World View: Arab League Votes $100 Million Monthly Aid to Palestinian Authority

This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics.com

• Venezuelan women openly weep as Hugo Chávez faces malignant cancer
• Latest climate charge conference is an even greater farce than previous ones
• Reviewing the ‘Climate Change’ issue
• Arab League votes $100 million per month in aid to Palestinian Authority
• Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

Venezuelan women openly weep as Hugo Chavez faces malignant cancer

Hugo Chavez (Trome)

Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez announced late Saturday that hisdoctors has found new cancer malignancies, and that he would haveto return to Cuba on Sunday for a fourth operation:

“It has been decided, it is necessary, absolutelynecessary, absolutely essential, to undergo further surgery andthat should happen in the coming days, even doctors recommended itwas yesterday (Friday). …

[With] the favor of God as in the past, we will be victorious.

Such are the circumstances of life, I still clung to Christ,clinging to my lord, clinging to hope and faith. I hope and I prayto God to give them good news in the coming days and we can continuetogether to build what we have to do for the homeland.”

Chávez said Vice President Nicolas Maduro would take over if he isincapacitated, and urged supporters to vote for him if an election isheld.

Chávez has had three previous operations in Cuba to remove cancel.Nonetheless, many Venezuelans were shocked by the announcement, since he hadclaimed to be completely cured before his October 7 re-election as president.

Rallies and prayer meetings were held across Venezuela on Sunday toshow support and to pray for a quick recovery. Many were weeping insadness, as in the case of housewife Gladys Millan, 45, who said,other countries.” Trome and Reuters

Latest climate charge conference is an even greater farce than previous ones

Every year, climate change activists expend astronomical amounts ofcarbon emissions to attend a climate change conference in some worldclass vacation spot. When they get there, they sit by the pool exceptto go to an occasional air-conditioned meeting room or to seek out aBBC reporter in order to whine about how the United States creates allthe evils in the world.

The latest climate change conference ended on Saturday in Doha, Qatar,the carbon emissions capital of the world. The conference wascharacterized by even greater farce than previous conferences.

Previous climate change conferences had the objective of getting theUnited States involved in the “carbon trading system,” which wouldallow banksters to create carbon trade derivative securities thatwould put trillions of dollars into banksters’ pockets with a new setof synthetic securities even more fraudulent than synthetic subprimemortgage-backed securities that caused the financial crisis.

Well, apparently that fraud is now considered to be down the drain.This week’s conference replaced it with a new objective: To get theUnited States to pay into a $100 billion “financial reservoir” calleda “Loss and Damage Fund,” to be used to pay developing nations hugeamounts of money to compensate for “loss and damage” from climatechange caused by America. The climate change activist freaks insistthat the Loss and Damage Fund could be financed by a tax on financialtransactions or airline levies, or by reducing the “immoral, obscenelevel of expenditures” on fossil fuels. They regard all this money asanyone else.

It’s embarrassing that the United States participated in this circus,because President Obama wants to prove how “committed” he is to savingthe world from climate change. But in fact, the climate change freaksat the conference were FURIOUS at Obama, because he let them down anddidn’t agree to pay money into the “Loss and Damage Fund.” But fearnot. The Administration agreed to support a “Loss and Damage Fund”for some unnamed time in the future, allowing them to blame theRepublicans if they win in 2016.

The conference also agreed to extend the moribund Kyoto Protocol,which was about to expire, to 2020.

You remember the Kyoto protocol, don’t you? It was never ratified bythe United States. Al Gore, who is the greatest climate change circusfreak of all, tried to push this through the Senate in 1997, when hewas vice-president. The attempt failed by a vote of 99 to 0 — aunanimous vote against it.

So the Kyoto Treaty is a worthless peace of garbage that evenDemocrats unanimously rejected, which may explain why the Obamaadministration is so devoted to it. We have Wall Street “experts”openly lying about stock valuations on CNBC, and we have politiciansin Brussels and Washington openly lying about climate change and thefinancial crisis, while the Obama administration commits itself tothis farce. Respectable people are gangsters, and gangsters aretreated as respectable people.

Reviewing the ‘Climate Change’ issue

Let’s just go over some things about the climate change issue.

Climate science is not rocket science. When a rocket scientist testshis conclusions, the whole world can see whether or not the roverlands on Mars without crashing. There’s no politics or guesswork inthe final outcome.

Climate science is “science” only in the same way that sociology isscience. They take measurements of weather around the world, dostatistical analyses and create computer models, and reach someconclusions. Once they’ve determined statistically that it’s gettingwarmer here or getting colder there or getting wetter here or dryerthere, that’s the end of the “science.” The rest is all guesswork andpolitics.

Just as sociologists choose ideological targets to “blame” forpoverty, climate scientists choose ideological targets to “blame” forclimate change. Carbon emissions were chosen as the thing to “blame”because that’s where the money is and what the politicians want.Correlating climate change to carbon emissions is not science, it’sguesswork and politics.

Just to take one other possibility: There are 20,000 or so earthquakesa year, almost all of them too small or too remote to make the news.However, there are some reports that the number of major earthquakeshas been increasing in the last 15 years, especially in the “ring offire” in the Pacific, where a large number of earthquakes and volcaniceruptions occur. Is that caused by carbon emissions? Why not?

More to the point, perhaps these 20,000 earthquakes per year and thevolcanic eruptions are modifying and shifting ocean currents, causingthe Arctic ice to melt. That seems to me to be a more likelyexplanation than carbon emissions, but you never here it mentioned bythe climate “scientists.”

And even if you assume that the climate science is all true, and evenif you assume that carbon emissions are the cause, it’s still afinancial scam, because there’s no technical solution to the problemright now, and making trillions of dollars available to banksters willdefinitely not solve anything except hasten the worsening of financialcrisis.

And making billions of dollars available to corrupt warlords andleaders of developing nations so they can build themselves largerpalaces and larger Swiss bank accounts won’t reduce carbon emissionseither.

And even if you assume that the climate science is all true, and evenif you assume that carbon emissions are the cause, and even if youassume that the technology exists, then some company will market itand quickly become very wealthy. We don’t need Solyndra-type fiascosto bring carbon-related technologies to market. It will instantly beas popular as the Model-T Ford that solved the horse crap emissionsproblem a century ago.

In fact, I expect new nanotechnology and intelligent computertechnology to begin to provide solutions to the carbon emissionsproblems in the 2020s, and this can’t be sped up. Things happen intheir own time. You can’t invent the car before you’ve invented thewheel.

I have a very long memory. In 1970, I read an article in RampartsMagazine that “scientists” had “proved” that because America waspolluting the oceans so much, all the oceans would be covered with alayer of green algae by 1980. In 1972, the “Club of Rome” published areport on the Limits of Growth that “scientists” had “proved” thatwithin a few decades, the world would grind to a halt because ofpollution. It turned out that they had reached their conclusionsbecause of a bug in their Fortran program. There’s no end to thiskind of crap. And recall that we used to believe in “global cooling”rather than “global warming.”

So if you’re a “climate change activist,” you’re welcome to believeanything you want, but don’t confuse what you believe with science.BBC and Guardian (London)

Arab League votes $100 million per month in aid to Palestinian Authority

The members of the Arab League voted on Thursday to provide thePalestinian Authority with a $100 million monthly “financial safetynet.” On November 29, the United Nations General Assembly voted tocreate a state of Palestine, and Israel’s reaction was to announce thebuilding of 3,000 new West Bank settlements, and to withhold $100million in tax collections to the Palestinian Authority. PA presidentMahmoud Abbas requested the financial aid from the Arab League tocompensate for the loss of the tax revenue. Reuters and Al-Jazeera

Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

I like quoting analyst John Mauldin, because he’s phony in a differentway than almost all the other financial analysts. The ones on CNBCand Bloomberg television tell full-throated lies about stockvaluations constantly, as I’ve documented many times, naming names andquoting quotes. (See, for example, “14-Apr-12 World View — Wharton School’s Jeremy Siegel is lying about stock valuations” from earlier this year.) Respectablepeople are gangsters, and gangsters are treated as respectable people.

Siegel is a moron, but Mauldin actually understands the sophisticatedmathematics behind price/earnings ratios (stock valuations): Dividethe stock price by last year’s earnings. That computation is toocomplex for the geniuses on CNBC, who are constantly claiming thatvaluations are at historic lows, when in fact they’ve beenhistorically high continuously since 1995.

But Mauldin understands the math. He just fails to draw the obviousconclusion — that by the Law of Mean Reversion, stocks are going tofall to the Dow 3000 level. He just pretends that stock valuationswill stay historically high forever, so that he won’t lose any of hismulti-million dollar clients. As I say, that’s a lot less phony thanthe liars and morons on CNBC.

In his latest column, Mauldin quotes himself from 2004:

“Unless steps are taken soon, it is possible we cansee shortfalls approaching $1 trillion-$2 trillion instate-sponsored pension funds within 10 years. A deficit of thissize on the state level can truly be called a crisis. A taxincrease or other adjustments to fund this will be a large drag onthe economy.”

That was a pretty good prediction, though he complains that “I caughtsome flak for being so pessimistic about the potential problems,”which I can understand, since I’ve been called a crazy psychopath anumber of times, though much more rarely in recent years now thateverything I’ve been writing keeps coming true.

His column contains an analysis by Ed Easterling of Crestmont Researchwhich says, in essence, that Mauldin’s 2004 prediction is now comingtrue, mainly because public sector labor unions are bankrupting thepension systems and the state taxpayers who are on the hook to make upthe shortfall, and because estimates of stock market returns are wildoverestimates. Easterly concludes:

“The result is an ongoing gap of near 4% annually thatwill cause an ever-widening shortfall for state pension plans.The problem is not a gap created by a unique event in 2008, butrather it is the result of an environment that started about adecade ago.

That gap, moreover, will not move at glacial pace presenting asubtle 4% shift each year. Rather, with the force of anearthquake, periodic market declines will reveal largechasms.”

I certainly hope that no long-time reader of these GenerationalDynamics articles is dumb enough to still be in the stock market.John Mauldin

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