A Place to Stand

It is generally being accepted that the Copenhagen Climate Summit isn't going to produce an agreement because while all the politicians are going to say how important it is that we destroy much of the world in furtherance of the War Against Fire none of them are willing to put their part of the world economy on the block.

We may be being blindsided. Viscount Monckton thinks so. While the politicos may not put up any money for the bonfire they may be willing to sacrifice national independence. Seeing how almost the entire political class in almost every European country have been keen to immerse their country in the EU, even when the people haven't (which diffuses power but does not reduce it, while making every layer of government less accountable & less able to be opposed by ordinary people).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMe5dOgbu40&feature=player_embedded

“At Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed — Your president will sign it. Most of the third-world countries will sign it because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regimes around the world, like the European Union, will rubber-stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

“I have read that treaty and what it says is this: ‘That a world government is going to be created. The word, government, actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity.

“The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third-world countries in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, a ‘climate debt,’ because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t - and we’ve been screwing up the climate. We haven’t been screwing up the climate, but that’s the line.

“And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.
“How many of you think that the word election or democracy or vote or ballot occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right. It doesn’t appear once.

“So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement and took over Greenpeace so that my friends who founded it left within a year because they’d captured it.

Now the apotheosis is at hand.....
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Now it will actually be relatively difficult to apply this in America because they have a minor thing called the constitution but this will not stop it being passed, very quietly, here. Though it has naturally gone unreported by our media it will mean that as soon as it is passed we will be told we cannot decide that catastrophic global warming is a lie because it is in a treaty & once something is in a treaty you can't object to it.

I am with Professor John McCarthy on why a world government should be opposed.

You say the only alternative to nuclear war is world government. There is only one possibility worse than nuclear war for the survival of modern civilization, and that is world government. Civilization might recover from the damage of a nuclear war, but judging by past static empires in Egypt and China, it might never recover from world government, there being no chance of external intervention. As it is, present governments are only prevented from becoming dominated by crazy ideas that will suppress all opposition by the existence of other governments. The only way a people can be sure that their government is substandard is that it does worse than those of other countries.

Having other countries also gives sceptics somewhere to go & even write subversive things from beyond the government's reach. Global warming is clearly the current crazy idea & now officially, in Britain, a religion & one which would like to persecute heretics.

Even if the current warming lie collapses because of the obvious fact that we are undergoing cooling, once such government is in place it will be used, possibly to promote the next global cooling scare. The important thing is not any genuine concern for any real phenomenon but the way all such scares ("hobgoblins") are used to maintain & extend power.

Labels: global warming, International politics

I have discussed before how the 'elfin spectorate cost us the equivalent of 4 million people's work & indeed that the extra deaths from lost economic growth exceed, by a couple of orders magnitude any possible lives saved by the bureaucrats.

This is from an article, with my comments,
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several factors shape people's perception of risks:

Trust. The more we trust the people informing us about a risk, or the institution or company exposing us to the risk, or the government agencies that are supposed to protect us, the less afraid we'll be. The less we trust them, the greater our fear. Not sure about this - politicians & journalists are the 2 groups at the bottom of public trust lists & they are the ones pushing almost all scare stories whereas scientists come pretty high up & they are the ones who say nuclear is safe & make up the large majority of prominent warming sceptics. This suggests that advertising of scare stories is a much greater cause of worry than the intrinsic trustworthiness of the fearmonger. It should be acknowledged that politicians have gone to considerable lengths to find fakecharities or scientists, invariably ones they employ, as front men - hence the firing of Professor Nutt for not making scary claims about drugs.

Control. The more control we have over a risk, the less threatening it seems. This explains why it feels safer to drive than fly, though the risk of death from motor vehicle crashes is much higher. True

Dread. The more dreadful the nature of the harm from a risk, the more worried we'll be. Cancer is generally considered a more dreadful way to die than heart disease, yet heart disease kills roughly 25 percent more Americans. True & entirely reasonable

Risk vs. benefit. The more we get a benefit from a choice or behavior, like using a cell phone when we drive or that "nice, healthy-looking tan" from the sun, the less concerned we are about any associated risk. Though this applies only to personal benefits not those to society as a whole.

Human-made vs. natural. Natural risks seem less scary. Solar radiation causes an estimated 7,100 melanoma deaths in the U.S. per year. Yet many sunbathers worry more about nuclear radiation. Among more than 90,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only about 500 cancer deaths have been attributed to radiation exposure over the past 59 years. This is a biggie. I'm not sure that this is innate rather than that the Luddites controlling the media & politics give infinitely more coverage to new alleged risks. I don't think Victorian sailors showed an aversion to steam ships on the grounds that though they sank less often than sail ships they did so for new reasons like boiler explosions.

"Could it happen to me?" Statistical probabilities like one in a million are often used in risk communication, usually to no avail. One in a million is too high if you think you could be "the one." That is why the public sometimes demands additional regulations to cut already low risks to zero. This also suggests reporting error as a cause. By definition, if the risk is higher, the chances of it happening to you, except where it is very strongly limited to particular risk groups, is higher. This is probably why the AIDS virus scare was pushed since, if it had been seen to be overwhelmingly limited to gays & drug users there would have been less public interest & thus less money.

New or familiar. New threats--for example, West Nile virus when it first appears in a community--generate concern. After residents have lived with the risk for a while, familiarity lowers their fear. For diseases over the very long term, ie centuries, there is something to this since diseases mutate to take only the already weak. Also when a disease first appears it is difficult to assess the threat & it can quite easily spread 1,000 times more or 1,000 less than the median estimate - it is therefore wise to worry much more than the median estimate. This happened with mad cow disease & indeed SARS. Fortunately we have not yet found something where the error has been significantly on the low side.

Children. Any risk to a child seems more threatening in the eyes of adults than the same risk does to them. Which is entirely reasonable in itself since they have much longer life expectancy. However it does give the fearmongers a handle. Any time you are told we must have no smoking/ID cards/more prisons/more global warming regulations/censorship "for the children" you can be fairly sure that anybody using children as a moral hum,an shield is out of all the other arguments.

Uncertainty. The less we know, or understand, about a risk, the scarier it seems. And uncertainty is, by definition, the other side of the coin of the promotion of unproven or false fears since they are unproven but it is inherently impossible to disprove an unspecific scare. The entire anti-GM foods scare is based on claiming that some unknown effect might happen from some unknown cause, at some unknown period in the future.

Perceiving risk through these emotional and intuitive lenses, which have been identified by researchers Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, is natural human behavior, but "It can lead us to make dangerous personal choices," Ropeik says. Driving may have felt safer than flying after September 11, 2001, but those who opted to drive rather than fly were actually raising their risk. Risk misperception can threaten health by making us too afraid, or not afraid enough.

Finally, as George Gray points out, failing to keep risk in perspective leads us to "pressure government for protection against relatively small risks, which diverts resources from bigger ones."

"By understanding and respecting the way people relate to risk," Gray says, "risk communicators can play a vital role in improving the public's health."

This list does not include air crashes, which may be above the 1 in a million listed but difficult to accurately assess, being killed by meteorite - my own favourite which can be assessed as about 1 in a million in a lifetime of being killed by a dinosaur killer meteor (which hit 65 million years ago), or another 3 mile island (well under the million to 1). Interestingly it does include Radon in homes which is a risk only if you accept the LNT radiation damage theory, while epdimemiological evidence shows Radon beneficial.

Labels: Fear, Social

The LibDems have produced advice for their bloggers on how they handle comments. Though nobody in the party is able to answer accusations that they have been complicit in war crimes & genocide they have clearly been considering it.

You really can decide your own policy on abusive comments or swearing. It’s your blog. Again, it hardly ever happens. But if someone, for example, writes that a very genteel politician is an “organ thieving Nazi whore”, then you are within your rights to delete that comment.

Indeed. This is allegedly because of the threat he might sue. The fact that no such LibDem politician has even disputed, let alone felt able to sue over anything I have said would, as a matter of fact, largely preclude them suing their own supporters for not censoring now.

In the interests of good fellowship & because I thought the advice contained some danger if applied only to censoring criticism of LibDems in a way which would imply approval of criticisms of others I put up this.

Also if you subsequently allow a comment which says that Nick Griffin were a Nazi (which for the record he isn’t) or indeed anything questionable about him & it had been proven that you HAD censored similar remarks about a LibDem politician, allegedly on the grounds that it was libellous, you would not only have to prove that Griffin were a Nazi but that he was more clearly a Nazi than any aforementioned LibDem politician who had a proven record of supporting ideological Nazis publicly committed to & engaged in racial genocide (also organ thieving) in the Nazi cause. If it could be proven you were using a different standard against Griffin that would be proof your libel was malicious which makes it considerably worse.

The easier & commonly used LibDem tactic is simply to censor anything factual but unsupportive of the party & make no bones about it.

They seem to have misunderstood it presumably misreading writing that Griffin is not a Nazi as that he was. An easy mistake to make if you are not good at reading. Certainly it in no other conceivable way breaches the rules for what should be censored yet, to my astonishment, it has been

Labels: British politics

To discuss any subject accurately it is important to be sure everybody is applying the same meaning to the words used.

This is particularly important when using words in a political context because politics depends on using words to get your way & quite often that means misusing them.

The surest ways of doing this are checking a dictionary everybody agrees to be honest or checking the original meaning of the word.

FASCISM - 1 often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control

The derivation is from the Latin word fasces; a fasces was a bundle of sticks used symbolically for the power through unity. The fasces, which consisted of a bundle of rods that were tied around an axe, were an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrates; they were carried by his Lictors and could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command. Furthermore, the symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is easily broken, while the bundle is difficult to break.

The misuse of the term by, among others, the government funded thugs approved by the Labour/LibDem/Conservative party, calling themselves "Unite Against Fascism" is not recent.

The word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else... almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. – George Orwell, What is Fascism?. 1944.

Going to what the original Fascism stood for in Italy we find

Within The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle the initial stances of Fascism were outlined, requesting amongst other things voting rights for women, insertion of a minimum wage, insertion of an eight-hour workday for all workers and reorganisation of public transport such as railways...

The fascists had enough of what they considered a weak parliamentary democracy process and organised the March on Rome in an effort to take power, with promises of restoring Italian pride, reviving the economy, increasing productivity, ending harmful government controls and furthering law and order...

Italy's policies became more protectionist. Tariffs of grains were increased in an attempt to strengthen domestic production ("Battle for Grain"), which was ultimately a failure. Thus, according to historian Denis Mack Smith (1981), "Success in this battle was... another illusory propaganda victory won at the expense of the Italian economy in general and consumers in particular"...

&

Mussolini's coalition passed the electoral Acerbo Law of 1923, which gave two thirds of the seats in parliament to the party or coalition that achieved 25% of the vote. The Fascist Party used violence and intimidation to achieve the 25% threshold in the 1924 election, and became the ruling political party of Italy.

So that's basically it. Fascism, according to its founders, stands for law & order, using promises to improve the economy to achieve power, economic protectionism & controls (which, as ever, don't work) & not much more except for a corrupt electoral system that gives a majority irrespective of how few people voted for the "winning" party. So bearing in mind that Labour gained only 35 per cent of the vote in May 2005, but won 355 MPs (54%) & that both Labour & Conservative, but not UKIP, BNP or indeed LibDems, think that this corruption of democracy is important/ The mantle of Fascism clearly lies on the the first two parties, particularly Labour who are committed to big government interventionism & not to the parties committed to electoral democracy.

Labels: British politics, Social

Via Pournelle's site comes news that an X-Prize has been won for the development of a laser powered lift that has risen to nearly 1 km.

A robot powered by a ground-based laser beam climbed a long cable dangling from a helicopter on Wednesday to qualify for prize money in a $2 million competition to test the potential reality of the science fiction concept of space elevators...

The contest requires their machines to climb 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) up a cable slung beneath a helicopter hovering nearly a mile high.

LaserMotive's vehicle zipped up to the top in just over four minutes and immediately repeated the feat, qualifying for at least a $900,000 second-place prize.

... They said their real goal is to develop a business based on the idea of beaming power, not the futuristic idea of accessing space via an elevator climbing a cable.

"We both are pretty skeptical of its near-term prospects," Kare said of an elevator.

The contest, however, demonstrates that beaming power works, Nugent said.

"Anybody who needs power in one place and can't run wires to it — we'd be able to deliver power," Kare said.

Earlier out on the lakebed, team member Nick Burrows had pointed out how it grips the cable with modified skateboard wheels and the laser is aimed with an X Box game controller...

The competition was five years in the making, Shelef said.

"A lot of hurdles to cross," he said. "Now that it's happening I'm actually happy already. It doesn't matter what the outcome is."

Funded by a NASA program to explore bold technology, the contest is intended to encourage development of a theory that originated in the 1960s and was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke's 1979 novel "The Fountains of Paradise."

Space elevators are envisioned as a way to reach space without the risk and expense of rockets.

Instead, electrically powered vehicles would run up and down a cable anchored to a ground structure and extending thousands of miles up to a mass in geosynchronous orbit — the kind of orbit communications satellites are placed in to stay over a fixed spot on the Earth.

Electricity would be supplied through a concept known as "power beaming," ground-based lasers pointing up to photo voltaic cells on the bottom of the climbing vehicle — something like an upside-down solar power system.

The space elevator competition has not produced a winner in its previous three years, but has become increasingly difficult...

While the concept of an elevator to space may seem too fanciful, Andrew Williams, 26, a mechanical engineer on the Saskatchewan team, said he has no doubts it will come about.

"Once we put our minds to something it's just a matter of time for us to achieve it," he said.

Once again we see that X-Prizes can stimulate innovation in a way which conventional funding grants would look askance at (X-box controls & skateboard wheels).

I am also dubious about "near term" building of a space elevator if that means less than half way through the careers of LaserMotive's owners. On the other hand I would be much more surprised if (unless we destroy ourselves) it took until the 22nd century as envisioned in 1979 by Arthur C. Clarke. Though the big science is being sat on the smaller stuff, including strength of materials research is going very fast.

PS Chaos Manor has also been discussing nuclear power & mentioned an article I have previously discussed about the AP1000 reactor costing as low as $1.2 bn.

Labels: Science/technology, space, X-Prizes

Cameron has given a speesch saying he won't keep his promise over the EU treaty but promising lot os new promises about how we will get a referendum next time which are much less credible than the promise he has just broken.

His speech is here in full

I have put my response on Iain Dale's blog here but I want to place it here as well:

He did make a "cast iron promise" (in his own words) that we would have a referendum on it (which to my mind means a referendum on continued full membership but am open to alternatives). There were no weasel words on not having it if it passed.

The new promise seems impossible secondly because, unless Britain adopts a formal constitution which I would like, a promise to bind future governments is non-binding if they vote not to be bound (as with the cynical guarantees that the government of 2100 will ban fire). Primarily it is impossible because this constitreaty contains rules as to how to change itself so that if it is simply impossible to have a referendum on it then it is simply constitutionally impossible to reject future centralisation using those rules.

I am still interested in what the constitution of the Conservative party is. Is it indeed, as Cameron seems to feel, that nobody else has any rights to say what the party stands for today & completely reverse it tomorrow again. Even Stalin didn't, at least in theory, have that power & I find it difficult to believe the Conservative party is more dictatorial.

On a previous occasion MPs issued a personal manifesto on the EU. That should not be necessary this time. They need only state that they adhere to the current & I believe legal position of the party, that we are entitled to a referendum, until its membership decide to change it. I assume the large majority of MPs & almost all members wish to keep the promise.

We are in the situation where all 3 of the major parties have quite deliberately lied to the voters on a matter of major constitutional importance. This cannot be excused as "no new taxes" sometimes can if circumstances change. There are NO unforeseen circumstances forcing any of them to break their word.

If this stands it means there are no circumstances whatsoever under which any representative of any of the 3 major parties can ever be assumed, without strong supporting evidence, to be telling the truth, or in which any promise any of them make can be taken as trustworthy. That being the case democratic government is obviously impossible.

Labels: British politics

This is an article which compares the big government system in California with the small government of Texas. As the 2 biggest states, both on the Mexican border they are closely comparable & historically California (Hollywood, silicon valley, aerospace) has been the more successful. Dr Pournelle has described it as "A good article, if lengthy. Compares Texas which promises low taxes and a lower grade of public services with California which promises high grade public service and corresponding taxes: the problem being that California has the taxes but the public services are for the benefit of the public employees, not the middle class and the taxpayers. The consequence is the continued wreck in California."

What is surprising is the growing evidence that the low-benefit, low-tax alternative succeeds not only on its own terms but also according to the criteria used by defenders of high benefits and high taxes. Whatever theoretical claims are made for imposing high taxes to provide generous government benefits, the practical reality is that these public goods are, increasingly, neither public nor good: their beneficiaries are mostly the service providers themselves, and their quality is poor. For evidence, look to the two largest states in the nation, which are fine representatives of the liberal and conservative alternatives...

According to the most recent data available from the Census Bureau, for the fiscal year ending in 2006, Americans paid an average of $4,001 per person in state and local taxes. But Californians paid $4,517 per person, well above that national average, while Texans paid $3,235...Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas saw a net gain, in an average week, of 1,544 people... states without an individual income tax “created 89 percent more jobs and had 32 percent faster personal income growth” than the states with the highest individual income-tax rates...

[California's} public sector’s diminishing willingness and capacity to fulfill its promises to taxpayers. “Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California,” Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com and a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times this past March. “Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California’s government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class.”

...once you adjust for population growth and inflation, the state government spent 26 percent more in 2007–08 than in 1997–98. Back then, “California had teachers. Prisoners were in jail. Health care was provided for those with the least resources.” Today, Watkins asks, “Are the roads 26 percent better? Are schools 26 percent better? What is 26 percent better?”...

[on attempts to get rid of quangos] The path of least resistance was to do the same old thing, not the sensible thing. The resistance comes from the blob of interest groups, inside and outside government, that like California’s public sector just fine the way it is and see reform as a threat to their comfortable, lucrative arrangements. It turns out, for example, that all the pointless boards and commissions are bulletproof because they provide golden parachutes to politicians turned out of the state legislature...

The optimistic assessment is that things are going to get worse in California before they get better. The pessimistic assessment is that they’re going to get worse before they get much worse.

California is now bankrupt & being protected by loans & subsidy from central government. Hopefully this will not continue forever, since, however painful, bankruptcy is the ultimate pressure that gets resources taken away from the useless & put under the control of the competent. It don't think any state in a federation has ever been declared bankrupt but think that putting in the receivers would be the best thing that could happen.

What federalism has over lots of separate states is that people are relatively happy to vote with their feet moving “to that community whose local government best satisfies his set of preferences.” In selecting a jurisdiction, the mobile consumer-voter is, in effect, choosing a club to join based on the benefits that it offers and the dues that it charges. But this only works where national, particularly linguistic, differences don't exist. Hence the UK is a viable federation & the EU isn't.

Precisely the reason why I support full federalism across Britain & oppose full EU membership. Granted that in Scotland we have largely seen a California style 'orrible warning rather than a good example.

All of this is very reminiscent of Scotland where we also get about 20% more per head from Westminster than the national average; where we have a parasitic state sector that takes up 60% of the economy; a political class that is more interested in banning things, preventing us having nuclear power, stopping the free market building houses, golf clubs, factories etc & wants to destroy half our economy over the next 11 years; and where Jack McConnell's total failure to carry out his promised "bonfire of the quangos" shows how entrenched & bullet proof politicians are.

Perhaps a Cameron (Scottish father) government will grasp the nettle of fiscal autonomy (ie that we keep the tax money raised here but not more which is, at least officially, what the SNP want & let the SNP can prove whether they can run the country solvently or not. There is no intrinsic reason why the Scottish economy can out perform the UK average, particularly if we get the power to cut corporation tax which fiscal autonomy requires. All we need is to be rid of our useless political class who have unanimously voted to destroy our economy. Fiscal governmental bankruptcy with a thriving real economy would be far better than a the overstuffed government destroying our anaemic real economy we have now. Far better to have the admonistrators running it than these parastic numpties.

Labels: economics, Scottish politics

best photo I could find of a Conservative audience

Official party policy on an EU referendum enunciated by David Cameron is that

Today, I will give this cast-iron guarantee: If I become PM a Conservative government will hold a referendum on any EU treaty that emerges from these negotiations.

He included a photo of his signature & compared his integrity with that of Brown

Gordon Brown, it's a gesture to the British people saying: "I know best. Your views are irrelevant. Get used to it."

Make no mistake, that's the reason he refuses to give the British people a referendum on the EU constitutional treaty - he simply doesn't trust them. It's the arrogant belief that he - and only he - has the right to decide what's best for Britain's future.

Well, Prime Minister, I've news for you. The old politics that you grew up in no longer reflect the new world we live in. It's a world where people are demanding - and getting - more power and more control over their lives.

Difficult to conceive of something more definite than that.

So in the presumably unlikely event that Cameron, in power, reverses himself would such a reversal be official policy. What I am asking is, under the Conservative Party constitution how is official policy made.

To find out I looked up constitution of the British Conservative party on Google & astonishingly it isn't there.

I did find a speech from William Hague some years ago saying how important it was that it be democratic & give the members a say but the thing itself is missing.

Can anybody help.

On the one hand such things are not taken very seriously by our leaders (the Scottish Lib Dem conference is officially the sovereign body of the party & it unanimously passed my motion calling for the arrest & trial of western leaders who had committed war crimes against Yugoslavia, which is thus still legally the Scottish party position, yet took my support of that as being evidence that my views were irreconcilable with the party). on the other hand legality can come back to bite at the most unexpected moments (the break up of the USSR took place because the Stalin Constitution specifically said that the federal state were sovereign, thereby proving what a fine, free 7 democratic place the USSR was, & I doubt if Stalin ever expected it to be taken seriously).

It seems to me likely that a majority of MPs & an enormous majority of members will want a referendum. Also an overwhelming majority of the electorate - polls show 80% of Scots wanting a referendum on independence even though a large majority don't actually want independence but lets find that out:

Do you want a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty?
	Yes
	No
pollcode.com free polls

So if the majority want to keep the present policy who would be breaking party discipline if they supported something different?

UpPDATE - Later this day it was announced that the Czech president has ratified the treaty. Can't blame him for not saving our bacon when our own PM wouldn't. The Conservatives are now going to have to decide whether to stand by their promise.

Labels: British politics

I wrote previously of the largest meteor strikes in history the biggest of which is the Burckle Crater in the Indian Ocean. I mentioned this on Pournelle's blog & on Sunday somebody mentioned this New York Times article on the subject

But Madagascar provides the smoking gun for geologically recent impacts. In August, Dr. Abbott, Dr. Bryant and Slava Gusiakov, from the Novosibirsk Tsunami Laboratory in Russia, visited the four huge chevrons (characteristic shape of debris formed by the high point of a meteor caused tsunami) to scoop up samples...

About 900 miles southeast from the Madagascar chevrons, in deep ocean, is Burckle crater, which Dr. Abbott discovered last year. Although its sediments have not been directly sampled, cores from the area contain high levels of nickel and magnetic components associated with impact ejecta.

Burckle crater has not been dated, but Dr. Abbott estimates that it is 4,500 to 5,000 years old.

less certain is this

Bruce Masse, an environmental archaeologist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He thinks he can say precisely when the comet fell: on the morning of May 10, 2807 B.C.

Dr. Masse analyzed 175 flood myths from around the world, and tried to relate them to known and accurately dated natural events like solar eclipses and volcanic eruptions. Among other evidence, he said, 14 flood myths specifically mention a full solar eclipse, which could have been the one that occurred in May 2807 B.C.

Half the myths talk of a torrential downpour, Dr. Masse said. A third talk of a tsunami. Worldwide they describe hurricane force winds and darkness during the storm. All of these could come from a mega-tsunami.

Of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, Dr. Masse said, “and we’re not there yet.”

Indeed we aren't there yet. Nonetheless the size of the Chevrons & their position do show how high the water came in that area & can give an assessment of how high it should be elsewhere. This was an era when clay tablets were the height of literary communication so it is hardly surprising that no record of scientific measurements or explain it without reference exists. Anybody who has seen records of battles as late as the Middle Ages will know that records rarely accurately assessed how many men were in the armies, & that is something that kings & their scribes must have known & have had a deep personal interest in so a lack of decisive records is no surprise. The dating of 2,807 BC seems enthusiastic but a similar mention of an eclipse when Odysseus returned home has been used to date the Odyssey. We are at the stage regarding this crater that we were when the Dinosaur Killer meteor was first hypothesised by Dr Alvarez on the basis of finding a geological layer of iridium. We will see how it goes.

Still fairly isolated. As a species we have been lucky. Here is a rather elderly article that estimates a 1-6,000 risk to us all.

Labels: Science/technology

Not being a complete libertarian I do accept the desirability of some taxation. The destructive effects of various taxes vary. Corporation tax is the single most damaging one because it directly cuts into & deters new investment money.

Mark Wadsworth on his own blog & here has gone on at length about how tax on land value does not hurt the economy because the tax is on the inherent value not the buildings on it so that tax is irrespective of the development of the land & hence doesn't discourage it. Indeed it has a positive effect since it discourages land hoarding & thus keeps the land in use.

I also approve of taxes on things we know to be harmful to us - eg smoking, alcohol & drugs. I blogged yesterday on legalising drugs but do support taxing them. Tax is a method of pressure which does not deprive us of the freedom of choice that criminalisation does. That it makes a profit is not something to be despised.

I have previously done a poll on what proportion of the economy should be government spending & the result came out at under 20%. I am happy with that & would see 10% (historically a tithe in the days when the social services were a branch of the Church) going for welfare. I would wish that to come from income tax/national insurance ring fenced to particular welfare programmes. That means they are effectively a form of insurance but, unlike private insurance, when everybody is charged a flat rate the administration costs are very low - this is one area where the state can be more efficient than free enterprise.

Currently we raise taxes like this

The total of alcohol, tobacco & custom duties comes t0 18.7 billion Taking VAT on top of that comes to £22 bn. The world drugs business was estimated in 2003 as $322 bn. Change that to pounds, update it for 2009 & take the UK portion as 1/20th (higher than our share of world GNP but we have a more serious problem than most of Europe & richer countries can afford more than their proportion) gives about £18 bn. So taken together is about £40 bn.

10% of national GNP is £140 billion. Council tax comes to £24.9 bn. Add the same again for land value tax (I am not going to include business rates because, though there is a good theoretical basis for them I don't want to include anything that hurts growth. Lets keep half of fuel duties to pay for transport infrastructure - £13 bn. Betting tax £1.5bn. Despite the Tories I rather approve of inheritance tax at £3.2 bn - after all the beneficiaries haven't worked for it. Lets keep capital gains tax which is largely a way of filling an inheritance loophole - £5 bn. Total £109 bn. Lets keep some of the stamp duty, vehicle excise etc simply because registering ownership is a valuable service government provides.

That is about £120 bn. If anything more than that is needed we can let tobacco/alcohol/drug taxes rise. Letting them rise at 9% would bring in another £20 bn in 5 years & if the country achieved 9% growth which I have long said would be easily achievable with a truly free market economy, would merely maintain the current cost as a proportion of pre tax income (quite a lot less in post tax income :-)

That means the abolition, or in a few cases large reduction in the aggregates levy, climate change levy, landfill tax, petrol revenue tax, air passenger duty (a lot of small eco-fascist taxes which don't come directly from us so we don't notice them) insurance premium tax, much of vehicle, stamp & "other taxes", business rates, corporation tax & VAT. Taking 10% for the welfare state paid out of income tax & national insurance which currently raises £260 bn we save £120 bn or £4,000 more in the average wage packet.

None of this is complicated it simply requires making the decision to cut the state down to its non-parasitic function.

UPDATE In comments Mark has said that "other taxes & royalties" is licencing of licences on monopolies (like airport landing slots, radio spectrum etc) & presumably licences for oil exploration. As such they are a useful state function & like LVT are dealing witrh a fixed quantity so taxation is not economically destructive. That means another £15.7bn. Hmmm - that means government can clearly reach 10% of GNPharmlessly. The troll is looking rather easy to feed.

Labels: Fixing the economy, Government parasitism, Social

Professor David Nutt has been sacked from an unpaid post as an "independent" government science advisor on drugs because of what he said. This was:

January 2009 ... paper was headlined "Equasy, an over-looked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms".

He said the point of the article was to explain that the harm from illegal drugs could be equal to harm in other parts of life, such as horse-riding, hence the invented term equasy or "equine addiction syndrome".

Prof Nutt argued that "equasy" could be blame for 10 deaths a year and more than 100 traffic accidents...

"Making riding illegal would completely prevent all these harms and would be, in practice, very easy to do...

"This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates - indeed encourages - certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others, such as drug use."
Professor Nutt stuck to his guns and in the summer gave a lecture on the relative risks of various drugs which, in turn, became a paper published by one of the UK's leading university departments of criminology.

In the paper, he reproduced a chart of drugs and other substances, based on their risk to health. The chart stated that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis...

"I think the precautionary principle misleads," he wrote. "It starts to distort the value of evidence and therefore I think it could, and probably does, devalue evidence.

"This leads us to a position where people really don't know what the evidence is. They see the classification, they hear about evidence and they get mixed messages."

There seems to be no factual dispute that his figures are entirely true. The reason he is no longer a scientific advisor to the government is simply because he has been stating facts the government don't want to hear & don't want the public to hear.

Compare his treatment with that of Sir David King who has told the most outrageous lies about global warming being likely to make "Antarctica the only habitable continent" by 2100. Does anybody think that Sir David has shown 1,000th as much honesty & integrity as Professor David or that his knighthood is not a reward for being a liar?

Clearly Professor Nutt does not accept that we must live in a world where science has been replaced by "post normal science" where the "important characteristic of scientific knowledge - its openness to change as it rubs up against society" replaces the traditional position that facts are not subject to change by corrupt snake oil salesmen rubbing themselves up against politicians as I have pointed out Professor Mike Hulme profitably does. Once again we see the state propaganda machine trying to corrupt everything it touches.

I am coming to believe that extensive, perhaps total, drug legalisation & probably taxation, is the way to go.

Last year I attended a lecture at the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (which I thoroughly reccommend) where the lecturer, while definitely not a supporter of broad legalisation himself, made it clear that the harm to drug users mainly comes from impurities or variations in strength of the drugs rather than to their inherent danger. Obviously if Boots were selling them this would not be a problem. The other side of that is that we should expect that if prices fall & availability rises so will usage. This is not a certainty - legalisation for example pretty nearly destroyed CB radio in Britain & if Boots are selling them at a marginal profit they won't be handing out free samples to get people hooked - but I think it would be optimistic not to assume a rise in usage.

However the other area that drugs cause problems, for which he confirmed legalisation would produce no significant bad effects is in the damage drug addict criminals commit to get their fix & the degree to which it brings about organised criminality across society. He mentioned a criminal case in which it emerged that a major drug dealer had been making donations to a political party, though he did not give details & our free & trustworthy media seem to have shown equal reticence. This is, after all, exactly what happened during Prohibition in the USA & the growth of organised crime then still affects them.

On balance then the disadvantages of criminalising drugs seem to considerably outweigh the advantages even if we don't accept the precautionary principle that people should be free to do as they wish without government control unless unless the case for government control is overwhelming & indisputable. Obviously as a classic liberal I do accept that principle in relation to government interference (& only in relation to that).
Professor David Nutt in an open shirt - as he was interviewrd on Newsnight

Bet we could cut other taxes if we taxed drugs.

UPDATE This morning (Sunday) on the Marr show the government’s chief health official was asked, 3 times, whether Profesor Nutt’s assessment of the drugs risk was correct & 3 times refused to answer ultimately saying that (A) he should have given his advice entirely behind closed doors so that the public wouldn’t know & (B) that because the public thought drugs uniquely dangerous the politicians need to take their ignorance into account. The contradiction is obvious.

Compare & contrast 2 other government experts who got it wrong, or at least said things blatantly untrue. Sir David King as the government’s chief science advisor said that by 2100 “Antarctica will be the only habitable contin et” & got no breath of criticism. Sir John Scarlett was chosen by Blair to investigate if Iraq had WMDs & duly assured the government & people that he did – as reward he was made boss of MI6 from which he retires today. My guess is that Professor Nutt isn’t in line for a knighthood.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism

Tom Harris, a local MP (Glasgow South) recently was listed as Labour's best blogger so I checked him out & have occasionally put up comments.

I have had my post censored by him with these words on one of his threads.

"Neil Craig – We don’t publish your sort round here."

So what had I said?

Had I accused him of being part of a party of war criminals? Though obviously he is I had been polite enough not to say so.

Had I accused him of mass murder, child rape, genocide, organlegging? Nope - again I had been polite.

Had I accused him of treason against the country or indeed particularly against his most loyal voters? Certainly that has happened but I didn't mention it there.

Had I accused him of being a Nazi? No, though true I hadn't.

Had I perhaps accused him of using his election to steal from the public for himself? No.

Or of stealing from us on behalf of his friends? Again guilty but I never mentioned it.

Had I accused him of deliberately lying in the promises he made to get elected? Again no doubt of his & his party's guilt but not this time.

Or said that as a proven liar, war criminal. child rapist etc etc there were no circumstances under which his word, or that of any member of his party, could ever be trusted on anything again. Nope - not me.

The "your sort" who must, at all costs, be censored are anybody sceptical about catastrophic global warming.

Worse than that - in the finest traditions of 1984 he has made it quite clear that he personally knows it to be not merely a scam but a ridiculous one at that. What he censored was a comment I made supporting a rather amusing piece he did on what complete bollocks Sir Nicholas Stern, the government's selected expert on global warming had been saying:

Humans ‘will need to grow wings and develop x-ray vision to beat climate change,’ says Stern

OKAY, he didn’t quite say that, but he might as well have.

“Give up meat to save the planet“? I don’t think so, old chap. I love meat, me: I rarely eat anything that didn’t once have parents...

As for urging us all to go veggie… yeah, good luck with that one, Your Lordship. You couldn’t get me a Bic Mac meal with strawberry shake while you’re out, could you? And go large…

Harris clearly knows it is a lying scare story, an imaginary "hobgoblin" designed to keep us alarmed & easily led & whatever his own witticisms, is desperate to censor any dissent.

And this is one of the best & brightest of the corrupt, lying, thieving, murdering, fascist scum that makes up the Labour party.

Labels: British politics

Matthew Hoh, a senior US administrator, has resigned from his position running one of Afghanistan's provinces on the grounds that the war is unwinable.

I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque & Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan.

..."We are spending our way into oblivion.

The entire pdf deserves reading, certainly by anybody with responsibility for ordering soldiers to put their lives on the line.

The impression given is of an army being ordered to march into quicksand on the theory that eventually the heap of equipment & bodies will be enough to form a road & with the implication that anybody who suggests doing something else is failing to respect the sacrifice of those already under the sand.

Of course this is not the way to build a road. Nor is it the way to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. The most important thing is to decide what the objectives are.

One cynical interpretation of the object is that produced by Orwell in 1984.

To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive...

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living

combined with Mencken's "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." In which case the propose of the war is to spend money thereby preventing it being spent on something constructive & to keep us scared enough to put up with all the "anti-terrorism" bureaucracy & stupidity. It appears the cost of the Afghan war to Britain is £2.5 billion a year & would thus guess the US cost to be about 20 times that ($90 bn) which, if we are going to be there for 30 years would soak up enough money to colonise the entire solar system or build 5,000 nuclear power plants (assuming economies of scale) & give most of the world a standard of energy use & thus living equivalent to what Britain has now. My guess is that the £2.5 bn figure is now to low - lets hope the 30 year one is to high. This seems to be out of all proportion to the value to us of the country. Indeed even out of all proportion to the 9/11 deaths, which, after all, are less than NATO's murders in Serbia & Kosovo.

So if the cynical view is correct the war is going very well for those responsible.

---------

However treating it as a conventional military problem we have a different choice.

First establish the objective. The initial objective was to kill bin Laden, smash al Quaeda & prevent it threatening terrorist attacks. On that it has been wholly successful. I think bin Laden is dead & has been for years & his name is nowadays used much less often by the media so he may indeed be being airbrushed out the picture. Nowadays the objective seems to be to establish a "democratic", centralised state with western gender values. This goes against all their cultural traditions & if that is what we are going to spend the next 30 years enforcing on them we will have to kill an awful lot of them.

On the other hand if we restrict our aims to the original ones we know we can achieve them because we already did. This is something those responsible for making decisions about lives should read.

From the beginning of 2007 to March 2008, the 82nd Airborne Division’s strategy in Khost proved that 250 paratroopers could secure a province of a million people in the Pashtun belt. The key to success in Khost—which shares a 184 kilometer-long border with Pakistan’s lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas—was working within the Afghan system. By partnering with closely supervised Afghan National Security Forces and a competent governor and subgovernors, U.S. forces were able to win the support of Khost’s 13 tribes.

Today, 2,400 U.S. soldiers are stationed in Khost. But the province is more dangerous...

We saw how this could [putting Afghan troops in control] could work in the Tani district of Khost starting in 2007. By assisting an ANA company—with a platoon of American paratroopers, a civil affairs team from the U.S.-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, the local Afghan National Police, and a determined Afghan subgovernor named Badi Zaman Sabari—we secured the district despite its long border with Pakistan.

Raids by the paratroopers under the leadership of Lt. Col. Scott Custer were extremely rare because the team had such good relations with the tribes that they would generally turn over any suspect. These good tribal relations were strengthened further by meeting the communities’ demands for a new paved road, five schools, and a spring water system that supplies 12,000 villagers.

Jerry Pournelle puts it even more bluntly

[Buying up the opium crop} will drive up the supply, of course, but even so it will be cheaper than what we are doing; and enriching local tribal khans -- sometimes called warlords -- will help keep Al Qaeda out of their territories. Silver bullets often work wonders, and are sometimes cheaper than real ones. And no, that's not Danegeld. The Afghan warlords didn't invade us last night, and we're not paying them cash to go away. We're paying them cash to make our enemies go away. Hire and purchase...

To that I would add that our military advantage is technology. Our disadvantage is that our soldiers are ordinary humans like them - except that we can't take the sort of casualties Afghan warriors have been cheerful about for millenia. So we should not be having our soldiers on the ground any more than the absolute minimum (remember that the Taliban were first driven out by northern alliance tribal forces supported by bombers), we should be limiting ourselves to providing aur support, money & remotely piloted spotter aircraft. On a side I would offer $1 million to anybody who brings in the head of an al Quaeda Arab (DNA can now tell ethnicity). My bet is that life would become pretty hazardous for any al Quaeda member still in the region - that is if they haven't already gone the way of bin Laden.

HT Mark Wadsworth for the Orwell comparison

Labels: Fear, International politics

This links to a rather good article by Bill Willingham (author of the Fables series of comics or as the literati style it - the Fables series of Graphic Novels, available at good bookstores). His theme is that the reason there is a reason why we don't have most of the things that Dan Dare promised us (flying cars, Moonbases, Atomic spaceships) even though we have some things on which we are actually ahead of the promised curve (colour TV, mobile phones, internet).
============================

“It’s not the future until we have jetpacks and flying cars. They promised us jetpacks and flying cars! Where are they?” And I realized there’s no escaping this question, either from Chris or any of a myriad other sources. The future isn’t allowed to be here until we have our jetpacks and flying cars. And that’s just the minimum. Space stations, moon cities and personal household robots are also to be desired for a fully functioning future.

... I pondered, and then despaired when a terrible realization hit me. We are in the future, Chris. We got our jetpacks and flying cars. We’ve had them for years.

...We don’t have them because we rejected them. We collectively said, and continue to say, “No thanks.”

And why is that?

Because they’re not safe.

Sure, they’re safer than the first airplanes were in their infancy



I disagree on 2 points but neither are material to his conclusion that we could & should have the future we were promised. The smaller one is that there is a genuine traffic control problem with flying cars, but it is a soluble one on which I have written before.

My bigger disagreement is that it is not us who have decided that we want to be scared of everything but that it is our parasitic government who has given itself a mission to protect us from life. Government has a vast amount of our money to spend & has to find some excuse for doing so which is why government funded quangos & fakecharities are always trying to stir up a scare story on something irrespective of there being no actual evidence (global warming, GM food, food colouring) That the primary objective is to give government an excuse to spend money is that in things for which government is really responsible (MRSA in hospitals, hypothermia due to fuel poverty, the 70 million the DDT ban killed) it does not act to prevent death - indeed the opposite - it is having government involvement, not whether it kills or cures that matters. Another example of this is in housing where, yet again, we have long had the technical capability, as Heinlein said, to provide unlimited good, cheap modular housing but purely because of government parasitism we don't get it, so clearly it isn't purely or even primarily a safety issue.

Indeed look at how individuals behave. Richard Branson is always flying round the world in a condom, skiing is as popular as ever, bungee jumping moreso & teenage kids still motorcycle. It is not individuals who don't want adventure but government which gains power through claiming it alone can protect us from dangers & no longer has the USSR to threaten us with now has to make do with protecting us from all the "dangers" of progress, real or more often imaginary.

Labels: Fear, Science/technology

Labour's people once upon a time

Bertolt Brecht, German communist playwright, poet etc wrote this bitter condemnation of the East German authorities following the 1953 uprising, quelled by Soviet troops.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Sometimes life goes beyond the imitation of art. One of my rules is that when some politician says something against their interests it is true because they have no incentive to lie. A Labour nomenklaturist called Andrew Neather has gone public in London's Evening Standard to say that the Labour party deliberately decided to promote mass immigration to achieve demographic change to their political advantage - effectively to elect a new people for their benefit:

Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.

Understandable since the main losers from immigration by unskilled people are those at the poorer end of society, to whom they are competition rather than cheap workers - the ones whose loyalty Labour have always relied on because they claimed the party existed to protect their class interests. The obscene lying scum who make up the Labour party decided, quite deliberately, to elect a new people on whose votes they could entirely rely (this being before they started bombing Iraq thereby alienating a lot of Moslems).

Understandably this has had some newspaper coverage

Mail on Sunday - 'Dishonest' Blair and Straw accused over secret plan for multicultural UK

Telegraph - Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser

Sunday Express - LABOUR IMMIGRATION ‘PLOT’

Daily Star - MIGRANT FLOOD 'PLAN'

& on blogs here & abroad

The government has produced what used to be referred to in the Nixon era as a "non-denial denial" saying "I don't know to whom he is referring or what he is referring to, but if one wants to take the views of somebody with a political motivation, that's up to him." This has been naturally been reported by the BBC as a dismissal of a piece of news the entire organisation had decided to censor reporting of in the first place. Neather has done another article denying nothing he said but using smoke & mirrors to which I have added this comment:

Inexplicably in the list of "related articles" at the end of this there is no link to the original article. Allow me to make up for that strange omission - http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers---london-needs-immigrants.do

Anyone reading it will see that Neather, displaying all the ego one might expect from NuLabour apparatchiks, had said exactly what he is accused of saying. The minister in Parliament has issued a "non-denial denial" blaming it all on Neather having the "views of somebody with a political motivation" - as can be seen by his response here his only motivation is to support Labour which suggests the truth is, if anything, even nastier than what those in charge have decided to keep from their core voters.

Difficult to think that any self respecting member of the "white working class" will ever again wish to vote for a party that behaves with such contempt & betrayal of its people's interests.
-------------------
I have also sent a letter to most of our press which appears not to have been published. Perhaps this isn't an important story. Perhaps it is but if so there must be some other reason for not publishing reader's views.

Labels: British politics, Media