Bat-chomping eco-crucifixes!
G’day Folks,
The DT blogs are down for maintenance for an unusually long period of time. So all regular readers of James Delingpole’s blog are welcome to continue the discussion here. Even the trolls can come in, just to make it interesting. I’m sure comments will drift towards the usual theme, but I’ll restrict moderation down to the libellous and the illegal.
I’ll shut this page down as soon as the DT blogs re-open.
Cheers
Ozboy
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
Hello Oz (and everybody)! Gosh I laughed on seeing the ‘refugee camp’. You know us well, Oz.
Who you calling refuge?
K: Take yer dentures out and you’ll be able to pronounce it right!
Well on the bad news front (WUWT) the Supreme Court has sided with the EPA saying it can regulate CO2 as a pollutant, since they are retarded the EPA that is they will enforce it with a vengeance. As most people exhale CO2 at 50,000 ppm expect them to force people to buy carbon credits or be droned by the POTUS.
The problem lay with the wording of the original pollution legislation being extremely vague in the extreme, already senators are finally stirring into action to change the law as it is obviously an ASS. This decision makes me think they will approve Obummer care on Thursday.
It’s a pity we can’t invite some of the AGW trolls it would be nice to make blobby behave herself and we could see if their actually was a heart beneath that hard crusty exterior.
Well, if anyone hangs out anywhere James’s trolls do as well, or has some other way of contacting them, you can let them know they can come over to this page, at least while the DT is down. I’m throwing the bar open in good faith, and all I ask is that they don’t abuse the hospitality.
I suspect they won’t come, as the ones who are paid to troll won’t be paid to come here, and the others may be a little intimidated by Izen – Oz 😆
Good old Izen.
K: Regarding excretion of CO2: perhaps the POTUS can let us read his teleprompter instead of reading it to us. That might diminish at least a fraction of the world’s output.
Amanda yes less hot air in the world.
Getting lots of hits on this page already, but I think everyone’s waiting to see who else comments here first.
For first-timers, your posts will be held up until I clear them, but that should be within minutes as I’m at my computer all day today. Anyone who becomes a LibertyGibbert regular can get on the “white list”, which means your comments go straight through.
The WHITE ZONE is for LOADING and UNLOADING
Well not many people around but it is night to most people.
Most people don’t live in Godzone. And ain’t that a very good thing. Not that FB has anything against people,but 4 million is a crowd.
Well I would be happy to live somewhere with a whole lot less people like Montana or Wyoming.
K: You sound like Chewy’s dad (that’s my hubby; Chewy is our nickname for the dog). However, he may just have to be satisfied with a point property on a canal in Florida. We’ll have to rent it at first, seeing as how we can’t apply for a mortgage, my 800+ rating and his high 700s rating now having tanked to zero on account of our friends in Washington. Apparently, if you are not a person that likes to have debt, you may not qualify for a mortgage. I happen to see things the other way around: I think that you should not have to pay back a credit card to buy a pair of shoes, but if you want to buy a really big-ticket investment, then sometimes it helps to have a loan (we owned our last house outright).
The new law tells banks what is in their interest, as if banks don’t know. This if after forcing them to lend money to deadbeats who were bad risks and didn’t deserve the loans in the first place. According to one loan officer we spoke to, the government was desperate to forestall further foreclosures, so it instituted this pig-stupid law, which ignores absolutely everything about a customer apart from the bit about whether you’ve been using a Macy’s card to fund your t-shirt purchases over the past few months. Silly us, we’ve been living within our means the past few years, and renting (we did have a big mortgage, well within our means, in the UK, but have since relocated and the lenders don’t care). The whole reason we are IN this mess is that people were encouraged to live off other people’s money, and not run a personal cash economy. We have run a cash economy, recently found that we qualified for loans and that our credit rating was virtually second to none — and then, rug pulled out — all of a sudden, we are worse clients than a college kid spending like the Prodigal Son on a newly got credit card. Fairness, anyone? Good sense?
Our lease runs out at the end of next month. The guy that leased this dump is a deadbeat himself: hasn’t paid his mortgage since August 2011 (the court documents we were served by the constable spelled this out), while he has been collecting a big fat rent check from us the whole time. The bank cannot really touch him, nor it can evict us (which is good, in so far as we are entirely innocent): dirtbag deadbeat landlord gets the kid-glove treatment from the law. He is apparently ‘unfortunate’. We, on the other hand, are respectable as the AGW scam is mendacious, can demonstrate that we always pay our bills, have bought and sold two homes, and have a continuous employment history (well, Mr does), and we cannot get a loan.
is not if, I meant
P. S. When I say ‘lived within our means the past few years’ — we have always done so; I just mean that we have not borrowed one red cent for anything. Car owned outright; house owned outright; etc.
Also, you might say: ‘Well you can’t get a loan, so what? Guess you can’t afford the property, then, so live within your means, as you champion’. But the point is that we are being penalized financially for having been responsible. Interest rates are extremely low right now. It makes financial sense to buy a house in part with a mortgage, rather than cash out (taxable event!) of productive, long-term investments. Putting everything we own into our home would make us asset-rich and cash-poor, a situation we don’t really want to be in. We have to buy the homes that are available in our neighbourhood, i.e. where the job is. So we can’t just declare: ‘Oh hell, we’ll only spend a couple of hundred Gs’. That just isn’t an option in coastal St Pete.
Again: why are we being penalized for being careful with our money all our lives?
In that case my credit must be awesome then.
amanda don’t feel bad I was really close to buying a house when the credit crisis struck and that stuffed me for buying a house, probably just as well because the prices collapsed.
K,A,
We could do a whole thread (or six) on the Austrian business cycle, which produces exactly the effects that you describe; the explosion of cheap credit, fuelled by artificially low interest rates and fractional reserve/central banking, leads to increasingly irresponsible investments, until the whole shebang becomes unsustainable. Maybe sometime soon – Oz
Oz actually it was a mixed blessing as I am now free to move anywhere in the country and not tied to bricks and mortar. It turns you into a wage slave soon my daughter goes to college well another year and at that point she’s all growed up and I’m off out West if I can. What should have been a nasty sharp shock of 9 months has turned into four years and counting of depression.
Quite so, Oz.
K: All right for you: I had to sell my house in Houston so cheaply that we had no gain at all. We had put a lot of money into the house — new windows, new furnace, loads of repairs, extensive new plantings in the garden, drainage improvements — but no, we got out just with what we’d paid for it (after five years). And of course, we had to pay the 3% to the agent in fees. My neighbour next door did really well out of his house, which was larger but less stylish and up-to-date. But he sold a couple of months before us; we had to sell during the crash — which (and this is my gripe) people like us had done nothing to bring about. As my hubby says: ‘The Left ruins everything it touche: the free market; education; the aspiring, independent souls of people’.
touches, not touche for god’s sake(!)
En garde,,,,
Yes it does it always claims the best of intentions but the road to hell is paved with them, you do not fight poverty by handing over money to make poverty a lifestyle choice. You should be doing everything you can to create the best environment so business can create as many jobs as possible. The left has grown so cynical about it’s motives they are no entirely nihilistic and destructive to everyone except themselves.
K: You’ll get out West, soon enough, and feel much better for it : )
K: Just saw your comment at 1:44 Guffaw
K 1:48: Yes, exactly. Why is our ‘landlord’ — a guy in his 20s with a pensioned public-school teaching job — able so insouciantly to defraud the mortgage company while collecting rent from us for an entire year? Has the fuzz felt his collar? — Are you kidding? He’s practically a sacred cow.
I’ve put something in the Jukebox. It’s so me.
Well it sucks but that’s life a lot of people go through life cruising and taking advantage of the system while the rest of us pay for them one way or another. Things seem to be coming to a head either the left will over reach and try to impose it’s benevolent dictatorship or it would like to believe or we get “mittens romba” otherwise known as Obummer lite. One gives us the excuse to fight the other the slow road to decline and oblivion.
My gut tells me things will start to come to a head starting the 29th June they have run out of cans to kick down the road.
In any other time Mittens would be an okay POTUS but now is not the time for him.
I can’t imagine ANY time that’s right for an Obama, though he’d make a fine air traffic controller at Kandahar airport. They’d all be on the tarmac discussing who was most entitled, on account of recklessness, cynicism, and self-imposed bankruptcy, to take off first.
The latest rumour and I stress rumour is the reason we don’t see Obummers birth certificate is his real dad is Frank Marshall Davis.
Yeah, I heard that from zlop over at DT. Given Obama’s description in his autobiography of him wailing over his father’s grave in Kenya, I don’t give the Davis story much credence (or, for that matter, any other story emanating from a spambot). But who the hell knows? Oz
Still writing my illustrated statement for a 22 IWT (industrial wind turbine) array, proposed near me, with others in the wings, waiting on events. I only have another couple of days. To finish, and produce four bound copies, and visuals on disc for presentation. Along with my day job of course. (The whole damn thing is a stitch up anyway, with local democracy bypassed using section 36 of the electrical act for developments above 50 MW in capacity.)
One thing that struck me, contrary to claims recently on JD’s blog by Tom Sharp Sparks or whoever he is, is the number of peer reviewed reports written about sound issues to residents. ……..(Sharp Sparks tried to claim that peer review has been absent, as if that means there is no issue. …But couldn’t even get that right.) This whole damn business stinks.
Ozboy that was the latest Alex Jones theory, my missus reckons Malcolm Ten.
Fenbeagle yep the whole planning thing is corrupt it always has been unfortunately.
It is really annoying. I desperately want to apologise to Jobrighton for something I said at which she took offence (for some reason which is beyond me) and I can’t while comments are disabled at the DT. I like it here. Cosy. Nice to see some old friends here, too.
Maybe Jo will float on by here, too. Welcome to LibertyGibbert, anyway – Oz
Regarding the shut down at the DT This is a snippet from Monday
“Quick note, being up to me eyes in stuff and holding the fort alone i got pissed orf with usheen and posted on Chivers blog and copied to JD’s.It disappeared so fast that I even missed a screenshot [right mouse key is fooked too which is of no help]
The gist of it
“Dear Tom, ushenn/damolces your onetime wannabe moderator is fouling up on the JD blog and the moderation is slack,can we post important stuff here?”
Instant result 🙂 as MLP got wacked but usheen is still fucking about .There is still that connection to Chivers”
Now I am not claiming any fame but 30 minutes later the comments were down so perhaps I triggered some plan that was already in train ? Good innit 🙂
G’day, Mack – have one on the house.
Could be a coincidence – I dunno – Oz
Source? Link?
Cheers Oz, such a palaver trying to get here and elsewhere as I had lost all me passwords for WP. I’ve not done much other than to try to kick troll ass of late and I keep an old mangled laptop out in the workshop an sheds wot is logged onto Dellers. Knackered me back again this AM so sitting here full of Codeine and diclac and cussin as I have so much to do before the next LIA hits us
Happy for the breather, the last day and a half have been heaven. Let’s be honest, we are way on top now, and it’s upto the watermelons / collectivists to come up with a Hail Mary to reverse the trajectory against them. All we get nowadays is stale guff that has been debunked many times before. Indeed, the vast majority of my material nowadays is just copy and paste from my Disqus dashboard of old comments to respond to the same debunked garbage which the zombies keep repeating.
However, as Mack and others have said in the past, now is not the time to let up, esp. to kill off renewable follies and to get the Tory party back on the straight and narrow (or else abandon ship to UKIP), so back to full speed once the comments go back up again. Keep up the good work Oz, and all.. and let’s raise a toast to all the good work that JD has done on behalf of common sense conservatism across the Anglosphere. Cheers, CSM.
@Pedestrianblogger
jesus wept,that usheen is some plonker in the kingdom of plonkers.
Cheers, CSM, and cheers, all. Off to work in a minute. Thank you, Ozboy, for your hospitality and the best of luck to you, Fen, in getting your local bird-munchers stopped in their tracks.
Mack. Re Usheen: your comment is understatement gone mad. Have a good day, all.
I can’t think of anything you could possibly have said to upset Jo, Pedestrian. Unless it was pointing out that she doesn’t always seem herself.
@- Kitler
“Well on the bad news front (WUWT) the Supreme Court has sided with the EPA saying it can regulate CO2 as a pollutant, since they are retarded the EPA that is they will enforce it with a vengeance. As most people exhale CO2 at 50,000 ppm expect them to force people to buy carbon credits or be droned by the POTUS.”
As the only troll around at the moment apparently I guess it falls to me to point out how nonsensically silly your ‘Carbon credits’ for breathing is.
The carbon in our breath comes from carbohydrates and other organic compounds in the food we eat. That is carbon sequestered from the atmosphere by plants, it is part of the biological carbon cycle.
The point of carbon credits is to inhibit the use of fossil fuel carbon, not intervene in the natural cycle.
It is true that much modern agriculture involves the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and fungicide, and the preparation, transport and processing of the food produced. The massive output of modern intensive agriculture is dependent on fossil fuel inputs.
But those would be taxed at source s with the fuel duty that all governments impose at present.
The EPA regulations are well supported by the science, in fact the responses the EPA made to the various objections is one of the best resources for refuting the denialist anti-science idiocy that keeps being resurrected by the people who resent making any sacrifice now for the benefit of future generations.
Hope you’re not doing much else today – Oz 😉
I don’t resent making sacrifices Izen, can I suggest we sacrifice some of our politicians first? And that people from the future should send their complaints back in writing (four bound copies) and I’ll give their concerns all due consideration.
CO2 levels up, temperatures down. Why is CO2 claimed to be a problem?
btw, sorry for being a bit off-topic, esp. with the arrival of Izen to the fold, but was just wondering what folks’ views on Glass-Steagall are, and whether it should be brought back. My understanding is that Bill Clinton allowed Glass-Steagall to be dismantled in return for certain favours he wanted from the banks, including extending loans to those who couldn’t afford them to artificially increase home ownership (as per the Community Reinvestment Act, etc.).
This is a tough one for me, as modern day conservatism says that we should have a free market with limited effective regulations. However, I do think many of us are against companies that just grow into behemoths, abusing their power, esp. with some adopting the view that they are too big to fail, and will always have the safety net of a bail-out. The main issue here is that the companies get so large that they stifle innovation from small/medium size businesses, and also can afford to have huge lobbying presence wrt. politicians, leading to crony capitalism, etc. We probably have seen such in the energy sector, with GE, Shell, etc..
Anyway, sorry if you perhaps have discussed this before Oz, and will check back in due course, as it’s time for a nap here.
That’s fine CSM, under the circumstances there’s really no such thing (on this thread, anyway) as “off-topic” – Oz
Glass-Steagall type legislation is an essential component of what is needed, but it didn’t prevent the scamming and counterfeiting of currencies through inflation and credit creation.
Hand in glove with it, should be what Karl Deninger describes as “$1 of Capital”. For every $1 of debt issued, there needs to be $1 of reserve liquid capital to back it up. Then if the debt goes bad, there’s the liquid funds available to cover it immediately.
This would prevent all the nonsense at a stroke.
But even so, enforcement is still necessary, and handcuffs have to be seen as well as used.
This DISQUS shit is some nonsense huh? It’s obviously no longer a ‘maintenance’ issue is it (DISQUS is still running on other sites such as Bloomberg).
No getting away from it, Karl Denninger worked out the only way to run a blog type system. Have any actual ‘blog’ commenting disabled, but have a forum joined on to the blog at the hip for proper running and maintenance.
Der Spiegel has copied the system now, and I think it’s the only arrangement that can actually work.
Frankly though, I’m more missing Daniel Hannan and a few others blogs more than JD at the moment, and was about to get stuck in with some insights about how shooting organisations have been actively working against their members interests to further a UN agenda (it’s the same shit sandwich, in another field).
Oh and also the inflation aspect needs to be addressed too.
Any politician or bureaucrat that is employed by the Public, if there is any inflation on their watch, needs to be put against a wall and shot, to prevent them from coming close to any position of influence ever again.
Inflation is far worse than theft (though it is theft), and it murders Society, condemning the poor, the weak, and the elderly, to the worst effects of it.
Shooting is too good for the bastards.
The DISQUS shit is back up at the DT.
Thanks Ras.
Everyone back to the wars! Oz
Well that was interesting! I just got more hits on this page in a day than LibertyGibbert normally gets in a week. Thanks to all regulars and newcomers for dropping by.
I’ll leave this thread open overnight (my time), just in case Disqus crashes yet again. Ciao.
Typical! I finally get back to the Bar’n’Grill and everyone has buggered off!!
Ah well, back to work.
@- Old Mack says:
“CO2 levels up, temperatures down. Why is CO2 claimed to be a problem?”
Because it is a key component of the global climate energy balance.
You can have your own opinions, but not your own facts.
CO2 levels are up, and so are temperatures.
“The Northern Hemisphere land and ocean average surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 0.85°C (1.53°F) above average.
The globally-averaged land surface temperature for May 2012 was the all-time warmest May on record, at 1.21°C (2.18°F) above average.”
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/2012/5
Ozboy
I just got the link for your blog… am TSS over on JD’s blog. It was nice and quiet for two days, eh? Good of you to set his up for those who just can’t get away!
Thanks mate, and welcome to LibertyGibbert – drop by anytime – Oz
Izen as per breathing gettting taxed believe me the progressives are insane enough to try it.
I guess Izen that you are aware of the legislation already enacted in Godzone where bovine eructation attracts a carbon tax penalty. All your arguments delineating the lunacy of taxing human respiration apply here also. Nevertheless the legislation was passed.
thx for sharing your wisdom Ras, agree that restoring Glass-Steagall would be a start, but definitely not a silver bullet.
@- farmerbraun says:
“I guess Izen that you are aware of the legislation already enacted in Godzone where bovine eructation attracts a carbon tax penalty. ”
No I wasn’t aware that legislation has been enacted that imposes a cost on farmers in direct relation to the level of bovine eructation that they are responsible for. The last I heard there was some vague handwaving about monies from the agricultural sector being used for research while the government ignored a source of around 20% of the GHG production in Godzone.
perhaps you could link to the details…?
@- ” All your arguments delineating the lunacy of taxing human respiration apply here also.”
No they don’t.
you are comparing apples and oranges…
Or perhaps more appropriately meat and potatoes!
If you tax the fossil fuel use in agriculture, transport, fertilizer etc then you target the extra carbon added to the system when the foods produced with those inputs are metabolised and the carbon exhaled.
The problem with bovine eructation and the use of Nitrogen fertilizer to dairy grassland is that it acts a massive multiplier of the GHG effect of the fossil fuel inputs. The much more potent GHGs, methane and NO2 produced increase the thermodynamic impact of the emissions by at least 20 times that of CO2. Which is why Godzone has agriculture as nearly half of the GHG effect that its economy generates.
If you are going to charge for the negative externalities that an industry, or agriculture generates then you have to measure the impacts honestly. Equating human respiration with bovine eructation in its additive effect on disturbing the thermodynamics of the climate is inaccurate. By at least an order of magnitude.
woops…
It is Nitrous Oxide that the agricultural sector generates, thats N2O, not nitrogen dioxide.
Izen , you wrote :-
“The carbon in our breath comes from carbohydrates and other organic compounds in the food we eat. That is carbon sequestered from the atmosphere by plants, it is part of the biological carbon cycle.”
That is exactly the situation in sustainable agriculture vis a vis bovine eructation.
The cows eat pasture grown without nitrogen fertiliser, with only a little lime, sulphur and phosphorus(naturally mined) used every ten years or so to replace that which is sold off in produce. Fossil fuel use is minimal since the cows harvest the pasture directly and spread their excretions directly back onto the soil.
I am sure that you are aware of the role of nitrous oxide in the nitrogen cycle; likewise the role of methane in the carbon cycle.
I am sure you know the time it takes for atmospheric methane to become CO2 and be recycled back into food/fuel.
I think that using unsustainable agriculture as the basis of your argument is very weak, because obviously such practice will be very short-lived. It has only existed since 1950 : I doubt that it will last another 50 years. That does pose something of a problem for urban dwellers, but who cares? 🙂
Interestingly, James Hansen , on his recent visit to Godzone, advised the NZ government to forget about N2O and CH4, as being too small to worry about. It is not often that farmerbraun finds himself in agreement with James Hansen 🙂
@- farmerbraun
I agree that cows do not add extra carbon to the atmosphere beyond any fossil fuel input, but they do increase the emission of radiative forcing components and that is the justification for considering them when trying to impose the costs of negative externalities on the climate caused by agriculture.
Hansen’s argument is that unless we avoid burning the coal reserves anything else is irrelevant. Without a commitment to leave the fossil carbon the coal represents in the ground charging for other radiative forcing agents is a shadow solution, a feel-good policy that allows governments to claim they are acting while avoiding the real problem.
I understand the argument made in both cases. I strongly suspect that together they reveal the systemic inadequacy of present social systems of governance to engage meaningfully with the problem of potential intergenerational harm from actions that benefit the present.
New quickie post…. http://knottedprop.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/the-supreme-court-should-we-have-term-limits/
Hi there,
It looks like the US congress vermin can do something right after all. They’ve just voted to hold Attorney General, Eric Holder, in contempt over his obfuscation in the gunwalking investigation.
Pelosi lead a protest walkout of Democrats – perhaps they didn’t want to have their names on a list for voting in Holder’s favour?
http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/holder-held-in-contempt.html
@- Luton Ian
Could you explain why the GOP is going after Holder?
All I can find is a fatuous conspiracy theory that he somehow mismanaged a program started by Bush to sell guns to illegal arms dealers in an attempt to track the guns supplied to Mexican drug cartels. The claim seems to be that he did this to make ‘guns look bad’ to advance the case for gun control and regulation.
He claims he had no direct knowledge or management of the gunwalking program which was mainly overseen by State DAs.
Historically accusations of government conspiracy almost always turn out to be that much more common governance process, SNAFU.
In what way is this action against Holder anything more than a partisan attack on an Obama official?
Izen when you have two border agents dead and thousands of Mexican nationals and you have turned Northern Mexico into a war zone or a defacto Narco state and then we find out it’s a deliberate effort to undermine the second amendment, hell yes we are pissed and are demanding accountability.
@- Kitler
” when you have two border agents dead and thousands of Mexican nationals and you have turned Northern Mexico into a war zone or a defacto Narco state ….”
The culpability for Mexico being a Narco state and the resulting deaths is not the result of recent American policy. And the gun running program by the ATF was instigated by Bush.
@-“…and then we find out it’s a deliberate effort to undermine the second amendment, hell yes we are pissed and are demanding accountability.”
And it is this accusation that to any outsider looks like the most ridiculous partisan conspiracy theory. With an effort to impose fake ‘accountability’ on a political opponent for purely party political motives. Is there any hard evidence that Holder was involved in this rather than it being the Phoenix DA and Voth and Dobsen in the ATF ?
Here’s a dedicated post where you can continue this – Oz…
https://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/2012/06/29/gunwalker-what-the-hell/