Convening to ring the alarm about global warming, our putative betters and would-be rulers gathered in Davos, Switzerland, filling the local general-aviation hangars with some 1,700 private jets. Taking an international commercial flight is one of the most carbon-intensive things the typical person does in his life, but if you’re comparing carbon footprints between your average traveler squeezed into coach on American and Davos Man quaffing Pol Roger in his cashmere-carpeted intercontinental air limousine, you’re talking Smurfette vs. Sasquatch. The Bombardier’s Global 6000 may be a technical marvel, but it still runs on antique plankton juice. The emissions from heating all those sprawling hotel suites in the Alps in winter surely makes baby polar bears weep bitter and copious baby-polar-bear tears.

The stories add up: Jeff Greene brings multiple nannies on his private jet to Davos, and the rest of the guys gathered to talk past each other about the plight of the working man scarf down couture hot-dogs that cost forty bucks. Bill Clinton makes the case for wealth-redistribution while sporting a $60,000 platinum Rolex.

The hypocrisy of our literally (literally, Mr. Vice President!) high-flying crusaders against fossil fuels — who overlap considerably with our high-living crusaders against economic inequality — is endlessly annoying if frequently entertaining. And there is something unseemly about enduring puritanical little homilies on how we need to learn to live with less from guys wearing shoes that cost more than the typical American family earns in a quarter. When that obnoxious Alec Baldwin character from Glengarry Glen Ross informs that sad-sack real-estate salesman that his watch costs more than that guy’s car, he was trying to provoke him into getting richer, to the tune of a Cadillac Eldorado or, if not that, at least the second-prize set of steak knives. But our modern progressive versions of that guy are even more obnoxious: They demand that we lower our expectations while they live lives of opulence that would have embarrassed the Count of Monte Cristo.

Out-obnoxious-ing a guy with Alec Baldwin’s smirking mug takes a lot of brass.

These ridiculous hypocrites deserve every syllable of abuse that comes their way. I instinctively write off all denunciations of the wicked 1 percent coming from anybody unwilling to live at or below the median U.S. household income, which amounts to less than Clinton’s Rolex is worth. But there is something worse at work here than hypocrisy: stupidity. And stupidity is, like private-jet travel, shockingly expensive.

Our governments and our business and political elites are not mainly made up of stupid people. One of the shocking things about getting to know people in government, whether in elected office or in the bureaucracies, is that they are mostly bright, well-intentioned, and honest. Together they represent a sterling example of one of the most important and least understood of modern social paradoxes: None of us is as dumb as all of us.

SNIP

Read more:http://m.nationalreview.com/article/3971...in-d-williamson

The only thing I have against the annual Davos conclaves is Liz Clayman has to bundle up in loose knits....

VS

This is my favorite guy at Davos and that's saying something given the crowd which was there. Here is but ONE of his houses, the 195 million $ baby said to be in Beverly Hills.



"In Beverly Hills, the 25-acre compound includes about 53,000 square feet of living space, 12 bedrooms and 23 bathrooms across several buildings. A quarter-mile driveway runs past a vineyard before reaching the main home, a 35,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style villa.

A separate, roughly 15,000-square-foot entertainment center has a bowling alley, a theater that seats 50 and a dressing room, and a discothèque with a rotating dance floor. Other amenities include a Turkish-style spa and a 128-foot-long reflecting pool.

Mr. Greene, who made a fortune betting against subprime mortgages, bought the estate out of receivership for $35 million in 2007 from Saudi businessman Mishaal K. Adham and his wife, while it was under construction."

http://www.designerzcentral.com/designer...or-195-million/

Interior shots of this little fixer upper can be seen at the link. Greene also "owns...two other Los Angeles mansions [one in Malibu], a mansion in Palm Beach, a mansion in the Hamptons, and a 145-foot party yacht called Summerwind that once severely damaged a protected coral reef off Belize."

https://homes.yahoo.com/news/own-five-ma...-150056064.html

Envy is no part of my makeup, and I begrudge no one their success nor their wealth. But with this yutz I may make an exception.