A Place to Stand

Congress has rejected the rescue package. I think that that is a good thing though I have also said that the B&B bailout was a good thing. The difference is that the US deal was to completely save the American bankers by taking only the really bad loans off their hands, thus rewarding incompetence. We, on the other hand, are protecting only the depositors & loaners to B&B & restructuring (ie shrinking) the industry. The American bail might have provided short term comfort but would almost guarantee repetition by not removing the moral hazard. All the calls for more regulation which would, in practice, only institutionally prevent new solutions.

The B&B solution may well actually make a profit for the taxpayer in the end, unless house prices fall much further, because the taxpayer has their good loans as well the "toxic" ones.

What solution should America do. I think they should institutionalise a new form of bankruptcy for financial institutions whereby they take over, without compensation to shareholders, any bankrupt bank & then back its debts. This would prevent runs, as happened with the Northern Rock fiasco, which our government did mess up. The administrator would then run it & sell off whatever he could in the normal way. My guess is that, since despite all the claims this is not a "worldwide" crash China & the oil states, which are both awash with cash, would be willing to purchase/invest in restructured banks which they were confident weren't going to disappear. The Lehman crash for example took down $800,000,000 from Norway's oil fund.

An interesting thing about the failure of the US bailout is that it clearly happened because Congresscriters found their constituents were strongly against it. The establishment tried to bounce them into this by all sorts of scare stories, not wholly unjustified. They failed. This suggests that the ordinary US citizen has considerably more respect for & faith in free marketism than their leaders. This is one pretty hopeful sign for the US, at least over the long term.

I said previously that the solution is ultimately to give up the idea that we can all get rich in the "post industrial economy" by selling pieces of paper to each other. Kipling said the same earlier,

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

Fortunately technology is still progressing & we are capable of producing far more wealth than ever in history. However well the Chinese are doing they do not, yet, have our technological capacity. If only the government supported parasites were taken off our backs there is literally no limit to what we could achieve. The Gods of science have been very good to us.

The Falcon 1 booster redeemed itself Sunday with an electrifying launch that put an exclamation point on six years of hard work and disappointment for SpaceX, a startup company chartered to revolutionize space travel.

The 70-foot-tall rocket successfully delivered a 364-pound hunk of aluminum nicknamed "Ratsat" to orbit on the launcher's fourth flight, ending a streak of three consecutive Falcon 1 failures dating back to 2006.

"That was freakin' awesome," said Elon Musk, founder, CEO and chief technology officer of Space Technologies Corp.

Indeed it was.
The Chinese & Russian governments may be far ahead of our own dear idiots but commercial launchers are also working.

Coverage of this has naturally been lamentable. As I write this it is limited to space community publications. On the other hand when the Wright Brothers took off it took about a week for it to get reported - by their local paper.

The sum of $5 billion to be paid for construction and maintenance of a space station which has been continuously in orbit with at least 5 Americans aboard for a period of not less than three years and one day. The crew need not be the same persons for the entire time, but at no time shall the station be unoccupied.

This is the 2nd X-Prize suggested by Jerry Pournelle, after getting a cheap orbital craft. Of course it need not be Americans, if Britain, or indeed the rest of the world were to get off our collective arses & put under £3 billion aside. Since there is now way we have to pay anything for about 8 years (4 years before the spaceplane can be constructed, 1 year to actually build this & 3 years & a day beyond that.

What does this produce that space station Freedom hasn't. Well pretty much everything since "Freedom" really hasn't done anything but be there. Because it is run by NASA & everything costs 100 time what it should nothing that can be done is financially viable. Things it should have been doing & a private enterprise spacestation that wanted to make money would do are:

Materials testing. The number of materials that can be made in zero G, where light & heavy elements can mix properly exceed, by orders of magnitude, the total that can be made down here. Beyond that it will be possible to make them in different structures than we can. For example in a gravity field if you put bubbles in molten steel they will rise to the top instantly. Where there is no gravity it is possible to create steel girders like aero. Such materials should have 80% of the strength & 10% of the weight of conventional ones. It is my opinion that when we have a true spacegoing civilisation creating materials not possible on Earth will be the greatest industry. Space has tremendous other possibilities - unlimited energy, laboratory condition vacuums & metals, even platinum & gold, & other elements available by the millions of tons from asteroids, but all of these are merely a step up from what we can do on Earth. New materials are something which usually simply cannot be made here & thus have a value which is both potentially unlimited & impossible to know till we have made & tested them.

Satellite emplacement & repair. Once you are in orbit you can take time to get to a different orbit. Taking longer means less fuel & therefore less cost so emplacing new satellites from an orbital station is much easier than putting them up by rocket. it also means they can be assembled in the space station rather than having to be designed to fit in a rocket nosecone. Finally it means that the simpler sort of repairs can be made either on site or by bringing them back to the station. Current satellites have to be designed for having system redundancy & everything being as robust as possible at the expense of other function, simply because they cannot be repaired.

Most satellites are for surveying or communicating with Earth & there is no reason why a much bigger space station cannot engage in this even more successfully. Much of the work can be automated & pictures sent down but when anything unexpected is wanted there is no automated machine that can do as much as a competent human.

In energy terms Earth orbit is "halfway to anywhere in the solar system" as Robert Heinlein said. Interplanetary spaceships will not be designed to land on Earth but will start from & be built in orbit. Your craft has to be aerodynamic to get to orbit but optimum deep space designs will be very far from aerodynamic. This probably applies even to commercial travel to the Moon. A space station is therefore am important stepping stone to the universe & the place where true spaceships will be assembled.

We are well behind where Kubrick thought we could be by 2001 though as you can see he expected that by then the station, though in use, would still be abuilding (though to nitpick if you were going to build a 2nd ring you would build it separately under zero G & then attach it rather than building it while it was attached to & spinning as fast as the first ring).

Sarah Palin is the only major candidate who has expressed doubts about manmade global warming.
PBS has a short video on their website, including a poll that asks: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be VP? As of Sept 25, 42% percent had voted YES, 58% NO. Let's turn this around. You don't have to give your name
or email address in order to vote. Here's the link:
http://www.pbs.org/now/polls/poll-435.html
After you vote, please pass this message to your friends.

This passed on from SEPP. As of Sunday midday it is 49% each with under 1% don't knows.

On a previous occasion I reported how Friends of the Earth had got their members to load a poll & bearing in mind the obvious popularity of Palin it is fairly clear they have been doing so again yet once the sceptics get moving we appear able to match them. It is possible that a majority might not want her as VP but not that that many think she is "unqualified".

On Thursday the Chinese launched a manned rocket & today they have done a spacewalk. This was mentioned on the BBC News for the first time this morning, as almost the last item. I put a comment on the BBC's Nick Robinson blog in response to his statement that the credit crunch is "the only story in the world". I think when history come to judge it China's space programme will be seen as more important. A previous comment from me on there was disallowed so we will see if this is.

Space development is the single most important extension of human activity since we left Africa & possibly since we left the trees. China is clearly committed to participating in it. I wish we were too. If not we will be seeing a more important & probably longer lasting cultural change than happened when Vasco da Gama & Columbus set up European hegemony of the world. As a human being i do not resent China doing this, as a Briton I resent that our establishment isn't & I resent the parochialism of our media who so downplay it.

Last December I predicted:

"The Chinese do something really big in space & this encourages everybody to take space development seriously (I think this is quite likely - China is clearly pulling out all the stops to look good over the Olympics & if they were to do something spectacular the the US plainly can't - launch a genuinely reusable shuttle, start their own space station, land a vehicle on the Moon - a month either way they would certainly manage that)."

This is a bit less spectacular & my guess is that they had originally intended to do it during or on the last day of the Olympics but didn't quite manage it. If so they are pushing their technical capacity which proves that they are not unbeatable but also that they are committed to doing it. I have no doubt they could be beaten by government supported X-Prizes but very great doubts that they will be.

The first US spacewalk was in 1965 & 4 years later they landed on the Moon. Because the technology has improved since then the time scale should, if anything, be shorter but a Chinese Moon landing by 2012 seems likely.

UPDATE
My second comment on the BBC blog has been disallowed. With another one elsewhere that is 3 out of 3 censored.

Follow up to yesterday's article & my remarks about Green MSP Robin Harper saying that for the amount we are paying for EDF to build reactors we could pay to insulate enough houses to save more electricity than the 2 x 1 gigawatt reactors they intend to build.

This was clearly a lie & I emailed the green party asking them to prove or dissociate themselves from this claim or provide any factual evidence for it.

Well this morning I got this reply from Mr Harper (emphasis added) so clearly the Greens are all standing by his lie.

Dear Mr. Craig
The Green party have supported Energy Action Scotland in their work for a decade and more. Insulation of old peoples homes is an absolute priority. It cuts fuel bills, sometimes by as much as 60%.

Spending money on electricity generation does not reduce the cost of electricity, no matter where the money comes from, Government or Private, we pay for it through taxes and charges - the only way to guarantee that pensioners can afford to pay for their heating is to make sure they do not need to use much energy in the first place, by making their houses super efficient. Our policies cut fuel bills permanently

Best wishes
Robin Harper MSP

My reply:

Dear Mr Harper,
I am forced to recognise this statement (the highlighted bits) & the one you made yesterday as representing the highest standard of honesty of which you & the Green Party are capable.

On the other hand your claim that money, coming from France, invested by EDF, including the more than £4 billion being paid to the Exchequer actually comes from our Exchequer is obviously a complete total 200% lie.

The claim that cutting electricity prices by up to 2/3rds, rather than more than doubling it as with the windmills you wish, would not make them more affordable is also obviously, equally dishonest.

You have proven beyond any possible dispute that you pensioner murdering eco-fascists are willing to tell absolutely any lie, no matter how obvious in your attempt to impoverish us & drag us back to the caves.

Perhaps you would care to produce some evidence that, as you assert, the fuel bills of Scotland's pensioners have now been cut & by you. Perhaps not.

The record of the eco-Nazi movement, from claiming that we are going to have a new ice age, half the world dying of starvation/pollution all predicted for many years ago, etc., etc., through to the present means that these lies are no surprise. The fact that you have been involved in killing more people than Hitler means that your obscene & cynical lies about "helping" the pensioners you are trying to murder are also to be expected.

Sincerely

Neil Craig

Should anybody in the green movement produce any evidence that the government are secretly providing all the money EDF are going to spend or that this money actually would, if used to subsidise insulation, actually save more electricity I will be happy to publish it.

The French state utility is paying £12.4-billion ($23.8-billion) to buy British Energy, the owner of Britain's aging nukes, a fleet of eight power stations that generate about a fifth of the nation's electricity. As a sop to national sentiment, a quarter share of the nuclear generator will then be sold on to Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, the country's biggest power and gas retailer.

It is a deal that has been brokered by Downing Street, a recognition not just of the government's 35-per-cent holding in the nuclear generator but of the huge political and economic stakes in the outcome. British Energy's nukes are in their dotage. Reliability is dogged by maintenance problems - in May, the unexpected shutdown of one unit, Sizewell B, caused blackouts in the northwest of England.

Over the next 15 years, most of the nuclear fleet must be shut down and the looming gap in the nation's power supply has been a political hot potato for many years

Part of a rather good article, more in sorrow than anger, which pinpoints exactly how political cowardice & "environmental" Ludditism destroyed the British nuclear industry leaving no option but to ask the French to keep our lights on.

Even then this deal is predicated on the assumption of spending billions to placate the Green pensioner freezers. The real reason EDF is willing to pay £12 billion is not the profits to be made by the current reactors, though they are a factor, but that they are sites which cannot reasonably be accused as not being suitable for nuclear reactors. The infrastructure of electric lines is worth having & the local workforce are valuable but the big value is in the regulators probably being willing to give permission to build there, which they wouldn't do for a new site.

Yet another instance of the actual costs of doing something being dwarfed by the cost of squaring the politics. This is why we don't have electricity to cheap to meter.
------------------

Yesterday Radio Scotland reported this in their normal manner. That is to say they got a soundbite from a Green to say how dreadful it was.

I emailed them "reporting" on the French nuclear purchase the BBC decided to broadcast only a soundbite from a "Green" source. Where exactly is the balance in that. Exactly how many progressive organisations did you contact to get a soundbite? "

Next newsbreak they had somebody from a "customer supporting" organisation who said that the French taking over a big British supplier would be dreadful because it would cut down the number of suppliers & thus limit competition. EDF does already do some business in the UK but mainly it is a French company. I emailed them:

"So not only is the BBC quoting anti-nuclearists & but not soundbites from progress supporting lobbyists over the purchase of our nuclear capacity it is bringing in an entirely opposing & spurious soundbite about it cutting the number of companies in our energy market. Since the purchaser of the British nuclear generators is French they were not players in our market in the first place..

The BBC has, for decades, eschewed any attempt at impartiality or objectivity over the nuclear issue & even though the government have belatedly come round to supporting it, you are still doing so.

You could, at any time, get a soundbite from Sir Bernard Ingham of SONE or indeed myself of the 9% Growth Party or many others & have deliberately chosen not to broadcast such.

24,000 pensioners die each year of hypothermia precisely because we do not have the cheap electricity that could be produced. The BBC, by its deliberate programme of censorship, shares in the responsibility for each of those deaths."

Next time round they brought in Professor Ian Fell who did an intelligent & amusing interview explaining that the lights are more likely to go out in Scotland if we don't let nuclear save us. He answered silly questions like "can't we just rely on England to produce our power" (the interconnection with England, even though being upgraded, won't be able to provide that much) & "will EDF want to move their HQ out of Scotland just because we aren't allowing them to do the actual production here (they only located in East Kilbride because the government told them to in the first place).

Did they get this interview on just because their lack of balance was being pointed out. Perhaps.

Then this morning's phone in was on the same subject. Guests were Green MSP Robin Harper & radio presenter Johnny Ball. Harper stated that, for the cost of letting EDF build this we could pay for enough home insulation to save more electricity than EDF will produce. Since we are paying absolutely nothing to subsidise them this seems improbable.

The phoners seemed balanced between sensible & sane which is a step in the right direction though there was one particularly silly woman who said that her husband wasn't as fit as he had been years ago & that she ought thus to get compensation from owners of the nearby Hunterson. I called & said that the French were producing electricity at 1.3p a unit & disputed Garry's remarks about it being unsafe, pointing out that we have had 2 deaths worldwide from nuclear over 20 years compared to 150,000 annually from coal. Basically everybody was going through the old arguments with the old lack of any evidence being as unimportant as ever.

Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Palin
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Palin

Washington's not building ships or boats
Some are building monuments, others printing $ notes
Everybody's in despair, every girl and boy
But when Sarah the Eskimo gets there
Everybody's gonna jump for joy

Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like Sarah Palin

I like to go just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet
But jumping queues and makin' haste, just ain't my cup of meat
Everyone's bullied, feeding lobbyists from the public trough
But when Sarah the Eskimo gets here
All the the lobbyists will have to ---- off

Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Palin
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like the mighty Palin

Let me do what I wanna do, I can't decide 'em all
Just tell me where to put 'em and I'll tell you who to call
Nobody can get no sleep, there's someone on everyone's toes
But when Sarah the Eskimo gets here
Ameica ain't gonna doze

Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like Sarah Palin
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like Sarah Palin
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like Sarah Palin
Come all without, come all within
You'll not see nothing like Sarah Palin


With respects to Bob Dylan & Manfred Mann

This is an ongoing project to name at least 30 big engineering projects (using the term in a wide sense) which we could now, or in the reasonably foreseeable future, undertake & which would materially add to human choice.

Many of them would not be permitted or would be made prohibitively expensive because of their "environmental" or other effects or because government would get in the way in other ways. I am going to deal with that problem by ignoring it. I will treat them as if it doesn't matter if there are a few less rare weeds, even though, to a second approximation it sometimes does a bit.

This is inspired by a lecture to be given by Professor Colin McInnes on to the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (22nd Oct 7.00 PM John Anderson Building, Strathclyde Uni). The guy is head of Space Dynamics there & the lectures is to be on "the means by which large-scale engineering ventures can offer a route to future prosperity"

I have previously done articles on:

1 - The Scottish Tunnel Project (cost £ a few hundred million)

2 - A major expansion of nuclear power. (£ 1 billion a year)

3 & 4 - Floating islands powered by ocean thermal (OTEC) devices &
using them to produce oil from algae ((£1 billion + each)

5 - Ascension Island as a conventional global spaceport (couple of hundred million £s)

6 - An orbital spacecraft ($1 billion max)

7 - Set up an X-Prize Foundation with guaranteed funding rising at the rate of gross profit of companies registering as contenders for prizes plus 2% pa but to a maximum of 20% a year, any excess being rolled over for future years. 80% minimum of money to go for space development X-Prizes. (start on anything from £100M to £1 billion annually)

8 - Establishing an orbital telephone system & giving free telephone coverage across Africa. (est £1 billion after you have cheap launch facilities)

There will be some crossover between these articles & my Showcase Technology for Scotland though they were selected for being easily affordable under Scotland's budget whereas this lot are easily affordable by a world that will spend $1 trillion on invading Iraq, $800 billion on refunding stupid bankers, £405 billion on EU regulations annually & £150 million annually on the Kyoto Treaty & $50 billion in false breast implant suits.

The Andrew Marr Show this morning was devoted to an interview with Gordon. Now I rather like him. I think he is head & shoulders above anybody else in cabinet & that he really believes in things unlike Blair & so many other politicians (Clinton, Miliband, Salmond, Obama, Cameron, Sheriden) who would make a good living selling snake oil. It may also be that we are both, by upbringing, dour Scots Presbyterians but I like him for most of the things that make him unpopular. (The same may be true in reverse about Thatcher - that here middle England shopkeeper persona just did not work in Scotland)

As an interview it was solid & unexciting which is OK for him. However he only gave to factual commitments & both are profoundly wrong.

1) He said that what the world financial community needs is more regulation, enforced internationally & he is just the guy to get world leaders to do it - No we absolutely don't. I have doubts if under regulation is the problem at all. Certainly there is reason to think that in the US diversity regulation played a major part in getting bankers to give mortgages to people who didn't have the resources but were part of an ethnic group very short of people with money. The normal assumption with statists is that if regulation didn't work the solution is more regulation, whereas logically it is more likely that it would be better to have less.

In any case world regulations would be worse. Once in place any damage would be worldwide, which would make the present crash look gentle & thus there would be no other example to compare with to see what worked. It would be an excuse for even more bureaucracy & open the door to enforcement of whatever ideas are politically correct at the moment (global warming, peak oil, "fair trade", localism, free migration, serfdom, the impropriety of interest are all ideas which have been, at different times, politically supported). Whatever the idea somebody will want power to enforce it.

2) He said that not only should our government not cut back on spending but should increase it & went on about free childminding services, implicitly increasing public borrowing because he mentioned no tax rises - No. The government is already spending to much & it is seriously cutting our growth rate & thereby destroying our possible future. Free child care for all would be lovely & so would Christmas every weekend but it is not affordable. I don't know much about child minding but I strongly suspect that it is becoming so expensive that many mothers cannot afford to work precisely because it is already so regulated. Certainly government getting further involved is not going to reduce the cost.

Finally he said how keen he was for people to email him with their thoughts, that he was eager to talk to the public & all such would get a reply. Well Gordon here is one I made last May. I'm sure I will get a reply soon:

"The news is not good. Your party's popularity is dropping like a stone. This is almost entirely due to the fact that the economy, the bedrock on which your reputation was built, is visibly crumbling (we are almost out of Iraq & the personal qualities for which you are now being blamed are the same ones which were previously praised in comparison to the aptitude for spin of your predecessor). Oh well, politics is not a fair game & if you are being overly blamed as PM now you were overly praised as Chancellor for inheriting a strong & competitive economy with relatively low government spending which is now less competitive with higher government spending & inflationary pressure. Also you have been given a remarkably easy ride by the other parties who, when you point out that our economy is outperforming that of the old EU counties & Japan fail to counter that it is growing at only about 1/4 the rate of the BRIC counties (Brazil, Russia, India, China & those taking their example).

However may I draw your attention to a proven successful option for a government deep in economic trouble. In 1989 Ireland had very similar problems - stagnation, high government spending & upward inflation. The solved it by the revolutionary tactic of applying the classic liberalism of Adam Smith (& once of the Liberal Party), a gentleman of whom you have spoken favourably.

In 1989 they cut corporation tax, regulations, particularly the regulations preventing housebuilding, & government bureaucrats. By 1990 they were growing at 6% allowing them to cut CT further to its present 12.5% & push growth up to a maximum of 10.5%

All of these options are open, indeed much easier, for you. The relationship between CT & growth is even more clearly established now, you are already under pressure from Northern Ireland & Scotland to match Irish CT rates there (indeed the SNP's promise to work for that played a significant part in their success last year). The housing shortage & hence high prices, are even more egregious here than they were in Ireland & you have already sponsored the Barker Report which made the novel, for UK politics, discovery that the only way to solve the shortage of housing was to allow people to build more. Granted a house price fall would cause significant problems for many bankers but it would certainly be good for ordinary people who want to be able to afford somewhere to live & I do not think the prime duty of government is to ensure bankers continue to enjoy the standard of living they have become accustomed to. This is particularly so since all companies offering mortgages have know for decades that the above inflation rise inn house prices has nothing to do with the manufacturing cost & is entirely the monopolistic cost produced by the "planning" system.

I suggest that you cut Corporation Tax immediately by 5%, which would cost about 9 billion, with a promise to do the same in each succeeding year to bring it down to 10% and the same with business rates. This could be paid for by the elimination of the most destructive quangos, putting Jonathan Porrit off the public payroll & cutting the windmill subsidies. Since you are already now committed, with belated Tory support, to more nuclear, windmill subsidies perform no useful purpose if they ever did

This would indeed be something close to a U-turn, taking the wind out of the Tory & LibDim sails. In one way you have an advantage over them. The Tories have pledged to maintain your public spending, whatever it is, if they come to power but you are under no such restriction.

If you did this you would undoubtedly suffer a year even worse than the present. However at the end of it you would have a country with about 6% growth, a large number of opposition predictions of disaster to throw back in their faces & a reputation as the man who kept his head when all about were losing their's & blaming it on you. At the end of the 2nd year you would have a massive surplus, caused by that growth, to distribute in tax cuts & then sail into the election."

European scientists and engineers are working on a potential new mission to bring back material from an asteroid. This, according to reports on the radio, is going to cost about E300 million.

Some years ago, back before I was expelled from the Liberal Democrats for having ideas, they put out a general call to members for some innovative idea to discuss at conference. I put in a motion for debate calling for Scotland to put up a £20 million prize for a probe to soft land on an asteroid (but not to return which partly explains the lower cost). The party's response was, I was told with perhaps some exaggeration, that the high heid yins of the LibDems rolled around the floor laughing at the impossibility. But then this was 2002 back before anybody as respectable as ESA was planning anything similar.

The £20 million I proposed is a lot less than ESA's £300 million but my proposal was just for a probe to go there which is a lot cheaper than making something big enough & complicated enough to bring something back. Also it wasn't being run by ESA which, on half NASA's budget, has yet to put a human into space.

Compare this with the Google Lunar X-Prize which has put up 20 million dollars for an independent probe which will take a vehicle to the Moon which can move around there & do serious scientific work. 12 teams have put in for this.

Looking at it that way I am convinced that there is much more chance of my proposal working than of ESA's doing so, within budget. A Scottish prize would, still, be a major spur to high technology in Scotland, at a price, if it worked, less than the amount paid by many quangos for consultant's reports & if it didn't for no cost at all, that being the nature of prizes.

Below is the wording of my proposed conference motion to demonstrate how forward looking post devolution Scotland & the LibDems could be. At the very least I have no doubt it would have attracted some press coverage & as can presently be seen, establish both country & party as being ahead of the curve. Oh well. The downside of offering prizes is, of course, that you don't have to pay out which is not very far down. You can see the argument in full on this link.

Conference calls on the Scottish Parliament to offer a prize of 20 million pounds to the first Scottish group to soft land a vehicle on an asteroid beyond the orbit of Mars by 2050

1) Recognise we are not in recession. We have had one quarter of zero growth not 2 quarters of negative growth. National wealth is therefore not declining it is merely bumping along.

2) Recognise that the thing that started all this talk about worldwide recession - the oil price rising to $145 - has ended. It has sunk to just over $90 & looks likely to fall further as the Americans allow themselves to drill. If anything this should lead to a boom.

3) Recognise that technology is improving all the time, that Moore's Law continues & that there is no technological reason why growth cannot continue.

4) That what we are seeing is the fallout from a bubble of house prices rising faster than the RPI or even people's incomes which, by definition, was going to stop sometime. This bubble was caused by government regulation which prevented the building of new houses to meet demand & hence much of the financial industry plus estate agents & conventional builders were a house of cards built on a foundation established by regulatory fiat.

5) This means we should expect a healthy economy to involve a considerable shrinkage in the financial industry (& in estate agencies which nobody cares about because they don't have the power to knock the pillars out from under the rest of us).

6) Government should not try to save the banks but should try to make sure that essential services of storing & moving customer's money about continue. Government has no duty to help shareholders & little to help employees. Thus takeovers or even purchases in bankruptcy are not to be prevented & may well shake the bad debts out of the system, but government should provide funds to continue trading in administration (or almost in administration). Government taking on bad debt wholesale, as the US seems to be doing, runs the risk of spreading the bad debt throughout the healthy & productive economy.

7) What is really needed is for investors to believe that their investments can be safe & preferably profitable. For that government should demonstrate that it will support investment in the area where it should be most effectively used - capital in productive industries.

9) Therefore cut corporation taxes. Probably only a token cut is currently feasible but make a firm promise that the rate will be further cut if growth takes place & the Laffer curve works so that the total tax take from such tax will not be allowed to rise.

10) Cut the outrageous morass of regulations that increase expenses (the Forth Bridge costing 13 times what the last one did) & make new sorts of ventures (such as GM) effectively impossible.

11) Energy. We are heading for blackouts & already have some of the world's most expensive electricity. Ultimately without electricity we do not have industry & it doesn't matter how effectively the financial services industry makes everybody rich by selling pieces of paper to each other, without stuff being produced we have no wealth

Previously I have said that all that is required is to allow builders of nuclear power stations to build & we will have unlimited energy & all get rich. I now think, to re-establish confidence it would be better for the government to sweep away almost all of the regulations & to hire the builders. Introduce immediate licencing of French & Canadian reactor designs & licence current & previous sites as being suitable for reactor building.

British nuclear is already, in practice, nationalised. Formalise it & set it up as a public company with a remit to start 6gw of new capacity each year (12 in the first year) which should take 4 years to complete. This would increase our capacity by 10% annually. Most current reactors are about 1gw but if 4 new 1.5 gw ones were started each year, using off the shelf designs & mass production method it would produce considerably cheaper electricity than even France's 1.3p a unit.

I have discussed this before. Assume each reactor costs about £1 billion which is actually higher than some & takes no account of the long production runs (mind you it also takes no account of having to pay nuclear engineers who we drove out of the country years ago, enough to come back - perhaps as much as a merchant banker). Half can be paid from the decommissioning fund by not disassembling old reactors at current sites but merely leaving them for 50 years till they were safe & a quarter by selling 10% of the shares &/or borrowing against future electricity. Having 10% in private hands & putting day to day management in their hands should keep it free of political action. This would therefore cost the Exchequer about 4 x 1/4 x £1 billion annually which is much less than we now waste on windmills.



We have had years of the political elite telling us we must make do without growth & introducing ridiculous, usually "environmental", regulations to enforce it. Well that is what we have got & it looks like nobody actually likes it. We can & should try the opposite.

On Newsnight Scotland last night there was pretty much agreement that the short selling of HBoS stock had been on a pretty small scale. That there had been no massive flight by shareholders.

Basically if there are very few sellers but equally few buyers a small sale sets the price. This means that the selling which let Lloyds TSB take over a £280 billion company may have been triggered by sales amounting to only a few million. This was the 3rd such instance. There was a selling panic a year ago, another 4 months ago in the middle of a rights issue.

In 1986 Ernest Saunders, the CEO of Guinness arranged for Ivan Boesky to spend £100 million to ramp up the price of Guinness shares artificially so that it could take over United Distillers by paying for it in artificially inflated Guinness shares. Though Saunders was jailed for this & according to his Harley Street doctor, began suffering from senile dementia - which led to his release, following which he became the first person ever to recover from this condition - Guinness did not lose the fruits of his fraud & indeed it is difficult to see how such a merger could be corrected in a manner just to everybody.

I hope there will be a serious enquiry into who did this short selling & why. Anybody who sold shares (even if they didn't have them, which is how short selling works) at below the price Lloyd's are offering for them has made a very large loss & would be expected to be in trouble if the purpose of the sale was purely to gamble on the price falling further. assuming it wasn't a fraudulent attempt to fix the price they are likely to lose their jobs. If it was I would like to think they will lose their liberty. Here's hoping.

In the longer term an industry where mergers are more important than start ups is one in decline. If most of the business of UK banks is in selling & moving around mortgages then a substantial decline may be both inevitable & desirable. We know that houses prices could be a quarter of what they now are. If so people would not have to spend their lives in thrall to the "financial services industry". The "post industrial society" beloved by those in power where everybody is getting rich selling pieces of paper to each other has reached the end of its road bit we are perfectly capable to doing the sort of high technology manufacturing the world needs - if only those in power would let us.

We have to start making things.....Americans have got to understand that moving money around in circles is not actually production; that most "services" in the service economy aren't actually need or producing much -- did we need 100,000 sales agents for high risk mortgages that put illegal immigrants into $400,000 houses on interest only loans? Sure there are real service jobs, like mechanics and plumbers, who take things that don't work and make things that do work, but that's not the same as selling bad mortgages to people who shouldn't be borrowing money in the first place.

Remember when we were heading into a long term recession because "the era of cheap oil is over" & because of peak oil we are heading for $200 a barrel. Seems like only a couple of months ago. This was the primary cause for the economic collapse we are undergoing. Well:

Light, sweet crude for October delivery fell $4.56 to settle at $91.15 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, after earlier dipping to $90.51, its lowest level since Feb. 8. On Monday, prices closed below $100 for the first time in six months, shedding more than $5 and wiping out all of oil's gains for the year.

The reason. Well as Julian Simon proved in his bet with Paul Ehrlich commodity prices are in a long term reduction in terms of human labour & indeed always have been. As technology improves commodities get easier to obtain & become a lesser part of the cost of things. There are, occasionally eddies in this flow & a certain amount of deliberate damming up but the trend is clear.

We were promised that peak oil had now been reached or passed. Well see how much oil has been knocked out of the woodwork by this scare. The oil whose production had "peaked" is now rising fast as new drilling is allowed & Canadian tar sands come on line. Since the $ has fallen about 60% against other currencies this $91 is the equivalent of about $55 in terms of the $30 oil a decade ago & since the world economy has grown 5% a year in that period world average incomes have gone up 60%. Thus oil, in man-hours, is almost back where it started & still falling. Since the Israelis say they can make oil from shale at $17 a barrel & the use of GM algae to produce it hasn't got beyond the laboratory stage but has unlimited promise, we may expect further falls.



Which proves our credit crunch/recession is purely caused by the financial shenanigans we have been engaging to maintain both prosperity & the Luddite opposition to any technological progress the western world, but not the eastern, has been engaged in.

Stop playing around with printing pieces of paper & allow entrepreneurs & engineers the freedom to invest & create wealth. If the bloody politicians, other eco-fascist parasites who, a couple of months ago were saying we had reached peak oil & other fabricated scare stories would just get out of the way we would all have a fast rising standard of living.

This is an article on how the Ossetian war was actually fought. I have highlighted a few bits & comments in italics. That virtually none of this has appeared in our MSM shows how poorly informed we are.

The conflict began some time after midnight on August 8. The Georgians claim that they crossed into South Ossetia in response to an Ossetian attack; even if this had been the case, then the massed Georgian forces had been waiting for just such an opportunity - given their carefully prepared plans (see below).

The precise sequence of events here diverges based on whom one asks; the Georgians maintain that they first attempted to rush Tskhinvali with a column of troops and tanks, while the Ossetians suggest that the artillery and rocket barrage hit the town first. Notably, the Georgian artillery was already in position to open fire on Tskhinvali at the first sign of resistance before the conflict began, and so the Ossetian version rings truer. Regardless, it is indisputable that in the dawn hours of August 8, parts of Tskhinvali were pounded by Georgian artillery and rocket launchers deployed on the heights east, south, and west of the town, while a large group of Georgians smashed their way in along the southern road. Simultaneously, at least one or two reinforced battalions of the Georgians...attempted to cut the Tskhinvali-Rok Tunnel road some 10-20 kilometers north of the town itself. Other Georgian forces fanned out to attack Ossetian villages around Tskhinvali.

Georgia's plan was, per maps and documents that were later captured by the advancing Russians, to capture Tskhinvali within the first 5-6 hours of the conflict (another reason for why I would think the artillery barrage preceded the column that went into the town, since theoretically that makes more sense than calling in massed artillery bombardments after you're already enmeshed in street battles), establish a firm roadblock north of the town, use the daylight hours of August 8 to rush through most of the remaining Ossetian territory, and present the presumably stunned and bamboozled Russians not only with a fait accompli but also with the daunting proposition of having to smash their way into South Ossetia through a blocked-off choke-point under fire from tanks and artillery. At which point, too, they would be under untold political pressure from the U.S. to keep their paws off the "Democratic (capital D) Republic of Georgia".

It was, for lack of a better description, a stunningly brilliant plan. With only a few minor problems.

Problem 1. The Ossetians themselves.

It should be noted at this point that the Ossetians as a whole are a very proud people. Martially so, as well. It is said that during World War 2, the Ossetians earned the distinction of having the highest number of Heroes of the Soviet Union per capita, out of all of the USSR's 100 plus nationalities, including the Russians themselves. [The "Hero of the Soviet Union" is the rough equivalent of the Victoria Cross or the Congressional Medal of Honor - with potentially half or more of the awards being made posthumously.] In my opinion this alone justifies Russia's action. Nations which are either honourable or intelligent will go through hell to stand by those who fought at their side, as we so abjectly failed to in Yugoslavia.

Somehow or another, it turned out that virtually all of Ossetia's armored vehicles were in "parade" mode, i.e. not battle-ready. Clear proof that neither they nor the Russians were planning war. ... This left roughly 3,000 light infantry with some marginal artillery and helicopter support. Still, this 3,000 would fight, most likely to the death, which was something the Georgian planners ought to have considered before tasking roughly two combat brigades with securing (securing!!) an area of nearly 4,000 square kilometers in under 18 hours. Even without any resistance (and believe you me, the Osseti population would most definitely attempt to resist, given the ethnic component of the conflict), this would probably have been a somewhat strenuous task, in particular given the limitations of having to move reinforcements and supplies into the region via a single not-very-wide roadway, to say nothing of Ossetia's hilly and less-than-tank-friendly terrain.

Problem 2. The plan's sheer brilliance.

Let's see. Time is of the essence. Speed is of the utmost importance. So let's send the main thrust of our attack straight into the enemy's main city....We're going to send our main column into an urban battle, granted, inside a town of 20,000 rather than a large city like Stalingrad. Still, narrow streets are bottlenecks and deathtraps to armored vehicles no matter what the scale.
Absolutely brilliant.

Problem 2.5 - the brilliance continues.

On top of everything said above, the Georgians also had to devise a way of dealing with the 500 Russian peacekeepers deployed in South Ossetia. So what did they decide? Bypass and isolate? No no - surround and assault! Presumably hoping that only a portion of a single combat brigade would suffice to overrun a full battalion of albeit lightly-armed (assault rifles, machine-guns, a few RPGs, a couple of BMP IFVs) peacekeepers while the rest of the force could proceed to subjugate South Ossetia while sticking to the Brilliant Master Plan's schedule.

Problem 3.

....Any delay in the Grand Plan of Ossetian Subjugation meant that the Russians could (and did) race down the road from the Rok Tunnel and turn a would-be "fait accompli" into an actual slugfest. See Problems 1 and 2 above for potential sources of said delays.

Problem 4.

Apparently this whole concept of the Russian 4th Air Army was not even remotely considered.

Problem 5.

Ah. Problem number five. You see, the Georgians clearly had assumed that their brave troops, trained by equally brave Western advisers (the U.S., Britain, Turkey - the Ukraine, even - all pitched in to one degree or another), as well as their brave officers, would actually conduct themselves with a modicum of tactical skill.

....We return to the action of August 8-9.

As mentioned previously, one way or another the Georgians barged their way into Tskhinvali while pounding the city from the heights above. Meanwhile, a second column lunged to cut the road north of Tskhinvali to the Rok Tunnel.

The Ossetians were not idiots. They expected pretty much this exact turn of events. Roughly 300 "kamikaze" light infantry remained in Tskhinvali itself, their job to keep the Georgian main column busy for as long as possible. Meanwhile, virtually every other man under arms and every functioning piece of equipment was thrown at the smaller Georgian force attempting to cut the road to the Rok Tunnel.

By midday on August 8 (or thereabouts), this smaller Georgian force (quite likely outnumbered by the Ossetians attacking it, though certainly not outgunned) was pushed back away from the north road, though the Georgians could still subject portions of it to artillery and sniper fire. In Tskhinvali, the 300 "Spartans" fought a vicious battle as the Georgians barged their way into town, nearly reaching its center before becoming bogged down in street combat. At least some of the Georgian tanks became separated from their supporting infantry, with three being destroyed in the first hours of the fighting. The total Georgian force - estimated at 3,500-4,000 men - milled about largely in the southern half of the town while artillery pounded the northern side.

The Russian peacekeepers around Tskhinvali also proved a tough nut to crack; most of the battalion's buildings and vehicles were destroyed quite quickly, however a good three quarters of the troops remained combat capable and putting up whatever resistance were possible in the face of tank and self-propelled artillery fire over open sights. Still, the battalion CO gave the order to destroy all documents and radios, clearly expecting to be overrun sooner rather than later.

In the air, the Georgians sent the occasional SU-25 flight to drop bombs on Tskhinvali or the surrounding villages. The Ossetians' one military airfield, however, remained largely unmolested, Idiots and their helicopters began raiding Georgian reinforcement columns. Thus, by some time in the afternoon on August 8, a column of 3 Georgian tanks and 8 APCs or IFVs was completely destroyed from the air as it approached the Georgian group in Tskhinvali. Field reports at this juncture indicate that the Georgians aren't following basic "air security" procedures; their vehicle columns are streaming forward with no AA protection of any kind, while their artillery and MRLS crews are piling stacks of shells and rockets right next to the guns and launchers themselves, such that one cannon burst in the general direction of the firing position was usually enough to completely obliterate the gun or launcher and its crew. At the same time, reports also surfaced that the 300 "Spartans" in Tskhinvali managed to somehow trap a chunk of the Georgian force in the town, and had even captured a few of their BMPs and one Humvee (suggesting that the Georgian soldiers had fled rather than put up a fight against an outnumbered and outgunned enemy). The announcement of a captured Hummer drives the Russian general public (as represented by Internet postings of all shapes and sizes) even more up a wall than it had already been. Of course, the "Spartans" are pretty jumpy - the 3 UH-1s beloging to the Ossetians seem to all be shot down by friendly fire from the captured BMPs (who, in turn, had thought that these were Georgian attack helos making a run).

By around 1400-1500 hours local time, the Russian 19th Motor Rifle Division - mobilized that morning - begins to rush through the Rok Tunnel and south towards Tskhinvali. The delay took place partly because it took until morning to determine that this was a full-scale Georgian attack rather than just an especially powerful raid - and because the UN meetings called at Russia's behest could not meet much earlier. By this time, of course, Russian television channels were broadcasting full-on images of frightened Ossetian civilians fleeing the area or digging themselves out from under the rubble of Tskhinvali, crying into the camera about lost loved ones and begging for help. How I love effective TV blitzes...And how I love the fact that our media can be trusted not to let us see pictures which were clearly available to them

At any rate, by late afternoon on August 8, the Russians engaged the Georgians, first linking up with the Ossetian troops on the northern road and detaching a force to contain the smaller Georgian column, and then pushing into the northern outskirts of Tskhinvali itself. Meanwhile, Russian aircraft and helicopters - plus artillery detachments - began counterbattery fire against the heights around Tskhinvali, although this was not extremely successful.

By midday on August 9, the situation in South Ossetia had changed dramatically. Russian and Ossetian troops surrounded and began to reduce the Georgian pocket in the north, as well as a portion of the Georgian troops in Tskhinvali proper. Meanwhile, the first Russian reinforcements reached the peacekeeper battalion further south, and Russian artillery and aircraft continued to pound the heights around the city. Georgian reinforcement columns were also vigorously attacked.

The Georgian troops from the main column - those who had not been trapped in Tskhinvali, at least - began their retreat almost as soon as they saw the Russians entering the town. Certainly some detachments stood and fought, but the majority went back to their "second line" positions to regroup. During the night, the artillery duel continued, and by the morning of August 9 several Georgian tank and infantry attacks had been launched to reach both the trapped Georgian detachments (the one in Tskhinvali and the one alongside the road north); these proved unsuccessful, with the Georgians losing 12 tanks in one attack on Tskhinvali proper. The Georgian government began to move reserves into position, although reports indicate that by this time, the bulk of these were "reservists" who did not have much fight in them. Some ethnic Georgians also began to flee South Ossetia, fearful of reprisals (justifiably so). All throughout, detachments of Georgian troops that had fanned out to the villages on either side of Tskhinvali continued to raze them to the ground with tanks and artillery; mass executions of the civilian populations were reported but not independently confirmed.

August 10-11.

On August 10, the main Russian forces were still semi-stuck around Tskhinvali, trying to push the Georgians off the heights while reducing the pockets of resistance in the town proper. The Ossetian troops by now were largely moved to help with securing Tskhinvali and with escorting refugees out of the city and the surrounding areas. In addition to the 19th Motor Rifle Division, several Paratrooper detachments (from the 58th Air Assault Division, I believe) were arriving by aircraft while Russian marines landed in Abkhazia, ostensibly to support the Russian peacekeepers there. Other 58th Army units were also streaming into the area, as were the two Chechen battalions (whose arrival was a welcome surprise some time around the morning of August 10) Certainly a surprise if you believe what we are told about the Chechens being held in Russia by force. The Chechen battalions quickly managed to capture enough Georgian BMPs to ferry themselves about and launched an attack towards Gori, which ran into a massive Georgian ambush that caused few casualties but took most of the day to resolve.

By this juncture, the 4th Air Army had had enough and began to bomb and strafe airfields in Georgia proper while also patrolling the skies with Su-27 fighters. Reports of solitary Georgian Su-25 aircraft ineffectually strafing Ossetian and Russian positions continued through August 11, however these may have been able to sneak in "through" the overall aircraft traffic in the region (given that both sides were relying primarily on Su-25s for ground attack mission at this point, not entirely surprising); it is at this juncture that the Russians discover, to their considerable displeasure, that the Georgians are fielding next-generation SA-11 SAMs (one of which brought down a Tu-22 bomber flying a reconnaissance mission, although the crew was, apparently, extricated one way or another). These are presumably hunted down and suppressed over the next couple of days, together with their (presumably Ukrainian - because the Georgian army simply did not have any qualified or "trained-up" personnel to use these systems) crews, as well as any other air defenses in the region, but the Russians still lose about a half-dozen birds in the process. Nevertheless, massive strafing of Georgian reinforcements continues.

....By August 11, the Georgian army in South Ossetia is completely and thoroughly routed; its artillery and heavy equipment blown away or abandoned, its troops suffering massive casualties from air and artillery attacks. The pockets in Tskhinvali and along the northern road pretty much cease all resistance, though to date there is no word on prisoners. The Georgians' two combat brigades thrown into the assault at the start effectively cease to exist, while the remaining army and reservists - those who were back in Georgia or had managed to escape to Gori - continue fleeing. The remaining Georgian regular army is pulled back to protect Tbilisi itself, while most Georgian military installations are being abandoned; the brigade that had been stationed in Iraq is being flown back in (reportedly in U.S. transport aircraft), however it, too, is positioned primarily to defend Tbilisi against a Russian strike.

Meanwhile, the Russians continue to push south, as do the Abkhazi. The latter clear out the Georgian defenses (and 11 villages) on the southern side of the Kodori Gorge and dig in against any counter-assault. The Russians launch a full-scale air and sea bombardment of just about any military structure or facility in Georgia - the port facilities of Poti are damaged (though not Batumi - which is a city not of ethnic Georgians but of a recently-"pacified" pro-Russian Adjari minority); Russian aircraft blow up the military depots in Gori (the secondary explosions from which damage the surrounding civilian buildings, which are then showcased in CNN and BBC reports on the subject of "Russian airstrikes against innocent civilians" I remember film of this ); Russian troops move towards Gori and Sugdidi. Georgians are leaving Tbilisi to the east, hoping to escape to a somewhat-more friendly Azerbaijan.

Conclusion of combat operations.

By August 11-12, it was only a matter of when a cease-fire would be signed, and on what terms. The terms, essentially, were dictated by the Russians. Militarily speaking, the Russians continued to bomb, shell and otherwise attack Georgian military infrastructure; moreover, Russian platoon- and company-sized detachments race towards now largely-abandoned Georgian military basis, e.g. the one in Gori, and proceed to methodically destroy or dismantle any piece of military or other equipment therein. This process was ongoing through at least August 14-15 if not later, prompting Western cries about "Russian occupation". Radar installations, ammunition depots, armored vehicles - everything was and is being either destroyed or "appropriated for the benefit of the Russian state", while the Georgian military is reduced to a collection of regulars and reservists, largely in the form of light infantry with few remaining vehicles. The Georgian Navy and Air Force, such as they are, have apparently ceased to exist by this juncture. While there is no word on Georgian military or civilian casualties, at least the former can be estimated at upwards of several thousand. Russian losses through August 11-12 are comprised of 70-75 KIA, 19 MIA, and roughly 190-200 WIA; these totals include 15 KIA and more than 100 WIA from the Georgian initial atack on the peacekeeper battalion. Russian tank and equipment losses are less well-known, but are probably in single digits in all categories; those of the Georgians are probably pushing 75%-100% of all units of a given type.

.....The 4th Air Army, in fact, underperformed, given that, at least on paper, it should have shut down all Georgian air traffic on the first day of fighting, not on the third or thereabouts. Although here one does not know precisely when the rules of engagement were revised to allow it to strike into Georgia proper evidence the Russians were endangering themselves minimise the fighting

....The Russians did quite well, given the logistical constraints (e.g. one road leading into the region). STRATFOR, in fact, came out with a report where it professed amazement at the rapidity and extreme effectiveness of the Russian counter-assault.

....Throwing everything you have, effectively, on a gamble like this, bespeaks strategic foolishness of the extreme kind. Especially if your closest friend and ally (represented by Condi Rice) told you, to your face, to step off about three weeks before you got started. The one point in the US favour. I had found it impossible to believe our MSM when they said the Americans weren't behind this, particulalry when Putin popped up with a US passport found among Georgian baggage. I find this article more credible than all our MSM put together....The Americans, on the other hand, were far too surprised to make me congratulate them. They clearly seemed to be in shock to see the Georgians actually launch the operation; and were in an even greater shock at the Russian response. Somebody at the State Department - or the CIA, or the Pentagon, or all of the above - seems to be operating under the assumption that this is still the 1990s

The BBC have had as their #1 story in Scotland today that there are 7 radioactive hotspots at Dalgety Bay.

Local people are worried Dalgety Bay may now be placed on a new register for radioactively contaminated land.

It follows previous monitoring over a number of years which found dozens of hotspots, thought to be the legacy of luminous dials from wartime aircraft.

Radioactive radium in the dials was thought to have been incinerated and used when the foreshore was reclaimed

I have written on this previously & have seen nothing to change my initial belief that this is natural background radiation. As normal the reporting gives no figures of the extent of the radiation, though, if it can be blamed on numbers painted on dials 60 years ago it cannot be much. Clearly it is not remotely comparable to the natural radiation on Guarapari beach which causes no problem. Something that reinforces my belief is that the radio reporting said that 7 contaminated areas ranged in size from a grain of sand to a small rock, neither of which sound like a paint particle.

They also reported the same at Aberdeen beach some time ago. A fertiliser manufacturer in the 1960s & 70s got the blame for that one.

Basically just another example of the BBC playing up a non-story to promote fear & their Luddite cause.

And by comparison this is a link to a story from Russia Today during the Republican Convention. They played up the nearby Ron Paul Convention which was wholly missing from BBC reporting. Estimable though Mr Paul's position may be it clearly does not compare with the official Convention & the Russians should not have given it as much coverage. Nor is it wholly unimportant since he did get a significant vote & the BBC were wrong to ignore it. Neither Russia today nor the BBC actually said anything untrue but gave completely different impressions, which is how it is done. If we must have bias I much prefer the Russian media bias in favour of libertarianism to the BBC bias in favour of fabricted scares & ever more state regulation.

Milton Friedman

Tavish Scott the new Scottish LibDem leader has broken one of the taboos in Scottish politics. He has said that it is desirable to use our right under the Scotland Act to cut income tax.

"We should use the Scottish Parliament's power to cut income tax by two pence in the pound."

He should be commended for this complete reversal of party policy. The Conservatives must, quite deservedly, be feeling sick as a flock of parrots for not saying this first. We can be certain that he has not done this without checking with some focus groups that the public want it.

As somebody expelled from the Lib Dems for supporting lower taxes on the grounds that this was "illiberal" & "too right wing" to even be discussed I am pleased to see that eternal liberal principles have changed in the intervening 2 years.

As leader of the 9% Growth Party, the only party to have campaigned in last year's election for cutting Scottish income tax I am pleased to see that Mr Scott is now a follower of ours. In the same way while we were the only party to campaign for new nuclear power, the Labour & Conservative parties have now followed us on that. To round it off, since we supported X-Prizes for space development, the SNP have offered one for a sea turbine & subsequently,& quite possibly consequently, John McCain offered one for an improved battery.

Nonetheless I cannot fully endorse Mr Scott's about face for 3 reasons.

1) He has made no specific proposal as to how it should be paid for. We said that a 3p cut should be paid for out of the £1 billion a year of pointless windmill subsidies.

2) 2p is a very silly figure to choose. There is a fixed cost in changing the rate which is about equivalent to 1p income tax. Therefore it makes financial sense to go for a 3p cut or nothing. 2p is falling between 2 stools.

3) We have been quite clear that the first priority is encouraging growth & that the way to do that is, as the Irish did, by cuts in corporation tax & rates which should be the priority. Desirable though income tax cuts are it is obvious that a one time only 2p in the £1 cut will provide only a fraction as much to ordinary people as Ireland's 7% growth (let alone the 9% we are committed to), year on year.

Mr Scott is to be commended for making a single belated, half hearted, cynical about turn somewhat in the direction of economic sanity. Let us hope that, though he has been the first to break ranks on this issue, He will not be the last..

"I am favour of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible." to quote Milton Friedman. It may be the wrong tax to cut & by a silly amount but it is to be welcomed.

Our party may be small in votes & members but almost everybody in Scottish politics is now among our followers, which is a good start.

From an interesting article on V-Dare which I am quoting because it gives a reference to a named individual who makes a pretty serious allegation against our beloved leaders:

Back during the Nixon years my Phd dissertation chairman Warren Nutter, was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. One day in his Pentagon office I asked him how the US government got foreign governments to do what the US wanted. "Money," he replied.

"You mean foreign aid?" I asked.

"No," he replied, "we just buy the leaders with money."

It wasn't a policy he had implemented. He inherited it and, although the policy rankled with him, he could do nothing about it. Nutter believed in persuasion and that if you could not persuade people, you did not have a policy.

Nutter did not mean merely third world potentates were bought. He meant the leaders of England, France, Germany, Italy, all the allies everywhere were bought and paid for.

They were allies because they were paid. Consider Tony Blair. Blair's own head of British intelligence told him that the Americans were fabricating the evidence to justify their already planned attack on Iraq. This was fine with Blair, and you can see why with his multi- million dollar payoff once he was out of office.

The American-educated thug, Saakashkvili the War Criminal, who is president of Georgia, was installed by the US taxpayer funded National Endowment for Democracy, a neocon operation whose purpose is to ring Russia with US military bases, so that America can exert hegemony over Russia

It is not deniable that genocidal child rapist & war criminal Bliar is becoming very rich indeed & the suggestion that he resigned his seat largely to get off the register of MPs interests certainly fits the facts.

This corruption also goes round in circles. Saakashkvili may be paid by the US government but it recently turned out that McCain was being paid by Saakashvilli. At the last US election it turned out Gore was getting funded by a wealthy KLA supporting Albanian with no visible means of support. The KLA were & are, in turn, financially supported by the western powers. Friends of the Earth, Ash & presumably many other lobby groups are funded by government. The Yugoslav, Ukrainian & Georgian governing parties are. The US ambassador to Belarus (previously US official in Nicaragua) once boasted he was funding 300pro-democracy groups. The role of Saudis in funding almost everybody from Mark Thatcher to Osama bin Laden is well known & little discussed, as are the bribes we give to the Saudis. Clinton got into trouble for taking money from the Chinese.

And so it goes. Embezzling public money for yourself would be highly improper but doing so to bribe foreigners is accepted & everybody is a foreigner to most of the world. After all there is no shortage of money in government & increasingly world "leaders" have far more in common with & far more empathy with each other than with for those they rule. And the media can be relied on to confine their reporting of such things to the likes of Milosevic, where the accusations were clearly untrue, after all they don't want off the gravy train either.

James Nansen was the principle defence witness here & he has put what he said here It runs to 14 pages & mostly consists of treating the Catastrophic Warming Theory as true rather than a theory with no actual supporting evidence. Beyond that there is a fair bit of being economical with the numbers, giving the impression of things without actually saying so. For example "Present rates of sea level rise and species extinction are already rapid compared to rates of change in recent millennia". Nobody knows what the rate of species extinction is because nobody knows how many there are & the rate of sea level rise may have as much as doubled from the 6" a century it has been for the last 10,000 years, or it may not since the margin of error is greater than the measurement. Since "rapid" is a subjective term it cannot be said without question that Hansen was lying on that.

On the other hand he said:

"....Sea level is now increasing at a rate of about 3 cm per decade or about
one-third of a meter per century..."

"....What has changed recently is the steady global warming, at a rate of about 0.2°C per decade" in fact it has declined since 1998 & is now back to where it was when Hansen first predicted 0.5 per decade 20 years ago

"business as usual [ie warming at this rate] would lead to a great increase of extinctions and the possibility of ecosystem collapse" there is no evidence whatsoever of this

"These summary facts were known by the UK government, by the utility EON, by the
fossil fuel industry, and by the defendants at the time of their actions in 2007:
(1) Tipping Points: the climate system is dangerously close to tipping points that could have disastrous consequences for young people, life and property, and general well-being on the planet" It is not "known" & it is not true. Temperatures are lower than in the Medieval warm period, in turn lower than the Late Roman warming, in turn lower than 5,000 BC. None of these had the promised "disastrous effects" though the Sahara was lush 5,000 years ago.


These are all lies told under oath in court. They are lies which could have been easily refuted had the "prosecution" made the attempt. A fair trial is only possible if the prosecution & defendant are on different sides. Somehow I doubt if the authorities will show the zeal in prosecuting perjury here as in the Tommy Sheriden case.

I believe the jury system is a vital defence of our freedom. Nonetheless no human institution is beyond being corrupted & we say that yesterday.

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a "lawful excuse" to damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent

.....During the eight-day trial, the world's leading climate scientist, Professor James Hansen of Nasa, who had flown from American to give evidence, appealed.....

.....He was one of several leading public figures who gave evidence for the defence, including Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond Park and director of the Ecologist magazine who similarly told the jury that in his opinion, direct action could be justified in the minds of many people if it was intended to prevent larger crimes being committed.

The acquittal was the second time in a decade that the "lawful excuse" defence has been successfully used by Greenpeace activists. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace campaigners led Lord Melchett, who was director at the time, were cleared of criminal damage after trashing an experimental field of GM crops in Norfolk. In each case the damage was not disputed – the point at issue was the motive.

Thus the jury were persuaded, again, to release thugs who had caused substantial damage to an innocent & law abiding organisation.

Well sorry the rule of law is not an optional extra. There are circumstances where the individual should be prepared to break the law but when it happens they must expect to face the consequences. If the state is complicit in crime then we live in a very unfree society & that is what has happened here.

There is an emotional but no moral difference between the blackshirts being allowed to attack Jewish shops or southern courts refusing to prosecute lynching & Greenpeace being given writ to attack those they do not like.

The fact that their global warming threat is demonstrably as untrue as the accusation that all Jews were in a worldwide conspiracy enhances the comparison.

James Hansen is a liar who besmirches the name of science. His initial predictions, which if the word of the BBC is in any way to be trusted, has been proven true, have actually been proven wrong. He has been caught faking temperature readings. His NASA appointment is a purely political one.

Zac Goldsmith is a pal of Dave Cameron & the heir of billionaire Sir Jams Goldsmith, who worked to make his money. He uses his money to fund his minuscule circulation Ecologist Magazine which, in turn, is the basis for his claim to expertise.

It seems clear that not only was the court mugged by these "great & good" fascists but that it put up no counter attack. An attempt could easily have been made to dispute the assertions of these liars, indeed on those few occasions when this has been done the result was victory for the sceptics.

As an absolute minimum the government must pay for the damage done (under the Riot Act I think they may well have a legal obligation to anyway.

And if the Conservatives wish to claim to be a party of law & conservative values, Zac Goldsmith must be expelled.

If this precedent is allowed to stand, that destroying property is OK because there is claimed to be a risk to future property from global warming then consider the case of those opposing nuclear power. It is accepted that something in the region of 24,000 pensioners die of fuel poverty annually. There is no doubt whatsoever that we could have power at under half the present price if we went for new nuclear. Thus anybody who explicitly or implicitly supports this result 7 who opposes new nuclear is endorsing the theory that anybody who wants to prevent pensioners dying of hypothermia is entitled to kill them. I suspect they would not be pleased to see what they practice being applied to them.

Lot of stuff in the news today about the new Cern collider. Mostly wrong. An interesting mixture in the media of a virtually religious awe without knowing exactly what to be awed about & criticism on 2 grounds.

1) That £5 billion is a lot of money. Well when divided across Europe (it comes to about £700 million for Britain which would be £60 million for the Scots) & dividing it up over 20 years (ie £3 million per annum for Scotland) it is not very much.

By comparison we gave up £6 million a year in fees from oil tankers on the spurious environmental grounds that they were likely to spill oil in the Firth of Forth. The EU regulatory system costs us £405 billion annually. In those terms it is small change.

2) That some scientists say it is going to create a black hole & destroy the world.

Also nonsense. If it were to create such a miniature black hole & there is no reason to suppose it will, it would instantly evaporate. Stephen Hawking proved this years ago but the catastrophe story is more newsworthy.

The "some scientists" are 2 who went to a Hawaiian court (!) to get it stopped. One is an engineer & the other has a biology degree & teaches “grade school to college”. There is also some German chemist. It shows how the media can & do literally search the world for somebody they can falsely describe as "independent astrophysicists" after their 15 minutes of fame. Unfortunately it is inevitable, human beings being what we are, that they will find somebody. This explains most of the scare stories that make up the media's "science journalism".

An worthwhile exception is this from Time:

From the flagellants of the Middle Ages to the doomsayers of Y2K, humanity has always been prone to good old-fashioned the-end-is-nigh hysteria. The latest cause for concern: that the earth will be destroyed and the galaxy gobbled up by an ever-increasing black hole next week.

.....German chemist at the Eberhard Karis University of Tubingen, filed a lawsuit against CERN with the European Court of Human Rights that argued, with no understatement, that such a scenario would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law. Last March, two American environmentalists filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Honolulu seeking to force the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. The lawsuits have in turn spawned several websites, chat rooms and petitions - and they have led to alarming headlines around the world (Britain's Sun newspaper on Sept. 1: "End of the World Due in 9 Days").

Should we be scared? No. In June, CERN published a safety report, reviewed by a group of external scientists, ruling out the possibility of dangerous black holes. It said that even if tiny black holes were to be formed at CERN - a big if - they would evaporate almost instantaneously due to Hawking Radiation, a phenomenon named for the British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose theories show that black holes not only swallow up the light, energy and matter around them, but also leak it all back out at an accelerating pace. According to Hawking, if tiny black holes occurred at CERN, they would evaporate before they got a chance to do any damage

......CERN spokesman James Gillies said that even if it is successful, the experiment will go ahead without U.S. participation.

"The U.S. court has no jurisdiction over our equipment...."

PS Mr Higgs, whose particle is being searched for, is Scottish. It will be interesting if the particle is found. Patriotism notwithstanding will be even more interesting if it isn't because that is how scientific progress is made - finding the theory is wrong & you need to improve it.

....blackouts are almost inevitable within the next few years.

This is the stark warning from the head of an energy think-tank who believes power cuts could be serious enough to spark civil disorder.

Campbell Dunford of the respected Renewable Energy Foundation said: "It's almost too late to do anything about it. Nothing will stop us having to pay very high prices for power in future.

"If we pull our finger out now we can limit blackouts but it's going to be pretty grim whatever happens."

Gordon Brown pledged last week to end Britain's reliance on the "dictatorship of oil" but Mr Dunford believes the Prime Minister's new interest in the security of energy supplies may have come too late.

Only last Thursday, National Grid issued an urgent call for power after a series of power station breakdowns. Suppliers were asked to bring all their available generating capacity online, including costly oil-fired stations.

In May, hundreds of thousands of people in Cleveland, Cheshire, Lincolnshire and London suffered blackouts when seven power stations were closed.
If even renewabilists are saying this then things must be pretty serious.

REF claims it is supported by private donation and has no political affiliation or corporate membership which, if so, makes it unusual among the government funded "environmental" movement.

If it is not part of the government funded mafia this may also explain why this announcement was only covered by the Express.

If even renewabilists are saying this then things must be pretty serious when normally we can expect any announcement from renewable lobbyists to be major news on the BBC, ITN & pretty much everywhere.

Everybody knows that it is easily possible to produce as much nuclear electricity as we could want at half the current price. They also know that 24,000 pensioners die annually because of fuel poverty. We have seen considerable friendly coverage of James Hansen's outburst that those who are "deniers" of global warming should be brought to trial for scepticism. Less coverage for Moobat's call for mob lynchings.

Perhaps we should be asking how long it will take for the members of the political parties, press & BBC & ITN who have lied continuously & deliberately in the eco-fascist cause & have thereby been responsible for the pointless but deliberate murder of 100s of thousands of pensioners to be brought to justice?

A Greek pensioner shouts slogans during an anti-government rally in Athens March 5, 2008. Parts of Greece suffered blackouts