The boys with the black stuff...........

Now there is the inevitable panic over oil prices, and delight amongst the oil traders (I read somewhere that a barrel of oil is traded 47 times before entering the consumer market).

So what’s it all about? Are we on the brink of huge price increases? Rationing? A new Great Depression?

We need to factor into the situation a few home truths to be able to form a prediction.

The largest oil producer in the world is not Saudi. It’s Russia.

The second largest is America.

My friend Jim Fideldy from Minneapolis , who drilled for oil for a living before selling his company a short while ago, tells me that there is such an oil boom in North Dakota that there is a huge shortage of labour and house rents are going off the clock. We don’t hear much of this in the media. The major new field in North Dakota produces so much oil that it has put US domestic storage under pressure. The surplus is so great that a wide gap has opened up between the world's two major benchmark prices, WTI (US driven) and Brent (mainly Asian demand-driven).

Horizontal drilling is one of the tech advances that have allowed global reserves to continue increasing despite very limited opening up of major new oilfields over the past 20 years.

If America only consumed the same amount of oil per head as Europe this would save the equivalent of the whole of Saudi’s annual output. So it’s time for the Yanks to wean themselves off the black stuff.

Saudi is the third largest producer BUT it is the only major oil exporter that has surplus capacity. Iran is only producing at about half the pre-revolution rate, so there must be plenty of spare capacity there that might be exploited when that domino topples, as it surely must before long. The oil industry in Venezuela is going downhill with the rest of the economy under the lunatic socialism of Chavez.

My take?

If the price spike is relatively short-lived, the impact on recovering Western economies will be manageable. But demand for Arabian oil will increase because of demand from the burgeoning Asian economies, so political upheaval in the Gulf States could be critical. We may be in for a bumpy ride. In particular, the US economic recovery is very fragile, and another oil shock could tip it back into recession.

Looking on the bright side.........

Who is now at serious risk of becoming a collateral casualty of the Fall of the House of Gaddafi? Step, forward Comrade Bob Mugabe, bwana m’kubwa of the Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Zimbabwe. Good Old Bob has been a bosom buddy of the Libyan loony from early days. His barbaric regime has been propped up by repeated grubstakes in money and oil in return for massive diamond concessions. When this is removed – like, with immediate effect – we can expect to see ferocious infighting amongst the various pimps, whores and comic-singers who have utterly destroyed a wonderful country.

But don’t expect a jacaranda revolution there. The next tyrant will be whoever is the nastiest and most blood-thirsty of the Generals and Party bosses.

Eurotrash

The EU has funded a Spanish sex shop, with money coming from the European Social Fund. The shop received €611.15 in order to "improve the employability of the unemployed".

The British must be in despair about their political masters.

The British must be in despair about their political masters. The last lot were bad people determined to do anything to keep themselves in power. This new lot has the same intention, and will be pushing ahead with a new voting system that will almost inevitably lead to coalitions doing dirty deals to keep themselves in office regardless of the wishes of the people.

What makes them worse is their cynical incompetence.

The defence review was a shambles that will cost billions. The scrapping of the Ark Royal, Nimrod and the Harrier leaves UK perilously exposed.

And if you thought Cameron had abolished the nanny state, we have the official wowsers telling us to eat less red meat, and Tories – yes, Tories – suggesting that companies should be forced to have a minimum of 25% women directors. To add to the crime sheet, Dave has reneged on most of his civil liberties promises, so Britain remains the Stasi state created by NuLab.

They have failed again in the Middle East. When Libya was going up in smoke what was Cameroon doing? Well, he was on a tour of the Gulf on an arms selling mission to the remaining oligarchs as if nothing had changed and the old villains were going to be in charge for ever. Cleggover was on holiday and said that he hadn’t realised that he was in charge during Dave’s junket.

You couldn’t make it up!

The Foreign Office has f****d-up completely. The Camel Corps at the FO was caught with thumb in bum and mind in neutral. Time was when the FO recruited the brightest and best via a daunting competitive examination. That was before the public service was debauched by Blair. The press is full of tales of the shambles of the evacuation from Libya.

The height of incompetence is their failure to predict what was coming. It stuck out like a greyhound’s gonads. Weeks ago the blogs were full of predictions about the domino effect. Why did the professionals fail to see what to ordinary Joes was blindingly obvious?

So where next? This is what the admirable site Big Brother Watch has to say:

‘Eritrea seems an obvious candidate. It’s been governed by President Isaias, without any hint of democracy, since 1991. The Mo Ibrahim Index ranks Eritrea as the worst country in the world for human rights. (Even Somalia was better.) Reporters Sans Frontieres put Eritrea at the bottom of their press freedom index. The country is now second worst in the world for education provision according to the Global Campaign for Education, and the Global Hunger Index rates Eritrea as one of only four countries in the world where the levels of hunger are extremely alarming’.

Chatterati asleep at the Mahgreb wheel.....

 If had I my wits about me, I could have predicted the defenestration of Middle Eastern regimes. It is a bit untidy that I am not more proactive in anticipating and predicting what is going on there, especially when the facts are so apparent and compelling. While I meet each day in anticipation of what events might befall the world, I really should be checking to find out which of my expectations are about to mature. In addition, there are countless journalists and political pundits who have a lot to account for in their failure to highlight antecedents to revolution.

Fareed on CNN, in retrospect I might add, contributed some insights into the ME situation that I had not considered. He first spoke of the massive youth populations approaching and sometimes topping the demographic halfway mark. Given the global economic situation, large numbers of these youth are unemployed. Secondly, he noted the pervasive use of social networks such as Facebook. These, he stated, were not only sources of information, but sources of leadership. Instead, Fareed continued, of only listening to national leaders on social, economic and political matters, the social networks offer a viable and refreshing alternative to controlled and scripted dictatorial statements.

Performing routine and mundane tasks such as making concentric circles in my pastures on my tractor offers plenty of time for processing current events. My latest is projecting the global role of social networks on human behavior. The town crier has gone not only regional and national but global. Hear ye, hear ye world, our esteemed leaders and their minions have amassed billions in national wealth and stashed it safely abroad while we pee-ons go hungry. While dictators' wives have closets full of shoes for their social jaunts to glitterati hot spots, many of the people, especially youths, are jobless, frustrated, alienated and hostile toward their leaders.

The less numerous older and elderly people, I believe, remain emotionally attached to their leaders as father figures and national icons. I saw this personally in Indonesia when Suharto's regime went belly up. After all the nasty things people said about him and his corrupt family, tears flowed when he announced his departure from office.

The events in the ME have not gone ignored by American youth. Although they are far from fomenting a revolution, they are beginning to ask why so many people enter politics poor and idealistic and retire rich and cynical. Our public media, in the meantime, is busy lauding or condemning O for having won or lost in his efforts to manage the latest crisis.

Dave on a sticky wicket

The overwhelming vote by the House of Commons against the ECHR ruling on prisoners’ votingrights hopefully shows that the EU worm is beginning to turn, even if less than a third of MPs bothered to turn up for the vote.

Dave now has a real problem.

If the Government defies Strasbourg there might follow stiff fines and even stiffer claims for compensation. There would be resignations from Ministers and an end to the coalition. There could even be resignations from the Disneyesque Supreme Court – no bad thing, since Judges these days appear to be administering political correctness rather than the law.

If Dave defies Parliament, he risks a backbench revolt that could do for his leadership, and it would be an open admission that Parliament is no longer sovereign, a situation that has existed for a long time but which politicians have refused to face. The fissures in the Tory Party that did for Maggie would reopen and the Party would once more be hopelessly divided on Europe.

Now we have the farce of the Attorney-General saying that the ECHR does not have the last word and the Justice Secretary saying that it does.

They are all missing the point. The ECHR is right.

Prisoners were not disenfranchised before the Blair Reign of Terror. Blair took the vote away from them. No government has the right to do this. If any government can remove a citizen’s voting rights at will then goodbye democracy.

Almost simultaneously the EU published the results of a poll on public perceptions of it. A majority of people in Germany, Greece, Cyprus, Latvia, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden mistrusted the EU. But a massive percentage of Brits distrusted it to the extent of about three times the next highest level of distrust. When asked whether they thought that the EU was a ‘good thing’ all other countries voted ‘yes’, although in many cases by only a tiny margin. The UK gave a resounding ‘no’.

Sooner or later the tipping point will be reached. The imposition of shed loads of European law by non-elected, corrupt, self-seeking bureaucrats in Brussels who are loathed in Britain can’t go on forever, surely.

In addition, there is the monstrosity of the European Arrest Warrant under which Brits can be hauled off to face ‘justice’ in a jurisdiction which is thoroughly corrupt for something which is not an offence under English law, such as ‘holocaust denial’. As for European Court of Human Rights, 23 out of 47 judges had no judicial experience before being appointed. They are there to implement Brussels diktats, not to dispense justice. They also get tax-free salaries of £180,000 a year, plus 3 months annual holidays and index-linked pensions.

The latest loony Brussels nonsense is to create Europe-wide regulation of financial services, so goodbye to the City, the ambition of the French since time out of mind.

In the last referendum in 1975, we voted to join the Common Market, a trading bloc. We did not vote for ‘closer and ever closer union’. I rarely agree with Wedgie-Benn but when he said that he would not obey any law passed by people he could not vote for, I said ‘Amen to that’.

This is the BBC..........

The BBC reported on newly-weds who had their reception at Colonel Saunders. We really needed to know that, didn’t we?

The former boss of Radio 4 says that there should be more blacks on ‘The Archers’ (‘an everyday story of farming folk’). On radio.

But to be fair, the Beeb has rejected complaints by (white) parents that a cartoon show called ‘Rastamouse’ is racist because the dialogue is in patois. Dey baan backacow, man. But Rastamouse must be on the weed or he is not a true Rasta. That ought to worry parents more.

BBC TV News reports ‘a large rat was seen scuttling along Downing Street’. Leaving the sinking ship of state, then. (No rats have been seen in the House of Commons. A lot of vermin and parasites, though)

I think we should be told.

Why are Wikileaks disclosures only from the west?

More EU nonsense

‘EUobserver notes that in a report published yesterday the House of Lords EU Committee concluded that the EU’s police training mission in Afghanistan has achieved “very little” in the past four years due to understaffing. The mission, which will cost €54.6m for the year 2010-11, is described as “woefully inadequate” and “has the wider effect of bringing EU Common Security and Defence Policy missions as a whole into disrepute.” The report notes that after four years of work, around 70% of Afghan police cannot read or write and process basic paperwork. The report also highlights “the slowness of EU bureaucracy” to get the project off the ground and the lack of cooperation with NATO forces. The Committee's Chairman, Lord Teverson, is quoted by the BBC saying, “there is no formal agreement between the EU and NATO in Afghanistan, which we find utterly unacceptable.”

'As the Torygraph sinks slowly in the west, we say farewell to journalism..........'

I find these days that I am reading less and less of the Torygraph. The same is true of the Sunday Times; I generally get to around page 22 before I start reading. Most of the DT is worthless. I persevere because of a handful of outstanding columnists.

The best is Jeff Randall, but he only does one column a month. His TV business programme is a ‘must view’.

His partner as the ‘Essex Two’, Heffer gets it right about one in three times. His piece on the alternative voting system was absolutely spot-on. Well, I would say that because he reprises my own views on this which I set out here when the idea first came up, which was not on the publication of the Tory Election Manifesto because Dave didn’t mention it – or that there would be a referendum.

I don’t read him when he bangs-on about education. When he keeps campaigning for the rehabilitation of the grammar schools he is farting against thunder. It is just not going to happen. But he is right about universities; there are too many of them and too many are not only surplus to requirements but totally useless.

Janet Daley is never short of brilliant. Mary Riddell is as out of place as a pork chop in a synagogue. The women columnists are largely a waste of space. There is even a ‘celebs’ section.

Lord Fartwell must be revolving in his grave.

Commenting....mystery solved!

Well, it's not exactly obvious; the answer  is to click 'comments' at the foot of the blog, or to go to 'links' at the bottom tothe right,  where you will be invited to 'post a comment'. It has taken me only 6 months to  work this out.

Perhaps we might get the odd comment - or even an ordinary one.

Brown was a bully, Dave is a bore.....

'Has the art of politics no apparent utility? Does it appear to be unqualifiedly ratty, raffish, sordid, obscene, and low down, and its salient virtuosi a gang of unmitigated scoundrels? Then let us not forget its high capacity to soothe and tickle the midriff, its incomparable services as a maker of entertainment’.

Broon and his unspeakable gang were a constant and rich source of amusement because of the sheer dottiness of much of their programme. The present coalition is about as amusing as genital herpes. It is smug, dull, earnest, self-important and totally out-of-touch, but it is also very, very boring. I feel for the Parliamentary sketch writers who have to make something entertaining out of such dull material.

Even the loony lefties and council jobsworths seem to have gone into recess (but see below). Nothing to laugh at all.

But there was an amusing story on BBC World TV News about a prison in California teaching cricket as a means of rehabilitating thugs. That should do the trick.

Well, kiss me neck, as we would say in Jamaica. The House of Commons has voted by a ten-fold majority to tell the European Court to get lost over its ruling that prisoners should be able to vote. Whether this will be of any effect remains to be seen. Refusing to follow the ECJ ruling could lead both to fines and to compensation claims.

From memory, in my time prisoners were not amongst the disenfranchised, but they had some difficulty in getting to the polling station.

This may be the beginning of moves to extricate the UK from the ‘human rights’ nightmare. There is certainly great pressure from Tories and many others. A possible answer to the current dilemma would be to wipe out Blair’s postal voting reforms that debauched the system, like so much else he did, and opened the door to voting fraud.

Just to demonstrate that all is not lost, here is another corker from Big Brother Watch.

Barmy Britain. ‘A 64-YEAR-OLD grandmother says she was made to feel like a criminal after stooping to pick up a cigarette wrapper in Coventry city centre that she’d just dropped. Lesley Apps was hit with an instant £50 fine when a council officer swooped. Lesleysays a piece of the wrapper had accidentally fallen out of her pocket and she was picking it up when she was fined. She said: “I was doing the right thing but I was still punished.“Maybe I would have been better off if I had left it’.’

The incident happened at 9.45 a.m on January 14 after the retired café worker bought a pack of cigarettes at a newsagents. She said: “I was already bent over to pick it up.I was probably a bit slower than usual because I was having back trouble but even then it was clear I wasn’t just going to leave it there.I tried to explain but she didn’t give me a chance.

And there was the mother of a student with schizophrenia. When he went missing she phoned the University for information about him, she was told that they could not release information without his permission under the Data Protection Act

Publishing comments..........

Out of 1500 hits on this site we have only received a handful of  comments, which is something of a mystery as we publish the same blog on another site and it gets plenty. We got an e-mail from a reader enquiring if we had received his comments. We have not. We posted a comment from ourselves and this was published OK. Anyone out there who has sent a ccomment is asked to re-send; there may be a technical problem or there may be a recuurring error in publishing the comment. Please remember to click 'publish'.

Never let a crisis go to waste.......

The dilemma of the month is what to do with Egypt. The country's situation is like a Rorschach test for diplomats and political pundits the world over. Everyone has an opinion forged from their own view of the situation and each is a bit different. I am learning all sorts of things about Egyptian politics that I did not know or had forgotten. Farheed Zacharia has been helpful in clarifying things, and so has the world press. Mubarak was so smooth and entrenched that I forgot he was but a cog in the military regime that actually calls the plays. I do believe, however, that many observers had also neglected this important point owing to how swimmingly relations between Egypt and the West have been going.

The US and the West are enduring a delicate dilemma. At issue is whether we should firmly express our self interest and publicly outline a transition strategy at the expense of Mubarak and the military, or to refrain from anything but the most innocuous proclamations and, like a free market economy, let the social and political forces at work manifest themselves. We are under heavy pressure to both intervene and stay aloof and such pressure comes with a myriad of instructions on how we should behave in our selected strategy.

The Saudis want us to refrain from embarrassing Mubarak. The Muslim Brotherhood wants us to keep entirely out of the situation. Israel seeks a stable and pro-Israeli government not unlike what Mubarak and Sadat had practiced in the past and would like the US to do everything in its power to ensure that happening. Dick Cheney and what remains of the Neo Cons want to maintain Mubarak in power and continue to feed the Egyptian military. Meanwhile, back at the White House, O is praying for world peace and tranquility which, in retrospect, is most certainly his studied approach to the unfolding situation. While O has not thrown Mubarak under the bus, he has issued a few nudges in that direction.

I continue to believe that Mubarak will go and strongly support the Saudi appeal to assist him in doing so without embarrassment. Saudi and Egypt together are the heart and head of Islam respectively and, as the two foremost Sunni Muslim nations, they need each other to maintain dominance in the Arab and indeed the Muslim world. To be sure, the transition away from Mubarak and his strong arm style of government will take time whether he oversees the transition or not. Moreover, the taste of power experienced by the protesters will linger and expand not only in Egypt, but in other Middle Eastern and quite possibly African and Asian countries as well. The urban youth of Egypt who rebelled against the military regime have had an addictive experience and are unlikely to be satisfied with going home satisfied that there is nothing more to do.

This means that in response, the Egyptian government must either redouble its policy of suppression or mete out a few concessions to the people. The trick is to follow both responses with some measures for controlling the more outspoken protesters and to relax the rules just enough to satisfy public demands, but not enough to empower the people. Perhaps a new head of state will suffice; one who promises reform and who is not heavily tainted with the Mubarak brand of governance. I doubt that al Baradei will fit this bill and I suspect he knows it. He talks as if he wants the military regime to relinquish its dictatorial powers in favor of a civilian government. If that were to occur, which is highly unlikely, the result would be less of a civilian government and more of a Muslim Brotherhood led regime.

The role of the Muslim Brotherhood cannot be neglected. They are not only strong in number and influence, but capable of bringing in outside assistance in the form of moral support, political leverage, money and weapons. The price they would pay for this would be heavy indeed, but like most Muslims I have met, the price would be accepted in the name of Allah.

In conclusion, I suggest we talk softly and carry a big stick; i.e. pray for peace and tranquility and quietly put our heavy allies together to form, together with the Egyptian government, a solution with as limited consequential damages as possible. The heavy allies include Israel, the UK and Saudi Arabia for a start. A major concern should be interest groups seeking to take advantage of the crisis.

Lockerbiegate: US Senators to get stuffed?

Is there no end to the arrogance of US Senators?

They have put Lockerbie back on the front page by ‘demanding’ that former Ministers in the Brown cabinet should appear before them to explain the decision to release Mehgrabi.

Is this just grandstanding or do they seriously expect anything more than the ‘get stuffed’ reply that they had when they tried to get the Scots to kow-tow to them?

 They have got the horse and cart in the wrong positions.

They should be inquiring into the safety of the guilty verdict and the conduct of the trial.

 They should be inquiring into the role of the CIA in bribing their chief witness and coaching him in court.

They should ask about discrepancies in the body-count.

They should determine whether or not there was a CIA intelligence team on board the flight.

They should ask to see all the depositions that would have been submitted to the second appeal hearing.

They should read the full report of the UN observers who described the trial as ‘a complete travesty’.

US Foreign Policy? What policy.............?

The concept of US foreign policy is a fallacy. We have no foreign policy as such, but rather foreign policies and the immediate problem with them is they are often contradictory. For every applied example of our policies, we can easily find examples of similar circumstances in which they were not applied. I find it all a bit confusing at first blush, but given a bit of study and retrospection there are threads of sanity; self interest being a major one.

Even worse, are the critics of our policies and chief among them is the political opposition at any given time.

The sitting government is condemned for efforts to be the world's policeman on the one hand and for not intervening in a crisis on the other. We do nothing in Zim, but intervene in Iraq. But yes, Iraq has oil and are our policies not all about oil as so many pundits claim? Yes, of course, but then again Afghanistan is not all about oil, nor is Cuba, but Venezuela certainly is and we have chosen to tolerate their slings and arrows. So forget oil, our policies also include retribution, especially for the likes of al Qaeda.

That is why we are in Afghanistan. Yet al Qaeda is no longer there and has not been for some time. Did we not know that? I guess not, but never mind, since al Qaeda has moved over to Pakistan and has spread to other snake pits of jihad, we can go home, n'est pas? Wrong again, we can't go home. After all there is the Taliban to contend with and everyone knows they don't educate their women, they stone female fornicators and they sever the left hands of common thieves.

Reminiscent of America's hang up with the need to civilize the Japanese, we are again shouldering the white man’s burden as filtered through our particular brand of ethics, morality and values. Plus, as everyone knows, if we leave Afghanistan, al Qaeda will move right back in there.

In essence, we have bribed Egypt to the tune of a billion odd dollars a year to behave as a defender of America's pro Israel stance in the Middle East. At least, this is what I have consistently read ever since I began studying world affairs some umpteen decades ago. So we added Mubarak's name to a long list of dictators we supported for reasons of self interest.

This has been part of our foreign policies beginning in Latin America and eventually extending throughout the world. We are even getting accustomed to the dictators we support abusing our hospitality and pocketing the lion's share of our foreign aid. We even live with the rage generated by the knowledge that we throw billions into dictators’ Swiss bank accounts and endure an expanding poverty problem here at home.

The Egyptian hens have come home to roost and we are worried whether or not Mubarak's successor will be so cheaply influenced. It would help if we could identify a successor, but to date, no name has come into focus other than that of our old tormentor, Mohamed el Baradei, of IAEC fame, the one who said some years ago when he was the IAEC Director, there was no hard evidence that Iran is upgrading uranium for weapons use. We had a hissy fit over that statement, although I believe him and I also believe that he was correct in his assessment.

The hard liners under Bush wanted al Baradei to condemn Iran's nuclear program and thereby provide credible evidence for Iran's crucifixion. What's more, al Baradei is supported by the Muslim Brotherhood which, to Americans, is like a cross between the Gestapo and al Qaeda. Never mind he espouses a secular state; he sinned by telling what he considered the truth to power and the power became incensed. We could not bend al Baradei to our wishes and that makes him a loose cannon.

This may all be academic as Mubarak is clinging to power like a mussel sticks to a rock. I have no illusion that he will keep his word about leaving in September as he has claimed. More important, nor do the Egyptian protesters. Mubarak is history and I believe history will not wait until September to manifest itself.

Afghaniscam again...........

Washington seems to be getting in a terrible muddle over Egypt.

Jo Biden says that Mubarak is not a dictator and should not stand down. O made a particularly vacuous comment on TV news. He said that problems are not solved by violence.

Then what are we doing in Afghanistan?

And how do you change a brutal and oppressive regime except by violence when everything else has failed?

The US gives $1.5 billion in aid to Egypt each year but $1.3 billion of this is military aid. This might suggest a rather skewed approach to ‘aid’ for a country in which 30% of the population lives below the poverty line. It might also suggest that the US has an arm-lock on the key player in any future political settlement.

On Afghanistan, the Beeb did an excellent documentary on the preparations by the Queen’s Royal Lancers, a cavalry regiment, for their deployment to Afghanistan and then followed them through the next six months until they returned home minus two.

At the training camp in Norfolk, a complete Afghan village has been created. It has a complement of real live Afghans and is highly realistic. An interesting aspect was that the Regimental Sergeant Major was black. He is clearly an outstanding soldier, because this is one of the most difficult ranks to attain. It is regarded as the most important rank after the Commanding Officer. Racial stereotyping is a fruitless undertaking, is it not?

The war has now been going on so long that the British army is the most battle-hardened since WW2.

So why are we there? The original pretext was to deny Afghanistan as a base for Al-Qaeda. They are no longer there. They have scarpered to Yemen, Somalia and other fundamentalist hell-holes. We were told that the deployment of British forces would be for 18 months. That was 10 years ago. We are mired in a war that is the longest fought by Britain since the Napoleonic Wars. We are fighting the Taliban who have never done us any harm. What are NATO’s War Aims? We have never been told.

It is abundantly clear that foreign military adventure in Afghanistan must fail. This has been the lesson of history from the 18th century to the Russian disaster. ‘The Great Game’ should be compulsory reading for every politician from every NATO country.

Kipling had it right:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,

And the women come out to cut up what remains,

Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Daft DT headline of the week

‘Women in Britain are the fattest in mainland Europe’.