A Place to Stand

An article well worth reading on how the photos of Qana were, at the very least, posed.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/07/milking-it.html

Essentially the same "aid worker" appears in over a dozen photos within a few minutes, in various sorts of attire "discovering" dead & injured.

This is, of course, old hat. The media have been going about this for at least the 16 years of the Yugoslav wars The ITN "accidentally" faked video being merely one. It may very well be that Hezbollah have been learning how to do it from our Bosnian Nazi allies. On the other hand there are 2 major differences this time. Firstly there is journalistic support for the other side this time, particularly in America. Secondly while in Yugoslavia it seems likely that the CIA were in there faking as hard as anybody the aren't helping this time. The CIA faked satellite photos of the Srebrenica "mass graves" proving that they were new by producing before & after photos taken "24 hours apart". When it was spotted that not only had a mass grave been created in those "24 hours" but so had a new house. Equally we have the advice given to Izetbegovic that what he needed was aa incident to like a marketplace shelling to justify western bombing, shortly before 1 of the 3 marketplace massacres carried out by our Nazi friend & blamed on the Serbs to justify aggression. Then we have the alleged Srebrenica Massacre where the US government told Izetbegovic that what he needed was a massacre of at least 5,000 which duly got faked. There is also the Racak Massacre "discovered" by America's top human rights expert, William Walker, CIA asset, former US ambassador (read governor general) of El Salvador & apologist for death squads there. The attack on Yugoslavia was ultimately justified on the basis of his claim that this was not a firefight but a massacre of civilians shot "execution style" in the face. If Walker is not an obscene corrupt murdering Nazi as well as being the US governments top human rights expert this must be true. At the milosevic trial, after forensic evidence had been produced that most of the victims had powder burns on their hands, thus proving they were combatants & nobody had been shot in the face he admitted at the Milosevic "trial" that he had made it up. The media decided not to report it.

This is yet another example like al Quaeda, many of the world's drug lords, the Mafia godfather Carlos Marcello who helped Oswald & controlled Ruby, & the SS General Gehlen who helped found the CIA, as well as ODESSA & the German secret service. In all of these cases the US has found that funding these genocidal thugs has come back to bite them (as well as the rest of us). It now appears that the media tricks the CIA taught are also coming back to them.

The good news is that where, in Yugoslavia, we only had the integrity of journalists & High Court judges to rely on (yes I'm referring to the judge in the LM case who said the truth "doesn't matter") we now have the blogsphere. The proving that these photos were arranged has come, not from eagle-eyed journalists but from bloggers. Indeed even though it is clearly proven that this very important story was faked the official media have barely mentioned it. There have been cases in the US where bloggers have caught the big media lying/accidentally not telling the truth but this story may mark the watershed where it is no longer possible to pretend that the blogsphere is full of conspiracy anoraks & the TV & papers tell the authoritative version. IpNow if you want the authoritative facts go to the blogsphere.

And in the best tradition of the blogsphere being a bunch of nutters threatening death & destruction a Reuters (yes the Reuters which started international news reporting by sending pigeons to London to say that Napoleon had lost at Waterloo) rep has informed Little Green Footballs that they are 'I look forward to day when you pigs get your throats cut' & left his fingerprints on it too. Stupid boys.

A rather interesting article here on research into aging & how to stop/reverse it.

A growing number of maverick scientists, doctors, researchers, biogeneticists and nano-technologists, many with impeccable academic credentials, insist that the war against ageing can be won. All believe significantly longer lifespans and, perhaps eventually, true biological immortality, are not only possible but also scientifically achievable. What's more, it could happen in time to aid those now living.

The first person to live to be 1,000 years old is certainly alive today; indeed, he or she may be about to turn 60, says Aubrey de Grey, the Cambridge University geneticist who has become the de facto spokesman of the anti-ageing crusade. "Whether they realise it or not, barring accidents and suicide, most people now 40 years or younger can expect to live for centuries". Nutty? Some scientists do dismiss de Grey as a wildly optimistic crank. But plenty of others, though not necessarily accepting all his predictions, have joined in the search for a real fountain of youth. "I am working on immortality", so says Michael Rose, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who has already achieved breakthrough results extending the lives of fruit flies. "Twenty years ago the idea of postponing aging, let alone reversing it, was weird and off-the-wall. Today there are good reasons for thinking it is fundamentally possible".

.........Federal funding for research into the biology of ageing, excluding work on ageing-specific diseases like heart failure and cancer, has been running at about $2.4bn (£1.3bn, E1.9bn) a year, according to the National Institute of Ageing, part of the National Institutes of Health. Though enthusiasts of long living say much more spending is needed, the tally now is not far from the $3bn the government doles out for research in all behavioural sciences, or the $3.5bn for research on women's health beyond breast cancer.

.........Molecular geneticists at the University of Southern California, meanwhile, stunned colleagues when they reported finding that deleting a gene known to prolong ageing somehow ended up greatly extending lifespan. And at the University of Washington, researchers have successfully lengthened the lives of laboratory mice by 20% by boosting natural antioxidants. The hope is that these findings and others could point the way to entirely new classes of drugs to lengthen lives or treat specific, age-related ailments like cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

As a believer in the ability of human beings, using the scientific method, to achieve almost anything I have no doubt whatsoever that we can end aging. If progress can be made with mice it can be made with men. A man is a more impressive creature than a mouse but biologicly they are equally complex. The problem then becomes a social one. The population would increase theoreticly to an unlimited extent. The entire concept of pensions, either private or public becomes redundant. Perhaps most dangerously any treatment is likely, intially, to be expensive. In the longer term it is likely to become much cheaper both because of economic growth & because of economies of scale. This is what happened with the motor car & even moreso with the computer. However, while it is expensive it may produce social tensions between the rich & poor which will make the era of Marx look gentle.

On the other hand improved health care means we already have an appreciable lengthening, approxiamately 1 year for every 4 that passes for the last century & nobody would wish to reverse this. I therefore disagree with the opponents at the end of the article.

American Enterprise Institute fellow Leon Kass, the former head of Bush's Council on Bioethics, insists that "the finitude of human life is a blessing for every human individual". Bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the Garrison, New York-based Hastings Centre, agrees: "There is no known social good coming from the conquest of death."

Arguments like that could hurt the efforts of anti-ageing enthusiasts to win more federal funding. They'd like to see more funds not just for stem-cell research but for the full range of anti-ageing studies. Despite the efforts by the National Institute of Ageing, federal support for the field still lags well behind that for specific diseases. Research into brain disorders, for instance, gets $4.7bn a year, nearly double the sum for anti-ageing. "If the same amount of money was spent on this as is now being spent on AIDS, breast cancer or even diabetes, we would see breakthroughs come much faster," argues noted futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of the book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever.

Unnecessary death annoys me. If the survival of the individual is not a "social good" then be damned to whoever holds that notion of society. I think we should start thinking about what to do to ameliorate the inevitable problems but that we should SPEND THAT MONEY.

Addendum http://www.sens.org/how.htm by Aubrey de Grey has been brought to my attention. I reccomend it for further reading.

2 unpublished letters in the last week. The nuclear one was inspired by the blackout in central London last Thursday. This went to both the Herald & Scotsman but neither used it. On the other hand the Scotsman online has recently started taking comments & I have been quite free there.

On Thursday their was a short power outage in central London due to
high demand caused by the heat. Another way of saying high demand is low supply. I fear that this is the first small cloud on the horizon that presages approaching disaster.

We all know that Britain & even moreso Scotland face massive losses in our electricity generating capacity over the next few years. Scotland faces 50% closure including both Hunterston (in 2011), Torness & in 2015, new emission controls closing much of our coal generated capacity. Even on top of that gas, as many will have noticed, is becoming more expensive & difficult to obtain.

In October 2001 I spoke at the Scottish Lib Dem conference in favour of new nuclear power as being economical, safe, presenting no serious long term waste problem (due to the short half life of reactor waste) & sustainable for at least the next 4.5 billion years. Unfortunately the Executive amendment opposing all nuclear power passed. Part of the reason for it passing was a very fine speech by Ross Finnie which focussed not at all on the scientific & engineering questions raised & entirely on asking the conference not to embarrass the leadership. In this he made the absolute promise that the leadership would "not allow blackouts to happen" in which statement he clearly had the support of his colleagues. In a subsequent discussion with me, when I gave him a copy of my speech & begged him to look seriously at the points raised, he made the same promise. I was subsequently expelled from the party for supporting nuclear power & economic & technological innovation generally.

In fact no party is being serious about this looming catastrophe. Even Mr Blair's deathbed conversion is not as much as it seems. The government is still committed to spending 5 years doing paper work investigating whether the French, Canadian or US designs available are actually fit for purpose & would work & whether the sites would be able to sustain a reactor. Since all this work has been done years ago by France, Canada & the US, they clearly do work & have for years & the laws of physics do not vary with national boundaries this is clearly nonsense. A long investigation into whether it is possible to site a reactor on the Hunterston site is equally pointless. The actual building should take another 4 years. With Hunterson due to close in 2011 we need a replacement in 4 year. The solution is obvious & still perfectly feasible. Even now unnecessary fuel poverty kills 24,000 UK pensioners a year but if we have massive midwinter blackouts the carnage will be unthinkable.

In the circumstances those members of all parties who say we can get by without new credible power sources (i.e. ones which actually form the baseload of any nation anywhere in the world - this does not mean windmills of "clean coal") should publicly repeat the SLDs guarantee they will not allow blackouts due to high demand & low supply. At least then we make properly demand that when the inevitable power cuts come they resign their seats & make way for somebody who places competence above political correctness. Of course by then it will be to late to save 100s of thousands of lives.

I have yet to have any letter published which refers to my terminated membership of the Lib Dems. This may be a coincidence.

The second one was a response to correspondence in the Herald about America's role in the war & how they expect everybody to be eternally grateful for it. The writer produced a listing of other participants which did not include Yugoslavia. I am sure no deliberate slight was intended it is merely that when, over many years, the media forget to notice an event it tends to slip out of public memory.

In Ian Mitchell's listing of countries which joined us in the fight against Nazism, other than the US whose continual cries for gratitude he correctly despises, he forgets a very important one. The people of Yugoslavia rose against their own government when it appeared to be making an accomodation with Hitler. Germany was thus forced to turn her full power against Yugoslavia & Greece & thus put off the the invasion of Russia by one month, As a result Germany met their first defeat in the middle of winter beforre Moscow. This on its own changed the course of the war.

Their country was occupied & they fought with incredible bravery against their Nazi occupiers & various collaborators. As a result they, if Churchill is to be believed, held down more enemy troops than Britain & America combined up till D-Day. The Germans killed 2 million Yugoslavs, mainly Serbs. This Holocaust is ignored in western histories.

If the Americans expect to demand gratitude for their role in WW II they must also pay it to those they owe. Instead they have bombed & murdered the children of those who saved them (Milosevic's parents were well known Resistance heroes). The same applies to Britain who has betrayed the memory of our "finest hour" by bombing our bravest allies. Germany, of course, has shown more gratitude to their Nazi collaborators. So, sucking up to Germany, have we.

I can see that this is a perhaps somewhat of a rant & more importantly getting a bit off the topic which had been running in various letters. On the other hand I feel historical truth to be important. When I was young all our comics showed various Brits (usually called Dusty Miller or similar sobriquets) winning the war with the aid of the odd yank & Aussie. It was only in my teens that I learned the Russians (then the hated enemy) had even been in WW2.

I am pleased to have had this letter, comparing Israel's war with NATO's in the Herald today. I suspect that its publication may owe something to the PS which I am leaving in. I hope you will allow me to bask in my fame of the moment before putting up the 2 unpublished letters tomorrow. To be fair to the Herald they did not edit anything out of the letter & it is very critical of the media. In fact they actually separated out the 3 sentences which origianlly made up 1 paragraph into 3 separate paragraphs thus making it considerably better & hard hitting.

May I commend Chris Walker on his amusing letter about the hypocrisy of present condemnations of Israel following our flying bombs to Saddam Hussein, back when he was our friendly "strong leader" (like Pakistan's now) & the remarkable failure of the media to report it?

May I also remind you that it is only a few years since planes were taking off from Britain to deliver bombs, including cluster bombs to Yugoslav cities & indeed hospitals, without the inconvenience of landing?

This was done not to oppose terrorism but to support a KLA whom the US government had said were terrorists & according to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, were engaged in genocide.

It is noticeable that many politicians (Jack Straw, Ming Campbell, Clare Short, Nicol Stephen etc.) who are loudest in calling the Jews self defence a "war crime" were among the most enthusiastic supporters of bombing civilians then. The remarkable failure of our media to accuse the governments involved then of war crimes or to report the subsequent non-existence of the mass graves, on which that war was sold, or the subsequent genocide carried out under NATO rule should be a matter of shame.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
PS This will be the 3rd letter I have sent you in a week. Let us hope this one meets the Herald's exacting literary standards.

Letter to the Indie on file from 4th July. To nobody's surprise the Indie decided that they are indeed racists. Not only did they not publish the letter (perhaps a little robust for their taste) but they allowed no other letter or editorial statement as correction. Meanwhile the Indie, from its self described "liberal & independent" stance keeps on its lying racist Nazi diatribes against Israel for doing far less than these scum cheered for a few years ago.

Today you decided to publish a letter quite gratuitously using the name of Slobodan Milosevic a man whom the editor must know to someone "to whom any from of racism is anathema" as an example of somebody who might commit war crimes such as dropping explosives on them & cutting off electricity.

As you know perfectly well not only did he do no such thing but it was the genocidal racists running NATO who did so.

Indeed people such as Scottish Lib Dem leader Nicol Stephen have gone on record to say that for Israel to attack a power station is a war crime when he is perfectly well aware, blond aryan that he is, that his party very actively supported not merely that war crime against Yugoslavia but far far worse ones such as ethnic cleansing, child sex enslavement & genocide in Kosovo under NATO's authority.

Clearly it is absolutely impossible for anybody who supported any such war crimes, even the minor ones like attacking power stations to oppose Israel on remotely humanitarian grounds. Their opposition must be purely anti-semitism. In the case of those who supported the War To Help The KLA Commit Genocide this is unsurprising since they are already proven Nazis.

While not everyone will entirely agree with what I have said anyone who checks the facts will accept that it is factually indisputable. On the day on which the man who committed the Srebrenica massacre, Naser Oric was released as a fine upstanding representative of NATO & Nazism generally it would be impossible for any newspaper which was not out & out pro Nazi to fail to publish letters putting both sides.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
PS Considering the last sentence I look forward to the Independent, if a non-racist paper publishing this or if not, not.

An interesting interview found courtesy of John Ray's Greeniewatch on house pricing. It appears housing costs depend heavily on the degree of government regulation & hardly at all on the amount of land available. The author is Australian so he is particularly annoyed that regulations limiting the amount of land available is pushing house costs above the international average of a whole 3 times average annual income. I guess that would be about £90,000 (or £60,000 if talking about post tax income) in UK terms. If there isn't enough land in Australia to satisfy the regulators who say where we can't live the demand of regulators for land where people shouldn't live is truly insatiable.
Some excerpts

Wendell Cox: That's right. We looked at housing affordability in 100 markets in six nations. My great interest in that has to do with the recognition that home ownership is the principal driver of economic growth. What we found is that in Australia things are pretty bad. As I think most Australians know, housing affordability has been greatly lost. The great Australian dream, I would argue, is in the process of being destroyed for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of future households. As you think, for example, in the Sydney area, housing prices relative to incomes are three times what they should be, three times what they are in Atlanta or Houston. In places like Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth, housing prices relative to incomes are about double what they should be, and this is being caused principally by the kind of regulations you've mentioned and that's the extreme regulation of land going under the name urban consolidation, anti-sprawl, et cetera, and it is doing to have, I believe, very serious impacts on the Australian economy in the long run.

......What we did is we looked at median house price and compared it to median household income in each of the countries. Essentially, historically, whether we talk about Australia or the United States or the UK, that measure is normally about three where the market is allowed to operate

......Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston are the three fastest-growing large urban areas in the first world, housing affordability...with the huge demand those guys have got, housing affordability is down in the three range instead of the eight-and-a-half range or the six range

....Whyhy do you think urban consolidation was and still is so popular?

Wendell Cox: It is principally popular among a group of planners for whom what the city looks like aesthetically is the most important thing. They have done all sorts of research that's largely wrong, you hear them complaining about land being taken out of agricultural production because of urbanisation when in fact, for example, in Australia all of the land taken out of agricultural production for the last quarter century exceeds the size of the state of Victoria because you've gotten better at producing agricultural products.

......Michael Duffy: I once gave a lecture, not that long ago, at a university on urban planning and at the end one of the horrified students in the class said to me, 'But you can't just let people do what they want!'


Wendell Cox: Yes, but the interesting thing is all sorts of economic studies around the world show that economic growth and affluence happen where people are allowed to do what they want, and that's what is really at risk here. I don't know what the impact is going to be but it is not a good impact when you significantly increase the price of housing for no good reason.

So all the bull we have from the politically correct numptys in Holyrood about "affordable housing" is merely to cover the fact that the only thing that makes housing unaffordable to even relatively well paid people like teachers & policemen is the regulations they saddle us with. In my opinion if the government were also to give some support to off site modular manufacturing of homes they could get the prices down even below the 3Xincome figure. Currently, of course, regulations act to ensure all that mass production cannot be applied because houses need individual rather than type planning approval.

Finally here is a remark on public transport which I wish I had seen before doing a bit on the 29th June on why building a bullet traibetweenen Glasgow & Edinburgh is insane.

Looking around the world at all the cities you've studied, is there any evidence you can actually shift people out of cars and onto things like light rail?


Wendell Cox: Not a shred. For example, when they built the Portland Oregon light rail line they found a reduction of traffic congestion along the adjacent freeway for a matter of about 30 days. The fact is that the basic problem with public transport, while we all love it, is that it only gets you to one place. If you go to any city, I don't care if it's Sydney or Portland or Perth or Paris, what you will find is public transport gets you to the core but is absolutely useless and uncompetitive in terms of getting you around the urban area otherwise. You think about Sydney, for example, only 13% of employment is downtown. That means 87% of the employment can't reasonably be reached by public transport.