"A Arte da Fuga" ("Die Kunst der Fuge", BWV 1080) é uma obra-prima de Johann Sebastian Bach: um único tema musical persegue-se, a si mesmo e as múltiplas variações, num diálogo musical intenso desenvolvido a diversas vozes, rico de simetrias, inversões, ritmos e tempos diferentes. Fugas para aartedafuga@gmail.com
The documents, released by the National Archives, show how Mrs Thatcher embarked on a personal crusade during the first weeks of her administration to make sure Sir Geoffrey did not flag in the face of resistance from fellow ministers. The papers are full of angry hand-written comments from the Iron Lady complaining “this will not do”, “too small” and in one case just “no” heavily underlined.
2. O CDS limita a medida às contratações sem termo. Mas haverá assim tantas empresas dispostas a contratar desempregados sem termo? Numa empresa costuma haver um período de anos em que o empregado fica a recibos verdes ou a termo. Só os trabalhadores mais antigos é que costumam passar a contrato sem termo. Existem empresas dispostas a passar um desempregado à frente de todos os restantes trabalhadores com contrato a termo apenas para receber um subsídio?
Esta proposta de lei do CDS destina-se sobretudo a criar uma nova clientela, porventura mais ao gosto da nossa direita socialista - empresas e ex-desempregados empregados por essas empresas, que passarão a estar dependentes da subvenção estatal, e que se constituirão como mais um grupo de pressão interessado no saque do Estado. Os efeitos morais desta medidinha serão pouco encorajadores - podemos esperar que os beneficiados demonstrem menos auto-suficiência, menos adaptabilidade, e menos empreendedorismo.
Pela primeira vez passo um 24 de Dezembro em Lisboa, o Ventamento Global Antropogénico proporcionou-me três horas de voo sobre o Atlântico, e umas quatro horas nos encantadores corredores do Aeroporto de Lisboa.
A propósito, para quem ainda não viu, a TAP acabou de divulgar um video de relações públicas, uma flash mob dance, ideia giríssima, embora muito estafada e verdadeiramente insultuosa -- não só considerando a qualidade do serviço de atendimento ao cliente do nosso sistema aeroportuário, como também e sobretudo o custo da TAP para o bolso dos contribuintes. Por motivos de indisposição cívica, não deixo o link.
Entretanto, pude gastar alguns petrodólares no centro comercial mais verde da capital, em compras de última hora para presentes de Natal. Quem suspeitar estar na posse de euros assim lavandariados, é favor enviá-los para a conta bancária do AADF, receberá de imediato créditos de CO2-verde, produzido com elevada responsabilidade social, e mais amigo do ambiente.
Sem prejuízo de escrevermos até ao fim do ano, muito Bom Natal!
Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).
But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, .... that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
El Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) ruso no deja lugar a la duda: la unidad de investigación climática (Climate Research Unit) manipuló los registros de Rusia para avalar el cambio climático. Los datos de las estaciones no muestran un calentamiento en el último siglo ni el presente.
The crux of the argument is that the CRU cherry picked data following the same methods that have been done everywhere else. They ignored data covering 40% of Russia and chose data that showed a warming trend over statistically preferable alternatives when available. They ignored completeness of data, preferred urban data, strongly preferred data from stations that relocated, ignored length of data set.
One the final page, there is a chart that shows that CRU’s selective use of 25% of the data created 0.64C more warming than simply using all of the raw data would have done. The complete set of data show 1.4C rise since 1860, the CRU set shows 2.06C rise over the same period.
El jefe del Panel Intergubernamental sobre Cambio Climático de la ONU (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, ha sido acusado de conflicto de intereses por beneficiarse de todo un conglomerado empresarial muy vinculado al "comercio de emisiones". Antes de presidir el IPCC, Pachauri fue un magnate del petróleo.
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.
We have looked for your declaration of these interests in the documents of the IPCC, particularly in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, but we have not found them.
Our conclusion is that you have numerous substantial direct or indirect vested financial and commercial interests profiting from the emissions reduction processes that the documents produced by the IPCC under your chairmanship have triggered.
We should be grateful for your response within 48 hours, failing which we shall be entitled to presume that you, the IPCC and the EPA – to whose administrator we are copying this letter – intend to conspire, and are conspiring, to obtain a pecuniary advantage by deceiving the public as to the nature, degree, and significance of the global surface temperature trend. In that event, conspiracy to defraud taxpayers would be evident, and we should be compelled to place this letter in the hands of the relevant investigating and prosecuting authorities.
It is impossible to be charitable with someone else’s money. Charity comes from your own heart, not from the government spending your money.
When we pay our taxes to the government and it gives that money away, that’s not charity, that’s welfare.
When the government takes more from us than it needs to secure our freedoms, so it can have money to give away, that’s not charity, that’s theft.
And when the government forces hospitals to provide free health care to those who can’t or won’t care for themselves, that’s not charity, that’s slavery.
That’s why we now have constitutional chaos, because the government steals and enslaves, and we outlawed that a long time ago.
Nonetheless there will be a great pronouncement whenever Copenhagen ends. The betting is that the Chinese and the Indians, who have steadfastly refused to agree to reduce their overall emissions, will agree to some vague targets thanks to a bribe courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. Of course, that agreement will be contingent upon them actually getting the loot, which seems pretty unlikely given the upcoming election.
El país organizador de la cumbre que pensaba salvar al mundo del cambio climático ha tirado la toalla. Según informa el diario Berlingske Tidende, renuncia a alcanzar un acuerdo mundial, tras los sucesivos días de caos en las negociaciones.
Despite the deal "not sufficient" to fight the ravages of climate change, diplomats at the Copenhagen climate conference appeared to have reached a deal after hours of tense negotiations even no country was "entirely satisfied" with the agreement.
After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but did not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.
CFACT unfurled the banners for two reasons, CFACT president David Rothbard explained. “Greenpeace ships, like the Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise, have become global symbols for radical environmentalism, and we wanted to call attention to the harm these groups are causing. And second, it seemed appropriate to use one of Greenpeace’s favorite tactics to make this point.”
Greenpeace is one of the “most unethical and irresponsible corporations on Earth,” said Christina Wilson, a recent graduate from the University of Minnesota-Duluth. “It’s time to expose it for what it is, and help promote real environmental justice. So I was really excited to participate in this human rights effort.”
If the hard socialism of Communism produces economic and societal collapse quickly, Mises theorized, the soft, incremental socialism of the West — popularized again recently as the “Third Way” by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton — would produce poverty in stages. Every bureaucratic intervention in the market reduces long-term wealth creation, even if it provides a temporary boost to the economy. In time, this reduction of wealth is blamed on the inefficiencies of the remaining “unfettered” market, which provokes calls for greater intervention, ad infinitum.
The economic laws described by Mises that brought down Communism apply equally to the American brand of soft socialism. Market forces will soon lay waste to American central planning just as surely as they did to the Soviet version two decades ago. The crises in housing, health care, and banking, the inevitable results of government intervention, are but harbingers of greater instability in our way of life.
Just this year, the data behind Michael Mann’s hockey stick was finally released. Mann had used only 12 carefully selected tree ring sequences to prepare his story — omitting 34 that didn’t suit his purpose. This is surely one of the most scandalous examples of cherry picking on record, a blatant attempt to keep the world scared of carbon dioxide, and to keep reputations and research budgets safe.
This August, right in the middle of the BBC’s promised barbecue summer (which didn’t come to pass), the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit disclosed that it had destroyed the raw data for its global surface temperature records. Despite the fact that they own some of the most powerful computers in the world, the reason they advanced was “an alleged lack of storage space.” The very foundation of the global warming argument was gone forever. Draw your own conclusions — sabotage or desperation?
The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.
El recuento final destapó el 3,2% de votos en contra, un 1,6% de votos en blanco y un 0,3% nulos. La Coordinadora calificó la jornada de "heroicidad" por los medios disponibles, si bien la participación quedó fijada en un discreto 27% | 700.000 ciudadanos, 166 pueblos, 29 comarcas y 15.000 voluntarios, protagonistas del 13-D
In conclusion, Madame Speaker, allowing for competing currencies will allow market participants to choose a currency that suits their needs, rather than the needs of the government.
The prospect of American citizens turning away from the dollar towards alternate currencies will provide the necessary impetus to the US government to regain control of the dollar and halt its downward spiral. Restoring soundness to the dollar will remove the government's ability and incentive to inflate the currency, and keep us from launching unconstitutional wars that burden our economy to excess.
With a sound currency, everyone is better off, not just those who control the monetary system. I urge my colleagues to consider the redevelopment of a system of competing currencies and cosponsor the Free Competition in Currency Act.
Así, el pasado agosto, el 75% de los ciudadanos respaldaban la auditoría de la FED. Y muy recientemente, la prestigiosa casa de encuestas Rasmussen publicaba nuevos resultados que confirmaban los anteriores datos: el 79% apoya la iniciativa, mientras que tan sólo el 7% se opone. En la actualidad, esta medida está siendo discutida en el Senado, a la espera de una decisión sobre su ratificación.
preguntarán a más de 700.000 ciudadanos -empadronados en estos municipios y mayores de 16 años- si están de acuerdo en que "la nación catalana se convierta en un Estado de derecho, independiente, democrático y social, integrado en la Unión Europea".
.... the industry has to invent anti-capitalist cheats, like patents and copyright, that are effectively legally guaranteed monopolies in distributing the thing.
If you look at the economics, file-sharing is good for music companies. They've got it wrong. Records were originally sold to promote live performances. When they realised people wanted to buy the records, they changed their business model. They are going to have to change it back. Or Steve Jobs will.
During its 96 years of existence, the Federal Reserve has played havoc with our economy and brought great suffering to millions through unemployment and price escalation. In addition, it has achieved what only a central bank can: a steady depreciation of our currency. Today's dollar is now worth four cents compared to the dollar entrusted to the Federal Reserve in 1913.
Ninety-six years should have been plenty of time for the Fed to come up with a plan for preventing economic crises. Since the Fed is the source of all economic downturns, it is impossible for any central banker to regulate in such a manner to prevent the problems that are predictable consequences of his own monetary mismanagement.
To make a decision regarding .... incompatible interpretations, we need a theory. By theory, I mean a proposition whose validity does not depend on further experience but can be established a priori.
For instance, - a larger quantity of a good is preferred to a smaller amount of the same good; - production must precede consumption; - what is consumed now cannot be consumed again in the future; - prices fixed below market-clearing prices will lead to lasting shortages; - without private property in production factors there can be no factor prices, and without factor prices cost-accounting is impossible; - an increase in the supply of paper money cannot increase total social wealth but can only redistribute existing wealth; - monopoly (the absence of free entry) leads to higher prices and lower product quality than competition; - no thing or part of a thing can be owned exclusively by more than one party at a time; - democracy (majority rule) and private property are incompatible.
The third myth is the belief that there exists no alternative to Western welfare-democracies. Again, theory demonstrates otherwise. The modern welfare state is not a "stable" economic system. It is bound to collapse under its own parasitic weight, much like Russian-style socialism imploded a decade ago. More important, however, an economically stable alternative to democracy exists. The term I propose for this alternative is "natural order."
We must not abandon utopia because the antagonism between ideas and reality is both the major dilemma of democratic socialism and its fascinating driving force.
Olof Palme
Sobre a perturbação que poderia chamar-se yeswecannite:
The egalitarian revolt against .... reality, as significant as it is, is only a subset of a deeper revolt: against the ontological structure of reality itself, against the "very organization of nature"; against the universe as such. At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will.
Scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.
The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.
Their correspondence show a claque of scientists massaging data to make it fit their theories, squelching scientists who disagreed, punishing academic journals that didn't toe the apocalyptic line, and hiding their work from public view. "It's no use pretending that this isn't a major blow," glumly wrote George Monbiot, a U.K. writer who has been among the fiercest warming alarmists. The documents "could scarcely be more damaging." And that's from a believer.
.... the single most important fact to emerge from the Climategate scandal. Peer-review is dead. Meaningless. Utterly void of credibility. More irredeemably defunct than a Norwegian Blue.
What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
“On a global scale it’s frightening because this group of people not only control the Hadley Centre, which controls the data on global temperature through the Hadley Climate Research Unit but they also control the IPCC and they’ve manipulated that. And of course the IPCC has become the basis in all governments for the Kyoto protocol, the Copenhagen accord and so on….”
We now have clear evidence that a concerted effort has been made by the IPCC connected climate scientists to block dissenting opinion on climate change, regardless of it's scientific merit.
we must understand how the whole thing hangs together, because the edifice of AGW is very definitely not just pure science, boffins in white coats in labs and so forth. It spans the whole gamut from real pure science, through the applied sciences and Engineering, passing through economics and finally ending up in the dark arts of Politics and Diplomacy. That's a lot to take in, so I have created a handy diagram that explains.
O caso Climategate, onde se manipularam dados para provar o aquecimento global, é um dos maiores escândalos científicos da História, pelo modo como afecta a credibilidade pública da comunidade científica e sobretudo pelas suas implicações económicas e políticas.
Algunos ya lo califican como el mayor escándalo científico del siglo. Este fin de semana la red se ha convertido en un auténtico hervidero tras la publicación de toda una serie de documentos comprometedores pertenecientes a la cúpula científica del calentamiento global antropogénico (causado por el hombre).
even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a "unified" view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the "common cause"; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to "hide the decline" of temperature in certain inconvenient data.
It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren't averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
Em 1640 pela Catalunha rebentavam violentas revoltas, que aliás permitiram que Portugal recuperasse a independênca. Enquanto por lá gritava-se "morte ao mau governo", por aqui clamava-se por um governo diferente.
