Barrel Strength

The article, published in today’s Globe and Mail, and derived from the Guardian, has to be read in the complete inverse of its intentions:

-the result looks likely to sully the country’s image abroad

-the vote represented a triumph for the far right Swiss People’s Party

-the vote also reflected an act of mass defiance of the national establishment

Well, what else would they say? That it was a triumph of the ordinary white Christian Swiss who says he wants to live in a white Christian country? And moreover, have a say on the direction of his own country’s basic nature? No, the Guardian could never say that. That would be….. wait a minute…. uh, racist!!

From an AP report:

“The nationalist Swiss People’s party (SPP) described minarets, the distinctive spires used in most countries for calls to prayer, as symbols of rising Muslim political and religious power that could eventually turn Switzerland into an Islamic nation.

“Muslims make up about 6% of Switzerland’s 7.5 million people, many of them refugees from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Fewer than 13% practice their religion, the government says, and Swiss mosques do not broadcast the call to prayer outside their buildings.”

I seem to recall a Turkish Prime Minister, Tayyip Erdogan, who  had publicly read an Islamic poem including the lines: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”

  Maybe someone listened to him.

PS: It should be noted that Switzerland is a republic, not a disguised monarchy, and that voter initiatives are allowed.  That would explain the difference between Switzerland, say, and Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and so forth.

I was stirring the risotto tonight, telephone on the shoulder, crowing about what a great week it was for conservatives. Oban was my interlocutor at the other end of the call. The hack of the Climate Reseach Unit at East Anglia University continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Global warming exposed as fraud! Berlin Wall falls! Communism over! Hurrah!

Yes, I have been exultant. I have probably made myself more than usually obnoxious to wets, bedwetters, warmists, leftists: the vast throng of the wrong.

Oban pointed out, in his usual mild but incisive way, that the other crew of ideologues who had been proven decisively wrong, and who had cost the world economy a few trillion, not by treaty but by unintelligible debt instruments, were the pure marketeers, the libertarians, the ones who thought that the market would always assess risk correctly, and that therefore no financial crash was possible in an environment of pure information. Yes, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, chief architect of the laisser-faire in markets for the last 15 years. The one who constantly preached to the US Senate that there was no need for the US Commodities Trading Organization to regulate debt instruments which were at the base of the current financial crisis.

All true. But you know the difference? Alan Greenspan came to the US Senate and admitted he was wrong. He said he was completely wrong about the capacity of markets to assess risk. In short, his postulate, the equivalent of e=mc², was wrong.

“”I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” said Greenspan.”

In the New York Times coverage of that story, he said:

But Mr. Greenspan, who was first appointed by President Ronald Reagan, placed far more blame on the Wall Street companies that bundled subprime mortgages into pools and sold them as mortgage-backed securities. Global demand for the securities was so high, he said, that Wall Street companies pressured lenders to lower their standards and produce more “paper.”

“The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations (undeniably the original source of the crisis) would have been far smaller and defaults accordingly far lower,” he said.

Despite his chagrin over the mortgage mess, the former Fed chairman proposed only one specific regulation: that companies selling mortgage-backed securities be required to hold a significant number themselves.

I am waiting, but not holding my breath, for Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Kevin Trenberth, Michael Mann et alia, to admit to their errors, let alone crimes.