Wrecker greens - by Richard... Monday, January 24, 2011

Wrecker greens - by Richard... Monday, January 24, 2011

Whatever Cowen's ambitions might have been about holding on until 11 March, they seem to have been wrecked by the Irish Green Party. It has decided to withdraw from the Government after "losing patience" with the lack of resolution to the ongoing saga of Fianna Fáil's leadership.

It has been suggested that the immediate outcome of this palace coup is that the date of the election will be brought forward from 11 March, with Green Party leader John Gormley (centre of pic) declaring that Fianna Fáil’s leadership issue was too much of a distraction for the Government and meant an immediate election was necessary.

An early contest, however, is still not a foregone conclusion, even though the opposition Labour Party is preparing a vote of no confidence. There is still the matter of the Finance Bill to get though, to give effect to the measures contained in the Budget and give a legal basis to the EU bail-out.

This is supported both by Gormley and his party, and the Opposition benches. Cowen is saying that it would not be possible to deal with the Finance Bill within one week, so he will not be resigning as Taoiseach. Nor will he be seeking the dissolution of the Dáil and an immediate election. And in this, Cowen does seem to have the whip hand. If he is dumped immediately, the Finance Bill goes, and Brussels would be exceeding displeased.

Nevertheless, Fine Gael's deputy finance spokesman Brian Hayes says that it is party's view, alongside the Greens, that the Finance Bill can pass all stages in both Houses in time for the Dáil to be dissolved next Friday. An election could then follow within four weeks.

The odd man out is Sinn Fein's Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin. He says the Bill should not be put before the Dáil, and is calling for an immediate dissolution. That is unlikely to happen, but the Sinn Fein stance could reap electoral dividends when voters come to deciding who will replace Cowen and his crew. Not only the government, but the entire political class is on notice.

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Goldy - by Richard... Sunday, January 23, 2011

Every time someone dies as a result of floods in Queensland, a thousand greenies should be dragged out of their squats and drowned.

That, of course, is goldy - a bit like irony, as anyone who isn't being wilfully stupid can see. The difference is that it is better quality than the stuff produced by George Monbiot (aka Moonbat, although "ocean-going shit" will do) - and it doesn't rust.

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Before and after - by Richard...

The video above shows what happened when we still had a country – and industry – run by grown-ups. And look what we have now come to. Children are to be taught about homosexuality in maths, geography and science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to "celebrate the gay community".



Weep for what we once were and have now become.

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Avoiding the debate - by Richard...

As a further illustration of quite how childish our newspapers have become, we can set the scene with a robust opinion piece in the Australian Sunday Herald Sun, addressing the continuing scandal of the Brisbane floods.

Exploring the role of management of the Wivenhoe Dam, under the heading: "Greens be dammed, we need protection," this piece notes that: "Eco-catastrophists always cite the precautionary principle: if they are right and we don't reduce CO2 emissions, we face Armageddon. If they are wrong, all it costs is dollars." It then goes on:

But when money is allocated and attention prioritised to making contingency plans for vague hypothetical scenarios in the distant future, real priorities are neglected and real risks overlooked.

When leaders proclaim climate change as the greatest moral challenge, the entire machinery of government becomes preoccupied with the busy work of solving an imaginary problem. It is then easily blindsided by a real emergency.

This all-too-human phenomenon of selective attention is depicted in the famous psychology experiment with a gorilla. Volunteers have to watch a video showing a group of people passing a ball and count the number of times the ball changes hands. Most people concentrate so hard on the ball they don't notice the big gorilla that walks through the middle of the screen.

We have been so busy fretting about carbon dioxide that we have neglected the real challenge - how to adapt and protect ourselves from natural disasters.

As important as the sentiment is the debate – the fact that there is one. And the issues being rehearsed are not just local to Queensland or even Australia. The piece explores tensions between rampant greenery and public protection which are manifest here and everywhere in the developed world.

Kick-starting that debate is what Booker tried to do last week in The Sunday Telegraph, while the main newspaper focused on stream of consciousness and human interest copy.

One might have thought, though, that with the dam management and the green involvement prominent in the Australian media, this week's newspaper might actually acknowledge the extent of the debate and the strength of feeling. But not a bit of it. They ignore it. We have instead morehuman interest as we are regaled with a half-page illustrated account of "the desperate attempts to save a family from the Queensland floods."

This retreat into childhood truly is disturbing. Never more so do we need these important issues debated and when the so-called "broadsheets" sell the pass, we really are in trouble.

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"Unusually strong" - by Richard...

On the back of "abnormal weather " we now have a further development in the Okhotsk Sea crisiswith TASS reporting "unusually strong" ice pressure. This actually comes as no surprise at all, as the wind direction and strength over the last few days has combined to create possibly the worst conditions that can be encountered.

As a result, the convoy comprising the Admiral Makarov and the Krassin icebreakers, attempting to lead out the Bereg Nadezhdy fish carrier and the Sodruzhestvo factory ship, has not moved a single mile forwards since Saturday morning. It is still stuck at a distance about 30 miles away from the areas of open floating ice, exactly where it was yesterday.

The plan devised for the rescue operation has not changed, and is now being described as "multi-stage and complicated", with the Makarov and Krassin attempting first to free the fish carrier from the ice, after which the intention is to return for the Sodruzhestvo with its 348 crew members.

Waiting at the edge of the ice are the icebreaker Magadan and the tanker Viktoria. The latter will have to refuel the two icebreakers before they start back into the ice, but it looks to be a long wait. The trapped ships have entered their fourth week of confinement, some two weeks after premier Putin suggested they might have been freed.

Suggestions are now emerging that initial efforts to free the ships were delayed because all of the icebreakers in Russia's Pacific fleet had been leased out to the oil and gas company Exxon until 2016.

A rescue operation was initiated only after the Kremlin had intervened and guaranteed payment to the appropriate parties, by which time several days had passed. Putin must now hope for a successful ending to this crisis, as loss of the ships and any men may raise uncomfortable questions about the lack of preparedness in the region.

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It's Booker time - by Richard...

Two main offerings from the master scribe this week, one on EU megalomania - Galileo and carbon trading - and the other on another form of megalomania, the RSPCA and squirrels. Readers of this blog will be familiar with the EU stuff. The RSPCA is new, although one suspects that if there was an EU animal welfare agency, it would be modelled on the RSPCA and look very much like it.

Comments are not quite as active as one might expect, but even the stray Europhiles who are wandering onto the comments on Galileo are not quite as vile as the dedicated warmists (although most rabid warmists are Europhiles, not all Europhiles are rabid warmists).

Anyhow, the thought does occur that, as Booker writes of Wikileaks having dobbed in the unfortunate Berry Smutny, the now-suspended CEO of a German firm building Galileo satellites, it was supposed to be the subsidised Guardian that was masterminding the publication of the leaked US cables – one of which being the source of this information.

However, blog readers will recall that The Guardian did not put this information in the public domain, or any of the newspaper's EU partners. It was actually released by the non-EU NorwegianAftenposten.

Even in its pursuit of truth, justice, apple pie and cheap headlines, therefore, The Guardian is rather selective about what it tells us, not wanting to upset its furry little friends in Brussels (or the euroslimic BBC for that matter). There are leaks, and then there are Guardian leaks, it would appear.

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