Is this the same Nick Clegg?

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On Friday night, François Fillon, the French prime minister, interrupted an official visit to Brazil to call Mr Clegg to "clarify" his recent comments that Britain's credit rating should be reviewed.
The Deputy PM told Mr Fillon that his recent remarks and those by other senior French figures had been "simply unacceptable and that steps should be taken to calm down the rhetoric".

Yeah, I know. Being told off by Nick Clegg. It sounds like being savaged by a kitten that's been quite heavily sedated, doesn't it? But you know, I reckon he meant it. He might even have meant it more than Cameron meant to say 'no' to the Merkozy being last week, and I wouldn't rule out Clegg going for the full diplospeak version of je t'encule in the future.

Because I think Cleggy boy has noticed something. His reluctant BFF next door has suddenly become more popular with the electorate. Undeserved, perhaps, but even if Cameron stood up to the EU for Britain by complete accident he'd have got some political capital out of it, and Cleggy probably fancies a little of it for himself. Hang on, he may be thinking to himself, there's votes in this Euroscepticism thingy. And let's face it, for a man who's only a liberal or a democrat as and when it suits him it's not impossible that he might decide to be a Europhile only when it's worth his while as well.

To paraphrase Marx - Groucho, that is - these are Nick's principles and if you don't like them he has others.

Terrifying

At Douglas Carswell's:

The Treasury’s policy of “Continuity Brown” means we look set to borrow more money in this Parliament than Gordon Brown managed in 13 years.

I've long since stopped trying even to estimate the number of times I've said this, but this ConLib Cobbleition government really is as bad as Labour, arguably with the additional down side that if the whole house of cards has to come crashing down before it can be unfucked and rebuilt Labour's incompetence in general and Gordon Brown's lunacy in particular might have brought that day a little sooner. The Cobbleition seem to be there with the purpose of prolonging the agony in the hope of winning power and prolonging it for another five years, and for that I despise them.*


* Actually I despise them for quite a lot of other things, all of which they share in common with Labour. But tonight it's just the insane profligacy.

Do you have to be a European to believe the Euro is not all but dead?

And does the head in the sand approach mean greater problems when it finally keels over? Some certainly think so.

TOP US military officer General Martin Dempsey has admitted he is ''extraordinarily concerned'' about the euro's survival, pointing to potential civil unrest and the break-up of the European Union.

''The euro zone is at great risk,'' the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, giving the strongest indication yet about the depth of Washington's concerns over Europe's financial tumult.

''We are extraordinarily concerned by the health and viability of the euro because in some ways we're exposed literally to contracts but also because of the potential of civil unrest and break-up of the union that has been forged over there,'' General Dempsey said.

I can't help feeling that if the US are getting the Joint Chiefs of Staff involved they're very, very worried over there. We all know that Americans aren't allowed to die for any reason at all any more, and there are many tens of thousands of them in Europe at any one time. Warnings from economists may carry the weight of expertise but when a major power's military starts talking about it it sounds like someone somewhere now expects the worst.

Cuts, Spanish style vs British style

Click images for links.

The northeastern region has been ordered to rein in its deficit and has embarked on a series of stringent austerity cuts.
The latest edict issued by the region’s ministry of education instructs state schools to cut “excessive consumption” of toilet roll among pupils and limit the quota to a maximum of 25 metres per child per month.
This most recent penny saving measure comes amid widespread cuts to education budgets across Spain that has led to regular protests in the streets by teachers.

Okay, not nice, and even though you can always give your kids some bog roll to take into school with them toward the end of the month I can't help feeling there's probably a better place to make savings than on bog paper. On the other hand they are at least trying, whereas...

Officials in the Department for Transport have found the extra cash from other spending along the 100 mile £32 billion proposed route.
The change to the plans will mean that a final decision on whether to give the green light to the HS2 project will now be delayed from this month to mid-January.
The High Speed Rail 2 connection, which would be built between 2016 and 2026, will cut the journey time between the two cities by 35 minutes to less than 50 minutes.

To save half an hour? Why not bin the fucking thing and save £32 billion? Is Gordon Brown still running the country? Because the amount of government profligacy makes it fucking look that way.

Gissa currency

Actually 17 currencies might be better. You could call them Francs, Marks, Punts, Pesetas, Drachmas.....

Questions to which the answer is "No"

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... the question arises, should the rest of the world take over management of Europe to prevent or mitigate disaster? Specifically, should the US Federal Reserve assume leadership as a monetary superpower and impose policy on a paralyzed ECB, acting as a global lender of last resort?

And for the answer I think we should turn to one of those well worn graphical illustrations of how deep America's debt rabbit hole goes. This one is an excellent example from usdebt.kleptocracy.us. The first image shows the approximate US public debt by the end of the year if it was a piles of actual size $100 bills compared to quite a famous landmark, and the second shows that plus its unfunded liabilities.

If you've read the captions on those images (you can embiggerfy, or better yet go look at the original where you can see a similar representation of the US budget for 2011) you'll have noticed that the first of those, the $15 trillion pile, is roughly the size of the Gross Domestic Product for the entire United States. In fact the captions are a little out of date - US debt will not now reach 100% of GDP by Christmas 2011 because that happened four weeks ago.

So actually the answer to the question of whether the US Federal Reserve should act as Europe's lender of last resort is not just "No" - it's "With what?"

They just can't stop, can they?

Click images for links.

In his long-awaited Autumn Statement, the Chancellor will outline a £650 million scheme to provide free “early education” for about 40 per cent of two year-olds.

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will today announce a £1 billion scheme to pay firms more than £2,000 for each young unemployed person they hire.

And all this at a time when some think the UK is already back in recession and may need a decade of austerity to really recover. So what's the Cobbleition's response? Copy the policies of the deranged madmen who fucked the country into this hole in the first place, that's what.

I can't carry on with this, I really can't. I've said umpteen times that they're as bad as the last lot and that there's no appreciable difference between the the main parties anymore with the possible exception of how quickly they're going to fuck the country into a hole. The issue of how deeply they're going to fuck it into a hole has long had cross party support. If I blog this again anytime soon something is going to get fucking broken. Instead I'll just point out that Douglas Carswell, the Tory party's favourite for MP Least Likely To Be Given A Front Bench Job, has been wondering what the government would be doing right now if it was still a Labour government with Gordon Brown leading it. His list looks depressingly like the actual policies of the Cobbleition.

Pots and kettles

Half inched from Zerohedge.

From the Mail:

Countries will be forced to submit their budgets for EU approval before they go to national parliaments, will have to sign up to strict new rules on the size of debts and deficits and will be sued for any breach in the European Court of Justice.

Mrs Exile comments, wondering if this would be the same EU that hasn't had its books signed off by the auditors for 17 years in a row. Damn good question. But in the absence of any sane answer I'd say that countries all over Europe can look forward to seeing headlines like the Irish did a couple of weeks ago.

Unless the whole bloody Euro train wreck finally comes off the rails first, of course. Who knows, that might even have happened by the time this post goes up.

Appropriate music track

Because this:

British embassies in the eurozone have been told to draw up plans to help British expats through the collapse of the single currency, amid new fears for Italy and Spain.As the Italian government struggled to borrow and Spain considered seeking an international bail-out, British ministers privately warned that the break-up of the euro, once almost unthinkable, is now increasingly plausible.
Diplomats are preparing to help Britons abroad through a banking collapse and even riots arising from the debt crisis.
The Treasury confirmed earlier this month that contingency planning for a collapse is now under way.
[...]
Recent Foreign and Commonwealth Office instructions to embassies and consulates request contingency planning for extreme scenarios including rioting and social unrest.

So this:

Happy sights, happy thoughts

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Don't get me wrong here, I'm not gloating. Well, to be honest actually I am gloating a bit, but not all that much. That partly because it's not happened yet and we should keep the champagne on ice until it does, and partly because I'm not philosophically opposed to the idea of single currencies or federalisation as such. I think living in a federation of competing states (with a small 's') has got a lot to be said for it providing they really are competing to attract citizens, and as far as I'm concerned people can do business in Altairian Dollars, Flanian Pobble Beads or the Triganic Pu, or even a single currency with a stupid name if they want, as long as both parties agree to it. What I find so objectionable about both the Euro and about EU federalism is the attempts to impose both on half a billion people whether they want them or not, and the lack of any real efforts to make either really worth wanting much.

The only note of caution I'd sound, and this is aside the view of the experts that the whole process is likely to be painful and bloody even for nations not directly connected, is that I suspect the death of the Euro will lay the grounds for the next battle. "We know what went wrong," they'll say. "We should have done it like the Americans did when the USA was born: political union first and monetary union second." Prepare yourselves, Europeans, because this might not be the beginning of the end, but just the end of the beginning.

Doesn't add up

Douglas Carswell shows us exactly how bad governments involving all three main British political parties have been at primary school level arithmetic.

Here's a thought; spending to prop things up cost us £390 billion we do not have. Abolishing corporation tax entirely would have cost the Treasury less than half that amount - £140 billion - in lost revenue over the past three years.

Or it could have been of personal taxation or a mix of things. Either way people would have had money in their pockets to spend on things they needed or wanted. Instead of which a few banks which should have gone down the swanney survived.

Whoopee.

Can Cameron really be this stupid?

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Dave? Do you think that this might possibly have something to do with the fact that you haven't stopped spunking away money by the billion as fast as you can tax it off of the current workforce and borrow it on behalf of their children? Fucking hellfire, in the last couple of days we're told that you've blown half a billion on the Northern Rock sale, granted perhaps unavoidably, and that you've decided to throw almost the same again at the building industry while underwriting all the mortgages of first time buyers. Not only have you not cut public spending you're actually spending even more than Labour did, and incidentally failed to get the public sector to stop thinking of that as a cut as well as failed to get them to stop hiring for bullshit jobs instead of people who actually provide useful services. You've carried on taking money that could have paid down some of the UK's eye watering debt and handing it to the EU, IMF and international aid, and you've continued Labour's wars at significant cost and embarked on a military adventure of your own. The bonfire of the quangos was at best a barbecue of a handful of them - one of those small barbecues made of thick tinfoil that you get from petrol stations, and for which you probably paid in cash and told the attendant to keep the change from a million quid. And you've failed to create growth because you've refused to provide the conditions for it to occur. That's just off the top of my head and I'm sure I could think of more given time and find out more still if I started looking. And here you are scratching your arse - it apparently being interchangeable with your head - and wondering why the plan's not working.

I'll tell you why, David. It's because it's basically the same fucking plan that Gordon Brown was using, you hopelessly inept cunt. How the hell did Britain come to this? It's had some dim politicians and not a few dim PMs, but how in Christ's name did it get landed with you: a PM whose extraordinary dimness must surely result from being so dense that light can't escape if it falls into his head? It's not madness that is doing the same thing and expecting different results, it's stupidity. And that's actually the generous alternative because if I thought you knew what the fuck you were doing I'd be describing you as evil.

I hate to go all Private Frasier again, but if these fuckwits aren't dragged out and chained to something solid where they can't do any harm - the Lusitania for example - I really do think the UK is doomed.

Come back, Gordon Brown... UPDATED

All is not forgiven by any means, not even remotely. But when the Cobbleition are doing things that are just as stupid as those Gordon Clown himself did there's a case to be made that you might as well put the lurching, snot munching, cyclopean horror with the faecal Midas touch back in charge and be bloody done with it.

The Prime Minister and his deputy, Nick Clegg, will unveil proposals to help first-time buyers of new homes by carrying part of the risk of their mortgages.

Dave, Nick, say it ain't so. Tell us that even you aren't so monumentally stupid that you can't see that it's precisely this kind of policy - using taxpayers' money to underwrite loans for overpriced housing to people who are at higher risk of being unable to repay them - that led with grim inevitability to the fucking subprime mortgage crisis in the fucking first place. And what did that lead to in its turn? Oh, yes, that'd be adding to an unsustainable bubble with a bonus prize of a banking crisis, wouldn't it? And you two freak shows are now standing here telling us that you want to fucking do it all over again in the deluded belief it'll get the economy moving. Folks, I think this year's Jeff Buckley Award for being the Public Figure Most Hopelessly Out of Their Depth may end up being shared.

They also propose subsidising the construction of 16,000 homes by giving £400 million of taxpayers’ money to property developers.

Oh, why not just round it up to a neat half billion? It's only money, after all, and of course you don't need to worry because it's not yours anyway. Listen, you morons, every bloody pound of subsidies - every penny the government spends, in fact - is a pound that must be taken off someone's disposable income either now or in the future. You're taking money away from people who might otherwise be able to put it towards the deposit for a house, d'you see? Or a car, or a meal out, or a newspaper or any number of things. They might even decide to stick it in the bank and save it if someone gives them an interest rate that can't be described as comical. Now tell me I'm wrong but if you want the housing market to pick up does it really make sense to take money away from people who need it to buy houses with? The very people that are currently worrying you because they're not buying houses because lenders aren't all that happy with the risks at the moment? Dave, Nick, please try to understand this: more disposable income + lower house prices = more houses being sold. Okay? And conversely less disposable income + higher house prices = ... want to take a guess? Do you see now, you pair of utter fucktroons?

And pardon me for asking, but what the hell does the government need the housing market to pick up for anyway? It was overpriced. It still is. It doesn't need 'unblocking' like it's a toilet that Gordon Clown and his badger faced sock puppet left bunged up after a particularly nasty dump - it needs the very correction you idiots are trying to forestall. Nobody disputes that the British economy needs reviving, but if there's a lesson to be learned from the last government, and Christ knows there's more than just one, surely it's that an economy that's running on a spending boom fuelled by a combination of cheap credit and appreciating house prices making people feel richer than they really are is not an economy that will run indefinitely before hitting trouble. Yet, Dave and Nick, this seems to be pretty much what you want to do.

In a further move, ministers are working on a scheme under which billions of pounds of money in pension funds will be used to finance the construction of power stations, wind turbines and roads.

What? WHAT? WHAT? Are you fucking serious? On top of everything else have you two started channelling Robert Maxwell or something?

Treasury sources said talks had been conducted with pension fund managers for months. They are hoping to attract managers to invest in infrastructure schemes because they provide a better rate of return than government bonds.

Oh, no shit? And the Cobbleition government, unlike its predecessors of all stripes, has suddenly got good at picking winners and reckons that the best investments around at the moment happen to be the things that it does and taxes people for because... uh, because there's rarely profit to be made in them.* Oh well, at least they're not talking about using Labour's idea of helping themselves to money in old accounts, even if that's probably just because they've already cleaned them out.

Look, Dave and Nick, the government already lighten the pockets of the British motorist to the tune of some £45-50 billion, in return for which about a fifth of that is spent on the roads, and now you want to fill in the few zillion potholes you've missed with the contents of their pension funds? Oh, and erect a few more bird mincing white elephants that are, to use Malcolm Tucker's phrase, as much use as a marzipan dildo, and so uneconomic that nobody in their right mind would build even one if not given someone else's money to offset the otherwise certain losses. And no, I'm not just saying that because Phil the Greek thinks so. Might I suggest that if you want more to be spent on road maintenance and other infrastructure (but not bird mincers) you stop spending money somewhere else? It's called living within your means, which is a concept that even plankton in the oceanic depths could probably wrap what passes for their heads around - in the depressingly likely event that you can't find anyone in Whitehall who understands go out and find a real person to explain it to you.

As for power stations, again I feel there is a lesson that should have been learned from the Labour years - just get out of the bloody way and let someone build the fucking things. Seriously, it's not like a power station doesn't produce something that people need and for which a ready market exists - Christ, even wind turbines have got that much going for them, they just can't produce it steadily and reliably - so there should be a return on building them providing the initial costs aren't prohibitive. That means not having interminable inquiries before graciously allowing someone to begin work on building something that people need, and then telling them to stop again because some middle class white kid with dreadlocks and a dream of erasing the memory of the silver (plated) spoon by not washing has found a pond, and look, there's like all tadpoles in it, dude. It means, as I mentioned, the government doing it's best just to get out of the fucking way.

Separately, Lord Heseltine, who advises the Government on growth, said MPs should waive through critically important infrastructure projects to get the economy moving.

It pains me to agree with a man who still wants Britain to sign up to the currency version of Heaven's Gate but that's kind of the thing I'm on about, though as an aside this isn't:

The former Cabinet minister said the Government could work with Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, to agree on which major projects to push through.

Yes, very good, Michael, a government of literally all the twats. Wonderful. Nurse! He's out of bed again.

But really, why not? The Cobbleition really are as bad as Labour, and we all know Labour were pretty shocking. But I've lost count of the number of times I've ranted and raved and railed at some new piece of pettiness or authoritarianism or nannying or incompetence or lack of backbone (especially with regard to the EU) or just plain epic fuckwittery. I've lost count how often I've said that it's just like Labour never left office. I even began this rant with the observation that if this is what Dave and Nick want to do then Britain might as well give up and bring back Gordon Brown to finish the demolition job he started. And if all the main parties are bent on Britain's self destruction and disagree only on the speed at which it should happen, if the only long term hope is to rebuild from the ashes, then it's starting to look to me like the petrol and matches and matches may as well be given to the worst nutter of the lot.

The alternative, of course, is to get rid of the whole bloody lot of them and replace them with sane people, but for some reason this doesn't seem to have very broad appeal in the UK. I'm sure the millions attached firmly to the tax tit and the millions more brainwashed to believe that this is how it has to be haven't got anything to do with it.

'Kinell!


UPDATE - Trust The Daily Mash to get to the essence of it.

The prime minister said: "This package will help to reinflate the house price bubble and give mortgages to people who can't really afford them. Unless anyone has any better ideas?"

Wonderful caption on the picture, too: "If it's broke fix it with the thing that broke it."

I feel like Private Frasier.

UPADTE 2 - Also blogged superbly and without all the swearing over at Counting Cats in Zanzibar.

* That often there's rarely profit to be made precisely because government is involved probably doesn't occur to them.

Not just the heirs to Blair

Nope, the Cobbleition is also a proud wearer of the Crown of Brown.

UK Financial Investments said it has agreed to sell 100pc of Northern Rock to Virgin Money for £747m in cash immediately, but this could potentially rise to around £1bn.
Under the deal, another £50m is “expected” to be paid within six months. The Treasury will also benefit by up to £80m if the bank floats in the next five years and retain £150m of Tier 1 capital notes.
Northern Rock, which signalled the start of the financial crisis in Britain when it collapsed in August 2007, is the first bank to be returned to the private sector.
The Newcastle-based lender received a £1.4bn bail-out when it was nationalised in February 2008 at the height of the credit crunch. So on paper, taxpayers end up with a loss of £400m, but this could rise to £650m.

Marvellous. Just fucking marvellous. Memo to Gordon Clown, and of course also to his blinky pet Ed Balls who sadly did quite not lose his seat in the election:

This is why you should have let Northern fucking Rock go to the wall,
you witless pair of financially incompetent cunts.

Happily for them, though miserably for everyone else, they're not alone.

George Osborne said the deal was a “good thing” for taxpayers, consumers and the banking system.

Did he say that? Did he really fucking say that? The Chumpcellor of the fucking Exchequer thinks that losing nearly half a billion quid, and possibly as much as two thirds of a billion, is a good thing. Has Gordon Brown got his fist up George's arse and is making his mouth move or something? That's got to be the most retarded thing to come out of the mouth of the finance minister of an industrialised nation since some fucktroon decided to sell nearly 400 tons of gold near a long term low in its value, and then fucking announce it in advance so the price fell even further. Oh, and that was a British one too, wasn't it? Come to think of it, it was... well, we all know only too well, don't we?

And although it wasn't quite on the scale of the billions and billions Gordon flushed away when he dumped gold at a historic low, which his mouth may well have helped make lower, Boy Georgie thinks it was a good thing for taxpayers to lose another half billion or so. Yes, the Cobbleition inherited the situation, and yes, it was Gordon, his badger faced sock puppet and Ed Bollocks who made the incredibly bad decision to bail out a bank that deserved to fail rather than just make sure of the investors' statutory protection. And yes, in that position you have to take the best offer you're going to get, and this is probably better than it might have been. But to have the new-ish Chumpcellor stand there saying it's anything than the loss of another half a billion pounds, perhaps more, is anything other than a colossal fuckup due entirely to the headless chicken panic response of the previous government is at best not very politically astute and at worst an indication that he's every bit as fucking stupid as they were.

And of course it's not over yet because only the good bit of Northern Rock was sold, which is presumably why they only got £747m for it. Oh, no what we can still think of as Northern Wreck is still there. And it's got company.

In January last year the company was split into a “good bank”, which Virgin has bought, and Northern Rock Asset Management, the “bad bank” of closed mortgages and unsecured loans which remain in Government ownership.
[...]
As well as Northern Rock’s “bad bank”, UKFI still owns Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds Banking Group and Bradford & Bingley.

And I don't doubt that if or when RBS, Lloyds Group and B&B are sold back into the private sector at a further loss to the taxpayers Georgie Lame will say that's a good thing too. It's good that it's over, but in all other respects it's hard to find anything good to say about the taxpayers having to drop their trousers and grip their ankles yet again because the fucking Treasury (along with most or all of the rest of government) has got next to no fucking clue how to spend money wisely and thinks there's an inexhaustible supply of it.

Jesus Christ on a borrowed bicycle, the place is fucking doomed.

Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala we can't hear you

Via the von Mises blog, the latest move in Europe to solve the continent's economic problems: ban credit ratings agencies from downgrading member states' credit ratings.

The European Commission on Tuesday (15 November) is to unveil proposals to clamp down on the credit-ratings industry, seen as one of the key villains in the eurozone debt crisis melodrama.

Internal market commissioner Michel Barnier is to propose a series of measures including a 'blackout' in the rating of troubled states in an attempt to limit the ratcheting up of market instability the EU executive accuses the sector of being responsible for when it has delivered downgrades to the credit ratings of countries.

The draft law would allow the EU to temporarily ban companies such as Standard & Poor’s, Fitch and Moody’s from issuing ratings changes if regulators assess that such moves would exacerbate market volatility.

Nice to see such great value being placed on free speech in the EU. If it might harm the project, even if it's an honest opinion, you can't say it. End of. As was said at von Mises, this is simply shooting the messenger. In fact it smacks of such desperation that I'm surprised that the messenger isn't already saying, 'Look, fuck that, I'm not going anywhere near the place and I'd advise anyone else with a vestige of sanity not to go anywhere near it either.'

'Kinell.

On taxing the sixth element

Or rather one of its oxides. Via the Real World Libertarian and quoted en bloc, a post by Viv Forbes of the Carbon Sense Coalition.

Back to the Dark Ages

The passage of the carbon tax bills today is no reason for celebration. It is a step back towards the dark ages.

Just a few generations ago, humans lived in a “green” world. There was no coal, oil or gas providing light, heat, transport and traction power.

In this green utopia, wood provided heat for cooking fires and forests were felled for charcoal for primitive metallurgy; farmers used wooden ploughs and harvested grain with sickles and flails; the nights were lit using candles and whale oil; rich people used wind and water power to grind cereals; horses and bullocks moved coaches, wagons and troops; there was no refrigeration and salt was the only preservative for meat.

Towns were tiny as the whole family was needed to work the farm. For most people, the daylight hours were filled with heavy labour to produce, preserve and transport food. There was no surplus to support opera, bureaucracy or academia.

Humanity was relieved from this life of unrelenting toil by carbon energy – steam engines and electricity, machines, tractors, cars, ships and planes.

Today the pagan green religion celebrates the first step in their long campaign to destroy industrial society and reduce population.

They should be careful what they wish for.

For example, just a few more bitter winters in Britain will see their wind powered lights going out.

A British observer once said of the Whitlam government: “Any fool can bugger up Britain, but it takes real genius to bugger up Australia”.

The Gillard-Green Government is showing the sort of genius needed to dim the lights in the lucky country.

I would say that this should serve as a warning to those outside Australia to do their damnedest to prevent their governments joining this madness, but as I mentioned at the weekend it seems that no other governments are all that keen anyway.

Great work, Jules. Really fucking outstanding.

New £50

I'm going to take a punt and guess that the most significant new security feature is that it'll soon be worth about thirty-six quid after the government tries to inflate away some of the national debt.

And people wonder how governments run up such huge debts

Take Italy, for instance. Everyone knows it's up a certain creek without a certain implement. Everyone knows that if the shit hits the fan in Greece Italy could be next. And yet the Italian government is buying 19 Maserati Quattroportes and modifying them with armour at a cost of a couple of million Euros... for just one ministry.

Italy's Ministry of Defence has been forced to defend its decision to purchase 19 Maserati limousines at a time when the government is cutting billions in public spending in response to the European debt crisis.
The four-door Maserati Quattroportes, which start from $118,000 in Italy and are powered by a 4.2-litre V8 engine, are reportedly replacing the ministry's fleet of Audis and Lancias. They have been armour-plated for additional protection.
[...]
Italy's defence minister, Ingazio La Russa, has accused the opposition of a "witch hunt", claiming the Maseratis were purchased using funds from the 2008-2009 budget and therefore before the introduction of cuts by the Silvio Berlusconi government.

A defence minister there, missing the point by a fucking mille miglia. Of course Britain should resist any temptation to get at all smug about this.

From Jan 18th

From August 14th

And let's be realistic, with the Cobbleition's track record over its 18 months driving the bus it won't be long before spend some money they haven't got on something far more catastrophically stupid.

Chinese whispers

Click for linky

Ouch.

Jin Liqun, chairman of China Investment Corporation (CIC), the nation's sovereign wealth fund, warned that Europeans should "work a bit harder" if they want to pull the eurozone out of recession.

Ouch.

He said people in the West are too reliant on welfare payments and the benefits system, looking for external solutions to the debt crisis rather than tackling the problem from within.

Ouch.

Mr Jin also said the long-term economic slide could only be solved by amending the restrictive labour laws that mean Western workers are unable to compete in global markets.
[...]
"The root cause of the trouble is the over-burdened welfare system, built up since the Second World War in Europe - the sloth-inducing, indolence-inducing labour laws.

Double ouch, but I can't see where he's wrong. It might be hard to hear it from someone representing a country where freedom can be a pretty notional concept and the state tries to oversee practically everything, but the guy's got a point. In the west the governments don't try to oversee as much - or at least most of them don't yet - but they have encouraged the raising of a couple of generations who rely on the state to wipe their arseholes for them because they couldn't find them by themselves bent over a mirror with a greased stick. Money no? Economy bad? Is wrong. Government fix. Government fix now. Also done poo-poo and now smell bad. Government fix that now too please.

And it brings to mind something I said back in January when I came across a US site advocating protectionism and other anti free trade measures: I think that the Chinese might turn out to be better at capitalism than we in the west. Well, as long as they don't make a habit of producing seven foot long slippers by mistake.

In Masho veritas?

Well, if it applies to wine couldn't it apply to The Daily Mash talking here about the 'Occupy' mob's spread from New York to other cities?

... first-time protestor, Roy Hobbs, insisted: "I'm here because I'm sick and tired of all the greed that stops me from getting what I want.

"That's why I've come up with a plan that will solve everything. It involves dividing all the money in the world equally and then waiting to see what happens next."

You know, I really believer that is the plan. I really, really do.