Gordon Brown blames UK consumer for rising food prices

OK. I heard this on the radio news today. Apparently, according to Gordon Brown, the reason why food is much more expensive of late is because of… wait for it…

The consumer wasting vegetables, buying them and then throwing them away because they don’t know how to look after them properly and have gone off - and the evil supermarkets making ‘two for the price of one’ offers tempts them into it too.

I am now waiting for Gordon’s performing seals on, say the GMC, to start calling for VAT on vegetables to be doubled to eliminate this problem. Or maybe consumers to be licensed to purchase food, license cost £25 renewable yearly, 2,500 civil servants to administer.

Next they will be quoting little old ladies on how a robust national ID card system will help curb the wastage and prevent illegal immigrants from depriving 'hard working families' of their carrots.

I am so glad it has nothing whatsoever with the drop in the value of the pound against the Euro that by weird coincidence happened about the same time as food costs rose

Or the cost of oil rising and therefore petrol rising (most of the cost of which is due to punitive taxation) and therefore transportation rising in turn. Also coincidentally happening at the same time.

Oh and we must not forget Gordon’s Government slavishly following the EU dictat of pushing bio fuel production, that takes acres and acres of productive land out of food production and into fuel production.

Does he really expect anyone to believe it?

One can hardly imagine even one so stupid as to sell off half the nations gold reserves when the market had bottomed out to believe such complete nonsense himself.

Gordon’s pork pies anyone?

Still, thanks to all his New Labour cronies, he and they, have just secured access to new 'John Lewis' fridges in all their second homes, to help keep their veggies and pork pie collections fresh in...

UK State clampdown on employing illegals

Well New-Labour’s kakistocracy is clamping down on firms that employ those (sub text - nasty foreign spongers) illegal immigrants. They made it illegal to employ illegal immigrants, they prosecuted companies that did and now they are going to pillory the employers by ‘naming and shaming’.

The lie they tell to justify this?

Apparently it’s all to help crush major organised criminal enterprises that use international people trafficing networks to smuggle people into the UK, as a supply of illegal labour. Any way the employers deserve it. They are unscrupulously undercutting the labour market by avoiding paying taxes on wages, that are below the minimum wage anyway. Why, surely virtually stealing jobs from the honest hardworking indigenous population...

...who find they make as money on benefit doing nothing than they could from such jobs as the immegrants are doing.

That’ll help drive up the cost of food and services. Is anyone out there using more than just a single brain cell to parse these excuses?

So we take one step back from the spin and lies.

The real problem is that New-Labour have effectively lost control of the UK’s borders. For years if illegal immigrants decamped from trucks and were caught they would be given instructions to make their way to reception centres and directions, the vast majority of whom promptly vanished. Those that were not caught vanished also.

Rather than have an effective system (this is New Labour here) they persecute hapless lorry drivers and employers, trying to force them to make up for government incompetence and despite a massively ramping tax burden state under funding.

OK. Now lets take another step back. Is there one? Yes.

Why is this a problem? Why are illegal immigrants a problem? Why are they illegal in the first place for that matter?

They claim benefits from a system they never contributed perhaps? Drain the good old NHS of resources when they never paid anything into it? Jump the social housing queue? Etc. etc. etc.

The underlying reason is that in sufficient numbers immigrants are a problem for a ‘cradle to grave’ welfare state, with universal entitlement like the UK’s, designed to run in isolation. Such a system also undeniably makes the UK much more attractive to economic migrants exacerbating the ‘problem’.

Without a welfare state that is constructed in the way the UK’s is immigration would become much less popular. Immigrants would not be a drain on the public purse either. They would either contribute to the economy and stay or not. If not they would not be able to survive here and would leave. If they committed crime then, tried, imprisoned then deported.

All that would be left would be boarder security issues and any social problems left.

Maybe that’s why New-Labour are so keen on the ID card and illegal immigrants (Oh - and of course the ‘War on Terror) will be their excuse to justify it…

The truth is out there…

It seems that secret files on Unidentified Flying Objects (UFO’s) seen in the UK are being released.

Now Unidentified Flying Objects just about sums it up. They are basically something that someone saw in the sky that they could not work out what it was.

Now even pretty sensible people can wonder what on earth they are seeing under the right circumstances.

I remember years ago whilst driving at night seeing what looked like a weird glowing object in the sky, that apparently changed shape between lenticular and globular. A surefire Alien Space ship you might think. We decided to investigate. After several miles we got close enough to see it was a blimp lit up and floating above a small airfield. The apparent change in shape a result of seeing it from different angles.

Of course we could have been reprogrammed by the alien occupants of a real space ship to think that - Cue twilight zone music, doo do doo do...

If you then factor in those who don’t think carefully, or those who really badly want to believe the earth is some sort of Watford Gap interchange for aliens … Then there the downright sad and loopy who just want attention. Well it is easy to see how these reports get generated.

Why were the reports kept secret? I would suspect, especially during the cold war, against the chance someone had spotted an experimental aircraft, or weapon, either ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’. If one was spotted and needed some disinformation to obscure the details the UFO enthusiasts might be an excellent tool for that too.

In the middle ages it was the dog heads, men with faces in their chests, monopods with big feet, devils and such now it is little green men. Now it’s greys and a whole collection of others to go with them.

The truth is out there - and it is probably far more mundane, at least when it comes to little green men, than many would apparently like.

Alarmist predictions of 5 foot rise in sea level

According to a report from a UK/Finnish group sea levels could rise by up to almost 5 ft (4 ft 11 ½ inches) by the end of the century.

But ‘up to’ clearly includes any figure below that, including no discernable difference at all.

Apparently the team has built a computer model that can reflect the relationship between temperatures and sea level over the past 2000 years.

For the model’s predictions outside normal parameters to work it has to be accurate outside the parameters. It is simply not possible to test it against reality without data and many a model that accurately reflects relatively chaotic behaviour within certain bounds fails singularly when taken outside them.

It is an fact that global temperatures were significantly higher than current levels, between the 9th and 14th centuries. A period of some 500 years when temperatures were warmer than those today, what does the model say about sea level and ice cover during that period?

There is also the fact that the data on temperature predictions fed into such a model has to be accurate for it to be accurate. GIGO as they say.

The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 was statistically the same as 2006 and 2005 and every year since 2001. Unless the IPCC does a Robert Mugabe on the figures ‘global warming’ appears to have, for the moment at least, halted .

What happens next is anybody's guess - and that’s really what it is, a guess.

It could warm up to something more like it was back in the middle ages, it could remain stable, conceivably it could drop. Whatever happens it will sooner or later change, one way or the other.

That’s what climate does - and has done since long before humans learned to harness fire.

Maybe politicians on the AGW bandwagon should think twice about bio fuels and punitive taxes before they cause a crisis of their own, a food crisis.

Mind that’s no reason not to cut pollution, or build nuclear power stations, or develop compressed air or hydrogen powered transport. That makes sense anyway.

A short comment on Mme Sarkozy and ‘that’ picture

The Sarkozys are on a state visit to the UK. President Sarkozy really seems to be looking to improve/upgrade the relationship between the UK and France. He looked smart, hansom and businesslike, his wife Carla, a former model, looked beautiful, cool and sophisticated when meeting the Royals.

As mentioned she is a former model and there is in existence a tasteful enough nude photo of her, taken before she ever imagined she might ever became the ‘first lady’ of France, that is going to be auctioned at Christies.

There is nothing she need be embarrassed about, she was honestly making her independent way in the world and that was a part of it. It owes something in style to the French artist Georges Seurat. If it were in oils no one could argue that it wasn’t tasteful art.

But the good old UK tabloids seldom fail to make us look like lowlifes. The visit proved and opportunity too tempting for them miss. They published the picture together with a leering two faced “Welcome to Great Britain, Madame Sarkozy”.

If it was not intended to be a calculated insult it could easily be taken as such. It could certainly be represented as such by anyone so inclined. Especially if they considered the politics of the tabloid and the government.

If a paper wished to publish the picture, maybe it would perhaps have been better to have done so before the visit, or wait until it was done. Or better still just printed an article to accompany it rather than trying to be ‘clever’.

Schedule introducing UK ID cards delayed

It is interesting to note that New Labour are planning to introduce the National ID card incrementally.

This seems to be one of their favourite ‘stealth’ methods. Apparently they are putting back the date where larger numbers of us will be forced to get them from 2010, until 2012 now.

They know it is un popular, and there is some resistance, so they are buying themselves an extra two years, in the hope attention fatigue will set in.

The technique, one they are fond of, is to introduce unpopular measures in small relatively imperceptible doses. First they Identify a relatively small group to apply whatever they are planning to. A group that does not include the majority of citizens and who preferably will not have the majority of the public’s particular sympathy.

In the case of HIPs it was houses with four bedrooms or over. “The Wealthy”, “Rich Toffs” – a classic hate group and target.

They are careful to avoid stirring people up by ensuring that even of the groups targeted only relatively small percentage are actually directly affected at any time. In this case those actually considering selling their homes.

Then they wait a while and take in another chunk of the population (say owners of three bedroom properties), repeating as necessary until they have everyone.

They are always careful to avoid stirring too much of the population up at once, in case it allows resistance to build to the point where the lethargic UK population will actually protest in significant numbers.

In the case of ID cards it will apparently be “Foreigners”, “Bogus Asylum Seekers”, “Economic Migrants”. They have chosen to target first. Currently they are to be targeted this year.

See if you can spot this technique being used elsewhere....

BBC pulls plug on ‘Planet Relief’ climate change TV special

The BBC have thankfully decided to abandon plans for a ‘Planet Relief’ climate change TV special. It was supposed to be an environmental equivalent to Live8.

The most likely reason it has been pulled is that viewers, both in the UK and abroad, seem to be taking a sharp dislike being lectured to and preached at by holier than though TV personalities. That is now thought to be the primary reason that July's Live Earth concert ratings ‘bombed’.

Climate activists such as Mark Lynas predictably attacked the decision. He said, "This decision shows a real poverty of understanding among senior BBC executives about the gravity of the situation we face,", thus demonstrating a certain puritanical poverty of understanding on his own part about viewing figures.

Audiences are not keen on being preached at by ‘believers’. They apparently prefer a documentary format, that at least pays lip service to the idea of scientific accuracy and objectivity.

One of the gimmicks the Planet Relief promoters were planning was to try to organise viewers to take part in a short mass ‘switch-off’ of electrical equipment, so they could say how much carbon had been saved.

It seems, if they had, then the item of electrical equipment most likely to have been switched off would have been the TV…

Gore alleges anti climate change conspiracy

Al Gore is alleging there is a global conspiracy against him and the so-called ‘scientific consensus’ on anthropocentric global warming.

He claimed, at a forum in Singapore, that the Exxon Mobil Corp, together with other unnamed ‘carbon polluters’, are waging a secret campaign to dispute the theory.

He went on to claim that "In actuality, there is very little disagreement." and alleges that "the deniers” (the infra green luddites just love that term) ”offered a bounty of $10,000 for each article disputing the consensus that people could crank out and get published somewhere,". "They're trying to manipulate opinion and they are taking us for fools,", he bleated.

Get real!

I suspect it’s Mr Gore who is doing his level best trying to manipulate public opinion, there is ultimately probably a lot more money and power at stake for his side and him personally than for anyone else - and that when all is said and done he and his cronies will turn out to have been taking people for fools.

Has he listened to himself? I know he is probably preaching to the converted and that the faithful will not like to question his assertions - but he sounds just a little like a conspiracy theorist, not too far from the Islamist claims that the CIA and MOSSAD blew up the twin towers, or that the CIA, or some other US government agency, have a captured flying saucer tucked away at a secret base.

To really hook the suckers in with this one he needs to work the CIA into it, at least, big business is good, but it still needs a little something extra to really get the conspiracy nuts going…

Now what are my chances of getting $10K for this?

Zero, Zip, Zilch, Nil, None, Nought, Nowt - if I had to guess...

The briefing against patio heaters continues...

It seems mosquito populations are ‘taking off’ ;-), particularly in Norfolk according to the BBC. An insect conservation trust spokesman pointed out: "Where you have warm, wet weather in the summer that does tend to be a good time for mosquitoes, giving them the opportunity to breed.” "Last year June was quite warm and wet and there appeared to be a lot more mosquitoes about then."

Up until the 1880s malaria was common in the UK and was endemic in areas of Kent and Essex.

So far so good… Now the Metro, a free newspaper for London Commuters, is linking mosquitoes to the newly demonised Patio Heater.

They seem to suggest, quoting Matt Shardlow, of the trust Buglife, that there is a ‘connection’ between growing mosquito populations and the increased use of outdoor heaters.

Queue: Twilight zone music…

...OK stop now.

What he actually said was: "A lot of people believe that mosquitoes are attracted to body heat but when they identify their prey, what they actually home in on is the carbon dioxide.”

What that means is that, the heaters may attract any mosquitoes that happen for other reasons to be in the vicinity to make for the area round the heater. In the same way as a group of people sitting outside in the evening might by their exhalations of carbon dioxide, without the aid of an ‘evil’ patio heater, might attract them.

The heaters do not spontaneously create mosquitoes. They do not provide the conditions for them to breed, creating a plague of them.

So, the only actual ‘connection’, as they so disingenuously put it, between the ‘growing mosquito populations’ and the increased use of out door heaters, is that they may make it more likely, that a few more of the mosquitoes within ‘smelling distance’, will eventually find their way to an operating patio heater - mistakenly taking it for a crowd of people, in the same way as a moth might mistake a patio light for the moon and turn up for the evening…

It's the truth Jim - But not as we know it.

How the media (in this case the BBC) misdirect, even as they present the facts. The main 6 pm UK BBC News on Monday the 16th ran the story of Dr Andrew Wakefield who raised questions over the safety of the Measles Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

He is in trouble with the UK General Medical Council (GMC) over the matter and is up on charges brought by them of acting ‘unethically and dishonestly’. Something he and his colleagues strenuously deny.

The background is: He, together with two colleagues, published a research paper in the Lancet in 1998 that raised the possibility that the new MMR vaccine was linked to both autism and the bowel disorder Crohn's disease.

The Government and medical establishment have repeatedly rejected the suggestion that there was any increased risk to the new vaccine.

Now regardless, of the merits, or not, of the current case, for the moment let’s look at the BBC reporting of it. Really look at the way it was put together.

The BBC report showed a graph indicating the drop in the take up of the MMR vaccine against an increase in the incidence of measles and explained it in these terms, the strong implication being that Dr Wakefield and his colleagues had been responsible for what amounted to almost a measles epidemic and a child had died. Practically a mass murderer then…

I shall not go into the careful phrasing of the propaganda report, that suggested that there could be no question the vaccine was not safe as houses and had a certain hint of ‘scientific consensus’ about it in a massive body of evidence.

They even trotted out a Mother (and indeed, who should know better?) who told us all that her G.P. (General Practitioner, or Dr) had ‘assured her the MMR vaccine was perfectly safe’. Much more convincing than all those parents who had turned out demonstrating in Dr Wakefield’s favour.

It may be the BBC were only repeating what they had been told. In that case the researcher in this case may also be interested in purchasing some attractively fancy looking shares in a Bolivian gold mine I can make available to them at short notice - as soon as the ink has dried.

The fact is those who had concerns about the new joint vaccine had wanted to ensure that the previous single vaccines continued to be available for parents to request, precisely in order to avoid any risk of epidemic.

It was actually the Government and the medical establishment that made it almost impossibly difficult to obtain the single vaccines and effectively forced parents to choose between the new MMR vaccine, or no vaccine at all.

Despite strong campaigning from parents to be able to choose, in August 1999, the government de-licensed the single measles vaccine and banned the widespread importation of the vaccine into the UK. Such a fine example of patient choice and the free market in action. Some parents who could afford it even took their children abroad to be vaccinated using the single jab.

After that, the old vaccine was and may still be, available in this country - but only if parents were able to persuade a doctor to organise importation "for personal use", then administer it, even if newly unlicensed, in the face of massive official disapproval.

In 2001, the heavy guns of the World Health Organization (WHO) waded in, issuing a fatwa statement, "strongly supporting the use of MMR vaccine on the grounds of its convincing record of safety and efficacy."

It may, or may not, be relevant that a significant number of members of the Committee on Safety of Medicines (CSM) and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, two Department of Health committees responsible for reviewing the safety and efficacy of the MMR vaccine, are reported to have had links with companies that manufacture it including some as actual as share holders.

One could also be forgiven for thinking that if the authorities had ever really been concerned about the possibility of an increase in the number of cases of Measles they would have allowed parental choice between the original viable alternative and the MMR vaccine, rather than trying to bully them with an all, or nothing, choice.

So, that rise the BBC mentioned in the number of measles cases, can be squarely laid at the door of the government and the medical establishment for effectively banning any alternative to MMR.

That is what the BBC failed to mention and by doing so is effectively actually covering up. A work of art using only actual facts, Jo Goebbels would have been proud.

Talk about show trials and rewriting history to suit. It all has a certain worrying familiarity,