extreme greens have indeed called for humanity’s destruction. We can see how irrational that is in that the only possible reason for that could be human morality (rendered inane as soon as the solution is achieved) or to help nature recover, which is pointless on the scale of the existence of humankind.

Down the scale of environmentalists almost all the serious activists advocate action that would seriously damage human comfort of life. The most widespread of those being massive reductions in carbon dioxide demanded by global warming alarmists. This would not only seriously restrict human lifestyle (an important consequence trivialised by those who advocate carbon restrictions, either because they think temperature is more important than people or because, like Al Gore, they know their own lifestyles will not be harmed) but it will kill millions. It is already increasing the desperate poverty in Africa, not only grinding poor people into the dust but killing them as well.

None of this makes any sense to the human environment. No moral choice to keep climate constant* is more important than the immoral act of the harm done.

The net result that can be claimed though is damage to western economies, damage to the integrated global market, political harm to large companies now unwilling to defend their activity, suppression of free economic growth and implementation of draconian rules, restricting individual freedom. All of these are aims of communists.

The connections between socialism and the hard-core environmental movement have been widely explored, and even publicised by the communists. Now the US President has appointed an avowed communist as a green adviser, most ridiculously to try to create jobs.

So the fundamentalist green movement is run through with red, and the results of the climate panic constitute a wish-list for socialism, but do more harm than good to the environment. Can anyone seriously doubt that the climate change debate is almost pure politics?

*This is the political discussion, so I am not trying to break the scientific case for anthropogenic climate change, just show that the case is politicised.

Update: I forgot to relate the politics behind this to Critical Theory, the back-door attempt to spread communism through a variety of apparently unrelated left-wing causes as detailed in the most important video I posted a link to last week. The important common factor in in the causes linked by critical theory was to attack western values and strengths. Fundamentalist environmentalists certainly aim for that.

Update: More evidence of politics in climate science.

TV Documentary Lies To Steal Presidential Election

No it was not Obama’s election, in fact they were not successful. However Bernie Goldberg has further proof that CBS deliberately lied to try and influence the close Presidential race in 2004.

It has long been known that Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS documentary programme 60 minutes that seemed to show a senior officer’s criticism of a young Lieutenant G W Bush, suggest that he went absent without leave and support accusations that he failed to fulfil his obligations to the Air National Guard. The accusation was that he was a slacker, who was trying to avoid being drafted to Vietnam by joining the ANG and avoiding duties where possible, protected by his father in the Senate.

Of course it turned out that the documents were fake, and there the story ends for most of the news media, an embarrassment brushed over.

Well it turns out that not only did Lt Bush not shirk his duties, not only did he specifically volunteer to go to Vietnam (others with more experience were chosen instead), but that Mary Mapes, the producer of that episode of 60 Minutes, knew at the time it was made that he had volunteered. She had been told on more than one occasion.

This is really very serious.

I was no Bush supporter (although knowing more now I am relieved Gore and Kerry lost) but neither did I ever subscribe to the ridiculous ‘idiot’ or ‘Hitler’ memes. It was always known that election was close, and Vietnam was important. The media painted Kerry as a hero to help his cause (although his record was suspect while he was there, and he told lies about atrocities once he returned).

The Democrats were trying to paint Bush as a coward to contrast, and the 60 Minute episode was widely quoted in the press to support that; it could easily have changed the election result. Mary Mapes was a known ‘liberal’ as the Americans put it. It appears she produced a programme that she knew all along was advancing a lie, in order to influence an election. That is shocking, even for the modern news media.

What is even more widely relevant is that this information has been available for several years, and the US news media do not want to know. They will not tell the truth.

Background For Those Unfamiliar

This incident brought Charles Johnson’s Little Green Football (UPDATE: link removed as Charles Johnson has descended into insanity, and I am not willing to direct people to his creepy blog) libertarian blog to national (and to some degree international) media attention, when he challenged the documents and proved that the document below, dated 1973, was almost certainly produced on Microsoft Word (the animation compares the 60 Minutes fax, and identical wording written in Word with default fonts and paragraph settings), and could not have been written on any known typewriter available in 1973.

How Sick Can They Get?

I am not sure how to put this, as it is … stunningly crass. Ace of Spades is reporting an NRO post that a writer at the left-wing Huffington Post has said of Senator Ted Kennedy’s career that Mary Jo Kopechne would “… [maybe] feel it was worth it”.

There goes the left again; I said Senator Kennedy had plumbed the depths and continued on for fathoms, then less than four hours later those left manage to go even further than their mentor. Even I, who have few illusions about socialists often being unpleasant and self-righteous people, am truly stunned by this.

All You Need To Know About Balls

Warning: article contains a photograph. Do not scroll down if you are of nervous disposition or violent temper.

Ed Balls is not the most popular man in British politics. He revolts me. He is a known Brown sycophant, but I think the real reason he is detested is that he plays politics. He is like those people who get involved in the student union, or the committee of their club. The politics is more important than what actually gets done in the job, because the job is trivial, the prestige, the petty power and socialism are everything.

The title of Mr Balls’s article in today's Grauniad, Old Tories In Disguise, is the first sign of despair to all who care about education. It is clearly simply an attack piece against the Conservatives, as if Balls cannot quite believe Labour are in power, and like the press still think of them as opposition. Instead of a positive attitude to dealing with the education system, Balls just wants to use it to beat the hated foe.

The article continues in that vein, meaningless hot air designed only to attack the Conservatives, wrapped in self-satisfied dogma. It is treated as self-evident that government compulsion and guarantees are a good thing, without considering the corollary that freedom and self-reliance are therefore bad.

How can the man in charge of schools use the phrase “…less than 30% of pupils…”? Either he is ignorant of very basic grammar (as is whichever SpAd helped him write the piece) or he can only think of children as statistics, a continuous quantity with no individuals, just an amorphous mass.

I take no responsibility for vomit damage to keyboards, or screens broken by thrown objects.

The piece is also dishonest. Talking about Conservative policy, the so-called ‘Swedish model’, although I can think of far better Swedish models and this policy is used in many other places, he claims that it is going to be more expensive by only considering Sweden.

All I can say is ‘Balls’. Education is already expensive in this country, and the vouchers could save a lot of money, whatever the Swedish experience.

A similar system is more expensive in Washington DC. That is a sop to the unions, because the government guarantees each existing school’s income, so all voucher costs add to the budget. The pupils who get places on the voucher scheme actually cost the state about half what the other pupils do.

Voucher schemes are in place in a growing number of areas of the USA, and not only do the voucher pupils get generally better education, but the ordinary state schools have improved. Costs have not gone up. In fact the only place where the state schools have not improved is in DC, because there is no incentive to keep pupils. So the system that is more expensive is worse for precisely the same reason. That is very strong evidence that Balls is wrong, that voucher programs don’t make state schools worse. Competition makes them better, but Balls cannot admit that because socialism is more important than good education to him, the schools minister.

In fact Sweden has more evidence, in that many planned voucher schools never open because state schools have improved in response to the perceived threat.

So Balls is opposing the voucher scheme, but his stated reasons are nonsense. I have already suggested dogmatic socialism as one of his reasons. This article’s title suggests that pure politics, opposing Conservatives, is another. Of course the unions would hate it, for pure socialism and their members would have to compete, so the Labour paymasters are another reason. It seems the final reason is just power for Mr Balls. This government has concentrated power at every turn, and the article openly opposes any move of decisions from Whitehall even to councils, let alone parents.

The final condemnation of Balls is that objectively education is not improving as he claims. I know from close friend who is an academic, so instinctively left-wing. He interviews and selects students for one of the best universities in the world, has the choice of the very cream of what comes out of our education system. Every year he despairs more than the last, because not only do the students know less (which is a deliberate aim of socialist education, and means his university has already added a year to science degrees) but they are less, rather than more, capable of independent thought and deduction. The supposed aim of new educational structure is to improve those areas.

The Most Important Video

This might be the most important video you ever watch.

Rather the historical detail it gives on Critical Theory, with the perspective that shows on the links between ‘liberal’ socialism, communism and political correctness, could be the most important fact to spread. Certainly those of you concerned about the ‘New World Order’, the EU and bias in the news media will learn about your fears.

The most important thing I took from it is that these things are not vast conspiracies with tentacles in all walks of life. They are emergent patterns, coming from socialist dogma of Critical Theory just as an efficient, structured economy emerges from the free market or organisms emerge from evolution. Structures that look a lot like a conspiracy, behave a lot like that and could have the same end results. However the apparent tentacles are not willing, aware parts of some plot, they are ordinary people with incorrect or more often incomplete information – the narrative mentioned in the video.

That is the reason that no conspiracy has become obvious (I wrote before about the reasons most conspiracy theories don't add up). However it is also the great weakness of Critical Theory, and if it remains free the internet is likely to kill it. Knowledge is key to stopping its spread.

Since this is mentioned on Instapundit and is a PJTV video it will have a wide audience.

Racist Left

I have often argued that describing a political party or an individual ‘extreme right-wing’ because they are racist is wrong, it is a slanderous propaganda that the Left themselves have come to believe. Yesterday Reason Online had an article about the history of violent racism in the American Left.

That is far easier to prove in the US than in Britain. While Britain was in difficulty coming to terms with the beginning of mass immigration of non-European people, a Democrat Senator was filibustering (talking out) the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Now it is possible to object to rights legislation and not be racist, regardless of what the left will tell you, but Senator Byrd was a senior member of the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation formed in 1865 in part to serve the interests of the Democrat Party.

In the 1920s it was the Republicans who were trying to legislate against lynching, and the Democrats who prevented that legislation. Please listen to Nina Simone, and ponder on the utter evil that can make legislation against lynching controversial.

The Ashbrook Centre article goes on to argue that many of the current policies of the Democrat Party when it was written in 2002 harm blacks more than whites. Those arguments transfer far more readily to the British Labour Party, which has remarkably similar policy aims and political tactics, even if the political climate means each achieves different results.

The most practical racism still existing in free nations, discrimination at work, is a form of protectionism which fits much more readily with socialism than free-market capitalism. In the UK, where most of the support for the left comes from inner cities and unions, recent immigrants (who tend to live in cities and work more cheaply than natural-born workers of equivalent skills) are far more likely to come into conflict with Labour supporters than Conservative ones. That is why a lot of the support for the BNP is in areas where Labour is losing core support.

The extreme left, both internationalist socialists, the communists, and nationalist socialists from German Nazis to the BNP, have had strong racist tendencies. The Soviet Union was anti-Semitic, as well as racist against citizens who were not ethnic Russians, especially non-Slavs. China is today racist against those not of Han extraction.

So never believe it when you see the Left equating racism with the Right. At the very least we have proved here that racism is as much a factor on the Left, I would contend that the Left has historically shown far more racism.

Update: one thing I failed to include is that more on the left than the right (self identified) claim to dislike or hate Muslims according to a poll on the Muslims Against Sharia website. While this is not itself racism, it is bigotry (note they dislike Mulims, not extremism or Islam) of a nature often caused by racism.

Unions and Other People’s Business

Equity has stuck its nose into the reality TV business, claiming that participants should be paid. The performing artists’ union apparently reckons that X Factor is making money by “exploiting and humiliating” contestants. Well I only occasionally watch the first round, which can be hilarious, and I reckon the contestants humiliate themselves.

However what business is it of Equity? I doubt there is a significant proportion of Equity members among them (if there were there would be far fewer completely hopeless and clueless people, and they provide the entertainment).

Equity’s statement claims that “… [t]he contestants in such programmes are often compelled to enter into restrictive contracts …”, which is a direct lie. The contestants enter into a voluntary agreement with the production company; no-one compels them to put themselves forward for the competition. Why should Equity feel it has any say in those people’s right to sign that contract?

All the unions used to be like that, in the days when closed shops were legal and ‘flying picket’ a term in common use. They must never be allowed to have back the power they once had and many hardcore socialists want them to have again. In particular unions like Unite and the NUT, which involve themselves in political activity that does not relate directly to members’ rights, must be challenged every time they make demands of the government. Of course this government is hardly likely to do so, the Labour Party would be bankrupt if it were not for the generosity of those unions. That is a serious conflict of interest.

Unfortunately the only argument TF1 appears to make against a French court ruling that they have to pay contestants in similar cases is that this might spell an end to reality TV on their channel. As far as I can see that is the one benefit of the ruling.

How Far is Andy Burnham from Reality?

Andy Burnham has written a ridiculous article called ‘Defending the N in NHS’ for the Guardian. Personally I think we should defend the ‘H’ and the ‘S’ in NHS; screw the ‘N’.

In today’s Spectator Coffeehouse David Blackburn writes a well-considered attack on Andy Burnham’s Guardian article. I would go far further than Mr Blackburn. I think that the piece shows Andy Burnham is deluded or dishonest at best, seriously detached from reality at worst. He writes,

“…the Tories would scrap Labour's three flagship waiting targets: 18 weeks, four-hour A&E and the two-week cancer target. Removal of these … would inevitably see a loss of public accountability and a return to postcode variation”

Forget that waiting four hours in A&E is not really acceptable, and read the letters page in today’s Telegraph. From Mr William Standish of Ormskirk,

“… referred by my GP to be investigated for possible prostate cancer … the earliest date available being five weeks later. I then went on holiday to France.

…

When we arrived home there were three letters. The first cancelled my June appointment. The second gave a July appointment. The third cancelled the July appointment. Three weeks later, I received a fourth letter saying I had to apply all over again to get an appointment”

So I suspect that Mr Standish, for one, is unlikely to be concerned about the removal of the two-week target. It does not appear to have done him any good. Public accountability seems to be conspicuous by its absence, and unless patients in all areas have to wait over two months for an appointment (rather defeating the object of a two-week target) the postcode variation never quite went away.

Of course a single case does not show a universal standard, but it does show that nothing else can be a universal standard. The only point to Mr Burnham’s great concentration on the ‘N’, apart from socialist dogma, is to get consistent standards for everyone. So this one case does show that Mr Burnham is deluded or dishonest.

Iain Dale pointed out on Friday that Andy Burnham was claiming the NHS had no waiting lists. Mr Dale also pointed out that this delusion was a bigger story than anything Daniel Hannan could say. Unfortunately the press never quite got the hang of treating Labour as the government, or holding them to even the same standards as the Conservatives.