Man in a Shed: To see ourselves as other see us

Monday, April 16, 2007

To see ourselves as other see us

Read Mark Styen over at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Lets be clear here - because of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown under equipping the Royal Navy and allowing for its humiliation our standing in the world has dropped considerably.

Those of us who work and travel in the middle east are now all at more risk and the likelihood that Iran will try something bolder on the Royal Navy ( why not capture a whole ship ? ) goes up.

What would the Cornwall's response have been to sea skimming missiles ? To avoid escalating the situation perhaps ?

The 15 British military personnel behaved in the bare minimum of what could be expected. They certainly did not distinguish themselves. No one in the Arab world is going to fear the likes of them.

And no fear means no respect - which in the current circumstances is very serious indeed. As no doubt Iran intended.

I don't really blame Des Browne - the media fiasco in a minor footnote - skilfully used by Blair and Brown to deflect from the urgent failure of their military and defence policy.

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The pound in your pocket

"We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists." James Callaghan

“The trouble with theoretical economists is that they don't understand that when you have a deficit, you can only finance it by borrowing, and you've got to persuade people that it's worth lending money to you and that they'll get their money back... there's no way of escaping it.” Dennis Healey during the 1976 Stirling Crisis.

"Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens ... Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of over-turning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose." John Maynard Keynes, 1920.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

Inflation is taxation without legislation .. Milton Friedman