A Place to Stand: 28/10/2007

Saturday, November 03, 2007

SHOULD WE TRUST THE PAPERS OR BLOGS?

An article here supporting James Watson's position on race, or more accurately going into specifics on how so many of his "respectable" academic critics who have said that there is no scientific evidence for IQ differences are clearly being deliberately 100% dishonest. There are in fact a vast number of IQ tests of subsaharan Africans showing a massive difference. One may argue that the IQ tests aren't conclusive proof but to say they do not exist is clearly incompatible with any form of honesty, scientific or otherwise.

One thing that annoys me is that this article, which is clearly better written & far better researched than any of the numerous newspaper articles, unanimously on one side, can be published only on the blogsphere.

"Professional" journalists regularly disparage bloggers as merely amateurs & the net as nest of conspiracy theories (excluding the theories that the Russians/Chinese/Iranians/Iraquis are conspiring to hide their WMDs which are acceptable in the MSM). Perhaps they should acknowledge that the best of the blog is far & away more informed & informing than they are & the worst not much worse.

Any newspaper that cared to publish this article could do so after negotiating an appropriate fee (or even after getting its journalists to rip it off & take out long words) but they don't do so which shows they are quite deliberately seeking not to inform.

// posted by neil craig @ 5:45 pm 0 comments

ALL GOD'S CHILLUN ARE LIBERALS EXCEPT THE LIBERALS

From the Spectator

....global capitalism has won the political argument, rendering the old distinction between left and right almost meaningless. Today, the divisions that count are the ones between libertarianism and statism; between the hard-headed empiricism of the Enlightenment and the (currently more fashionable) touchy-feely romanticism of the New Age.

....I’m thinking mainly of the way in the last decade we’ve lost so many of our traditional liberties — perhaps more of them in one go than in any era since the days of Cromwell or the Norman terror. By exploiting fashionable concerns like ecological correctness, equality and the dreaded health ’n’ safety, the state now feels it has a right to interfere with almost everything we do: what we eat and drink, whether we smoke, what we get up to in our bedrooms, how fast we drive on empty roads, how many bedrooms we have and with how nice a view, how many cheap flights we can afford, what our children’s view is to be on climate change, whether our kids get to learn anything useful, whether or not we can hunt.

If opposing the tyranny of the state, upholding the rights of the individual and standing up for scientific rigour, rationalism and empiricism makes me a Marxist, then a Marxist is what I am. Now can all those of my Tory MP friends who’ve been nervous about defending these things please pull their finger out? They’re universal values, not exclusively right-wing ones.

Which puts it well. I consider my values to be classic liberal ones & they are certainly the ones on which the Liberal party was founded (individual freedom, equality under the law, freedom of speech & scientific enquiry) yet I find the same values held, on the same intellectual basis, by self styled conservatives like Jerry Pournelle & Marxists (the Spiked crowd) but absolutely opposed by many who call themselves liberals such as the Liberal Democrat Party & the Guardian as well as movements such as Greens, radical feminists & other single issue types who call themselves "leftist" but whose programmes have virtually nothing in common the labour theory of value on which the mass urban working class socialist movement was built.

Part of this is also inspired by the speech of Ken Macleod, GoH at Glasgow's recent science fiction convention Satelite One who, as a previously avowed Marxist & still an avowed socialist, made a speech unambigously saying that free markets work more productively than state planning. He regreted that Stalin had ever come to power in the USSR (with which few would disagree) believing that they got a paranoid leader purely because paranoia was the natural result of the fact that the western powers had indeed been constantly plotting against them (which they certainly had) & that without this pressure Bukharin would have come to the top & restored substantial free enterprise in the way China is doing now. Alternate histories are always fascinating & it certainly fits. He believed the western side in the cold war had largely been the aggressors, as do I.

We are certainly in a political melting pot. Whether the libertarian side ends up being called liberalism, or conservatism or social democracy or even communism & the statist side ends up called liberalism or environmentalism or socialism or conservatism I am on the side that believes in progress through individual freedom rather than stability through controls.

// posted by neil craig @ 2:02 pm 0 comments

COMPARE & CONTRAST

I wish to introduce my US readers to Melanie Phillips & my UK readers to Peggy Noonan.

Both are "conservative" intelligent, realistic, tough minded, principled & understanding that the law is not a dispensable luxury.

I was introduced to Peggy by Jerry Pournelle's site where he said she was "always worth reading" & to Melanie by John Brignell of Numberwatch as "a new heroine of common sense in the British press".

On of the advantages of the net is that we are not limited to our own national press (though the parochialism of the US media in concentrating on the US may be as wearing to us as the impartiality of the UK media in concentrating on Britain must be to Americans) & I think we could all benefit from a wider perspective. I know I have quite a high proportion of my readership from the US.

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/archive/

// posted by neil craig @ 12:55 pm 2 comments

Thursday, November 01, 2007

VAMPIRES - ECOLOGICAL VICTIMS

According to all the films vampires are not only incredibly powerful & long lived but able to reproduce themselves at a great rate (theoretically one per night). I have never seen an explanation of why, like Fermi's question about alien civilisations, we are not hip deep in them.

Reading something else about the number of human diseases which we got because we started living by farming animals it struck me vampires must be susceptible to human diseases, since we are so closely related to them, & totally unable to to avoid picking them up in their most energetic form, due to the vampire's total dependence on humanity. Rather as if all eucalyptus bushes suddenly became infected with Koala fever. The Black Death must have come as a worse tragedy to them than to us because they are exposed to so many & such energetic disease vectors (ie suck the blood of so many people). Unlike humans being more long lived they would not have so quickly evolved (we are all descended from generations who survived bubonic plague & earlier, measles which is partly why we survive them now).

They may be impervious to bullets but I have never seen a film where a vampire successfully recovered from the flu.

By the time Vald Tepes (born 1431) became a vampire the entire vampire population must have been down to a handful. Being at the top of the food chain means being at the bottom of the disease chain. Poor creatures.

// posted by neil craig @ 5:31 pm 0 comments

PETS IN PRISONS

I was at the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow yesterday for a lecture by Professor Aubrey Manning on animals & humanity. Not nearly as touchy feely as I had expected.

A point he made in passing was that pensioners with pets live significantly longer than those without, which I have not been able to find a link to but seems very likely & that people in prison allowed pets have a lower recidivism rate , which I have.

The dog’s and the inmate’s day starts at 6:00AM when the inmates get their dogs up and ends when they bed them down at 10:30Pm. The inmates and the dogs work hard, but the rewards and benefits are great for both.

The program allows the inmate to perform community service while incarcerated, build self-esteem, self discipline and confidence, and maybe learn to love and be loved UNCONDITIONALLY for the first time in their lives.

Transition back into society is much easier for those who have participated in the program. Research on programs with inmate/trainers training rescue dogs document almost a zero recidivism rate of the prisoners participating in the programs.

Almost 100% of the dogs participating in the program are adopted into permanent homes

Now some scepticism is worthwhile because no figures are given as to the size of the sample population - an almost zero recidivism rate could mean one person out of a total of 6 - & it is likely this was tried with fairly reasonable prisoners in the first place.

Still there are quite a few sites saying the same. It depends how much prison is for punishment & how much for rehabilitation & I would prefer the latter, if & only if it really produces rehabilitation. All the experiments here seem to have been in the US & I think a trial here would be useful.

I would also like to see pets being encouraged in retirement homes. My suspicion is that our regulators are actively preventing this on hygiene terms. However such rules are there to keep people alive longer & if pets would instead do this better & make life considerably happier then I think rules should be amended accordingly.

The other place I could see this being worthwhile is for children taken into "care". Care homes, disgracefully, produce a very high proportion of those in prison & homeless. The state is a very poor provider of such "care" . If there is any group in society we have failed it is such children & if this could go a little way to helping we should.

// posted by neil craig @ 1:08 pm 2 comments

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

WHY THE FORTH BRIDGE COSTS 8 TIMES WHAT IT SHOULD

I still cannot fully answer this question(& having passed my last article on to various people I can say that our media & politicians are unable or unwilling to answer it either, or even to ask it). However this article From Professor Bernard Cohen on how the price of US nuclear reactors went through the roof may be enlightening

Make no mistake about it, you can always improve safety by spending more money. Even with our personal automobiles, there is no end to what we can spend for safety — larger and heavier cars, blowout-proof tires, air bags, passive safety restraints, rear window wipers and defrosters, fog lights, more shock-absorbent bumpers, antilock brakes, and so on. In our homes we can spend large sums on fireproofing, sprinkler systems, and smoke alarms, to cite only the fire protection aspect of household safety. Nuclear power plants are much more complex than homes or automobiles, leaving innumerable options for spending money to improve safety. In response to escalating public concern, the NRC began implementing some of these options in the early 1970s, and quickened the pace after the Three Mile Island accident.

This process came to be known as "ratcheting." Like a ratchet wrench which is moved back and forth but always tightens and never loosens a bolt, the regulatory requirements were constantly tightened, requiring additional equipment and construction labor and materials. According to one study,4 between the early and late 1970s, regulatory requirements increased the quantity of steel needed in a power plant of equivalent electrical output by 41%, the amount of concrete by 27%, the lineal footage of piping by 50%, and the length of electrical cable by 36%. The NRC did not withdraw requirements made in the early days on the basis of minimal experience when later experience demonstrated that they were unnecessarily stringent. Regulations were only tightened, never loosened. The ratcheting policy was consistently followed.

In its regulatory ratcheting activities, the NRC paid some attention to cost effectiveness, attempting to balance safety benefits against cost increases. However, NRC personnel privately concede that their cost estimates were very crude, and more often than not unrealistically low. Estimating costs of tasks never before undertaken is, at best, a difficult and inexact art.

In addition to increasing the quantity of materials and labor going into a plant, regulatory ratcheting increased costs by extending the time required for construction. According to the United Engineers estimates, the time from project initiation to ground breaking5 was 16 months in 1967, 32 months in 1972, and 54 months in 1980. These are the periods needed to do initial engineering and design; to develop a safety analysis and an environmental impact analysis supported by field data; to have these analyses reviewed by the NRC staff and its Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards and to work out conflicts with these groups; to subject the analyzed to criticism in public hearings and to respond to that criticism (sometimes with design changes); and finally, to receive a construction permit. The time from ground breaking to operation testing was increased from 42 months in 1967, to 54 months in 1972, to 70 months in 1980.

The increase in total construction time, indicated in Fig. 2, from 7 years in 1971 to 12 years in 1980 roughly doubled the final cost of plants. In addition, the EEDB, corrected for inflation, approximately doubled during that time period. Thus, regulatory ratcheting, quite aside from the effects of inflation, quadrupled the cost of a nuclear power plant. What has all this bought in the way of safety? One point of view often expressed privately by those involved in design and construction is that it has bought nothing. A nuclear power plant is a very complex system, and adding to its complexity involves a risk in its own right.

The Forth Bridge has gone up 8 times what it should be & it is stretching credibility to assume that safety & environmental controls have increased the price that much (twice what they did for US nuclear plants) but it is probably at least a partial explanation & I would still really like to have some explanation from those politicians who consider themselves fit to run the place or those journalists who consier themselves fit to explaon politics to us.

On a previous article it was said that producing regulations costs those protected/the victims (according to taste) 20 times what it costs government to produce & enforce them. This is why ratcheting works as it does - the pain is felt by the wealth producer (& ultimately by the consumer) & not by government thus they have no incentive to ever ratchet down, particularly if "special interest groups" largely funded by government itself are always putting pressure to add regulations.

2 solutions.

Firstly some time ago I proposed the establishment of a Parliamentary committee purely to find regulations which should be reduced.

Secondly how about allowing a legal right of appeal. If engineers can go to court & prove beyond reasonable actuarial doubt, that a regulation costs more than twice as much, per statistical life saved, than is allowed in some other industry, the government must refund half of the extra cost. At the very least that would share the pain with the governments that are causing it, which would be likely to be instructive.

(Thirdly & not a legal question - when reporting on some green protest should the media, out of respect for balance, tell us how much their protest or the extra rules they want are likely to ultimately cost us all.)

// posted by neil craig @ 3:33 pm 0 comments

IPCC "TO CORRUPT TO SAVE"

... according to one of the 2,500 scientists who they & the media classify as part of the "scientific consensus" on warming.

Vincent Gray has begun a second career as a climate-change activist .... Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.

.... Dr. Gray's mission, in his new role as cofounder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.

"The whole process is a swindle," he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.

Having, in comments on a previous debate, been accused of being a "Nazi" for denying that large numbers of people from Tuvalu had bee forced by rising sea levels to migrate (he produced statements from the Guardian & similarly disreputable rags which supported it) I would draw attention of anybody who believes we are not being deliberately lied to to a further part of the article:

Dr. Gray has detailed extensively the areas in which global warming science falls down. One example that this New Zealander provides comes from his region of the globe: "We are told that the sea level is rising and will soon swamp all of our cities. Everybody knows that the Pacific island of Tuvalu is sinking. Al Gore told us that the inhabitants are invading New Zealand because of it.

"Around 1990 it became obvious that the local tide-gauge did not agree -- there was no evidence of 'sinking.' So scientists at Flinders University, Adelaide, were asked to check whether this was true. They set up new, modern, tide-gauges in 12 Pacific islands, including Tuvalu, confident that they would show that all of them are sinking.

"Recently, the whole project was abandoned as there was no sign of a change in sea level at any of the 12 islands for the past 16 years. In 2006, Tuvalu even rose."

I think it is clear exactly who the liars are.

// posted by neil craig @ 12:08 pm 1 comments

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

SAINT AL'S STOCK PORTFOLIO

Al Gore, inventor of the internet, saint of the global warming movement, winner of the Nobel & Oscar for convenient lies, war criminal involved in genocide ethnic cleansing & child rape in Kosovo Croatia & Bosnia/Herzegovina & discoverer that smoking is a major cause of global warming & believed by everybody on Earth (but not Mars), has had his ethical stock portfolio examined.

""Despite its widely publicized rhetoric, the Gore firm's stock portfolio looks to be that of an ordinary diversified mutual fund," said JunkScience.com publisher Steve Milloy. "If this is 'sustainable' investing, then it is a meaningless term," Milloy said.

GIM, of which Al Gore is the chairman and founding partner, filed its Form 13F-Holdings report with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on October 23, 2007. The report may be viewed at http://www.junkscience.com/oct07/GIM_Holdings_102307.pdf.

According to the report, GIM has $438 million invested in the following 22 companies: AFLAC, Amdocs, Autodesk, Becton Dickinson, Blackbaud, Donaldson Company, General Electric, Greenhill & Co., HDFC Bank, Johnson Controls, Laboratory Corporation of America, Metabolix, Millipore, Mueller Water Products, Northern Trust, Procter & Gamble, SPDR Trust, Staples, Techne Corp., UBS, Varian Medical Systems and Waters Corp.

GIM's top five holdings are Johnson Controls, AFLAC, Becton Dickinson, General Electric and Procter & Gamble.

Al Gore says on the GIM web site that, "Integrating issues such as climate change into investment analysis is simply common sense."

But with the exception of General Electric ─ which actively lobbies for global warming regulation while its stock significantly underperforms the broad stock market ─ GIM's portfolio doesn't seem to have anything to do with climate change. Notably absent from GIM's portfolio are energy and utility companies ─ even those that claim they will benefit from global warming regulation. With the exception of GE, corporate members of the pro-global warming regulation lobbying group called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership are also missing from GIM's portfolio.

"GIM's portfolio is a run-of-the-mill mix of financial service, healthcare, consumer products, technology and industrial materials companies that hardly seems to live up to Gore's rhetoric about social and environmental sustainability allegedly driving GIM's investment choices," Milloy said. "There seems to be no particular focus on energy efficiency, alternative energy, reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, or other so-called 'green' business ideals" Milloy said."

Doubtless Roger Harrabin or somebody else on BBC news will be reporting this hypocrisy with due prominence. Or not as the case may be.

// posted by neil craig @ 4:15 pm 1 comments

HOW CHEAP COULD HOUSING BE IF PLANNERS WEREN'T HELPING US

The Cato Institute have produced an interesting article on government planning & its high failure rate.

Everybody plans. But private plans are flexible, and we happily change them when new information arises. In contrast, special interest groups ensure that the government plans benefiting them do not change — no matter how costly.

.... Chaos science reveals that very tiny differences in initial conditions can lead to huge differences in outcomes — that's why megaprojects such as Boston's Big Dig go so far over budget.

Long-range plans fail because planners have no better insight into the future than anyone else, so their plans will be as wrong as their predictions are

...Some of the worst plans today are so-called growth-management plans prepared by states and metropolitan areas. They try to control who gets to develop their land and exactly what those developments should look like, including their population densities and mixtures of residential, retail, commercial, and other uses. "The most effective plans are drawn with such precision that only the architectural detail is left to future designers," says a popular planning book.

About a dozen states require or encourage urban areas to write such plans. Those states have some of the nation's least affordable housing, while most states and regions that haven't written such plans mostly have very affordable housing. The reason is simple: planning limits the supply of new housing, which drives up the price of all housing and leads to housing bubbles.

In states with growth-management laws, median housing prices in 2006 were typically 4 to 8 times median family incomes. In most states without such laws, median home prices are only 2 to 3 times median family incomes.

Few people realize that the recent housing bubble, which affected mainly regions with growth-management planning, was caused by planners trying to socially engineer cities.

I have discussed before the question of getting rid of most building restrictions & making type certification a function of central government (which would thus make off site mass production feasible). If our planning systems are not more restrictive than in the more controlled US states then our housing costs could also be reduced to 40% of the present level by cutting planning restrictions. If our restrictions are more onerous & if mass production became easy cutting housing costs to 20% seems perfectly feasible.

Of course such a "house price collapse" would leave a lot of people feeling poor even though it is just a paper loss & a lot of bankers & building societies screaming to be protected from negative equity. Tough. The world should not guarantee bankers a living - this is what went wrong with Japan's economic miracle - the government protected bankers from a property collapse by lending them trillions at nearly, sometimes actually, zero interest & therby chocked off funds for real investment.

If anything I have less sympathy for the building societies. They were formed last century specificly to help ordinary people get houses. They must know that it is possible to produce cheap homes but use their lobby muscle to preserve the present expensive system & their hands around the necks of ordinary mortgage seekers.

// posted by neil craig @ 2:23 pm 0 comments

Monday, October 29, 2007

PADDY ASHDOWN, EURO-DICTATOR IN BOSNIA

Contributed by Pete North

Bilderberger, dictator and friend of terrorists, lies to Hague Court.

Dateline 14th November 2005

"There can be no peace nor co-existence between the Islamic Faith and non Islamic institutions....The Islamic movement must and can take power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough not only to destroy the non Islamic power but to build a new Islamic one". Alia Izetbegovic, President of Bosnia (the Muslim Declaration of 1969)

"(Alia Izetbegovic) became the father of his people - the person who did more than any other to ensure the survival of the modern state of Bosnia and Herzegovina." Lord "Paddy" Ashdown at Alia Izetbegovic funeral October 2003

"In his current role Lord Ashdown's power is absolute. He can pick up one of the telephones on his desk and sack any official in the country. He can freeze the bank accounts of anyone he deems objectionable. He can overturn the decisions of courts." The Independent

Lord Ashdown was Leader of the British Liberal Democrat Party (devoted absolutely to the abolition of free nation states in the name of the corporatist European Superstate). A previous leader of the British Liberal Party was David Lloyd George who said:

"Adolf Hitler is the greatest living German. It is a pity there are not more like him in England"

As Nebojsa Malic wrote at Antiwar.com on November 9, 2005 under the justified title A Viceroy Departs: The Tyrant of Bosnia Goes Home it has been announced that Lord "Paddy" Ashdown (known in Britain as "pantsdown" after some sexual scandal) will leave his position as supreme ruler of Bosnia Herzegovina at the end of the year.

Supreme Ruler Ashdown was Blair's creation.

How did a very ordinary British politician, Ashdown, ever get to be appointed as an absolute ruler of Bosnia? It arose out of the petty politics of the election which brought Tony Blair to power in 1997 - and it is perhaps fitting that just as Blair's power is collapsing in the Labour party, his protégé Ashdown should be standing down - doubtless to spout his pious platitudes in the British House of Lords!

Blair never thought that he would get a majority of 160 in 1997 so he made an unofficial pact with the small Liberal Democrat Party of which Ashdown was the rather cocky leader. Part of the deal was to promise Ashdown a new election system - "proportional representation" - by which the Liberal Democrats would almost certainly be in coalition governments for ever more! (Like their friends in the German FDP). But when Blair got to power he persistently refused to deliver. Ashdown gave up, stepped down as party leader and his consolation was Bosnia and Herzegovina! (The LibDem leadership under Ashdown made very little noise about the fact that Blair had broken a specific manifesto pledge to have a referendum on changing to a proportional electoral system - Neil)
Like so many of the planners and perpetrators of the war against Yugoslavia Ashdown was an attendee at the euro-federalist (founded by a "former" Nazi) BILDERBERG group. Some years ago he was reprimanded by the British House of Commons ethics committee for (initially) not declaring his costs to attend such a meeting. His costs were apparently paid for by "Spanish businessmen".
.......................

"for the past 10 years, the most senior leaders of al Qaeda have visited the Balkans,
including bin Laden himself on three occasions between 1994 and 1996. The Egyptian
surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training
camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading
networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia.
This has gone on for a decade. Many recruits to the Balkan wars came originally from Chechnya, a jihad in which Al Qaeda has also played a part."

The absurd Ashdown view of European and Balkans history is summed up in a Guardian interview (quoted by Nebojsa Malic in his antiwar.com article):

"This country is about history, and unless the Serbs in particular - although terrible things were done by the Bosniaks and Croats too - come to some understanding of this history, we cannot build a stable state. The major burden of guilt is on them, and they have to acknowledge it, just as the Germans acknowledged it."

As Malic rightly comments of this historically and ideological farcical analysis:

"The creation of "a stable state" in Bosnia depends on
the Serbs accepting their assigned role as Nazis"(In fact it was the Bosnian Moslem leader, Izetbegovic who had been a WW2 SS auxiliary)

In 2004 Dictator Ashdown from his "Office for the High Representative" of Bosnia summarily dismissed elected members of parliament and leading Serbs in Republika Srpska (still part of Bosnia, but almost entirely Serb and, after NATO's and German Europe's break up of Yugoslavia and the takeover of Serb majority lands by Bosnians, Albanians and Croatians which should have become logically part of Serbia). This dimsissal of elected representatives was ostensibly because they had not "co-operated" with the (so called and ad hoc) International Criminal Court in The Hague set up by Clinton, Blair etc. This must be contrasted with an even greater lack of co-operation with that court by Croatia (for which, thanks to their friends in Austria) they are now being invited to negotiate entry to the EU!

Ashdown has not even attempted to carry out the tasks for which he was appointed - as the periodical Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily - (Volume XXII, No. 168 - Wednesday, October 20, 2004) commented:

"Ashdown has seen it as a mission not to implement the 1995 Dayton Accords - for which his post was created by the international community - but rather to transform Bosnia & Herzegovina into a unitary state, ending the Dayton-stipulated format of two substates within a federation. Essentially, Ashdown, according to the sources, intends to see Republika Srpska "disappear". Significantly, Republica Srpska is the only part of Bosnia-Herzegovina where the rule of law applies, and where there is productivity, ethnic and religious tolerance."

Just as outright lies and "incidents" were fabricated to justify the illegal war against Yugoslavia and totally unproven accusations of "ethnic cleansing" were levelled at the Serbs even as the Serbs were the greatest victims (there are 1 million Serb refugees following that war) so ludicrous claims for deaths at the hands of Serbs ("massacres") were claimed.

None is more token than the Srebrenica affair which Ashdown has used to intimidate the Serbs and override all international assessments of the 1995 (and earlier) fighting in and around the town of Srebrenica. On April 20, 2004, Ashdown summarily dismissed the Republika Srpska official, Dejan Miletic, who had been in charge of investigating war crimes, and then ordered the Bosnian Serb leadership to make a statement - totally dictated by Ashdown's Office of the High Representative - accepting the Ashdown and Islamist version of what happened in the Srebrenica fighting, despite the fact that Ashdown's repeated statements consistently flew in the face of independent forensic investigation of the affair. Indeed Ashdown had refused even to speak with the forensic scientists who had, independently, developed the intelligence of what really happened in Srebrenica. (This is reminiscent of the attempts to minimise the horrors of the Ustashe death camp Jasenovac by the present Croatian state)

One Western European member of the OHR staff said:

"Ashdown isn't going to let the facts get in the way of his story. It's all about him, not about building the stable, multi-confessional state which the Dayton Accords specified." ('Ashdown Expected to Escalate Attacks on Bosnian Serbs' Defense & Foreign Affairs Daily, 28/6/ 2004 )

As part of this general historical "truth cleansing" operation one of the leading ethnographers in Serbia, Professor Milan Bulajic, Director of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade was dismissed from his post and his department wound up! One of his areas of expertise was Srebrenica!

ASHDOWN'S LIES AT THE HAGUE TRIBUNAL.

In March 2002 Paddy Ashdown appeared as a prosecution witness in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. He gave evidence about his four day visit to Kosovo in 1998 and claimed he was a witness to atrocities allegedly carried out by the Yugoslav Army. He claimed he had witnessed these events from a position above the village of Gegaj in Albania overlooking Kosovo. But when he was told that from his observation point it was impossible to observe the area he claimed he changed his story and said in fact he was somewhere else!

After it was proved in court that Ashdown could not possibly have seen anything from the position he had previously claimed, above the Albanian village of Gegaj, he supplied the court with grid co-ordinates different from his original testimony, and these new co-ordinates put him inside Kosovo and not in Albania. That contradicted his March 2002 testimony. Moreover, on the map the prosecution supplied to try and verify Ashdown's testimony the village of Gegaj had been moved! When challenged on this point the prosecution reluctantly admitted it may be a faulty map!With such a witness and such a prosecution only the worst bigots could possibly see the Hague Tribunal as other than a kangeroo court and the worst example of "victors justice" - victors, indeed, in an illegal war.

Ashdown omitted to mention that his frequent, expenses paid, trips to the Balkans were courtesy of George Soros's Open Society Institute, the very same institute that provides funding and staff for the ICTY itself. The Open Society is a corporatist, euro-federalist organisation devoted to destroying the nation states of Europe in the name of the European Union. In Yugoslavia it saw an opponent of everything Soros stood for.

Furthermore, Ashdown testified about his visit to Studencani where he met villagers who talked to him and verified Ashdown's further claims regarding the actions of the Serbian police in that village. But in fact Ashdown's visit to Studencani was not to meet the villagers but to meet the terrorist organisation, the KLA. A video was shown at the Hague Court of Ashdown's meeting in which Ashdown is heard assuring the KLA that he will 'do his best' to get assistance for them.

There are few more ruthless terrorist organisations in Europe than the KLA which was responsible for the deaths of Serbs and Albanians alike. As Michael Levine, former U.S. counter-narcotic agent and one of its most decorated officers, stated:

"(T)he KLA, ..is tied in with every known Middle and Far Eastern drug cartel. Interpol, Europol, and nearly every European intelligence and counter-narcotics agency has files open on drug syndicates that lead right to the KLA, and right to Albanian gangs in this country. My contacts within the DEA are, quite frankly, terrified, but there's not much they can say without risking their job. The Albanian mob is a scary operation. In fact, the Mafia relied on Albanian hit-men to carry out a lot of their contracts.... And now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they are politically protected."

This complaint is reminiscent of the US Ambassador to Belgrade in 1947 John Moors Cabot who wrote to his superiors in Washington (who then as now were appeasing the fascist elements in Europe)

"I gather that some arrangement has been worked out with the Vatican and Argentina protecting not only Quislings but also those guilty of terrible crimes committed in Yugoslavia"

In 2000 Ashdown demonstrated clearly his euro-federalist imperial ambitions. In an article in the Independent newspaper he wrote:

' Yet today Europe undoubtedly is a power, even a superpower. It has the world's second most powerful currency (no - don't laugh) and arguably the world's biggest single market. And so it has an economic space to protect and interests to pursue.'

Like his "Liberal" predecessor in British politics, Lloyd George who admired Hitler so much, with words like the above Ashdown would make a wonderful modern day orator at the equivalent of a Nuremburg rally! As John Laughland wrote in a recent article on Bosnia

" Ashdown's so-called 'exit strategy' is in fact simply an entry strategy - into the
European Union. The dictatorial powers of the High Representative will be abolished
only when Bosnia has signed an Association Agreement with Brussels. Power will
simply be transferred from one undemocratic structure to another, and self-government will be returned to Bosnia only when it is no longer self-governing."

How typical of the modus operandi used by the European Union to ensnare the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe - out of the Soviet Union frying pan into the European Union fire. Few figures have represented the new dictatorship with more conviction than Lord "Paddy" Ashdown.

http://www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2005-11-14.html

// posted by neil craig @ 4:39 pm 1 comments

Sunday, October 28, 2007

FUNDING OF "ENVIRONMENTAL" LOBBYISTS

The rise of the "environmental" movement over the last few decades is usually portrayed as a triumph of a popular grass roots movement over nasty big business interests. Perhaps some of it initially was but it is clear there are a lot of full time staffers organising the spontaneous popular movement.

I noticed, for example, that in the recent Heathrow protest, where initially the media promised thousands would turn up, but this was later reduced to hundreds, the first day appeared to be devoted to putting up large numbers of tents preparatory to the actual people turning up. Clearly money for this protest was much more easily available than real human protesters, though the media naturally were silent on this.

Recently it was discovered that Friends of the Earth, far from being a grassroots organisation, are largely funded by the EU & member states. FoI are, of course, on the BBC almost daily "protesting".

On a previous occasion in online debate in the Scotsman it was pointed out to me that ASH had been given £3 million by the government to lobby the government for the smoking ban.

The Soil Association is currently redefining their definition of "organic" (a somewhat meaningless term to start with) to no longer mean food grown without pesticides but food grown in countries where it can be brought to market fresh here without aircraft. That is to say it has become a de facto UK protectionist organisation rather than merely an organisation for farmers to lobby for higher prices. It is less clear about the division of its funding

However the way it lists contributors (1) Lottery & statutory bodies (2) charitable trusts, which can cover a lot of sins but usually means very rich people, (3) companies & last & probably least (4) "Finally, we would like to pay tribute to the extraordinary generosity of an ever-growing number of individuals who have made donations" which strongly suggests that money from ordinary people is the merest token.

Just as political parties are relying, to an ever increasing extent, on rich donors (or in the case of Eastern European countries donations from "pro-democracy" western sources) we are seeing "environmentalists" being employees of the government bureaucracies they are meant to be lobbying. It is hardly surprising then if they always lobby for more government bureaucracy & control of our lives.

This perhaps explains how "grassroots" Luddite pro-regulation bodies grow. They are fed by gobs of government money & watered by massive media coverage (eg the massive coverage given to a few hundred people over several days at Heathrow) - this is known as "astroturfing". Meanwhile groups supporting freedom or even merely sanity are rendered invisible.

I may be biased since, a few weeks before my expulsion from the LibDems I spoke against a party motion to ensure that control of Scottish industry was handed over to government inspectors pledged to ensure businesses were run according to the wishes of "special interest groups". Perhaps, in the interest of freedom statutory bodies (including the lottery) should be given a legal duty to ensure that when they donate to a political cause they must give comparable donations to opposing bodies. This is currently the rule under the Education Act, which, while actually not enforced by the court, at least belatedly led to the judge deciding that the true facts be at least mentioned by teachers showing Gore's propaganda lies.

// posted by neil craig @ 3:14 pm 0 comments

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