(My thanks to a reader for suggesting this)

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER.

ORIGINAL VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter.
The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.
Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.
MORAL OF THE OLD STORY:
Be responsible for yourself!

MODERN VERSION

The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks the ant is a fool and laughs and dances and plays the summer away.

Come winter, the shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while he is cold and starving. The BBC does a big news item about the poor grasshopper’s dreadful suffering showing pictures of the shivering grasshopper next to a video of the ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food. The Guardian does a 2-page feature on the grasshopper’s tale of woe. Ed Miliband angrily attacks PM David Cameron in the House of Commons and berates the Tories for their lack of compassion, for being “the nasty party”.
Labour politicians tour TV and radio stations, lambasting the Government’s economic policies and asking “how can this be, that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?”
The trade unions – mainly Unite, teachers and social workers – stage a noisy demonstration in front of the ant’s house where the news stations film the protestors singing, “we shall overcome” and shouting “down with poverty” and “down with capitalism”.

The Archbishop of Canterbury holds a special service (televised by the BBC) for the grasshopper and has the congregation pray for the grasshopper.
Nick Clegg gives a speech where he claims that when he went into Coalition with the Tories, he never expected that they would allow anyone to suffer as much as the poor grasshopper and he demands action from Cameron. “Enough is enough” Clegg thunders, “George Osborne’s austerity cuts have gone too far”.

The grasshopper appears on breakfast TV bemoaning his fate to grovellingly sympathetic interviewers. When the ant is interviewed, he gets harangued for his greed and selfishness. 

The Equality and Insect Rights Commission issues a report proving that the ant has infringed the grasshopper’s insect rights. The politically-correct bien pensants at the BBC, the Guardian and the Labour Party claim that the thieving ant has got rich off the back of the grasshopper and call for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his fair share.

Finally, under massive pressure from the media onslaught, the Government drafts the EEAAA Economic Equity & Anti-Ant Act retroactive to the beginning of the summer. This levies a special tax on the ant for having stored up too much food. The tax is so excessive that the ant cannot pay it. So the Government takes possession of the ant’s home in lieu of the unpaid tax and gives it to the grasshopper and his very large extended family created during the summer when the grasshopper was frolicking while the ant worked.

The story ends as we see the grasshopper and his large extended family finishing up the last bits of the ant’s food while the government house he is in, which, as you recall, just happens to be the ant’s old house, crumbles around them because the grasshopper family didn’t maintain it. The ant has disappeared to Australia, where they appreciate his work ethic and experience in collecting and storing food.

The grasshopper is later found dead in a drugs related incident which was induced by the over consumption of dried medicinal vegetation stored by the ant for times of need. The house, now abandoned, is taken over by a gang of spiders, newly arrived in the country, who terrorize and wreck the once prosperous and peaceful neighbourhood.

MORAL OF THE STORY:  You may be reading this because you are an ant. You may wish to pass this on to other ants. But don’t bother sending it on to any grasshoppers because they wouldn’t understand it anyway.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, one historian wrote a book called “The End of History”. I haven’t read it, but believe that the premise was that once the possibility of conflict between the Soviet Union and the West disappeared, there wouldn’t be any major wars again. As the book’s blurb says: “With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 the threat of the Cold War which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century vanished. And with it the West looked to the future with optimism”. How wrong the writer was because he completely failed to spot the rising threat to the world from the religion of peace

Yesterday, I touched on the rather “sensitive” issue of beheadings and suggested that everybody in the civilised world should see a few beheading videos. Then we could have a real conversation about the threat posed to our world by a rather large number of followers of the religion of peace. What is perhaps more worrying than the actual beheadings is the failure of the leaders of the religion of peace’s British community to utterly and demonstrably condemn violence and promote tolerance.

On a slightly different tack, here’s a story from a national newspaper:

” A teenage girl dug herself out of shallow grave after she was raped by two men and buried alive. The 13-year-old was snatched while walking to Koran lessons from her local village in Punjab and raped by the men in an isolated area. Her attackers then buried her alive when they thought that she had died during the assault.

Child rape is becoming increasingly problematic in Pakistan. According to Pakistani children’s charity Sahil, the number of children raped between 2002 and 2012 increased from 668 to 2,788. Though the real number might be much higher as many victims are killed either by their attackers or by their family to hide the shame the raped girls have brought on them.

One of the most notable cases was that of Kainat Soomro who was attacked by four men when she was aged just 13 in 2007. She was shunned by her village after speaking out against her attackers and was labelled a ‘kari’ or ‘black virgin’. Despite her own family being ordered to kill her to rid themselves of shame, they stood by her despite threats of violence against them. Her father and one of her brothers were beaten, and another older brother went missing and was later found murdered. Despite her quest for justice, her alleged attackers were eventually acquitted.”

I have no doubt that in almost all these rape cases, the local religious leaders encouraged their followers to have the raped girls killed and actively protected the rapists.

Here’s a picture which should cause derision:

It’s the Supreme Court of Pakistan where something that we wouldn’t recognise as “justice” is dispensed by some of the most corrupt, backward people on this planet.

In Europe, the Renaissance took us out of the Dark Ages and then we made further progress through the Enlightenment. I think it may be time for us to demand that the leaders of Britain’s religion of peace community take a lead in modernising their religion and condemning practices and beliefs that belong only in hell. Otherwise we may face a grim future.

Will they speak out? Will they try to modernise their religion? No? I thought not.

(To lighten things up a bit, tomorrow I might bring you the story of the world’s stupidest drug dealer)

This week the Tories have been having multiple orgasms because our GDP supposedly grew by 0.8% in the latest quarter. Cameron, Osborne and their chums hope this “good news” will carry them through to an election victory in 2015. But their intense delight at Britain’s supposed economic recovery has been rather spoilt by 8% to 10%  rises in energy bills. And Cameron was absolutely massacred over energy prices by a surprisingly rampant Ed Miliband on Prime Minister’s questions in the Commons.

The problem for the Tories is that, while they swoon with post-coital pleasure over the economic news, the people who will be voting in 2015 will be influenced by their own, not the country’s, economic situation. And while life looks wonderful for the Tories and their rich friends with their large salaries, expenses, pensions, property holdings and investments, 90% of the population are seeing their living standards being savaged.

The top 1%, the top 5% and the top 10% of Britain’s population have seen their earnings shoot up over the last twenty years. But 90% of us have seen our incomes stagnate:

(Apologies that the chart only goes up to 2010 – but since then incomes for the top 10% have been shooting up again)

Yet while our incomes have stagnated, prices have been going up:

The chart shows CPI (Consumer Price Index) – but real prices have probably been going up almost twice the rate our Government admits.

Even worse for Cameron and his cronies, the Government doesn’t see living standards reaching their 2007 levels till well after 2018:

This has allowed Miliband to suddenly turn from zero to hero with a new winning strategy – stop attacking the Tories over the economy and start attacking them over living standards. Miliband is right, this has been a recovery for the rich.

And that’s what will probably win Miliband the next election.

(I won’t be blogging tomorrow as I’ll be travelling. Next entry will be on Tuesday)

I’ve just read one of the most chilling articles I have ever seen. It was in the international (English language) version of the German magazine Der Spiegel. The headline was “Fanning The Flames of the Euro Crisis: Europe’s 10 Most Dangerous Politicians”. The article included a “rogues’ gallery” of Europe’s 10 supposedly “most dangerous politicians“.

I don’t know who half of them are, but they include Nigel Farage from the UK, Marine Le Pen from France, Geert Wilders from Holland and Timo Soini from Finland

What they all have in common is that they have all dared to criticise the EU bureaucracy and their great European project. The grovellingly europhiliac Der Spiegel accused these 10 “most dangerous politicians” of being “populists who are whipping up sentiment – and thereby worsening the crisis”. Furthermore, Der Spiegel was outraged that these 10 “most dangerous politicians” were “playing with fire that could threaten the entire European project”. And Der Spiegel ranted that the 10 “most dangerous politicians” were criticising the EU “to attract as many voters as they can for their own gain. All of this, of course, comes at the expense of a united Europe”.

Der Spiegel was particularly outraged that Marine Le Pen had said: “Frau Merkel and her friends, Van Rompuy and the European Commission are in the final stages of creating a European Soviet Union. We are about to lose our status as a free nation”. What Der Spiegel didn’t mention was that respected former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was quoted about six years ago as saying: “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe.”

What is frightening about this article is the mindset it reveals. The Europhiliacs, like Der Spiegel, seem to believe that everything the EU does is right and anyone who dares question our masters in Brussels must therefore be wrong and “dangerous”. It never occurs to the Europhiliacs that people like Farage and Le Pen and Wilders might represent their compatriots’ desire to be free of the crushing weight of the corrupt, wasteful EU bureaucracy that is crippling European economies, crushing industry, destroying jobs and ruining lives (particularly in countries where youth employment is above 50%).

Already the Europhiliacs are calling those who criticise the EU “dangerous”. The EU bureaucrats overthrew elected governments in Italy and Greece and replaced them with more obedient EU lackeys. In Greece, the admittedly rather unpleasant but democratically-elected members of Golden Dawn have been arrested and the Greek Parliament has voted to deprive the anti-EU party of any state funding. I wonder how long it will be until our EU masters decree that any criticism of them is “damaging to European solidarity”, “risks inflaming hatred” and therefore should be a criminal offence?

Here’s the article https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/ten-politicians-who-worsen-the-euro-crisis-with-aggressive-rhetoric-a-848762.html

Oh, and here’s a comment I quite liked from a reader of a national newspaper: “Our Lords and Masters have a new, slightly less ambitious goal: the euro survives.  Nothing else.  Prosperity is unnecessary.  Stability is unnecessary.  Growth is unnecessary. However weak, however ineffectually it replaces such strong currencies as the Deutschmark and the Franc, the euro shall be considered a success if it continues to exist as a currency, like the Angolan Kwanza or the Bangladeshi Taka, and all policy shall be directed to that end.  Nations in Europe exist to serve the currency, not the currency to serve the nations. This is not economics.  This is religion”

Two days ago on my car radio I heard Jonathon Porritt being interviewed on World At One by a sycophantically grovelling and depressingly ill-informed BBC supposed “journalist” about the Government’s decision to build a new nuclear power station. Porritt is a supporter of the Green Party, was formerly Director of Friends of the Earth and for decades has campaigned on environmental issues.

If I heard correctly, one of the absurd claims made by the great Greenie Porritt was that “the Government has put all its eggs in the nuclear basket”. Another was that nuclear power was much more expensive than the Greenies’ wonderful “renewable energy” – windfarms, solar, biomass, tidal etc. This was backed up by Caroline Lucas, member of Parliament for the Greens, who also shared her great wisdom with us saying, “This is a terrible deal for billpayers.”

So today, I’ll just try to refute these two common Greenie (IMHO) lies.

We currently get about 18 % of our power from nuclear power stations. Fifteen of our sixteen reactors will be closed by 2023, leaving just Sizewell B operating. Sizewell B provides about 2% of our energy and the new Hinkley Point reactor will provide about another 7%. So, when Hinkley Point is running in 10 or 11 years time, we’ll get just 9% of our power from nuclear. That’s half of what we get at the moment and doesn’t look to me like, as Porritt claimed, “the Government has put all its eggs in the nuclear basket”. Can Porritt not do simple arithmetic? Doesn’t he realise that 9% is half of 18%? Or was he just exaggerating to make a point? Or was he deliberately lying, hoping that none of the listeners would have the time or energy to get the real facts? Who knows? But this does suggest we can’t trust some of the things the great Greenie says.

Then there was claim number 2 – that nuclear would be more expensive than Jonathon Porritt’s and Caroline Lucas’s beloved windfarms and solar and biomass and tidal. Let’s test that. The wholesale energy price in Britain is currently around £44/MWh. The new Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be guaranteed £92.50/MWh – over double the current wholesale price. In comparison, producers of onshore wind power already get £100/MWh: offshore wind £155/MWh: solar £125/MWh….(see chart)

I didn’t include wave and tidal power as, at £305/MWh, they would be well off the scale of the chart. So, if my figures are correct, nuclear looks like being cheaper than the Greenies’ forms of “renewable energy” and if I heard Porritt correctly, he was being more than economical with the truth.

Though, of course, we don’t really need any of Porritt’s cherished but completely inefficient windfarms, or his ghastly solar farms in Britain where the sun seldom shines, or his ludicrously environmentally-damaging biomass. We’ve got lots of coal, there will be a glut of gas in a few years and new cheaper nuclear technologies will soon be feasible. But we’re committing economic suicide by increasing the amount of expensive “renewable energy” because our worthless politicians listen to people like Porritt and needlessly force up energy prices making our industries uncompetitive and destroying jobs.

However, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Jonathon Porritt is entitled to claim a baronetcy awarded to his father, becoming The Hon.Sir Jonathon Porritt, 2nd Baronet, but has so far declined to do so. So I guess Porritt has a few million tucked away somewhere. And Caroline Lucas will have her wonderful MP’s pension and will probably get a well-paid quango job and/or pushed up into the Lords if she’s chucked out of Parliament. They’ll probably live like multimillionaires for the rest of their lives. So why should they worry that their demented policies are bankrupting British companies and throwing British workers on the dole?