We know he's not that stupid - by Richard... Tuesday, January 31, 2012

We know he's not that stupid - by Richard... Tuesday, January 31, 2012

We don't have a great deal of time for Myrtle, but we know that he is not this stupid. The only thing we can surmise is that he has been kidnapped, with the villain taking over his blog and impersonating him.

The Hannan I knew had brains enough to know that were was no veto, and that the answer to the current mess is not an in/out referendum.

One assumes that the kidnapper(s) must be linked in some way to People's Pledge, as this is the outfit that is being promoted, one that is wasting good money on something we are unlikely to get and which, if we did, we would probably not win.

But what do we make of this man, a man who is now maintaining that he did veto the EU treaty? "We vetoed the treaty," he says. "That's why an EU treaty doesn't exist", he says. "There isn't an EU treaty because I vetoed it", he tells the BBC.

The man is even now contradicting his own spokesman. The Smethurst said: "There was … no text of a Treaty which was vetoed; it was rather the process of amending the European Union Treaties to this end which was vetoed".

Yet the media – on this live press conference - didn't challenge him. The two questions following were about bankers' bonuses. That is the media for you, the Fourth Estate, guardians of democracy. Pathetic. Truly pathetic.

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The future - by Richard... Monday, January 30, 2012

A propos this, read this. Via Autonomous Mind, who gave me the tip about Gene Sharp, Witterings from Witney shows us what we must do.

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Reality bites back - by Richard...

These deaths are just the headline cases. How many more die from that silent killer, hypothermia, without anyone recording the event as such? When the differential mortality figures come in, what will be the seasonal excess?

But even with just the headline mortality, the point is made that cold kills. Defra and its greenie friend may make the case for increased deaths due to global warming. They, however, are talking about potential risks, conditional on warming that is no longer happening. We are talking about the reality.

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False alarms - by Richard...

There is a certain amount of hyperventilation on the blogosphere, accompanied by a significant number of e-mails in my inboxes, drawing my attention to strikes and unrest in Italy (and especially Sicily), with suggestions that we could be looking at the start of a revolution.

However, before drawing too many conclusions from current events, it is always a good idea to look at the recent past - as in the second of the "cuts" above: that is Italy in December 2007.

The point is that industrial unrest is a standard background feature of Italian politics – it is easier to record the periods when there were not major strikes in that benighted country. That does not in any way indicate that great political changes are afoot.

In fact, what is missing here is any sense of a political movement. We are not in the 1920s and 30s, when the epic battles between Socialism, Communism and Fascism were being played out. There are few "street" issues, currently, that have any profound political significance. Largely, we are seeing the projection of self interest and self-protection (such as protecting pension rights),

But, as we wrote in December, it is unlikely now that we are going to see the archetypal revolution, and especially not one preceded by waves of strikes and industrial unrest. The world has moved on and we do things differently now – in Europe, at any rate.

The future is probably going to be this, or something very similar. In many respects, this is already happening. By contrast, the wave of street demonstrations and strikes we are seeing at the moment is just political fluff – false alarms.

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The Boy retreats - by Richard...

Bruno Waterfield says that Britain has officially dropped its opposition to the use of EU institutions to administer and enforce a eurozone fiscal pact. The Tory europlastics will be cross, their leader now stripped of his eurosceptic mask. That effectively snuffs out even the Tory version of the "veto". It is a deceased veto, dead without even being born.

This is confirmed by the AFP agency, which seems to be inventing even newer non-vetoes, Cameron, not for the use of. Britain "will not veto the use of European Union institutions by the other 26 members of the bloc as they push forward a new fiscal pact which excludes London", it says.

Apparently, though, it is citing Willie Hague, who is saying that Britain has "real legal concerns" about the use of the ECJ under the new treaty arrangements, but "would reserve its position for now". He told BBC radio: "If the use of the EU institutions at any point threatens Britain's fundamental rights under the EU treaties or damages our vital interests such as the single market then we would have to take action about that, including legal action."

Translated, that definitely means that Cameron is to take no action.

Nick Wood in the Daily Mail seems to be up to speed on this: "Backsliding" will be a word not far from the lips of Eurosceptic MPs as they anxiously scrutinise David Cameron's foray into the Brussels bearpit today, he writes, adding such gems as: "Dave is in danger of being outmanoeuvred by a European ruling class …", and: "Dave's Brussels triumph looks more threadbare by the day …".

"Once again", concludes Wood, "we are muddling through in the EU slipstream". And so it will always be, as long as we have a europhile masquerading as our prime minister. Yet they are still calling him "Teflon Cameron" over at Tory Boy Blog, although they acknowledge that "backsliding on the veto, would provide the conditions for a major revolt".

Well, it looks as if "Teflon" has met his Brillo pad. However, Duncan Smith is still being quoted as saying: "I absolutely trust the prime minister on this, I know where he stands".

And don't we all?

"Senior Conservative backbencher" Bernard Jenkin thus has the measure of the man. According to the Evening Standard, he says: "This is a retreat. What is the difference between refusing to sign the treaty of 27 and then allowing the hijacking of the EU institutions with a treaty of 17 plus?"

Are the Tories revolting?

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What happened? - by Richard...

Booker is not the only one to notice that Obama has gone shy about "climate change". Maxwell T. Boykoff in The Washington Post has picked it up as well, calling it a "dangerous shift" in the rhetoric. Asking "what happened" to the terms "climate change" and "global warming", Boykoff observes that they have nearly disappeared from the political vocabulary,

A recent study at Brown University looked specifically at the Obama administration's language and calls for "clean energy" and "energy independence" now occupied the terrain. Graciela Kincaid, a co-author of the study, wrote: "The phrases 'climate change' and 'global warming' have become all but taboo on Capitol Hill. These terms are stunningly absent from the political arena".

This somewhat ties in with a report from Reuters last week, which noted that the United Nations "earth summit" scheduled for June in Rio is also abandoning "climate change" in favour of setting goals for "sustainable development".

This rather confirms the inherent flexibility in the green objectives, with "climate change" being but one issue in the UN's ambitious "Agenda 21" programme. This, in fact, stems from the Bruntland Report in 1987, which talks of "interlocking crises", which enables activists to switch from one heading to another, which still pursuing the same overall game plan.

Changing the rhetoric, therefore, gives the Greens tactical flexibility and a degree of resilience, enabling them to reflect the public mood and political realities – more so in the US. There, it would seem, if "climate change" is encountering resistance, the people can be sold "energy independence". But the underlying agenda remains the same.

In the UK, though, there seems to be less flexibility. Even while the Mail on Sunday, the same edition is covering the British administrations "first national risk assessment of climate change", warning us that – quite literally – some of us are going to die (5,900 every year – it would seem).

Given that the UK has been more committed than the US to tackling climate change, and for longer, it maybe will take longer to change the rhetoric. Already, though, we see multiple job adverts for "sustainability officers" (and variations), more so than climate change vacancies.

However, the purists are not happy. Rebranding is all very well but Boykoff complains that calling climate change by another name creates limits of its own. "The way we talk about the problem affects how we deal with it", he says. "And though some new wording may deflect political heat, it can't alter the fact that, 'climate change' or not, the climate is changing".

Perhaps, though, rebranding is not necessary. After all, global cooling is also "climate change", even if one suspects that our response to cooling might be a tad different from how we deal with the proclaimed but non-existent warming.