A Place to Stand

The names of some of the people barred from entering the UK for fostering extremism or hatred have been published for the first time. - BBC

Which is an interesting way of phrasing it. Indeed it is not anything like a full list - for example the best known recent banning was that of Dutch politician Geert Wilders for publishing some of the more nasty bits of the Koran. What the government have done is selected a few names whose banning they think will be good publicity & show the government's values. It is pure spin designed to reinforce xenophobia. Since the 2 Russians named are in prison & likely to stay there for many years & Michael Savage hasn't been here for 25 years & had no immediate plans to come here. Saying they will be turned away at customs clearly serves no practical purpose.

Perhaps Jacqui will also be sending out a press release saying how Count Dracula, Attila the Hun & the Daleks are also warned they not be allowed through Heathrow customs. It would be about as useful.

However the particular case of Michael Savage deserves inspection & not just because he looks likely to get significant damages from this nonsense. The government have said

"Therefore we will not hesitate to name and shame those who foster extremist views as we want them to know that they are not welcome here."

The Home Office also seems to have made some suggestion that he has advocated violence but he denies it & they have not even had the decency to give time & place for this. Of course, Jacqui Smith herself has not merely advocated but participated in violence, genocide, child rape & organlegging & the British government has been wholly supportive of visits by Americans such as William Clinton who are equally genocidal so it certainly can't be any matter of principle.

Looking at his website it is full of news stories which tend towards libertarianism (against banning books, interested in whether pot should be legalised, against phone tapping & the abuses of "homeland security", for Oklahoma's use of the 10th amendment to overrule Federal law[a potentially bery important story barely covered elsewhere]) a disapproval of Obama, support of the right to bear arms, disapproval of Muslim jihadists having training camps in the USA etc.

And several articles about being banned by the UK government.

And several against the global warming scam.

In general he looks like a very American & less pompous/opinionated/intellectual (delete to taste) version of Peter Hitchens. If our genocidal Home Secretary believes it is proper to prevent such people speaking here then she & her party are indeed fascist. I hope his defamation suit gives her a bloody nose.

Incidentally it is worth pointing out that US global warming alarmist James Hansen who has called for imprisoning people for disputing his proven lies about catastrophic warming & massive sea level rise was allowed to come to this country to tell a court that he advocated the suspension of the rule of law to allow people to engage in violence to promote warming alarmism & cause blackouts. Clearly nothing to do with being worried about violence then & everything to do with suppressing inconvenient facts.

I thoroughly recommend & have been contributing to John Redwood's blog:

John's article "Both the Brown and the Obama administrations seem united in one thing - the pursuit of lower living standards for all.....

I said "For the last 40 years it has been politically fashionable & not just among LudDim & Labour parties & the BBC, to say that we are, or will within 10 years, be suffering environmental melt down & the common people must be persuaded not want a higher standard of living.

Well they have got their wish.

In reality, with scientific knowledge expanding faster than ever & Moore’s Law, if anything, speeding up we could all be having the growth rates of China & India if our political class would get out of the way."

Stuart Fairney Reply "That may be the smartest comment I’ve ever read on this blog.

But how can we expect politicians to vote to reduce their power and influence. Turkeys voting for christmas etc This theme was discussed in the best political novel of 2008

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Single-Acts-Tyranny-Stuart-Fairney/dp/0956001602/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241545958&sr=8-1"
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John's article "When waste, needless programmes, stupid jobs, pointless regulation, poor efficiency and rampant feather bedding are rife in an organisation, cutting costs is not only easy but rapidly makes the service better."

I said "Wikipedia says John “in 1995 he returned £100,000,000 of Wales’ block grant to the UK treasury unspent following efficiency savings and cost-cutting measures”. I assume total savings were several times that but most of it was used, more usefully in Wales. On a proportionate basis that sum was £2 billion across the UK & probably twice that now & multiplied again several times because Major clearly did run a much tighter ship than Brown.

He can credibly talk the talk having walked the cost cutting walk.

Reply: Yes, I saved more than £100 m and spent the rest of things Wales did need. It is never easy getting them to spend on things people want, as the establishment always wants to spend on itself."
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He produced a very downbeat assessment of future growth based on what the Treasury believes to be our current underlying growth rate "So what is the trend rate of growth?

Current Treasury figure 2.75%

Less lower population growth -0.4%
Less impact of larger inefficient public sector -0.2%
Less debt effect -0.3%
Less financial sector distortions and losses -0.3%
Less incentive effect of new taxes -0.2%

Possible new trend rate of growth after recession 1.35%

I will be doing some more work to develop this model. Every 1% off the growth rate means the average family of four being worse off by £1,000 a year for each year of the slower growth. The losses compound up to large numbers quite quickly, as every year adds another shortfall of an additional £1,000 in their share of National income."

I disagreed on the assumption that we can substantially improve that trend by ending government Ludditry "I don’t think things need be so bad as that. It depends very much on the growth rate. If we got even the world average long term growth rate of 5%, let alone India & China’s 10% we could pay off debts in a few years. Growth in turn is not a fixed amount & if we got rid of government anti-nuclear & other ludditry & overregulation we could manage it.

This from Jerry Pournelle yesterday:

“Low cost energy is the key to economic growth, and nothing the government is doing would have as great an effect as a huge nuclear power program. The TVA was the best investment of the New Deal. It may be that private power would have done as well, but the cheap energy from TVA brought energy to the South.

Cheap power is the key to growth; and clearly that will not happen under the Change that we can believe in.”

It could happen in Britain. The best electoral promise in many years was Sarah Palin’s “Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines and build more nuclear plants”. That would work & there are many people in the Conservative party who would support it. I’m not sure if there are enough."
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UPDATE Stuart & others have also commented favourably on this comment of mine:

If money being printed is “flowing into commodities” that is a very bad sign. It means (A) that commodity prices are being artificially pushed up which makes everything more expensive while acting as a depressent to real production & (B) that investors are finding a shortage of real productive investments to make. I believe that the cause is that western governments have produced so many regulations either preventing manufacture (nuclear plantsw, GM, golf courses) or enormously expensive compared to the free market parts of the world (steel making, housebuilding, construction & manufacturing generally).

Technology is still progressing faster than at any time in human history & if we allowed its use we would be growing similarly.

Rather than printing pieces of paper & working the economy by by moving them round we coyuld be running space X-Prizes & building a production line to manufacture nuclear power plants & massively cutting these destructive regulations.

This is an article on Techcentralstation which I sent to Jerry Pournelle quoting an excerpt:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=050109A

"One of the best ways to get boys reading is to offer them reading material that motivates them to want to read. Boys enjoy reading: nonfiction; stories with action and adventure; stories with male protagonists; and a wide variety of reading materials, including books, magazines, newspapers, how-to manuals, Web sites, comic books, and graphic novels.

Many teachers do not offer boy-friendly reading material because they view it as substandard. They believe it's better to require boys to read books that meet high literary standards..."

High literary standards being defined as stuff that is introspective, action free, relationship heavy, with no fight scenes & read by schoolmarms of both sexes.

I read Treasure Island in 7th Grade. It was in the reading textbook (Most Tennessee textbooks had mostly public domain material). Do they read Stevenson in grade school now?
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I don't think there are objective standards for determining that War and Peace is of higher standard than a how-to manual. If not there is no excuse whatsoever for slanting education against teaching boys just because they are glandularly requited to be more adventurous. his is not only a socially destructive policy it is wicked. It would not be much less so if if there were objective literary standards applying.

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A couple of other remarks from on the same day from Jerry that I thought worth keeping

On how peer reviewed science stultifies: I have said for many years that our grant system ought to be required to reserve some portion -- in the neighborhood of 10% -- for unpopular theories and experimentum crucium, as an insurance against the consensus bandwagon effect. I am more convinced of that than ever now.

On the new Federal Energy Regulator embracing windmillery: Which pretty well means that the recession will become a depression. Low cost energy is the key to economic growth, and nothing the government is doing would have as great an effect as a huge nuclear power program. The TVA was the best investment of the New Deal. It may be that private power would have done as well, but the cheap energy from TVA brought energy to the South.

Cheap power is the key to growth; and clearly that will not happen under the Change that we can believe in.

Today is the 30th anniversary of Margaret Thatcher coming to power. At the time, as a LibDem I regretted her getting an overall majority, though I can't say I thought a Labour majority was desirable either.

The Radio Scotland Morning Show today was on the somewhat pejorative theme of "should Thatcher apologise to Scotland" which naturally brought out all those whose only contribution to politics is to demand more taxpayer's money, which unfortunately is quite a lot.

I have added this to Graham's blog

Britain was in a state of virtual bankruptcy when she took over from the last Labour government (its the story of the end of all Labour governments). Since then we have achieved a growth rate better than that of the other big EU countries. If we accept that economic growth has been 1% a year better since 1979 than it would have been if Labour had nationalised the "commanding heights of the economy" as they promised (& actually a difference much larger than 1% is likely) she is responsible for 30% of Britain's wealth now.

I strongly suspect that not a single one of the parasites decrying her failure to give them as much of the taxpayer's money as they want has either had the good manners to thank her or the integrity to refuse 30% of their dole/civil service salary that comes from the real economy. Nor indeed that anybody in the taxpayer funded BBC has either.

On Daniel Hannan's blog, where views are more onesided the other way I put

Her biggest mistake was to allow North Sea oil to keep up the value of the £. It made sense in the fight against inflation but it made industry so much less competitive than it need have been & thus the job losses so much worse.

Everybody has 20-20 hindsight & I know of nobody, in any party, who said this at the time.

She was neither as successful nor as destructive as portrayed. Not as much a reformer as she wanted to be, because most of her party were not nearly as libertarian as she. Though she improved Britain's economy it was not nearly as spectacular as the growth achieved by Ireland after its free market reforms in 1989. On the other hand it was far more spectacular, at least in a positive direction, than any of her opponents would have managed.

Perhaps her greatest achievement was after she left office. It has been said that New Labour was her achievement & Tony Blair merely following in her footsteps, but with a sheepish grin. There is a lot of truth in that & certainly New Labour is more Thatcherite than it is Labour. I would also suggest that she has changed the Conservative Party at least as much, though they are less keen to advertise it. When she was PM almost every cabinet contained a majority against her on many issues, laterally particularly the EU. She has said that she was a classic liberal but the Conservative party wasn't. It, to a much greater degree, is now as people like Hannan, Redwood, Douglas Carswell, David Davis & Iain Dale prove. It is certainly more eurosceptic than even she ever was in office - after all the Conservatives, under Heath, pushed us into the EU.

These achievements were made by the real intellectual rigour she brought to politics, which it is much easier to display out of office than when you have to head a government. They are also the product of having & expressing beliefs. Honest expression of belief is at best a hindrance to getting office. On the other hand having beliefs is essential to real achievement which is why she will be remembered long after Blair is forgotten.

"And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things" Nicolo Machiavelli

From The Moon is a Harsh Mistress - Professor Bernardo de la Paz' speech to the Lunar constitutional convention near the end of part 2

"Like fire & fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom - if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. I would not be unhappy if this convention sat for ten years before reporting - but I would be frightened if you took less than a year.

Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional ...for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. For example, I note in one draft report a proposal for setting up a commission to divide Luna into congressional districts and to reapportion them from time to time according to population.

This is the traditional way; therefore it should be suspect, considered guilty until proven innocent. Perhaps you feel that this is the only way. May I suggest others? Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him. Constituencies might be formed by dividing people by occupation ... or by age ... or even alphabetically. Or they might not be divided, every member elected at large - and do not object that this would make it impossible for any man not widely known throughout Luna to be elected; that might be the best possible thing for Luna.

You might even consider installing the candidate who got the least number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from a new tyranny. Don't reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous - think about it! In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes worse than overt tyrannies.

But if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about 10,000 human beings, perhaps 7,000 of voting age - and some of you were elected by slim majorities [Ed-he is clearly speaking of a FPTP rather than proportional electoral system] Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by 4,000 citizens. He would then represent these 4,000 affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would be a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with 8,000 supporters might have 2 votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out - many of them! But you could work them out ... and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government; the disgruntled minority which feels - correctly - that it has been disenfranchised.

But whatever you do do not let the past be a straitjacket!

I note 1 proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent - the more impediment to legislation the better. But instead of following tradition, I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws only with a 2/3rds majority ... while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere 1/3rd minority. Preposterous? think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command 2/3rds of your consents is it not likely to make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as 1/3rd is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

But in writing your constitution let me invite attention to the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative" Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies ... no interference, however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation ... no involuntary taxation. Comrades if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your government should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome.

What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government power to do something that appears to need doing. Please remember always that the Lunar Authority was created for the noblest of purposes by just such sober and well-intentioned men, all popularly elected. And with that thought I leave you to your labours.
Thank you"

“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities!” Walt Kelly

On one hand we have never been so susceptible to a major new disease. In previous ages it took months or even years for a disease to cross continents. Now with international air travel we see a Mexican flu strain appearing in Scotland & Australia within weeks of its first appearance in an isolated Mexican hamlet. In another way we are endangered because, unlike earlier generations, we have never known of plagues sweeping the country & killing 10 - 15 - even 30% of the entire population. Beyond that we have a serious problem that many antibiotics have been so widely used that the diseases have evolved past them & they are ceasing to work.

On the other hand we know how diseases spread & the world has the capacity to react fast & virtually anywhere in the world, quarantine, isolate & hunt down infectious disease.

It is a race between the geometric spread of disease & the intelligent directed research & hunting of it. A race where the margin between victory & defeat is very thin & unforgiving.

The important thing to know about a disease is how how & how fast it spreads - this is the disease vector. Anything that interferes with the vector slows or reverses its spread - hence the advice to wash hands, always use a handkerchief & Mexico's masks & closure of sports stadia. None of these will stop it dead but all cut its rate of spread.

If this flu strain, & flu is a particularly infectious disease, infects, on average, 2 people in 3-5 days then the number of people it gets in 90 days is 2 to power 23 =
8,388,608. If by quarantining, changing habits & even curing people it can be reduced to 0.9 people then the number of new cases after 3 months [0.9^23} is less than zero [0.09].

This is why, unlike all the eco-scares which ought to be denounced as fakes when they don't happen, disease scares ought to be treated very seriously even though, if we are lucky, deaths may be in the 10s rather than the millions. The margin between the 2 is very small & SARS, which is now treated with some amusement, could easily have got free & killed 10s of millions rather than hundreds.

That is why it would be wonderful if this strain were to prove a surmountable opportunity. We are unlikely to find a disease more infectious than flu. This strain seems relatively non-lethal, which makes sense since the most successful infections do not kill their hosts for the same reason that the most successful car thieves don't normally crash. The relatively high lethality rate in Mexico seems to contradict this but I am convinced this is because it is actually much more widespread there than acknowledged. The chances, out of a population of 108 million, of the honeymoon couple treated in Scotland, accidentally encountering a disease vector from 1 of only 1,600 officially acknowledged victims would be of the order of 100,000 to 1 against. The chances of it happening more than once to other tourists are very much longer.

However the good news is that, according to the very limited knowledge we actually have, only 2 people have caught the infection from these 2 & other cases inside Britain. That looks like we may keep the infection rate down to much below 1. If, with our knowledge of this strain improving day by day, not least because of our doctors at Monklands hospital, this rate can be achieved worldwide, particularly Mexico, it is theoretically possible this strain could be wiped out. I would give odds against that much success, but not long odds.

The major worry must be that flu is considerably more dangerous during the winter when all our immune systems are weaker & so that even if it is beaten back now it may come back in the winter. Even if it is eliminated in the rest of the world it may remain endemic in Mexico & developed countries, acting in their own interests, should be unstinting in helping Mexico fight it.

On the other hand if we surmount this the human race will have conquered the first of the eternal horsemen of the Apocalypse. We completely eliminated smallpox, but because it exists only in humans it was particularly vulnerable. We eliminated SARS but it was new to humans. To eliminate just 1 strain of flu would be knocking out the champion.

Lets hope this turns out to be a surmountable opportunity.


*We have also pretty nearly eliminated Famine & driven Death back by at least a generation. War still looks fearsome but it is the only horseman created by human beings.

An interesting example of the extension of legal action.

Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.

...The magazine's Web site describes the April 21, 2008, article as being about a New Guinea tribesman who avenged an uncle's slaying by a neighboring clan by killing his uncle's murderer. The summary didn't identify the tribesman.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in New York state Supreme Court.

Obviously I know nothing about whether Diamond did actually deliberately "sex-up" the story which the tribesman told him & which he appears now to be claiming he sexed up in the first place. Obviously to do so would a dreadful thing if anthropology were were much od a science. On the other hand he wouldn't have been doing anything that Margaret Mead didn't do a 81 years ago or indeed somebody posing as Homer did in the Odyssey.

While I suspect Jared may well have been embellishing to reinforce a PC anthropological view this looks very much like an artificial suit about which the nominal plaintiff wouldn't have cared had he not been put up to it. To quote from Stinkyjournalism

When Papua New Guinea researcher Michael Kigl, working with StinkyJournalism, went to Daniel Wemp’s Nipa home in the Southern Highlands, in July 2008 to ask him about The New Yorker article, he was shocked. Wemp had no idea that he or people he mentioned to Diamond in random stories about tribal warfare back in 2001-2002, would be publicly named, and worse, erroneously linked to heinous crimes

so this guy looks like a cut out for these people & has suffered no real damage himself.

So why am I interested in this nonsense? Well it strikes me there are 350,000 from Kosovo who were ethnically cleansed &/or had their relatives murdered. Ditto half the population of Sarajevo & about half a million from Croatia. Our governments did this, quite deliberately, on the basis of years of lies (eg that the Yugoslavs had killed anything up to 500,000 Albanian men in Kosovo - more than 100% of them - prior to NATO bombing) told by almost the entire western media & politicians.

If I were running the Serbian government or a large contingency fee lawyers firm in New York, London or Brussels I would be looking for some photogenic Serbian clients. If 750,000 people got $1 million apiece this would only be 30 times what various silly American women & their lawyers got in scam breast enlargement suits. Wouldn't it be good if, for once, the law was used to achieve justice for people who have really suffered?