Filed under: Intelligence, National Security, The United States, United Kingdom | Tags: Britain's MI6 and MI5, Terrorism in Yemen, U.S. Intelligence Community
Good news on the intelligence front has not been particularly plentiful. So when news that a new underwear plot was foiled, too much information was the problem. Former agents from the U.S. intelligence community are blaming the Obama administration for undermining national security and compromising the British intelligence establishment, MI6 and MI5.
Mike Scheur, former head of the CIA’s Bin Laden unit, said that leaking about the nuts and bolts of British involvement was despicable and would make a repeat of the operation difficult. “MI6 should be as angry as hell. This is something that the prime minister should raise with the president, if he has the balls. This is really tragic” Scheur said.”Any information is too much information. This does seem to be a tawdry political thing.”
Robert Grenier, former head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, in an article for al-Jazeera, said the spies of the US intelligence community “rather than quietly celebrating success are wistfully shaking their heads…As the director of national intelligence launches an investigation, he does so knowing the real culprits—in the White House and on Capitol Hill — are beyond his reach. He added “As for British intelligence, …they must be really unhappy. …The Americans are doing a very good jjob of undermining trust, and the problem starts at the top.”
It was clear that the information from this agent could have gone on for some time, when it was cut off by a leak. His intelligence was helping to target crucial drone strikes within Yemen, including one that killed the man responsible for the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The leak appears to have frustrated a painstaking and risky operation.
Yemen has been a key target country for the CIA and MI6 in line with the growing strength of Aqap in recent years. But the lead on the ground has been taken by the Saudi intelligence service, the Mabahith, which is best placed to operate in the local environment and exploit links on either side of the border.
Filed under: Australia, Europe, Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology, United Kingdom | Tags: Global Warming Skepticism, Obama Wants More Money, Public Skepticism
The European Union’s climate policy is in freefall. Carbon prices (they do cap-and-trade) have lost nearly 14% of their value (April 2). The already depressed carbon price dropped from €7 to a record low of €6.14 by early afternoon.
The Germans are dumping their subsidies for solar energy. The British government has rejected the bogus economics of climate change, though they are not quite ready to announce it formally.
Europe is coming to the realization that on top of all their other economic problems, they don’t need to be subsidizing expensive solar energy that hikes the power bills for the public while producing little energy.
In Canada, Lawrence Solomon writes in The Financial Post that the world is awash in oil, and in the future, the MIddle East will go back to being an obscure backwater because the world will no longer be dependent on its oil.
The Aussies are not happy with Prime Minister Julia Gaillard’s climate efforts and taxes, and are showing their displeasure at the polls, tossing out their Labour government.
And at the University of East Anglia, a new postgraduate course hopes to bring together researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop “new ways of thinking about environmental change and social transitions.” If you have experience in writing “eco-poetry” the UEA wants to hear from you. UAE is noted as the birthphlace of ClimateGate.
Everywhere, a sensible public is becoming more skeptical of outrageous climate claims, and the climate alarmists come up with new stories of impending doom. Dr. Tim Ball, Canadian climate scientist says that “when asked what’s wrong with global warming —most can only say sea level rise.”
And here at home, in alignment with the rest of the world, the Obama administration has requested $770 million in federal funds to combat the effects of global warming in developing countries, according to a congressional report. This continues administration policy of using foreign aid to combat the effects of global warming in the developing world —despite another year of $1 trillion deficits.
According to the Congressional Research Service the administration has spent a total of $2.5 billion on the Global Climate Change Initiative on anti-global warming efforts in Latin America, Asia and Africa. If approved by Congress the latest request would boost foreign climate change spending to $3.3 billion. The money supposedly goes for adaption, clean energy, and sustainable landscapes.
CRS noted that —like most foreign aid programs — there was a high probability that foreign countries would misuse or wast GCCI funds. They also mentioned that “Congress may want to consider the fact that there is a lack of consensus on whether global warming will happen at all.”
Filed under: Iran, Politics, Progressivism, United Kingdom | Tags: David Axelrod, Democrats, Eric Holder, Medvedev, Obama
Bill Whittle addresses this administration and all its works and finds them to be “Merchants of Despair.” Whether intentionally or unintentionally, they have brought Chicago style politics to the nation’s capitol. Actions have consequences, and they did not understand what the consequences of their actions would be.
They thought it was a game, a political game, in which they won, and so could take advantage of the financial crisis to do things that they well knew that the American people did not want. But they did them anyway, in a kind of thumbing of the nose to the public, who did not understand what was afoot.
They brought debt and unemployment, inflation and misery to millions of Americans, and thought it didn’t matter. They used the ‘government’s money’ to pay back those who supported them, and thus rewarded, they can expect support again, to do it all over. That’s not free market capitalism, and not a free country and not a free people. And we don’t do things that way.
Like this:
Filed under: Politics, Foreign Policy, The Constitution, Economy, Conservatism, Freedom, Capitalism, United Kingdom, National Security, The United States, Iran | Tags: Senate Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Strategy and Tactics
This week on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell discusses why the glacial pace of deliberations and decisions in the Senate is a feature, not a bug.
“Once it was clear the president was going to try to turn us into a Western European country as rapidly as he could, about the only strategy you have left when your opposition has a forty-seat majority in the House. . . . We knew we couldn’t stop the agenda. But we thought we had a chance of creating a national debate about whether all of this excess was appropriate. And the key to having a debate, frankly and candidly, was to deny the president, if possible, the opportunity to have any of these things be considered bipartisan.”
This interview will do a lot towards explaining American politics and American government— at least the Senate version. Why the Founders created the Senate the way they did.
Filed under: Economy, Health Care, Progressivism, Capitalism, United Kingdom, Law | Tags: The Supreme Court, Britain's National Health Service, Only "Scare Stories"
As the Supreme Court hears arguments about the fate of ObamaCare, it is useful to once again take a look at the country with the longest experience with socialized medicine. Britain adopted their National Health Service just after World War II.
When we read the accounts of NHS care in the British papers, we are told that they are only “scare stories.” They would never happen here, we are told. Yet, we were told, Obama’s health care advisers — Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Peter Orzak, Tom Daschle, and Dr, Donald Berwick — were all extravagant admirers of the National Health Service. They talked a lot, we were told, about the fact that the highest costs of medicine came in a person’s final years.
That’s where the ideas for the Independent Pay Advisory Board (IPAB) that Congress is trying to repeal right now, came from. That’s where “comparative effectiveness research” came from. Obama even referred to it when confronted with a woman in one of his campaign events, who wanted to know what value ObamaCare would place on ‘zest for life’ when deciding on a procedure for an older person (in this case, her mother who needed a pacemaker at age 100 — got it— and has enjoyed 5 more years and is still going strong). Obama mumbled a little and said something about there was a time when radical expense maybe wasn’t worth it, and pain pills were more in order.
Monday, March 25, 2012, The Telegraph reports: Elderly Dying due to Despicable Age Discrimination in NHS.
A lack of treatment or insufficient treatment is contributing to 14,000 deaths a year in people over the age of 75, Macmillan Cancer Support has found, in what it called an ‘unacceptable act of discrimination’.
Deaths from cancer are reducing in most age groups but at a slower rate in those aged 74 to 84 and are increasing in people aged 85 and over, the report said.
Professor Riccardo Audisio, Consultant Surgical Oncologist at St Helens Hospital, said: “It is despicable to neglect, not to offer, not to even go near to the best treatment option only on the simple basis of the patient’s age. “This has been a horrible mistake that, particularly in the UK, we have suffered from.”
According to research published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, there would be 14,000 fewer deaths from cancer in those aged over 75 per year if mortality rates from cancer matched those in America.
Keep in mind that this is just, we are told, a “scare story” from England, and has nothing to do with ObamaCare.
Free market medicine is based on competition, which helps to keep the costs down, and rewards excellence. Socialized medicine, which offers all things pretending to be “free,” encourages overuse, because nobody really knows what anything costs. It’s just that the taxes keep going up. And both the providers and the administrators focus becomes reducing the cost. Providers try to receive adequate recompense for their efforts; administrators make more rules to slash expenses. The incentives have changed, and excellence goes by the wayside. It’s just the way of the world.
Filed under: Economy, Energy, Environment, Junk Science, United Kingdom | Tags: Extraordinarily Expensive, Not Worth the Cost., Wind Power
One of the United Kingdom’s leading energy and environmental economists has warned that wind power is an extraordinarily expensive and inefficient way of reducing CO2 emissions. There is a significant risk he said, that annual CO2 emissions could be greater as a result of Britain’s flawed wind policies when compared with the option of investing inefficient and flexible gas combined cycle plants.
Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University found that
—Meeting the UK Government’s target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 13 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity at a cost of about £120 billion.
—The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants at a cost of £13 billion — an order of magnitude cheaper than the wind version.
—Under the most favorable assumptions for wind power, the Government’s wind policy will reduce emissions of CO2 at an average cost of £270 per metric ton (at 2009 prices) which means that meeting the UK’s renewable energy target would cost a staggering £78 billion per year in 2020.
The key problems with current wind power policies are simple. They require a huge commitment of investment resources in a technology that is not very green in the sense of saving a lot of CO2, but which is very expensive and inflexible. Unless the UK Government scales back its commitment to wind power very substantially, it’s policy will be worse than a mistake, it will be a blunder.
The full report is here. Perhaps someone should forward it to Secretary Chu? Obama? Granted, it’s all delineated in British pounds, but the message is fairly clear.
As far as I can tell, all wind farms go in with the assumption that they will be successful and last for a long time. That does not appear to be the case. I read very recently that their expected shelf-life is only about 20 years. I have also read that you will never see a wind farm where all the turbines are actually turning. There are dreadful pictures available of abandoned wind farms. That’s a lot of metal and electronics and who knows what else to dispose of.
Do we pay attention to warnings like this? Or do we just swallow the promoters songs about capacity? Surely there is someone somewhere who wants to save money? Britain is far from alone in taking a second hard look at wind power.
The problem is government renewable energy mandates which have locked them in on doing something stupid. The name may change, to clean energy technologies, or some other descriptor, but it’s still the same old cap-and-trade by a different name.
Filed under: Energy, Environment, Junk Science, Science/Technology, United Kingdom | Tags: Matt Ridley, The Matt Ridley Prize, The Rational Optimist
Matt Ridley, author of many books, especially The Rational Optimist,in a new article in The Spectator, points out that the British government has finally seen through the wind-farm scam, but getting rid of it is something else. Now he is confronted with a personal problem. A family trust has signed a deal to receive £8,500 from a wind company, which is building a turbine on land that once belonged to his grandfather. He is not a beneficiary. But he finds the idea that any part of his family is receiving ‘wind-gelt’ so abhorrent that he has decided to act.
He is offering a checque for £8,500 as a prize for the best article devoted to rational, fact-based environmental journalism. It will be called the Matt Ridley prize for environmental heresy, and he hopes that it will somehow bring David Cameron to his senses.
To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide.
If wind power was going to work, it would have done so by now. The people of Britain see this quite clearly, though politicians are often willfully deaf. …The biggest investors in offshore wind — Mitsubishi, Gamesa and Siemens — are starting to worry that the government’s heart is not in wind energy any more. …
So even if you accept the most alarming predictions of climate change, those turbines that have ruined your favourite view are doing nothing to help. The shale gas revolution has not only shamed the wind industry by showing how to decarbonise for real, but has blown away its last feeble argument — that diminishing supplies of fossil fuels will cause their prices to rise so high that wind eventually becomes competitive even without a subsidy. Even if oil stays dear, cheap gas is now likely to last many decades.
Great fun. If you have not read The Rational Optimist, you are missing something splendid. Or go to TED, and watch his lecture on “When Ideas Have Sex.”
Filed under: Global Warming, Junk Science, Science/Technology, United Kingdom | Tags: House of Commons, Professor Richard Lindzen, The Climate is Always Changing
Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT is one of the world’s greatest atmospheric physicists. He spoke to the House of Commons this last week. As James Delingpole says:
“Dick Lindzen does not need to raise his voice. He does not use hyperbole. In a tone somewhere between weariness and withering disdain, he lets the facts speak for themselves. And the facts, as he understands them, are devastating.
Here is how he began his speech, which was organized on behalf of the Campaign to Repeal the Climate Change Act:”
Stated briefly, I will simply try to clarify what the debate over climate change is really about. It most certainly is not about whether climate is changing: it always is. It is not about whether CO2 is increasing: it clearly is. It is not about whether the increase in CO2, by itself, will lead to some warming: it should. The debate is simply over the matter of how much warming the increase in CO2 can lead to, and the connection of such warming to the innumerable claimed catastrophes. The evidence is that the increase in CO2 will lead to very little warming, and that the connection of this minimal warming (or even significant warming) to the purported catastrophes is also minimal. The arguments on which the catastrophic claims are made are extremely weak – and commonly acknowledged as such. They are sometimes overtly dishonest.
The full text of Professor Lindzen’s speech is available here.
Filed under: Islam, Israel, National Security, Politics, United Kingdom | Tags: British Conservative, Debate at the Cambridge Union, Douglas Kear Murray
Here is Douglas Murray at the Cambridge Union last year, debating three members of the British establishment. Murray is a British Conservative, writer and commentator. He appears regularly in the British broadcast media commenting on issues from the conservative standpoint, and is frequently critical of Islamic fundamentalism. Only 33, he is author of a number of books, and skilled at debate. An interesting young man.
Filed under: Africa, Australia, China, Developing Nations, Europe, Middle East, United Kingdom
11. New York, New York
Here is a collection of pictures taken out of airline windows. Sounds like looking at a bunch of clouds, but they are quite amazing, as you tour the world. Enjoy.
Filed under: Foreign Policy, Iran, National Security, United Kingdom | Tags: British Embassy in Tehran, Protesters Stormed Embassy, The Work of Sanctions
In Iran: protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran, smashing windows, throwing petrol bombs and burning the British flag in protest against the sanctions imposed by London.
Britain, Canada and the United States have imposed new unilateral sanctions on Iran this week, while the EU, France and Italy have all said financial measures against Tehran should be strengthened. London banned all British financial institutions from doing business with their Iranian counterparts — including the Central Bank of Iran.
Iran is the fifth biggest oil exporter in the world. The embassy storming is a clear sign of greater political infighting within Iran’s ruling hardline elites. The conservative controlled parliament is trying to force the hand of President Ahmadinejad and expel the British ambassador. The hardliners in Iran will use the crisis to unite people and to blame the crisis for the failures of their own economy.
Iran, of course, claims that it only wants nuclear plants to create electricity. That is why the mysterious explosions at known missile development sites is international news. And why they have sought help from North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia.
Several dozen protesters broke away from the crowd of a few hundred people outside the main British embassy compound in downtown Tehran, climbed over the gates, broke the locks and went inside. They pulled down the British flag and burned it, and raised an Iranian flag in its place. They smashed windows, took a framed picture of Queen Elizabeth, carried off the royal crest as police stood by, and set a car on fire.
Another group broke into a compound that was once the embassy’s summer quarters, and is now used to house diplomatic staff. Six embassy employees were held briefly. A German school next to the Qolhak compound was also damaged.
Britain is outraged. Nations are required to protect the embassies of other countries. Iran has clearly indicated that it has no intention of giving up its nuclear efforts. The question is whether sanctions can make a difference. The Iranian government has attempted to keep channels of negotiation open in an effort to limit the worst effects of sanctions, but shown no sign of backing down.
I wish I had more confidence in the understanding and capability of my government.
Filed under: Europe, History, United Kingdom | Tags: Quickie History, The Story of English, Where the Words Came From
