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Britain On The Brink from Man Of The Woods on Vimeo.

Telegraph: ‘Icons’ of English countryside disappearing fast, warns Bill Bryson
Village pubs, phone boxes and other defining features of the English countryside need to be protected “before the only icons we have left are corporate logos”, Bill Bryson, the author, has warned.

In a startling call to action the American, now president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE), said it was “heartbreaking” to watch such features as independent local shops, post offices, and hedgerows swept from the landscape for the sake of a profit.

Bryson, 57, was born in the Midwestern prairie state of Iowa, dominated by industrial scale agriculture, but has lived most of his adult life in Britain.

He became an unlikely champion of the British countryside after describing its idiosyncrasies in his 1995 travelogue, Notes from a Small Island, and was appointed president of the CPRE in 2007.

While people were “beginning to appreciate that their national heritage is unique but dangerously finite”, he urged: “We need to make this a real movement before the only icons we have left are corporate logos.”

Bryson was speaking after the CPRE asked 1,037 people to identify their favourite ‘Icons of England’.

Besides those mentioned above, the CPRE’s top 10 also consisted of post boxes and post offices, traditional livestock breeds, home gardens, village greens and the Lake District.

Read more telegraph.co.uk

Free Congress Fundation: William S. Lind

Most Americans look back on the 1950s as a good time. Our homes were safe, to the point where many people did not bother to lock their doors. Public schools were generally excellent, and their problems were things like talking in class and running in the halls. Most men treated women like ladies, and most ladies devoted their time and effort to making good homes, rearing their children well and helping their communities through volunteer work. Children grew up in two–parent households, and the mother was there to meet the child when he came home from school. Entertainment was something the whole family could enjoy.

What happened?

If a man from America of the 1950s were suddenly introduced into America in the 2000s, he would hardly recognize it as the same country. He would be in immediate danger of getting mugged, carjacked or worse, because he would not have learned to live in constant fear. He would not know that he shouldn’t go into certain parts of the city, that his car must not only be locked but equipped with an alarm, that he dare not go to sleep at night without locking the windows and bolting the doors – and setting the electronic security system.

If he brought his family with him, he and his wife would probably cheerfully pack their children off to the nearest public school. When the children came home in the afternoon and told them they had to go through a metal detector to get in the building, had been given some funny white powder by another kid and learned that homosexuality is normal and good, the parents would be uncomprehending.
[Full story →]

Telegraph: Carbon taxes will provide the EU with its own revenue steram. That’s the dream of the new EU President, says Christopher Booker.

No doubt as we contemplate the figure who has rocketed from obscurity to became “the President of Europe”, we have all made silly little jokes about “Mr Rumpy”. After the eight tortuous years it has taken to get the “Constitution for Europe” into place, with all the talk of how vital it was for the EU to have a figurehead to represent Europe on the world stage as the equivalent of the President of the United States, some may now think of the poet Horace’s famous line, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus (“the mountains are in labour, and will give birth to a ridiculous mouse”).

But it would be wrong to underestimate Herman Van Rompuy, the first permament president of the European Council. This Belgian economist is a clever and ruthless political operator. Once, to win a political battle, he changed the locks to prevent his opponents entering a crucial meeting. (For details of his character, see the Brussels Journal blog by one of his former colleagues, Paul Belien.) And the reason why he was very much the preferred candidate of the European Commission is that the one thing for which President Van Rompuy can be relied on is a determination to use all his crafty skills to further the power of our new government in Brussels.

At the heart of the “European project”, there has always been one core goal in all it does – to absorb ever more of the powers of national governments into the centre. And almost the only thing we know about Mr Van Rompuy’s ambitions in his new office is that he wants “more Europe”.

Much of his wish list may have been drearily familiar ever since the Addenino report of 1985: more flying of the “ring of stars” flag, more singing of the “European anthem”, EU number plates on cars, EU identity cards. But the one thing the EU has needed to make its powers complete, and which not even its Constitution could give, was the power to levy its own direct taxes. It is no accident that this is now at the top of Mr Van Rompouy’s list – nor that the way in which he plans to raise those taxes is by levying new charges on every kind of activity that emits CO2.

Way back in1991, Brussels first proclaimed its intention to give a “moral lead” to the world in “combating climate change”. The following year it published plans for an EU-wide “carbon tax”. Ever since, saving the planet has risen steadily higher on the EU’s agenda, as the perfect idealistic cause to justify more new laws – from the landfill directive that has reduced our rubbish collection to chaos, to the legislation that forces us to encumber our countryside with useless wind turbines, and to use nasty, inefficient, mercury-filled light bulbs.

Read more telegraph.co.uk

Americans are now learning that Mike Huckabee is the man who pardoned cop-killer Maurice Clemmons. This Neocon lap poodle of the mass media, Mike Huckabee, let Clemmons out of Arkansas prison as Governor of Arkansas. Huckabee served as a Neocon spoiler in the 2008 Republican primary to bleed votes away from Ron Paul. He was rewarded for this sabotage with his own TV show on the controlled mass media. Huckabee has that lust for power that corrupts. He has already been spotted in Iowa starting a campaign for the 2012 presidential election. Well, he can kiss that goodbye now that Americans are finding out what a catastrophe he was as Governor of Arkansas, letting hardened criminals like Maurice Clemmons run free to execute four young police officers, one of them a woman, sitting in a restaurant. Who wants to bet that the Washington prosecutor won’t find that this was a race crime? Jamie Kelso

Telegraph: Baroness Ashton, the new European Union foreign minister, is facing questions over her role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament amid claims that it may have had financial links to the Soviet Union.

Lady Ashton, who was last week appointed EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, was treasurer of CND in the early 1980s. She has said she had no contacts with the Soviet Union and had never accepted money from Moscow.

The UK Independence Party has written to Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission President, asking him to investigate whether Lady Ashton was party to payments allegedly made to CND from the Soviet regime in Moscow.

The letter, based on allegations made by Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident, claimed that it is “very likely” that CND received “unidentified income” from Moscow in the 1980s.

“CND was notoriously secretive about its sources of funding and did not submit its accounts to independent audit; however, after public pressure they were audited for the first time in 1982-1983,” Gerard Batten, a Ukip MEP, wrote.

“It was found that 38 per cent of their annual income (£176,197) could not be traced back to the original donors. The person responsible for this part of CND fund-raising, from anonymous donors. . . was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.”

Read more telegraph.co.uk

Climategate has just blown the Global Warming Hoax sky high. The biggest fraud in the history of science has been exposed for all to see. But now will the people see it? Not if the lamestream media has its way. One of the biggest criminal coverups in history is now running as the lamestream controlled media has swung into full Memory Hole mode. The 1,000 emails and thousands of documents that some heroic patriot smuggled out of the totally criminal Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University should lead to immediate indictments and arrests. Long prison terms should be meted out. All of the criminals masquerading as scientists who have been smoked out should be stripped of all credentials immediately. Any scientific body that refuses to strip these credentials will thereby expose itself as a sham. Bronze statues of the heroic patriots who risked everything to get the truth to us will be placed in town squares in the future. This person or these people changed our people’s history for the better. Obama, the Neocons, the George Soros’s were on the verge of imposing Global Warming Hoax dictatorship over all of us. Jamie Kelso

Telegraph: The “appalling” errors that contributed to Britain’s failure in Iraq are disclosed in the most detailed and damning set of leaks to emerge on the conflict.
On the eve of the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the 2003 invasion and its aftermath, The Sunday Telegraph has obtained hundreds of pages of secret Government reports on “lessons learnt” which shed new light on “significant shortcomings” at all levels.

They include full transcripts of extraordinarily frank classified interviews in which British Army commanders vent their frustration and anger with ministers and Whitehall officials.

The reports disclose that:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, misled MPs and the public throughout 2002 when he claimed that Britain’s objective was “disarmament, not regime change” and that there had been no planning for military action. In fact, British military planning for a full invasion and regime change began in February 2002.

The need to conceal this from Parliament and all but “very small numbers” of officials “constrained” the planning process. The result was a “rushed”operation “lacking in coherence and resources” which caused “significant risk” to troops and “critical failure” in the post-war period.

Operations were so under-resourced that some troops went into action with only five bullets each. Others had to deploy to war on civilian airlines, taking their equipment as hand luggage. Some troops had weapons confiscated by airport security.

Commanders reported that the Army’s main radio system “tended to drop out at around noon each day because of the heat”. One described the supply chain as “absolutely appalling”, saying: “I know for a fact that there was one container full of skis in the desert.”

The Foreign Office unit to plan for postwar Iraq was set up only in late February, 2003, three weeks before the war started.

Read more telegraph.co.uk

This week the British people listened to the Daily Mall’s Peter Oborne present, on Channel 4, his devastating account of the Jewish lobby’s control of their government. Now we know that virtually all the principal politicians in the UK of both parties, like their brothers across the lake in our House and Senate, take “contributions” from the Israeli lobby machine ensuring that the Anglo-American mid-east policies follow the dictates of the Israeli government. Gilad Atzmon responded to this report in his article “Britain must de-Zionise itself immediately,” noting that this control has been in place for so many years the lobby feels “untouchable.”

Read more:
http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/zionist-control-of-britains-government-1940-2009-by-william.html

Telegraph: A Russian Orthodox priest known for his outspoken criticism of Islam and his attempts to convert Muslims to Christianity was assassinated in his Moscow church by a masked gunman.

The gunman approached Father Daniil Sysoyev, 34, in his small wooden church in Moscow on Thursday night, checked his name and then shot the priest in the head and chest, police said.

The priest died on the way to hospital, Interfax news agency quoted investigators as saying. A choirmaster was injured in the attack, and is in hospital under armed guard.

Father Daniil, who claimed to have christened 80 Muslims, had repeatedly received death threats.

“I have received 10 threats via e-mail that I shall have my head cut off (if I do not stop preaching to Muslims)“, Father Daniil stated on a television programme in February 2008, according to Interfax. “As I see it, it is a sin not to preach to Muslims“.

The killing could increase tensions between the powerful majority Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, and the country’s growing Muslim minority of about 20 million.

“The main theory is that religious motives are behind the crime,” a spokesman for the prosecutor-general’s office said.

Father Daniil had written books including “An Orthodox Response to Islam” and “Marrying a Muslim”, in which he advised Russian women against taking a Muslim partner.
Read more telegraph.co.uk