A Place to Stand

There was a recent rather strange story in the British media about a ship, carrying timber, being hijacked. The Scotsman & British media generally aren't saying much.

RUSSIA last night said nothing suspicious was found on the ship Arctic Sea seized by suspected pirates in the North Sea this month.

Speculation was rife about a secret cargo of arms or nuclear materials, as a ship carrying timber would be an unlikely target for pirates.

Rather more informative speculation comes from Asia Times. I assume the country with the "distinct interest" in Israel not being attacked is Israel:

"On July 24, between the islands of Oland and Gotland, the vessel was attacked by a group of 10 to 12 people in black masks. They beat and bound the crew while searching for something on the vessel. According to some sources, the hijackers spent nearly 12 hours on the Arctic Sea before leaving empty-handed.

After the attack, the crew reported the incident solely to the Russian Embassy in Helsinki, which then relayed the information to Swedish authorities a couple of days later. Meanwhile, the Arctic Sea followed its course.

On July 28, the Arctic Sea had the last radio contact with the British Coast Guard as the ship entered the English Channel between Britain and France, at which time the crew reported everything was okay. However, according to other sources, the final transmission was on July 30, 80 kilometers south of Penzance in southwest Britain.

After that, the Arctic Sea sent no signals and the vessel disappeared from radar screens. It was allegedly hijacked again on August 3, at which point the hijackers demanded a $1.5 million ransom for the vessel's safe release.

... On August 14, the Russian navy rescued the vessel in international waters 480 kilometers off the West African island nation of Cape Verde.

... The Moscow version raises, among others, the following questions:

If, for the past 500 years, there have been no pirates in the Baltic Sea, why have they suddenly reappeared?

Given that a hijacking operation of this scale is financially costly, why would the pirates target an old rusty vessel with cargo of even lesser value?

Why did the pirates leave it? Did they really abandon the ship?

When and by whom was the ship hijacked again?

Why did the Russian navy and the FSB suddenly decide to act so decisively to rescue a Maltese-flagged cargo ship, while ignoring the plight of Russians captives overseas - for example, sailors hijacked by Somali pirates or arrested under false pretexts by Nigerian authorities?

Only one thing is clear: the Russian authorities have something to hide.

Julia Latynina, a Russian investigative journalist, noticed that, before the Arctic Sea received its cargo in Finland, it underwent two weeks of maintenance in the Russian port of Kaliningrad, a major Russian military base in the Baltic Sea.

This is where, Latynina presumes, the ship was loaded with a cargo attractive to the pirates. Could it be drugs? No, says Latynina. They wouldn't be worth a sophisticated operation of hijacking a ship in the highly policed waters of the Baltic Sea. She believes that the only plausible explanation must be an illegal shipment of weapons destined for, say, Iran or Syria. Moreover, there were no pirates, but rather a group of professionals sent by a state displeased with these activities.

This correspondent asked a former GRU (Russian Military Intelligence) officer, who many years ago escaped to the West, what he thought was on board the Arctic Sea. Instead of giving a direct answer, he suggested checking an obscure Russian-language website Anvictory.org, where a former Russian military officer based in Ukraine, Vladimir Filin, posted an article entitled, "Biochemical weapon which [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin intends to drop on Jewish heads." Filin writes that the Arctic Sea, under the cover of a load of Finnish timber, was delivering a shipment of weapons to Iran via Algeria.

Filin said the crates (loaded on board in Kaliningrad) could have contained four X-55 strategic cruise missiles (without front sections) and devices to implement an air launch from military planes of the SU-24 type, provided that the aircraft were retrofitted as carriers of a single cruise missile.
He asserts, too, that this was not the first shipment. According to Filin:
Russia had previously delivered to Iran the front sections of X-55, which was retrofitted to carry Soviet-made chemical weapons.

The biochemical weapons were already delivered from Russia to Iran by air. It was expected that, in the near future, Russian specialists would arrive in Iran in order to bring the SU-24 and X-55 up to a state of readiness and to train Iranian military personnel.

It was also expected that, given the high probability of an Israeli military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, X-55 missiles loaded with biochemical warheads could be used in the Iranian counterstrike against Israeli cities.

[...] Given the scale of the potential international brouhaha, a country with a distinct interest in preventing this shipment chose to interdict it in an unofficial manner.

[...] So far, this is all what I have to say."
#################################

Now why is our media so useless that they have effectively nothing to say over this & we have to rely in the Hong Kong press to report what happens in the English Channel. It clearly isn't because it embarrasses our government this time. Why can't they report events that aren't pre-arranged or reporting that hasn't been predigested to remove anything complicated or unusual? Is it because our entire media lives on press releases & briefings from government & government approved sources & they have just got out of the habit of reporting things themselves?

Labels: International politics, Media

Q1 What would you say is the most important issue facing Britain today?
Q2 What do you see as other important issues facing Britain today? pdf

Ist number is those who think it is the single most important issue, 2nd think it is important
Economy/economic situation 34 54
Crime/law & order/violence/vandalism/ASB 11 32
Unemployment/Factory Closure/Lack of Industry 14 30
Race relations/immigration/immigrants 11 25
Defence/foreign affairs/international terrorism 5 17
National Health Service/Hospitals/Health care 2 16
Education/Schools 1 12
Morality/individual behaviour/lifestyle 2 10
Inflation/prices 3 9
Drug abuse 1 7
Poverty/inequality 2 6
Pollution/environment 1 5
Housing 1 5
Bird flu/Pandemic Flu/Swine Flu 1 4
Pensions/social security/benefits 1 3
Public services in general 1 3
Taxation * 2
Local government/council tax * 2
Common Market/EU/Europe/EURO * 2
Low pay/minimum wage/fair wages * 1
Petrol prices/fuel * 1
Nationalisation/Government control of institutions 0 1
Transport/public transport * 1
Pound/exchange rate/value of pound * 1
Countryside/rural life 0 1

As normal "its the economy stupid" with 51% choosing it, unemployment & inflation as the most important issue. Pollution/environment comes at 2% & that includes a lot of local things rather than just global warming so it seems this catastrophic warming doesn't upset many people. For most subjects the important listing is less than double the those listing it as primary. I am a little surprised since that means people on average, listed fewer secondary subjects than primary ones - it may be that it was the people asking the questions rather than those answering them who were so single minded. Ones which scored high on secondary - race, defence, NHS, education, morality, drugs, pollution, housing & swine flu look, with the exception of race which we don't like to admit being important, like things that people here more about from the media than experiencing directly.

It does suggest that the election, like most of them, will be won by whoever looks most competent to run the economy. All Cameron's cuddly greenery may have improved his position among 1% of the electors, & if it hurts perceived economic competence, as it certainly should, has weakened them among 51% of electors. Fortunately for them Brown & Clegg are even worse.

Labels: British politics, Fixing the economy

Steve Sailer has written several times on the way the cost of starting a family affects people choosing to have children & therefore the political culture (red state/blue state). This is from a primary article;

The best indicator of whether a state will swing Red or Blue? The cost of buying a home and raising a family. --- Steve Sailer

“For People increase in Proportion to the Number of Marriages, and that is greater in Proportion to the Ease and Convenience of supporting a Family. When Families can be easily supported, more Persons marry, and earlier in Life.” Benjamin Franklin

As America’s coastal regions filled up, affordability of family formation began to differ sharply from state to state (disparities partially masked over the last few years by subprime mortgages and other financial gambits). CNN reported in 2006: “More than 90 percent of homes in [Indianapolis] were affordable to families earning the median income for the area of about $65,100. In Los Angeles, the least affordable big metro area, only 1.9 percent of the homes sold were within the reach of families earning a median income for the city of $56,200."

...“Manhattan’s 35,000 or so white non-Hispanic toddlers are being raised by parents whose median income was $284,208 a year in 2005.” Second was San Francisco, where the 50th percentile of income for white parents of small children fell at $150,763. That explains a lot about why the city by the bay is last in the country in percentage of residents under 18, below even retirement havens such as Palm Beach.

...And where it is economical to buy a house with a yard in a neighborhood with a decent public school, you will generally find more conservatives. It’s a stereotype that marriage, mortgage, and kids make people more conservative, but, like most stereotypes, it’s reasonably true.

...Bush was victorious in the 26 states with the least home-price inflation since 1980, while Kerry triumphed in the 14 states with the most...The correlation between low housing inflation and Bush’s share of the vote was strong, with a correlation coefficient, or “r,” of 0.72. A rule of thumb in the social sciences is that correlation coefficients of 0.2 are low, 0.4 moderate, and 0.6 high. Thus 0.72 is quite high, especially given the complexity of voting patterns.

...For example, white women in Utah lead the nation by being married an average of 17.0 years during those 27 years from age 18 through 44. In contrast, in liberal Washington D.C., the average white woman is married only 7.4 years. In Massachusetts, where Bush won merely 37 percent, years married average just 12.2.

Applied to white women, this new measure proved to be the single-best predictor imaginable of Bush’s share of the vote by state in the last two elections. Bush carried the top 25 states, while Kerry won 16 of the lowest 19.

...This theory suggests that, in order to encourage marriage and children among voters, Republicans should pursue policies that raise wages, lower demand for houses, and keep the public schools from eroding further. The most obvious way to move the country toward a more Republican future is to restrict immigration.
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In Britain we have just passed the level of 50% of children being born out of marriage. Some of these will be relatively well off stable households who didn't marry at least partly because it would cost them extra taxes. However many are from single parent homes & the correlation between fatherlessness & growing up criminal is well proven.

There has recently been a considerable amount of publicity about how Britain's population is growing & the official implication is it is because of more children being born not more immigration. "It is the usual government spin to claim these numbers as a success for immigration policy despite the fact that foreign immigration is virtually unchanged at about half a million a year." The immigration figure is actually the net immigration figure - immigration (obviously not counting illegals) - emigration (to countries where family formation is easier) - Poles going home because, with the £ falling there are greener pastures elsewhere. We are also living longer.

The Office for National Statistics says the country's population is now growing by more than 0.7 per cent every year — three times the level in the 1980s.

The figures show that 791,000 babies were born in 2008 — 33,000 higher than the year before — bringing Britain's population to 61.4 million. The population last year was 60,975,000.

A quarter of all births last year were to women born outside the U.K.,

So population is growing by half a million, net migration is the same but 200,000 of those births are to immigrants & half of them are illegitimate.

The main cost of family formation is a home & as pointed out before, because of government regulation, homes cost 4 times what they could. I also strongly suspect the cost of child care is artificially pushed up by government regulation to the same degree (it is always easy to sell more government regulation of anything to do with children).

I do not think it is in the best cultural interests of the British population, or indeed of politicians who support family values, to maintain massive government disincentives to people having children & thus being politically family orientated themselves & then relying on mass immigration, by peoples with different cultural values, to increase the numbers.

Labels: British politics, Social

Via the Taxpayer's Alliance article on all the non-jobs comes this piece of taxpayer funded negatively productive nonsense

you will lead on the development and implementation of the Corporate Equality and Diversity strategy and associated action plans.

As the leader of a newly established team, you will motivate and inspire all employees and stakeholders about equality and diversity. Your communication skills will enable you to build credibility and raise the profile of equality and diversity

further on the advert confirms that

In line with the Local Government and Housing Act 1989 this post is politically restricted. We are committed to equality and fairness at work - applications are encouraged from all diverse communities.

To put it another way NO WHITES NEED APPLY.

How fortunate we have an Equality & Human Rights Commission to bring this rogue employer to heel, after all if they are going to jump on a small voluntary group like the BNP for not accepting membership dues from certain ethnicites, without any evidence whatsoever that they want to join think how much harder they will jump on an organisation with such power (ie governing) who hand out jobs on a racial basis.

After all they are commited to equal rights for all.

Or am I being naive?

UPSATE Fred on how special treatment for diverse people "it often injures the people it is supposed to help; that it succeeds in antagonizing whites without benefiting blacks; that it has become more of an ideological battleground than a practical program; and, finally, that it is a fraud, serving principally to benefit groups that grow fat from racial programs"

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism

I wrote before about the poetry of Lily Allen's lyrics. This is from her new hit 22

She's got an alright job but it's not a career
whenever she thinks about it it brings her to tears

It strikes me that as individuals it is impossible for the majority of people to have above average jobs. However if a career is a job with prospects of doing better in future &/or being able to achieve something then it is possible for an entire nation to go for a career. The alienation of most people is because we are cogs in a spinning directionless machine rather than part of a society that is going somewhere or even knows where it wants to go.

To have a career you have to map out where you want to go. The same applies for a country. We should map out what career objectives Britain wants to achieve over the next 50 years. I would suggest either Parliament or any single party approving it proclaim objectives & report annually on whether they are being achieved.

These are what I support. If anybody has alternatives....


1 - 9% annual growth

2 - Be at or near the top of international tables of human freedom

3 - Be at the forefront of space development, mainly by using X-Prizes. Ultimately investing as much as we do in the military.

4 - Be at the forefront of scientific discovery & technology use, by using X-Prizes &/or other working methods. Ultimately investing as much as we do in the military.

5 - Support peace through adherence to equality for all nations under international law.

6 - Be at or near the top of tables of corruption free countries.

7 - Be in the top quartile of low crime countries

8 - To maintain our culture keep 1st, 2nd & 3rd generation immigrant citizens in the British Isles to not more than 1/6th of the population

9 - Support the development of other nations by supporting free trade, assisting in the dissemination of technology & giving 0.7% of GNP through both private & public sources, as aid. Long term government aid to be limited to countries whose governments to maximise their own economic progress.

10 - Bring British citizens guilty of war crimes & genocide to trial.

A few explanations - (1) is my long term hobbyhorse, but none the worse for that. Apart from a few eco-nuts who ignorantly believe economic growth depends entirely on using more oil etc, rather than on using resources with improved technology, nobody has seriously disputed that it can be achieved. Parts (2)(3)(4)(6) & (7) would all improve growth & would in turn be more affordable with growth. High growth produces a virtuous circle which makes almost all other goals more easily achievable. For example 20m years of 9% growth would bring the UK economy up to matching the US economy of today (thus if the US economy grew at 4.5% we would match them in 40 years).

(3) & (4) Currently Britain spends 2.4% of GNP on the military which is £34 billion ($54 bn) which is far & away more than any other country spends on space. Moreover spending it on X-Prizes would be about 20 times more effective than NASA is so the speed with which we switch to fast track space development can hardly be overestimated. I certainly would not propose putting that much money into X-Prizes from day 1 but to increase it as the economy grows. Also, if we go for a peaceful policy of not invading other countries our actual military spending could decrease & as the economy grows fast the proportion decreases quites fast so by the time our economy has tripled (13 years) we could be spending 0.8% of GNP each on military, space development & science, with zero added burden, if we wished.

(5) is about never again participating in criminal wars such as Yugoslavia & Iraq & probably never again trying to occupy other nations. Not only have these been immoral & therefore not something that Britain should do if we want to be proud of ourselves but they have an immense cost to us. I am not calling for pacifism - we should fight to defend allies being attacked, maintaining freedom of the seas (& ultimately space) & even sometimes preemptive strikes against military targets but occupation is neither moral nor useful & wars consisting of civilian bombing, as in Yugoslavia, are immoral. Maintianing a blockade of Iraq & air control cost about $10 million a year whereas occupation has cost trillions. (10) is linked to this & I can think of no way of convincing the world's peoples that we arev worthy of trust & respect, or to convince bombastic politicians to seek another career, than hanging Blair.

(7) note that I am aiming for a lower standard in solving crime than in corruption & freedom. This is not because I am being less ambitious but because we are currently further down the tables. In all these cases I would suggest hiring somebody in whatever countries are at the top of the table, usually Singapore, to write & publish a report saying what we need to do.

(8) we have a long term immigration problem & we had better face it because it isn't going to go away. I would be happy to have as many foreign born scientists as we can cope with but that is not where the problem lies. Note that I have specifically limited this to the British Isles - if we are going to build a spacegoing civilisation (& on floating & non-floating islands) that will involve mass immigration. Even there I would not hand out citizenship lightly to people who have no reason to be consider themselves British though I would auction off a few hundred thousand citizenships annually.

(9) currently aid has little, if any, benefit. This programme is pretty close to what we already spend (most government figures only include government aid) but designed to actually achieve something.

In all of these I have tried to put numbers on these ambitions - if you don't do that we are merely talking about an aspiration not a promise & there is no way of measuring whether it has succeeded - this may be why political promises often don't contain firm numbers.

Labels: constitutional amendments, Fixing the economy, Science/technology, space

President Barack Obama says the United States has lost "the greatest United States senator of our time"

US Senator Ted Kennedy will be mourned around the world as a champion of equal rights, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Wednesday, while ex-premier Tony Blair called him a "true public servant."

"Senator Edward Kennedy will be mourned not just in America but in every continent," Brown said

Back when he was getting his knighthood Simon Heffer in the Telegraph said

I felt sorry for Ted Kennedy when I heard he had a brain tumour. I temporarily forgot the support he gave to IRA murderers during the 1980s and 1990s. Since some nasty people flew airliners into a few buildings in 2001 the Americans have stopped seeing the glamour of terrorism.

Until then, however, Fenian murderers were routinely feted on St Patrick’s Day, and no American welcomed them more warmly than Ted.

Now, for services to gangsterism, he is to get a knighthood. It comes as the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland announces that terrorist activity is rising, despite a so-called ceasefire: Ted’s friends remain drug runners and bank robbers. What wickedness this is, and what an insult to those whose husbands, wives and children were blown up in shopping centres by the IRA.

This from a list of IRA supporters:

KENNEDY, Edward (Ted): US Senator Mass. USA Pro-IRA, anti-RUC Democratic US Senator Left Mary Joe Kopechne to drown in car he drove off bridge after leaving party. Tried to get others at party to take blame before he tried to get help to rescue her.

KENNEDY, John Jr: American IRA supporter Attended funeral of IRA bomber Patrick Kelly

Perhaps Mr MacAskill will make a remark about "higher powers".

Edinburgh's trams should be not more than £105 million instead of £600m & counting

Forth Bridge costed at £4.2 bn, previous one was at £320 million inflation adjusted, a tunnel would cost £40 m

Crossrail at £16 bn should be £1.3 bn

Glasgow Airport rail link now at £300 million when we could have a monorail at £20 million.

Millenium Dome was £46 million to build & £670 million after the paperwork was finished.

The damage Health & Safety & similar regulations do.

And why we simply can't build as technologically advanced buildings as they do in China.

I have blogged previously on this immensely valuable pdf document - a statistical analysis of what factors correlate with growth. It is worth doing it again & I am now going to reprint stuff from

Chapter 9 FACTORS AFFECTING GROWTH pdf page 53:

"resource-rich countries are usually slightly more prosperous than resource-poor ones. The problem is that they are not as prosperous as they should be"

"there is a great deal of evidence to the effect that governments tend to use resources less efficiently than entrepreneurs. The most significant point is that
what matters more than how much governments take in tax is what they do with it. The evidence suggests that governments are more likely to promote growth if they use their revenue primarily to:

build infrastructure, especially
transport infrastructure;

provide services, rather than
regulate economic activity;

do things that don’t duplicate
what the private sector can do,
specifically that they do not
compete with it; and

increase efficiency by outsourcing
and privatising." p54

"strong correlation between ‘business tax friendliness’ and growth. Tax friendliness measures the impact of tax complexity and incidence on business" p54

"governments are best advised to do less rather than more because the downside risk of what they do is greater than the upside potential" p55

"countries with the world’s smallest governments tend to be super-achievers" p55

"Notwithstanding a value-free approach, much of this report refers to indices of freedom defined in various ways (civil liberties, rule of law, economic freedom, political freedom et al). This was not contrived; it is simply that the factors that correlate most with prosperity happen to be indicators of some form of freedom. We expected other factors to present high positive correlations, such as natural resources, climate, history, culture, religion and governance. Neil van Heerden, former head of the SA Foundation, suggested that these ‘negative’ findings might be more instructive than positive correlations. Identifying the
extent to which people ‘know things that just ain’t so’ is essentially the falsification of hypotheses." p56

"key finding is that the least regulated economies (top quartile) grow 2.2% faster than those that are most regulated (bottom quartile)." p56

"It finds that efficient economies rely more on commonlaw than regulation, and that social democracies (like Denmark, Norway and Swede) benefit from streamlined business regulation, they offset the burden of welfare by liberating productive market forces" p57

"The world’s twenty least regulated economies are all (except Taiwan) rich first world countries, including all G8 countries" p57

"such as health and safety regulation, most of which has never been shown to have benefits exceeding costs, and all of which imposes enormous direct and indirect costs
on people at the expense of prosperity" p57

"A retreaded tyre regulation in the USA, for instance, was found to have cost a few million dollars for every sub-standard tyre identified by the measure" p57

"regulatory compliance (‘red tape’) cost South African businesses R79 billion in 2004, equivalent to 6.5 per cent of GDP" p57

"An OECD study found that over-regulation is the major cause of the slower rate of growth of the European Union compared to that of the USA. But what are the benefits of regulation? The study found ‘no quality benefits’. We all know that government is
costly, but a 75-country study found that regulations usually cost a country twenty times more than they cost the government" p58

"government may have a more intransigent problem with excess red tape than it realises. This is its fourth major attempt at systematic regulatory review. The first...The report was circulated through the Cabinet to all departments with a view to them addressing the problem in accordance with its recommendations.
... it was never heard of again. The second was to be undertaken by the Small Business Council, but it was dissolved. The third (full & never heard from again). It may be helpful to establish why isolated departments did succeed at substantial market liberalisation" p58

Chapter 10 CHARACTERISTICS OF WINNERS & LOSERS p59

"sound policies can withstand almost any shock, and produce prosperity under almost any conditions." p59

"There is virtually no empirical evidence in favour of aid, subsidies, debt relief, technical assistance or protection" p59

"the Marshall Plan failed to generate prosperity. Furthermore, the UK received much more aid than Germany without achieving high growth. If anything, aid enabled it to perpetuate inappropriate policies." p59

"the relative size of education budgets does not correlate significantly with growth" p60

"highest growth countries cover the full range of possibilities, from poor (Trinidad & Tobago) to rich (Iceland), small (Luxembourg) to big (China), formerly capitalist(Ireland) to formerly socialist (Vietnam), resource-rich (Mozambique) to resource-poor (Finland), countries that were colonised until recent decades (Tunisia) and
ones that were not (Finland). There is also a wide range of cultural, religious, ethnic, historical and geographic diversity among high growth countries" p61

"experience of other countries is that it is likely to achieve and sustain high growth only if it resists the temptation faced by all governments to abandon a winning formula when sustained high growth is achieved. As this report shows, markets tend to respond enthusiastically to pro-market reforms" p62

"Trinidad & Tobago, shifted from one extreme to the other having elevated itself from the lowest to the highest growth rate group" p62

11 SHORT LIST OF WINNERS' POLICIES p65

"The proverbial “bottom line” is that the world’s experience suggests that ........ is likely to prosper if, and only if, it:

1. reduces crime;
2. relaxes and preferably scraps exchange control;
3. reduces time people have to spend with bureaucracy;
4. relaxes or scraps insistence on centralised bargaining
5. shifts from spending on economic regulation and
parastatals to spending on transfers and subsidies...
6. the rule of law;
7. foreign trade liberalisation;
8. business liberalisation;
9. banking and financial market liberalisation.

And from p 44

"The world’s experience appears to support the view that economic freedom may be a necessary and sufficient condition for prosperity."

Labels: ecnomic growth, Fixing the economy

A few days ago I blogged about the Saltire Prize being, so far as I knew, the only government sponsored X-Prize in the world. Well it turns out that the US Army put up $3 million of prizes & it worked:

"August 18, 2009: The U.S. Army's decades long effort to develop a practical autonomous UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle) has succeeded. Earlier this month, two T2 vehicles equipped with sensors and control equipment, successfully passed realistic tests...

Two years ago, for the third time since 2004, the U.S. Department of Defense sponsored a race for robotic vehicles. For several decades, the U.S. Department of Defense has been trying to build a robotic vehicle. But in early 2004, the Department of Defense decided to try something different, and give enterprising civilian organizations a chance to show what they could do. DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) held the DARPA Grand Challenge. Put simply, the first robotic vehicle (moving completely under software control, with no human intervention) that could complete a 240 kilometer course, would get a million dollars for its designers. No one even came close. But a second Challenge, held in late 2005, yielded several finishers, and the first one picked up the million dollar prize for navigating a 212 kilometers cross country course in just under seven hours. All vehicles operated under software control, as true robots. The third "Challenge" race was held in late 2007, and had a two million dollar prize for the first vehicle to complete a 60 kilometer course through an urban environment (an abandoned air force base) in under six hours...

The DARPA Challenge races have been a bonanza in terms of advancing the state of the art for robotic vehicles. For less than $10 million in prize money and expenses, the Department of Defense has created new technology that would have otherwise cost more than $100 million, and taken a lot longer to perfect."
---------------------------------

I hope it was a lot less than $10 million in prizes & admin expenses since it was 3 million in prizes. The non-military spin off of having such driverless vehicles seems to me to likely to proportionately match the non-billiard ball spin off when a billiard ball company put up such a prize for a substitute for elephant ivory to make balls & wound up with celluloid, the first plastic.

However the principle that X-Prizes work, in this instance admitted to be something like 30 times better than conventional government funding, is even more valuable than that. I have still yet to hear anybody explaining why not - particularly when you remember that if nobody wins the prize, as happened the first year her, no payment is made.

I got this story via Jerry Pournelle eh says "I have never understood why prizes are not popular. They cost almost nothing -- perhaps a million a year total to fund a commission that determines if a prize should be awarded -- and you know the total to be paid. A ten billion prize for a Lunar Colony Prize (keep 31 Americans alive and well on the Moon for 3 years and one day) would either get us a Moon Base or it would cost nothing. A reusable space ship prize of 5 billion (send the same ship to orbit 13 times in one year) would again get us a space ship or would cost nothing. We spent more than half that on the X-33 fiasco." Perhaps it is the ultimate proof of Pournelle's Law - that the prime purpose of government spending is to pay government workers & their friends & X-Prizes are devoted almost entirely to the nominal but secondary purpose of achieving results.

Labels: Government parasitism, X-Prizes

From the Telegraph:

A group of chefs, sommeliers and chateaux has issued a call to action, urging the country to secure ambitious targets in the months ahead to limit global warming...

"As flagships of our common cultural heritage, elegant and refined, French wines are today in danger," 50 leading names from the world of French wine and food wrote in an open letter. "Marked by higher alcohol levels, over-sunned aromatic ranges and denser textures, our wines could lose their unique soul."

The signatories said that if global temperatures rose by more than two per cent before the end of the century, "our soil will not survive" and "wine will travel 1,000 kilometres beyond its traditional limits".

"We will have new wine-producing regions in zones where one doesn't normally cultivate vineyards like in Brittany and Normandy," said Jean-Pierre Chaban, a climatologist at France's National Institute for Scientific Research, in an accompanying online film. "It will spread to Great Britain. One can imagine vineyards in southern Sweden and Scotland."
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Unfortunately temperatures are continuing to fall

Black line is CO2. Note how closely it correlates with temperature (red line)
However the Met office, having predicted warmer temperatures next year, winter & summer for a decade, including "barbecue weather" for just now are predicting this "Early indications are that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year."

Still at least all this warming hysteria produces an excuse to keep the common people in their place, while making a good profit:

School introduces compulsory £100 'eco-friendly' uniform

Oaklands Roman Catholic School in Waterlooville has introduced the uniform made from recycled bottles which can only be bought from the school or from the Schoolwear Shop in nearby Havant.

Labels: global warming

The BBC warns

A radioactive particle and two shovels worth of radioactive waste have been found in grazing land near a nuclear power site for the first time.

The field next to Dounreay on the Caithness coast has been earmarked for a low-level waste dump.

This is based on SEPA's press release which says

"The Scottish Environment Protection Agency received notification from DSRL, as per normal practice, of the detection and recovery of a fuel fragment and two shovels worth of radioactive waste. These were detected while DSRL was monitoring the footprint of the proposed new low level waste facility. The active material has been removed. This is the first known find of such a fragment in this particular area. Approximately one third of the area of the new facility has been monitored to date. The fuel fragment was recovered some 240m inland from the sea cliffs and the two shovels worth of radioactive waste some 300m inland of the sea cliffs, both in rough ground. The fragment was recovered at 5-10 cm depth.

"This fuel fragment would be classified as "minor" according to the DPAG categorisation and does not present a significant hazard to the public.

As normal in such things, at Dounreay & elsewhere, there is no mention, even in SEPA's press release, of exactly how much radiation this "fuel fragment" gives off. However it seems the local John O'Groats Journal & Caithness Courier have been more diligent than the BBC & got them to provide a figure. "It was found to have an activity of 58,000 becquerels" Now 58,000 sounds like a pretty scary number so are SEPA involved in some conspiracy to downplay this as minor. Well no. The Becquerel is not as fearsome a unit as you might be meant to think.

One Bq is defined as the activity of a quantity of radioactive material in which one nucleus decays per second...

For example, natural potassium (40K) in a typical human body produces 4,000 disintegrations per second (i.e., 4 kBq of activity). The nuclear explosion in Hiroshima (14 kT) is estimated to have produced 8×10^24 Bq.[2]

To the more pedantic theoretical physicist absolutely anything is radioactive but in practical terms this is not so. So we find that this radioactive "fuel" is 14 times as radioactive as the non-radioactive potassium in 1 human body (or to be fair 1/130,000,000,000,000,000,000 of Hiroshima). Bearing in mind that the human body is overwhelmingly made up of stuff other than potassium it looks like this "fuel" is less radioactive than a single one of the workers looking for it, though also smaller. Quite obviously, like the stuff they found at Dalgety Bay, we are dealing with purely natural radioactives once again.

As regards SEPA's allegation that this is a "fuel fragment" - this can only be another lie. To quote Steuart's guest article previously

I do not see how anyone could determine that a particular emission came from a natural radionuclide rather than an artificial one. ...

A layer of soil 30 cm deep and 1.6 km square would contain on average 1 g of radium (depends on locality, moisture content and the presence of buildings and roads. It would also contain ~3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium. The Ra concentration is about one part in a trillion

This must, in turn, make all their previous claims, widely reported but also without figures, about the various radioactive particles found on Dounreay beach, very questionable.

Incidentally, since this search was being done of empty land which had not been used for radiation purposes but was intended to be in the future it is obvious none of this expensive searching was any more necessary than for any other piece of agricultural land (one could even argue less necessary since it wouldn't even be used for growing food). This is a sign of the lengths government empire builders go to artificially ramp up the cost of nuclear & decommissioning. Imagine how expensive farming would be if the same rules applied.

One good thing about this is that though it has been reported by the very local paper & the BBC, who can be relied on to push any eco scare stories, it has got little further.



Ambulatory low level radioactive waste looking for the stationery sort.

Labels: Dalgety Bay, nuclear

Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 people. As a believer in the death penalty I see no reason why it should not be exercised for such crimes. However in his case there is one overwhelming mitigating circumstance.

He is clearly Innocent. When the investigation of this began it was widely accepted that the trail led clearly to Syrian backed Palestinians acting at the behest of the Iranians who were, not unreasonably, miffed about the USA having shot down an Iranian passenger plane on its regular route across the Gulf (made considerably worse by Reagan's decision not to courtmartial the captain of the ship that fired the missile but to decorate him).

Then Syria joined us as our patriotic ally in the first Gulf War & suddenly, for no evidence based reason, the frame moved form Syria to Libya. Eventually the Scottish judiciary participated in fitting up the 2 Libyans in the world closest to the line of travel of the bomb & convicted one, justifying fitting up Libya. Now Libya is our patriotic ally in exploiting its oil for large amounts of money & as a way of making Europe less dependent on Russian oil. So Megrahi is released. Almost every judge in the Scottish judiciary was involved, at some point, in the Megrahi fit up.

It was obvious that this was going to happen as soon as Jack Straw reversed himself a month 5 days later released Ronnie Biggs. Biggs was charged with being a minor player in the theft of £2.5 million from the government. The excuse the government has always given for the severity of this sentence is that it involved not just that theft but giving "black eye and facial bruising" to a train driver. Clearly it would have been impossible to ensure he died inn jail while giving compassionate release to Megrahi.

Lets look at a few more of the hoops our noble judiciary are willing to jump through to ensure that there be no clash between government interest & justice.

The Milosevic "trial" failed, after 4 1/2 years to produce any actual evidence whatsoever against Milosevic with the sole exception of the testimony of General Wesley Clark who said that for no discernible reason Milosevic had approached him & confessed to the fabricated "Srebrenica massacre". Clark then also perjured himself by saying there was no link between NATO & the genocidal KLA. Convicting Milosevic, without evidence, would have entirely discredited western judiciaries but releasing him was also not an option. Then he was poisoned by Rifampicine, probably by members of MI6 serving as part of the court & certainly by somebody who knew, in advance, that the "judges" (one of whom, Lord Bonomy, is Scots) were not going to allow him medical treatment from doctors who would have proven the poisoning.

On a different level we have Gary McKinnon being extradited for hacking into CIA computers, searching for UFO conspiracies, & the NatWest Three exrtradited to the US & imprisoned for breaking US fraud laws. In both cases the point is that the events took place in Britain so we have effectively allowed the US government to imprison people for acting, in Britain, doing things which may not be illegal in Britain. Sovereign states simply do not do this & the US certainly, & correctly, doesn't reciprocate.

Compare the treatment of Megrahi with that of Fikret Abdic. He was the most popular Moslem leader in Bosnia but, since he was a supporter of free markets & of Yugoslav union the western powers decided to fund & support Alia Izetbegovic, an (ex-)Nazi Muslim extremist committed to the genocide of all non-Muslim communities in Bosnia (& ideally the whole world). In due course Abdic's supporters took up arms in his home district of Bihac because our al Quaeda friends were press ganging locals into the Muslim Nazi forces.

Being the only prominent Moslem politician not involved in racial genocide, & having support among Orthodox Serbs as well, he would have been NATO's ideal if they had ever had any interest in reconciliation in Bosnia. Instead the ICTY called on the Croatian Nazis to bring him to trial, which in 2002 they did sentencing him to 20 years (reduced to 15) for opposing racial genocide & our al Quaeda allies. No "compassionate" release called for there indeed the BBC went to considerable lengths not to report on him at all, refusing to use his name 7 calling him simply "a local warlord".

Other examples of the perversion of the rule of law are the refusal of corrupt Scotland's Lord Advocate Rt Hon Elish Angiolini QC refusal to investigate the criminal liability of ministers for mass murder & war crimes. Whether necessary or not the release of convicted IRA members is not justice.

That our government isn't always keen to role over is seen in their demand that the Andrei Lugavoi be handed over for "trial" in Britain in relation to a polonium poisoning in which a group of people, in London, involved in plotting coups against the elected Russian government appear to have been careless in handling the stuff. The Russians have refused to extradite but are willing to try him in Russia if the British government would care to produce their evidence, which they refuse to do.

More mercy has been shown to Nasir Oric who was Moslem commander in Srebrenica responsible for the undisputed genocide of 3,870 Serb civilians. He was not even brought to trial for this, though he did receive an astonishingly light sentence for other atrocities. Equal "compassion" has been shown to our KLA employees whose responsibility for racial massacres is indisputable.

The evidence against Radovan Karadzic is very dubious & it looks like he will be making a very aggressive "defence". I have no doubt justice will not be done.

While the "compassionate" release of Megrahi will hardly bring back the years for this innocent man it is at least something. Clearly the legal system, in international affairs, has shown itself endlessly submissive to political requirements & almost completely unconcerned with justice, or even law.

UPDATE Because this was such an important "news" story the BBC carried live Kenny McAskill's speech saying what his decision was. He wittered on so long that before he had finished, indeed when had only said he was rejecting freeing him on the first grounds, the BBC went on to the next programme.

UPDATER The Scotsman used this portion of this article as a letter:

Megrahi was convicted of the murder of 270 people. As a believer in the death penalty I see no reason why it should not be exercised for such crimes. However in his case there is one overwhelming mitigating circumstance – he is clearly innocent.

The world economy grew 1.6 percent quarter-on-quarter in the three months ending June 30. Yet excluding China's 14.6 percent rise in gross domestic product, world GDP was flat or contracted slightly, according to Barclays Capital.

So it is not a world recession it was a western recession except that we now know Germany & France are back into growth & that Japan has grown by 0.9% over the last quarter. Britain & America have contracted significantly, the rest of the world has grown & China has grown 14.6% (which suggests their stimulus package wasn't really needed). The Japanese figure is particularly interesting because Japan has been in almost zero growth since 1990 despite or more likely because of continuous bank bail outs & public spending increases. It should be remembered that for decades Japan's growth was world leading & thereby transformed itself to a country on track to replace the USA as the strongest economy.

If what we actually have is a recession in America & Britain, with overspill into those countries that trade with them then we should look at what we are doing different & conclude that it is wrong.

According to Santayana "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" & the lesson of Japanese history, which it seems they have now learned, is that preventing the market working by more government spending & bail outs only entrenches the failings. I would prefer that we do not, like Japan, have 2 decades of non-growth while the rest of the world regains the world average of 5%. This would leave the world, but not us, 2.65 times better off.

Labels: Fixing the economy, International politics

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Subject:
Friday 14 August 2009

Posting:
"OK so my last post 5:49pm on 15 Aug 2009 has been "referred". So lets keep it simple. The first post here calls Dan Hannan a "Nazi" for saying the NHS isn't wonderful. Yet the BBC censor anybody who makes lesser accusations, with infinitely more evidence which they know to be true, against approved politicians. In what way is this not political bias?"

==============================
The above came from BBC Newsnight. The first post, which I was not advised was being censored made the same point about the BBC supporting a comment that Dan Hannan is a "Nazi" for saying that our NHS has worse survival rates & is more expensive than Singapore's.

My reply had suggested calling this Conservative MEP a "Nazi" was improper, particularly since the BBC have a record of censoring any comments which suggest that there was anything improper in government politicians engaging in aggressive war & bombing of civilians against Yugoslavia (both legally war crimes) & supporting massacres (Dragodan), genocide & the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 (from Kosovo), the sexual enslavement of children (attested to by Amnesty) & the dissection of living humans to steal their organs (given a minor mention on Newsnight), all of which have a much closer connection to Nazism than liking Singapore's health system has.

They, not to my surprise, censored the 1st comment, even though I hadn't specifically named anybody let alone accused any government minister of being a Nazi.

The censoring of the 2nd post, bold above, is less defensible, particularly on the alleged grounds of defamation. I not only don't name the politicians who planned that war of genocide I don't even say what they are accused of - so who is being defamed & over what?

I have sent the BBC this reply & in the event that they vary from previous experience by actually replying to some criticism I will publish it here.

Who is it defamatory against. I deliberately didn't even name the politicians, or party, whose apparent wrongdoing I didn't even specify.

Thus according to the BBC it is officially ok to call a Conservative MEP a Nazi, purely for not saying the NHS is wonderful, but defamatory to hint that MPs who might be Labour, might ever have anything to be ashamed of.
I formally request your justification for this apparent double standard.

This is pretty close to the endpoint of where political censorship leads. For decades the BBC have been eager to tell any lie & censor any fact to assist in murder, genocide & whatever so long as it was government & broadly cross-party policy & the dead were foreigners. Then they were willing to tell any lie & censor any fact to promote scare stories against the British people (eg catastrophic global warming). Then they were willing to lie & censor to attack small political parties outside Parliament (the BNP) or indeed to support them (the Greens). Now they are prepared to engage in purely party lying & censoring supporting the most outrageous lies (eg that this MEP is a Nazi when he is clearly a classic liberal) while censoring even the most oblique criticism of the governing party.

This is the Newsnight item under consideration. I note that the first comment, the one which described Hannan as a "Nazi" has today been removed. However this was after 4 days & clearly owes more to BBC embarrassment at having been caught out than any wish for equality - otherwise my posts would only get cut 4 days later. It is still acknowledged that the "Nazi" post was there whereas mine have been totally "airbrushed" out of existence.

Labels: British politics, Media

I was sent this from the Washington Times:

The United States is functionally bankrupt. Our collective capacity to deal with this astonishing fact is seemingly nonexistent. Our national politics have become show business, exhibiting a complete refusal to strategically respond to this reality.

Let's look at the simple numbers of our national debt. Our on-the-books national debt is $11.6 trillion. But off-the-books federal debt, including Medicare and Social Security, is $107 trillion...

add the $11 trillion to the $107 trillion, and we get $118 trillion. These are big numbers but still just fifth-grade math. Now our total annual national output, or gross domestic product (GDP), is about $14.3 trillion. Total federal receipts, or income if stated in business terms, are about $2.5 trillion...

Ask any accountant, banker, or anyone remotely familiar with simple accounting knowledge if we can service this debt, and the collective answer is a resounding "no." Any business with these ratios would be a complete basket case, hopelessly bankrupt

In Britain our deficit is £800 billion ($1.3 trillion) which with officially 18.7% of US GNP would be equivalent of about $7 trillion. This looks a bit better than in the US but not much & probably mainly because the £ has recently fallen against the $ & in general we are in the same mess.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said the nation's overall net debt ballooned to £798.8bn (€923.7bn) in June - the highest proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) since records began in 1974.

Getting British estimates for other, mainly pension, liabilities is more difficult but I do not believe they will be, proportionately, significantly less.

The WT article mentions the obvious, arguably only possible, way out with a strange response

I once asked one of my federal senators, Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, how we would handle this nightmare, and he simply replied, "We'll grow our way out of this."

Senator, I challenge you to lay out this cheery scenario. We are not politically set up to grow at 8 percent or 9 percent like China. We would have to adopt extremely aggressive pro-growth policies, and those are not politically acceptable at this time.

What I find intriguing about this is that though the WT dismisses supporting growth as not politically acceptable it implicitly accepts that (% growth, as in many countries from China to Ireland, is feasible.

I simply do not believe that, outside of political activists who are slightly unusual bunch, the idea of getting a lot wealthier is going to be unacceptable.

On that basis I recommend Sarah Palin's facebook. Currently it is, understandably, all about the healthcare row but she has, on a number of occasions, specifically mentioned the importance of growth. Reading this will also show that, agree with her or not, she is most definitely not the uninformed, foolish, ingenue so often claimed by opponents. Her detailed mastery of the subject is obvious (as Obama's isn't) & suggests if anything her intelligence is to great for popular electoral politics.

As Habits of Highly Effective Countries (a pdf i have recommended before & will again) says "Fortunately, higher growth tends to coincide with more economic
freedom regardless of how its protagonists define it" so basically it can be achieved simply by politicians getting out of the way. If Britain & America have managed to bankrupt ourselves, while France, German & today japan give signs of coming out of recession, we may have limited our options so that economic success is the only one left.

UPDATE The Daily Politics has done an assessment of Britain's total liabilities & it comes to £6,561 billion, 4 1/2 times our GNP which makes it a bit less than America's 8 times but not good.

Just thought I would mention how his "defence" seems to be shaping up & it looks like attack is the best form of defence. Considering that it is a full year since his arrest & that they had 13 years before that to prepare the prosecution seem amazingly slow. He himself on the other hand...

1 - Radovan Karadžić said that U.S. government, in collusion with other countries, was supplying arms to Bosnian Muslims, one of the warring parties in the Bosnian civil war (1992-1995), in violation of the United Nations arms embargo.

American Congress investigation showed that between 1993 and 1995 the administration of then-U.S. president Bill Clinton held discussions on at least three occasions with State Department officials, requesting that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan funnel machine guns, missiles and other weapons to Bosnia’s Muslim-led government, Karadžić said in his submission to the NATO court in Hague, Netherlands. ...U.S. nighttime flights delivering arms and military equipment to Bosnian Muslim forces...

Karadžić requested that tribunal seeks documents about the illegal transfers of weapons and ammunition to Bosnian Muslims from the Pakistani government, since Pakistan has not responded to three of his requests already issued through their Netherlands embassy. MORE

Because it was a deliberate breach of mandatory UN sanctions delivering such weapons & the Mujaheddin to kill with is, automatically, a war crime for which US leaders would have long since been brought to trial if the "court" was in any way whatsoever honest.

2 - That the US government, represented by Richard Holbrooke, gave an unambiguous promise that he would not be prosecuted if he stepped down from the presidency of Republica Srpska. Holbrooke has always denied this but he is a liar.

Mohammad Sacirbey, former Bosnian foreign minster says that US diplomat, Richard Holbrooke made an unambiguous political deal with Serb leader Radavan Karadzic.
Sacirbey pointing out that he has been telling this story for more than a decade now, said the Holbrooke-Karadzic pact called for Karadzic to give up leadership of his political party and to drop out of public life in return for his already existing war crimes indictment being scrapped

I think this is the weakest part of his defence since the US government had no legal authority to do so. However in practice everybody knows the "court" is their creature & had the US government been, under any circumstances, in any way trustworthy, they could have kept this promise.

3 - That the so called Srbrenica Massacre is a deliberate racist propaganda lie supported only by wholly corrupt Nazis & their dupes like virtually all western politicians & journalists. The fact is that there is no real evidence that the alleged massacre of 8,000 - 14,000 Moslem Nazi soldiers ever took place. In fact the only undisputed genocide was of 3,870 Serb villagers from which the Moslem commander Nasir Oric showed journalists videos, from his extensive collection, of him personally beheading women & children. This genocide was also attested to by NATO commander Morrilon during the Milosevic "trial". Since then DNA technology has improved to the point where bodies ethnicity can be determined. The NATO funded "court" has refused to make such tests or to allow anybody else to. Picture via Peter North's blog

4 - The "Srebrenica Massacre" is the only serious charge against Karadzic who, legally, was actually President of Bosnia & Hercegovina, under its rotating presidency at the time the Moslems started the war & therefore cannot possibly be guilty of making war on it. It is pretty much the only serious charge now levied against the Serbs generally & it is a lie. The most remarkable recent development, obviously unreported in our media, is that many of the Dutch NATO soldiers present as peacekeepers have undertaken to testify on behalf of Karadzic that the Serbs committed no genocide. This is brave of them & may well open the entire can of worms about how these NATO "peacekeepers", under orders from the Dutch government of Wim Kok & presumably more powerful NATO leaders, not only failed to demilitarise the town but had to actively allow Oric's forces to break the cease fire, sending troops through thier lines to attack these outlying villages, massacring thousands, & then give them protection behind the peacekeepers when they returned. It was this genocide alone that made it necessary for the Serbs to move against Srebrenica.

The number of Dutch veterans, members of the battalion stationed in Srebrenica during the 1992-1995 civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who are prepared to testify on behalf of Republika Srpska first President Radovan Karadžić, has more than quadrupled in the past few months, ever since one brave soldier — Marco Van Hees — courageously stepped out of the heavy media blackout surrounding Dutch troops, determined to help unearth the whole truth about Srebrenica.

“At this moment, 91 Dutch Army veteran, member of the battalion stationed in Srebrenica in 1995 is ready to tell the whole truth about the events in that enclave and thus defend Radovan Karadžić,”
MORE

The indictment may name Karadzic but the trial will be of the obscene genocidal Nazi filth running the NATO countries & their wholly corrupt media. Another verdict of poisoning may be difficult to sustain.

Labels: International politics, Yugoslavia

I must admit to a lack of expertise on health care & doubt if there is an answer that achieves perfection. After all perfection in health care would be everybody surviving forever & while I have blogged on aging research I don't see that happening soon.

However this listing of worldwide life expectancy seems to me to a good starting point for anybody looking at what works (I have removed the postage stamp countries where statistics are distorted):

3. Japan 82.02 years
4. Singapore 81.80 years
6. Hong Kong 81.68 years
7. Sweden 80.63 years
8. Australia 80.62 years
Switzerland 80.62 years
10. France 80.59 years
12. Canada 80.34 years
14. Italy 79.94 years
17. Spain 79.78 years
18. Norway 79.67 years
19. Israel 79.59 years
20. Greece 79.38 years
21. Austria 79.21 years
24. Netherlands 79.11 years
25. Luxembourg 79.03 years
26. New Zealand 78.96 years
27. Germany 78.95 years
28. Belgium 78.92 years
29. United Kingdom 78.70 years
30. Finland 78.66 years
32. Jordan 78.55 years
33. Puerto Rico 78.54 years
34. Bosnia and Herzegovina 78.17 years
37. United States 78.00 years
38. Cyprus 77.98 years
39. Denmark 77.96 years
40. Ireland 77.90 years
41. Portugal 77.87 years
42. Albania 77.60 years
43. Taiwan 77.56 years
46. Korea, South 77.23 years
47. Costa Rica 77.21 years
48. Cuba 77.08 years
49. Chile 76.96 years
50. Libya 76.88 years
52. Ecuador 76.62 years
53. Slovenia 76.53 years
54. Czech Republic 76.42 years
55. Argentina 76.32 years
57. Georgia 76.30 years
60. Uruguay 75.93 years
61. Saudi Arabia 75.88 years
62. United Arab Emirates 75.69 years
63. Mexico 75.63 years
64. Paraguay 75.34 years
Tunisia 75.34 years
67. Panama 75.19 years
Poland 75.19 years
69. Dominica 75.10 years
70. Serbia 75.06 years
71. Slovakia 74.95 years
72. Croatia 74.90 years
74. Sri Lanka 74.80 years

While there is a correlation with GNP it isn't all that close. However the US at 37 compared to 7th in GNP is clearly missing something. The UK at 29th & 26th respectively has nothing to boast about. Japan at 3rd/21st & Singapore at 4th/27th look like the ones we should be learning from. Dan Hannan at the centre of a media storm here as "unpatriotic" for not saying our health service is wonderful speaks of learning from Singapore. Hong Kong at 6th/12th & France at 10th/28th both score well.

It is also worth noting that 74th place Sri lanka is still achieving 91% of the life expectancy of Japan with only 14% of its per capita GNP & this is reflected across the board. It suggests that no matter how good or bad health care is it doesn't have that much effect.

Labels: International politics

This from The Register -

The world's source for global temperature record admits it's lost or destroyed all the original data that would allow a third party to construct a global temperature record. The destruction (or loss) of the data comes at a convenient time for the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia - permitting it to snub FoIA requests to see the data.

The CRU has refused to release the raw weather station data and its processing methods for inspection - except to hand-picked academics - for several years....

Professor Phil Jones "I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

In 2007, in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, CRU initially said it didn't have to fulfil the requests because "Information accessible to applicant via other means Some information is publicly available on external websites".

Now it's citing confidentiality agreements with Denmark, Spain, Bahrain and our own Mystic Met Office. Others may exist, CRU says in a statement, but it might have lost them because it moved offices. Or they were made verbally, and nobody at CRU wrote them down.

As for the raw station data,"We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data"

Canadian statistician and blogger Steve McIntyre, who has been asking for the data set for years, says he isn't impressed by the excuses. McIntyre obtained raw data when it was accidentally left on an FTP server last month. Since then, CRU has battened down the hatches, and purged its FTP directories lest any more raw data escapes and falls into the wrong hands.

Anybody not familiar with the processes of science may not realise exactly how fraudulent this is. In politics we are used to being told that there is information that would prove we are all going to die in 45 minutes but security consideration prevent us knowing what it is but science, real science, is different.

Professor Jones' remark shows he has no connection to science. The reason any real scientist wants to share their data is precisely because somebody might find something wrong with it. That is what science is - the testing of theories against evidence.

Since their story has repeatedly changed it is obviously impossible to believe any of them. If the we accept Professor Jones assurance that he simply refuses to hand over the data then the claim that they have been destroyed is a lie. If we accept the claim that they have been destroyed then the statement that they are being kept because of untraceable confidentiality agreements is a lie. If it is confidentiality agreements then the claim that it is the Professor's decision is a lie. What we can say for certain is that (A) the Met Office are a pack of liars & (B) that the global temperature figures are worthless.

This is important because a couple of years ago Stephen McIntyre got hold of the data making up the US temperature figures & proved that 1998 was not the warmest on record, 1934 was warmer. This was actually accepted by the US authorities as correct. Since then the alarmist case has depended on saying that though the US figures are correct the world figures show warming went on till 1998 (& predicting the current cooling is merely an 11 year blip). To do this they had to ignore that US figures were inherently more reliable because they had not been interrupted by war etc & that they had not been corrected. Now, however, it turns out that the data making up the world figures have been allegedly destroyed & hence the conclusions are worthless.

Obviously since this is the most important global warming news since McIntyre [proved 1934 was warmer 2 years ago it is going to receive hundreds of times more coverage than the normal global warming story, at least in any honest newspaper, which currently means only the online Register.

In Scotland we get 42.2 Terawatts of electricity from our nuclear capacity of 1 x 1215 reactor at 70% capacity & 2 at 682 gigawatts totaling 2.2Gw. That is 42 billion kilowatt hours or 19 billion a year for each gigawatt of installed capacity.

A new off the shelf Westinghouse AP 1000 generator would, under mass production conditions, cost $1,200 million. At a 10% return that would be $120 million a year or 0.6 cents (0.4) a unit. Because nuclear uses so little fuel & is very large scale it has always been accepted that the majority of cost is going to be in building it. So even if we assume total costs to be double that, nuclear power need not cost more than 1.2p a unit. This is a reasonable improvement from the previously discussed French cost of 1.7p a unit, both since their reactors are now 30 year old designs & because the Westinghouse price is a future one based on the assumption of mass production.

This would be a quarter of overall current electricity costs & about 8% of what we are expected to pay for windmill power.

Note that I do not dispute current estimates from the British nuclear industry of about 3.5p a unit. These are based on the regulatory system in Britain, which, like many other countries, piles on every extra cost the Luddites can think of. I merely point out that this is both unnecessary & enormously destructive. Another example of such destructiveness is that, in their politically motivated destruction of Britain's nuclear industry they forced the sell off of British owned Westinghouse for a small fraction of its true value which, in a competently run country, could have given Britain world leadership in this industry.

Compare this to evidence to Congress by David Criswell. He is speaking in favour of lunar solar power (LSP) satellites, which in a longer term will certainly work, but the figures for cost & effect apply to any system.

When LSP provides 20 terawatts of electric power to Earth it can sell the electricity at one-fifth of today's cost or ~1 ¢/kWh. At current electric prices LSP would generate ~9 trillion dollars per year of net income.

Like hydroelectric dams, every power receiver on Earth can be an engine of clean economic growth. Gross World Product can increase a factor of 10. The average annual per capita income of Developing Nations can increase from today's $2,500 to ~$20,000. Economically driven emigrations, such as from Mexico and Central America to the United States, will gradually decrease.

Increasingly wealthy Developing Nations will generate new and rapidly growing markets for American goods and services. Lunar power can generate hydrogen to fuel cars at low cost and with no release of greenhouse gases. United States payments to other nations for oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, and commodities such as fertilizer will decrease. LSP industries will establish new, high-value American jobs. LSP will generate major investment opportunities for Americans. The average American income could increase from today's ~$35,000/y-person to more than $150,000/y-person.

A cut to a quarter may not be quite as good as a cut to a fifth but it isn't that far off. Dr Criswell's calculation that a cut by 80% would allow the economy to grow to 428% certainly implies that the British economy could more than triple & the world economy grow even more from this one reform alone.

I'm sure Dr Criswell knows his stuff & that space based power, though I would suspect from satellites in closer Earth orbit, does have potential, in due course, to provide unlimited power. This does not in any way detract from the argument for right now using, to best effect, a technology we know does work today & can provide a not dissimilar benefit.

UPDATE A commenter here has mentioned the Russian VVER generators.

The VVER-1200 is an evolution of the VVER-1000 being offered for domestic and export use. Specifications include a $1,200 per kW electric capital cost, 54 month planned construction time, and expected 50 year lifetime at 90% capacity factor. The VVER 1200 will produce 1,200 MWe of power

That is the same cost per unit as it is said the AP1000 will go down to after long run production has been achieved. That in turn suggests that if long run production of this generator can be achieved so will further cost reductions & we may, in time, see electricity costs dropping to, or even below the 1p per kwh mark.

Labels: Fixing the economy, nuclear

This is the prize Scotland's government put up using the X-Prize format

£10 million will be awarded to the team that can demonstrate in Scottish waters a commercially viable wave or tidal energy technology that achieves a minimum electrical output of 100GWh over a continuous 2 year period using only the power of the sea and is judged to be the best overall technology after consideration of cost, environmental sustainability and safety.

That certainly looks like a definition of an X-Prize, even though there is a not unreasonable matter of judging.

Now I believe & have said before, that a subsea turbine is not the most important thing we should be encouraging. That would be an orbital shuttle or the improved battery that John McCain proposed or several of the things Newt Gingrich suggested. On the other hand it is a substantial step towards funding things this way, rather than through government grants which amount to a blank cheque with no failure conditions.

Alex Salmond at least gets the theory though he is also politician enough to lay it on with a trowel:

Mr Salmond announced the details at a reception in Edinburgh Castle for
scientists, environmentalists and potential entrants.’The Scottish Government’s
10 million Saltire Prize is one of the biggest international prizes in history,’ said Mr Salmond. ’It is Scotland’s energy challenge to the world, a challenge to the
brightest and best minds worldwide to unleash their talents and push the frontiers
of innovation in green marine energy.’

However I am a little cautious over this bit "Entries for the Saltire Prize open next summer, and the closing date will be in June 2013, with the winner chosen two years later."

Firstly I am by no means sure that a truly "commercial" sea turbine is possible - this should not be a problem because if it isn't then we should not expect the prize to be won. However the date for a winner to be chosen suggests that somebody may be chosen come what may rather than handing it over to the first person to crank out 100Gwh for 2 years. That would rather negate the point.

Tavish Scott of the LibDems did go out of his way to make it clear that he didn't understand the difference between a prize & complained that it wasn't a real prize because it hadn't yet been handed over to everybody who turns up at the starting line. By comparison the SNP certainly rate at least 7 out of 10 & will be higher if they don't fumble the actual award. Though I have said some of this before I am pleased to see the actual wording of the prize & it is more reassuring. After all no government elsewhere, as far as I know, has endorsed any sort of X-Prize.

The Saltire site does have an embarrassing list of the endorsements they find politically useful - all from various sorts of eco-nut - but I suppose that is politics, better to have such people inside the tent pissing out than vice versa.

Labels: Scottish politics, X-Prizes

Via CCNet I read an interesting post from TonyN on Harmless Sky. Paraphrasing, it suggests The Royal society is not quite as convinced of catastrophic warming as it is paid to be:

There is no doubt that The Royal Society has a position on climate change, but to what extent is this venerable and distinguished organisation able to express a truly independent and objective opinion on a matter of current public policy?

Here is what the Society say at the head of the main page on their web site dealing with climate:

"International scientific consensus agrees that increasing levels of man-made greenhouse gases are leading to global climate change. Possible consequences of climate change include rising temperatures, changing sea levels, and impacts on global weather. These changes could have serious impacts on the world's organisms and on the lives of millions of people, especially those living in areas vulnerable to extreme natural conditions such as flooding and drought"

At a glance, this appears to be a reiteration of the current orthodoxy, but a more careful reading reveals it is remarkably cautious. There is no reference to conclusive, or even compelling, scientific evidence but only to 'international scientific consensus', it speaks of 'possible consequences' rather inevitable consequences, and suggests that these 'could' be serious rather than predicting certain disaster. There is plenty of wriggle-room here should opinion change.

...very different from what the last president of the Society, Lord May of Oxford, was wont to tell the media. His claims that the science of anthropogenic climate change is as clear as that relating to gravity or evolution made one wonder ...

In the United States, both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society have come under pressure from members to review their alarmist and dogmatic public utterances on climate change (See post at WattsUpWithThat ...

Royal Soc as FAKECHARITY

Although a charitable body, The Royal Society serves as the Academy of Sciences of the United Kingdom (in which role it receives funding from HM Government).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society

Government funding comes in the form of Parliamentary Grants-in-aid which, over the last four years (most recent accounts 31st March 2008), has amounted to: £31.7m, £32.9m, £36.6m and £44.9m respectively. So from 2005 to 2008 the government's contributions have increased by about 42%.

The next heading in the accounts is 'Other grants and contributions', which suggests more support from the public sector. For the same period this amounts to: £9.5m, £8.8m, £7.3m and £7.8m. It looks as though, you can add about another £8m (on average) in public funding to the amount received from Parliamentary Grants-in-aid.

Turning to the expenditure side of the accounts, we find that items that are attributable to research funding amount to £29.0m, £30.2m £32.3m and £38.4, an increase of 32% over four years. So the Society's activities as a conduit for government funds directed towards research have also increased at the same time as the Parliamentary Grants-in-aid, but to a lesser extent.

But it is some other items of expenditure that really caught my eye.

2005 Informing scientific policy £0.4m
2006 Independent advice nationally and internationally £1.1m
2007 Influence policymaking with the best scientific advice £1.5m
2008 Influence policymaking with the best scientific advice £2.3m

This area of expenditure has increased by nearly six times.

Although the wording in these entries varies, it is pretty clear that they all cover the same activities, and the latter two entries are quite unambiguous. Moreover they look very much like allocations for lobbying activities directed towards the government, which in turn funds the Society. Why should this be?

Overall, it is apparent that government support for an institution which is, at the same time, a charity, a national academy of science and a channel for public expenditure related to scientific research has grown very considerably during the period when global warming has become a political hot potato...

One last point. During an interview on Radio4's Today programme, the following exchange took place between Evan Davis (the presenter) and Sir Jonathon Porritt, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, who is a lifelong environmental activist.

Evan Davis: Does it worry you that somehow the pressure ... . isn't being brought to bear on government [to take action on climate change] and the government isn't making the case loudly enough for actual change to occur.

Sir Jonathon Porritt: Yes it's a funny one this, you sometimes hear minsters saying that they wished the environmental organisations were whipping up more public pressure so they would then be able to respond to that pressure.

Radio4 Today 29th June 2009 about 2mins 25sec in.

This provides a fascinating behind-the-scenes glimpse of how the business of government is conducted under the present administration. I'm sure that Sir Jonathan saw nothing strange in his admission that the government are happy to use environmental activists to drive policies that they know the public are, at best, lukewarm about. And if our national academy of science lobbies the government alongside the activist groups, then that is even more potent pressure that ministers can react to.

###########################

Something Tony is kind enough not to mention is that Mr Robert May (1936-1959), Dr Robert May (1959-1969), Prof. Robert May (1969-1996). Prof. Sir Robert May (1996-2001), Prof. The Rt. Hon. The Lord May of Oxford (2001-) was prior to becoming President of the Royal Society in 2000, the Chief scientific Advisor to the Government, a political appointment whose subsequent holder Sir David King has told "infantile" lies in support of global warming from which he has certainly profited.

On another post on the same site Tony quotes a BBC interview with the chair of a Parliamentary Committee on what makes good science:

"Mr Willis said the government had "a good record" in funding scientific research.

"But it's how you use that science," he added.

"For example, we've got a huge climate change agenda, we've got a huge energy agenda. Where are we using the scientific and engineering advice?

"Unless at the policy stage ministers are urged to ask that basic question, 'Where is the evidence to support our policy and if there isn't, how do we get it?'

"That makes good government."


It seems you get it by paying for it. The Royal Scoiety is the premier scientific society in the world. Its motto 'Nullius in verba', roughly translated as 'Take nobody's word for it', dates back to 1663>. Its members have a duty not merely to their own self respect but to their eminent predecessors, who counted Charles II as their patron but did not let him dictate their opinions, not to let Ed Miliband do so.

David Miliband & Alan Johnson have jointly (alternate paragraphs maybe) written an article in the Sunday Telegraph about our government not being responsible for torture.

When detainees are held by our police or Armed Forces we can be sure how they are treated. By definition, we cannot have that same level of assurance when they are held by foreign governments, whose obligations may differ from our own.

Which may or may not work for MI6 officers flying out to sit outside the door as police in other countries torture people to answer British questions but it is certainly an admission that when police, directly under their authority do such things & thousands of times worse against entirely innocent people, Messrs Miliband, Johnson & the rest of the Cabinet are personally criminal.

"Murder, torture and extortion: these are the extraordinary charges made against the UN's own Kosovo Protection Corps in a confidential United Nations report written for Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"The KPC stands accused in the document, drawn up on 29 February, of 'criminal activities - killings, ill-treatment/torture, illegal policing, abuse of authority, intimidation, breaches of political neutrality and hate-speech'.

"The 5,000-strong corps, funded by UN members including Britain, has a £30 million aid budget for Kosovo. It was set up to provide 'disaster response services'; instead, says the UN, it has been murdering and torturing people. "

Since then the kidnap of 1,300 civilians & their dissection by the KLA/NATO police has become public (if not very public thanks to the enthusiasm of our media to censor in the cause of genocide).

So by their own admission these war criminals all personally knew that their police were engaged in genocide (Dragodan Massacre) & worse (dissecting living humans to provide parts for our hospitals) as must the American & other NATO political & military leaders.

'The Law of Land Warfare']

"A military commander is responsible not only for criminal acts committed in pursuance of his orders, but is 'also responsible if he has actual knowledge, or should have knowledge....that troops or other persons subject to his control are about to commit or have committed a war crime and he fails to take the necessary and reasonable steps to insure compliance with the law of war to punish violations thereof.'"
- - From 'Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy,' by Telford Taylor, US Chief Counsel at Nuremberg, page 58, © The New York Times Company, 1970. Taylor is citing US Army FM 27-10, 'The Law of Land Warfare,' (1956) page 178.)

As police the KLA, now called NLA in deference to being out of area, also continued their war crimes against Macedonia

"Up to 20 per cent of the KPC are now absent from active duty - and, like Mr Ostremi [the KPC chief of staff, accused of launching the attack on Macedonia!] most are believed to be fighting with the NLA...."

Cleasrly all the artificial fuss got up about torturing Binyam Mohamed's is nothing but a deliberate smokescreen to hide the fact that every senior politician in goverenment has already committed crimes thousands of times worse.

Hacim Thaci, KLA terrorist leader, Bernard Kouchner, Gen. Michael Jackson, Agim Ceku, notorious war criminal and leader of our "police", and Wesley Clark

"What's the point of having this great terrorist army if we're just going to arrest them?"
Madeline Albright

Labels: International politics, Yugoslavia