Navajo and Hopi Indians tell environmentalists they're not welcome

Interesting. A very similar thing has happened here in far north Queensland when aboriginal people realised that greenies liked trees more than people, and were quite prepared to stab them in the back by doing deals with the Labor government over the so-called wild rivers legislation.

Effectively, Labor put its political interests, ie its need for green voting preferences, ahead of the needs and rights of indigenous people.

The Wilderness Society was happy to tolerate aborigines in its precious wilderness as long as they stayed poor and didn't get in the way.

It was almost worth it to see aboriginal people protesting outside a Wilderness Society function in urban Brisbane full of the usual white inner-city living upper-middle class suspects. You know, your typical Greens voter

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. - The leader of the country's largest Indian reservation threw his support behind the neighboring Hopi Tribe, whose lawmakers declared environmental groups unwelcome on the reservation.

Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. and Hopi lawmakers say environmentalists' efforts could hurt the tribes' struggling economies by slowing or stopping coal mining.

 

Shirley said Wednesday that he will stand in solidarity with the Hopi Tribe, and joined Hopi lawmakers in encouraging other tribes to re-evaluate their relationships with environmentalists.

The Durango Herald

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Which sells better - Ford F-150 or Toyota Camry?

From Tim Blair:

When in charge of markets, governments tend to deliver what they think the public should buy rather than what the public wants to buy. Which is how things are shaping up for GM, now under majority government ownership. Last month the carmaker planned to shut its Orion plant:

But a few weeks later, the company reversed course. GM now says it will retool Orion to make compact, gas-sipping cars. The change of heart says a lot about how GM’s new owners – the federal government owns 60% of the company and the United Auto Workers (UAW) owns 17% – are making considerations other than profitability a top priority for the auto maker.

Because if profitability were a priority, the Orion plant might be re-tooled to build something even larger than the mid-size sedans it’s currently producing:

As Ford looks to reinvent itself with smaller, energy efficient vehicles they are faced with the stark reality that as of late May their Ford F-150 series continues to outsell the Toyota Camry.

Let that sink in for a moment. The best-selling truck in the U.S. still outsells the best-selling car …

There is a widely-held view outside the US (and within it) that the US auto industry is in crisis due to producing the wrong vehicles – behemoths, when everyone wants capsules. This isn’t so, as even Barack Obama knows. The main problem lies elsewhere, as Mark Steyn has pointed out:

GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people.

How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around 1600 bucks; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That’s to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell.

Solution: keep making the popular trucks, but cut the gigantic corporate socialism. Oh, and appoint Iowahawk as US car czar:

Obama – a Hemi man himself, when allowed his choice – is headed in the opposite direction: too small to fail.

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Urgent action needed before the lights go out in Britain

Wind farms will be a monument to an age when our leaders collectively went off their heads

Let us be clear: Britain is facing an unprecedented crisis. Before long, we will lose 40 per cent of our generating capacity.

 

And unless we come up quickly with an alternative, the lights WILL go out. Not before time, the Confederation of British Industry yesterday waded in, warning the Government it must abandon its crazy fixation with wind turbines as a way of plugging this forthcoming shortfall and instead urgently focus on far more efficient ways to meet the threat of a permanent, nationwide black-out.

 

There are a few contenders for the title of the maddest thing that has happened in our lifetime. 

 

But a front-runner must be the way in which politicians of all parties have been seduced by the La-La Land promises of the wind power lobby.

 

If you still haven't made your mind up about wind power, just consider some of the inescapable facts - facts which the Government and the wind industry do their best to hide from us all.

So far we have spent billions of pounds on building just over 2,000 wind turbines - and yet they contribute barely one per cent of all the electricity that we need.

 

The combined output of all those 2,000 turbines put together, averaging 700 megawatts, is less than that of a single, medium-sized conventional power station.

 

The rest here.

 

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Less central role for US dollar a good thing?

Jeffrey Sachs writing in Scientific American thinks so.

The U.S. response to the Chinese proposal was revealing. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner initially described himself as open to exploring the idea; his candor quickly caused the dollar to weaken in value—which it needs to do for the good of the U.S. economy. That weakening, however, led Geithner to reverse himself within minutes by underscoring that the U.S. dollar would remain the world’s reserve currency for the foreseeable future.

 

Geithner’s first reaction was right. 

Article here.

 

Via The Instapundit

 

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Australia's cultural rent seekers

Same tired old, (and not a little pretentious and self-important), justifications below from a sector that imagines it deserves special treatment at tax-payer's expense.   Really, the insufferable arrogance of these people! Australians were just helpless acceptors of whatever British publishers decided they should read? What planet is this woman on?   We had no "authentic...cultural identity" prior to 1972?   In relation to the Australian film industry, you can see the studied and willful blindness that so characterises the cultural left. As Blair points out, there is no shortage of Australian films being made. That isn't the reason that so few people decide to spend their hard earned money on them when making a choice about what to see.   No, she'll ignore the very simple explanation - most Australian films are unwatchable self-indulgent rubbish that noone in their right mind would pay to see. Vide stage plays that are little more than leftist agitprop, such as the one that had the luvvies sponteineously orgasming over that had a character clearly supposed to be Peter Costello by any other name giving orders to the Navy not to rescue people on a sinking refugee vessel! I mean, really.   As Orwell so perceptively observed so many years ago - only an intellectual could believe that. No ordinary person would be so foolish.   And poor Ms Adler obviously doesn't understand the Market. Bit like K R Puff'n'Fluff in that regard. Even evil multinationals want to make money and know that they can only do that if they offer people what they want to buy. It really is that simple out in the real world. But not for for folks like her it seems. But then, she's got her own interests to look after   Tim Blair Monday, May 04, 2009 at 04:14am     Louise Adler, publisher of gibberish, defends the Australian book industry’s cultural protectionism: Until the 1970s, British publishers decided the reading habits of Australians … With the advent of the Whitlam and Fraser governments, an authentic Australian cultural identity was brought into being by fiat, with the establishment of such agencies as the Australia Council and the Film Commission. Overnight, Australian stories told by Australians in Australian accents were available to Australian consumers.   So much for pre-70s Australian writers Henry Lawson, Miles Franklin, Ray Lawler, Hal Porter, John O’Grady, Banjo Patterson … By the 1990s, the Australian publishing scene had matured sufficiently to view itself as local in origin and global in practice.   What did the “scene” think it was previously? Adler next contrasts the thriving “publishing scene” to the moribund film sce … industry, which only a few words earlier she’d associated with Whitlamite cultural triumph: We have witnessed the demise of the local film industry. In 2007, Australian films represented a paltry 4 per cent (of which 2 per cent was delivered by Happy Feet) of total box-office revenue. How can it be in the national interest for Australian consumers to be deprived of Australian content?   Revenue is a guide to how many people saw those films, not to the availability of Australian content. As it happens, there were many Australian releases in 2007. Almost all of them were rubbish, which is why local audiences avoided them. The consequences of an open market on the cultural landscape are obvious and verifiable. Exhibit A is surely the local music scene, which has been decimated by the abolition of territorial copyright.   The top 100 singles in 2008 contained 20 Australian songs. The top 100 album chart contains 24 local works. “Decimated”? A marketplace that abolishes the principle of territorial copyright will wind back the clock on a proud and profitable publishing culture, reduce the availability of Australian stories and hand back a monopoly to multinational publishers to make decisions about our market far removed from local realities.   Like the “reality” of a “decimated” local music “scene”? More on this fear of alien cultural influences from Bob Carr: Publishers say they need this protection to support local culture. This is garbage. The truth is Australians will always want to buy good Australian writing.

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The last great Prime Minister of Britain

Andrew Bolt Monday, May 04, 2009 at 08:27am The 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister of Great Britain is celebrated: We are here to celebrate a famous victory and to pay tribute to a great Lady who not only saved Britain but together with Ronald Reagan, ended the cold war, tore down the iron curtain, and enabled millions to escape the tyranny of communism. Her greatness may be measured by the smallness of her successors. What might she now think of the great spending splurge in Britain, the US and Australia. Lord Forsyth, in a fine speech at Thatcher’s tribute dinner, says it for her: When Margaret wanted to redecorate the study in no 10 she paid for it herself. She always paid cash and never signed the bill in the members dining room and many of her colleagues who did so were given stern lectures on the dangers of debt and credit.. She changed the way people thought about wealth creation, enterprise and the role of the state. Part of her legacy was the destruction of socialism and the creation of New Labour. Today we are back to the 70s in a Britain on the brink of bankruptcy thanks to the meddling excesses of Gordon Brown, the irresponsibility of some bankers and the searing incompetence of the regulators and monetary authorities here and in the United States. Old Labour is back. Margaret’s fixed ropes of sound money, living within our means, controlling public expenditure and smaller Government to release the enterprise of the British people are still in place. Source

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