EU is worst example in history of arrogant and wasteful bureacracy, time to leave Evil Empire of Europe, Warner, 3/31/2009

3/31/09: "Now is the time to leave evil empire of Europe," Gerald Warner, Scotsman

"ON THURSDAY voters go to the polls to elect members of the European Parliament. The bizarre nature of this exercise can best be illustrated by recalling that from its inception until now the EU parliament has enjoyed neither the authority to initiate laws nor to repeal them. That is in keeping with the ethos of the European Union an organisation that believes power is too important to be entrusted to the masses.

The European Union is an enclosed tyranny, addicted to micromanagement of its subjects' lives and devoid of any kind of cultural coherence. It is the worst example in world history of the arrogance and wastefulness of an untrammelled bureaucracy. The greatest single step Britain could take towards freedom and self-fulfilment would be to remove itself from the control of this behemoth.

The EU, like its partner in corruption the United Nations, is a totally artificial construct. It has no roots in any real society and exists only as a vehicle for the power-hungry and the greedy to indulge their unhealthy appetites. Guarantor of European peace? Get real: who seriously believes we would have spent any part of the past 40 years at war with Germany, but for the benevolent interposition of Brussels? Metternich's Concert of Europe it is not.

At every stage in its growth, the EU has advanced by stealth, subterfuge and downright lies. Remember the dishonest agenda with which Edward Heath sold it to Britain? Purely a trading partnership, blah, blah… In reality, from the first moment of its conception, it was intended to be a political union, a major power bloc. With increasing power it has grown more dictatorial, as witness the way in which the wayward Irish were forced to vote twice, after they gave the "wrong" answer in a referendum, an experience that may be replicated this year. Ditto the Danes.

After the Lisbon Treaty had been rejected and thus automatically fell into desuetude, bureaucrats in Brussels continued to prepare its implementation, in the sure confidence that nothing so trivial as democracy or legality would be allowed to impede the development of the European project. Nor is it even culturally European, as the drive to incorporate Turkey, an Asian, Islamic nation, demonstrates.

The latest ploy among Europhiles is audaciously to conscript some Eurofolly of absurd regulation into their own argument and characterise it as the "caricature" case advanced by Eurosceptics. In reality, the demented banana-straighteners of Brussels are still in business; a recent example is the ridiculous directive that obliges all British buses travelling more than 30 miles to decant their passengers half-way through their journey, take them back on board and change the number of the bus.

Yet such buffoonery masks an infinitely more sinister agenda. The EU is a socialist institution, with all the rampant intolerance that implies. It is the embodiment of Marxism of the Frankfurt School, whose programme is political correctness, trampling down all traditional morality and every last vestige of the Judaeo-Christian ethic with ruthless determination. The author Vladimir Bukovsky identified this threat when he denounced the EU's "intellectual gulag known as political correctness" and warned: "This is the beginning of the gulag. The beginning of your loss of freedom."

Bukovsky knows what he is talking about: he was a prisoner for 12 years in the Soviet gulag and recognises the marks of the beast. In the building of our own prison camp, Britain has made a net contribution of £22 billion since 2002. In return, we have been rewarded with the loss of our sovereignty and the reduction of our voice to a representation of 78 out of 785 MEPs. Yet, for the eunuch parliamentarians of Brussels and Strasbourg, life is good.

From tomorrow, their basic salary will rise to £83,282 a year, plus up to £363,000 in expenses (receipts not required). They also receive £41,573 "transition payments" as golden handshakes on leaving office, with pension rights of up to £30,000 for one five-year term. As at Westminster, our MEPs have not been backward in employing family members on expenses: 30 of them do so.

No wonder MEPs are Europhiles. For the rest of us, there is no conceivable reason to love this evil empire. None of the major political parties offers any remedy. David Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is worthless, because he will not commit himself to doing so even if the treaty is already in operation, as it almost certainly will be by the time he is in a position to organise a plebiscite. The time for tinkering is past: the EU is unreformable. It is time to make our excuses and leave." by Gerald Warner, Scotsman on Sunday, Scotsman.com,





via Lucianne.com

BELTWAY GOP out of touch with most voters--Rasmussen

5/1/09: "Just 21% of GOP voters believe Republicans in Congress have done a good job representing their own party’s values, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) say congressional Republicans have lost touch with GOP voters throughout the nation. These findings are virtually unchanged from a survey just after Election Day.

Among all voters, 73% say Republicans in Congress have lost touch with the GOP base.

Seventy-two percent (72%) of Republicans say it is more important for the GOP to stand for what it believes in than for the party to work with President Obama. Twenty-two percent (22%) want their party to work with the President more.

Not surprisingly 72% of Democrats say it is more important for the Republican Party to work with Obama, but 54% of unaffiliated voters hold the opposite view.

“To be relevant in politics, you need either formal power or a lot of people willing to follow your lead. The governing Republicans in the nation’s capital have lost both on their continuing path to irrelevance,” Scott Rasmussen says in an analysis this week.

Party officials and pundits have been debating for months what direction Republicans should take following Obama’s election and sizable Democratic gains in both houses of Congress. Some argue that the party should move in the direction of the Democrats on issues, while others say the GOP has been hurt by abandoning its core conservative economic and social positions. "

• (BUT RASMUSSEN'S RECENT POLLS SHOW THE DEBATE IS OVER. GET RID OF THE ELITES).
  

"The debate flared up again this week with longtime Republican Senator Arlen Specter’s decision to become a Democrat out of fear he would lose his own party’s primary to a conservative challenger next year. Fifty-one percent (51%) of Republican voters say the Pennsylvania senator’s switch will have a significant impact on the laws passed by the Senate.

Voters for the first time since the election now say congressional Republicans are as partisan as their Democratic counterparts. Up till now, Democrats in Congress have been seen as governing in a more partisan fashion than Republicans. Fifty-five percent (55%) now expect politics in Washington, D.C., to be more partisan over the next year.

At the end of April, for just the second time in more than five years of tracking, Republicans led Democrats in the Generic Congressional Ballot. Forty-one percent (41%) said they would vote for their district’s Republican candidate while 38% would choose the Democrat.

In January, 56% of all voters said the Republican Party should return to the views and values of President Ronald Reagan to be successful. Eighty-five percent (85%) of Republican voters agreed." "69% of GOP Voters say Republicans in Congress out of touch with the party base" via Phil Hendrie

Climate Change extremists

UK Telegraph, Christopher Booker: "How would you cope if faced with a GCSE physics paper? Have no fear. You don’t need to know anything about physics. As can be seen from the adjacent question from last year’s paper on physics and electricity, so long as you’ve listened to enough environmentalist propaganda to know what answers are expected (eg that most of the sources of the electricity we use are creating global warming), you could get 100 per cent. But if, of course, you don’t agree with the Government on these matters, you will fail.

Doubtless one of the teaching aids which might have guided you to the right answers would have been Al Gore’s famous Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, which in 2007 our then environment secretary, David Miliband, ordered to be sent to every secondary school in the country. It was obviously inconvenient that in October that year a High Court judge should have ruled that nine of the claims made in that film were so scientifically absurd that the Government would be in breach of the law against teaching propaganda in schools unless the film was accompanied by material correcting its errors. But when last week I asked the Department for Children, Skills and Lifelong Learning (or whatever they now call the old ministry of education) for sight of that corrective material they never came back with an answer.

Does one not get the feeling that all this propaganda over the terrifying threat of global warming is beginning ever so slightly to turn people’s minds? Caroline Lucas MEP, the leader of the Green Party, last week agreed on television that flying to Spain was “as bad as knifing a person in the street”, because air travel like this is causing people to die “from climate change”.

Dr Richard Dixon, director of the Scottish WWF, was at the same time claiming that failing to ensure one’s home is “energy efficient” was a “moral crime”, as “anti-social as drink driving”, and “we should be having a discussion as to whether it should become an actual crime”.

This echoed the recent observation of Ed Miliband, our Energy and Climate Change Secretary, that opposing wind farms should be as “socially unacceptable” as not wearing a seatbelt. Meanwhile, no doubt encouraged by this kind of talk from ministers, 100 “climate campaigners” were arrested by the police, who feared they were planning to put out of action a coal-fired power station in Nottinghamshire, to stop it continuously contributing to the National Grid 1,000 megawatts of electricity – considerably more than the average output of all the 2,400 wind turbines in the country.

This is the same grid, of course, 75 per cent powered by nasty, dirty, CO2 emitting fossil fuels, which Gordon Brown hopes will secretly power the electric cars he proposes to give customers £5,000 each to buy in order to help save the planet – even though his grants won’t be available until 2012. Meanwhile, as 17 of our major power stations are likely to close within six years, thanks to obsolescence and EU rules, Mr Brown shows remarkably little interest in how we are going to keep Britain’s lights on (although certainly no less, to be fair, than does Mr Cameron).

Truly these days, in more ways than one, are we moving towards a new dark age. Fortunately, however, the latest available data show the downward trend in global temperatures continuing, At least the one thing we don’t need to worry about, it seems, is global warming.

Ours for £1bn: some pictures of a big aeroplane

Fifteen years after John Major (in his wish to be “at the heart of Europe”) signed Britain up to what was called the Future Large Aircraft project, the EU’s bid to build a replacement for the US Hercules transport aircraft appears on the brink of collapse. Despite last week’s plea from Airbus’s chief executive that the A400M project must be kept going to save “40,000 European jobs”, all we have got so far for our £1.2 billion investment has been

28 computerised photographs of an aircraft so beset with technical problems it seems unlikely ever to fly.

But with Britain’s ageing Hercules fleet due to fall out of the sky by 2012, we have now missed our place in the queue for replacements. Due to Tony Blair’s Euro-besotted decision in 2000 to buy the A400M, it seems our Armed Forces will soon be incapable of fighting overseas, even if a prime minister of the day wished them to do so.

Explorers on the rocks

Thanks to sharp-eyed observers on the US science blog Watts Up With That, we see how Pen Hadow’s much-touted Catlin expedition to measure that disappearing Arctic ice is degenerating into farce. Despite claims by Prince Charles and a galaxy of warmist sponsors that Hadow and his two colleagues would provide “vital scientific data” to show how the ice could soon vanish, the loss of equipment through intense cold has reduced them to measuring the ice with an old feet-and-inches tape measure, Last week their website had to post an apology for providing misleading data, It seems increasingly unlikely the gallant trio will reach the Pole, despite rather more efficient satellite data confirming that the ice is considerably thicker than last year." "'Save the Planet' Rhetoric Soars to Crazy New Heights,"via Lucianne.com

Antarctic ozone hole healing. Memo to Al Gore: Grab the Digitalis.

(Christian Science Monitor): "Just when it looks as though people could breathe a sigh of relief over the hole in stratospheric ozone over Antarctica —

• it’s expected to heal by 2050 —

scientists are raising a new ozone-related concern: rocket launches.

That’s right. Rocket launches.

• The idea is not as wiggy as it may sound. As early as 1974, some scientists had noted that the space shuttle — still a gleam in NASA’s eye at the time — would be a source of chlorine emissions as it climbed through the atmosphere and passed through the stratosphere.

Chlorine-based compounds called chlorflorocarbons have been the main driver behind the loss of ozone in a high-altitude layer of the atmosphere called the stratosphere. They’ve been banned via the 1987 Montreal Protocol, along with other ozone-trashing compounds.

Indeed, some people have argued — wrongly — that the space shuttles have been responsible for the ozone hole....

• Down the road, however, the picture could change, especially if aerospace-industry launch projections pan out.

The team’s pitch: Don’t wait until then to figure out if this will be an issue. That could lead to a mishmash of regulations that could choke off the launch business. Instead, gather the data now in a rigorous, transparent way so that if emissions regulations are required in the future, they won’t be cobbled together at the last minute with little scientific basis for designing them....

• The US once ponied up millions of dollars to study the environmental effects if hundreds of high-flying supersonic-transport airliners took to the skies.
  

• The number of SST airliners never topped 20.
  

Here, the team argues, the rocket fleet is real, clearly growing, and yet few are taking as serious a look at the environmental effects from rocket emissions — a task that could be accomplished far less cost." (ie "climate" hysteria for profit)

Hundreds Protest Carbon Trading-will not help climate change-UK

"Hundreds of people today set up a "climate camp" in the City of London to protest against

• economic measures which they say

• will not tackle climate change.

Protesters who had gathered in small groups around the City descended on carbon trading body the European Climate Exchange on Bishopsgate, shutting off a stretch of road and pitching tents in a matter of minutes.

The climate campers are protesting against carbon trading, which they say is

• not an effective way to reduce greenhouse gases as
  

• it allows rich countries to carry on polluting while "offsetting" their emissions elsewhere....

"Carbon trading has been the false solution that has been thrown at us when we've held previous camps and we want to tackle that head-on today."...

Architects of AIG and US ruin were in London

9/21/08: "Joe Cassano was the president of a subsidiary of AIG that 'lost' £5.5bn earlier this year, setting the insurer on a path to bankruptcy.

• And today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that the dealings that brought it to the edge of collapse were done in London.

Last week, AIG was effectively nationalised with an £48bn loan from the US Federal Reserve to avert a collapse that would have triggered unimaginable consequences on the world's financial markets.

In March, when the losses were revealed, Mr Cassano, a 53-year-old New Yorker who had an office in Mayfair, left the company. Asked by The Mail on Sunday if he felt responsible for the AIG crisis, he smiled and said: 'I left there six months ago.'

Refusing to answer further questions, he went inside his four-storey townhouse in one of London's most exclusive streets.

• Mr Cassano, who learned his craft on Wall Street, was one of the founding team in 1987 of AIG Financial Products. Effectively the insurer's banking unit, it sold cover to financial speculators, many involved in the American housing market.
  

Two decades on, Mr Cassano is one of several AIG executives facing a lawsuit accusing them of deceiving hundreds of thousands of investors who suffered huge losses in the latest crash on Wall Street. According to papers filed in New York's federal court,

• he claimed the policies he marketed were so safe they would never lose as much as 'one dollar'.

His pitch was so convincing that many small investors sank substantial sums of their life savings into AIG shares.

A financial expert told The Mail on Sunday: 'I'm not going to call Cassano a crook but he was the head of the division that took AIG down. If the US government had not stepped in, and AIG had gone bankrupt, the knock-on effect at institutions around the world would have been disastrous.

• 'As it is, Cassano's exotic financial dealings are the biggest single component of the crisis on Wall Street and in the City.'

Cassano moved to England in 1987 from the US but still owns a house in Westport, Connecticut. His division AIG FP sold credit default swaps (CDSs), which are, in effect, a type of insurance against an organisation going bust. AIG FP wrote CDS contracts with a range of investment banks and other financial groups. A CDS is linked to a specific type of asset, typically a company bond or other loan or package of loans. The buyer of the CDS pays a regular sum to the issuer. In return, if there is a default on the asset the issuer pays out a predetermined amount of money.

London has seen a boom in the credit derivatives market over the past ten years because of a combination of the

• UK's relaxed regulatory environment and a concentration of people skilled in this type of complicated trading.

During the credit explosion the CDS demand was huge. By 2007 Cassano's division was providing guarantees mainly

• through credit default swaps
  

on about $ 500bn of assets (£285bn).

In effect Cassano's business was underwriting a huge proportion of the global credit bubble -including the vast American subprime mortgage market. And as house prices in the US fell, the AIG books began to unravel. In December 2007, Martin Sullivan, chief executive of the whole of AIG, assured shareholders that the chances of the US housing bust leading to losses at AIG was 'close to zero'. But he confirmed AIG Financial Products had written off $1.1bn (£600m) because of its credit contracts covering American mortgages.

• The bombshell came on February 11. PricewaterhouseCoopers, auditors to AIG, said there had been 'material weaknesses' in the standards of financial reporting at Cassano's division. Worse was to come. On February 29, AIG announced it was writing off $11.1bn (£ 5.5bn) on its CDS business.

Troops' fears over their life cover in war zone

By Jonathan Petre, Mail on Sunday British soldiers have expressed alarm that a scheme to insure them on the battlefield could have been put in serious jeopardy if the US insurance giant AIG had collapsed last week.

• Most members of the armed forces top up inadequate Government compensation by joining the recommended private scheme PAX, which is underwritten by AIG.

Soldiers fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan tend to take out the maximum cover possible to double the money that will be paid out to them if they are wounded, or to their families if they are killed.

• With high casualty rates --almost 200 servicemen or women have been killed in the two conflicts - manyms of pounds have already been claimed.

The British arm of AIG that operates PAX insisted yesterday it would have been able to meet its obligations if its troubled parent company had folded.

But at the height of the crisis, servicemen and women were expressing their fears on unofficial websites.

One anonymous posting on the British Army Rumour Service website was headed

• Are Our PAX Policies In Safe Hands? It read:
  

• 'PAX is underwritten by AIG. Looking at this, I'm not sure they have much of a future. Just have to keep breathing then.'

The Ministry of Defence admitted yesterday that it had been so concerned about the situation it had sought assurances the scheme would continue if AIG collapsed. "...

NY CITY MUSEUM SHAKEN DOWN BY CLIMATE CHANGE PROFITEERS

This pathetic banner at the entrance of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City was photographed in March 2009 by Tom Nelson and posted on his blog. "Climate" Shake Down artists got B of A and the Rockefeller Foundation to sponsor it, per Tom Nelson's blog.