Barrel Strength

Conrad Black and Julius Caesar have something in common. Both live or lived in legally rough times. Justice in republican Rome was arbitrary, partial, prejudiced, and infected with political vengeance.

It was said that a Roman governor had three years to make a governorship profitable: one year to pay back the bribes that got him his office, another year to make the profit, and a third year to make enough to pay the lawyers to defend him through the inevitable trials which would accompany his return to Rome.

Conrad Black was sentenced to six and a half years on the basis of a law that was recently quashed by the US Supereme Court. The prosecution had alleged that revenues from a non-competition clause in his contract of sale of his shareholdings in his company, a clause which was approved by tax lawyers, accountants and his own board of directors, was a crime of failing to offer his shareholders his “honest services”. His conviction is an ongoing scandal. Unable to prove anything criminal by recourse to ordinary statute law, the prosecutors had to rely on a badly worded paragraph that allowed prosecutors to invent what can be called “common-law crimes”, which is a polite way of saying: making it up as you go along. 

The legal risks of doing business in the United States are enormous and not sufficiently appreciated by outsiders.

The United States has a culture of rough politics, and it is getting rougher. It bears comparison with the politics of the late Roman republic. Law has become an instrument of oppression of members of the “senatorial” as well as of the knightly and plebeian classes. Prosecutions follow no principle. The risk of being a member of the board of a corporation are so high that a great deal of money must be spent on litigation insurance.

The near obsession with legal considerations in the United States is not the sign of progress or enlightenment that Americans think it is. Rather, it is the sign that the powers of one privileged class of people, the lawyers, are becoming so great that normal human or business considerations are being subordinated to the purely legal issues of litigation and prosecution risk. The more the uncertainty, the greater their powers as a class.

It would not take a genius to reckon that the powers of priests in 17th century Spain were too great; that the whole society was becoming distorted by religious fanaticism. Likewise in the United States, and increasingly in Canada, the lawyerly class is exercising too much power. Social and business relations are being driven into a narrow legal focus, where the question becomes “what is legal”, rather than “what should we do?”.

A society built on laws is becoming lawless, and I would argue it is becoming lawless because it constantly turns to law for solutions that should come from social consensus, trust, and host of other personal and political virtues. Any partial truth held to be the whole truth becomes a lie.

Conrad Black’s contention is that about a quarter or more of the intelligent labour of the United States is unproductively employed in finance, law and accounting. The reduction of legal risk would liberate many of these people for more productive employment. For the first time in my life, just this past weekend, I started to wonder about the safety of the republic, and its future. The lesson from Julius Caesar is that when the politics get too rough, when the stakes both personal and financial get too high, then some man of talent will eventually say “enough!”, and neutralize the Senate.

It seems so!

Democracy could ‘collapse’ in Greece, Spain and Portugal unless urgent action is taken to tackle the debt crisis, the head of the European Commission has warned.

In an extraordinary briefing to trade union chiefs last week, Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso set out an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in which crisis-hit countries in southern Europe could fall victim to military coups or popular uprisings as interest rates soar and public services collapse because their governments run out of money.

The stark warning came as it emerged that EU chiefs have begun work on an emergency bailout package for Spain which is likely to run into hundreds of billions of pounds.

Daniel Suarez’ “Daemon” marks a cunning sci-fi police procedural which turns into, simultaneously, a thrilling page-turner and a profound critique of capitalist society in its current computer-dependent state. What if I could get across an important techno-political treatise in the guise of a thriller? What if I could get across a chapter in Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles, or Machiavelli’s The Prince, both of which are brilliant essays on of western warfare and political evolution, as a high-tech police procedural? What if Hobbes wrote Leviathan not as learned discourse on the nature of the state in Renaissance Europe, but as a high-tech science fiction thriller?

Several important writers have tried to tell us that the modern state is finished. But what do we mean by the word “state”? Bobbitt told us that the nation-state was passing into the market-state, which is where we are now. Basically this transition from nation-state to market-state signifies the withdrawal of the state from attempting to equalize outcomes, to one which tries to maximize your opportunities. Bobitt writes brilliantly. I recommend him. Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age also dealt with the nature of the world where nanotechnology has destroyed the basis of the nation-state, and I recommend him, too.

But Suarez is at an entirely more effective level of discourse because you are going to find him in the front of the airport book store before you get on your plane. You are going to be absorbed by the detective story that constitutes the beginning of the novel, and you are going to be increasingly impressed by how good it gets: how much more complex the implications, and how very cleverly he conveys his ideas about the obsolescence of our current governmental-economic structures. Why are they obsolescent? Because the uniformity of the machine-level at which all data is stored, configured, and manipulated has left us essentially as vulnerable as a wheat monoculture to rust, or a potato monoculture to blight.

The blight in question is the “daemon”. The genius inventor of multi-player immersive computer games, Mathew Sobol, has died, and his death causes a number of events to spring forth.  Essentially the daemon, a sophisticated program, takes over the IT departments of many large corporations as a parasite, and threatens the total evaporation of their records unless they comply with Mathew Sobol’s requirements. Sobol speaks through videos recorded before his death. He (in the form of computer-generated videos) asserts that he is the first man fully to realize the implications of computer insecurity and to exploit them in a comprehensive way. His daemon has become a parasite upon computer-dependent civilization, just as it was designed to be.

Don’t be put off by my praise: this is a fascinating book. Daniel Suarez has written something worth your attention.

How many big stupid ideas have marched through our institutions in our lifetimes, wrecking as they go?

Let us define what we mean. A Big Stupid Idea is any idea which, though it may once have been true, or is partly true, is pushed to such an extreme that it lasts beynd its time, or worse, is pushed to the exclusion of its necessary qualifications. a truth can become an untruth when it is claimed to be the Whole Truth.

I invite anyone to add their own Big Stupid Ideas to the list.

And pardon the offence to my market-oriented friends, but the latest big stupid idea is:

1) The market is the solution.

Uh, no. The market is a restricted sand-box whose rules and dimensions are determined by non-market institutions such as courts and parliaments, the rule of law, and the guardian forces of the state which protect the sandbox, and the tolerance of the public for its outcomes.

When those who play in this sandbox load the ordinary joes of this life, including you and me, with their failures, but privatize the winnings, society reacts negatively. The social contract between those who play in the sandbox and the rest of us is a real fact, which the Ayn Randists ignore at their peril.

2) Genetics has no (legitimate) role to play in the determination of social outcomes.

I can never figure out whether this is an “is” argument or an “ought” argument, but in either case it is wrong. The abundant new evidence accruing daily about the role of the genetic in every social outcome (viz. The Bell Curve, Before the Dawn, The Ten Thousand Year Explosion) and in the fundamental composition and success rate of various humans is so overwhelming that only an ideologist could be blind to it. As to the “ought” portion of the argument, I rely on the immortal words of Eric Voegelin:

“All men are equal, and all men are unequal. And the ways in which they are equal are as interesting and important as the ways in which they are unequal. Any society which forgets the truth of either fo these two propositions will end in violence.”

Thus, recent findings include the facts that: race is not a social construction, but a real biological fact; intelligence is distributed differently among ethnic and and racial groups; evolution has not stopped, but is in fact accelerating; a great deal of the different outcomes among nations and peoples is not therefore the result only of unfair exploitation, but of genetic factors. How to make outcomes fair in such as situation is not a trivial exercize in forced redistribution.

From the failure to provide for the genetic factors of life proceeds many further errors and false ideas.

On a smaller scale, here are few more:

3) Isreal is an apartheid state: the Palestinians are the blacks; the Israelis, the Afrikaners.

From this narrative, everything flows. ThePalestinians are the virtuous underdog, the Israelis the white supremacist masters. The role of Islam in making this inter-ethnic and religious issue intractable is ignored. Apparently intelligent people believe this. It has the effect of letting them know they are on the right side, which is its main function. No further thought required.

4) Islam

God has commanded you to obey God’s ravings, accurately recorded verbatim in the Koran, to tyrannize and subdue every other person in the universe, and the female sex especially. Jews are to be exterminated on the Day of Judgment. And so forth.

Need I say more?

5) Man is causing irreversible damage to the environment through burning fossil fuels, and only a concerted, coordinated global campaign to reduce carbon emissions can save the planet.

This is the latest emanation of leftist control fantasies, after the failure of Marxism. It is just the zombie of state socialism with an another compelling pseudo-scientific justification, rising from the grave of Communism.

The fact that we can and should take better care of resources (fish, forests, air, soils) than we do has nothing to do with the spiritual impulse to control every living thing which lies at the core of ecologism. Making the production of carbon dioxide as sin is about as sensible as making lust a sin. If it worked for the Christians, then why not for the Greens?

What are your candidates for Big Stupid Ideas? At best they should not be restricted to Canada or North America. They should be working through the culture more or less around the world, or the english-speaking portion of it that we are familiar with.

Stieg Larsson’s Elizabeth Salander series is a moderately entertaining read, despite everything bad I am going to say about it. Having stayed up too late last night finishing the last of the  series, I must complain about some of Larsson’s tedious moralizing leftism, and his dhimmitude to women.  

Lest you think me unfair imputing leftism to Larsson,  which oozes through the books, the Wikipedia entry for him states:

Larsson was initially a political activist for the Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers League), a photographer, and one of Sweden’s leading science fiction fans.[3] In politics he was the editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen. He also wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen

The series of three books is built around various men behaving badly towards women. Even the male protagonist, the journalist Blomkvist, is criticized for a love ‘em and leave ‘em attitude. What was Stieg Larsson repenting? 

Blomkvist’s fictional sister says of him: “He screws his way through life and doesn’t seem to grasp how much it can hurt women who think of him as more than a casual affair.”

The strange, anti-social heroine, Lizbeth Salander, has been the subject of a vast conspiracy to ruin her life, run by a section of Swedish Security Police.

Her father, former member of Russia’s military intelligence,  ran a white slavery business; her half-brother murders women for sport.

A colleague of one of the central women in the story sends her vicious emails because she would not look at him in high school.

The central villain in the first Stieg Larsson book tortures women to death in his basement.

Salander, the heroine, is attacked  by biker thugs, of whom she disposes readily.

Her father puts a .22 bullet in her head.

It goes on and on.

Like many modern books, the last one in the series needs a thorough editing. The first half of the book could have been dropped with no loss of interest or importance to the devlopment of the plot. In fact the second and third books are badly written. Far too many characters are introduced. The plots go nowhere for weeks of fictional time.

Then there is the relentless recitation of facts and brand names which characterize modern police procedurals. No one has an orange soda; they have a Ramlosa (European brand name). Every car trip is described street by street: for example – “She turned left of Helmansgatan, drove a couple of blocks to Svavelsjo, and parked in front of the Tre Kronor.” Who gives a damn?

The weirdest thing, for a North American, is the feeling that in Sweden, we are seeing a vision of our own future. Larsson envisions a society so tightly bound up in procedural fairness and privacy laws that its organs of state seem barely able to function. The police are barely effective. The state also seems to have a thing against people taking measures to defend themselves. For example, the heroine Salander is charged with manslaughter for killing her father, after the fucker had popped a .22 into her head, and she had clawed her way out of a shallow grave and subsequently put an axe in his face. Credentialism runs unchecked: there is a sort of collective gasp of awe when the  lawyer defending Salander at her trial reveals that she has a degree in pyschology. Whoopie doo!

Stieg Larsson’s male lead, Blomkvist, says towards the end of the tale, that the principal issue is men’s violence towards women.

I agree that the villains in Larsson’s books are all men and they richly deserve the fates he devises for them, but a moment’s reflection will indicate that each sex can be evil in the manner of their own kind. I suspect that Stieg Larsson would not agree to the proposition that men and women are morally equal.

Sweden is the place where one of the Muhammad cartoonists  is assaulted when he tries to give a lecture at a university, where he sleeps in different houses at night, and where the burka-clad woman who calls for his death does so with impunity, where the Malmo fire department needs police protection to enter Muslim parts of town, and yet the imaginiation of the earnest dweeb leftist Stieg Larsson is taken up with violence against women of every kind except the principal source, even in his own country, Islam. Go figure.

You can wait for the movies of the Larsson books; they will be more tightly edited.

____________________________

A good review of the books – one which agrees with me – can be found in an interview with Larsson’s wife, Eva Gabrielsson, in the Guardian, of all places.

Marci McDonald’s dimwitted expose of the vast conservative and Christian plot to change Canada is a classic example of a very narrow mind encountering people who do not agree with her, and recoiling in shock . Glendronach nailed it a few days ago. Marci McDonald manifests the curious and increasing phenomenon of the left bigot; the side that used to believe in the inexorable triumph of their brand of rationalism is frightened that the tide has turned.

“Who are these revolting people, anyway?”, she seems to ask. The same people who voted for Reagan, honey.

 In an interview in the Toronto Star, she says:

“That showed the canniness of Harper’s strategy,’’ explains McDonald. “Most people saw it as, ‘Oh yes the neocons don’t like government-funded social policies.’ What they didn’t realize was that he was also pandering to social conservatives who don’t believe that the government should have any role in child-rearing, who believe that mothers should be at home bringing up their children or who send their children to religious daycares and schools. It was one of those policies that cut across both of his constituencies, economic and social. That would characterize most of his policies.”

“This was not a polemic I wrote; I do not reveal that Stephen Harper has a secret altar in his basement. But I did try to connect the dots because everybody was telling me this isn’t happening here, not in nice, tolerant, moderate Canada,” says McDonald.

For a conservative (or sensible moderate, for that matter), it would appear normal that governments have a highly restricted role in child-rearing, that mothers as much as possible be enabled to stay home to raise children, having regard to women’s free choice and economic opportunities, and that the family, not the state, have the preponderant if not exclusive voice in religious education. This has been the way societies of all religions have modelled themselves, since time out of mind.  The late 19th and 20th century  fixation on the state as the levelling, progressive, and liberating vehicle for social progress is the exception in millennia of human history.

The challenge to all those folks down in Toronto’s Beaches area is that they have inherited a civilization whose tolerance in based in the evolution of Christian thought, and who believe that Christianity is per se the enemy of that nice, decent moderate Canada in which they live.  As far as I can see, their anti-Christianity  is to the polity as carpenter ants are to a house. They seem to believe that belief in our creaturehood by a higher power, who is also the author of this universe, is something that should not be allowed to inform politics, but their “nice”, secular, “moderate” beliefs are to be the exclusive legitimate basis of both  political participation and set of goals which politics seek to achieve.

As Charles Lewis observed in the National Post, if McDonald wished to find intolerance in Canada, she need only look at her face in the mirror.

Let us assume, as it is safe to do, that Mark Steyn is correct about everything, particularly British Tory leader David Cameron . The British Tory leader is therefore a trimming weasel of leftist tendencies, who has abandoned the conservatives of Britain for some fluff and twaddle that cannot be made to work. If he comes to power with the Liberal Democrats, says Steyn, the Conservative Party will be in office but will not hold power. But would you want the Conservatives to come to office in Britain without the ability or will to handle its burgeoning debt, its uncontrolled immigration, its festering underclass, its creeping suppression of Christianity and common sense, without the will, vision, and leadership to tackle the problems? Would you want the Conservatives to hold office at the price of proportional representation, which would make the Lib-Dems kingmakers in perpetuity?

If you believe, as I do, that Britain is heading for an existential crisis, would it not be better for a Labour/Lib-Dem alliance to be holding the can for the oncoming disaster?

The Telegraph reports that the Lib-Dems and Labour are now in negotiation to form the next government.

I wish them success. They deserve each other. And it gives the Tories time to change leaders or for its leader to change his ideas.

Soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Gordon Brown had a run-in with a real elector the other day.  His shock upon confronting the real opinions of an elector was so great that he was overheard to call her a bigot for mentioning the very large number of Eastern Europeans immigrating to Britain. 

Mrs Duffy, a lifelong Labour supporter, had the temerity to tackle Gordon Brown on the national debt, education and his party’s immigration policy.

Worse than leaving the microphone on, he was heard to blame the entire idea of meeting an elector.

Brown: That was a disaster. Should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that?

Aide: I don’t know, I didn’t see.

Brown: Sue’s, I think. Just ridiculous.

Aide: Not sure if they’ll go with that one.

Brown: They will.

Aide: What did she say?

Brown: Everything. She’s just this sort of bigoted woman who said she used to be a Labour voter. Ridiculous.

Just ridiculous to endure the unscripted opinions of the electorate!

As anyone who has campaigned knows, you meet some real wackos going door-to-door. But Gillian Duffy is not that type. She is a solid and sensisble Labour supporter, and, from earlier reports in the papers, a former councilwoman and a hospital volunteer. Not the sort to blather on about the intergalactic conspiracy of Masonic-Judeo-Bolshevik mentats out to destroy our way of life.

The shock of meeting someone from outside the bubble (of political correctness) was more than Gordon Brown could stand.

Sort of reminds me of Allan Rock: the kind of guy who arrives at a summer barbecue where people are drinking wine and eating meat who announces pompously that neither he nor his  wife drink alcohol or eat meat. Who has his subordinate warn Ann Coulter of the limits of expression in thought-controlled Canada. Who wants your rifle registered with the state. Who finds himself out of power, the place where Gordon Brown will also shortly find hismelf.

These people must be driven frompower everywhere. But who are they?

As I do not participate in the classes where they learn to obey their alien overlords, I cannot be sure. The Gordon Browns and Allan Rocks of this world seem to combine invincible ignorance of the real world  and the humans who compose it with invincible sense of entitlement to govern it in the name of improving us, to bring us up to their exalted level of political correctness. They are shocked, shocked to discover that people might actually have formed negative views about high rates of taxes, immigration, or crime, and declining standards of education, civility and garbage removal.

Theodore Dalrymple, the most perceptive chronicler of this species of human, and the Orwell of our age, was once in conversation with a dining-room full of Allan Rocks and Gordon Browns. Despite thirty years’ worth of close acquaintance with the dysfunctional behaviours of the lower classes, caused in large part by the welfare policies supported by the people at the dinner party, he was unable to persuade of the most elementary facts he had observed.  People who could not cook, clean, or take care of themselves or their bastard children, and whose behaviour could only be described as intensely self-destructive.

Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Unfortunately, the form of madness taken by the Gordon Browns and Allan Rocks of this world is the entire set of conventional left-wing beliefs, and they are impervious to fact, criticism, or revision.

Let us look at the facts:

1. Europe is being destroyed from within by elites who seek to replace its actual populations with a rabble of barbarian immigrants, with all the effects of crime, no-go zones, and imposition of the values of those barbarians on Europe.

2. The same process is happening in the United States, by uncontrolled illegal immigration of mestizo-Spanish central Americans.

3. The United States has been taken over by an affirmative-action President who neither understands the culture of the place nor its capitalist underpinnings, and who does not much like its white citizens.

4. A variety of laws and speech-control commissions have been empowered to suppress discussion of race, religion, and intelligence distribution on any terms other than the virtues of mulitculuralism, massive barbarian unqualified immigration, tolerance of Islam and the assumption of white guilt for all social evils.

Yes, this is one of those days when I think that western civilization is in a process of rapid and uncontrollable decay. I do not see anywhere, except on a few conservative blogs, any realization of how bad it is and how rapidly it is getting worse.

I do not see any political leadership, or serious political movements, anywhere in the West, daring to take on the assumptions that are driving us over a cliff, namely:

1. The equality of all cultures

2. the equality of all races (in terms of intelligence and achievement)

nor do I see any challenge being mounted to

3. The apparent desire to diminish, demean and or replace the white race with something else wherever it is currently dominant, if that is the appropriate word, or hanging on, if you prefer

or defence of

4.The superiority of of our constitutional order.

Do you?

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-fox-cnn-msnbc-ratings-2010-1

It seems that people like conservative political entertainment television more than the left would like us to.

Conducted by Bruce Bawer, author of “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within“:

http://www.rights.no/publisher/publisher.asp?id=59&tekstid=3259

Settled science indeed. Phil Jones qualifies, recants, and suddenly has reason to mention the medieval warm period.

Oh, and he may simply have lost the papers containing the data underlying claims of anthropogenic global warming. Messy professor’s office, you know. Remember, trillions of income transfer were riding on this.

To quote Glendronach, “the global warmists are retreating so fast they are red-shifting.”

Foreign Policy blog informs us of this.

Despite having served for years as a distinguished Pakistani diplomat, Akbar Zeb reportedly cannot receive accreditation as Pakistan’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The reason, apparently, has nothing to do with his credentials, and everything to do with his name — which, in Arabic, translates to “biggest dick”:

In Saudi Arabia, size does count.

A high level Pakistani diplomat has been rejected as Ambassador of Saudi Arabia because his name, Akbar Zib, equates to “Biggest Dick” in Arabic. Saudi officials, apparently overwhelmed by the idea of the name, put their foot down and gave the idea of his being posted there, the kibosh.

According to this Arabic-language article in the Arab Times, Pakistan had previously floated Zeb’s name as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, only to have him rejected for the same reason. One can only assume that submitting Zeb’s name to a number of Arabic-speaking countries is some unique form of punishment designed by the Pakistani Foreign Ministry — or the result of a particularly egregious cockup.

Addendum
by Glendronach

Always look back to history for guidance, even in this matter:

Changed conceptions are as real as changing the direction of your search beam. They have the same effect, of illuminating what was previously not seen.

Take, as an example, the increasing flood of findings which have shown shown that the AGW scare was false. Moreover, I suspect that journalists, finally awakend from their doctrinal slumbers, will show how it was a concocted, long term, well-funded international campaign of  thought-control, with specific intentions to empower new ruling classes to govern the capitalist economies on the basis, for want of a better word, of a Gaian religion.

All from a change in perspective.

Today’s sermon arises from the sudden flood of damaging information on the fundamentals of AGW – man-caused global warming. The whole thing is going up in smoke before our eyes, for those who have eyes to see. Go to Climate Depot for the evidence of what I mean.
The story is as big as the fall of the Berlin Wall. It prefigures the complete collapse of the scam behind it.

This is not an inquiry into how it happened, nor is it intended to lay any more blame than I have already. The sudden revelations of the East Anglia Climate Research Unit emails showed to anyone who could read that the data was faked, the science was as cooked as your grade 12 science lab results, and worse, that a crew of enthusiasts has decided to blacklist those who did not breathe the same fumes. All true. But not what I am getting at.

It was Einstein who said “theory determines what is observed.” He meant that, until you can conceive of light being bent in a gravity field, you will not search for it. You will not assemble the instruments, go fo the funding, make a fool of yourself, if necessary, to disprove or prove a proposition that has not yet been framed.

As soon as the theory is properly framed, it can be tested.

The theory now being tested is that AGW is a scam, and suddenly vast amounts of false science are being exposed.

 The ordinary skepticism which journalists apply to statements of politicians regarding their noble motives is being applied to internationally important dignitaries preaching AGW. The miracle is that it took 15 years for them to begin asking skeptical questions.

But I am not asking you to notice the effect of the change of focus; I am asking you to notice the change of focus itself. I can think of no better demonstration of the power of our minds to change “facts”. The change starts in the mind and goes outward into the world.

So if you tell me that there is nothing in the universe but matter and its vibrations, I ask you to think, how do these vibrations of matter cause such huge change of perspective? Would not an upward evaluation of matter be appropriate if it were seen capable of such magical transformations? And if there is a second distinct substance in the universe, of which mind is the foremost example, would you be able to find a better demonstration of the power of mind to shape events, than the difference in the AGW juggernaut between last September, when it could not be stopped, and now, when it is broken and burning?

Moral: If you do not like your life, change your theory.

Fanaticism is shouted out by Cabinet ministers and policy choices continue to be made for purely political reasons, despite the collapsing “science”  of man-caused global warming. The zombie stumbles on.

 
Britain’s Climate Change Minister, Ed Miliband, declares war on climate change skeptics.

“Mistakes and attempts to hide contradictory data had to be seen in the light of the thousands of pages of evidence in the IPCC’s four-volume report in 2007, said Miliband. The most recent accusation about the panel’s work is that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, may have known before the Copenhagen summit that its assessment report had seriously exaggerated the rate of melting of the Himalayan glaciers.

“However, Miliband was adamant that the IPCC was on the right track. “It’s worth saying that no doubt when the next report comes out it will suggest there have been areas where things have been happening more dramatically than the 2007 report implied,” he said.”

“The danger of climate scepticism was that it would undermine public support for unpopular decisions needed to curb carbon emissions, including the likelihood of higher energy bills for households, and issues such as the visual impact of wind turbines, said Miliband, who is also energy secretary.

Yep, I guess it would.

Worse, in a way, is Canada’s Jim Prentice saying Canada will reduce its CO2 emissions by 17%.

 ”Canada has formally notified the United Nations that it has embraced the Copenhagen Accord and will cut its carbon emissions by 17 per cent by 2020 from 2005 levels.

Federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice says it was the federal government’s plan all along to align its position with that of the United States.

Prentice has said that the first step towards a binding international treaty on climate change is for countries to outline their own emission-reduction targets before the UN’s official deadline of Jan. 31.

He says that although reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 per cent will be challenging, he believes it is attainable.”

 In the case of Prentice, does he believe a word he is saying? Or is he just talking for the microphones?