At the End of the Day

A regular dose of marketing bollocks on French wine bottles these days is that such and such a plonk is l’expression du terroir’, but it was a tad disturbing last night to see an Italian primitivo recommended to me on a restaurant wine list as ‘the perfect expression of terror’. Il Brigadio Rosso, perhaps. Actually, it was quite good.

In fact, I can make a strong case for looking at the eurozone’s problems in the context of its member States’ wine output. Or put another way, any criterion would be better than the ones we’re employing now.

Take Greece. The Germans would like to take Greece and put it somewhere in the Congolese swamplands. This is because Berlin finds it hard to deal with anything and anyone unwilling to become German; and also, Greece isn’t responding to Troikanaut financial austerity pills. But a proper survey of Hellenic wine output could’ve predicted the tragic spread in EU bonds-appeal.

Did you ever try Retsina? I’ve never been a huge fan of pine-flavoured paraffin, but it’s amazing how – after only three bottles of the stuff – it seems like a clever idea to try a fourth. There is a very clear allegory here for any student of the entirely dysfunctional relationship between Athens and its international lenders since 2009.

Spain, on the other hand, makes several very palateable wines capable of competing on the international scene with rubbish French clarets sold at top dollar in M&S, and sickly German reds available from Lidl.

It is therefore too big to mess with: hence the completely different bailout deal made available to Spain by the bullies of Berlin-am-Brussels (vis a vis the one on offer to Greek Retsina-runners).

What this tells us about Ireland’s chances is hard to judge, but given Portugal churns out enough Mateus Rose to disguise the complete and pernicious incompetence of the European Commission, I’d venture to suggest that they’ll be OK.

Italy’s unique advantage here is that it has not only Gattinara, Prosecco, Frascati and Chianti as bargaining chips, it makes exciting cars and addictive pasta to ensure it will remain a serious global contender for many decades to come. What’s more, it has Goldman Sachs and the Cosa Nostra on its side.

My predictions about ezone survivors are based on myriad other considerations of course, but I do find the preceding factors telling. And what they’re telling me is that all of these ClubMed players should tell Angela Merkel where to stick her Fiskal Union, and use the consequent currency devaluations to put the French and Germans out of business when it comes to wine.

I have a gut sense that just the threat of this will be enough to bring Berlin  out of its catatonic indecisiveness: they, the Scandas, and the Dutch will declare wine an illegal product of the Devil. Together, they will found FEBRUARY – the Fiscal European Beer-Related Union of Accountant-Regulated Yawns. The rest of us will then, with luck, get our lives back.

 

Sunday Splash

There’s a double-whammy for the Barclays of Notquite-Sark in this morning’s Telegraph lead: the twins hate giving foreign aid, and they hate the EU. So when Tory Minister Alan Duncan says “we give the EU foreign aid money and they squander it”, the offshore proprietors cream their jeans.

I don’t like Mr Duncan. He’s a lightweight, and part of Dianne Abbott’s fag-hag circle. Of course the EU squanders foreign aid: it squanders everything. So get out. If Mr Duncan wants out of Europe and his boss doesn’t, then he should resign.

As for the Tubbytwins, they don’t pay any UK tax, so WTF has it got to do with them?

Talking of overseas aid, The Indie on Sunday stays close to the Dave Cameo take-me-roughly please Cash for Anything scandal. After accepting tons of dosh from Tony Bamford (Mr JCB) in 2010, Cams has now dug himself another large hole by making a JCB factory visit the jewel in the crown of his Brazil begging-bowl fiesta.

Bamford is said to be in line for a peerage on the next House of Lords list. He and his missus are members of the Tooting Norton tendency. This is all part of Scameron’s ‘leg up’ approach to life: “‘e’s rolled up ‘is sleeves an’ ‘eaded it an’ it’s in the net”. All perfectly fair and above board, just like Jeremy Hunt, two Party Treasurers, G4S contracts, and texting Rebekah.

Dear me, this is all sounding a bit Alan Rusbridger. The Observer headlines the Ed Miller Band, sternly noting that the deputy head of Geography Labour leader has given ‘an ultimatum’ to City: that he will split off casino operations if bankers don’t mend their ways.

There’s really no need for the ‘if’ bit in this non-story: it’s just that, as always, Unsteady Eddie lacks the cojones to say “we will break you up, period”. And in other news, the East Cloggermole UDC (twinned with Ittyoshu in Japan) has delivered an ultimatum to Wen Jaibao: lay off the sabre-rattling – or else.

The Mail on Sunday reveals to a not entirely breathless world that runaway sex-pest and all-round paedo-beast Jeremy Forrest ‘was sleepless for much of his recent honeymoon’, or so his wife says. This is quite normal MoS. This is a tedious story MoS. We’re all really, really bored MoS. Go away.

But the Sun on Sunday (or SOS as the wags have taken to calling it) doesn’t understand this either. In a faint re-run of 300 Argentine deaths being celebrated with ‘GOTCHA!’, the Cu***nt Bun shows wicked kidnapper and totty-teacher Forrest in a woolly hat boarding a plane back to England with the words ‘GOT HIM’. Hurrah: Lolitas everywhere can now sleep safely in their beds, as opposed to the headmaster’s.

The Sunday Mirror does, however: “we’ve got a theme here lads: some blokes like ‘em teenage: now let’s play another tune”. Yes, this week it’s Jimmy Squeaky-Clean Saville’s turn to be revealed as a filthy abuser of unwilling jail-bait.

I used to be a regular at Saville’s Beat City club in the early 1960s, when I was 14. Most of the girls in the club I was variously groping and knicker-fumbling were the same age or slightly older. Jimmy’s sole crime was being thirty years older than me, and more experienced.

That they went off for a bit of whatnot after the show with JS was an open secret. Unwilling? Hardly.

I’m still reading the Viz Profanasaurus. ‘Inserting the skin flute’ had me laughing again this morning, as did the premature ejaculation descriptor ‘Coming off at the Milly Billy roundabout’.

It’s a must for every lav, this one.

At the End of the Day

Over the years, one by one, all those posh-sounding English south-coast resorts have been proved to be – once I’d visited them – completely bogus. Bognor Regis may well have been George V’s favourite spot for dipping into the waves, but today it is an unutterably scruffy, unprepossessing place.

Weymouth may conjure up images of elegant Edwardian decadence, but on a summer’s afternoon in 2012 it is largely populated by uncovered women covered in tattoos and babies. Their menfolk are either absent, or looking vacant.

Littlehampton – whose name used to put me in mind of the Daily Express cartoon flapper Maudie Littlehampton – is an eyesore.

But there are two notable exceptions. Christchurch remains the very epitome of older genteel Englishness living cheek by jowl with stylish marina-wealth. And Worthing – a real surprise this one – is a seductive blend of contemporary apartment-block design and Georgian terraces.

The traffic everywhere, however, is horrendous – and more than enough to remind me how overcrowded we are as a country. One longs for the endless, empty kilometres of French autoroutes.

I stopped off in Lyndhurst for lunch at a good pub there. The landlord is the most uncanny Tony Blair doppelganger you will ever meet. Even his manner is similar. I wonder if he’s been cultivating it.

I’m staying with a chum in Uckfield tonight. In his loo is a 2010 copy of the Viz classic Roger’s Profanisaurus. Some of the cockney rhyming slang remains hysterically funny -  my own particular favourite being A crock of Douglas – for Douglas Hurd/Turd.

Marvellous stuff.

 

THE SATURDAY ESSAY: Let’s hope the death of an Ambassador leads to the death of denial.

Western ignorance of the Arab mind, and denial of Islamist goals, must come to an end

“US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Steven is thought to have been killed in an attack on the US Embassy Compound in Benghazi”.

That was an early newswire flash on September 11th this year. It is bald, calm and professional – and thus gives no real hint at all of how Chris Steven died.

After the initial shock of the event, I began to half-distractedly piece together some disturbing elements of the attack. A Washington contact told me that the Compound troops had been issued – as a sign of the new rapport between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood – with blank ammunition. The diplomat’s mind is both oddly cynical and gullible at the same time, but my source was clear about the fact that Steven’s minders were overwhelmed by “a screaming mob” while moving him out to a safe house. Whether his bodyguards were armed or not, I don’t know: but I’m told the Ambassador could’ve been adequately defended within the compound had the State Department not quite consciously put his life at risk with a futile gesture.

Another bizarre thing seems the almost total MSM silence about the date of the attack: September 11th. The assumption seemed to have been that this was pure coincidence given that (as one FCO official told me last week) “this was a reaction to the anti-Islam film”. In short, it wasn’t planned.

US President Barack Obama concurred in this view when he spoke to the media. He accepted that the outrage had been milked by terrorist cells, still insisting however that the riots were the response to a clear insult aimed at the Prophet.

But a diplomat in Paris with a long history of dealings in Arabist affairs disagrees.

“We are quite clear here that the entire action was coordinated, ” he told me last week, “The film had been around for months apparently. The Shi’ite organisers needed an an excuse to make a point, and this was it. I am sure that the average, ignorant fundamentalist was genuinely angry about the film, but it is nonsense to suggest that this was spontaneous. It was concerted, and it was a spectacular propaganda coup from almost every angle.”

Up until yesterday morning, I felt this was a story whose main potential lay in the Obama White House and its controlling penchant for censorship. A New York contact agreed, and had been supplying me with odd tidbits about preparations in the Romney Camp to blow the lid off why Chris Steven had died: ‘Obama soft on Islam and leaving Americans to die’ would be dynamite in the Presidential election campaign.

But as so often with the GOP candidate, his staff seemed to be fumbling the opportunity. I was about to drop the project in favour of a developing Westminster story when an email (from someone of whom I’m aware as an occasional Slog threader, but have never used as a source) arrived at jawslog@gmail.com.

It concerned the death of Chris Stephen. And it attached a photograph taken during the last minutes of Ambassador Steven’s life. I’ve had the validity of it checked out: the source remains a mystery, but the content is not photoshopped in any way, and the individual featured is – I’m 99% certain – Chris Steven.

The shot isn’t any kind of ‘scoop’: it has been doing the internet rounds for some days now, and is being used pretty overtly by the US Superpatriot tendency to suggest that the American Ambassador’s death was both cruel and depraved. That said, there are some things in the photo that would appall anyone considering themselves civilised.

Because I’m not in the business of hate-blogging, and because the pc cadres would say I was if I showed it – Catch 22 – I have no intention of reproducing the image here on the site. But if rubber-necking someone else’s death-throes does it for you, then I’m more than happy to send it to anyone who writes to me at the above mail address.

I must, however, tell you what I find repulsive in the photograph. And then I must share with you a frank and pc-free opinion about its ramifications.

Dragging Chris Steven along by his armpits in the shot is some psycho with a mobile phone in his mouth, recording Mr Steven’s terror in extreme close-up. Clearly visible on the assailant’s teeshirt is a Manchester United logo in the official away-strip colours. Ambassador Steven is barely conscious: his shirt has been pulled almost entirely off, and he’s obviously already been beaten half to death. You can’t see any further faces in this tableau, just several hands also eager to grab this symbol of their hatred and mania.

One thing is for certain as you regard the image: this man is not going to be allowed to have a dignified death. Even the Nazis – when purging the SA in 1934, for example – shot people against a wall in some kind of military attempt at rough ‘justice’. But Christopher Steven died horribly, brutally, and at the hands of a cowardly mob hell-bent on mindless vengeance.

It is alleged by some media in the US that Christopher Steven was multiply sodomised before his death. There is no suggestion at all of that in the picture, but ritual humilation (by the supposed removal of masculine anal virginity) is not uncommon in Arab thinking: as TE Lawrence found out to his cost in 1916. However, it remains a potentially inflammatory rumour, and – in the absence of any more grotesque evidence – should remain just that. Perhaps Mr Psycho’s phone video could establish the truth one way or another.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Now let me tell you what truly disturbs me about this picture. I’ve seen it many times before.

Not this specific one, obviously. I mean, I’ve seen this sort of thing a hundred times over the last half-century of Arab turbulence in the context of the West’s mania for energy security. From Iraqi leader Colonel Kassem’s body in a pool of blood in 1963, via Sadam Hussein’s utterly undiginified execution (while being taunted) at the hands of his jailers in the newly ‘democratic’ Iraq of 2006, right the way through to Muammar Gadaffi being dragged through the streets of his regime’s last redoubt Sirte.

I have three things to say about this, and predictably they will annoy the knee-jerk Left , Right, and Left again respectively. So I must be getting pretty close to the truth here.

First, the Arabs in the Middle East are not like us. Their culture is, like the past, a foreign country where most Westerners have never been. It is Hobbesian, deriving as it does from the harsh dictates of life in the desert: vicious, vengeful, unforgiving, hugely misogynist, strict and proud. No deviation is allowed. In the mindset of Arabia, the leadership doesn’t practice political correctness, it demands cultural rigidity. It executes thousands, hacks off limbs, cuts out tongues, censors all media, stones women who commit adultery, and – above all – despises the West.

The Arabs despise us for two reasons: because we keep on interfering in their affairs, preaching to them about democracy, and organising covert operations on their territory; and because we are seen as weak, decadent, effeminate, inglorious and generally untrustworthy. Until more influential people in the foreign offices and State departments of our culture study the Arab (male) mind, take an objective view of history, and wake up to the harsh reality outside their fluffy world of fanciful pc, then the violence will continue…and radical Islam will make more gains in terms of both converts and political takeovers.

Second, I think somebody – and very soon, before we’re all blown up – needs to cut the American commerce-to-geopolitics axis of delusion down to size. Many historians, for example, now accept that Kassem was removed because he told the Americans where to stick it as he embarked on a series of reforms in the 1962/3 period. We know the Americans got rid of Saddam, because we all had a ringside seat for Dubya’s Shokkanorr Festival. We know they propped up the Shah for decades in Iran. And we can trace how, since Autumn 2011, they have used their financial transmission clout to destroy the Iranian currency’s value. Their latest ploy is to back the Sunni schism of Islam in general, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, as “less extremist” than the Shi-ites who dominate in Iran…and who back Bashar Assad’s minority Alawhite regime in Syria. Before the year is out – probably – Assad to will be dragged along a thoroughfare somewhere for the mediaeval execution performance. That too will be down to the Americans. In 2010 they took out the washed-up and half-dead Al Q’eida guru Osama Bin Laden on Pakistan’s sovereign territory – without consultation.

From Hillary Clinton’s point of view, US foreign policy has thus been a massive success: Saddam, Bin Laden, and Gadaffi are history, Assad is on the way out, and Ahmadinnejhad’s empty rhetoric has pushed him away from the centre of power in Tehran. From the extremist Arab viewpoint however, things look diametrically different: from Lahore to Benghazi, Islamists are in power, and fundamentalist recruits are being attracted in ever growing numbers. Want to know why? Because It’s very easy to demonise the US: the US elite is pretty damn demonic, and displays this side of its nature non-stop.

Further, Islamists have been able to show their (largely thick chav) following that Obama may look and sound different to George W Bush, but he’s just the same old same old messenger from Satan really: gutless, devious, pulling the strings – and ready to dump on any Arab regime unwilling to play things The American Way.

The truth is that, when it comes to US  influence in the Middle East, the overwhelming proportion of Arabs have got the measure of American agents, can see them coming – and know they are hopelessly wedded to oil as a form of industrial energy plus citizen propulsion. They will use the Clinton Plan – and then spit in her face once the time is right.

Third and finally, Europeans (and here I mean the culture, not the directionless political entity run from Berlin-am-Brussels) need to divest themselves of denial about the true nature of Arab culture and fundamentalist Islam. While the two things are, much of the time, mutually exclusive – real Islam has acted as a sensible social brake on the worst elements of the Arab nature – in the Middle East they are increasingly interdependent.

I say again: we cannot negotiate with these people, and we cannot patronise them any more. Apparent acceptance of negotiation and nefarious strategy are ploys, nothing more. When a half-baked twerp like David Cameron shouts the odds in favour of Recep Erdogan one minute – and then bombs Benghazi the next – the Libyan victors and Islamist Turkish elite will make purring sounds. But they both follow a religious creed dedicated to the destruction of Christian culture: and along that road, there are no U-turns – only occasional delays before moving the tank divisions forward once more.

The only State likely to be a reliable ally for Britain in the Middle East is Israel. There are simple reasons for this: a sizeable proportion of Israelis originated in Europe and America, they have a decent democracy and the Rule of Law, they don’t behead their leaders and then roger them up the backside in public, they’re highly intelligent, very industrious – and the obvious link between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. They feel this too, and are forging ahead with Greek and Cypriot alliances.

Islamists would like Israel wiped from the surface of the planet, and Israeli Jews either sent somewhere else, or slaughtered in their own backyard. The location of The Promised Land was a mistake from the moment it was envisaged, and grossly unfair to the Palestinians. But the idea propogated by Islamism (and its ragbag of fellow-travellers) that Israel’s existence is the thin end of a global Zionist wedge is deranged.

The barabarians are close to a complete takeover of Islam now. The very antithesis of ecumenical belief, they are trouble wherever they spread this vile spray of anti-Infidel bigotry. Get real: this problem is our generation’s Nazism. It isn’t going to go away. Christopher Steven paid with his life for the illusions of Clintonite grandeur. The rest of us should learn from that, and honour the ordeal of this likeable man.

OPINION:Why we should redefine wealth taxes as fines on anti-social wealth

The definition of ‘wealth tax’ is too narrow….and the past is no guide to the future. The likes of Vince Cable should set out to be more Eliot Ness and less Ed Balls in the way they go about it.

There’s a long and well-argued piece in the Telegraph today from arch-Rightie Fraser Nelson of The Spectator .  As often happens when a neocon gets on his hind legs, deliberately simplistic arguments are sometimes presented as absolute truth and settled science. But this following extract gives a flavour of the intelligence Nelson applies to the issue:

‘The idea of taxing wealth is dangerously seductive, even to some on the Right….Denis Healey once believed this, too. A wealth tax was in the 1974 Labour manifesto….Healey gave up, saying he could not find any wealth tax that would be worth the political hassle….There are serious questions to be asked about the wealth gap in British society. Quantitative easing may yet emerge as having done more than anything else to widen it….The basic truth is that Britain is already taxed as much as it can bear; it is spending that is out of control. Finding deeper savings in the government budget is not without its political risks. But a wealth tax would be the biggest, riskiest and craziest gamble of all.’

When Fraser Nelson says “it is spending that is out of control”, he is right on the money. When he worries about wealth inequities, he is being more thoughtful than most of his ilk. But he’s giving far too narrow a definition to the term ‘Wealth Tax’.

As Fraser knows perfectly well, the considerations relating to the Wealth Tax debate have changed through 180 degrees over the last forty years.

Today, the debate is really twofold. First, if very rich individuals and corporations evade tax by going offshore, push jobs offshore, and use sovereign stimulation to falsely inflate profits without tackling debt, how is one to dissuade them from their sociopathy? The answer would seem to be via some kind of wealth tax they can’t evade – preferably with the added element of prosecuting those who collude in it. With some $35-40 trillion estimated to be illegally hidden in tax havens, this is grand larceny on a scale to dwarf anything the Mob could match.

Second – and this plays directly to one of Nelson’s points – if Western bureaucracies continue to be 100% resistant to attempts at slimming them down – and rewarding success not abject failure – then there too we need an ‘indirect’ wealth tax called (1) Summarily firing them without compensation; and (2) removing pension emoluments they awarded themselves without the required reference to a sovereign legislative body. (In the UK, for example, I am talking about the obscene increases in pension liabilities to the Sir Humphreys of Whitehall after 2006. The retribution I have in mind is far more of a fine and a tax).

I have long argued for the abolition of income tax, to be replaced by a system of fines for corporate and individually anti-social behaviour. Whereas income taxes are entirely gratuitous and indefensible, a tax system escalating in direct proportion to selfish lawlessness has both a solid criterion, and an ethical imperative capable of become a catalyst in the repair of our woefully degraded values as a civilisation.

There isn’t a single person of any significance in the Anglo-Saxon (or the EU’s ClubMed ‘democracies’ like Greece and Italy) with the spine to tackle these issues. The reasons are:

i. They are dependent on big business money
ii.Their bureaucrats know where the bodies are buried, and always blackmail their way out of the noose
iii. Banks hold most sovereign fiscal and stimulation plans to ransom, often misusing them for their own ends anyway.

The mansion tax is idiotic and not cost-effective to collect. But by tackling the real troughers with ruthless courage, George Osborne could wipe out around £1.2 trillion of UK debt by Thursday next week. He knows it – and everyone with any Sovereign finance nous knows it. Were he to do this, the markets would reward Britain more than handsomely.

But he lacks the bottle to face out the blackmail. And so thus far, the Draper has cut £13bn off the spending bill, seen it all eaten up by new spending, and stood by as Swervin’ Mervyn blew £280bn on pointless QE.

That really is gesture politics – and we all know the number of digits involved in it.

Related: Shell’s outrageous hypocrisy in the face of EU regulation

Megan Stammers & Jeremy Forrest:

a little less rhetoric, a little more comparative analysis?

Forget the blurred lines of the statutory rape laws. Apply some common sense and history to the case of the Stammers/Forrest elopement.

The Telegraph leads this morning with a proposed new law under which ‘the police could be banned from automatically naming teachers in cases such as that in which Jeremy Forrest fled the country with his pupil, Megan Stammers’. The suggestion underlying the piece  is that Jeremy Forrest is a paedophile. I submit that this is extremely unlikely.

Our current Monarch Queen Elizabeth II met (and was initially courted by) Prince Philip around the 14-15 age mark. Fair enough, I doubt if they were bonking like rabbits from then on – and teachers are placed in a position of trust – but we are talking here about a sexually mature female only months away from being legally able to give consent. If one looks at Europe’s crowned heads over the centuries, many courtiers in earlier times would’ve considered Megan Stammers not just fair game, but if anything slightly over the hill.

I wouldn’t be a teacher today for all the unsold condos in China. Not for nothing did ex-teacher Sting ask his pupils “Don’t stand so close to me”: as much as some of his former profession may well be predators, the Lolita syndrome is also a very real one. I never was a teacher, but I’ve had sex with several girls aged 15. I didn’t know they were at the time, but I wasn’t particularly worried about it – and neither were they. Would it have held me back had I known? I doubt it: I was 19 at the time.

The idea that this is a strain of paedophilia is arrant nonsense, and the law on teenage consent is, frankly, all over the place. At fourteen you have no legal responsibility for your actions, but at 16 the Labour Party would like you to have the vote. At 16 you can decide whether to have sex or not, and at 18 you can legally drink. I don’t think I know a single teenager today aged 15 who hasn’t tried drugs, been drunk, and had sex. I don’t approve of that – on the contrary, I am alarmed by it: but we shouldn’t use a plastic paedophilia cork to put that genie back in the bottle. It just isn’t practical.

Were this to be my problem to solve as an Education and/or Home Office Minister, I would extradite the couple and fire Mr Forrest: he will have a moral turpitude clause in his contract (so he must pay the price for obeying the dictates of the purple helmet) while Miss Stammers is 15 not 18 – and must therefore be returned to the legal control of her parents.

Would I lower the age of consent? No, because as usual we’d be caning the symptom rather than changing the culture. Would I prosecute Jeremy Forrest? No, I’d turn a blind eye to it. That might not satiate a hungry MSM eager for raw meat, but it would be the sensible approach. We have enough laws as it is: Forrest must lose his job, but on a comparative scale he hasn’t committed any serious crime….yet. I doubt very much if he will.

I’ll be interested to see in the coming days what the political class makes of it all. This is, we should remember, the political class which has tolerated an iniquitous and endemic minority ring of devious paedophiles in both our educational and childcare systems for over 30 years now. Were they to bay for Forrest’s blood, it would represent hypocrisy of the highest order.

So I imagine that’s what they’ll do.

Earlier at The Slog: President Gauck signs off the most dictatorial financial body in European history.

EUROBLOWN: German President signs off destruction of euro.

Gauck has, against his will, given the ESM powers that Adolf Hitler would’ve craved

Today (Thursday) President Joachim Gauck of Germany signed the instrument of ratification for the European Stability Mechanism. The ESM will thus come into force on 8th October 2012.

In doing so – and in private, be assured, this is much against his will – Gauck has authorised the rule of an ESM Gauleiter  with nothing short of dictatorial powers. As The Slog demonstrated over a fortnight ago, the ESM Council is uncontrollable, and effectively beyond the reach of any established Law on the planet.

But the Karlsruhe Court ruling of 12th September this year prohibits any ESM governor from increasing Germany’s contribution to the financing of the ESM Council above €190bn without the consent of the Bundestag.

So what we are looking at here is a German Constitutional Court telling an EU mechanism above any law that, unless it obeys German law, the Bundestag will give it a jolly good spanking. I think Karlsruhe woud have a better chance of lassoing ether. And given the Bundestag’s spineless track record to date, I think we can safely assume Germany’s fate is sealed.

As I posted earlier, the truth is being kept from the German mass electorate. Not just by censorship, but also by distortion and deception. With a stroke of his pen, the Bundespräsident has conferred legitimacy upon a body that is supreme but not sovereign.

In other words, it has 100% power, and 0% accountability. Hitler himself could not have asked for more. What a bitter-sweet frustration this must be for the control freak Angela Merkel.

Related: The two rag-tag armies fighting over Greece’s fate

Life imitates satire as Spain descends into surreal parody

Germany: beware of being the pomp in Pompeii

The German population found itself last night in ignorance of the Madrid anti-austerity violence during the day. Neither of the public service TV broadcasters ARD & ZDF reported any riots in Spain during their evening news bulletins. We have no choice, in this specific context, but to rephrase ‘public service’ as ‘State’. Lest anyone might think I’m blowing that blatant censorship out of proportion, ARD is the second biggest television broadcaster in the world after the BBC.

I think we are entitled to ask today what the Hell is going on in the eurozone. For one thing is becoming horribly obvious:  outcomes one thought suitable for satirical parody in the morning become fact before the day is done. I refer, of course, to the rapidly approaching socio-economic anarchy in Spain.

In a bid to appease his wacky wannabe masters, Spanish economy minister Luis de Guindos claimed this morning that his fiscal reform plans exceeded the recommendations of the EU. The site Seeking Alpha opined that the boast ‘is an important one as it means Spain can submit to a bailout without having to go through the politically difficult route of accepting EU conditions’.

Sure enough, the de Guindos Spanish austerity plan got a massive thumbs-up from Brussels. EU economic chief and Shark’s Finn Olli Rehn called it “concrete, ambitious, and well-focused,” proudly noting that it followed the recommendations made by the European Commission earlier this year to the letter. Seeking Alpha again suggested that ‘his words suggest Spain can submit to a bailout without needing to agree to any more reforms than it’s already imposed on itself’. This morning, I had posted this in jest:

‘But the Spaniards remain ahead of the curve when it comes to cunning economic planning. Their idea is to create their own bailout, by skinning the populace down to the bone, before they need to ask for an EU version.’

What can I say to the many Spanish Sloggers who come here regularly, beyond, “When Olli Rehn approves your economic strategy, be very, very afraid indeed”? Not a lot, I fancy.

If only Rajoy and the other folks in Madrid could avoid Greece’s mistake, and realise one irrefutable fact: they are giving in to a self-styled Herrenvolk internally divided to a degree that goes far beyond a joke.

A leadership elite in Germany united behind the goal of lifting the eurozone out of its image as a blundering Brussels bollocks bunion would be – whatever the rest of us think about the prospect – unstoppable as a force. But the reality posted over and over ad nauseam at The Slog is that the eurozone impasse is insoluble as long as three deep divisions continue: that between Germany and France, that between Berlin and the Bankfurters, and that between the Bundesbank and the ECB.

Yet there is something about ClubMed politicians – an odd combination of deep-seated cultural insecurity and gravy-train greed – that blinds them to their real power to do good for genuine liberty and democracy.

On a more global basis, dissent continues to sour relations between Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington about the sustainability of the Greek debt, and within the Troika itself about which of them should bear the most weight of the elephant in the negotiating room: the European Central Bank, the eurozone member States, or the International Monetary Fund. These three brass monkeys in turn are as blind to the concept of debt forgiveness as Clubmedders are deaf to the roar of power galloping their way as a result of mineral and energy wealth discovered in their territorial waters.

I confess to being baffled by the wooden analyses of the southern Europeans. And equally, I admit to having my suspicions about exactly what grubby bribery might be going on between predator hawks and depraved rats behind the scenes. But as to the result, I have no doubts at all: any smart-arsed conspirators north of Alsace who think they can control this bubbling magma are tragically deluded. Divide And Rule may be a sound policy on paper, but volcanic explosions overwhelm a million smug Pompeians.

Earlier at The Slog: How neocon notions are failing three in four Britons.

 

 

NEW ONS SHOCKER: Just 1 in 4 UK adults aged16-74 has a full-time job

THE FINAL PROOF: How neocons and liberals have accelerated Britain’s progress over the cliff

45% of all those currently in work don’t have full time permanent jobs, according to this month’s ONS labour market data .

While that 45% number reflects a reality in the UK Labour market highlighted by The Slog in previous posts, the cumulative result of adding up all the anomolies of our economy’s inability to employ people paints a very bleak long-term picture indeed.

The ONS also tells us that 22.4% of adults aged 16-64 are economically inactive. So that doesn’t include the retired…although of course some of them will be in the 45% of part-timers – thanks to the last fifteen years of Westminster policy shrinking their pension values.

But let’s start from one simple assumption: that very few people over 75 beyond Rupert Murdoch are still working. That’s 9.2% of all adults….but generously leaving out the 6.5% aged 65-74 entirely.

The aggregate comes to a staggering 76.6% not in a full time job. Only one adult in four – at the most – enjoys full-time employment in the United Kingdom.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why the statisticians are scratching their heads, and asking why unemployment is static or falling in the deepest recession for eighty years. The simple reality is that employment is changing: from long-contract, full-time career work to zero contract, short-hours part time or freelance work.

To paraphrase an old and dishonest Saatchi & Saatchi political campaign poster from 1979, the immigration/economic model/reduced welfare/globalist matrix being followed by Britain isn’t working. As The Slog pointed out eighteen months ago, we have far too many people living here for all of them to be kept fully economically active by the current economic model of globally mercantilist competition, and fiscal austerity.

To be precise, we can only provide that for around 25% of adults aged 16-74. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a pathetic result, and must join the Hall of Neocon Theoretical Infamy being compiled on this site.

We don’t need a Plan B in Britain, we need a different economic alphabet. And that’s something that none of the existing Wetminster Parties is ever going to supply.

We also need in Britain (and go away all racists, you’re not welcome here) a grown-up attitude to immigration and multicultural laissez-faire. It is a tenet of the K’ran that Muslims should reproduce as freely as possible so as to eventually turn the infidel into a natural minority. The latest official figures for England and Wales  show a market difference in total fertility rates (TFR) between Islamic followers and everyone else: people born in the UK had a TFR of 1.67, India 2.21, and Pakistan and Bangladesh 4.9.

Under the soi-disant anti-immigration Tory Party, barely a scratch – never mind a dent – has been made on the surface of new migrant totals entering Britain.

Put together, we have here neocon infamy and liberal insanity creating a recipe for socio-economic disaster. It’s why The Slog prides itself in being neither Left nor Right, but instead putting a Radical Realist pov when approaching our very profound problems as a nation.

Big hat-tip to Kevin Green at REC Technology for originally alerting me to the 45% figure.

Closely related: How this socio-economic model is changing things for the worse in 3,500 ways a year

THE NEWS-UNREAL

Homage to Catatonia

It’s only a matter of time before the German tabloid press runs a story showing that the Troika has discovered a hitherto hidden €730bn debt owed by Greece to the Martian Tourist Board. Oh those wicked, obese greasy Greeks with the fat bellies under string vests, doing their exhibitionist Zorba dancing when they should be working 13 days an hour – what are we to do with them?

The Troikanauts snuck out a release at the weekend claiming the real 2012/13 budget shortfall was likely to be be €20bn, not 12.7bn. Bild then raised Spiegel another €10bn. “Greece faces a financing gap that won’t be solved by budget measures being discussed because a weak economy and delayed privatisations have worsened its fiscal situation,” International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde helpfully observed. Actually, Greece faces a financing gap that could not be solved even by an economy growing at 6% per annum duckie, because Greece is dead: it’s just that being a thick French tart, you hadn’t noticed. Also you created the debt rollovers by blanking out default from the Lexicon of choices, Chrissie. Also your austere growth strategy created the weak economy, my little former lawyer who knows less than a licked stamp about economics.

News reaches me here in Sloggers’ Roost that Berlin has been secretly feeding Monsanto NK630 to Spanish bonds, in a bid to get their yield levels lower. But this is a vain ploy: although Madrid 10-yrs now have the highest resistance to Roundup on the planet, they’re still the stuff Mario Draghi uses when responding to a call of nature.

But the Spaniards remain ahead of the curve when it comes to cunning economic planning. Their idea is to create their own bailout, by skinning the populace down to the bone, before they need to ask for an EU version. This is a great scheme, because it means they can old off Brussels almost indefinitely, using the time to find their own debt holes, create their own fall-off in tax receipts, and their own austerity until they have to turn round and ask for the EU model. By then, of course, the requests will be emanating from several independent Iberian States. The negotiations will also, I’d imagine, be hampered by the existence of a full-scale civil war in the region.

Meanwhile, back in the cradle of nursery economic thinking, new figures from Greece do actually show a hitherto unspotted debt of €200bn. But this time, it’s owed by the small business sector to the State…and it has nothing to do with tax evasion: every cent of it has been acquired since the Milton Keynes economic strategy was introduced by the Troika, in association with surviving geriatric centagenarians in Berlin still able to remember the 1923 Weimar hyperinflation, but not who they are.

“We have looked very closely at the figures involved here,” Mme Lafarge did not say – but give her a few days, and she will, “and our conclusion is as certain as I was two years ago that French banks are impregnable. It is this: Greece’s small businessmen are deliberately refusing to become German like all good eurozone citizens must except we French because they are small-minded and that is why they only have small businesses and sub-atomic sized willies. Big businessmen are being far more sensible, and fleeing the country to buy expensive condos in Paris instead, because they know that Parisiens are the most sophisticated and civilised people in the Universe. I can see the nurse approaching, and so I must now sign off and take my daily dose of Monsanto NK630.”

Here on planet Earth, the dramatic drop in SME turnover, the extraordinarily high business taxes, and reduced access to bank loans are the genuine culprits in Greece. Add to this is the small matter of most SMEs being flat broke, and you wind up with an unpaid bill of €200bn. Once upon a time, well within living memory, the entire Greek debt was just €20bn more than that. But then the masterminds from Berlin-am-Brussels got involved, and the rest is mystery.

“We are ruled by clocks, liars and fools,” remarked GK Chesterton almost a century ago. He must be giggling in his grave.

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At the End of the Day

‘Abbott says it’s [sic] humanised monoclonal antibody for the treatment of glioma has been granted orphan designation by the European Commission.’

Global Markets and Forex page at Seeking Alpha

God knows, it’s hard enough to keep up at the best of times. But with that amount of science and market jargon crammed into nineteen words, what chance do any of us stand? Let’s put it another way:

‘Abbott Laboratories believes that its pill for treating human beings going blind has been given the go-ahead by the EU pointy-heads’.

But of course, it might not mean that at all. It might mean that an obscure monk has cloned one human, but thus far only in black and white. Full colour clones will come later, but in the meantime the mysterious spy Glioma has been declared an orphan by the powers that be, on the grounds that her mum and dad are no more.

And who knows what Nick Clegg meant when he said this at the LibDem Party conference today:

“There is no silver bullet, all Parties will have to acknowledge the need for further belt-tightening. Going green means going forward. To make blue go green you have to add yellow again and again and again. If we secure our country’s future we will secure our own”.

Let us now go back to our constituencies, paint our silver bullets yellow, and put blue water between ourselves and the Conservatives. Let us tighten our belts in order not to be caught with our trousers down, wear brown trousers in order to disguise the shame of our open bowels, pull up our green socks of recovery, and roll a bowl a bowl a penny a pitch such that people will say, if the Coalition should last for a thousand days, we secured out country’s right to own the future.

But here’s another one on the subject of ongoing rows between Greece and its creditors:

“In theory, the IMF could withdraw from the deal if it is not satisfied the bailout fulfilled the criteria,” said Ben May of Capital Economics. “In practice, it isn’t so black and white and there is obviously potential for some kind of fudge.”

We like the idea of a potential for fudge. Evangelos Venizelos is very partial to a finger of fudge, especially if it’s neither black nor white. But in practice, we must withdraw from the deal before he becomes filled full from having tried to eat the bailout.

After a while, it becomes impossible to take this bollocks seriously. After a short while, even. So I leave you tonight with the news that Harvard Lags Peers as Endowment Loses Less Than 0.1%, pipelines are to Expand U.S. Supply Glut, and all over the world, people are Gaming Out the U.S. Fiscal Cliff. I wish them all the very best of luck.

RUSSIAN NK630 BAN: French researchers used cancer-prone rats…

….but Russia suspects Monsanto’s monopolist motives

Just as with the global warming debate, neither side on GM is entirely good, bad or indifferent

Even if we lack solid research to suggest serious health dangers in the growing use of GM crops, the long-term monopolistic and controlling aims of Monsanto remain a very real and present danger. Sources suggest this may be uppermost in the mind of Russian officials who yesterday halted the use of the Monsanto NK630 wheat strain in their country. If we have good reason to question the anti-NK630 research conducted by Gilles-Eric Seralini, we have even more obvious reasons to suspect the long-term motives of Monsanto.

Further to The Slog’s earlier post about Russia putting a stop on further use of the genetically modified ‘Roundup Ready’ wheat  strain NK630, more skullduggery is coming to light by the hour. It seems that in 2012, there are liars, damned liars, and advocates.

1. Monsanto seems to be implicated in spreading disinformation about the sample size of the French labrat research. Although there were doubts suggesting that ‘the control sample’ of non-NK630 fed rats was only ten strong, in fact (a) the study looked at 200 rats, and (b) the duration of the study – two years – was far longer than any previous research.

2. However, the French director of the study Gilles-Eric Seralini’s team used a strain of rat that is known to be highly prone to developing mammary tumors. That factor, plus the small sub-sample sizes of 20 per cell, mean that the prevalence of mammary tumors found among the treated female rats could be pure happenstance.

3. Nevertheless, between 1992 and 2002—the timescale during which GM crops moved rapidly from test plants to dinner tables, the USDA spent about $1.8 billion on ag-biotechnology research—of which a minute 1% went to safety testing. At the same time, the sheer power of ag-biotech industry influence maintains a dubiously tight control over who researches what—and dominates the research agenda at America’s main ag-research universities.

4. One of The Slog’s two Russian sources has come forward by email to offer this view: ‘I’m told the [Russian] government has access to intelligence suggesting that Monsanto is using the aperture of a year in which there are chronic grain shortages to frighten everyone into going completely over to GM in general, and pressing ahead with NK630. Let me say that there are suspicions here about their motives, and also among our farmers about Monsanto’s repressive trickery on patents and repurchasing’. Neither of those two observations are unique to this source, by the way. Former seed-trade executive and Slog threader Edward Spalton notes, “I think it’s a fair idea to give the plant breeder some income from his long-term research and efforts, but the modern practice seems far too restrictive, and weighted in favour of Monsanto and their like.”

An interesting take comes from Slog Scandinavian source Dietrich von Ausland: “I am all in favour of crop improvements and we stand little chance of feeding the future world without GM development to facilitate this. However, I absolutely agree that big business in general and Monsanto in particular is just not to be trusted with it. I am all against the English tree-hugging fluffies who are just scared of GM on principle. But that does not mean we should rush into the arms of commercial crooks.”

Others further  support that essentially neutral, commonsense view. “Many of the noisiest [anti GM] protagonists – the prime example being the CRU at UEA (an academic disgrace) – are statistical numpties. But Monsanto’s commercial model depends upon patents, and growers having to return annually to obtain Monsanto seeds. Good reasons not to take anything Monsanto says on trust.”

Exactly. And an equally good reason not to take Gilles-Eric Seralini’s data on trust either: the bloke has a long anti-Monsanto track-record. That doesn’t make him a bad guy, but it does make him innately biased. Others, however, are not at all biased – merely long-time observers of the Men from Monsanto. Kit Green writes, ‘Most GM crops only produce higher yields because they are resistant to high doses of herbicides and insecticides. The funders of GM research are the chemical companies who all want to sell more chemicals. There is far less money in just making seeds stronger and self resistant to disease and pests. It is iniquitous that peasant farmers in many countries are being hoodwinked into buying seed that produces sterile crops, so ensuring the purchase of new seed every year.”

I have to say that the evidence to support that last contention from Kit is irrefutable: it’s the Monsanto business model, for crying out loud. However, as ever when there are potential consequences to be assessed, the motherlovers on Wall Street are keen as mustard to dismiss any and all tentative frontal-lobe thinking – in favour of Goforit: Goldman Sachs’ response to the evidence of rat-organ damage was to upgrade Monsanto shares, a move that saw the company’s stock price power ahead by 2.8% on the day (September 19th). “Monsanto’s doing a lot of things right,” OptionMonster’s Jon Najarian told CNBC  the same afternoon. Perhaps not if you’re a rat, Jonny baby.

Monsanto’s unremittingly aggressive approach to litigation, its seed commercialisation practices, and its history as a chemical company, have made it widely hated. This isn’t entirely Greenpeace nuttery: lest we forget, these are the beautiful people who gave us DDT, Agent Orange, and of course Roundup. I became concerned when I noted at the weekend that the collateral marketing materials from Monsanto were branding NK603 as ‘Roundup Ready’: that’s to say, mutated to ensure complete resistance to the weedkiller. You can kind of discern a double sales-bonus for Monsanto in all this; you can also be assured that NK603 will itself be pounded with Roundup throughout its growing season. Let’s hope those washing products employed by cereal manufacturers are effective. (For all I know, they’re made by Monsanto too).

The two key elements in the GM debate that cause me anxiety are first, the statistics on whether we actually need to use GM in the first place; and second, the track record of the Men from Monsanto. They may be using this drought-ridden year to scare the crap out of everyone, but it seems unlikely NK630 survives dry weather better than any other maize type – maize per se being easily the most thirsty grain crop there is. At the end of the day, Monsanto shows all the signs of being just another sociopathic multinational pharmco masquerading as good capitalists solving the global food problem: in reality, they are as monopolist in their actions as Murdoch.

Related: Shell & the EU – an object lesson in hypocrisy.