A Place to Stand

  Councillors kiting cheques

Councils across the UK had a combined pension deficit of £54 billion in 2010-11, according to research by The Taxpayers’ Alliance.

This figure is down from £91 billion in 2009-10, but still an increase from £51 billion in 2008-09.

The local authority in Scotland with the largest deficit in 2010-11 was Glasgow City Council with £625 million.

------------------------------------------------
      A very important but complicated story, in which it is not easy to portray anybody as the "goodies" and thus doesn't get reported here.

A former general and 30 other officers were detained Thursday for their roles in a 1997 coup, continuing the clash between the government and the nation’s once-indomitable military.

Long considered the untouchable guardian of a staunchly secular state, the Turkish military has lost its immunity since the pro-Islamic government took power and paved the way for a series of cases against current and retired officers.
Hundreds of people — from the former head of the army and other officers to academics and journalists — have been arrested and accused of plotting to overthrow the current government through an ultranationalist network known as Ergenekon

  Were any of them planning a coup? Maybe, maybe not. There does not appear to be evidence but the Turkish military have, since Ataturk, had a role, enshrined in the constitution, to prevent a militantly Islamic government taking over, whatever the electorate say.

    Now that is certainly undemocratic and we are now all in favour of "democracy" in the Islamic world, though this was not always the case. On the other hand we are not in favour of them democratically voting in an Islamic regime - which, from history, is unlikely to have any long term commitment to democracy and far less commitment to freedom than the military.

    However, at least officially, we want Turkey in the EU and that requires it to be a full democracy, with as fully militantly Islamic a government as the people will vote for (while nonetheless being committed to free speech on the Armenian genocide, rights for gays and women and every other EU shibboleth.

   On the 3rd hand Turkey is populous country with a growing population, an economy growing at around 7% annually, a history of occupying large parts of Europe and apart from Russia, is the only serious military competitor to the EU countries on the continent. Of course it is a member of NATO so that's ok. So far.
----------------------------------------
   Some good news. All the scares about antibiotics producing new strains of disease invulnerable to them seems, at least, greatly overblown.

Bacteria found deep inside a cave that has had scant exposure to the outside world for at least four million years share some of the same antibiotic-resisting traits that other bugs are supposed to have developed in response to modern medicines.
That’s the finding of a new research article, Antibiotic Resistance Is Prevalent in an Isolated Cave Microbiome, which plumbed the depths of Lechuguilla Cave, a 200-kilometre long cave in New Mexico, USA, to find bacteria populations that have had little or no exposure to the outside world.

--------------------------------------
            BBC admits receiving millions in grants from EU and councils


Who would have thunk it?
--------------------------------------
      America's Zimmerman/Trayvon case. Reported here with the marginal amount of doubt, in America's media, that this really was a nasty white man shooting a black child excised from our coverage.

  Googling Zimmerman Trayvon one finds a long list of the top 2 pictures, showing this large and larcenous youth as a much younger child and only this composite far down the list.
-------------------------------------------
  Ok this is rather silly - checking LibDem blogs for some mention of them now being the 4th party I found this kite being flown about Zac Goldsmith, the very spume on the wave of ecofascism, being about to join UKIP. I comment

There is flying a kite and there is plain lunacy.
UKIP don't believe that we are experiencing catastrophic global warming; we don't want to cover the country in windmills; we do support cheap nuclear electricity; we do support the development of shale gas. Under what possible circumstances would Zac be welcome in UKIP?
The subconscious subtext here may be that you recognise, with the LudDims now the 4th party, Zac, or anybody else, would not be so foolish as to consider joining you despite the fact that he shares your ecofascist hysteria

  Most unusually for the illiberal "liberals" this has not, yet, been censored.
-----------------------------------------
  From Al Fin - A map of world spending on scientific research. I think Britain can be proud of this.

-------------------------------
  Delingpole on how the warming fraud is being treated by the public

the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren't interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.
There was one big problem though: "We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you," whispered the show's host, Julia Hartley-Brewer.

-----------------------------------------------
   And the econazi answer to losing the argument is this, via Forbes magazine - to threaten that

Every time someone validates or fine-tunes the science, ten or twelve well-funded and active propagandists

      We know who the active denialists are – ....  Let’s start keeping track of them now ....Let’s let their houses burn

    There was a regime that did stuff like that and, assuming that Mr ForbesJews. Of course no more attempt is made to produce evidence for sceptic organisations being better funded because, while representing the very highest standard of honesty to which the econazis (or indeed Forbes) ever aspires it is a total and deliberate lie.

   That is why it has been denounced by every single "environmentalist" who has more integrity and decency that the |Nazis who burned out the Jews. Every single member of the Green party, BBC, Holyrood  or any econazi organisation who is not personally a subhuman thief and murderer with less humanity than a rabid dog. So far this includes not one single member of any of these groups.