A Place to Stand

  The Russian government underestimated when they said the US was paying Ukrainian violence by $20mill a week. Assistant Secretary Nuland says total is $5 billion so far.
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Though no LudDims have replied to my invitation to debate the EU with them they have accepted Nigel's. Ah well, RHIP.
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Mike Haseler on Scottish Sceptic carries out a complex mathematical assessment of when he expects the Met Office to be able to justly claim they can forecast climate a century hence. Not this century.
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Julian Simon - the one who won the Simon-Ehrlich bet and has been proven essentially right in his optimism about human progress when Ehrlich's doomsaying has been absolutely wrong in every possible way. So obviously, seeing the needs of those who control "practical politics" and don't want progress, Ehrlich got the "genius" grants and Simon didn't.
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The 7 year old boy who died in the floods deliberately caused by our Environment Agency.
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Chinese Lunar Lander Jade Rabbit comes back from the dead.
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• Office of Gordon and Sarah Brown has £10,000-a-week expenses
• Not a registered charity, two thirds of funds raised spent on expenses
• Less than  £1 million given to charity out of over £3 million
• raised
• Vanity project lets  Gordon and Sarah enjoy jet-set premier life-style of first class flights and five star hotels

from Guido
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There is a perfect storm developing then in the European banking sector.

First, there is the increasing likelihood that the ECB will unleash a new round of asset purchases from the banks to flood them with the liquidity they need to buy up their respective national governments’ sovereign bonds and so hold bond yields down.

Second, there is a Eurozone-wide regulatory initiative to recapitalize the banks, likely following on from the results of the ECB’s bank stress tests. Third, there is an increasing chance of a deep stock market correction happening this summer. All three, taken collectively, could trigger a crisis of confidence in the banking sector. An insolvency crisis too should not be ruled out in the event of some large banks failing to recover from derivatives markets exposures in an increasingly volatile currency, interest rate, and stock-market environment.

from the von Mises Institute which is a pretty damn credible source
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Breibart - the new home for Delingpole
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Austria is getting pissed off at Germany destabilising the grid by dumping intermittent windmill power on them (via Poland and the Czechs who are already pissed at them).

Instructive bearing in mind that the SNP have promised us any English government will not only want our windmill power but will keep subsidising it after separation and supply us with mittent power whenever the wind doesn't blow,
 

  Was on Radio Scotland today 12-1.00pm.

It's actually called "Brian's Big Debate" but a debate is something where both sides of an argument get to speak, indeed get equal time to speak & the BBC don't do debates.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03vd2yh   link

5 guests from Labour, SNP, Tory & from Unite (the government employees union that, at least officially, is the main funder of the totalitarian PR group HnH) & a comedian (all comedians are actively left wing political correctitudes according to the BBC - Jim Davidson, for example, isn't a popular comedian).

While UKIP are almost entirely censored from the state owned BBC we have had an effect - the Greens, who were virtually a permanent fixture are not so blatanly supported and since Cowdenbeath made us the 4th party, the LibDems seem to be missing too. How long till we beat theTories and approved political discussion is limited to 2 parties.

There were 4 questions,on 3 of which I got to speak. Having been in this audience several times before I guess i am getting how to get to speak. Put up your hand, HIGH AND KEEP IT UP EVEN, OR PARTICULALRY WHEN YOU ARE IGNORED AND KEEP SPEAKING.

Audience must have been a couple of hundred - the show was sponsored by the Glasgow Business Council and there were more business suits than normal (& no classes of schoolkids) but most of the questions came from a fairly small number of people, as normal.

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1 - About the Ukraine fighting - all panelists said the expected cliches. I was first to speak & said

"The western role in the Ukraining conflict isn't widely reported. The US assistant secretray of state, Victoria Nuland, was caught giving the Ukrainian rebel leaders their literal marching orders - you can find the tape online but it doesn't get much coverage in the approved media.

The reason she can do this is because "non-"governmental organisations, which are all funded by western governments, are supplying the rebels with $20 million a week and a significant amount of arms.

If somebody was to pay Rangers or Celtic supporters groups a $1 million democracy awareness raising grant to occupy George Square, George Square would be occupied.(laugh)


( At this point Brian said lets move on but I kept speaking and what i said went out) The only reason anybody in Ukraine wants to join the EU is because they could migrate. If the British people are not comfortable with 30 million Romanians and Bulgarians being able to come it unlikely they will be happier with 50 million Ukrainians."

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2 - Was about celebrity endorsements of the refereendum campaign (Bowie having just done so). Which gave the panel the opportunity to work Bowie song titles into their answers. put up my hand intending to say "Showbiz people say politics is showbiz for ugly people so I suppose that means showbiz is politics for shallow people so their endorsements aren't very important" which would have raised a laugh & makes the point that politics is important, but is hardly profound. I didn't keep my hand up and wasn't chosen to speak.

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3 - Should the SNP come up with a plan B for our currency. Brian poinred to me and said "that man at the back with his hand up", several rows behind me.

Shortly after he chose the person directly in front of me.

Then 2 places tomy left.

Then the one sitting on my right hand. Then me.

"You can't become a member of a club that doesn't want you. Doesn't matter if you think you qualify. I happen to think Osbornes 4 conditions for it wise for England to share liability with us are reasonable (these 4 conditions have barely got a media mention), but either way we can't if they won't let us. The SNP are just embarrassing themselves by not saying what their alternatives are.

Incidentally I disagree with the lady who said giving a Plan B (audience member 2 minutes before) would weaken the case for plan A. If you want to negotiate you need an alternative otherwise youn have nothing to negotiate with."

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4 - Asking if the panel would like to live on benefits. (near the end one of the panel said to the lady asking it "I've had dinner at your hoose, it was great" which suggests she was not simply a member of the public but an activist, and probably not living on benefits - the question is very of the unanswerable "have you stopped beating your wife" sort and indeed the lady near the end pointed out that it hadn't been answered)

Indeed I didn't answer it. I said

"A major cost to those in poverty is electricity. We have over 1 million Scots households in fuel poverty with avergage bills of nearly £1,500 but it is intended to raise this to £3,000 by 2020.

If ANY of the approved parties actuall cared about poverty they would be working to reduce prices...... (Brian said thank you we've got to move on and this time the microphone was removed. To be fair it was near the end of the programme. This meant I dodn't get the chance to say on air)....... but only UKIP want to reduce prices. Even ed Miliband, with his cynical and destructive promise of a short term freeze, is on record as saying he wants higher electricity prices. In fact we know that at least 90% of electricity prices are various sorts of government parasitism and all of these parties are actively trying to increase them."

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All in all as good as one can expect on a broadcaster that censors dissent as heavily as the BBC.

   Steve Sailer has recently been writing more, and far more accurately, than our own beloved state media about the Ukrainian situation. He largely blames a continuing campaign by the US/NATO/EU to destabilise the place simply to be rude to the Russians.
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the rise of anti-Russian jingoism in the American media is apparent to both the right and the left. In The Nation, NYU Russian Studies professor Stephen F. Cohen lamented about the press’s run-up to the Sochi Winter Games:

American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

The US media’s ideological justifications for its anti-Russianism involve gay rights (”World War G”) and democracy (“World War D”). But those concepts don’t appear much in evidence in scenes from central Kiev, where the City Hall of the embattled pro-Russian government had been occupied since December by masked men swinging iron bars. Maybe I’m just stereotyping, but the soccer hooligan Right Sector and Dynamo Kiev ultras who have done much of the fighting against the government—the lads who consider opposition leader Vitali Klitschko, the retired heavyweight champ, a wimp—don’t give off a particularly gay-friendly vibe.....

Putin has recently attempted to furnish his subjects with a conservative nationalist ideology to counter aggressive American globalist liberalism. The ex-KGB man recognizes that liberalism—in the reigning sense of minoritarianism—is suffering from diminishing marginal returns, with ever-tinier minorities the subject of its obsessions, as we see with World War G moving on to World War T. (Of course, globalist liberalism doesn’t seem to actually make countries more equal; indeed, inequality of wealth has exploded during this period of minoritarian triumph.)

Much of the American press’s anger at Russia stems from the feeling that maybe Putin is on to something. (if so Russia being attacked for decades for having a left wing ideology is now being attacked for having a right wing one - its a funny old world)

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Another reason for going for them is that those in power like to have some enemy to keep us scared and we have had Islamic terrorists for sufficiently long now to be boring

"America's Global War of Terror has been a huge moneymaker for Washington's Beltway, but it's starting to get a little old. Looking to the future, why not a replay of a tried and true honeypot: an arms race with Russia?

 With thanks to the Casuals United site who clearly don't like this attempt to manufacture dirt either.

  Nice to see that, despite the government caused recession there is still plenty of money about.

   This is a leaked letter from "Hope not Hate", whose funding is not entirely apparent though some of it seems to come from civil service unions, saying they will pay for dirt on UKIP. The government has denied directly funding them, which may be true, though the Lab/Nat/Con/Dems do openly support this smear campaign.



    I have clashed with HnH twice before

- once when Lord Monckton and I attended one of their meetings and by a mixture of smooth niceness and argumentativeness (I was argumentativeness) got them to concede, in front of the audience, that UKIP was not extremist and even that "it goes without saying" that HnH are much more seriously opposed to real fascism such as the attack on Nigel Farage. (Both HnH & the Farage attackers include members of the SWP).

- 2nd time when they, and a tame journalist on the London Evening Standard of all places, denounced me for not being enthusiastic about bombing Syria. Obviously neither the HnH site nor the Standard was prepared to allow my reply, that I do indeed not like bombing people and giving details about the Syrian war. That's journalistic integrity for you.

  The name is clearly political spin - all Hate, no Hope.
    

         I find this apparent finding of Scots ancestry for the Kalesh people near the Khyber pass inexplicable.

The Kalash people of Pakistan were found to have chunks of DNA from an ancient European population. Statistical analysis suggests a mixing event before 210 B.C., possibly from the army of Alexander the Great

This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers, as do several other groups in the region.

   Did Alexander the Great have a Scottish regiment?  Perhaps that explains why he was so successful.

    "Sir, it was an ambush there were 2 of them" - traditional.

     Not entirely impossible - it is known that after 1066 much of the Byzantine Empire's Varangian Guard, nominally Vikings, was made up of English warriors driven out by the Norman Conquest, but at that stage the Norse had established trade routes across Russia (the Russ were Norse conquerors)  so there was the contact.

     This is part of the newly produced Genetic Atlas of Human Diversity. The amount of information available in each of our DNA is incredible (I am told that unlinking 1 DNA coil it could be stretched to the Moon) and we have barely started being able to read them.

This is going to be of interest only to those who care about history and conspiracies. That includes me.

I have just finished reading Carroll Quigley's The Anglo-American Establishment widely known in conspiracy circles as it deals with the Rhodes/Round Table group's growth into the CFR/Trilateral Commission/Bilderbergers. In fact it doesn't actually do that - effectively stopping with the outbreak of WW2 which lead the members of all groups who had promoted "appeasement" to lie low.

What the book makes abundantly clear is that not only the Round Table conspiracy but more importantly Chamberlain and his friends (which amounts to the entire party) were not only pushing "appeasement" but that the inverted commas are justified. "Appeasement" was never intended, at least by Chamberlain and co either to provide justice for german aspirations (the original reason given) or to buy Hitler off from war (the later reason). It was, at all times, a deliberate programme of building up Germany and pointing then into a genocidal war against the USSR to cruch communism (& incidentally the genocide of at least 100 million). And in which the main enemy to be bamboozled was the British people bwho would not put up with Germany being encoureged in unlimited aggression.

Start with the German reoccupation of the Rhineland which was immediately followed by an Anglo-German Naval Treaty 1935 (p 270) in which Britain recognised Germany's right to breach the Versailles Treaty by building a navy 35% of the size of Britain's in surface ships and unlimited submarines. This is normally considered simple poltroonery by Chamberlain but the book explains how it was no such thing. It was an attempt to put Britain in a direct alliance with Nazi Germany against France. The point is that France and Britain already had a naval alliance by which France had agreed to keep its navy to 33% of Britain's. We released Germany from its Versailles obligations but not France from their's. Thus we were giving Germany the power to defeat France at sea, particularly since France had to station ships in the far east to protect indo-China and the Mediterranean to deter Mussolini. At one blow Chamberlain emasculated our big nominal ally and did so sufficiently unobtrusively that nobody could effectively object.

This ties in with something Quigley's book doesn't mention - that when the Spanish Civil war broke out the British government told France, that if they helped the government, the way the Italians and Germans were helping Franco, we would consider that to be aggression under the Locarno Treaty by which Britain had guaranteed to support the non-aggressor side in a Franco-German war.

In 1937 our Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax had a long conversation with Hitler which German records show he said "(a) Britain regarded Germany as the chief bulwark against communism in Europe; (b) Britain wantecd a 4 power agreement between Britain, Germany, france & Italy to run Europe; (c) Germany couls liquidate Austria, Czecholsovakia and Poland if it could be done without provoking a war Britain would be however unwillingly dragged into" (p 275).

What Hitler apparently did not appreciate was how much the British government feared that the British people would insist on us standing by our treaty obligations (or, perhaps more likely, refuse to re-elect the Tories if they betrayed them) so that to do this Germany had to do it by threats and limited aggression while avoiding a general war.

Possibly Hitler didn't entirely understand the subtlties of such a "democratic" politician and his need to have a fig leaf to conceal what he was doing from the people.

That is pretty much what they did. Chamberlain ensured that the Munich Agreement "negotiations" involved those 4 countries but not the USSR or Czechs despite the fact they were willing to fight and italy wasn't.

During these "negotiations" Chamberalain arranged an entirely spurious "poison gas air raid" scare purely to scare the population into obedience - there was no military justification for it whatsoever.

Then, following a speech in Birmingham where the audience made it clear to Chamberlain they did not want to sell out to Hitler (mentioned in AJP Taylors Origins of the 2nd World War rather than this book) he covered himself by offering a guarantee to Poland.

But Quigly points out that this was not meant to be a serious guarantee. Specifically it was a guarantee only of the continued existence of a Polish state not of its territory. In particular Danzig and the Polish corridor were up for grabs. In fact Chamberlain tried to use his guarantee as an excuse to press Poland to give up that territory.

The objective, the book says, was to give Germany that corridor which would thus give it a continuous frontier up to the Baltic states which Germany could then seize giving it a frontier with the USSR, enabling his desired war of genocidal aggression.

This also explains the nature of British "negotiation" with Russia for a collective security guarantee of Poland - why it was designed to ensure Russia could not safely accept it. The French, not being privy to the plot always wanted a straight 3 power defencive alliance and guarantee of Poland which was exactly what Britain's government feared since it would have averted WW2 (or if Hitler and the Germans were wholly insane, ensured it was over in weeks). What we offered instead was that Russia make a unilateral offer to go to war to defend Poland, if asked, without any corresponding collective security promise from the allies, or indeed Poland. That would have given Poland more leeway in negotiating away their corridor but done absolutely nothing to prevent the war Chamberlain was pushing for (p 300). Also on 25th August the, a week before the war broke out, the British ambassador offered an alliance between us against Russia after a successful "negotiation" with Poland (p299).

And so we had WW2.

I think that if Hitler had just realised how deceitful Chamberlain's policy was he would simply have said that his attack on Poland was to seize the corridor and other territory and would maintain an "independent" Poland, albeit German occupied, our government, eager for this war against Russia, would have accepted that.

Enen during the Phoney War, where we were technically at war with Germany but doing nothing, he made 2 attempts to get into war with Russia at the same time (over Finland and incredibly by planning bombing Georgia). This attempt to make it an absolutely unwinnable war can nonly be explained if Chamberlain was as totally loony as Hitler is sometimes said to have been, or it it was an attempt to produce a fait accompli for the british people that would oblige us to switch enemies even at that late date.

   We hardly seem to gear about these games without the $50 bn pricetag being mentioned. Usually with the implication or outright claim that it is all going into Putin and his friend's pockets. So is it:

 Although few stories mention it, the source of that estimate was Dmitry Kozak, a deputy prime minister who headed Russia’s Olympic preparatory commission, which was charged with supervising the work in Sochi. Last February, Kozak told reporters in Moscow that Russia was prepared to invest 1.5 trillion rubles in Sochi, which was the equivalent of $50 billion.

But like most large round numbers, this one needs a few caveats and asterisks.....estimating the cost of the Games depends on how, and what, is counted.

Kozak said that the Russian government would spend $6.7 billion on Olympic facilities. He said Russia would invest another $16.7 billion in upgrading rails, roads and other infrastructure surrounding Sochi. That comes to $23.4 billion in 2013 money — massive, but not even halfway to $50 billion.

The rest of his projection included private, speculative investment by Olympic sponsors, including billionaire friends of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. Russia hopes the Olympic stimulus will turn the Sochi area into a year-round tourist magnet long after the Olympics are over, and it encouraged investment in hotels and other facilities in the region.

But not all of this spending was directly related to the Olympics, such as the construction of a Formula One racetrack in Sochi that reportedly cost $350 million. And as Kozak noted, some of this money would have been spent by public and private sources without the Olympics.

     So $6.7bn - just over £4bn - for the actual facilities. Hardly extortionate compared to our £2bn £9bn £14bn £20bn. The rest looks like sensible commercial spending on not just building a new town but a spectacular on designed to be a one of the world's big holiday resorts. I don't know how much it would cost to build Benidorm in one go but I suspect it would be of that order.

    It certainly seems unlikely that the billionaires are investing $26.6 bn in the expectation it will disappear into fraud - that is not how you become a billionaire.

    If you are going to invest in building a holiday centre can you think of a better way of getting it the publicity that distinguishes good from world class than hanging it round an Olympics.

    But mentioning that doesn't fit the agenda of our state owned censoring media who want to ramp up fear and hatred of the Russians for having an undemocratic government (much more democratic support than ours) with a state owned censoring media (mostly less state owned than us and with legal rights for small parties to get coverage*).

* Granted we also have a legal right, as part of the BBC Charter, that our state owned broadcasters must get "balanced" coverage proportional to their support - its just that the law is worthless if those in charge ignore it.