A Place to Stand

Hunterson nuclear power station & windmills producing 0.00233 as much

Browsing I came across this in an otherwise unremarkable article about China & renewables.

China's biggest advantage might be its domestic demand for electricity, which is rising 15 percent a year... (by demand they clearly mean supply, since demand, at the right price, is infinite)
To meet demand in the coming decade, according to statistics from the International Energy Agency, China will need to add nearly nine times as much electricity generation capacity as the United States will. As a result, Chinese producers of generating equipment enjoy enormous efficiencies from large-scale production.

In the United States, power companies often face the choice of buying renewable energy equipment or continuing to operate fossil-fuel-fired power plants that have already been built and paid for.

In the US & indeed UK the real problem is being allowed to build power plants, particularly if you note that the most inexpensive & reliable power source is nuclear.

The link between availability of electricity & economic growth is clearly established. China produces $2.45 of GNP per kWh used, the developed world averages $3.90 & the UK stretches our power most in the developed world (excluding Ireland, Hong Kong & Singapore which are obvious special cases) by getting $6.14 GNP out of each kWh. Currently we are not increasing our electricity at all, indeed it is set to reduce sharply with ending our last nukes & new emission standards. Indeed the Scottish Parliament has unanimously voted, in a manner which proves them all clinically insane or lying to make themselves look better by appearing clinically insane, to destroy half our electricity over the next 10 years.
Since China is increasing its capacity by 15% a year & getting 10-11% growth most years it seems likely that if we did the same we would do at least equally well. Currently Scotland's power use comes to about 5 GW (8% of the UK). One new 1 GW reactor (there is no real limit to the number of reactors you can have on 1 site) would not exceed that 15% increase since it takes 3 years to build one & in 3 years growth compounded would mean 15% was 1,1Gw. This could be started instantly, it would only take somebody actually interested in improving things to be "Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to ... build more nuclear plants". It is only government paper parasitism that makes it take 10 years to build a nuke - the actual building takes 3 years.

China's economy is not doing well it is merely doing adequately. Ours could do well if the lunatics weren't running the government.

Or can anybody deny that Brown, Obama, Cameron, Clegg, Pelosi et al are indeed either insane or pretending to be to look good?

Labels: Fixing the economy, International politics, nuclear

The polls are showing an increasing likelihood of a hung Parliament. Iain Dale forecast very close to a hung Parliament when the polls were showing a comfortable Tory lead, with probably about 100 independents, simply because national swings no longer reflect local conditions. William Hill are making this 2:1.

So if the Conservatives are the largest single party what should they & David Cameron do?

We are in uncharted water. Normally a party leader who fails to win gets the chop & the Conservatives have been particularly keen to cull losers. Both Thatcher & Iain Duncan Smith were removed even without losing simply because they were expected to. If the Conservatives are the largest party they haven't totally lost but they certainly haven't come close to winning. If you can't win when the government has brought to country to, at least, the edge of national bankruptcy & kept us in recession from longer than our competitors then it is unlikely there are any circumstances under which a Cameron Conservative party could win.

It seems to me Cameron has made 3 very major mistakes -
1 - Pulling the Tories onto the global warming/Green bandwagon, just as the wheels were going shoogly.
2 - Ignoring the economy, the biggest single issue in almost any election
3 - Making & breaking a "cast iron" referendum promise.

All of them are major failures of electoral tactics. Unlike many electoral questions they are even more important in government.

#1 & 3 are ones on which the large majority, of his party are against him. Conservative Home recently estimated that for catastrophic warming.

The only thing that could keep him as leader would be if the LibDems offered the poisoned chalice of minority government which could only be giving the Conservatives enough rope to hang themselves. It would be impossible for the LDs to support the sort of tough cuts needed, to avoid trying to take credit for every cut staved off or to support them through the length of a Parliament. The best that could happen would be that they get the opprobrium for recession & cuts & then get dropped in it when it was deepest.

The better alternative would be that Cameron would go, or be pushed if he refused but I doubt he would be so foolish. I assume replaced by David Davis who ran him a close 2nd in the leadership contest & has the sort of toughness people want in a recession & has shown integrity, whether you agree or otherwise, in resigning over ID cards. I previously suggested Cameron could regain momentum by bringing Davis & Redwood into the team but, astonishingly enough, it seems my advice isn't being taken yet again. In this case, after a year of Conservative reappraisal & of grossly incompetent Labour government (one reason they don't have their hearts in this election must be fear of winning) propped up by LDs he would be able to force a new election & walk it.

This tactic is a combination of the Emperor Claudius promoting Nero to "Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out" & Mencken's "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard" but on the other hand we common people right don't have any major party offering us anything we want so a real choice would be pretty good.

Labels: British politics

Norman Tebbit has started a blog & it is one of the interesting politician ones. He is a fearsome political operator & the Conservatives lost a generation of office when he didn't become leader. Googling for a quote I found this comment from a knowledgeably political commentator who unfortunately can't spell psephology - "Norman Tebbit was an annoyingly competent pepsologist when in power & still clearly knows many things that the current high flyers have yet to learn." I am certain that he would have detached the working class, as opposed to the on the dole or government employee class permanently from the New Labour party.

This rather touching thread takes Blair to task over Iraq, not so much from a classic "leftist" point but for the sheer stupidity, pointlessness, callousness of it & its being managed with more concern for spinning it than for casualties. On this he is right but what I had not known previously is something he says inter alia about the effect of the removal of the death penalty:

the actual number of people who have been murdered by killers who have been let out from jail to kill again since the suspension, then abolition, of capital punishment. Up to April 2008 it was 131. That is an average of all but three a year. All these people were innocent. Each one a miscarriage or failure of the justice system. Quite remarkably, three convicted killers even killed again while in prison

I support the death penalty because I believe it acts as a deterrent. Anybody who doesn't must explain why they either (A) believe murderers are more afraid of prison than hanging or (B) say that they believe murderers shouldn't be imprisoned either but presumably let off with a warning/probation/community service.. Nothing else is intellectually honest & I have never seen any opponent manage either. Nonetheless I have always also accepted that miscarriages are possible, indeed over the long term certain, & have had to accept that as the cost of not being perfect. I am thus glad to have these figures since clearly any worthwhile judicial system is not going to execute even within an order of magnitude of that many innocent people & the figure given takes no account of first time murderers who would be dissuaded which is equally clearly likely to be at least an order of magnitude greater again.

A common point on both issues is that the people politicians kill by their deliberate action & those they kill by refusing to take responsibility for the duties they have sought are equally dead & the politicians responsible similarly heinous.

Labels: British politics, Social

The Institute of Science in Society really sounds like, well, an institute of science. In fact it is just a another bunch of wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasites flying under yet another false flag. I have said before & will doubtless have to say again that one of the problems with politics is that the parasites who crawl out from under things & never have anything to contribute keep adopting respectable political banners. These banners are worth defending because an ideal that cannot be expressed in words will disappear.

The Luddites have adopted many of them - "environmentalist", "ecologist" (both genuine scientific terms), "concerned local", "progressive", "liberal", "concerned scientist" (Union of - membership available to all $25) etc.

My particular annoyance with them is this article which, with all the outrage of the thief they say should not be copied & uses the name of the pioneering scientist Sir Austin Bradford Hill & his principles (which I reprint because the "Institute" has no claim to ownership) in a wholly fraudulent way to say that by these quite proper & rigorous principles catastrophic warming is something other than a scam.

In the the words of Numberwatch's John Brignell "Sir Bradford Hill, a great proponent of statistical rigour. After the death of Hill, his colleague Doll rather went off the rigorous rails and launched into some of the greater excesses of the subject that its practitioners call epidemiology" {I recommend this link to anybody interested in how statistics are fiddled to produce scare stories]thus a field he helped form has been traduced & turned over to charlatans who endlessly get paid, almost always by government, to produce the scare stories the papers are infested with.

So these are the principles he laid down & they are indeed worth checking any eco-fascist claims against:

(1) Strength of the association. The death-rate from lung cancer was over nine times as high in smokers as in non-smokers; in heavy smokers, it was more than twice that again. This was obviously much stronger supporting evidence than if the rates had only been slightly higher.

(2) Consistency: Are we talking about the result of a single study, or of several, and if there is more than one, were they all done in the same way or were they really different? Bradford Hill pointed out that according to a committee advising the US Surgeon General, 36 different inquiries, not all using the same methodology, had found an association between smoking and lung cancer. That does not rule out the possibility that the same fallacy was at work in all of them, but it strengthens the case.

(3) Specificity: If a disease occurs only in one group of people and if there are no other diseases that occur only in this group, this is strong evidence for cause and effect. In fact, while the death rates for smokers are higher for many causes of death, the increase is much greater for lung cancer than for the others, so this criterion is still satisfied.

(4) Temporality: While cause obviously has to come before effect, it is not always obvious which of two events was really first. If people who smoke are more likely to die from lung cancer, does that mean that smoking causes cancer or is it that the sort of people who are predisposed to lung cancer are also likely to adopt a life style that includes smoking? Here the obvious explanation is correct – smoking does cause lung cancer – but it is a question we should ask.

(5) Dose response: Does increasing the purported cause increase the effect? In the case of smoking and lung cancer, the increase in death rate rises linearly with the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and this is strong supporting evidence. On the other hand, in many cases there are threshold or trigger effects, and then there will be no dose response. Drinking two glasses of poison doesn’t make you twice as dead.

(6) Plausibility: Is the cause-effect relationship plausible? Ideally, we would like to be able to find the mechanism that links cause and effect, but often this is not possible; if it were there would be no problem. We can, however, ask if it is at least plausible that A could be the cause of B. Hill immediately warns, however, that what is considered plausible changes in time. In the nineteenth century, for example, it was thought totally implausible that doctors not washing their hands could be responsible for the deaths of women in maternity wards.

(7) Coherence: Does the claim that A causes B seriously conflict with what we know about B? This is really a companion to the plausibility criterion. If our present knowledge provides no plausible mechanism by which A can cause B, can we actually rule it out? John Snow was not able to suggest how polluted water could be the means by which cholera is spread, but even in 1854, there was no good scientific reason for ruling out the possibility that it might be.

(8) Experiment: If we change A, does B change as well? If people stop smoking, does the death rate from lung cancer fall? We now know that it does. Not only do deaths from lung cancer in a population increase when the proportion of smokers goes increases [2], an individual who gives up smoking reduces his or her chance of contracting the disease depends on the total number of cigarettes smoked [3]. Bradford Hill did include laboratory experiments in his paper, such as the effect of tobacco smoke on dogs, but because he was writing specifically for epidemiologists he considered those to be part of coherence.

(9) Analogy: Are there analogous examples? After it had been established that thalidomide and rubella can produce birth defects, it was easier to make the case that some other birth defect could be caused by a drug or a viral disease.

And this is my reply:

Association - The increase over the last "2 or 3 centuries" (so not that certain) may be passable but since CO2 didn't start rising till the 20thC that disproves any correlation.

Consistency can only apply when the studies are unrelated. As you point out they are often merely rehashes of each other. Had there bee consistency over different methods or even over a long period of time that would be relevant but in fact we know that before the warming scare there was a cooling scare, in which Hansen & some other alarmists were involved. The consistency argument points to a consistent history of "environmental" scare stories all of which have, so far, proved to be untrue.

Specificity - warming has been found on Mars & other planets. That is consistent only with the solar theory.

Temporality - as you have acknowledged, the temperature growth has been going on for "2-3 centuries" which predates the CO2 growth & thus proves the latter did not cause the former.

Dose response - CO2 has continued to rise at the same rate but over the last 12 years temperature has fallen - no correlation.

Plausibility - not all calculations from the 19thC are automatically accepted (e.g. Kelvin calculated the earth couldn't be over 1 million years old). The current theory depends on unknown but massive positive feedbacks & that we rest on a knife's edge likely to tip on to catastrophic warming (Arrhenius assumed negative feedback.) If there was a positive feedback it would mean there has been no time in the last million, possibly billion, years when we fell off that knife edge which is statistically incredibly implausible.

Coherence - there is & always has been an inconsistency in that measurements of tropospheric temperature should be rising faster than on the ground (the CO2 being in the atmosphere). The opposite is the case. The proposition is not coherent.

There are many possible analogies but taking ozone - the "environmentalists" promised catastrophe & that even if CFCs were banned it would take 50 years before the Antarctic Ozone hole stopped growing (they had not predicted the hole for Antarctica before it was first measurements were first taken there). In fact the hole started shrinking almost immediately - as soon as Mount Erebus stopped pouring out millions of tons of sulphur in fact. The analogy with this & the other false scare stories is obvious.

The "Institute" has censored my comment (& presumably others since none appear). Now what sort of "Institute of Science" prevents factual discussion of basic scientific principles? - a fraudulent one, that's what sort.

On a further thread they have the another "scientist" "rebutting" the sceptic's arguments on warming. Again this "rebuttal" is not strong enough to face examination & they have censored this rerebuttal:

Your first argument obviously depends on the assumption that absorption of CO2 naturally is an absolutely fixed amount. That purely by chance it happens to be exactly the same as production over millions of years. That a rise in the amount of CO2 would not make it easier for water or trees to absorb more of it. This could be called a highly improbable unproven assumption if we did not know that it was totally false. Experiment shows that plants do grow faster in a higher CO2 environment - something that the "Institute of Science in Society" would certainly know if you knew any science.

On your other allegations:

There is no empirical evidence for CO2 causing measurable warming.

It is a lie to say there is no correlation between solar activity & temperature. The last 2 years, for example, have had very low sunspot level & as anyone can see our promised "barbecue summer" & "mild winter" have been cool or as you put it "unusually cold weather".

The globe is cooling - if it were not we could not be having "unusually cold weather".
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They have other "scientific" articles on why GM is dangerous etc. The whole panoply of anti-science scares on offer posing as science.

If anybody thinks I am a little annoyed at this it is because it was brought to my attention on another blog by somebody who had obviously been taken in by the aura.

Not every single "environmentalist" is, like these, a wholly corrupt, lying, pensioner murdering, eco-Nazi, Luddite, parasite morally inferior to normal creatures under rocks but they are very difficult to find. Such would already, without prompting, have publicly denounced almost all the other "environmentalists" for lying. But then such people, like the honourable founder of Greenpeace, would be doing real environmentalism now.

PSD I got barred from Treehugger too for telling the truth so that they could keep lying about "consensus"..

Labels: Fear, global warming, Government parasitism

President "Snake" (his KLA name) Thaci of Kosovo & former Prime Minister "slippery" Blair

Last week I had another letter published in the Morning Star. It is based on a previous thread here. Once again it went out to all major UK papers & some overseas ones & yet I have not seen it published elsewhere, though I did mention the same points on Melanie Philips' blog. I do regard the points I made as very important & is something all of the dead tree & broadcast media have ignored. I was not surprised the propagandist media ignored it, though the Morning Star choosing it shows it worthy of publication - the attempt to write the Yugoslav wars out of history & make the dead unpersons is truly Orwellian & therefore says much about the society we live in.

During the former attorney general's testimony to the Iraq inquiry the word "precedent" was used 16 times, overwhelmingly in regard to the precedent established by bombing Yugoslavia.

This was said to have been justified on the "new legal theory" that "a reasonable case could be made - I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case," to quote this eminent legal authority's testimony, that it was lawful to bomb people.

The interesting thing is that, whatever we may suspect about the honesty of the case made for WMD in Iraq, we know for an absolute fact that the case for the Yugoslav war - that Milosevic was engaged in genocide - was not only untrue but a deliberate lie. Like Iraq, Kosovo was a war undertaken without UN authority - and we never even attempted to get authority.

The real precedent provided by Kosovo, as Goldsmith said, is that "simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case," however dishonestly, and that you can get away with murder. Mass murder.

Whatever whitewash we see at the Iraq inquiry, the case that Blair and his supporters are guilty of war crimes is undeniable. Indeed in Kosovo we saw the NATO-armed KLA, reappointed as NATO police, engaging in the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people carried out under NATO command authority.

The NATO-funded war crimes commission has charged many Serbs largely on the grounds that they were part of a "joint criminal conspiracy." It can hardly now be denied that Blair, his supporters and at least his entire party organisation, were part of a joint criminal conspiracy to commit war crimes - and probably twice.

Neil Craig

Neil Clark, a solid supporter of the truth on Yugoslavia & regular writer for the Morning Star has chosen this as his letter of the week saying

This excellent letter, from our friend and regular commenter Neil Craig, appears in the Morning Star....

The importance of the Yugoslavia ‘precedent’ cannot be underestimated.
As I argued here, and elsewhere, the road to Baghdad began in the Balkans, and, as Neil Craig says, the fact that Blair got away scot-free with an illegal and deceitful war in 1999, only emboldened him to do it again in 2003.

I have added a comment

Thanks for the kind words Neil.

I am perhaps not of the conventional left but share objectives with anybody who wants human progress. I am very proud to have had several letters published in the Morning Star (my earliest was used as evidence that my opposition to genocide in Bosnia was "illiberal" & "incompatible with membership" of the LibDems) not just on Yugoslavia but on the opposite objectives of Marxist socialism & Greenery & even on space development.

The Star has proven itself far more liberal than any other part of our national media who simply censor mention of the atrocities & dissections our government participates in (& ignore space too).

It is interesting that such consistent opposition to war crimes & genocide, even when the victims are from a socialist regime, comes only from the most honourable parts of the "left" & from the libertarian "right".

Labels: letters, Media, Yugoslavia

Douglas Carswell has a really significant innovation brought about by a visit to Uganda.

I was fascinated to see that almost everyone has a mobile phone. When I was growing up in Kampala twenty years ago, there weren't even many landlines.

Technology hasn't merely democratised communication, it has given almost every Ugandan a system of instant, electronic banking. One of the great, unforeseen consequences of mass mobile phone ownership has been the evolution of a system of mobile phone-based banking. By transferring mobile phone credits from phone to phone, Ugandans are able to pay for things securely, and bank in a way that was previously impossible.

It got me thinking....

What if one day a mobile phone company in such a country was to start selling phone credits that were decoupled from the value of the local currency? Rather than having X number of shillings worth of credits on your mobile, you would have a certain number of credits - which could be worth one amount one day, and a different amount another day.

If there was also inflation (the shilling losing value), folk would pretty soon transfer their wealth into phone credits. Bingo! You would have not merely micro electronic banking, but in effect a private currency operating alongside the "official" unit of exchange.

My bet is that this is going to happen someplace pretty soon. Technology hasn't merely smashed the state monopoly on providing telecommunications. It could break the state monopoly on currency.

What about Britain? What if in a few years time most Britons did their grocery shopping on-line? What if we each had an account with, say Tescos or Morrisons or Lidl, denominated not just in £ sterling, but in the supermarket's own system of credits - similar to mobile phone credits.

If inflation was to pick up...

What if you could transfer your holding of supermarket credits over to someone else, in payment not just for supermarket bake beans, but for anything you like?

Fantasy? Not as fantastic as the idea of mobile phones seemed in Uganda two decades ago. As governments debauch the currency, I suspect that we will see the evolution of new, non-state controlled means of exchange.

This struck a chord with a couple of previous suggestions from me - that the best way the EU countries could help Africa was by building ourselves a geostationary telecom system & sharing it with Africa & by sponsoring a continental African bank which would not be limited by national currencies within boundaries & would not be debased by governments running the printing press.

Douglas has gone far further than anything I thought of by applying it to debasing governments here. I commented

if some genuinely independent international bank did it it would, apart from giving them immense profits, tend to encourage popular trust in free enterprise. It is difficult to trust politicians more than businessmen when you trust the business currency more

It is difficult to see how governments could stop people using this cashless international money if they trusted it. If governments do let inflation rip, which is simply breaking their trust that the "promise to pay the bearer on demand one pound" will be fully kept & bankers/telephone companies keep their's, trust would inevitably flow that way. In which case the socialist nation state is a dinosaur.

Note also that since none of this money flows through the national currency it cannot be taxed. At worst it could result in everybody earning their incomes in another country like footballers. Mark Wadsworth's hobbyhorse, that all tax should be raised from land values since it is something that cannot be increased/reduced by taxation (well not till we start building floating islands & orbital settlements) & that the long term value depends on how well the country rather than the landlord manages their affairs could come to pass. Indeed if this is already being done in Uganda it could come about here very quickly indeed.

"Give me control of a nation's money
and I care not who makes the laws." Mayer Rothschild from an era before the state got full control of everything

Labels: economics, Science/technology, space

Channel 4 News last night did an item about climategate leading off with a sttatement read out from Professor Jones saying how he never done nothing gov. He didn't even have to read it personally let alone answer questions to lead the report. The rest of the first half was of the same "nothing to see here" variety. However the 2nd half was a discussion between Lord Lawson & Professor Bob Watson, a professor of Environmental Science who certainly ought to know the facts better than Lawson. Near the end of the discussion Watson stated that the substantial sea level rise we are seeing is proof of this catastrophic warming. Lawson denied this saying it is in line with the historic trends.

I have emailed him & C4

I note that during your appearance on Channel 4 last night you stated that the catastrophic warming theory was supported by the current substantial sea level rise. Lord Lawson said this was not so & that such rise was in line with what has been happening for thousands of years. This is a clear disagreement on fact.

As a Professor of Environmental Science one must assume you are well aware of the facts, whereas Lord Lawson is not a scientist. We must assume this statement of yours represents the standard of honesty to which you proponents of catastrophic warming generally aspire.

What evidence do you have that this substantial & unprecedented rise is actually taking place? I had understood the rise was between 1.8 & 3.1mm a year & has been since the last ice age which does not appear to justify the description of catastrophic.

If there has not been such substantial warming both you & Channel 4 will of course wish to give the correct facts on air.

I know the BBC have maintained their lie that sea level rise has been so enormous that the delta of the river Ebro in Spain has been subsumed & Al Gore that it has subsumed Pacific islands but that is simply the sort of total lies that represent the highest standard of honesty they ever aspire too.

If Prof Watson or indeed C4 reply I will publish. To be fair to them later results put the rise at 3.1mm & earlier at 1.8mm but neither is a significant rise & seems to be inside the limits of measurement error.

Labels: Fear, global warming, Media

Today is one full year since Byron Tilly, speaking on Radio Scotland phone answered my question about the possibility the "radium" allegedly found at Dalgety Beach was not radium by saying that (A) the detection of Radon proved it must be Radium (this is of course untrue since natural Uranium also decays to produce Radon & indeed is its prime source) & more relevantly (B) that SEPA had found actual particles of this radioactive material & tested it, proving it to be paint.

I immediately emailed you to ask

This morning your representative on the BBC Radio phone in stated that radioactive particles found at Dalgety Bay had, beyond dispute, been identified, presumably by chemical or spectroscopic means, as consisting of paint. Can you please confirm where these results have been publicly published & how many of the particles, in numbers & as a proportion of total particles found, have been so positively identified

On 6th Feb you told me a reply had been sent but apparently gone missing in the ether (by the way it still is.) On examining your reply & finding it less than informative on the questions asked I made this a formal FoI enquiry.

Following receipt of a disc containing significant information proving that the SEPA had long known that the radiation level was only 2/3rds that found naturally in any Aberdeen street & that it had generally been impossible to disaggregate the radioactivity into discrete particles, as would be expected if it were discrete paint particles I repeated my request about when the paint particles Tilly & SEPA were & still are maintaining had been scientifically proven to be paint. No such evidence had been produce in response to the FoI enquiry but obviously, unless Mr Tilly & SEPA are wholly & completely dishonest in maintaining its existence it must exist.

I emailed Mr Tilly (14th May) to ask

The Dalgety Bay Report on your website you referred me to, you may be astonished to find, appears unaltered from when SEPA previously directed me to it. Then I pointed out that at no stage did it mention the scientific tests which, if SEPA is in any way honest, have been done to prove the microscopic radioactive particles consisted of paint

& FoI@SEPA (18th May) to ask

Acknowledged. Any idea when my other query in Feb will get a specific answer?

Despite a subsequent contact in June in which SEPA denied having spent any money on this investigation I have yet to receive a response on the request to know what the scientific tests were that proved particles to be paint, as SEPA has, for a year now, maintained, who did them & what the results say.

As you will be aware deliberate refusal to answer a FoI inquiry is a breach of the law, even though it appears to have been a regular occurrence among government employees working on the global warming scare.

On the other hand I must accept, subject to evidence, that SEPA had found these paint particles since otherwise the organisation would be have been & since no retraction has been made, would still be engaged in deliberate fraud to promote your low level radioactivity scare. I know that SEPA have claimed to have found "daughter elements" of radium among the rock but that merely proves scientific illiteracy since the "daughter element" in question, Radon, is a gas.
Since this is the 2st anniversary of making the FoI inquiry I must ask for a confirmation within 48 hours of exactly where & when the tests proving particles on the shore to be paint took place.

In the event that it were to turn out that SEPA have lied & maintained a lie about proving it to be paint I would insist that you issue a public correction & as the person who was told on live radio that my speculation that the "radium" could simply be natural background radiation (as it has turned out to be) could not possibly be true because of this "paint" I would require you to ensure Radio scotland properly reports that I was not wrong.

We shall see what the response is. Certainly if the claim about finding the radium paint (which was water soluble & has allegedly been on Dalgety Bay beach for over 50 years) is a lie, which they have knowingly maintained SEPA should publicly withdraw it. The climategate CRU mob have been accused of breaking the law in refusing to answer FoI inquiries about their data.

Labels: Dalgety Bay, Fear, nuclear

The Velvet Revolution was the triumph of freedom in Czechoslovakia when people rose up against the communists & without violence, overthrew them & established a free & democratic society.

The Velvet Revolution was a fraud, orchestrated by a hidden conspiracy directed from the Kremlin

These look like 2 incompatible theories, one held by all right thinking people who trust their free & democratic governments & the other by a small group of paranoid, probably extreme right wing, conspiracy nuts.

The fact is that both are true. Governments were falling across eastern Europe, which had been held in power by the now failing USSR. That the people did mostly hate the government & want it replaced by democracy & freedom. The fact is also that the actual revolution was organised by Russians & their local friends in an attempt to stop Russia being embarrassed by the remaining hard line eastern European state & hopefully to set up a liberal Gorbachevian regime which would remain committed to socialism.

The author of this article clearly doesn't like the conspiracy theory but admits to the facts

According to the official version, the Velvet Revolution started on November the 17th , when the Socialist Youth Organization (SSM) arranged a demonstration in Prague’s Albertov district to commemorate Jan Opletal, a medic who was shot dead by the Nazi occupants in 1939. After some brief speeches, the students marched to Karel Hynek Mácha’s grave at Vyšehrad – and then towards the centre of Prague.

By the time they reached the end of the Národní Avenue, where special riot police forces blocked access to Wenceslas Square, the students were accompanied by tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, who peacefully chanted freedom slogans. Yet the Special Forces reacted with a brutality uncommon even to the Bolshevik regime. When the savage beatings ceased an hour later, nearly forty demonstrators had been rushed off to hospitals, and one student was even reported murdered by the police.

The violent action on the evening of November the 17th later became known as the “Massacre on the Národní Avenue” (a rather pathetic monument to commemorate the event has been installed in the arcade outside Národní 16). The word “massacre” may seem a bit exaggerated, since the only dead demonstrator, as it was established some days later, was actually a fake (although the alleged police murder served as an effective reminder of Jan Palach). Nevertheless, the regime’s brutal behaviour against defenceless students triggered a strike among Czech actors and subsequent demonstrations and civic protests in nearly every city and town in the country.

In the following days, the Bolsheviks were forced to renounce one privilege after another. After two weeks of mass demonstrations – some of them attended by almost one million Czechs – the regime collapsed entirely. “Love and truth” had finally defeated “lies and hate”, and the Czechs had added a bright – and much-needed – chapter to their modern history. Or was everything different? Visit any hospoda in this country, and you’ll probably hear another version. To quite a few Czechs, the Velvet Revolution was, in reality, a reform-communist putsch that failed.

One of the best “proofs” of this conspiracy theory is that the students, participating in the demonstrations on November the 17th were led to the centre of Prague by an agent from the secret police, or StB who acted as a radical SSM agitator (the agent’s presence was later documented). At Národní Avenue, the same secret agent supposedly played the role of the student who was beaten to death by the police. The purpose? To publicly discredit the orthodox leadership of the Czechoslovak Communist Party and thus help the Party’s reform wing gain power.

In other words, Czech secret police staged the Velvet Revolution with political backing from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his reform-minded comrades in Czechoslovakia. Both the students and dissident movement were exploited as unknowing instruments, but for some reason or other, the plot didn’t succeed.

There is no question that this happened since the student beaten to death whose death was the catalyst of the revolution is known & is alive.

Ludvík Zifčák and assisted by other secret agents (those who took him to hospital and initially disseminated the rumor). Zifčák is currently a chairman of the "Communist Party of Czechoslovakia", a non-parliamentary group willing to re-establish a Communist regime, with popular support below 1%, and rejects all inquiries relating to his role in the revolution

also

The Army and People's Militia were ready to attack the demonstrators, but did not receive orders to do so.
Secret police carried out surveillance on all the leaders of the revolution and had the ability to arrest them. However, they did not do so and let the revolution progress.
A Soviet military advisor was present in the control center of the police force, which beat the demonstrators on November 17. Supposedly, he did not intervene, but his role is unclear.

But it seems likely that, having started the revolution Gorbachov found that the man he wished to put in charge of a revamped socialist Czechoslovakia, Zdenek Mylanr didn't want the job

Following the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, there were rumours that Gorbachev's reform-minded KGB and their Czechoslovak collaborators had plotted to install Mlynar as the leader of a revamped CPCz to prevent the complete collapse of communism

What does this show. Well it shows the real world is much stranger if we do not ignore the men behind the curtain. It shows that conspiracies are endemic to human society even though they get written out later. But it also shows that conspirators are not the all knowing grandmasters of the chess board of existence but as fallible as the rest of us whose conspiracies, by the very nature of their complexity, are likely to break down & achieve something quite different to what was intended. And it shows that inconvenient individuals, making a stand at the appropriate, or inappropriate, time can, in this chaotic universe, have astonishing influence.

Zdenek Mylanr 1930-1997

Labels: conspiracies, International politics, Social

Hat tip to Mark Wadsworth who made a less extensive version of this poll some time ago.

What are the 3 biggest threats to western civilisation?
	The Islamicists
	Racism
	Anti-racists and political correctness lobbies
	Catastrophic warming or other environmental scare
	Anti-technolgy Green Luddites
	Big Government
	China, India etc.
	Mass immigration and differential population growth
pollcode.com free polls

Labels: Errata, global warming, Government parasitism

No opportunity has been lost to attack & now strike off Dr Wakefield whose findings of a link between the MMR vaccine & autism have led to a number of middle class people, probably including Tony Blair, stopping their children getting the government vaccination.

I don't know personally whether there is any case but Professor Brignal of Numberwatch seriously doubts it.

The author of the scare, one Dr Wakefield, blew his credibility at the outset in publishing by press conference a result based on just twelve cases. The subsequent contributions seem to combine the post hoc fallacy with ad hoc theorising. Unfortunately for the population at large, his opponents, the UK government, have also blown their credibility with their inept handling of such disasters as BSE, CJD and Foot and Mouth. The chattering classes are the ones who are opting out of the vaccination programme and, as a result, the first outbreaks of measles have occurred in widespread locations. What these people tend to forget is that it is not only their own families’ health they are playing with. An infected child is a danger to the likes of unborn children and vulnerable adults.

The General Medical Council, under all this pressure, decided to strike hiim off because

The doctor at the centre of the MMR controversy Andrew Wakefield was 'dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain' of children, the General Medical Council has decided.

Dr Wakefield abused his position of trust as a medical practitioner, failed in his duties and brought the profession into disrepute, the panel said.

In researching links between autism, bowel disorders and the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine he ordered unnecessary invasive tests on children without proper ethical approval.

He also failed to disclose conflicts of interest to The Lancet medical journal which published his findings that sparked the collapse in public confidence of the vaccine.

Dr Wakefield and two colleagues, Prof John Walker-Smith and Prof Simon Murch, are charged with serious professional misconduct over their research methods and face being struck off the medical register.

Politicians said the findings were damning and raised questions about research regulations.

However this is hardly the only dubious research ever produced. Indeed there seems to be a new one, or retread of an old one in the papers at least daily.

The statistical or other evidence against passive smoking, salt, cholesterol, catastrophic global warming*, the LNT radioactivity scare**, mobile phone**, breast enlargement***, dioxins, Iraq not having WMDs***, global ice age***, Y2K***, nuclear winter**, acid rain**, various cannabis threats, CJD***, alleged rising sea levels***, terrorism, AIDS*, overhead power lines**, nuclear reactors, GM foods**, oil running out in 5 years (repeatedly since the 1960s)*** etc. etc. is at least equally dubious yet we see nobody struck off for them. Indeed many careers have been built on pushing these scare stories with the enthusiastic support of politicians, media et al.

So what is the difference?

Well all the other examples have been used, by those in power to a greater or lesser degree. As Mencken said "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."

MMR on the other hand has been a scare which inconvenienced those in power.

Also looking at what he is specifically charged with - doing thorough tests without permission from "peers" & not disclosing links - the first is one which would give the scientific establishment power to veto any inconvenient research & is certainly inconsistent with any claim that he was not considerably more thorough in his research than in most of the above listed scares. The second is one that almost all researchers could be accused of, particularly where government has supported a theory. Both look like somebody searching for an excuse because no fraud can be shown.

How many such researchers have never received any government money (for example it has only been possible to find one scientist, worldwide, who supports catastrophic warming & isn't clearly government funded). Are we to see all scientists who have pushed warming or any of the other scares, supported by government & have not said at the top of their reports that they are writing this as government propagandists expelled by their professional bodies. Much though it appeals in cases like Paul Ehrlich who has made a lucrative career out of such scares, all proven wrong, I would not like to see this, at least not unless some actual fraud has been proven*.

But if so to strike off Dr Wakefield is not remotely proportionate. He is not being struck off for being proven wrong but for opposing the state decision on what officially "The Science" is. That is Lysenkoism - this lynching is incompatible with the scientific process. His may be bad research but it is certainly not worse than the sort the sort routinely demanded of government science "advisors". It sends a signal that nobody should ever risk even looking at any accepted theory sceptically in case they they think they find some contrary evidence & without scepticism science does not exist.


* instances where fraud has been found, eg "hide the decline" in the climategate emails.
** scares for which there is no evidence whatsoever eg that low level radiation is harmful
*** scares which have now been proven false eg the breast enlargement scare which George Moonbat dishonestly berated Michael Durkin for not supporting.

Labels: British politics, Fear, Science/technology

This in the Scotsman today. I have highlighted the edited bit which lists many other points on which the big parties act as one. This went only to the Scotsman, because it was a reply to a particular letter. but I think I will sent a variant out to the rest of the press.

Anthony Garrett (letter Thurs) decries the refusal of so many to vote, claiming our politicians are as honest as any in the world. Has he noted that Labour & the Lib Dems cynically broke their manifesto promises that we would be allowed a referendum on the EU, the Tories broke the same "cast iron promise" & the SNP, who were in a position to hold a Scottish referendum did too? If their most binding promises are so easily broken, how can we trust to their "honesty" in any lesser or more difficult matter? Has he noted that all 4 enthusiastically push the "catastrophic warming" lie which so increases their power & our taxes? That all but the SNP support criminal, indeed genocidal wars & not one of them has a word to say against the way our "police" in Kosovo were allowed to dissect over 1,000 people, while still alive, to provide our hospitals with organs? That all are committed to destroying at least 50% of our electricity & therefore of our economy by 2010? That none of them object to Labour's policy of "electing a new people" by promoting mass immigration? That they have all connived at doubling the average household's electricity prices to £1200 annually with the lie that "the era of cheap power is over" when they all know that it could have been halved to £300 with new nuclear. That none of them aspire to match, or are even willing to discuss, the world's AVERAGE growth rate of 10%? That on almost all the major questions they function as 1 party, a party which has a virtual monopoly of the media, particularly the state funded BBC? All we are left to do is to ratify which branch of the ruling party gets to apply the whip this time.

I think the excision of the highlighted bit, even here, rather supports my contention about the virtual media monopoly held by our one & a little bit party state. Interesting to see the barriers between permissable & impermissable subjects. It is permissable to discuss the EU referendum - it is not to mention our government's dissection of living people, or even that we are so far behind world average growth.

Though I think the Conservatives winning would be less economically catastrophic than other vehicles of our clinically insane ruling class I am coming to the belief that voting for almost anybody outside that class, preferably UKIP (but also the BNP who, unlike the One Party, have condemned war crimes & dissecting people in the Nazi cause) would be better than giving the appearance of support (probably amounting to about 20% of voters) to the genocidal war criminal idiots.

Labels: British politics, letters, Scottish politics

Last night on TV I saw Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General who first said going to war would only be legal if "we would need to be able to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and non-cooperation" & then reversed himself after being flown to America. Frightening the effects of rendition, even when direct torture isn't involved. He justified it on the basis of "past precedent" which struck a chord.

Indeed looking at his testimony online we see the word "precedent" used 16 times, half directly in connection with Kosovo & then the final time as a joke so it has obviously been a point of issue. The questioners are keen to say Kosovo is not a precedent, indeed far to keen, but Goldsmith isn't. They have been generally considered suspiciously unwilling to ask the difficult questions.

I don't think there was any precedent for this, because I think that if there had been, I think it would have been drawn to my attention before, when people were saying, "You can say there is a reasonable case". I think there are sort of two elements. I think first of all, the International Criminal Court certainly focused the attention of the armed services on their personal responsibility. I think there is also another feature, which is a sort of growing interest, belief, in legality, and the individual responsibilities of people who are involved in action...

The other was the Kosovo precedent. If I may just explain. When action was taken in relation to Kosovo, there was essentially a new legal theory that was developed, which was that there could be military force used to avert a serious humanitarian crisis(1). In that -- on that occasion, there had been a veto by Russia I believe, in the Security Council. So United Nations authority was not present. Still the view was taken, by this country and by others, that military action was justified on this new basis and I think there was a sort of view in some places: well, we managed to, as it were, avoid the fact that there was a veto on that occasion. Does that mean that if there is an unreasonable veto by another country that that can be ignored? ...

On, I think, 27 February, I met in Downing Street with, again, the Prime Minister's advisers and I told them then that, in the light of the further enquiries I had made, following my visit to the United States, following discussions with Jeremy Greenstock, following my investigation of the negotiating history, I was of the view that a reasonable case could be made -- I'm sorry, there was a reasonable case (2)that a second resolution was not necessary, and that that was, on past precedent, sufficient to constitute a green light...

First of all, it is very clear that the precedent in the United Kingdom was that a reasonable case was a sufficient lawful basis for taking military action. That was the basis, as I said -- say in my note of 7 March -- and I checked this at the time, because this is what I had been told by my officials -- it was the basis for the action in Kosovo,(3) it was also the basis for the action in 1998...

BARONESS USHA PRASHAR: We said earlier, the Kosovo precedent was irrelevant. RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: I think -- forgive me, I'm saying on the basis of what is the right test to use, I'm saying that as a matter of precedent it was standard practice to use the reasonable case basis for deciding on the lawfulness of military action...

I don't need to, because the precedent is simply it is enough to say there is a reasonable case and this is what had been, and so I said, "Well, there is a reasonable case"...

SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Were the precedents that helpful? You have already indicated that Kosovo was a completely different basis of law. Desert Fox is obviously relevant, but, again, you have indicated a difference there. How strong were these precedents, and isn't it a bit unnerving at this sort of stage to say that we are going into this with no more than a reasonable argument?
RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: I don't think "reasonable case" quite means that, but, of course, I see, Sir Lawrence, the point that you are making. That is why, when the armed forces and the Civil Service said, "We need to know that you think it is right to do it", I saw that point of view. I had been doubtful originally. I had originally been not that instinctively in favour of this reasonable case, but these precedents were helpful, because, although Kosovo was a different legal basis, the point was that the British Government had committed itself to military action on the basis of legal advice (4)that there was a reasonable case. That was the precedent. It had been pressed upon me that that was the precedent in the past. I can see, and in a sense this is right, that, with hindsight, I was being overly cautious in expressing it in this way, but that was the precedent that had been used and I went along with it. Not, "I went along with it", I followed the same practice...

FREEDMAN You are giving the armed forces more but not on the basis of any more legal arguments.
RT HON LORD GOLDSMITH QC: Well, not on the basis of more legal argument, but on the basis of asking a different question. This is, in a sense, why I'm saying "with hindsight". I would have liked to have known before the following week that what the armed services and the Civil Service expect was not what had been by precedent given in the past, that they wanted more(5)...

I was following precedent in giving the green light again(6)...

So going through them:

1- "New legal theory" is an interesting phrase. It means a theory for which there is no legal precedent. Without some newly passed law it is a contradiction in terms - if its new it isn't legal & if it is legal it can't be new. I could claim to have a new legal theory that i was allowed to rob & kill people but it would be no more legal than it would if Tony Blair had such a theory - which is exactly what he did.

The other, even more important part of this is that the "new legal theory" depends on the action being taken to "avert a serious humanitarian crisis" - now on this we absolutely know , it is not like Iraq where we say Blair cannot have believed the WMD story was true because of the lack of evidence. Over Kosovo we know for an absolute fact that all of Parliament & the government knew that the claims of genocide by Yugoslavia was a deliberate lie because the Foreign Secretary told Parliament, on the record, that it was not the Yugoslavs committing genocide ("humanitarian crisis") but the NATO trained & armed KLA who were engaged in genocide |& whom we went to war to assist. If the genocide accusation against Milosevic was false & known to be the war was criminal.

2 - I think he meant it the first time - that a "reasonable" or at least apparently reasonable case could be made to appear not that it existed. Slips of the tongue tend to show the thought processes better than considered statements.

3 - "was the basis of action in Kosovo" strong evidence that Kosovo was. legally, the important change in what we may laughingly call the governments respect for the rule of law & that Iraq is merely the culmination.

4 - Confirmation that the government did actually seek legal advice on the Kosovo war, something which I was told was an official secret when I made my FoI inquiry into the legal advice on that war. Since it was based on the "new legal theory" that all previous legal theories about illegal war were wrong I can understand why what the justification actually said is still an official secret.

5 - Clear proof that it was only the outcry by the public & some politicians which changed the situation - the military & civil service wanted their asses covered by a piece of paper from some compliant government judicial officer to protect them - something they had not been significantly worried when the "new legal theory" was used to justify genocide in Kosovo. In fact, as the "I was only following orders" defence showed, such an opinion, if it is worthless is worthless as a defence.

6 - If the previous Attorney general had no problem lying why should he.

Since, provably, everybody in Parliament & government knew the Yugoslav war was being fought to assist in genocide not for the public reason there can be no question that, even under "new legal theories" it was a war crime & those involved [personally complicit in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, sexual enslavement of children & dissecting living people to steal their body organs. Moreover under the doctrine of "joint criminal conspiracy" adopted, with our government's approval (& funding) by the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal, every member of the Labour, Liberal Democrats & Conservative parties & indeed BBC, ITN & other lying journalists who have all been made aware of this are also personally part of such a Nazi supporting joint criminal conspiracy.

Labels: British politics, International politics, Yugoslavia

I have previously written about Vitamin D deficiency in Scotland. This is well known as being the cause of rickets (brittle & bent bones) but this is merely the most extreme symptom.

The vitamin D hormone system controls the expression of more than 200 genes and the proteins they produce. In addition to its well-known role in calcium metabolism, vitamin D activates genes that control cell growth and programmed cell death (apoptosis), express mediators that regulate the immune system, and release neurotransmitters (e.g., serotonin) that influence one’s mental state.

Now Britain's BMJ says even rickets is returning because of our sedentary & indoor lifestyle.

But doctors reported this month that cases of the debilitating disease have once again become "disconcertingly common" in Britain.

"Kids tend to stay indoors more these days and play on their computers instead of enjoying the fresh air," said Simon Pearce, a professor at Newcastle University in northeast England and lead author of a new study on Vitamin D deficiency.

"This means their vitamin D levels are worse than in previous years," he said in a press release.

Half of all adults in Britain -- especially in the north -- have Vitamin D deficiency in winter and spring, with one-in-six having severe deficiency.

The reason for it being inherently more in the North is because we get less sunlight. Scotland, in particular, is as far north as Hudson's Bay, Petersburg & Siberia. Because of the Gulf Stream we can maintain a much better climate & thus higher population than any of them, however it still leaves us nationally with a deficiency in vitamin D. This is probably why Scotland has more multiple sclerosis than anywhere else in the world & we are top of the league in so many illnesses intensified by an overall immunological weakness.

This is the sort of thing a Scottish government, with presumed particular competence in Scottish problems could fix. For a relatively small cost & infinitely less interference than all the fuss about passive smoking, they could require extra Vitamin D to be added to certain staple foods sold here (milk & bread would be most likely). This would be likely to do more for Scotland's health than all the ministerial posturing in the world. Or alternately

"Fifty years ago, many children would have been given regular doses of cod liver oil, but this practice has all but died out," noted co-author Tim Cheetham, also a professor at Newcastle.

Labels: Science/technology, Scottish politics, Social