Give ’em their own tactics back. The campaign of terror being waged by the non believers in global warming within the Liberal Party is a clear example of how determined blackmailers can crush sensible but sensitive souls. What Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin et al are doing is threatening their colleagues with the virtual destruction of the Liberal Party unless they get their own way. There is only one way of handling political bullies like them and that is to stand up to them and be prepared to use exactly the same tactics in return.

The sensible supporters of the need for action on global warming should simply make it clear that they will be voting in favour of the negotiated agreement on the ETS legislation whoever is the Liberal Party leader and whether the party room votes against the legislation or not. Faced with the absurdity of the ETS being law but electing as leader someone opposed to it, surely some of those now wavering and considering a vote for Abbott on Monday would stick with Turnbull.

And if they didn’t then most of them would be signing their political death warrant anyhow. At a double dissolution election at the end of February with the Liberals divided and led by Abbott there would be a massacre.

A real life how to spy book. Back in the days before spooks went around with sophisticated electronic listening devices, operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency had to acquire such skills as concealing a doping pill in a matchbook, then covertly dropping it into a person’s drink while distracting them by lighting their cigarette. To help agents master the necessary techniques,  the CIA employed magician John Mulholland for a fee of $US3,000 to compile The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception, a copy of which was recently rediscovered by the Agency’s official historian.

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It has now been published and Publishers Weekly comments that “despite the authors’ best efforts to promote their discovery of Mulholland’s work as a rare piece of historical evidence of the CIA’s legacy of black arts, the manuals, with their earnest, how-to descriptions of surreptitiously spiking drinks, palming documents and signaling colleagues with a feather in a hat band seem more quaintly anachronistic than revealing or sinister.”

For my part I am waiting for the first law suit in the United States from someone claiming to have been a victim of a drink spiker using the CIA’s techniques.

Good reason to be a little gloomy. BHP Billiton boss Marius Kloppers did not dwell for long at his company’s annual meeting this week on the prospects for the year ahead but he did strike a cautionary note. “We continue to believe,” he said, “that we will come out of this recession less strongly than in previous cycles.” With United States having the previous day revised down from 3.5% to 2.8% the official estimate of third quarter GDP growth it is easy to understand why. There’s not much of a recovery in that number and every likelihood that next year growth will decline again now that inventories have been restocked. Without a growing USA, and thus limited export growth, the Chinese will have trouble sustaining their own recently improved growth rate.

An industry on the brink. Stand by for the peripheral damage to the Australian thoroughbred horse industry – and probably the world’s – as a result of the crash of the Dubai economy. The decision overnight by the Dubai Government owned company Dubai World to welsh on its debts surely makes it impossible for Australia’s biggest race horse owner, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to continue spending millions at yearling sales. And if he and the family owned Godolphin stop bidding here and elsewhere, then prices will surely crash. Stand by for the bursting of one of history’s biggest ever investment bubbles