A good start - by Richard... Friday, July 29, 2011

A good start - by Richard... Friday, July 29, 2011

Martin Jay, the "veteran foreign correspondent" writes for al Arybia News offering an amusing and often insightful perspective on the EU.

"Europe's bold project is not a peep show, but a sinking ship … let's get an Italian clown to play with the deckchairs", is the title of the piece in which he recalls interviewing Romano Prodi EU commission president from 1999 2004:

He flapped his arms in some sort of funky-chicken spasm; he huffed, puffed and jittered on camera like a demented Muppet, but [he] was a joy to interview as he always understood the first rule about broadcast media: that it was entertainment driven ...

His comment during a TV interview for an American network in 2003 still brings a smile to my face, returning to me as I often stroke the shaft of nostalgia in the Belgian capital. "My job is to re-connect Europe's citizens with the European Union", he said, with the eager look of an Albanian paedophile waiting for the school bell to ring.

"Ah but Il Presidente", I stirred in the plastic studio seat which seemed to go well with my even-cheaper suit. "Surely you don't mean: 're-connect' … but simply 'connect'"?

After an analysis which is only too familiar to readers of this blog, he notes of recent events that: "This is the beginning of the end, as soon the giants – France and Germany – will be forced to infringe more EU laws just to satisfy local unrest. Then the project will start to look about as stable as a spastic trying to repair a broken TV with a bowl of jelly".

Jay has done a remarkable thing here, writing in a fresh and entertaining fashion on a theme – the collapse of the EU - that is so desperately familiar that most of us are bored witless even thinking about it.

For sure, it is going to happen. The thinking, as I have said so often before, is what should happen next ... what we should be doing. Even leaving the EU would not solve anything, and the break-up of the EU will create as many new problems as it solves.

Most of all, we need to do something about the chronic democratic deficit in this country, reining back our politicians and bringing them under control. That will need more than entertaining writing, but even that would be a good start.

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Always a reason - by Richard...

Time magazine sums it up by stating that, in all probability, Breivik most likely acted alone. And to many, it then says, "it may come as a relief that Breivik's claims of being just one of several killer cells in some wider conspiracy for global domination turns out to be nothing but a web of deception spun by a brutal killer".

But – and there always is a "but" - investigators and counterterrorism officials are not relieved. They fear that Breivik represents a new, potentially deadly paradigm shift in the world of extremist violence – the "Lone-Wolf Terrorist".

Now, if Breivik had been part of a group, there would most certainly have been calls for more action to contain his form of terrorist. But the investigators and counterterrorism officials are certainly not going to let a "paradigm shift" go to waste. This too "may need more government attention", we are told by the Bloomberg agency.

And behind this is the masterful exploiter of the "paradigm shift" – none other than the European Union determined to turn these killings into a beneficial crisis.

Thus the Polish presidency convened a joint meeting of the two Council working groups on terrorism, the Terrorism Working Party (TWP) and COTER.

And after representatives of the Norwegian authorities informed the meeting about the events and the ongoing investigation., there was a "debate which included experts from EU member states, representatives of several EU bodies and institutions (Europol, European External Action Service, European Commission) as well as the office of the EU Counterterrorism coordinator".

The Oslo attacks, concluded these great sages, proved that "terrorism has nothing to do with any particular religion or belief". Thus, particular attention was given to the processes of radicalization and recruitment.

But the real meat was the issue of "lone-wolf terrorism", represented by terrorists that are self-radicalised (e.g. through the internet) with no obvious attachment to any terrorist organisation.

This, they say, seems to require increasing attention. And, of course, the "experts" have decided that, in confronting the threat of a terrorist attack, regardless of its underlying motivation, the effective exchange of information is vital - lots more meetings in agreeable places, with plenty of long lunches.

Then we get the payoff line: "The importance of strengthening response capacity was another issue that was highlighted". Needless to day, it is that "response capacity" which the EU will be only too happy to provide ... another job for euro-plod.

But it is also a wide-open invitation for local plods to bear down on individuals who mind their own business and have absolutely no links with any actual or suspected terrorist organisations. The very fact of the absence of such links is now sufficient to invite suspicion and action. After all, if they have absolutely no contact with other terrorists, that proves they are "lone wolves".

And there we have it. For the officials, whatever the event, whatever the crisis, there is always a reason for intervening. And this one is a beauty: no one is now safe from the finger of suspicion, and the long arm of euro-plod. Absence of evidence is now evidence.

As did one of the "colleagues" once suggest a statute to the "great integrator" Nasser, one can see them putting up a statue to Breivik. He has given them all they need.

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Eleven weeks' borrowing - by Richard... Thursday, July 28, 2011

Considering that HMG is borrowing on average something like £3 billion a week, just to keep up with current expenditure, it is a little hard to get too excited about the estimated cost of £4,025.6 million to maintain our operation in Afghanistan for the current financial year.

But that is the figure the Defence Committee has published, with the proviso that it may run to £4.4 billion, or even more. And that, of course, is not the total cost – merely the additional sum needed to support the operation, over and above that of maintaining the units involved at their normal state of readiness.

The additional billions, according to The Guardian, bring the cost of the Afghani operation to £18 billion, met from the Treasury reserve.

That figure does not include what the defence committee describes as "additional costs in terms of training opportunities cancelled or deferred and equipment wear and tear that will eventually have to be met" – and nor does it take account of the probability that, had they not been chasing ragheads around the countryside, Dave could have made the soldiers redundant and sold their toys off for scrap.

So far, Dave and his merry men have written off about some £12 billion-worth of kit, including the Nimrods, the Harriers, the Navy's type 22 frigates, and sundry other goodies.

However, that still leaves £33.8 billion to find for the core defence budget for 2011–12; £34.4 billion for 2012–13; £34.1 billion for 2013–14; and £33.5 billion for 2014–15, much of which could be saved if Dave got rid of the armed forces altogether, cutting about eleven weeks' worth of the borrowing requirement each year – plus just over a week for Afghanistan and Libya.

One really gets the impression that Our Dave isn't really trying hard enough.

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Under our noses - by Richard...

Unremarked in the UK MSM, not only because of its familiarity but also because the danger is not fully (or at all) realised, are recently announced EU plans for increasing the spend on "research". Thus it is left to The Irish Times to tell us that the EU plans to spend €7 billion on research in 2012, the largest single research budget in the world bar the US National Institutes for Health and NASA.

This is part of the Seventh Framework Programme running from 2007 to 2014, but it is only part of it. Most of the projects paid-for out of the fund are match-funded, with upwards of 60 percent found from other sources.

Needless to say, the Irish Times writes in glowing terms about this bonanza, extracted from increasingly unwilling taxpayers, and notes that the successor named Horizon 2020, has a proposed budget of €80 billion, the only major area for increase in the EC budget after 2014. It is clear from these announcements, says IT writer Conor O'Carroll, "that European governments see investing in research and innovation as vital to economic recovery". He then details some of the areas that will be funded.

However, what is not said is that the primary purpose of EU research funding is the promotion and development of integration – through diverse means ranging from the study of the "European dimension" of so many issues, to the insistence of cross-border research teams, thus forcing the Europeanisation of the research effort.

Alongside this, a major function of the research funding is to buy up academia, creating an "intellectual" class beholden to the EU and thus, in theory, supportive of it.

Then, unrealised by many, much of this funding is directed at specific issues with a view to developing EU policy, to the extent that the European academic community has been absorbed into an extended policy-making matrix, giving it a stake in the central government structure. The corollary of that, incidentally, is that there is no money for national policy development.

Such is the effectiveness of the EU publicity machine, however – and the gullibility of its "donors", that the research programme is seen as an unalloyed good, creating "opportunities" and all sorts of benefits for the academic community.

In fact, under our very noses, the EU is buying up academia with our money, turning it into a trans-national fifth column, in the service of European political integration. Opportunities there are, but none that are at all wholesome or welcome. We are paying for our own demise.

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Not "deniers" but "dissenters" - by Richard...

Conservative white males (CWMs) are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views ... these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well.

and ...

CWMs also tended to assert a stronger understanding of global warming than other adults – and those who said they understood it best were the most likely to be the strongest deniers.

and ...

The pattern demonstrates that CWMs "are more likely than other adults to reject the scientific consensus on climate change ... "not surprisingly," 58.8 percent of CWMs "deny the existence of a scientific consensus," compared with 35.5 percent of other adults.

So ...

The more you know, the less likely you are to believe the garbage. That does not make us "deniers". We should be calling ourselves "dissenters" ... and that would make a good replacement for the debased "eurosceptic", where the same applied. The more you know about the EU, the less likely you are to be want to be part of it.