I could not say it better. Be careful sharing it though. The attribution to Klaus is not certain. “Progressives” will trot out their denials and fact checkers. I have posted this several times over the last years. Don’t shoot the messenger. Understand the message. It really does not matter who said it. We still have a big problem and it is not only Obama.
Yep, I am another lunatic.
I lived and worked in Tokyo for HP in the ’80’s. In Nov ’88 in my exit interview as I was heading back to the U.S., I told my boss’s boss that Japan’s stock market was about to crash and Japanese banks would fail. They laughed at me.
Despite the fact that before I arrived, the business group I was responsible for had been flat for 20 years, but after I was there 4 years my business had grown 700% in Yen terms. But my managers did not, could not, accept my warning. The evidence was clear and right in front of me and them. (The Japan market crashed two months after I left.)
Japan was and is operating on 180 DSO. The true state of the economy is hidden by their Tegatta system, which is an accepted system of payment by negotiable note, and other interlocking devices. Company managers have stacks of these Tegatta notes in their safes which they use to pay off debts or buy things, with generally accepted rules of engagement. But the Tegatta debt is outside the monetary system, unrecorded and of unknown size and effect, on top of the official debt in excess of 100% of GDP.
So, not only does Japan have QE, official government debt over 100% of GDP with the requirement that banks purchase a % of government bonds, they have extensive cross holdings of corporate stocks and interlocking boards, and Zaibatzu (anti-competitive conglomerates), they are holding mountains of negotiable notes equivalent to about 6 months sales outstanding. It’s another layer of debt that Americans do not have. (But we do have student debt and credit card debt.) The weight of the Yen is enormous.
Thus you have an 18 yearlong recession in Japan, but most things appear to be OK if not prosperous. For example, retail stores are loaded with the latest and greatest inventory, but the stores do not actually own that inventory…it’s all debt. And yes, it is factored/discounted. A mountain of debt held up only by the mutual confidence of the Japanese people. Screw up and you lose face, and nothing worse can happen to you than that. Face is the ultimate result of political correctness.
Japan is still afloat because their largest market, the U.S., is still buying. But mutual diversity is not an advantage in this case. The mutual confidence among Japanese does not exist in America or Europe. Maybe in China and South Korea.
Taxes in Japan are very high, so high that salaries are suppressed significantly. One unacknowledged consequence: the Japanese population is not replacing itself…very low birth rate.
A long recession is spiraling downward to an eventual depression which could make the nation, as they know it, become extinct. Pushed along with some other problems caused by immigration policies, Europe already followed Japan off the debt cliff. Italy, I believe the second largest economy there after Germany, also runs on 180 DSO or more.
There also, except by the grace of God, the U.S. is heading. Except, at the moment, the U.S. has no giant export product in hand with which to save the U.S. economy from its debt crisis.
Enter Trump’s big opportunity “to make America great again:” Revive and build the U.S. energy export industry. That’s a 10 year project in the normal course of events. If the nation were on a highly focused mission, like going to the moon or a Manhattan Project, we could have a new market in 5 years. Better yet, the demand is there.
Below is a link to about 1000 peer reviewed science papers which are skeptical about human-cause global warming. This is my response regarding the following absurd and mendacious statements in The Atlantic (Ref link below):
“While scientists continue to explore the consequences of climate change, there is essentially no debate among scientists about global warming’s “connection to the actions of mankind.”
“Nor has there been a debate for years. Since at least 1995, the balance of evidence in climate science has indicated that human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions are behind the planet’s warming. Agreement on this question has only strengthened since. By 2012, an international panel of leading researchers in the field said there was at least a 95 percent chance that human activity has caused global warming since 1950.”
Ahem.
The Atlantic is publishing a lie. In fact, there is plenty of debate and there are plenty of skeptics.
For example:
“…Kenneth Richard published his list of 500 climate catastrophe skeptic papers appearing in scientific journals in 2016 alone. It is the latest addition to the 282 papers published in 2015, and the 248 papers published in 2014, bringing the total number of peer-reviewed papers published over the past three years to more than 1000.”…
Harvard astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon thinks the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has strayed way off track. “I’m not surprised by the large number or empirical evidence that rejects the CO2 dangerous global warming alarmism,” wrote Soon in an e-mail. “This sort of literature review ought to put the sort of biased, if not anti-science, reports by the UN IPCC to shame.”
Dr. Soon added: “It is high time for the wider public to not only bear witness to the unbalance and corruption of our science institutions, but also to demand answers on why there has been such a disregard for truth and fact.”
Mike Hulme said, “I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the [catastrophe] skeptics. How the wheel turns. Why is it not just campaigners, but politicians and scientists too, who are openly confusing the language of fear, terror and disaster with the observable physical reality of climate change, actively ignoring the careful hedging which surrounds science’s predictions? To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which DO NOT emerge from empirical or theoretical science.” (emphasis added by Bud.)
(Mike Hulme, director of UK’s Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, told the BBC in November, 2006. The Tyndall Center advocates human-caused climate change.)
But this quote from the UN’s Own “Agenda 21” says: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
And Al Gore, former U.S. vice president, and a large CO2 producer says: “Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”
Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office says: “The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”
It seems to me that there is plenty of debate about almost everything related to human-caused climate change/global warming. So why did The Atlantic publish that? It is beyond a biased opinion; The Atlantic is publishing a lie.
In fact, there is plenty of debate. In a previous post I provided an attachment in which Professor Lindzen clearly explained the few areas upon which scientists agree. Climate science is an enormously complex field. We do not yet know what we do not know.
The climate models, upon which proponents of human-caused global warming are basing their geo and human engineering recommendations, have not produced accurate forecasts. Their models don’t work. Their recommendations are based on models not data. Chris Folland of UK Meteorological Office says: “The data don’t matter.” The models are not verified by data. And, they want to shut down debate.
What could go wrong? Plenty. One model from Russia is producing far more accurate forecasts of world temperatures, though it has only been run a few times. The model is forecasting global cooling as a result of periodic changes in the sun. And man’s influence is so small it is not measurable and thus irrelevant. It’s got nothing to do with man, which is the opposite of what The Atlantic published.
Shiver me timbers. Proponents of human-caused climate change have obscured an important topic about ocean currents with “a cascade of value-laden assumptions which DO NOT emerge from empirical or theoretical science.” (emphasis added by Bud.)
Paper with article by Professor Richard Lindzen: http://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Climate-Surprise-CO2C.pdf
And now it is time to replace what sounded good with what worked.
“Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.”
–Thomas Sowell
Scott Adams, the well known, expert, cartoonist, has persuaded himself that he is boxed in a corner by his lack of knowledge in science. He admits that one side is right and the other side is wrong. But he has convinced himself that he cannot decide which is which. Scott’s bias is that someone, perhaps Scott himself, convinced Scott that climate science is somehow impenetrable knowledge for mere humans, non-scientists, as if a scientist was some special sort of human being. But a scientist is just a normal human who questions the world around him, rather like Scott has become an expert in persuasion, except a scientist does not stop there. Will Scott categorize my comment as an ad hominem attack? Probably. Scott has created a mental block for himself and wants to persuade you to join him. Misery loves company. Scott has decided not to study or think further about this particular subject, so he has built a persuasive wall to justify his position. He ignores the mathematical fact that every expert in every discipline is growing in ignorance every day. Orthodoxy is a security blanket, a safe place, where you believe you have the freedom to not think about what is happening to you in the real world. Thinking is hard work and is rarely tried. Our society has reached massive conformity about many questions which are still truly open questions. This is done by media, politicians, cartoonists and educators etc simply by getting most people to accept roughly the same parameters on these questions. Then the media, politicians, cartoonists and educators etc rip-off you off. Some expert discusses two or three points of view, as Scott just did, lying safely within the parameters previously presented. People consider those alternatives as presented, as Scott has done. Then, most people adopt the comfortable illusion that they have thought about the alternatives and freely formed their own opinion. They created their own orthodoxy about that question, comfortably boxing themselves into a safe place, just as Scott has done. On the other hand, what a thinker and realist does is to seek out the conceptual parameters that define the range of all possible alternatives on a given question and then to imagine alternatives to those parameters. A scientist does that and then devises experiments to test the alternatives against real world conditions, rather than a thought experiment or computer model. The best scientists will test the hardest alternatives first. For example, measure the greenhouse warming, or the forcing, caused by human-produced CO2 under real world atmospheric conditions. Those experiments have been done and repeated many times. The result is that the warming and the forcing due to CO2 are far too small to measure with acceptable accuracy and reproducibility. Other climate variables are much larger. In fact, no one knows whether the net result is warming or cooling in the real world because the effects of CO2 are too small to measure. But, those who have vested interests will not explore, publish or think about that result or the next questions and dots connected to that result. They are THE experts, comfortable in their orthodox, safe place and they enjoy the benefits you provide them. So, they send you on a wild goose chase, or in this case, a polar bear or hurricane chase. It is not in their interest for you to connect the dots. If you accept that, if Scott persuades you, then tyranny of thought wins.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/155121836641/the-illusion-of-knowledge
Burning down the bridges as they retreat, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, other Obama officials met with Palestinian Authority to coordinate the UN resolution against Israel and Trump’s plans. Minutes of secret meeting: Rice “stressed the danger posed by the Trump administration.” Kerry and Rice “advised Palestinian President Mahmoud ‘Abbas to not take any preliminary steps that could provoke the Trump administration. “They [also] stressed the need to avoid military action or martyrdom [attacks], as these would greatly jeopardize the Palestinian position.” Palestinian negotiating team leader Saeb Erekat; ‘If U.S. Embassy Is Moved To Jerusalem, We Will Call To Expel U.S. Embassies From Arab And Muslim Countries.’
Obama should offer to stop hassling Syria’s leader, Bashar al-Assad, if Assad agrees to promptly take back all Syrian refugees who repatriate and guarantees their freedom in Syria. If Obama does it now before Trump is inaugurated, at least there would be one positive thing in Obama’s legacy. If Assad or any group harms the repatriated refugees, then the community of nations will remove him. I think Russia, the US, the EU, Iran, Egypt, Syria’s neighbors and other interested nations will agree.
budbromley 
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