Frankton Memorial Dedication - Cockleshell Heroes - Pointe de Grave - 31/3/11

My wife and I were lucky enough to be invited today, by the Royal Marines, to the unveiling of the new Frankton Memorial, at the northernmost point of the Medoc, Pointe de Grave.

The most moving moment of the ceremony for us, was the moment when two elderly French ladies who had assisted some of the marine commandoes in their escape from the Nazi murderers, who against all rules of warfare, had already slaughtered many of their comrades. This photograph of mine captures the  touching moment after these brave ladies had laid their wreaths:

Another very personal highlight of the ceremony honouring Anglo-French harmony, was the complete absence of any of the blue, yellow starred, EU flags, symbol of the present latest danger to our freedoms.
 
A BBC report is linked here, while a more personal tribute from BBC Scotland is here.

Make tomorrow English Fools Day

The following is a press release received from the English Democrats Party:

English Fools Day (1.4.11; 10.00am to 12.00 noon)

On the 1^st April England becomes the last nation within the UK not to have free prescriptions because Scotland joins Wales and Northern Ireland in having, Barnett Formula funded, free prescriptions. To add insult to injury the British Government has announced that it will be putting up English prescription charges from £7.20 to £7.40!

The English Democrats will therefore be organising a colourful and jokey demonstration, in keeping with April Fools Day, to make the point that this April Fools Day is really English Fools Day. 

This demonstration will be held outside the (English) Department of Health, Richmond House, Whitehall London from 10.00 to 12.00 (Police permission has been obtained). 

The theme is that we English are the fools for not fighting our corner with sufficient vigour! The English Democrats intend to change that! 

 

Nigel Farage MEP on Elmar Brok MEP

More on Elmar Brok's EU Parliamentary immunity from prosecution by Mary Ellen Sinon, is linked here.

Living in the EU Loony Bin!

The following dose of rare common sense comes from an article in the Telegraph this morning, linked here:

Mark O'Sullivan at Currencies Direct pours scorn on the ESM. He says:

“The irony of asking both Greece and Ireland, who both had to be rescue last year, to contribute €31 billion to the newly formed ESM did not seem to bother eurozone leaders.

“This once again showed that eurozone leaders just do not get it: asking sovereign states who are in effect insolvent to actually borrow in the debt markets to contribute to their own rescue fund.

“The Portuguese are a classic case. They still refuse to ask for a bail-out, but are more than happy to bring down the government when the austerity measures that are needed are voted down, forcing the prime minster to resign, and pushing them ever closer to the bailout they are trying to avoid.

“So Portugal - now a government-free zone - is also being asked to stump up €18 billion towards the ESM, despite the fact they could be weeks away from themselves being bailed-out. The eurozone would be much better suited if the next rescue package had the acronym HELP, as until bondholders are forced to take a haircut the problems in Europe are being either ignored or compounded into an unworkable mess.”

NB This blog editor added the emphasis to the last sentence of the quote!

Gormless Governance by Milksop Ministers!

Fittingly George (née Gideon) Osborne had a recurrance of what appeared to me to be teenage acne for his appearence before the Commons Finance Committee yesterday. The spectacular blunder over the two billion pound tax grab against the North Sea oil and gas industry was covered on Channel Four TV News, last evening as may be read about and viewed from this link, amusingly titled, "Crude awakening for Osborne's refuelling of the economy". More from Aberdeen on that topic this morning from here.

This blog immediately pointed out the grossness of Osborne's budget misjudgement, read here, when the  details were known. Many years spent analysing the feasibility of commercialising North Sea oil fields allowed me to immediately recognise the potential and pointless disaster Osborne had created. Obtaining an acceptable annual average rate of return on such huge investments is always stunningly adversely affected by apparently small changes to tax legislation. All such tax regimes result in percentage returns based on the realised hydrocarbons sales price, it is therefore completely disingenuous of Osborne to argue, as he did yesterday, that changing the tax regime was the only means the government (not necessarily synonymous with the people of the country) would gain its share of rising market prices. As I stated in my posting of last Thursday in the link above:

Furthermore and even more critically at present, North Sea energy (is) in a declining phase (and) thus needs extra tax incentives as it provides a protection against the ever growing middle-east chaos.

Is immaturity sufficient excuse for Britain's milksop ministers getting everything so clearly wrong, read this on the RAF pilot shortage for example?  Is David Cameron as big a moron as his daily actions now increasingly indicate and can Nick Clegg really be as cretinous as he is allowing himself to appear?

Whatever the answer, as set out in my posting of yesterday immediately beneath this, it is clear that with Gordon Brown these two set out to deliberately bankrupt our country in a vain and hopeless bid to save the doomed Euro, immediately following the last General Election. It has since appeared that action might well prove to be be the worst they could achieve, however, daily growing evidence now throws even that assumption into doubt!

WHY DID THE THREE MAIN PARTY LEADERS AUTHORISE ALISTAIR DARLING TO SIGN UP FOR THE EFSF, KNOWING THE PROCEDURE WAS ILLEGAL, THE UK LACKED ANY GOVERNMENT WITH THE POWER SO TO DO AND THAT IT WOULD MERELY WASTE BILLIONS TO DELAY THE INEVITABLE?

Establishment Lying over the EU Bail Out Fund.

Bruno Waterfield in the Daily Telegraph this morning has charge and countercharge over who knew what and who did nothing to avoid Britain having to stump up, what is now known to be, billions and billions of pounds for the EFSF.

Happily, as is nowadays so often the case, unlike all the mainstream media, this blog was alert to the dangers and carried details of all the developments as they unfolded, while the rest of the nation followed the sycophantic garbage that was the media reporting on the formation of the coalition government.

Below I will supply links to my own reporting, during the actual events as brought out in Mr Waterfield's column today. The following passage contains the crux of the dispute:

Mr Cameron attacked Mr Darling for taking the wrong decision during an emergency meeting in Brussels on May 9 and suggested he ignored advice given to him by Mr Osborne. But Mr Darling said: "What we discussed was not voting against but abstention, recognising that Britain could have been outvoted."

Mr Cameron replied: "I have had a full discussion with the Chancellor about this issue and he was absolutely clear it was not something Britain should agree to."

A government document, signed by Justine Greening, a Treasury minister and seen by The Daily Telegraph has suggested that the Prime Minister's account is wrong. "It should be noted that while agreement on behalf of the UK was given by the administration, cross–party consensus has been given," said the briefing note, dated last July. 

 I summarised the entire disaster looking back to early May, on 21st December last year, and concluded that charges of negligence would eventually need to be brought against all those involved: I quote a small part of that posting, which is worth reading in full, together with its several links, for a full understanding of the depth of the lies now being told:

The use of Article 122 was widely known to have been an illegal ruse at the time. The incoming administration led by Cameron, Clegg and Osborne could have refuted Darling's concurrence to such illegality and instituted proceedings to exempt the UK from the disastrous financial consequences.

Can any now doubt that it was a complete dereliction of duty NOT so to do? Indeed can any voter not now perceive that all three main political parties in the UK are complicit in the illegal squandering of the nation's wealth at the behest of the Euro Group member states of the EU of which  assemblage Britain is not even a part?

It was absolutely clear that Darling should never have been allowed to attend the 9th May meeting, as I blogged on that very day, the country was without a government AND not part of the Euro Group which was the only portion of the EU then in crisis. That posting concluded as follows:

Alistair Darling belongs to a defeated party and should have no authority to attend an ECOFIN meeting charged with reaching a pan-EU agreement as commanded by members of the euro currency group.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg should clarify Darling's status immediately and if possible prevent his departure from the country!

Matters did not rest there however, for the Coalition had ample opportunity to clarify the situation when the new Chancellor attended his first ECOFIN meeting as I set out in my posting of 17th May, linked here.
Instead of so-doing he involved himself in the known illegality at a cost to the country which it remains impossible yet to calculate.

To conclude, let me highlight again in red, as I did last December, the main point at issue first posted on 9th May 2010, as is now confirmed by the Treasury Official Justine Green as revealed by Bruno Waterfield in today's Telegraph:

Alistair Darling belongs to a defeated party and should have no authority to attend an ECOFIN meeting charged with reaching a pan-EU agreement as commanded by members of the euro currency group.

David Cameron and Nick Clegg should clarify Darling's status immediately and if possible prevent his departure from the country!  

Plutonium in soil at Fukushima

The Irish Times has the details, still apparently being disputed by the company that manages the damaged nuclear plant as the quotes below illustrate:

A by-product of atomic reactions and also used in nuclear bombs, plutonium is highly carcinogenic. Nuclear scientists believe some of the plutonium may have come from spent fuel rods at Fukushima or damage to reactor No 3, the only one to use plutonium in its fuel mix.

Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said while the plutonium levels were not harmful to human health, the discovery could mean a breach in the reactor's containment mechanism......

 §§§

Sakae Muto, a Tokyo Electric vice-president, said the traces of plutonium-238, 239 and 240 were in keeping with levels found in Japan in the past due to particles in the atmosphere from nuclear testing abroad.

"I apologise for making people worried," Mr Muto said.

The Wikipedia entry on plutonium toxicity and plutonium in the environment, may be read from the links.

Atlas Shrugged - The Movie

There is an interesting plug for both Mark Steyn and Atlas Shrugged in one posting on Samizdata today, linked here. Two of my favourites in one post, good show Johnathan Pearce!

To plug the new film due out in mid-April in the USA, you can respond to the video on this link:

http://www.atlasshruggedpart1.com/IAmJohnGalt

Portugal - Has been there, seen it and done it!

Portugal has had its ups and downs in recent years, but in the past the rest of Europe could calmly ignore the problems. Not so in the nightmare world of the European Union and the euro currency it brought with it. The following from Wikipedia, nicely illustrates this point:

In 1960, at the initiation of Salazar's more outward-looking economic policy, Portugal's per capita GDP was only 38 percent of the EC-12 average; by the end of the Salazar period, in 1968, it had risen to 48 percent; and in 1973, on the eve of the revolution, Portugal's per capita GDP had reached 56.4 percent of the EC-12 average (though the figure is necessarily dampened by the 40% of the budget that went to African wars). In 1975, the year of maximum revolutionary turmoil, Portugal's per capita GDP declined to 52.3 percent of the EC-12 average. Due to the new revolutionary economic policies, oil shocks, recession in Europe, the return of hundreds of thousands of overseas Portuguese from the former overseas provinces, Portugal underwent an economic crisis starting in 1974–75.[26] Convergence of real GDP growth toward the EC average occurred as a result of Portugal's economic resurgence since 1985. In 1991 Portugal's GDP per capita climbed to 54.9 percent of the EC average, exceeding by a fraction the level attained during the worst revolutionary period.[27] After the revolution Portugal's economy would collapse and it took 16 years for the GDP as percentage of the EC-12 average to climb to 54.9 percent again. Portugal had been one of the founding members of EFTA (European Free Trade Association) in 1960. After the fall of the Estado Novo regime and the loss of its overseas territories in 1974 and 1975, Portugal left EFTA and entered into the European Economic Community in 1986.

This crisis this time, however, may be the last that the EU can face, according to this report from the Wall Street Journal! The ECB, of course, knows no restraints, resuming its bond purchase programme today, according to Reuters. Whose money with value are they using to acquire worthless and soon to be unsupported bonds, one must once again wonder?

German voters deliver shattering defeat to Merkel

In an event, likely to be of huge significance for the whole of the EU, Germany's Green Party appears, this morning, to have won control of the wealthy German State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, a wealthy region along Germany's border with France and Switzerland, which has been under the control of the Christian Democrats since 1953. Read the Wall Street Journal report from here.

A video, highlighting the immaturity of the voters who have delivered this further disaster to European democracy, may be viewed here:

Can the EU impose a Bail Out on Portugal?

Any individual believing in national sef-determination and democracy must answer NO to the question in this postings headline.

Anybody wishing for the continuation of the EU in its present form is compelled to answer YES!

That, in a nutshell, is why the EU has become a tyranny! The terms of the EFSF require that the government of a Euro Group country wishing for money from the EFSF requests the funding assistance. Rather than do that, the Government of Portugal resigned, and under its constitution a new government apparently cannot be voted in and formed in less than two months. The President has limited powers so it appears a likely outcome will be a default when funds due to foreign banks next fall due, or that outside governments (presumably the home countries of such foreign banks) make the payments on Portugals behalf to avoid default. This would be outside the EFSF and the IMF and would be an acceptance of default in all but name!

The following paragraphs from a report in the Sunday Telegraph this morning, linked here, seem to sum things up very neatly:

Nobody in the country wants the EU-IMF intervention, but it now seems certain to be imposed, just as with Ireland last year, to protect the euro – not to mention the economies of France and Germany– from the contagion of the financial crisis.

“Portugal doesn’t need any help,” Mr Sócrates pleaded with other European leaders at an EU summit in Brussels on Friday.

“I know what it would mean. I know what it meant for the Greeks and the Irish and I don’t want that for my country.”

Even the centre-Right opposition Social Democratic party that torpedoed the socialist government opposes the terms of a bailout, which is expected to bring even tighter austerity policies and lower living standards for years.

Popular anger at measures aimed at averting a bailout has sent Portugal into an economic tailspin.

Monetary meltdown - John Ridd on Wheat!

This blog has long proposed that the acreage yield of wheat from good farm land in temperate zones would be an ideal standard for fixing monetary trading values either internally and/or internationally. Click here to read some of such posts.

Somehow our unscrupulous politicians must be forced to halt using ever-growing computer power to create ever greater quantities of ever more worthless digital money. The riots now spreading to Syria and Jordan will become ever more difficult to halt when the resulting complete disillusionment reaches Western industrialised societies!

In my slow, steady but  most enjoyable re-read of Lorna Doone, and against the present backdrop of the coming Portugal default and ensuing collapse of the Euro currency, I thought that at the start of this weekend, I would share, with my apparently ever-growing readership, the words of John Ridd,  on the crucial topic of wheat:

"God makes the wheat grow greener,
While farmer be at his dinner"

§§§

   And so, one beautiful spring morning, when all the earth was kissed with scent, and all the air caressed with song, up the lane I stoutly rode, well armed and well provided.

   Now though it is part of my life to heed, it is not part of my tale to tell, how the wheat was coming on.  I reckon that you, who read this story, after I am dead and gone (and before that none shall read it), will say "Tush!  What is this wheat to us?  We are not wheat: we are human beings: and all we care for is human doings."  This may be a very good argument and in the main, I believe that it is so.  Nevertheless, if a man is to tell only what he thought and did, and not what came around him, he must not mention his own clothes, which his father and mother bought for him.  And more than my own clothes to me, ay and as much as my own skin, are the works of nature round about,  whereof a man is the smallest.

§§§

I also blogged last August on the crucial role played by wheat in the development of Europe and quote this paragraph in particular:

In Professor Norman Davies' tour de force 'Europe - A History', he recounts how wheat, being a seasonal crop requires intensive labour only at the spring sowing and autumn harvest, thus leaving early Europeans, whose staple cereal wheat became, "time and freedom to branch out, to grow secondary crops, to reclaim land, to build, to fight, to politicize." Such a conjunction, he continued "may well contain the preconditions for many features of Europe's social and political history, from feudalism and individualism to warmongering and imperialism."

Think a bit on nature, once again, this spring weekend. I wish all a peaceful one.

EU Council ends with details unresolved

The FT has probably the best report so far on the latest fiasco among the follies that is the EU system of monetary meltdown.

More on that and the potential wonders of wheat first thing tomorrow.

UK's Telegraph group finally sees the light on the EU!

The Telegraph newspaper has selected Peter Oborne to trumpet their conversion to seeing common sense. The entire article is worth reading in full, from here, as it confirms exactly what this blogger has been pointing out for years in even greater grisly detail. I have selected a few choicer quotes:

"The resignation plunges the eurozone into a crisis it cannot survive....

"The scary truth is that the scale of the problem facing the eurozone has been gravely underestimated by British commentators. The reasons are shaming. One significant factor is the financial and economic illiteracy of political journalists and foreign correspondents.....


"But the most important problem is the failure to study history. Here the facts are devastating, and bear repetition. Portugal has defaulted on its national debt five times since 1800, Greece five times, Spain no less than seven times (and 13 times in all since 1500).

By contrast, Anglo-Saxon countries rarely, if ever, default.....

"Sarkozy and Merkel are dreaming. They are out of their depth, struggling against forces they cannot control and which will in due course wash them away. It is economic reality, not political speeches.....

Treasures from the threads - number sixty-one

On the Spectator Coffee House discussion on why Cameron made no demands in conceding an EU Treaty amendment which required unanimity came this powerful point.

denis cooper

March 25th, 2011 9:09am

Trevorsden -
So as a thinking person, do you believe that it is our national interest for our government to sign us up to a "Save the Euro" campaign?
I remember when Hague was more interested in "Save the Pound".
Under present treaty arrangements the two are incompatible in the long term, because THE EUROZONE CAN ONLY GROW.
There should be a treaty mechanism for a country which has joined the euro to make an orderly withdrawal, but there isn't.
There should NOT be a treaty obligation on all EU countries to eventually join the euro, but apart from the UK and Denmark there is that legal obligation and it is automatically imposed on all new member states.
Cameron had it in his power to insist on those two treaty changes to cut the eurozone down to size and limit the long term threat it would pose to our national interests, and to demand other concessions such as an end to the EU Parliament sitting in more than one place and permanent exemption from the WTD, as the quid pro quo for the treaty change wanted by Germany and France in particular.
Instead he is prepared to give them whatever they want and demand nothing in return, and Matthew Hancock and 309 other MPs, including all the Tory MPs bar about 20, have just voted in favour of that policy of appeasement.

The few (29) MPs who still believe in British democracy.

Westminster ceded legislative power to the EU by the following vote on Wednesday evening. 310 MPS voted for this treason, only 29 against. The link to the Hansard report is here. It appears as follows with a full list of the 310 traitors:

23 Mar 2011 : Column 1063

Deferred Division

Section 6 of the european union (amendment) act 2008

That this House takes note of draft European Council decision EUCO 33/10 (to amend Article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union with regard to a stability mechanism for Member States whose currency is the euro) and, in accordance with section 6 of the European Union (Amendment) Act 2008, approves Her Majesty's Government's intention to support the adoption of draft European Council decision EUCO 33/10.

The House divided: Ayes 310, Noes 29.

The 29 who opposed this outrage were as follows:

Bone, Mr Peter
Campbell, Mr Gregory
Campbell, Mr Ronnie
Carswell, Mr Douglas
Cash, Mr William
Chope, Mr Christopher
Corbyn, Jeremy
Davies, Philip
Dodds, rh Mr Nigel
Donaldson, rh Mr Jeffrey M.
Drax, Richard
Gray, Mr James
Henderson, Gordon
Hollobone, Mr Philip
Hopkins, Kelvin
Main, Mrs Anne
McCrea, Dr William
Nuttall, Mr David
Paisley, Ian
Percy, Andrew
Redwood, rh Mr John
Shannon, Jim
Sheerman, Mr Barry
Shepherd, Mr Richard
Simpson, David
Skinner, Mr Dennis
Stuart, Ms Gisela
Tapsell, Sir Peter
Wilson, Sammy

Question accordingly agreed to. 

The completely delusional universe of EU Leaders

The bumbling explanation of the EU leadership's views on the Portugal crisis, as offered by the blathering dimwit Robert Peston, the BBC's Business Correspondent, on their Radio Four Today prgramme this morning at 0713, is a classic of its gendre and will be linked here for your listening amusment when the audio link is up. Listen now!

Meantime, having agreed a future package which will come into effect in 2013, blithely assuming that the entire structure is not actually collapsing around their ears and eyes, while hearing and seeing nothing, agreement on present arrangements was deferred until June to satisfy the Finns and leave them to elect a Government that will accept no further financial obligations, and the Germans to continue their support for Chancellor Merkel's party for the rest of this month's local elections. Fat chance!

According to potty Peston the ECB will have to handle the bankruptcy of Portugal in negotiations with a non-existing government during the next two months. Commission President Barroso meanwhile can see through the fog, smoke mist and double speak to stoutly declare the following, as reported by EU Observer, linked here:

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, himself a former centre-right leader in the debt-ridden southern state, insisted the country would push ahead with plans to get its budget on track.

"He [Socrates] made it clear that ... whatever will be the next government, all the commitments in terms of the fiscal targets will be respected," Barroso told journalists.

"We expressed confidence in the capacity of Portugal to overcome the current situation and also its capacity to find the funding it may need in the months to come."

So that's all right then! But one question does remain, who will eventually pay off all the bad debts the ECB is accruing?

Finland threatens upgrade of EFS! Euro trembles - Major Banking defaults loom!

The following report comes from Finfacts Ireland, linked here:

It's reported from Berlin that Chancellor Merkel plans to propose that Germany €22bn contributions to the new €500bn rescue fund be stretched over five years rather than four as  agreed two weeks ago.

Meanwhile Finland has dissolved its parliament and will hold a general election on April 17 and is unable to make any decisions on the bailout fund. The right-wing True Finns party, which opposes measures to help embattles countries of the single currency area is expected to do well.

In the Irish Times, further explanation, linked here, on the existing bail out scheme the EFSF, points out:

The EFSF is backed by €440 billion worth of guarantees from euro zone countries but its lending power is limited to €250 billion as a condition of the triple-A credit rating it relies on to secure favourable borrowing rates. This is because only six of the 17 euro zone countries – including Germany and Finland – are beneficiaries of AAA rating.

EU leaders want to increase its lending capacity to €440 billion as part of a new “grand bargain” for the euro zone and most of them, particularly the triple-A countries, agree this should be done by increasing the fund’s guarantees.

But Finland’s centre-right government, under pressure as support rapidly grows for the Eurosceptic True Finns, has refused to increase its guarantees and is not expected to agree an increase at this summit.

Questions of legality for the EU Council for today and tomorrow.

1. Have the Parliamentary procedures followed by Cameron to gain consent to EU Trety changes any legality. (The curious procedures in the Commons and the Lords have lacked consistency and coherence and leave this observer clearly of the opinion that they do not!)

2. Can the EU Council proceed, given that the Government of one of its member states (Portugal) fell last evening and that another (Belgium) has been operating without any democratic legitimacy for months.

3. The Lisbon Treaty, from which come the passarelle provisions, now planned to be used to impose non-democratic economic governance across the European Continent, was rejected by the voters of France and Holland in national referenda, was shamefully re-run in a referendum in Ireland and was implemented by constitutional mal-practice in the UK, in defiance of a clear commitment by the three main political parties at a general election to hold a subsequent referendum on that treaty!

The NHS is a "moral mistake" - Senior Establishment Figure

Charles Moore, former longstanding editor of the Daily Telegraph, has slammed the shambles that is the NHS, which Osborne should have brutally pruned in his budget yesterday, in place of further taxing the North Sea oil industry and one of our main hopes for the slim chance of an eventual economic recovery. Furthermore and even more critically at present, North Sea energy in a declining phase thus needs extra tax incentives as it provides a protection against the ever growing middle-east chaos. The oil companies will inevitably be forced to recoup the two billion pounds of extra costs raised by raising their prices to Brtitain's motorists, the UK market being a distinct tax area which includes UK Continental Shelf activities.

Looking to the disgraceful NHS, where waste, inefficiency and indolence thrive in an equally unsanitary environment, the latest report arriving in my immediate circle, for example, being that of a young mother suffering an infected wound some weeks after a caesarean section.

The report referred to in this post's headline, appeared in the Spectator Magazine on 19th February, overlooked on first reading.The statement is so significant, I quote it in full herewith, it is linked here:

The National Health Service has now lived almost long enough to test its claim of full treatment ‘from cradle to grave’. 

Certainly most of those now dying under its care have paid taxes for it throughout their working lives, in the name of this proposition. Now we hear from the Health Service Ombudsman, Ann Abraham, that it frequently neglects old people, often to the extent of killing them. Why does this surprise anyone? It is in the nature of a service which forbids genuine choice to patients that it will end up suiting the convenience of those who work in it rather than meeting the needs of the sick. Until money truly follows the patient, each old person walking into a hospital will be seen by those working in it as an additional burden, getting in the way of treating others. More than 60 years of state medicine have almost killed off the original Christian ‘Big Society’ motives behind nursing and replaced them with trade union ones. The wider culture increasingly sees ‘assisted’ dying as positively virtuous, and the contempt that this implies for the value of an old person’s life therefore spreads through the nursing profession. The old people now being killed by the NHS are of the generation which most fervently believed in it. Their hopes are being dashed. We shall never have humane health care in this country until we understand that the creation of the NHS — though not the subsidy of health care for the poor — was a moral mistake.

This blog editor has crusaded against the NHS since his first experience of it in the nineteen-fifties, read one recent quote here. It is refresshing to have such a senior former mainstream journalist join this cause, the essential point is still being missed however, this being, if normally healthy individuals cannot at the outset be made responsible for their own personal hygiene, physical health, fitness and well-being, why should we expect them to be responsible for all the other aspects of a normal human life?

More from this blog on the NHS is here.

Portugal and Belgium - two ex-nations boasting EU Presidents, both with democracy destroyed! Co-incidence?

Hardly can there have been a greater crisis than that being faced by the EU this evening.

Can two individuals, the Portuguese, EU Commission President and the Belgian, EU Council President, not more perfectly epitomise the institution that is effectively destroying the countries of their birth?

Can any doubt the personal motivations of these two men? Surely there can be little question but that it is money and power! Is it co-incidence that their appearance itself forces major doubts of their sincerity?

Why do other nations, with longer democratic histories and greater reasons for national pride, wish to follow in the footsteps of where these so-called "presidents" lead? Are Ireland and Greece the new role models?

Who is really pulling our strings and so determinedly destroying our individual choices and family well-being?

Who is John Galt?

When Great Alfred lay on Athelney.....? An Anglo-Saxon message for the EU

When King Alfred the Great lay on the Isle of Athelney, the true forebears of the English, well knew the consequences and fearsome perils of paying the Danegeld. Would that our leaders of today were as wise, read this EU Observer report from yesterday,linked here.

Today, a grubby instrument of doubtful legality, (no, not the budget, although that will surely receive all the publicity) will doubtless be passed in the House of Commons by our money grabbing, maggot MPs, thus sealing the demise of our democracy, it being the first of what will inevitably become a river of orders in the form of non-negotiable statutes passed to us by the German controlled EU, in accordance with their remit to in future enforce Economic Governance across Europe, to which we will inevitably be subject, once they create the crisis that will force our weak rulers to sign up for the Euro.

After Jan and Robert Kilroy-Silk, I was the third party member of a political party called Veritas, meaning truth, formed to bring that stolen commodity back to the people of the British Isles. We were thwarted, partly by the mainstream media, to whom the truth remains anathema. After the budget today, and with other ongoing and unstoppable events, the bloody penury of the British People will be shouted across the headlines of this same media, driving home to the former nation its dreadful message of the daily purgatory of being penniless.

This blog, is not one of those that likes to revel in expletives. Down the many years of Ironies and Ironies Too the writer has tried to avoid the use of expleteives, but on this occasion, given that there will most likely never again be another opportunity, bloodlessly so to do, I believe the House of Commons should quite simply, today tell the EU, to Fuck Off!

A review of the Atlas Shrugged movie.

Read it here. Generally favourable.

Lord Pearson's conclusion yesterday in the Lords

To conclude, I submit that it is really not in this country's interest to prop up the euro. The quicker it disintegrates the better, with countries that cannot afford to be part of it going back to their national currencies. Only then will they be able to start trading their way out of the colossal debts into which the euro and the project of European integration have led them. Mr Van Rompuy has just said that the EU will collapse if the euro fails. I fear he may be wrong and that the juggernaut of European integration could continue without the euro and would indeed do so, but if he turns out to be right, what a pleasant prospect greets us: no Commission, no Committee of Permanent Representatives, no Council of Ministers, no European Court of so-called Justice, no EU Parliament, none of the colossal fraud, waste and overregulation which weigh us down at home and in our competition and trade with the rest of the world. We would be left with a Europe of democratic nations freely trading and collaborating. It is to those sunlit uplands that the Government should be leading this country and the rest of Europe. That is where the national interest lies, not in this grubby instrument of doubtful legality.

The entire debate from Hansard is linked here.

EU/Irish face-off over Interest/Tax Rates Continues. Passarelle purgatory for the UK

The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schauble, backed by his colleague from France, Christine Lagarde, made the following statement yesterday, as may be read in the concluding paragraphs in this report from the Irish Times:

... German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble said that Ireland must make “proposals” if it wants a reduction on the interest rates.

“When someone wants to change a contract which he has just agreed to, then he has to think not only about what the other party to the contract should change, but he must also come up with suggestions about what he can change himself,” he told reporters.

France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, took a similar line.

“Today we decided nothing on Ireland because we had no indication from our Irish colleague of any kind of modification,” she said.

What was deceided was a new seven hundred billion euros fund to guarantee future bail outs across the EU, only being used once Germany and France have established complete and absolute control over the running of the economies of all other former nations within the Euro Group.

Complacent Brits such as the conceited Cabinet Ministers of the Coalition Government, should read the Lisbon Treaty and awake to the fact that their nation is committed by Treaty to joining that very same Euro Group, that they will be bound by all provisions then in effect for the common currency, that this will occur sooner rather than later due to the bullying now an everyday occurrence within the Euro Zone and the power the Euro Zone will soon control to create a currency crisis for the pound sterling.

This is economic warfare, it has been ongoing since the Macmillan and Wilson Premierships*, which deliberately destroyed EFTA.  The British nation has subsequently been driven up a cul de sac by weak politicians while the final end game is about to begin, with the use of the Lisbon Treaty passarelle, in the Westminster parliament tomorrow.

*Two Harolds who lost us our country as effectively as their namesake in 1066!

RAF Typhoons at risk for nothing!

On 28th February a mere three weeks ago, this blog asked "Where is HMS Ark Royal NOW? You scumbag politicians" as David Cameron announced the case for a Libyan 'No Fly Zone'.

Did the spendthrift numbskulls leading this Coalition Government, Cameron, Clegg, Hague and Fox then pause and re-commission and re-deploy our then one remaining aircraft carrier, HMS Ark Royal to the Mediterranean, complete with its operational Harrier fighter jets, ideal for enforcement of a 'no fly zone'.  The ship, its planes and their pilots, had only just then been declared as fit for nothing else but the scrap heap? But No! Of course they did not! Such a reversal would have required a public admission of error and a speedy volte face. Something shirts stuffed only with pride could never contemplate! Yet it may well have saved the nation many millions of pounds!

Yesterday on Sky News TV, Dermot Murnaghan, (IMO one of the few intelligent broadcasters nowadays on British TV) asked General Lord Dannet about the HMS Ark Royal and the reply was clear, that even today that decision should be reviewed. Sky News, as usual continuing their own interests in driving British policy decisions, later edited out the references to the Ark Royal, re-playing Dannet's comments in subsequent news bulletins, as if no mention of HMS Ark Royal and its Harriers had ever been made.

Meantime, this same news broadcasting organisation showed three RAF Typhoons taking off from RAF Coningsby, reportedly to bomb Libya, in fact merely for Gioia del Colle airbase in southern Italy. The full sorry story of this plane, once known as the Eurofighter, may be read from here. Put simply, this plane, is an EU project and therefore, like all such expenditures, nothing but an expensive joke and confidence trick perpetrated against the people of Europe.

Putting such a piece of kit (which if the nation is to continue its present National Health Service and Foreign Aid programme, cannot possibly be afforded or justified) is political negligence of the highest order, when the HMS Ark Royal and its Harriers, already written off costwise, could have so easily been equipped and deployed!

Anti-Gadhafi Coalition faces Yemeni sniper crisis!

There seems little doubt that roof top snipers who shot protesters through the head and neck in the Yemen appear to have been operating with some form of official sanction. Press reports are widespread as may be read by clicking on the following publications titles; Telegraph, New York Post, Seattle Times, and a PBS video:



The situation in Bahrain is also one that the UN Security Council also seems in need of addressing if any consistency is to be applied in the growing Middle-East crisis. Another video illustrating this point is here:



A debate on Vermont Public Radio on the difficulties all this presents the West may be heard (or a transcript read) from this link.

EU President Van Rompuy and Gadhafi

Unconscionable Germany, and the obscene waste by Baroness Ashton and the EEAS.

Every individual employed by the EEAS should tender their resignations this weekend. One parliamentary question indicating the blind and reckless spending of that organisation, tabled last December, is linked here.

The Globe and Mail from Canada this morning publishes an article highlighting the farce that a common EU foreign policy is seen as in the saner world, read here.

Last September the UK Civitas organisation published a report calculating that the costs of the EEAS had by then reached 399 million pounds sterling and that the organisation was mainly engaged in 'spin' a euphemism for lies in post-Blair Britain.

Germany is presently holding a two year seat on the UN Security Council, yet in spite of their Foreign Minister promising that "Germany will be a reliable, responsible and engaged partner....We will do our part to ensure that the world continues to see the council as the central body for peace and security in the world." that country abstained in the vote aimed at putting a halt to the murderous Colonel Gadaffi having a free hand from the international community to carry on recklessly slaughtering his own citizens.

Which EU citizens wish to associate themselves with such an abstention, and what values are thus accepted, effectively stating "our neighbours may do as they wish, as long as we are free to tell all in the EU how to run their societies, while we continue getting ever richer, no matter what bestiality occurs beyond our immediate zone of control!"

What value do EU citizens gain from the hundreds of millions now being squandered by the EEAS? Is such arrogant carelessness what our hundreds of millions of pounds is being spent to promote, while our own aircraft carriers and fighter jets are prematurely scrapped?

Worse still, next week the 26 other nations plan to hand control of the economic governance of the EU to this same Germany. In Britain's case in a manner, sneaked before Parliament, in a grotesque mockery of what was once our democracy.

It is not even as if the events in Libya are happening in some far off corner of the world far from the EU. Malta, an EU member lies close by the Libyan coast less than half an hour flight away.

If this is not a defining crisis for the EU, then what else will ever be? The corrupt, mad and useless spending on the worthless and uselss EU must be brought to an end once and for all! Europeans must be free to consult their own  individual consciences in determining who might govern them. In such a manner do national consciences take form, this process cannot occur within the EU.

Voting intentions update on the only EU voters who now matter!

The following, showing the reasons for Merkel's panic, is from Reuters, linked here:

By Annika Breidthardt

BERLIN, March 18 (Reuters) - Support for Germany's anti-
nuclear Greens has risen sharply since the Japanese crisis,
putting Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives in danger of
losing a regional stronghold next week, a poll showed on Friday.

The Deutschlandtrend poll also showed that more than two
thirds of respondents believe Merkel's decision this week to
close down seven nuclear power plants for safety checks was an
election stunt.

Merkel's CDU faces three state elections this weekend and
next, including a March 27 vote in Baden-Wuerttemberg which the
party has ruled for more than 60 years and which is also home to
one of Germany's oldest nuclear power plants.

The poll put the Greens at 24 percent in Baden-Wuerttemberg,
up three percentage points from only a week ago when a huge
earthquake triggered a tsunami and the crisis at Japan's
Fukushima nuclear complex.

Together with their likely coalition partner the Social
Democrats, who were steady at 22 percent, they would be ahead of
the current Baden-Wuerttemberg coalition of CDU and liberal Free
Democrats (FDP), the parties of Merkel's federal government.

Merkel suspended her unpopular nuclear policy in reaction to
the Japanese crisis, shutting down the seven oldest nuclear
plants including one in Baden-Wuerttemberg.

But the poll showed her CDU dropping three percentage points
to 39 percent in the state, one of Germany's richest. The FDP
lost half a percentage point to 5.5 percent, just above the 5
percent it must achieve to enter the state parliament.

Last month the CDU lost the Hamburg state election
disastrously, further reducing Merkel's sway over the Bundesrat
upper house, whose composition depends on the relative strengths
of parties in the regional assemblies.
 Merkel's majority in the Bundesrat vanished last year after
the CDU failed to hold onto North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany's
most populous state. Loss of Baden-Wuerttemberg would deliver a
big blow to Merkel's authority, analysts say.

At a national level, the Greens gained 5 percentage points
from a week earlier to reach 20 percent, according to the poll.

However, pollsters said survey results were more volatile
than usual due to the emotional shock of Japan's disaster.

Merkel's move to reverse last year's decision extending the
life of the nuclear stations has drawn scorn from the opposition
which says she is merely trying to avoid a major electoral
setback in the regional votes this month.

This allegation was reflected in the poll, with 68 percent
of respondents saying they believed it was an election stunt.
The poll said 26 percent saw it as a credible change of policy.

The CDU also faces a tough challenge from a resurgent
hardline Left Party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt on
Sunday, where it now holds power with the Social Democrats.

Voter disillusionment may also mean the far right National
Democratic Party could enter the state parliament there.

Below is a table of Federal and Baden Wuerttemberg polls,
according to results released by the ARD television channel:

(in percent, changes in percentage points)

FEDERAL           BADEN-WUERTTEMBERG

CDU                   35 (unch)         39 (-3)

SPD                   28 (unch)         22 (unch)

GREENS                20 (+5)           24 (+3)

FDP                    5 (-1)          5.5 (-0.5)

Cowardly Germany and Gadaffi!

Germany abstained in the UN Security Council vote at the UN last evening. Libya's Gadaffi has declared a ceasefire even before one military flight had been launched to enforce the UN no flight order against his murderous regime. Norway, meanwhile  a non-EU country, had already declared it would contribute to the actions against Gadaffi.

Yet France and Britain are prepared to countenance Germany becoming the effective sole driving force of the EU at a Council meeting next week. For more on that topic, read my first post of today, immediately below.

Britain and France MUST halt any futher moves towards an EU foreign policy or further EU integration. Surely the events of the past 24 hours prove the warnings of this blog over many years to be absolutely correct?

Franco/British actions MUST now protect their own citizens!

The joint efforts of Britain and France, which impressively succeeded in obtaining a UN Security Council resolution against Colonel Gadaffii last night, must now be continued to address the democratic rights of their own countries' citizens which seem likely to be completely expunged in the EU Council next week.

A thoroughly despicable and shabby piece of trickery was placed before Britain's Parliament this week, as I reported here, and will return again next Wednesday. It is beyond all conscience that an EU Treaty amendment requiring unanimity could be forced through without any attempt, from either Britain or France, to redress the democratic deficit which has swung so far in favour of the non-democratic eurocrats of the EU against the historic and hard won democratic rights of both the peoples of Britain and of France.

I have been living in the South-West of France for several years and I am now aware that there is little difference in the fundamental beliefs between the people amongst whom I now live and those in my own place of birth in Devonshire in the South-West of England.


It is therefore particularly abhorrent that President Sarkozy should have placed himself alongside Chancellor Merkel in pushing for these changes which will shift the economic governance of the now fully non-democratic EU firmly to the East of our Continent.


Ireland is being particularly victimised in these matters, as the Prime Minister of Luxemburg has pointedly made clear in his use of the term "torture". More distressingly given the deteriorating economic situation in Greece, Portugal and other peripheral ex-nations of the EU, the entire process is, in any presently foreseeable circumstance, inevitably doomed to failure.


Events in the Far East, Middle-East and nearby Mediterranean are driving the necessity for a complete re-appraisal of political alliances and imperatives. This is not the moment to seal a non-democratic Federal Europe! Cameron must now convince Sarkozy of that fact and thereafter combine their efforts to restore proper democracy to the peoples of their two formidable nations!

Obama to visit Ireland in May. Kenny stands by 12.5% corporate tax rate.

An interesting interview has just finished on Bloomberg TV with Enda Kenny of Ireland, a link is here, while a euronews report is here. The main points are in this postings headline. A signal has clearly been sent to the EU!

Treason at Westminster (continued)

The full text from Hansard of the debate in Parliament last evening, when Ministers point blank refused to attempt to gain any concessions from the EU when agreeing to a Treaty amendment by use of the Lisbon passarelle is linked here. I quote merely from the speech of Bernard Jenkin MP:

In the few minutes for which I intend to speak, I shall concentrate on what was said by my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Mr Cash) and by the right hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr MacShane). The Government should be worried when there is agreement between those two Members. On this occasion, they agree that momentous events are afoot. My hon. Friend seemed to be saying, in so many words, that while we had always opposed the formation of a federal Europe which would inevitably be dominated by Europe's major economic superpower-Germany-we were now facilitating the creation of a federal Europe, at least within the eurozone.

The matter will now receive further debate on Wednesday 23rd March, demand concessions be obtained by Britain before acceding to this change from your own MP!

The unmitigated disaster of scrapping UK mortgage interest tax relief!

Tax relief in the UK was known as Miras, read here, it was introduced in a bid to encourage home ownership. It followed along from the earlier abolition of annual taxation assessed on the market value of property.

Is home ownership a sensible objective? A few minutes spent watching the following video clip may well incline one to that view, albeit relying on the exagerated comedy features of a popular British TV show:



In the UK today, the three main political parties, compete to claim themselves as being the most "progressive", of which, after any brief  analysis, independently minded researchers would likely be convinced is merely a new word describing modern day marxism, it is unlikely therefore that many proponents of the case for private home ownership can be found amongst their ranks.

Amazingly I have recently been informed by e-mail, that such an aboilition is starting to be considered in the USA itself. I provide a link to a site dedicated to fighting such a disastrous course. Read here and here.

Home ownership benefits society in a miriad of ways providing employment not just to local builders, carpenters and plumbers but countless other service providers attracted by serving communities with a vested financial stake in making their communities attractive and prosperous. The one serious drawback I have been offered being that it may have a slight tendency to reduce the mobility of labour.

What can be learnt from the situation that has developed in the UK since Miras was withdrawn by the social engineering New Labour Party at the beginning of this new century?

Robbed of mortgage interest tax relief, the benefits of property ownership became confined to the imperative for an ever escalating price of property. Britain's politicians, beneficiaries of tax-payer funded second home allowances and thus with a double (in some cases even treble) stake in ever overinflating house prices, connived to ensure this could initially be achieved. This corrupt conspiracy peaked when house prices were deliberately removed from the Bank of England's target inflation figures, which revised inflation calculation method was imposed upon (and/or accepted by) the BoE's new Governor, Mervyn King, upon his appointment.

A reintroduction of mortgage interest relief in the upcoming budget of George Osborne would be the first sign of a return to sanity by the supposedly "conservative" portion of Britain's coalition Government. As the sub-prime mortgage debacle has proven, a property owning democracy depends on a decent education system, as a re-introduction of Grammar Schools are similarly not on this government's agenda, a return to a decent society capable of prudent mortgage management, seems mere wishful thinking for the UK.

I hope the USA has more success in fighting off the removal of the small subsidy central government supplies when providing mortgage interest income tax relief. Considering this provides so many other, often intangible benefits, the actual costs must be minimal. Where have the tax funds thus saved by Britain over the past ten years been spent? An area too murky and dreadful even to begin to contemplate.

Other posts from this blog on the present housing crisis may be found by entering some of the following key words in the "Search" section at the head of this blog or clicking on the links:

Walkaways

Fannie Mae

House Price Crash

Mortgages

Other episodes from Keeping up Appearances, illustrating the inevitable delapidation of socially provided housing versus private property (although the implied social divisions are not an essential prerequisite!!!) are available on YouTube. (I believe the programme has been seen on Public Service Broadcasting in the USA, please note we Brits are not all in one category or the other!).

Happy St Patrick's Day to all with any Irish among their forebears.

The Fahies and Farrels amongst my forebears join with the Bachellers and Desmonds, with whom I am now joined by marriage, in wishing all the luck of the Irish to all connected with Ireland in any way whatsoever, wherever they may be across the entire globe.

Please take time to register the dreadful treatment presently being dished out to the small, once independent, nation of Ireland, by the increasingly tyrannical EU, details of which are fully available on this blog, which the head of the 17 Euro Group of countries, Jean-Claude Juncker, Prime Minister of Luxemburg, described only yesterday, as being akin to "torture".

EU's Energy Commissioner downgrades Japan's nuclear crisis from "Apocalypse" to "Catastrophe"

In this blog editor's understanding of english, a "catastrophe" seems less severe than an "apocalypse".

Maybe its different in German! In either event it once again demonstrates that in picking EU Commissioners the general rule of picking the dumbest possible candidate still seems to apply!

If you do not believe this is true, read yesterday's remarks, reported here, and today's from here.

Senior Europhile Juncker, slams EU "torture" of Ireland

Jean-Claude Juncker, is reported by Reuters, linked here, as follows:

"Not as chaiman of the Eurogroup, but as Luxembourg prime minister I don't like this link between the corporate tax issue and the so-called Irish package," Juncker told reporters.

"I'm not happy with the idea that some governments obviously find some pleasure in torturing Ireland in the meetings and outside. I don't like this way of dealing with serious problems," he said.

The Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Juncker, has been at the forefront of the EU project for many years and this blog has always viewed him as very much among the bad guys, bent upon the destruction of all democracy and decency within our continent. It seems quite incredible that so late in the day he now has opened his eyes to what is really taking place.

We must hope other leaders of smaller EU ex-nation states, similarly and rapidly have the rose coloured spectacles removed from their eyes and begin to take positive action to restore their democracies!

While David Cameron remains as Prime Minister of Britain there will be no help from that quarter in halting the emerging tyranny!

The Mawkish Madness of Mrs Merkel.

From last week, only German voters will any longer have democratic say in the running of the 27 former nation states of the EU!  Germany's leader, Frau Merkel was proclaimed triumphant as she swept all before her at the EU summit which ended last weekend!

11 - 3 - 11 the date of that EU meeting, would thereafter be symbolically carved on the tombstones of Europe's democracies, just as this blog surmised but feared on the morning of that day.

Yet it was another event, occurring almost simultaneously that day, in Fukushima, as long feared, whose consequences now highlight the enormity of the disaster into which the EU is sleepwalking, and the idiotic ludicrousness of Europe's almost half a billion citizens, putting their fate into the hands of such an electorate and the kind of leaders it produces, leaders crying out to be replaced by saner,  no doubt crueller and therefore potentially non-democratic versions of humanity.

How long will the Germans allow themselves to be ruled by feminine intuition and impulsive emotionalism and what will their replacements' attitude be to their deliberately economically crushed, and therefore fawningly dependent, subjugated neighbouring states?

Der Spiegel, has an article, linked here, claiming that Mrs Merkel's announcement of the immediate shutdown of several older nuclear power stations in Germany, (following the tsunami in Japan) is based on political calculations in the face of local elections in Germany due this month. It is headlined as follows:

Moratorium Seen as Ploy to Placate Voters

Enough said?

Securing UK Energy supplies - The Bacton Interconnector and Huhne vs Redwood.

My first post today, considers how the world might best begin to address a potential energy supply shortage and urges that the IEA, rather than the EU, be involved in running any such programme. Assuming that can be achieved, how then may the corrupt EU be kept from any inolvement in allocating supplies within the 27 countries of the EU, its sticky-fingered and morally unprincipled officials could almost certainly be relied upon to establish the basic principle as one of self-enrichment for themselves likely resulting in supply priority for the wealthiest?

The Lisbon Treaty, among its many other deep and disgraceful flaws, states the following on energy:

An important policy in relation to energy is that a new part on energy is added to the TFEU with one article (Title XXI with article 194 in the consolidated TFEU, title XX with article 176A in the Lisbon Treaty). The article is relatively short, it reads:

"1.In the context of the establishment and functioning of the internal market and with regard for the need to preserve and improve the environment, Union policy on energy shall aim, in a spirit of solidarity between Member States, to:
(a) ensure the functioning of the energy market;
(b) ensure security of energy supply in the Union;
(c) promote energy efficiency and energy saving and the development of new and renewable forms of energy; and
(d) promote the interconnection of energy networks.

2. Without prejudice to the application of other provisions of the Treaties, the European Parliament and the Council, acting in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure, shall establish the measures necessary to achieve the objectives in paragraph 1. Such measures shall be adopted after consultation of the Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions.

Clearly, with such ludicrous and practically meaningless verbiage, the potential for many months of pointless bickering and all the usual EU failures must quickly appear.

Britain's interface with the Continent, in so far as natural gas is concerned, is via the Bacton Interconnector, read here. To ensure there is no misunderstanding as to Britain's views on where energy sovereignty starts and ends, I suggest the government moves immediately to place the British end of that facility, immediately under its control by use of a strong military presence.

Replacement of the former EU MEP and EU quisling Chris Huhne as Energy Secretary, by a robust Conservative such as John Redwood should ideally be carried out concurrently!

The IEA and NOT the EU is the correct body to allocate scarce energy resources.

The EU is corrupt. The EU is inefficient. The EU Commission, Parliament and other connected bodies are not trusted by the citizens of Europe as they are seen to be self-serving. The Lisbon Treaty provisions lack diplomatic legitimacy.

The call by the EU for energy ministers from its member states to attend a meeting designed to produce an EU response to the likely consequences of a halt to oil and gas flows through the Straits of Hormuz following the movement of Saudi Arabian trrops into Bahrain yesterday combined with the explosions at the Japanese nuclear power plants, should be rejected by the British Government.

An organisation, in existence since 1974, with worldwide membership from 28 major energy consuming nations has experience of energy allocation in times of crisis, the expertise to handle such a project AND the  potential of being trustworthy to fulfill such a delicate task, where the prospects for manipulation and massive self-enrichment are self-evident.

IEA Home Page is here, IEA Member Countries are listed here. IEA and Energy Security here.

UK Debt problems - Grimmer than grim!

The Slog blog has noticed what Ironies Too and its forerunner Ironies, have been pointing out for years, in a post titled:

REVEALED: The full strength on what lies ahead, and what the Government plans to do about it.

We’re facing a national emergency. The Prime Minister and his entourage need to wake up

Revealed my foot, only for a Rip Van Winkle! Welcome to reality Mr John Ward!

Euphoria fading on the EU sell out to Germany

Friday's late night deal, or more exactly the one finally struck in the early hours of the following day, is beginning to receive the critical attention it deserves, rather than the knee-jerk approval initially offered by the markets. The following is from an article by Irwin Steltzer in the New York Times, linked here:

The pressure to do something was irresistible. And what they did was to multiply the moral hazard created by the initial bailouts. The European Financial Stabilization Facility will be allowed to lend €500 billion, rather than only part of that amount under the initial arrangement. And the fund will be extended beyond its planned expiration date of 2013. It seems that stronger countries such as Germany and France will provide callable guarantees, but weaker countries will have to contribute hard cash, although how that drain helps them to grow is unclear. The fund will be able to buy newly issued sovereign bonds at auction, but not older issues held by the ECB, which was hoping to offload the €77 billion in bonds it acquired to support the prices of troubled countries' bonds.

Saudi troops reported in Bahrain

The New York Times has the startling report from the above headline, here. The reduction in crude oil demand following the refinery fires in Japan, seemed to have lulled the oil markets into dropping prices in a manner that implies the problems across the arab oil producing countries have miraculously been solved.

The reaction to the explosions in the Japanese nuclear power generation plants, already seem to be driving the debate in the West against nuclear fuels, which in the end must require a greater reliance on coal and oil or a huge reduction in energy consumption.

What a moment for the West to appear effectively leaderless and clueless even on what to do about Libya, after days of hand-wringing!

German jackboot increases the pressure on Europe's jugular!

The following are the concluding paragraphs to an article in this morning's Daily Telegraph, linked here, on the capitulation of the EU states to huge sacrifices of sovereignty to the Germans:

   Popular revolt is the dog that has not barked since the long slump began. This may just be a question of time. The pattern of the 1930s is that deep alienation starts in year three as austerity grinds on, and in this case tensions on the eurozone perip(h)ery can only turn nastier as the ECB tightens monetary policy.

   What is clear is that sovereign states are being forced to cut wages and dismantle parts of their welfare state under foreign diktat, with a gun held to their heads. This will not be forgotten lightly. The character of the European Project has changed utterly.

Further reading on what made 11-3-11 such a dark day for Europe, read here, (even graver than it will eventually prove for Japan, after the dreadful earthquake and tsunami) may be read from this link.

German bullying of Ireland continues into the early hours. France is next target!

The Herald in Ireland reports, linked here, that the German bullying of Ireland following the Friday EU meeting, continued until 02:00 am yesterday morning.

Only time will tell how long Ireland's new government will be able to withstand such pressure, given that all former nations within the EU have rendered themselves virtually defenceless against the economic hegemony of the Germans!

As was always inevitable, now that the asset stripping of the UK has been virtually completed, with a totally compliant pro-EU coalition government in power in Britain, following its Labour Party predecessors with the identical policies that are bankrupting the former nation, the EU must turn elsewhere for future sources of funds.

France is now finally in the EU's sights!  Can Britain thus hope for support from the French against the EU? We must hope so, perhaps this is a glimmer of hope on this Sunday morning full of the hoorifying news from Japan. The moving ceremony I attended yesterday, as recorded on the posting below, offers some historical evidence of hope for such an outcome.

The Appéllation Contrölée system in France gives that country one of its many unique characteristics, these are now within the EU's sights, particularly the special provisions regarding the creation of cognac, read here.

WWII Remembrance, Medoc, 12th March 2011

11-3-11 An interesting day!

This blog will have no further postings until 13-3-11 or as Americans would put it 3/13/11.

Atlas Shrugged movie hitting distribution problems!

Part 1 is due for release 15th April but is experiencing distribution snags, read here.

Watch Obama admitting he owns the Worldwide Credit Crisis!

As Bernanke's printing presses continue to race and the poorer nation's of the world revolt in response, the following nine minute video shows evidence that US President Obama, now overseeing the trashing of the world's one reserve currency, following in the footsteps of Presidents Carter and Clinton, deliberately forced America's banks into making the unsound loans, the consequences of which are yet to be fully seen. The video clip lasts 9 minutes, watch it through for the real shock comes right at the end, when it becomes clear that all this was known even before Obama was elected!

The EU's MEP's have voted for the Tobin Tax!

How will the Euro affect scarce oil distribution within the EU?

In the old days of oil shortages, the stronger European currencies, such as the Deutschemark and the French Franc, had a clear advantage when bidding for scarce supplies. What now?

As Libyan oil fires light the desert sands and Bloomberg reports signs of panic buying in the market, this blog will supply the experience of decades in the oil supply business to provide thoughtful analysis of events as they unfold.

Read some interesting history from an earlier, similar crisis, that was posted on this site earlier this week, from here!

Michael Noonan of Fine Gael gets Ireland's nightmare Finance Portfolio!

The Irish Times report, on the swearing in of the new puppet government of Ireland, for the EU, is here.

Wikipedia on Noonan is here.

The coming "Grab for Oil"

It is hugely premature to talk of tapping the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), yet incredibly that is what is reportedly (read Reuters) being discussed in the Bedlam that is Barack Obama's White House.

Two factors maintain the myth of Global Energy Security. The first is Saudi Arabian spare productive capacity and the second is the SPR. The highly successful decades long propaganda campaign regarding Saudi reserves cannot withstand any evidently effective Days of Rage, (read AEP in the Telegraph this morning), while the SPR is clearly finite.

The Quantatitive Easing Revolts (or Bernanke Bankruptcies) now sweeping the world, might soon arrive in the industrialised West, if some Government, somewhere, does not quickly get a grip.

The stinking swamp that is the Euro currency.

This blog wrote off the single euro currency as presently constructed, long, long ago, before last Christmas if I recall correctly. It is worth reminding ourselves of the present state of play however and this report from Canada provides a useful update, from which I have selected a few choice quotes:

On Greek bonds -

Ten-year bonds yielding in the neighbourhood of 12 per cent are nothing if not the stuff of junk collectors’ dreams.

 In fact, the 10-year Greek bonds now trade at a yield nearly twice as high as Lebanese debt (6.25 per cent); Sri Lanka (9.25 per cent); Egypt (6.85 per cent for nine-year bond) and even Iraq (7 per cent for bond maturing in 2028) are regarded as safer bets in the bond world. If you’re looking for an almost equivalent risk, try barely functioning Pakistan (14.3 per cent).

While the comment concludes as follows:

In the meantime, we have the following unfolding in Europe:

 * The new Irish government wants the EU to reduce its average interest charge of 5.8 per cent on €45-billion worth of loans. And it is resisting pressure from higher-tax France and Germany to boost its corporate tax rate of 12.5 per cent.

*They can deny it all they like, but Portugal and Belgium are almost certainly going to join the bailout queue. And Austria and Spain aren’t out of the woods either. But the problems Belgium and Portugal face are more imminent – namely a raft of maturing debt. Portugal will have to fork out the equivalent of 1.9 per cent, 2.7 per cent and 2.9 per cent of GDP to meet obligations maturing on March 18, April 15 and June 15, respectively. For Belgium, the totals it will have to pay out or roll over between mid-March and mid-April amount to a whopping 5.3 per cent of GDP.

And European leaders wonder why investors are demanding record compensation for the risk of owning these and other struggling members’ bonds?

In all this it is absolutely essential to remember that everything that is unfolding has been deliberately contrived, to allow the complete takeover of Europe by the corporatist nightmare that is the present EU. Democracy was the first sacrifice, now any pretence of self-governance for the victimised ex-nations is being stripped away.

English speakers living outside the EU, must watch in horror if they remember the sacrifices made by their forefathers to restore liberty to Europe, twice in fact in only the first half of the last century.  Britons must stand condemned at their own stupidity and shamed at the deceit and decadence of their rulers!

Thick Tory Prime Ministers and their Futile Foreign Secretaries.

Watching the incompetent Foreign Secretary, William Hague, yesterday (for whose resignation this blog has been calling for many moons, most recently on 24th February, linked here), I find myself recalling an earlier, pig-headed, bullying and treacherous British Conservative PM, Edward Heath (version 1.0 if you may, making Cameron after Major verion 3.0) and his ludicrous Foreign Secretary side-kick, whose name has now escaped me, in recalling their farcial attempt to gain extra oil supplies from the Shah of Iran, during an Arab oil embargo, when the government had stupidly and with almost perfectly botched  timing, picked a fight with the coal miner's. (More background in this pdf Firing Line interview with William F Buckley Jr).

I was working in the oil supply industry at the time, so knew many of the details, and therefore, also incidentally, exempt from the three day working week. Our operatives faced heavy fines or even jail sentences, if customers were provided any oil deliveries in excess of the percentage allocations then in force. Heath, (having already ensured the eventual economic destruction of his nation, due to his treacherous signing up to the secret provisions of the ever closer union that is today the EU), sent his Foreign Secretary off to Teheran to beg the Shah for extra crude oil supplies. They were successful, ( who knows at what pointless cost for the Shah was soon to be toppled), but instead of arranging the necessary tankers and shipping the oil to the UK, as any simpleton would have realised would be necessary (to circumvent the international arrangements in force to mitigate the shortages [no need for Lisbon Treaty "solidarity" garbage in those happy days]) they merely assigned the new oil mostly to BP but also to Shell if I recall, who then had to add the quantities to their allocated worldwide sales base, thus providing the UK only a tiny percentage of the volumes begged from the Shah.

Horrifying is it not to note, that some forty odd years later; the Foreign Office is still staffed by numbskulls fully prepared to carry out the most ludicrous policy dictats from Tory thick-headed, non-entities temporarily resident in Downing Street and Carlton Gardens?

Ireland - 'Financially Vaporised'

Following from my posting below on 'Democracy - Defied and Denied,' Mary Ellen Synon, in her Daily Mail blog, this morning, has a brilliant exposure of the farce which occurred at Helsinki, linked here, from which comes this startling quote:

In the present crisis, ‘Ireland experienced an increase in Government debt of circa 220 percent.’ In historical terms, the Reinhart-Rogoff research shows that an 86 percent debt level increase would classify us as being seriously bust. But 220 percent would, as Dr Gurdgiev puts it, classify us ‘as having been financially vaporised.’

We have been financially vaporised because the out-going Finance Minister was obedient to Jean Claude Trichet, the head of the European Central Bank. Mr Trichet told the Minister to guarantee all the bank debt and the Minister obeyed. This debt was in great billions owed to German banks. Some to the French banks, too, but spectacularly to the German.

You must know all this by now. We have been financially vaporised so that Angela Merkel’s under-capitalised, badly-performing German state banks get back all the money they so stupidly lent to Sean FitzPatrick and the rest. That is why the Chancellor dismissed Mr Kenny at Helsinki, and why she will do so again on Friday in Brussels. If it is a choice between the truth coming out about her own country’s banking crisis, and drowning the Irish taxpayer in debt – well, as far as Mrs Merkel is concerned, just drown the Irish. Glug, glug, glug.