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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Dec-2012
10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

Web Log - December, 2012

10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

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

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)

Hugo Chavez (Trome)

Venezuela's president Hugo Chávez announced late Saturday that his doctors have found new cancer malignancies, and that he would have to return to Cuba on Sunday for a fourth operation:

"It has been decided, it is necessary, absolutely necessary, absolutely essential, to undergo further surgery and that should happen in the coming days, even doctors recommended it was 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 pray to God to give them good news in the coming days and we can continue together to build what we have to do for the homeland."

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

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

Rallies and prayer meetings were held across Venezuela on Sunday to show support and to pray for a quick recovery. Many were weeping in sadness, as in the case of housewife Gladys Millan, 45, who said, "Onward, my president. I love you, we need you, not only us but many 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 of carbon emissions to attend a climate change conference in some world class vacation spot. When they get there, they sit by the pool except to go to an occasional air-conditioned meeting room or to seek out a BBC reporter in order to whine about how the United States creates all the evils in the world.

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

Previous climate change conferences had the objective of getting the United States involved in the "carbon trading system," which would allow banksters to create carbon trade derivative securities that would put trillions of dollars into banksters' pockets with a new set of synthetic securities even more fraudulent than synthetic subprime mortgage-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 the United States to pay into a $100 billion "financial reservoir" called a "Loss and Damage Fund," to be used to pay developing nations huge amounts of money to compensate for "loss and damage" from climate change caused by America. The climate change activist freaks insist that the Loss and Damage Fund could be financed by a tax on financial transactions or airline levies, or by reducing the "immoral, obscene level of expenditures" on fossil fuels. They regard all this money as "free money" that they could use for their purposes, with no loss to anyone else.

It's embarrassing that the United States participated in this circus, because President Obama wants to prove how "committed" he is to saving the world from climate change. But in fact, the climate change freaks at the conference were FURIOUS at Obama, because he let them down and didn't agree to pay money into the "Loss and Damage Fund." But fear not. The Administration agreed to support a "Loss and Damage Fund" for some unnamed time in the future, allowing them to blame the Republicans 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 by the United States. Al Gore, who is the greatest climate change circus freak of all, tried to push this through the Senate in 1997, when he was vice-president. The attempt failed by a vote of 99 to 0 -- a unanimous vote against it.

So the Kyoto Treaty is a worthless peace of garbage that even Democrats unanimously rejected, which may explain why the Obama administration is so devoted to it. We have Wall Street "experts" openly lying about stock valuations on CNBC, and we have politicians in Brussels and Washington openly lying about climate change and the financial crisis, while the Obama administration commits itself to this farce. Respectable people are gangsters, and gangsters are treated 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 tests his conclusions, the whole world can see whether or not the rover lands on Mars without crashing. There's no politics or guesswork in the final outcome.

Climate science is "science" only in the same way that sociology is science. They take measurements of weather around the world, do statistical analyses and create computer models, and reach some conclusions. Once they've determined statistically that it's getting warmer here or getting colder there or getting wetter here or dryer there, that's the end of the "science." The rest is all guesswork and politics.

Just as sociologists choose ideological targets to "blame" for poverty, climate scientists choose ideological targets to "blame" for climate 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's guesswork and politics.

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

More to the point, perhaps these 20,000 earthquakes per year and the volcanic eruptions are modifying and shifting ocean currents, causing the Arctic ice to melt. That seems to me to be a more likely explanation than carbon emissions, but you never hear it mentioned by the climate "scientists."

And even if you assume that the climate science is all true, and even if you assume that carbon emissions are the cause, it's still a financial scam, because there's no technical solution to the problem right now, and making trillions of dollars available to banksters will definitely not solve anything except hasten the worsening of financial crisis.

And making billions of dollars available to corrupt warlords and leaders of developing nations so they can build themselves larger palaces and larger Swiss bank accounts won't reduce carbon emissions either.

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

In fact, I expect new nanotechnology and intelligent computer technology to begin to provide solutions to the carbon emissions problems in the 2020s, and this can't be sped up. Things happen in their own time. You can't invent the car before you've invented the wheel.

I have a very long memory. In 1970, I read an article in Ramparts Magazine that "scientists" had "proved" that because America was polluting the oceans so much, all the oceans would be covered with a layer of green algae by 1980. In 1972, the "Club of Rome" published a report on the Limits of Growth that "scientists" had "proved" that within a few decades, the world would grind to a halt because of pollution. It turned out that they had reached their conclusions because of a bug in their Fortran program. There's no end to this kind 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 believe anything 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 the Palestinian Authority with a $100 million monthly "financial safety net." On November 29, the United Nations General Assembly voted to create a state of Palestine, and Israel's reaction was to announce the building of 3,000 new West Bank settlements, and to withhold $100 million in tax collections to the Palestinian Authority. PA president Mahmoud Abbas requested the financial aid from the Arab League to compensate 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 different way than almost all the other financial analysts. The ones on CNBC and Bloomberg television tell full-throated lies about stock valuations constantly, as I've documented many times, naming names and quoting quotes. (See, for example, "14-Apr-12 World View -- Wharton School's Jeremy Siegel is lying about stock valuations" from earlier this year.) Respectable people are gangsters, and gangsters are treated as respectable people.

Siegel is a moron, but Mauldin actually understands the sophisticated mathematics behind price/earnings ratios (stock valuations): Divide the stock price by last year's earnings. That computation is too complex for the geniuses on CNBC, who are constantly claiming that valuations are at historic lows, when in fact they've been historically high continuously since 1995.

But Mauldin understands the math. He just fails to draw the obvious conclusion -- that by the Law of Mean Reversion, stocks are going to fall to the Dow 3000 level. He just pretends that stock valuations will stay historically high forever, so that he won't lose any of his multi-million dollar clients. As I say, that's a lot less phony than the liars and morons on CNBC.

In his latest column, Mauldin quotes himself from 2004:

"Unless steps are taken soon, it is possible we can see shortfalls approaching $1 trillion–$2 trillion in state-sponsored pension funds within 10 years. A deficit of this size on the state level can truly be called a crisis. A tax increase or other adjustments to fund this will be a large drag on the economy."

That was a pretty good prediction, though he complains that "I caught some flak for being so pessimistic about the potential problems," which I can understand, since I've been called a crazy psychopath a number of times, though much more rarely in recent years now that everything I've been writing keeps coming true.

His column contains an analysis by Ed Easterling of Crestmont Research which says, in essence, that Mauldin's 2004 prediction is now coming true, mainly because public sector labor unions are bankrupting the pension systems and the state taxpayers who are on the hook to make up the shortfall, and because estimates of stock market returns are wild overestimates. Easterly concludes:

"The result is an ongoing gap of near 4% annually that will cause an ever-widening shortfall for state pension plans. The problem is not a gap created by a unique event in 2008, but rather it is the result of an environment that started about a decade ago.
That gap, moreover, will not move at glacial pace presenting a subtle 4% shift each year. Rather, with the force of an earthquake, periodic market declines will reveal large chasms."

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

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (10-Dec-2012) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Dec-2012 10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege

Venezuelan women openly weep as Hugo Chavez 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

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 10-Dec-2012
10-Dec-12 World View -- Mauldin: Looming crisis, state budgets soon to be under siege