A Place to Stand

Professor David Nutt has been sacked from an unpaid post as an "independent" government science advisor on drugs because of what he said. This was:

January 2009 ... paper was headlined "Equasy, an over-looked addiction with implications for the current debate on drug harms".

He said the point of the article was to explain that the harm from illegal drugs could be equal to harm in other parts of life, such as horse-riding, hence the invented term equasy or "equine addiction syndrome".

Prof Nutt argued that "equasy" could be blame for 10 deaths a year and more than 100 traffic accidents...

"Making riding illegal would completely prevent all these harms and would be, in practice, very easy to do...

"This attitude raises the critical question of why society tolerates - indeed encourages - certain forms of potentially harmful behaviour but not others, such as drug use."
Professor Nutt stuck to his guns and in the summer gave a lecture on the relative risks of various drugs which, in turn, became a paper published by one of the UK's leading university departments of criminology.

In the paper, he reproduced a chart of drugs and other substances, based on their risk to health. The chart stated that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis...

"I think the precautionary principle misleads," he wrote. "It starts to distort the value of evidence and therefore I think it could, and probably does, devalue evidence.

"This leads us to a position where people really don't know what the evidence is. They see the classification, they hear about evidence and they get mixed messages."

There seems to be no factual dispute that his figures are entirely true. The reason he is no longer a scientific advisor to the government is simply because he has been stating facts the government don't want to hear & don't want the public to hear.

Compare his treatment with that of Sir David King who has told the most outrageous lies about global warming being likely to make "Antarctica the only habitable continent" by 2100. Does anybody think that Sir David has shown 1,000th as much honesty & integrity as Professor David or that his knighthood is not a reward for being a liar?

Clearly Professor Nutt does not accept that we must live in a world where science has been replaced by "post normal science" where the "important characteristic of scientific knowledge - its openness to change as it rubs up against society" replaces the traditional position that facts are not subject to change by corrupt snake oil salesmen rubbing themselves up against politicians as I have pointed out Professor Mike Hulme profitably does. Once again we see the state propaganda machine trying to corrupt everything it touches.

I am coming to believe that extensive, perhaps total, drug legalisation & probably taxation, is the way to go.

Last year I attended a lecture at the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow (which I thoroughly reccommend) where the lecturer, while definitely not a supporter of broad legalisation himself, made it clear that the harm to drug users mainly comes from impurities or variations in strength of the drugs rather than to their inherent danger. Obviously if Boots were selling them this would not be a problem. The other side of that is that we should expect that if prices fall & availability rises so will usage. This is not a certainty - legalisation for example pretty nearly destroyed CB radio in Britain & if Boots are selling them at a marginal profit they won't be handing out free samples to get people hooked - but I think it would be optimistic not to assume a rise in usage.

However the other area that drugs cause problems, for which he confirmed legalisation would produce no significant bad effects is in the damage drug addict criminals commit to get their fix & the degree to which it brings about organised criminality across society. He mentioned a criminal case in which it emerged that a major drug dealer had been making donations to a political party, though he did not give details & our free & trustworthy media seem to have shown equal reticence. This is, after all, exactly what happened during Prohibition in the USA & the growth of organised crime then still affects them.

On balance then the disadvantages of criminalising drugs seem to considerably outweigh the advantages even if we don't accept the precautionary principle that people should be free to do as they wish without government control unless unless the case for government control is overwhelming & indisputable. Obviously as a classic liberal I do accept that principle in relation to government interference (& only in relation to that).
Professor David Nutt in an open shirt - as he was interviewrd on Newsnight

Bet we could cut other taxes if we taxed drugs.

UPDATE This morning (Sunday) on the Marr show the government’s chief health official was asked, 3 times, whether Profesor Nutt’s assessment of the drugs risk was correct & 3 times refused to answer ultimately saying that (A) he should have given his advice entirely behind closed doors so that the public wouldn’t know & (B) that because the public thought drugs uniquely dangerous the politicians need to take their ignorance into account. The contradiction is obvious.

Compare & contrast 2 other government experts who got it wrong, or at least said things blatantly untrue. Sir David King as the government’s chief science advisor said that by 2100 “Antarctica will be the only habitable contin et” & got no breath of criticism. Sir John Scarlett was chosen by Blair to investigate if Iraq had WMDs & duly assured the government & people that he did – as reward he was made boss of MI6 from which he retires today. My guess is that Professor Nutt isn’t in line for a knighthood.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism

Tom Harris, a local MP (Glasgow South) recently was listed as Labour's best blogger so I checked him out & have occasionally put up comments.

I have had my post censored by him with these words on one of his threads.

"Neil Craig – We don’t publish your sort round here."

So what had I said?

Had I accused him of being part of a party of war criminals? Though obviously he is I had been polite enough not to say so.

Had I accused him of mass murder, child rape, genocide, organlegging? Nope - again I had been polite.

Had I accused him of treason against the country or indeed particularly against his most loyal voters? Certainly that has happened but I didn't mention it there.

Had I accused him of being a Nazi? No, though true I hadn't.

Had I perhaps accused him of using his election to steal from the public for himself? No.

Or of stealing from us on behalf of his friends? Again guilty but I never mentioned it.

Had I accused him of deliberately lying in the promises he made to get elected? Again no doubt of his & his party's guilt but not this time.

Or said that as a proven liar, war criminal. child rapist etc etc there were no circumstances under which his word, or that of any member of his party, could ever be trusted on anything again. Nope - not me.

The "your sort" who must, at all costs, be censored are anybody sceptical about catastrophic global warming.

Worse than that - in the finest traditions of 1984 he has made it quite clear that he personally knows it to be not merely a scam but a ridiculous one at that. What he censored was a comment I made supporting a rather amusing piece he did on what complete bollocks Sir Nicholas Stern, the government's selected expert on global warming had been saying:

Humans ‘will need to grow wings and develop x-ray vision to beat climate change,’ says Stern

OKAY, he didn’t quite say that, but he might as well have.

“Give up meat to save the planet“? I don’t think so, old chap. I love meat, me: I rarely eat anything that didn’t once have parents...

As for urging us all to go veggie… yeah, good luck with that one, Your Lordship. You couldn’t get me a Bic Mac meal with strawberry shake while you’re out, could you? And go large…

Harris clearly knows it is a lying scare story, an imaginary "hobgoblin" designed to keep us alarmed & easily led & whatever his own witticisms, is desperate to censor any dissent.

And this is one of the best & brightest of the corrupt, lying, thieving, murdering, fascist scum that makes up the Labour party.

Labels: British politics

Matthew Hoh, a senior US administrator, has resigned from his position running one of Afghanistan's provinces on the grounds that the war is unwinable.

I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque & Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan.

..."We are spending our way into oblivion.

The entire pdf deserves reading, certainly by anybody with responsibility for ordering soldiers to put their lives on the line.

The impression given is of an army being ordered to march into quicksand on the theory that eventually the heap of equipment & bodies will be enough to form a road & with the implication that anybody who suggests doing something else is failing to respect the sacrifice of those already under the sand.

Of course this is not the way to build a road. Nor is it the way to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan. The most important thing is to decide what the objectives are.

One cynical interpretation of the object is that produced by Orwell in 1984.

To understand the nature of the present war -- for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive...

The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living

combined with Mencken's "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." In which case the propose of the war is to spend money thereby preventing it being spent on something constructive & to keep us scared enough to put up with all the "anti-terrorism" bureaucracy & stupidity. It appears the cost of the Afghan war to Britain is £2.5 billion a year & would thus guess the US cost to be about 20 times that ($90 bn) which, if we are going to be there for 30 years would soak up enough money to colonise the entire solar system or build 5,000 nuclear power plants (assuming economies of scale) & give most of the world a standard of energy use & thus living equivalent to what Britain has now. My guess is that the £2.5 bn figure is now to low - lets hope the 30 year one is to high. This seems to be out of all proportion to the value to us of the country. Indeed even out of all proportion to the 9/11 deaths, which, after all, are less than NATO's murders in Serbia & Kosovo.

So if the cynical view is correct the war is going very well for those responsible.

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However treating it as a conventional military problem we have a different choice.

First establish the objective. The initial objective was to kill bin Laden, smash al Quaeda & prevent it threatening terrorist attacks. On that it has been wholly successful. I think bin Laden is dead & has been for years & his name is nowadays used much less often by the media so he may indeed be being airbrushed out the picture. Nowadays the objective seems to be to establish a "democratic", centralised state with western gender values. This goes against all their cultural traditions & if that is what we are going to spend the next 30 years enforcing on them we will have to kill an awful lot of them.

On the other hand if we restrict our aims to the original ones we know we can achieve them because we already did. This is something those responsible for making decisions about lives should read.

From the beginning of 2007 to March 2008, the 82nd Airborne Division’s strategy in Khost proved that 250 paratroopers could secure a province of a million people in the Pashtun belt. The key to success in Khost—which shares a 184 kilometer-long border with Pakistan’s lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas—was working within the Afghan system. By partnering with closely supervised Afghan National Security Forces and a competent governor and subgovernors, U.S. forces were able to win the support of Khost’s 13 tribes.

Today, 2,400 U.S. soldiers are stationed in Khost. But the province is more dangerous...

We saw how this could [putting Afghan troops in control] could work in the Tani district of Khost starting in 2007. By assisting an ANA company—with a platoon of American paratroopers, a civil affairs team from the U.S.-led Provincial Reconstruction Team, the local Afghan National Police, and a determined Afghan subgovernor named Badi Zaman Sabari—we secured the district despite its long border with Pakistan.

Raids by the paratroopers under the leadership of Lt. Col. Scott Custer were extremely rare because the team had such good relations with the tribes that they would generally turn over any suspect. These good tribal relations were strengthened further by meeting the communities’ demands for a new paved road, five schools, and a spring water system that supplies 12,000 villagers.

Jerry Pournelle puts it even more bluntly

[Buying up the opium crop} will drive up the supply, of course, but even so it will be cheaper than what we are doing; and enriching local tribal khans -- sometimes called warlords -- will help keep Al Qaeda out of their territories. Silver bullets often work wonders, and are sometimes cheaper than real ones. And no, that's not Danegeld. The Afghan warlords didn't invade us last night, and we're not paying them cash to go away. We're paying them cash to make our enemies go away. Hire and purchase...

To that I would add that our military advantage is technology. Our disadvantage is that our soldiers are ordinary humans like them - except that we can't take the sort of casualties Afghan warriors have been cheerful about for millenia. So we should not be having our soldiers on the ground any more than the absolute minimum (remember that the Taliban were first driven out by northern alliance tribal forces supported by bombers), we should be limiting ourselves to providing aur support, money & remotely piloted spotter aircraft. On a side I would offer $1 million to anybody who brings in the head of an al Quaeda Arab (DNA can now tell ethnicity). My bet is that life would become pretty hazardous for any al Quaeda member still in the region - that is if they haven't already gone the way of bin Laden.

HT Mark Wadsworth for the Orwell comparison

Labels: Fear, International politics

This links to a rather good article by Bill Willingham (author of the Fables series of comics or as the literati style it - the Fables series of Graphic Novels, available at good bookstores). His theme is that the reason there is a reason why we don't have most of the things that Dan Dare promised us (flying cars, Moonbases, Atomic spaceships) even though we have some things on which we are actually ahead of the promised curve (colour TV, mobile phones, internet).
============================

“It’s not the future until we have jetpacks and flying cars. They promised us jetpacks and flying cars! Where are they?” And I realized there’s no escaping this question, either from Chris or any of a myriad other sources. The future isn’t allowed to be here until we have our jetpacks and flying cars. And that’s just the minimum. Space stations, moon cities and personal household robots are also to be desired for a fully functioning future.

... I pondered, and then despaired when a terrible realization hit me. We are in the future, Chris. We got our jetpacks and flying cars. We’ve had them for years.

...We don’t have them because we rejected them. We collectively said, and continue to say, “No thanks.”

And why is that?

Because they’re not safe.

Sure, they’re safer than the first airplanes were in their infancy



I disagree on 2 points but neither are material to his conclusion that we could & should have the future we were promised. The smaller one is that there is a genuine traffic control problem with flying cars, but it is a soluble one on which I have written before.

My bigger disagreement is that it is not us who have decided that we want to be scared of everything but that it is our parasitic government who has given itself a mission to protect us from life. Government has a vast amount of our money to spend & has to find some excuse for doing so which is why government funded quangos & fakecharities are always trying to stir up a scare story on something irrespective of there being no actual evidence (global warming, GM food, food colouring) That the primary objective is to give government an excuse to spend money is that in things for which government is really responsible (MRSA in hospitals, hypothermia due to fuel poverty, the 70 million the DDT ban killed) it does not act to prevent death - indeed the opposite - it is having government involvement, not whether it kills or cures that matters. Another example of this is in housing where, yet again, we have long had the technical capability, as Heinlein said, to provide unlimited good, cheap modular housing but purely because of government parasitism we don't get it, so clearly it isn't purely or even primarily a safety issue.

Indeed look at how individuals behave. Richard Branson is always flying round the world in a condom, skiing is as popular as ever, bungee jumping moreso & teenage kids still motorcycle. It is not individuals who don't want adventure but government which gains power through claiming it alone can protect us from dangers & no longer has the USSR to threaten us with now has to make do with protecting us from all the "dangers" of progress, real or more often imaginary.

Labels: Fear, Science/technology

Labour's people once upon a time

Bertolt Brecht, German communist playwright, poet etc wrote this bitter condemnation of the East German authorities following the 1953 uprising, quelled by Soviet troops.

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Sometimes life goes beyond the imitation of art. One of my rules is that when some politician says something against their interests it is true because they have no incentive to lie. A Labour nomenklaturist called Andrew Neather has gone public in London's Evening Standard to say that the Labour party deliberately decided to promote mass immigration to achieve demographic change to their political advantage - effectively to elect a new people for their benefit:

Drafts were handed out in summer 2000 only with extreme reluctance: there was a paranoia about it reaching the media.

Eventually published in January 2001, the innocuously labelled "RDS Occasional Paper no. 67", "Migration: an economic and social analysis" focused heavily on the labour market case.

But the earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date. That seemed to me to be a manoeuvre too far.

Ministers were very nervous about the whole thing. For despite Roche's keenness to make her big speech and to be upfront, there was a reluctance elsewhere in government to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour's core white working-class vote.

Understandable since the main losers from immigration by unskilled people are those at the poorer end of society, to whom they are competition rather than cheap workers - the ones whose loyalty Labour have always relied on because they claimed the party existed to protect their class interests. The obscene lying scum who make up the Labour party decided, quite deliberately, to elect a new people on whose votes they could entirely rely (this being before they started bombing Iraq thereby alienating a lot of Moslems).

Understandably this has had some newspaper coverage

Mail on Sunday - 'Dishonest' Blair and Straw accused over secret plan for multicultural UK

Telegraph - Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser

Sunday Express - LABOUR IMMIGRATION ‘PLOT’

Daily Star - MIGRANT FLOOD 'PLAN'

& on blogs here & abroad

The government has produced what used to be referred to in the Nixon era as a "non-denial denial" saying "I don't know to whom he is referring or what he is referring to, but if one wants to take the views of somebody with a political motivation, that's up to him." This has been naturally been reported by the BBC as a dismissal of a piece of news the entire organisation had decided to censor reporting of in the first place. Neather has done another article denying nothing he said but using smoke & mirrors to which I have added this comment:

Inexplicably in the list of "related articles" at the end of this there is no link to the original article. Allow me to make up for that strange omission - http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers---london-needs-immigrants.do

Anyone reading it will see that Neather, displaying all the ego one might expect from NuLabour apparatchiks, had said exactly what he is accused of saying. The minister in Parliament has issued a "non-denial denial" blaming it all on Neather having the "views of somebody with a political motivation" - as can be seen by his response here his only motivation is to support Labour which suggests the truth is, if anything, even nastier than what those in charge have decided to keep from their core voters.

Difficult to think that any self respecting member of the "white working class" will ever again wish to vote for a party that behaves with such contempt & betrayal of its people's interests.
-------------------
I have also sent a letter to most of our press which appears not to have been published. Perhaps this isn't an important story. Perhaps it is but if so there must be some other reason for not publishing reader's views.

Labels: British politics, Media

This is his website. A lot better to read the words of the Czech President than the spin, cliche & lies of most of our own beloved leaders.

If only the other EU countries were run by people one half as civilised as Klaus (& if only there were more Czechs, a most competent & civilised people, in the EU than Germans) it would be a success that we would be proud to be part of.

On the Lisbon Treaty

the Lisbon Treaty constitutes a fundamental change for the Czech Republic. As you know, I have always considered this treaty a step in the wrong direction. It will deepen the problems EU is facing today, it will increase its democratic deficit, worsen the standing of our country and expose it to new risks - among other things also because it endangers the legal status of the citizens and the stability of property rights in our country.

An integral part of the Lisbon Treaty is the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. On its basis, the Luxembourg Court of Justice of the EU will assess whether the legal provisions, customs and practices of the EU member countries comply with those of the Charter. That will make it possible to bypass Czech courts and to raise property claims e.g. of those displaced after WW2 directly before the Court of Justice of the EU. The Charter makes it possible to reexamine even those decisions of the Czech courts that are legally binding.

On Catastrophic Global Warming

I keep saying that the real threat is not global warming itself. The real threat starts when politicians dare manipulate or play with the climate....

A month ago, I attended an international conference in Italy devoted to the same problem. To my surprise, both the moderator of this event and one of the panelists thought that what I suggest in my book is a trade off between climate on one hand and freedom on the other hand, that – according to me – we can have either one or the other. This is not what I’m saying. I am asking what is more endangered due to our activities, the activities of mankind, now. And that is, no doubt, freedom. Climate is OK.

Labels: global warming, International politics

Daily Mail photo of UAF demo

According to their friends in the government funded fakenewspaper the Guardian the "anti-fascist" demonstrators of UAF outside the BBC during the recording of Question Time were chanting

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire, put Nick Griffin on the top, put the Nazis in the middle, and burn the fucking lot."

Not much dispute then who are the fascists. This is the same group of thugs who were able to attack Griffin outside the House of commons with, allegedly, no nearby policeman noticing, & no subsequent arrests though TV crews filmed the attack.

So who is behind UAF?

Links to supporting organisations
» National Assembly Against Racism (NAAR)Well their website says
who don't say how they are funded but whose site isn't asking for donations so is almost certainly a government funded Fakecharity» Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) do claim "we are largely self-funding, with the extent of the work we can do depending on fundraising events, and on sponsorship and individual membership and donations" on the other hand they don't actually list where that funding comes from & their list of supporters is a bunch of pop singers I have never heard of & don't sound like they can give vast amounts. Subject to them putting their funding sources on their site I must consider them a Fakecharity
» Show Racism the Red Card
shows the logos of their sponsors who are a mixture of government quangos (eg One Scotland), football organisations (Football Foundation) & unions of government employees (Unison)» University and College Union (UCU) so at least partly a Fakecharity
» National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) independent Union
» Communication Workers’ Union (CWU) Union of Her Majesty's Royal Mail» Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) Government employees
» National Association of Schoolmasters and Women Teachers (NASUWT) Government employees» National Union of Teachers (NUT) Government employees
» National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) Government employees
» UNITE the union Easily Britain's largest Union contains both public & private workers & cannot be considered under public employee control. The fact that it is listed last may mean its contribution is less than that of smaller unions.

So 2 1/2 of them, the ones at the top of the listing too, are government funded Fakecharities. 4 Unions of government employees. 2 independent Unions. Note that people have been fired from various parts of government employment simply for membership of the BNP. Clearly being paymaster to a group of violent thugs threatening politically approved murder is not a breach of the same rules.

The conclusion must be that this violence is being overwhelmingly paid for by the government or government unions acting with their specific approval. Though the Consevative, LibDem & Green partites are also affiliated to these filth the primary culpability must lie with Labour since they control the government.We are seeing government rent-a-mobbery & on the edge of seeing government paying to have people beaten up. If anybody other than the government were doing this they would be quickly arrested on conspiracy charges. In fact it is becoming obvious that the police consistently refuse to arrest those engaged in UAF criminal violence.

Labels: British politics, Fear