1066 + 944

It’s like 1066AD all over again, only this time instead of swinging swords, the invaders are flaunting cash. The French are about to invade Dover:

For generations the White Cliffs of Dover have stood as a symbol of indomitable British pride.

But now Dover is up for sale and the leading bidder has been revealed to be an age-old enemy – France.

The Port of Dover is one of a string of publicly owned assets which have been earmarked for privatisation as the Government battles with a record £830billion of national debt.

Its advisers have recommended selling Dover to France as ‘a very logical move’, but the plan has prompted outrage.

Conservative Party prospective MP for Dover Charles Elphicke said: ‘In trying to sell off our port and the White Cliffs, it’s clear Gordon Brown has no sense of the history of our nation or the pride of our town.

‘How dare he consider selling it all off to the French? Dover is the English border. We stood proud in defending our nation in times past.

(William did not land at Dover, of course, he landed at Pevensey.) Nonetheless, this is instructive for Americans. It should show everyone what happens when government – and government debt – spirals out of control for generations. How long until the US is forced to sell public assets due to the out of control deficit? What will it be here? Will Yellowstone be on the block? Mount Rushmore?

Fort Dix?

Which ones will China buy? Which ones will go to Saudi Arabia?

Think it can’t happen? Ask the folks in Dover.

Not The One

Not even the won anymore. Clifford Orwin, Professor of political science at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, looks at the Obama presidency. And is not impressed:

So yes, American voters wanted change, but erred in thinking Mr. Obama would bring the change they wanted. He erred in thinking that his was the change they wanted brought.

Health care was the wrong issue also because there was no short-term health-care crisis – only a long term (fiscal) one – while there was a raging recession. This is the issue that matters most to voters, and Mr. Obama has yet to impress them with his handling of it. No matter that he inherited 7.5-per-cent unemployment: it has risen to and remains stalled at 10 per cent. At that level, paternity ceases to matter. The white working class, which voted for Mr. Obama but has never loved him, is again in play. Scott Brown won Massachusetts as the smooth spokesman of its rough discontents.

Nor can Mr. Obama claim offsetting successes elsewhere. Americans feel not more but less secure from terrorism after his changes on that front. “Engagement” with Iran and the Muslim world generally has achieved precisely nothing. His halfhearted pursuit of the Afghan war has satisfied neither right nor left, while probably emboldening the Taliban. Among America’s allies, the peoples may love Mr. Obama, but the governments smile and sit on their hands. As for greenness issues, they’re browning rapidly, as even Democratic voters become increasingly skeptical of climate change. And will the master of the corporate bailout now take on the corporations? Mr. Obama’s rhetorical cupboard seems bare.

The Wizard of 0’s rhetorical skills are actually not all that good. Only a fawning press appeared to make them so. And, frankly, he was following a guy who was somewhat challenged in that department. George Bush was never great in his delivery of speeches.

On the other hand, I rather suspect Bush was sincere a heck of a lot more than Obama has ever been. In fact, I suspect Obama has never – not once – meant or believed anything he has delivered via teleprompter for any longer than the text was displayed on the machine.

Obama’s real agenda had been revealed by off-the-cuff, off-the-teleprompter statements like those to Joe the Plumber. The rest is all smoke to gull the masses. The great and powerful 0 is all machinations, pretty words and a very little man behind a curtain.

His SOTU tonight will be rife with the word I but will not contain any real substance. (I cannot wait for the I-Count. It will be very, very high, as will the “Let me be perfectly clear” count).

There simply is nothing much behind the curtain.

Creepy

Human bedwarmers.

When Bureaucrats Decide

A glimpse into what the future will look like under ObamaCare: Bureaucrats decide, you suffer:

The Government’s drugs rationing body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), has provisionally said that it does not intend to recommend the use of the drug, called Tocilizumab, or Roactemra.

Nice claims that the £9,000 a year drug, for rheumatoid arthritis, has not proved that it is cost effective.

But patients in Scotland are to receive the treatment after it was recommended by the body which regulates drugs on the Scottish NHS, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC).

The move will reopen accusations of medical ‘apartheid’ within Britain.

It follows an outcry after patients in Scotland were given access to expensive cancer drugs denied on the NHS in England and Wales.

Note that the nameless, faceless bureaucrats making these decisions never have to face the voters. They decide, you suffer.

This is what health care looks like when the government runs it. Were these the chains you were hoping for?

Green, Red, Is There Really A Difference?

Juxtaposing a couple of headlines makes one wonder.

Obama to create 17,000 green jobs. What’s a green job?

President Obama announced $2.3 billion in federal tax credits on Friday, which he said would create 17,000 new “green” jobs.

Which is great, except that no one can count green jobs because, fundamentally, no one knows what a green job is.

I know, it should be obvious. Green workers are people who make solar panels, install insulation, run recycling programs, and similarly environmentally helpful things. But it quickly gets more complex that that.

Are all workers at an automaker green if a few of them make hybrid cars? Does the janitor’s position at a wind-turbine factory count as a green job? What about the urban planner who designs a mass transit system one year and a strip mall the next?

Do the math and each of those wunnerful jobs will cost American taxpayers a meer $135,000 each. But consider this headline:

Devaluation ups stakes in Venezuela election year

Venezuelans rushed to the shops on Saturday, fearful of price rises after a currency devaluation that will let President Hugo Chavez boost government spending ahead of an election but feeds opposition charges of economic mismanagement…..

….Chavez, whose popularity usually rises in correlation with public spending, also said on Friday that the Central Bank had transferred $7 billion of foreign reserves to a development fund used to finance investment projects.

Draw your own conclusions about the motivation for the sudden largess (with OUR tax dollars) on the part of the Wizard of O.

But consider for a moment: How many non-green jobs will be displaced by the really expensive “green” jobs? UMW members, ask yourself how many miners lose jobs? Non-union people ask yourself the same.

How many of you will have your health care plans taxed by the Wizard and his health care “reform”? Union and non-union. How many? How many of you will be hit with confiscatory taxes if you cannot afford the extremely high – and rising – premiums.

How many of you voted to be indentured to a private insurance company? With no hope of ever being free from your required purchase of health care insurance.

How many of you will benefit from the won’s 17,000 pricey green job scheme? In a country that has lost 85,000 jobs in the last month alone?

At what point do people realize that they are being played by a charlatan, a fraud, a liar?

This man is destroying the economy. Better get calling, folks. You – and I – are in real trouble.

The Donner Party It Ain’t

Well, if you’re going to get cut off by snow, being in a pub isn’t the worst fate that can befall you.

England’s longest New Year party finally ended this morning when a snow plough and gritter reached Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in the country, where 30 students and teachers had been cut off for two days.

Supplies of draught beer were down to Black Sheep’s Riggwelter as the group from Leeds University cross country club consoled themselves amid 7ft drifts.

They were joined by 17 people rescued from the nearby A66 which was closed between Bowes and Brough as heavy snowfall hit the whole Pennine chain yesterday . The Snake Pass between Manchester and Sheffield was also impassable after drifting caused by high winds.

Oh the humanity! Down to a single choice of draft beer!

The Tan Hill Inn appears to be a bed and breakfast type inn (with reports of somewhat eccentric service). I’m guessing that everyone was pretty well taken care of. And hey, they drank up all the rest of the beer. Couldn’t have been that bad a time.

And they’ll have stories to tell that don’t include haunch of tourist. Bonus!

Swine WHO?

The “pandemic” of swine flu killed something like 11,500 people, worldwide. (Well, until they take two years or so to cook the books, then it will be revealed that 78 zillion people actually died in less than a nanosecond). The US CDC estimates that 36,000 Americans die each year from “regular” flu.

A sure sign that all the hype, all the Obama-induced panic, all the money wasted on swine flu vaccines was crap from start to finish?

The head of the UN World Health Organization is trying to drum up more hysteria – but has not bothered to get a swine flu vaccination for herself.

Dr Chan said drug makers and countries promised to donate nearly 190 million vaccine doses to WHO, with the first doses of the donated vaccines to be distributed in Azerbaijan, Mongolia and Afghanistan next month.

However she admitted she had not yet had a vaccine but said she would have it soon.

Yeah, and I’ll trust you soon, too.I’ll believe it is a real crisis when you begin acting like it is. That Chan has not even bothered to get the shot says it all. It is not and never has been a real crisis.

The same hype, hysteria and fraud rules the global warming frenzy. Also a UN sponsored effort.

And yet another one that the Obama administration is fully on board.

Do you really want these people running – or rather ruining – your health care?

I’ll Be Froze For Christmas

Britain:

The big freeze is likely to keep many thousands of families apart at Christmas.

Drivers have been warned not to go out on treacherous roads, flights have been cancelled and train services badly disrupted by the cold.

The AA and police have urged families to postpone celebrations until the roads are safer.

United States:

A strengthening storm producing snow, ice, rain and locally severe thunderstorms over the Plains will transform into a severe blizzard spanning Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, zapping power, closing roads and placing some people’s lives in peril.

Snow and ice are already coating roads, sidewalks, trees and power lines from around Lake Michigan to the the High Plains.

Wind-whipped and blowing snow will then begin to pound Nebraska, Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma on Christmas Eve.

Germany:

A seven-year-old boy was stopped by police in northern Germany while trying to plough snow with a front loader he borrowed from his parents’ business, authorities said.

Officers on patrol found the boy atop the 3.5-metre-tall (11.5-foot-tall) excavator after he had cleared the street in the town of Reinfeld and was driving back to the parking lot.

Serbia:

Dozens of children in a southern Serbia town set up barricades with their sleighs to stop workers from putting salt on the streets and melting the snow, the Beta news agency reported on Tuesday.

Supported by their parents, the kids first got into a verbal altercation with workers in the town of Kursumlija, but then things heated up and they threw firecrackers at their equipment.

In Copenhagen, the warmists, including the president of the United States, tried to convince the world that global warming was occurring. Either your eyes or the warmists are wrong.

Which do you trust?

The Goat’s Toasted

Once again, the annual Christmas tradition in Gavle, Sweden is intact. The goat got it.

Arsonists set fire early on Wednesday to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.

Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.

“It’s a tradition to burn it down,” Lofberg said. “It’s happened an untold number of times since the 1960s … it’s been burned down more years than it’s survived.”

Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been following the goat tradition since 2006. (Here and here. We missed in 2007.) At this point, the city fathers of Gavle should realize that trying to stop the annual torching of the goat is a losing proposition. Why not go with the flow and start a festival that burns an effigy at the end. In other words, let Burning Goat become the Swedish version of Burning Man.

We’re guessing it would be a bigger economic boon to the city than the straw goat.

We expect credit for the suggestion.

Hide The Decline Data

Gee, nothing suspicious here:

For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data:

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/people/briffa/yamal2009/

Now redirects to a generic page of UEA. Try it yourself.

Now here is what that page says:

Climatic Research Unit

Due to the present high volume of visitors to this page, you will shortly be directed to the latest news about CRU on the main University of East Anglia website, or you can go there immediately by clicking on this link.

The cached page at Google is still available here, though none of the links to data or papers works there either.

If CRU were a stock brokerage house, the principles would already be in jail. These are not the actions of an organization that has nothing to hide.

Via Memeorandum.

Taking A Swing At Copenhagen

Dennis Miller takes on the surprised raccoons of Copenhagen.

You’ll have to read it to understand that sentence.

Secret Deals

Surprise! The fix is in. After all, it’s the Chicago Way.

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN’s role in all future climate change negotiations.

The document is also being interpreted by developing countries as setting unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The so-called Danish text, a secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – but understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week.

Let’s ask ourselves a very simple question: If Obama would do this to the world, what would he do to the people of the United States?

All you folks who are hoping for the benevolent mercy of ObamaCare – does this inspire confidence in you? Do you think the great and beneficent Wizard of O cares one whit for you and yours? He just shafted billions. What’s a few million more?

As for the rest of the world, how’s that hopenchange holding up? Still think this man is better than Bush? At least Bush never tried anything this underhanded.

Limos, Private Jets, Caviar, Hookers

Check, check, check, check. Everything’s ready for the big shindig in Copenhagen. Or Gropenhagen. Or Copenhooker. Whatever:

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.” …

…And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to “be sustainable, don’t buy sex,” the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

But the delegates are taking screwing to a whole new level. After all, they’re aiming to do it to the entire globe. The prostitutes are just jumping to the head of the line.

The Telegraph hints that some special deal with the Chinese may be in the works – hence the sudden switch in attendance dates for Obama. If so, the American public needs to know what, exactly, Obama promised the Chinese. Then again, the Chinese may have head faked Obama and his crew, figuring that they can even further diminish the man by playing on his ego. It would be easy for the Chinese to do so. And fun for them, as well.

But if you do go to wonderful, wonderful Cop-a-hooker be sure to buy a program. That way you can tell the pros apart.

Incidentally, it is going to be a bit raw, weather-wise (as well) for the next two weeks. Hence the comment from the limo operator about the forecast.

UPDATE: Others, via Memeorandum: Pajamas Media, The Other McCain, American Power, Gateway Pundit, Andrew Bolt

And When The Omagic Goes Away

Or how the latest Super-Gigantic, Historical, Bestest-Evah, Self-Referential Speech is playing in Europe. That would be very, very badly, indeed.

Just in Time for the Campaign

For each troop movement, Obama had a number to match. US strength in Afghanistan will be tripled relative to the Bush years, a fact that is sure to impress hawks in America. But just 18 months later, just in time for Obama’s re-election campaign, the horror of war is to end and the draw down will begin. The doves of peace will be let free.

The speech continued in that vein. It was as though Obama had taken one of his old campaign speeches and merged it with a text from the library of ex-President George W. Bush. Extremists kill in the name of Islam, he said, before adding that it is one of the “world’s great religions.” He promised that responsibility for the country’s security would soon be transferred to the government of President Hamid Karzai — a government which he said was “corrupt.” The Taliban is dangerous and growing stronger. But “America will have to show our strength in the way that we end wars,” he added.

It was a dizzying combination of surge and withdrawal, of marching to and fro. The fast pace was reminiscent of plays about the French revolution: Troops enter from the right to loud cannon fire and then they exit to the left. And at the end, the dead are left on stage.

Obama’s Magic No Longer Works

But in this case, the public was more disturbed than entertained. Indeed, one could see the phenomenon in a number of places in recent weeks: Obama’s magic no longer works. The allure of his words has grown weaker.

Long time readers know where I stand when it comes to America’s armed forces.

And I am afraid for them.

I am afraid for my country.

Carbon Jackboots

Mark Steyn on carbon fascism from jet-setting bureaucrats:

In order to save the planet from global roasting, it seems entirely reasonable to ask Mr. and Mrs. Joe Peasant to subordinate their freedom of movement to an annual “carbon allowance” preventing them flying hither and yon and devastating the environment. As Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, explains:

Hotel guests should have their electricity monitored; hefty aviation taxes should be introduced to deter people from flying; and iced water in restaurants should be curtailed, the world’s leading climate scientist has told the Observer.

Rajendra Pachauri? Hey, if you’re manning the VIP lounge at Heathrow, that name may ring a bell:

Dr Rajendra Pachauri flew at least 443,243 miles on IPCC business in this 19 month period. This business included honorary degree ceremonies, a book launch and a Brookings Institute dinner, the latter involving a flight of 3500 miles.

Wow. 443,243 miles. How many flying polar bears does Dr. Pachauri kill in an average quarter? Well, not to worry, he probably offsets his record-breaking ursocide with carbon credits from carbon billionaire Al Gore.

Personally, I have logged something like 3-4,000 miles in the past year. And this cricket fanatic wants to monitor my flying and water use – and even take away ice for my water?

This is the fanaticism that the crew at CRU enable with their conspiracy. This is totalitarian.

I feel a Godwin’s Law violation coming on. I also cry “Hypocrite!” and let slip the hounds of sarcasm on this officious, little asshat.

Have at him, folks.