5 minutes ago
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, sh*ts like a duck, it is a ...?
If you have a series of, Anglo-French naval treaties, the kermits are paying you for your carrier development, you have signed an agreement on joint carrier operation, and you are about to ditch the JSF, the aircraft you are going to buy for your carriers is ...?
But never worry, 13th Century Fox is on the case. Close your eyes and sing this happy little song - everything will be alright.
COMMENT THREAD
Even if early-season snow is not that uncommon in the area, it's still snowing in parts of the Adirondacks, USA, which are seeing the season's first significant snowfall. Two inches of snow fell Friday at Lake Placid and higher elevations experienced heavier accumulations. Snow also fell across higher elevations in Vermont. Killington had four inches of snow by midday Friday.
And the pic that tells the story comes from this report, showing a truck passing over Sherburne Pass on Route 4 in Killington, Vt., as an unexpected snowstorm dumped a blanket of snow on higher elevations in Vermont.
When it comes to our turn, and the brass monkeys are shedding spherical objects, German entrepreneur Siegfried Rotthaeuser and his brother-in-law have the answer. From China, they are importing "small heating devices", which they have branded "heatballs."
Rated either at 75 or 100 Watts, these personal heaters also give off considerable amounts of light, which gives them a useful secondary role. For convenience, these translucent glass devices can be fitted into standard lamp holders, which previously took 75 or 100 Watt light bulbs of the type now prohibited by EU law.
On their website the two engineers describe the heatballs as "action art" and as "resistance against legislation which is implemented without recourse to democratic and parliamentary processes." We are not sure quite what they mean by that second statement, but we look forward to the first batch of heatballs arriving in this country, hopefully before the expected snows arrive.
COMMENT THREAD
You may permit yourself some wry amusement, on contemplating the names of the speakers. And the private dinner afterwards could be entertaining.
COMMENT THREAD
The Cleggerons promised us a bonfire of quangos. The Independent, amongst others, is not particularly impressed. We share that view and was planning to give the issue a good going-over today. The MSM is crawling all over it though, and this is one instance where you don't keep a dog and bark yourself.
Even The Daily Telegraph is being sniffy, fronting a story headed "Bonfire of quangos 'is a smokescreen that will cost money'". The strap-line reads: "Ministers have been accused of reneging on promises to start a 'bonfire of the quangos' and of simply moving many functions elsewhere in Whitehall".
That's about the size of the problem, and the measure of the dereliction. Quangos and the rest are instruments of government. To get rid of them, you have to get rid of their functions. Then the organisations wither on the vine. Simply to abolish the organisation achieves nothing. The functions must then be absorbed into the general government machine, or another way must be found of fulfilling them.
Also, the whole idea of quangos was to give their functions greater visibility and transparency, so that their costs would not be buried in departmental budgets. On this basis, to re-absorb necessary functions into the respective ministries is a retrograde step.
That the exercise is turning out to be "smoke and mirrors" seems to be entirely consistent with the Cleggeron experience. Elsewhere, in the letters column of the Telegraph, we see a letter from Sir Paul Judge, headed "myth of spending cuts", telling us that the coalition government is not planning to reduce its expenditure.
It is planning to increase it by nine percent, from £697 billion in this financial year to £757 billion in 2015-16. Smoke and mirrors indeed.
On the same page (print edition) there is a leader headed, "We must put a stop to the EU budget scandal". One is tempted to say, "who's this 'we' white man". But weariness descends, even at this early hour. You an huff and you can puff, but you will not blow my house down, said the little piggy. This is piggy politics, and the EU just shut down the slaughterhouse.
Thus, I'm going to retreat into working on the Battle of Britain narrative today. I'm having an interesting time exploring a new thesis for the origin of "the few", which is addressed here. Views, as always, would be very welcome on this comment thread - otherwise, comments on the thread below.
On a housekeeping note, it is good to see the forum so active. The spammers are back in force though, so if you want to join the forum, let me know by e-mail, so I know to look out for your application. Meantime, you could look at this video on climate change. Hmmmmm.
It makes an interesting contrast with this, which records the Guardian report telling us that while the EU's emission of CO2 declined by 17 percent between 1990 and 2010, this apparent progress is bogus.
If you add up the CO2 released by the goods and services Europeans consumed, as opposed to the CO2 thrown off by the goods and services they produced, the EU is responsible for 40 percent more CO2 in 2010 than in 1990. The EU, as the Guardian puts it, has been outsourcing pollution — and jobs — rather than cutting back on greenhouse gasses.
Smoke and mirrors is only the half of it.
COMMENT THREAD
It's a win-win for us, with the climate guru staying in place as head of the IPCC. The discredited charlatan can lead his failed institution to its ultimate nemesis with the production of its next climate change report. With him in charge, its credibility is already fatally damaged.
COMMENT THREAD
Well, I did the Radio Oxford interview on climate change this morning, alongside Chris Goodall, who was introduced as an "environmentalist". It was left to me to point out that Goodall is actually a politician. He is a paid-up member of the Green Party and stood for them (unsuccessfully) at the last election.
My line then was that "climate change" was essentially a political issue, being used to run an agenda which had captured and subsumed environmentalism. Of course we should all be concerned for the environment, and take care of it – but there is a lot more to environmentalism than climate change. I even got to use the word "watermelon" and explain what it meant.
At least Goodall had the sense to agree about the involvement of politics - and how political climate change really is. But it is not just climate change. Politics creep in everywhere, not least into the amazing rescue in Chile yesterday – which cost an estimated $22 million.
You would have to have a heart of stone not to applaud the bravery, the skill and dedication of the rescuers, but that does not also stop you from observing that industrial accidents in that country last year took 433 lives, many of them in mining – which contributes 40 percent of the government's income.
Thus, it was no coincidence that the Chilean president, Sebastian Pinera, should be present to greet every rescued miner. It was a political statement as much as a humanitarian gesture. But would a politician stoop so low as to exploit the rescue of these trapped miners? It hardly needs an answer.
So back to politics. The brilliant, all-seeing and wondrous Daily Mail (I got a cheque from them this morning for my Halal piece) is pointing out that Cameron is dithering (remember that word, and how the Tories loved to apply it to Brown?) about whether to cut the cold weather payments from the current level of £25 per week to the original £8.50
On the other hand, we have The Daily Telegraph telling us that fuel poverty has doubled in five years. And then, we have the idiots arguing in front of the Commons energy that "failure to impose CCS levy on energy bills would be 'disastrous'". They want the government to add £4bn to our energy bills for demonstration carbon capture and storage plants.
Noises off, though, come from Peter Voser, chief executive of energy giant Royal Dutch Shell PLC. He is saying that the UK government should divert investment from offshore wind power to natural gas exploration and production.
It will be impossible, he says, to hit 2020 carbon dioxide emission reductions targets without increased use of natural gas in the country. Using natural gas instead of coal is also a cheaper way to cut emissions than offshore wind.
But hey! You don't listen to people who know in this man's Army. When you can capture the world's media by standing at the top of a hole greeting rescued miners, when your policies (or lack of them) probably put them there in the first place, the lesson is absolutely clear. Political theatre, not policy, is what matters. Bury the 433 - there is no theatre in dead workers. But spend $22 million saving 33 men in front of the cameras.
Similarly, there is no theatre in pensioners dying of cold, or in saving them. They are invisible. But next week, Cameron meets Chilean president, Sebastian Pinera – and the cameras will be there. Way to go, Dave! Give your best cheesy smile to the nice people and they'll vote for you every time.
COMMENT THREAD
They ought to make Louise Gray write the sort of article illustrated above, as a penance for the sort of crap she so often produces. But it is great fun to see the warmist Telegraph offering dire warnings about forthcoming cold winters.
Also fascinating is to see is the forecaster "Weather Outlook" - which is said to have an accurate seasonal forecasting record – warning that the UK is "now being gripped by a bitter series of winters comparable with the harsh 1939-42 winters which made conditions so horrendous during the Second World War."
I seem to recall saying something not dissimilar myself recently, once or twice, although it is difficult getting a reliable narrative as, in the UK, it was illegal for newspapers to publish details about the weather during most of 1940.
However, someone must have seen the fatuity of banning discussion when the Germans were sitting on the other side of the Channel, and their aircraft were making daily visits to all parts of the country. Thus, towards the end of the year (1940) there was a slight relaxation.
As a result, on 11 October 1940, we had John Ware in The Daily Express writing a long article about the weather. I thought you might find it interesting, so I have transcribed the whole article below:
Now that the Germans are just across the Channel and over this country every day, the weather is again being talked about and written about in the news. But for nearly a year it was kept secret – the most fantastic weather year since British records were kept.Ware concludes with a hope for a winter of low cloud and really cold weather – to keep the bombers away. He certainly gets the really cold weather but, unfortunately, it does not keep the bombers away.
Hardly a week from November 1939 to the end of September 1940 would have been off the front pages in peacetime with its weather freaks, and the Englishman's favourite topic would have echoed all over the country like the meteorological storms that made it.
The coldest winter for forty-five years was followed by the best summer of the century and the driest since 1921. But it was not a particularly hot summer – the impression of heat that lingers in your mind from those days between the beginning of May and the middle of September is due to the almost continuous sunshine. No day produced a temperature over 90 degrees, although June 8 and 9 were near this figure.
But the hottest day of the year came late. It was on September 4 when the mercury just touched 90. No previous record of the hottest day coming so late in the year has been found. The drought, which would have been on the front pages for many weeks, was almost continuous from May.
No day until the middle of July recorded more than .01 inch of rain – the minimum required to break the drought. May and June were continuously sunny and clear-skied. The July break lasted a fortnight with some rain and cloud. Everybody said: "We can't grumble. We've had such a wonderful summer and now it's over. How we could have enjoyed it but for the war."
And then August came in – the driest August since 1818, a hundred and twenty-two years! Even with the ever-present danger of giving information to the enemy the authorities had to put out posters warning you to use less water. August was almost entirely rainless and this persisted until September 8, when a gradual deterioration in the weather took place.
The spring which followed the severe winter began the long summer with almost summer temperatures. April averaged more than three degrees up on normal. And surprisingly the BBC mentioned the "beautiful spring day" on April 8 in a broadcast to Germany. But the newspapers were prohibited from mentioning it.
The winter, as you well remember, was the coldest since 1895 and January the coldest since 1838. The Thames was frozen in the upper reaches, ice interfered with shipping in the Estuary, and even the sea froze in Morecambe Bay.
The lowest temperature was 10 below zero, recorded at Rhayader, Radnorshire, on January 21. More insurance claims for cars with engines split by frost were recorded in January than in the whole of any one winter. Trains took a week to get from London to Glasgow, the passengers sleeping at wayside stations unable even to reach a road, which in any case they would have found blocked.
Factory workers in East London were unable to go home for two days and stayed in the factory hostel. Snowdrifts sixteen feet deep were reported in outer London areas.
This weather, which began before Christmas, lasted until March. It included Britain's worst ice storm, which was hailed as a thaw and proved to be a frost. The rain came down and as it fell into the lower atmosphere it froze. Nearly the whole country was covered with ice for two days, and transport was stopped.
Conditions were so abnormal that the Air Ministry relaxed its ban on the news and told the story.
Of special interest to us though, is that this is the start of thirty-year so-called "little cooling" – bizarre weather which exactly conforms with the warmists' "climate disruption". The more we get of this weather, and the closer the parallel we have with the forties, the more likely it is that we can say we are experiencing another period of extended cooling.
And what will the warmists do then, poor things?
COMMENT THREAD
Nice piece from Jim. Well worth a read.
COMMENT THREAD
I could not help but observe, though, that in 1940, the position was exactly the reverse. The newspaper would have cost you 1d (old penny) while the KitKat cost – as you can see from the advert – twice as much at 2d.
Mind you, a packet of cigarettes would have set you back 1/6d (7½p in new money), something like 18 times the cost of a newspaper. Now, your cigs are about five times the cost of a daily paper. By any measure, the relative price of newspapers has increased massively. Combined with their decrease in value, it is entirely unsurprising that they are losing circulation.
Funnily enough, one of the few stories of interest in today's edition is this one - on the BBC and climate change.
The mighty Beeb is being told to row back from its current position, that the science is "settled". Instead, its new editorial guidelines, published yesterday, say expressly for the first time that scientific issues fall within the corporation's obligation to be impartial.
"The BBC must be inclusive, consider the broad perspective, and ensure that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected," says BBC trustee Alison Hastings.
Coincidence or not, this morning I got a phone call from BBC Radio Oxford, asking if I would speak on their show tomorrow (at about 10:10am) on ... climate change. Specifically, they are having a debate about the resignation of Hal Lewis, which Dellers did big, amongst others.
I suppose I'm now going to have to take a little more interest in the issue, but at the time, I was distinctly underwhelmed. What particularly grabbed my attention in the transcript of the letter was the comment from the egregious Hal, on the treatment of "Climategate" by his society.
"It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity," he says, adding: "Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work."
That rather sort of comes under the category, "No shit, Sherlock!" After all these years, only now does he tells us, "This is not science; other forces are at work?" This is either pathological myopia or naivety to a most extraordinary degree.
Anyone who is interested in science, and has even a passing knowledge of science history, will know that the scientific establishments in their various disciplines are driven by politics, so intense and vitriolic at times as to make party politics look like the kindergarten.
Nor has it ever been any different. On my bookshelf, I have a treasured copy of "The Life of Pasteur" by René Vellery-Radot, first published in English translation in 1901 and reprinted several times until 1920, which is the date of my copy.
His life spanned the days of applying leeches to patients and where the existence of bacteria was denied, and infection was a result of "spontaneous generation". Germ theorists, or "deniers" such as Pasteur, were given short-shrift and, at one time, he had to leave the country to continue his research.
One quotation from Pasteur which I treasure, was in response to a question from an admirer about the "attacks and praises" he had endured and enjoyed through his career. "A man of science should think of what will be said of him in the following century, not of the insults or the compliments of one day," he replied.
Another of his more profound statements related to the respective roles of personal beliefs and "acquired science". Said Pasteur, "the two domains are distinct, and woe is him who tries to let them trespass on each other in the so imperfect state of human knowledge".
That rather pins down the Michael Manns of this world, who have difficulty separating the two domains, but in Pasteur's day, no less than now, the purity of science was an issue that had to be fought for. One of the problems we have now, I think, is that the likes of Hal Lewis have been asleep too long in their ivory towers.
Welcome back to the real world, Hal, where newspapers now cost twice as much as chocolate bars – and tell you less.
COMMENT THREAD
There's big news, as in earth-shaking events (sometimes literally), and then there's "little" news, things that happen to ordinary people and normally don't make the media – but which very often have a vastly greater impact on the people involved. Richard Littlejohn is doing the latter in this article - rather appropriate, given his name.
The first story concerns a brush with the police, all too familiar these days – leading to the observation that "the police wonder why Middle Britain’s faith in the forces of law and order is at an all-time low". Actually, I don't think they do. My general experience is that they don't give a shit what "Middle Britain" thinks of them – otherwise they wouldn't be doing what they do, in the way that they do it.
And this is not just theoretical. We now have Kit Malthouse, London's deputy mayor with responsibility for policing and crime, saying officers from Britain's largest force are living in villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire partly because of concerns over living in London.
He said there is a "growing divide between the police and the public, which is not yet at dangerous levels but may well become so". Speaking to the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, he said: "Police officers now, certainly Metropolitan Police officers, often want to live in police ghettos, villages in Surrey and Hertfordshire, which are disproportionately over-populated with police officers because they like to live together."
The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority said the growing divide between police and the public could be seen "in all sorts of ways". Officers and police community support officers (PCSOs) "now don't like to travel in uniform because they don't want to be identified", he said.
This was a reference to an incident in Croydon two years ago in which two officers were attacked by "a baying mob" after confronting two young girls over dropping litter. "No one came to their aid, quite the opposite," he said. "The public feels as it they have less and less investment in the police service. That sense of investment, and that sense of ownership of the police, has somehow deteriorated."
And the guy featured in the Littlejohn story is yet another one who would probably no longer cross the street to help the police, even if they were on fire. And that is not so very far from being there to pour the petrol. As they sow, so shall they reap. It may take time – but it happens eventually. And it's the "little" news that gets the crowds going.
COMMENT THREAD
To put it bluntly, though, who gives a tinker's cuss whether that deadweight dross in Parliament registers anything? As Philip so neatly states, "For good or ill, we are in the EU and no mainstream political party is proposing that we leave." And he also tells us that, "Along with several other countries Britain argued unsuccessfully for a freeze in the budget but was outvoted at an EU summit a few weeks ago."
Put two and two together and all you have left is a bunch of expensive and impotent timewasters – along with Mr Johnston and his media friends, whose own inadequacies are far too numerous to mention.
But, if we stay with the print media, of which Johnston is part, a scan of today's paper with a critical eye immediately tells you the problem. As I noted with The Sunday Times recently, we are being (and have been for some time) short-changed. Typically, in The Telegraph, a page will give you three, or maybe four stories, a large picture and an advert. And, as so many of the stories are lightweight dross, a whole newspaper can contain no more than two or three (being generous) stories of interest and substance.
Compare and contrast the edition of The Yorkshire Post for 1 October 1940. You will see over 20 substantive stories on just the front page. The publishers are rationed to just six pages (something for our green "friends" to think about) but in those there is more information than you will get in a week's supply of the current newspaper.
So we return to Mr Johnston, who bleats from his sadly depleted corner, that the EU's spending "must be subject to the same rigorous scrutiny that we expect from domestic governments."
Apart from the fact that it is a waste of time scrutinising that over which we have no control, the point that Johnston misses is that the media should play a huge part in the scrutiny process. But there is no adequate scrutiny even of domestic governments, as newspapers cut down their journalistic input and devote more and more of their space to tat. It is hardly likely, therefore, that the EU will get, or can get, sufficient attention.
That, of course, is where the blogs come in. A carefully selected range of well-written and informative blogs will give you far better coverage of events, with wider and more thought-provoking comment than the whole of the MSM.
No wonder Mr Marr is so vitriolic. He knows when he has been outclassed. But, for Mr Johnston, the answer to his "scrutiny" issue lies in the archives. When newspapers start looking like newspapers again, we might possibly be able to claw back some of the lost ground. It won't be sufficient, but it is probably necessary. In the meantime, the blogs have it and Marr can return his head to its rightful (and usual) place – up his own rear end ... and Johnston can carry on his ineffectual bleating.
COMMENT THREAD
I discovered a new database yesterday which, for a relatively modest fee, gives me the wartime editions of the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror and The Yorkshire Post. As you can imagine, for me it is like Christmas came early, and I spent most of yesterday "unwrapping" my presents.
Actually, it was a crap day. There are some nights when, for no apparent reason, you cannot sleep. With an early start to give a BBC interview, I sort of dozed off by four in the morning and was up at seven. At my brightest I was not, so mechanical tasks was about it.
Perhaps being semi-comatose was just as well, which meant that the comments by that slime Andrew Marr about blogging almost floated by – almost, but not quite. What a seriously low-grade shit that man is.
Anyhow, yesterday was a day to forget. Today's another day ... and the treadmill awaits, as I daub my pimples, rub my cauliflower nose , inhale the damp in my mother's basement and contemplate the view that "... the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night"
What a total schmuck he really, really is. But at least I had my database to play with.
COMMENT THREAD
As an illustration of how the warmists lack any sense of proportion, we have today the dreadful Tim Yeo pontificating on how reducing current spending on "low carbon technology" would be "like cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939".
This is the chairman of the Climate Change Select Committee, and he is anticipating next week's announcement on spending cuts. He is concerned the forthcoming spending review will see funding for carbon capture delayed "or worse", cash cut for upgrading ports to handle offshore wind farms, and green subsidies for small-scale renewables reduced.
Yeo says government needs to put more investment in areas such as renewable power, rather than less. Less money in these schemes could make the UK renewables sector too unpredictable to survive, he warns.
Then we get the money quote. "Cutting spending on low carbon technologies now would be like cutting the budget for Spitfires in 1939. The UK was running an even bigger deficit in the 1930s, but we would never have won the Battle of Britain if spending on defence had been sacrificed."
Yeo, is another of those Tory MPs who has made a career out of being amazingly thick, so it would not even begin to occur to him how fatuous his remarks are – and what an insult they are to the people who actually fought in the battle.
But it would also never occur to him to question the myth on which he relies. In the sense that he means it, there probably wasn't a "Battle of Britain" as such, with the gallant "few" saving the British nation from the Nazi hordes.
And in that very specific sense, it would not really have mattered whether we had had Spitfires or even whether we had cut the budget. As always, what matters is how you spend the money, and we most certainly could have got far more bangs for our bucks.
That, however, is an argument that Mr Yeo would not like to hear.
COMMENT THREAD
My cunning new strategy of ignoring it in the hope that it will go away and die clearly isn't working. It's still there and now we learn that energy chief Guenther Oettinger will be announcing some time soon that Europe needs to spend €1 trillion to bugger up its energy system.
There is a real problem about getting worked up about how much we pay into the EU. The amount of money they are costing us through their daft laws and schemes is so huge that the bit we have to give them directly is, by comparison, minuscule. Even so, when the "colleagues" start talking about trillions, that gets seriously scary. They mean to destroy us, and this is how they will do it!
COMMENT THREAD
This is the £16 billion FRES programme, which I have consistently opposed, writing over 100 pieces about it. Yet I was almost a lone voice, stacked up against an indifferent and ignorant media, with only Booker for support in the media, and the tenacious Ann Winterton in Parliament.
On the other side of the divide, its greatest supporter has been General Sir Richard Dannatt, with the wholehearted approval of the Defence Committee and the Tory defence team.
But now we learn that FRES is dead in the water. "It's a dead duck. It is the definition of everything that is wrong with the MoD's procurement process," says a senior Ministry of Defence source. Actually, this isn't a procurement issue - it is a definition problem. The Army couldn't get its act together and make a coherent case for its future needs.
Fortunately, the project has not gone so far down the acquisition path that it is incapable of being cancelled. And, although I say it myself – because no one else will – that is in no small measure due to the opposition of this blog. Such was its reach and its sister blog DOTR, that we had the then procurement minister coming onto our forum to plead the case, after I had written this.
This I remarked at the time was when the blogosphere came of age. A blog was setting the agenda and forcing ministers to respond. We in turn responded with this - a case which was never satisfactorily countered. Few people know the effect that piece had on the defence establishment, and why. I do.
You can read much of the background in Ministry of Defeat, still the only book that gets near telling the story. It has a recent review here.
Yet it is the Gen Dannatt who is lauded as the great expert, doyen of The Daily Telegraph - the man who "knows". This is the man who would have lumbered us with that useless pile of junk called FRES, and its lifetime costs in excess of £60 billion. By contrast, this blog won't even get a look in, shunned by the great and the good for telling the inconvenient truths.
Even then, the media doesn't get it. That idiot political editor Patrick Hennessy, who writes the piece about FRES being ditched, states: "The decision will mean that the Army will be forced to fight in Afghanistan and in future conflicts with its existing fleet of ageing vehicles, some of which first entered service in the 1960s."
In his little Westminster bubble, the world passes him by. Has he not heard of the Mastiff, Ridgeback, Wolfhound, Ocelot? How you can be that ignorant and still be a journalist is one of those modern miracles. No wonder they think Dannatt is an expert.
COMMENT THREAD
And, as Booker points out, Ed Miliband is also potentially the costliest politician in British history, after championing the 2008 Climate Change Act – his only significant achievement in his meteoric political career.
Given the fatuity of this legislation, its extraordinary expense and the damage it will do to the economy – to say nothing of the baleful effect on people's lives, you might think that this one and only achievement might disqualify the man from further high office, or any office at all apart from honorary, unpaid dogcatcher.
But not a bit of it. Signally missing from all the attempts to find any substance in the strangely two-dimensional figure who is now leader of the Labour Party has been any reference to this very achievement – the fact that he is potentially the most expensive politician in Britain's history.
The legislation commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050, at a cost estimated, on the website of his old Department for Energy and Climate Change, at up to £18.3 billion every year for the next four decades.
In cash terms this amounts to £734 billion, making it far and away the most costly law ever put through Parliament. It will equate to more than £700 a year for every household in the land, as we pay for thousands more useless windmills and other quixotic gestures through fast-rising taxes, soaring electricity bills, draconian regulatory costs and heaven knows what else.
Furthermore, neither Mr Miliband himself, nor any of his Act's supporters, could begin to explain how that 80 percent target is to be attained without closing down virtually our entire economy.
Is the politician responsible for such a law, we might ask ourselves, fit to be considered as our future prime minister? Except that it was also enthusiastically voted for by virtually every MP present in the House, including of course David Cameron's Conservatives and the Lib Dems, with only three voting against.
Wherever we look, the lunatics are now firmly in charge of the asylum, and until enough politicians come to their senses and realise what a catastrophic blunder they have made, so it will remain.
For the meantime, says Booker, whenever we see or hear Mr Miliband, we may at least recall that claim to fame – the most expensive politician in history, responsible for a law that was not only the most costly ever put through Parliament but that will also be recognised, eventually, as the most insane.
And that is what is so deeply, darkly depressing – the idea that our MPs, many of them re-elected and still in the House, could be so utterly stupid, so crass and so devastatingly blind as to vote for this legislation, and thence to support either Miliband, Cameron or Clegg – all of whom support this ruinous imbecility.
With this and our continued membership of the EU – and many other insults – no person can have any dealings with these fools. By any measure, they have disqualified themselves from polite society.
COMMENT THREAD
Personally, I think people should as a matter of course clear the footpaths in front of their own properties, and especially commercial properties. In many countries this is either a tradition or required by law. We should not as a rule expect local authorities to be clearing snow on their own.
But what is especially interesting about this piece is the uncontested assumption that an "Arctic winter looms". The paper could be wrong, of course, but taking this line suggests that it is getting a strong line of information which gives the idea some plausibility – even if more snow is simply another sign of global warming.
COMMENT THREAD
h/t Dellers. And three back-up copies of the Muslim parody ... here, here and here. Franny seems rather to have given up on this one! And total views of "no pressure" (and the parodies) is now up to 1,588,458.
On the other hand, despite Delingpole (and myself) being signed up to the 10:10 campaign, their supporters currently stand at 73,010 - DOWN from 95,329 this morning. Anthony Watts has a similar observation. This looks as if the video has cost them more than 20,000 suporters.
COMMENT THREAD
Thus asks Dellers, suggesting that he might have done what all the canny eco fascists are doing these days and given up on Man-Made Global Warming. Because hey, after all – you heard it here first (almost) – biodiversity is the new black!
Of course, it might be because Moonbat is totally compromised. How can he possibly offer an objective view when The Guardian is the sole remaining media partner to 10:10 and his colleague on the environment desk is Duncan Clark, who just happens to be strategy director for 10:10?
This is the same Duncan Clark, incidentally, who tells us that, "We need to slash emissions of all greenhouse gases from all industries", then adding: "If we're upfront about the scale and urgency of the challenge, then it's possible we can still turn the ship around." The funny thing is, though, that he's never upfront about being the strategy director of 10:10 – you have to look up his profile to find that out.
So that leaves Moonbat working for a tawdry rag that has long since ceased to be a newspaper and is now the front for environmental campaigning groups. No wonder he is so silent, presumably hoping the "splattergate" controversy will die down so that he can creep out from under his stone and pretend it all never happened.
COMMENT THREAD
.
You can see where Franny went for her inspiration ... look at the first few scenes, where teach isn't getting through.
In fact, though, Franny is a big fake. She describes herself, in breathless biographies in the Guardian etc, as an "ex rock drummer turned self-taught film maker." In fact she's a second generation, upper middle class, activist media brat.
Her Daddy, Peter Armstrong, was a senior documentary maker for 20 years at the BBC (where else) until he bought out the multimedia technology he had developed there and floated "The Multimedia Corporation" on the junior stock market. It later bombed in the dot-com crash. He now runs his own international activist organisation
Daddy worked with her for ten years on her first film – "McLibel" – about the two hippies who were sued for telling lies about Macdonalds. She still runs a website providing anti-Macdonalds propaganda to activists.
Her stepmum is also an activist film maker and Mummy and Daddy still work with her at her film company – Spanner films. "Greenery" is just her latest vehicle for self promotion.
(Research from Barry Woods, picked up from WUWT comments - thanks. The blogosphere at its best ... something Franny will never understand.)
COMMENT THREAD