A provisional victory? - by Richard... Wednesday, January 11, 2012

A provisional victory? - by Richard... Wednesday, January 11, 2012

In the latest draft of the intergovernmental treaty, this version of Article 1:

By this Treaty, the Contracting Parties, as Member States of the European Union, agree on a "fiscal compact" and on a stronger coordination of economic policies, involving an enhanced governance to foster fiscal discipline and deeper integration in the internal market as well as stronger growth, enhanced competitiveness and social cohesion.

… becomes this:

By this Treaty, the Contracting Parties agree, as Member States of the European Union, to strengthen the economic pillar of the Economic and Monetary Union by adopting a set of rules intended to foster budgetary discipline through a fiscal compact, to strengthen the coordination of economic policies and to improve the governance of the euro area, thereby supporting the achievement of the European Union's objectives for sustainable growth and employment.

And this, we are told is a "provisional victory" for The Boy. God help us if he is ever defeated.

Doing it differently - by Richard...

According to a report - reviewed by the Daily Wail - entitled Criminality's Grip on Business, the various Mafia groups across Italy make a profit of around £116 billion a year.

Extortion and intimidation is used to extract millions from shopkeepers, restaurants, cinemas, construction companies and thousands of other businesses as the godfathers spread their criminal enterprises across the whole of the country.

However, there is no cause of any moral superiority on our part. We just do it differently here, with our quango queens, local council CEOs, police bosses and our over-paid bank chiefs with their bonus culture.

The difference is that we have legalised extortion and intimidation, so that the council chiefs on their £250k "packages" can send out their bully-boy bailiffs, and thugs in blue, to scoop up the goodies without having to get their hands dirty.

At least in Italy, there is some – albeit slender – hope that the authorities might get to grips with the Mafia. In the UK, the authorities are the Mafia.

This snow is not happening - by Richard...

Peter Hardy in the Failygraph reports that, shortly after 7am on December 16, the pisteur charged with measuring the snowfall at the permanent weather station just above Courchevel 1850 shook his head in astonishment. Then he crouched down on the edge of the piste to check and recheck the figures.

"It couldn't be true, but it was", Hardy writes. "In just 10 pre-Christmas days more snow had fallen in the Trois Vallées than during the whole of last season. At other resorts across the Alps an avalanche of similar records has since tumbled – and still the snow has continued to fall in prodigious quantities".

But, of course, it can't be true. On 21 May 2008, the same Failygraph reported on a study of snowfall spanning 60 years, which had indicated that the Alps's entire winter sports industry could grind to a halt through lack of snow.

The study, reported in the New Scientist magazine found a dramatic "step-like" drop in snowfall at the end of the 1980s which has never recovered. The average number of snow days over the last 20 winters was lower than at any time since records began more than 100 years ago.

"In some years the amount that fell was 60 percent lower than was typical in the early 1980s", said Christoph Marty, from the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Davos, who analysed the records. "I don't believe we will see the kind of snow conditions we have experienced in past decades," he added.

And how can a scientist from the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research be wrong? Our modern-day the pisteur must be dreaming. This is a collective delusion.

The perils of referendums - by Richard...

It is easy to be suspicious of the sudden rush of publicity over the timing of a referendum on Scottish independence, especially as the basis of the argument seems thin.

Given how reluctant The Boy is to have a referendum on EU issues, his enthusiasm for referendums on other subject and his keenness to have an early referendum on this issue, one wonders whether this is, in part, a diversionary tactic to keep the media and the voters entertained and preoccupied - and away from more sensitive issues.

What does come over, however, is that all parties to the current dispute appear to think timing is important, underlining the fragility of ad hoc referendums as a tool of direct democracy.

As long as the politicians have control of the process and are able to decide whether a referendum is held on any particular issue, the timing of a vote and the question(s) to be asked, the people are not really in control. The whole process is far too easily manipulated.

On the subject of Scottish independence, there is an element here of bald men fighting over a comb. Increasingly, the "big decisions" are taken by the EU, and that will remain the case even if Scotland does break away.

Thus, the choice for the Scots is whether they are ruled on local matters by London or Edinburgh, when for many the preference is neither. Salmond does not really speak for Scotland, and the fate of the Union is far too important to be left to the machinations of this self-serving politician.

On the other hand, if the Scots really do want full independence, then it is in our interests to see an orderly transition, if for no other reason than we can then have a guilt-free gloat as we cut off their £26 billion annual subsidy, and watch their lights go out as Salmond's windmills fail to perform.

For the time being though, we the people assume our traditional posture as spectators, while the politicians play their games, deciding on when to allow the Scottish people their bit-part to endorse what has already been decided for them.

Whichever way the charade goes though, it should not be confused with democracy.

A mindset conspiracy - by Richard...

With the formal approval for HS2 high-speed rail scheme in the bag, we can now look forward to another of those grandiose schemes, so beloved of politicians, this one aimed at spending £32.7 billion by 2026, to have 1,200 ft-long trains capable of holding 1,100 passengers, whisking them on a 140-mile route from London to Birmingham in just 45 minutes.

However, we are also informed that, once the network is complete, a trip from Birmingham to Paris will take just over three hours, compared with four at present. And with extensions further north, a direct train service from Leeds and Manchester to Paris will then take three and a half hours – a saving of one hour. This much improved access to the continental rail system will be possible, according to the Failygraph:

… thanks to the decision to include a direct link between the new high speed line and the existing track from London to the Channel Tunnel in the first phase of the project, which was the biggest surprise in the Transport Secretary's announcement.

Immediately, the finely tuned nasal apparatus detects a highly odiferous rodent, one picked up in November by Witterings from Witney, which goes under the name of the EU's Trans-European Network (TEN). Through this scheme, says WfW, the United Kingdom is being integrated within the European Union state in ways that are not publicised.

The man is right in one sense. We are being integrated within the EU, but there is no secret about it. The TEN has been a key part of EU policy, since the scheme was presented by Jacques Delors – then EU commission president - to the European Council in Brussels on 11-12 December 1993.

Delors was concerned to present a big idea to cure "Europe's structural unemployment" and, at the same time to demonstrate the supposed benefits of "Community action".

The "big idea" he presented to the Council was a massive scheme of public works which he equated to the "New Deal", a scheme to build the "trans-European infrastructure", interconnecting energy transmission systems and a series of cross-border road and rail projects, of which high-speed trains were a major part.

Originally expected to cost about £260 billion, the core idea was to provide a massive boost in employment, but there was no element of compulsion. The EU commission could only provide "guidelines" and help co-ordinate the plans of individual member states, using the budget to part-finance some of the schemes in the less-developed areas.

Even then, the EU was not alone. So gargantuan was the scheme that even the United Nations got involved through UNECE, which produced its own Master Plan. However, it was also absorbed into the Lisbon Strategy and plays an equally central role in the attainment of the objectives of theEurope 2020 Strategy, both of which the UK fully supports.

Thus it is that the UK has "volunteered" to spend huge amounts on completing the British end of the TEN, attracting the warm approval of the "colleagues", but initiated primarily because the political classes all have similar thought processes, and have agreed to act together.

This I advanced as the "mindset conspiracy", arguing that you could take individuals from the political classes across Europe, separate them and place them on their own desert islands. But, give them the same inputs and, entirely separately, they would make exactly the same decisions. There is no conspiracy as such, but the effect is the same.

Nevertheless, once a member state decides to provide a facility, compulsion does kick in, throughCouncil Directive 96/48/EC (as amended). This, together with other instruments, requires interconnection and interoperability of national networks as well as access to such networks.

If there was any surprise in the Transport Secretary's announcement that the scheme should be linked to the European network, there should not have been. The moment the administration had decided to go ahead with HS2, a connection would have been mandatory.

The scheme itself, though, is a national own goal, and underlines the problem we have with withdrawing from the EU. You can take Britain out of the EU, but it is not so easy taking the EU out of the British government. The minds of the "colleagues" and our politicians and civil servants are so perfectly attuned.

The ironic thing is that, if the government was that concerned to improve the transport system and create thousands of jobs, massive works are required to eliminate the epidemic of potholes, with an estimated price tag of £13bn.

But such an option – for which the hard-pressed motorists have already paid – would never fly. It lacks the glamour and the photo-opportunities afforded by HS2, and would actually do some good. This, the politicians could never allow.

And they think the EU is mad? - by Richard... Tuesday, January 10, 2012

There can be few things more insane than this. I suspect that our government would be only too pleased to take lessons though.

"Shrinking ice" stops tanker - by Richard...

It may be relatively mild in Britain, but not so in Alaska which is suffering an "exceptionally harsh" winter with snow at crisis point in some locations.

Thick ice in the Bering Sea is also giving problems. The US coastguard's only functional icebreaker in the area, the USCGC Healy, is having difficulty getting to grips with ice up to 2.5 feet thick in the approach to the seaboard town of Nome, which is running out of diesel and gasoline.

After a ferocious November storm prevented the November delivery, the Russian tanker Renda has been despatched to deliver 1.3 million gallons of petroleum products.

Escorted by the icebreaker, the tanker was due to dock yesterday, but now no arrival date has been scheduled, with the ships about 165 miles away from the port.

Interestingly, Cmdr. Greg Tlapa, executive officer of the Healy, complains of the ice conditions changing constantly. When they reach heavier ice, he says, the path is closing between the two ships. In such cases, the Healy has to double back to relax the pressure from the surrounding ice.

The scale of the mission is unprecedented for the Coast Guard in the Arctic, Tlapa says, perhaps regretting that the US is not equipped with heavy icebreakers capable of close-coupled towing, of the type we saw a year ago in the Okhotsk Sea.

One does wonder about the National Snow & Ice Data Center, however, which is reporting that"Arctic sea ice continues to shrink", with ice extent "particularly low on the Atlantic side of the Arctic, most notably in the Barents and Kara Sea".

One really hates to think what the ice might have been like if there had been no global warming.

Not a happy bunny - by Richard...

Your Freedom and Ours has a look at the "Ganley revival". Helen is not a happy bunny, even if she is highly amused by this peculiar man.

Living history - by Richard...

I suppose, in a sense, we should be grateful, having been offered such clear evidence of the decay of the train wreck they call the media – alongside a fine illustration of the power of the narrative.

Thus do we have the Daily Wail blathering about David Cameron's "historic veto", the Independenthas Clegg calling for the EU to "bypass Cameron's veto", and the Financial Times reports him as seeing the "EU veto as 'temporary'".

Somewhat down market, the Express tells us that Clegg is plotting "to sink David Cameron EU treaty veto". Even further down the food chain, the Mirror has the Lib-dim leader mocking the veto, while The Sun has Nick Clegg the "traitor" for declaring that Britain "must back the treaty David Cameron vetoed last month".

If it wasn't so serious, it would be hilarious – but at least we do have that compensation of seeing the MSM getting it so spectacularly wrong. The media is devalued coin, not able even to report with accuracy the very basics of EU politics.