. .it is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects - military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden - that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

Reading in the Times that “Hundreds of boxes of the antiviral Tamiflu were sold last week and demand for surgical face masks rose amid fears that swine influenza will develop into a pandemic.” reminded me of LC Jones and his immortal phrase in the hilarious series Dad’s Army whilst he went about doing just what he was advising against.

What is it with a society that lives longer, healthier and more prosperous than before to give in to irrational terrors and emotional outbursts? How come it always succumbs to media led scare stories even though we’ve been led on wild and very expensive goose chases before?

I think it is one manifestation that far from living in age of reason, we have returned to an age of irrationality and superstition where so called journalists, politicians and scientists have forfeited critique, objectivity and empiricism to assume the roles of shamans and high priests. Culminating perhaps with the greatest scare of them all – “Global Warming”

How can we forget the great salmonella scare of the 80s, or the Listeria hysteria of the 90s? How can we forget the “Mad cows and Madder politicians” or the Belgian dioxins debacle? In retrospect, There’s nothing to laugh about indeed they make very depressing reading. Irrational scares come at an exceedingly high price. In many instances, as a consequence of these scares and the draconian measures imposed by political Don Quixotes who wanted to be seen to be doing something, whole businesses were wiped out, families ruined and unfortunate individuals have taken their own lives. The only thing that ever comes out of them (besides that companies who offer the ‘elixir’ literally making a killing and the media that peddles them boosts its sales) is more government regulation and a bigger state.

The Swine influenza scare is not new. In 1976 in the US there was a large fuss about it. Out of a whole congress only two voted against government intervention, one of them was Ron Paul. The result: one person died from the swine influenza and twenty five died from the administered vaccine that was supposed to immunize them. It is a sad but real fact of life that when governments intervene they usually make things worse.

I therefore appeal for people to calm down. They have more chance of being eaten by a shark or struck dead by lightning than falling foul of Swine Influenza. Whilst administering calm precaution, government should concern itself with addressing the real health hazards in our midst such as the silent but relentless spread of tuberculosis and HIV.

In the meantime, those who love to read should make an effort to procure the book “Scared to Death, Why scares are costing us the earth” by Christopher Booker and Richard North – ISBN 978-0-8264-8614-1. On second thoughts, such a brilliant expose’ of some of the most destructive delusions of our time should be made compulsory reading for everyone, particularly journalists and politicians, because if they took heed the world would suddenly become a better place.

Azzjoni Nazzjonali welcomes all kinds of private investments into our economy, not least where it concerns its lifeblood; energy.  However AN’s support is qualified to those investments which are commercially viable and which will not require public subsidy to sustain. It is illogical to expect the public to invest in energy technology only to end up buying the resultant energy at more expensive and inefficient rates.

Hence news of such investments should be accompanied by all the relevant facts. The reported interest of a Dutch firm to build an offshore wind farm with a claimed eventual output of ‘105 megawatts from 30 turbines’ is a case in point. Nowhere is it pointed out that this output is presumably the maximum that it can attain under perpetually ideal conditions. Hence in less than ideal conditions (which are the norm) it will generate much less than the total claimed. Furthermore a change in the output of wind farms of 50% in a few minutes is not unusual. Attempts to predict the output of wind farms more than an hour ahead have not been successful. This therefore necessitates an investment in a frequency keeping station because the amount of electricity generated must always match the demand exactly to avoid system collapse. Besides from the fact that energy will also be lost in transmission, renewable energy like wind is not produced when needed, so investment in expensive energy storage will also have to be made.

All this of course means that unless we are to avoid eventual power cuts, the amount of energy such an investment claims that it will deliver will still have to be backed up by conventional power generation. Hence the government will still have to invest public money to increase its output to cater for these eventualities besides from investing in a frequency station and energy storage. At best, wind farms would assist us in managing our peak demand but not much else.

It is likewise pertinent to note that many renewable energy providers such as Shell,  BP and Iberdrola Renewables,  are increasingly abandoning their investments in wind energy when faced with public funding cuts – a trait which reveals the fundamental commercial non-viability of this particular form of ‘alternative energy’.

I strongly believe that the media has a fundamental role in scrutinizing such news and educating the public with real facts rather than simply parroting what it is fed. This is the only way to ensure that the public (and not private companies feeding off the public trough) gets its value for money and a return on its investment.

The European Greens, Socialist and other left leaning parties have always militated for immigrants to have the right to vote. The reason is obvious. Greens and Socialist parties around Europe, increasingly depend on the immigrant vote to assume or retain power.

This is not a new impetus either, it has been going on for the best of two decades as the mass amnesties given to millions of illegal immigrants by left leaning governments all around Europe (like in Spain and Italy) clearly attest.

Analysis of voting patterns across Europe likewise attest en-block voting of the ‘immigrant electorate’ for left-leaning parties.

The trade-off being that voting Socialists and Greens has always ensured ever more group ‘rights’, privileges and welfare benefits for immigrants.

Flooding Europe with immigrants has also an added value for European Greens and Socialists – In their quest to construct a European Union of Socialist Republics, it helps to destroy the culture and identities of the member states. Rootless societies are more easily ruled - This is why multiculturalism is so vigorously promoted as a state doctrine wherever there are socialist governments. It is also for the same reason that the ‘progressive’ left seeks to undermine the natural family and tradition at every opportunity.

The downside to the European Socialist/Green/Immigrant alliance of convenience is that the agenda is being increasingly set by the new kids on the block. And their agenda cares not whether it coincides with the political, social and cultural aspirations of the indigenous peoples.

Those who believe that such matters will not percolate down and effect us locally are mistaken. Unfortunately, already 70% of all laws being enacted locally emanate from Brussels. If the Lisbon Treaty will be adopted that percentage will be 100%. Azzjoni Nazzjonali therefore urges everyone to use their EU MEP vote very wisely.

Check this out and take this test - i found it pretty accurate.

http://euprofiler.eu/

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon told our parliament that “the issue of irregular migration was closely linked to that of climate change”. How stupid of me! And all this time I believed that the root cause was a combination of tyranny, corruption, tribalism, failed Marxist economics and genocidal warfare – you know, all the undesirable characteristics that tend to define many of the failed states that make up the United Nations.

To me it seems like that all this climate hullabaloo is the UN’s sole reason for existing and for keeping thousands of bureaucrats feeding off the public trough. It pretty fails to deliver on anything else – it couldn’t even run a food for oil program in Iraq. But if we are to indulge in this nonsense, we might as well play it to our advantage. You see Mr Ki-Moon, sea levels are rising so fast that Malta will diminish substantially in size that we simply cannot afford to take any more immigrants – and oh yes, all these immigrants will be contributing greatly to a drastic increase in our carbon foot print! So please, either scrap our country’s emissions targets or revise your obsolete refugee convention. In the real world, you cannot have the cake and eat it.

The Keynesian binge

We are witnessing an unprecedented world-wide frenzy of public spending with figures so large that they have become incomprehensible – but they are real alright and they will have to be repaid at some point by the poor taxpayer. Whilst apologists invoke Keynesian economics, I call it criminal. Would you, not being able to repay your credit card repayments, take out another credit card to repay the first? I hope not. I always thought it would make rather more sense if you cut your spending and saved up a bit. That’s what sane people would do, but then again, we inhabit in a different planet from that of politicians. Just to put things in perspective, the amount that will be borrowed by the UK from 2008 to 2014 in is more than the debt it ran up to win World War One, World War Two and the Napoleonic Wars combined. It seems that where Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler could not exhaust Britain’s financial resources, the Brown Government will do so. The Irony is that Gordon Brown had threatened to close down tax-havens – I believe that with this borrowing and the 50% tax rate he slapped on the ‘rich’ he has ensured that they will thrive. I also think that Ireland is rubbing it’s hands in anticipation, given this unexpected boom, it’s recovery may well be much faster than everyone thinks. There are lessons of course in all this, lessons that we ignore at out own peril.

It’s Official: Humans declared toxic.

The green faith reveals itself in full contempt. Humans are by their living, breathing nature now officially pollutants of this world:

The US Environmental Protection Agency has shifted course and deemed carbon dioxide a health risk and consequentially all breathing animals as toxic.

But what will trees use for food when carbon dioxide is eliminated?. Madness is on the hoof.

Won't need speed cameras, that's for sure

Comment: Arnold Cassola and  other Green evangelists have been harping lately how a Green Economy would stimulate an economic revival. The Green Economy is a dangerous myth - it is a byword for a return to a new primitive age. There is a country which has a such an economy.. it’s called North Korea, so i included some pictures to give you a preview of  how life would look like should the  Greens ever had the chance to determine your life. Of course your ‘leaders’ would still be able to enjoy the trappings of life…

by Dominic Lawson.

When everybody seems to have the same big idea, you just know it can only mean trouble. Remember sub-prime mortgages? Now universally excoriated as the spawn of the devil, the proximate cause of the credit crunch and all that followed, a few years back “sub-prime” was everyone’s darling. Financiers loved it because it generated sumptuously high-yielding debt instruments; governments, because it promised to make even the poor into proud property owners.

Now business lobbyists and governments on both sides of the Atlantic have got a new big idea. They call it “green jobs”. Leading the pack is, as you might expect, Barack Obama. The president recently defended a vast package of subsidies for renewable energy on the grounds that it would “create millions of additional jobs and entire new industries”.

In Britain, the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, promises billions in state aid for the same purpose. To add verisimilitude, last week he gave a royal wave from the inside of a prototype electric Mini. Mandelson’s chauffeur was a representative of the lower house: the transport secretary, Geoff Hoon.

Decarbonated Production

The occasion for this photo opportunity was the government’s proposal to offer a £5,000 subsidy to anyone buying an electric car of a type not yet available: exact details to be given in Alistair Darling’s forthcoming budget. The idea is to create a “world-beating” British-based electric-car-manufacturing industry, while also attempting to meet Gordon Brown’s promise to have the nation converted to electric or hybrid cars by 2020.

That remarkable prime ministerial pledge predated the recession; its motive was to demonstrate that Britain was “leading the world in the battle against climate change”. We aren’t, as a matter of fact; but under new Labour we have certainly led the world at claiming to do so. Mandelson expressed this almost satirically last week when he declared that “Britain has taken a world lead in setting ambitious targets for carbon reduction”.

As ever, new Labour confuses announcements and newspaper headlines with real action. Whenever it becomes obvious even to ministers that Britain will not meet its current carbon reduction target, they replace it with a yet tougher target, only with an extended deadline.

It does not yet seem to have occurred to new Labour that this is making it look ridiculous, especially to the environmentalists whose support it is presumably trying to solicit. Or perhaps it has, but it would rather that than lose our “world leadership” in target-setting.

There is something almost comical in the government’s belief that the electric car, dependent as it is on the national grid, is a sort of magic recipe for reducing carbon emissions. Some months ago President Sarkozy of France had an identical idea and commissioned a report on the prospects for turning Renault and Citroën into producers of mass-market electric vehicles. The report concluded that “the traditional combustion engine still offers the most realistic prospect of developing cleaner vehicles simply by improving the performance and efficiency of traditional engines and limiting the top speed to 105mph. The overall cost of an electric car remains unfeasible at about double that of a conventional vehicle. Battery technology is still unsatisfactory, severely limiting performance”.

Note that this crushing verdict came in a country where electricity is for the most part generated by nuclear power, which produces . In this country, more than three-quarters of the grid’s power comes from theno CO2 fossil fuels of gas and coal.

Presumably it is the latter that accounts for the fact that when the London borough of Camden commissioned a study to see whether it should introduce electric vehicles for some of its services, it found that “EVs relying on the average UK mix of energy to charge them were responsible for significantly more particles of soot that lodge deeply in the lungs . . . than the average petrol-powered car”.

If all our electricity were to be generated by wind power, without any fossil-fuel back-up, this criticism would not apply. Then the cars could take days, rather than hours, to recharge (depending on the weather) and would be so expensive to run that driving would become the exclusive preserve of the rich.

A further absurdity is that electric cars are suitable only for short rides within urban areas – precisely where we are being encouraged to abandon cars and use public transport. Ken Livingstone exempted electric cars from his congestion charge as if, in addition to their suppositious environmental benefits, they also had the magical property of being incapable of contributing to congestion. As the Ecologist magazine has reported: “The focus on electric vehicles and the political love they get is totally misguided . . . to have that as the spearhead of government transport carbon-reduction policy is insane.”

The magazine is controlled by Zac Goldsmith, the prospective Conservative candidate for Richmond Park and team Cameron’s environmental guru. Last week his colleague George Osborne took a different tack, observing that the absence of plans for a national network of charging points meant that “the Labour plan is like giving people a grant to buy an internal combustion engine, without bothering to set up any petrol stations”. Osborne had his own suggested grant to create “green jobs”: “We will give every household a new entitlement to £6,500 of energy-saving technologies.”

I’m not sure how the Tories came up with the figure of £6,500. It is pointedly bigger than Labour’s proposed £5,000 electric car subsidy; but all these figures are preposterous. If you multiply £6,500 by the number of households in the land, you get to £160 billion, bigger on its own than the national debt that Osborne has repeatedly told us is unaffordable.

Electoral bribes apart, there is a more serious misconception behind the idea that ploughing subsidies into the “green economy” is a sure-fire way of boosting domestic employment. At best it will move people from one economic activity to another. Labour’s plans would subsidise car production workers to move from making conventional models to electric vehicles, which hardly anyone wants to buy. Osborne’s proposals would subsidise the double-glazing and home insulation industry and suck in many workers gainfully employed (without subsidy) elsewhere.

The key to a successful, wealth-generating economy is productivity. Saving energy is what businesses have done already, because it lowers their production costs. The problem with any form of subsidy is that it makes the consumer (through hidden taxes) pay to keep inherently uneconomic businesses “profitable”. Meanwhile, diversified energy companies such as Shell, with plenty of speculatively acquired wind-farm acreage, are salivating at the plans by Obama to introduce cap-and-trade carbon emissions targets for American industry.

Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, had some soothing words for US manufacturing companies that complained that the new policy will make them even less competitive with Chinese exporters, since the people’s republic has indicated that it has no intention of inflicting a similar increase in energy costs on its own producers. He suggested that America might have to introduce some sort of “car-bon-intensive” tariff on Chinese goods. One of China’s envoys, Li Gao, immediately retorted that such a carbon tariff would be a “disaster”, since it could lead to global trade war.

Actually, Mr Li is right: and this is how an achingly fashionable and well-intentioned plan to create “millions of new green jobs” could instead end up making the global economy even sicker than it is already.

Cannot get much greener than this

original article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6122592.ece

If ever there was a musician who was aware of the big picture it must be Ludvig Van Beethoven. Not only did he see it, he could also hear it despite his deafness.It is said that God shouted into his ear - and I for one believe it, his music is simply divine and  drags you through all the emotions of human existence.

It is depressing when one stops to contemplate, that today we eulogise aimless drum banging glorified as a gift of ‘ethnic’  culture - or the incoherent mutterings of RAP ‘music’, or the abstract, incoherent babble of garbage otherwise known as house, techno and what not.

Genius is genius, but it is also the offspring of culture. Only over a century ago they aspired for greatness - today we wallow in mediocrity. And it shows in everything we attempt - from politics to architecture - we have lost the sense of beauty - We lack the cultural confidence and it will take a substantial amount of re-education and a rejection of the predominant culture of cultural Marxism to regain it.

But enough of the lamentation, and let us appreciate this great son of Western Civilisation.  Here is the heart wrenching and ecstatic overture of his - Egmont - directed by the legendary Von Karajan

Incidentally, my best friend - a disciple of the maestro alerted me to a fictional yet great film about Beethoven. It’s called “Copying Beethoven”. Watch the trailer here:

I think the best scene from this film is this one here - The Maestro was not known for his political correctness! imagine the posturing and bending over backwards today! what have we been reduced to?

Still I believe - the best rendition of the Master, is Gary Oldman’s in the Immortal beloved:

Immortal beloved indeed, He who crossed out Napoleon’s name after having seen through the sham - Immortal beloved we weep…

Dr. Jose Herrera, who is our country’s shadow minister on justice, and who only a few weeks ago lectured us (gosh we didn’t know) on the national security considerations of illegal immigration problems has turned up defending an illegal immigrant cum  khat smuggler in court.

In his article Dr. Herrera stated that “Contrary to general perception, the immigrants are only too aware of all our weaknesses. In fact, it has become a common tendency for them to take advantage.”

Yet in court, in his attempt to defend the Khat smuggler, he argued that the “immigrant had imported an unrestricted plant, so he should not be found guilty of doing something which was not a crime at law. Furthermore, he argued that their client did not have the intention to commit a crime.”

Thankfully our magistrates and courts are not yet that dumb. “The court described the argument that the accused had no intention to commit a crime “is lame at best”. It recalled how Khayre refuted ownership of the suitcase containing the plant and that it was wrapped in banana leaves in order to preserve both illegal psychoactive ingredients.”

Magistrate Hayman, rightfully states that the “influx of peoples from different cultures in our island does not and should not mean the acceptance of extraneous traditions especially ones with serious illegal implications”. Dr. Herrera kindly take note - for God’s sake, you are the shadow minister!.

I myself would only have qualified the magistrate’s statement to read that “the influx of peoples from different cultures in our island does not and should not mean the acceptance of extraneous traditions” - period.

The illegal immigrant turned smuggler was sentenced for six months. One expects that he will also be subsequently deported.

Link