economics

The success of globalization

Massive globalization — a major move towards free market capitalism — has brought over a billion people out of poverty, while sixty years of socialist chaos and violence has failed to convince most of the world that central planning is a very bad way to run any economy.“Ruble” symbolizes pretend money, unconvertible into goods, much as “Finland” symbolizes submission to a hostile power, and “Peso” symbolizes inflation. Globalism has done …

war

Yellow bellied surrender monkeys

In the last ten years or so we have been hearing a lot of disturbing reports about Britain – reports of a society of fearful and servile subjects, of criminals acting with impunity, of the British accepting second class status to Islam.  Maybe the gun lobby is exaggerating British submission to criminals, maybe racists and war hawks are exaggerating British submission to Islam, but this story of cowardice and betrayal …

war

What has been happening in Georgia

The boundaries of all the Balkan and Caucasus states are ill defined, one blurs into the other, each contains people who feel themselves outsiders and oppressed. In some, like Estonia, “oppression” is merely that if you cannot speak the majority language, or a widely spoken international language such as English, you have poor job prospects. In others, oppression consists of robbery, rape, and murder. By and large the resentment is …

economics

Explanations of the oil price rise

My explanation for high oil prices is the collapse of oil states. Arnold Kling argues that instead the problem is that investors fear the collapse of advanced states, so are reluctant to take their money. My explanation is that oil states are increasingly short of the competence to pump oil, the ability to provide security to people pumping oil, and the credibility to make deals with people who are competent …

economics

US Chamber of commerce protests junk science

The second national climate assessment predicts that the United States will “very likely” experience rising sea levels and increasing droughts, heat waves, intense storms and resulting illness and premature death over the next century as climate change intensifies. But, as is the usual practice with climate “science” , the report fails to make available the evidence that supposedly leads to this conclusion, a gross and flagrant violation of normal and …

global warming

Global warming is not science

Science is based on experiment and evidence.  The motto of the royal society was “Nullius in verba”, which means “Take no one’s word for it”.  This motto was reinterpreted to accommodate the “evidence” for global warming. Most science journals have condition of publication that authors must comply with any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article, which condition has …

economics

Bernanke explains what he is doing wrong

In his speech Governor Ben S. Bernanke observed that if inflationary expectations rise, and the Fed fails to raise interest rates correspondingly, this is unstable. He failed to make the reason for this clear, but the reason is that real interest rates are nominal interest minus expected inflation – so a rise in inflationary expectations causes a fall in real interest rates, causing massive real borrowing – as for example …

war

We won in Iraq

Michael Yon declares the war over. He should know. He has been wandering around the place looking it over. But if we have a few more victories like this one, we will have lost, and Islam won. We cannot do Iran what we barely managed to do to Iraq, and still less can we do to Pakistan what we barely accomplished in Iraq. We are losing in Afghanistan, for it …