Quote of the Week

“Talking sense” to California is to assume something the majority of the people there don’t have: commone sense. (If any of you live there or have lived there, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)
“I can never fear that things will go far wrong where common sense has fair play.”
Thomas Jefferson

Dunno about California, but I’ve sure as hell given up on New Jersey. Despite having recently siphoned about $65 million as general-purpose revenues from the funds set aside under participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), our professional “pay-to-play” parasites in Trenton refuse to withdraw from this predatory scheme of carbon-trading fraudulence.
So much for kicking a National Socialist ex-Goldman Sachs senior partner out of Drumthwacket to replace him with a Red Party supposed “fiscal conservative.”

CA will have to learn the hard way I fear.

Having lived almost a year in Marin County, and three years in Orange County CA, I’d like to beg to differ regarding the generalized statement about CA. Marin County was filled with of the most sanctimonious, self-righteous people it’s ever been my displeasure to meet. Orange County was libertarian, thoughtful and, yes, very laid-back. One wouldn’t know they were in the same state.
Guess where the most skepticism regarding “Global Warming” exists.

The wonderful, wonderful, ongoing opportunities that false markets present!
Carbon trading has been an absolute boon to the profit takers, be they legal or illegal, and they cannot wait for the first piece of “rationing” legislation! It will be their nirvana. Never mind CRC!
When will we ever learn?

At 9:42 AM on 30 January, James Barker had written:

Not sure how to talk sense to a group that seems to strongly believe that there is a free lunch and wants everyone to share it.

…to which the only proper reply is the translation of a remark made by economist Frédéric Bastiat:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

At 9:58 AM on 30 January, wsbriggs writing of:

Having lived almost a year in Marin County…

…necessarily evokes the lyrics of fannish filker Leslie Fish in her song “The Coven,” as follows:

The earth’s fire-breathing daughter,
Came up from Oakland town.
With her high priest and her coven,
Who had good jobs all around.
Now where to find a stretch of land,
And a good big house therein?
Enough to hold them every one,
Where else but Marin?
The day that they were moving in,
The welcome wagon came.
Twas a guru in a nightshirt,
And a wealthy local dame.
They murmured “Groovy, what’s your sign?”
“Not now,” the priestess said.
“Will you help me haul this freezer in?”
The couple turned and fled.
Next week the priest went shopping,
And he came back with a steer.
Alive and well and mooing,
The neighbors said “My dear!”
“Is this organic lawn control?”
“Hell no,” the priest did say.
“It’s our summer solstice sacrifice.”
The neighbors ran away.
The summer solstice ox rose,
With a blast you couldn’t beat.
The coven ate and drank and danced,
‘Til they passed out on their feet.
The neighbors peeping through the fence,
Yelled “Where do you think you are?”
“The nudity and grass are fine,”
“But the dancing goes too far!”
The neighbors got together,
They said “These freaks must go.
They must be smoking mary-jane,
We’ll tell the sheriff so!”
“We’ll hide our coke and call the law,
But first we’ll warn them fair.
Let’s burn a hot tub on their lawn,
Then chase them outta there.”
The earth’s fire-breathing daughter,
Sent a message to the town.
“If you don’t leave me and mine alone,
I’ll shake your playhouse down.”
The neighbors sneered “Oh, how uptight,
How superstitious too.”
Then they hollered for the law,
As lib’rals always do.
The sheriff of laid-back county,
And all his laid-back men,
Went rolling up the coven’s hill,
But they never came back again.
For the hill did shake and the earth did quake,
And a mudslide thundered down.
A police car model stereo set,
Was all that anyone found.
There is a house in north Marin,
The locals all ignore.
For since the earthquake hit,
It has no neighbors any more.
But late at night when the moon is bright,
There’s a fire on the hill,
And the sound of pipes and laughter,
Where the coven dances still.

Ref: oxymoron. an oxymoron is a figure of speech that contains apparently contradictory terms in conjunction, eg, “left-wing intellectual” or ,”socialist democracy”. “Further fraud”, doesn’t seem to meet the criteria, as “further”, is complementary to,” fraud”, and is not contradicting the meaning of,”fraud”.

The question I have, and maybe you all can help to answer it, is how much money did the CCX bilk out of “investors” before they shut the doors? The same question could be asked about the EU Carbon fraudsters. How much was the haul?

More proof (if we needed it) that P.T.Barnum Lives!
How could there be problem with Carbon Trading when it will Save the Planet?
Unthinkable! (which describes the folks who came up with it)
(/sarc if anyone needed it)

or try these:
http://bigbluecarbon.com/10unit.asp

WTF?
“Extra climate summit to focus on Kyoto successor
UN confirms Bangkok talks in April…
28 Jan 2011
Climate negotiators will stage an extra round of talks this year as they attempt to thrash out a deal to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.
UN officials said a five-day session will be held in Bangkok in April on top of planned meetings in Bonn in June and ahead of the annual summit of environment ministers in Durban at the end of the year…
Even though the Bangkok talks will gather senior negotiators from almost 200 countries, a further session is likely to be held between Bonn and Durban, officials said, after the false start of Copenhagen and incremental progress last month in Cancun.”
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/1940380/extra-climate-summit-focus-kyoto-successor
Looks like the gang is going to squeeze another vacation out of things before the gravy train slows down too much.

Does “true believer” count as an oxymoron? (especially if applied to catastrophiliacs)

Wilky. January 30, 2011 at 9:11 am:
“What do you call taking the keys away from a Prius driver? Smug control”
Where I come from, the ‘r’ in Prius is silent…

Ah! So the little boy was right all along! The King really is bollock naked!

Mike D. says:
“January 30, 2011 at 11:15 am
The question I have, and maybe you all can help to answer it, is how much money did the CCX bilk out of “investors” before they shut the doors? The same question could be asked about the EU Carbon fraudsters. How much was the haul?”
The largest people sold out before the place shut down and before the axe fell, so they made a nice profit on it, but it was mostly owned by banks at the end. (IE: Goldman, etc. if my memory serves me correctly) who still claim ownership to it. The idea is to claim a loss on the investment over the next few years before they trash it…so that they pay less taxes and end up not losing very much at all. Government bails out banks, the banks screw the Government twice….But shrug, not sure what you can do when banks are “too big to fail..”
So individual people did not get duped, but the Government did and our taxpayer monies will over the next few years. And the people who got out mostly made nice money…its been awhile since I finished the research on that, so the details are really fuzzy and what not, but that was the general idea at the end. All of it is of course legal with our current system…but shrug, what can individuals do who do not have political connections nowadays?

What I find rather objectionable, and that you have not picked up on / pointed out, is that the market is closed due to “hackers”. As though this is the fault of some bunch of evil pen-clicking Boris’s (See James Bond, Goldeneye).
What’s actually going on is that a bunch of criminals and clever conniving theives have figured out that this is a silly market ripe for scamming. Strange that, seeing as verification is kinda hard.
It’s not shut down because of hackers, its shut down because of fraud.
The EU should stop trying to muddy the water. But then, ClimageGate was due to “hackers” too.

Cultures that don’t learn their own history keep making the same mistakes. Does the term ‘South Sea Bubble’ ring any bells?
The South Sea Company was a British joint stock company founded in 1711 to take over three-fifths of the British national debt financed from the profits of future trading with South Sea Islands and Spanish South America. In 1720 the company proposed that it should assume ALL of the British national debt, most of which had been incurred in the war against Spain. Th3ew company offered its own stock in exchange for government bonds and expected to make huge profits on these transactions, which epitomise the worst of insider trading. The publicity led to the trading frenzy being termed the ‘South Sea Bubble’, which burst in Sept. 1720. A similar ‘bubble’, John Law’s Mississippi Scheme, failed in France at the same time. As a consequence of these and other ‘bubbles’ bursting, all joint-stock arrangements, banks failed, thousands were ruined, fraud was exposed in the South Sea Company and corruption exposed in the British parliamentary cabinet. Joint-stock companies, which allowed buyers to purchase stock on credit then sell again for cash when prices rose, were made illegal by an act of parliament.. The South Sea Comwpany’s directors had their estates confiscated and sold, the proceeds used to relieve the suffering creditors, among them Sir Isaac Newton, understandably annoyed at his own foolishness in losing twenty thousand pounds, the current equivalent of about 3 million pounds.
The Company was restructured, it’s stock divided between the Bank of England and the East India Company and acts of parliament to stabilise the British economy were driven through under the guidance of newly-appointed First Lord of the Treasury Robert Walpole. The company continued to trade for more than a century, involving itself in the slave trade, whaling in Greenland waters and other activities, but not with much success.
This inglorious epidode in history has been termed ‘the 18th Century Enron’.
Why do governments and citizens never learn from history that there is no such thing as a free lunch?

re: “CA will have to learn the hard way” – I live in a socialist country – Canada. CA will not learn the hard way – CA will be rewarded for their liberal nonsense and bailed out by the rest of the U.S. taxpayers – who will have no input or choice in the matter – the socialist way.

What was the carbon footprint from start to finish of the CCX?
Must have been megatons.

Mike Restin wants to know “Where do I go to buy my carbon credits?.
Fear not. The exchanges in Chicago and in the European Union may have shut down, but there’s a guy I know in Brooklyn who can sell you carbon credits and ownership shares in one of the classic pieces of suspension bridge architecture presently extant.
Florida real estate, too.

I b’lieve a recent study of bubbles and markets concluded that they are intrinsic, part of the way people do business. Enthusiasms and greed create bubbles, little and large, and no regulations or controls can stop that without actually eliminating the markets.