Heavy snow kills - by Richard... Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Heavy snow kills - by Richard... Tuesday, January 17, 2012

The report refers to Afghanistan, where heavy snow and avalanches have killed at least 16 people in mountainous north-east, leaving dozens more trapped in their homes.

A week of heavy snowfall cut off main roads in remote Badakhshan province, making it difficult for rescue workers to reach affected villages. "So far 16 people have been killed as a result of heavy snow and avalanches in at least six districts of Badakhshan," provincial spokesman Abdul Mahroof Rasikh told AFP.

Twelve districts remain unreachable, but rescue teams made it to Ishkashim district where around 70 families are still trapped under snow, he added.

And now for the money quotes: "Heavy snowfall and avalanches kill scores of people in Afghanistan each winter ... In 2010, avalanches killed more than 150 people in the high-altitude Salang pass through the Hindu Kush mountain range that connects Kabul to the north".

In Kashmir also, five people are reported killed in Arctic conditions, with temperatures recorded as the lowest for 16 years. This, though, pales into insignificance compared with the reports from New Delhi, home of Rajendra Pachauri.

From there, we are told that North India is reeling under intense cold wave condition that has lead to more than 140 deaths across the region. The national capital region of Delhi is under a spell of cold wave with the minimum hovering around 5 degree Celsius on Tuesday morning.

Some of these areas have seen their first snowfall for 60 years, yet in no instance do we see the warmists complaining. They are only interested in death by global warming. Death by freezing is of no importance.

Declaring an interest - by Richard...

Purchasers of the print edition of the Failygraph today have been greeted by a full-page puff for the cruise industry, written by one of the newspaper's cruise sales team, Jane Archer.

As we pointed out yesterday, Archer has a habit of writing emollient pieces on the back of cruise liner disasters, reflecting the commercial interests of her employers, The Telegraph Group, which runs a significant travel business, marketing cruise holidays.

Compare and contrast the Archer puff with a piece by Gwyn Topham, in the Guardian (above) - which does not have the same degree of financial interest in selling cruises. Should politicians (other than ex-EU commissioners) have stood up in the House and made a speech on areas where they had major financial interests, the Failygraph would, no doubt, have waxed indignant about their failure to declare their interests.

But, in the foetid world of the media Telegraph, it seems, hypocrisy is the done thing. Not only may you publish long comment pieces under the guise of objective journalism, aimed at protecting your commercial interests, you can even con people into paying for the privilege of reading it.

Diagnosing the problem - by Richard...

"If you misdiagnose the problem", writes Jeremy Warner, "you are highly likely to prescribe the wrong sort of treatment".

The corollary also applies. In order successfully to solve a problem, you must first diagnose it correctly. Warner has "thought long and hard" about this, about "why Europe should be so bone-headed about the crisis it faces". And he still is nowhere near getting there.

Unsurprisingly, for the chattering classes, he started off on the wrong foot, telling us that "it was tempting to put these failings down to want of intellectual vigour".

Economics, goes the old [lame] joke, is not rocket science; if it was the Germans would be much better at it. "But actually", says Warner, " there are some very fine German economists all of whom fully understand the nature of the problem".

Hence in Warner's book, the problem is worse than that. "What it's really about", he opines, "is refusal to face up to the truth – that monetary union, the imagined crowning glory of the European project, cannot work under the present framework or anywhere close".

"Europe's leaders don't want to hear this", he adds. "They still cling to the belief that monetary union of fiscally sovereign nations can, provided everyone sticks to fiscal disciplines, be made a functioning and transformational engine of growth".

You might have thought he could do better than this. The problem, after all, is very simple. The euro is not an economic but a political project, and the "colleagues" are reacting in a political manner rather than taking the appropriate economic measures.

Their stance is that "the euro must survive", whence they dig their heels in and refuse to budge. They refuse to take the obvious and necessary economic measures because they are at odds with the political objectives.

It really is quite interesting to see how difficult the chatterati find it to come to terms with this very simple point. But the explanation is also quite simple. To do so would require them to come to terms with their own blindness – their own refusal after all these years to realise that the European Union was a political project, not a "trading agreement".

They themselves cling to the belief that the European Union is primarily an economic project, which has somehow gone off the rails, and only needs some economic correctives to bring it back on track. And that "refusal to face up to the truth" is what dooms them. If you start off from the wrong premise, you will always struggle to make a correct diagnosis.