fahrenheit451:292

To quote that haunting line,one of many,from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon  ,there's nothing more to say.

There really isn't and Peter Hitchens has said what needed saying on brexit  better,more succinctly and incisively than just about any journalist /commentator anywhere.

So, gleaned from his Mail on Sunday  blog of 20 October 2018 :-

"  Negotiation is a test of strength. And Britain is far weaker than the giant German empire that is the EU.

Sooner or later, if we truly want to get out of that empire, we are going to have to grasp this. Poor, hopeless Theresa May hasn’t a chance, not least because she has never really wanted to leave. So she flounders between wild fake militancy, adopted to protect her right flank, and pathetic weakness – her actual position.

But I have even less time for the posturing braggarts, on all sides of the question, who now pretend that their positions are so pure and wonderful that they cannot give an inch. The Europhiles are ghastly, especially their dangerous call for a second referendum.

But worst of all are those who demand a total, pure exit from the EU, even if it means a catastrophic walkout with nothing agreed.

As I sometimes point out, I don’t recall seeing most of these heroes around when I was one of the few voices calling for British independence in the long years before 2016.

Back then, most of these born-again, all-or-nothing fanatics, in politics and the media, were keen allies of Mr Cameron, perhaps the worst Prime Minister this country has ever had.

Remember how he derided anyone who objected to the loss of national independence as silly old fools ‘banging on’, or as ‘fruitcakes’. Well, it seems, they are all fruitcakes now. Though their obsessions are strange.

I wanted to get out of the EU, and still do, because I believe continental law and forms of government will eventually destroy English law and our unique free Parliament.

I couldn’t give a farthing for the freedom to import chlorine-washed chicken from the USA, or fling our markets open wide to Asia. In fact, I rather fear it. I do not think that, by leaving the EU, we will suddenly export more. Why would that happen? Our goods are not especially cheap and we make little that the world actually wants. I think we will import more.

What I want to do is rip up our allegiance to the European Arrest Warrant, a grave breach of our ancient liberties which everyone seems to have completely forgotten about. I want to get rid of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, now our real Supreme Court. And I want to stop rubber-stamping European Commission directives and pretending they are our own laws. And I would also like to shake free of the crazy policy of pushing the EU eastwards into Ukraine and the Caucasus.

If Brussels and Washington really want a war with Russia, then let them have one. But Britain has no interest at all in reviving this grubby, aggressive conflict, which has already convulsed Europe twice in one century.

These aims can be achieved by doing what I have now been urging for months – the Norway Option. This needs no permission from Brussels. It formally takes us out of the EU, so fulfilling the referendum vote. It would make the Irish border as relaxed as the current frontier between Norway and Sweden, which is pretty relaxed. It frees us from three-quarters of EU interference in our laws and life.

It keeps us in the European Economic Area, so there is no risk to the economy. It frees us from the EU’s damaging Common Agricultural Policy and from the daylight robbery of the Common Fisheries Policy. It hugely cuts our contributions to Brussels.

But, thanks to strident, inflexible groups of MPs whose main concern is their future careers, it has barely been considered.

I can’t stop them. But if they manage to lead us into chaos and an economic crash, then I shall at least try to make sure that their selfish folly is not forgotten.  "

Yeah and Amen.

fahrenheit451:291

It's only a couple of blog posts or so ago that I opined that no-one really gives a shit about investigative journalists.

That was in the wake of the news of Marinova's murder in Bulgaria.She was the third investigative journalists murdered in a EU member state in the past 12 months. Galizia in Malta and Kuciak in Slovakia being the other two martyred for the truth and public accountability.

But  " news " corporate MSM news has now moved on to Khashoggi. A sworn opponent of the ruling Saudi Royal family and of its quasi-medieval politics and practices. A writer and polemicist in exile in the USA and habitue of the Washington Post he popped into the Saudi embassy in Ankara to sort out some bureaucratic paperwork. He was consequently tortured,murdered,cut up into pieces and buried.

Even in Erdogan's Turkey,where some 250 professional Turkish journalists are languishing in prison,this act of barbaric impunity was more than one step way too far to shrug off or excuse.And the proverbial merde hit the international diplomatic fan in spectacular fashion.

Khashoggi is now flavour of the month as far as martyred journalists go.

Which is kind of odd since in theory the murder of investigative journalists ought to be treated equally,except we all know that they're not.

Realpolitik and the ranking of nations plays its ineluctable part in determining just how much concern and consternation surrounds any death of any journalist.How do the murders of Marinova,Kuciak and Galizia stack up against that of Khashoggi's ?

Here's something gleaned from Balkan Insight ,3 September '18 :-

" After Bulgaria funnelled 90 million euros from the EU into restoration projects that critics have slated, conservationists dread the results of the next spending spree – and the expected tourist boom has yet to materialise.

Ana Blagova BIRN“It’s weeping – a weeping fortress,” conservation architect Stella Duleva told BIRN, describing the white substance leaking from the newly-restored walls of the 4^th-century Roman fort of Trayanovi Vrata in Bulgaria.

“It had survived 16 centuries, and now it’s been ruined by 2 million euros,” she added.

Sitting atop a mountain pass between ancient Thrace and Macedonia, the fort is one of 120 heritage sites that Bulgaria’s government chose to restore as tourist attractions between 2011 and 2015, using its own money and nearly 90 million euros from the EU’s Regional Development Fund, ERDF.

Conservationists warn that much of the “restoration” work has damaged rather than preserved centuries-old landmarks, without attracting the hoped-for tourism boom. Even one of the scheme’s cheerleaders has suggested that funds have been misused.

Now another tranche of European funding, known in Bulgaria as “Operational programme ‘Regions in Growth’”, is due to become available this year. Under it, at least 100 million euros will be allocated to develop more tourist attractions.

The EU and Bulgarian authorities have conceded to BIRN that lessons need to be learned from the earlier programme, but are still backing the latest spending spree. "


Viktoria Marinova had been busily uncovering widespread fraud and corruption involving EU funding in Bulgaria when she was murdered,apparently by a psychopathic lowlife with a record who was speedily apprehended by the authorities in Germany within a matter of days following Marinova's murder.How convenient.

Kuciak ( along with his girlfriend ) were executed by Mafia hit-men in Slovakia and Galizia was car-bombed in Malta.All of them inextricably linked to various and diverse widespread,institutionalised corruption and fraud within the various member states and between EU member states and the EU bureaucracy itself.

All those prominent political leaders who have spoken out about Khashoggi and demanded to ascertain the  " truth ",all had been previously eerily quiet on Marinova,Kuciak and Galizia.

And so it goes...

farenheit451:290

The following appeared on Belfast Telegraph Digital :-

October 15 2018

DUP deputy leader Nigel Dodds said that Brexit has turned into a " battle for the Union itself ", with the EU and UK government no closer to agreeing a withdrawal deal.

 So,here we are at the precipice.It's worth recounting briefly which intricate labyrinth of steps we've traversed in order to find ourselves at this singularly existential juncture.

 It's okay,you can skip the next bit since in retrospect it seems highly implausible that such a portmanteau of eventualities could occur or are ever likely to occur in such a fashion ever again.

Tories decide to add a commitment to holding an " In-Out" referendum on EU membership to their manifesto for GE2015. They do it,in what their leadership assumes is a countervailing and pre-emptive manouevre to stop further votes being lost to UKIP.

Against the odds,Cameron leads his Party to an outright victory with a 20-odd seats overall majority.

Parliament approves with virtually no dissenting votes against that a binding In-Out referendum will be held on June 23 2016.

As polling booths closed on June 22,leading bookmakers were quoting that the Remain campaign is 9 to 1 on, to win.In lay man's terms that means in order to win £1 you'd have to place a bet of £9.That's the racingiest certainty of all time.

Except that the bookies' and the metropolitan elites' and political establishment's favourite came in second.

2 years of unabated Sturm und drang ensued.

During which time Cameron & Osborne jumped ship asap after the Leave victory and Theresa May - Anglican Tea Lady of the Year became Tory leader and with it PM after having campaigned for Remain.
By 2017 she'd become more confused than usual and in a prolonged fit of political hubris called for and engineered a General election which the opposition parties generously helped her to do.A 20-odd seats overall majority got blown out of the water,but as still the largest party, the Tories cut a deal with the DUP to allow them to govern.So instead of gaining a surer grip on the brexit negotiations with a larger Tory overall majority who she could command at will, May the supreme anti-strategist ended up with no majority and her premiership and dreams of grandeur on life support with the switch firmly in the grasp of a fiercely pro-brexit DUP.

And so on and so forth up to the present day.

Brexit itself remains firmly on course to be utterly,callously and brutally betrayed by the nation's political class.Something like 80% of the itinerant Westminster benchwarmers were for Remain and were always highly unlikely to expedite matters in such a manner as to assuage the expectations that a Vote for Leave unleashed.

As for the contrived hysteria and virtue signalling over the Irish border and all the quasi-theological cant over a backstop and the Good Friday Agreement,blah,blah,blah remember this; the ratbag Fenian regime residing in Dublin has to have its national budget approved by a committee of the German Bundestag before it,the ragbag regime in Dublin is even allowed to spend any of its own pocket money.

Treachery ,hypocrisy and otiose cant are the political class' tools of the trade.And the sooner the tumbrils come to cart them all off,the better.

And so it goes...

fahrenheit451:289

Truth is most people probably don't a give a shit about investigative journalists.Or what happens to them or doesn't happen to them.Perhaps the only time when some random spark ignites the public's interest in investigative journalism is when a scandal is uncovered and wrong doing is exposed to the bright daylight of public scrutiny.

Not all journalists are investigators but it goes with the profession's territory.Born to snoop,to pry,to ask the really awkward questions,to dig, to get their goddamn head blown off if they dig too deep and wind up annoying the wrong people at the wrong moment.

But when all the sums get added up at the close of business,not too many give a damn one way or the other;unless and until,of course events start to impinge too often and bodies start to pile up in plain sight of the civilians who would,if they could choose,rather not know,rather not confront the mire and the blood of Realpolitik as it gets played in real time with real consequences.

Political parties and their activists and partisan commentators who keep up the volume pumped up on any and all matters and all kinds of issues ,for some reason have fallen silent on the recent spate of journalist murders.

The most recent one,just a few days ago in Bulgaria was that of local investigative journalist Viktoria Marinova,who was the authorities say was raped and murdered.She had been looking into fraud and corruption linked to EU contracts. Back in February of this year, in Slovakia, it had been the turn of Jan Kuciak who together with his girlfriend were found shot dead.Apparently Jan Kuciak had dug deep and found links between elements of the Italian Mafia and government officials.

A year ago,in October 2017 Caruana Galizia, a well known and widely respected investigative journalist in Malta died in a car bomb attack.She too had been collecting evidence on EU related fraud and corrupt local politicians.

Both in Slovakia and Malta widespread public protest demonstrations have taken place with politicians and Police officials alike in both countries being placed under intense popular pressure and scrutiny and in some cases have resigned from office.

The common thread of the awarding of EU funded contracts,bureaucratic shenanigans,the involvement of local and national political figures etc.etc. are no mere coincidence.

Fraud,corruption,,nepotism and the involvement of Mafia gangsters in the misappropriation of billions of euroes makes for a very large political cesspit.One that the European Union is wholly incapable of even beginning to deal with.

fahrenheit451:288

There comes a point, and in any event we are in fact way,way past it, where reiterating the same arguments,exposing the same facts,re-heating the same revelations that had once initially shocked us just becomes tedious.

It is axiomatic that within the European Union the further east and south east that you go,the greater the increase in fraud and corruption there is in any given member state. However, even before the annexation,sorry accession, in 2004 and 2007 of the virtual entirety of the economically moribund and socially sclerotic former post-1945 communist states - institutionalised fraud and corruption abounded in stalwart EU member states such as Portugal,Spain,Greece and Italy.

The litany of antiquated,clapped out rustbelt national economies includes those of the former baltic Soviet republics - Estonia,Latvia,Lithuania, parts of the Yugoslav federation -Croatia ,Slovenia alongside Poland,Hungary,Czechia,Slovakia,Romania and Bulgaria.

Many of these never came close to passing all the absurd and ultimately unenforcible standards of governance and financial probity insisted upon by the EU as necessary preconditions to being admitted into full EU membership.

The online euobserver carried a brilliant piece on October 5 2018 highlighting just how unfathomable the murky depths of fraud and corruption still are and that essentially the EU itself is wholly incapable of even beginning to address in any effective and cogent manner.
Herewith an extract.

By PETER TEFFER

BRUSSELS, 5. OCT, 08:48

The leader of Romania's Social Democrat party maintains he is innocent.
But, according to Romania's National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA), Liviu Dragnea created an organised criminal group and defrauded EU structural funds.

Romania's fraudbusters had help in their case from the Brussels-based European Anti-Fraud Office (Olaf).
"Olaf conducted thorough investigations that we hope will have a strong deterrent effect," said the office's then acting director-general Nicholas Ilett in November 2017, when the accusation of the DNA was announced.

Whether that deterrent effect will occur remains to be seen.
If proven, the Dragnea case - which is still ongoing - would only be one of many examples of the EU's regional support fund being hit by fraud last year.
"Fraud involving EU structural funds remained at the core of Olaf's investigative work in 2017," the office said in its annual report.

By the end of last year, 73 of Olaf's 362 ongoing investigations were specifically on structural funds – making it the largest category four years in a row.
Other annual reports, by the European Commission, also indicate that cohesion funds are a significant target for criminals. Why is that?

Part of it has to do with the fact that regional support simply makes up a large share of the EU budget, Ilett told EUobserver in June, when he was still acting director-general of Olaf.
Some correlation between amount of spending and level of fraud is to be expected. "Of course it is more complex than that. It's also inherent in the nature of the spending," he said.

"There is a system of shared management and that also can constitute a risk. Because there are more people involved in the decision-making process and you can have decisions taken quite locally, where there may sometimes be a risk of a lack of control, and a risk of patronage, nepotism, corruption at the local level," noted Ilett.

Mihaly Fazekas, researcher at Cambridge University, agreed, and pointed to the large amount of discretion given to local and regional authorities in distributing the EU funds.
"If you have a corrupt elite, discretion is good," the researcher told EUobserver. "If you have a friend who happens to build stadiums, you will build a stadium even if the village has no football club which is in the first league or no one watches football."

Paradox

Fazekas is more of an expert on corruption than on fraud, but the two issues are closely related.
He noted that the plethora of administrative requirements for recipients of EU funds have an adverse affect. "While bureaucratic controls try to decrease corruption, inadvertently they make market entry harder – reduce the number of bidders, hence make corruption more likely," said Fazekas.

How much money is actually being defrauded from the annual EU budget for cohesion policy – and whether the problem is increasing – is hard to determine, according to Olaf's Ilett. "It's very difficult to measure over time. It's one of the things we know that we don't know," he noted.

The commission's Protection of the European Union's financial interests reports, or Pif reports, give some indication.
The report on 2017 said that EU member states reported a total of €320m of cohesion policy and fisheries funding as fraudulent irregularities. The 2016 figure was €237m, also for cohesion policy and fisheries combined. In 2015, when cohesion policy was still counted separately, member states reported €477m in fraudulent irregularities.
But Olaf's Ilett said the figures needed to be interpreted cautiously because there is no harmonised approach.
"The trouble with the PIF report figures is that it contains what the member states have declared, and within that there is a category of what they think is fraudulent," he said.

And there you have it - the Anti Fraud office don't know how much has gone missing  or how much is still going missing,where its going missing let alone who might be responsible for it going missing.

We need to get out of this insane asylum asap by way of the door marked Brexit;don't you think?

fahrenheit451:287

There's something vitally important taking place in England today.Only I can't remember what it is or where it's being held or even what it's supposed to be about that makes it seem so terribly important to some people.

And that ladies and gentlemen is a concise a report on the proceedings of the Conservative Party Conference 2018 in Birmingham as it is possible render.

Oh. go on then, herewith some further musings on this sad and tragic event.

Had the insufferably patronising,self-entitlement flaneurs of the Tory hierarchy that came out in support of Leave, even at least half-heartedly put together as broad a based political coalition for Leave leadership team, then quite possibly we might all be many miles down the road from Stalag Luft IV by now instead of arguing about who should go first through the escape tunnel's exit and into the forest which the tunnel fell fifty feet short of due to planning miscalculations.

The EU's funded #PeoplesVote aka #OpenBritain aka #LabourIn ( aka the Labour Party all wings & factions ) has already seemingly persuaded half the inmates of Stalag Luft IV , that they should stay put and renegotiate the terms and conditions of their imprisonment with the prison camp's administration.

The Conservative Party, au contraire has no place for such brazen expressions of antidemocratic,unconstitutional sedition.They're already fully booked.

The only reassuring augury to manifest itself is that which clearly indicates the approaching final doom of the entire misbegotten and otiose enterprise still calling itself Conservative. It's no more that than Labour is anything anymore to do with labour.

In that sense Brexit has succeeded admirably; it's ostensible purpose may have suffered a seemingly substantive set back and even have been defeated.

But its true purpose has delivered the torpedoes into the respective engine rooms of the two antiquated rustbuckets of Conservative and Labour with unerring and implacable deadly accuracy.