"A dumping ground for bad loans"

The European Central Bank 

Der Spiegel reveals the sad truth: 

The European Central Bank has become a dumping ground for bad loans: While Europe is preoccupied with a possible restructuring of Greece's debt, huge risks lurk elsewhere -- in the balance sheet of the European Central Bank. The guardian of the single currency has taken on billions of euros worth of risky securities as collateral for loans to shore up the banks of struggling nations.Since the beginning of the financial crisis, banks in countries like Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Greece have unloaded risks amounting to several hundred billion euros with central banks. The central banks have distributed large sums to their countries' financial institutions to prevent them from collapsing. They have accepted securities as collateral, many of which are -- to put it mildly -- not particularly valuable.These risks are now on the ECB's books because the central banks of the euro countries are not autonomous but, rather, part of the ECB system. When banks in Ireland go bankrupt and their securities aren't worth enough, the euro countries must collectively account for the loss. Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank, provides 27 percent of the ECB's capital, which means that it would have to pay for more than a quarter of all losses. For 2010 and the two ensuing years, the Bundesbank has already decided to establish reserves for a total of €4.9 billion ($7 billion) to cover possible risks. The failure of a country like Greece, which would almost inevitably lead to the bankruptcy of a few Greek banks, would increase the bill dramatically, because the ECB is believed to have purchased Greek government bonds for €47 billion. Besides, by the end of April, the ECB had spent about €90 billion on refinancing Greek banks.Former Bundesbank President Axel Weber criticized the ECB's program of purchasing government bonds issued by ailing euro member states. In the event of a bankruptcy or even a deferred payment, the ECB would be directly affected.But even greater risks lurk in the accounts of commercial banks. The ECB accepted so-called asset-backed securities (ABS) as collateral. At the beginning of the year, these securities amounted to €480 billion. It was precisely such asset-backed securities that once triggered the real estate crisis in the United States. Now they are weighing on the mood and the balance sheet at the ECB.No expert can say how the ECB can jettison these securities without dealing a fatal blow to the European banking system. The ECB is in a no-win situation now that it has become an enormous bad bank or, in other words, a dumping ground for bad loans, including ones from Ireland. 

Read the entire article here

PS
Without the euro and the European Central Bank, we would not have this kind of a mess, which may lead to a serious weakening of the whole European economy. The common currency was built by a number of European politicians, who intentionally chose to turn a blind a to basic economic realities. They are not anymore around to pay for their huge mistake. As always, the taxpayers will end up paying.

An Inconvenient Truth

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told'

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story

by Christopher Booker

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.

Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

Too Much Food Causes Problems

Bumper Harvest In India 

A new study published in the Science magazine says that global warming has contributed to a drop in the yield of crops in Russia, China and India:

Crop yields hit by global warming

Global warming is hurting world food production, says new study. A drop in the yield of some crops around the world was not caused by changes in rainfall but was because higher temperatures can cause dehydration, prevent pollination and lead to slowed photosynthesis, the new study says. Wheat and corn yields were down in Russia, China and India, due in part to rising temperatures, according to the study published in the journal Science. The new research adds to other studies which have tried to distinguish between climate change and natural variations in weather and other factors.

Read entire story here

And here is the latest news just in from India:

India faces problem of plentiful food

There is a bumper wheat and rice crop. In Andhra Pradesh, India's rice bowl, production is up 30%. Millers are offering only Rs 8 for a kilo of paddy though the MSP is Rs 10.30. Angry farmers last week threw paddy into the Krishna river. The state government has borrowed Rs 550 crore from RBI for procurement. The FCI can do little. After buying 50 million tonne wheat and rice this season, added to 44 million tonnes left from last year, it is exhausted.
The oilseed crop is 20% larger. Import of palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia is down for the sixth straight month till April, a three-year low. Sugar output is up 28%. Even exports can't prod the bulls into action.
Production of pulses rose by a fifth to cross 17 million tonne. The Planning Commission pegs this year's demand at 19 million tonne. As the gap narrows, premiums are evaporating.
Cotton prices hit a 140-year high in March on the back of the world market and then crashed by Rs 20,000 per candy within two months. Textile mills can't absorb the record harvest. In crop after crop, output is higher. In West Bengal, farmers have put 60% of their potato in cold storage, hoping prices will improve. And a 15% jump in onion harvest has pushed wholesale prices in Maharashtra back to Rs 5 per kilo. In January, we paid Rs 70.

PS

Surely Dr. Wolfram Schlenker and the other members of New York´s Columbia University´s research team must be pleased to learn, that global warming evidently has stopped, at least in India - or alternatively it has contributed to a record harvest

Unasked questions

Mladic, war crimes and the West 

The response to the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb commander shows how some pine for the good v evil parable of their Balkan crusade.

by Mick Hume 

There has been much pious talk about how the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb commander Ratko Mladic on war-crimes charges will bring closure to many victims of the war in the former Yugoslavia. But ‘closure’ is the last thing the Western authorities want in relation to the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. They want to keep the wounds open, keep the horror alive, in order to remind us all of a time when the West could pose as a force for Good against the Evil of the Serbs in the civil wars that wracked the former Yugoslav republics.

Indeed, the more zealous campaigners for Western intervention must look at Mladic today with a sense of nostalgia, for that faraway golden age when they were widely seen as being on the side of the angels – before the disaster of Iraq, the drawn-out debacle of Afghanistan, and the derisory war on Libya. An age when the Western authorities could set themselves up to sit in judgement on the world in the war-crimes tribunal at The Hague – a far cry from today, when the US government cannot even assassinate the world’s most infamous terrorist without being accused of committing a war crime itself.

Whether or not Mladic gets a procedurally ‘fair trial’ before the International Tribunal at The Hague is irrelevant. Judgement has already been passed, as the world’s media declares him ‘the Butcher of Bosnia’, guilty of the most heinous crimes against humanity seen in Europe since the Second World War, most notably the Srebrenica massacre. spiked has no interest here in siding with Mladic, or with any participants in the Balkan conflicts. But, as throughout those wars, there is a need to question the political myths and the moral crusading that have been used to justify Western intervention and cloud the issues at stake.

In that spirit, there are a few questions that are unlikely to be properly addressed during the drawn-out legal circus of Mladic’s forthcoming trial.

Why did Srebrenica happen? For most commentators this is a simple issue: the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic’s command was a demonstration of evil incarnate, the ‘worst act of genocide in Europe since Auschwitz’. What more need be said or asked about such a heinous crime against humanity?

An elite that cannot envisage the future except in terms of decline and disaster.

Beware Malthusians in reasonable clothing

The green critics of population control are just as misanthropic as their prophylactic-promoting opponents.

by Tim Black 

The ambient jazzy, folky music - possibly nicked from a nearby Starbucks - had been turned to mute. The lights were dimmed. And the effect was near instant. The postgraduate-dominated audience under-populating the Bloomsbury Theatre in London was finally settling down in glum anticipation of ‘My vision for the future’, the first public event of ‘Population Footprints’ – a ‘UCL and Leverhulme Trust conference on human population growth and global carrying capacity’.

Quite what the audience was expecting, I’m not sure. Doom-laden prophesying? Possibly. Encomia to family planning? Probably. Frighteningly self-righteous blather about there being too many people and too few resources? Almost definitely. This last, after all, is the great unmentionable that the green and the not-so-good can’t stop mentioning, a neo-Malthusian idea that has seized the withered imaginations of every repressed misanthrope from Forum for the Future founder Jonathon Porritt to the patron saint of wildlife programmes, Sir David Attenborough. As Attenborough himself said in a recent piece for the New Statesman: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.’

So, given this current cultural climate, in which it’s almost conventional to view the propagation of the species as an act of self-destruction, what the audience was probably not expecting was the opening gambit of Fred Pearce, environment consultant for the New Scientist, author of Peoplequake, and, most important of all, someone who doesn’t think population growth is much of a problem. ‘We are defusing the population bomb’, he declared. There was no booing. But there was no applause either.

Not that Pearce would mind, of course. He seems to be enjoying making a name for himself as the debunker of overpopulation hype. A few weeks ago, for instance, he took on no less a source of procreation anxiety than the United Nations Population Division (UNPD). The problem for Pearce was that in 2009, the UNPD had estimated that the global population, currently just under seven billion, would reach nine billion by 2050 before levelling off. At the beginning of May, however, it revised its predictions. Now global population was not only going to reach nine billion by 2050, but it was going to keep on rising until it reaches over 10 billion by 2100.

Pearce was not convinced that there was much evidence to support such a revision. In fact, as hepoints out in Nature magazine, current world population and current global fertility rates are actually lower than the UN predicted they would be at this stage two years ago. So why, contrary to actual population trends, does the UN now envisage a further rise in future fertility rates? None of this makes sense, argues Pearce: women are now having half as many babies as their grandmothers and world fertility has fallen from 4.9 children per woman in the early 1960s to its current level of around 2.45. The only way the UN can come up with such groundless population projections is by assuming that many developed countries currently with fertility rates well below the replacement level of 2.1 will suddenly start, contrary to all expectations, to produce more and more children. As Pearce observes, this assumption has simply been imposed on to the modelling system. Hence the revision ‘looks more like a political construct than a scientific analysis’.

All of which sounds like a rational voice amid the cacophony of overpopulation doom-mongering. This is surely a good thing, right? What could be better than an award-winning science journalist and author calling out the prophets of overcrowding?

The problem is that while Pearce is correct regarding the population-hyping models used by the UNPD, he has not come to destroy the Malthusian core of green-tinged thinking; he has come, whether he knows it or not, to save Malthusianism, not damn it. Save it, that is, from its overexcited champions who see the threat of ‘catastrophic’ population growth as a stick with which to beat people the world over into prophylactic-using submission.

A reminder that there was a time when climate scientists actually did science

1979 Prediction: Warming Trend Until The Year 2000, Then Cooling

Medieval predictions

Italian Scientists On Trial For Manslaughter After Failing To Predict Earthquake

by W. Briggs

Seven Italian geologists have been hauled before an Italian judge—whether in chains or no, we are not informed—and charged with the heinous crime of manslaughter. Specifically, these men are being held culpable for the deaths of 309 people following an earthquake.

On 6 April 1990, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake shook L’Aquila, Italy. A not unusual event. According to the United States Geological Survey, earthquakes in Italy are as common as Italian soccer players crying foul. At this writing, the last was one month ago, a magnitude 3.3 in Central Italy.

Not only Italian geologists, but geologists everywhere are notoriously bad at predicting just where and when the next earthquake will be. True, these scientists are equipped with elaborate computer models which show how one chunk of earth slides under another and how this slip-sliding causes the earth above to shake and rattle.

Problem is, these models, even though they can be and are used to make predictions, are useless for that task. Geologists at least have the benefit of tracking their faulty predictions, information which can be used to improve their models.

In any case, the L’Aquila quake was not predicted. Which is to say, it was not predicted by the Italian version of the USGS. A man named Giampaolo Giuliani did predict a quake, but he said it would be centered at Sulmona, Italy and that it would take place days before the L’Aquila quake.

The Great Leap Backwards

The Green Fourth Reich

by Dave Blount

Germany produced many of the key figures in the development of socialism, including Otto von Bismarck, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Adolf Hitler, so it should come as no surprise that some Germans are falling head over jackboots for its most alarming incarnation yet, ecototalitarianism:

When it comes to environmental and climate policy, Germany's Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change (WBGU) is an influential advisory committee for the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. …

In April 2011, the WBGU presented a report entitled "World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation". The main theses of the WBGU are as follows: The current economic model ("fossil industrial metabolism") is normatively untenable.

"The transformation to a climate friendly economy… is morally as necessary as the abolition of slavery and the outlawing of child labor." The reorganization of the world economy has to happen quickly; nuclear energy and coal have to be given up at the same time and very soon. …

All nations would have to relinquish their national interests and find a new form of collective responsibility for the sake of the climate: "The world citizenry agree to innovation policy that is tied to the normative postulate of sustainability and in return surrender spontaneous and [persistent] desires. Guarantor of this virtual agreement is a formative state […]."

This strong state provides, therefore, for the "social problematization" of unsustainable lifestyles. It overcomes "stakeholders" and "veto players" who "impede the transition to a sustainable society." In Germany, climate protection should therefore become a fundamental goal of the state for which the legal actions of the legislative, executive and judicial branches will be aligned.

Note that all of this rests on the liberal belief that CO2 has a deleterious effect on the climate — an unproven theory that has been crumbling in the face of a cooling climate.

Why should people around the world voluntarily give up their demands for material welfare and security? Consequently, the WBGU admits frankly, that the decarbonization of the society can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy - both nationally and internationally.

Decarbonization means deindustrialization — i.e., poverty directly imposed by the government.

Internationally, the WBGU calls for a "World Security Council" for sustainability. The members of the proposed "future chamber" for Germany would explicitly not be chosen democratically and would limit the powers of Parliament.

This time German oligarchical collectivists won't have to count on the Wehrmacht to impose their dystopian schemes. The United Nations will be much more effective. Democrats can be expected to collude with them eagerly.

For an idea of what happens when authoritarians try to bring about economic transformations on this scale through coercion, refer to Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward, which killed 45 million Chinese in four years and subjected the survivors to a generation of abject misery — and remember that unlike environazis, Mao wasn't destroying living standards deliberately.

Bankers, lobbying CEOs, and saber-rattling policy wonks

Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy

"Even large business interests can come and go, but the political apparatus itself, the most inherently corrupting of all institutions given its unavoidably coercive and monopolistic nature, will continue to inflict misery and loot the disadvantaged on behalf of the powerful."

by Anthony Gregory

The idea that corporate interests, banking elites, and politicians conspire to set US policy is at once obvious and beyond the pale. Everyone knows that the military-industrial complex is fat and corrupt, that presidents bestow money and privilege on their donors and favored businesses, that a revolving door connects Wall Street and the White House, and that economic motivations lurk behind America's wars. But to make too fine a point of this is typically dismissed as unserious conspiracy theorizing, unworthy of mainstream consideration.

We have seen this paradox at work in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse. The left-liberals blame Wall Street and Big Finance for betraying the masses out of predatory greed and for being rewarded for their irresponsibility by Washington's bailouts. At the same time, the Left appears reluctant to oppose these bailouts outright, seeing the spending as a necessary evil to return the global economy to stability, however inequitably. What's more, left-liberals fail to call out President Obama and Democratic leaders for their undeniable hand in all this. They blame Goldman Sachs but see their president, who got more campaign money from the firm than from almost any other source, as a helpless victim of circumstance, rather than an energetic conspirator in corporate malfeasance on top of being the enthusiastic heir and expansionist of George W. Bush's aggressive foreign policy.

The tea-party Right is also hesitant to examine the corporate state too closely. These conservatives detect an elitism in Obama's governance but are loath to earnestly challenge the economic status quo, for it would lead to uncomfortable questions about the warfare state, defense contractors, US wars, the whole history of the Republican Party, and all the typical right-wing assumptions about the inherent fairness of America's supposedly "free-enterprise" system. By refusing to admit that economic fundamentals were unsound through the entirety of the Bush years — by failing to acknowledge the imperial reality of US wars and their debilitating effect on the average household budget — the Right is forgoing its chance to delve beyond the surface in its criticism of Obama's reign.

One word: “Srebrenica.”

The Making of a Monster

by Janine di Giovanni

 

For years, during the grim and seemingly endless Balkan wars of the 1990s, Ratko Mladic appeared a mysterious, almost mythic figure, a stout and red-faced general in combat fatigues, who was rarely seen by anyone but his most trusted men. To many Serbs, he was a hero, a defender of national pride and values. To the families of his victims, he was a coldblooded killer who led his soldiers not into battle, but into a state of carnage during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. While all sides—Muslim, Croats, and Serbs—were guilty of heinous crimes, it was Mladic’s men who crossed into infamy, slaughtering nearly 8,000 Muslim boys and men during the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

During the years I spent reporting these Balkan wars, my notebooks grew thick with accounts of the terror Serbian snipers inflicted on the residents of Sarajevo, the city they held in a malevolent siege for years. I heard lengthy, heartbreaking accounts of the destruction of Srebrenica, Gorazde, Foca, and Mostar.

But I met Mladic only once.

It was the winter of 1993, a particularly desperate time for the Bosnian civilians, whose villages were left behind as smoldering pyres by marauding Serbian soldiers. Somehow, by a muddy road, through pelting, icy rain, I had made it to Lukavica, the Serb military stronghold where Mladic and his men had made a stop. Dressed in full military regalia, the general was seated in his jeep, appearing smaller than I had expected. I asked him for an interview. Looking at me with a glacial stare, he seemed to regard me not as human but as some strange species. “Tell the reporter to move away from my car before I run her down,” he barked to one of his lackeys. I never saw him again.

It would take almost two decades after that before he was finally caught. His wife, Bosiljka, had claimed he was dead; there was speculation that he had had plastic surgery to avoid capture. But last week, after too many close calls, too much leaked information, too many escapes, Serb intelligence agents found the 69-year-old general at last. His face, though aged, was the same—that of Europe’s most notorious fugitive from justice. Serbia’s president during the war, Slobodan Milosevic, who preceded Mladic to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague after he was arrested in 2001, was known as the Butcher of the Balkans (his trial ended without a verdict when he died in prison in 2006). But it was the bloodthirsty Mladic, soon headed to The Hague himself to stand trial, who oversaw the charnel house.

The capture of Mladic ends what Boris Tadic, the current Serb president, described (with a monumental euphemism) as a “difficult period of our history.” His arrest, he said, will remove “a stain from the face of the members of our nation wherever they live.” Perhaps it will also, in some small way, ease the anguish of the families of the victims who, in the words of the prosecutor for the ICTY, suffered “unimaginable horrors.”

Banking is just a part of the free market

The State and 100 Percent Reserve Banking

by George Selgin

Free bankers have been fighting a war on two fronts.  On one they face champions of central banking and managed money.  On the other they struggle against advocates of 100-percent reserve banking.  Although the second front is a lot smaller than the first, it’s far from being unimportant, in part because the battle there is being fought against people who generally favor free markets, who might have been expected to join rather than to oppose our cause.

They oppose it for a variety of reasons, one of which is their belief that, in a truly free-market setting, fractional reserve banking wouldn’t survive.  Instead, they insist, 100-percent reserve banks would prevail.  That they haven't is due, in their opinion, to a banking industry playing field slanted in favor of favor fractional-reserve banks, especially by either implicit or implicit deposit guarantees financed through forced levies upon all banks, and sometimes by taxation or inflation.  In short, fractional-reserve banking has been nurtured by government subsidies.

Free bankers have tried responding to this argument by noting how fractional reserve banking has prevailed under every sort of bank regulatory regime, from the earliest beginnings of banking, not excepting regimes that involved very little regulation, like those of Scotland, Canada, and Sweden, and that lacked even a trace of government guarantees or other sorts of artificial support.  But since some 100-percenters seem unmoved by this approach, I here take a different tack, which consists of pointing out that every significant 100-percent bank known to history was a government-sponsored enterprise, which depended for its existence on some combination of direct government subsidies, compulsory patronage, or laws suppressing rival (fractional reserve) institutions. Yet despite the special support they enjoyed, and their solemn commitments to refrain from lending coin deposited with them, they all eventually came a cropper. What’s more, it was these government-sponsored full-reserve banks, rather than their private-market fractional reserve counterparts, that were the progenitors of later central banks, starting with the Bank of England.

So far as records indicate, the very earliest banks were private institutions that began as sidelines to other businesses.  The very first bankers may have been thetrapezites or money-changers of ancient Athens, or their later Roman counterparts.  But the earliest concerning which any details are known were the “banks of deposit” that arose during the 12^th century in Italy, especially in Genoa and Venice, and the record clearly indicates that these banks were credit-granting institutions rather then mere coin warehouses.  Indeed, it was almost inevitable that they should have been so, because in order to efficiently undertake to make payments by bank transfer, and so spare their clients the necessity of dealing with the shoddy coins then available, they were bound to promise to return on demand, not the very coins deposited with them, but coins of equal value, which in effect meant becoming debtors rather than bailees.  Moreover, overdrafts were bound occasionally to result in credits in excess of cash reserves, while the interest to be earned from additional lending allowed bankers to reduce the fees they charged for their payment services, and even to occasionally pay interest on their “deposits.”   In any event the lending was never concealed.  In London goldsmith banking took a similar course, though not until the mid-17^th century.  In short, so far as records indicate, all of the earliest private banks operated on a fractional-reserve basis.

For your own good

It's time to stand up for smokers' rights

by John Humphreys

Perhaps it is inevitable that people will always need to find a minority to hate. Whether it is based on race, or sex, or sexual preference, or lifestyle choice, or language, or religion, or personal habits... the instinct to discriminate, to distrust "different" people, and to enforce conformity is a constant theme throughout history and throughout the world. If this instinct was purely personal, then it would not be a big issue. People could simply choose to associate with those people they prefer, and we could all live in peace. But sadly, many groups want to use the government to force their bigotry on others.
Over the past 100 years there have been some great improvements in social policy, as the government removed most of their discrimination based on race, religion, sexual preference and sex. There are a few outstanding issues (women in the military, gay adoption rights, special rules for Aborigines) but on the whole we now have less official discrimination in these areas. Sadly, not all minorities have been this lucky.
While some minorities become popular political causes, other minorities are on the receiving end of negative political populism. Politically correct campaigners will loudly support the "good minorities" such as GLBT or immigrant groups, but they are equally loud in their condemnation of the "wrong minorities". This seems to indicate that we are not becoming more tolerant... we are simply switching our bigotry on to other areas.
Some of the biggest victims of this modern discrimination are smokers.
Immediately the anti-smoking bigots will insist that they are not really bigoted, because smokers deserve to be punished. Of course, that is exactly what the racists, sexists and homophobes say. 
Most people want to consider themselves a "good person", and so bigots often feel the need to create artificial reasons to justify their intolerance. The excuses range from the plain wrong to the desperate, but the common theme is that in all cases the freedom of smokers is considered irrelevant. If a "good minority" was dismissed this quickly there would be cries of pain from an outraged media and a horde of moralising pundits. But when it comes to smokers... the "moral police" join the lynch mob and declare smokers guilty by definition.
One of the first lines from the bigots is that smoking is bad for you. True, but so what? Lots of things are bad for you, but life is about more than longevity. 
People often make trade-offs between "quality of life" and "quantity of life". We make many decisions that will marginally increase our chance of death, but for a benefit. People choose to go skiing, or sky-diving, or motorbike riding, or drinking, or working in a mine, or eating fatty food, or playing contact sports... knowing that there is a health risk but determining that the benefit is worth the cost. In a free society, people should be free to make their own life decisions.
The health Nazis don't get this point. They really seem to think that the whole purpose of life is to live for as long as possible... and if you ever make an "unhealthy" decision, then you are simply wrong and need to be controlled by your owner the government. A whole army of these anti-fun fanatics have been put together in the Preventative Health Taskforce, so that the government knows exactly how to micro-manage your life. 
As the IPA explained, "The Taskforce recommends 39 accords, scorecards, standards, reviews, action research projects, frameworks, compacts, programs, partnerships, systems, initiatives, criteria, surveys, strategies, agencies, curricula and campaigns for obesity alone". In New Zealand, the fun police have even claimed that when you have two drinks in a night, you are officially "irrational" and therefore had no fun. (Read Eric Crampton's response here.)
At the core, the idea here is that smokers are just "wrong" and they need to be fixed. As a Facebook friend recently put it, "since you do not act like an adult but like a 13-year-old kid that thinks that smoking is cool, the government has to set limits to your destructive and anti-social behaviour". 
Sadly, the author didn't even seem to notice the totalitarian nature of his sentence. Imagine the response if somebody made the same comment about one of the "good minorities".
Thankfully, when most normal people are pushed they admit that people should be free to choose their own lifestyle. The debate then turns to "externalities".
The first externality used to justify anti-smoking intolerance is the health costs of smoking that fall on the taxpayers because of our socialist health system. Again, there is truth in this claim. The most obvious solution would be to introduce a smokers-premium on health insurance, but that would require health policy reform, which is always difficult in our modern welfare-democracy (note, private health providers already have a smokers premium). 

The Party

China’s Never-Ending Party

by John Derbyshire 

You think the 2012 Republican field is lackluster? Check out these party animals.

The “party” in that last sentence is the Chinese Communist Party. The gents standing in the picture are the aptly named Standing Committee (changwu weiyuanhui, literally “everyday affairs committee”) of the CCP’s Central Politburo. Except in the most strictly taxonomic sense, they are not animals, but human beings, or somewhat lifelike simulacra thereof. These are the people who run the affairs of the world’s most populous nation and will continue to do so for another year or so. The picture was taken in October 2007 and they serve five-year terms.

The members of the Standing Committee are so lacking in luster, one feels that the guy wearing a blue tie with his hands folded in front of him—it’s Wu Bangguo—might as well have gone the whole distance and worn a clown suit. The current ages, left to right, are 68, 55, 57, 68, 68, 69, 71, 57, and 67. Technocrats? You bet. From the left again: Numbers one and four are trained in geology, number two in economics and law, and all the rest in engineering—electrical, hydraulic, electronic, electrical, chemical, chemical. They have “rarely appeared in public together again,” we are told. I should think so: That much dullness all in one place might collapse spacetime.

“China’s ‘miracle’ this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality.”

I acquired that picture from a book called The Party by Australian journalist Richard McGregor. Published last year (I’m behind on my reading), The Party explains the miracle of China in recent years.

It’s not the ten percent annual growth figures: Any fool nation with a billion people could have done that, starting as they did from such a low base. No, China’s “miracle” this past quarter century is a political one: the survival of the communist system in all its lawlessness and control-freak brutality. You might almost say “half century”: I was hanging out with Old China Hands in the early 1970s, when the Cultural Revolution was in full flood. General opinion among the OCH’s was that the regime had committed suicide and would be gone before the decade ended.

Forward to 1989 and the nationwide demonstrations that culminated in the Tiananmen Square massacre. The regime seemed indecisive. Rumors circulated that a senior military commander was balking at party orders to move on the demonstrators. (McGregor says those rumors were correct: It was Lieutenant-General Xu Qinxian, commander of the 38th Army. He was court-martialed and sentenced to five years for his insubordination.) Well nigh everyone—including me, and including veteran dissident Wang Bingzhang—thought the game was up for the ChiComs.

Forward another dozen years to 2001, when Gordon Chang brought out his book The Coming Collapse of China. Chang said it would all be over for the CCP in five years. (Ten years on, he’s still saying it.) As it happens, I spent the summer of 2001 in China with my family. I came back convinced that the Communist Party could go on indefinitely, and I wrote articlessaying so. How come Gordon Chang’s speaking fees are so much higher than mine? It’s an unjust world all right.

And they’re still there. They’ll still be there next fall, though the lineup will have changed somewhat. Xi Jinping, second from the right in that photograph, will almost certainly take over the top spot from Hu Jintao. (The CCP, like our own beloved Republican Party, adheres to the next-in-line principle of leadership selection.) Whatever: There’ll be nine sixty-ish gents with dark blue suits, red ties, and engineering degrees.

Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four is told that the future will resemble a boot stamping on a human face forever. China’s future will be a well-polished pair of black Oxfords padding diffidently across the Great Hall of the People’s deep-pile carpets forever. The guys with the boots will be kept discreetly out of sight except when needed.

The Chinese Communist Party has it figured out. After 62 years of blunders, horrors, and reversals, they have pulled off a miracle of statecraft, a Staatskunst Wunder. With their 77 million members distributed in hundreds of thousands of cells, they have turned Lenin’s crude power cult into a robust, adaptable apparatus of total control that, like God in the universe, is everywhere present but nowhere visible—or is visible only, as with that photograph, in a form so bland the eye turns away in search of something recognizably human.

They have their placemen in every bank and company, every school and college, every church and drama club, every military unit and research institute. When the party says, “Jump!” the organization jumps, however “independent” it is in theory; as their banks jumped, against their better judgment, during 2009’s financial crisis.

The party has it all figured out. They will go on forever.

"Save" the Planet or the Treasury ?

The agenda revealed

by Richard

In theory, all the greenery coming out of our provincial government and the EU – like carbon credits - is intended to bring down "carbon" emissions, and thus save the planet. That governments make money out of the measures is just coincidental.

And if you believe that one, the latest Reuters report will comes as a bit of a shock. It tells us that the EU's carbon credit market could be flooded with excess permits over the next decade, cutting prices in half and depriving governments of billions in budgeted revenues.

Apparently, this terrible outcome will arise from the new "energy services directive", due in late June, which will force owners of buildings, vehicles and more controversially, industry, to cut energy consumption through efficiency measures.

One might have thought that such a move would be applauded for its planet-saving potential, but not a bit of it. More efficiency and thus less energy usage means less CO2 which means less permits needed ... leading to a surplus.

"There's a real concern of negative impacts on prices if the issue is not properly addressed," says one EU source. "Some of the studies imply that carbon prices will collapse".

One study suggests carbon credit prices might fall to €14 per tonne, compared to a business-as-usual price of €25. Another sees the price dropping to zero. "The energy services directive could potentially wipe out billions of euros for governments across the EU, unless EU ETS allowances are set aside," says Sanjeev Kumar at environment consultancy E3G.

So it is that there are strong rumor that the governments of EU member states will block the energy-reduction measures, to avoid

Laughter is a formidable weapon

End Game Part II

Keep sleeping, it's late already

End Game

By RT

A small group of anti-war protesters, over Memorial Day weekend, held a silent dance protest at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C.

Socialists of Europe unite

Putin Wins Over Khodorkovsky in European Court

By R. Wensel

The European Court of Human Rights has rejected former Russian 

oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky's claim that he was prosecuted for political reasons. The seven-judge panel, including one Russian justice, said in its 46-page ruling, 

"Khodorkovsky's case might raise some suspicion as to what the real intent of the Russian authorities might have been for prosecuting him, (but) claims of political motivation behind prosecution required incontestable proof, which had not been presented."