Stuffed, stuffed, stuffed - by Richard... Friday, July 23, 2010

Stuffed, stuffed, stuffed - by Richard... Friday, July 23, 2010

If ever there was a necessary state intervention, it was the loan agreed by a dying Labour government to Forgemasters to finance the production of components for nuclear power stations – of which there is a worldwide shortage of capacity.

Yet, one of the first things the Clegerons did was cancel the loan – and on grounds that now look very dubious indeed, if The Guardian and the rest of the media have got the details right.

With accusations of sleaze in the air, we are looking at an administration which is on track to be just as vile and disreputable as its predecessor, only in a fraction of the time, especially with that sleazebag Huhne being accused of messing up the loan – possibly deliberately (8 minutes into the video).

The current row follows on from a report by KPMG which tells us that without more direct support from the government, it is still uneconomic for utility companies to invest billions of pounds in nuclear power.

The view is that it is unlikely that the new generation of nuclear plants will actually get built – something which has been evident for some time – simply though noting the lack of news or actual progress. As the timetable slides, and as we see the Forgemaster loan go down the tubes, there is only one conclusion – we are stuffed, stuffed, stuffed.

The Chinese, who recently reported commissioning their first fourth generation plant, and has unveiled plans to increase its 9.1 gigawatts of nuclear power to 40 gigawatts by 2020, must be lost in amazement at the willingness of British politicians to commit economic (and political) suicide.

Our expectations of the previous administration were always low, but there are some who actually expected more of the present incumbents. But it seems to be a general rule of thumb when assessing governments that, just when you think things have got as bad as it is possible for them to be ... they get worse.

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Day 13 - Battle of Britain - by Richard... Thursday, July 22, 2010

After a weekend of indifferent weather, the Straits of Dover for this Monday was set fair. The rest of the Channel was generally cloudy, with light westerly winds. There were bright intervals between showers in the east.

Readers of The Daily Telegraph were treated to headlines telling them of 24 "Nazi Raiders" shot down over the weekend. But this was to be a day when daylight activity was light, with only sporadic reconnaissance flights, occasional ineffective attacks on shipping and nuisance raids. Typical of this activity was at about 1145 hours when a Ju88 penetrated to Bristol and Cardiff and then Penarth, dropping bombs at the locations. The aircraft was intercepted and the rear gunner is believed to have been killed. The aircraft escaped across the south coast.

Read more on DAYS OF GLORY

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Missing in action - by Richard...

The nation's favourite newspaper is having a tee-hee moment about the misuse of photoshop by BP. Photoshop, it then says, has been used to commit "some outrageous crimes against fact-based photography," offering us some more examples.

Of a certain crime against fact-based photography committed by a certain Adnan Hajj, however, there is no mention at all. Curiously, reference to the controversy is completely missing. One wonders whether this could be because it was a crime – one of many – in which the newspapers were complicit, carried out as it was by one of their own, theReuters press agency. 

And, while the newspaper is devoting considerable space to slagging off BP over this misdemeanour, one cannot recall it being so strident way back in 2006, even if its then picture editor was on the case. It is thus sometimes very hard to avoid walking away with the idea that double standards are being exhibited by the media

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No news is the news - by Richard...

Many times in this blog we have noted that the real news is the stuff not being published by the MSM. Now, on the "climate change" front, that has never been more true. The silence speaks volumes.

That particular silence is the one that attends the publication of the Booker column on 11 July, revealing to the world that the IPCC did after all have feet of clay in its claims on the Amazon, with the source of "Amazongate" finally tracedto a Brazilian website.

When you get an "exclusive" like that – especially as the original Amazongate story was rather high profile – other newspapers and news agencies tend to pile in and lift the story. This time, though, with only very few exceptions, there has been silence. 

One of those exceptions was Lawrence Solomon in The National Post, who saw in the revelations the first test of the IPCC in a new post-Climategate era of openness and accountability that many seemed to be talking about. This, however, was even then a forlorn hope. The retraction on 20 June by The Sunday Times of its Amazongate story had already been hailed as a major victory by the warmists, who were set on exploiting it. 

Something of this can be seen from the WWF press release which had Keith Allott, head of climate change (there's glory for you) declaring that it " ... hopefully indicates that after a period of some hysteria, balance and consideration is being restored to the media's reporting of climate science."

In fact, there was more expectation than hope. Led by the WWF, the warmists embarked on a sharply focused campaign against many of the newspapers which had written about Amazongate, demanding that they followed The Sunday Times lead and retracted their own stories. 

Under this pressure, not a few editors were beginning to wilt, especially as there were hints of further PCC references. Booker's story, therefore, could not have come at a worse time. Although no newspapers have yet followed suit, it was noted and, at the very least, stopped the rot. No other newspaper has retracted its story.

Quite how finely poised the pendulum is now can be seen by the continuing silence. At the beginning of this week, a major international newspaper was to have published a piece calling for the retraction of The Sunday Times retraction, but internal politics have kept it off the pages so far.

And, while The Guardian and others were quick to publish news of Simon Lewis's complaint to the PCC, which triggered the ST retraction, none of the papers which so prominently announced this development have announced the complaint to the PCC about the retraction, a complaint which has now been formally accepted and is being investigated.

Interestingly, the silence also comes at a time when not only has the IPCC case on the Amazon been trashed but also, on the eve of the publication of a new tranche of research papers which seriously undermine the doom-laden scenarios promulgated by the warmists.

Just one of those, in the coming edition of New Phytologist, puts loss of the forest at a mere six percent. This is a paper by Marina Hirota et al on "The climatic sensitivity of the forest, savanna and forest–savanna transition in tropical South America." With this, the re-evaluation of earlier papers and the emergence of some which have been little-cited, the warmists' case has never been weaker. This makes the silence even more deafening, 

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Parish notes - by Richard...

The great project proceeds apace, with day 13 to be posted later today. We're beginning to populate the sidebar, with links to entries on all the main aircraft flown in the battle. Initially based on Wikipedia, we'll gradually tailor the entries to be Battle of Britain specific, and feed in some of the comments already placed in the forum.

Great minds think alike, it seems. We've spotted another daily blog about the Battle of Britain. The about us section is particularly interesting.

Battle of Britain thread

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The calamity cretins - by Richard...

Look how nice I am to you ... a post about the Clegerons and no facial picture. I can spare you that at least. But then you don't need faces for gaffes – and gaffes there have been aplenty. First, we have The Great Leader (or The Boy, if you prefer ... although we could do a mind-meld and have The Great Bleader ... I digress, but then I told you I was in a silly mood).

Anyhow, onto TGL, who is in Washington where, yesterday we picked him up from a WSJ op-ed talking about junior partners in the 1940s and the 1980s.

But, without his speech writer to hand, having to go solo on Sky News, The Great Leader completely ballses it up, telling Boulton: "We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis."

No we weren't - everybody knows that. The Septics weren't even in the war then and, as for being partners, they were even less well equipped than we were. In Europe, at least, we were very much the senior partner until the Allies were safely ashore at Normandy in 1944, and Ike took over as supreme commander. Up until then, we had called the shots, including the "Europe first" policy.

Now, it may look to be a small point – but it isn't. We have a man masquerading as a British prime minister who doesn't know any history. More to the point, anyone who could come out with that sort of crap has no feel for history. Different people use slightly different words. Some would say he isn't "centred", others say "rooted" and others use the word "bottomed", meaning "founded". But they all mean the same thing. Anglo Saxons would use four letters.

Any which way, if this had been an interview for the job of prime minister, the man-child should have failed. It is unthinkable that anyone with a feel for this nation of ours, and aspirations to lead it, could have been so crass.

Which brings us to Clegg. This child has been left in charge of the shop while The Great Bleader has been playing away. And, according to The Guardian and others – including Hansard, as the fool spoke the words at the the dispatch box – he has declared the Iraq war to be "illegal".

The only real things you can say about this is that Cameron and Clegg really do deserve each other – and we don't. Be we the thickest electorates in the history of ... electorates, we didn't deserve this. We really didn't.

There are certain things you don't do in life. One is fart loudly in church during the sermon. The other is to declare the Iraq war illegal when you are pretending to be deputy prime minister and the doorkeeper has let you into the Commons chamber by mistake. Somebody might just take you seriously.

For sure, a lot of people – even a few of our readers, who should know better – might agree with the loathsome Clegg. But, if you value the idea of sovereignty, there is no such thing as an "illegal" war. If it has been declared and conducted in accordance with national laws, it can be wrong-headed, unwise, even immoral - but not illegal.

But even if you do think that it is illegal, you don't stand at the dispatch box and say so. And such is the creaky mental architecture of this fool that he is now insisting that he was speaking in "a personal capacity". This child isn't safe to be let out on his own. One is not even sure that a sojourn without nappies is a terribly good idea - although the nappy should be wrapped round his face to keep The Little Bleader quiet.

I think you may now see why I am having a little bit of difficulty at the moment. How do you take these cretins seriously? How can one come to terms with the fact that they are in charge of our government?

And, by the way, we learn that two more soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan – both shot, and both in the same incident. As part of a combined force, they had gone to the rescue of a wounded colleague. But the really worrying thing here is the location – Lashkar Gah.

This is the place at the heart of the British military presence in Helmand, hitherto regarded as so secure that ministers and other VIPs are taken here for walkabouts. Then they can go home as "warriors" and prattle about having "been there" – the fabulous "wenneyes" – and how much progress there has been.

That troops are now being killed and injured in the streets of Lashkar Gah is a measure of how far down the pan the Afghan adventure has gone. If the man-child at the top of our government and his fatuous sidekick think we can hold out until 2014, then they are as seriously stupid (and dangerous) as they appear to be.

But, as we are beginning to see, with the calamity cretins in charge, anything is possible. Now would be a good time to run for cover.

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