A Place to Stand

  Last night C4 News reported on Newt' Gingrich's speech in Florida calling for a serious space programme, run on commercial lines, with the aim of getting to Mars in his second term and without increasing the space budget, indeed taking 10% of the budget of the useless NASA bureaucracy and putting it into X-Prizes.

   My only problem with that is that, since X-prizes work 33 to 100 times better than conventional funding he should make that 80-90%.

   C4's problem was not that. Indeed in a report which consisted largely of snide remarks about how many other Presidents had promised to do something (the massiver difference being that they all promised it would be done after they had retired) they entirely forgot/censored the bit about X-prizes.

   I have yet to see a serious argument against X-prizes form anybody but if anybody has one please let me know. The Washington Post's argument comes from a resident "expert" who says prizes in the $2 billion range don't work, even though smaller ones do. Since there have never been any prizes of that level this is a perfect demonstration of what is required tom be a media "expert" - being willing to say whatever the media want combined with never needing "no steenking facts".

   This is a comment I made on Mark Wadsworth.

If your ambition is limited to air and a limited amount of food, space industrialisation would be pointless.
If infinite amounts of electric power with minimal to zero running costs were desirable you would want solar power satellites. If communication were of interest you would like communications satellites - the amount of information &/or size of the receiver at our end varies inversely with the size of the satellite. If you fancied unlimited supplies of all those "peak" metals we are about to run out of you would want asteroid mining. If you thought more new materials than have ever been constructed before, put together under zero G might produce some with useful properties you would want space industrialisation. If you wanted the human race to ever aspire to its potential you would certainly want this.
Of course that excludes virtually everybody in British politics - hence our problems.
The only thing wrong with this is that Newt is only promising to put 10% of NASA's budget into X-Prizes.

  Next Big Future has an admirable article on the subject with these proposals for future X-Prizes

Prizes that follow up


Have a $60 million prize for a robotic lunar base by 2017.

$300 million prize for more elaborate robotic lunar base by 2018.

$200 million prize for robotic and/or teleoperated base in earth orbit by 2015.

$500 million prize for manned inflatable base at earth orbit by 2016.

$1 billion prize for manned inflatable base at a lagrange point by 2018.

$2 billion prize for manned base on the moon by 2019 (not permanent but weeks at a time.)

$10 billion prize for the permanent manned base by 2020.

Have a lot more sub-prizes for other goals.

  That comes to $14 billion which is the budget we give to NERC (a quango you have never heard of - one of a number existing to raise awareness/lie about global warming) over 16 years. So let anybody who says we can't afford it explain that.

  Lets make some numbers dance.

Total M4 money supply in Britain £2,100 billion
British GDP £1,600 billion
Ratio 1.31
Maximum theoretical sustainable growth rate 23.8%. OK I will accept that this is theoretical but the theory is unquestioned. In the actual world the highest growth  rates, excluding countries coming out of wars or discovering vast quantities of oil are, for sovereign state, Singapore last year at 14.4% and for economic areas, Guandong province in China which has been doing 20% for years so not that far short of theory.
Amount raised by British taxes 36.9% of GDP (app £600 bn)

Amount by which money should be raised if we had 23.8% growth = £1.600bn X 23.8  X 1.31 = £500 million.

Amount in the second year (23.8% higher) £620.

And so on.By the 3rd year we would be getting in £760 bn - roughly current government spending (so no deficit). Obviously also with the GDP base growing there would be absolutely no problem borrowing.

Not saying that we shouldn't be cutting the cost of government - we definitely should if only because big government parasitism is what is preventing growth. Nor that we should rely on that sort of growth rate - nobody sensible relies on best possible outcomes all the time.

But I am saying that deficits, inflation, national bankruptcy etc are not the real issues. All of those are merely the symptoms of the real problem which is that growth is being deliberately prevented by Luddite government parasitism. Solve that, the solution is easy and obvious, and everything else is easy.

24 point out of recession in days plan

Gingrich not only won, but with a convincing majority. Gingrich took 40% of the vote, Romney 28%, Rick Santorum 17% and Ron Paul 13%.

  That may not absolutely clinch it but when Ron Paul doesn't win, as Ron Paul has confidently predicted he won't (he is in it more to stir debate on principles than to win, which is an honourable position)(I think Ron Paul would make a great supreme Court judge but a poor chief executive) it would be reasonable to expect at least 99% of his supporters to prefer Gingrich to Romney.

   Romney has simply failed to generate any enthusiasm and the only reason for supporting him is that he is so "moderate" that he won't frighten anybody away. There may be a little to that but elections are won by generating at least some support. On this basis the fact that Gingrich has been the debate winner inn most of the TV dabates is important. He may have said

“It is not that I am a great debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest-held values of the American people.”

    but that is not bad debating. When the campaign comes down to ??? V Obama on TV debates and Obama has no teleprompter, if ??? is Gingrich he will win.

   Another point is that Romney has had very gentle media coverage whereas Gingrich has faced literlally hundreds of "ethics" complaints which were so obviously and wholly false that they are all one needs to know about the corruption that not merely exists but is endemic in the party that made them.

   And Gingrich actually wants to do something not merely to get his feet under the table as Obama so obviously did. When Romney said in one of the debates that he disagreed with Gingrich's belief that humanity should be mining the Moon, Gingrich not only didn't downplay it but gave it as a reason to support him. Gingrich understands that X-Prizes can get space industrialisation, and other forms of technological progress, going. He knows that Free Enterprise + Cheap Energy = Growth. Pournelle may not have yet endorsed him but Gingrich has endorsed Pournelle.

    Can one imagine Britain having a prominent leader with as much competence and gumption?

  For many years various British governments, while asserting that EU membership is economically good for us, have refused to authorise a proper cost benefit analysis of it. Perhaps it is cynical to suggest they know the answer and that is why they won't ask the question.

 For some time I have pointed out that the Scottish government could do one for Scotland but obviously they share Westminster's opinion about the benefits of not knowing.

  However it turns out that Switzerland did do that analysis & this is the result:

Annual Cost to Switzerland of alternative relationships with EU:



2007-2013


Swiss francs millions Index


Continue Bilateral Agreements 557 million - £1.4bn


Join EEA 737 millon - £1.9 bn


Join EU (net contribution) 3400 million - £8.7 bn


Join EU (gross contribution) 4940 million - £12.7 bn
 
  Converting from Swiss francs to £s (0.69 per £) and our GDP compared to theirs ($2,480bn to $666bn) the figure for Britain if all other things were equal would be 2.57 times higher in £s as shown in Block.

  This is actually rather lower than the estimates of British contributions to the EU - usually about £15 bn financial costs. However Switzerland is entirely surrounded by EU countries and thus all its imports and exports, except air cargo, must pass through the EU whereas Britain is entirely surrounded by open sea and does not have that misfortune.

   Of course this takes no account of the 5.5% of GNP (or probably much more now if only because of the extension of "climate change" Luddism) the EU "Enterprise" Commissioner said in 2007 was destroyed by economically destructive regulations. 5.5% is about £86 billion annually

   The US economy is back into growth, albeit unspectacular growth, because shale gas is allowing their energy prices to fall.

The era of cheap fossil fuels is over, we are told. But if new unconventional gas sources do to prices here what they have done in the US, that assumption is false. The natural gas price has halved in five years on the US market Nymex, to $3.14/mmBTU, down from a spike of $14 in 2007.

In a new report this week PwC predicts US manufacturing will undergo a renaissance thanks to cheap energy, with shale gas saving industry $11.6bn in lower, not higher bills. By remaining wary of climate change mitigation policies, the US economy seems to have dodged a bullet.

   As is the rest of the world.

   But in Britain we have already had one freeze in shale gas development caused by ecofascist claims to be afraid of "earthquakes" (actually earth tremors at least 500 times less powerful than quakes). A wholly false scare story.

Drilling for shale gas in the U.K. won’t cause dangerous earthquakes and poses little risk to the environment given appropriate safeguards, scientists said....

“Most geologists think this is a pretty safe activity,” Mike Stephenson, head of energy science at the British Geological Survey, said at a briefing in London yesterday. “We think the risk is pretty low and we have the scientific tools to tell if there is a problem.”....

More Than Iraq

The U.K. could have more shale gas the previously thought, Stephenson said. The British Geological Survey is reviewing its estimates for U.K. onshore shale gas resources. The survey originally estimated that there is about 150 billion cubic meters....

Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. says it’s found more natural gas trapped in the shale rock around Blackpool in northwest England than Iraq has in its entire reserves.

The rock drilled by Cuadrilla, the company that caused last year’s earthquakes, is similar to that found at the country’s major coal-mining sites, suggesting potential tremors will be of a similar or lesser magnitude, he said.

“There’s not an exact analogy to coal mining, but the seismicity is remarkably similar,” Styles said at the briefing organized by the Science Media Center. “If there are going to be others, they will be about this magnitude and because they’re of that magnitude they’re very unlikely to cause damage.”

  But our ecofascists need not worry. Britain's Energy and Climate change Minister Chris Huihne has guaranteed that he is going to prevent the development of this new technology in Britain. Not because he claims it is in any way harmful but the exact opposite. He has promised to stop it purely because it will provide us with cheaper energy and thus make his the government subsidised windmill "industry" even more uncompetitive than nature had previously done.

Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, said on Monday evening. “We will not consent so much gas plant so as to endanger our carbon dioxide goals,” he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party conference in Birmingham.

   The LudDim/Tory coalition know how to get out of recession easily and absolutely refuse to do it.  That obviously cannot be honestly denied.

    The LudDim/Tory coalition claim they want to end the recession. That cannot honestly be denied as representing the very highest standard of honesty to which they aspire.

    The very highest standard of honesty to which the LudDim and Tory parties ever aspire is to complete, total and absolute dishonesty in the cause of fascism, increasing poverty and extending their mass murder of  10s of thousands of pensioners, through fuel poverty, annually. That cannot be honestly denied either.

    Some comments from me on other sites which I think even more profound than usual*

   On John Redwood's thread about the proposed new £33 billion (£45 bn says TPA) high speed railway.

In Norway over the last 2 decades they have cut 700 km of tunnels at a cost of about £4 million/km> Denmark has done something similar in the Faroe Islands, at a slightly higher cost but it is remote.
If we could match that price and if it has been done engineers can do it, then that would be about £5.5 billion for 2 track tunnels all the way to Scotland. In fact since we have economies of scale and no problems with undersea tunnels it should be much less than that.
What this proves is how enormously parasitic our public projects system is.
In FoIs I have been told that government projects have an inflation rate consistently 4% above everybody else’s and that this has been the case for over 50 years. This explains why British public projects cost around 8 times their engineering cost.
A further FoI elucidated the fact that the civil service’s only possible explanation for this was that in the early 2000s oil prices went up!!!
Clearly the real reason is some mixture of bureaucratic parasitism (like the £200 million mentioned without a spade being turned) and “preferred bidders” getting to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think the business case for this would be good anyway but certainly the best use of government time would be cutting costs to what real costs are rather than preparing to spend £10s of billions wastefully.
Perhaps a Parliamentary question or committee enquiry into why our public projects cost so many multiples of their actual cost might be worthwhile.
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Redwood's on an independence referendum

My opinion (I should acknowledge I don’t want separation, at least so long as Scotland’s MSPs are running the country even worse than the UK’s MPs) is that we should have 2 referendums.
Firstly one held by Holyrood, which would be consultative, to authorise them beginning to negotiate the division of assets and liabilities. The UK Parliament should obviously decide that no Scottish MP could serve on their side of the negotiation. Then a binding referendum run, as the Scotland Act requires, by the British state.
Independence is a very serious and irreversible decision which should not be taken lightly and 2 referenda, at different times, one after the technical issues were thrashed out, would ensure that a decision for separation was our settled will. A single referendum with a 51% decision, held on the anniversary date of the Battle of Bannockburn and possibly a lower turnout than for a general election would not demonstrate “settled will” and be as much a fix as the original referendum by which we joined the EEC.
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Pointlessness - somebody who has listed my "how to get out of recession" e-petition as unworkable without, as my reply and his answer makes clear, actually reading it. He censored my follow ups.
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Censored by John Redwood from a thread of his Following Remembrance Day. The quote is from his article. -

“I still cannot accept the way the politicians and generals accepted death on such a huge scale. ”
Not that rare. After all throughout the cold war the politicians and generals accepted Mutual Assured destruction (MAD) which assumed deaths on a scale at least 10 times that of WW1. That was horrible and I think it was wrong because I do not believe the USSR ever wished to start and “win” a war – they just wanted to be left alone too. But if you accept that both the Soviets and the Kaiser were bent on world conquest, as were were told at the times, it is difficult to say we should not have accepted such casualties.



I used to be proud about how we stood against the horrors of Nazism but when we, merely to get German permission to opt out of the Euro, supported criminal regimes run by “ex-”Nazis in former Yugoslavia openly committed to the racial genocide of the Serbs I came to feel that our opposition to Hitler was more accidental and less principled than we are told. Certainly if our schools had taught the history of Nazi genocide against Soviets, Serbs and Gypsies instead of pretending the only victims were our Jewish allies I very much doubt if the British people would have supported our government’s promotion of atrocities against the Serbs more than matching Hitler’s in individual evil if not in pure numbers.
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Al Fin on "peer review" being used to discipline "science"

There is an OECD report that found a negative correlation between government funding of science and achievement. Clearly peer review and established bureaucracies are a way by which those at the top can divert government money towards what we might consider the established ideas and thus reduce original research. Or sometimes, as with CAGW, government eliminates the middle man and decides what may be "discovered" by funding only the amenable.
However I do not conclude from that, as some do, that government should not fund any research - technological progress is so important to society that almost nothing else is more deserving of funding - but that such funding should, almost entirely, go through X-Prizes rather than through grants. Thus rewarding & encouraging achievement rather than box ticking.
I suspect the reason the state much prefers grants is that it gives them the power of patronage. The state's interests are not ours & vice versa.
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John Redwood on whether the bureaucrats are trying over the euro

The underlying problem is that when the country runs with people losing jobs for not towing the line but do not for getting it wrong, the country is being wrongly run.

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Douglas Carswell on the Bank of England control of credit.

Bubbles are created by investment money looking for something to invest in with maximum returns artificially pushing up the value of the property being invested in and creating a circle of growth, up until it bursts.
The best way of preventing bubbles is having something with real value to invest in. For over a decade Britain's governments have been preventing industries with genuine growth potential because they are genuinely capable of producing new wealth (nuclear power, GM foods, modular housing, space industrialisation) for purely Luddite reasons. The BofE went along with that that the real culprits are the politicians.
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John Redwood censors a reply to a reply to a comment of mine on a thread of his on the historic British policy in Europe being to oppose the strongest power


The Slovenians probably, by a somewhat greater margin than the Scots do but a smaller one that the Basques and Kurds do. The Croatians wanted a lot more than their own country – they wanted another people’s country – large areas of “Croatia” contained a Serb majority whose populations NATO carefully helped them to “purify” and exterminate. The majority of “Bosnians” never wanted and do not now want a Moslem dictatorship, since they are not Moslems – again the problem was not the separation which every NATO country which was not being racist was equally keen to go to war with Spain and Turkey over, but that they wanted to grab other people’s lands and get rid of the people.
The Albanians already have their own country. It is called Albanian and the current Albanian majority in Kosovo was created by Albanians deciding they did not want to live in Albania but some more prosperous country. I assume you would like to see NATO go to war to ensure the Mexicans get their own country too, in southern Texas and California?
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Douglas Carswell on the failure of the EU. The quoted bit is from him.

"the trade block we joined in the early 1970s which then accounted for 36 percent of world GDP, will account for less than 15 percent in 2020."
The current EU is much larger (Spain, Portugal, Sweden, East Germany, Eastern Europe, Malta, Cyprus, Finland, Baltic states) than the one we joined, which makes its economic failure the more egregious.
That alone is more than good enough reason to leave.
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*As said by Dr Doom in the Superman/Spider-Man 2 comic by Jim Shooter

  Are we alone in the universe? It is a, probably the, major question. With the sheer size of the place it seems improbable but the fact that, in the billions of years the planet has existed nobody else has left concrete evidence of existence - something the size of a bus left on the Moon billions of years ago would still be there and would hardly be beyond the capacity of any level 2 civilisation.

     John Gribbin has done his own assessment and come to the conclusion that we are alone in the Galaxy for, among other reasons.

Gribbin points to the origin of the Moon by an impact with a Mars-size body over 4 billion years ago as a pivotal and yet very dicey event. The impact itself had to avoid destroying Earth’s spin (as apparently happened at Venus) and yet excavate and launch into space enough material to form an unusually large Moon that could gravitationally anchor Earth’s axial tilt. Without such a Moon our rotation axis would wobble chaotically due to tugs by Jupiter, Venus and other bodies, and undermine the long-term climate stability conducive to the development of high intelligence and civilization.

  Certainly the existence of our Moon is so extraordinary that no explanation exists that fully explains it. If intelligent life is that uncommon that would mean either Earth has 2 events which have astronomical odds against or that they are related. Personally I think the variable and high tides the earth has must have greatly eased, or made possible at all, the journey of life from sea to land. There may be other effects.

     Dr Bruce Cordell's estimable site has also published his assessment of the odds under the Drake Equation and comes up with a highest estimate which is only a bit more optimistic.

Initial Kepler results plus the Watson/Carter model of intelligence appear to preclude other intelligent ETs in our Galaxy unless their L’s are in the millions of years. This was attained only by our species upper limit, using Gott’s technique; the closest ETs would be ~10,000 light years away. Other high-tech civilisation timescales — species LL, nuclear doomsday, and singularity — are consistent with the Rare Earth Hypothesis

   If we are alone in the universe, or at least sufficiently alone that we are never likely to face competition there are philosophical consequences. We alone are the carriers of intelligence. If we destroy ourselves, through comparatively meaningless squabbles, or limit ourselves to never getting off the planet we alone on this small planet will have robbed the universe of meaning.

  On the other hand this greatly increases the chance that we will succeed. The simplest answer to the Fermi question and the only one that makes sense over eons, is that intelligent scientific civilisations wipe themselves out as their power increasingly exceeds their self restraint. However if we are alone the question never arises and there is no reason to believe we will not succeed in settling as much of the universe as we wish and achieving the fullest possible understanding and mastery of it. 

   Some time ago I did an article on a catastrophic warming lecture, run by the "Glasgow Skeptics" (an organisation which in the Orwellian manner, is absolutely opposed to scepticism). The lecturer Eugene Scott was totally unable to produce any actual evidence for her claims and I was later told that it was wrong to blame her for her for this because "she isn't really an expert" which seems a curious basis for asking her to pontificate on the subject.

    The real justification for her doing so is that she is the boss of the American NCSE*, - a busybody organisation which originally justified its existence by fighting creationism but which has since clearly found there is a niche for opposing scepticism about catastrophic warming and decided to take advantage of it, undismayed by their ignorance of the subject.

    Some time ago I sent this letter to Ms Scott and the NCSE. They have been unable to despite in any way whatsoever any of the points - specifically that there is no evidence for their claims and that therefore nobody with the remotest respect for science, indeed nobody but an out and Fascist, could support their policy of suppressing free investigation. of the evidence requested and the obscene Nazi whore has not apologised, though she has certainly been given more than enough time.

Dear Ms Eugenie Scott,

I saw your lecture last Thursday in which, among other things, you boasted of the National Center for Science Education's role in prevention Al Gore's film being matched by children being allowed to experience a debate on the subject of alleged catastrophic global warming. By definition a debate, which is itself a balanced process, cannot on its own balance a one sided, indeed repeatedly untruthful lecture. However it would have ameliorated the situation since the children would not have been limited purely to Gore's proven lies.

I assume, since you are lecturing others on the warming scare you are an expert on the subject as well as on the principles of science. As such you must be aware that Mr Gore's film has been proven stuffed with indisputable lies. Clearly you will know that the promotion, indeed exclusive promotion, of indisputable lies is not consistent with any respect whatsoever for the principles of science. Nor does it fit any definition of "education" though it does count as propaganda. Your claim that the public should not be allowed to hear ideas not promoted by those in power, but only state lies, is a major part of the definition of Fascism.

I also publicly asked questions following your lecture.
Any theory, to be scientific, requires to be accepted as falsifiable by some evidence (this is accepted by all who understand science as you claim to), thus catastrophic warming must be falsifiable. So what would you accept as falsifying it. You could produce no such conditions (indeed the fact that Hansen's 1988 1 C rise prediction by now has not come true the theory would already have proven it false it were part of science). Thus attempting to enforce warming alarmism on children is inconsistent with any claim by the NCSE to be scientific.
You were also unable to name a single solitary scientist, anywhere in the world, who supports the catastrophic warming scare and is part of the majority of scientists who are not paid by the state. While, as an open fascist you are enthusiastic about promoting state propaganda, no matter how dishonest, it cannot be honestly denied that a "scientific consensus" cannot exist if none of these scientists are part of it. As such your continued repeating that there is a "consensus" on the subject, while knowing there none of these scientists in it proves you to be wholly, completely and totally dishonest...
I would also be interested to know if you can name any single creationist organisation or individual who has less than 1,000 times as much honesty, human decency and respect for scientific principle than your own Fascist organisation. If you cannot you clearly owe all creationists a public apology for implying some moral superiority over them by lying child abusing Fascists such as yourself
I await your confirmation that you intend to act. I believe I am also entitled to an apology for being lied to by you.
Will all due respect

Neil Craig

* NCSE according to the organisers stands for National Center for Science Education but since they are absolutely opposed to the principles of science and far from supporting education, are resolutely opposed to it this cannot be true. A more factual use of their acronym is Nazi Child-Abusers for Suppression of Education.and I do not think any employee, donor or other person associated with it could dispute the proper title
    
    Should any representative of the organisation wish to say anything with any factual basis (no obscenities or fact free ad homs) I am certainly prepared to publish it.

   A couple of interesting articles at Next Big Future here and here from Joseph Friedlander on Dr. Bruce Cordell 's theory, looking at Kondratieff waves, that we are due a major economic boom starting about 2012.

  Kondratieff waves are a claimed regular (55 year cycle) of innovation. I don't take it as being that predictable. At best, if you watch natural waves coming in at the sea shore you will see that some waves are larger, some almost non-existent and some arrive a little earlier or later than expected. Nature, not being a machine, is more messy than we pattern forming folk living in a mechanical society are comfortable with.

   Nonetheless there does seem to be validity to these cycles. Dr Cordell describes the cause as periods of enhanced ebullience, which he calls a Maslow window (after orbital launch windows - because if you miss they they are gone).

About twice per century over the last 200+ years there are extraordinary pulses of great explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) and macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal) that resonate around the world. These “Maslow Windows” are times of extraordinary affluence-induced ebullience similar to “animal spirits” theorized to drive business cycles by British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. In response to ebullience, many in society ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy and, as their world view expands, find that great explorations and MEPs are not only intriguing, but seem momentarily irresistible. This captivating, but short-lived ebullience is triggered by major, twice-per-century economic booms over the last 200+ years that were first described by Kondratieff in the 1920s.

   Purely personal and anecdotal but I do get the feeling that, popularly rather than governmentally, we are entering such a period. People are starting to be willing to optimistic scenarios - that we aren't expecting catastrophic warming; that new technologies can do amazing things; libertarianism - all of these are far more acceptable than even a couple of years ago as Ron Paul's success testifies. I remember the 1970s when the opposite was very much the case - as the success of Paul Ehrlich with his long list of transparently ridiculous disaster claims proved. Pournelle has talked of audiences drowning him out when he told them we weren't doomed, which is something one might expect them to be glad to hear. 

     Wouldn't take such cycles too far - if true China has been at the top of its own cycle for 30 years. But well worth watching. There certainly are more than enough new technologies available to provide real growth if we are allowed, or have the confidence to allow ourselves - space development; Moore's Law of computers actually speeding up*; GM crops; shale gas; nuclear power; modular building; "cold fusion"; seasteding - each of which has the potential to cause the equivalent of the industrial revolution.

    Both of the articles are quite long and complicated and well worth the time. Here are a couple of comments I have added.

May I suggest that the cause of such cycles ending cannot be an inherent loss of investment resources since by definition the overall economy has grown in the growth phase. What could happen is that the parasites grow faster than the wealth creators. Historically that could be anything from ne4ighboiring tribes looting the cities of ancient Mesopotamia; the growth of an ever more useless and parasitic aristocracy under Louis XIV the Sun King; to the current state parasitism where tax takes about 50% of the economy and regulatory controls (nuclear regulations, housing restrictions, environmentalism etc) destroy at least 50% of the possible economy reducing what people really get to 25% of the optimum.
Modern governments can afford to extract more than barbarian hordes and absolute monarchs because there is so much more existing now but this in turn means that the potential for growth without the parasitism is very much greater than ever before. This growth in state parasitism may also explain what economists call the "productivity paradox" - that the doubling of computer capacity every 18 months has not improved growth rates (at least not in the "developed" countries though the number of countries achieving 10% annual growth is unprecedented elsewhere.

+

It may well be that success in a Maslow window attracts war.
A significant reason for British and French enmity to Germany before WW1 was that Germany's economy was growing faster than their's. Paradoxically this was also a reason for German enmity to Russia at the same rime since Russian industry was growing fast, albeit from a low rate. In WW2 a major cause of enmity towards the USSR was that it, during the 1920s & 30s, had a remarkable growth rate. Hitler in particular thought that if Germany didn't take Russia's resources (lebensraum) by the 1940s they would become a resource poor backwater (wrongly as post war history showed). The enmity between the northern and southern states of the USA in the 1850s was also fuelled by the disparate growth of the north.
On the question of whether war can have technologically beneficial results I think there is some reason to say yes. Governments waste enormous amounts of productive wealth during wars but they waste it during peace as well. The difference is when there is an existential threat to the state (ie a war more serious than Vietnam) government becomes willing to spend some of those resources on promoting innovation and that is enough. The common explanation for the US getting out of the Depression is wartime spending but if that, alone, were true then when the war was over it would have sunk back into an even deeper Depression. Instead the inventions and infrastructure built to stop the Wehrmacht marching up Pennsylvania Ave made everybody rich.
Compare the literally trillions Obama has put into "stimulus" projects, all of which has gone to cronies or old industries, with the refusal to put anything into X-prizes. 1% of that money put into prizes would have developed a lot of space industry by now and more than ended recession but, without an actual existential threat government has no incentive.
It was only when the USSR collapsed of its own governmental parasitism that the western governments fully adopted the current "environmental" Luddism which has brought us into the current recession - the competition of a rising China is thus good for humanity & probably the average US citizen

 
  This links to Dr Cordell's site - again worth following.
 
* Finally here is Wikipedia on what is called the "Productivity Paradox" - that, at least in developed countries the massive increase in computer capacity (the Moore's Law doubling time of capacity now reduced to about a year) has not been accompanied by an increase in productivity. The obvious answer, which has escaped the official experts, being that this has allowed and been swallowed up by a matching increase in government parasitism. The possibilities, if we do not let government parasites steal this window from us are without parallel in human history. If we let them the possibility is comparably dire.

UPDATE Dr Cordell has put down a comment which I wish to add here:

"Just 2 brief points:


1) On the above comment, not all explorations that are great are "Great Explorations". Great Explorations always have an international audience that's riveted.
A classic example of an exploration that was great (but not a GE) was a Howard Hughes-like character of the 1800s named Clarence King. The Yale-educated socialite was friends with President Adams, a great explorer of the American West including exposing the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, and the first director of the US Geological Survey (1879), and yet he is almost unknown today. Compare his celebrity with Dr. David Livingstone ("Dr. Livingstone I presume.") who explored during the mid-19th century Maslow Window and is still a minor pop culture icon even today.

and
2) I initially noticed that the Great Explorations, MEPs, and major wars lined up very well with the Stewart Energy Cycle (it was later that I noticed it also worked well with K-Waves etc.), which is a very well-documented societal energy use cycle that was discovered in 1989 by the prominent nuclear engineer Hugh B. Stewart. You can see the cycle in my ISDC presentation for 2011 -- http://21stcenturywaves.com/the-articles/ It's 3rd from the top on the page."

    I assume the immense interest in space exploration from the Sputnik moment to the Moon landings, followed by coverage of later landings allegedly not displacing reruns of I Love Lucy as examples of lack of interest after the Maslow Window closes. Admittedly Sputnik and the Moon landings were more important but not that much so. This would suggest that another reason for the window closing, apart from increased (government) parasitism is that we humans just get bored with success. Such boredom doesn't make much sense but experience supports it. - Neil

   This is my latest ThinkScotland article up here now. Please put comments there
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 Alex Salmond has been righteously annoyed about a report Citicorp wrote to advise their investors whether to  put their money into Scottish windfarms. In fact the report sticks rigidly to the investment opportunities of their clients and steers clear of the political question of what windmillery does to us punters.

   That this can be considered controversial shows how unconcerned with economic, engineering or any other reality the Holyrood "consensus" is.

     The starting point of the report is that both England and Germany can get power far cheaper (essentially French nuclear) than Scotland will ever be able to sell it at and then question whether they will, for political reasons, buy it anyway. They skip that wind is so variable that it can provide no part of baseload (as Scottish Renewables have acknowledged) or that, because of that intermittency, Scotland will be the one dependent on electricity from (or via) England. For obvious reasons, even were price not a factor, most customers would prefer reliable rather than intermittent supplies

    Ignoring the fact that wind power is intermittent is proper for the report if the only consideration is their client's revenue as it should be - Holyrood is where the Scottish people's wellbeing should be considered - and if they can be certain these countries will pay the full price for intermittent power even at times of low demand when they don't need it. This latter assumes a triumph of politics over reality which may or may not be justified..

    Last December only 0.2% of UK power came from wind and a wind powered Scotland would have needed massive supplies, indeed larger supplies than the interconnector can handle and probably much larger than England, if it were also depending on wind, would have had spare, to keep lights and heating on. This is not a consideration for Citicorp but it should be for Holyrood.

    Citicorp's question is who will pay the massiver promised subsidies in the event that Scotland ceases to be part of the UK. They accept that Scotland can't. Their 3 questions are whether,  if we become "independent" England will continue to subsidise the windfarms already built; whether they will subsidise as many new ones as Scotland authorises; and whether this can be guaranteed for the next 25 years. Alex may decry them asking this but it is an obvious doubt.

     In fact their answer to the three questions assumes a new English government would sign up to this & is only doubtful on the 3rd part. I find that optimistic but even so my understanding is that "no Parliament can bind its successor" so that the answer to the last has to be No whatever the Parliament of the moment says. What Parliament, 10 years from now, when everybody realises how useless windmills are (or is that 6 months from now) is going to feel bound to pay billions to a foreign country, who no longer has any votes in that Parliament?

   Without subsidies, indeed massive subsidies, even wind turbines already built aren't worth keeping running which is why 14,000 of them already stand, abandoned, in the US. I hope Citicorp's customers know that because it is a question "renewables investors" in Spain are already facing as that country decides it can no longer afford to pay enough for it to be profitable for an "investor" to invest in running a searchlight all night to keep his solar power cells producing.

   Anybody, anywhere in the world relying on governments being elected keen to pour tens of billions into subsidising windmills, for the next 25 years, either has more faith in the promised impending catastrophic warming becoming highly visible or in the electors not rebelling, than I.  To rely on the electorates being willing to fork out to help what would be a foreign country seems even more disconnected from reality..

   What this whole episode reveals is that independence is not being treated as a serious issue but merely a standard to wave. A party seriously committed to independence would be able to tell us what currency we would have. A party seriously committed to independence would not be making Scotland totally dependent on England to keep the lights on, if we are lucky. A party seriously interested in independence would not be relying on continuing to receive billions in subsidy after independence.

     On non wconomic matters, a party seriously interested in independence would have some idea of what its future constitution would be - even something as simple as would Scotland be one of the very few countries with a unicameral legislature and power in the hands of the Prime/First minister rather than a President. A party seriously interested in independence would have come up with some serious plans for the state broadcasting organisation. A party suggesting a willingness to compromise on "devo-max" would even be able to say what it was. The refusal to consider these matters suggests they aren't serious and the failure of the other parties to bring them up suggests they also are merely engaged in kabuki theatre.

     I suspect there is nobody more worried about Alex Salmond winning the independence referendum than Alex Salmond. What on Earth would he do then?

      The role of the SNP has always been to threaten to throw their toys out of the pram if Westminster doesn't give them more, which is not something a country should be proud of, and something very destructive of Scotland's sense of self reliance, as we can see.

       If  Scotland's political class continue to act as if politics is simply the art of extracting subsidy we may  get a Czechoslovak solution. When the Wall came down the Slovak political class metamorphosed into Slovak nationalists, calling for independence but willing to accept more subsidy instead. The Slovaks voted for them on that basis and the Czech leaders forced them to live up to their promises by "letting them go" without a referendum which would certainly not have secured a majority.

      Polls in England show a minority but a growing minority there in favour of Scots independence and a Czechoslovak solution is no longer an impossibility. But what would the SNP, or indeed any of the other parties, for this is very much a race to the bottom, do then?

       I should also point out that the shock of being thrown in at the deep end prompted the Slovaks, long considered a stronghold of old fashioned socialism, to embrace the free market more enthusiastically than their neighbours and have, consequently, prospered. Independence would certainly force us, sooner or later, to acknowledge reality but would any of our current political institutions acknowledge it before national bankruptcy?

      I personally would prefer to remain part of Britain. Britain is, still, one of the world's important countries while Scotland, however successful, won't be  Scotland's role in world history, as great a role per capita as any people apart, possibly, from the Jews, is virtually all within the Union.

      Size is not related to running a successful economy. China, the world's largest country is growing at 10% annually, Singapore, one of the smallest, at 14%.  India was one of the slowest and now one of the fastest growing without gaining or losing an acre. An independent Scotland, or a Scotland within the Union could easily be the richest or the poorest part of the British Isles. The relevant factor is having competent government and Alex Salmond, attacking Citicorp for, only partially discussing reality, shows what the real problem is.

      A recent poll which shows that 2/3rds of us would choose independence if it were worth £500 a year and only 1/5th if it cost £500 shows that for most people the economy is indeed of far more importance. What I would choose is a federal UK with sufficient fiscal autonomy that Holyrood would be visibly to blame for economic idiocies and visibly rewarded for allowing the economy to grow. Even so it might take a couple of elections for a party committed to competence to appear or evolve.

      A Federal system encourages good government because the well run parts provide a good example and the badly run bits an 'orrible warning (this is feedback, vital to any dynamic system, in politics as much as engineering). It has largely worked for the US and could for Britain.

    If the SNP were serious about "independence" they would welcome Citicorp pointing out what they had apparently not noticed - that we would have to be able to keep the lights on without foreign subsidy.

  Did you see this reported by our media - the impartial free press that have been so enthusiastic about the "Arab Spring"?

Almost 80 percent of Egyptian Muslims in nine provinces voted for radical Islamist parties in the second round of Egypt’s election. Roughly 5 percent voted for a moderate Islamic party and about 15 percent voted for liberal parties.
That says it all. In the overall vote — that is, including the Christian voters — 70 percent supported radical Islamists, 47 percent (4 million) supported the Muslim Brotherhood (86 of 180 available seats so far; they might win more), and 32 percent were for the Salafists (3.2 million; the Washington Post seriously underestimated their votes).
The liberal (but not overtly anti-Islamist) Wafd won 1 million; the liberal Egyptian Bloc won almost 800,000; and the moderate Islamic Wasat Party got 370,000.
Incidentally, the vice-chairman of the Wafd said in an interview last July that the U.S. government carried out the September 11 attacks and Anne Frank’s diary was a fake. At least he doesn’t like Iran, though he thinks it is right about the Holocaust being phony. And he’s the liberal...
Egyptians and foreign observers now have two choices: face reality or retreat into comfortable fantasies about moderate Islamists. The Christian population cannot afford to engage in fantasies so it is increasingly fleeing, as documented by Lucette Lagnado in a moving, detailed article on Coptic refugees in the United States.

    Me neither.I think I keep a pretty good idea on the news but had no idea that the Islamic Brotherhood were getting around 80% of the vote.That is and ought to be worrying for anybody who approves of democracy  and freedom as principles or even who just wants to live in a peaceful world.

    One might wonder what the diplomats; the great and genocidal; government experts; and all those politicians we are expected to trust to know what they are doing think about it.

    The answer is Nothing. If you think we are kept ignorant by the government, the government is even more eager to keep itself ignorant.

   As the article's author points out the government has specifically banned this article from the websites it uses to "inform" its own "experts" on the grounds that mentioning the victory of a party with at least significant neo-Nazi views is encouraging hate. It seems certain this is merely the tip of the iceberg of censorship going on there.

   I presume the BBC and the rest of the "responsible" media have adopted a similar, though perhaps slightly less firm, line.

    The practical, as opposed to principled, objection to big brother style censorship is that it prevents even the dictators learning the truth. So long as even those in charge can't find out what is going on they can't do anything to improve things even if they wanted to.

    I have limited interest in how Egypt runs itself, just so long as it doesn't attack other countries. However attempts at the adoption of full scale totalitarian fascism in Britain concerns me greatly.
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    That this is not alone and that the alleged concern about ethnic niceness is being used to suppress free speech & promote fascism widely in Britain is shown by the recent imprisonment of 17 year old Stephen Birrell as part of the equally evil and equally stupid SNP campaign against free speech. He is, by any normal definition of the term, a political prisoner and has thus earned the support of both Rangers and Celtic fan groups.

 It takes a particularly high degree of ineptitude, blinkered devotion to censorship and hyhypocrisy to unite both the practitioners of free speech and its alleged victims in opposition to our leader's inept fascism.

The more we accept the idea that the state should curb harmful and offensive language, the further we retreat from Mill’s plea to protect free speech even when we find words distressing. Mill’s suggestion that adults should be free to say whatever they want, short of causing harm, meant something in societies that defined harm in physical rather than psychological terms and that judged humans as capable of making that distinction.
The society we live in today is very different. A newspaper editor, reacting to my objections to the new laws, recently pointed out to me that Mill and Voltaire are long dead.

  On 28th November I sent an FoI Enquiry to SEPA asking for information on

"Assuming SEPA have been running your investigation into alleged manmade radioactivity at Dalgety Bay in the proper scientific manner the very first thing you must have done is to determine the number of aircraft destroyed at that beach; weight of paint required to paint the numbers on each of the dials in such aircraft; and the proportion of paint that consists of radium ...

  Secondly, since any serious scientific investigation of substances requires a control example you must have carried out a similar investigation into the radioactivity level of a comparable and presumably adjoining beach"

  Unsurprisingly the answer provided no answer to these. However it does answer the questions of whether SEPA have even attempted to answer these and therefore whether it is even possible for SEPA to have been engaged in a scientific procedure. No and No.

"SEPA is considering these aspects as part of our investigation; however precise data is not available"

 "when monitoring for background (control) can be on an area of the site itself",

 "SEPA does not hold data on the rate of man hours per particle"

    If SEPA has no precise data on the maximum possible contamination and has made no serious attempt to obtain such data it simply is not engaged in a scientific investigation and is not capable of making any honest assessment pf the site. The answer implies but doe not say, that the MoD have refused to provide the data. The MoD have claimed to be co-operating with this inquiry so one or other is lying. My bet is that it is SEPA but we will see.

     The "control" area being the site itself is clearly nonsense. Warming alarmist claims that we had a particularly warm October depend on looking at previous Octobers. Not even they would say that this October was the warmest October for 11 months. SEPA clearly aspire to being far less scientific than even them.

      If they have no idea how much time has been put into searching for particles (a particle being merely a clump of rock/soil which is significantly more radioactive than the others and random variation is bound to produce a large number of them, then they can have no idea whether such clumps are more, or less, common than elsewhere, though obviously since the average Aberdeen street is more than 50% more radioactive random chance would produce many more clumps of greater radioactivity there.

      SEPA have said that unless the MoD ponies up an unspecified amount of money to take action they resolutely refuse to specify, to prevent a "threat" they are unwilling or unable to produce evidence for, within  3 months (ie at the end of January or early Feb) they will designate the land a "radiation hazard" despite there being no evidence whatsoever that it is more "hazardous" than any other similar piece of land and is agreed as being less radioactive than some. SEPA will do this on the basis that they do not need evidence and "It will not change its mind".

      They have been given the power to ruin this (or any other) thriving community anytime they want, without any scientific justification and this corrupt, lying, entirely parasitic bureaucracy intend to have their fun.

   And neither the local MP, whose legal duty is to his constituents, nor any other elected politician is willing to stand up for the people.

Another enquiry
Dear SEPA,
                    In response to your recent reply to my FoI on Dalgety Bay I would like, under the same rules, to ask for clarification.

  Your answer on the first point - what is the theoretical maximum amount of radiation present - implies that  the MoD have refused to supply data they must have known. The Mod, however, have said they have co-operated with you. I would therefore like to see a copy of the communication from the MoD refusing this reasonable request - assuming it exists.

  I would also like to know what "imprecise" estimate you have been using for all this time and what it was based on?

  Since SEPA decline to give even an imprecise estimate of how much effort has been put into this does SEPA accept that the average square mile of land, to a depth of 1 foot, would yield 9 tons or uranium and thorium and 1 gram, vastly more than you have actually found - if SEPA were to put enough effort into searching for it. Obviously much more if it were done in any Aberdeen which is the closest thing SEPA have produced to a control area. 

 Al Fin on the inherent cultural anti-progressivism of Islam
"United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four"

Scary considering the Islamic immigration of Europe.
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  Frank Furedi on how the "leftist" Luddites are stealing the term "progressive" - having already stolen and debased so many other terms like "liberalism", ""socialism", "science", "environmental", "sustainable", "equality", "freedom" etc etc.
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Video of "peaceful protest" to promote their "ideas" by the Occupy thugs.
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Some laws of Systemantics

The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. (Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency.)   etc

No system works well. The bigger the are the worse they work.
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The same as above as seriously applied to science.            H/T Charles Crawford
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New Year’s Resolutions For Climate Scientists  by Steven Goddard


I will admit that warming has been much slower than we expected etc
 They never will.
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!982 article on how the De Beers diamond monopoly and Madison Avenue kept up the price of diamonds. Apparently no De Beers senior executive had, then, for 40 years, set foot in the USA to avoid being questioned under anti-trust laws.                         H/T Steve Sailer
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Dan Hannan on how the ONLY remaining argument for staying in the EU is that otherwise we might become like Norway or Switzerland - the 2 richest countries on the continent.
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Me on Pournelle's

Health Care as a Social Concern
When it comes to infectious diseases we are not individuals. We are all vectors in the disease pool. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the growth of cities which have always been pools for infectious diseases. I suspect this is not unrelated to the growth of welfare states, from Bismarck’s to Roosevelt’s at the time. Nobody, no matter how libertarian, says people in cities should be free to store shit in our apartments. The great Victorian public sanitation systems were carried out by city governments run by unrepentant capitalists.
For the long term i.e. decades not presidential terms, the important fact is that infectious diseases are no longer serious killers (with the possible exception of AIDS) but diseases of age and lifestyle to which we react as individuals not vectors. This means that much of the social basis for welfare is gone.
In some ways I regret this. As a society we are far richer than the Founders could imagine & we can afford to look after people to an extent they couldn’t.

Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary

In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.
Mrs Spelman said farmers must “seize the opportunities” of increased production ..... “It could also bring longer growing seasons, reduced frost damage, and the opportunity to introduce new crops and livestock species.”
An advice service for farmers will offer tips...

A study commissioned by the conference from the Scottish Agricultural College even suggested that the boost from a warmer climate could help Britain compete in the global market

    The point about this is that Spelman is not some thoughtful free thinker but very much a loyal to whoever is in charge apparatchik. She has held "girlie" posts in foreign aid and environment and fought for the "pro-environmental" policy of fortnightly rather than weekly bin collections. This is pro-environment because it means the money saved goes to fund expensive and wasteful "recycling" rather than keeping real people's environment free of waste and rats.

     She was sufficiently loyal not to get into trouble when she was found to be fraudulently using paying her nanny out of Parliamentary expenses. Obviously she voted for the Climate change Act, which requires the economic destruction of Britain, like a loyal sheep.

   If she is saying "global warming" is not only not catastrophic but to he welcomed that party line has obviously changed.

  This fits closely with Osborne's call for "Labour's Climate Change Act" which he and all but an honest handful of Tories, not now in office, voted for should not be enforced more thoroughly than any in any other European country which doesn't have it.

   The catastrophic warming scam goes down the official memory hole, even as some new ecofascist lie is developed, but the government jobs, regulatory ratcheting and overall parasitism remains.

   Of course we will get no apologies from the thieving parasites in Westminster who put it in place. Indeed, since the whole purpose of embracing ecofascism is not about the environment but about keeping us eager to be led to safety there is no contradiction between the government spending billions annually on propagandising ecofascist scare stories to increase their power over us (£450 million to one quango NERC alone) and at the same time spending more on an "advice centre" to promote the advantages of warming. Truth is irrelevant - the common factor is that "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."

   On the other hand Spelman is not as scientifically illiterate as the NERC board member and Chief Scientific Adviser to Scotland who says global warming will increase day length.

Ms Spelman climbing down

    In their anxiety to suppress technology which can make the world rich the ecofascists have been desperately searching for an argument against shale gas. The only one that has seemed to hold any water is that extracting the gas can cause "earthquakes". This "magnitude 2.3 earthquake" was used to stop the British industry in its tracks, at a time when the American economy is starting back into modest growth purely because this new energy source has cut gas costs to 1/4 of ours.

    However the Richter scale works on 10 fold increases for each point.

  Below 5 on the Richter scale, which is the magnitude for international reporting, it cannot honestly be called a quake.


"4.0–4.9 Light Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely. 13,000 per year (est.)


5.0–5.9 Moderate Can cause major damage to poorly constructed buildings over small regions. At most slight damage to well-designed buildings. 1,319 per year"

    "Rattling noises" are purely an Earth tremor.

tremor. A shaking or vibrating movement, as of the earth.

    Actually a 2.3 tremor is 1/500th of even the dividing line and "not felt but recorded" and there are over a million of them annually. I think one should quake much more about the thought of there being a single elected politician or journalist anywhere in the country willing to pretend that any of the claims of any of the murdering ecofascist parasites, unsupported by overwhelming independent proof, being worth a moment's consideration. In any case the word "quake" can never honestly be used instead of tremor to describe such low magnitude "threats".

Magnitude -  Description Earthquake effects - Frequency of occurrence



Less than 2.0 - Micro Micro earthquakes, not felt.[14] Continual


2.0–2.9 - Minor Generally not felt, but recorded. 1,300,000 per year (est.)


3.0–3.9 - Often felt, but rarely causes damage. 130,000 per year (est.)


4.0–4.9 - Light Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely. 13,000 per year (est.)


5.0–5.9 - Moderate Can cause major damage to poorly constructed buildings over small regions. At most slight damage to well-designed buildings. 1,319 per year


6.0–6.9 - Strong Can be destructive in areas up to about 160 kilometres (99 mi) across in populated areas. 134 per year


7.0–7.9 - Major Can cause serious damage over larger areas. 15 per year


8.0–8.9 - Great Can cause serious damage in areas several hundred kilometres across. 1 per year


9.0–9.9 - Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. -1 per 10 years (est.)


10.0+ - Massive Never recorded, widespread devastation across very large areas; see below for equivalent seismic energy yield. - Extremely rare (Unknown/May not be possible)

H/T Al Fin

  On of the sites I regularly comment on is the Scottish Sceptics one. On it there has recently been someone commenting from the alarmist side as well. He goes under the name Scottish Renewables. He regularly makes assertions which he is repeatedly challenged to substantiate factually and is unable to - but this does not stop him maintaining all of the. For example that mass production in the nuclear reactor industry alone could not significantly reduce costs.

   It is quite possible for somebody to overstate or even talk nonsense in the heat of the moment but when they continue to maintain the inaccuracies over a long period of time, knowing the facts and unable to produce any factual basis for such claims there can be no possible doubt that the lie is deliberate and premeditated. By definition somebody willing to do so blatantly cannot ever be assumed to be telling the truth in any other case. This is what SR was and still is doing.

   When it is done by somebody who knows that the lie they are telling is being done to deliberately results in the death of the 25,000 pensioners who die, unnecessarily, because of fuel poverty annually in Britain who could, in whole or large part, be saved by substantially lower energy costs I do not see that it is possible for anybody to say they are not responsible for the consequences they seek. This applies to every person who knowingly supports fuel poverty.

    It would be possible for "environmentalists" to properly argue that the cost of these deaths is justified by the saving to the world in retaining the supplies of uranium in the ground or preventing another Chernobyl (though it would take 500 Chernobyls in Britain alone each year to match the death toll) or some other reason. So far nobody has done so but I would be willing to publish it if they could.

   Which brings us to the conundrum in the title here.

   Having taken long term advantage of the fact that sceptics are, due to our liberal nature, always willing to allow alarmists a free voice (usually, as here, excluding posts which make no attempt at debate and limit themselves to obscenity and rudeness - something common among those who claim to care about the environment) Scottish Renewables has chosen to make his own clearly well funded site the site of an attack on me claiming I am insane. The ultimate irony being that, obviously having, used sceptic's commitment to free speech to lie and made such a claim SR has censored my reply. In part in one case and in whole in 2 others.

   So here they are.   And on a different thread

Anybody who wants to can follow the trail of gratuitous lies you used to get to this point. You have repeatedly been asked to proved verification for the claims you made and repeatedly answered not with facts but with ad homs. Even in the reply to the post mentioned you make a medical claim about me. It is possible that you are a qualified doctor but I doubt it. If not then in what way is describing you as a liar inaccurate?

There is no dispute that fuel poverty kills around 25,000 pensioners a year. Nor that it could be effectively ended by a free market in power - which would mean nuclear rather than windmills. The "environmentalists" benefiting from windmill subsidies or paid by the government to promote it cannot deny this. Thus in what way is the term “murdering ecofascist parasite” non-factual?
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Anybody reading here can see you do not & cannot dispute the fact of 25,000 people being killed, quite unnecessarily, every year by fuel poverty. Nor that you are actively promoting the ecofascism that causes it. Therefore, if the English language has meaning you are a hired parasitic murderer and fascist.

You have made no attempt to provide the medical qualifications necessary for your accusation of lunacy to be even theoretically possibly anything other than a fascist lie. I note you have not attempted to withdraw it and must accept it as representing the pinnacle of honesty to which you ever personally aspire. I await your apology.

I note that every single supporter of "environmentalism" here, who possesses any trace of integrity, has had to dissociate themselves from your lies. That there is not a single person in the "Green" movement with any integrity is hardly my fault, but equally hardly disputable.

I tend to assume you will censor this post as you did the last, or moreso. Which only proves that you know you are a wholly corrupt fascist liar whose claims cannot survive honest discussion

And

Unsurprisingly all of the 15 "myths" about the stupidity of windmills are true.

Obviously anybody wishing to "play fair" on the subject, as the article requests, would be willing to allow discussion on the facts but since no "environmental" blog anywhere in the world, let alone either this one or the one delineating the "myths" allows free debate you will just have to accept that they all know for certain their claims are unsustainable.

  Should SR feel at any time able to factually dispute anything I have said he is, of course, welcome to do so. Unlike him I do not approve of suppression of free political discussion, regarding that as fascist (as did Mussolini).
 
  Equally should anybody know of any "environmentalist" site anywhere in the English speaking world which does not practice political censorship of discussion I would be very interested to hear of it. That one at least would not be properly described as ecofascist. Having previously asked for a single identifiable prominent supporter of alarmism, not just a "climate scientist" who is not ultimately paid by the state I would also like to extend it to a single identifiable prominent alarmist who is opposed to the fascism of political censorship.

   Is there a single solitary "environmentalist" anywhere in the world who posseses a sufficient trace of honesty to be willing to say that anybody who makes deliberately dishonest claims of "lunacy", or claims designed to assist in killing people is doing something wrong? They deserve the chance to prove if there is even 1.

 No spectacular changes of direction. Another good year for humanity and bad one for western civilisation. This trend is not permanently sustainable - something will give - but I think the political decline has some space left to run. Cheerful stuff underlined.

Scotland

We will continue to underperform the UK recession. All the main parties in Holyrood will continue to, wrongly, blame Westminster rather than themselves for this. Electricity prices will continue their rise. Some Westminster politician will say that if Scotland becomes independent there will be no requirement to buy expensive electricity from us if cheaper gas is available - this will be denounced as speculation. At first, under their new leader, Conservative support will fall. However after that support for all the main parties will fall in tandem which will merely show as contempt for all Scottish politicians. Those politicians will continue to only discuss "independence" avoiding any real debate.

UK.

The policitaly maintained recession will be maintained. Every MP & MSP will know how to get out of recession in days but only a few "right wing" (according to the BBC) Tories will suggest doing so.

EU

The Euro will be retained in name but in fact for Greece, Italy, Spain & Portugal it will become a separate currency, just as the Swiss and French Francs are different. This will not cause catastrophe but the EU will maintain its recession. One of the Scandinavian countries may decide to hold a referendum on leaving. Anti-EU parties will increase their vote in virtually all members with elections.

America

A progressive (in the sense of supporting progress) candidate will be adopted by the Republicans, probably Gingrich. The campaign will be as dirty as any in US history, with the media and Democrats producing new or revamped scandal stories daily, at least 99% of which will have nothing both new and true in them. Nonetheless Obama will lose, though his last 2 months, after losing, will be nasty. What happens after that, though good, will be for 2013.

World Economy

The world economy may slow slightly but will continue to grow at 4% or more and China's at 8% or more.

World Politics

South Korea will work hand in glove with China over North Korea. Their objectives will be, in order, to prevent disorder and millions of refugees; to prevent a war; to open up NK. A 3 sided war of secession will break out in Iraq with Turkey, Iran and Saudi each intervening to stop their chosen enemies winning. There will be considerable western supported terrorism in Syria, armed stand-offs in Libya and anti-Christian pogroms in Egypt. Pakistani terrorist will carry out atrocities in India and Pakistan

Humanity

SpaceX's commercial spaceship will dock in February with the ISS. By the end of the year commercial space flights will be becoming regular and we will be seeing the start of a major investment boom in space.The EU will be trying to get agreement with the rest of the world to stop it and failing.

Catastrophic global warming will never be referred to and the scare story will largely be about other potential unknown effects of CO2 rising. Some other eco-scare will be being promoted - perhaps species extinction.

World oil/gas production and reserves will rise rapidly. There will be continued technological progress in virtually all scientific fields. There will be uncertainty about whether the Higgs Boson has been discovered and about whether commercial exploitation of low energy nuclear reactions is practical but not about their existence.

  Via Next Big Future comes this from Westinghouse, the manufacturer of the industry standard AP1000 nuclear generator that they are planning to mass produce a new line. The Westinghouse SMR. >225MWe. Passive safety systems and an extension of the AP1000 technology.

  What really gets me is

"The Rail-Shippable scale allows for efficient factory fabrication and delivery allows quality control unattainable with on-site construction...

The most economical
Simple compact system configuration reduces operations and maintenance and cost.

The most rapid project development
...modular approach provides for rapid project development and installation [elsewhere stated as 18 months]

   Since the AP1000 costs around $1.8bn but in quantity $1.2bn (£800 m) so when these are being mass produced if they cost less we are talking of not more than £200m a shot. Because they are tall objects designed to be buried 4 of them should only take up about as much space as 1 conventional reactor. This does look like being a breakthrough and one which it will be difficult for the Luddites to regulate out of existence. Requiring no on site building & rail portable makes it easy to set up and at this power level even quite small communities can run them. And once they are being widely used it will become increasingly difficult to persuade people they shouldn't have one, or not to let them realise when 90% of the cost isn't actually being paid for the engineering but for the political regulatory parasitism.

   The biggest problem with nuclear has always been the political parasites. Because it has been such a big structure taking 3 years (plus political parasite time) to build it has been very vulnerable to changes in the political wind.

    We see the same effect in comparing the housing industry to the car industry. A century ago houses and cars cost the same. Houses have increased fourfold in real terms and car prices reduced because local authorities can control the land and thus the building of houses but you can just drive up in a new car. If that comes about in the nuclear industry and it becomes possible to just buy a transportable reactor off the shelf we should see the same effect. The manufacturers will not have to kowtow to political parasites - they just wait till the next customer rolls up.

     Since "Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Success" it may become impossible for the Luddites and parasites to retain at least half of the cause of the current recession.

    Admittedly they are unlikely to have this going in less than 18 months so it won't close the gap in our immediate blackout problems but the future is clear.

  Happy New Year. 

Malaria remains a major public health challenge in many countries. 2008 WHO estimates were 243 million cases, and 863,000 deaths. About 89% of these deaths occur in Africa, and mostly to children under the age of 5...

Once the mainstay of anti-malaria campaigns, as of 2008 only 12 countries used DDT, including India and some southern African states...

Effectiveness of DDT against malaria When it was first introduced in World War II, DDT was very effective in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality. The WHO's anti-malaria campaign, which consisted mostly of spraying DDT, was initially very successful as well. For example, in Sri Lanka, the program reduced cases from about 3 million per year before spraying to just 29 in 1964. Thereafter the program was halted to save money and malaria rebounded to 600,000 cases in 1968
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  There is no question that DDT use in the 1950s did reduce deaths from around 1 1/2 million a year to 10s of thousands and that the total differential since then amounts to around 70 million.

  Nor, despite Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the decades of subsequent scare stories about DDT, that it has never been definitely proven to have killed a single human being. Indeed that it has sometimes been used as a medicine

   The arguments against using DDT in a massive way are (A) that it is very dangerous and (B) that extensive use will bring about reduced effectiveness.

   (A) is clearly a false ecofascist scare story. This article 100 Things You Should Know about DDT must be be read by anybody wishing to pontificate on the subject and with the remotest interest in not killing more millions of people.  There is no serrious evidence of danger, even to birds where the most serious claims have been made. There is no possibility that even unknown effects could render it 1,000th as damaging as the disease it prevents. In terms of human life the DDT ecofascist fraud has been even more damaging than the Linear No Threshold radiation ecofascist fraud which, in turn, has been more damaging that the current catastrophic warming ecofascist scare.

   (B) is not altogether false. Almost any chemical used in quantity will, over time, through evolution, cause some reduced effectiveness. However firstly it appears to be being considerably exaggerated since it is now the sole credible argument opponents have. Secondly it is not so much an argument against using it at all, as an argument for using it in large doses, quickly. In particular - small doses are most guaranteed to breed resistance since it is bound not to have a total effect.


. Also if long term breeding of resistance is a fear then ending the problem quickly is the obvious choice.

  Therefore if we really want to effectively end these deaths I propose a massive international campaign of malaria eradication using DDT to a full extent.

   Perhaps this might not entirely eliminate it everywhere, as smallpox was, because there are natural reservoirs of malaria whereas smallpox needed to live in humans. On the other hand the history is on our side. Malaria has been very much more extensive than it is currently. Malaria used to kill 10s of thousands in Britain. The same, but moreso, applied to the USA, making the southern states a death trap for white men. Even within the Arctic circle it killed 10s of thousands around Murmansk in northern Russia during WW1. It is effectively extinct in all of these now. There were other reasons than DDT, indeed it disappeared in Britain before DDT was discovered but that is all the more reason for believing it can be eradicated. The example of  Sri Lanka given above does suggest that only a little more effort in 1964 would have cut the last 0.001%.

    The world is far richer than in 1964 and medicine far better developed. Clearly if we could come that close then it will be far easier now. It would be a big programme but we could save many millions of lives.

    If the political will is there.

  I have just been reading a book King Arthur The true story by Phillips and Keatman. Graham Philips  Arthurian website is here.They conclude that Arthur was a real person who fought his major battle in raising the siege of a hill fort at Badon Hill [ Badon then being pronounced Bathon and being the site of the only warm water volcanic springs in Britain ie Bath} around 518.

    This fits such historic records as we have which are clear about the battle, though the earliest ones don't say who was in charge but do agree it was very decisive. Later ones say Arther killed 960 Saxons personally [ancient records often claim to have killed or beaten about 10 times what modern scholars think]. The archaeological record also shows that the Saxon kingdom of Sussex was essentially destroyed then, not being reformed for nearly a century. Looking at a map you will see that had they controlled Badon/Bath they would have been within a few miles of the Severn and isolated the remaining British tribes between Cornwall and Wales.

   There is no archaeological evidence of the battle site, not unexpected, but everything fits there. This is from the book's timeline:

460 AD - Ambrosius becomes leader of the British forces British defences are reorganised. There is an imperialist revival in Britain


470 A British contingent fights for Emperor Anthemius in northern France.


476 Odovacer defeats Emperor Romulus Augustubulus and proclaims himself king of Italy. The final collapse of the Western Roman empire occurs.


480 There is a military stalemate between the Britons and the Saxons in the south of England. The Angles Suffer defeat in the nothr. Cunorix is buried in Virconium.


485 Aelle defeats the British at Mearcredesburna.


485-8 Arthur fights for Ambrosius against the Angles.


488 Hengist dies and is succeeded by Octha. Arthur succeeds Ambrosius.


488-93 The Arthurian campaigns.


491 Aelle beseiges the fort at Anderida (Pevensey) and establishes the kingdom of Susse.


493 Arthur defeats Aelle and Octha at the Battle of Badon. The Anglo-Saxons retreat into south-east England.


495 Cerdic [Saxon} lands in Hampshire, possibly as a mercenary.


508 Cerdic achieves victory over a [local] British king named Natanleod, and establishes control over an area roughly the size of modern |Hampshire. An alliance is made between Cerdic and Cunomorus [Cunomourus is certainly also called Mark and there is evidence that Mark was the historical Modred - the alliance includes Cerdic marrying a Briton, assumed to be Modred's daughter].


519 The battle of Certicesford [safely identified as modern Charford near Salisbury].The Battle of Camlann {Arthur's final battle and presumably they are the same battle]. The death of Arthur [this being the book's position, assuming Arthur was a Briton king - I am assuming he was either wounded or that after 34 years and the British alliance falling apart as Britons and Saxons intermarried, decided to go home].


520 Virconium is abandoned [the book takes Virconium in Powys as Arthur's Camelot



    The book names Arthur as an alternate name for a Welsh king of Powys and Gwynedd recorded as Owain Ddantgwyn, whose capital was probably Viroconium, dismissing the alternative that he was a Brito-Roman named Artorius and assuming that the name derives from the celtic word for Bear used as a title {in the same way that Pendragon is certainly a title meaning chief dragon", the dragon being the symbol of Gwynedd which they had taken from the Romans).

     I like Artorius and want to put what I think is a credible variant.

    There is evidence that though the Romans had left Britain in the 470s the British tribes sent some auxiliaries to help the Roman army. Considering they were being exterminated by the Saxon invaders at the time this either indicates an enormous degree of loyalty to the Rome that had deserted them or that they wanted some Roman help in return. With the Empire being officially dissolved in 476 this is quite a good time for some remaining elements of the Roman army to leave for Britain as loyal Romans carrying Roman traditions into exile/The Roman army honourably sending aid to loyal savages begging for help/unemployed soldiers taking a job as mercenaries, according to taste. There are quite a few such examples in history.

      The British chiefs wanted a Roman general, tactically more sophisticated than them, and some elite troops (cavalry or trained and armoured infantry of which  both Britons and Saxons were short).

        A young officer called Artorius and a unit of auxiliary cavalry drawn from the Sarmatian tribes go, at the invitation of the British king Ambrosius to help stop the Saxon advance. [The Sarmatian horsemen, of whom the Ossetians are the descendants, definitely had the concept of drawing a sword from the ground as their symbol of leadership. They also had a particular story of a dying warrior who demands that his best friend destroy his sword by throwing it in the water, but the friend, not wishing to destroy a beautiful weapon, twice, doesn't but the friend twigs and on the 3rd occasion the sword is caught by a woman's hand]  Now here is what I believe is an original connection - "Artorius" is not merely a Roman name it is an ancient Etruscan one and there is a reference to Arthur, in a scene carved on the Cathedral of Modena in Italy which slightly predates the medieval knowledge of the character. Modena is nowhere close to Britain but it is in Etruscan territory. Just as somebody called Neil, living in the UK, is more likely than not to be Scots, or Northern Irish even though we have been part of Britain for centuries it is more than likely that a man named Artorius was a local of the Etruscan lands, of which Modena is the heart.

ARTUS for Modena cathedral

    So Artorius landed in Britain in 485 in command of a cohort of Sarmatian auxiliaries. Rome's army could spare them particularly since the Britons would be paying and nobody else was paying Romans. It would not be the first time an Empire sent a tribe whose loyalty was not primarily to Rome well away from where they might meet some fellow tribesmen.

     Arthur is recorded as having fought 11 victorious battles. These battles were all across the country as far away as Scotland which fits with commanding a cavalry force in combination with whatever local tribal leaders/kings could raise [One telling argument against him being a Celtic king is that, despite the title given him later, the early records quite specifically refer to him not as a King but as the "war leader" of "the British kings" not even "other British kings". One can see why the British "kings" would vote to accept a Roman officer, tactically far more sophisticated than them and in command of cavalry forces that could put more fear into the Saxons at least as happily as they would accept a "king" who was another tribal leader. Just as the Phillipinos accepted MacArthur as their leader in WW2.

     King Arthur's Round Table, enters the written record shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his book, in a follow up written by a poet called Wace. However his writing was done near Cornwall, at a time we know the common people there still revered Arthur, so it is credible that he did not invent this but took a local legend. That doesn't necessarily mean to me that there was a physical Round Table but that there was a consensus that there was no order of precedence in the war council, not even for Arthur. That suggests Arthur as "dux bellorum" (literally war leader) was not the most powerful king and, at least until he won, considered almost a hired hand.

     History is replete with national heroes who actually come from an adjoining culture, usually a more sophisticated one and unite the nation they are founders, but not members of . Moses is an Egyptian name; Napoleon was Corsican; Hitler - Austrian; Stalin - Georgian; Alexander - Macedonian rather than true Greek; El Cid at least part Islamic; Herman from a family that had served the Romans; Che - Argentinian not Cuban;  Skanderbeg - Serb not Albanian; Bruce - as Norman as Scots. For Arthur to have been been just the most powerful British king is historically less likely.

     The other thing all the early records agree on is that they don't know where Arthur was buried. It is a major part of his mythic status. Arthur, having established a golden age of peace after decades of Saxon massacres, is, we are often told, going to return when the country needs him. The burial location of a king is an important thing at the time in the opposite way. It adds to the status of his successors, being able to provide physical proof of their right to rule as lawful descendants of such a king. Surely if Arthur had been Owain his descendants would made a big thing of where he was buried?

       The book suggests that Camlann, Arthur's final battle credibly placed in 519 and something close to a draw, was against an alliance of new Saxon invaders in Wessex in marriage coalition with Modred the king of Devon/Cornwall and a genuine historic figure. I suppose that he was wounded then and decided it was time to retire, back to Modena. In which case he did indeed depart with the Britons hoping for a return. Shortly thereafter archaeology suggests the British chiefs did fall to fighting each other. 70 years later the "Anglo Saxons" did renew their advance but the history of the Wessex Saxons family whose leader Cerdic was followed by a son whose name was part Saxon, part Briton and a grandson with a wholly Briton name suggests it was a melding rather than the genocide it had been.

      Though there is a lack of historical record of him there is a lack of historical record of  EVERYBODY at the beginning of the British Dark Ages. However there is record of a number of different British kings calling their children Arthur - a name previously unknown.  This means there must have been a real Arthur.

      I am not certain on this but it appears these subsequent Arthurs appear in several different royal families which, in another point I have not seen suggested elsewhere, suggests the original Arthur was not the king of any local dynasty, with whom each of the others were competing. That means not a dominant Briton tribal king. There is no question that the time Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote of him and he entered literary recognition Arthur was still a popular heroic figure to the entire population not just, or even particularly, of the people of Powys.

      Is all of this correct - unlikely. However I would stand by most of it being and certainly of arthur being a genuine historical figure and I think every single fact here is more likely than anmy single alternative.

       A cocktail party theory I would not stand by is of Camelot not being Viroconium but Colchester in Essex. The big thing in favour of it is that in the Roman era its name was Camulodunum which would clrearly have been spoken commonly as Camelot. The big thing against is that its location is in Essex, the heart of the main apparently undefeated Saxon kingdom, which I grant is a big "against". However if we assume Badon was such a great victory that the Arthurian forces did indeed defeat and occupy all the Saxon lands then Colchester would have been a good place for a Roman Arthur to set up his military headquarters, though if he was king of Powys then such a relocation becomes unlikely. Certainly Arthur's court has more the feel of a military order than a civil capital city. Some support for this is given by the fact that, despite Camelot now being the magnificent capital city out of myth it was not Arthur's capital in the original story by Geoffrey of Monmouth. "The castle is mentioned for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes' poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, dating to the 1170s ...Nothing in Chrétien's poem suggests the level of importance Camelot would have in later romances. For Chrétien, Arthur's chief court was in Caerleon in Wales; this was the king's primary base in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and subsequent literature." Geoffrey was native to Caerleon so his identification of it as Camelot looks more like local pride than reality but nonetheless for anywhere other than Camelot to have been seen as the capital is at least consistent with it being a forward military base.
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     I once visited Tintagel Castle [according to legend Arthur's birthplace, his father being "both" the king of Devon/Cornwall and Uther Pendragon king of Gwyned/Powys. Possibly both kings, or rather their successors, had agreed to "adopt" him as their sons, a practise common with Roman Emperors too]. The castle ruins there were medieval and put there so that the local lord could bask in the association. But there are late Roman remains and it is defensible. And on the highest rock there is the carved image of a foot - a common Celtic symbol that the true king's foot will fit that footprint. {there is one on Dumbarton Rock capital of ancient Strathclyde in Scotland too and the idea of the Stone of destiny is clearly a development of that].

    So Arthur did, in a few short years bring a last, post Roman, golden age of peace, did decisively win a battle which, if lost would have put the Britons beyond hope of recovery and ensured that the country that eventually  developed was a culture of mixtures rather than extermination.

    I hope Arthur got back to the sunshine and grape juice of Modena. The fact that 6 centuries later he was recorded, in a frieze in Modena Cathedral and nowhere else so remote strongly suggests that he, or at least his friends did and the story became famous there. I have no idea what if the records there, if any, compare with those of Britain of the time, but it might be a fruitful area of research.

Solsbury/Badon Hill - overlooking Bath/Bathon/Badon and site of an iron age fort