A Place to Stand

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