The price of ego

Well, little Euroslime Dave is having a ball with our money. Pics (one above) and details suggest that we had three Tornadoes on that little jolly to Libya, each carrying FOUR Storm Shadows. At a million a pop, that's £12 million-worth of tax payers' money up in smoke.

The 3,000-mile round trip, we are told, took eight hours, accompanied by VC-10 and Tri Star tankers, plus an AWACS E-3D, as a command aircraft. Currently, the running cost for a Tornado is about £45,000 an hour, and the big jets cost about the same (or slightly cheaper). In terms of order of magnitude, this amounts to a mission cost (call it the delivery charge) of just over £2 million. With ordnance, that puts the total price of yesterday's little episode at a cool £14 million.

Most of this is money already spent, but the aircraft use up hours, and the ordnance has to be replaced. Therefore, it is actually real money, that has to be extracted from the taxpayers' pockets. And it is interesting that, with all the flag-waving and trebles all round, none of the hand wavers or the babies have actually worked out how much little Euroslime's vanity trip is costing.

The interesting thing is that, spread in the right places, you can get an awful lot of leverage for £14 million.  Delivering about six tons of high explosive, at a rough cost of £1,200 per lb is about the least cost-effective way of spending that amount of money.  However, when it comes to bolstering the Boy Slime's ego, no doubt he will think it money well spent.

UPDATE 1: "Libya action hits Ryanair flights", says The Independent. The Budget airline has had to alter its flights to Sicily because of the air strikes against Libya, making room for Italy to move F-16s and Eurofighters from bases in northern Italy to Trapani, from where Ryanair normally operates.

A thought occurs. Why don't we give the explosive delivery contract to Ryanair? I'm sure they could do it cheaper, and carry passengers at the same time. Think of the flight premium they could charge ... an extra tenner to watch a Storm Shadow launched ... proceeds to the Tory Party funds. Simples.

UPDATE 2: Hand waver on Sky News (see here) gaily describing an Italian-built Palmaria 155mm self-propelled gun (above) as a "tank". Knocked out by the French, this is a true example of European co-operation. The Ities sell the Libyans the kit, the Kermits destroy it, regime change happens and then the European arms salesmen move in for the next round. It all makes work for the (European) workman to do.

UPDATE 3 The babies have got in on the act as well, with another pic of this famous "tank" ... aka Italian-built Palmaria. Mind you, it has taken long enough to get the girlie boys to tell the difference between a "tank" and an APC. But it is asking too much for them to work out the difference between a tank and a SPG - that would blow their tiny little minds.

UPDATE 4: This isn't a tank either. It's a self-propelled nun.

UPDATE 5: A very sceptical look at the whole adventure, and the underlying agenda. Some interesting observations - verging on tin foil ... except, think "Pan Europa". The "colleagues" have always wanted North Africa as part of Greater Europe. The idea goes way back.

UPDATE 6: And then you have Gerald Warner: "All they are saying is give war a chance. Ticking another box on the Things To Do list, the Heir of Blair last week managed to initiate a war he could call his own".

True, Dave inherited the Afghanistan debacle, but that was a hand-me-down conflict originally the property of his hero Tony. What Dave wanted was a piece of action of which he could take personal ownership; nothing too bloody, nothing too protracted and certainly nothing too expensive - ideally, a wee pretendy war to boost his status.

Good stuff! You can see why the babies got rid of him from The Failygraph. Not sure about the "nothing too expensive" though. This looks as if it will be costing us a good few hundred million, with no end in sight.

COMMENT THREAD

Meanwhile

The story the British MSM can't be bothered to tell. The Irish are getting stuffed by the EU. Come to think of it though, when was that news?

COMMENT THREAD

One of our interests is missing

A small salvo from Szamuely. Does Dave really know what he's doing? Well, there's always room for accidents, but this isn't one of them. Such is the hyperbole from the hand-wavers and the babies that not one is asking the key question – what is the national interest? Yet they are happy to report without a bat of an eyelid that the RAF is now preparing to use Storm Shadows against Libyan targets.

These, of course, are the million pound bombs that the Tories originally ordered as another of those mad European ventures from wonder boy Portillo. Kermit tills will be ringing out as they work out the cost of replacements of what is primarily a French project. Unsurprisingly, Sarkozy is beaming with pleasure.

And that really is the question – of all the mad dictators in the world – why is this Dave's or even our problem, to the extent that we can afford to lob million-pound missiles at stretches of empty desert? Do we actually want to support these rebels? Or is this really about giving Dave some feel-good headlines while topping up the Kermit tills with our money?

COMMENT THREAD

Plugged in

Apparently, they have run an extension lead out to Fukushima and plugged the plant back into the mains. It will be switched back on as soon as the call centre has cleared the down-payment through the bank and the direct debit has been set up.

The BBC and the other babies can now return to waving their hands and emoting about the latest group of earthquake victims they've discovered, carefully doling out the victim quota so they don't run out before the call comes to wave their hands over Libyan victims. Meanwhile, another blogger is less than happy about moronic journalists.

He's setting up a "wall of shame", but I think it would be just better to post the names of the very few journalists who have an emotional IQ of a five-year-old or higher, and an equivalent grasp of physics. Meanwhile, the babies are getting excited about the bombardment of Libya with 112 Tomahawks ... wow! Have they any idea how big that country is?

The situation is slightly redeemed by the great political satirist Matthew d'Ancona whose dry wit is so subtle that, on first read, you actually think he's praising Euroslime Dave. What a card!

Interestingly, I picked up this piece by ex-journalist David Simon. It makes some good points, but underlines the salient fact that most MSM journalists really do not understand blogging – or bloggers.

Eventually, though, the MSM is going to self-destruct, and not for any of the reasons David Simon makes out. It is going to be for the single reason that the news media has forgotten what it is for. And unfortunately, their problems can't be solved by running an extension lead out, and plugging them back in.

Meanwhile, Japanese fire truck drivers are to be sent on courses to improve their parking techniques (pictured - love the registration plate ... it has to be a coincidence ... isn't life strange).

COMMENT THREAD

Cats

Costing our nuclear future?

There is no parallel between Fukushima and Chernobyl at all, says Booker , who notes that the scaremongers have been out in force, with talk of "meltdown" and claims that the Japanese nuclear power plant emergency threatened a disaster "worse than Chernobyl".

There is, of course, says our man, no parallel with Chernobyl at all. The problem at Fukushima was not the explosion of a working nuclear reactor (all its reactors had been automatically shut down). The main problem was the lack of water to cool spent fuel rods.

Then, even if the overheating rods caught fire, the worst-case scenario was never more than that some radioactive particles, given an unfavourable wind, might reach as far as Tokyo. There was never any chance that this could compare with Chernobyl, although even the long-term effects of that 1986 disaster, as it turned out, were very much less serious than scaremongers at the time predicted.

Booker makes the point that the excessive stockpiling of fuel rods at Fukushima has arisen because pressure from anti-nuclear groups has made the safe dispersal of nuclear waste so difficult. This means, in a sense, the Greens are partly responsible for the problems – not that they will ever admit it. Greens never take responsibility for anything – everything is always someone else's fault.

The big problem though is that the effects of this unique accident on the renewed drive for the nuclear energy that the world so desperately needs may be seriously damaging. In the forefront of those countries which have now responded by closing down reactors or abandoning plans for new ones is Germany, where Angela Merkel was booed in the Bundestag for suggesting that we should move on to "the age of renewable energy as soon as possible".

At least here in Britain our energy secretary, Chris Huhne, has so far refrained from saying anything so fatuous; although how he is going to persuade our German and French-owned electricity companies to build the nuclear power plants needed to keep Britain's lights on will be more of a puzzle than ever.

Really though, there are enough complications to our energy policy already, without adding this – which is something we as well as the Japanese could have done without.

COMMENT THREAD

The storm gathers?

You can tell that the situation in Japan is under control, simply from the headlines ... or the absence of them. Now that Fukushima hasn't blown sky high within the attention span of a retarded gnat, the babies of the media have moved on to play with their latest hystérie du jour.

It is The Times here which leads the way with a portentous headline, redolent of the darkest days before the Second World War: "The Storm Gathers", as the media shows pictures of a Libyan jet crashing and burning (or it could be a jet-on-a-stick, which they've set fire to?) and action pictures of French AlpaJet trainers, for heaven's sake.

Are we on the brink of world war? Does Armageddon beckon? Nah ... we have a poxy, two-bit dictator in a poxy, fly-blown strip of desert, taking the piss and – as Arab dictators always do – slaughtering his people. And we are to send in a clutch of aeroplanes and maybe do a bit of derring do, on a scale that wouldn't even make a decent Sunday afternoon airshow.

But that's the babies of the media for you – incapable of reporting the news accurately or honestly, totally losing it when it comes to a sense of proportion and out to lunch when it comes to reporting anything complicated or which requires intelligent analysis.

Meanwhile, Spiked online adds it weight to the litany of condemnation of the babies, while Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent puts the boot in, but in a measured and informative way:

Irish residents in Japan have been emailing me accounts of the incredible calm and social concern of the Japanese people, and their own disgust at the foreign media frenzy, which is making it seem as if the entire archipelago is in danger of "nuclear meltdown".

But the dogs have barked and the caravan has moved on ... already the BBC stars and the forty or so reporters and the hundreds of hangers-on will be packing up in Japan and booking their passages to some warm Mediterranean location, where they can spout their breathless garbage, endlessly waving their hands in approved BBC fashion, to emphasise their vapid mouthings.

And nothing they say can be trusted – nothing they say is of any value, until it has been checked, compared, the sources examined and the implications discussed. From useful sources of information, the collective media howl is just noises off – raw, unprocessed outpourings adding to the background noise.

Occasionally, I have had doubts about the value of blogging. Not any more – we are small, only slightly insane, but by comparison, a haven of calm, clinical analysis. And that, dear readers, is a measure of how bad it has become.

COMMENT THREAD

Second-rate minds

I wrote this on 16 August 2009 – arguing for an engineering solution in Sangin, where the setup of the town prevented effective or safe policing. Over 100 soldiers have since died there - I've lost count. And now, yesterday, we read this:

In a war where winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is the ultimate goal, damaging homes with powerful explosives and bulldozing a mosque and scores of other buildings may not sound like a wise idea.

But U.S. Marines in this key Taliban sanctuary say that's sometimes the only way to make progress, even if it risks angering the same people whose loyalties are required for success — a difficult trade-off that troops have grappled with throughout Afghanistan.

"We are here to rebuild, but sometimes that takes destruction," said Capt. Matthew Peterson, a company commander whose Marines were tasked in late December with clearing a key part of southern Helmand province's Sangin district.

The whole piece is worth a read – it is not very long – and then my piece linked above. What is particularly depressing is the experience at Wishtan – about which we wrote, on many occasions, where too many British soldiers were killed.

This current article tells us that the Marines initially opted not to use the base at Wishtan — part of a broader strategy to free up troops to do more patrolling. But they eventually decided it was critical to controlling key terrain, forcing them to launch their own operation to clear the area.

Since then, the Marines have managed to keep the main road clear and have yet to suffer a serious casualty in the base since the operation began in late December. They do say, though, that fighting has dropped throughout Sangin during the winter months – as it often does.

But the fact remains that the USMC are adopting the "engineering solution" that I was suggesting nearly two years ago, and are seeing a drop in casualties – even though they have not gone to the full extent I would prefer. We need to get rid of those walls (above) - all of them.

However, in 2009, my suggestions pointed in the right direction. They went up as high as they could go at the time, but the obstacles, mainly in the minds of men who call themselves soldiers, were more formidable than any the enemy could erect. And so we withdrew from Sangin – as we had done elsewhere in Afghanistan, and before that from Iraq.

Wars are won and lost in the minds of men. We have second-rate men, with second-rate minds. That is why we lost in Iraq, and that is why we will lose in Afghanistan. In this one instance, the USMC are showing us how we could have won.

But with the people we have, we cannot win - they cannot learn the lessons. They are incapable of learning. That is why there is not a great deal of point in writing about the campaign - other than occasionally to place a marker on our journey to defeat. And that we have done in this piece today.

But, as the Boy Slime gallops off to war in Libya, would be too much to hope for that he could finish losing the last one, before he so gaily starts the next? Can't we just lose one war at a time?

COMMENT THREAD

Theft is all around us.

It isn't just the government, local councils and the police who are indulging in collective micturition - the abstraction thereof. Legitimized theft is now an everyday fact of life. I have just put the phone down on a customer "service" individual, or rather they hung up on me, as I attempted to explain why the taking of monies for no service provided is by anyone's estimation, theft.

You've all seen it. In this instance, it was www.quickcreditscore.co.uk. You go through their sign up procedure, for a "free trial period", as all of them require, before you can get what you need. Only then do you find their system cannot find your details and thus cannot provide you with a service. But when you to check your account, you find that they have taken the money anyway.

Now comes the fun bit: you ring up for a refund to be told by a brainless automaton, masquerading as a human being that there is an implied membership renewal, by way of signing up with them. You may not have realised it, but since you did not call in order cancel it, you are not entitled to a refund. Another player in this game is www.lovefilm.com, which does exactly the same.

And although in this case, it is only a matter of fifteen pounds, the effect is quite disproportionate to the amount. A lesser mortal might contemplate locating their offices (if indeed they're in the UK and not just a registered PO box) and shoving a burning rag through the letter box. But our kind of people don't do this. We might briefly in our imaginations rehearse rampaging though their offices, floor by floor, pumping magazine after magazine into anything that moves, Terminator style. Such is the value of a good education.

But people like us don't do such things. We do not resort to violence. We're the nice people who go to trading standards, taking weeks to be told that these thieves have a perfect legal right to steal our money. So we smile sweetly and wait for the next gang of thieves to steal our money. We know that if we protest too much, it is us, not them who end up with the criminal record.

However, even nice people like us do not have endless patience. And while we would never dream of storming down to the offices of the thieves and ripping throats out - in the immortal terms of that age-old advert - we know a man who can.

COMMENT THREAD

Bootnote

I don't really rate Lewis Page – too full of himself, and only I'm allowed that privilege – but my opinion of him has just soared. He writes:

As one who earns his living in the media these days, I can only apologise on behalf of my profession for the unbelievable levels of fear and misinformation purveyed this week. I have never been so ashamed to call myself a journalist.

Good for him ... and how interesting that we see now three disparate commentators (including myself) note how far over the top the media have been. They won't recognise it, of course, but this is something of a watershed – the time they regressed from being merely childish to fully-fledged babyhood.

Page is right to be ashamed. But the shame is that the people who should be, won't be. They wouldn't even begin to understand why they should.

COMMENT THREAD

Preparations continue

Soon there will be the perfect no-fly zone. Then we start on the cockroaches.

COMMENT THREAD

They know not what they do

Keep this up and eventually someone is going to get killed. This is precisely the sort of thing that does it, brought about when officials forget who they work for, and get out of control. And when it happens, it isn't murder ... it's suicide.

Strangely, it is the little things that engender the blind fury ... like the unfair parking ticket, getting done for doing 32 mph in a 30-zone, a fine for putting out bin on the wrong day, or being fined for littering when you accidentally drop a tenner on the pavement. The Daily Mail is mining a hugely rich seam when it publishes stories such as these - but they all have a cumulative effect.

I don't know for certain why it should be the case that people get so worked up, although it is probable that people get most worked up about things they can relate to, or affect them personally. Thus, while the lofty bureaucrats so airily dismiss the concerns of the plebs, little do they realise that, letter-by-letter, they are writing their own suicide notes.

COMMENT THREAD

Laugh or cry?

I am not quite sure which to do at the moment, but the thought of Euroslime Dave turning out to be the great war leader is almost as bizarre as the idea of Libya being elected a member of the UN Human Rights Council, or BBC staff being taught how to catch a bus.

Could never happen.

COMMENT THREAD

Settling down

And after the hyperventilation comes this report:

"This is not a serious public health issue at the moment," Malcolm Crick, Secretary of the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, told Reuters. "It won't be anything like Chernobyl".

One would like to think that all the media jeremiahs might possibly show a little shame, but there's more chance of a Japanese nuclear reactor blowing up than that - or those irritating little Beeboids not waving their hands as they prattle. Where did they get this from?

This sad little episode, however, underlines how utterly untrustworthy the media has become. We should be able to rely on it for dispassionate, factual reporting and sensible, informed analysis - such as this. Instead, in the main, we get hysterical babies squealing about the end of the world.

We deserve better from our media than this, but we're not going to get it – not in any hurry. It's gone too far down for a quick and easy recovery. But at least a lot more people have seen the media for what it is. That is a start.

COMMENT THREAD

Barriers to understanding

Two things have intervened in the media coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant crisis to make it misleading to the point of incomprehensible.

The one is the frequent use of the Chernobyl disaster as a comparator, where there are absolutely no comparisons with the incident at Fukushima. The second is the childish refrain of "meltdown" by scientifically and technically illiterate journalists, who seem to be incapable of understanding what is happening, yet seem determined to spread their own incomprehension far and wide.

Fortunately, a little clarity is beginning to emerge, although few press reports are without errors which could so easily mislead unless one already has a firm grasp of the basics. Thus, I am in a position of eating humble pie, having assumed that the earthquake disaster was one which the MSM was best equipped to handle.

On balance, as it has fallen prey to extravagant scaremongering, it has done an execrable job. Compare, for instance, the level-headed reporting of Captain's Journal with the hyperventilation of the babyish Daily Telegraph, which is so luridly over-the-top as to be useless as a source of information. Then we have the BBC – quite literally – indulging in point scoring. Truly, we are dealing not with children here but babies - the regression is quite alarming.

Making do with the best of what we have, one article worth reading is this one in the New York Times, and this one in the Guardian. Revolting though the paper might be, it still seems to have one or two grown-ups on its staff. Then, with very great caution, as it is littered with errors, there is the Reuters report. For some up-to-date information, have a look at this one.

Culling the detail from these, it would appear that the crisis now rests not with the reactors per se but with the "pools" in the reactor buildings used to store spent fuel rods. The storage pool in reactor 4, is said to be completely empty, and the Japanese workers are focused efforts on the storage pool at reactor 3, for reasons which do not seem to be entirely clear, but related to the fact that it is a MOX reactor and hence less stable than the rest.

It is this pool, in reactor three, on which helicopter crews and teams of police officers in water cannon trucks, together with fire trucks, have been trying to direct water, in an attempt to "douse overheating fuel rods". Storage pools at reactors 5 and 6 are also said to be leaking.

Now, as to the dangers, "meltdown" is not an issue. The great danger is that the spent fuel - as the water evaporates or leaks away – will overheat to such an extent that they catch fire. The emission of combustion products could release huge amounts of high-level radiation into the air, which could spread a considerable distance. With over 1,000 tons of spent fuel stored, the potential for a serious event is high.

The effects of this, disastrous though they would be, are likely to be relatively local. We are not looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster, where an active reactor exploded, ejecting material into the upper atmosphere, which then spread thousands of miles.

Japanese authorities are, however, talking about the possibility of "re-criticality" in the fuel rods, if they have become bunched up together in such a way that critical mass is achieved, and the nuclear reaction restarts. That, as they say, could have interesting consequences, as high volumes of decay products would be emitted to atmosphere.

At the moment, though, the worst case scenario would appear to be localised, high level emissions, sufficient to make the plant and the immediate area uninhabitable for some years, with dangerously high levels of radiation downwind of the reactor for tens and possibly even a hundred or so miles. With the wind in the wrong direction, residents of Tokyo could be at risk.

On the plus side, engineers have been reported as having reconnected the plant with an electrical supply, and are working on restoring on-site pumping facilities, which may take the edge off the crisis.

Altogether, then, we have a very serious crisis here, even if it is by no means as serious as some of the more lurid press reports would have us believe. Latest reports suggest that the efforts so far have been "somewhat effective" and it could be that the worst of the crisis is already over.

The media though, has not come out of this well. The lack of technical knowledge of so many of the writers, together with an obvious enthusiasm for disaster scenarios has so distorted the coverage that most journalism, rather than informing, has been a barrier to understanding.

It is unlikely that any lessons will be learned. They are beyond that, so utterly self-absorbed that not one of them would even begin to understand that they have done anything wrong. And thus this period of exaggerated and inaccurate reporting marks another step in the decline and fall of the industry.

COMMENT THREAD

End of the BNP?

This looks pretty serious for the party, and seems to spell the end for Nick Griffin. When or if the BNP implodes, there may then be room for a genuine nationalist party, without the taint and the baggage of the existing construct.

On the other hand, this may be an opportunity for UKIP, except that that party also has its stresses. It is in no better a position to offer a coherent message than the BNP. It seems to me, therefore, that the message must transcend party, and appeal directly to the electorate – then to have not one but all of the political parties embrace it as a survival stratagem. Political parties, as such, no longer seem to work. We need to introduce a new paradigm. The new media possibly affords the opportunity to make that happen.

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

Ideas

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt
US diplomat & reformer (1884 - 1962)

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

"Leader" calls for "leadership" shock

While Euroslime Dave equivocates about a no-fly zone for Libya, we get Stephen Glover in The Mail ask: "Has the democratic world ever been so weak and divided?"  Actually, the phrasing of the headline is wrong - much of the world Glover describes has long ceased to be democratic in any meaningful sense. And that may well be why it is so weak and divided ... it has lost its spiritual core, its will to live. Instead of leadership, we get David Cameron - and Barak Obama.

We're actually used to the idea of Catastrophic Clegg forgetting who is in charge, but when Euroslime Dave seems to have same problem, we see a systemic fault that no mere wake-up call is going to solve. It was suggested to me that perhaps Dave thinks he's still in opposition. But there is more to it that that. With the Libyan situation now going totally belly-up – and with little Willie Hague discovering that Gaddafi hasn't gone to Venezuela for his hols, after all – we now have Dave urging the UN on to "show some leadership".

This is the very antithesis of leadership. The idea of a man pretending to be a British prime minister, holding hands with France, asking a corrupt bunch of time-servers in New York to do something, the capability for which it does not have – and which we no longer have – is positively embarrassing. The person who should be showing some leadership is our Dave himself.

When you think about it though, in asking the UN Security Council to back a "no-fly zone", that is precisely what he is likely to get. Everybody will commit absolutely not to fly over Libya, leaving the field totally clear for Gaddafi to slaughter his rebellious subjects.

We never actually thought it would come to a point when you felt positively embarrassed to be British, but you have to give it to Dave and Willie ... they've managed to chalk up another first.

In days gone by, one might turn to the weightier newspapers to see what they had to say about the issue, but with The Times retreating behind a paywall, it has become irrelevant. Looking at The Daily Telegraph in the newsagent, and its banner headlines, it suddenly struck me what has happened to it - it has become the first and only tabloid broadsheet - a tableet? It too has written itself out of the script.

That leaves the Daily Mirror to make some appropriate comments about Willie, and The Daily Mail to offer some comment about changing defence priorities. "Only five months have passed since the Coalition’s hastily-drafted strategic defence review," it says. "Yet already the world on which its assumptions were based has changed in the most dramatic way".

The paper then calls for the defence review to be re-opened. But the writer should look at the piece written by Glover. The western world has lost its bottle ... the defence review was a symptom, and as long as we have effeminate babies like Cameron in change, we're going nowhere but down the drain.

COMMENT THREAD

Community relations

We think we have problems, so it is quite instructive to read this in the St. Petersburg Times:

Artist Oleg Vorotnikov was recently released after spending several months in custody. In September he and other members of the non-conformist art group Voina, or War, overturned several police cars in a highly visible protest in St. Petersburg over a bill to reform the police that they have branded a sham.

After his arrest, some of Vorotnikov's possessions were impounded by the police. After his eventual release, he filed a formal request at the police station for the return of his items. It did not cut much ice with the officers. "The police officers tore up my letter in front of me", Vorotnikov said. "And then the boss said that he would piss over what I had in my hands if I didn't shut up and stop demanding my stuff".

Come to think of it, it's not a whole lot different from trying to make a complaint to West Yorkshire's finest. At least they are not as thick as the London Plod though – fitting up a "client" while wired for sound. You don't actually know which to be more worried about.

And then we have Manchester Police covering themselves in glory again. Says Chief Superintendent Rebekah Sutcliffe: "All reports of gunshots are taken very seriously and because of the potential threat to people's lives we have to take swift and appropriate action to deal with these very serious risks". Where do they get these people? Is there a special planet we don't know about?

COMMENT THREAD

Not global warming?

Now that it is snowing heavily in northeastern Japan, why are the warmists not blaming global warming? After all, since it caused the original earthquake – and global warming caused all the storms in Europe and the UK - surely they can bring themselves to dump the blame for the snow on their favourite obsession.

COMMENT THREAD

A loser's creed

It is rather appropriate that a newspaper that has become known to its former friends as The Daily Failygraph should give space to Mark Seddon to enunciate his failed ideas. Nevertheless, it is marginally interesting to see the author of his own inadequacies actually spell them out, which we see when Seddon offers us what he believes to be the USP of his meal ticket:

This new campaign breaks with tradition because it comes primarily from the Left, includes Labour MPs such as John Cryer and Kelvin Hopkins, trade unionists and Greens, such as Jenny Jones, the party's candidate for London Mayor. Authors and writers – Fay Weldon, John King and Virginia Ironside – have come on board as well. Of course, many of our supporters want a referendum in order to vote "no" to continued EU membership, while others, such as Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, and Keith Vaz, the former Europe minister, are enthusiasts for the European Union – but agree that there should be a referendum.

One could ask why one should begin to think that having these people on board is an inducement to join a campaign, but what really blows Seddon out of the water is his bland assertion that, "A Europe-wide free trade area has become a sprawling political union, drawing huge economic and social power to its centre ... ".

In discussing something that is not and never has been a "free trade area", that always was a customs union, and always intended to be a political union, this man is showing that he does not have the first idea of what he is talking about, and has never bothered to learn.

What saddens is the fact that the Failygraph prints such tosh, but then that is why it has become the Failygraph. One would like to think that, in days or yore, wise and knowledgeable sub-editors would have picked up these sorts of error – although I suspect I would have been disappointed.

However, Seddon has basically shot his bolt. Short of starting yet another campaign, he hasn't much more to offer – and certainly, on current form, has nothing to offer the Eurosceptic cause. This is a man who, in a debate, would be an embarrassment, although that probably assures him a long and profitable association with the BBC.

But then, if this is truly a man running an organisation whose website crashes on 20,000 hits in 48 hours (and is proud of it), then a truly glittering career awaits him in government service. He is wasted on mere Euroscepticism and it would be a shame to hold him back.

COMMENT THREAD

Year of the icebreaker

Despite all the little warmist wuzzies hyperventilating about ice extent, this is beginning to look as if it is the year of the icebreaker. We've had the Okhotsk Sea, then the Baltic and now St. Petersburg at the eastern end of the sea.

From there we get reports that icebreakers have been called in to free dozens of ships that have become trapped in ice in the Gulf of Finland. At least 97 ships were still waiting for help as of Tuesday, although this is down from 160 ships two days previously.

The eastern Gulf of Finland has not seen such thick ice since 1992, according to the Federal of Sea and River Transportation Agency. In some places the ice is more than three feet thick. The strength of the pressure exerted by the ice is measured at three points — a serious threat for the exteriors of the vessels, so we are not talking about a jolly little rest cure here. Think bent metal, big 'oles and bubbles.

The icy conditions also have significant economic impact, which is making shipping operators wish rather fervently for more less warming ... to bring a reduction in the ice.

Most of the trapped ships are cargo vessels, but some are passenger ferries. Many have been trapped for a several days. Among the ships freed over the weekend was a ferry that had been stuck for six days with 12 people on board, including a pregnant woman. The ferry runs between a port near St. Petersburg and the Kaliningrad region.

The Princess Maria ferry running between St. Petersburg and the Finnish capital, Helsinki, has been suspended since 9 March,  but was due to resume its operation on Wednesday.

The federal agency says that ten icebreakers, including the nuclear-powered Vaigach based in Murmansk, were leading the ships to open water in caravans. Andrei Kovalyov of Rosmorport, a state company overseeing seaports, said passenger ferries and ships with hazardous cargo were being given priority. He says the situation could improve within three weeks if weather conditions were favourable.

Given this sudden rush of global warming, for those who might be considering their long-term future and looking for a stable career, with prospects, at the moment "icebreaker crew" looks extremely promising (although you might find it difficult to convince people you were serious if you said you worked on the Mudyug - icebreaker pictured, top). Ice fishing (pictured) also looks good.

COMMENT THREAD

Put not your trust in governments

This haunting tale Takata, a town that failed to heed the lessons of history:

"From the top floor we watched everything get swallowed," 73-year-old Tsuyoshi Kinno said. "People relied too much on the order and bureaucracy. They became too obedient. In the olden times they would have just got straight to the mountains, to higher ground."

And there, on 9 March, I wrote:

... if you rely on government, its neglect may kill you, and having done so it will lie and deceive to obscure its actions and its responsibility for them. Salvation lies not in government but in making government conform to the wishes and needs of the people. Government is a poor master. But it can be an adequate servant, if forced to be so.

Self reliance, healthy scepticism, a good understanding of history, and a strong-dose of bloody-mindedness – are the essential survival traits in this world. We need a system – which we are now going to have to devise – which enables us to make government do what we want, and not the other way around.

Are we therefore talking about "realism" for our new "ism" – perhaps "newrealism" (one word)? Do we need to play with the word - such as turn it into "nurelism"?

Whatever we call it, this would have as its basic philosophy a rejection of the modern fantasy that government is a force for good, treating it as a necessary evil which must be constrained and tamed: our country; our government; our decisions - ours, not yours.

And there's our slogan: "ours, not yours".

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

Unexpected consequences

The Reuters news agency is reporting that British homes and businesses are likely to see their energy bills increase further as a result of Japan's nuclear crisis and the political turmoil in North Africa.

Even before the violence in Libya cut gas supply to Europe, and the closure of several nuclear power plants in Japan drove up UK energy prices, UK suppliers had already raised their tariffs blaming rises in wholesale costs since early 2010. This was already set to cost us about £63 more, on average, this year.

But further increases in wholesale prices - with gas for summer delivery up 17 percent and the equivalent power price up 11 percent from the start of 2011 - together with the high cost of bringing more low-carbon technologies into the UK mix, are likely to filter through to cash-strapped British consumer customer bills in a few months.

The interesting thing though is that the soubriquet "cash-strapped" is not mere polemics. According to The Daily Mail, around twenty percent of British households are in debt to their energy supplier. Consumers collectively owe a massive £624 million to electricity and gas companies. The average amount of debt now stands at £126 per household, a lower figure than last year but still 10.5 percent higher than in 2008, when the average debt stood at £114.

Mind you, putting the global figure in perspective, it would appear that punters are queuing up to pay £500 million for Olympics tickets – if they could get the payment system to work ... and the countdown clock, which also seems to have ground to a halt.

That is not to say that the people who are apparently having trouble settling their energy bills are the same who are going to be buying tickets, but it does indicate that there is a certain amount of gash money in the economy.

Nevertheless, the people who are really going to be caught out are the politicians. Having been confident that they could top-load energy bills to pay for their carbon fantasies, they will find energy prices already increasing to unacceptable levels, without their imposts. Carbon-free mania is looking unaffordable, so the politicos are going to have to rein in the greenies - and their own ambitions.

When we first heard the news of the Japanese earthquake coming in, little did we expect such widespread consequences. And the ripples have by no means begun to abate. In fact, the stresses are beginning to multiply.

COMMENT THREAD

Their contempt for you is total

This is a few days old now, but it has haunted my thoughts ever since. There is an undeniable majority who now favour a referendum on our continued membership of the EU. When confronted with the facts, the political classes mock, they howl with laughter and they jeer. These smug, self-satisfied vermin are so assured in themselves, that they know what is best for us, that they can dismiss out of hand the one thing that broadly unites British opinion. Their contempt for you is total.

Perhaps the only thing that is as detestable, is that this is the best that Euroscepticism, for all the millions of pounds and countless man hours it has consumed, has to offer; A doddering old fool making light of the greatest betrayal we have ever known, standing to be ridiculed in the House of Commons.

And yet today, Facebook is all atwitter and Twitter is all afacebook about yet another intellectually empty campaign. With it comes the ongoing tribal spats between factions, as to whose worthless petition is more deserving of the dwindling limelight, failing to notice that if a major national newspaper does not get their attention, then nothing conventional or peaceful will.

If ever you needed evidence that democracy is dead, then what you have just witnessed is it. That is their verdict on you, your opinions, surveys and petitions. They have passed judgement on us and now we must return the favour in kind. If they will not listen then we must make them. It is the view of this blog that they do this because they do not fear us. It is time that changed. We must now make sure they do not sleep soundly.

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

More pictures

A photo album of nearly 100 photographs on Facebook. Many you will have seen before ... some are new - especially these here.

And is the nuclear crisis over?

COMMENT THREAD

Sleeping easily in our beds

After this, we get this:

Police rushed a pair of officers in a marked car to a park after two young sisters were spotted picking daffodils. Sienna Marengo, four, was seen picking flowers with six-year-old stepsister Olivia in Poole, Dorset. A member of the public reported them to police and two constables attended and advised the girls' mother, Jane Errington, that she and her partner, Marc Marengo, could be arrested for criminal damage.

We will all now sleep that much easier in our beds, now that we know that Dorset police are on the case. Funny thing is, when I was a kid, we used to have park keepers, who stopped us picking the flowers. Such is progress that we now get two uniformed plods in a patrol car. And the plods tell us they are short of money?

COMMENT THREAD

Thinking straight

The response to latest make-work scheme for redundant campaigners seems, from the poll response (illustrated above), to be one of less than total enthusiasm.

One never ceases to wonder, however, at how easy it is to milk the Eursoceptic community with one faux campaign after another, often with the seductive cry of: "better to do something than nothing". There are far too many people thinking with their backsides instead of their brains. When you get the Speccitwats and a failing newspaper in it together, it is time step back and ask what is going on.

Interestingly, I quoted J B Priestley quite recently ("Out of the People", 1941), on the issues of activism and strategy. He wrote:

We often hear people cry: "Never mind all this writing and talking, get on and do something." The answer to that is, that at the stage at which most people in the country have arrived, writing for them and talking at them is the best kind of action. It is a change of ideas and mental attitudes they primarily need.

That is especially true now – what we need is a "change of ideas and mental attitudes".  The reason we got into the Common Market in the first place was because people were attracted by the idea ... not the practicalities ... they had no notion of what those entailed.  The way we get out is to reverse the process. We have to devise an alternative idea, a "vision" of a Britain of the future. You think of a Britain as you want it to be, a Britain that you believe would be attractive to the majority, and which is achievable.

Then you "sell" that vision. When and if it comes to an EU referendum, all you then have to do is point out that the vision is not achievable as long as we are members of the EU. In that context, instead of leaving the EU being seen as a leap into the dark, it is seen as a barrier preventing us from reaching the light. That is a winnable position.

One of our commenters got the point:

Our eventual withdrawal from the EU must come about as a natural consequence of a new national way of thinking ... a new 'ism'. Which will have gained such purchase within the hearts and minds of the nation, that continued EU membership becomes untenable simply because it is at odds with that new thinking. Withdrawal won't even require a referendum ... it'll just happen as a matter of course.

My point, which very much reflects what is said above, is that the battle is won or lost in the preparation: think Monty and el Alamein. The battle was won before the first shot was fired. This is the position we must be in. If they lose the battle, they lose the battle ... if we lose the battle, we lose the war.

Cranmer gives it a fair outing, and offers far more thought that that idiot Myrtle, but his conclusion that it is "all we've got" simply doesn't wash. Futile gestures are still futile gestures, however they are dressed up.

If we lose a referendum, Euroscepticism is wiped out for a generation. There is too much at stake here, for us to be playing games, or allowing the agenda to be taken over by lightweights who are only after a meal ticket. Just for a complete change, let's stop being professional losers and instead consider a winning strategy. In two or three years, we could be there.

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

That's all we need

The old charlatan Rajendra Pachauri is getting his pension fund TERI to buy a super-computer to do climate modelling. "Climate modelling at TERI envisions addressing key environmental challenges from global to local levels, by providing plausible scientific knowledge on climate change issues," says Rajendra.

Forget exploding nuclear plants ... this is really serious. Once this man gets his hands on a working computer model, we're domed.

COMMENT THREAD

Tipping point

For the first time ever, more people said they got their news from the internet than a physical newspaper last year. This is according to a study from the Pew Research Center, reported in the Los Angeles Times, with the added detail that the only platform to beat the web in terms of audience was TV.

The caution here is that this applies to American adults, and may not apply to the UK. However, it does show the direction of travel, reinforcing earlier studies. And, while most of the traffic goes to the websites of traditional news providers, our own experience shows that blogs too are increasing their share of the readership.

This has the makings of a game changer. Politicians have always assumed that the MSM is the primary disseminator of news and opinion, while also assuming that, if they stay abreast of MSM content, they are in touch with the issues in front of the population.

With far more news providers on the block, and with an increasingly fragmented agenda, those comfortable assumptions no longer apply. And nor does the parallel assumption that the MSM is setting the agenda. The paradigm is changing – and with it the balance of power.

Where this all ends up is anyone's guess, but it is reasonable even now to suggest that things are never going to be the same again.

COMMENT THREAD

Doggies, poppies and Pex

A long time ago, I got the job of writing the regular farming column in Private Eye called Muckspreader. It was my first regular journalistic job and, while I had plenty of experience of writing, it was quite another thing keeping up a regular flow of original stories for a national magazine.

For advice on how to handle this, I turned to the first editor of Private Eye, my then partner in crime, a man better known as Christopher Booker. Amongst the tips he gave me was that, by taking two different stories already in the public domain, bringing them together, either to make or reinforce a point, could itself qualify as a genuine, original piece of work.

In that context, and using the shock effect of undisclosed links, we can bring together this story, illustrated by the picture above, and contrast it with this story - illustrated right.

Now to disclose the stories, in the first we see a pensioner was slapped with a £50 fine as she mourned by her father’s grave – because she came with the family dog. Val Brogan, 65, was tending the resting place of her late dad James Eyres when she was approached by two police community support officers.

Val – who was with her daughter, Nicola Erlan, and Nicola's cocker spaniel, Bailey – was told the cemetery had a strict no-dogs policy and slapped with the on-the-spot fine, despite her tearful protests. The fine has now increased to £80 because she has not paid immediately.

What is especially chilling is the leaden response from Manchester Police, who are responsible for this piece of inspired community relations. They have defended the action at St Joseph's Cemetery in Moston, saying "they were only following council orders".

And now for the contrast ... we have Emdadur Choudhury, who milks British taxpayers for benefits which include a free council flat in Bethnal Green and almost £800 a month state handouts, who last week "laughed at justice" as he was handed a paltry £50 fine for setting light to poppies on Remembrance Day and yelling "British soldiers burn in hell".

Further comment is largely unnecessary, other than to wonder at what precisely was going through what passes for the brain of District Judge Howard Riddle, the man who made the decision to impose the fine on Choudhury. Perhaps he should have some quiet discussions with the plastic police in Manchester.

We will permit ourselves the observation though, that any society which permits this contrast – and whose officials and elected representatives do not actively seek to remedy the matter – are party to terminal decay. But just to rub this in, we have another contrast – the fate of Pex, again highlighted by Booker, compared with the treatment of Emdadur Choudhury.

One could start getting seriously angry here.

COMMENT THREAD

Pictures

Something the Daily Mail site does extraordinarily well. The first image is especially haunting. Meanwhile, Dellers is taking on the nuclear issue, with his customary verve. The picture of the mutant pony is terrifying.

COMMENT THREAD

And then what?

Yet another half-baked campaign for an EU Referendum starts up today, this one supported by The Daily Mail. Allied with the Democracy Movement, we are told by the "People's Pledge" that there are five key reasons why we should have a referendum:

• No one under the age of 54 has had the chance to vote on our relationship with Brussels
• The EU now makes a majority of the laws we must obey
• The UK has less than 10% of the votes in the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament
• The EU is costing Britain more and more money
• The EU wants to give itself new powers of 'economic governance'

Fine. So we have a referendum. Then what? The question, of course, isn't answered. It isn't even addressed. But, in the unlikely event that we ever have a referendum – and Euroslime Dave isn't set to rush into the breach – that will be the reason why we lose it.

The truth is that this is another make-work scheme for the Democracy Movement, yet another funding vehicle to keep the boys and girls going until the next half-baked idea lurches onto the horizon. But until someone is able to come up with a "positive object, it will do no better than the last attempt.

Speaking strictly personally, I am getting sick to the back-teeth of these ill-thought-out campaigns, and just a look at the campaign team and some of the supporters tells you all you need to know about this one. And I know it is terribly old fashioned to suggest it, but unless you devise an intellectual base before you set up a campaign, you will fail.

But then, these campaigns are in many respects designed to fail. They give the plebs something to do, make a few of them feel important and stop others actually thinking about what they should be doing - all the while soaking up funds that could be better used to drive a genuine campaign. And soon enough, there will be another one along ... so sign the pledges while you can folks! You know it makes [no] sense.

UPDATE: Raedwald isn't thinking, but Edward Spalton, on his comments, most certainly is. What is it about heroic failure which makes it so attractive to the Eurosceptic community?

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD

Ah!

Catastrophic Clegg tells us: "We still have a soul". But what sort of soul?

In a Napoleonic sense, he is an unlucky general. He has been wiped off the front pages by Japan, so his message has been completely drowned. But perhaps that is just as well. The Eurotrash want to reposition the Lib-Dims from being a party of protest to becoming the voice of Middle England.

Certainly, with that YouGov poll, he is going to be struggling. At ten percent of those who expressed a preference, he is only three points ahead of UKIP. And he thinks he can take the Middle England slot? He must be out of his tiny little mind.

But, as the a lone protestor at the conference said, offering a parody of David Steel's much derided conference proclamation of 1983: "Go back to your constituencies and prepare for oblivion."

COMMENT THREAD

Fukushima for dummies

A concise, very simple explanation of why the world is not going to end this evening ... or even tomorrow. As they say, fuk-u-shima.

COMMENT THREAD

Our conception of the "new Europe"

One of the great arguments between us and the Euroslime is the role of Winston Churchill in the promotion and development of the European Union. The official EU hagiography, for instance, starts with Churchill calling for a "kind of United States of Europe" in a speech he gives at the Zurich University in September 1946.

For students of EU history, therefore, it is fascinating to see that, on 23 August 1940, Churchill's War Cabinet in London agreed to set up a committee charged with making suggestions:

.. in regard to a post-war European and world system, with particular regard to the economic needs of the various nations, and to the problem of adjusting the free life of small countries in a durable international order.

The original initiative to set up the committee came from Information Minister Duff Cooper on 20 July 1940. He was responding to Hitler's plans for a "new European order" – with Cooper's idea couched in terms of offering the people of Britain and Europe specific "war aims". And here, there was a second string to the bow, because the committee also had to:

... consider means of perpetuating the national unity achieved in this country during the war through a social and economic structure designed to secure equality of opportunity and service among all classes of the community.

In approving the committee and its terms of reference, the Cabinet agreed that there was a growing demand for "some statement of what we were fighting for". We must, the Members said, make our aims clear, not merely to our own people, but also to the peoples of Europe whom we were trying to free. A time would come, they said, to "put across" our conception of the "new Europe".

Of special interest here is that, unusually, Churchill not only spoke to the item but his comments were also recorded in detail. Some of the points he thought "would be included" were that, in addition to the five Great Powers of Europe, there should be three groups of smaller States - in Northern Europe, in Middle Europe, and in the Balkans:

He also looked to see the five great nations and these three confederations linked together in some kind of Council of Europe. There should be a Court to which all justiciable disputes should be referred, with an international air force. There must be a scheme for a fair distribution of raw materials. It was also important that there should be no attempt at a vindictive settlement after the war.

Another fascinating thing here is the timing. This is at the height of the Battle of Britain. Nazi bombers and fighters are storming over the coast each day, hunting down RAF airfields, factories, and convoys – with Fighter Command supposedly on the verge of extinction.

Later on this day, the Germans bombed suburbs of London. Yet not for one minute do you get any sense of crisis as the politicians of a nation supposedly expecting invasion at any moment calmly assert that there should be no "vindictive settlement" after the war.

COMMENT THREAD

Life goes on

I was quick to bow out of reporting on the Japanese earthquake yesterday, remarking that this was an area where the blogs could not immediately complete. Unless there, actually on the scene, it is difficult for us to be anything other than derivative, lifting other people's work without offering any significant added value.

The issue that may emerge as one which will need the greatest analysis may be the nuclear reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi complex, where the chances of a release seem high. Even with the death and destruction around, this is getting special attention. It may have a significant impact on the ongoing energy debate. You can bet that the greenies will exploit any problems to the maximum extent that they can.

On a broader canvas, in suggesting that the blogs are not best equipped to pursue the earthquake story, one also looks at the print editions of the newspapers today in the newsagent. Then reluctantly buying one of them, one wonders why they bother with their style of reportage. In a fast-moving story, theirs is all yesterday's news, already left behind by television and internet coverage. Anyone seriously interested in keeping informed will rely on those sources, rather than tired – and space-limited – newspaper copy.

All the copy really does is reflect the media tendency to obsess about the hystérie du jour (not that Japan is hysteria, per sec - we are talking about the media response). They tend to clear the decks and report only on one thing at a time, and very little else.

One might have thought that a true and effective role for newspapers is to "watch our backs", monitoring all the news and events - not just those on the telly - informing us and reminding us that, even with the tragedy and disaster of Japan, there are other things going on in the world. However, keeping a sense of perspective, and being able to follow multiple agenda, is a sign of maturity which seems to have evaded the media fraternity.

In that context, I don't know how many readers picked up from my last ruminative piece, the apparently bizarre behaviour of MPs in the situation I raised. There we had London in flames, with what was possibly one of the most dreadful periods of the war in that particular locality, and we had this group calmly discussing "war aims" – the way things should be when the war, at some time in the unspecified future, was over.

Actually, though, the behaviour was neither bizarre, nor even in the slightest bit irrational. There was nothing else the MPs could or should have been doing to address the immediate situation. And part of their jobs – an important part – was to look to the future. It came under the heading, "life goes on" – the routine and not so routine tasks must go on regardless.

For me personally, this is a particularly difficult time, for precisley that reason. With everything going on around me, life has to go on. In the latter stages of writing my book, this is turning out to be one of the most complex – and time-consuming - pieces of writing I have ever done. I have an issue here which is actually, incredibly topical and one of enormous and current political significance, which has been neglected and mistreated through the decades, distorting our perception of who we are, and of our politics.

Stuck in my groove, however, I can quite see why past writers have taken the line of least resistance, and gone for highly simplistic – and thus heavily distorted – versions of history. Dealing with the reality is so complicated that, for many, it is obviously too difficult and not worth the effort.

What we have in the story I am writing is an amalgam of at least five separate strains – making it almost like a soap opera with several plot lines running simultaneously – each interacting and affecting each other. How much simpler it is to write of just one plot lines, ignoring the others and their interactions. Simple it is though, but very far from reality.

The complex mix that I am synthesising tells me that the Battle of Britain about whiich I am writing is very different from the one ablout which we read. What we saw fought in 1940 was a battle that is still being fought today. It was far more of a political than it was a military event - the shooting was was just the backdrop. The distinction then was that the military issues brought the politics into high focus and created pressures for their resolution.

That was what the "war aims" debate was all about, a shorthand for the debate about the future, the nature and shape of society, and where we as a nation should be going.

As I get a feel for the subject – that only comes with months of study and almost total immersion – I am coming to the conclusion that there were two strands of the debate then. One was about how Britain should look in the aftermath of war, in particular its place in the world. Then there was a separate – but parallel – debate about how liberated Europe should look.

I am not giving anything away if I suggest that the former was largely suppressed – ruthlessly so - by Churchill. He was a man of the past, defender of the status quo, of King and Empire. On 10 November 1942, in the wake of the victory at el Alamein he famously declared: "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire". There were going to be no debates on war aims – no "new world order" - while he was about.

The debate about the shape of Europe, however, continued apace. Churchill could not control or suppress that. So when it came to Dean Acheson's "end of Empire" comment, the lack of debate – and thinking – about Britain's post empire role had left an intellectual void. In their bid to fill the vacuum, the political classes rushed into "Europe". For them, it was the only game in town.

That is where we are today - right now. The debate suppressed in 1940 was one we still have not had. The context has changed – instead of a post-war Britain, we are now looking at the shape of a "post-Europe" Britain. But it is the same debate - the debate suppressed has become the debate delayed. It is one we must now have.

This, after all, is the Richard Stokes prescription: it is no use fighting for a negative object. You must have a positive one. And looking at our forum on this and the many interesting contributions, the one thing that does emerge is that we have a very long way to go.

We seem to have got out of the habit of visionary thinking, of deciding on shapes, ideals and the very nature of society. But, without that, we will never be free of our chains. As we found at the end of the war, change without vision is simply to swap one set of chains for another.

COMMENT: NEW "ISM" THREAD