Faux-science & the global warming racket...

Excellent news this week on global warming, climate change or whatever misleading title it carries these days.

The first is that the largest wind-turbine manufacturer seems to be going tits-up.

It has cancelled plans to build a mega-factory in the UK.

It has lost 90% of its share value.

It lost £60,000,000 last year.

And it has shed thousands from its work-force.

The second is that one of the leading and pioneering scientists, Fritz Vahrenholt, has had his Damascene moment, and no declares that there is no reliability in the science, and that the only certainty is that economies will be ruined by climate-change measures that inter alia will jack up the price of energy to critical levels.

This is what he also says about the integrity of the science:

For many years, I was an active supporter of the IPCC and its CO2 theory. Recent experience with the UN's climate panel, however, forced me to reassess my position. In February 2010, I was invited as a reviewer for the IPCC report on renewable energy. I realised that the drafting of the report was done in anything but a scientific manner. The report was littered with errors and a member of Greenpeace edited the final version. These developments shocked me. I thought, if such things can happen in this report, then they might happen in other IPCC reports too.

He says that climate change, studied over a 10,000 year period, is demonstrably due mainly to solar radiation, but the man-made contribution is highly questionable as to both its extent and its effect.

There is, of course, another certainly – that a lot of people are making a shed-load of money out of this racket.

Muslim myths?

I am currently reading ‘The Forge of Christendom’, which is Tom Holland’s sequel to ‘In the Shadow of the Sword’. It deals with the so-called Dark Ages when in fact Christendom surpassed Islam. This is a whole chapter of which I am totally ignorant, dealing with a period of European history that in fact disproved the title of the age. I had not known that the last Roman Emperor, Augustus (a Saxon) died in 1000. By the end of the century when the book finishes, Islam had been driven from many of its former conquests. Christianity had by this time spread across the whole of Europe.

Neither did I know that in the early days of what became the Ottoman Empire the bureaucracy was Christian.

Book reviewers are an odd lot. I wonder if they have been infected by the current morbid effect of Islamophobia? Charles Moore in the DT, who is normally very sound, treats the book as if it is an expose of the faults and contradictions in the Qur’an, doubts about the history of Mohammed,  and a dismissal of Mecca being a holy city. The Sunday Times recommended soft-backs describes it briefly in similar terms.

In fact, the book is about the disintegration of ancient empires and it is not until page 367 that we come to the forging of Islam, a chapter of a mere 65 pages in a volume of 526 pages. Most of the stuff about the rise of the Arab empire is outwith his analysis of Mohammedanism.

He does cast doubt on the origins of the Qur’an, suggesting that far from having been handed down entire direct from God to Mohammed, it was compiled by scholars for collections of fragments, and in fact until modern times there were no less than 7 versions. There was a huge find of fragments in modern times, in Yemen, which, after an initial study, was suppressed.

We know, of course, that the Gospels were edited from substantial source material and it is possible that the same was true of the Qur’an.

Some of what is taken to be Islamic law is lifted from the Torah. For example, stoning to death of a woman taken in adultery is prescribed in the Torah but not in the Qur’an, which prescribes whipping. I get the impression that much of what we find objectionable about Islam is not sanctioned by the Qur’an at all, in the same way

And it is particularly interesting that both Arabs and Jews claim to be direct descendants of Abraham.

He avers that Mecca was unlikely to be the holy city because in Mohammed’s day it amounted to very little. And the first biography of Mohammed was not written until about 200 years after his death. On the other hand there is far more verifiable detail about the fact of Mohammed’s existence than there is about Jesus.

For good measure, ‘the Promised Land’ is a religious construct. There is no historical justification for it.

Something new to me is his account of a Jewish state that existed in Arabia. It made the fatal mistake of carrying out a pogrom of Christians, the upshot of which was that they themselves were utterly destroyed by an army of Arabs, and of Christians from Ethiopia.

When he was interviewed about his book, Tom Holland was asked whether he feared the same fate as Salman Rushdie. He dismissed this silly question by saying that Muslims would simply ignore him. Certainly there is nothing that is offensive to Muslims, but much food for thought.

‘Oil price shock!’

I look frequently at the price of West Texas crude, and the ‘shock’ is a pleasant one(which is why it has been under-reported in the media); the price has fallen from its high of around $140 to just over $80.It bounced back to $90 on the forecast of a tropical storm in the Caribbean which could disrupt supplies., but this is a speculative blip. Brent has fallen nearly $40 from the year's high and  U.S crude has dropped $33 from its 2012 high of $110.55.

Our petrol price, amongst the highest in the UK when it peaked a £1.99 a litre, is now down to £1.44 and falling. If this continues through the summer, when demand is least, we should save a lot on our next consignment of heating oil (which is much reduced anyway because of our winter escape plan).

Why is this happening, apart from seasonal factors?

Pretty complex.

The US has been building up its reserves that now stand at the highest stocks since 1990.

In the market, Saudi is calling the shots. Venezuela, Iran and Nigeria, the naughty boys in the OPEC club, want Saudi to cut output. It is currently 1.6 million barrels a day above quota. They need a price well in excess of $80 to meet their commitments. The Russians need about $90 to stay out of trouble.

The Saudis are not playing ball . What a shame!

A main consideration is that the Saudis don’t want a global recession that would hammer oil prices, not least because of the impact on their massive Western investments.

Then there is the anticipated market effect of removing up to 700,000 barrels per day with the imposition of the EU embargo on Iranian oil from 1^st July. Saudi has a strong strategic interest in ensuring that the EU does not go soft on its regional rival.

Switching to the US, its success in reducing reliance on Gulf imports has been sensational. It now imports only 45% of its oil requirements, and its reserves of oil and gas are rising rapidly. Gas prices are at probably an all-time low.

So what’s the problem?

In a word, Obama. Apart from his being wedded to green politics, it is beyond me why O has persistently tried – often successfully – to frustrate measures to reduce America’s energy dependency on imports. He has shown extreme reluctance to grant permits for on-shore and off-shore drilling. He has refused to give the go-ahead to pipelines to carry Canada’s huge quantities of shale oil to the US. He has stymied exploitation of Alaskan deposits, presumably at the behest of the Friends of the Caribou, since the population is so sparse as not to notice.

Oh, no! Assange is back.............

Well, Julian Assange has welshed!

Now we know more of this miserable character we should not be surprised.

He was supported by a whole raft of celebs, including the egregious John Pilger (another whingeing Aussie) and Jemima Khan, who are now likely to have to whistle for the £240,000 bail money. His wealthy chum who put him up for well over a year in his country house during bail must also be feeling a tad let down by this abuse of hospitality.

His legal case was that the Swedish prosecution was bogus, the courts were not going to be fair to him, and it was all a ruse to get him extradited to the US where he could face the death penalty for espionage. There was also the procedural point that the public prosecutor is not a ‘judicial official’ within the meaning of the EAW legislation, and that an EWA can only be issued by a judge or magistrate, in which event the whole proceedings were fatally flawed.

Taking the latter point first, I have to admit that I raised my eyebrows at the rejection of this line of argument. A public prosecutor is a civil servant, not a member of the judiciary, which makes the EWA even more of an outrage. No wonder the figure of justice is blind!

Extradition to face the death penalty for espionage?

I don’t think so!

When I last checked, the US lawyers were running around like blue-arsed flies trying to find something to stick on him. Espionage is limited to people having an office of profit under the Federal Government?

What, then? Criminal libel, always supposing that this is a crime in the Land of the Free?

And if the Swedish charges are as absurd as they sound, I would have thought his prospects of acquittal were pretty good.

There’s a lot more to be told yet.

So why Ecuador? It has an extradition treaty with the US, so it is an odd and dangerous choice.

It seems that he and the President have things in common.

Assange interviewed him on ‘Russia Today’, a Putin mouthpiece and apparently they got on like a house on fire. El Presidente is also a media baron. Both are, as The Economist describes them, ‘thin-skinned and narcissistic’.

They have a very selective view of freedom of information. President Correa threatens other media outlets. Assange wanted to censor his own biography. He got into a fearful row with Private Eye when he accused Eye and The Guardian of a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ when Ian Hislop did a piece about a Wikileaks associate who was a holocaust-denier and wrote anti-Semitic articles. They are both virulently ant-American.

We all may be very tired of a very tiresome individual but one thing is sure.

This will run and run.

why don't they listen to us?

Europe's Three Stooges...

The derision poured on Barroso at G20 makes me reflect on what a terrible shower are the ‘leaders’ of Europe. The only man among them is Angular Merckel.

Let’s take them from the top.

Van Rompuy, the ‘President’ starts off with a handicap because his ludicrous name (to British eyes) only provokes the hoi polloi to make vulgar remarks about ‘rumpy-pumpy’. He seems to have the charisma of a newt. We have never seen him interviewed so we don’t know whether he has a weedy voice that would go with his grey and insignificant appearance or whether he has the commanding oratory that one would expect of a President. Of course, he may be another Churchill. In Flemish. He has always worked in the public sector, but at least he has held elected office.

Verdict? There is less to him than meets the eye.

Which brings us to Barroso.

His appearance at the G20 was pure comedy. This unelected, ex-Maoist Jackanapes lecturing Obama on democracy? You couldn’t make it up. ‘It woz the Yanks wot done it!’ The Eurozone crisis is all the doing of the US political-industrial complex blah, blah….It would be hilarious if it were not for the fact that this self-delusionist is at the helm during an economic melt-down in Europe of cataclysmic proportions. He lives in a parallel world if he believes the rubbish that he spouts.

It seems that he and Rompuy don’t get on too well. That’s no bad thing.

Which brings us to the last of the Three Stooges.

I refer, of course, to the dire ‘Baroness’ Ashton. She has never been elected to anything in her life. She has never earned a penny that didn’t come from the public purse. Throughout her career she rose without trace. She is the EU ‘Foreign Minister’ representing a non-state but which has a diplomatic mission in almost every country in the world. We have little idea as to what she does. Except, of course, build a hugely expensive empire, command a budget that increases at a colossal rate when everyone  else is tightening belts, and travel by executive jet.

And the rest of commissariat?

Too ineffective and insignificant to be noticed?

No wonder that a dull, uncharismatic hausfrau bestrides Europe like a colossus.

The Beeb has lost the plot....

Clearly, the debacle over the BBC coverage of the Jubilee water pageant was no aberration,

On Saturday we tuned in to ‘Trooping the Colour Highlights’. It was a one-hour programme.

The first 25 minutes was a load of introductory gunge before we even got to Horseguards.

When the action started, we were treated to constant inane chat about who composed a particular march in 1834 and other boring trivia, but no real attempt to talk us through the ceremony itself.

Time was when we had the  incomparable Tom Fleming as presenter. Not anymore. The presenters seem totally ignorant of what they are presenting and simply bored by the whole thing.

And Allan Titchmarsh, BBC’s sniveller-in-chief doing ‘Last Night of the Proms’ that last year excluded ‘Sea Songs’, Sir Henry Wood’s own composition?

The Beeb has lost the plot!

Spanish practices....

I have been trying to figure out just what the hell is going on in Spain. Greece is a side-show. It only has a midget economy, and everybody knows that, after years of living high on the hog at others’ expense, the game is up. Nemesis beckons.

Spain is different – but in some ways the same.

It is different in size. It has a large industrial economy. And it has even larger debts.

It arrived at the present impasse because, like Ireland, it embarked on a madcap building boom off the back of cheap money. Unlike Ireland, it helped destroy its expat market through corruption and dispossessions without compensation. Like Greece, it had a bloated public sector, excessively generous pension benefits and early retirement, and a ‘jobs for life’ regime that made it almost impossible to get rid of workers.

But its sovereign debt, although high, was at least not critical. Its GDP/ debt ratio is better than Britain’s. Its problem was with its regional banks, not the big beasts like Santander, but the relative tiddlers, the equivalent of the German landesbanken (which are also in trouble; we don’t hear much about them. But we will).

So the question is: why not let them fail? They would soon have been snapped up by predators.

Instead, Spain goes cap-in-hand to Brussels and gets a €100 bn bail-out without, as far as we know, any of the draconian conditions applied against Ireland.

The money is not being paid to the affected banks, but to the Spanish Treasury. This all becomes sovereign preferred debt which pushes Spain into the danger level. Rates have hit 7% which is unsustainable. The Treasury than allocates the dosh to the banks which then buy Government bonds. Round and round it goes.

And where is the asset backing?

At which point all becomes clear.

There is no money. It’s all funny money.

It’s the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme.

US media under fire

 

The media here is also under fire, but with less fanfare than the BskyB scandal. Up into the 80's, American's took little notice of media bias. There were of course periodicals with an open bias, but radio and especially TV were considered neutral. TV seriously sapped the radio audience and its nightly news ratings were based largely on the appeal presenters had for the public. To be sure, Walter Cronkite was king of the presenters, but he had some serious competition that enabled all three of the major networks to stay in the money. Then came cable.

It all started with Ted Turner and his CNN concept. I recall when it first appeared, there were almost no adverts and the reporting of world events seemed instantaneous. Being overseas at the time, we only had access to CNN international. Turner turned out to be a megalomaniac as was evidenced by his behavior toward his crew as he successfully defended the America Cup against Australia way back when. He came across as Captain Bligh. He is also the largest private landowner in the USA. He is certainly no slouch, but neither was the captain of the Bounty.

CNN was initially perceived as politically neutral; probably because the American TV audience was not accustomed to the sort of reporting bias that prevails say in the UK and Europe. It came as quite a revelation to us that both Cronkite and CNN and the rest of the networks were liberal and oriented to the democrats. They still are and even more so today by contrast with the starkly Conservative Fox News Channel, a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corporation. Fox news, makes CNN and the original networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) look like they all subscribe to The Guardian.

The Fox News motto, 'fair and balanced' is a joke not unlike the New York Times banner 'all the news that's fit to print'. So, Fox is still posing as unbiased and would be better off to lose that motto and simply lay claim to the political right as does the Telegraph.

Indeed, most of the classic American press (the original networks and major newspapers including the NYT) claim to be politically neutral. So does our public broadcasting system which is clearly left oriented, but nowhere near to the degree of the BBC. As Fox is leading the way toward overt bias, it will not take long for others to follow. Eventually we shall have as colorful a range of media as does the UK and Europe. We are still growing up.

tentous - My Telegraph

iGoogle The Old Word Order…….

There was a very entertaining and perceptive piece in The Oldie magazine under this title.

The opener is

‘Nig-nog, Jew’s arse, homo – the language of John Torode’s Forties childhood sounds horrific today. But did it reflect or incite true prejudice? Not at all’.

Obviously language changes through the ages; when did anybody last say ‘Gadzooks!’? The context changes and so does the acceptability of words. Until comparatively recently it was unheard of even in the roughest circles to use foul language in the presence of a female. Now it seems as if the females are amongst the worst offenders.

He says that the ‘N’ word was frequently used in normal speech ‘Work like a nigger’; ‘Nigger brown paint’. He is an East Ender. We country boys used words rather differently. Until adulthood, I never saw a black person, other than an RAF Sergeant from the Caribbean who cycled through our village and was gone in minutes. We referred to anybody of a swarthy hue as ‘Darky’. My father always used ‘nigger’, but we were never sure who he was talking about. Our picture of an African was with a big toothy grin, a bone through his nose and wearing a grass skirt whilst boiling a fat clergyman in a large pot. That was how the comics portrayed them, and great fun it was. The idea that we would grow up racially prejudiced is just too absurd.

He says ‘Nig-nog’ was a mild insult for someone who was a bit of an idiot. ‘It never occurred to me that I was using a racially-based epithet’.

Well, he wasn’t, whatever Wiki might say. I first heard it in the army in 1955. It was used by NCOs to describe we new recruits, straight out of the egg, knowing absolutely nothing about anything. Race never entered our consciousness in those days because Britain was almost entirely white, so racial epithets scarcely ranked in ordinary vocabulary.

Here is a dictionary definition that supports my view:

‘This phrase has absolutely no racial dimension, despite appearances. It is a Northern British (e.g. Yorkshire) term referring to a silly person. It does not derive from nigger and should not be considered racist at all.

Tha cawn't even spell thi own name -th'art a bluddy nig nog’.

Homosexuality? His generation would say ‘homo’ or ‘strange men’.

The proliferation of derogatory epithets seem to be either a modern or an urban phenomenon – or both.

We had no idea what it was. We would refer to ‘bum-bandits’, but we hadn’t a clue what exactly they did.

We would sing a little parody:

‘The boy stood on the burning deck

His arse against the mast.

He swore that he would never budge

‘til Oscar Wilde had passed’.

iGoogle

Leveson: how long, O Lord, how long?

The local scene is as dull as the weather. The Murdoch Inquiry is interminable. M’ learned friends representing the various interests must be opening off-shore bank accounts. I reckon leading Counsel must be on at least £5,000 a day. Cameron has yet to appear. Let’s see how he slithers out of this.

The next stage will be the criminal court hearings against Rebecca Big-hair, who is being lined up to take the rap on behalf of all the villains. Talk about the law of unexpected consequences. The whole thing was set up to screw Murdoch, but with one bound the Dirty Digger was free! It’s the politicians and the Old Bill feeling the heat instead. And why not?

The sorry saga of the Culture Minister lumbers on. In another era when there was a certain amount of integrity in politics Hunt would have resigned instantly without letting this farce draw on. But he is reputed to be as useless as the Pope’s wobbly bits and obviously quite unprincipled like many in the Cameron clique, and his political advisor got the early bath instead.

‘And what became of it at last’ quoth little Peterkin. Why, that I cannot tell’ said he, but…...

The only certainty is that things in the meeja will never be the same again.

It’s a heaven-sent opportunity to restrict press freedom. Since our only guardians against the elective dictatorship of the Commons are the media and the House of Lords, and both are about to be emasculated, the prospects for freedom are dire.

Hacking won’t stop, but hacks won’t do it themselves. They will simply buy the stuff from freelancers. Only the Daily Star, owned by Dirty Desmond, the King of the Top Shelf, will stay a largely unchanged because it publishes no news at all – only tits ‘n bums (38 at the last count).

The Red Tops will be more circumspect, and I reckon that we shall see some terminal casualties in the print media. The Gruaniad and Observer are in the cross-hairs because they are losing shed-loads of money without the sort of resources that enables Murdoch to fund the loss-making Times, which goes in the books as a tax-loss to News International in its Delaware lair, so the net cost to the Dirty Digger is zilch. The Independent is owned by a Russian money-bags, so should be OK until he tires of it. The Daily Mirror is in deep poo. The Torygraph seems sound, so perhaps the policy of dumbing-down is working – but on diminishing returns, I’d say.

The French connection.......

The current round of French elections is garnering even less interest than the US merry-go-round, but they have led to quite a lot of interest in the French population of London which is sufficiently numerous to justify their own Deputy.

The figures are astonishing. It is estimated that over 400,000 live in London, mostly clustered around South Ken and the Cromwell Road. That makes London the fifth largest French city, bigger than Nice or Nantes. In English terms the French colony is the equivalent of Leicester, Portsmouth or Bradford.

There are French cafes, patisseries, grocers and bookshops. There is a French lycee that has the highest standards, so much so that many non-French parents try to get admission for their kids, and the fees are a fairly modest £2,000 per term.

So what’s the attraction? I reckon it’s some push-me and some pull-me.

At one end of the scale there are the wealthy. The ‘push’ part is mostly Hollande. The prospect of confiscatory taxes and an anti-business political culture seems to have provoked something of an exodus amongst the wealthy which has produced a spike in demand for up-scale housing in the favoured areas. The ‘pull’ part is especially the fact that London is the financial capital of the world and the place to be if you work in financial services.

At the other, there is the well-educated, able, ambitious, creative younger generation. London offers them better opportunities than Paris. There is less bureaucracy, especially in setting up a business. It is also more fun and less stuffy for young people. It has a buzz that appeals to them that Paris lacks.

It seems that it is also much more tolerant of minorities. London is not bothered where you came from or what colour you are as long as you are up to the job.

These are exactly the sort of people that the UK needs, and France’s loss will be our gain.

And yet already I can hear the whinging about ‘stealing British jobs’, that great myth put about by such as the Daily Mail (which has just outsourced its photo-editing to India and sacked all its UK staff).

Bienvenu!

Prince Charles's fruit salad......

Watching a small part of the Jubilee shindig, a thought occurred to me. Does Prince Chuck wear too much fruit salad (medal ribbons)when in uniform?  He seems to have as many as Kim Il Jong.

I was entitled to the 1077 Jubilee Medal but only virtute officii. I had done nothing to deserve a gong. So I ceded it to my elections officer. She had officiated at every general and local election since 1937.

Her husband had died recently from the after-effects of maltreatment in a Jap POW camp in WW2. She definitely deserved some recognition.

I would not accept an award that I had not worked for or put myself at hazard. I have the Rhodesia Medal and the Zimbabwe Independence Medal, which I have only worn once, at the 5^th Anniversary in Zimbabwe, where I got a lot of curious looks from the locals, as if to say ‘What’s this muzungu doing wearing our gong?’

In Zim in 1980 we were in clear and present danger. There were several accidental deaths in operational areas; our team had one wounded by an armour piercing shell that went straight through his Land Rover and showered him with aluminium fragments; one guy drove straight over a land mine that failed to explode; and a friend of mine walked unscathed for the total wreck of  a light aircraft that hit a large boulder at the end of a forced landing in the bush.

I don’t recall Charles being at risk to justify his chest-full, unless it was from the grub on his mine-sweeper. Andy and Harry, on the other hand, have well-earned campaign medals.

Just protocol, I suppose.

So farewell, then, Manx TT.....until next year, anyway!

Lousy weather for the end of the biker-fest aka the Manx TT. Another Saturday ruined by delayed racing held over from Friday; the start of the Senior TT, the big boys who do 200 mph going past our local pub, was progressively put off from 1.30 p.m. to late afternoon and then cancelled, so  we couldn’t get out all day, even though nothing was happening. That’s the penalty of living inside the circuit.

Results so far: 53 accidents, 5 fatal, 9 serious. Plus 11,000 bikes - one for every 100yards of tarmac on the entire island.

The rain has been torrential You can imagine what it did to the many camp sites that spring up all over the island during the 2 weeks of the TT.

Some were completely flushed out and there was a desperate appeal on the radio for people with spare beds to take in refugees.

Would you take in a complete stranger, a hairy biker from Bavaria, some smelly, bearded hell’s angel who has been sleeping in his leathers against the cold and wet for the past week .

No neither would I!

And yet the radio station were so swamped with offers that they had to issue another urgent appeal; this time, to stop calling. There are a lot of very kind and decent people out there. We don’t hear much about them.

The people of this island are – well – insular. They tend to be quite reserved and rather difficult to get to know. But if you, as a come-over, make the effort to break the ice you get immediate smiles.

One of the very largest activities here is charitable work.

They personify ‘salt of the earth’.

Normans 1, Saxons 0......

We are definitely in the age of infantilism.

We have two new TV programmes, one with Gryff Rhys-Jones  showing us the unknown glories of the English countryside. Unknown to whom? I was very familiar with the scenery in his first programme, a trip down the Essex coast and up the Thames in a Thames barge c. 1899. But he did evince two pieces of information that were new to me.

The vessel was not fitted with an engine when it was first built. You don’t say!

And very high quality bricks are handmade in an old kiln which owe their fine texture to the absence of volcanic ash in the clay. Volcanos are not big in Essex, it seems. Not many people know that.

To crown it all(as one might say) a programme on the Jubilee showed a picture of the Queen’s dad, KGVI; except that it was the Duke of Windsor!

Then we had a new history programme (what, another?). This one explained the Norman Conquest as if the audience consisted solely of particularly dense 7-year old boys. The invasion of William’s army was depicted by film of troops in the WW1 trenches. Eh?

At one stage I thought he was going to explain everything as if it were a football game.

‘England played Vikings at Stamford bridge. They won easily but then they had to make the long trip  to Hastings where they had a late fixture with Normandy. That night they had a few pints of King & Barnes Fine Old Horsham Ale, and the next day they found Normandy as fresh as paint having a kick-around on the field.

When the game started the Skipper noticed one of his players messing around with a long-bow, even though it hadn’t been invented at this time. ‘You want to watch him’, one of the players said to Captain Harold ‘He’ll have some bugger’s eye out with that!’’.

'Remember the Alamo......'

I have just been reading a review of a new book about the Alamo, ‘The Blood of Heroes’ by James Donovan. It has a rather different take from what we have been led to believe.

The conventional view is that the heroes were Davy Crocket and Jim Bowie (although I thought that one or other of them played little part in the final battle, being sick with fever).

The book asserts that Travis was the real hero, whereas he has been presented as a somewhat foppish and ineffective officer. But it is said that what he commanded was a rabble of ne’er-do-wells, outlaws, misfits, riff-raff and general  larrikins - the GTT brigade. He forged this unlikely shower into a disciplined and very brave force that held out for 13 days against an army ten times its size.

Donovan also says that the ‘line in the sand’ was no myth, and only one man failed to cross it.

The real significance is that the battle was no defeat but a decisive action that delayed the advance of Santa Anna, enabling Sam Houston to train and equip his raw army. Santa Anna then made two basic military errors in outstripping his supply lines and dividing his force.

Houston then gave Santa Anna a whacking at San Jacinto at unfavourable odds of 2 to 1, and so we have Texas.

It seems also that the lost settlement of Roanoke might have been identified. A map of the North Carolina coast line made for the first expedition in 1585 has a small patch on it which nobody thought to lift, although it has been in the British Museum since 1866. Under the patch is what appears to be the settlement. It’s underneath an Arnold Palmer golf course, which the archaeologists will now be digging up!

Fascinating stuff!

The BBBC, the Jubilee and the Olympics; game for a laugh!

Some excellent news about the upcoming Nuremburg Rally aka the Olympic Games. The IOC booked 40,000 hotel rooms for its party of freeloaders and hangers-on. Yes, rooms for the whole duration, not, as I had originally thought, room nights. Naturally this created a shortage so the hotels increased their rates by as much as 400%. So guess what. 30% are unsold even at this late stage. It seems that tourists are giving London the cold shoulder. So much for the economic boost we were promised when we were unfortunate enough to beat the French for the venue. Hollande must be doing handstands.

We had a similar experience in Jamaica during the cricket World Cup. The hotels doubled their rates. And nobody came!

We hear also that London’s biggest mini-cab firm has instructed its drivers to ignore the ’Zil’ lanes which close off London streets to all but the mighty. And a class action is being brought against the organisers by traders who will be unable to access their businesses.  The DT reports that Dave is so worried about a backlash from Londoners that the issue is high on the agenda at No. 10.

Apparently, a screen is to be erected along the beach at Weymouth to prevent owners of beach-front houses from getting a free peep at the yachting events. That should keep the fire service busy the night before the event.

‘At scenes so tragic I could scarce forbear to laugh’.

Meanwhile, the Beeb is having its arse kicked from here to breakfast time over its pathetic coverage of the Jubilee. There have been no less than 2.500 complaints direct to the BBC. We have seen blogs and e-mails from all over the world slating the airheads who gave what passed for commentary. It seems that the majority had no experience whatsoever in commentating on anything at all. They even brought Anneka Rice back from the dead. She was last seen about 40 years ago and was famous only for her shapely bum

We would not have dreamt of watching the concert. Having seen the cast list, Buck House must have looked like the place where the elephants go to die.

Here is what the DT had to say.

BBC staff were reluctant to speak on the record yesterday, but they had some pithy views in private. “The –––– is really hitting the fan here over the Jubilee coverage, especially the river pageant. Skin and hair flying,” said another senior journalist. “It was a disastrous mistake to do it in the style of The One Show. It needed a father-and-son [Peter and Dan] Snow job.”

The even more hilarious news is that the head of the service responsible for this fiasco is a front runner to take over the top job of DG when the present overpaid nincompoop leaves.

And it’s not even the Silly Season yet!

Dropping BRICS......

One thing we are not short of is doomsayers. ‘Ten years before economy recovers’; ‘Break-up of Euro will be disaster for UK’; you know the sort of stuff. All this rubbish is presented as fact, when at best it is speculation and at worst scare-mongering to sell papers.

We are told that we have regressed to 1996. Things were really bad then, were they not? Soup kitchens, mass unemployment. Try remembering 1956. We are approximately 4 times richer than we were then.

A recurrent theme is ‘the BRICS are coming’. We are going to be overwhelmed by the Emerging Economies and impoverished whilst they grow fat at our expense and pinch all our jobs.

When is all this going to happen? Well, it isn’t, and here’s why.

That they get richer does not mean that we get poorer. It’s more likely that they will become more like us economically. The untapped market is huge, big enough for everybody.

And the doomsayers assume that the BRICS growth is inexorable.

Let’s take Mr Chin first.

True the growth in the Chinese economy over the past 20 years or do has been phenomenal. But it’s a bit of a mess; house building, industrial production and electricity supply (a sure economic indicator) have slowed quite sharply in the last year. Investment spending on capital projects has accounted for over half of growth; net exports contributed nothing.

Public debt is only about 50% of GDP, but the savings rate is a huge 51% which stifles consumer demand. There is a supply side/demand side imbalance and so an over-reliance on export markets especially the US.  Wage inflation is very high – the last time I checked it was about 24% -  which is sharply reducing competiveness. There are signs that American companies in particular are ‘in-shoring’ – coming back to the US where wage productivity is better and where there is not the constant threat of intellectual property theft.

There are also serious ‘structural’ problems. The Government has fingers in every pie. Waste is commonplace. Officials are corrupt. Savers are ripped off by arbitrarily-set interest rates. And there have been changes and scandals at the very top of the Communist Party pyramid. The structure of government seems a tad rickety right now.

Maybe the most serious structural problem is the sanctity of property rights. It doesn’t exist. One consequence is that only about 4% of the land area is under cultivation. Farmers can be easily dispossessed with no or inadequate compensation, so there is no incentive to invest in more efficient farming methods.

Prognosis? Now that the elite have acquired a taste for Ferraris, Rolls-Royces and fine wines there is certainly no going back and as the rich get richer the poor become less poor, on the cliché that a rising tide floats all boats. So China will continue to be a global star, but the growth will be less frantic – more pussy cat than tiger.

And for Mr Chin to become as rich as Uncle Sam the GDP would need to be 5 times as large as the US. That’s not going to happen anytime soon.

Brazil? Well, it’s predicted 4.5% growth is hardy ‘tiger’ and that looks optimistic anyway. It is highly commodity-dependent, although it has some fine high-tech industry like Embraer. It has some big new oil fields but seems to be developing a strangely hostile attitude to the industry, like the threat of imprisonment and hefty fines for a small leak at a Chevron field off the coast and a requirement that 65% of oil industry equipment must be locally made, which will make development slower and costlier.

The tax burden is 36% of GDP and too much goes on tasty pensions and an over-large state. It is becoming an expensive place to do business, with labour costs 3 times those of some other emerging economies.

The President – worryingly -  has started to make some Chavez-style pronouncements.

Prognosis? Continued strong growth but nothing tigerish or enough to deal with its staggering social inequalities.

Russia? A corrupt kleptocracy dependent on oil in the grip of Rasputin’s KGB muckers. It is the second largest producer of oil and the largest exporter of gas. But it is only ranked 70 in GDP/ppp. Does not really qualify as ‘emerging’. No threat economically. Politically? That’s another story.

The elephant in the room for both China and Russia is demographic collapse; both have fertility rates way below replacement rate, and so face rapidly-aging populations.

India? It has a vast reservoir of cheap labour; a very enterprising and capable business class; a huge market – and  the English language and the English Common law, the two great legacies of the Raj. Its further education in science, technology and mathematics are world-class. But its governance is a mess, with self-seeking, incompetent and corrupt politicians, and a public service to match. It ranks 95 on the TI corruption index, It is still not sure whether it wants to have a market economy – witness its U-turn on the admission of foreign supermarket chains  to protect its legions of dhuka-wallahs.

Its economy is susceptible to shocks from the US and Europe where it is very export-dependent. Growth has slumped sharply of late.

Prognosis? It will continue to grow as a major world economy, if at a less dizzy rate – but it desperately needs the smack of firm government and to clean up its act.

South Africa? Don’t make me laugh!

Prediction? The next ‘tigers’ will be Indonesia, Burma and a clutch of African countries.

Jubilee: was it worth the money?

Needless to say, the whingers will be out in force over all this Jubilee jollity. ‘Look what it’s costing….moan, moan’.

So let’s have a look at the figures.

The Treasury is contributing £1 million. The estimated earnings from tourism, souvenirs and all the rest is £1.42 billion. Nuff said.

Of course, these are the wowsers who are always banging on about the cost of the Monarchy. So how much does Her Maj actually cost the tax-payer.

The current cost is in the region of £40 million, or 62p. per head.This does not come from our taxes. It comprises 15% of the surplus generated by the Crown Estate. The rest of the surplus (around £300 million in total) goes to the Exchequer.

Even serious newspapers comment on the ‘fortune’ that Her Maj gets from off-shore wind-farms. In fact, she doesn’t get a penny, because it all goes to the Crown Estate and thence to the Exchequer.

A pretty good bargain, I’d say.