Global Economy Bursting?

[Randolph Kinney]

Michael Crichton notes the relationship of "Industry and Science" in his book "State of Fear." Various assertions appear in the book, for example:

• The science behind global warming is so incomplete that no reasonable conclusions can be drawn on how to solve the "problem" (or if the "problem" even exists.)

• Elites in various fields use either real or artificial crises to maintain the existing social order, misusing the "science" behind global warming.

• As a result of potential conflicts of interest, the scientists conducting research on topics related to global warming may subtly change their findings to bring them in line with their funding sources.

Crichton argues for removing politics from science and uses global warming and real-life historical examples in the appendices to make this argument. In a 2003 speech at the California Institute of Technology he expressed his concern about what he considered the "emerging crisis in the whole enterprise of science—namely the increasingly uneasy relationship between hard science and public policy."

 

[Randolph Kinney]

European Bailout Fund Could ‘One Day’ Issue Bonds in Yuan

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-...one-day-issue-bonds-in-yuan-regling-says.html

The euro area’s bailout fund could at some point issue bonds denominated in the Chinese currency, Chief Executive Officer Klaus Regling said in Beijing today.

“We are authorized to use any currency we want if it seems efficient so we may one day issue in U.S. dollars or renminbi,” said Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility, using another name for the yuan. “It depends whether the Chinese authorities would approve of that. I could imagine that over the years that might happen, maybe not immediately but maybe one day,” he said.

 

[Austin]

A few comments on global warming and some reasons I believe it is a hoax: Most of the big Battles of the American Civil war were fought within a 150 mile circle of Washington DC. I had two great grandfathers in Lee’s army. My grandmother’s father was one of them and she told many tales from the family history.
One of my fascinations I have is to take Civil War picture books and go back to the scene and observe the actual rocks and scenes of the war. A good example is at Gettysburg Battlefield PA which was photographed after the battle. You can really notice some things from these pictures. For example the land at the time was stripped of trees. People talk of deforestation but we have many more trees and forest now than then. I mean the land was barren. I noticed that the boulders on the Gettysburg battle field were covered in a growth of funguses, likens sp and it was almost like they had hair on the rocks. Now the boulders are stripped clean.
I was reading this summer on the history of the battles in the western theater and all of the tales of diseases like malaria, swamp fever etc. all over the South. Never in my 66 years have I heard of a case of malaria or swamp fever in this country. I don’t see how those people survived and many did not like Jefferson Davis’ first wife who died of malaria and Davis was close to death of the same disease at the same time. More solders died of disease than in battle in the Civil War at a rate of about 3 to 1.
Death was always hovering in the air in the 1800’s. My grandmother told me that when she was a teen in the 1890’s there favorite game was to play dead man and bury themselves in the leaves. She told of hearing raven birds that sounded like a baby crying and they would look in the woods for the baby. I have never seen a raven in my life anywhere in the South. She said they did their courting when someone died. The night before burial the teens and young people would sit up all night, called sitting up with the corpse, and that was that was the way they met people.
The town we lived in in Southside Virginia has a river running through the middle of town and there was a canal system along the river to get around the rapids all built in the early 1800’s. One day around 1960 we took my grandmother who was about 80 years old to the eye doctor in January. When we crossed the bridge over the river she looked at the canals and said-“Look the canals are not frozen and no one is ice skating.” I never heard of ice skating on the river. 1960 was one of the coldest winters in the 20th century here. I remember it well and the river never froze nor the canals.
In the Civil War books I just read it was snowing in November in northern Virginia and the Potomac River stayed frozen all winter long. That has not happened in my life time and I never ever heard mention of it. Our ponds freeze in winter but never the river or any moving water.
The forest have completely changed in the last 135 years. Back then Chestnut was the manor tree in the South all destroyed by disease. Back in the 1980’s & 90’s I used to go to Florida to the races and I remember passing Savanna Georgia along I-95 and seeing the forest growth. The modern trees are pine and hardwood that grow up to around 90 feet. There were at the time some dead tree stumps scattered in the forest that were broken off about 150 up and the place they were broken off were about 5 feet thick and never tapered up to that point. I don’t know what those trees were, I have often wondered, but they must have been 300 feet or more tall. Yesterday I passed there and not one stump was left standing.
I read on the news this morning Oct 31, 2011 about the huge snow storms in the New England area and out west this weekend with up to 20 inches the earliest in many decades. The point is that the earth is in a constant cycle and with this much climatic change over a 135 year history demonstrates that the normal cycle makes it impossible to support a general theory of any significant climatic change. It is all political science-pun intended! Is politics a science?

PS: Just in case you did not connect the dots-The time of the cold winters with frozen rivers was the same period of time with the hot malarial summers. Extremes of heat and and cold all occuring at the same time.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Norway's Sovereign Wealth Fund Sold All U.S. Mortgage Bonds

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/10/28/bloomberg_articlesLTRWRC07SXKX.DTL

Norway's $570 billion sovereign wealth fund sold all its holdings in U.S. mortgage-backed securities as part of a shift of its fixed-income portfolio.

The fund holds no mortgage bonds issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the U.S.-controlled mortgage financiers, and an "insignificant" amount of private home loan-backed bonds, said Yngve Slyngstad, chief executive officer of Norges Bank Investment Management, today in an interview in Oslo.

The debt was sold primarily because of the refinancing risk, he said. In the U.S., when a borrower refinances a mortgage it can cut short the maturity of the bond backed by the loan and reduce the expected interest over time, so-called prepayment risk. The fund held 36 billion kroner ($6.6 billion) in bonds from Fannie Mae at the end of the second quarter and 11.5 billion kroner from Freddie Mac at the start of the year.

The buyer of GSE mortgage bonds that are refinanced is expected to be the U.S. federal reserve.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

The point is that the earth is in a constant cycle and with this much climatic change over a 135 year history demonstrates that the normal cycle makes it impossible to support a general theory of any significant climatic change. It is all political science-pun intended! Is politics a science?

The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Optimum).[1] While not a true ice age, the term was introduced into scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.[2] It is conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries,[3][4][5] though climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions. NASA defines the term as a cold period between 1550 AD and 1850 AD and notes three particularly cold intervals: one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, each separated by intervals of slight warming.[6]

My conclusion is warming occurred after the last LIA interval. Now, global cooling is showing itself to be coming back.

If there is any "science" in the global warming - climate change model as caused by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, the solution to global cooling is to burn more carbon-based fuels so that the CO2 levels are driven higher and higher.

Eventually man can overpower nature and the natural cycle to control long-term climate conditions to his liking.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Columbus blamed for Little Ice Age - Science News

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335168/title/Columbus_blamed_for_Little_Ice_Age

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate

By Devin Powell

November 5th, 2011; Vol.180 #10 (p. 12)

MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and other explorers who followed him may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate.

The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, Stanford University geochemist Richard Nevle reported October 11 at the Geological Society of America annual meeting. Such carbon dioxide removal could have diminished the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooled the climate, Nevil and his colleagues have previously reported.

“We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident with the European arrival,” said Nevle.

Tying together many different lines of evidence, Nevle estimated how much carbon all those new trees would have consumed. He says it was enough to account for most or all of the sudden drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice during the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a depletion of a key greenhouse gas may have helped augment Europe’s so-called Little Ice Age, centuries of cooler temperatures that followed the Middle Ages, Nevle's team has argued.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Does Carbon Dioxide Drive Global Warming?

Conclusions

Individual temperature records commonly used by climatologists and paleoclimatologists show that the past 1,000 years have been marked by periodic warm and cold periods, not by a uniform climate trend. The recent warming trend since about 1850 appears to be the continuation of the warming following the Little Ice Age, rather than a sudden upsurge after a long period of relatively uniform temperatures. The detailed temperature record since 1850 shows a temperature decline between 1940 and 1970, which flies in the face of the explanation that a continuous exponential increase in carbon dioxide causes global warming. And the simultaneous record of temperature and carbon dioxide concentration in ice cores indicates that carbon dioxide concentration changes after temperature changes, not before, indicating that carbon dioxide is the result, not the cause, of global warming.

 

[Riick]

Judges Are for Sale
— and Special Interests Are Buying

(( Surprised? ))
Big business and their lobbyists are "packing" the courts - with judges that put special interests ahead of the public interest

Read more here: http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/31/judges-are-for-sale-and-special-interests-are-buying/#ixzz1cNFHuIpq

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[Randolph Kinney]

Judges Are for Sale
— and Special Interests Are Buying

(( Surprised? ))
Big business and their lobbyists are "packing" the courts - with judges that put special interests ahead of the public interest

Read more here: http://ideas.time.com/2011/10/31/judges-are-for-sale-and-special-interests-are-buying/#ixzz1cNFHuIpq

.

So who is paying? The new study – by New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice, the National Institute on Money in State Politics, and the Justice at Stake Campaign, a non-partisan reform group – found that a small group of super spenders plays the biggest role, using their money to buy the kind of judges they want hearing their cases. These super spenders are the usual suspects: mainly big business, corporate lobbyists, and trial lawyers.

I'm shocked! Corruption you say in politics and justice? Say it ain't so!

Why does all this matter? Because as money floods into judicial elections, we are getting courts that are filled with judges whose first loyalty is not to justice – or to the general public – but to insurance companies, big business and other special interests.

The definition of an honest politician is once he is bought, he stays bought. Same for judges.

 

[Austin]

A year ago I was on vaction at the beach and watched a lot of TV. What I was watching was the impeachment trial of a Federal Judge from New Orleans being tried in congress. You talk about some high powered lawyers-sheesh! Boy you talk about corrupt, you guys don't have a clue. It was mostly about rigging the bail bonds racket. The judge would find out much money the defendant's family had and set the bond at a level they could pay so the bail bondsman could make a big chunk of cash, something like $6,000 a pop. Then the bail bondsman would paint the judges house, fix his cars, take him and his family to Vegas etc.
I left the beach and never heard what happened. Then my newly mented lawyer nephew went to work as the chief full time clerk for a Federal Judge so I axed him about the details. He said the judge was impeached and I believe is one of the few times in history this has every happened.