Yale, Michael and hate

I guess this was the week dedicated to the term Mafia – with Simon Busuttil taking out his big gun and spraying all his Labour adversaries with a Mafiosi label.    

It is a tough observation to make, but I am not quite sure it sounded very credible, coming from a party leader who heads a political grouping that has had its fair share of Mafioso-like dealings.

This was also the week when former MEPA and lands junior minister Michael Falzon believed that he had scored a point by attacking the National Audit Office and accusing it of being politically motivated.

When everyone is quite aware that he was the junior minister who ran a Lands department that ran a system which was riddled with inconsistencies, and that it was he who oversaw and signed away the official allocation of land and cash to Marco Gaffarena.

This week was the incredible week of Yale University, which came out with the implausible story that Malta ranked 9th of all countries in the world when it came to green credentials.

Out of a total of 180 countries.

I am not saying Yale University have no sense. I am simply saying that if I were to get a scholarship to Yale, I would refuse to take it up.

I am simply stating that if Yale used information and then interpreted it according to a fixed equation, the Maltese statistic proves that the information is flawed or wrong or that the equation is simply skewed.

The question is how could Yale have arrived at this ludicrous conclusion?

I guess the reason for this is very simple. On paper we have a legal regime that really protects the environment. Hardly anything can be better, one would think.

And this is very true, most of it originates from the EU accession days.  

In real terms, if real were real, we are going to be one of the first nations on earth to reduce fossil fuel emissions, and by 50%.  

We also have a sewerage system which purifies raw sewage, we recycle our waste, we have a controlled landfill, we have very strict laws which protect our biodiversity and we also have a number of listed Natura 2000 sites and a fair share of nature reserves when compared to the size of our country.

But when you look closer it does not take long to realise that all is not rosy.  In fact it is far from being so.

If for example you take the Natura 2000 sites, such as the Il-Park tal-Majjistral off the Radisson, the area is literally peppered with illegally created bird trapping sites on pristine, ecologically sensitive garigue. Both Roderick Galdes and his WRBU know all about this, but they prefer not to discuss it.

On the one hand, we are reducing gas emissions from the new energy utility, but it is only by sheer chance.  The choice of energy production by using gas was not made because of any environmental considerations but because of fiscal matters.

It is a good omen by all means.

We can go on by referring to the exaggerated number of cars clogging our roads and we should thank the Lord that we live on a wind-blown island not in a land locked country. Does that make us green?

Needless to say one of a long list of environmental credentials that were missed by Yale is the total disregard of the Maltese and Gozitans for their countryside, which they treat like a permanent dumping site.  

Today countryside lanes are still embellished with garbage and litter. It is a veritable dump.

All over the countryside quarries continue to operate, cutting through the landscape and amputating large tracts of the Island.

Yale of course had not heard of MEPA or of the acute and incurable concrete cancer that has struck our country, which is losing its little greenery to creeping grey.

Nor did it hear of the hunting problems in this country and the government’s decision to open spring hunting for two species of bird which are seriously threatened and considered to be vulnerable.

Neither have they heard of the quality of our water and our dependence on reverse osmosis for having water in our system.

But such is life, we live in a world of statistics and records and comparisons. And it all depends from which angle you look at things.  Yale definitely looked at Malta through their fat asses.

Or maybe they have an Atlas where an utopian Malta exists which is not the Maltese Malta.

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Saturday morning, and I get a phone call to express my view in a radio programme hosted by Andrew Azzopardi.  The subject is the controversy over the revelation of the source of a story.

And of course all hell has broken loose because the defence lawyer to Konrad Mizzi has, not very intelligently, asked for details about the source, and wants the definition of a journalist.

Invited to share his wisdom on the subject on the radio is Father Joseph Borg.

Asked to comment, I said that in court when I am sued for libel I am always obliged to prove my story. 

I do not attribute an item to a source. Instead I provide a hard nosed fact and substantiate my story. But I can never say that, for example, Andrew Azzopardi is having an affair, and then hide behind attributing this to a source.

In other words I cannot quote an imaginary source. 

That is what the hate blogger is always doing, I said.

Inventing stories and then sometimes she gets it right.

I do not believe she has any proof that Konrad Mizzi was in a relationship with his communications coordinator, because it is simply a lie.

A fat lie.

And just in case you have not quite understood, I am saying it in black and white here for all to read, she is a bloody liar and hateful person who just invents things, especially if something concerns her critics, and more so people involved in the Labour Party.

I do not even want to discuss the matter of her being a journalist, to me she will never be a journalist but a hateful person who has destroyed the lives of so many people.

Her profession is hate mongering and if someone from a political party or the self-conceited defenders of the faith want to stand up for her, they have every right to do so. But that does not make her a journalist.

Obviously, both Andrew Azzopardi and Joe Borg failed to express this precise comment.

Sources are sacred, but only when they exist and if they do exist they should come up with facts not gossip.

The blogger from hell has no facts, just a very rich and biased imagination based on perhaps many of her personal hang ups and prejudices.

The perpetrator of hate has temporarily become a victim, in the eyes of some, and the sooner the source issue is put aside, the clearer it will be for all of us, especially those who like me are unimpressed by anyone who should stop attempting to play the victim. In this case, in reality, the ‘victim’ is a perpetrator of foul lies, invective and odium.

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As I was closing this opinion, the government announced the appointment of Toni Abela as a member on the European Court of Auditors. I wish him well, more so considering that one expects some criticism from the opposition.  

He is infinitely a more superior nomination than his predecessor, Louis Galea, a politician who was the focus of two very serious inquiries – the Auxiliary Workers’ Scheme and the Foundation for Tomorrow’s Schools.  

So before anyone questions Toni Abela’s nomination, ask about his integrity and honesty. Second to none.