Monthly Archives: December 2009

Climate-Gate: Media Ignored Scientific Back-Trackers

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This story back in September ought to have made a lot of headlines, but didn´t. Perhaps it will now:

“When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it’s usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany’s Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC’s last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN’s World Climate Conference — an annual gathering of the so-called “scientific consensus” on man-made climate change — Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.”

The global warming theory has been based all along on the idea that the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would absorb much of the greenhouse warming caused by a rise in man-made carbon dioxide, then they would let off that heat and warm the atmosphere and the land.

But as Latif pointed out, the Atlantic, and particularly the North Atlantic, has been cooling instead. And it looks set to continue a cooling phase for 10 to 20 more years.”

My Comment

Now why would Latif come out with this suddenly? Maybe he had a peek at some of that data the CRU scientists were trying to hide and decided to dissociate himself in advance from a scandal threatening to blow up…

Goldman Bankers Talk To God But Keep Powder Dry

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Ah, the masters of the universe….always so quick to protect their own hides…

This, from Bloomberg (Dec. 4):

“I just wrote my first reference for a gun permit,” said a friend, who told me of swearing to the good character of a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who applied to the local police for a permit to buy a pistol. The banker had told this friend of mine that senior Goldman people have loaded up on firearms and are now equipped to defend themselves if there is a populist uprising against the bank.

I called Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag to ask whether it’s true that Goldman partners feel they need handguns to protect themselves from the angry proletariat. He didn’t call me back. The New York Police Department has told me that “as a preliminary matter” it believes some of the bankers I inquired about do have pistol permits. The NYPD also said it will be a while before it can name names.”

Meanwhile, CEO Lloyd Blankfein´s on talking terms with God, and assures us he´s only going about his father´s business….

No profiles in courage here.

Just to bring in a little perspective: These are multimillionaires, who work and live in the best part of town, who have immense political clout, who are probably tall males, if the profile typical of a high-flying Wall Streeter is anything to go by.

I used to teach at a school in the inner city for a few years, trudging home sometimes well past ten at night, often with music equipment in hand. I started carrying mace only at the end. I never had my wallet picked or a purse snatched. Once, a couple of panhandlers acted aggressively toward me. I returned the favor and they backed off. Another time, at 2 AM, near a bus-station, a teen girl “broke bad” with a razor blade. Two young men came over and warned me to get away so I wouldn´t be hurt. Twice, walking through a ghetto, I´ve had young teenagers carry my bags and give me directions, without my asking.

The only time I was robbed was in an affluent neighborhood, where someone picked my pocket. Later there were the brokers, the lawyers, and the rest to add to my bitter experience and teach me the semi-criminal nature of the upper echelons of our society.  This upper level is not “smart,” as Bethany McLean seems to suggest in her strange piece on Goldman Sachs in Vanity Fair . Call it by its proper name. It is corrupt. Deeply so.

And its corruption is commonplace.

The monstrous size of the crimes committed reflects not the size of the men who commited them but the monstrosity of the ideology of which they are, in some sense, the greatest victims….

Climate Chief Jones Steps Down

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The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:

“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….

… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”

My Comment:

I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.

Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this.  Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.

When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.

Walter Williams On Mandatory Health Insurance

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Walter Williams, via Lew Rockwell:

“You are a 22-year-old healthy person. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 a year for health insurance, you’d prefer investing that money in equipment to start a landscaping business. Which is the best use of that $3,000 or $4,000 a year — purchasing health insurance or starting up a landscaping business — and who should decide that question: Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, George Bush, a czar appointed by Obama or a committee of Washington bureaucrats? How can they possibly know what’s the best use of your earnings, particularly in light of the fact that they have no idea of who you are?

Neither you nor the U.S. Congress has the complete knowledge to know exactly what’s best for you. The difference is that when individuals make their own trade-offs, say between purchasing health insurance or investing in a business, they make wiser decisions because it is they who personally bear the costs and benefits of those decisions. You say, “Hold it, Williams, we’ve got you now! What if that person gets really sick and doesn’t have health insurance. Society suffers the burden of taking care of him.” To the extent that is a problem, it is not a problem of liberty; it’s a problem of congressionally mandated socialism. Let’s look at it.

It is not society that bears the burden; it is some flesh and blood American worker who finds his earnings taken by Congress to finance the health needs of another person.”

War On Terror Monitoring Likely to Spread to Latin America

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UpsideDownWorld.org

“Eric Farnsworth, Vice President of the Council of Americas, said he believes that Iran may be looking for uranium, possibly in Venezuela. But Time Magazine reported in an Oct. 8 article that “experts say it’s hardly certain Venezuela even has much, if any, uranium to provide Iran or anyone else.” Farnsworth also claimed Iran’s improved diplomatic relations with countries in Latin America is a boon for its intelligence capabilities.

Dina Siegel Vann, another “expert” who testified at the hearing, cited a U.S. State Department Terrorism report published in April that stated the Tri Border Area of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil is a hub for Hezbollah and Hamas sympathizers-something that has been widely disputed.  Vann, Director of the Latino and Latin American Institute at the American Jewish Committee noted that the report also cited Bolivia as a possible site for terrorist activity.

“Concerted and decisive action is needed to closely monitor the activity of Iran and the groups it subsidizes, to correctly assess their potential for mischief, and to establish mechanisms to prevent potentially dangerous scenarios,” said Vann.

Coincidentally, these attempts to designate parts of Latin America as potential threats and conduits of terror attacks are in countries that have democratically elected left and center-left governments. And all of this comes as Washington’s controversial military base deal with Colombia awaits approval.”

My Comment

We´ve been blogging for some time now that Latin America seems to be going the way of Asia as a site of resource- warfare cum terrorism-monitoring.  This article signals another step in that direction.

Now, according to the electronic police state rankings of  Cryptohippie for 2008 (I blogged this several months ago), Brazil is still a “green” state – that is, one in which monitoring is lagging.  But articles like this suggest that it will be heading in the direction of the more advanced yellow, orange, and red states (in order of increasing surveillence).

Feds Suspected Rajaratnam Ten Years Ago

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Forbes has a report on an Intel engineer, Roomi Khan who cooperated with the Fed´s to avoid charges in a wire fraud case back in 2001- 2002. Apparently Rajaratnam was making money from inside information even then.

“According to a June 2002 sentencing memorandum for Khan, the earlier case arose after Intel suspected Rajaratnam was getting tips from an Intel insider because he was predicting Intel’s revenue “with extreme accuracy.”

Intel set up a hidden video camera that on March 6, 1998, recorded Khan, employed as a product marketing engineer at the company, faxing an important report concerning Intel’s three main Pentium processors to Rajaratnam.

The memo said Khan on March 24 then faxed handwritten pages that contained pricing information and sales data for Intel chips. “By multiplying those numbers, one can determine Intel’s total revenue for the quarter,” it said.”

Gold Down On Biggest Volume In History..

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Via Economic Policy Journal:

“The exchange-traded fund, SPDR Gold Shares, that holds gold bullion was down 5% Friday afternoon on record trading volume as the gold price fell. More than 70 million shares have traded hands with an hour of trading to go. It’s the highest volume in its history. The gold ETF was launched in late 2004 and has assets of more than $40 billion”

V Tech: Administrators Took Care of Themselves Well Before Students

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More evidence that the V Tech shooting involved a lot of negligence on the part of school officials:

“Some Virginia Tech officials warned their own families and the president’s office was locked down well before a campus-wide alert was issued in the 2007 slayings of 32 people, according to a revised state report that details new fumbles in the response to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history.

One student survived several hours after being shot without anyone notifying her family until she had died, said the updated report, released Friday.

At least two officials with a crisis response team called their family members after the first shootings at a dorm and about 90 minutes before the all-campus alert was issued at 9:26 a.m.. The president’s office was locked down at 8:52 a.m. and two academic buildings were also shut down before the general alert.”

Jobs Report Signals Possible Rise in Interest Rates

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Wow. That was quick. Thwack. Gold got its sunny little head lopped off (for now)…just after it had peeped over $1225 ..and this morning fell to the sub $1180´s level (>$50 decline), apparently on the jobs report, which shows jobs decreased by 11, 000 in November, considerably less than the 30,000 predicted in the most optimistic forecast. That signals a quicker end to the recession and the likelihood that Bernanke will raise interest rates, which in turn is dollar positive.

The dollar index is over 75 now and looking good.

“The data point to a transition in the economy from a deep recession to a modest recovery,” said William Sullivan, chief economist, JVB Financial Group in Florida.

“This will encourage the Fed to be more vocal about an exit strategy from their highly accommodative posture.”

A look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics Report for November 2009 (non-farm payrolls) shows that most of the jobs were added in temporary employment and in health care – which is very inflected by government spending and programs.

That means in the rest of the economy, the real economy, the situation isn´t better at all.

And when you go through the rest of the numbers, that´s the case. Indeed, some numbers are significantly worse.

"The number of long-term unemployed
(those jobless for 27 weeks and over) rose by 293,000 to 5.9 million. The
percentage of unemployed persons jobless for 27 weeks or more increased by
2.7 percentage points to 38.3 percent.

Over at GFT Forex, Kathy Lien also expresses some suspicion about the numbers, implying that they might be due for a revision in the future and contrasting them with the Consumer Confidence numbers and the employment part of the ISM reports.

But traders, probably looking for a reason to sell gold at such overbought prices, took the improvement in temp employment as a sign of better things to come, translated that into a possible interest rate hike, and jumped out of stocks and gold.

Which suggests that the move up in gold was not so much a result of perception of it as a safe-haven as perception of it as a currency and a vehicle of speculation.

And the moral of this story is a lot of what´s going on is not the market. It´s not supply and demand. It´s more like smoke and mirrors..

Japan Selling US Treasury? Endgame Begins for Empire

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From Business Insider:

“This morning, this message popped up on Bloomberg:

“MARKET NEWS SAYS ‘RUMORS’ ARE JAPAN MAY TELL OF PLANNED SALE”

Said sale in question is rumored to be a U.S. Treasury sell off by the Japanese government.

Adding fuel to the fire is the U.S. and the Federal Reserve. Today, the Fed conducted a reverse repo (repurchase) test that could help with the Japanese UST sale.

On the other hand, this wouldn’t seem to jibe with reports that the country’s main concern is the rising yen. If anything, you’d think they’d be snapping up more treasuries. So something is amiss.

The Houston Chronicle reports Japan could be selling off as much as $100 billion worth of treasuries.”

My Comment:

Well, nothing does jive these days.  And the reason nothing does is because half of what´s done in public is done for motives and with a trajectory invisible to the public eye.

And yet the press reports these events without any context or history as perfectly transparent events….

I´ll be back with whatever I can dig up. I don´t understand reverse repos…