A jolly January

To give me a gentle start into 2015 blogging – and to help those of you currently enjoying computer and internet  access to catch up with things you might have missed here last year – I’m going to post some of the best posts from last year.

These were NOT PC’s top five still relevant (or still pointed) posts for January last year…

1. So how much of the "Paleo Diet" is based on an actual Paleolithic diet?
   Since I still have this conversation about this fad diet with someone at least once a week (sigh), here’s TED Fellow Christina Warinner, an expert on ancient diets, answering the question:
           So how much of this "Paleo Diet" stuff is based on an actual Paleolithic diet?
   The answer is not really any of it…
   
2. Skousen celebrates new non-destructive growth measurement
   As I mentioned the other day, mainstream economists are talking up New Zealand as a “rock star” economy on the basis both of expectations of greater demand from China for our milk products, but also because of greater consumption spending.
       The latter can only figure as “growth” if the way you measure growth is based on consumption rather than production, which is exactly what so-called Gross Domestic Product measures – measuring spending on retail goods or by government (which is all consumption spending) as production, but ignoring most of the production that makes this spending possible.
       It’s like judging a rock star’s success not by how many great records he’s produced and sold, but by how many lines of coke he puts up his nose.
       It’s this sort of nonsense that allows unthinking alleged economists to utter nonsense suggesting consumer spending drives more than two-thirds of the overall economy, and giving vote-buying governments the cover to issue shopping subsidies and central bankers to talk about dropping helicopter-loads of money whenever they see spending fall.
       This is not just nonsense, it’s dangerous nonsense….
   
3. Councils’ “experts” among the last still drinking Al Gore’s Kool Aid
   Al Bore’s absurdist 2006 film also showed alarmist maps and videos of sea levels rising 20 feet by the by the year 2100 – a rise that would bury a big two-storey house under the sea.
       None of the UN’s IPCC reports ever supported this surreal fantasy (or his entirely made-up claim that “New Zealand may be refuge as rising sea levels displace hundred of millions of people”). Indeed the latest UN IPCC report continues to dial back its alarmism, with figures showing sea level rise exhibiting no rate of acceleration at all: rising over the last 100 years at the roughly constant rate of 1.7mm. For those without a calculator, that’s  a rise of just 170mm, a level that would only be able to just barely put a strip of 6 inch thick flooring under water…
       Indeed, the UN does offer scare stories suggesting accelerated rises from 410mm to 640mm for their most likely “projections.” Yet GPS and satellite measurements, only used in the last decade, indicate that “Relative Sea Level,the distance between the level of the sea and the level of neighbouring land, … frequently [shows] little sign of change during the recent decade,” even in those places like Stockholm, Pago Pago and San Francisco highlighted by the UN’s report as being especially scary¹.
       San Francisco, by the way, is where Al Gore owns seafront property.
       So why, you might ask, are Christchurch’s “experts”² now planning to limit what people can do on their property on the basis of guesswork suggesting seas will rise at double the rate of even the scariest of scenarios dreamed up by the UN …
   
4. Pete Seeger: “If I had a hammer and sickle”
   America’s most famous, and most influential, Communist has just died.
     Pete Seeger, folk singer, banjo player, successful communist recruitment tool – the man some dubbed Stalin’s Songbird – was 94.
       “The conventional wisdom holds that it was ever so—that American popular musicians have always been leftists, and that music-as-radical-politics has stretched across the decades, expressing the nation’s social conscience…  Yet this “native tradition” is a myth. Until quite recently, popular music’s prevailing spirit was apolitical … The politicisation of American pop … grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party’s “Popular Front” effort to use popular culture to advance its cause…”
   
5. Kim DotCon takes another scalp
   It seems Kim DotCon is political kryptonite to anyone he touches…