Placido Domingo as Putin's useful idiot

How sad it was to see Placido Domingo, perhaps the world's greatest living operatic singer, in the role of the useful idiot. That happened on Thursday, when Domingo joined Russia's corrupt dictator Vladimir Putin at a black-tie-gala to mark the opening of a $700 million stage for the Mariinsky Theatre. 

However, Marinsky's director, the much overrated Ossetian conductor Valery Gergiev, is no useful idiot - he is a close personal friend and active supporter of the criminal dictator, who, together with another of the stars of the opening gala, soprano Anna Netrebko, actively participated in Putin's "election" campaign.

It is not surprising that Putin only a few days ago bestowed on Gergiev a Hero of Labor award, restored from the Soviet era, for his contribution to the arts. 

When artists and intellectuals, both in and outside of Russia, have criticized the dictator for his repression of human rights, the maestro has been comparing him to Peter the Great and Prokofiev. 

Gergiev does not have a single critical word to say about the sad state of Putin's Russia:

Today, analysts say President Putin spent his first year methodically cracking down on Russia’s opposition. This crackdown goes beyond the symbolic restoration of street patrols by Cossacks, the whip wielding enforcers of Czarist days.

“The tactics are destroying the opposition, destroying the protest movement by persecuting, imprisoning, marginalizing, forcing to emigrate - whatever,” says Dmitry Suslov, international affairs professor at the Higher School of Economics.

The Kremlin sent a high profile signal with last summer’s trial of Pussy Riot, a female punk band that protested in Moscow’s main cathedral. Two of the women are serving two-year jail sentences.
 
Now it is the turn of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most popular opposition leader. He is on trial in a provincial city, 1,000 kilometers from his power base here.
 
Opposition politician Vladimir Ryzhkov says the trials reflect a wider crackdown that President Putin started after returning to the Kremlin one year ago.
 
“Putin and his parliament enacted an entire series of laws aimed at prohibition: the prohibition of protests, the prohibition of the freedom of expression, the prohibition of criticizing the government and church,” said Ryzhkov, co-chairman of the Republican Party of Russia, a new group.
Source

PS
One can only hope that Domingo, who is known to be an honest and serious man, thinks twice next time when he is asked to join a celebration organized by friends and lackeys of a dictator.

Germany celebrates its export successes while indoctrinating children in poor countries against "cars, buses and factories"

Promoting Germany's industrial exports is one of the most important activities of Angela Merkel's government: 

In Germany, industrial exports are seen not merely as the consequence of the competitiveness of the economy, but as a goal in themselves. A brand is an object of pride, for the left and the trade union movement as well. It’s also insurance against demographic decline, as investing the trade surpluses will help in part to cover Germany’s social expenditures in the future.

And Angela Merkel is making that outbound voyage. Since 2007 the Chancellor has made no less than 274 trips abroad: 168 within Europe, 59 to Asia, 29 to North America, 11 to Africa and seven to Latin America. Even little Moldova was entitled to a visit. In this crammed itinerary, China occupies a special place. In the last six years, the Chancellor has made no fewer than six lengthy official visits there, including two in 2012, spending time both in Beijing and in the provinces. Clearly this isn’t happening by accident. In the past 10 years trade between the two countries has shot up from €36bn to €144bn, with China becoming Germany's third-largest trading partner

However, the same German government is also promoting and financing a campaign to indoctrinate children in the Pacific region against "cars, buses and factories"  in the name of fighting (non-existent) human caused "climate change"  :

 6,000 copies of the children’s story book “The Children Take Action – a Climate Change Story” were today handed over to the Permanent Secretary for Education for delivery to all primary schools in Kiribati. The Curriculum Development and Resource Centre (CDRC) will use the book to improve literacy skills in te-Kiribati and English. In addition, the story book will help children learn, in a very simplified way, the basics of climate change and its impacts on our environment. For example: 
 
"Jone didn’t know what climate change was and asked his grandfather to explain. Grandpa told Jone that the Earth’s temperature is becoming hotter. “My temperature gets hot when I am unwell,” said Jone. “Yes!” said Grandpa. “The Earth is becoming unwell too. There is less food for the birds and the fish. That is why they are leaving our island.” “What is making the Earth sick?” Jone asked. “We are,” said Grandpa. “Gases from our cars, buses and factories are making the Earth too hot.” “People are driving more cars and building more factories. So the Earth is getting hotter and hotter.” “Just like putting too many blankets on me!” said Jone."

The story was developed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and 1500 copies were printed with funding from the Australian International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative. The book has since been translated into te-Kiribati and 6360 copies printed by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)/Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) Coping with Climate Change in the Pacific Island Region Programme (SPC/GIZ CCCPIR on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, BMZ).

The German government rightly takes pride in the country's global export success, which "will help in part to cover Germany’s social expenditures in the future". But one can only wonder why the same government wants to deny poor people in developing countries the same access to industrial and economic development.  

There is a fine word that explains what this is all about: Hypocrisy

The great Stalin revival continues in Russia

The Great Leader

The Stalin revival continues in Putin's Russia: 

First it was the Soviet national anthem. Then it was the Soviet military parades. Now it is the Soviet lapel pins glorifying heroic work for the motherland. 

On May 1, Russian President Vladimir Putin will once again try to tap into Soviet nostalgia, this time by awarding Soviet era “Hero of Labor” stars to Russians in return for laudable deeds. It will be the first time the medals are bestowed since they were discontinued in 1991.--

The medals -- set up under Josef Stalin in 1927 -- will be handed out at a ceremony in Putin’s hometown Saint Petersburg to mark May 1, the Russian national holiday celebrating “Spring and Labor Day,” the successor to the Soviet “International Workers’ Day.”

RFERL forgot to mention at least three other Stalin favorites, already reintroduced by Putin; show trials, political killings executed  by the security service KGB/FSB and the gulag revival.    

What's next? 
Perhaps a revival of the literary tradition?: 

Thank you, Stalin, Putin. Thank you because I am joyful. Thank you because I am well. No matter how old I become, I shall never forget how we received Stalin Putin two days ago. Centuries will pass, and the generations still to come will regard us as the happiest of mortals, as the most fortunate of men, because we lived in the century of centuries, because we were privileged to see Stalin Putin, our inspired leader. Yes, and we regard ourselves as the happiest of mortals because we are the contemporaries of a man who never had an equal in world history.. 

O great Stalin Putin, O leader of the peoples,
Thou who broughtest man to birth.
Thou who fructifies the earth,
Thou who restorest to centuries,
Thou who makest bloom the spring,
Thou who makest vibrate the musical chords...
Thou, splendour of my spring, O thou,
Sun reflected by millions of hearts.

Unemployment - the only sector in the eurozone and the EU with strong growth

These people are the ones who should be held accountable for the record unemployment and recession  in the EU.

"Our economic fundamentals remain strong"
EU Commission president J.M. Barroso (speech in New York, April 12 2013)

The only thing that is growing fast in the eurozone (and basically in the entire EU) is unemployment. Today official eurozone enemployment hit a new high: 12,1% - 19.2 million people - are on the dole. In the full 27-member EU, a total of 26.5 million (10.9%) people were out of work in March.

The Eurostat data show a dramatic year-on-year rise; a year before the eurozone unemployment was 11% and 10.3% for the entire EU. 

Greece (27.2%) and Spain (26.7 %) were the hardest hit. 

You could be forgiven for thinking that it could not possibly be much worse. But, as economist Andrew Watt (Germany's Macroeconomic Policy Institute), shows us, you would be wrong: 

"we can make a rough and ready calculation of the “real” rate of underemployment in Europe. According to the European Labour Force Survey, average hours of part-timers are a tick under twenty per week, whereas full-timers work 41.5 hours a week. We don’t know exactly how the working time preferences are distributed, but a reasonable starting point would seem to be to assume that those part-timers wanting longer hours have the same average hours as all part-timers and that they want to move to the average of full-timers. In  other words we add somewhat more than half of the 9.2 million involuntarily part-time workers to the unemployed total.** We then add the people in the two sub-groups of the economically inactive both to the numerator (unemployed) and denominator (unemployed plus employed).

If I haven’t made any stupid excel mistakes*** the underemployment rate in the EU27 could be considered to be up to 16.7% and in the euro area as high as 18.0%. In other words the unemployment rate captures only about two-thirds of the extent of European underemployment."

PS
It is of course possible that I have misunderstood what Barroso said. He may actually be right when he states that "our economic fundamentals remain strong" - if he meant to say that his own and the other commissioners' economic fundamentals remain strong. 

"Global warming" has northern USA in its grip: Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities in April

Explanations from warmist climatologists about why all these April cold and snow records actually are a result of global warming are soon to be expected: 

"more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center"

April has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest.

"The weather map ... looks like something out ofThe Twilight Zone," Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog last week.

Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.

Cities such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Unfortunately for warm-weather lovers, after some mild temperatures the past few days, the chill is forecast to return as the calendar turns to May: Accumulating snow is forecast overnight Tuesday night and Wednesday in Denver and in Minneapolis-St.Paul by Wednesday night and Thursday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette.

Source

New alarmist Michigan State University study "affirms the success" of the "denial machine"

Warmist Michigan State University associate professor of sociology Aaron M. McCright has (together with a researcher from the Oklahoma State University) published a study - "The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's Views on Global Warming, 2001 - 2010". 

The study is, as could be expected, full of sociological gobbledygook. The good ones are, of course, socialists, leftists, liberals and envirofundamentalists. They are the "forces of reflexivity". The bad ones - Republicans and conservatives - are "forces of anti-reflexivity". 

Even if the researchers are heavily slanted in favor of climate alarmism, the main conclusion of the study is in reality a vindication of climate realism.

The results reaffirm the success of what McCright calls the "denial machine" – an organized movement to undercut the scientific reality of climate change during the past two decades.

Here is an extract from the "summary and conclusion" of the new study: 

Indeed, among elites and organizations within our society, there is an
enduring conflict between forces of reflexivity (those mostly on the Left who identify
problems with our economic system) and forces of anti-reflexivity (those mostly on
the Right who defend the industrial capitalist order of modernity against such critiques). Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the debate over climate change,
the most challenging global environmental problem and one with the greatest regulatory implications.
Our results indicate that this conflict is also diffusing throughout the American
public. Liberals and Democrats are more likely to take the side of the scientific consensus and many environmental movement organizations, proclaiming that global
warming is real, is human-caused, and is a worrisome threat. On the other hand,
conservatives and Republicans are more likely to dispute or deny the scientific consensus and the claims of the environmental community, thereby defending the industrial capitalist system.
This trend poses a challenge for proponents of reflexive modernization, as a growing
percentage of the American public—and not justself-interested industrial/conservative
elites—denies the scientific evidence documenting anthropogenic climate change and
thus the need for ameliorative action. This diffusion of anti-reflexivity throughout
society results in a declining portion of the populace willing to acknowledge a major
negative consequence of industrial capitalism. The culture wars have thus taken on a
new dimension, with serious implications for long-term societal resilience.

Yes, even a leftist sociology professor realizes that the alarmists have lost the war. And the "implications for long-term societal resilience" will be extremely positive, thanks to the victory of the "anti-reflexivity forces", of which this writer is a proud member. 

PS
The Michigan State University page on McCright shows that the associate professor has based almost his entire career on "exploring" the "climate change contrarians". Now, when it is clear that they have won, the professor should probably try to find another leftist bandwagon to profit from.

"his main contribution has been exploring how and why the American conservative movement and its allied climate change contrarians have effectively challenged climate science and policy in the United States for the last two decades." 

Russia's Pulkovo Observatory: "we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years"

Scientists at Russia's famous Pulkovo Observatory are convinced that the world is in for a period of global cooling. 

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

 "Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth".

Solar activity follows different cycles, including an 11-year cycle, a 90-year cycle and a 200-year cycle. Yuri Nagovitsyn comments.

"Evidently, solar activity is on the decrease. The 11-year cycle doesn’t bring about considerable climate change – only 1-2%. The impact of the 200-year cycle is greater – up to 50%. In this respect, we could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040 but it won’t be as pervasive as in the late 17th century".

Somewhere historians are most certainly already writing the final chapters of a long overdue book, "The Rise and Fall of the Global Warming movement". The news from Pulkovo makes it all the more important to concentrate on the real threat of a cooling world. Although it is good to know that scientists do not think that the next cooling period will be as pervasive as the one in the late 17th century.

Hopefully the Russian scientists are right about the possibilities of Arctic exploration even in colder circumstances: 

Even though pessimists say global cooling will hamper exploration of the Arctic, experts say it won’t. Climate change and the resulting increase in the thickness of the Arctic ice cover pose no obstacles to the extraction of oil and gas on the Arctic shelf. As oil and gas reserves of the Arctic sea shelf are estimated to be billions of tons, countries are demonstrating more interest in the development of the Arctic. Climate change will also have no impact on the Northern Sea Route, which makes it possible to cut trade routes between Europe, Asia and America. Professor Igor Davidenko comments.

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