Bad mouthing…

…greenheart
There’s not a wharf in Britain where you won’t find some of our greenheart piles. And this goes back for centuries. When it comes to withstanding the vicissitudes of the sea and its salt water – not to mention is barnacles – nothing compares to greenheart. Forget about all the different stressed concrete piles or exotic metal alloys – they’re no contest! While wharves may be an exoteric niche, we could’ve held our heads up high and boasted we had the gold standard in this area at least.
But no more. The EU just announced that our greenhearts aren’t harvested in compliance with their laws and regulations. And since they’ve evidently appointed themselves protector of Mother Nature, they’ve placed a ban on our greenheart exports. Now what’s going on here? Where in the heck did the EU get their figures on our “harvesting”? Couldn’t have been from that most European of countries, Norway, could it?
Norway, after all, had insisted on independent monitoring and measuring of our harvesting of our forests be done before we collect on the US0M they promised – to make sure we stayed on the straight and narrow – as THEY defined it. And we haven’t been cited for non-compliance, have we? You bet we haven’t! Some folks believe they’ve seen this ploy before. A nation wants to protect its market or wants to put a squeeze on another country and they impose “standards” they know you either can’t comply with, or, as would be in our case, you’re complying but by the time you prove it, you’re sunk!
But there’s another possibility – one that has its origin in the relentless propaganda war waged by some haters of the PPP government against companies to which that administration gave grants. Take Janet Bulkan for instance. Over the last decade, there hasn’t been a single initiative of the PPP in the forestry sector that she hasn’t ripped into. And with her contacts in the foreign NGO’s that live off “protecting” our forests, it’s not too difficult to see some third level bureaucrat compiling her skewed reports and making a case that our harvesting of logs aren’t “legal”. You think the fella who signed off on the ban actually read all the background material his underling cited? Forget it!!
But there are two huge ironies here. If the last theory’s on the ball, then Bulkan’s ploy has actually backfired. It’s made the government she helped install end up with mud on its face. They will now have to disavow all the “facts” she’s been concocting and hocking all over the web.
Secondly, the company hardest hit is Barama. And it was the PNC that brought THEM in!!!

…lean and clean
It was rather Freudian that Vice Chancellor of UG, Ivelaw Griffith, launched the first edition of HIS Newsletter with this sentence, “The Spanish Philosopher Jorge Santayana once offered the prescient proposition that ‘to know what people really think pay regard to what they do, rather than what they say’.” Well, since Griffith was parachuted into UG from some college in the American South, not many folks know much about him – save for some old heads who remembered he was once a rising star in the YSM of yore.
So what has Griffith DONE, so that we may KNOW him? Well he’s just produced that slick and glossy magazine “Renaissance” dedicated to him, the “Vice Chancellor”. “Renaissance” of what? His career which had plunged after he was let go from that US Southern college? Moving on the front page there’s an article entitled, (what else?) “A Vice Chancellor with a difference”.
Now the man’s just announced FOUR “assistant Vice Chancellors”!! AND a “Chief of Staff”!
Presidential ambitions revealed??

…the height challenged
As one of the many who’ve been the butt of many crude comments because of his vertical elevation, your Eyewitness finally has a hero he can look up to: the new Chief of Staff of the Disciplined Forces.
A hat tip to the Brigadier!!

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