Republicans race to the bottom..

Even  we relatively well-informed Limeys who have travelled in America should never believe that we ever  will understand America- or US polity, anyway.

 

The Invisible Man in the White House is arguably the weakest POTUS in living memory.

 

His foreign policy has been imperceptible. The Gulf states were American clients until four years ago when Obama ceded them to Russia, Iran and Turkey. He has proved to be immovable on using American power to deal with the chaos in Syria. This shambles could have been dealt with in the first month of the uprising against Assad by imposing a no-fly zone and destroying his air force and helicopters.

 

During the intervention in the Balkans, a conflict which did not threaten the West,  the US flew around 250 sorties a day. Against ISIL it is about six. Last Wednesday the US began to bomb ISIS oil convoys, their main source of funds! Four years down the track.

 

On this woeful record Obama should be toast; Republic candidates for nomination should be ripping him apart.

 

But are they? Nope!

 

Not one seems at all bothered by mayhem in Syria, the ISIL threat, the strong possibility of a Paris-style terrorist attack in New York or Washington. They are obsessed with refugees, who have been compared to rabid dogs.

 

They see Obama’s decision to allow 10,000 asylum-seekers into the US (Frau Merckel has 1 million or thereabouts) as the end of civilisation as we know it. There have been calls for State Troopers to round up and remove all asylum seekers, and 26 State  Governors have said that they will refuse to accept refugees. The State Department might have a contrary view.

 

New Jersey’s Chris Christie says he will not even allow orphan five-year olds. Mike Huckabee says that Minnesota would be too cold! A Louisiana senator reckons that Obama is directly importing terrorists into his state. Ted Cruz, another front-runner for the nomination, reckons there should be a ‘litmus test’ that would bar devout Moslems.

The Republican boss in Tennessee reckons that his National Guard should round-up all  Syrians living there and throw them out of the State. All 30 of them!

 

And best of all is Donald Chump. If elected he promises to send every single Syrian back home. He says he saw thousands of Moslems celebrating in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11, although nobody else did, and he advocates closing mosques and places frequented by Moslems for fear of radicalisation. All this while building 2000  miles of wall coast-to coast to keep out Mexican ‘rapists and murderers’.

 

But the race to the bottom was surely completed when the utterly shameful internment of American of Japanese origin during WW2 plus the rejection of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is lauded as ‘way to go!

 

 

Even  we relatively well-informed Limeys who have travelled in America should never believe that we ever  will understand America- or US polity, anyway.

 

The Invisible Man in the White House is arguably the weakest POTUS in living memory.

 

His foreign policy has been imperceptible. The Gulf states were American clients until four years ago when Obama ceded them to Russia, Iran and Turkey. He has proved to be immovable on using American power to deal with the chaos in Syria. This shambles could have been dealt with in the first month of the uprising against Assad by imposing a no-fly zone and destroying his air force and helicopters.

 

During the intervention in the Balkans, a conflict which did not threaten the West,  the US flew around 250 sorties a day. Against ISIL it is about six. Last Wednesday the US began to bomb ISIS oil convoys, their main source of funds! Four years down the track.

 

On this woeful record Obama should be toast; Republic candidates for nomination should be ripping him apart.

 

But are they? Nope!

 

Not one seems at all bothered by mayhem in Syria, the ISIL threat, the strong possibility of a Paris-style terrorist attack in New York or Washington. They are obsessed with refugees, who have been compared to rabid dogs.

 

They see Obama’s decision to allow 10,000 asylum-seekers into the US (Frau Merckel has 1 million or thereabouts) as the end of civilisation as we know it. There have been calls for State Troopers to round up and remove all asylum seekers, and 26 State  Governors have said that they will refuse to accept refugees. The State Department might have a contrary view.

 

New Jersey’s Chris Christie says he will not even allow orphan five-year olds. Mike Huckabee says that Minnesota would be too cold! A Louisiana senator reckons that Obama is directly importing terrorists into his state. Ted Cruz, another front-runner for the nomination, reckons there should be a ‘litmus test’ that would bar devout Moslems.

The Republican boss in Tennessee reckons that his National Guard should round-up all  Syrians living there and throw them out of the State. All 30 of them!

 

And best of all is Donald Chump. If elected he promises to send every single Syrian back home. He says he saw thousands of Moslems celebrating in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11, although nobody else did, and he advocates closing mosques and places frequented by Moslems for fear of radicalisation. All this while building 2000  miles of wall coast-to coast to keep out Mexican ‘rapists and murderers’.

 

But the race to the bottom was surely completed when the utterly shameful internment of American of Japanese origin during WW2 plus the rejection of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is lauded as ‘way to go!

 

 

 

Even  we relatively well-informed Limeys who have travelled in America should never believe that we ever  will understand America- or US polity, anyway.

 

The Invisible Man in the White House is arguably the weakest POTUS in living memory.

 

His foreign policy has been imperceptible. The Gulf states were American clients until four years ago when Obama ceded them to Russia, Iran and Turkey. He has proved to be immovable on using American power to deal with the chaos in Syria. This shambles could have been dealt with in the first month of the uprising against Assad by imposing a no-fly zone and destroying his air force and helicopters.

 

During the intervention in the Balkans, a conflict which did not threaten the West,  the US flew around 250 sorties a day. Against ISIL it is about six. Last Wednesday the US began to bomb ISIS oil convoys, their main source of funds! Four years down the track.

 

On this woeful record Obama should be toast; Republic candidates for nomination should be ripping him apart.

 

But are they? Nope!

 

Not one seems at all bothered by mayhem in Syria, the ISIL threat, the strong possibility of a Paris-style terrorist attack in New York or Washington. They are obsessed with refugees, who have been compared to rabid dogs.

 

They see Obama’s decision to allow 10,000 asylum-seekers into the US (Frau Merckel has 1 million or thereabouts) as the end of civilisation as we know it. There have been calls for State Troopers to round up and remove all asylum seekers, and 26 State  Governors have said that they will refuse to accept refugees. The State Department might have a contrary view.

 

New Jersey’s Chris Christie says he will not even allow orphan five-year olds. Mike Huckabee says that Minnesota would be too cold! A Louisiana senator reckons that Obama is directly importing terrorists into his state. Ted Cruz, another front-runner for the nomination, reckons there should be a ‘litmus test’ that would bar devout Moslems.

The Republican boss in Tennessee reckons that his National Guard should round-up all  Syrians living there and throw them out of the State. All 30 of them!

 

And best of all is Donald Chump. If elected he promises to send every single Syrian back home. He says he saw thousands of Moslems celebrating in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11, although nobody else did, and he advocates closing mosques and places frequented by Moslems for fear of radicalisation. All this while building 2000  miles of wall coast-to coast to keep out Mexican ‘rapists and murderers’.

 

But the race to the bottom was surely completed when the utterly shameful internment of American of Japanese origin during WW2 plus the rejection of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is lauded as ‘way to go!

 

 

 

 

 

Even  we relatively well-informed Limeys who have travelled in America should never believe that we ever  will understand America- or US polity, anyway.

 

The Invisible Man in the White House is arguably the weakest POTUS in living memory.

 

His foreign policy has been imperceptible. The Gulf states were American clients until four years ago when Obama ceded them to Russia, Iran and Turkey. He has proved to be immovable on using American power to deal with the chaos in Syria. This shambles could have been dealt with in the first month of the uprising against Assad by imposing a no-fly zone and destroying his air force and helicopters.

 

During the intervention in the Balkans, a conflict which did not threaten the West,  the US flew around 250 sorties a day. Against ISIL it is about six. Last Wednesday the US began to bomb ISIS oil convoys, their main source of funds! Four years down the track.

 

On this woeful record Obama should be toast; Republic candidates for nomination should be ripping him apart.

 

But are they? Nope!

 

Not one seems at all bothered by mayhem in Syria, the ISIL threat, the strong possibility of a Paris-style terrorist attack in New York or Washington. They are obsessed with refugees, who have been compared to rabid dogs.

 

They see Obama’s decision to allow 10,000 asylum-seekers into the US (Frau Merckel has 1 million or thereabouts) as the end of civilisation as we know it. There have been calls for State Troopers to round up and remove all asylum seekers, and 26 State  Governors have said that they will refuse to accept refugees. The State Department might have a contrary view.

 

New Jersey’s Chris Christie says he will not even allow orphan five-year olds. Mike Huckabee says that Minnesota would be too cold! A Louisiana senator reckons that Obama is directly importing terrorists into his state. Ted Cruz, another front-runner for the nomination, reckons there should be a ‘litmus test’ that would bar devout Moslems.

The Republican boss in Tennessee reckons that his National Guard should round-up all  Syrians living there and throw them out of the State. All 30 of them!

 

And best of all is Donald Chump. If elected he promises to send every single Syrian back home. He says he saw thousands of Moslems celebrating in the streets of New Jersey on 9/11, although nobody else did, and he advocates closing mosques and places frequented by Moslems for fear of radicalisation. All this while building 2000  miles of wall coast-to coast to keep out Mexican ‘rapists and murderers’.

 

But the race to the bottom was surely completed when the utterly shameful internment of American of Japanese origin during WW2 plus the rejection of thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany is lauded as ‘way to go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Airport security? Don't make me laugh!

About 57 years ago I embarked on my first long-haul flight, from Gatwick to Salisbury Rhodesia.

 

I arrived at the terminal, a large Nissan hut left over from the war, which was the totality of Gatwick Airport in those days.

 

I presented my ticket, checked in my bag, passed Immigration with scarcely a cursory nod from the officer, and ambled onto the aircraft; elapsed time – ten minutes maximum.

 

Since that time I have criss-crossed the world and logged hundreds of passenger-hours My last (and it almost certainly will be now that air travel has ceased to be a mildly pleasurable adventure and become a deeply unpleasant ordeal) was from the Isle of Man to Gatwick, taxi to Heathrow, flight to Bangkok and finally to Chiang Mai.

 

That entailed three passes through ‘security’. And it’s a cruel farce. Jacket off, shoes off , belt off, laptop out. A tube of toothpaste is discovered in my carry-on. Out it goes. Then the aftershave.

 

Never mind the ‘sharps’. Woe betide you if you are found concealing nail scissors. Quite how you could hijack a 747 thus armed is a secret known only to ‘them’. A while back there was an amusing letter in the Telegraph from an airline Captain who recounted how this very thing happened to him. When he got into his seat at the business end of his jumbo, he was sitting next to the fire axe. In response, an airport policemen recounted how they also have to go through the identical checks while armed to the teeth with sub-machine guns, Tasers, tear gas and handcuffs.

 

But we can all acquire a handy weapon quite legally and openly.          A smashed litre bottle bought in  Duty Free or on-board might do rather more damage than nail scissors. The simple answer is for all duty-free liquor to be sold in plastic bottles, as they are in the bonded store. Much less weight also, although the contents will be just as flammable, which suggest  duty free sales at ‘arrivals’ instead of ‘departures’.

 

Which brings us to the nonsense of liquids. Scientists will say that it is impossible to manufacture a bomb from liquids whilst sitting in an economy-class seat (or anything else for that matter). The liquids ban is a fiction. Nobody has ever been detained for carrying suspicious liquids. And nobody has ever been detained as a result of removing their shoes!

 

None of this rigmarole has much to do with anti-terrorism.  But in the wake of recent events stand by for the politicians to start waffling about ‘increasing airport security even if this means more delays at check-in’. Those are the words of the Foreign Secretary already. And yet the TSA has a budget of $7 billion without detecting a single terrorist in 10 years.

 

The security systems are a bad joke: in undercover operations, Department of Home Security inspectors got fake bombs and firearms through the screening process in  67 out of 70 tests.

 

Passengers ought not to be prime suspects in  terrorist threats. Baggage handlers should be high on the list since they have no difficulty in opening passenger bags to steal valuables (30,000 reported cases in the US last year).

 

The simple truth is that airport security has never played a role in frustrating terrorist attack plans; all have been the result of good intelligence.

 

There is a solution, one which I advocated at least a year ago, and that is to follow best practice as demonstrated by El Al. I have a friend who does consultancy assignments in Gaza which means frequent air travel via Israel. He has never had a problem; security clearance is swift and thorough with minimum inconvenience to passengers,

 

So how do they do it?

 

This is where the evil pf PC rears its ugly head.

 

Instead of looking for weapons the Israelis look for suspects, and this means profiling. Hebrew-speaking Israelis get scant attention. A woman in a burka might warrant rather more but not necessaril. The El Al approach is not based on stereotypes but on psychological observation.

 

Insider threats are a particular danger; it is pretty certain that if the Sinai disaster was caused by a bomb, the most likely culprits will be airside workers – cleaners, refuellers, marshallers etc. It was certainly not a passenger!

 

The whole airport security structure is an unfunny farce designed to deceive us into believing that ‘something is being done’ when it is nothing  more than theatre.

 

 

SNP: Scotland's democratic dictatorship......

In a ‘word association’ test of ‘SNP’ the English would say ‘independence’, ‘referendum’, ‘thugocracy’ and not much more. Sturgeon keeps returning to the demand for another referendum like a dog returning to its vomit.

Her latest stunt is for her Gorbals headbangers in the Commons to propose an amendment to the Scotland Bill, giving the absolute right of the Scottish Parliament (i.e. Rosa Kleb herself) to hold a referendum on the break-up of the United Kingdom. Of course, this has no chance of being accepted but it will provide the Nats with yet another excuse – if they needed one – to press the ‘grievance’ button, always a sure way to  throw dust in the eyes of the Scottish electorate as to the appalling mess Sturgeon and comrades are making of governance in Scotland.

The English, meanwhile, are largely oblivious or indifferent to the fact that the Nats have governed Scotland since 2007. They wasted no time in grabbing virtually all the levers of power, making Scotland one of the most highly centralised countries in the world.

And a nice mess they have made of it, with more, much more, to come.

An early move was to consolidate all constabularies into a single force, Police Scotland. This is a self-evident absurdity, the very notion that an area the size of Belgium varying from highly urbanised areas such as Glasgow to remote crofts, small and remote hamlets. Outer islands and the vast Highlands can be policed as a single entity and controlled and managed by a single Chief Constable is risible. (He has taken an early bath, and his successor is being sought. Hardly surprising!)

But not to a totalitarian, top-down, one size fits all, control freakery.  It suits Sturgeon very well to have a single copper at her beck and call in Edinburgh to carry out her every instruction, and who is accountable to a single police authority appointed by –yes, that’s right – the SNP nomenklatura.

It is therefore hardly surprising that 50,000 fewer crimes are cleared up annually than under the previous eight police forces or that there are scandals like the woman lying dying in a car crash for three days before the police responded to the emergency call that was made shortly after the accident. Or that it took the police twenty hours to respond to an emergency call concerning an elderly and disabled woman. They found her dead lying next to her dead husband.

Small wonder then that coppers are leaving the service in droves.

There is one proposal that could have been penned by George Orwell.

It is called ‘GIRFEC’ which stands for ‘getting it right for every child’. Under the proposal every child will be allocated a state guardian (by the SNP, of course). Their function will be to ‘monitor what children and young people need’.  This state-appointed busybody will ensure that the child is ‘safe, healthy, achieving, nurtured, active, respected, responsible and included’.

The roles of parents, doctors and teachers will be irrelevant and immaterial. Children will be brainwashed by a political party that has a majority of one - 64 MSPs, all Socialist control-freaks. State guardians will be able to quiz social workers, doctors, teachers, police, without consulting parents.

Turning to the state of the NHS in Scotland, the Nats made it into a political football, and had the effrontery to criticise the NHS in England despite the fact that Scotland has been 100% responsible for its own health care since the creation of the Scottish Parliament. In eight years it has done nothing to improve the service, but it has increased its grip on health boards.

Meanwhile, waiting times have risen considerably. The NHS share of budget has fallen whereas England’s has risen.

There was a time when Scottish education was arguably the best in the world. Its people have always been highly literate and numerate. Scotland had seven universities when England had only, and they admitted almost-penniless students like David Livingstone.

Now standards have dropped from middling to poor, 140,000 college places have been cut. The ban on tuition fees has led to fewer, not more, students from poor backgrounds, who are half as likely to go to university as the English equivalents. To help pay for the abolition of fees, grants to students have been cut. And literacy skills at primary schools are getting worse.

Local government has been emasculated by the transfer of powers to the centre. Councils themselves are up to their sporrans in debt notwithstanding generous funding by the UK government.

Meanwhile, the SNP MPs are intending to refresh the West Lothian Question by opposing the Government’s proposal to liberalise Sunday trading in England. ‘Turkeys’ and ‘Christmas’ come to mind.

The best is yet to come – the EU referendum.

What will happen if Scotland votes to stay and the rest of UK votes to leave? Grounds for divorce, perhaps? And what happens if the Scottish vote turns a ‘leave’ vote in the rest of the UK  into a ‘stay’ majority overall?

What a pretty kettle of Arbroath smokies!