Thursday afternoon catch-up

The usual story; too many open tabs and nowhere near enough time.

1) Are Hezbollah setting up a base in Cuba? Naharnet have the story:

'A U.S. Republican lawmaker has warned that Hizbullah could build "missile sites" in Cuba and pose a threat to the United States.

"Why would you normalize trade with a country that sponsors terror?" Rep. Michele Bachmann asked an audience of supporters in Cedar Rapids, Iowa Monday, in response to a question about her position on trading with Cuba.

"There are reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hizbullah,” she said.

The Shiite party “is looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you are 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don't want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hizbullah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish," she added.

Bachmann was apparently referring to an unsourced report in the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera earlier this month about how a handful of Hizbullah members have set up some sort of encampment in Cuba.

The report was never backed up in major publications but was picked up by conservative blogs like Glenn Beck's The Blaze and Andrew Breitbart's Big Peace.'

2) Has the Obama government armed Mexican drugs barons? pajamas media says that they have, that it is not accidental and that the Obama supporting media have deliberately ignored the story:

'Monday’s revelations by Mike Vanderboegh at Sipsey Street Irregulars and David Codrea at the Gun Rights Examiner, corroborated here at PJMedia and expounded upon at Fox News, comprise a “smoking gun” of the one of the most stunning political scandals in U.S. history.

As William Lajeunesse writes at Fox:

Not only did U.S. officials approve, allow and assist in the sale of more than 2,000 guns to the Sinaloa cartel — the federal government used taxpayer money to buy semi-automatic weapons, sold them to criminals and then watched as the guns disappeared.

I don’t wish to understate it: elements of the U.S. Departments of Justice, State, Homeland Security, and Treasury are responsible for supplying an arsenal to narco-terrorists waging a civil war against an American ally. Our federal government may bear responsibility for at least 200 murders committed with “walked” firearms, in what Mexican Attorney General Marisela Morales describes as a “betrayal” of her country by the Obama administration.

...

But despite the revelations from of documents and testimony obtained by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and repeated calls for full disclosure from senators and congressmen, mainstream media organizations have done everything in their power to bury the scandal. This can only be viewed as a partisan media’s attempt to protect a criminal executive branch.'

3) What really caused the Eurozone crisis? The Street Light Blog has an interesting quotation from Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, from his recent piece in the Financial Times:

Whatever role the markets have played in catalysing the sovereign debt crisis, it is an undisputable fact that excessive state spending has led to unsustainable levels of debt and deficits that now threaten our economic welfare.

4)  Are BBC employees more 'of the left' than 'of the right'? The BBC is meant not to be biased, indeed we are told that impartiality is in its genes. This old Conservative Home piece says otherwise:

'One of the great things about Facebook is that you can find the nichest of niche groups of like-minded people. It has an advertising package to match. You can, for example, upload an ad banner that will appear 10,000 times to female twenty-somethings who live in York and enjoy listening to jazz. This kind of micro-targeting has got to be the next stage of the Party's online advertising campaign. The advertising package has other uses...

BBC employees went Facebook mad earlier this year with 10,580 now having profiles on the social networking site. Many of them chose to specify their political views as either liberal, moderate or conservative (there isn't a socialist option available to the chagrin of many). An advanced search reveals that more than 11 times the number of BBC employees on Facebook list themselves as liberal than conservative:
BBC - 10,580
BBC liberals - 1,340
BBC moderates - 340
BBC conservatives - 120

Former BBC journalist Robin Aitken, who has still yet to be properly interviewed by any of his many former colleagues about his whistle-blowing on its institutional biases, said you couldn't make a cricket team out of the number of Tories at the corporation. He wasn't far wrong!

To show that these proportions don't merely reflect the fact that the student-dominated Facebook is full of young liberal trendies anyway, a search of the UK-wide Facebook population reveals a liberal to conservative ratio of just 2.5 to 1, that's four times less liberal than those on the BBC network:
UK -  6,407,580
UK liberals - 545,240
UK moderates - 251,320              
UK conservatives - 216,660
Narrowing it down to the London network where most BBC employees reside, the ratio is still just nigh of 3 to 1 at 147,340 to 51,760.'

5) Social engineering in education continues apace, as The Independent reports that:

'A controversial plan to rank all A-level students according to the schools they attend – which would allow universities to discriminate against pupils from private schools – is unveiled today by Britain's biggest exam board.

The plan by the exam board AQA (Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) provoked a storm of argument among academics and independent schools. There were immediate fears that candidates will be penalised simply because they achieve good A-level results at a good school. Independent schools are also alarmed that the approach could discriminate against disadvantaged pupils to whom they have offered scholarships.'

6) I dislike Marcus Brigstocke, well who doesn't, so I was pleased to see this New Statesman article from 2008 , here's the conclusion:

'All Brigstocke does is preach to the choir. He is the poster boy for an effete, obsolete, undergraduate, Meccano-set humour that can be snapped together in short order. Absolutely nobody, apart from BBC commissioning editors, thinks Brigstocke is funny. He is, in fact, the very opposite of funny. He is the new Jim Davidson.'

7) The Mail discovers that a convicted aider of would-be Islamic terrorists cannot be deported because of human rights legislation and as a result travels on the very tube trains, amongst the very people that he was convicted of trying to assist in the killing of. Richard Littlejohn  has his own take on the story.


8) Archbishop Cranmer ties together the fuss over Andy Coulson receiving severance pay after leaving News International and whilst being employed by the Conservative party with the lack of fuss over Chris Patten's  EU pension. The EU pension point is one that I have raised over and over again, most often with reference to Peter Mandelson. Here's part of the Archbishop's article:

'Robert Peston (BBC) broke the story (which some already knew) that Mr Coulson continued to receive money as part of a 'severance package'. His Grace has done a bit of fishing around on this, and such arrangements are not at all unusual under 'compromise agreements': the reasons may relate to taxation, or some clause to stagger payments to ensure the compromise conditions are met. So the issue appears to be that Mr Coulson was apparently serving two masters - in the words of John Prescott, he was a 'double agent being paid by the Tories & Murdoch'.

If that is the principal objection - or perception - how can Lord Patten simultaneously be Chairman of the BBC Trust and in receipt of an EU pension? He readily gave up jobs (with the Global Leadership Foundation, the International Crisis Group and Medical Aid to Palestine) which might have been perceived as a conflict of interests, but his EU pension of around £100,000 per annum continues to be paid.

Lord Patten's pension is conditional upon him doing nothing to harm the interests of the European Union. According to Article 213 of the Treaty establishing the European Community:

The Members of the Commission shall, in the general interest of the Community, be completely independent in the performance of their duties.

In the performance of these duties, they shall neither seek nor take instructions from any government or from any other body. They shall refrain from any action incompatible with their duties. Each Member State undertakes to respect this principle and not to seek to influence the Members of the Commission in the performance of their tasks.

The Members of the Commission may not, during their term of office, engage in any other occupation, whether gainful or not. When entering upon their duties they shall give a solemn undertaking that, both during and after their term of office, they will respect the obligations arising therefrom and in particular their duty to behave with integrity and discretion as regards the acceptance, after they have ceased to hold office, of certain appointments or benefits. In the event of any breach of these obligations, the Court of Justice may, on application by the Council or the Commission, rule that the Member concerned be, according to the circumstances, either compulsorily retired in accordance with Article 216 or deprived of his right to a pension or other benefits in its stead.

...

 

The BBC already manifests considerable pro-EU bias, but Lord Patten is perceptibly unable to address this lest he be accused of acting against the interests of the Union.

Now, Lord Patten may be an honorable man. But, as Lord Prescott has pointed out, there is the perception of a conflict - of being a 'double agent'.

Why, pray, is the media kicking up such a fuss over payments to Andy Coulson from 2007, but not batting an eyelid over the hundreds of thousands of pieces of silver still being paid to keep the state broadcaster in thrall to the EU?'

9) Why are Turkey kicking up such a fuss over Israel and also Cyprus? The answer is not just anti-Semitism, it is also Gas - lots of GAS. Eagle Speak has the full story:

'So, Turkey has been shaking the war stick at Israel, making big noise over the Israeli blockade of Gaza that last year resulted in the stopping of Turkish ship and the violence that followed. In addition, Turkey is most unhappy with the discovery of large amounts of natural gas beneath the waters off Israel and Cyprus.

...

For Cypriots who always had an Arab-envy, seeing their neighbors drawn in oil while they have to import every drop of it, has been frustrating if not intoxicating. Loren Steffy, the business columnist for the Houston Chronicle, reports: “Just as the Israeli discoveries may transform that country from an energy importer to an exporter, a similar find off the coast of Cyprus could turn the island nation into a major European energy hub”.

Terry Gerhart, the Vice President for international operations of Houston-based Noble Energy declares: “Cyprus could be on the verge of a natural gas revolution. Gas will strengthen the Cypriot economy for decades to come. Cyprus will become the Mediterranean’s energy hub”.

Well, maybe - both Cyprus and Israel are going to have some serious challenges - as noted here:

From Israel, there is good news and bad news.

The good news – and it is huge – is that Israel will soon be awash in natural gas. Gas discovered on the country's outer continental shelf will turn the country from being hydrocarbon-deprived to being a net exporter.

Indeed, Israel is set to become so rich that it is laying the groundwork for creating a sovereign wealth fund for overseas investments in order to protect the country from inflation and the shekel from getting too strong.

The bad news is that with Hezbollah poised to control Lebanon's government, Iran has de facto arrived on Israel's northern border. Even without an Iranian nuclear weapon, this is a grave deterioration in Israel's security.

Already Lebanon has asked the United Nations to guarantee that Israel does not violate the integrity of Lebanon's outer continental shelf, where Iran plans to help Lebanon drill for gas.

Geology is about to change the political geography of the world's most combustible neighborhood.

The two huge gas discoveries are in the Tamar and Leviathan fields. Taken together, the gas reserves are estimated at 26 trillion cubic feet or 10 times larger than Britain's North Sea discoveries.

Since its creation in 1948, Israel has drilled on land for oil and gas with very little success. While the Arab Gulf countries have found and produced massive quantities of oil and gas, Israel has scrounged in the international markets for its hydrocarbons, including coal.

Israel's isolation made this difficult and expensive. In recent years, it has bought gas from Egypt. But Egypt will lose its good customer.

Turkey, once Israel's only Moslem friend – until the botched seizure of a humanitarian ship bound for blockaded Gaza – will be affected too. There were plans for a pipeline that would carry gas from Azerbaijan across Turkey and undersea to Israel. That economic boost will no longer be going to Turkey, but instead will probably go to Greece and Greek Cyprus. There have been preliminary discussions between Israel and Greece about shipping gas through Greece, by an undersea pipeline or a liquefied natural gas train, as an entry point into Europe.

So now, we see new headlines Turkey rattles sabres over Cypriot natural gas drilling:

Prospects of an underwater natural gas bonanza in the eastern Mediterranean have sparked a fresh row between Turkey and the divided island of Cyprus that is also embroiling Greece and Israel.

The Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, warned last week that he was ready to send warships to the area, both to escort Turkish aid convoys to the Gaza Strip and to monitor Cypriot and Israeli energy projects.

How far Turkey is prepared to escalate tensions will become clearer in coming days.

A Texas-based company, Noble Energy, is due to launch exploratory drilling south of Cyprus soon on behalf of the Greek Cypriots, who represent the island internationally and in the European Union.

Asked about those plans, Egemen Bagis, Turkey's EU minister, warned this month: "It is for this [reason] that countries have warships. It is for this that we have equipment and train our navies."

In the past, Turkey has proved ready to back its positions in maritime disputes with military muscle.

Why is Turkey involved? Ah, the "Cyprus Problem!" '

Turkey invaded and occupied Northern Cyprus but that  gives them a foothold on the island and thus the chance to try and lay claim to Cyprus's gas finds...


10) Finally as the Eurozone gets closer and closer to the abyss, Stop Turkey has an interesting article:

'Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has called for a United States of Europe to be created with Turkey as a full member and Russia as an associate member.

We should "not dither any longer, but get serious with the European core," he said, pointing to the international competition of different world region: otherwise Europe and its nation states will "sink into insignificance" between Asia under Chinese leadership and a re-strengthened America. Schröder supports the goal of a United States of Europe that Ursula von der Leyen[a German politician] had brought up. "The Europe I imagine is more strongly integrated, supplemented with the membership of Turkey and an association with Russia."

Since leaving political office, Schröder has been involved in energy and pipeline projects that involve Russia and Turkey.

He also calls for a joint European finance minister:

"National sovereignty must be relinquished", referring to parliamentary budget rights.

"What the national parliaments give up must go to the European parliament as the highest authority." In addition, he imagines that a "special committee" of the EU parliament could be formed, "consisting of the members of the Euro zone and taking over this monitoring function".

"Great Britain creates the biggest problems." The country is not in the euro, "but the British still want to have a say in the design of the business area." That doesn't go together.'

The answer is always closer union and bringing Turkey into the EU will aid in the destruction of the Judeo-Christian identity of the EU.