A Place to Stand: 18/11/2007

Saturday, November 24, 2007

FIGHTING TO COMMIT GENOCIDE

The Guardian has, quite astonishingly, been publishing articles from their regular columnists(here & here which are 180 degrees against everything they have been previously saying about Kosovo. Suddenly, having for months been doing articles about how dreadful the Serbs & Russians are for refusing to go along with western desire to hand over Kosovo to our genocidal Islamic terrorist friends & decades of supporting genocide, they are suddenly saying it shouldn't be handed over after all.

President Snake Thaci (his nom de terreur) says that as of December 10th he is going to declare "independence". I suspect NATO just hasn't got the military commitment to act. Leaving out the minor point that 65% of Kosovo's GNP is NATO aid. Presumably well over 100% of the government budget some of which will be going into the Swiss bank accounts of the gangsters who make up the leadership of the KLA. Does anybody doubt that the KLA are going to immediately start up genocide & ethnic cleansing again?

In the occupation agreement, (which specifically acknowledges Kosovo as part of Serbia - but never mind) the NATO/UN occupiers guaranteed to ensure peace & security & to disarm the KLA. So when the KLA start openly committing genocide by shooting people what are the occupiers to do. Before the eyes of the world, with no excuses about Milosevic or such they will be forced to actually use their troops to stop genocide. But this is not 1999. Afghanistan & the blogsphere has changed things. We have seen most of the NATO troops in Afghanistan given rules of engagement that say they are not to fight in provinces where there is combat going on & certainly never to fight at night. Are these people going to fight their own employees. Britain has already pulled our troops out & we have barely enough to guard Buckingham Palace let alone Kosovo. I assume the US troops there are not their best fighters either. I think the French would fight, but then they not entirely on message about this imperialism. The Dutch actively refused to prevent the genocide of 3,800 Serb civilians at Srebrenica. The Wehrmacht are the old friends of those members of the KLA who were in the SS.

The only alternative to stopping President Snake would be for NATO troops to actively support genocide by stopping the Serb military, led by the President that Albright chose for them, reoccupying their own country. All of this done with the entire world watching through the net & with the western world now considerably better informed about our Nazi allies than they were when virtually all news was controlled by the MSM.

This may be Putin's moment. Russia is officially part of the occupation force. Suppose they fly in a 20,000 of the re-equipped & revamped Russian army, flying the UN flag, to Pristina or, if it turns out technical difficulties prevent NATO letting them land, to the Serb side of the border. Is there any possibility that NATO troops would be willing to fire the first shot at Russian UN forces for the purpose of protecting people openly engaged in genocide in an area where their communications are chaotic (there is now a road over the mountains between Kosovo & Albania but it is hardly satisfactory) & where they would ultimately be outnumbered. Does anybody doubt that the Russian troops would be infinitely better at stopping the war criminal Snake's genocide. Why they might even be able to find the KLA creatures who posed for photographs carrying human heads - 2 of whom have been positively identified as members of NATO's police, but they still have been officially unable to trace.

It is time to bring the Nazis to justice. All of them

// posted by neil craig @ 4:04 pm 0 comments

COMMENTS

Eco-fascism

Research by Edinburgh University into the exam results of S4 pupils from North Lanarkshire in 2006 found that in the case of maths, attainment of pupils was significantly lower in smaller classes.

In chemistry and modern studies, the report found that class size "does not appear to have an effect on attainment".

Another "peak oil" scare story.

If only all the Luddites & most of the government regulators would just find a hobby as comparatively useful as playing blow football with maltesers & let those who want a better tomorrow get on & build it.

// posted by neil craig @ 3:56 pm 0 comments

Friday, November 23, 2007

HOW MUCH DOES THE EU COST?

Earlier this year Gunter Verheugen, EU Enterprise Commissioner, said that the EU's regulations cost the community £405 billion annually (5.5% of GNP) According to Wikipedia the EU's GNP is $13.8 trillion & Britain's is $2.27 trillion ie 16.45% of the whole. Therefore the regulatory cost to us should be £66.6 billion. Direct payments to the EU for the decade up to 2002 were:

The latest figures show that over the ten-year period 1993-2002 inclusive, the UK paid over to EU Institutions... gross, cumulatively: £104 billion.

In those same ten years the UK received back, cumulatively: £64 billion.

So the UK's net contribution over that ten-year period was £40 billion, or an average of £4 billion per year Correcting for inflation & growth (cumulatively about 5% a year over 10 years) should be a bit over £6 billion.

This makes a total cost of £73 billion a year, which, with 29.22 million employees in Britain. amounts to £2566 per head (that is after tax!).

Of course this makes no allowance for the possibility of bias. It is conceivable that Gunter's figures are not entirely accurate, however I think, bearing in mind that he is an EU Commissioner, that they are not going to be an underestimate.

Of course this takes no account whatsoever of the fact that EU growth is, unsurprisingly, less than the world average, as is almost inevitable if 5.5% of GNP disappears into the regulatory morass. Taking the EU growth rate as 3.2% (I must admit I was surprised it was so high though clearly it is disproportionately in the poorer eastern European & Iberian countries which is thus worse for us) compared to the world average of 5% means that over a decade we lose 17% of our incomes. Compared to the direct financial cost that is far higher.

// posted by neil craig @ 12:21 pm 1 comments

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

CURRENT COMMENTS

// posted by neil craig @ 4:10 pm 0 comments

LOWER TAXES IS BETTER THAN GOVERNMENT "INVESTMENT"

An article on TCS on how those US States which invest public money in "development projects" as Scottish Enterprise spends £600 million a year to do here, tend to have lower growth than those which cut taxes (about a tenth of that on the recent business rate cut) or regulations & corruption (the only suggested reason why building projects like the £2.4 billion for a new Forth Bridge are 8 times what they should be).

Here's a dirty little secret about economic development: across the United States, there is a depressing correlation between the incidence of economic development programs and low levels of economic growth. That's right - statistically, the more economic development programs you have in your state, the more likely it is to be mired in sclerotic annual growth levels. Is this just chance? Maybe, but probably not.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is tiny, proudly anti-tax Delaware. A feisty little state of hardly more than 700,000 people, it wields an impressive Gross State Product of over $60 billion and grew 3.3% in 2005. Compare this with neighboring Pennsylvania, a state inundated with layers upon layers of economic development authorities (see: Pennsylvania Economic Development Association, Governor's Action Team, Team Pennsylvania Foundation, Delaware River Port Authority, et cetera and et cetera), who registered barely more than half that growth (1.7%) in the same year. And Connecticut, according to the Commonwealth Institute, has invested some $622 million in public money to business subsidies since 1991 with little in the way of results. The same study shows that the subsidized parties produced less than half of the jobs forecasted, costing taxpayers over $50,000 per job. Jobs aren't a perfect indicator of economic expansion, but it stands to reason that programs meant to create jobs that aren't have little public utility besides keeping some bureaucracy or another on the payroll. These should stand as a sobering lessons to those reactively advocating development programs without thought to providing a genuine structural environment to encourage growth.

........many cities consistently fail to leverage what mechanisms they have to promote growth and instead jealously protect existing industries and cobble together policies that more resemble scrambling for leftovers to prolong the appearance of economic health....

Many a municipal or state government's economic policies, which have often amounted to little more than papering over inherent structural and systemic inadequacies, must be retooled to accommodate, rather than supplant, private interests within their communities. Higher per-capita income will improve standards of living, not flagrant subsidy programs. Greater worker productivity will most effectively help generate revenue, not draconian tax policies. Innovation and expansion will help foster a deeper business environment, not protectionism. In order to make such economic development market driven, sustainable, and publicly beneficial, it's time to bring it off its rhetorical pedestal and reaffirm proven policies of productivity and growth.

PS Delaware being able to give the sort of example mentioned is why I think a federation is, on balance, the best sort of government - because the examples of success & failure provide proper feedback to other states - which is why I think devolution has been a good thing for Britain & that it should be continued with a fully federal Britain.

// posted by neil craig @ 11:37 am 0 comments

Monday, November 19, 2007

GUARDIAN & "OUR MEDIA'S DELIBERATE CENSORSHIP OF DRAGODAN"

I put this comment up on a rather silly Guardian article explaining how we are America's poodle (largely true), thus putting us into hock to a country run by evil neocons with far lower ethical standards than our own (largely false). He attacked an American who had said the British & US have "shared values". My comment was to puncture the self satisfaction of the writer rather than primarily to publicise Dragodan, thus the first lines are repearting, in quotation marks, what he said.

"Does the prime minister have in mind the "shared values" of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib? Of "extraordinary rendition" and "enhanced interrogation"?"

Compare & contrast with the deliberate genocide, under British government authority, of 210 civilians in the Dragodan Massacre in Kosovo. By comparison Guantanamo is legalistic pussyfooting.

Compare also the US media's exposure of the My Lai massacre with our media's deliberate censorship of Dragodan.

Dragodan held a mass grave (officially not a mass grave but 210 separate graves all in the same place since a mass grave is, legally, evidence of genocide). It was in the British controlled sector of Kosovo, being a suburb of Pristina & many of the bodies are of people identified as being alive when NATO took over. It was presumably carried out by our KLA employees but since this could not have taken place if we had disarmed the KLA, as we undertook to do in the occupation agreement, or if we had not immediately sworn in the openly genocidal KLA as our "police" force". Consequently legally it was carried out under British authority & complicity.

I have discussed this before when the Herald published my letter about it. I was also censored on the subject by the Guardian before however on this occasion there can be no suggestion that I was being offensive or OTT, or in any way breaching their guidelines, indeed I was primarily defending the US, at least by comparison.

This is therefore clearly nothing but censorship by the Guardian of an incident of genocide. Once again this is not an example of posts being marked "deleted by moderator" - the post, like the massacre itself, has just become retroactively non-existent.

// posted by neil craig @ 6:09 pm 1 comments

BBC LIES AGAIN - ON "WARMING" THIS TIME

The BBC (Radio Scotland today 16.55 today) has stated as a matter of fact that sea level in the Mediterranean has specifically risen to a serious extent, due to global warming. Indeed you specified this as a different & more serious effect than the washing away of the land at the mouth of the Ebro river saying that the sea level rise was itself damaging.

I do not wish to suggest that this claim represents anything other than the very highest standard of honesty of the BBC but would be interested to learn what peer reviewed scientific paper has confirmed the existence of such a Mediterranean sea level rise, caused by alleged global warming, how much it has been measured at & what damage it has done to the mouth of the Ebro compared to the ongoing changes caused by river flow washing soil away.

Neil Craig

PS If the BBC's claim turns out to be untrue will you be retracting it?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I sent this email to 3 BBC depts. In fact sea level rise is currently running at about 6" a century & has been since the last ice age.

Obviously no retraction was made & no reply attempting to justify it was sent. I then mentioned this in a comment (#103) on a BBC site actually discussing the possibility they might be biased about warming. Somewhat to my surprise they didn't censor it despite (or possibly because) they had previously censored an authoritative comment & Biased BBC Friday Nov 16th had mentioned it.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In fact if the BBC was remotely interested in balanced reporting all they need to do is give over a couple of hours (far less than given to Gore & Madonna) for a genuine debate. They won't because, as they must know such debates, like the one in New York, invariably result in success for the sceptics.

A couple of days ago I asked the BBC to justify a news item they produced stating as fact that current sea level rise in the Mediterranean had done specific & visible damage at a particular site. Since they have not retracted the claim it must be accepted as representing the highest standard of honesty to which the BBC aspire. On the other hand it is a complete lie - sea level rise is 1.3mm a year, as it has been for the last 10,000 years, which will destroy nothing. The BBC deliberately lied & worse, are maintaining this lie.

// posted by neil craig @ 1:24 pm 0 comments

Sunday, November 18, 2007

SCOTLAND 1, ITALY 2

We lost which, considering that Italy are the world champions & Scotland aren't, isn't really unexpected. However with the exception of letting in a goal in the 69th second (oops) & one in injury time, which came from a corner which really shouldn't have been given, honour was well satisfied. The Italians certainly think so

A sub-headline in national newspaper La Repubblica said: "From Toni to Panucci, the perfect game - but it is a 2-1 (win) obtained with a World Cup spirit."

Ten million viewers watched the game on television in Italy and they were given immediate cause to cheer after Toni's second-minute opener.

Now if only we hadn't managed to lose to Georgia we would have gone through. We do so well against the odds - beating France & Ukraine & playing our hearts out after losing a silly goal to Italy in the 2nd minute. It would be nice to kill the dwarves as well as the giants.

// posted by neil craig @ 2:33 pm 1 comments

A Place to Stand