Cristina Fernández de Kirchner gets some dentures

The people of Argentina are suffering as inflation and a badly run economy, caused by decades of maladministration undermine their society.  But as always the interests of the people are not the same as the interests of the people.

Ask the people of Argentina how they think somewhere in the region of £145 million of their money should be put to use and you won’t find many who would suggest buying military aircraft.  But nevertheless, that is what Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and her government have just chosen to do.

As if that were not bad enough, what the gobby old girl from La Plata has chosen to spend the money on is buying a fleet of 20 Mirage F1 fighter jets from Spain, built since the 1970s and recently decommissioned by the Spanish Air Force.  In fact, despite modifications and upgrades, so old and lacking in capability are these jets the nickname the pilots had for them was ‘La abuela’ or the Grandmother.

With Argentina stepping up its false claim over the Falkland Islands along with its efforts to impose a de facto economic blockade of the islands, some see the acquisition of these Mirages as the de Kirchner administration attempting to bare its teeth.

That is certainly the hype-fuelled take of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express (which puts the purchase price at a mere £10 million) who immediately try to paint this as a threat to Falklands territory and link the Spanish sale to the dispute over Gibraltar.

But given these aircraft are little more than museum exhibits, the modern aviation equivalent of a musket, the only thing on show are a new set of Argentine dentures.  Not that the cor blimey British media, with its ‘powerful reputation for accuracy’ understands.

We could be in the grip of a decade of wet summers say scientists at Met Office climate summit…

… reports the Daily Wail in the latest big global warming, climate change, extreme weather story.

This is yet another thing that was never predicted by those wonderful, high certainty, government policy-influencing computer models.  No doubt this warrants another round of fat bonuses at the Met Office this year!

The real reason for the Met Office ‘extreme weather’ meeting

And the hype continues…  This is all part of the ongoing effort to create FUD in support of the political climate change agenda that services a lavish money train.  The Daily Wail is happy to play its part spreading the propaganda.

Have you noticed how until fairly recently weather forecasts just predicted the weather that was expected (to the usual mediocre standard).  But now it is a more common sight to see the weather forecaster standing in front of a split screen with the map on the left and large ‘weather warning’ triangles on the right.  But the weather warnings are seldom extreme events, they are the same kind of conditions we have long been used to on a sporadic basis, but now instead as simply being accepted as the varying nature of our weather they are presented in a way that deliberately suggests the conditions are somehow extreme, out of the ordinary and cause for concern.

I can think back to a May in the late 1980s where I was on my way to the coast and we had snow in southern England.  I can think of numerous occasions where heavy rain resulted in serious floods that covered playing local fields and football pitches.  Even ditches became small rivers and we kids built makeshift rafts to sail along them and try to sink each other.  I can think of several rotten summers where school holidays were characterised by rain, lack of sun and cooler than usual conditions that made a day jumping in the local river and larking about on the riverbank in our swimming trunks less than balmy.  What we are seeing now is not exceptional at all, and I doubt previous generations going back centuries would find them exceptional either.

The issue here is not that the weather has suddenly got very bad, it is that the weather is failing to conform with the Met Office’s predictions for a global warming thermaggedon.

The real reason for this hyped up meeting it that, having had to quietly and reluctantly dial down the rhetoric on ‘global warming’ in the face of observed events, the Met Office is seeking to reinforce its push of the ‘climate change’ narrative, where even conditions that run contrary to the Met Office’s previous predictions (not warmer, not drier, and not less snowy after all)  just happen to have the same human induced carbon root cause requiring the same politically driven taxpayer funded ‘solutions’.  There is nothing new under the sun here, apart for the desperate and cobbled together justifications for ‘action’ being presented to us.

Anyone being taken in by these hyperbolemongers deserves to be taken for fools.  The Met Office remains a poorly performing laughing stock devoted to hype in service of their and the government’s vested financial interests.

The media’s powerful reputation for accuracy… again

Another one for Lord Justice Leveson.

This time it is Reuters demonstrating that oh-so powerful reputation for accuracy that so impresses Hacked Off’s favourite judge, hizzoner Leveson LJ.  The corporate news provider states on their video report on wealth safe havens, by hack Tara Joseph, that gold has slumped to its lowest price in 30 years!  (I would embed the video if anyone can tell me how to do it on WordPress).

Let’s see if Reuters are right, shall we?  We won’t even go back 30 years, we’ll go back just 10.

The sad thing is, people still trust the mainstream media.