A Place to Stand

Robin Pagnamenta, Energy and Environment Editor of the Times writes

British companies are being forced to pay over four times more for their electricity this winter than competitors in France and in excess of 70 per cent more than in Germany.

The discrepancy will increase concerns that Britain's crumbling power infrastructure is a growing threat to the country's competitiveness and comes as Ofgem today announces its report into competition in the energy market.

Wholesale power prices in the UK have soared because of a squeeze in generating capacity, which is expected to leave an unusually thin margin of spare supply next month.

On Friday, the forward price of power for November reached more than £130 per megawatt hour. In France, it was about €40 (£31) per megawatt hour, according to Spectron, a supplier of energy market data. In Germany, the price stood at around €97 per megawatt hour.

Jeremy Nicholson, of the Energy Intensive Users' Group, gave warning that some British companies could close this winter because they will not be able to pay such high prices.
Little more to say. This is simply because France produces its power 85% from nuclear & most of the rest from hydro. Perhaps I should apologise for previously saying that we could more than halve electricity prices by going nuclear thereby massively cutting the number of people in fuel poverty & the 24,000 pensioners a year who die of it. I had clearly underestimated the injury we impose with this eco-fascist nonsense.

Jerry Pournelle has also taken up yesterday's story about KLA organlegging. His comment in italics, mine bold

I thought you might be amused & should be proud that when I Googled for an image of "Kosovo organlegging" your imperial picture came 4th.

http://images.google.com/images?gbv=
2&hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=kosovo+
organlegging&btnG=Search+Images

This is because you posted an email I had sent you. An investigation driven by Serbs & Russians is going on & they have a witness who says that President Thaci whom we set up got 4 million marks personally from selling body organs. It is difficult to think of a descriptive term to cover the journalists & broadcasters who have decided that this is something we should not be allowed to hear about.
http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/
news/dcn100108.htm
Neil Craig

One expects to see a great deal more organlegging. I can even see naming someone a recipient for an organ as a condition of obtaining a loan...

The problem is coming up with a non-religiously based argument for forbidding it. Should not people be allowed to sell what is theirs? What good is my property if I cannot sell it? But if that be true of property, what about life and liberty?

Selling of Organs has been going on for years & apparently the Sarajevo papers classified are full of them. What we let the KLA/NATO Police do has not been voluntary.

This photo comes via Pete North's blog where if you wish to see what NATO stands for, or more likely if you feel you ought to, you can see far more. It seems apt that it illustrates not only today's earlier post but also the one on Monday comparing our government's environmental fascism with Orwell's book.

Interestingly when I googled "boot stamping on a human face" it wasn't shown though many less apt ones were.

UPDATE 23/10?8
Surprisingly a Google image search for "boot stamping on a human face" place to stand - stll doesn't even show this picture here although even more astonishingly that title does bring up my later article & infinitely lecc relevant article on draining the Solway Firth!

Inexplicable innit.

Bodies of Kosovo Serbs whose vital organs were extracted for sale were thrown into the shaft of a deserted mine “Deva” in Albania, on the border with Serbia, Press Online reports.

According to the Serbian media, remains of several hundred Kosovo Serbs whose organs were first taken out, and who are still listed as missing, were thrown into the mineshaft in northern Albania, on the border with Serbia.

Albanian KLA (UCK) terrorists have moved the remains of the killed Serbs to Deva Mine from the first mass grave they were buried in, near Djakovica. Serbian Office of the War Crimes Prosecutor has confirmed they have evidence at least one truck was used to transport some 70 bodies to northern Albania, where the remains of the victims were dumped into a deserted mineshaft.

War crimes prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told media he will soon go to Albania, where he is expected to meet with the Albanian state prosecutor regarding the investigation Serbia launched in March about the kidnappings of Serbs and other non-Albanians in Kosovo and Metohija province, and harvesting their organs for sale. Note this is admitted to be purely in response to the Serbian investigation. No attempt wahtsoever for the NATO funded "court" to actually prosecute the murderers on its own.

“We have learned by a mere coincidence that Deva Mine is most probably one of the biggest Serb graves in the region. Prosecutor Vukcevic and his team are going to Tirana at the start of October. We expect Albanians will enable us to verify all the information we have gathered during the investigation. It is very important that they allow us to visit all the locations suspected to have been used as concentration camps where Serbs kidnapped from Kosovo-Metohija were being held. Countless people were tortured in those camps, that is where their vital organs were being extracted for sale in the West, after which they were being killed and thrown into the mass graves. Some of those locations are in the region of Tropoje, Kukes, Bajram Curri and Deva Mine,” Serbia’s State Prosecution Office said.

Russian State Prosecution Launch Their Own Investigation

In the meantime, Russian Federation has also opened an investigation about the organ trade Albanian KLA was conducting in Serbian Kosovo province and neighboring Albania since, according to the reports, Russian women were also among the kidnapped victims used for organ harvesting by the KLA terrorists.

Russia’s Central Investigative Committee, a department of the Russian Federal Prosecution, had started verifying information gathered about the KLA kidnappings and murders of the Russian citizens in the period between 1999-2003. They are also verifying testimony by the Hague’s former chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte, about some 300 Kosovo Serbs KLA had kidnapped and transported to Albania in 1999, to harvest their vital organs for sale. Carla Del Ponte wrote in her book Russian women, tricked by the Albanian mafia to come to Serbian province immediately after the war, as NATO troops marched in following the bombardment, were also in that group of 300 mostly Kosovo-Metohija Serbs. Officially NATO had undertaken to disarm the KLA as part of the occupation agreement. Instead they, quite deliberately provided them with police uniforms & more weapons &sent them out to commit genocide.

One of the influential Russian newspapers recently reported that Albanian mafia had used in this horrific way and killed at least 500 people, 50 of whom were Russian citizens.

Investigation about the organ trade atrocities was opened in Serbia as soon as Carla Del Ponte’s book “The Hunt: Me and War Criminals” was published. In the book, Del Ponte testified that Kosovo Albanians have kidnapped and transported some 300 Kosovo-Metohija residents, mostly Serbs, to northern Albania after June 12, 1999, when NATO troops were deployed in Serbian province. According to De Ponte, kidnapped victims were held in storage depots and similar facilities in northern Albanian towns, such as Kukes and Tropoje. Young and healthy prisoners were regularly fed and were spared beatings and torture prior to being moved to places where their vital organs were extracted, like the basement of the yellow house near the town of Burrel, recently visited by the German Spiegel reporters.

After their vital organs were removed, the victims were killed, while the harvested organs were transported to the West, for rich patients needing transplants, via a smaller airport near Tirana.

Hashim Thaci Earned 4 Mill. off the Serb Vital Organs

Hague tribunal witness K-144, who personally took part in these atrocities against, told investigators the sale of organs of the kidnapped victims went through Italy, that it was conducted under direct command of the terrorist KLA our police and also that the Albanian state leadership was aware of these atrocities and allowed the crimes to be committed on their territory, silently tolerating them.

Eyewitness K-144 testified that in the group he was involved with, at least 300 kidneys and more than 100 of other vital organs of the imprisoned Serbs were sold. According to his testimony, the victims were being killed afterward and buried in the mass graves. K-144 claims that present Kosovo province “prime minister” Hashim Thaci, former KLA leader, had earned at least 4 million German Marks from the sale of the Serb organs.

Czech Social Democrats Seek UN Investigation

This testimony prompted former Czech Prime Minister Jirzi Paroubek to urge the Czech government to request the UN investigation of the macabre chain of Albanian crimes, which would also determine whether the current leader of Kosovo Albanians, Hashim Thaci, had profited off the organs extracted from Kosovo Serbs.

Leader of the Czech Social Democratic Party Paroubek yesterday requested from Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg to seek investigation about the involvement of the Kosovo Albanian leaders in the sale of organs of the kidnapped Serbs and other non-Albanians.

“I am deeply disturbed by this information”, Paroubek said yesterday at the press conference, reminding that the indications of such atrocious crimes have contributed to Czech Social Democrats’ categorical refusal to recognize imposed independence of the Serbian province.

“At that time [of Czech recognition] the content of book by the Hague’s chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte was known, suggesting that some of the present Kosovo officials, as former representatives of the terrorist organization of ‘Kosovo Liberation Army’, took part in the murders of the Serbian prisoners”, Paroubek said, assessing the decision about investigating this atrocity, recently described by the Swiss Tages-Anzeiger, should be reached at the current UN General Assembly session.

Someone on the Scotsman site (back before they censored my participation) said that this could not possibly have happened because if it had it would be produce front page banner headlines in all our newspapers. That would, of course, only be the case if those newspapers were, at least to some limited degree honest & staffed by decent human beings. Of course if the entirety of our media were controlled by a less noble version of the sort of people who ran the newspapers for Mr Goebbels one would understand it being wholly censored.

At least under Goebbels they had the excuse that they would be sent to concentration camps whereas our journalists, personally accessories in genocide, child sex slavery & dissection of living people to steal organs, though every one of them is, need fear only having to work for a living if they told the truth.

Space elevator refers to a structure that reaches from the surface of the Earth to geostationary orbit (GSO) and a counter-mass beyond (or other planets but lets not get ahead of ourselves).

Not feasible yet but we can currently make short nanotube carbon molecules & once they are long enough they will be strong enough for a 36,000 km long rope to hold its own weight plus cargo. A nanotube is a form of carbon molecule (as diamond is) originally shaped like a goedesic dome & then extended & extended more.

The Japanese have announced interest in being the first to develop a space elevator with a potential US$10 billion project to produce the necessary carbon nanofiber and then a space elevator.

......in total it's believed that more than 300 scientists and engineers are engaged in such work around the globe.

NASA is holding a $4 million Space Elevator Challenge to encourage designs for a successful space elevator......

"At present we have a tether which is made of carbon nanotube, and has one-third or one-quarter of the strength required to make a space elevator. We expect that we will have strong enough cable in the 2020s or 2030s," Tsuchida said....

"As the base of space elevator will be located on geosynchronous orbit, [the] space elevator ground station should be located near the equator," he said.

Although the Japanese association has set a time frame of the 2030s to get a space elevator under construction -- and developments are moving quickly -- Hoffman acknowledges that it could be a little further away than that."

Such a structure would have to be built in orbit & then lowered to the equatorial landing point. This means we would have to have a significant spacegoing capacity before starting building it. I also think it might well turn out that lengthy nanotubes will turn out to be more easily constructed in zero G, something we already know to be the case with crystals, because gravity distorts during construction. We also need a balancing weight to ensure that the centre of gravity is at the GEO point. This could be either 36,000 km more of tube or, more credibly, a large rockie asteroid or some mixture thereof. This, even more strongly presupposes we already have a serious spacegoing civilisation before we build it so this is most definitely not an alternative to a commercial shuttle.

A corollary of Heinlein's statement that low Earth orbit is "half way to anywhere" in the solar system is that if there is an extension going outwards from the GEO point it becomes possible to launch vessels essentially by letting them "fall" outwards using Earth's centrifugal force to let them go. Since Earth rotates once every 24 hours it would be possible, by varying the time of release & how far up the cable it was allowed to "drop" to launch at least daily to any point in the system.

Also worth pointing out that once the technology has been created for one Space Elevator a 2nd & subsequent ones will be far cheaper.

I think the best action that could be done to promote this just now would be X-Prizes of about $200/£100 million for producing stronger & more extensive nanotubes. The financial reward of a 1000 mile tube would be significant in building etc but not enormous whereas the financial reward of eventually producing the elevator are beyond imagination.

The worst thing about the society Orwell portrays in 1984 is its intentionally unchanging nature.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Strangely enough, since the book was written as an attack on Stalin this is the particular point on which the attack is misdirected. Stalin, with his 5 year plans & such was committed to economic progress at any cost & to making the USSR change into a a modern industrialised power. In this he succeeded, though Brezhnev & the bureaucracy then screwed it up.

Stalin’s legacy perhaps was summed up best by Winston Churchill – “Stalin came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in possession of atomic weapons.”

That may justify what he did. Certainly nothing else could but equally certainly it is what makes Stalin a creative force in world history when Hitler was merely a destructive one.

Which brings us to the "environmental" movement. I recently had a discussion online involving a Green who asserted specifically that economic growth is not a good or desirable thing. Many of the Greens actually want to go backwards to some sort of medievalism, others to"1976 when we were poorer and led a less materialistic lifestyle" but most in practice & sometimes in theory too only want to stop everything dead right now, without any deeper thoughts.

In this they are not emulating real communists but a sort of Spitting Image version. No wonder so many of our current political leaders were "Trotskyists" in their youth. You can be a "Trotskyist" without understanding much about communism or indeed Trotsky & without taking any responsibility for their real achievements, bad or good. All you have to know is that they were sort of revolutionary & left wing. You certainly don't have to know that Trotsky not Stalin first called for productivity growth or that Marx's whole thesis was based on economic progress:

"Trotsky called for workers' democracy and the eradication of bureaucratism linked to a perspective of rapidly building up the country's industry through the introduction of a plan.....Trotsky's proposed economic plan on the contrary was intended to develop the material level of the country".

Instead we see ex-"Trots" like Miliband & ones who still, sometimes, claim to be so like Sheriden adopting the anti-progress policies of the Greens. So ignorant of the movement they were part of that they have adopted Orwell's parody of it.

Another feature of 1984 is the way the State uses language to mean the opposite of its OED version. Thus the Ministry of Truth was his propaganda ministry & our Department of the Environment & Energy is the one that builds windmills. In the discussion mentioned above the Green claimed that he supported "improvement" but that while a wealthier society was no improvement "better education" & more regulations (specifically on housing) & regulators were. (Better education sounds good but he had previously supported the showing of Gore's film in schools, packed with proven lies, as an example so clearly "better" was an Orwellian redefinition of the term to mean "with more propaganda lies").

"Ignorance is Strength" according to the State in the book & we all know the ability of "environmentalists" to treasure their ignorance of physics, economics or even simple arithmetic. Amory Lovens, leader of California's nuclear shutdown initiative, sneering "The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax", as though it were something to be proud of was merely an early entrant in a long queue of apparatchiks who still lie to us.

This is what, behind all the lies, for them 2 & 2 does make 5 if the movement demands it. But behind all that they are just scared. They know human progress is not only possible but easy to achieve. Nobody devotes their lives to destroying something they do not believe exists. It is just that an eternity of stamping on human potential is something they understand & thus scares them less than progress.