Quotations

Quote of the Day

by

When I try explaining “global warming” to people in Iran or Turkey they have no idea what I’m talking about. Their life is about getting through to the next day, finding their next meal. Eco-guilt is a first-world luxury. It’s the new religion for urban populations which have lost their faith in Christianity. The IPCC report is their Bible. Al Gore and Lord Stern are their prophets.

Ian Plimer, author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science .

See also, Climate change: The sun and the oceans do not lie.

Hat tip: Michael Barone

Quote of the Day

by

Commenter “Lifeofthemind”, in response to this post at Belmont Club (discussing the Obama administration’s prospects if public support for its program declines):

For what it is worth, which is what the audience is paying that is exactly nothing, Soros-Axelrod-Obama do know what they are doing. It is unlikely that they will cancel elections or or do anything else spectacular that would only serve to rally the resistance. My expectation is that they do not worry unduly about the sagging poll numbers but they do intend to win the next election. How to square this circle when it is likely that in 18 months we will be experiencing 15-20% in both unemployment and inflation? They intend to do it the Chicago way, they intend to buy it with your money.
 
The Democrats are going to have over half a trillion dollars in slush fund money ready to pump out for the 2010 election. Acorn and an army of hacks will push to hold onto Congress in 2010 and the census will be cooked to deliver the Congress in 2012. The declining economy will drain resources from the opposition. As a side benefit the carping left will discover a new discipline that Republicans could never threaten them with. Recalcitrant academics and think tanks will be defunded and media jobs will be increasingly under the control of Obama aligned conglomerates. Immigration reform will complete the picture for Obama’s reelection. While much of this will be technically illegal, in the general sense of corruption, it does not mean that they will resort to violence or attempt to repeal the 2nd Amendment before 2012.
 
As I said before people should stop assuming that Obama will make a mistake and do something overtly revolutionary. Expecting or hoping that he does so puts people in a passive or reactive mode. It is like those who still expect his birth certificate or college transcripts to magically appear and then somehow force someone to invalidate the election. Anyone who is thinking that way needs to have Cher slap them in the face and yell “Snap out of it.” Can we win this battle? Yes but it will take hard sustained work.

Quote of the Day

by

But beyond humor that misses, with some audiences or with all, what characterizes snark? Two things, I think. One is that it is an appeal to emotion – it is a statement with a particular affect, and the affect is an appeal to an attitude in which both writer and reader participate, but they participate in an exclusionary way. This is what makes it a branch of irony. Instead of arguing to everyone on the basis of shared reason so that, at least in principle, everyone could be included in the shared sentiment, snark depends upon exclusion. It is a refusal to offer a public argument, with the possibility of reasoned inclusion, and instead depends upon prior shared views that merely exclude because snark does not make an attempt to persuade. It is ‘affectively exclusionary’ in the language of moral psychology.
 
[…]
 
Two, because snark depends upon a prior shared commitment, it is a form of question-begging argument. Not precisely a form of argument, because it is about affect, not reason. So, more precisely, snark is the affective cognate of a question-begging argument, in which the sentiment of the conclusion assumes the sentiment of the premise. It assumes that one already shares the attitudes necessary to … share the attitudes.

–Kenneth Anderson

Have a Nice Day

by

The underlying fundamentals are toxic: US gross debt as a percentage of GDP (currently at 375%) is still climbing, housing prices are still falling (wealth destruction as far as the eye can see), un/underemployment is still rising (an inability to service debt), the financial industry is back to its old tricks (bonuses are shooting through the roof again, etc.), China is still manipulating its currency (dashing prospects of future jobs), commodities (higher costs for daily life) are shooting up again, etc. Worse, what action has been taken is largely short term masking of symptoms and not a cure. Our government “brain-trust” is using all of its financial powder on deprecated 20th Century economic measures to prop up the industries that got us into this crisis: like the greasing of palms in the bloated construction industry (what relation that industry has to our future prosperity is a big mystery) and the flooding of a failing oligopoly (the financial industry) with free money.

So where is it heading?

“… a post-Westphalian century replete with neo-feudalism and global guerrillas is on an inexorable march.”

John Robb.