Saturday 16 July 2011

A Soylent Green moment - by Richard... Saturday, July 16, 2011


That the dregs of "Fleet Street" such as the News of the World should behave like the dregs, is like, er ... wow, amazing (not). That The Sun should be the scum is one of those "well I never" moments. Much lauded for its skill in brevity, that latter journal made up for what little skills it did exhibit by a diet of distortion and inaccuracy.

One would expect, therefore, that the political establishment might rise above the scum – dealing with it at arm's length and treating it with some reserve and even disdain. That is what is different about this tawdry saga, in that it reveals the fact that the two are one and the same.

Thus we have The Independent - and most others – reporting on the scale of private links between David Cameron and News International.

The man masquerading as our prime minister has been shown to have met Rupert Murdoch's executives on no fewer than 26 occasions in just over a year since he entered Downing Street.

Furthermore, the ghastly Rebekah Brooks is the only person Cameron has invited twice to Chequers, a privilege not extended even to the most senior members of his Cabinet. James Murdoch, News Corp's chairman in Europe and the man responsible for pushing through the BSkyB bid, was a guest at the Chequers eight months ago.

And the former NOTW editor Andy Coulson – who was arrested this week in connection with police corruption and phone hacking – was invited by Cameron to spend a private weekend at Chequers as recently as March.

Far from treating the scum with disdain, our politicians seem to revel in its company, indulging in mutual recto-capital insertion to a degree which would scarcely seem possible or safe. It really does invite the observation that merd of a feather sticks together. Dregs shall speak unto dregs – they are one and the same.

The only thing that saddens is the number of people, some quite intelligent and sound, who have been taken in by this motley shower. Instinct - very quickly backed up by fact - told us that Cameron and his "set" were not people of any worth. We did say so right from the beginning. Now, too late, the sad truth is dawning more widely.

This is a Soylent Green moment - "Cameron is scum". The sooner he is gone the better.

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No way back - by Richard...


There is some seriously good writing on the blogosphere at the moment, not least from the consistent Autonomous Mind and Wittering for Witney.

Both, in their own ways address the Murdoch imbroglio, AM dealing with the hypocrisy of The Guardian, while WfW tilts at Douglas Carswell for suggesting that the response to the affair demonstrates that we still have a sovereign legislature. Our "rotten legislature" is getting off its knees, says Carswell, and: "Parliament is recovering its purpose".

This, of course, is pure bubble speak. But then, even intelligent men have difficulty seeing things straight when they are trapped in the bubble – so you can quite see why Carswell should have a problem. WfW puts him right on a number of issues, leaving us in no doubt as to how far from reality this man has strayed.

What is more difficult to do, however, is point to all those issues which should have been dealt with in much greater depth, and which have been swept aside by the torrent of self-indulgent media coverage about Murdoch and related issues. There is nothing in this world, now or previously, that is so important as to have warranted this amount of media attention.

Tying this in with Carswell's idiot suggestion that "Parliament is recovering its purpose", we have a powerful illustration of exactly the opposite, occasioned by an article published on Watts up with that, on carbon capture.

Thus recounts how American Electric Power has scuttled its pilot project to bury CO2 from its Mountaineer coal-burning plant in Red Haven WVa (pictured). The original projected cost, before unanticipated overruns, was $668 million. About a third of the gross output from a plant would be required to capture, compress and inject the CO2 into the ground, generating an automatic 50 percent increase in the cost of net output, before conversion costs.

"The AEP plan, announced with much fanfare in 2009, marked the first time that carbon dioxide was to be captured and buried at a US power plant", we are told. The pilot system would only have captured 110,000 tons of CO2 per year, out of a total of 7.9 to 9.8 million tons per year from the plant. The company, headquartered in Columbus, "cited difficulties in getting state regulators to approve charging customers for the costs of carbon capture".

What this does, therefore, is confirm my own argument that the imposition of carbon capture on new coal-fired generation capacity is so expensive that it amounts to a de facto ban on the use of coal for electricity generation. Thus, when we go back to earlier this week and the Huhne energy policy, what we actually see being slipped past Parliament, with neither debate nor recognition, is precisely a ban on the use of coal for our future electricity needs.

Such a momentous and expensive change doubtless should have been challenged by an alert and "sovereign" legislature, and rejected by any such institution which was acting in the interests of its electors. But rather than Parliament "recovering its purpose", it has allowed this absurd and ruinously expensive policy through on the nod.

That Parliament has so lost the plot that it has allowed this to happen is worrying enough. But when, regardless of this Рand many other derelictions Рwe have an MP who thinks that the grossly excessive attention to the current hyst̩rie is an indicator of a return to health, it really is time to worry.

All the signs are that the institution has sailed past the point of no return. There is simply no way back.

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Noted By Madame Defarge - 4 - by Richard... Friday, July 15, 2011


In the tradition of Madame Defarge, we continue to record the 274 MPs who gave away £9.8 billion of our money, with their votes.

The next in our Hall of Shame is Peter Aldous, a Conservative (In Name Only), supposedly representing the constituency of Waveney, with a slender majority of 769 – which would be easily beatable by UKIP in a seat where its candidate polled 2684 votes in the general election. He would be a worthwhile target as he believes that the European Union's institutions and mechanisms should be strengthened and that Britain should be more closely integrated with the EU.

Mr Aldous's facebook profile is here. He says his number one priority is attracting more jobs to Waveney. This has involved campaigning for better roads and railways [including the 3rd Crossing and the Beccles Loop], superfast broadband and upgrading the electricity network, so that Lowestoft "can fully benefit from the great opportunity presented by offshore wind farms".

Clearly, Aldous is "blue greenie" as well as rabid euroslime, having recently said: "Not only can offshore wind generate significant amounts of electricity, it can support a new generation of engineering skills creating long term jobs which will be key to sustainable growth".

He claims he has also campaigned to ensure that pensioners get a fair deal – notwithstanding that he wants to condemn them to fuel poverty, with his enthusiasm for one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation known to man - in classic two-faced style, also backing a campaignto "end cold rented homes".

And this certainly did not stop him tramping through the lobby to vote for giving our money away – much of it to be taken from those very pensioners for whom he professes to care so much. His personal share of this smash and grab is £36 million, which he now owes us. He can, therefore, now consider himself Noted By Madame Defarge (NBMD). The knitting grows longer.

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The band leader resigns - by Richard...


... parliament reorganises the deck-chairs, and the sound of gurgling can be heard from the lower decks.

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Littlejohn - by Richard...

"I am left with the conclusion", he writes, "that the entire political class, police and all, are rotten to the core. They deserve each other, but I'm damned if I know what we have done to deserve any of them".

Richard, we don't deserve them – and that includes the organisation for which you work and by which you are so handsomely paid. So what are you – we - going to do about it? And if the answer is "nothing", that is what we have done to deserve them.

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Posted by Britannia Radio at 09:42