I am not a sheep, I have my own mind.
I have had enough of being told what and how to think?
Whilst we are still allowed the remnants of free speech, I will speak out.
I also reserve the right to discuss music, geekery, sport and Dr Who
" Poll: Tories advance on key Labour strongholds The Conservatives have taken a commanding lead in the battleground seats that will decide the next general election, raising their hopes of inflicting a historic landslide defeat on Labour."
Don't raise your hopes, this Labour government will pull any stroke, try any trick and spin & smear for al they are worth between now and the general election and of course the BBC will be there every step of the way to give assistance and cover.
Currently he is First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council and Church Commissioner. I understand that he is to add Minister for Information to his portfolio.
Is there a problem in the Labour government? Is Peter Mandelson really the only half way competent minister that can be entrusted with power?
A few weeks back I blogged about the Saudi's military incursions into northern Yemen and the almost total lack of interest shown by the world's media. This of course contrasts with the forensic examination of any military activity undertaken by Israel.
The BBC happily reported at the time that:
"Saudi Arabia has insisted its forces only attacked Yemeni rebel positions on Saudi territory, according to the state news agency.
This directly contradicts a number of separate reports on Thursday that air strikes had taken place on on rebel strongholds in northern Yemen."
Today hidden away in the BBC's Middle East coverage is report that:
"Nine Saudi soldiers have been seized by Houthi rebels in northern Yemen during fighting, the insurgents have said.
A rebel spokesman based in Germany told BBC News that the incident took place inside Yemeni territory and urged Saudi Arabia to stay out of the conflict.
The Saudi defence ministry confirmed nine soldiers were missing and may have been taken prisoner."
Will the BBC be recanting their report that Saudi troops were not entering Yemen? Don't be ridiculous, they persevere:
"Saudi armed forces say they have since driven the rebels out of the kingdom, but frequently deny attacking targets within Yemeni territory. "
The BBC in love with Islam and Islamic countries so why criticise them for invading a neighbour. The BBC so anti-Israel that any "infraction" of "international law" is a major issue and due huge coverage. If this is not true then release the Balen Report.
This prize goes to the dynamic combination of Alistair Darling and the BBC for the BBC headline "Recession 'worse than estimated'" and the first lines of this report
"Chancellor Alistair Darling will say in his pre-Budget report that the economy performed worse in 2009 than he first predicted, Treasury sources have said.
Mr Darling is expected to say that the UK economy shrank by 4.75% this year - more than the 3.5% originally forecast in the Budget in March. "
Economy performed worse that the Chancellor predicted, wow who could have seen that coming? "No shit, Sherlock"
Of course as this is a BBC article they loyally report the Labour party line "he is likely to stick to 2010 forecasts of growth between 1-1.5%." Of course it is Alistair, of course it is.
Samizdata has an interesting piece by Michael Jennings about climate modelling and his experiences resulting from his background in research science. Here are some extracts from a very interesting article:
"As it is, we have a few extremely crude mathematical / computer models that suppose mechanisms that go from human activity to CO2 release to global warming. They don't agree with one another, and they are incredibly crude. (The Earth's atmosphere is an extremely complex system. These models only have a tiny fraction of its complexity). They have a poor record of predicting the future.
The science of global warming ultimately boils down to saying that "The level of warming is unprecedented". "Human releases of CO2 into the atmosphere are unprecedented". "Therefore, the second causes the first". This isn't an inherently ridiculous thing to say. If climate change really is unprecedented then we would look for other unprecedented things as likely causes and human activity would be the likely one. We could then look for mechanisms and solutions, but we would largely be doing so with our eyes closed.
I will listen to somebody who more or less says this and that the risks of global warming are so great that we must do something about them, but somebody who simply states that the science is settled and beyond discussion is frankly not even worth arguing with.
...
In scientific research involving computer modelling and data analysis, this often leads to computer models consisting of layer on layer of code crufted on top of lower layers that are not well (or at all) understood. Data does get lost, or assumed to be correct because the previous person used it and there is no real way to verify it. Supposedly impartial journals do become captive of a particular point of view. People's whole careers do become dependent on a particular interpretation of the results, and it then becomes very hard for them to back down. People become more and more certain of their results when the personal cost of abandoning them gets greater and greater."
"David Cameron has defended his claim that government money is being used to fund schools run by an organisation "with links to extremists".
Ministers denied the Tory leader's allegation that cash came from an "anti-extremism" fund, adding that it was from a separate scheme. "
Do read the whole of the BBC article and then for a more reasoned and detailed explanation of what has been happening, I recommend a trip to Harry's Place where a former Hizb ut-Tahrir activist, Imaad, explains how the organisation works. Here are a few extracts to whet your appetite (my emphasis):
"being a “member” of HT is not like being a member of any other organisation.
...
I fully accepted their ideology, campaigned for them, manned stalls outside mosques and universities to propagandise for them, helped arrange their annual conferences and even distributed Khilafah Mag (pdf) – HT’s in-house magazine for which Farah Ahmed used to write crude propaganda pieces – but I was never officially a member. I was one of the so-called Shabab (lit. Young men) who are devoted to HT and whose activism on behalf of the party HT could not operate without. They take a full role in working towards the Khilafah state (Caliphate) and attend HT study sessions (halaqas) – after they’ve attended the halaqas for a while and completed the first three core books in HT’s programme of theo-political indoctrination they even pay a subscription to the party – but they are not, according to HT, members.
HT works on the principle of plausible deniability. Some of the people who are most important to spreading HT’s ideology are not technically HT members or even Shabab. Hamza Andreas Tzortzis of the Hittin Institute can deny being an HT member all he likes but nobody can deny the similarity between the Hittin Institute’s output (pdf) and HT’s propaganda. Of course he has made certain slips that indicate where his loyalties lie, for example emailing (pdf) the Centre for Social Cohesion back in 2008 from the address info@hizb-towerhamlets.org and regularly speaking at HT organised events, but officially he is not an HT member.
...
The real danger here is the fact that intolerant Islamist beliefs are being passed onto very young children without their parent or wider society full knowledge. HT’s focus on who is or isn’t a ‘member’ is just part of the smokescreen by HT to disguise their attempts at infiltrating Muslim communities who have already overwhelmingly rejected them."
I have written about the dangerous Hizb ut-Tahrir before, albeit not enough. Harry's Place has covered this organisation in far more detail have a read.
So why is Ed Balls muddying the water? Is he hoping to shore up the Muslim vote? Is he hoping that some muck sticks to David Cameron and the Conservatives? Or is he like Gordon Brown all but incapable of spinning and smearing?
Read the whole story at NZ Climate Science where they "compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data". Shockingly they found that whilst the official temperature record shows a clear rise in average temperatures, the raw data shows nothing of the sort. On digging further they discovered that:
"About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.
The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.
One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.
We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace."
I wonder what the explanation will be and what other "official temperature records" have been likewise adjusted?
Further to this piece I have found the video of Al Gore's idiotic remark that
"...two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot"
The man is no expert on climate change or geothermal energy but he is very good at making money.
"Baroness Ashton, the new European Union foreign minister, is facing questions over her role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament amid claims that it may have had financial links to the Soviet Union. "
I blogged about Baroness Ashton's CND past previously, although I think that her alleged previous links to the USSR are not a problem for one of the big players in the EUSSR.
"Subject: Re: WMO non respondo
… Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …
Cheers Phil"
Here is a flowchart for the "Scientific Method"...
Maybe someone could explain how "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it. …" fits in with "Analyze results - Draw Conclusion"...
"the cycle of formulating hypotheses, testing and analyzing the results, and formulating new hypotheses, will resemble the cycle described below."
"Each element of a scientific method is subject to peer review for possible mistakes."
"A linearized, pragmatic scheme of the four points above is sometimes offered as a guideline for proceeding:[33]
1. Define the question
2. Gather information and resources (observe)
3. Form hypothesis
4. Perform experiment and collect data
5. Analyze data
6. Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
7. Publish results
8. Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
The iterative cycle inherent in this step-by-step methodology goes from point 3 to 6 back to 3 again."
You can read far more about this matter and more at .
I have long wondered what would happen if a solution to the "problem" of CO2 emissions was ever discovered. What would the "green movement" do, after all if excess CO2 (whatever excess CO2 is) could be eliminated then we would not need to make the radical reductions in CO2 emissions that we are told are necessary to save the planet.
"Peridotite, it turns out, absorbs carbon dioxide, and according to Krevor it potentially represents one of the greatest — if most bafflingly ignored — solutions to climate change in the world.
Originating deep in the earth, peridotite is a part of a family — "ultramafic rock" — that reacts naturally with CO2 to form solid minerals. Last May, Krevor was the lead author of a study identifying and mapping enough ultramafic rock in the United States to sequester an enormous amount of carbon dioxide. Taking into account various land-use constraints — private property, proximity to cities, national and state parks — he and his fellow researchers found storage potential for 500 years of the country's CO2 emissions.
So it's a mystery of current climate studies that the U.S. Department of Energy, the country's largest single source of funding into clean energy research and development, has awarded just one small grant, in 2003, to researchers studying mineral sequestration.
"It's very striking," Krevor said. "This is a technology that's a potential game changer, and there's been very little research done in the area.""
If the ecologists are not interested in mineral sequestration then might that be because their object is not CO2 emissions reduction but wealth redistribution.
All the above assumes that the science of Global Warming is correct, something that intelligent people I think realise is not by any means proven.
"The fact that I flew here to sit on a panel for one and a half hours, then I´m flying straight back to the US, is an example of our commitment to environmental sustainability..."
Indra Nooyi, CEO of PepsiCo, blissfully unaware of the irony of her statement as she boasts of her company's environmental commitment.
The LA Times reports something that the left just won't understand:
"Not that it matters politically because obviously she's a female Republican dunce and he's obviously a male Democratic genius.
But Sarah Palin's poll numbers are strengthening.
And President Obama's are sliding.
Guess what? They're about to meet in the 40s."
Read the whole story and you will understand why the left were so keen to try and kill off Sarah Palin as VP candidate last year and why she scares them now.
Watch today's Daily Politics and watch Andrew Neil firmly skewer Jacqui Smith for her government's alleged funding of extremists. It's good that there is at least one BBC interviewer willing to question a Labour (albeit ex) minister and push the point again and again.
To ad to the EU's appalling accounting procedures we can now add the United Nations. It seems that:
"Vast sums promised by rich nations including the UK to help developing countries tackle climate change cannot be accounted for, according to a study. A total of 20 nations pledged up to 410 million dollars (£247 million) a year in 2001, resulting in a pot that should be worth well over 1.6 billion dollars (£963 million).
But only 260 million dollars (£157 million) has been paid into two United Nations funds earmarked for the purpose according to the latest figures, the BBC World Service investigation said.
The EU said the money was collected in "bilateral and multilateral deals", but was unable to provide data to back up the claim."
The Telegraph have a helpful table of the winning lottery numbers for each of the last 15 year's lotteries.
Now because I am a bit geeky, I put the figures into Excel to do some analysis but right away I spotted something odd. If you add up all the times that each ball has been drawn in the main draw you get 8,742 which when divided by 6 (the number of drawn balls in each main draw) gives you 1,457 draws. However if you add the number of times each ball has been drawn as the bonus ball (one per draw) you get not 1,457 but 1,451 - WHY?
I refuse to do any analysis until I have solved this basic query!
"A bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser is causing more than 50 million files stored online to leak potentially sensitive information that could compromise user privacy, a security researcher said.
The documents stored in Adobe's PDF format display the internal disk location where the file is stored, an oversight that can inadvertently expose real-world names and login IDs of users, the operating system being used and other information that is better kept private. The data can then be retrieved using simple web searches.
Google searches such as this one expose almost four million documents residing on users' C drives alone. Combined with searches for other common drives, the technique exposes more than 50 million files that display the local disk path, according to Inferno, a security researcher for a large software company who asked that his real name not be used."
"On a more serious front, I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran."
If you are of the Apple persuasion you may be interested to learn that Friday 27 November is rumoured to be Apple "Black Friday" when Apple are rumoured to be holding a one day shopping event, both in-store and online, with discounts of up to 25% available on some Apple equipment. We shall see, but 25% off an Apple iMac 27" now that would be almost worth it...
Do watch the interview/discussion on Andrew Neil's blog between Professors Singer and Watson. See which you think sound more plausible. Andrew Neil seems like he might be on the sceptical side, or at least more open minded than most at the BBC - "One thing seems pretty sure: the debate certainly isn't over!"
Meanwhile over at The Guardian, George Monbiot accepts that
"It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.
Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed. "
But he then tries to convince us that
"To bury man-made climate change, a far wider conspiracy would have to be revealed."
and launches into a fantasy piece which is best left unreported upon. What's the matter Mr Monbiot, worried that you and your friends RedGreen agenda is about to be exposed?
"This is what they did — these climate “scientists” on whose unsupported word the world’s classe politique proposes to set up an unelected global government this December in Copenhagen, with vast and unprecedented powers to control all formerly free markets, to tax wealthy nations and all of their financial transactions, to regulate the economic and environmental affairs of all nations, and to confiscate and extinguish all patent and intellectual property rights.
The tiny, close-knit clique of climate scientists who invented and now drive the “global warming” fraud — for fraud is what we now know it to be — tampered with temperature data so assiduously that, on the recent admission of one of them, land temperatures since 1980 have risen twice as fast as ocean temperatures. One of the thousands of emails recently circulated by a whistleblower at the University of East Anglia, where one of the world’s four global-temperature datasets is compiled, reveals that data were altered so as to prevent a recent decline in temperature from showing in the record. In fact, there has been no statistically significant “global warming” for 15 years — and there has been rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
Worse, these arrogant fraudsters — for fraudsters are what we now know them to be — have refused, for years and years and years, to reveal their data and their computer program listings. Now we know why: As a revealing 15,000-line document from the computer division at the Climate Research Unit shows, the programs and data are a hopeless, tangled mess. In effect, the global temperature trends have simply been made up. Unfortunately, the British researchers have been acting closely in league with their U.S. counterparts who compile the other terrestrial temperature dataset — the GISS/NCDC dataset. That dataset too contains numerous biases intended artificially to inflate the natural warming of the 20th century.
Finally, these huckstering snake-oil salesmen and “global warming” profiteers — for that is what they are — have written to each other encouraging the destruction of data that had been lawfully requested under the Freedom of Information Act in the UK by scientists who wanted to check whether their global temperature record had been properly compiled. And that procurement of data destruction, as they are about to find out to their cost, is a criminal offense. They are not merely bad scientists — they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.
I am angry, and so should you be.
What have the mainstream news media said about the Climategate affair? Remarkably little. The few who have brought themselves to comment, through gritted teeth, have said that all of this is a storm in a teacup, and that their friends in the University of East Anglia and elsewhere in the climatological community are good people, really.
No, they’re not. They’re criminals. With Professor Fred Singer, who founded the U.S. Satellite Weather Service, I have reported them to the UK’s Information Commissioner, with a request that he investigate their offenses and, if thought fit, prosecute. But I won’t be holding my breath: In the police state that Britain has now sadly become, with supine news media largely owned and controlled by the government, the establishment tends to look after its own.
At our expense, and at the expense of the truth."
Sorry to get all X-Files on you but it seems that "the truth is out there", if only we are allowed to examine the real data and speak freely without being called "climate change deniers".
"Spending by children in the UK has hit record levels despite a fall in parents' disposable incomes, research has suggested.
The London School of Economics said spending by young people was now worth £4.89bn to the British economy. "
I am sorry but unless the children are earning that money, and I doubt that they are, then this purely money being recycled from their parents (and other relations & friends). In which case surely the story is that children spend £4.89bn a year of their family's income. This wealth is not generated by the children but by the family or friends who give them the money.
£4.89bn spent by the under 16s who make up around 19% of the UK population. With a national population of around 61,500,000 that is an average spend per child of £79 per annum. However the BBC report it as it
"averages out at more than £10 a week for seven-to-10 year olds and more than £15 a week for 11-to-15 year olds. "
The Mail reports the case of the mother expecting her 14th child who has vowed to keep having children until she has twins.
The "lady" in question is picking up £50,000 a year in benefits.
The justification is hard work and a need to give birth to twins:
"(xxx) begins her chores at 4am every morning and keeps the house spotless to avoid being tagged a layabout scrounger.
She said: 'If people saw us living in a pigsty they would say that we were a scrounging, low-life family who begged from the state.
...
'And that's so not true. Even when I'm straight I can't put my feet up. I've been known to take down curtains at midnight and wash them.'
She added: 'We have a lot of bunkbeds and cots. All the furniture in the bedrooms is on wheels so that we can move it at bedtime.
'Baudelaire sleeps in a travel cot, and a couple of the lads use an airbed. It's a squash and a squeeze, but it's cosy. It's home.'
Now 20 weeks' pregnant with baby number 14, (xxx) is preparing to welcome the clan's latest arrival - and already planning for more.
She said: 'I wanted two - that's the disappointing part of this pregnancy. But there's always next time. I'm going to keep trying, that's for sure.'"
Thirteen babies, one on the way and a determination to have more; I am sorry but why should the public pay for anyone to squeeze out babies over and over again?
Read the incredible story of Rom Houben, who was trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, as doctors thought he was in a coma but he wasn't.
"... he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound. 'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear,' said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegatative state."
The scariest line
"'I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer."
23 years unable to communicate and treated as if in a coma but actually fully aware, that sounds like a living nightmare to me.
I do wonder what the change in the science was that determined that Rom Houben was not in a coma though...
Christopher Booker talk sense on Climate Change, do read the article. With the revelations coming out of the UEA Climate Research Centre email hack story the time has never been better to push the truth about "Climate Change".
"let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government's own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion a year - that's £720 for every household in the country - every year from now until 2050.
...
On every side we are told that 'the science is settled', that '2,500 of the world's top climate scientists' agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.
Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.
...
In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.
The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.
There is no less ice at the Earth's poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.
In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world's climate.
The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.
These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a 'minority report' of the U.S. Senate's environment committee.
...
One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.
For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory - not least some of the world's most eminent climate scientists - has been vilified as a 'denier', to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler's Holocaust.
...
But equally suspicious has been the way the advocates of the warming orthodoxy have been repeatedly shown to have fiddled the scientific evidence being used to promote it.
The most notorious example of this was the so-called 'hockey stick' graph, which for years was brandished to show that, after flat-lining for 1,000 years, global temperatures had suddenly soared upwards in the late 20th century to levels never known before in recorded history.
The hockey stick was used by the IPCC and Gore as the supreme icon of their cause. Then, two statisticians revealed that the graph had been created by a computer model programmed to produce hockey stick shapes whatever data were fed into it.
And now come these leaked emails showing that the very scientists who were responsible for championing the hockey stick - all at the heart of the IPCC establishment - have been regularly discussing how the evidence could be manipulated to promote their cause.
...
A detailed study of the contributors to the most recent IPCC report has shown that the number of scientists responsible for the key chapter on the extent and causes of global warming - on which everything else in the report depended - was not 2,500, but barely 50.
Almost all this handful of scientists were firmly committed to the official view on global warming before they were appointed - and they include those whose leaked emails have now created a shock wave running around the world.
Tellingly, what they also all have in common is that their findings are based on computer models programmed to assume the chief cause of global warming is the rise in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.
It is precisely this assumption which more than anything else has been called into question by the fact that global temperatures have not been continuing to rise as the computer models insisted they should."
The Today piece was moved to 08:50 and there it was the floods in Cumbria were possibly caused by Global Warming but it is entirely consistent with basis physics and our models. John Humphrys brought up the CRU email story but gently and Professor Slingo dismissed it as only a small part of the story, were "stolen" and were "taken out of context". So there we are 60 world leaders in Copenhagen is unprecedented, we must act and the BBC are back on course with the Man Made Climate Change scare story.
Having successfully kept the Climate Research Unit story, as much as possible, to one about hacking and sceptics being the guilty party, I see that the Today programme is returning to the normal agenda. The schedule for today's programme includes this:
"0847 - Three of the country's leading science organisations join forces today to warn of the dangers of climate change. The Met Office, Royal Society and Natural Environment Research Council include evidence which has emerged since the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as they try to convince politicians of the urgent need for action ahead of Copenhagen. Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, discusses the climate change evidence."
No mention of climate change sceptics or what evidence was discovered in the emails and apparently no opposing view to be heard.
"On May 29th 2008, Prof Jones instructs colleagues to delete emails in a message helpfully titled "IPCC & FOI":
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
AR4 is an IPCC report that Keith Briffa and others at the CRU worked on together, and at least one FoI request on exactly this correspondence had apparently been submitted by a David Holland on May 5th 2008.
The Freedom of Information Act 2000 expressly forbids - on pain of criminal conviction - destroying information that has been requested under FoI. As the Information Commissioner puts it:
If information is held when a FOIA request is received, destroying it outside of your normal records management policies will result in a breach of the Act. You must confirm that you hold the information and consider disclosure, subject to any exemption. It will also be a criminal offence to conceal or destroy information if this is done with the intention of preventing disclosure under either FOIA or EIR.
This offence is punishable with a fine of up to £5,000.
Tellingly, another email from Prof Jones later that year shows that UEA's internal FoI team had evidently become concerned about his secretive actions:
"I did get an email from the FOI person here early yesterday to tell me I shouldn't be deleting emails"
If the FoI team were concerned that Prof Jones might be breaking the law - and even committing a criminal offence - on an area that they are legally responsible for, they should have reported him to the Information Commissioner. Perhaps his flowering relationship with the FoI officer and the Chief Librarian precluded this. "
Try the excellent quiz at The Shadow Lands and you will be amazed at what you discover.
Meanwhile here's another extract from the email database that I think is quite astonishing (my emphasis):
"Just sent loads of station data to xxxx. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. yyyy has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it !"
Openness and willingness to have data and conclusions checked not much in evidence there...
"OH **** THIS. It's Sunday evening, I've worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I'm hitting yet another problem that's based on the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they're found."
Let's just savour that "the hopeless state of our databases. There is no uniform data integrity, it's just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow"Are you happy that the decisions to radically cut CO2 emissions and tax us into the ground for emitting CO2 is on the basis of "settled science" based on "hopeless...databases... no uniform data integrity... (and) a catalogue of issues..."?
I'm not.
It seems that not only do we have possible fraudulent activity at the CRU but also more worryingly the data itself looks like it is in many cases garbage. Data has been lost, analysed with buggy programs, gaps filled with synthetic data and so on and on and on.
Having dealt with the UEA Climate Research Centre hack as a story about hacking and not detailing any of the emails uncovered by the hack, the BBC have now dropped the story altogether from their Science and Environment home page. It would seem that the BBC are being very careful to drop this story as quickly as possible. There was a 6:25 piece on the Today programme this morning not that you would know it from The Today programme's front page. Do take a listen to the piece at 07:35 today (link here) and get the full feeling for how the BBC so want this story to disappear. The piece is described thus:
"A row has broken over illegally obtained emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA). The emails, written by some of the most respected scientists in the field, were hacked and leaked, and have been seized upon by climate change sceptics who say they suggest that there is manipulation of data by climate change scientists. UEA Professor Robert Watson discusses the incident."
Oddly no mention of Lord Lawson who was the other interviewer, maybe the BBC would rather not give climate changer sceptics the oxygen of publicity.
Rumours abound that the quiet, unassuming Herman Van Rompuy, the first permanent president of the European Council, is not the nonentity that the MSM seem to be suggesting he is. Rather he has form as a proponent of EU taxation and it seems that this source of central EU revenue will come via a combination of CO2 taxation an a form of Tobin tax. Thus a trade body reliant on its members for its income becomes a state with its own independent sources of income. The EU project has always been about 'ever closer union and the implementation of the EU Constitution, albeit in the guise of the Lisbon Treaty, takes this project several large steps closer to fruition.
The time for European nation state is running out, all hail the EUSSR.
Shocking news revealed by The Telegraph, allegedly (my emphasis):
"On the eve of the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, The Sunday Telegraph has obtained hundreds of pages of secret Government reports on “lessons learnt” which shed new light on “significant shortcomings” at all levels.
They include full transcripts of extraordinarily frank classified interviews in which British Army commanders vent their frustration and anger with ministers and Whitehall officials.
The reports disclose that:
Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action. In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.
The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process. The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.
Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each. Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage. Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.
Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat”. One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling”, saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.” "
Read the rest of the article, it will make you wonder that whilst Gordon Brown might be vile, incompetent and seriously inept is he even in the same league as Tony Blair?
An interesting question posed by Michael Heaver on a UKIP supporting blog. Apparently the unelected EU President, Herman van Rompuy, has had this to say in the past about the prospects for Turkey's membership of the EU:
"Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past".
"The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey."
Of course nobody should believe that just because Herman van Rompuy said this in the past that he meant it and/or will stick to this line in the future. There are people in the EU and elsewhere that will brook no opposition to their plans and the concerns of 'the people' are of no concern to them.
"Anger at Peter Mandelson's £13m plan for ‘minimalist palace’ after he calls for pay restraint"
It seems that:
"With its moody lighting, low-slung sofas and plasma TVs, there is only one Cabinet Minister who would feel truly at home here – this is the £13million new Whitehall ‘palace’ being built for Peter Mandelson.
The Business Secretary’s London HQ – the nerve centre of the ‘empire of Mandelsonia’ – is being given a slick, minimalist refurbishment to reflect his growing power in Government.
But last night Tory chairman Eric Pickles accused Lord Mandelson of hypocrisy for demanding pay and spending restraint while lavishing funds on his own department. "
How odd to see the word 'hypocrisy' and the name 'Peter Mandelson' in the same article, how very odd. As with most ex and indeed current Marxists, nothing but the best for the members of the politburo.
But it is this part of the article that annoyed me the most as it sums up the wastrel habits of this vile Labour government:
"A Business Department spokesman said: ‘Currently, staff in the department are split between this and a second site – as we are surrendering that site, it is a cost-neutral project.’ "
There you go there is an amount of money to spend and so long as we don't exceed it that's fine. Might a better option have been to consolidate the two offices but not spend £8-£10 million on the office re-fit? Was a cheaper option even considered? I doubt it, after all it's not Peter Mandelson or Gordon Brown's money their future income is safe and the massive tax increases will hardly dent Peter Mandelson's enormous EU pension.
The second article is from The Times and concerns the believable claims that
"Gordon Brown is facing demands to make Lord Mandelson foreign secretary in a row that risks tearing apart his government.
The business secretary is secretly pressing Brown to hold a cabinet reshuffle so he can achieve his life-long ambition of running the Foreign Office. Mandelson made the request after he was snubbed for the post of European Union foreign minister at last week’s Brussels summit.
Mandelson’s reshuffle call puts the prime minister in a perilous position as he struggles to retain the support of the most powerful figures in the cabinet.
If he bows to Mandelson’s wishes, he risks alienating David Miliband, the foreign secretary, and his ally Ed Balls, the schools secretary, who is still eager for promotion. If he refuses Mandelson’s demand, he risks losing his loyalty with potentially devastating consequences for the election."
Peter Mandelson scheming for advancement in public office, who would have thought it? Is the UK really ready for an unelected Prime Minister with a twice disgraced and now unelected Foreign Secretary; and don't forget the never elected Baroness Ashton as the EU high representative. Democracy Labour style - makes you sick doesn't it?
It's cold, it's very wet and I haven't seen the sun all day, so this is just to cheer us all up. Supermodels Eva Herzigova, 36, Helena Christensen, 40, and Claudia Schiffer, 39; that's better...
To celebrate the re-starting of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) here's two videos to explain how it works; first a new one and then an oldie but goodie...
So until October 2008 Baroness Ashton was Labour’s leader in the House of Lords and played a key part in getting the Lisbon Treaty through the upper house and avoiding the calls for a referendum. Now Baroness Ashton is the surprise selection of the EU's 27 member states as high representative for foreign affairs and security.
"Harriet Harman tried to laugh off her impending prosecution for allegedly using a mobile while driving, with a quip about Thierry Henry’s notorious handball.
Labour’s deputy leader is facing charges of driving without due care and attention and driving while using a hand-held mobile. She strongly denies the charges.
But on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions on Friday night, she made a thinly veiled reference to her brush with the law when asked about the blatant handball by French captain Henry that put Ireland out of the World Cup.
Prompting laughter from the studio audience, Ms Harman said: ‘I think there was nothing hands-free about Thierry Henry’s football.’ Any Questions presenter Jonathan Dimbleby kept the joke going by saying: ‘I am now very concerned you have spoken in “sub judice” – I don’t know quite how to handle this.’
Earlier in the programme, Ms Harman was distinctly unamused when a member of the audience mischievously asked whether Ministers should be ‘routinely’ given hands-free car-phone kits.
She complained it was ‘unfair’ to ask her the question and insisted she could not talk about it."
So does Harriet Harman think that breaking the law is something to laugh at? I suppose when you are a Labour minister and therefore usually above the law then maybe it is.
"For middle-class women, having kids is a lifestyle choice, an excuse to put their Ugg-clad feet up while barking at the nanny for 12 months before returning to a warm office where they can coo to the baby via a webcam and have a nice sit-down."
"The wife of Commons Speaker John Bercow was sacked from a leading City firm after it claimed she had lied about having a degree from Oxford University.
Sally Bercow was dismissed by public relations business Consolidated Communications after it contacted the Oxford authorities and discovered they had not granted her a degree.
The company accused her of having lied on her CV. It also claimed that Mrs Bercow - who at the time was known by her maiden name, Sally Illman - had used 'multiple CVs' with different 'facts' about her past on each one."
Of course Mrs Speaker has an explanation...:
"Mrs Bercow, 39, last night denied lying. She admitted she had referred to an 'upper second' in theology at Oxford on her CV. But she claimed this was her first-year exam result and was not intended to conceal the fact that she had left Keble College after two years after falling behind with her studies and rowing with her tutors."
When People saw the photos of Mr & Mrs Bercow last week; one tall and attractive, one a less than attractive pipsqueak, I heard "what on earth does she see in him; now we know that they are kindred spirits...
Still tumbleweed on the BBC who are clearly hoping that this story disappears and they can go back to pushing the pro-Man Made Climate Change agenda and associated "green taxes" and world political control agenda, as they have been doing for so long now.
In the rest of the media this story has not gained much traction, I suppose because so much of the MSM has invested so much in pushing the same flawed agenda. The Mail reports the story in a fairly straight manner under the headline
"Hackers 'expose global warming con': Sceptics claim that leaked emails reveal research centre massaged temperature data"
I can see nothing in The Times about this story in fact they keep up the pro-Man Made Climate Change agenda with a piece entitled "Climate change to lash Britain with tropical storms". Allegedly
"BRITAIN should brace itself for more tropical-style deluges of the kind that wreaked havoc on Cockermouth, according to climate experts.
They warn that, although no single event can be attributed to climate change, the warming of the atmosphere caused by greenhouse gases means such disasters will become more frequent."
The Guardian have nothing on their front page but on their Science and Environment page I found this article that restricts the headline to "Climate sceptics claim leaked emails are evidence of collusion among scientists" - "collusion" is that the worst of the claims? The Guardian are slightly torn here between supporting the agenda that they have pushed for so long and exposing a fraud. Reading the whole article is interesting as the conflict is clear as they worry about the veracity of the emails whilst pointing out the evasiveness of some of the scientists.
How about The Independent? Nothing on the front page so I looked at their Climate Change front page, and unsurprisingly for a media outlet that has its own Climate Change section... Not a word, not a mention. It would seem that nothing must be allowed to pierce the absolute certainty of Man Made Climate Change in the minds of Independent readers.
I may look at the other papers later but it looks like good marks for The Telegraph and Mail, a "could do better" to The Guardian and "nil points" to The Times, The Independent and The BBC.
Whilst the BBC's report on the UEA Climate Research Centre hack refers just to the hacking and makes no reference to the deceit uncovered, they do fin the space to report yet another shock-horror story about the claimed effects of higher CO2 levels. This time the scare story is that:
"Ocean acidification could cause fish to become "fatally attracted" to their predators, according to scientists.
A team studying the effects of acidification - caused by dissolved CO2 - on ocean reefs found that it leaves fish unable to "smell danger". "
Meanwhile The Telegraph do at least report the real story thus:
"Climate scientists accused of 'manipulating global warming data' - Some of the world’s top climate scientists have been accused of manipulating data on global warming after hundreds of private emails were stolen by hackers and published online."
This report includes one of the clips that I referred to yesterday:
"One of the emails under scrutiny, dated November 1999, reads: "I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.""
and the unsurprising news that
"Scientists who are alleged to be the authors of the emails in question have declined to comment on the matter. "
This story must not be allowed to wither away as the BBC hope, so keep pushing the story folks...
The actual emails referred to here are no longer on the FTP site. Climate Audit and Watts Up With That are having problems with the amount of traffic coming to their sites re this expose which, if true, is dynamite.
The Watts Up With That page that you should take a read of is this one with plentry of example emails, here's one example to whet your appetite (my emphasis):
"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998."
You might also like to follow the debate at The Examiner who fisrt broke the story.
Biased BBC report some very interesting news from The Examiner:
"The University of East Anglia's Hadley Climatic Research Centre appears to have suffered a security breach earlier today, when an unknown hacker apparently downloaded 1079 e-mails and 72 documents of various types and published them to an anonymous FTP server. These files appear to contain highly sensitive information that, if genuine, could prove extremely embarrassing to the authors of the e-mails involved. Those authors include some of the most celebrated names among proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)."
Interesting in itself, but it gets even more interesting as Biased BBC report (my emphasis):
"Hadley has confirmed that it has been hacked and it has cancelled all existing passwords. If you see or hear any mention of this on the BBC please point it out in the comments so we can monitor how this story is spun, both by Hadley and the BBC.
Update 13.45. Andrew Bolt has been picking through the emails and documents and, if they are all genuine, the information in them is simply astonishing.
There's a document by Hadley's Professor Phil Jones which shows that he was so concerned by Freedom Of Information requests for raw data that he was contemplating ways to remove key information and reconstruct the data to make it fit the preferred conclusions. There's an email from American climate scientist Tom Wigley advising Professor Jones how to manipulate some data to emphasise warming trends. There's an email from Jones telling his colleagues to delete incriminatory emails. There's another from Jones in which he tells a colleague that he's used the same "trick" as Michael Mann (Mr Hockey Stick) "to hide the decline", and in yet another he calls the reported death of a climate sceptic "cheering news". There's an email from Mann himself promising senior Hadley staff that they can use the RealClimate website to post articles and he will ensure the censorship of any comments from sceptics challenging what they've written. There's an email from senior IPCC scientist Kevin Trenberth in which he asks, "Where the heck is global warming?…The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t." There's an email in which Hadley staff promise to blackball scientists from the IPCC report whose work doesn't conform to their alarmist predictions: "keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !""
Is this the smoking gun on climate change?
The BBC report the news in a way that ignores any of the emerging information. The BBC prefer to report that:
"The e-mail system of one the world's leading climate research units has been breached by hackers.
E-mails reportedly from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU), including personal exchanges, appeared on the internet on Thursday.
A university spokesman confirmed the email system had been hacked and that information was taken and published without permission. "
Apparently
"Researchers at CRU, considered to be one of the world's leading research bodies on natural and human-induced climate change, played a key role in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, which is considered to be the most authoritative report of its kind."
Maybe the BBC's environment analyst, Roger Harrabin, who has no science degree but did study English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge would like to pass comment on the facts being revealed...
"A charity run by the interior minister of Hamas has offered $1.4 Million for a captured Israeli soldier. Given how much they keep talking about wanting peace, I assume that they only want to talk to the soldier and then will let him go. You know, the way they are talking to Gilad Shalit."
Well that's where Israel's trading prisoners for a video of one captured soldier, Gilad Shalit, has got them. Now Hamas know that to get even more money and prisoners they need to capture more Israeli soldiers.
I expect the West's human rights organisations will be complaining about this tactic any moment...
"This is big. Al Gore is now saying carbon dioxide isn’t actually to blame for most of the warming we saw until 2001:
Gore explored new studies - published only last week - that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide – while the focus of the politics of climate change – produces around 40% of the actual warming. Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions.
Which suggests not only that was Gore wrong to claim the science was “settled”, but that the hugely expensive schemes to “stop” warming by slashing carbon dixoide emissions will be less than half as effective as claimed. "
Should anyone be surprised that Al Gore got the "science" of Climate Change so wrong, after all I read that :
"For all of Gore's later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6 (Man's Place in Nature) and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year."
I suppose that still makes him better qualified in science than the BBC's environment analyst Roger Harrabin who studied English at St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Here's the science expert Al Gore in an interview with Conan O'Brien recently:
"Al: It definitely is, and it's a relatively new one. People think about geothermal energy -- when they think about it at all -- in terms of the hot water bubbling up in some places, but two kilometers or so down in most places there are these incredibly hot rocks, 'cause the interior of the earth is extremely hot, several million degrees, and the crust of the earth is hot"
Several million degrees, wow that's hot, like really hot; especially when you realise that the temperature at the surface of the sun is around 6,000 degrees celsius and the sun's core around 12,000 degrees celsius. According to what I have read the temperature of the Earth around two kilometres down is around 60 degrees celsius. The temperature at the earth's core is quoted as variously 5,000 degrees celsius or less or 9,000 degrees.
Al Gore - scientist, humanitarian, rich man - and getting richer all the time as his eco-companies rake in your taxes...
More on climate change lies later today, there's a lot around!
"Barack Obama has warned that the US economy could head into a “double-dip recession” unless urgent steps were taken to rein back America’s mounting levels of public debt.
With the US unemployment rate now running at 10.2 per cent, the President said his administration faced a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and spur job creation while bringing the rising deficit and debt under control.
“I think it is important though to recognise that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”
“One of the trickiest things we’re doing right now, is to on the one hand make sure the recovery is supported and not withdraw a lot of money either with tax increases or big spending ... at the same time, making sure that we’re setting up a pathway long term for deficit reduction,” he said. “It’s about as hard of a play as there is.
...
Mr Obama said that his administration is weighing tax breaks that could encourage businesses to begin hiring again.
“There may be some tax provisions that can encourage businesses to hire sooner rather than sitting on the sidelines. So we’re taking a look at those,” he said. "
The underlying debt burden is greater than it was after the Second World War, when nominal levels looked similar. Ageing populations will make it harder to erode debt through growth. "High public debt looks entirely unsustainable in the long run. We have almost reached a point of no return for government debt," it said.
Depressed, you bloody well should be; the west's economies are shot to pieces and those of us in work, over the age of 40 and under the age of 70, will be paying off the debt for the rest of our working lives.
The unelected Labour peer Baroness Ashton has been selected as the EU's high representative of foreign affairs and security by the leaders of the EU's 27 member states at a meeting in Brussels.
Does anyone else feel that the way that a woman who has never been elected to a political position will now be one of the most powerful people in the EU is somewhat symbolic of the lack of democracy in the EU.
Let's look at Baroness Ashton's CV: 1977 to 1979 worked at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament before being elected as its national treasurer and then a vice-chair. So the vice chair of CND whose organisation undermined western security is now nominally responsible for the EU's "Security", maybe Marxism has won... 1983 worked for the Social Work Training Council. 1983 to 1989 Director of Business in the Community working with business to tackle inequality 1998-2001 chaired the Health Authority in Hertfordshire and became a Vice President of the National Council for One Parent Families June 2001 made a Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Education and Skills 2002 appointed minister for Sure Start in the same department September 2004 made a Parliamentary Under-Secretary in the Department for Constitutional Affairs 2006 sworn into the Privy Council May 2007 became Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the new Ministry of Justice June 2007 Gordon Brown, appointed her to the Cabinet as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council 3 October 2008 nominated as the UK's European Commissioner in the European Commission November 2009, she became the first EU foreign minister
So the "noble lady" has managed to make it from working at CND to being High Representative of Foreign Affairs and Security without being democratically elected to any public office.
Isn't modern Labour and EU democracy simply marvellous, absolutely no need for elections at all. The people have no say, just the requirement to pay taxes and obey the multitude of laws introduced by their lords and masters.
Thank you EU for imposing these bulbs on us in the name of preventing Climate Change. The public suffer because of your misplaced obsession with a nonsense theory.
"Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.
The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.
Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found. "
But as this does not fit their world view that alcohol is evil, how sharia law compliant of them, they have to immediately state that:
"Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year.
The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease. "
Oddly the BBC never issue "health warnings" about reports that state how dangerous alcohol drinking is even when they are later proved to have conclusions that are almost entirely fictional.
I see that this blog is now number one on google.co.uk for - gordon brown university pamphlet welfare - for this fascinating article. Do read the whole piece for some worthwhile background on our "freeloader" Prime Minister.
There you go, from National Statistics itself, as published today, the Cumulative public sector current budget is so bad that it is actually off the graph!
"Gordon Brown has admitted that he regrets the way he worded his recent criticism of X Factor duo John & Edward.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister branded the pair "not very good" as he discussed the ITV1 talent show in a radio interview.
Speaking on This Morning today, Brown admitted: "I got into a bit of a problem because I said I did not think they were very good at singing - but they are very good at other things.
"I don't know who's going to win, but I rather burned my boats with Jedward."
After confirming that he would like the twins to "do well", the politician added that he and his young sons are supporters of the programme's last remaining female act Stacey Solomon.
Brown also said that his children enjoy Danyl Johnson's performances, but mistakenly referred to the teacher as "Daryl"."
I wonder how much foucus grouping was done to come up with an answer that compliments so many and plumps for the only female contestant left? This smacks of a repeat of "biscuitgate".
Meanwhile I heard yesterday that Boris Johnson when asked about who he wanted to win some reality show, or some other equally puerile question, replied along the lines that he didn't watch the programme and did that really reduce his credibility. Well said Boris; most of these programmes are utter drivel and any politician that desperate to appear one of the people that they pretend to like these programmes deserves nothing but disdain.
"Let us be clear about the aim of halving the deficit. Next year the deficit is forecast to be 14 per cent. When Denis Healey was Chancellor and Britain nearly went bust, it was 7 per cent. So under this Prime Minister's magnificent plan to halve the deficit, we will be back to where we were-virtually bankrupt-last time Labour wrecked our economy."
I know I blogged about this yesterday but people still seem to be confused. The BBC report the promise thus:
"Fiscal Responsibility Bill - Provides a "firm and binding statutory basis" for the government's promise to halve its budget deficit within four years."
Hansard report this part of the Queen's Speech thus:
"As the economic recovery is established (sic), my Government will reduce the budget deficit and ensure that national debt is on a sustainable path. Legislation will be brought forward to halve the deficit."
Let nobody be in any doubt that the promise to cut the deficit by 50% over the next four years would mean the National Debt rising by over £550 billion (assuming an even yearly reduction in the deficit). And nowhere on the BBC can I see this point being made. Now most of the UK population does not understand the difference between "deficit" and "debt" so why does the BBC not follow its mission to educate and explain the difference? Is the BBC colluding with a Labour government by seeming to indicate that the economic position is not that bad and that the country's debt can be halved in four years?
Words fail me at watching this video shot at Microsoft's store at the Mission Viejo mall in California. Yes Apple is cool and Microsoft is not, get over it...
Pure electioneering but maybe for 2014/15 rather than 2010. This speech was about setting unachievable targets for the next Conservative government to fail to meet. In any case, the Labour promise is not to halve the accumulated debt in four years but to halve the annual deficit. So if this year's deficit is £200 billion then Labour would still be borrowing £100 billion in four years time and the UK debt would still be rising by £100 billion a year. This would mean that the UK's annual interest payments on the debt would continue to rise from the current projected figure of £65 billion per year especially if the cost of servicing this debt rises along with interest rates. It is quite possible that the UK would need to borrow £100 billion a year just to service its debt obligations.
This Is London report a new menace on the roads of London.
It seems that a new generation of "intelligent" speed traps are being introduced as another way of raising money and making London's roads even more hazardous. These new average speed camera systems will be used to track cars over a wide area - such as a housing estate - instead of the old fashioned Gatso type that just flash at one place. Plenty of drivers will no doubt be receiving those £60 fines in the near future (I am not sure if they will also get 3 points).
So where in London is the first site? Mansfield Road, NW3; that's the road that links Camden Town/Haverstock Hill with Highgate Hill/Kentish Town Road. The whole of the 20mph zone on this road will be under the watchful gaze of the placed on hight new blue average speed cameras.
The usual suspects will no doubt say that if you obey the speed limit then you will have nothing to fear but the truth is somewhat at variance with this. From my experience of average speed cameras on stretches of motorway roadworks, drivers do indeed obey the speed limit unfortunately they achieve this by keeping one eye on their speedometer all the time. On a motorway with no traffic coming in the opposite direction, or coming from side-roads or cyclists weaving about or pedestrians crossing the road this is just about safe but on a London urban main road?
Of course nobody has explained why there is a 20mph speed limit on part of Mansfield Road, it's not a fast piece of road just a typical London road. What has happened over the last 15 years or so is that speed limits in London have bee reduced by around 10mph on main roads; the A40 dropped from 60mph to 50mph, the A406 from 50mph to 40mph and almost at the same time the speed cameras were introduced. Now we are to have many many more 20mph zones until 20mph is the standard speed for residential areas.
If this technology trial is successful then the plan is to roll these systems out across London and what a great revenue raiser they will be.
The line that is always used is that "Speed Kills" and that speed is a major factor in road accidents. This is of course rubbish as I pointed out 2 years ago
"A DfT strategy paper claimed speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents". The "excessive and inappropriate speed" that helped "to kill about 1,200 people" each year was "far more than any other single contributor to casualties on our roads". The source given for this claim, to be repeated as a mantra by ministers and officials for years to come, was a report from the government's Transport Research Laboratory, TRL Report 323: "A new system for recording contributory factors in road accidents". Not many people would have looked at this report, since it was only available for £45. But some who did were amazed. The evidence the report had cited to support its claim that speed was "a major contributory factor in about a third of all road accidents" simply wasn't there. Many other factors were named as contributing to road accidents, from driving without due care and attention to the influence of drink; from poor overtaking to nodding off at the wheel. But the figure given for accidents in which the main causative factor was "excessive speed" was way down the list, at only 7.3 per cent."
Do read the whole of that piece but this extract might also prove interesting:
"The statistics for Durham showed that, of 1,900 collisions each year, only three per cent involved cars that were exceeding the speed limit, just 60 accidents a year. Look more closely at the causes of these 60 accidents, the "actual cause of the accident invariably is drink-driving or drug-driving". Drug-taking was now involved in 40 per cent of Durham's fatal road accidents. Many accidents, he said, were caused by fatigue, although one of the most common causes was the failure of drivers to watch out for oncoming vehicles when turning right. To none of these could speed cameras offer any remedy. "The cause of accidents," Garvin (chief constable of Durham) concluded, "is clearly something different from exceeding the speed limit"."
Also
"In September 2006, the DfT finally conceded one of the central points that Safe Speed's Paul Smith had been arguing for five years: that only five per cent of road accidents were caused by drivers who were breaking the speed limit. In The Daily Telegraph, Smith was quoted as saying "the government's case for continuing to install cameras has been destroyed"."
So the truth is that speed cameras do not make the roads safer, are not needed and are being used to raise revenue - who would have thought it?
"The man who operated the Gordon, the puppet gopher that appeared on Children's BBC programmes with Phillip Schofield, is now the corporation’s head of compliance"
Paul Smith - the puppet master, the man pulling the strings (yes I know Gordon the Gopher was a glove puppet), the man with a hand in every pie...
The Pedant General has a must-read piece over at Devils Kitchen giving us all a "handy cut-out-and-keep guide for politicians wishing to apologise for something."
Swindon will be the first UK town to offer free wireless internet access across the whole town.
Digital City UK Ltd will run the project for Swindon Borough Council which has a 35% share and they intend to roll out the technology in other towns and cities in the UK.
The Swindon project, costing around £1 million will install a "WiFi mesh" offering blanket internet coverage for its 186,000 citizens and presumably a large number of visitors. The system will be free but Digital City hope to make money by selling relatively cheap 20MB links to those who require faster browsing and download speeds.
I wonder what the free speed will be? I suppose so long as it is faster than a 3G card then it will be fast enough for most people and it will be free. Somehow I doubt that access will be unlimited or Swindon could become the illegal download capital of the UK.
OK so their not geeks but tech and new media entrepreneurs but it's all in a good cause so buy your copy of the 2010 calendar here and take a look at their home page here.
Details of the charity, Take Heart India can be found here.
Here's a list of those who will be in the calendar: * Alan Wylie, Huddle * Alicia Navarro, Skimbit * Andrew J Scott, Rummble * Anke Holst * Anna Bance, Girl Meets Dress * David Langer, Groupspaces * Elizabeth Varley, TechHub * Fabio de Bernardi, ilikeucoz * Gabrielle Laine Peters * Hermione Way, Techfluff.TV * The Huddle team * Joana Simoes * Joe Stepniewski, Skimbit * Joshua March, iPlatform * Lucian Tarnowski, Brave New Talent * Malcolm Scovil, LeapAnywhere * Oliver Mardling, WhatTalent.com * Poppy Dinsey, Globrix * Rassami Hok-Ljungberg, 2 Pears * The Reevoo team * Sam Barnett, Struq * Sam Mathews, fnatic & Evisua * Sophie Cox, Worldeka * Vincent Camara, intruders.tv * Zuzanna Pasierbinska-Wilson, Huddle * A special appearance by Mike Butcher, editor of TechCrunch Europe
Maybe for 2011 a nude calendar of geeky bloggers? Maybe not!
The news that Andy House, owner of Performance Auto Sales in Lufkin, Texas, was driving on Interstate 45 early last week when he crashed his 2006 Bugatti Veyron into a nearby lake reached me along with a rather dull picture and the news that according to Mr. House, he had been distracted by a low-flying pelican which caused him to drop his cell phone and so lose control of the car... and drive into a lake. This was interesting but not very visual until I found this piece of video of the incident, apparently taken by two dudes excited by the presence of a Veyron and rather free with the word sh*t...
I don't see a low-flying pelican, do you?
The Bugatti Veyron is a beautiful and very expensive car, I presume this one is now ruined...
The BBC report but only on the Business Pages that
"The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) climbed to 1.5% in October, up from 1.1% in September.
Meanwhile the Retail Prices Index (RPI) inflation measure, which includes mortgage interest payments and housing costs, rose to -0.8% from -1.4%."
I thought that the agreed Labour/BBC narrative was that deflation was the problem and that only fools (like me) believed rampant inflation was coming soon. The BBC even desperately try to explain the rise in the CPI & RPI by blaming unusual external factors, not something that they ever did back in the early 1990s; but then that was an evil Conservative government not a lovely Labour one.
Massive inflation is on the way. Incidentally I note that the price of gold is now above 1130USD per oz.
The BBC report on the upcoming "Queen's Speech" which David Cameron has quite rightly characterised as the "most divisive, short-termist, shamelessly self-serving" one "in living memory". The BBC slip in this comment that I found interesting:
"A Downing Street spokesman said Business Secretary Lord Mandelson had briefed Tuesday's cabinet meeting on government on the key themes to be outlined in the Queen's Speech."
So an unelected member of the House of Lords briefed cabinet on the themes for the Queen's Speech; why Peter Mandelson and not Gordon Brown? Was Gordon Brown too busy saving the world from or just incapable of coherent thought and/or speech?
David Cameron recently summed up the planned Queen's Speech thus:
"Apparently it's all going to be about dividing lines between Gordon Brown and the Conservatives... That tells you all you need to know about the character of the government - and, indeed, this prime minister... Dig deeper into any of his plans and you'll find pettiness masquerading as principle.... Two and a half years ago the prime minister stood in Downing Street and told us that he would be 'strong in purpose, steadfast in will, resolute in action'. But tomorrow we will hear the most divisive, short-termist, shamelessly self-serving Queen's Speech in living memory."
I actually think that the public have rumbled Gordon Brown; they know that he is a liar and a schemer and that any bills proposed in the Queen's Speech are purely electioneering and division creating.
"Gordon Brown says he hopes control of some areas of Afghanistan can be handed over from 2010, raising the prospect of the eventual withdrawal of UK troops.
The prime minister wants to host a Nato meeting in January to "set a timetable" for transfer to full Afghan control. "
A conference in London with images of Gordon Brown bestriding the world stage alongside Barack Obama and setting a date to end Britain's involvement in an unpopular war in Afghanistan, I am sure that the timing is completely unconnected with an upcoming general election campaign.
The Waters of Mars was average for 80% of the programme but The Doctor becoming somewhat unhinged at the end was rather frightening - The "Time Lord Victorious" was not the cuddly superhero Doctor that he has become in recent years. Some great acting by David Tennant who is rapidly becoming my favourite Doctor, just as he is about to be replaced...
Nice touch the Mars base bein called Bowie Base, "Life on Mars"... I wonder how many of the under 10s got that reference?
Anyway here's a hand-video from the filming of one of the "End of Time" episodes, thanks to Planet Gallifrey
"Today the BBC has confirmed the timetable that will make HD services on Freeview available to 50% of the population in time for next June's World Cup, and to 98.5% [1] of the population by the end of digital switchover in three years' time.
In order to bring the benefits of HD on Freeview to as many people as quickly as possible, the Freeview HD rollout has been accelerated with an advance network so that viewers in London, Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Bradford and Birmingham receive signals by the end of March 2010.
The majority of viewers will come into coverage at the same time that they go through digital switchover – including viewers in Manchester in December 2009 and those in Cardiff, who will get Freeview HD by the end of March 2010. For the 7% of the UK population who switched before December 2009, a retrofit programme will bring them into coverage before the end of November 2010.
...
Timetable (Freeview HD signal availability commences at switchover unless otherwise stated)
England
Area - transmitter group - date
Manchester, Winter Hill, 2 December 2009 London, Crystal Palace, 2 December 2009 – advance network Newcastle and Tyneside, Pontop Pike, February 2010 – advance network Leeds/Bradford, Emley Moor, March 2010 – advance network Birmingham, Lichfield, March 2010 – advance network Liverpool, central Lancashire, Cheshire, north Staffordshire, Winter Hill relays, March 2010 – retrofit Exeter, parts of Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Stockland Hill, April 2010 – retrofit Bristol, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Mendip, April 2010 Devon, Cornwall, and the Isles of Scilly, Beacon Hill, Caradon Hill, Huntshaw Cross, Redruth August 2010 – retrofit Cumbria and the Lake District, Caldbeck, October 2010 – retrofit"
Read this and get very very angry at what is being done in our name. I know that this Labour government are a) stupid and b) unconcerned at spending our money, but paying the expenses of those on control orders...
This story from last week was so astonishing that I expected it to receive wide media coverage but it didn't so here I go...
"A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for "doing his duty".
Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.
In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.
"I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.
"At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall."
Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.
Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke's garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly lower than his neighbours.
He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station, which included "reporting found firearms".
Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke, he asked: "Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police, or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it by telephone, and not take it into a police station?"
To which, Mr Garnett replied: "No, I don't believe so."
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge – therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
But despite this, Mr Blackman urged members of the jury to consider how they would respond if they found a gun.
He said: "This is a very small case with a very big principle.
"You could be walking to a railway station on the way to work and find a firearm in a bin in the park.
"Is it unreasonable to take it to the police station?"
Paul Clarke will be sentenced on December 11.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.
"The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant." at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.
The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year's imprisonment for handing in the weapon.
In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: "I didn't think for one moment I would be arrested.
"I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets."
The court heard how Mr Clarke was on the balcony of his home in Nailsworth Crescent, Merstham, when he spotted a black bin liner at the bottom of his garden.
In his statement, he said: "I took it indoors and inside found a shorn-off shotgun and two cartridges.
"I didn't know what to do, so the next morning I rang the Chief Superintendent, Adrian Harper, and asked if I could pop in and see him.
"At the police station, I took the gun out of the bag and placed it on the table so it was pointing towards the wall."
Mr Clarke was then arrested immediately for possession of a firearm at Reigate police station, and taken to the cells.
Defending, Lionel Blackman told the jury Mr Clarke's garden backs onto a public green field, and his garden wall is significantly lower than his neighbours.
He also showed jurors a leaflet printed by Surrey Police explaining to citizens what they can do at a police station, which included "reporting found firearms".
Quizzing officer Garnett, who arrested Mr Clarke, he asked: "Are you aware of any notice issued by Surrey Police, or any publicity given to, telling citizens that if they find a firearm the only thing they should do is not touch it, report it by telephone, and not take it into a police station?"
To which, Mr Garnett replied: "No, I don't believe so."
Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a "strict liability" charge – therefore Mr Clarke's allegedly honest intent was irrelevant.
Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added.
But despite this, Mr Blackman urged members of the jury to consider how they would respond if they found a gun.
He said: "This is a very small case with a very big principle.
"You could be walking to a railway station on the way to work and find a firearm in a bin in the park.
"Is it unreasonable to take it to the police station?"
Paul Clarke will be sentenced on December 11.
Judge Christopher Critchlow said: "This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge.
"The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.""
So it seems that a man who handed a gun, that he had found in his garden, into the police gets charged, convicted and sentenced to five years in prison for "possessing a firearm". Does nobody think that this might be a little over the top? I wonder how the judge summed up the case, can one find out? Was the jury directed to a guilty verdict via an explanation of "strict liability"? I wonder if this is the same Paul Clarke and what light, if any, does that report shed on this case.
"A man who found a loaded gun linked to a gangland shooting was told by Scotland Yard to carry it across south London to a police station.
John Leary came across the weapon in a playground where it had been abandoned days after the crime. But the Met refused his request for a plain-clothes officer to collect it from his home.
Today the force admitted major failings over the matter.
Disabled Mr Leary, 51, found the weapon inside a plastic bag near his home on the Hemans estate in Stockwell. Speaking for the first time since the find, he said: "I was going to hang the bag on the railings until I felt its weight. When I looked inside there was a big revolver, a passport and some cash. It had a long barrel and I could see the chambers were loaded. There was no question of leaving it where kids play."
Immediately after finding the revolver he was confronted by gang members who tried to get him to hand it over. But he refused and called police.
Officers suggested they send a patrol car to his house, but he refused for fear of reprisals from the gang members who had seen him carry the bag away. "I told them it was more than my life was worth," said Mr Leary.
Police then advised him to go to his local station, in Larkhall Park, Wandsworth Road, but it was closed. He had to travel 2.5 miles into Clapham to Lavender Hill police station, where an officer agreed to receive the weapon. Mr Leary was taken into the Met's witness protection programme after the gang continued to target him, offering him £3,000 for the gun. They later subjected him to death threats and intimidation, forcing him to flee to his son's home."
So what would you do if you found a gun in your garden?
I understand that Gordon Brown is set to apologise, I presume for his mistakes over the last 12 years or so. I must say it is about time that Gordon Brown apologised for his near destruction of the British economy. I presume that he will also be apologising for the idiotic pre-announced sale of half of the UK gold reserves at a knockdown price. I suppose that Gordon Brown will also be apologising for creating the largest public debt in British history. Still on the financial side of things, I presume that the saviour of the world economy will also be apologising for the way he deliberately stoked one of the largest "bubbles" in history so he could carry on spending/investing/wasting money on public sector fripperies. I suppose Gordon Brown might also find time to apologise for his part in the near collapse of the UK banking system that resulted from his creation of a tripartite regulatory structure that was not for purpose. I presume he will also be apologising for his deliberate destruction of the UK's private pension system.
Moving away from the economy, I presume that Gordon Brown will also be apologising for his part in changing the culture of this country through a policy of mass immigration, a policy we know know to have been deliberately introduced. I suppose Gordon Brown will also find the time to apologise for his part in the destruction of the UK's constitution, the politicising of the civil service and the Quangoisation of the British body politic. I presume that Gordon Brown will also find the time to apologise for his breaking of Labour's promise to hold a referendum on the EU Constitution and for signing away Britain's independence in a sordid little private signing ceremony. I do hope Gordon Brown also finds the time to apologise for the way that he has created a dependency culture population so large that it may yet keep him and his grasping friends in power at the expense of the misery of millions.
Sorry, I have just heard that Gordon Brown's apology will be for none of these things, he in fact plans to apologise for the UK's role in sending thousands of its children to former colonies (mostly Australia) in the 20th century. Something that he has no direct or indirect responsibility for but that might make a few people think that he is a normal human being.
Tonight Peter Oborne presents a Channel 4 Dispatches programme entitled "Inside Britain's Israel Lobby". The Channel 4 blurb for this 'televisual feast' runs thus:
"Dispatches investigates one of the most powerful and influential political lobbies in Britain, which is working in support of the interests of the State of Israel.
Despite wielding great influence among the highest realms of British politics and media, little is known about the individuals and groups which collectively are known as the pro-Israel lobby.
Political commentator Peter Oborne sets out to establish who they are, how they are funded, how they work and what influence they have, from the key groups to the wealthy individuals who help bankroll the lobbying.
He investigates how accountable, transparent and open to scrutiny the lobby is, particularly in regard to its funding and financial support of MPs.
The pro-Israel lobby aims to shape the debate about Britain's relationship with Israel and future foreign policies relating to it.
Oborne examines how the lobby operates from within parliament and the tactics it employs behind the scenes when engaging with print and broadcast media."
Somehow I think that the Arab/Muslim lobby, certainly in Washington, has better funding and carries a lot more weight than the Israeli lobby. And it should be noted that whilst Israel is an ally of the West, upholding western values and democracy, it finds itself surrounded by Muslim states most of whom are either overt or covert sponsors of terror.
My views it seems are somewhat at odds with most of the commentators on the Dispatches page linked to above, who seem even more removed from reality than I would have expected. Here are a few clips of their considered views:
" YAEL KAHN on 07 November 2009 at 11:30 I hope the programme would expose how lobbyists for Israel trample over the UK democratic process. I expect Oborne to expose the destructive role of the Labour Friends of Israel in British politics, but I hope he won't stop there.
VERONICA PLANTON on 07 November 2009 at 23:18 Congratulations to Channel 4 and Dispatches on breaking the silence over the Zionist Lobby! Israel is a serial violator of the UN Charter and International Law. Ongoing breaches of the Hague Convention on War, Geneva Convention and International Humanitarian Law, along with non-compliance with 138 UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to comply with the basic principles of International Law, have turned Israel into a 'rogue state'. The State of Israel's military might is ranked 4th globally. The Israeli military Dahiya doctrine applied in Gaza involved the deliberate commission of crimes against humanity. It carried out a massacre against an unarmed population, 60% of which are children. It has maintained an illegal siege on Gaza in the face of international condemnation...I could go on and on, but I will resist the temptation for now. The terrorizing and killing of innocent civilians is defined as terrorism, perpetrated by terrorists. Mr White, I would be interested in your definition of 'democratic process'. The Zionist Lobby counts many British politicians in its ranks where they function as a fifth column in support of Israel's illegal actions. The powerful impact of the Zionist Lobby on British politics is more damaging to our country than that of the ghastly BNP.
NOISY TAPPET on 13 November 2009 at 16:04 Good. We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out. They are a menace to our foreign policy, security and reputation abroad. I hope this programme isn't 'pulled' at the last minute due to overwhelming pressure from the usual suspect. If it does what it should do, some very big names are going to be shamed, and not before time."
There are many more in the same vein but I think that a couple of more considered views deserve repeating:
" STV on 14 November 2009 at 14:03 I'm sorry, I must bring some balance to this debate. I do not believe Israel is a 'terrorist' any more than any other nation. Before the nation of Israel came back into existence in 1948 and since, Arab people have been fighting and killing one another. The Iran-Iraq war alone (among many others) killed far more Arabs than Israel ever has. Is Israel responsible for all these wars too?! There is a more complex answer to Israel "illegally occupying land", too. History is not so one-sided and there is great misinformation on the Palestinian / Arab 'side' too. If you were Israel, how would you react when surrounded by countries intent on your destruction, or even the destruction of Jewish people? Almost no Jews are allowed or able to live in most neighbouring Middle-East nations, whereas Israel is 20% Arab. Iran is more of an aggressor in that region, not Israel, with constant threats against Israel and the West. And if we're talking about 'war crimes', both Israel and Hamas (and others) are guilty of war crimes. Of course Israel has committed atrocities - every nation has done this; of course Palestinians deserve better. So let's keep this debate, if it truly is one, balanced. And no, I'm not Jewish or part of any Zionist conspiracy!
W MARTIN on 15 November 2009 at 14:57 I am neither a Zionist agent or even Jewish for that matter but I am appalled at some of the comments I have read here. If there was any doubt before there should be none now, there are bigoted forces within the UK that would like nothing better than to tar the entire Jewish community with a sinister brush. By all means let us look at the practices of all lobbying groups but let us do so with civility. Why I must ask, is that when Israel and Jews become the subject of investigation does this seem to give permission for society's bullies and bigots to crawl out from under their rocks? It is very troubling indeed.
FRAN on 15 November 2009 at 19:49 Hazel Smith writes "We need more information about the history of what has happened in Palestine." You certainly do, Ms Smith. Israel was created in response to the UN resolution which ratified the 1920 League of Nations decision to grant Jews self governance on part of their ancient homeland. Rather than welcome this, the newly created Arab states - yes Ms Smith, the Arab states were all created during this time by League of Nations mandates - decided to attack Israel as the world looked on. They gambled on driving the Jews into the sea and they lost. From thence the Middle East crisis unfolded with great suffering on both sides. That suffering included refugees - over 800,000 of whom were Jews whose forced explusion from countries around the Middle East is airbrushed out of history by the powerful and extravagently-funded anti-Israel lobby that no-one at all talks about. "
And as an aside, this invitation to the "Muslim Friends of Labour Annual Gala Dinner" may be of interest; the guest of "honour" is Gordon Brown.
"Residents in Manchester will become the first people in Britain to be able to apply for ID cards.
They can now directly apply to attend appointments from November 30 to have their photograph and fingerprints taken for the £30 cards at Manchester's passport office.
Junior Home Office Minister Meg Hillier said the cards would be particularly useful for students and young people as they would "save the cost and hassle" of getting into clubs and bars.
Anyone over 16 in the city with a UK passport can apply for a card.
Ms Hillier told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Really for a lot of people it's a day-to-day convenience thing.
"For a lot of young people ... they often take their passports to prove their identity in nightclubs and bars and the Passport Service sweeps these up every week. So for a lot of people it'll save the cost and hassle of taking your passport, risking losing it and instead you've got this very convenient little credit-sized card. I've got one and it's very useful.""
Do read the whole piece and wonder if anyone will fall for the crap that Labour ministers still insist on spouting about the ID card scheme. Remember that Gordon Brown's announcement to the Labour Conference that "in the next Parliament there will be no compulsory ID cards for British citizens" was the same misleading line that ministers have been spewing for years. The ID card scheme was designed so as to force people to "volunteer" for a system that they can never then leave. Be under no illusions that before long you will be forced to register for an ID card when you apply for a passport or, before too long, for any officially-designated document.
The National Identity Register is still a target of the Labour government, a government that will not be happy until we are all traceable 24 hours a day. Our every move, our every action, our every piece of correspondence and interaction recorded, stored and retrievable by the State and its functionaries. The Stasi would have loved to have had just 10% of the information that our new rulers will have about each and every one of us.
The Times alerts me to a new phrase in the liberal lexicon "resettlement overnight release" which means letting long term prisoners out of prison for up to 100 days a year in order to do community service.
The Ministry of Justice's own figures show there has been a sharp rise in the number of occasions when ROR is granted. In 2006, there were 3,813 licences for ROR. In 2007, it was 6,914, and last year, the total was 11,599.
This scheme is marketed as a way of reintegrating etc. etc. etc. but in reality it is a way of quietly reducing prisoner numbers. How does this affect the public? The Times has some examples:
" Harry Roberts, 72, who was given a 42 year jail sentence after murdering three policemen, terrorised a woman while let out on a scheme meant to reacquaint him with life on the outside. His release was cancelled and he remains in jail.
* Robert Foye, who was serving 10 years for the attempted murder of a policeman, raped a 16-year-old girl in August 2007 after being let out on day release to attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
* Thomas Murray, a convicted murderer and certified schizophrenic, entered the home of Nancy Nolan, an 80-year-old retired schoolteacher, and killed her with a lump hammer while on day release in 2000. "
Labour soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime. In fact Labour the party of criminals for criminals.
The news that Alistair Darling is to introduce state control of bankers' bonuses via the Financial Services Bill due to be introduced soon leaves me unsurprised. Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and the BBC have run a very successful campaign to lay as much blame as possible for the economic crisis on bankers and thus reduce the blame that should rightfully accrue to Gordon Brown. This new bill is merely the latest act in this misdirection and unless the Conservatives start telling the truth about where the blame lies rather than jumping on the blame the bankers bandwagon then much of the power of The City will disappear elsewhere.
The Mail reports in the shocked manner that only The Mail can muster that:
"The results of The X Factor have been called into question by television bosses after its tightly controlled voting system was effectively hijacked.
Instead of paying for premium-rate calls, thousands of viewers are now voting ‘unofficially’ – and much more cheaply – for their favourite acts via a website.
Viewers who vote via the free2call.tv website pay for their calls by listening to a 15-second online advert – but in doing so circumvent all the security surrounding the official phone lines."
Frankly I don't care who wins X Factor, Jedward or anyone else, I have never watched X Factor and don't intend to start now. Simon Cowell has quite enough money if people don't realise that the purpose of the show is to fill Simon Cowell's bank account then more fool them.
Rather than The Mail bemoaning vote-rigging on the X Factor, maybe they could investigate vote-rigging in UK elections especially via the "postal vote" system; surely that is more vital the UK than a reality "talent" show?
I read the news that "the Government is to order 20 troop-carrying Chinooks" and I can't help wondering how many soldiers might be alive rather than dead if Gordon Brown had not so pig-headedly insisted that no more helicopters were needed or had been requested.
"MOSCOW: Russian police have arrested three homeless people suspected of eating a 25-year-old man they had butchered and selling other bits of the corpse to a local kebab house.
Suspicions were raised when dismembered parts of a human body were found near a bus stop in the outskirts of the Russian city of Perm.
Three homeless men with previous criminal records have been arrested on suspicion of setting upon a foe with knives and a hammer before chopping up his corpse to eat, local investigators said.
The men have been charged with murder over the crime, which took place in a forested area of Perm, a city near the Ural Mountains located about 1400km east of Moscow. If convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison.
After carrying out the crime, the corpse was divided up: part was eaten and part was also sold to a kiosk selling kebabs and pies, the prosecutor-general's main investigative unit for the Perm region said in a statement on Friday.
It was not immediately clear from the statement if any of the corpse had been sold to customers. "
"An immigrant convicted of the horrific killing of a 17-month-old baby has been given £4,500 by the Government as a 'bribe' to leave the country.
Malaysian Agnes Wong, 29, was jailed for five years in 2008 for the brutal manslaughter of a toddler she was supposed to be child-minding.
She was let out of prison in July this year, and two weeks ago was put on a plane at Heathrow and sent to Malaysia with a 'voucher' worth £4,500 to spend when she got there."
The £4,500 payment is described as a "reintegration fund", good money for killing a baby; but I think we should be told what the tariff is for killing babies now - £4,500 each or is there a sliding scale? Does the age of the baby make a difference? Do you get more or less as the baby gets older? All these are vital questions but the really important question is "what the f*** is the UK Border Agency playing at?".
You might also like to mull over this comment:
"A Home Office official confirmed there were two other voluntary schemes offering illegal immigrants incentives to return: one for individuals in the asylum system paying up to £4,000; and one for immigrants who have no right to be here but have not claimed asylum, paying out a maximum of £1,000."
The key words surely are "illegal immigrants" and "no right to be here", this country is f***ed it's unreal.
The Telegraph reported yesterday the case of the "straight couple", Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, who want to "undertake a civil partnership ceremony to protest that marriage is an "apartheid" against homosexuals". Would you care to guess what London Borough they live in?
