A Climate Deal from Copenhagen? Don't Hold Your CO2

Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, on the climate change conference:

Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfill the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen.

-via the London Telegraph (Dec. 5)

CO2 - That Most Persecuted Molecule

Carbon dioxide is a pollutant? According to some (link below).

Plants have depended on CO2 since the beginning of life on earth.

When an elephant exhales a tree nearby breathes and smiles.

Who will stand and speak for CO2? Who will speak for trees?

More about EPA's anti-flora power grab HERE.

Confirmed in the UK: Global Warming IS Like a Religion

This morning's lead story in the UK's Independent trumpets a landmark ruling that allows employees holding "green" views to sue for unfair dismissal:

"Employees who raise concerns about their company's environmental practices won the right to legal redress yesterday after a judge ruled that green beliefs deserved the same protection in the workplace as religious convictions."

Elsewhere, Nobel Laureate Al Gore, stung this week by criticism in the New York Times and elsewhere over his playing the role both of advocate for the belief in global warming as well as investor in cap-n-trade schemes, struck back yesterday by launching a media campaign... in the UK.

Gore, who's been labeled on blogs a green "profiteer," appeared on BBC's flagship "Newsnight" interview program, as well as BBC Radio 1's morning news program.

One wonders... will green advocates under fire around the world make their appeal to the UK media, and in UK courts, much as do libel complainants?

Read the Independent story HERE.

To read the NYT's surprisingly skeptical turn about Gore's role of preacher and profiteer, go HERE.

To watch Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman "turn up the heat" on the Nobel Laureate Gore, view on i-player HERE. (May not be available at this link outside the UK. If not, persist, it's delicious.)

Editorial note, for FCC purposes, now or in the future: This blog is independent and unsubsidized. No goods or tangible value have been received in association with the composition or publication of this post.

“Was Churchill More a Liability than an Asset to the Civilized World?”

A friend who attended the 3 September 2009 Intelligence2 debate sent me the following notes.

-OT

Was Churchill More a Liability than an Asset to the Civilized World?

Supporting the motion: Pat Buchanan (billed “an advisor to three US presidents”), a Scotsman (Norman Stone, now teaching at a university in Ankara), and a Cambridge Economist (Nigel Knight).

Opposing: historian and Churchill biographer Andrew Roberts, Anthony Beevor (historian, noted for Stalingrad and Berlin), and Richard Overy.

The debate, moderated by the fragrant former BBC presenter Joan Bakewell, was held at the Methodist Hall, Westminster, a site that hosted the inaugural meeting of the UN General Assembly. The debate will be broadcast on TV and should be available in audio format via the web.

It’s worth noting that the I2 debates used to be sponsored by The Spectator, and are now sponsored by The Evening Standard, a publication now owned by Lebedev, the former Russian spy.

Your reporter needs to remind you all that this is an account of the debate, and the opinions described are those of the debaters, not mine, and that these are approximations.

Proceedings were launched by an outraged heckler “how dare you, etc…” applause.

Buchanan began the debate by allowing that judged only from his actions in 1940/41 Churchill was a great and courageous man, but in fact he was a leader for a half century during which (according to Buchanan) he left a record of “belligerence and bad decisions,” specifically actions that played a role in starting two world wars.

Principal among his bad, belligerent and ill-fated decision were

1) the 1919 naval blockade of Germany that led to the starvation of civilians, including women and children, an act which stoke a grievance that led to the rise of Hitler and the onset of WW2. [Very deterministic was Mr. Buchanan – OT]

2) The use in 1927 Iraq of “poison gas” on the Kurdish and Shiite populations, an act that when perpetrated by Saddam H was considered a war crime of a magnitude to justify his overthrow. (Robert was quick, in his turn, to quote documents from memory indicating that it was “tear gas” the British had used, of a sort used today in crowd control on the streets of London, not nerve gas such as Saddam used”).

3) The military debacle in WWI of Gallipoli.

4) The fumble, early in WW1 of Norway… a misjudged strategy compounded by Churchill’s blabbing about the impending operation to the press which alerted German command.

5) Bombing of the Rhineland, including civilian populations there, which led to the retaliatory bombings of Coventry, etc…

6) Post war UK capitulation to post-war US demands.

7) Churchill’s appeasement of Stalin at Yalta.

Taken together his acts took Britain from the greatest Empire since Rome to an island dependency of the US.

Andrew Roberts replied by correcting the bit about “poison gas” then added that given that he entered parliament in 1900 and served on and off until 1964, it was inevitable that Churchill shared in a number of misjudgments. That said, Churchill was quite simply the champion of the free world. As for WC as a military strategist, WC’s move to draw German forces to North Africa and extend them was ingenious. “Given that we now debate in a hall where de Gaulle launched the Free French Movement, where Churchill announced ‘victory is before us’ let us not sully this place with perverse arguments.”

The Cambridge economist recounted how Churchill, in 1925, as chancellor of the exchequer, against the advice of Keynes and others (other Cambridge economists), took the country back on to the gold standard, a disastrous move that led to deflation, unemployment, etc…

NK recounted Churchill’s decision, against the advice of air commander dowling, at the outset of WW2 to send fight planes to France making them unavailable to defend Britain.

“WC maintained a pre-WWII view of the navy, not recognizing the importance of Uboats or air carriers.”

NK described Churchill’s WW2 strategy as “dispersionist” and based on his WW1 Gallipoli strategy, which itself had failed. It postponed the concentration of force that is necessary to win, it cost time and lives (“ten million lives in the two European theaters”).

Beevor charged that Buchanan was making a revisionist argument akin to Putin recent comments suggesting that the UK was responsible for WW2, and that it was a false, dirty and dangerous argument. Time and again, Hitler would sign a treaty, use the pretext of defending German speaking peoples to annex a portion of territory and use that as a launching pad to take control of the rest of the country. This was Hitler’s aim, not a reaction to the British signing a defense pact.

As for his strategy of delay… the UK alone did not have sufficient forces to defeat Hitler. In early 1943 the UK did not have sufficient landing craft, the Luftwaffe was still strong, and the US army needed time to sort itself out.

In 1943 Tehran it was Roosevelt, not Churchill, who sacrificed Central Europe.

In sum, according to Beevor, he was our greatest asset.

Norman Stone, the Scot now teaching in Turkey, began with a Glasgow memory. He was a interrupted by a heckler (“How dare you...” with other sounds of approval.)

He outlined Churchill the Imperialist’s fumbling attempts in 1920s through 1930s to hold onto to empire escaping his grasp. How can WC be consider the great asset of the free world when he continually acted to deny democracy to people in Britain’s colonies. So many of our problems today are an inheritance from his bad decisions… chiefly the problem, for us here at home in Britain as well as abroad, of Pakistan.

NS condemned the 1945 bombing of Germany to bits as sadistic. WC did not, like de Gaulle, see ahead to the post-war period.

NS lays at WC’s feet Britain’s post-war decline… cue the reminisce of 1970s Glasgow [seems a non sequitor to me! – OT], and Britain’s small-minded thinking throughout that era.

Overy: “The countdown to war began in 1939. Try to imagine the consequences of that period without WC.” He recounts period, Hitler’s breaking of treaties, being presented with a basket of broken treaties on his birthday. The advocates for the motion seem to lay everything that happened in that era at Hitler’s feet, but at the very least I need to say that WC, unlike Hitler, tended to take advice. What (citing an earlier fact citation) could WC possibly do about Stalin’s decision to displace millions of ethnic Germans within the Soviet Union?”

He had a historic vision, a view that encompassed liberty, rule of law, parliamentary freedom, and a hatred of tyranny.

In 1941-42 the Liberal age was on the point of extinction. In 1940, there was discussion of a peace deal with Hitler (remember, at the time the US was neutral and the USSR was in an alliance with Nazi Germany)… and WC stood against that compromise.

In response to various questions from the audience:

Andrew Roberts rejoined the debate, remarking on Putin’s recent historical gambit: “The Munich Pact was not the trigger for WWII, the Hitler-Stalin pact was.”

Buchanan: “Churchill goaded Chamberlain to give Poland a guarantee of assistance that could not be followed through on.”

Who else could have played a pivotal role as leader?

The Cambridge economist suggested that Atlee was a more organized decision-maker.

Buchanan suggested that not only was the war unnecessary and the fault of Churchill’s belligerence, because “Hitler wanted no war in the west,” but that “if there’d been no war there would have been no holocaust.”

Andrew Roberts: What you say is monstrous. The holocaust started before Britain’s entry, and before the Wansee conference. There were both killings and preparation. The Wansee conference was simply to plan the industrialization of that effort.

Beevor:

As for the bombing of the Rhineland, it was it was designed to pull the Luftwaffe and its anti-aircraft guns from the Eastern front, and it was commenced at the request of the Red Army.

As for his handling of India… Churchill kept the Japanese out of India. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines 17% of the population died.

Remember, in 1939, on the day France and England voted to go to war, the League of Nations votes on the standardization of rails in Europe.

Roberts, in response to a question: “Thankfully, Churchill revisionism is a minority fetish, and its proponents are not to be found among the young but rather those of a certain age.”

What would Alexis de Tocqueville think?

Manhattan Institute fellow Steve Malanga writing in the Institute's City Journal:

The genius of America in the early nineteenth century, Tocqueville thought, was that it pursued "productive industry" without a descent into lethal materialism. Behind America's balancing act, the pioneering French social thinker noted, lay a common set of civic virtues that celebrated not merely hard work but also thrift, integrity, self-reliance, and modesty—virtues that grew out of the pervasiveness of religion, which Tocqueville called "the first of [America's] political institutions, . . . imparting morality" to American democracy and free markets. Some 75 years later, sociologist Max Weber dubbed the qualities that Tocqueville observed the "Protestant ethic" and considered them the cornerstone of successful capitalism. Like Tocqueville, Weber saw that ethic most fully realized in America, where it pervaded the society. Preached by luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, taught in public schools, embodied in popular novels, repeated in self-improvement books, and transmitted to immigrants, that ethic undergirded and promoted America's economic success.

What would Tocqueville or Weber think of America today?

Read more HERE.

Tick-Tock blog

... remains here, but is updated only occasionally...

Octave Tockfield writes

HERE, at Tick-Tock blogspot...

On the Relationship of Economic and Political Freedom

"Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. In addition, by dispersing power, the free market provides an offset to whatever concentration of political power may arise. The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.

"The combination of economic and political freedom produced a golden age in both Great Britain and the United States in the nineteenth century. The United States prospered even more than Britain. It started with a clean slate: fewer vestiges of class and status; fewer government restraints; a more fertile field for energy, drive, and innovation; and an empty continent to conquer. . . .

"Ironically, the very success of economic and political freedom reduced its appeal to later thinkers. The narrowly limited government of the late nineteenth century possessed little concentrated power that endangered the ordinary man. The other side of that coin was that it possessed little power that would enable good people to do good."

... via Rose Friedman, who passed away this week, writing with her husband Milton in their 1980 book "Free to Choose"

The Forgotten War - Iraq

Dexter Filkins writing in the New Republic:

Perhaps no other event in modern American history has gone from being contentious to being forgotten as quickly as the war in Iraq. Remember the war? It consumed a trillion American dollars, devoured a hundred thousand Iraqi lives, squandered a country's reputation, and destroyed an American presidency. Given the retreat of the American press -- the first American withdrawal from Iraq, you might say -- one could almost be excused, in the spring of 2009, for forgetting that 140,000 American troops are still fighting and dying there.

That an undertaking as momentous and as costly as America's war in Iraq could vanish so quickly from the forefront of the national consciousness does not speak well of the United States in the early twenty-first century: not for its seriousness and not for its sense of responsibility. . . .

The irony of America's big tune-out lies in its timing. It has taken place during what has been the most dramatic phase of the six-year-long conflict -- more precisely, during the reversal of the war's fortunes. It is this reversal, this unexpected turnaround to the possibility of something less than a disastrous outcome, that has allowed so many Americans guiltlessly to forget about it. In the summer of 2006, remember, the war in Iraq was spiraling toward defeat, and the Middle East seemed to be headed toward a regional war. Two summers later, however, conditions on the ground were so normal, relatively speaking, that the citizens of the invading nation could feel secure enough to avert their gaze.

Read the whole thing HERE.

Paglia on Obama and the Media

"Obama's ability to stay on his feet and outrun the most menacing waves that threaten to engulf him seems to embody the breezy, sunny spirit of the American surfer. In the closing weeks of the election, however, I became increasingly disturbed by the mainstream media's avoidance of forthright dealing with several controversies that had been dogging Obama -- even as every flimsy rumor about Sarah Palin was being trumpeted as if it were engraved in stone on Mount Sinai. . . . Given that Obama had served on a Chicago board with Ayers and approved funding of a leftist educational project sponsored by Ayers, one might think that the unrepentant Ayers-Dohrn couple might be of some interest to the national media. But no, reporters have been too busy playing mini-badminton with every random spitball about Sarah Palin, who has been subjected to an atrocious and at times delusional level of defamation merely because she has the temerity to hold pro-life views."

She right. Read the rest at Salon.com.

The Wine and Cheese Revolt

La Stampa daily of Turin reports that the Russian billionaires who invaded the French and Italian Rivieras in the '90s have become so unpopular that local restaurants are refusing to serve them.

"From north to south, a rebellion is growing against those who show off their money and power."

Roman Abramovich, the friend of Vladimir Putin said to be worth $23.5 billion, was refused a table the other night at Bistrot in Forte dei Marmi on the Tuscan coast, The Times of London reports.

When restaurateur David Vaiani told Abramovich his eatery was fully booked and said, "You can try again tomorrow," the oil tycoon was so furious that he took off immediately for Sardinia on his yacht.

A Poetic Lesson

The Wall Street Journal brings us an essay on the verse of former Guantanamo detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi and his poetic romancing of various rights guaranteed detainees by a recent ruling of the US Supreme Court.

Al-Ajmi's poetry was recited at a 2006 Seton Hall Law School 'teach-in' that was Webcast live to four hundred colleges and law schools in the US and abroad.

Al-Ajmi himself was released from Guantanamo in 2005.

On April 26th of this year, Al-Ajmi, a 29-year-old Kuwaiti, blew himself up in Mosul as part of a coordinated suicide attack on security forces of the democratically-elected government of Iraq. Thirteen died and forty-two were seriously injured.