Under what legislation are Greenpeace authorised to attack Drilling Operations?

An item in the Guardian Newspaper states that Greenpeace has commissioned an ex-Russian Fire Fighting ship to 'target' deep-sea drilling operations they consider 'dangerous to the environment.' The Danish government has responded to the threat by despatching a naval vessel to defend Danish drilling operations off the Faroe Islands and Greenpeace admits that these fields are on their list of 'danger' sites. They are also accusing the Danish government of 'over reacting' stating 'we are an entirely peaceful protest ship.'

Yes, and Che Guevarra was just a Freedom Fighter defending the 'rights' of oppressed citizenry whether they wanted it or not.

The recent assault by this 'peaceful' organisation on BP Service Stations across London will, no doubt, go unpunished even though, in strictest terms of existing law it is sabotage, or commercial disruption and could be argued that the loss of livelihoods by the operators of these stations - franchise holders - and the threats to their staff and loss of earnings by their employees should be billed to Greenpeace. I do not recall ever being asked to vote for Greenpeace - a multi million pound 'charity' with most of its assets and principal 'managers' domiciled well off-shore and out of reach of any legal jurisdiction they target - to 'police' anything or anyone. Nor have I ever seen any legislation passed by anyone - the UN is NOT and never will be a legislative body - authorising Greenpeace or any other 'charity' to act as policemenor in any capacity to interfere with the legal operation of the tapping of any resources needed to run the modern world.

The lie they perpetuate in the Guardian article, that this is a 'peaceful' protest is just that, a lie. This operation will include attempts to sabotage equipment, to board the rigs and endanger, by stupid stunts, the lives of the operators and the safety of the rig. That is piracy, yes, P - I - R - A - C - Y, and there is nothing romantic or good about it. Take a look at the International Maritime Treaties. Greenpeace and their surrogate organisations involved in putting 'boarders' onto any ship proceeding on any lawful business upon the oceans in International or National waters, are commiting an act of piracy and it is high time they were arrested and charged with this.

Let us hope the Danes are just the first of many navies to be sent to defend these assets and arrest the Greenpeace pirates.

The Great Pension Swindle

Throughout the Western World those of my age and generation, the so-called 'Baby Boomers' are being told that our pensions are unaffordable, that we must work until we drop and that all the money we have paid into pension funds is no longer available. Why is this? Well, in the UK, the answer is simple. It was never invested. Instead it was used to subsidise schools, the all consuming NHS, Parliamentary pay-offs and extravagance, social security for the 'won't works' and the hand-outs to immigrants. (A recent study showed that an immigrant could get benefits totalling over £400 per week while a Pensioner on the full State Pension gets under £200.) Add to that the failed social engineering experiments and all the other money consuming projects so beloved of the Left and Labour (Like Blair's electronic government - £1 billion or more and still not working!). That is the state of the 'State Pension' but why are the 'private pensions' in such a state of collapse?

Again you need look no further than the stupidity of Whitehall and the greed of the Directors. The collapse of the Maxwell Empire (The Mirror newspaper Group) is a clear pointer. The law 'allowed' the members contributions to be 'invested' in their own company. The various Boards interpretted that as a carte blanche to use the suprlus cash in the pension fund to prop up failing businesses, fund expansion or build unaffordable corporate headquarters. Those that were invested the Blair government and that economic disaster of a Chancellor, Gordon Brown, soon took care of. He changed the tax laws and stripped the pension funds of over £8 billion - and the Treasury is still stealing £6 billion a year out of the income that was supposed to pay for the pensions staff have paid for.

Elsewhere, as in South Africa, Employers Pension Schemes were required to be invested funds. You could not do as they do and did in Britain and use contributions to pay the pensions you were currently supporting. Those had to be paid out of your investment income. So the pension funds were, until recently, healthy. Then the present government began asset stripping.

My generation spent their youth being told we were 'too young' and 'too inexperienced' to be the top dogs. Then suddenly we were pushed aside by the PC Brigade and the Socialist graduates as having been 'privileged' and must therefore stand aside to allow the 'disadvantaged' to take charge. Some of us were even told we were to 'support and guide' the peoplebeing parachuted into positions for which they were neither qualified nor trained. We were to 'make our knowledge and experience available so they could catch up and take charge.' I freely admit that I was one of those who refused. If I wasn't good enough to hold the position, then I certainly wasn't good enough to 'guide' the complete ignoramus who was appointed. I also made sure that any direction from them which was likely to have repercussions was recorded and my objection with it.

So now the chickens are coming home to roost. My pension is under threat. I'm told that because the expected population and job expansion (people being employed in endlessly expanding jobs) hasn't happened; because the expansion of the economy isn't happening; because the wars Labour embarked on in Afghanistan, Iraq and who knows where else have cost more than they thought and because the Civil Service (Which contributes nothing at all to the economy) continues to expand exponentially, I will have to continue until I am 67, 68, 69 - or drop dead - before I and all my fellow 'Baby Boomers' qualify for our pensions.

I have a suggestion. Sack half the Civil Service, on the grounds of incompetence, a charge which could be easily proved in every case from the top down. Freeze 'Benefits' and cut Parliamentary salaries and pensions - the salaries by half and the pensions to the same 'pro rata' formula as the rest of us in any employment where the pension benefits are directly related to length of service. That will save several tens of billions and that can be invested to pay the pensions we, the Baby Boomers, have paid for. Selling off all the luxurious and hugely expensive office accomodation built in the last twelve or so years to house extra civil servants and the hordes of self-important twits called MPs would also provide a vast amount of money to balance the books.

Do I expect any politican to even consider this? I won't lay any money on it.

Owls, Kites and Kestrels...

Last night we had a visit from a large owl. As it was dark we couldn't see what sort, but evidently it has discovered the horde of field mice that have invaded our, and our neighbours gardens. Madam Paddy Cat was rather cautious about it all, with good reason I suspect.

Early this morning as I was enjoying my coffee in bed, one of the kestrels did a high speed dive into the garden and soared away clutching something. We have several kestrels hovering, diving and generally harrying the small critters in the fields all around us, but the majestic Red Kites take the prize. They soar magnificently and apparently efortlessly. Occasionally they have mock aerial combat displays and from time to time obviously make kills in the fields.

As I type Madam Paddy is out investigating the several mouse holes she has marked and targets daily. At 20 years of age though, her intent I think outweighs her ability...

Looks like the owls, kestrels and possibly the kites have the hunting field to themselves for now.

Martin's Martens ...

A friend of ours here in Taunusstein has visitors. Martin has Martens in his garden - as, it must be said, do the rest of us.



Being surrounded by forest, we have a lot of these lovely and playful little critters around us, though they are quite shy most of the time. Semi-nocturnal, you don't see them much in daylight, but you certainly hear them playing and hunting at night. Cousins of the weasel family, they are lithe, quick and eager hunters, so this year, the mouse explosion is probably a bonus for the Pine Martens and the House Martens or Marders as they are called here in Germany.



Though they look cuddly, they cause a lot of damage if they invade your loft. They do a lot of damage to cars as well at this time of the year. For some reason, unknown to mankind, but probably a secret Marten aphrodisiac, they take to chewing the rubber hoses in cars. Get a Marten into your engine and your coolant pipes are suddenly collanders, your electrics lack insulation and several other parts made of rubber or certain plastics - they are selective - are nibbled and stripped.

Martin's Martens have done just that to his car. An Opel - which, again for reasons known only to Marders - their favourite make ... But don't think your BMW or your Merc are immune, if there isn't an Opel around, they'll take second best ...

Raising the nuclear spectre...

The bush fires raging in a vast area around Moscow have caused widespread devastation. Two hundred or more deaths, several towns have been completely razed to the ground and hundreds, if not thousands are homeless. But the chief concern now seems to be that the fires have entered an area contaminated by the fallout from the smoke of the fire that destroyed one of Chernobyl's reactors. It seems the Greenpeace activists 'monitoring' the smoke have 'detected radiation.' One wonders, of course, what sort, and what isotopes they are measuring.

I'm very skeptical of anything Greenpeace tells me, especially after their claim that the Brentspar was 'loaded with radioactive material' when it was in fact, background radiation from seabed mud they were 'measuring.' There may be a little 'science' in there, but the 'spin' destroys any credibility it may have.

Recently I came across an article written by one of their activists postulating on the effects of a train carrying 'nuclear material, "exploding" following an accident' in the East London area. The article betrayed the fact that the author had no knowledge of spent nuclear fuel's nature and even less of the protection systems and shielding that is present when it is transported. This is a common myth the anti-nuclear lobby keep perpetuating. In their minds any radioactive material is the same as an A-Bomb. According to their mythology, simply bumping it can cause a nuclear explosion. The truth is somewhat different. In fact you have to use quite a lot of TNT to 'fuse' lumps of fissile material and create a nuclear 'explosion.'

The other myth the media are equally guilty of promoting is that the reactor at Chernobyl was a nuclear explosion. It wasn't, it was a steam burst caused by a fire in the graphite core which holds the fissile rods that cause heat when they are allowed to react without the Boron damping rods which absorb the radioactive particles the fuel rods emit. To cool the core and transport the heat being generated into heat exchangers which in their turn heat the water from the boilers to steam and drive the turbines which generate electricity for you and me. What went wrong at Chernobyl was an attempt to 'restart' a reactor manually. Uneven heating of the core led to a fire in the graphite blocks, that caused a coolant pipe to split and that caused water to flood into an environment where the heat was five or six times the boiling point of water and the pressure was low enough for the water to 'flash' instantly to steam.

One litre of water becomes one thousand litre of steam. The top blew off the reactor under steam pressure, the fire in the graphite got air and the rest is history.

There are serious risks with nuclear power. not least the human factor, but please, let's stop the morons who sread the myth that all nuclear installations are A-Bombs. They're not.

Fire and flood

The flooding in Eastern Germany and Poland is it seems balanced by the heatwave in Moscow and environs - over 40*C in places and it has been sustained now for several weeks. Small wonder than that there are fires raging across the huge expanses that typify this massive country. What is perhaps surprising is the loss of life - 250 according to the news - and the destruction of entire towns. It is almost as if there are no fire services at work at all there. Despite appearances though there are now something like 15,000 fire fighters at work but, at the last count, there are still something over 300 separate fires in progress. The satellite pictures show a smoke plume covering thousands of square kilometres and pictures taken in central Moscow show the city choked with smoke from the fires.

The President and Minister for Emergencies have both criticised the fire fighters, but, as one has pointed out in an intervoew, some of their equipment is unusable because they cannot get spares for it and most of the rest is out of date or inadequate. One hopes that Messrs Putin and Co will take the hint.

Meanwhile the tragedy in Pakistan continues unabated with another couple of months of monsoon still to come. To much rain in one part, not enough in another. Typical weather...

Unintended consequences

The generation that spent their university years boycotting, campaigning against everyone, sitting in classrooms to ban particular lecturers and generally sowed the seeds of civic breakdown are now sitting in Whitehall and Westminster and wondering why no one respects them, their office or their ideas.

Democracy only really works when there is trust between the politicians, the voters and the bureaucrats who serve both. That trust has broken down. There are far to many laws there simply because some ex-Hippy felt a need to show he/she was 'doing something' about anything. Far too many actually conflict with the very rights the law makers calim to respect and far, far to many actually conflict with other existing laws - simply because the idiot who wrote it for the MP behind it simply didn't bother checking. Trust has evaporated, the media have, probably rightly, managed to tar everyone in an elected office as sleavy, overpaid and certainly with his/her snout in the trough. That image is certainly re-inforced by the fact that our Parliamentarians are now almost exclusively 'Professional Politcians' in the sense that they do nothing else for a living.

Most start out in Accountancy or Law, get elected to a Local Council, then to a County Council and finally to Parliament. If they go through the Labour route, its through being an activist for the National Union of Students, then a Union Official, Local Government and finally a safe Labour seat. Never done a days work in their lives is a term applicable to the majority of MPs. As for their Civil Service chums, well there isn't much to choose from. The Civil Service is now recognised as an entirely self serving and self preserving parasitic organisation. Cuts in budgets may bring about a reduction in services this organisation is supposed to provide, it won't actually bring any savings and it certainly doesn't see any reduction in the size of any Department. What it does invariably do is see a huge rise in Unemployment as contracts for the military and other 'service' departments are cut.

Those who launched the "Summer of Love" wanted more say in a range of matters they felt strongly about but lacked the experience and even the knowledge to do. They began a process which now, through the plethora of "charitable" organisations, such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Animal Rights and so on, have undermined the very fabric of our democracy. I doubt they intended this, but it is a fact. As I said at the outset, democracy depends on trust and respect. Both are now long gone from our society.

I doubt that our democracy can survive.