In the interests of justice - by Richard... Thursday, July 29, 2010

In the interests of justice - by Richard... Thursday, July 29, 2010

And when they change the pigs, they sound just the same.

Home Office Minister Baroness Neville-Jones has defended the coalition government's decision toopt in to an EU order giving foreign police the power to demand evidence held in the UK. She tells peers: "We believe that opting into the EIO is in the interests of justice. It does not transfer any jurisdiction, which is what many might have feared."

Labour, Tories, Lib-Dims, Cleggerons ... all the same. Indistinguishable.

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Scroll down slowly - by Richard...

... very slowly ... you will come to a picture ...

Elf and safety, anybody?

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And your point is? - by Richard...

The Met Office, we are led to believe , is telling us that global warming evidence is "unmistakable".

This, of course, is the organisation which famously told us to prepare for a barbeque summer and the highway authorities that they needed no extra salt for the winter.

But, never fear. It has analysed ten indicators. Seven are rising: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity and tropospheric temperature in the "active-weather" layer of the atmosphere. Three are declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers and spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere.

Without dissecting the detail – leave that for others – note a certain bias, such as in: Arctic sea ice is "declining". Well, maybe, maybe not. But Antarctic ice is increasing at a record rate. And then, while spring snow cover may be declining, winter snow cover is increasing.

In other words, our old friend the cherry-picker is at work here – alongside Mr Weasel himself, Dr Peter Stott, who tells us that short-term changes which counter the trend are simply "climate variability", and that long-term trends needed to be looked at.

Well, let us turn to the Arctic. There is good evidence here that the climate undergoes an eighty-year cycle. Yet the records being used go back to 1979 – very much the short-term, which Stott tells us to avoid. He and his ilk see "clear and unmistakable signs of a warming world" because that is what they want to see. The best they can manage though is a fraction of one degree – in an interglacial period where one would expect temperatures marginally to rise.

What none of them will address is whether this marginal warming is natural – a combination of the underlying rise and longer-term cyclical variation, or man-made. They see it as man-made, because that is what they want to see. Life is too short to deal with these people. They sap life energy and, were they not so dangerous, they would best be ignored. 

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Does anyone actually care? - by Richard...

Watching three days-worth of oral evidence at the Chilcot inquiry on the Iraq war is not for the faint-hearted, but it is better watching the video over the internet than being there.

The reason for so doing is to follow the strains of evidence related to the Snatch Land Rover and especially relevant was Tuesday's evidence from Lt Gen Sir Robert Fulton, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff (Equipment Capability) from 2003 to 2006, and his successor, Lt Gen Andrew Figgures. He held the post from 2006 to 2009.

I write this with some diffidence, but am bolstered by the comments of a contact with whom I have been working these many years. He articulated by own impressions – that these two senior generals, when it comes to protected vehicles and IEDs, are extraordinarily ignorant. If you have the time, watch the performance of Fulton (pictured). It is lamentable.

But with Dannatt yesterday, if you put the narrative together, from the evidence, you come inescapably to the conclusion that the Army blew it. When it came to protecting troops from IEDs, as Dannatt himself says, "It remains unsatisfactory that it is only now that we have closed with the issue ... We worked round the problem, we didn't actually confront the problem."

We also get from Dannatt some extraordinary claims about the Future Rapid Effects System (FRES). The man actually tells us that this had originally been envisaged in 2002 as a "short to medium term requirement" with the first vehicles to enter service in 2007.

Once again, Dannatt betrays his own ignorance. It may be difficult to understand that the professional head of the Army can be completely out of touch but, like politicians, senior officers also live in their "bubbles", completely divorced from the real world. 

One of the reasons why the Israeli Army was so successful is that it was largely staffed by reserve officers, who had real jobs outside the Army. British Generals, with their Army mansions, their servants, chauffeur-driven limousines, and deferential staff, are dangerously insulated from reality. They really are terrifyingly out of touch. 

Even then, if Dannatt really believed that FRES was going to be operational by 2007, then he is worse than ignorant. He displays a naivety of almost staggering proportions, neglecting as he does the last word of the acronym: "system". 

FRES is what the US was calling FCS, the Future Combat System. It always was going to be complex and it was always much, much more than a vehicle replacement programme. It was to be a whole new way of fighting, part of the revolution in military affairs. It was to redefine military operations in the post-Cold War era.

Yet Dannatt claims he was "horrified" to learn in 2005 that the project had grown in cost and sophistication, with the delivery date put back to between 2015 and 2018. If he really expected otherwise and was at all surprised, then one really must wonder where he was ... to which monastery he had retired.

The thing is that even I was writing about FRES in 2004. Yesterday six years ago to the day, I wrote my first piece on the system, following up today, six years ago, with another piece. Don't take my word for it. Look at it, on the record. Six years ago, on 29 July 2004, I wrote:

... the government is preparing to sink around £6 billion into buying 900 vehicles, with an estimated budget for the total costs of ownership over the expected 30-year service life of almost £50 billion. That is a staggering £6.7 million average cost to buy each vehicle and an unbelievable life-time cost per vehicle – yes, each vehicle - of £55.5 million. To say that it would be cheaper to drive our troops into battle in a fleet of top-of-the-range Rolls-Royces hardly begins to illustrate the extravagance.

If I was writing that sort of thing then, how can Dannatt claim that he learned only a year later that, "the project had grown in cost and sophistication"? For that to be true, he must have been on another planet, or tucked away in that monastery.

If we did not know him better, we might think he is taking us for fools. In reality, the man has by now convinced himself that what he believes to be the truth is the truth. There are people like that. He is one of them. And the media, which has never followed FRES properly, nor understood it - any more than has the likes of Dannatt - allows him to get away with it. The journalists currently reporting on the issue have neither understanding nor history.

With Dannatt's evidence though, with Fulton, Figgures, and Jackson who also gave evidence yesterday, there can be no doubt that the MoD held off acquiring protected vehicles to protect the funding for FRES. There can also be no doubt that it took the politicians to push the military into acquiring the Mastiff. 

Yet the journalists are completely misreading events. Both The Guardian and The Daily Mail are at it as well. They are inverting the truth with their narrative that the Army was warning ministers about vehicle deficiencies. But the Army was not. The minsters werekicking the Army, telling it to get protected vehicles ordered.

And, as a final twist, we learn from Fulton, that the military already had a replacement for the Snatch lined up - the Vector. In their minds, they did not need anything else when they already had something in mind. Left to themselves, Vector would have gone into Iraq as well as Afghanistan. That was the original plan. Even more would have died than actually did, had the Army been allowed to run the show.

The problem is, does anyone care – do they care enough to get it right, or is everyone seemingly content that a completely distorted view of history should prevail?

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Skewered - by Richard... Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Booker has a few suggestions for Chris Huhne's employers, lovingly detailed in The Daily Mail .

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Day 19 - Battle of Britain - by Richard...

The weather on this Sunday was fair, although it clouds over in the evening limiting flying in some areas. The morning sees attacks in Cornwall, Cardiff and Newport. In the early afternoon, a sizeable force of forty bombers escorted by Me 109s heads for Dover. Nos 74, 41, 11 and 257 Sqns engage. The raid is broken up.

Major Werner Mölders, Geschwader commander of JG 51 and one of the top three Luftwaffe pilots up to this time, is severely wounded after mixing it with Sqn Ldr "Sailor" Malan, CO of No. 74 Sqn. Mölders manages to return to base but takes no further part in the battle for over a month. 

In Newcastle, twenty-five high explosive bombs are dropped almost in a straight line across the city. There is considerable damage. Three women are killed. One woman and two men are injured. (One reportattibutes this to 18 July, although an official report puts it on this day and the newspaper confirms it.)

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Bob Ward replies - by Richard...

On the forum today, the great propagandist has responded to the guest post byChristopher Booker yesterday.

From the thrust of his response, it seems the full-time employee of an institute paid-for by a billionaire financier with interests in global warming, is complaining that Booker is biased because he received a free flight and had his hotel bill paid in New York, to attend a Heartlands conference as a speaker.

Well, if that is the game you want to play, Bobby darling, here is a little puzzle for you. Above is a pic of Booker and me. Where are we? Who owns the executive jet in which we are about to ride? Where are we going? With whom did we have dinner the following night – and who paid the (very substantial) bill?

Click the above to enlarge ... another little clue for you. Don't say we don't make it easy.

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Bills up by a third - by Richard...

Householders face a £300-a-year rise in their gas and electricity bills and significant cuts in how much energy they use if Britain is to "keep the lights on" and meet its climate change targets, the "Government" has said. Actually, this is that fool Huhne, who has said people would have to make "ambitious" cuts in their own consumption.

So, what he is proposing is that we should use less electricity and pay substantially more for it, ending up with higher bills despite cutting consumption. As a motivational message, this is little short of moronic, although we've stopped wondering what these people do for brains.

The worst of it is that Huhne is almost certainly under-estimating the costs. Earlier estimates have gone as high as £5,000 a year for our energy bills.

There is a third element here, as well. Even though we are set for higher costs, and reduced consumption, at this rate we will almost certainly have power cuts as well. Huhne's grasp of the electricity supply industry makes this almost a certainty.

And, run not away with the idea that this is a maverick minister, indulging in his own free-lance fantasy. This fatuous policy very much has the support of The Boy, who is seemingly happy to drive the entire population into fuel poverty.

We appreciate that there was not much choice at the last general election – but choice there was. One trusts now that those who thought a vote for Dave or his minions a good idea are fully appraised of their foolishness.

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Day 18 - Battle of Britain - by Richard... Tuesday, July 27, 2010

In view of what actually happens on this Saturday, 70 years ago, the official accountalmost has a comic element to it. Initially, we are told:

Enemy activity appeared to have further decreased and those aircraft with few exceptions approaching the coast seemed to devote their attention to reconnaissance of shipping and to attacks when opposition was not immediately encountered but turned away when fighters were in the vicinity.

In fact, Luftwaffe operations start about 09:45am, with an attack on a convoy off Swanage, Dorset. Simultaneously, two convoys off the estuary are bombed, and a group of ships off Harwich come under attack.

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Look at the timeline - by Richard...

An article in The Daily Telegraph (online), headlined: "Ministers were warned that troops would die in Snatch Land Rovers", declares: 

Ministers were formally warned that using Snatch Land Rovers on the frontline would cost lives years before the vehicles were withdrawn, according to previously secret documents.

The copy, based on an agency report, thus continues a fictional narrative, eagerly seized upon by the Lib-Dims, which has been going on for years, about how an increasingly frustrated Army was desperately calling for better equipment, only to be rebuffed by "penny-pinching" ministers.

And, as always, the narrative – like the story – is wrong, a dangerous and ill-measured distortion which flies in the face of the evidence, even the evidence on which this story relies.

The basis of the story is a formerly secret minute, now released by the Chilcot (Iraq) Inquiry, written by Lieutenant General Sir Nicholas Houghton, then Chief of Joint Operations at the military's Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ). 

But the framing is that Houghton told the government in July 2006 that front-line commanders wanted better-protected vehicles so they could carry out missions "without unnecessary casualties". 

Crucially, the date of the letter is 7 July 2006 and, to follow the story properly, you need to look at the timeline. There, as we all know, the Snatch issue broke into the public domain in June 2006, nearly a month before the Houghton letter was sent.

Then, looking at the letter, we see that it is a response to a letter sent on 5 July, two days earlier, where the procurement minister (Lord Drayson) "sought confirmation as to whether there is a requirement for a medium weight, armoured patrol vehicle as an alternative to the use of Snatch or tracked armoured vehicles on current operations."

In other words, this was an exchange initiated by the minister, asking the military whether there was a requirement. And, as handwritten note on the top of the page puts it, he got an "unequivocal yes". This is an entirely different scenario from that posited by the newspaper, which gives the impression that the "general", out of the blue, was warning ministers.

The newspaper, interestingly, does not mention this note, but refers to another, an "NB" which tells the minister he can no longer say in the House that there has been no request from commanders for an alternative to the Snatch.

Here, the background is interesting, as this note is being addressed to Drayson who, hitherto, has been up front in taking advice from the Army that the Snatch is fit for purpose. This can be read as an instruction, and you do not have to look very far to work out on whose authority it is written.

But there is then another minute, in reply to this, asking the military to set out by 1600 hrs on 14 July to set out the number of vehicles required and the plans to deliver them by November.

What then transpired, we know, is that by 23 July, buying Mastiffs was a done deal, and the official announcement was made the next day.

But, as to what was going on before Drayson wrote his minute on 5 July, the public record, through the BBC, Mick Smith's blog in The Times and this blog all give adequate testimony to the fact that the Army did not "call" for the Snatch to be replaced until, effectively, ministers asked for a requirement to be put on the record.

How then the Snatch continued in use, even after the military agreed that it use should be re-assessed, is perhaps something Gen Houghton should be asked.

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Climategate, Amazongate, Bob Ward and the Murdoch empire - by Richard...

Guest post by Christopher Booker

To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

Everything about this story was bizarre. Its essence, based on information which as Webster told us was had been supplied by Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change, was that Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks.

These hired lackeys had then shamefully gone on to describe the various official inquiries into the Climategate emails scandal as "whitewashes", apparently citing them as evidence that the dangers of global warming had been "grossly exaggerated".

The story concluded by suggesting that Exxon Mobil had clearly corrupted these four venal think tanks into giving "the oil company at least another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon strategy".

The most obvious puzzle was why this remarkably tenuous tale should have been put byThe Times on its front page, presumably rating it as the most important news of the day. The evidence assembled by Mr Ward, who had apparently "been monitoring Exxon's links to sceptic groups," hardly seemed to stack up even in its own terms.

One think-tank had apparently received $50,000 last year, another had also received $50,000 - but how all this added up to "almost £1 million" in the past 12 months was far from clear. Furthermore, none of these think-tanks had really been anything but bit-players in the great ongoing row over Climategate.

As is familiar to anyone who has followed the details of that scandal and the various subsequent inquiries, it was hardly necessary for anyone to be given money by Exxon to describe their reports as no more than a blatantly perfunctory "cover up". Their sole purpose was clearly to shower the Climatic Research Unit and the various senior IPCC scientists involved in the incriminating emails with bucket-loads of rather murky whitewash.

Not one of the knowledgable sceptics who have torn those reports apart in detail, led by Steve McIntyre on Climate Audit, has ever received a cent of funding from "Big Oil". And what makes all this particularly laughable is that the penny-packets given to think-tanks which were almost wholly irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into all the groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have long since been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which famously rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

In fact two things made The Times's grotesque overblowing of this story rather much more interesting than many Times readers might have guessed. The first was the fact that the origin of the story was Bob Ward, who has in recent years become familiar to followers of the climate debate as a tireless advocate in the media for warmist alarmism.

Looking raather like a night-club bouncer, though not so polite, Mr Ward seems to have set himself up as a professional attack dog for the cause, harrying anyone who dares publicly to promote scepticism by any means he can find. 

He used to work in this capacity for the fanatically warmist Royal Society, in which role, in 2007, he organised a voluminous series of complaints to the regulatory body Ofcom, signed by "37 professors", against Channel 4's documentary The Global Warming Swindle. A year later, after wasting huge quantities of everyone's time, Ofcom failed to uphold any of Ward's complaints.

Since then Mr Ward (pictured top and right) has been employed in a similar capacity by the Grantham Institute on Climate Change at the LSE, where he acts as policy director alongside its chairman Lord Stern. Formerly Sir Nicholas Stern, this ex-Treasury official has, since his famous but much derided 700-page report in 2006, become one of the real high-priests of the warmist religion. And he has made a fortune from touring the world to advise mankind on how to reduce its "carbon footprint". 

Since he joined the Grantham Institute, Mr Ward has not only written countless letters to the press and appeared frequently on TV, he has also launched a number of similarly time-wasting complaints to the Press Complaints Commission against articles by climate sceptics such as myself.

I have been the target of two such monster complaints in the past year, each wasting collectively hundreds of man-hours, and on each of which the PCC eventually found it impossible to rule in his favour. Mr Ward was also closely involved in the row which earlier this year much excited the warmist press over a misquotation from Sir John Houghton, one of the founding fathers of the IPCC and one of the doughtiest champions of Michael Mann's now wholly discredited "hockey stick".

Mr Ward's employer, the Grantham Institute, is backed by significantly big money. It was set up in two parts, one under Lord Stern at the LSE, the other run by another committed warmist Sir Brian Hoskins at Imperial College, funded with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire. Its chief purpose is to advise governments, firms and investment funds on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change" - which is now of course one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative industries in the world.

Even more interesting in terms of its complex relations with the new worldwide climate industry is the vast business empire run by Rupert Murdoch and his son James, owners of the paper which last week published Ward's peculiar story.

If you mention to anyone in North America that the Murdoch empire might these days be moving towards rather active promotion of the warmist cause, they will only laugh, pointing out that, in the US, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are two of the very few pillars of climate scepticism in America's media establishment.

But at the British end of the Murdoch empire, there have recently been signs that this is far from being the case. For the past two years, for instance, its television arm, Sky, has been teamed up with the world's richest environmental lobby group WWF (income £400 million a year), in a bid to "help combat climate change" by saving the CO2-rich Amazon rainforest.

Then a few weeks back there was that curious episode when the Murdoch Sunday Timespublished a grovelling correction of a story familiar to reader of this blog which soon made headlines round the world as "Amazongate". 

This was the scandalous story, first dug out by the tireless researches of Richard North, of how the IPCC's latest 2007 report had included a shock-horror claim that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest was under threat from climate change. This had no scientific basis whatever. The only source given for this claim was a WWF propaganda sheet, which in turn had drawn its key sentence from the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group set up by Dr Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center (in turn closely linked to the WWF).

Even though The Sunday Times's report on this aspect of the story back in January was entirely correct (as was recently confirmed by WWF) for some inexplicable reason The Sunday Times agreed, following a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, to retract its original correct claim about the IPCC.

Rather more shadowy still, however, are the Murdoch family's links with Bill Clinton's Climate Change Initiative. The head of strategy and communications for this influential and lavishly funded body is James Murdoch's wife Kathryn. 

The "Climate Initiative" is in turn part of the William J. Clinton Foundation, fast-becoming one of the richest foundations in the world. It is supported to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft. Thanks not least to its involvement with climate change, it likes to boast that it has recently been named as one of the world's "Top 10 Green NGOs".

Both Rupert Murdoch and his son are listed as among the Clinton Foundation's leading donors. Rupert, along with Barbra Streisand, was one of the three sponsors of a project to reduce the "carbon footprint" of 20 major cities.

And Mrs Murdoch's Climate Initiative, as can be seen from its website, is involved in co-ordinating and arranging finance for a whole string of "climate-related" projects, potentially worth billions of dollars, from building vast solar energy parks in countries such as India to developing schemes for "carbon capture and storage".

Another of the Climate Initiative's major projects is to find ways of turning the CO2 locked up in forests into "carbon credits", which can then be sold on the world market at a large profit. In this potentially lucrative enterprise it is teamed up with, among others, the Woods Hole Research Center. As was first revealed on this blog, this is the body which, along with WWF, is involved in a scheme to turn the vast Amazon rainforest into carbon credits, under the UN's REDD scheme (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation). 

Also backed by the World Bank, they hope to get finally approval for this sheme at the UN's Cancun climate conference later this year, According to a formula worked out by Woods Hole's Dr Nepstad, they reckon that turning the world's rainforests into carbon credits could generate in all some $60 billion, by selling the right to offset the CO2 contained in the forest's trees against that emitted by firms in the developed world.

The Murdoch newspapers may of course be perfectly entitled to champion a cause in which their proprietors so fervently believe. But when it comes to comparing the piddling sums in funding received by a handful of sceptical think-tanks to the oceans of cash poured into the other side of the climate debate, there is no contest. 

How The Times's front-page headline might rather more relevantly have been re-worded was "Governments, foundations, multi-national corporations including the owners of this newspaper and Big Oil give hundreds of billions of pounds to promote worldwide climate bonanza." But doubtless The Times's editors would have ruled that this was too long for their front page.

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It goes on - by Richard...

A British soldier has been killed in a blast in southern Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence announced Tuesday, bringing the country's death toll to 325 since operations began there in 2001. The soldier from 36 Engineer Regiment was working with a team searching for roadside bombs when he was killed in an explosion on Monday in the Sangin area of Helmand province.

"He was part of a search team that was involved in an operation to provide security in Sangin District when tragically he was killed in an explosion," said military spokesman Lt Col James Carr-Smith. And, as always, we get the ritual words, cut and pasted straight from the MoD template: "His sacrifice will not be forgotten. We will remember him" ... just like we remember The Few (scroll to the bottom).

How many more bomb disposal officers are they going to kill before we get the correct equipment? And how long will it take for the media to realise that these people are being sent out to their deaths because, once again, the military have got it wrong?

This is like sending turret fighters in the Battle of Britain up against single-seaters, even though they were not up to the job - which we did. Or sending unescorted bombers on daylight raids deep into enemy territory, even though we were daily slaughtering Luftwaffe bombers, despite their escorts. We did that as well.

Or it is like sending pilots to fight over the Channel, with no dedicated air-sea rescue service to pull them out when they ditched. That couldn't happen, of course – except that it did. The impressive, high-speed launch pictured above looks ever so good ... but it did not come into service until 1941, AFTER the Battle of Britain.

The RAF got some launches then only because the South African Air Force had had the foresight to order them in 1939, and the British government took over the order. In the meantime, as the winter in 1940 approached, it requisitioned civilian lifeboats, leaving the merchant seamen to go without cover.

As we fast-forward to Snatch Land Rovers and soldiers in Basra sleeping in tents while their quarters were mortared, we see that nothing really changes - not even the naïve belief that the military looks after its own and actually cares whether its people live or die. As for civilians ... they matter even less.

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Wider not deeper - by Richard...

The mantra within what passes for the brain of your average "one nation" Tory like "Call me Dave" (who isn't a Tory at all really), is that the EU is a GOOD THING for trade. 

All that nasty stuff about European integration that those continentals rabbit on about can be sorted by continued enlargement. This dilutes the rule of Brussels and allows the classic British stratagem of "divide and rule" to apply, over which the mandarins from Whitehall can benignly exercise their arts.

Being a "one nation" Tory also means that there are not enough brain cells to carry two ideas simultaneously, which means that the species goes around bleating "wider not deeper", as the answer to all things EU. 

Needless to say, they remain sublimely oblivious to the fact that the last round of enlargement with those Eastern European Johnnies went wider and deeper. Enlargement thus remains the cure for all ills.

It is in that context that we must understand the latest exudation from The Boy. He is to urge the EU to drop the anti-Muslim "prejudice" against Turkey, which he says is blocking Turkey's membership.

It is not that the man is stupid, or even so detached from reality that we have difficulty believing he is on the same planet. Neither is the case. The real explanation is that he is a "one nation" Tory. This transcends stupidity.

Generations of inbreeding, combined with careful nurture within a microcosmic society which dictates the one permitted strain of thought of which the breed is capable, means that the likes of "Call me Dave" must come out with this tosh. It is the only thing for which he is programmed. It really is not capable of anything else.

Were he an animal, societies like the Kennel Club would intervene, and we would have pity on the poor creatures. But it is our great tragedy that the "one nation" Tories believe that they have an inalienable right to rule the planet. It is our even greater tragedy that so many of our fellow British are stupid enough to believe that they should. That is where the stupidity lies.

However, our fortune here is that enough people will judge The Boy's exudation as stupid (which it is not: see above) - so stupid as to be unbelievably crass. And, by and large, having had just as much of the "religion of peace" as they can swallow, they will most likely regard the call for greater tolerance as somewhat inappropriate.

Even more fortunately, many people will interpret this as a political death wish on the part of The Boy. And many, many more will now be willing to oblige him, and see that he gets his wish.

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