A Place to Stand

Scotland's premiere judge & Bliar's creature on the bench of the Milosevic "trial", Lord Bonamy, has stated that Islamic fundamentalism is not a danger to world peace. He should check with his master who wants to introduce internment without trial here on the claim that it a worse danger than the IRA, or Soviet nukes (or even global warming) ever were. Clearly Bonamy is not only corrupt enough to serve on this show trial but stupid enough to make it obvious.

Milosevic asked if any of what was written about the areas where he served was true.

At this point Judge Bonamy intervened, completely out of left field, saying that the question was foolish because the witness would have had to be in every part of Kosovo at once in order to answer.

Milosevic calmly repeated the question, which was; Was anything that “As Seen As Told” wrote about the areas where Col. Vukovic served true? The witness responded that almost none of what was written in the book was true, but this latest episode raises certain questions about the mental competence of Judge Bonamy.

Judge Bonamy frequently loses the point of the most obvious discussion. At one point during Wednesday’s hearing the witness commented that Islamic fundamentalism constituted a significant danger to world peace. Judge Bonamy angrily responded that he did not share the witness’s view. Bonamy proceeded to base his position on the fact that not all Muslims support terrorism. Of course the witness never said that all Muslims supported terrorism. The witness explicitly used the term “Islamic fundamentalist,” he never insinuated anything against Muslims as a group.

While Milosevic was comparing the orders with the war diary Judge Bonamy absolutely could not understand the point, even though it was easy as pie to understand. The witness was ordered to search out and destroy terrorists in certain villages, and when he completed his orders he would write in his war diary that the village had been “cleansed,” cleansed of the terrorist forces that he had been sent there to find and destroy.

The simplest of concepts escape Judge Bonamy’s understanding. The man is constantly making foolish interventions. When you hear the dumb things that come out of his mouth you just have to be amazed that he ever got to be a judge in the first place.

It says nothing creditable that the rest of the, not quite equally corrupt, Scottish judiciary keep quiet about this buffoon - these are the scum who will have to enforce Bliar's laws.

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Meanwhile I have had another mention on Jerry Pournelle's site where there has for some time been a debate on Europe (& America's) problems with the problems of an ever growing ethnic group alienated from European society. This debate was partly inspired by the riots in France which, after several days, are now starting to be reported in the official media.

Have just finished watching a programme on the Christian reconquest of Spain (being BBC it was a fairly PC item making clear that the barbarians at the gates were Christian, with which, in this case I agree). The point however being that there is nothing inherently inevitable about a Moslem 5-10% taking over.

On the other hand the more recent example of Kosovo, where in 1945 moslems formed 40%, & before we joined in, allegedly, 90%, achieved by a process of low level violence, corruption, unrestricted immigration & a government that refused to recognise racial allegencies existed.

If you look at Milosevic's speech at the Field of Crows < http://globalresistance.com/articles/jared/milosaid.html > he appears to have been, sincerely, dangerously liberal & indeed his major fault may have been an unwillingness to fight hard. Still we have produced NATO defended al Quaeda states in Bosnia & Kosovo & must accept it. At least 50% of local moslems, the female half, lose drastically out of this but thats western democracy.

Neil Craig

Most of the French seem cowed, but the Normans never were; and historically the Anglo-Saxon-Normans are the most warlike people of history, largely because we like war; it took all the superstitious awe the Church could manage to tame the Normans (Frenchified Danes and Swedes) and even then the whisper of a Crusade where they could fight for God -- God wills it! -- was enough to get them moving. William Rufus "feared God little and man not at all, and so stark a man was he that a widow could travel the kingdom with gold in safety." His brother Robert of Normandy at Doryleum stood all afternoon fighting on the defensive. "Why run? Their horses are better than ours." Until Tancred the Great came over the hill behind the Saracens.

No, I do not think it inevitable that Western Civilization will crash, but I do have my doubts about liberal democracy. Something will stir the blood before it is too late. Something always has. But it will not be politically correct.

I don't relish such a politically incorrect solution but far less do I relish, even though there would be some national justice to it, Paris & London being eventually ethnically cleansed as we did to most of Kosovo.

PS If putting comments you will see that you now have to be able to prove you are a real human rather than a spammer. I regret this but I was getting to many comments from people who "really like your blog & what it really needs is a link to my bicycling naked ladies selling real estate". Never never buy anything from a spammer.

I just saw the 2 Tory contenders on the Not-Frost on Sunday show. David Davis said he wanted to cut taxes to stimulate growth (no specific mention of corpotation tax which was not good economics but may be good politics) & held up Ireland as an example.

David Cameron boasted that somebody had said he had the biggest global warming programme of any major UK politician.

I hope we don't end up with a spin master & public schoolboy on both sides of the despatch box.

This is a speech by Michael Crichton which I have just read & which gives, as well as I have seen it put, the case for how political correctness has been allowed to subvert scientific truth. It is fairly long but I strongly suggest you read it.

In precis he says that the initial acceptance of SETI as a scientific discipline when there was no facts available about aliens set the precedent.

In turn we have the the nuclear winter scenario which was scientifically unproven but, since everybody is against nuclear war, few scientists except Teller were willing to say so. He goes into some detail as to how nuclear winter was sold by Paul Ehrlich & Carl Sagan (Ehrlich who has made numerous predictions, all rubbish, such as the claim that pollution would reduce US life expectancy to 40 by the 1980s & thus remains a well funded green guru, Sagan publicly predicted that smoke from oil fields burning during the Kuwait war would produce massive famines).

Some of this is hard to take since Frank Drake of SETI & Sagan are in many ways admirable people but the point is that scientific truth is never altered by niceness.

Having allowed nuclear winter to be sold through press conferences, media glitz & only long after by producing the scientific papers & the use of the term "concensus" to suppress disent the same tactics have been used to sell global warming, passive smoking & the attack on Bjorn Lomberg.

(Ehrlich)was asked, how accurate were these findings (nuclear winter)now?

Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists…"

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Read on.........

I am putting up figures from a Royal Academy of Engineering report on electricty generating costs. This is about as definitive as it gets for recent UK figures. As you will see nuclear comes in 2nd to gas but since this was published gas prices have rocketed so nuclear must be clearly lowest.

Gas Fired 2.2p
Nuclear 2.3p
Coal pulverised 2.5p
Coal fluidised bed 2.6p
Coal gassificatio 3.2p
Poultry guts bio 6.8p
Onshore wind 3.7p with back up generation 5.4p
Offshore wind 5.5p " " " " 7.2p
Wave & narine 6.6p
Note since wind doesn't work when there is little wind, or a lot, back-up is not an optional extra.

I have no doubt that nuclear electricity could be made cheaper, probably very much cheaper if the political will was there. Modern reactors are cheaper & more reliable as most current technology is better than that of the 1960s. Much of the cost is in the construction & in Japan, where building reactors is primarily an engineering problem it takes 4 years, ours are expected to take 10 years, where it is primarily a lawyering problem. We have a regulatory system which vastly increases running costs & which is clearly inspired more by hysteria than a real assessment of risk - nuclear has killed 4 people worldwode since Chernobyl, blacklung & emphysemia caused by acid rain kill 150,000 annually. This cost is also based on expensively decommissioning reactors - the sensible way to do it is to lock them up for 50 years until the radioactivity is down (highly radioactive material has, by definition a short half life) to safe levels at which point there is no problem.

Considering that Help the Aged say we have 24,000 pensioners dying every year from fuel poverty, the equivalent of a Chernobyl every 4 HOURS of the winter months, I believe it is grossly immoral, as well as stupid, to refuse to build reactors.

For more on nuclear see the Professor John McCarthy nuclear FAQs

Recently the Scotsman came out in a 2/3 page closely argued leader in favour of building new nuclear power stations - you can imagine how pleased I was. Nonetheless I spotted an error - they had based their argument on the idea that 20% of our electricity is nuclear whereas in Scotland it is up to 55%. Clearly pointing that out would serve to reinforce the point.

That was the first letter here.

I got a very good reply supporting classic power sources which I am reprinting.

I sent back this reply which, somewhat to my surprise hasen't been published. The Scotsman haven't printed any other letters on the subject & I am sure Stuart Campbell at least must have sent one so I presume they have decided to give correspondence on nuclear a rest for a time.

The original leader is at the bottom, since being much longer than the letters, had I started with it my bit would be drowned out.
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Nuclear power


I was pleased to see your editorial (15 October) supporting nuclear power, due to the catastrophic effects of drifting into a situation where Hunterston and Torness close without being replaced. However, you say that 20 per cent of Scotland's power is supplied by nuclear, when, in fact, that is the figure for the United Kingdom as a whole. In Scotland, the figure is 55 per cent.
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Enough power in store


The pro-nuclear lobby keeps trying to inflate the amount of nuclear power generated in Scotland, usually quoting figures between 50 and 55 per cent with Neil Craig (Letters, 22 October) quoting 55 per cent. Official figures for 2001, 2002 and 2003 are 36.8, 32 and 37.2 per cent respectively.

If the Hunterston B (1,190 MW) licence is not extended beyond 2011, it will close, but before 2010 almost 1,900 MW of additional power capacity will be available in Scotland.


The modernised Peterhead gas/oil-fired power station has a further 821MW that could be made available if the east-coast grid was strengthened. A 350 MW prototype carbon-free hydrogen-fired power station at Peterhead is planned to be operational by 2009.

There will also be a further 400 MW gas-fired station at Westfield, Fife, an upgraded 120 MW gas-fired station in Fife became operational in December 2004, and an additional 120 MW hydro capacity will be available by the winter of 2008, and we now have 50 MW of biomass and waste-fuelled power plants available.

BILL ROBERTSON
Old Greenock Road
Bishopton, Renfrewshir
(I really had to work to answer this)
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The letter from Bill Robertson (25th Oct.) saying that Scotland only relies on nuclear for 37.2% of our electricity rather than the 55% I said deserves a response. The figure he gives derives from a DTI report which also says that this was artificially reduced in 2002/3 by technical problems (mainly at Torness). The figure of 55% was accepted at Holyrood. The former relates to theoretical capacity, the latter to market share of power produced. Thus, for example while there may be 50 MW capacity of bio-mass (aka wood) available, without planting many hundreds of square miles of new forest it would be impossible to utilise this continuously as nuclear can.

In any case since my letter was in response to well justified predictions of catastrophe if we lose 20% of our power to say that it may actually, on an average day, be only 37% is not reassuring.

I agree we could put in new cabling to use power from Peterhead, though the hysteresis losses in moving power make that an inefficient measure. However, with the ratification of the Kyoto treaty, it is now illegal to increase CO2 production & thus we cannot rely on increased coal & gas fired power.

His reference to a prototype hydrogen powered generator solving our problems is misplaced. Hydrogen is not a power source - hydrogen is merely a storage medium. There is no such thing as a hydrogen well. To make 350 MW from hydrogen you have to first use over 1000 MW of power to make the hydrogen from water. This actually makes some sense if you use the off peak power of a nuclear reactor. Reactors work best producing flat out continuously & have minuscule fuel costs so the marginal cost, when demand is low is very small. However this only works if we actually have the reactor in the first place.

Mr Robertson has produced serious figures to back up his letter unlike so many "renewable" supporters who think electricity just comes from sockets but the fact remains that we are facing major blackouts over the next 2 decades for purely hysterical reasons. France produces 85% of its power from nuclear, sells large amounts of it very profitably to its Luddite neighbours (including 5% of UK power keeping the south of England warm) & is doing very nicely out of it. I think that is better than having pensioners dying of hypothermia because they can't pay their fuel bills as, according to Help the Aged, happens to 24,000 pensioners in Britain every winter.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
REFS
DTI report www.ukaea.org.uk/reports/ 2003review

Holyrood debate http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/business/officialReports/meetingsParliament/or-02/sor0314-02.htm
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& THE SCOTSMAN EDITORIAL:
HARD CHOICE ON NUCLEAR POWER

There were floods in Hawick this week. Not quite Hurricane Katrina, but with basking sharks invading Scottish waters we all know our climate is doing funny things. A concensus has emerged over the past couple of decades that it is best to be safe rather than sorry in this situation. So public policy has moved in the direction of redirecting the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, which scientists have implicated as a possible factor behind global warming. But just how serious are our politicians about cutting carbon dioxide emissions? Do they really mean it or is it just playing to the gallery? And how committed are the various environmental pressure groups to making the many political compromises needed to effect change in the energy market? Are they players or merely utopians who reject any compromise solution - which is no solution at all.

The facts speak for themselves. The Blair government has set a target for achieving 10 per cent of Britain's energy from renewable sources by 2010. however we can barely manage 4 per cent, & most of it from large-scale hydro-electric plants which the environmental lobby would oppose if built today. Wind power is the only practical renewable technology available in the timeframe but it struggles to produce 0.5 per cent of electrical power after 15 years of development at enormous public subsidy. Besides the environmental lobby has now turned its guns against shore-based wind turbines.

Lesson: the government will not meet its 2010 renewable energy target as the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, hinted loudly in his speech to the Labour Party conference a few weeks ago.

In Scotland championed by the environmental minister, Ross Finnie, illusions regarding renewable power illusions are even more fanciful. Scotland has the advantage of the great hydroelectric schemes built in the 1940s & 1950s, which provide around 13% of our electric needs. Rather than build on this legacy in a sensible fashion, Mr Finnie has set an absurd target of generating 40 per cent of power generation needs provided by renewables in 2020. This makes the Executive - especially its Liberal Democratic part - look heroic to the more impressionable part wing of the environmental lobby. However any sensible observer realises Mr Finnie's figure is either hopelessly farfetched or a cynical ploy be a politician who won't be around in 15 years time when it is exposed as a fraud.

A look at the small print of the Executive's policy on renewables reveals it is premised on the untenable assumption that future growth in energy demand is limited to between zero and 1% per annum. But governments of all parties have championed energy conservation in Britain for 30 years only to see demand soar by 60%. Electricity demand in the United Kingdom rises at 1-1.5% a year. Unless Mr Finnie plans to knock down most of Scotland's houses over the next 15 years & rebuild them with a serious eye to energy conservation you can forget the 40% figure. Even if Mr Finnie did succeed in his plans, renewable energy is substantially more expensive than other forms of generation. Household bills would skyrocket, while what is left of Scottish industry would be put at a serious competitive disadvantage.

Fortunately a little common sense has started to break out in government circles in the past few weeks, especially at Westminster. Mr Blair has begun a not-so-subtle campaign to put nuclear power back on the agenda as an alternative that renewables or conservation can do the job of cutting down on fossil fuel emissions fast enough to help with global climate change.

A clue as to how serious the Prime Minister is can be found in the fact that that the Department of Trade & Industry has recently confirmed it has been holding preliminary talks wit major nuclear utilities in Germany & France. The DTI has already identifies 3 sites to host new reactors, including Hunterston in Ayrshire. That puts Scotland squarely in the nuclear frame.

Not for the first time, the Executive is prevaricating. The Hunterston B nuclear power station in Ayrshire is set to close in 2011, while Torness in East Lothian will last until around 2020. Together they supply some 20% of Scotland's electricity. Take them out of the game & renewable will have to fill even more than that impossible 40% target. Unless new nuclear stations are commissioned, the reality is that Britain & Scotland are going to have to burn a lot more expensive, imported natural gas. So much for cutting fossil fuel emissions. So much for security of energy supply.

The conclusion is inescapable: if we want to cut fossil fuel emission in a reasonable timeframe, the only practical policy is to build a new generation of nuclear generating plant. Others are thinking this way too. China plans to build 30 new reactors by 2020, while environmentally-conscious Finland has already broken Europe's long moratorium on commissioning atomic power stations.

The latest designs of nuclear plant embody passive safety systems that do not require human intervention in the case of an accident. The Chernobyl reactor on the other hand, relied on human operating procedures which were violated. The new reactors are also much more economical to build, operate & maintain than the current generation.

Long term waste storage remains an issue, but if there is a choice to be made it is surely more to cut the fossil fuel emissions now and sort out the nuclear waste at our leisure. Half a loaf is always better than nothing to a starving man. It is just such hard political choices that the Executive has to start making.

This from today's Scotsman

A FARMER who built two detached houses without planning consent behind a wall of "tattie" boxes was yesterday ordered to tear the buildings down.

Charles Marshall Senior was accused earlier this year of a "serious and blatant" breach of planning controls after the Aberdeenshire company in which he is a partner, Marshall Farms, built two additional homes in a steading conversion development at South Auchinclech, Westhill, on the outskirts of Aberdeen.


Marshall Farms had originally been granted planning permission by Aberdeenshire Council in 1999 to convert the U-shaped steading into five homes.

But the council served an enforcement notice on the company seven months ago after officials discovered that an old bothy, close to the steading, had been demolished and replaced by an almost completed one-and-a-half-storey dwelling house and that a completely new dwelling house had also been partly constructed at the green belt site.

The two unauthorised buildings were hidden from public view behind a massive stack of potato boxes. But Mr Marshall later vigorously refuted suggestion that the wall of boxes had been built around the site to conceal the building activity and vowed to contest the council's action.

Yesterday, however, it was revealed that Marshall Farms has lost its appeal to the Scottish Executive and that Aberdeenshire Council's enforcement order has been upheld by Michael Thomson, an inquiry reporter with the Executive's development department.

Mr Thomson states in his judgment that there is no justification whatsoever for the additional buildings being constructed at the site and that they should be removed.

But, in his report, Mr Thomson made a point of praising the standard of the building work carried out at the site.

In his conclusions, he said: "At the start, I consider it necessary to record that the standard of the building work carried out on the appeal site appears to be of a very high standard.

"The materials used, at least on all the main elevations of the buildings involved, are also exceptional.

"While I found some of the details of the conversion to be incongruous to a scheme of such quality, overall it is rare, in my opinion, to find a developer willing to invest in building to such a standard.

" I therefore consider it all the more curious that so much of the work has been carried out without the benefit of planning permission and has been put in jeopardy as a result."

Mr Marshall, 72, said he was considering his right of appeal to the Court of Session. He said: "It's pathetic, but they have made the decision."

Questioned about the allegations concerning the wall of potato boxes being used to conceal the building work, he said: "They were in a field beside the houses. The boxes were waiting for the tatties to be harvested and the tatties are now harvested. It is a lot of rubbish from start to finish but we will rise to see another day, I am quite sure."

A spokesman for Aberdeenshire Council welcomed the reporter's findings. He said: "The council is pleased that the reporter has recognised the seriousness of the breach of planning control at South Auchinclech, but also wishes to acknowledge the co-operation it has received from Marshall Farms in respect of other planning matters brought to the council's attention.

"This case highlights the importance of following proper planning procedures when proposing a development, and the seriousness we attach to breaches of this nature.

"Marshall Farms will now have three months to demolish the unauthorised houses."

Indeed the importance of proper planning procedures is much more important than creating something useful. Note that this is being enforced neither on grounds of building standards (they were admitted to be of a particularly high standard) nor esthetic standards (unless piles of tattie boxes are considered high art). In this country a sizeable part of most people's income goes on housing. This proves that the cost of housing depends not on the cost of building houses but on government regulations. The fact that Marshall were sufficiently unconcerned about the marginal cost of building 2 houses, with no added land or consent, costs proves that.

It is ever more difficult for first timers to get housing, indeed there are many highland towns where young people are forced out because available houses are being bought as holiday homes. Quite obviously in a free market there would be no shortage because it would be possible to build more. Some years ago a US congressman calculated that housing costs could be reduced by 40%, but that was years ago & it wasn't Scotland - if land was available at market rates & it was permitted to use modern materials & mass off-site manufacturing I have little doubt that new housing costs could be reduced to no more than 25% of current costs.

"Affordable housing" one of the mantras of our government is a cruel lie - it actually means more taxpayer subsidies to allow the state (via housing associations) to build outdated homes which get filled only because of their monopoly position. This allows the state to keep people dependent. Truly affordable houses are entirely attainable - all that is required is that the politicians stop preventing builders building.

(this was also drafted as a Scotsman letter but they didn't use it)