The Muslim Population Has Grown From 1.65 Million To 2.87 Million Since 2001, Say Researchers. What Does This Mean For Britain & Europe?

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimates that there are 2,869,000 Muslims in Britain, an increase of 74 per cent on its previous figure of 1,647,000, which was based on the 2001 census. No demographic statistics are reliable in an era of open borders, but such an expansion is unprecedented.

The figure of 2.87 million was first published by Pew in a little-noticed press release last September, announcing a report on Muslim Networks and Movements in Western Europe. The Pew Centre, based in Washington DC, is one of the most respected demographic research bodies in the world; its methodology is scrupulous and its approach non-partisan. The new total for British Muslims means that, so far as this country as concerned, Pew’s major 2009 report Mapping the Global Muslim Population is already spectacularly out of date. See the map above showing the updated distribution of the Muslim population in Europe:

The material about global Islam in the 2010 report is fascinating, but it’s the revision of British figures that takes most people by surprise. Why was it not more widely reported in the autumn? And what are the implications for society? For an analysis that puts the statistics in context, see this article from the British Religion In Numbers website, which makes the point that the 2001 figure was probably an underestimate.

Pew’s UK figure for 2010 is 2,869,000, which is equivalent to 4.6% of the population. In absolute terms, the UK has the third largest Muslim community on the continent, after Germany (4,119,000) and France (3,574,000).

In percentage terms, the UK is in ninth position, after Belgium (6.0%), France, Austria and Switzerland (5.7%), The Netherlands (5.5%), Germany (5.0%), Sweden (4.9%) and Greece (4.7%). UK Muslims account for 16.8% of all Muslims in Western Europe.

There have been other indications of a dramatic increase in the numbers of British Muslims: the UK Labour Force Survey recorded a rise from 1,870,000 in 2004 to 2,422,000 in 2008. So Pew’s findings aren’t unsupported by independent data. Common sense suggests explanations for the increase: a high Muslim birth rate and large-scale immigration. But we are not sure that common sense tells us what this demographic earthquake means in practice for British public life.

Setting aside for the moment the topics of Muslim ghettos and jihadist Islam, let’s ask another question. What will happen when the indigenous white population realise one day that the European culture and lifestyle is changed for good and that the muslims have taken over and are now becoming the dominent culture? Will we see the sparks fly then? You bet we will!!!

Speaking Volumes To Silence Doubters

IN the land of the free, where you don't have to have any religion but just you try being a President without one (must be fundementalist Christian) by the way and settled by nonconformists fleeing religious persecution, dedicated to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, President Barack Hussein Obama has been reduced to a confession that his mother did not go to church. Instead, he became a "Christian by choice". Now isn't that wonderful? Sends a tingle up your spine doesn't it?

Having been cornered by a powerful constituency of doubters on the subject of his faith, his place of birth and other pertinent questions, Obama believes he has no choice but to spell it out: he was not raised a Christian, which does not mean he is an unbeliever or a timid, European-style birth, deaths and sometimes marriages agnostic. Or a Muslim.

The phrase "by choice", uttered on Monday in New Mexico, is his attempt to turn the issue to his advantage. He hopes Christian voters who worry about his identity and care deeply about his values will take these words to mean he is an active, and not passive, member of their spiritual "I believe in Fairies" club.

It speaks volumes about his vulnerabilities halfway through his first term in office, and about a country that still thinks of itself as "one nation under God".

Two years ago, Obama the campaigner stormed across the US calling himself the "kid with the funny name". It was a laugh line. It also drew attention to his middle name, Hussein, without doing him any harm in the polls. It thanked the audience for their tolerance. This was what the US was all about.

Two years ago. Obama the President has been intimidated by those whose instincts tell them that the US must be one nation under their particular God.

He did say in New Mexico how much it mattered to him that the US "embraces people of many faiths and no faith", but what was striking was he felt the need to. The majority that swept him to power took it for granted.

Obama is, indeed, a Christian by choice. One day there may be a US president who is something else by choice - but that day seems a long way off.

Now just to settles all doubts when will we see his birth certificate, we presume that it is written in Arabic?

Nine Years, Two Wars, Hundreds Of Thousands Dead – And Nothing, Nothing At All Learnt, Are We Proud Of Ourselves?

Did 9/11 make us all go mad? How fitting, in a weird, crazed way, that the apotheosis of that firestorm nine years ago should turn out to be a crackpot preacher threatening another firestorm with a Nazi-style book burning of the Koran. Or a would-be mosque two blocks from "ground zero" – as if 9/11 was an onslaught on Jesus-worshipping Christians, rather than on the atheist West. But why should we be surprised? Just look at all the other crackpots spawned in the aftermath of those international crimes against humanity: the half-crazed Ahmadinejad, the smarmy post-nuclear Gaddafi, Blair with his crazed right eye and George W Bush with his black prisons and torture and lunatic "war on terror". And that wretched man who lived – or lives still – in an Afghan cave and the hundreds of al-Qa'idas whom he created, and the one-eyed mullah – not to mention all the lunatic cops and intelligence agencies and CIA thugs who failed us all – utterly – on 9/11 because they were too idle or too stupid to identify 19 men who were going to attack the United States. And remember one thing: even if the Rev Terry Jones sticks with his decision to back down, another of our cranks will be ready to take his place. Indeed, on this grim ninth anniversary – and heaven spare us next year from the 10th – 9/11 appears to have produced not peace or justice or democracy or human rights, but monsters.

They have prowled Iraq – both the Western and the local variety – and slaughtered 100,000 souls, or 500,000, or a million; and who cares? They have killed tens of thousands in Afghanistan; and who cares? And as the sickness has spread across the Middle East and then the globe, they – the air force pilots and the insurgents, the Marines and the suicide bombers, the al-Qa'idas of the Maghreb and of the Khalij and of the Caliphate of Iraq and the special forces and the close air support boys and the throat-cutters – have torn the heads off women and children and the old and the sick and the young and healthy, from the Indus to the Mediterranean, from Bali to the London Tube; quite a memorial to the 2,966 innocents who were killed nine years ago. All in their name, it seems, has been our holocaust of fire and blood, enshrined now in the crazed pastor of Gainesville.

This is the loss, of course. But who's made the profit? Well, the arms dealers, naturally, and Boeing and Lockheed Martin and all the missile lads and the drone manufacturers and F-16 spare parts outfits and the ruthless mercenaries who stalk the Muslim lands on our behalf now that we have created 100,000 more enemies for each of the 19 murderers of 9/11. Torturers have had a good time, honing their sadism in America's black prisons – it was appropriate that the US torture centre in Poland should be revealed on this ninth anniversary – as have the men (and women, I fear) who perfect the shackles and water-drowning techniques with which we now fight our wars. And – let us not forget – every religious raver in the world, be they of the Bin Laden variety, the bearded groupies in the Taliban, the suicide executioners, the hook-in the arm preachers, or our very own pastor of Gainesville. And God? Where does he fit in? An archive of quotations suggests that just about every monster created in or after 9/11 is a follower of this quixotic redeemer. Bin Laden prays to God – "to turn America into a shadow of itself"... and Bush prayed to God and Blair prayed – and prays – to God, and all the Muslim killers and an awful lot of Western soldiers and Dr (honorary) Pastor Terry Jones and his 30 (or it may be 50, since all statistics are hard to come by in the "war on terror") pray to God. And poor old God, of course, has had to listen to these prayers as he always sits through them during our mad wars. Recall the words attributed to him by a poet of another generation: "God this, God that, and God the other thing. 'Good God,' said God, 'I've got my work cut out'." And that was just the First World War. God is good for contemplation, not for war. But – and here we are driven on to the reefs and hidden rocks which our leaders wish us to ignore, forget and cast aside – this whole bloody mess involves the Middle East; it is about a Muslim people who have kept their faith while those Westerners who dominate them – militarily, economically, culturally, socially – have lost theirs. How can this be, Muslims ask? Indeed, it is a superb irony that the Rev Jones is a believer while the rest of us – by and large – are not.

Hence our books and our documentaries never refer to Muslims vs Christians, but Muslims versus "The West". And of course, the one taboo subject of which we must not speak – Israel's relationship with America, and America's unconditional support for Israel's theft of land from Muslim Arabs – also lies at the heart of this terrible crisis in our lives. In yesterday's edition of The Independent, there was a photograph of Afghan demonstrators chanting "death to America". But in the background, these same demonstrators were carrying a black banner with a message in Dari written upon it in white paint. What it actually said was: "The bloodsucking Zionist government regime and the Western leaders who are indifferent [to suffering] and have no conscience are again celebrating the new year by spilling the red blood of the Palestinians." The message is as extreme as it is vicious – but it proves, yet again, that the war in which we are engaged is also about Israel and "Palestine". We may prefer to ignore this in "the West" – where Muslims supposedly "hate us for what we are" or "hate our democracy" (see: Bush, Blair and a host of other mendacious politicians) – but this great conflict lies at the heart of the "war on terror". That is why the equally vicious Benjamin Netanyahu reacted to the atrocities of 9/11 by claiming that the event would be good for Israel. Israel would now be able to claim that it, too, was fighting the "war on terror", that Arafat – this was the now-comatose Ariel Sharon's claim – is "our Bin Laden". And thus Israelis had the gall to claim that Sderot, under its cascade of tin-pot missiles from Hamas, was "our ground zero". It was not. Israel's battle with the Palestinians is a ghastly caricature of our "war on terror", in which we are supposed to support the last colonial project on earth – and accept its thousands of victims – because the twin towers and the Pentagon and United Flight 93 were attacked by 19 Arab murderers nine years ago.

There is a supreme irony in the fact that one direct result of 9/11 has been the stream of Western policemen and spooks who have travelled to Israel to improve their "anti-terrorist expertise" with the help of Israeli officers who may – according to the United Nations – be war criminals. It was no surprise to find that the heroes who gunned down poor old Jean Charles de Menezes on the London Tube in 2005 had been receiving "anti-terrorist" advice from the Israelis. And yes, I know the arguments. We cannot compare the actions of evil terrorists with the courage of our young men and women, defending our lives – and sacrificing theirs – on the front lines of the 'war on terror". There can be no "equivalence". "They" kill innocents because "they" are evil. "We" kill innocents by mistake. But we know we are going to kill innocents – we willingly accept that we are going to kill innocents, that our actions are going to create mass graves of families, of the poor and the weak and the dispossessed. This is why we created the obscene definition of "collateral damage". For if "collateral" means that these victims are innocent, then "collateral" also means that we are innocent of killing them. It was not our wish to kill them – even if we knew it was inevitable that we would. "Collateral" is our exoneration. This one word is the difference between "them" and "us", between our God-given right to kill and Bin Laden's God-given right to murder. The victims, hidden away as "collateral" corpses, don't count any more because they were slaughtered by us. Maybe it wasn't so painful. Maybe death by drone is a more gentle departure from this earth, evisceration by an AGM-114C Boeing-Lockheed air-to-ground missile less painful, than death by shards from a roadside bomb or a cruel suicider with an explosive belt. That's why we know how many died on 9/11 – 2,966, although the figure may be higher – and why we don't "do body counts" on those whom we kill. Because they – "our" victims – must have no identities, no innocence, no personality, no cause or belief or feelings; and because we have killed far, far more human beings than Bin Laden and the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. Anniversaries are newspaper and television events. And they can have an eerie habit of coalescing together to create an unhappy memorial framework.

Thus do we commemorate the Battle of Britain – a chivalric episode in our history – and the Blitz, a progenitor of mass murder, to be sure, but a symbol of innocent courage – as we remember the start of a war that has torn our morality apart, turned our politicians into war criminals, our soldiers into killers and our ruthless enemies into heroes of the anti-Western cause. And while on this gloomy anniversary the Rev Jones wanted to burn a book called the Koran, Tony Blair tried to sell a book called A Journey. Jones said the Koran was "evil"; Britons have asked whether the Blair book should be classified as "crime". Certainly, 9/11 has moved into fantasy when the Rev Jones can command the attention of the Obamas and the Clintons and the Holy Father and the even more Holy United Nations. Whom the gods would destroy.

Desperate Days For The Warmists

The following article from "The Sunday Times" on 25/07/2010 explains what is now happening to the climate change industry around the world and in my opinion indicates that the final days may be approaching when this scam will have zero credibility left.

Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One familiar technique they use is to attribute to global warming almost any unusual weather event anywhere in the world. Last week, for instance, it was reported that Russia has recently been experiencing its hottest temperatures and longest drought for 130 years. The head of the Russian branch of WWF, the environmental pressure group, was inevitably quick to cite this as evidence of climate change, claiming that in future "such climate abnormalities will only become more frequent". He didn't explain what might have caused the similar hot weather 130 years ago.Meanwhile, notably little attention has been paid to the disastrous chill which has been sweeping South America thanks to an inrush of air from the Antarctic, killing hundreds in the continent's coldest winter for years.

In America, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been trumpeting that, according to its much-quoted worldwide temperature data, the first six months of this year were the hottest ever recorded. But expert analysis on Watts Up With That, the US science blog, shows that NOAA's claimed warming appears to be strangely concentrated in those parts of the world where it has fewest weather stations. In Greenland, for instance, two of the hottest spots, showing a startling five-degree rise in temperatures, have no weather stations at all.A second technique the warmists have used lately to keep their spirits up has been to repeat incessantly that the official inquiries into the "Climategate" scandal have cleared the top IPCC scientists involved of any wrongdoing, and that their science has been "vindicated". But, as has been pointed out by critics like Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, this is hardly surprising, since the inquiries were careful not to interview any experts, such as himself, who could have explained just why the emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were so horribly damaging.

The perfunctory report of the Science Appraisal Panel, chaired by Lord Oxburgh, examined only 11 papers produced by the CRU, none of them remotely connected to what the fuss was all about. Last week Andrew Montford, author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science, revealed on his blog (Bishop Hill – bishophill.squarespace.com) that the choice of these papers was approved for the inquiry by Sir Brian Hoskins, of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, and by Phil Jones, the CRU's former director – an appraisal of whose work was meant to be the purpose of the inquiry.

A third technique, most familiar of all, has been to fall back on the dog-eared claim that leading sceptics only question warmist orthodoxy because they have been funded by "Big Oil" and the "fossil fuel industry". Particularly bizarre was a story last week covering the front page and an inside page of one newspaper, headed "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics".The essence of this tale was that Exxon Mobil, the oil giant that is the world's third biggest company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks. These had gone on to dismiss the Climategate inquiries as "whitewashes".It was hardly necessary to be given money by Exxon to see what was dubious about those inquiries. Not one of the knowledgeable sceptics who have torn them apart has received a cent from Big Oil. But what made this particularly laughable was that the penny-packets given to think-tanks that have been largely irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into the army of groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.Even the big oil companies have long been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low-carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

The Grantham Institute provides another example. It was set up at the LSE and Imperial College with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire, to advise governments and firms on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change", now one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses in the world. Compare the funding received by a handful of think-tanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars lavished on those who speak for the other side by governments, foundations, multinational corporations, even Big Oil, and the warmists are winning hands down. But only financially: they are not winning the argument.

Tiger, Tiger, What Damage You Have Done to The World

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned show trial, preferably followed by an execution, to bring the public together. It cheers almost everybody up, watching a fellow human being humiliated in public for crimes real or imagined, hearing them confess, head bowed, and seeing them having their noses rubbed in it good and proper. The Stalinists of the old Soviet Union were masters of the art but, give us credit: we’re getting there. And we don’t need the bureaucratic conventions of a communist state either — we’ll do it happily enough of our own volition, in an open and democratic manner.

Hate Week followed by Show Trial — everybody gather around for a spot of totalitarianism by mutual assent, and now, for your added pleasure, in HD. Grab your knitting: here comes the tumbril. The Tiger Woods televised confession and apology was extraordinarily chilling, mainly for the fact that it happened at all, but also for the words used by this pilloried man, which consciously or unconsciously had echoes of those old show trials of the 1930s and 1950s; a nod here to the doomed old Bolsheviks who confessed to crimes they did not commit for the sake of the party. Tiger Woods’s “crimes” were not really crimes at all, as any court would regard them; instead they were stuff that these days can have you simply destroyed and your livelihood taken away.

And then a nod forward from Tiger to Chairman Mao or maybe the entertainingly deranged Pol Pot: henceforth, the golfer said, he will live “a life of integrity”. What’s he going to do? Throw away his five iron and start tending the paddy fields? The public and press demanded he be abject, insisted he prostrate himself before the nation, and did the poor man keep his side of the deal. “I have let you down,” he said repeatedly. “I have bitterly disappointed all of you.” The only person you might argue he had let down was his wife, and she wasn’t even in the room. How has he let you down, or me? I suppose you could argue that he might disappoint golfing fans by missing a short putt on the 18th, but by having sex with some women? What business is it of yours?

The jury — the world — was then left to debate whether he’d been “sincere” or not. The debate is still going on. There was a page of hyperbolic drivel in one of our national broadsheet newspapers yesterday in which the writer commented on the telecast: “ . . . but a small voice kept asking if every word and gesture had been arranged”. Did it really, mate? That’ll be the little Hitler nestled inside your skull, then. Golfers, porn stars, kebab shop owners, insurance loss adjusters were all solicited for their opinions: was he sincere; did he mean it, the grovelling apology? Or should we make him grovel some more? Nick Faldo thought he had been sincere. Thanks, Nick. A fellow professional, Ben Crane, quoted from Jesus. A woman with enormous breasts in the New York Daily News said she didn’t believe Tiger for a minute.

The eternal justification for this sort of stuff, the way we excuse ourselves for revelling in private misery, is that famous people such as top golfers have a responsibility to live better lives than the rest of us, that they are there, in this gilded place, to set some sort of example. Because, you know, they earn all that money. This line is trotted out every time some poor soul is being eviscerated by press and public alike. But — and I’m sorry about this, but I simply cannot think of a better, less coarse description — this has always been a barrel of horse manure. An almost bottomless barrel. We have a Stalinist streak a mile wide, an endless appetite for vindictiveness and nastiness.

The Great Climat Change Farce - Get the real Facts

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest. But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change. “The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics. The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards.

As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end. And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide. Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging.

An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced. Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless. For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.” Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits. Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate sceptic, or worse.

But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed. By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the sceptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Sceptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Australia, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States. Our prime minister, the nodding donkey himself will follow whatever outlandish theory he can to legitimize his vast tax grab with his ill designed ETS. As Tony Abbot says "it is nothing more than a vast tax grab and an Employment Transfer Scheme". “I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper scepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors.

How much the public will keep caring is another matter. Have a look at what Lord Monkton has to say, I saw his lecture on Monday night in Perth and was very impressed. If you believe Al Gore now you certainly wouldn't after listening to the Lord.

Sick Of It!!!!

To add one more level of absolute stupidity to air flight (as is pretty much standard operating procedure with every new terrorist incident aboard an airliner), passengers are now no longer allowed to have anything on their laps for the final hour of a flight, and are not even allowed to stand up during that time.

And the airlines wonder why they are dying? It's not the terrorists that are killing them, it's their reaction... overreaction... that is killing them. They (and their passengers) need to tell the U.S and European governments that all of this nonsense has gone beyond ridiculous into insanity. I personally am sick of having these morons ordering me to remove my shoes, belt, watch, money from pockets, mobile phones and anything else that is currently not allowed before I can proceed through their ridiculous scanners that still invariably beep anyway. Surely they can see that I am not a potential terrorist? Sick of it.

Stop with the in-flight stupidity; improve passenger screening, let us responsible adults use real metal cutlery again. Airlines are punishing passengers for what is clearly a problem with the airport security apparatus. Improve scanners, improve procedures, improve training, and improve the job benefits so that you are not forced to hire retards and the assorted knuckle grazers that you typically find at airports for the job of ensuring aircraft safety. Most importantly don't intimidate the people without whom the airlines could not survive, yes us, the white middle class travelers who give the airlines a reason to be.

Oh yes, I forgot: Try paying 100 times more attention to the people who fit terrorist profiles (you know... single males (usually black, Arab looking or Muslim) from certain countries is a really good indicator) than you do to middle aged and old couples from Perth and families from Sydney would probably help immensely too. What on earth is so wrong with a bit of racial profiling anyway? If we know what the terrorists look like 99.99% of the time then why not target them and if things get worse then we may then have to consider banning the above from Western Airlines completely. Let them fly on their own stinking airliners from their own stinking countries and leave us alone.

p.s. And then we have the Obama reaction to the latest scare, did you hear it? Oh no, you say and the reason that you didn't hear one was because he didn't make a comment for 24 hours or so because he has a problem with anything Muslim related. Why? Because he is one!! Black African Muslim terrorists from Nigeria are not what Obama wants to hear about.

HOW THE GREAT DEPRESION BROUGHT ADOLF HITLER TO POWER

Oh goody! Looks like we're having another Depression -- maybe just a little one, but who knows how long we can stretch it out, if we give it a good try?

So now we can play FDR and The Glorious New Deal.

If that sounds insane to you, well, it's what both Charles Krauthammer and David Broder -- the Burt and Ernie of the Washington Post -- have now concluded about the Obama White House.

The Great Depression certainly empowered FDR to make big changes in America over his four terms. In spite of all the hoo-hah the country didn't get out of the long, long slump until 1940 or so, with the huge mobilization of men and industrial resources for World War II. But FDR did get to play to his heart's content, through the NRA, the WPA, the AAA, the CCC, the TVA, the NLRB, the FDIC and the SEC. By comparison all we've got is a measly TARP. So far.

Trouble is, the Great Depression also brought Adolf Hitler to power. (There, I knew there had to be a downside somewhere.)

For those who have forgotten history or never bothered to learn it, here's is the sixty-second version.

1. Adolf Hitler started out as just another Bohemian intellectual, a sort of fire-breathing hippie, hanging around the coffee houses of Vienna after the big defeat of World War I. Just like Lenin, Mussolini and all the other psychopaths who rose to power around the same time. (Look it up, kids). His ilk can still be found in all the big city cafes of Europe, along with Berkeley, California, Madison, Wisconsin, and other college towns. They all profess peace. But in the right conditions, they are all happy to set off sociological or real dynamite. (Viz., Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn; the Rev. J. Wright and all the rest.)

Today the cafe intellectuals are more likely to be Islamic fascists, but what's the big diff? They all follow Hitler's big maxim, "Alles muss anders sein!" ("everything must change") or, in Obamalingo, "Change you can believe in." They all hate whatever is; it doesn't matter where they want to go.

They want a perfect world, every single one of them. Therefore they all hate freedom, electoral democracy, and the blood-sucking capitalists. They all demand justice and equality. And millions of suckers always fall for it. Some things never change; even the words don't change, much less the marching music.

2. When Hitler got out of the Kaiserliche Wehrmacht with burned-out lungs from mustard gas, Germany was broke. The Reich had started the war as the wealthiest, most industrialized, most highly-educated, and perhaps even the most arrogant nation in Europe. (Although that's a tough one to judge, there being so much competition in the arrogance sweepstakes in Europe.) Anyway, if you remember the goose-stepping soldiers with the funny helmets with the little spikes on top, and all the cheering people standing on the sidewalks going Hoch! Hoch!, that's the one.

3. As punishment for the war, the Versailles Treaty required the Germans to pay their victims, to handicap their military and heavy industries, and to be nice to their neighbors. They did pay some money for a while, but then they just lied about all those other things. None of the victorious nations dared to actually find out if the Germans were re-arming or not. Besides, the Germans and Austrians felt threatened by the new and militant Soviet Union, accidentally created when the old Reich helped Lenin to overthrow the Czar of Russia. (Lenin was another cafe intellectual who turned into a ruthless mass-murdering tyrant, except that he hung around Zurich rather than Vienna.)

4. After WWI the Weimar Republic brought parliamentary democracy of a kind to Germany. But it also saw a wave of corruption, degradation of middle class values, attacks on religion, promiscuity, and glorification of "alternative lifestyles" -- which all agreed on their hatred of the bourgeoisie (who happened to be their parents) -- along with lots of artistic expressions of the same Up Yours! attitude that has made government-funded artists so popular in our day.
(A lot of our avant garde is just the derriere garde of Europe's Weimar period. Nothing new there at all.)

5. Having the Soviets practically next door was a big help to the German Communists -- who still called themselves Communists rather than Black Liberation Theologians, as ours do today. But just like Rev. J-Wright, they all hated middleclassness, or as they called it, the bourgeoisie. (That was their parents, remember?) So did Mussolini and Hitler, who also rose to power as radical world-changers in the turmoil of the day. They were also big ecofreaks -- because Mother Nature was good, you see. They practiced a fair amount of nudity and gayety, celebrated sex and violence, got drunk and carried on riots, and whipped up giant hatreds against scapegoats -- the French, other racially inferior peoples, and of course ... . Yes.

They also swore to eliminate the handicapped, the retarded, and any organized religion. Both the Communists and the Nazis really really hated Christianity. Not just Judaism and the Jews. They were equal-opportunity haters, without fear or favor.

6. The whole Ship of Fools seemed to go sailing along until the economy went kaput. But why did it? You can point to hyperinflation, long and deep declines in industry and agriculture, unemployment, and shaky currencies. Europe had decades of troubles before the United States caught the bug. Stock markets dwindled, trade barriers went up, and on October 29, 1929, far away in New York City, Wall Street went into a tailspin. It was followed by the other big stock markets. People lost their jobs and their savings. No capital, no productivity, just despair.

7. Europe decided that democracy wasn't its thing after all, and looked for nice trustworthy generals to take over the hopelessly ineffective parliamentary governments -- like in Germany. But the President of Germany, General Paul von Hindenburg, was elderly and out of his depth, and after a while was forced to ask that nice Herr Hitler to organize a new government. Hitler's National Socialist Workers Party had never gotten a majority, but the time was ripe, and the Nazis never cared much for rules. So they took power.

In the end United States kind of lucked out, compared to Europe -- but don't try to tell that to anybody who managed to live through it. It's not just our habit of democratic governance that brought us out of it without tyranny and the devastation of Europe and Asia. FDR had a certain amount of demagogue blood in him.

Or as he proclaimed in accepting the Democratic Party nomination,
"Throughout the nation men and women ... look to us here for guidance and for more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth... I pledge you, I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people... This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms."

A better "opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth? ... A call to arms?" Has the Obama crowd seen this speech? FDR naturally attacked greed and wealth, coming from a family of old wealth and long-forgotten greed himself. Greed is in the eye of the accuser.

What's the bottom line? Well, certain politicians thrive in times of trouble; and if they don't see enough trouble, they're always happy to add some more. They always practice the same kind of demagogy. They always promise radical change. And they often bring the opposite.

Historians have long pointed to the breakdown of Europe's middle class as the single biggest earthquake, the one that shook all the other pillars of society until it crumbled.

In the 21st century, you can kill the middle class by teaching kids to despise their parents and their traditions; you can tax them into poverty; you can whip up nationalistic fervor against the Frogs or theBoches; you can inflate the currency so that everybody is equally miserable; you can teach the poor, the black, the women, the young, to attack the middle class values that brought prosperity over generations of toil; you can torpedo the currency and destroy retirement plans; you can turn the Organs of Propaganda -- pardon me, the "news media" -- to assault middle class values; you can unify the very wealthy with the very poor to try to squeeze and whack the middle; you can take historic wrongs like black slavery or Christopher Columbus to turn people against each other; you can easily turn bubbleheaded movie makers and starlets against George W. Bush; you can break the banks and turn the desperate against the malefactors of great wealth; or you can unify white liberals with poor blacks and militant feminists against all the Evil White Guys...

But it's all the same, you see. Nothing ever changes except the color of the flags and the uniforms. And it's always the militant idealists, the obsessional clerks and scribblers, who seize the moment to raise yet another Hero of Change and Hope to the peak of power. Because, you see, Adolf Hitler was not the exception. In the century of Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, of Lenin and Stalin, of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, of Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein, of Ahmadinejad and Khomeini, of genocidal little tyrants in the Sudan and Rwanda, Hitler was by no means the exception.

He was just brought down faster than the others.
Heigh-ho. Interesting times.

See what a little history can teach you?

Doomsday nation

The story of how and why the west is bogged down in Afghanistan.

Nuclear-armed and terrorist-riddled Pakistan is spinning out of control, writes Sally Neighbour March 05, 2009

Article from: The Australian

IN 1994 a group of religious students from a madrassa in Kandahar banded together to take on the vicious warlords who then ran southern Afghanistan. About 30 young men with 16 rifles stormed a military camp where two girls were being held and raped, rescuing the girls and hanging the camp's commander from the gun barrel of a tank, or so the story goes. Thus began the movement known as the Taliban, from the word talib, meaning student. As Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid wrote in his seminal book, Taliban: "They saw themselves as the cleansers and purifiers of a guerilla war gone astray, a social system gone wrong, and an Islamic way of life thathad been compromised by corruption and excess."

Within months, 12,000 volunteers had joined the new organisation.

The Taliban would likely have been just another in the plethora of Afghan militias scrabbling for power except that it found itself a powerful sponsor in the government and military establishment of neighbouring Pakistan. Keen to have a biddable ally in Kabul, Islamabad provided the weapons, ammunition, funding and logistical support that enabled the Taliban -- "our boys", as Pakistan's interior minister famously called them -- to seize power and rule Afghanistan for five years.

But the forces of militancy unleashed more than a decade ago in Afghanistan are surging back across the border to swamp Pakistan itself. A full-blown insurgency is raging in the North-West Frontier Province and spreading to the main cities, and the country's powerful security forces seem impotent to stop terrorist atrocities such as Tuesday's attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore that have seen the country branded as the new epicentre of global terrorism.

As the US moves to send another 17,000 troops to Afghanistan -- and Australia faces pressure to boost its contingent -- it is clear that the roots of the militant uprising and the new wave of terrorism lie next door in Pakistan, where a far graver crisis looms. Nuclear-armed Pakistan is spinning out ofcontrol.

As William Maley of the Asia-Pacific college of diplomacy at the Australian National University in Canberra observes: "There are huge problems in Afghanistan. Confidence has plummeted because of the insecurity, but people haven't turned against the democratic transition, they are still strongly committed to it, and that may well carry Afghanistan through.

"But in Pakistan there is a profound crisis of confidence in the political system. It's a failing state and a decidedly roguish state. And this is why a lot of Western leaders are becoming profoundly concerned."

The roots of this transnational crisis stretch back more than a century to when Pakistan was part of the British Indian empire, or Raj, that sprawled across the subcontinent. Repeated attempts by the British to extend their dominion into Afghanistan failed, as they were fought off by the fearsome Pashtun warriors whom no invader before or since has been able to subdue. The British finally conceded defeat and in 1893 drew a line on a map to divide their territory from Afghanistan's. The enduring problem with this arbitrary border was that it cut straight through the middle of the lands known as Pashtunistan, the harsh mountain terrain inhabited by tribal Pashtuns, who number about 40 million and are renowned for their fierce independence, elaborate hospitality and ferocious fighting skills.

The British knew they could never conquer the Pashtuns, so in 1901 they carved out a separate realm called the North-West Frontier Province and gave the Pashtuns almost total autonomy in seven tribal agencies strung along the border.

For more than a century the Pashtuns were left largely to themselves, forming the world's largest autonomous tribal society, run by local jirgas (councils) according to an honour code called pashtunwali, which prizes courage, chivalry, hospitality and patriotism, and deems that "women belong in the house or the grave", in the words of a Pashtun proverb. The agencies were closed to strangers and guidebooks warned tourists that in the tribal lands: "Pakistani laws don't apply and the Pakistani government has no authority whatever."

The status of Pashtunistan was never resolved and spurred repeated uprisings and border clashes. To this day the Afghan Government refuses to recognise the so-called Durand Line (named after the Raj's foreign secretary Mortimer Durand), claiming the Pashtun lands are rightfully part of Afghanistan, and Pashtun leaders on both sides simply ignore it.

The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan prompted Pakistan to seize the opportunity to install a compliant regime in Kabul in the hope of finally resolving the border issue in its favour. It threw its support behind the Islamic militants, becoming the conduit for billions of dollars funnelled from the US and Saudi Arabia to the mujaheddin. When the rival factions turned on each other after defeating the Soviets, Pakistan switched its support to the Taliban and celebrated when the black-turbaned warriors swept to power.

The warning signs of blowback were there for all to see.

French scholar Olivier Roy wrote in 1997: "The apparent victor, Pakistan, could pay dearly for its success. The triumph of the Taliban has virtually eliminated the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. On both sides, Pashtun tribes are gaining autonomy; already small fundamentalist tribal emirates are appearing on Pakistani soil."

Up to 100,000 Pakistanis are estimated to have trained with the Taliban, then returned home to take up the fight.

As Rashid reported, as far back as 1995 the Movement for Enforcement of Islamic Law led an uprising to demand sharia law in Bajaur, the northernmost of the tribal agencies and lately the scene of all-out warfare between government troops and militants. In 1998 the Taliban Movement of Pakistan, Tehrik-e-Taliban, began burning cinemas, smashing satellite dishes and publicly executing murderers in areas it controlled.

The militants were fortified by the arrival in the tribal belt of the Afghan Taliban leadership and its al-Qa'ida allies, who escaped across the border after being driven out of Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks on the US in September 11, 2001. They were welcomed in Pakistan by tribal warlords such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, a veteran of the anti-Soviet jihad who is aligned with the Taliban and is also believed to be a prime mover behind the recent wave of terror.

Haqqani, too, owes his survival to the Pakistani military, at least in part. Pakistan's army chief Ashfaq Kayani was heard to describe Haqqani as a "strategic asset" in an intercepted conversation reported by The New York Times correspondent David Sanger in his new book, The Inheritance.

The twin arm of the aggressive and duplicitous foreign policy overseen by Pakistan's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence agency was to covertly wage war against its eastern neighbour India in disputed Kashmir. The ISI-sponsored, funded and instructed Islamist groups including Lashkar e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) as its proxies to fight Indian forces in Kashmir. Like the al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan, the training camps of LET in Pakistan, supplied and protected by the Pakistan army and ISI, became training sites for jihadists from across the world.

Islamabad's response to the burgeoning militancy was to declare a truce in 2005 with the leading Pakistani Taliban commander, Baitullah Mehsud, which bought him two years in which to expand his territory across the tribal areas and amass an armed following of up to 30,000 men.
Intelligence analysis group Stratfor describes Mehsud as part of a new generation of militant leaders, inspired and influenced not by the Pakistani security forces but by al-Qa'ida. Mehsud's group is blamed for a string of atrocities, including the 2007 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The militants have been emboldened further by a level of public support or at least tolerance. A 2007 survey in Pakistan by the US-based Terror Free Tomorrow showed that 67 per cent opposed military action against jihadists in the tribal zone. Between 37 per cent and 49 per cent said they supported the militants. Those figures have probably been bolstered by rising anger over the belated offensive in the tribal zone and the US Predator drone strikes aimed at Taliban and al-Qa'ida leaders that reportedly have claimed a high civilian death toll.

The army's claim to have wiped out the rebels in their stronghold of Bajaur has been greeted with scepticism.

Maley says it's "a balloon-squeezing exercise": the militants will simply pop up somewhere else. The likeliest place seems to be the nearby Swat Valley, where the Pakistani Government last month agreed to allow sharia law in return for a ceasefire.

Like many experts, Maley predicts this will prove disastrous, merely creating a new sanctuary for the extremists bent on destroying the Pakistani state

THE GORACLE SCAM HOAX

I came across a very interesting climate change article the other day and the story of how this huge industry came about in a nutshell is as follows:

The key players are now all in place in Washington and in state governments across America to officially label carbon dioxide as a pollutant and enact laws that tax we citizens for our carbon footprints. Only two details stand in the way, the faltering economic times and a dramatic turn toward a colder climate. The last two bitter winters have lead to a rise in public awareness that CO2 is not a pollutant and is not a significant greenhouse gas that is triggering runaway global warming. How did we ever get to this point where bad science is driving big government we have to struggle so to stop it?

The story begins with an Oceanographer named Roger Revelle. He served with the US Navy in World War II. After the war he became the Director of the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla in San Diego, California. Revelle saw the opportunity to obtain major funding from the Navy for doing measurements and research on the ocean around the Pacific Atolls where the US military was conducting atomic bomb tests. He greatly expanded the Institute’s areas of interest and among others hired Hans Suess, a noted Chemist from the University of Chicago, who was very interested in the traces of carbon in the environment from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle tagged on to Suess studies and co-authored a paper with him in 1957. The paper raises the possibility that the carbon dioxide might be creating a greenhouse effect and causing atmospheric warming. It seems to be a plea for funding for more studies.

Funding, frankly, is where Revelle’s mind was most of the time. Next Revelle hired a Geochemist named David Keeling to devise a way to measure the atmospheric content of Carbon dioxide. In 1960 Keeling published his first paper showing the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and linking the increase to the burning of fossil fuels. These two research papers became the bedrock of the science of global warming, even though they offered no proof that carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas. In addition they failed to explain how this trace gas, only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, could have any significant impact on temperatures.

Now let us go back to the1950s when this was going on. Our cities were entrapped in a pall of pollution from the crude internal combustion engines that powered cars and trucks back then and from the uncontrolled emissions from power plants and factories. Cars and factories and power plants were filling the air with all sorts of pollutants. There was a valid and serious concern about the health consequences of this pollution and a strong environmental movement was developing to demand action. Government accepted this challenge and new environmental standards were set. Scientists and engineers came to the rescue. New reformulated fuels were developed for cars, as were new high tech, computer controlled engines and catalytic converters. By the mid seventies cars were no longer big time polluters, emitting only some carbon dioxide and water vapor from their tail pipes. Likewise, new fuel processing and smoke stack scrubbers were added to industrial and power plants and their emissions were greatly reduced, as well. But an environmental movement had been established and its funding and very existence depended on having a continuing crisis issue. So the research papers from Scripps came at just the right moment. And, with them came the birth of an issue; man-made global warming from the carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. Revelle and Keeling used this new alarmism to keep their funding growing. Other researchers with environmental motivations and a hunger for funding saw this developing and climbed aboard as well. The research grants began to flow and alarming hypothesis began to show up everywhere. The Keeling curve showed a steady rise in CO2 in atmosphere during the period since oil and coal were discovered and used by man.

As of today, carbon dioxide has increased from 215 to 385 parts per million. But, despite the increases, it is still only a trace gas in the atmosphere. While the increase is real, the percentage of the atmosphere that is CO2 remains tiny, about .41 hundredths of one percent. Several hypothesis emerged in the 70s and 80s about how this tiny atmospheric component of CO2 might cause a significant warming. But they remained unproven. Years have passed and the scientists kept reaching out for evidence of the warming and proof of their theories. And, the money and environmental claims kept on building up. Back in the 1960s, this global warming research came to the attention of a Canadian born United Nation’s bureaucrat named Maurice Strong. He was looking for issues he could use to fulfill his dream of one-world government. Strong organized a World Earth Day event in Stockholm, Sweden in 1970. From this he developed a committee of scientists, environmentalists and political operatives from the UN to continue a series of meeting. Strong developed the concept that the UN could demand payments from the advanced nations for the climatic damage from their burning of fossil fuels to benefit the underdeveloped nations, a sort of CO2 tax that would be the funding for his one-world government. But, he needed more scientific evidence to support his primary thesis. So Strong championed the establishment of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was not a pure climate study scientific organization, as we have been lead to believe. It was an organization of one-world government UN bureaucrats, environmental activists and environmentalist scientists who craved the UN funding so they could produce the science they needed to stop the burning of fossil fuels. Over the last 25 years they have been very effective. Hundreds of scientific papers, four major international meetings and reams of news stories about climatic Armageddon later, the UN IPCC has made its points to the satisfaction of most and even shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. At the same time, that Maurice Strong was busy at the UN, things were getting a bit out of hand for the man who is now called the grandfather of global warming, Roger Revelle. He had been very politically active in the late 1950’s as he worked to have the University of California locate a San Diego campus adjacent to Scripps Institute in La Jolla. He won that major war, but lost an all important battle afterward when he was passed over in the selection of the first Chancellor of the new campus. He left Scripps finally in 1963 and moved to Harvard University to establish a Center for Population Studies. It was there that Revelle inspired one of his students to become a major global warming activist. This student would say later, "It felt like such a privilege to be able to hear about the readouts from some of those measurements in a group of no more than a dozen undergraduates. Here was this teacher presenting something not years old but fresh out of the lab, with profound implications for our future!" The student described him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming,"

That student was Al Gore. "THE GORACLE" He thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. So there it is, Roger Revelle was indeed the grandfather of global warming. His work had laid the foundation for the UN IPCC, provided the anti-fossil fuel ammunition to the environmental movement and sent Al Gore on his road to his books, his movie, his Nobel Peace Prize and a hundred million dollars from the carbon credits business.

What happened next is amazing. The global warming frenzy was becoming the cause celeb of the media. After all the media is mostly liberal, loves Al Gore, loves to warn us of impending disasters and tell us "the sky is falling, the sky is falling". The politicians and the environmentalist loved it, too. But the tide was turning with Roger Revelle. He was forced out at Harvard at 65 and returned to California and a semi retirement position at UCSD. There he had time to rethink Carbon Dioxide and the greenhouse effect. The man who had inspired Al Gore and given the UN the basic research it needed to launch its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was having second thoughts. In 1988 he wrote two cautionary letters to members of Congress. He wrote, "My own personal belief is that we should wait another 10 or 20 years to really be convinced that the greenhouse effect is going to be important for human beings, in both positive and negative ways." He added, "…we should be careful not to arouse too much alarm until the rate and amount of warming becomes clearer." And in 1991 Revelle teamed up with Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, to write an article for Cosmos magazine. They urged more research and begged scientists and governments not to move too fast to curb greenhouse CO2 emissions because the true impact of carbon dioxide was not at all certain and curbing the use of fossil fuels could have a huge negative impact on the economy and jobs and our standard of living. it appears that Revelle was considerably more certain than he was at the time that carbon dioxide was not a problem. Did Roger Revelle attend the Summer enclave at the Bohemian Grove in Northern California in the Summer of 1990 while working on that article? Did he deliver a lakeside speech there to the assembled movers and shakers from Washington and Wall Street in which he apologized for sending the UN IPCC and Al Gore onto this wild goose chase about global warming? Did he say that the key scientific conjecture of his lifetime had turned out wrong? The answer to those questions is, NO, maybe.

If he were still alive today. He might be able to stop this scientific silliness and end the global warming scam. Al Gore has dismissed Roger Revelle’s Mea culpa as the actions of a senile old man. And, the next year, while running for Vice President, he said the science behind global warming is settled and there will be no more debate, From 1992 until today, he and his cohorts have refused to debate global warming and when ask about we skeptics they simply insult us and call us names. So today we have the acceptance of carbon dioxide as the culprit of global warming. It is concluded that when we burn fossil fuels we are leaving a dastardly carbon footprint which we must pay Al Gore or the environmentalists to offset. Our governments on all levels are considering taxing the use of fossil fuels.

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency is on the verge of naming CO2 as a pollutant and strictly regulating its use to protect our climate. The new President and the US congress are on board. Many state governments are moving on the same course. We are already suffering from this CO2 silliness in many ways. Our energy policy has been strictly hobbled by no drilling and no new refineries for decades. We pay for the shortage this has created every time we buy gas. On top of that the whole thing about corn based ethanol costs us millions of tax dollars in subsidies. That also has driven up food prices. And, all of this is a long way from over. And, I am totally convinced there is no scientific basis for any of it. Global Warming. It is the hoax. It is bad science. It is a highjacking of public policy. It is no joke. It is the greatest scam in history.

Law Less Ness??

I remember a comment by one sociologist that Prohibition's biggest damage to America was that it was a huge blow to respect for the rule of law. Before Prohibition, all Americans — law-abiding and criminal — were cognizant of the moral, social, and personal repercussions of making a conscious decision to engage in an illegal activity. After Prohibition, the concept of "breaking the law a little" was born, and the creation of a gray area between the legal and the illegal created in America a large population of people who were prepared and for whose actions there existed virtually no legal repercussions.

This law-breaking nonchalance born in speakeasys and other abstruse locations eventually found its way into the forefront of American thought, in "bending the law", in "just as long as you don't get caught", in "just this once", in "loopholes". Now people can be convicted of a crime, and Americans can say, "Yeah he has a criminal record, but it's just for tax evasion" or "but officer, there isn't another car on the road for miles in any direction. Give me a break."

The sociologist explained that this nonchalance itself wasn't the problem, but was a gateway to a bigger problem: that it detrimentally moved America's mental and moral boundaries between socially acceptable and socially unacceptable. To put it succinctly: after Prohibition, "wrong" was simply not as wrong as it used to be.

MELTDOWN!! MELTDOWN!!

Great. I turn my back for a few months, and what has happened? The banks are on fire, the U.S economy is is now looking to be not much better at managing peoples money than those Nigerian scammers that so kindly send us those get rich quick offers, the the UK is at war with Iceland, Kevin is running around trying desperately to look serious and knowledgeable about economical matters and Malcolm is endeavouring to make us forget that he used to be one of those merchant bankers who got us into this mess in the first place. A list was published in the papers this morning of the probable next countries that will go bust, Pakistan, Argentina, well, most of South America actually, South Africa etc. The one bright spark on the horizon? Sarah could be the next VP. She said the other day in trying to demonstrate her foreign policy credentials that she could see Russia from her house, well, she bettered that the other night when she told an interviewer that in fact she could also see the moon from her house and that means that she would push for further space exploration. But I don't think that she will draw enough votes to get McCain over the line so we will be stuck with Obama anyway.

As I type these words, Sky News is zooming in on a screen full of red flashing numbers, apparently willing them to fall yet lower. The problem is a lack of confidence, they keep saying, cutting away every so often to show a big plunging downward arrow or a shot of a City trader holding his head in despair. But the constant doom and gloom headlines are not actually confidence inspiring are they? Maybe if the papers and TV news would give it a break for a couple of weeks it would all blow over anyway.

I'm a bit sick of that whole holding-his-head-in-despair thing, to be honest. It's about time they tried something more spectacular. Surely it's time for a revival of that great cliche of the 1930s, the ruined City whizkid hurling himself out of the window? The credit crunch high dive. Extra points if you manage to pull a backflip on the way down, or crack your jaw on a window cleaner's cradle somewhere around floor 35. The ultimate high score goes to the first one who manages to successfully update his Facebook status using an iPhone seconds before slamming into the pavement. "Danny is plummeting to his doom." Click here to tag him in a photo.

Is this the end of the world? If so, it's a bit more boring than I'd imagined. So far, it's been an invisible apocalypse. Poke your head out the window and there's little evidence of charred debris. Perhaps that's yet to come. Like I say, I'm writing this on Monday morning. By the time you read it, it'll be Tuesday. Maybe we're already bartering with coloured pebbles or fighting over water or something. But, be honest, we came into the world with nothing and we will go out with nothing.

Still, there's no point in worrying. If we're going to be plunged into some kind of barbaric medieval dark age, I might as well be philosophical about it, because there's no way I'll survive more than a month. I'd be hopeless at fighting over basic resources and don't have any essential manual skills, such as the ability to hunt and skin rats. Perhaps I can learn the lute and become a minstrel, or perform bawdy jigs in exchange for pennies. Assuming there are any pennies. Hey, maybe just before all currency is finally declared worthless we'll get to experience the whole wheelbarrows-full-of-worthless-banknotes thing, like they did in Germany just before the war. That'd be good fun wouldn't it? There will be Jamie Oliver books explaining how we can live on a small bowl of cold potato soup a day with maybe a carrot added on the weekends.

It all seems particularly bizarre, every time I walk down the street to the shops I walk past a TV shop the windows of which are crammed full of gigantic, wall-mounted HD plasma TVs, every single one of which is screaming bad news about the economy. I feels like being trapped inside a terrifying satirical sci-fi flick

And it had to happen, obviously. For years, money was just appearing from nowhere, or so we were told. People bought houses and bragged about how the value kept zooming up, and up, and up. And how terribly clever they all were. In fact they didn't seem to be houses at all, but magic coin-spitting machines. It was all a dream, a dream in which you bought a box and lived in it, and all the time it generated money like a cow generates milk. Great big stinking clouds of money. And none of it was real. And now it's gone. Your house is worth less than your shoes, and your shoes are now, in turn, worth less than (you fill in the gap). Yes, your most valuable possession is now your mouth and your brain, and you're going to have to use both of them in all manner of previously unthinkable ways to make ends meet, to pay for that box, the box you live in, the one you mistook for an enchanted, unstoppable cash engine. I hope you've got a nice kitchen and bathroom. Maybe they take your mind off things. And sell that flash coffee maker and the flash juicer while you're about it. You can't afford fruit any more. It's tap water at best from now on. It's good for you! Really, it is. But we always knew that anyway didn't we? We bought water at a higher price than a litre of petrol because we had so much disposable money sloshing around in our pockets that it became a headache knowing where to spend and what on next.

All of it was a dream. All that rubbish we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years - none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living and not talk endlessly about how brilliant we all were in picking which property and apartments to buy because the truth was that whatever you bought, it went up anyway without any meaningful input from you. And now all property will go down also without any help from you. Enjoy the new reality.

Dumb And Dumber Maths

There is an ongoing debate in the UK and Australia concerning the "dumbing down" of maths in schools. The emphasis has been switched away from algebra, arithmetic and geometry, the necessity for pupils to think for themselves about the required solution, and a requirement for conceptual understanding. It has moved towards less challenging, real-life problems that lead pupils, step-by-step, towards an answer.

Despite this lowering of the demands, there has also been a watering-down of pass marks: scores of less than 20 per cent can now be enough to be awarded a grade pass to university in Australia. The educational establishment has become overly concerned that children might be put off by the difficulty of maths, forgetting that having to deal with difficulty is itself a useful life skill.

The following illustrates the present crisis well:

1. Teaching Maths In 1970
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price.
What is his profit?

2. Teaching Maths In 1980
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is 4/5 of the price, or £80.
What is his profit?

3. Teaching Maths In 1990
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80.
Did he make a profit?

4. Teaching Maths In 2000
A logger sells a truckload of timber for £100.
His cost of production is £80 and his profit is
£20.
Your assignment: Underline the number 20.

5. Teaching Maths In 2008
A logger cuts down a beautiful forest because
he is selfish and inconsiderate and cares nothing
for the habitat of animals or the preservation of
our woodlands.
He does this so he can make a profit of £20.
What do you think of this way of making a living?
Topic for class participation after answering the
question: How did the birds and squirrels feel as
the logger cut down their homes? (There are no
wrong answers.)

6.. Teaching Maths 2018
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Rich And Poor Will Pay For The Coming World Food Crisis

"Global so called warming" is not the biggest problem facing the human race, it is the looming food crisis and the wars that will arise because of it.

There was a man sitting opposite me on the bus as I came home tonight. He was eating Big Macs from a paper bag as though his life depended on it. He swallows the first between St Georges Terrace and The Barracks Arch and the second as I was stepping off the bus at the stop opposite my apartment block. That is a total distance of about one and a half k's. That's about 1,000 calories in three minutes.

This story is, I suppose, a parable of the tyranny of food. So is Michelle's. I read her story yesterday in the Telegraph, she lives in Dakar, the capital of the West African nation of Senegal.

Her story features no flyblown refugee camps or skeletal babies with hollow eyes. Not yet, at least.

A glass chandelier hangs from Michelle's ceiling. There are artificial sweet peas on the mantelpiece and, on the wall, a framed certificate commending her brother for his 25 years' work as a social services administrator. Once, this middle-class family felt prosperous and ate three meals a day, Now, there is only a sparse lunch, and fruit for an evening meal. Never meat or fresh milk. Michelle and her daughter are the new poor, but - through pride, or habit, or fear - they do not count themselves badly off.

As she says: "There are children in this city who barely eat." In the nearby market, there are fewer beggars than you see in some parts of London.

But the dried fish and vegetables aren't selling, and street cafés that used to offer bread and coffee for breakfast now have only grey maize gruel in doll-size cups.

Slowly, and still almost invisibly, surging food prices have strangled this country and much of Africa and is now becoming a major problem in much of Asia as well as parts of Europe.

Riots broke out a few months ago in several African and Asian countries including Egypt, The Phillipines, Malaysia and Indonesia. The uprisings were fueled by the lack of and rising cost of staple food.

The politics of food used to be simple. The poor died of starvation and the rich of gluttony. Now there's a bond stretching from Senegal to Sydney to Jakarta and on to Rome. Australian families must find more than $200 extra a month extra to cope with basic living costs, and food bills alone are up 15.5 per cent.

In Italy, women are marching against the cost of spaghetti. In China, a consumer who ate 20 kilograms of meat in 1985 will eat 50 this year: and it takes eight kilos of grain to produce one of meat.

In Britain, farmers are slaughtering pigs they cannot afford to feed. Some of the elements of the food panic are trivial, some surreal. The Waitrose pasta shortage in Britain has been superseded by a fig roll crisis, caused by heatstroke among the Turkish wasps that pollinate the crop.

The supermarket biscuit blight might be several Jaffa Cakes short of a famine, but the world's population is rising fast and the omens daunting. By 2030, global demand for food will double.

A lot of this shortage is due to the Left-wing Eco-Liars and Mentalenvironists.

If we had invested in Nuclear power years ago we would not be in this mess. If the money stolen in energy and "green" red taxes had been put into improving infrastructure and real alternative energy sources such as pyrolysis/gassification as opposed to endless summits, committees and feel-good quangos, we would not be in this mess.

If the Europeans and especially the French had ditched the nonsense of the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy, we would not be in this mess.

If we hadn't have bloated the so-called "welfare state" to nurture every dysfunctional, lazy, feckless, baby-popping chav or made it so attractive that half of the universe turns up in places such as Britain to improve their lifestytle in the most unproductive way and at the expense of the rest, we would not be in this mess.

If Za-NuLabour-PF hadn't swollen the state into the power-junkie, interfering, massive malignant tax-absorbing cancer that it is, we would not be in this mess.

As usual the cretins on the Left will blame the USA, Big-Oil, Big-Business and the Lizard People, but if you look at what the same malignant Left have done to Africa and its corrupt coterie of vicious tyrants, it could have fed the world as opposed to need feeding and clothing by the world. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of Africa is now the basket-case of Africa.

Kyoto was a sham, a chance for idiots such as Gore, Blair and others to posture on the world stage making themselves look "green" and "caring" when it is those same "green" policies that are turning food into fuel. Wheat and Corn turned into Ethanol, by government diktat, to satisfy the "green" lobby. Hardly the fault of "Big-Oil".

The wheat, corn and rice should ONLY be used as food and drink sources. The technology exists to turn the straw and waste (and landfill rubbish) into gas to run power stations.

As for population, yep, far too high and for this I blame third world religion, poverty, religion, ignorance, religion and the welfare state.

After reading this ask yourself a very simple question. Why, a couple of short years ago was their plenty of food as well as ample surpluses? Where has is it all now gone?

Behind everything that has gone wrong lies the jealous politics of the bullying "socialist" Left. Are we better off after Mugabe and his commie mates have wrecked the countries that they "govern"? Is Zimbabwe better off after the productive sector was pillaged and where Mugabe is buying weapons instead of food and equipment? What does Cuba actually produce apart from cigars, illegal emigrants and cheap holidays? How long will Venezuela last under Chavez? Compare relative production between Jordan and Israel, or better still, what does the Palestinian Authority actually produce apart from hatred and missiles? The latter don't even make their own electricity and yet receive more "aid" per head than any other? Apart from oil, what else is actually produced and exported, apart from Wahhabi funded hatred, in quantity by Saudi Arabia?

Then re-read the above until it all sinks in.

It's Over And She Doesn't Know It!!!

Somebody with a few more minutes to spare than I do does the maths: At this point, it is statistically impossible for Hillary to win the Democratic nomination for President. Assuming an even split of superdelegates with Obama, Hillary must win 65% of Ohio and 65% of Texas, AND get all of the delegates from Florida and Michigan who were disqualified by the DNC to be counted as well in order to come close enough to Obama to make Pennsylvania meaningful.

The Bearded Monster Of Muddled Thinking

If you haven't yet noticed the controversy aroused by the statements of Dr Williams the archbishop of Canterbury last week then it is timely I think that we all listened very carefully to his muddled words.

The basic kernel of the lecture was as follows: that we should be wary of the "inflexible or over-restrictive applications of traditional law", that "a universalist Enlightenment system has to weigh the possible consequences of ghettoising and effectively disenfranchising a minority, at real cost to overall social cohesion and creativity", and that there is therefore a case for "plural jurisdiction".

What he basically said was that certain elements of Sharia law be incorporated into British law so as to make the resident Muslim population in the UK not feel so outcast and disenfranchised. What utter nonsense. The danger is even greater than that however, it is not just nonsense, it is the thin end of the wedge in that if this man and others like him with similar agendas are able to sway public opinion in this way and theoretically he does have the power and authority as the A of C then Britain will indeed be a Muslim state within the next fifty years. What a buffoon!!

In an interview with World at One on BBC Radio 4 on the same day as his idiotic speech, Dr Williams made his case more accessibly, claiming that the adoption of certain aspects of sharia law "seems unavoidable". As things stand, he said, "there's one law for everybody and that's all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that's a bit of a danger." Hence, the Archbishop's enthusiasm "for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law". Because Dr Williams has the hushed manner of a consultant oncologist reassuring a nervous patient, it is easy to assume that what he says is benign and full of common sense. Not in this case, however. In the name of liberal co-existence, the Archbishop took arms against the very principles that give our ever-more diverse, cacophonous and mobile society what cohesion it has. This was a very dangerous intervention.One of the reasons why religion is dying out in the well educated ranks in the UK and elsewhere is due to buffoons like Dr Williams speaking out on matters beyond their own cult. Religion has not had a place in the law of the land for many years now and that is a good thing.

Choose if you must to assemble in a dusty cold building every Sunday and sing dreary songs to your chosen monster in the sky, but leave the law alone. For those who do not suffer from mass delusion, we need those laws to protect us from you implementing rules based on your book of myth and legend. The Archbishop of Canterbury should spend more time worrying about the state of his beard and leave parliament and the courts to manage the laws of the land. The mistake many make is to attribute deep intellect, academic status and wisdom to an old ditherer who hides behind specs, prose which is difficult to understand an untidy bearded face.

The General Public Is Not Fit For Purpose

Is this the speech that a decent politician should, could make? I believe that it is time that someone had the courage to. It is written from a British perspective but equally I think applies to Australia.

People of Britain, in a democracy like our own, you share with us, your elected representatives, the sacred duty of governance. I should like to thank you for your contribution. I should like to, but I won't. Most of you are just too pig ignorant to take any notice whatsoever of what we try to do in your best interests. You're not only failing to do your bit; you've become the biggest outstanding obstacle to the advancement of your own well-being.I appreciate that you can't be bothered to vote, join a political party or teach your kids to be socially responsible.

You're far too busy with all that binge-drinking and spree shopping. Obviously, you've got to make phone-calls while driving, park in bus lanes and cycle on footpaths. And, of course, you find it too much bother to pay any of the resulting fines.But do you have to demand better services at the same time as lower taxes? Must you ask for the planet to be saved while you insist on driving and flying? Do you have to clamour for things to be banned while decrying any infringement of personal freedom? Must you complain about immigrants taking jobs you're too idle to do yourselves?

You say you want politicians to speak their minds, but whenever we do, you accuse us of gaffes or splits. You hound us for accepting dodgy donations, but you refuse to fund our parties out of your taxes. You begrudge us our little perks, though we can't claim unfair dismissal when you capriciously turf us out. You have the nerve to despise us, when, unlike you, we make at least some effort to discharge our democratic duty.Above all, with your unmerited sway over all of our destinies, you make it impossible for any politician to deliver a message like this. Voters, enough is enough.

You're ignorant, stupid, selfish and hypocritical. Quite clearly, you're unfit for purpose. Resign, I say, resign.

Wobbly Hillary Fights Back

Now that Billary has won in New Hampshire, the whole circus moves on to Michigan on the 15th, Nevada on the 19th and the racially charged South Carolina primary on the 26th and Florida on the 29th before moving to America’s most populous states and biggest cities next month. Obama would be expected to take SC easily as the black candidate but that was before the result of Tuesday’s primary, which may rekindle doubts in the minds of black voters who have told pollsters that they did not think he could win. Bill Clinton, who remains an enormously popular figure among African Americans and earned himself the moniker “America’s first black President”, is expected to feature prominently in the South Carolina campaign.

The biggest prize remains "Super Duper Tuesday" on Feb 5th when delegate-rich states such as New York, California, New Jersey and Illinois vote. Both candidates will need to raise vast sums of cash for an advertising air war as the focus shifts from the “retail” politics of the early-voting states to the “wholesale” operation needed for a national campaign. It is becoming a very interesting contest.

I Am Being Reviewed

I received the email below a couple of days ago. I don't know if you have noticed that now when you click the "next blog" button at the top of this page you are likely to get connected to a spam blog. They are virtually the same as spam emails, something I fortunately do not receive these days. The anti spamming efforts of the ISP's and Norton's has made a huge difference over the last year or so. But now that the spammers are finding that they are being defeated in the email spam war, they are looking for other ways to get their messages out and the blogs are in the front line. I like the bit about "Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not spam". Anyway this post has posted OK so I must have been cleared.


Dear Blogger user,


This is a message from the Blogger team.


Your blog, at http://all-the-issues.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. For an explanation of what spam blogs are, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577


You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog. To request a review, please fill out the form found here: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=35892063


We will take a look at your blog and unlock it within four business days. Please note that if we do not hear from you within 20 days, we will remove your blog. If this blog does not belong to you, then you do not have to do anything. Any other blogs you may have will not be affected.


Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not spam. We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this erroneous result. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to users like you instead of to spammers.


Thank you for your understanding and for your help in our spam-fighting efforts.


Sincerely,


The Blogger Team

Huckabee And Obama Take Iowa Wins

Mike Huckabee has won Iowa's Republican caucuses - the first nominating contest of the 2008 US presidential election. Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, came second.

At the Democratic caucuses, Barack Obama won a close race to defeat Hillary Clinton and John Edwards - but it is still unclear who was second. I watched Huckabee on the Late Night Show with Jay Leno last night (it would have been recorded on Wednesday) and I must admit that he looked good. He came across as being very laid back and relaxed. He made many jokes about himself and the overall impression came across as a genuine nice guy.

I would now say the Hillary is down if not out of the Democratic race. Obama won the Democratic race quite easily as expected and in the most open contest for many years my tip remains that the next president will come from Huckabee or Obama.

Past Iowa caucuses have broken some campaigns and given big boosts to others, correspondents say. The next contest is on Tuesday in New Hampshire.

The US media projected Mr Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and an ordained Baptist minister, would win the Iowa contest based on partial results from more than 1,780 locations across the state.

Similar caucuses, or public meetings, will take place across all American states before each party backs a single candidate to contest the November election for the White House.

The Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary on 8 January are regarded as key for building momentum in the state-by-state process of winning the presidential nomination.

Candidates who do poorly tend to drop out of the race. Polls from New Hampshire have indicated that the Republican contest is between Huckabee and the Mormon Romney with John McCain a distant third, while for the Democrats Obama and Clinton lead the field.

St Pancras International - London

St. Pancras railway station, branded as St Pancras International, is a major station located in the St Pancras area of central London, between the new British Library building to the west and King's Cross station to the east. National rail enquiries have split areas of the station up for ticketing purposes into St Pancras (International) for services to continental Europe, St Pancras (Domestic) for domestic services including East Midlands trains and, Southeastern services to Kent which will start in 2009 and St Pancras (Low level) for First Capital Connect services on the Thameslink route.

The station is the terminus of the Midland Main Line for services from London to the East Midlands cities of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, and Sheffield, presently operated by East Midlands Trains. In 2007, these were joined by High Speed 1, which carries Eurostar’s high-speed services to Paris, Brussels, and Lille. Suburban trains on the cross-London Thameslink route will begin stopping at new underground platforms in December 2007, followed in 2009 by domestic high-speed services to Kent.

St Pancras is often termed the ‘cathedral of the railways’, and includes two of the most celebrated structures built in Britain in the Victorian era. The main train shed, completed in 1868 by the engineer William Henry Barlow, was the largest single-span structure built up to that time. The frontage of the station is formed by St Pancras Chambers, formerly the Midland Grand Hotel (1868–1877), an impressive example of Victorian gothic architecture.

Both St Pancras and King's Cross stations are served by King's Cross St Pancras tube station, which provides onward connection by London Underground trains.