The news from London

I'm not in London but I'll post this clip because:

• When I see this face on a Guardian columnist, I recoil a little, so I'd never before read or watched anything by Charlie Brooker, hence I was curious to see the clip via Hot Air.
• 

•  The clip has some nice shots of my part of London.
•  It's struck a chord in the US, tho British in sensibility.

It's not about me

Obama is a joke. I would say that, wouldn't I? I've always thought him ludicrous. But even the hyenas are getting the joke:

Stewart:



Dowd on The One:

Someone who’s always game for a game of pickup basketball, loves talking sports and even boasts beefcake photos. A pro-choice phenom propelled into higher office by conservatives, independents and Democrats, a surprise winner with a magical aura.

The New One is the shimmering vessel that we are pouring all our hopes and dreams into after the grave disappointment of the Last One, Barack Obama.

The only question left is: Why isn’t Scott Brown delivering the State of the Union? He’s the Epic One we want to hear from. All that inexperience can really be put to good use here.

Trouble is, truth trumps satire:

And now for something completely different

There are certain phrases that once heard compel one to commit them to memory. One such is "the transformation of 2 stellated rhombic dodecahedrons from a cube":

The road to serfdom

The squillion dollar stimulus is Obama's sophomoric tribute to Keynes. The Obamans are so incompetent that much of it won't get spent, yet much will get squandered on Democrat-friendly bullshit. When you think that 40% of the Federal budget is borrowed money, it's like watching the biggest binge in history....big government, big wages, big pensions, big public employee voting bloc, big vampire squid on the face of America, big hangover; same in Britain. Keynes was a great thinker.....he was also wrong as this video proves:


Oh well, I may as well add a clip of one of Hayek's followers. This is from her last speech in the House of Commons. She'd been betrayed by her own party after leading it to 3 successive General Election victories and turning Britain from a dosshouse into a powerhouse. But in defeat she was clad in truth:

UPDATE:

Thatcher's biggest mark domestically came in economic policy, when she rejected the ideas of the Keynesian social democratic consensus which had informed policy since 1945 in favour of monetarism, inspired by Milton Friedman and FA Hayek. The papers reveal little about the opposition to these heterodox views from the Treasury and other civil servants. Just two weeks after the general election, she was writing to Hayek: "I am very proud to have learnt so much from you over the past few years. […] As one of your keenest supporters, I am determined that we should succeed. If we do so, your contribution to our ultimate victory will have been immense."

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Now I'm enjoying the lamentations of the Democrats as much as the next man, especially the lamentations of their women, but as I scan down the headlines and the commentary it seems like the Executive Branch has no authority left. This is getting serious.

Reflections on a good week

I had a drink with my neighbour yesterday belatedly to celebrate Chris Christie's win in New Jersey. On top of that was the Massachusetts win, the apparent death of Obamacare and the Supreme Court re-instatment of free speech for corporations other than media corporations. Some week.

It's good that Obama is president. Better Obamanism then renaissance than McCainism then decline. The growth of giant government has been sapping the West all my lifetime. Maybe Obama is the culmination of the sickness which provokes America's immune system, ie its culture and Constitution, to kick in hard and inoculate the body politic against socialism.

For the time being it's good that the right has no leader; better that the true character of the country should emerge spontaneously. A leader like Gingrich of old or Palin of the future would be a target to distract the aim of the Democrat circular firing squad. For the time being the hobgoblins are mumbling 'Bush did it' and 'teabaggers' as tho obscenity were argument, which I suppose it is in their circles.

I foresee that blacks who presently vote as a bloc of serfs will move away from mono-politics as they see that Obamanism is a dead-end. Plenty of decent blacks get it that abortion and absent fathers are their modern holocaust not racism. Maybe someone like Allen West will show the way.

As the whiskey kicked in I orated that the NJ Governor needs a vision beyond a tax freeze. NJ is almost the worst state in the Union to do business in thanks to the cancer of big government and big tax, but its natural setting is top-notch; great beaches, 4 seasons, lots of open space, NYC, strong communities outside the statist dependency hatcheries, hours from Britain and Europe, major international airport, entrepot potential thanks to the deeper, wider Panama Canal....
The vision should be a special economic zone something like Shenzen next door to Hong Kong or Eire minus the Euro. The emphasis should be on tax incentives for foreign capital and when I say 'foreign' I mean flight capital from California especially. Cutting tax collects more tax; cutting government cuts corruption. Anyway Nj should be thinking like a young ambitious far eastern mercenary state not like a Californian government apparatchik or a tenured academic. Go East, young man, they'll say in Silicon Valley.

The cherry on the top of last week was a climate change for Anthropogenic Global Scamming. There were grotesque exposés of the shoddiness and bias of the IPCC UN report to the point where there's talk of taking back its Nobel Prize. Glancing at the comments threads of Warmist organs like the Guardian and the BBC, it seems that hardly anyone defends Warmism any more. Instead of priests intoning 'settled science', 'overwhelming consensus' and 'peer review' there's an overwhelming consensus that climate scientists and climate journalists were driven by:

• Peer pressure
• Fear of ostracism
• Politics
• Groupthink
• Biased models
• Selective data
• Superstition
• Religious impulse
• Scientism
• Misanthrope
• Refusal to admit error
• It's where the money is
• Disinterested enquiry, not so much.

A parliament of scarecrows

Working for the American people

The stock market has dropped 5% in the last 3 days, confounding expectations that Tuesday's GOP win in Massachusetts would send stocks up. I'm unfazed at the down move anyway as a species of 'buy the rumour, sell the confirmation', but the drop is generally blamed on Obama's Wednesday announcement of a hot war on Wall Street banks. The specifics aren't there yet, but the general drift is to prevent proprietary trading by banks and to spend time between now and election day in November demonizing bankers. I'll pass over Obama's economic illiteracy, but here's one take in the FT:

Worse, most people do not think Mr Obama can even command unity within his own administration on the Wall Street proposals amid growing speculation about whether Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, can survive in his job. Mr Geithner was conspicuously sidelined during Thursday’s announcement by the presence of Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who lent his name to the push to rein in Wall Street banks.

The speculation about Mr Geithner is only likely to grow. “The Obama proposals were clearly politically motivated and came from the White House not the Treasury,” says a Democratic adviser to the administration, who withheld his name.

My favourite speculator:

Morning rant #8, Friday news dump - Cancel Peak Oil!

The US Geological Survey has re-assessed Venezuela's recoverable oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt. Apparently they're twice as high as we thought and total more than Saudi Arabia. This is heavy oil that's expensive to produce and treat, but so what? Orinoco oil has much better recovery rates than Canadian heavy oil which is flowing profitably, it's shallow, it's onshore and the USGS review uses current technology and geo-knowledge. At the present price of $75/barrel it's highly economic. If prices drop to make it uneconomic, then by definition we have plenty of oil anyway and the lower prices tend to incentivise cheaper processes. Such vast reserves in America's backyard can be added to Canada, Brazil and the terrific potential for deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico + other dramatic oil and gas discoveries in recent years. You could cut the USGS figure by 2/3 and still have ABUNDANCE.

So what could go wrong? There's Chavez, there's Latin-American disfunctional nationalism like Mexico's woeful underperformance since nationalising it's oil industry in 1938, or the Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming might proscribe heavy oil or just oil in general, above all there's the stupidity and cowardice of the Harvard Faculty Club junta in America.

Meanwhile Iran's nukes are imminent and Venezuela would be the ideal first stop to proliferate and test American will. While Obama is preening about his base's right to 'health care' and abjectly begging China and Russia for sanctions on Iran and N.Korea as a fig leaf for an actual defence policy, the world's political tectonic plates are shifting. There's an earthquake coming and America's unpreparedness and lack of spine will kill a lot of people. What will happen when Chavez announces he has a nuke and Obama had better shape up? Will the Director of National Intelligence go 'Duh!' and smack his forehead? 'We'll do better next time.' Odd's bodikins, what a shower of fuckwits!

Anyway price and politics will determine feasibility of extraction...just like on the Alaskan North Slope....and remember, 'peak oil = peak technology'.

RIP Marine Sgt Chris Hrbek

Yesterday we all went into town to wave flags at the procession bringing home Chris Hrbek, killed in Afghanistan.

Fallen Marine gets hero's welcome in his hometown

Massachusetts a day later

The GOP win in Massachusetts is worth a 'wow!' now, but in 2 weeks it'll be worth a 'wow,wow,wow!' Scott Brown can be the representative of the 'independent', ie decisive, American voter. The big drama isn't even 'health care', it's that Obama's authority is shot. Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Virginia, New Jersey, Masssachusetts. At this point he's an electoral liability. Moreover he can't get his nominees and he can't get his legislation and he's almost universally seen as weak on security. His mannerisms are all he's got and they look old. Even the MSM is edging away from him or contrasting his legislative nous with GW Bush who got plenty done without Obama's supermajority. Obama's past his shelf life after 1 year. Can he pivot like Clinton? Unlikely as he lacks Clinton's executive experience, comeback experience, common touch and raw intelligence. The best scenario is that he abdicates leadership to a much more conservative Congress post November 2010 and sits in the corner like an elderly relative who's lost his clout. More probably he'll wreak havoc with America's friends and embolden America's enemies over the next 3 years like Carter.

Oh well, at least let's enjoy these scoundrels twisting in the wind: