Suicide activists - by Richard... Thursday, June 03, 2010

Suicide activists - by Richard... Thursday, June 03, 2010

The "new" tactic – trading lives for publicity against Israel. And the Western media is in the market ... although the truth is beginning to emerge, even in the British media .

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Not drowning but waving - by Richard...

"Pacific islands 'growing not shrinking' due to climate change," headlines The Daily Telegraph, one of several media outlets to carry the story of a new study that has revealed significant growth in coral island chains. 

Some islands, it appears, have grown by almost one-third over the past 60 years. Among the island chains to have increased in land area are Tuvalu and neighbouring Kiribati, both of which attracted attention at last year's Copenhagen climate summit. 

These have been very much the "poster child" for the warmists, and the subject of numerous stunts, not least the holding of an underwater cabinet meeting last year (see video above) to highlight the threat from rising sea levels as a result of global warming.

Much to the discomfort of Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed, seven islands in Tuvalu actually grew, one by 30 percent. In Kiribati, the three of the most densely populated islands, Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai, also grew by between 12.5 and 30 percent.

Professor Paul Kench, of Auckland University, co-author of the study with Dr Arthur Webb, a Fiji-based expert on coastal processes, said the study challenged the view that the islands were sinking as a result of global warming. "Eighty per cent of the islands we've looked at have either remained about the same or, in fact, got larger. Some have got dramatically larger," he says.

If there was any justice, the Nasheeds of this world, who have been making a living out of milking concern for global warming, are now going to have find something else to bring in the cash. All that crap about "drowning" was, it seems, only waving. But then, we already knew that.

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Those "peace" activists - by Richard...

From the security cameras aboard the Mavi Marmara: the passengers of the Gaza flotilla are seen here preparing for confrontation with the IDF. They put on gas masks and arm themselves with rods, slingshots, broken bottles, metal objects, and water hoses. As the IDF approaches the ship they attack the forces by hurling these objects at them.

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Brain dead - by Richard...

Simon Hoggart, political correspondent for The Guardian dismisses the first PMQs of this parliament as having "all the excitement of a good game of cribbage". However, in a session that one could say was "nuanced", we saw – amongst other things - The Boy take possession of the Afghan War in a way that he will come to regret. Thus, we heard:

Afghanistan is my top priority ... we are six months into the troop surge ordered by President Obama. We back that strategy, and we must give it time to work ... we have to support that military strategy with a political surge, of which the peace jirga being launched in Kabul today is an example. I spoke to President Karzai about this yesterday, and stressed to him the importance of working towards a political solution in which everyone in Afghanistan feels that the Government of Afghanistan are a Government for them.

The current strategy of counter-insurgency is about trying to protect the public in Afghanistan from the insurgency and enlarge the area of that country in which normal life can continue. What is in our national interest - that is what we should focus on - is an Afghanistan stable and secure enough for us to bring our troops home. That is what we want to achieve ... we have to give the current strategy time to work.

For sure, entirely missing were some of the "biff-bam" soap opera elements, and the session was thus largely (but not entirely) devoid of the moronic braying that has characterised sessions fronted by Gordon Brown. But in its place was much material for thought and analysis, as we watch a new leader pave the way for his own political suicide. 

That it was thought to be dull says as much about the brain-dead political claque, represented by Hoggart, as it does the Cleggeron leader.

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Random shooting - by Richard...

Police in Cumbria are examining more than 30 crime scenes after local taxi driver Derrick Bird shot dead 12 and injured 25 before taking his own life. Eight of the 25 are seriously injured, three critical.

There is no sense to be made of this – none at all. Like it or not, though, it puts the Gaza "flotilla" episode in perspective and the very juxtaposition, time-wise, makes comparisons inevitable. On the one hand, you have "jihadists", tooled up and deliberately going out of their way to provoke violent confrontation, with nine of them ending up killed.

In yesterday's incident, twelve ordinary people going about their daily business, in a peaceful corner of rural England, are gunned down by a "nice" man in what appears to be a random shooting.

And who are the real victims?

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Cameron's War - by Richard... Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Although much hailed before the event, getting information on yesterday's meeting of Cameron's national security committee is proving extraordinarily difficult. All we have so far is a very limited statement from a Downing Street spokesman, telling us that: "There were wide-ranging, intensive and productive discussions during the extended session on this, the Government's top foreign policy priority."

"The Prime Minister and the NSC," we are also told, "expressed their great admiration and support for our troops serving in Afghanistan and paid tribute to the essential contribution that they and their civilian colleagues make. The NSC will now continue its work to ensure that the UK does all it can to support the agreed Nato strategy in Afghanistan to succeed."

Separately, we have a report in The Guardian which makes the claim – attributed to officials - that Britain is putting pressure on Afghanistan to assume full responsibility for its own security as soon as possible.

If that is true – and there is no reason why it should not be – it quite possibly represents the ultimate example of hope triumphing over experience, there being any number of accounts which attest to the incompetence of Afghan security forces.

The latest of these comes in the New York Times which describes the Interior Ministry's most promising force, which has been "undercut by drug use, petty corruption and, at times, a lack of commitment in the face of the ordinary hardships and duties of uniformed life." 

This piece deserves to be read in full but particularly relevant is the observation that many of the police from the force profiled were Tajik, and did not speak Pashto, southern Afghanistan's dominant language. Unsurprisingly, one of them complained: "Nobody can find a lot of information about the Taliban."

What, of course, this destroys is the facile idea that the southern, predominantly Pashtun population is ever going to accept the rule of Kabul, bolstered as it is – and has always been historically – by the northern tribes of an entirely different ethnicity.

Thus Simon Jenkins is telling us in The Guardian that Cameron should take the opportunity of the switch in Helmand from British to US control to admit the obvious and start to plan how best to leave. It is idle to pretend, he writes, that Britain's 2006 expedition to bring Helmand under the control of the Kabul regime has anything but failed.

Yet, rather than take that opportunity, the Cameron stance has been to support the last administration's policy and, as he did during the session allocated to PMQs in parliament today, commit to providing the military with "whatever they need", thereby effectively taking ownership of the conflict. It may have started off as Blair's war, then to become Brown's war, but it has now undergone a glacially smooth transition, on its way to becoming Cameron's war.

There is no obvious political reason why the Cleggeron leader should so recklessly assume responsibility for this conflict – other than, perhaps, he has been unduly influenced by today's leader in The Daily Telegraph, which intones that "tangible results" are "desperately needed" to reassure an increasingly sceptical public that the war is winnable - an outcome which only that newspaper can believe is possible. 

"Providing clear and unequivocal support for the military effort would be a good start," the paper says, advice which Cameron seems to have taken, unwittingly falling into a trap from which he will find it difficult to extract himself.

As a harbinger, the significance of which it is unlikely he would understand, yesterday we learnedof the death of another Danish soldier, since identified as 22-year-old Private Sophia Bruun. She was killed close to Bridzar military base in Helmand, after a Piranha armoured personnel carrier was hit by an IED.

The point that will escape Cameron is that this vehicle type was intended to be the base for the FRES utility vehicle which, given a choice, the Army would have preferred to the Mastiff and other protected vehicles. Affording the Army "unequivocal support" may prove to be unwise, given that it most often has no real idea what it really wants and, in any event, should be given what it needs rather than what it wants.

In return, however, the one thing Cameron need not expect is "tangible results", other than seeing the number of deaths climb from today's figure of 290 – with yet another Royal Marine killed by a bomb in Sangin – to 300 in the very near future. For his first performance in the PMQ slot today, he had to read out three names. Already, he has another for next week's list and soon enough he will be dealing with the torrent of media "celebrating" that macabre third century.

By then it will truly be Cameron's war. And if he makes 400, it will be the only thing he "achieves" from it.

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The same old stench - by Richard...

This is the sort of day when there are lots of things to write about, but mostly ongoing stories rather than brand new issues. One of those is the David Laws story, which we have already visited several times. 

There cannot, you might think, be much more to say on the subject, except that Heffer in The Daily Telegraph op-ed finds a great deal to say – mostly about what the affair tells us of the "new politics" espoused by the Cleggerons.

As always, there is no point in reinventing the wheel – let Heffer's words speak for themselves. But one has to say on this that he is right. The Law affair tells us a great deal, not least about the "us and them" divide which now separates us from the political classes. 

The response of "them" has been highly instructive – they have rushed to defend one of their own, and in so doing have illustrated with absolutely clarity how different mores apply to those who are "above the line". Thus, we find, with absolutely no surprise, that new politics or not, we have the same old stench.

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