A stupid answer to a silly question

Friday, May 08, 2009

A stupid answer to a silly question

"If Carbon Capture and Burial is the answer, it must have been a very silly question." For more, see the written submission from the Carbon Sense Coalition to the New Zealand Parliamentary Enquiry into the ETS.

Yet the EU is pumping money into this fantasy, while our MPs have sold the pass. All three main parties agree with it.

How is it that we can get so excited about penny ante expenses, when the collective is happily squandering £4 billion of our money on a complete and utter fantasy, for no gain whatsoever? 

If MPs cost £200,000 a year each, or thereabouts, then they are worth the money if they do their jobs. But, as Booker recently observed, if they are not doing their jobs, why are we even paying them salaries?

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Pratting about

As the political claque indulge in their endless prattling, with ever-more detailed scrutiny of their own navels, the real world goes on.

In that real world, real people die because these wastrels cannot concentrate on the jobs for which they are paid, one of which is to ensure that our troops are properly equipped, fighting to a workable strategy which has half a chance of success, and that the people running the show are properly scrutinised and brought to account.

I cannot estimate how much time and energy has been spent inside and out of parliament discussing MPs' expenses, but I can tell you exactly how much time has been spent on the floor of the House discussing current military strategy in Afghanistan – precisely none.

Thus we get the wages of neglect. MoD website, item 1:

It is with great sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm that one British soldier from 1st Battalion The Royal Gurkha Rifles and one member of 173 Provost Company, 3rd Regiment, Royal Military Police have been killed in Afghanistan.

MoD website, item 2:

It is with great sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm that a British soldier from 2nd Battalion The Rifles was killed in Helmand province yesterday evening, Thursday 7 May 2009.

MoD website, item 3:

It is with great sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm that a British soldier from The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, was killed as a result of a gunshot wound in Afghanistan today, Thursday 7 May 2009.

Four soldiers in one day. We have been writing for months that the situation was going belly-up … it is going belly-up. The first two were caught by a suicide bomber, in a market area of Gereshk district. Twelve civilians were killed and 32 injured as a Snatch Vixen patrol was targeted, the two killed soldiers having dismounted.

In the next incident, we have a Jackal driver killed, the sixth soldier now to be killed in this "boy racer" toy. Of the soldier shot, we are still awaiting more details. And the "fighting season" is yet to start.

Yesterday, we had an inquest into the death of Jason Barnes, the fifth and hopefully last soldier to be killed in a Vector.

Major Joe Fossey, an explosive expert from the Royal Engineers, described the front cab as "mangled beyond comprehension". "The front axle punched up and there was a buckling of metal" that had "crinkled it like a crushed Coke can". Capt Boyd described the driver's side of the vehicle a "complete mess". Cpl Barnes suffered catastrophic wounds with the front plate of his body armour blown away.

The vehicle has now been withdrawn - £100 million pissed up against the wall for a useless killer of men. And just three newspapers bother to report it, in short, down-page items. None of them tell us it was a 6kg mine. The minimum specification for a Level I MRAP is protection against 7.5kg. If the MoD had bought decent vehicles, the man would have lived.

Yet The Daily Mail report has as its headline, "MoD vows to 'learn lessons' after death of soldier ….". And the "lesson" is? The same day that the US Army rejects the International MXT, after failing the mine resistance test at the Aberdeen proving ground, the MoD orders 200 at a cost of £120 million.

The MoD is pouring money down the drain. It is spending £93,000 each ondune buggys - the US forces buy theirs for $18,000. We fly Harriers which take 60 manhours maintenance per flying hour, compared with a quarter of that for an F-15. It is planning to buy Lynx helicopters for £14 million each. The comparable US helicopter is lighter, faster, can carry more, costs less than half that amount and is available off-the-shelf. We can have our overpriced garbage in 2014.

And where the hell is Parliament in all this? Where is the political blogosphere? When the hell are these prattlers going to stop wasting their time and ours on personality politics, as Jeff Randall complains, and get down to some serious politics, scrutinising the hard issues … such as why our troops are dying in Afghanistan, with some of the military warning of worse to come?

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Yes Prime Minsiter

"The Prime Minsiter is revealed …" writes Robert Winnett in The Daily Telegraph.

No wonder the country is going to the dogs.

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A little more on the Czech situation

My first reaction to the suggestion that I should blog again about the Czech Republic and theConstitutional Lisbon Treaty was "yeah, whatever", which is the way I react to people's suggestions that I should do something I don’t want to do. But, well, whatever, I'd better bring people up to date.

First of all, here is the full text of President Klaus's statement made in the wake of that vote in the Senate:

I must express my disappointment that following unprecedented political and media pressure from both foreign and domestic sources, some Czech Senators retreated from the publicly expressed views they held until recently, undermining thereby their own political and civic integrity, and have agreed with the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty.

They thus turned their backs on the long-term interest of the Czech Republic, putting before that the short-term interests of current governmental office-holders as well as their own personal interests.

It is a sad evidence of another failure on the part of a significant element of our political elite, which parallels other bad moments in Czech history. Our politicians
have always found some cowardly reasons for actions of this sort: We are too small, too weak; we do not mean anything in the European context; we must conform even if we do not agree with what we are conforming to.

This is something I reject. We either regained our sovereignty after November 1989, and together with it the responsibility for the fate of our country, or it was all a tragic mistake. This is a very topical point to make in the year of the twentieth anniversary of November 1989.

Now I will wait to see if a group of Czech senators, as some of them previously announced, request our Constitutional Court for another scrutiny of the Lisbon Treaty in relation to our Constitution. If this takes place, I will not be considering my decision to ratify the Lisbon Treaty or not before the Constitutional Court issues its decision.

My views on this matter are known and clear. I cannot afford to be resolutely against something at one moment, and then, because it fits in with my personal political career objectives, to pretend to change my opinion.

Let me emphasize that for this moment, the Lisbon Treaty is dead, because it was rejected in a referendum in one of the Member States. That is why my deciding on the ratification of this Treaty is not the issue of the day.

It is good to see that he is placing blame where it belongs – on the shoulders of Czech politicians because history tells one that the latter are apt to blame other people for their own shortcomings.

The outgoing Prime Minister, Mirek Topolanek, for instance, has been trying to convey the impression that he does not really like the treaty but that he is being forced into supporting it because otherwise the Czechs will be sidelined within the EU. Presumably, if things go wrong and questions are asked why nothing was gained and much was lost by the ConstitutionalLisbon Treaty, he can wring his hands just as President Beneš did in the run-up to the Second World War and afterwards.

It is, as ever, a pleasure to hear unelected Commission President Barroso talk absolute rubbish, solemnly and uncritically reported by the Financial Times:

"This is very good news," said José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president. "The vote reflects the Czech Republic's commitment to a more democratic, accountable, effective and coherent European Union."

Fascinating. I wonder if the Commission President has actually read the treaty; or maybe he just does not know what the words democratic and accountable mean. Given his political career the latter is entirely possible. He is, after all, a man who has gone from being a Maoist to being President of the European Commission with a few stages in between but no real changes in his views, one suspects.

Meanwhile, Die Welt, of all newspapers is suggesting that the EU could work very well with the treaties as they are now and there is no real need for theConstitutional Lisbon Treaty, should it fail at the second Irish referendum. That may have more reference to the situation in Germany than in the Czech Republic.

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