Also Joe Cambria’s opinions about other people’s capacity to generate or to recognise humour should be read in the light of the fact that a certain Catallaxy habitue once ran a campaign to have John Quiggin sacked from UQ because of a joke on his blog about the procedure for appointing the Pope.

Meanwhile, the Catallaxy mob are far too embarrassed to defend their fellow Hayekian’s nescience on global warming and are reduced to snarking based on quoting me out of context.

Yeah. Not cricket and I said as much.

From where I stand, Paul, your statement was always a riposte rather than a complete historical thesis on that period in German history. All fun aside, there are some rhetorical techniques that don’t seem to be read as such by the literalists. Catallaxy seems to be full of them (after about 5 minutes investigation, admittedly), but there are a couple here and there on LP.

Let us not forget that when the Berlin Wall came down it was because East Germans clearly preferred to live in a society with Greens in state and federal parliaments, very strong environmental NGOs and (at the time) the strongest greenhouse gas emission reduction targets in the developed world.

Yeah… I’m a bit suss on that as well. Most wanted the Wall to come down for higher living standards, and also getting the Stasi off their back. I don’t think CO2 levels and NGOs really factored into the thinking of the average Josef living in Karl Marx Stadt at the time.

Still, Spiros was on the money with this:

If the Soviet bloc communists had deliberately set out to systematically destroy their natural environments, they wouldn’t have done anything any differently. They left the place filthy and poisoned.

Amazingly so. I think one of the SU’s main legacies is to create Lake Karachay – the “most polluted place” in the world. (Yes, even more than the area around Chernobyl.) Dump radioactive waste in the water, let a drought occur, and you have a place where you can get a lethal dose of radiation in an hour.

This is why Vaclav Klaus is an idiot. He should know damned better.

SATP: Lesson for the day – Exports and GDP are not the same thing.

Robert, have you ever considered the possibility that SATP is actually referring to the GDP of Woop Woop?

There, I’ve given my own side a token spray to prove my inherent fairness and decency as a commentator, now I can settle back into my comfort zone and bag the left in what remains of this Federal election year.

For bonus points, go to the ABS website and download the latest GDP figures, and have a look at the breakdowns by sector.

This is a joke? Right?

Has to be a statistician involved in that outcome.

Manufacturing isn’t drawing people back from overseas for the high pay for mind numbing menial jobs.

I think I’ve made this point before – it’s a bit of a myth that we don’t have a manufacturing industry in Australia any more.

That’s right, Kim. About a million people go off to work every day in this non-activity. I believe that it accounts for a greater proportion of GDP than mining or agriculture.

Good points, Adam.

If you come back to greenhouse gases rather than the environment in general the Stern Review found that economies become more GHG intensive as they industrialise. As their economies mature they become less GHG intensive with growth, but they do continue to increase emissions nevertheless. That’s internal, quite apart from the destruction they cause indirectly elsewhere.

The amount of stuff we manufacture in Australia continues to increase.

Malaysia, the Phillipines and Indonesia for timber, China and India for manufacturing, smelting and refining, Nigeria for oil…I’m sure there are other examples.