It seems we are now on the cusp of a rapid about-face from the former to the latter.

According to an article in the respected, learned journal Nature, global warming is off the agenda, at least for a few hundred-thousand years. The real menace is a vicious ice-age that will cover the eastern side of the British Isles with 6000ft of ice and snow. Even those of us in the warmer west can expect 3000ft of the white stuff.

If you’ve already thrown out your thermal underwear in anticipation of Mediterranean temperatures all year round, well … you should read Syntagma more often. We have been ridiculing the man-made global warmers for a couple of years at least.

Mind you, I doubt the global freeze-up picture too. Mankind has recently demonstrated a very destructive tendency to imagine that if something happens twice in a row it will go on forever, despite a million years’ experience to the contrary.

It comes from an over-reliance on a narrow concept of the intellect. Paranoia is a disease of rationality extended beyond its natural reach. Many people who should know better convince themselves that bad events must be set to continue and, naturally, get much worse. They react by building massive defences and shelters against “the coming storm”.

In reality, things usually switch over to the opposite well before crisis conditions set in — see my piece, Up-To-A-Pointism.

That is, unless a large enough group convince themselves of the worst and, by their actions, prevent the normal turnaround setting in. Almost all economic crises are made worse by economists and politicians. Now, it seems, actions to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere against supposed global warming could precipitate a sudden global cooling of unstoppable proportions.

When eventually the worst doesn’t happen, the “activists” will just find something else to scare the pants off themselves and the rest of us. It’s their nature. Fear is also a bankable commodity these days, especially for the bright sparks seeking government research grants.

Western administrations in the U.S., Europe and Britain, have been frantically creating siege conditions against jihadist terrorism since 9/11, even kicking away the basic freedoms that distinguish our societies from the supposed insurgents’ dismal autocracies. They lose the “war” before firing a shot.

In the UK, politicians mimicking beached sardines, are plotting a kind of Stasi-state right out of Eric Honecker’s East Germany. Individuals you wouldn’t normally trust with assembling a flat-pack whelk stall are building vast databases of the personal data of every individual in the country, backed up by draconian laws. And this is being done “for our own protection”.

Did anyone give them permission to do this? Alas, if it’s not global warming or an ice age coming to get us, it’s a new form of “white slavery”. And the slave masters are materializing from our own political class.

So here’s a word to the scientists. Stop building flummeries in the air from tiny samples of data. Desist from imagining that the 3lb lump of fat and gristle in your skulls knows all there is about everything.

In the meantime we could always redefine mental illness:

Thy name is SCIENCE.

John Evans

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The recent sectorized twitches of inflation that clouded many minds and drove policymakers for months, is decidedly off the agenda.

In the UK, big beasts are waking up to the gravity of the situation. Former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ken Clarke, has dismissed comparisons with the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, likening current conditions explicitly with 1929/30.

Economically-literate writers, like William Rees-Mogg in The Times (London), have jettisoned terms like downturn and recession and now use “depression” as their label of choice.

Normally cautious Bank of England Governor, Mervyn King, forecasts a 2 percent contraction in the British economy next year, with interest rates falling rapidly to nought percent for the first time in history.

Deflation is now the enemy we must all factor into our expectations in the near-to-medium terms. So why is deflation necessarily worse than inflation — a learned fellow said this morning, “Three percent inflation is heaven compared to deflation.”?

In an era of massive indebtedness, both private and public, deflation increases the burden. As incomes decline, private debts remain the same — at levels signed for in better times. It’s the exact opposite of the apparent wealth created during periods of rapidly rising house prices.

Professor Peter Spencer of York University says, “It is going to be absolute murder in Britain if inflation turns negative. The big difference with past episodes is that we are now much more heavily indebted. Few people owned their own houses in 1930s. Debts were miniscule.”

Another symptom of deflation is that consumers wait for lower prices before shopping, causing job-losses in the High Street and yet more bad economic news. Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s is the technically-perfect example of this psychology of fear taking hold. It is still suffering.

So what can be done either to pre-empt or cure the curse of falling prices across the board?

Curiously, Keynesianism which, in its widely misinterpreted version is disastrous in normal times, does hold out some hope in depressive conditions. Expect central banks to start printing money soon and dropping it from helicopters, if they haven’t begun already. Want to buy some rising stock? Buy helicopter shares. [This is not financial advice.]

If you’re one of those noble souls who saved assiduously during the asset bubbles, you will just have to stand by and watch the profligate oafs who caused the problem clean up, while your own responsible hoard of value drains away.

It’s just not fair, but it will probably have to happen “for the greater good”.

You have only one consolation: you can give the politicians who presided over the madness a good kicking at the next electoral opportunity.

And in the UK, that means Gordon Brown. He’s the one with the faux halo.

John Evans

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Specifically, there comes a point when you can’t absorb any more overblown rhetoric about something that can never live up to its billing.

Barack Obama’s coming Presidency is like that.

Obamamania has hit a tipping point when it’s just beginning to shapeshift into its opposite. Ominously, we’re starting to feel jaded by the hype. We know it can’t possibly all be true. We’re aware that some people are talking through their hats bigtime.

Let’s face it, one man can’t possibly be … Barack Obama. The burden would be too great.

The achievement so far — that of a god not a man with smelly feet who snores (Michelle Obama’s words, not mine) — has happened on the back of yet another phenomenal bubble.

We should pity the man. Does he know what he has taken on? Has he the self-knowledge to realize that the greater part of the world’s population is projecting its desires and fantasies onto his frail shoulders?

My opinion is that a measure of competent administration, while keeping his country out of more wars, and gradually purging the vast indebtedness of the nation without bringing it to a shuddering halt, will be the very best he can hope for. Even that short list may not easily be achieveable under current conditions.

It would be a bravura performance if accomplished, given Obama’s political and economic inheritance from the previous administration. It would also deeply disappoint and disillusion two-thirds of the world’s population. As a realist where politicians are concerned, I would regard those simple goals achieved as close to heroic.

The future will be built around carefully-crafted technical solutions to almost unresolvable problems across the board. A truly intelligent President will know that like a bad case of fever, the cure must be to let it run its course, especially given the massive interventions that have already occurred.

The danger for Obama is that expectations are running so high that he will feel impelled to make grand gestures both at home and abroad. Such gestures are never neutral in their effects, though. They are often increasingly destructive well before the desired outcome has had time to make itself felt.

In terms of foreign policy decisions, reversals of current positions offer more hope than new, grandiose pronouncements.

Reversing Clinton’s sliding of NATO right up to Russia’s borders would be a good start. An offer of non-deployment of the “Star Wars” rocket shield to Poland in return for a Russian guarantee of the integrity of its neighbours’ territory, would probably reduce the tense standoff.

NATO is a busted flush, in any case, with Continental Europe refusing to contribute to its burdens.

At home, reducing government’s stake in the U.S. mortgage market, and an unpicking of Bill Clinton’s clumsy attempts to ensure “All must have prizes,” in the shape of houses they could never afford, would be a smart move, but I fear an unpopular one.

As for the last Bush to occupy the White House, Barack Obama will not need me to advise him on areas of policy reversal.

It won’t be spectacular. The times don’t call for that. But President Obama must rein in the “can-do, must-do” pressures from his wilder brethren who crave a Messiah in the White House.

Again, it won’t be easy, and disappointment will result. However, nothing will benefit his country more than a term or two of sobersides, thoughtful governance, stripped of declamatory passions and meaningless promises.

The phrase, “Mission accomplished,” must never pass his lips.

John Evans

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Despite the polls, there are still a lot of unknowns — I’m not going to do a Donald Rumsfeld here, but I could. Apart from the so-called Bradley Effect, which may have lost some of its force, there’s also what I call, The Last Minute Panic Syndrome, which occurs when voters enter the polling station and think, “What do we know about this man? Can we trust that he’ll be up to it in these dangerous times?”

Don’t underestimate the latter — Bill Clinton (self-serving as ever) suggested that Obama is aware of it himself and obsessively phones every expert he can lay his hands on.

To declare an interest: before the primaries, I predicted here that John McCain would win. That was because I couldn’t see anyone better out there at the time.

It’s different now, of course. Barack Obama is definitely the quantum leap candidate, suggesting millennial change, at the very least in appearances and attitudes. If he isn’t elected, it will seem like a postponement of the inevitable, and, to many, an opportunity lost. There could be violence on the streets if it’s close.

My reservations about him are that he has unnervingly small experience, especially at this time of economic meltdown and other military dangers facing all of us. The world today is every bit as unstable as it was in 1914, 1930 and 1939. In comparison, 9/11 seems like a minor local incident — and look how Bush mishandled that.

Obama’s voting record in the Senate suggests he’s closer to Gordon Brown politically than any comparable American. Believe me, that is not a good sign. He may have a much stronger intellect that “W,” but in the present crisis conditions, any intellect is like an ice cube in a volcano.

But it has to be one or the other, McCain or Obama. Everyone else has been eliminated. The Veeps are all but forgotten in this moment of decision — even the gutsy Sarah Palin.

I’m not going to resile from my earlier prediction of McCain, although I know it could seem ridiculous by morning. The Mac may be back, but does he have the key to the croft?

If Obama does win, I predict he will bitterly disappoint his fervent evangelists who believe the world will change the moment he takes the oath. The appearance of the world may change, but the fundamentals will remain.

The next decade will be more like the 1930s than the 1980s. Obama himself may conclude in retrospect that he was unlucky to win when he did.

The conundrum though is, could he have reached the White House at any other time?

John Evans

The passage was: “With your support I will win this election, and together we will save the world.”

I can’t guarantee that it’s a verbatim version, but the phase, “we will save the world,” is.

Let’s hope that, if he wins, a more practical and realistic character emerges. The last thing the world needs now is another messianic, emotion-driven President in the White House.

Another James Monroe* — described as a “quiet President,” despite his clear achievements — would do very nicely in the current reduced circumstances.

* James Monroe Facts, from MSN Encarta:
Fifth President of the United States
Birth: April 28, 1758
Death July 4, 1831
Home State: Virginia
Party: Democratic-Republican
Terms In Office: 1817-1821, 1821-1825
Vice President: Daniel D. Tompkins
Significant Acts:
* Ordered the suppression of Seminole uprisings in Florida in 1817.
* Purchased Florida from Spain for the settlement of $5 million in Spanish debt.
* Signed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which set limits on the expansion of slavery into newly-acquired territories.
* Adopted the policy of setting aside land for Native Americans in the Great Plains.
* Signed a treaty with Russia establishing a boundary to Russian territory in North America.
* Proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine, opposing European intervention in the affairs of nations in the Western Hemisphere.

He certainly leaves the last three Presidents standing.

John Evans

Calculated at London’s Baltic Exchange, it measures the rental value of the world’s freight shipping fleets.

Yawn!

Think again. The Baltic Dry Index is now down 92 percent since peaking in June.

The Telegraph is reporting that, “Freight rates for shipping are crashing at the fastest pace ever recorded as banks shut off credit lines to the industry, precipitating a sudden crunch in world trade.”

Jeremy Penn, President of the Baltic Exchange commented, “It is extremely serious. Freight rates have never fallen this steeply before. It is telling us that world trade in raw materials has slowed dramatically. Shippers are having genuine difficulty obtaining letters of credit from banks.”

And this is only one example of the implacable meltdown of many once impregnable indicators. It’s not Arctic icefields we should be worried about, but the buttresses of debt and trade worldwide.

On a threefold scale of assessment of future world economic activity, how would you rate our prospects for the next five years?

1. Mild downturn,
2. Nasty recession
3. Full-on depression.

Not the most difficult of questions to answer is it?

I suspect merchant mariners everywhere will soon be echoing the sentiments of the poet John Masefield:

I must go down to the sea again,
To the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star
To steer her by.

John Evans

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In the past year more than 20 teenagers have hanged themselves in the area around the small borough of Bridgend in South Wales, UK. Why they did it remains unanswered and is baffling parents, police, experts and the authorities.

In America the phenomenon of high school kids shooting up their campuses, then turning the guns on themselves, probably comes from the same root cause.

The police say they were not all members of any web-based suicide cult, although a few of them may have used the chatrooms. They didn’t all know each other either, and didn’t constitute a group or gang. So what is happening here?

Bridgend is a rather nice area, surrounded by glorious countryside, including the Vale of Ogmore and Merthyr Mawr, a wild place of sand dunes and beaches. It’s also near to the upmarket Vale of Glamorgan, a wealthy patch of rolling, green hills and country pubs. There are many worse places to live.

They did all have one thing in common though. Like all modern teenagers they were immersed in social networking sites — Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and some with the virtual world of Second Life.

Their inner space was formed by the anarchistic conversations of mainly unknown “friends” made on these addictive sites. No settled discourse this, but a 24/7 babble of wildly differing opinions, rants and life objectives, generously sprinkled with bizarre fantasies incapable of fulfilment in the real world.

And there’s the crunch — “the real world”. It really is a second life on these sites, bearing little resemblance to the day to day concerns of older people. That, of course, is their attraction.

The sites’ main competitor is “the real world”, that space of dismal state schooling; urgent demands on climate change of which we are ingenuously presented as the main cause; the breakdown of our ethical system and its replacement with social Marxism (political correctness and obsessive equality) and the bureaucratic autism of the governing class.

The world they look out on is one of cynical politicians on the make, advertisements that make them crave objects they know they don’t really need, and an adult generation that has allowed chaos to reign. The idealism of youth is quickly spent.

Add to all that, mass immigration and the introduction of cruel medieval practices, gang culture, knife crime and drug-based gun law, and the Britain they live in no longer has the moral or physical authority to demand their loyalty.

Teenagers today like nothing better than to “get wrecked” — hopelessly drunk — most nights of the week. Without boundaries to make sense of their lives, or any compelling lodestar to guide them, modern youth sinks into the apparent benign world of social networking.

The outer world gives them nothing but information-overload characterized by countless pressure groups competing for their attention with contradictory messages and injunctions. Good parents get drowned out, as do decent teachers.

Even the government is now just one voice among many, chopping and changing its empty slogans on a daily basis. Thought anarchy rules the lives of young people, an unpleasant environment for mental development to take place.

So, social networking they go. The problem is, it has a very thin actuality. Quickly they discover it hasn’t the substance to satisfy their need for experience and the challenges that promote growth of character and individuality. They are trapped in a no-man’s land between a wafer-thin second life and an unbearable jungle of squabbling claim and counter-claim in the world itself. No wonder many are taking their own lives.

Social networks can be dangerous places to be if you are immature and seeking experiences that should come from life itself.

John Evans

Last year, the old one got rather lost on our company Christmas card, so its demise was on the cards (pun intended).

After trawling through a miserable selection of samples from pro designers, I sat down in exasperation and created it myself. Shock, horror from the designers — self-promoting, naturally.

As the customer, I’m always right.

And it looks great on our newly-printed Christmas cards.

Now Paul Boutin, better known for his ribald stuff at Valleywag, gives blogs, blogging and bloggers a good old kicking on Conde Nast owned, Wired Magazine.

Here’s a little taster:

“Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.”

I can’t say I disagree, I’ve been writing the same thing for two years.

However, a Devil’s advocate is needed in the cause of balance. Enter Andrew Sullivan of Atlantic Magazine and the UK’s Sunday Times. In a long piece which oddly examines the nautical derivation of the word “log” — it really was a sliver of log — he explores “Why I blog” — a title I’ve come across a multitude of times, on every conceivable blog, over the past four years.

Here’s a snippet:

“… as blogging evolves as a literary form, it is generating a new and quintessentially postmodern idiom that’s enabling writers to express themselves in ways that have never been seen or understood before. Its truths are provisional, and its ethos collective and messy. Yet the interaction it enables between writer and reader is unprecedented, visceral, and sometimes brutal. And make no mistake: it heralds a golden era for journalism.”

Yikes. Literary form? Quintessentially postmodern idiom?

Discerning Reader, sort it out yourself. Syntagma’s view can be found in the articles below.

John Evans

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