Republican flesh-eaters........

Our daily real time reality show is producing scripts that could not be written. It was madness on the part of the GOP and the Republican National Committee to allow monthly debates among contenders for the presidency. The candidates are eating one another's flesh.

It will get worse I am sure, but as a prelude to the next episode, the leftish opinion rag, Politico, announced a sex harassment scandal involving the Republican's favorite African-American, Herman Cain. Hermie quickly replied that he was framed as the harassment never took place even though the two female aids in question were compensated to leave their jobs and keep mum.

Not content with Politico's refusal to expose its sources, Cain charged a Rick Perry aid with the leak. It was an aid who had previously assisted Hermie in his political career. Rick rebounded by accusing the Romney camp of creating the leak. The big question for the next debate is as dramatic as who killed JR. Namely, who will be standing next to whom. If the choreography is not right, candidates are at risk of engaging in fisticuffs. Alternatively, they could be separated by cyclone fences. We shall see.

Again, Obama is winning the debate for the Republican presidential candidate while the Republicans are viciously split between moderate and ultra-right and no single candidate can command the allegiance of a majority. Oddly, Newt Gingrich may be their only hope; mind you out of a rather pathetic field. Romney continues to lull everyone to sleep and remains indelibly branded with Mormanism, as if it were a plague rather than a religion.

Cain is out as well he should have been from the beginning, and not because of his alleged sexual harassment, (another of his alleged victims has surfaced) but because he is unfit to lead the free world. Rick Perry cannot extract his foot from his mouth. Enter Newt who may well carry the GOP flag and if so may also assure Obama of a second term.

Thinking and open minded Americans are looking for a president they can trust. In spite of a golden opportunity to do so, the GOP has not been able to surface a candidate that meets that single criteria.

American resurgence? An American view!

Your trust in America is heartening, but I do hope that if you are correct, and I believe you are, our resurrection will  not be at the expense of our forefathers. I often hoped that the US and UK would forge stronger and more visible ties with respect to trade, human mobility, investment, and academic exchange programs.

These hopes have been seriously compromised by the results of Tony Blair's open immigration policy, on again-off again relations with the EU, and our own immigration problems that are best defined as allowing illegals in while everyone else seeking entry must stand in a queue that extends to outer space.

Personally I would not mind at all if the US were to fall from number one in the rank of nations. My only problem is who would supercede us.

China looms large and looming large is China's problem. Russia, nope, it will kill itself. Europe, which really means Germany, and that would not do, would it? India, not bloody likely with their caste and other social issues that will seemingly never be sorted. Brazil, steeped in crime and wont be  ready for the premier league for eons to come. The UK? Been there, done that, knows better.

We take ourselves too seriously and lack a sense of humor. Our puritan origins plague us with godly intentions in the direction of establishing world peace, extracting bad guys, cultural imperialism, and helping old ladies across streets that they never intended to cross.

We will blindly relieve Muslim women of their burqas without reference to their feeling naked without them. We feel that we have a monopoly on culture even though we don't have one ourselves. OK, jazz may be an exception.

Nor can we understand why nobody likes us. We give to the poor, respond to natural disasters, feed the hungry and support a legion of missionaries around the globe and including Europe.

What more could we possibly do to prove our devotion to the peoples of the world?

The resurgence of America...

Now for some good news.

The leftie pundits and Guardianistas have been smacking their chops and drooling at the pleasing prospect of America’s imminent demotion as the world’s leading economy, military power and general big-shot to a more modest status and a declining economy, falling living-standards, and permanent unemployment problems.

I think I may have to disappoint them.

I have just acquired a new book, ‘The American Phoenix’ from Lombard Street Research economists, who have a different tale to tell. I have yet to read it but a scan-read reveals some fascinating economic projections.

Let me begin with the all-important topic of fuel and energy self-sufficiency.

The US is now the world’s biggest producer of natural gas, having overtaken even the massive Russian production that supplies half Europe. This is mainly due to the shale gas revolution and especially the development of fracking. My friend Jim Fideldy, a life-time oil man, told me last year that travelling around ND was a revelation. It’s boomsville, with all the attendant stresses such as soaring rents and an acute shortage of both accommodation and labour. He said that he was offered three jobs in quick succession. Texas is also prospering from shale. The US had the highest net growth in oil supply last year, and shale oil is set to  produce 5.5 million barrels a day by 2015, which would be a 10-fold increase from 2009.

Amazingly, the US already meets 72% of its needs.

It would be a very perceptive person who could identify the geopolitical, economic and military implications of all this, but clearly they are huge. Dependency on the Middle East will soon begin to evaporate for the US at a time when Europe is becoming more dependent.

Where does this leave the UK?

We have vast shale oil deposits in the Irish Sea which we are already fracking.

But inevitably the Greens are making mischief, claiming that it is environmentally dangerous and causes earthquakes! These idiots would have us back in caves, but not dressed in skins because that would be contrary to animal welfare.

There are also some seismic shifts in other areas. ‘Off-shoring’ is turning into ‘on-shoring’ as a huge amount of work returns to the US, especially from China. This includes computers, electrical equipment, machinery, vehicle manufacture, plastics, rubber, and even furniture – the very things that made China the huge supplier of cheap goods and a favoured location for low-cost factories.

One reason for this is that wage inflation in China is currently running at 16%, so the wages-gap is closing rapidly, and the present dollar exchange rate makes US goods very competitive. But there are other causes – shipping costs, reliability and build-quality problems. And chickens can be seen coming home to roost as businesses lose patience with Chinese technology piracy and theft of intellectual property. The Chinese government has also introduced a $10000 annual levy on foreign workers.

It is estimated that as many as 800,000 jobs could be repatriated to the US by 2015 to make a total increase in employment of over 3 million – always remembering that it takes about 5 years after economic recovery before employment recovery reaches previous levels.

So the US has some pretty good cards to play, including the fact that it has a fertility rate of over 2 % in contrast to Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy and Russia (the UK is just on 2%), so it is not facing the massive aging population problem of Europe, which will be ruined by its pensions burden without major changes. And it is very significant that the US has 5 of the world’s top 10 universities (and amazingly England has the other 5!).

This leaves Europe ‘sucking off the hind tit’ as our old farmers would say.

The Euro is over-valued, partly as a result of deliberate and disastrous policy by the ECB in keeping rates above the UIS, UK and Japan, and partly because China is shifting part of its $10 TRILLION cash mountain into EMU bonds. This has led to a collapse in foreign direct investment of more than 60% in three years. The lack of competiveness has in turn led to a hollowing out of Europe’s industrial base. German productivity and efficiency means that for them the Euro is just fine compared with what the Dm would have been, but Germany’s surpluses mean that there must be corresponding deficiencies elsewhere in the Eurozone, as we see in the Club Med.

So if this analysis is correct, the US will remain as king of the midden!

Another letter from America.

The gaiety of nations was further enhanced by Ghadafi's demise and the immediately subsequent realization that his nemeses are not different than he was when it came to brutalizing, torture and murder. Everyone should have known that, at least everyone who has hourly access to international think tanks, security briefings and the latest intelligence reports. I guess Hillary Clinton really meant it when she said we should wait and see what the revolutionaries in Libya will be like. Worse, for Hillary, was her remark on a live microphone. On learning of Ghadafi's assassination she giddily remarked words to the effect that 'we came, we saw, he died". Everyone laughed at a remark that was in extremely poor taste.

The good news is that the UK will now man its merchant fleet near Somalia with soldiers, presumably marines as that was their raison d'etre. It is about time someone plucked the courage to confront the Somali gangs. What is amazing is that nobody did this a long time ago. It will be difficult for the pirates to combat the embedded riflemen as they lack the skills, training and capacities to do so. You might want to think about positioning some marines aboard freighters operating in the Straits of Malacca and the South China and Java Seas as well. The Bougis and their associates still account for a kings ransom in pirated fees.

Some native Americans are taking exception to the celebration of Thanksgiving as they equate the  event more with decimation of their population than with giving thanks for a serious lack of bounty. True, some few Indians aided the Pilgrims in their quest for food, but for the most part, relations became increasingly intolerant. By the time the Indian Wars of the 1870's occurred, nobody was thanking anybody.

An interesting media drama is unfolding as I write. The satellite TV company, DirecTV, which is the service provider of choice just now, announced that the Fox Network and its owner, News Corp, has decided to increase the cost of News Corp TV programs provided to DirecTV by 40%. DirecTV was not at all happy with this move. Is Murdoch is trying to recover some of his losses relating to the hacking incidents in the UK? The stakes are big because Fox News is popular, but even moreso are the New Corp-owned sports channels. You can take world and national news away from us, but we will rebel if you remove the sports. I imagine something will be worked out between them.

Footballer is ******* white ****

Having had to depart from a local pub rapidly due to ‘football’ being shown simultaneously on five wide-screen TVs on a Greek satellite with volume at maximum so that the furniture vibrated and the commercials were all in Greek, I yield to no-one in my loathing of a kid’s game that now involves 22 men kicking a round  ball from  one end of a field to another with the object of placing it between two sticks and getting paid £1 million a week for this 90 minutes of tomfoolery.

The saving grace is that the that the moral delinquents who get into the red-tops more for the stories that come from their swimming in the soccer cesspool than for actually playing the game do, often unwittingly, add to the gaiety of nations.

Currently there is a big hoo-hah over a white player who was very rude about a gentleman of colour; I am not sure whether they play for the same team, but it is not germane anyway.

The nub of it all is that he is being investigated for racism with a possible view to prosecution under one or other of the laws brought in by NuLab to criminalise us all.

Thanks to a piece which will appear in Rod Liddle’s column in the Speccie next week we now get a glimpse of what this is all about.

It seems that the miscreant called the innocent party a ‘f*****g black c**t’.

The stasi are not going for him because of the foul language, which is now so common in some circles that it is considered normal speech, having lost its power to shock through frequent use.

No, it is ‘black’ that is considered to be offensive.

But he is black. This is the only bit of truth in the insult. Regarding this as offensive is surely racist in itself and the representatives of the race relations industry who are pursuing this should surely be the ones in the dock.

If the boot had been on the other foot (in a manner of speaking) would the black guy be up for it by calling the other guy a ‘f*****g white c**t’?

I think we should be told!

********

So farewell, then, Jimmy Saville:

The old weirdo has finally fallen of his twig, snuffed it, gone to meet his maker, shuffled off this mortal coil. God fixed it for Jim.

We know all this because BBC TV News gave this the #1 spot for over 20 minutes. Good to know that all’s right with the world and nothing occurred anywhere more important than the demise of a creepy pop-jock.

Hypocrisy & tax havens

In my piece around this time last year on the topic of tax havens, I poured scorn on the notion that the Swiss would give up their cherished banking secrecy just on the say-so of the US and UK.

Well, the UK has just revealed some details of its ‘transparency’ deal with Switzerland.

In return for disclosing the 20% or so of undeclared accounts that are identifiably British, the Swiss will not be required to reveal anything more. But any fule kno that most off-shore accounts are blind or discretionary trusts or some other vehicle that does not identify the owner. Off-shore banks specialise in these, and there are entire law firms that do nothing else.

And the levy only applies to accounts still held as at May 2013, so anybody idiotic enough to keep his off-shore account in his own name will have 18 months to shift his wedge to another ‘tax haven’. True the Swiss will be required to reveal the number of accounts shifted and the 10 most popular destinations, but not to disclose how much money was moved or by whom.

What’s more, the Swiss and Brits have agreed not to make public any information gathered, so Freedom of Information Act inquiries will get nowhere.

Not that any of this will bother the Swiss or make any difference. The really big amounts of funny money come from Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia and China.

And did you know that although the US insists that the IMF investigates transparency into other countries’ offshore banking practices, it will not allow the IMF into its own banks, notwithstanding that America is the world’s largest tax shelter.

Endangered speicies: the English gentleman...

We have just finished watching a TV documentary about the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The role of this venerable institution is to turn out officers and gentlemen (and ladies these days). We were appalled and disgusted.

Why so?

When I was at Officer Cadet School in the mid-50s, foul language was absolutely forbidden. You might just get away with ‘damn’, but not ‘bloody’, ‘bastard’ and definitely not the ‘f’ or ‘c’ words. An officer cadet would be firmly disciplined and possibly ‘RTU’d’ – returned to unit. A staff member would be out. (But I do remember at a church parade later in my service when a squaddie went into the church wearing his hat. The Sergeant Major bawled out ‘Take your ‘at off, laddie. Show some respect in the House of the Lord, you c**t’).

And yet at modern-day Sandhurst we get an unbroken stream of profanity from the instructors. The deeply unimpressive NCO instructor seemed incapable of speech otherwise. A high proportion of Officer-Cadets are women. Formerly it would have been unthinkable to use foul language in front of women of any class under any circumstances. Now it is commonplace; even young women seem to use the ‘f’ word as a normal and frequent part of speech. Perhaps now we only train officers, even the concept of ‘gentleman’ being incomprehensible.

As the OED defines it, the word conjures up ‘a chivalrous, courteous man’. It has little to do with class. In days past, the labourer might be a perfect gentleman and the Squire anything but.

I remember my old man describing someone as ‘a gentleman-farmer; the only thing he raises is his hat!’

It envisages good manners (like  saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and sending letters of thanks in return  for presents, concepts largely foreign to today’s generation), consideration for others, opening a door for a lady .Years ago when feminism was just taking hold a friend of mine did just this. In reply he got ‘Sexist rubbish’. ‘No, madam, just good manners’ was his reply; but that episode might just give us a clue as to why ‘gentleman’ is no longer understood.

It was not shouting, not boasting, not ‘showing off’, no flashy or scruffy dressing. It was minding your own business and nor asking personal questions especially of people you scarcely knew (the bourgeois cocktail party gambit of opening a conversation with a patronising ‘And what do you do?’ was intended to ‘place’ you and determine early whether you were worth talking to). It was about having good table manners and not eating in the street.

A very important concept used to be ‘a gentleman’s word is his bond’. A friend of mine was a tea trader in London, as was his father and his father’s father before him. They never had paper contracts. He reckoned he would sometimes do two or three deals as he walked from Liverpool Street station to his office in Finsbury Square in the morning, always on no more than the strength of a handshake. Then came the ‘Big Bang’ in the City and American and Dutch traders moved in. Thereafter every deal needed a voluminous written contract.

He left the City.

It was Oscar who said ‘a true gentleman is never rude unintentionally’, although I rather like ‘a gentleman is one who would never hit a woman with his hat on’. And reverting to the military, our weapons training instructors would always advise when lying behind a light machine gun ‘to take the weight on your elbows......like a proper gentleman!’

Why does it matter, if at all? 

Perhaps because it is part of being civilised.

Libya's complicated connections.......

Back in the 80's, I managed a project in Libya from my then base in London. After some months into the project, I became frustrated with client personnel and their seemingly xenophobic attitudes. During one of my site visits, I querried an Egyptian who was working there and he sorted things out for me. He said that Libya is best understood as a completely Bedouin country whose residents remained in a desert state of mind. They sought water by day and warmth by night and little else concerned them. Hence, their apparently dour and indifferent demeanor.

I was satisfied and the intelligence actually helped me get through the project. I even quoted my source from time to time. It was not until yesterday that I realized the facts did not add up. An article on various Libyan caught my attention. It noted that one tribal militia held the Tripoli airport, another the Ghadafi complex and a third the port area. Was not Libya dominated by three major and competing tribes? Some research was needed on the subject.

Libya is decidedly not totally Bedouin, but rather a mixture of Arabs and Berber peoples living in 100's of different tribal groups. Ghadafi was from a tribe of mixed Arab and Berber people called the Gaddadfa. Surnames in Libya are often the same as or very similar to a person's tribe.

Arabs form the majority of the population followed by Berbers. There are also a very large number of mixed Arabs and Berbers, like Ghadafi. An accurate ethnic census of Libya does not exist. Suffice to say the majority are Arabs and Arab-Berber mixes. The pure Berber population is quite small, as are the African or more specifically Nilo-Hamitic Tebu people, some nomadic Hausa and nomadic Tuareg. The latter are a branch of the Berber.

I am not sure of the percentages of ethnic Arab influence, but the Bedouin seem to dominate with considerable contributions from the Beni Selim and Beni Hilal which are of Bedouin origin. Other Arab ethnic groups, especially from Egypt, also penetrated the deserts comprising modern day Libya.

The Berber, or more politically correct the Amazigh, inhabited the area since the stone age. They are ethnically related to the ancient Egyptians and extend all the way to Morocco. The word Berber was imposed on these tribes by the Romans giving the impression that they, and other warring tribes of the time, were uncivilized barbarians. Hence, Berber stems from the word barbarian rather than the other way around. Another misconception of mine.

Libya follows the Sunni Muslim religion with the exception of a small group of Sufi. They are tolerated, but only just.

An index of the Arab and Berber tribes, clans and sub-clans of Libya would be an academic exercise of little immediate interest. Clearly, Libya is ethnically diversified with a mix of formerly nomadic peoples the majority of whom now live uncomfortably together in urban settings along the country's Mediterranean coast.

The future of Libya will heavily depend on the ability of the more dominant of these groups to work out there differences and set aside their ethnic and tribal allegiances. In my opinion, such a requisite is nearly impossible to achieve and Libya will remain ethnically divided, competitive, distrustful and jealous.

Sarko bites the carpet......

Our dear friend and fiend, the poison dwarf, leaves no uncertainty about his feelings for Dave. The entire scenario in Europe exposes a classic theme of dissent between the UK, France and Germany with Italy and Spain being warned to behave themselves. In this case by tightening their belts. It would not do for these two bastions of Club Med living to importune the big boys up north.

I predict the big boys will ultimate become one, Germany, with France reverting to its southern European norms. Meanwhile, the tadpole will make heroic efforts to bark in hopes of keeping Dave and his non-Monetary Union friends in their respective lairs.

I am reminded of a critical period in American history dating back to the drafting of the constitution. Delegates put it together in camera and when it was complete, they wisely decided to put it up to a strictly yes or no vote. None of the 13 colonies were permitted to amend the draft because if the document were opened for scrutiny, it would never become law.

Most of the colonies agreed from the beginning, but some, like New York, faltered owning to the uniqueness of its situation. I believe that a more or less common culture prevailed and the requisite signatures were obtained. There were, by the way, some amendments made and accepted before the final document was produced.

It is inconceivable to me that the UK, Ireland and Europe could agree on any EU type concept as the basis for unity does not exist. Nor should it, as it is the cultural and linguistic and social differences that give these nations their charm, personality and national identity. While the US was in its infancy when the colonies agreed to form a republic, Europe is not. Europe is set in its ways and each member feels its culture is preferable if not superior to the others. While everything would be OK if the Greeks started behaving like Germans, this is not going to happen. Nor will the Greeks comply with regulations proposed by Brussels or Berlin. 

It would be prudent for the dwarf to mind his tongue as the end result of his frustration is an expansion of the cracks in EU solidarity accompanied by increased antipathies between the French and British.

Moreover, Dave has a point and if it is not heard and explained and debated, it will fester. Brussels cannot force the UK to monetarily contribute to Greek financial stabilization as it is a perceived infringement on UK sovereignty. Nor does it help that Dave does not have the money just now to contribute to Greek and other Club Med country stability.

Making common commercial, civil and financial regulations is one thing, but forming a common kitty is quite another.

Adults, leave them kids alone..

I must confess that I have tended to neglect Heffer since he moved to the Daily Wail.

It’s a curious rag. It has some of the best columnists in the business – apart from Heff, there’s Tom Utley, the egregious Richard Littlejohn, and Quentin Letts, the best Parliamentary Sketch writer in the business (and author of a number of very funny books, like ’50 People who buggered-up Britain’.

And yet the news and editorial is so shrill as to border on the hysterical. It’s as if the company mantra is taken from ‘Abide with Me’:

‘Change and decay in all around I see.....’ There is never, ever any good news that I can find but there is a lot that is trumped-up.

I particularly dislike the way it demonises the younger, under-25, generation, but as this seems to be a national pastime maybe the paper is only reflecting its readers’ attitudes.

Here is an example.

A couple of weeks ago it published a series of photos supporting a shock-horror spread about binge drinking amongst young women, showing them vomiting, striking crude poses, or lying dead-drunk in the street. It went on to say that such scenes are witnessed all over the UK every week-end (they have ways of knowing what happens all over Britain every week-end). Well, not on my manor, squire.

And this was just a reprise of a similar spread 2 years ago of pictures that were mostly taken 5 years ago.

So let’s see if we can get a bit of balance in this.

Sure there is misbehaviour amongst the young, ranging from booze to crime. It was ever thus. There was not much recorded juveniles crime 50 years ago for the simple reasons that there were very few 18 – 20 year olds on the streets, being mostly in the services (which the unthinking suggest should be brought back), and because the police preferred to give miscreants a good thraping rather than go to all the bother of prosecutions.

And the reason you didn’t see drunks lying in the street was because in those days the Old Bill enforced the law on ’drunk and incapable’ which they clearly fail to do now, like much else. Another reason is that there was not the affluence of modern times, but when we had the money we tied a few on. Of course, we only drank beer. This was in the days before the drinks-makers deliberately set out to foster under-age drinking through the introduction of alcopops and other vileness.

And exactly how ‘widespread’ is this behaviour. Now here’s a funny thing. It’s always someone else’s kids who are causing mayhem.

So what has the older generation gifted to the younger?

Well, for starters an education system that has been mucked about for 40 years and has as a consequence become increasingly dysfunctional to the extent that vast numbers of school-leavers are functionally illiterate, who have standards of literacy of 9-year olds, who are becoming incoherent as their spoken vocabulary is alarmingly small, and who are effectively unemployable in an economy that no longer demands sheer muscle-power. We have ‘universities’ that are a laughing stock, that run useless course such as the history of lace-making in the Shetlands and ‘football studies’. We have an acute shortage of graduates in ‘hard’ studies such as physics and maths, so that although job opportunities are there in abundance there is a massive mismatch between what business and industry need and what the educational system is prepared to supply.

At the same time we turn schools into examination mills that put enormous stress on youngsters. In my time we sat for 5 ‘O’ levels at 16, 3 ‘A’ levels at 18 plus 1 ‘S’ level for those seeking a County Scholarship to university. Now the poor little devils sit for maybe 10 or 12 ‘O’ levels.

Through our greed, fecklessness and improvidence we have bequeathed huge burdens of debt to our children and grandchildren together with declining living standards, smaller pensions and later retirement.

We have brought up our kids without any concept of discipline so that we now have the 1984’ish position whereby attempts at disciplining a child may result in a visit from the police or social workers. ‘Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law’.

In Jamaica a couple of years back I was chatting to some British army NCOs who were there for jungle training. They told me about recruitment problems and why so many ‘colonials’ get into the army. Partly it was because the standard of education of recruits was too low but also it was lack of even the most basic idea of discipline to the extent that they were totally mystified as to why they were required to get out of bed before 11 a.m. This was not defiance; it was incomprehension.

And what sort of role models have we given them? Spud-faced footballers who get £1 million a week for kicking a ball once a week for 90 minutes, who have the sexual mores of the farm yard; coke-snorting anorexics also paid large sums to wear awful clothes; untalented sluts who are famous for being famous; ‘pop’ singers who flaunt their sexual preferences but without any noticeable talent; and crooked leaders.

Parents obese to the point of obscenity feed them on junk and take-aways, never cook a meal for them and never sit down to eat with them. We encourage them in obesity, ban competitive sports, and hedge them around with ludicrous health and safety rules so that they grow up unfit, fat and risk averse.

And we have the chutzpah to criticise?

As the old song says ‘I’m glad I’m not young anymore!’

The White House marathon....a long and winding road

The big domestic news remains the Republican presidential nomination debates. This exercise in political masochism is finally being recognized for what it is. Although only about half finished with their scheduled number of debates, viewers and pundits alike are beginning to question the wisdom of this type of political forum. Predictably, as a candidate rises to the top of the polls, the other candidates begin to tear the person apart by making accusations, bringing up past blunders, and asking 'gotcha' questions. The latter being questions designed to embarrass or berate candidates.

What all this does bring out, in full public view is the integrity, vulnerability, mean spiritedness, toughness and resilliance of the candidates. Rick Perry, Governor or Texas, asked Mitt Romney, the current leading contender, why Mitt hired illegal workers to mow his lawn. This was intended to embarrass Romney and to expose him as a liar with respect to his stand against illegal immigration. The problem was that Mitt's worker was not directly hired by him, but was employed by the landscaping company Mitt had hired. 

This example illustrates Perry's lack of  forethought and outright stupidity in thinking that he could expose (gotcha) Romney. Mitt, for his part, simply told the truth and further stated that he had fired the firm as soon as he learned it employed illegals. The end result? Perry looks like a fool. Romney looks like a victim, but should have nevertheless been more thorough in hiring people and, most important, Obama looks like a candidate for sainthood.

It is beyond me why candidates that are so obviously unfit to rule, like Perry, would even think of subjecting themselves to the judgement of the tv audience. I can only conclude that Perry does not even understand himself, let alone national and world politics. Following closely in his footsteps is Michele Bachmann who has managed to memorize about six phrases which she weaves into the answer to every question she is asked. Herman Cain, an outstanding black businessman, is high in the rankings, but lacks the political and economic depth to prevail.

Rick Santorum, who served as a Senator from Pennsylvania, shows promise, but gushes at the mouth, and seems unable to keep his wits about him, but should prove increasingly capable with maturity. Ron Paul is a non-starter, but with some major assets. He is solidly logical although often impractical. He is a Libertarian and as such does not quite fit into either the Republican or the ultra-Conservative Tea Party mold.

Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is doing extremely well except in the polls. He is bright, experienced, clever, profound and infested with personal issues. His brain is too capacious for his ego and he is forever making the types of faux pas that I associate with an individual who is excessively intelligent but lacking in wisdom. He should be a senior advisor without a cabinet position.

After Gadaffi.......what?

You must see Peter Oborne's article in the DT on Ghadaffi's demise. It brings the post-Ghadaffi situation into focus and perspective.

My take at the moment is that Libya will not be settled until the tribes are isolated from one another which of course means dividing country into two or three smaller and independent nations. I know this idea is popular among Americans as we have divided Viet Nam and Korea and probably should have divided Iraq by at least separating the Kurds.

Peter's insights offer little alternative than independence for the major Bedouin tribes. He also mentioned Berber people in Libya's western mountains. I was unaware of their presence in Libya. It explains why one of the revolutionaries featured recently on tv here had a Berber name.

I just cannot see another solution and I have no hope at all that the forces of democracy will iron out the enmities, jealousy and distrust that prevails between the tribes.

Your William Hague is in Tripoli now; brave lad. His meetings with Mustafa Jalil are making history as I write. I doubt that dividing Libya is on the agenda, but Jalil and his National Transitional Council will need massive doses of help and experience and good luck before the tribal differences can be resolved.

There is also the big question of disarming the revolutionaries. Peter noted that Kalishnikov rifles are so plentiful that their street cost is only $800, down from $4,000.

This cannot be right. When I worked in Yemen about 12 years ago, they were selling for $50 each. Also, I can buy a state of the art assault rifle here in Texas for about $400 and less technical models for half that price.

Libya must be swimming in money if they can get $800 for an AK 47.

Obama beats Gadaffi....

So there was Obama on TV thanking the brave men and women of the US forces for their great victory in Libya. He also managed about four words to indicate that some others were also involved.

Except that there were 20 countries making a military contribution, most NATO some not.

From the outset, Obama was clear that US participation would be ‘low key’.

The heavy lifting was done by the British and French who carried out most of the air-strikes.

So, to the tune of ‘Mademoiselle from Armentieres’, altogether now:

 ‘It wasn’t the Yanks who won the war,

Parley-vous,

It wasn’t the Yanks who won the war,

Parley-vous,

It wasn’t the Yanks who won the war,

The Brits and Frogs were there before.

Inky, pinkie parley-vous!’

The Euro conspiracy unravels

Europe continues to sleep-walk into disaster. We have the ludicrous spectacle of Sarko as bag-carrier for Angular. We have him telling the world that France and Germany are in accord, but he doesn’t tell us about what. The Economist quotes a Eurocrat as saying that this ‘partnership’ hides ‘the strength of Germany and the weakness of France’.

France has not had a budget surplus for nearly 40 years. It has one of the biggest debt ratios in the Eurozone. Its AAA rating is in doubt. And Angular has just given Sarko a firm ‘Nein!’ when he tried to persuade her to ante-up to save the Dexia bank. The solution to the Euro’s problems lies in sorting out Greece once and for all (and default seems inevitable, with Angular wanting the depositors to take a bigger haircut than they signed up to), throwing a firewall around solvent countries, recapitalising the banks, and re-writing the rules.

Now the wheels are coming off with a vengeance. It wasn’t meant to be like this.

When the Euro was first contemplated all those years ago, knowledgeable voices were raised against it, pointing out that anyone with ‘O’ level economics or a basic knowledge of history would see that a ‘one size fits all’ currency was a chimera, an unworkable fantasy, because different economies had different needs and were at different levels of development and efficiency.

History had shown that every time a multi-national currency had been tried it had failed. For example, if you had one economy that needed an interest-rate reduction to stimulate growth and another needed an interest rate increase to cool down inflation you would have a situation that was absolutely irreconcilable and could only end in tears.

And so it has proved.

It was cheap money that slew the Celtic Tiger, after it embarked on a crazy spending-spree causing rampant inflation when an interest rate hike was essential to cool it. The antis were derided by the pro-Euro claque as economic Neanderthals, Little Englanders, Luddites, and every other epithet that the Guardianistas could throw at them. But now the Great Conspiracy unravels. Brussels knew all along that a Eurozone couldn’t work without more.

That was part of the game-plan.

The Euro was just a step along the road. It was a tactical measure. The Eurozone was designed to fail. The real objective was not currency union but political union. A single currency cannot succeed without it, as the Brussels mafia well understood.

What was essential was the transfer of budgetary and fiscal powers to Brussels, so that individual member states would lose any control over national budgets, interest rates, taxation levels, borrowing powers – in short, all the elements essential to the independent nation-state. The members would become satraps of the EU Empire.

The dominant parties would be Germany and France. Germany would be the senior partner because of population size and economic strength. The French would be the German’s understrapper. With the advent of monetary/political union in Europe, all of Hitler’s war aims would have been achieved except for the wide-gauge railway between Berlin and Moscow.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich.

Mixing the breed....

Mixed marriage has become something of a hot topic, possibly because latest surveys show that they are on the increase and that mixed-race births are on the increase (well they would be, wouldn’t they) and partly because of a TV series headed up by George Alagaiah.

George is the ideal person for the programme. He is an enormously experienced foreign correspondent, now a BBC anchor, speaks Received English, is extremely good-looking, and he is a Sri Lankan married to an English woman.

I am not entirely unacquainted with the subject. A close relative successively married an English woman, a Malaysian, and a Chinese. Thirty-odd years ago, an Irish friend who was a judge in Botswana married the Indian headmistress of the local girls school, and used restaurants and hotels in neighbouring South Africa at the height of apartheid without ever being challenged. I have another chum who is built like an anorexic jockey married to a statuesque Jamaican with a brilliant daughter at University. There is a local guy married to a Vietnamese who has really got his life sorted. She is Executive Vice President of an international company and he fishes all day in the Mekong River. I worked with a Jamaican Rhodes Scholar married to an English artist; unsurprisingly the kids are very bright indeed.

And why not?

The simple truth is that we English are the product of ethnic mixing since time began; Picts, Scots, Iceni,  Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frieslanders, Scandinavians, Normans, Jews, Huguenots, Italians, West Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Indians, Chinese and  all the rest of the great melting pot that makes us what we are.

And there is a great deal of truth in the old saw that it’s a wise child that knows  its own father. Some years ago, the Sunday Times did a DNA study of a select group from various ethnic backgrounds. The West Indian who guessed his paternal ancestor might have been a slave from Sierra Leone, as in ‘Roots’,  discovered that  he was German down the paternal line. There was a German influx to Jamaica in the early 19^th century (hence Germanstown) which interbred and has now vanished, except in one remote village where they have clung to both their racial identity and their language).

The great irony is that we now know that Alex Haley himself was actually Welsh in the paternal line!

There are some sound biological reasons for mixing the breed. Exclusiveness tends to make the stock deteriorate with humans as with animals. That is why so many of the aristocracy seem to come from the shallow end of the gene pool. And maybe why the mongrel English have such a propensity for strong drink, lechery, riotous assembly, fighting, exploration, Empire-building, and survival.

From observation, mixed marriages are as successful as others, perhaps more so because it takes particular binding to succeed against the prejudice of others. Where they fail seems to be mostly due to irreconcilable cultural differences. A Muslim man marrying an American woman would soon be in trouble if he tried to treat her as if they were in Islamabad not New York. Similarly an English woman who married her Renta Rasta would rapidly find that marital fidelity was not on his agenda.

But there is one aspect that Dave has promised to deal with (and he always keeps his promises, don’t he) and that is discrimination in adoption. Homosexual men can adopt boys with all the attendant dangers but woe betide a mixed-race couple who try to adopt a child. The race relations industry, being by definition racist, has a policy on this. Remember the white husband and Asian wife? They couldn’t adopt a white child because she was too dark, and they couldn’t adopt a coloured child because he was too light. Truly, it’s a mad, mad world, my masters!

Years ago there was little race consciousness in the UK, probably because most people had never seen a person of colour. In 1955, the non-white population was only 125,000. That was the year I entered the army, and in all my service when I must have seen literally thousands of soldiers nary a one was black. The pendulum now seems to be swinging back. To the younger generation, pigment is an irrelevance; in fact, it is becoming distinctly cool to be of mixed race, with so many role-models around, like Lewis Hamilton. Open the pages of the Sunday Times ‘Style’ magazine and many or most of the models have honey-coloured skin.

One of the most extraordinary products of a mixed race marriage is Mechai Vivavaidya.

Mechai’s father was one of the Thai elite. In the 1930’s he was selected for medical training in Scotland. There he met a Scots student whom he married after they both qualified as doctors. The circumstances of their marriage were a reflection of the times and the attitude towards miscegenation. To her family, marriage across a colour line was to be deplored; to his he was seen to be marrying beneath himself.

But it was a great success and they practiced medicine together in Bangkok.

Mechai went to school and university in Australia. Some years after his return to Thailand he founded the Population and Community Development Association which promoted birth control and in particular the use of condoms partly to counter the growing AIDS problem and partly to arrest the alarming population growth rate. When he began his campaign the average family was 7 children. Today it is 1.5.

People who have met him say his personality is such that you can feel him enter a room; truly magnetic. He clearly has the charm and intelligence of his Thai family background and the sheer grit of his Scottish mother.

His biography is ‘From Cabbages to Condoms’; it is riveting.

Of course, you will always get the ‘sucker’ question ‘Would you like your daughter to marry a coloured man?’ That one telegraphs its arrival about three days in advance. The answer is ‘It’s not the colour, stoopid, it’s the culture!’ If my daughter wanted to marry a Jamaican, I would look at him carefully because some Jamaicans make notoriously bad husbands. If she wanted to marry Lewis Hamilton, I would do handstands! She’s old enough to be his granny.


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