As IF Times

Source: UN Food Security Expert Warns About Impact of Climate Change – The New York Times

One of the main tenets of any successful propaganda campaign is to repeat the same thing over and over again until it becomes accepted as truth. In fact the person who revealed that strategy was a guy named Joseph Goebbels: here is the quote:

“…If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,  people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of that lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State…”

Of course the original quote may have been in German, but it still translates well.  The global warming crowd has taken this recipe even further.  Hardly a day passes when there is not some new calamity/malady/threat/danger apparently exposed by global warming.  So it’s not just repetition, which does work, but also reinforcement through supporting ‘evidence’.  The spreading of such propaganda today is aided by the fact that many use Facebook as a news source. The more the likes, the more likely the story’s veracity.

Just today, the New York Times cited an academic paper warning of declining sexual appetites attributable  to global warming.  Naturally, this study of sexual activity was released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, whomever they are.  I think that their research may be skewed by the fact that economists likely don’t get much sex in any case.  While this is not the gravest of dangers to result from global warming, it’s the one that perhaps hits closest to home…unless of course, you’re an economist.  A clever website, Whatreallyhappened   enumerates a pretty good survey of the accumulated calamities ostensibly caused by global warming.  Few of them rate up there with declining sexual activity, but some of the more amusing ones are:

attack of the killer jellyfish, Baghdad snow, beer shortage, brain eating amoeba, camel deaths, creatures  move uphill, fashion disaster, football team migration, giant oysters invade, invasion of midgets, witchcraft executions and a truly scary one which has already come to pass, lawyers’ incomes increase.

The linked article above is so truly dumb, it should have its own reality show with the Kardashians.  Wouldn’t warming cause an increase in the amount of arable lands which in turn would be beneficial to feeding people?

Don’t expect opposing voices to restore some measure of sanity to the ‘discussion’.  Philipe Verdier, the chief weather garcon for French Televisions has been sacked for daring to offer opposing views to the accepted truth.  Look out for the giant oysters.

link Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash – Bloomberg Business.

I think it’s a fair comment to make that if an economist says it’s a good idea, then the idea must be suspect.  There’s the old joke that the reason that there are decimal points is because economists have a sense of humor.  As many will know, economists live in the most esoteric of worlds in which arcane models are developed to explain movements in prices and in the supply and demand dynamics of goods and services in an economy.  If convincing enough, such models are used to form political policies which greatly affect the lives of citizens. Often, these models are created with the most fundamental error in assumption: namely, that people are rational.

Do they work? One word: Keynes. Another one: Obamacare.  So the musings of Citibank’s Mr. Buiter who thinks that the time is nigh to consider abolishing cash is a clarion call to go exactly the opposite way.  As many should have realized by now, the pervasive invasion of everyone’s privacy by all manner of intrusions whether mandated by law or volunteered via the seduction of social media has made everyone a drone whose activities can be traced at almost any given time.  You don’t need to wear tinfoil hats to be a bit wary of that.  Who isn’t a bit creeped out when an ad for electric dog polishers shows up on your favorite website right after you were searching for the prices of them the day before?

If all money is electronically stored and there is no cash, there is a trail of every activity that you engage in.  This will make life entirely more cumbersome for the regular people who don’t live in the make believe world of economists.  While this can put a crimp into nefarious activities such as drug deals, it will also make it difficult to bribe doormen at bars and restaurants, to say nothing of how to discreetly show appreciation for your favorite exotic dancer.

A world in which cash is eliminated is  a world in which we all become just numbers to be picked up as if we were in some futuristic Tom Cruise sci-fi flick.  I think we should go the other way.  Rather than having our net worth governed by some geek bureaucrat with access to a keyboard, we should go back to paying for things in cash.  Judging by what has happened when you allow lawyers to make laws and accountants to oversee taxes, it would be fatal to allow economists to eliminate cash.