A Place to Stand

Yesterday the Scotsman had a good letter from Professor Colin McInnes, of whom it has been said before, giving actual figures proving sea turbines to be about 3 times more expensive than nuclear.

Jenny Fyall writes that the £4 billion to be invested in wave and tidal schemes in Scottish waters will deliver 1,200 MW of electrical power (your report, 19 May). However, the power output of the scheme is to be split almost equally between wave (capacity factor of 25 per cent) and tidal (capacity factor of 40 per cent) so the average power delivered will be in the order of 400 MW.

If the same £4bn was invested in a 1,650 MW EPR nuclear plant (capacity factor of 90 per cent) the average power delivered would be in the order of 1,480 MW, more than three times greater than the renewables scheme, without the need for back-up.
ADVERTISEMENT Moreover, a modern nuclear plant has a design life of 60 years compared with 20 years for marine renewables, so more than 10 times as much energy would be delivered.

In addition, it is proposed that wave schemes are supported by five Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) for every MW-hour of energy produced, while tidal will attract three ROCs.

Each ROC provides £37 per MW-hour to generators (on top of the sale of electricity), so the £4bn scheme will attract renewable obligation costs in the order of £480 million a year. An industrial scale demonstration of wave and tidal power is an exciting development and is to be welcomed. It will allow innovation in engineering design to flourish and will provide real experience of operating costs. However, let's not delude ourselves that we are on the verge of a low-cost energy bonanza.

Being a natural stirrer I wrote to say why it should be 10 times & the Scotsman have printed it as their lead letter.

Colin McInnes (Letters, 20 May) admirably sets out the nuts and bolts of sea turbine cost and efficiency, showing that the £4 billion to be spent will produce 400MW.

His price comparison of this as being equal to a 1,650MW nuclear plant, excluding greater maintenance costs for turbines, may well be what our government is aiming at. It is not, however, what nuclear need cost.

Westinghouse (a company which used to be owned by British Nuclear until our government forced it to sell it to Japan) is selling its AP 1000 generator off the shelf for £1,200 per KW for the first reactor, which may fall to £800 per KW for subsequent reactors, so for the same £4bn we could get 4,500MW of electric capacity, 11 times as much.

Of course we won't get that because even self-styled "pro-nuclear" politicians want massive amounts of time and money-consuming regulation which, as can be seen, triples the cost, even though it still leaves nuclear less than a third of the cost of turbines and nearly a tenth of that of windmills. However, it is important that, whatever the final cost, the people are aware of the true options.

All economic experience shows that the formula, economic freedom + cheap power = economic growth, holds true. Britain already has some of the world's most expensive power, which is why we use less power per unit of GNP than any developed countries other than Ireland, Denmark and Singapore.

If our politicians insist on making it worse and increasing the 25,000 deaths a year from fuel poverty we have the right to know that this is what they are doing.

It is unedited. These are the references I sent the paper:

Ref - Westinghouse costing in $ on here http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323GNP to electricity ratio http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/06/snok-s-needed-for-each-kilowatt-hour.html

Some years ago the BBC ran, with typical commitment to propaganda rather than truth, what they called a "debate on Scotland's energy future" in which they chose the debate to be between 2 speakers who wanted more windmillery & 2 others who wanted nothing but windmillery". I would like the basis of debate to be moved from such a blatantly dishonest bias on "renewables" to a more honest & useful discussion of whether nuclear is 1/3rd of the cost or 1/10th of the cost of politically favoured alternatives (& I would defend the right of the renewabilists to participate giving reasons why they insist energy prices be 3 to 10 times what they could be).

Labels: letters, nuclear, Scottish politics

In February

Three British soldiers have been killed in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in the last 24 hours, taking the total of fatalities in the conflict above the death toll of the Falklands war in 1982...

A total of 256 British servicemen and women have now died since operations in Afghanistan began in October 2001.

That isn't a nice price to pay. Is it worth it - Ghod knows. As a mere mortal I would have to know what "victory" is defined as. If it is killing or capturing bin Laden I am pretty sure he has already been killed & I note the media mentioning him less & less so they may too. If it is preventing the Taliban controlling all of Afghanistan then we can do that because even before intervention they hadn't destroyed the "northern alliance".

I am sure that in any military terms we can win forever because a revolution in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is dominating the battlefield. Whether having soldiers on the ground enhances our strength or merely provokes annoyance from the locals while giving them targets is a different question.

However what I am concerned about here is more the morale of western societies. Not so much of the people on the front line, who seem as brave as ever, but of those watching.

2nd Afghan War - 1878-1880

We fought a very silly war with Afghanistan over whether they should be bullied by Russia or by us. We fought a number of pitched battles winning decisively as pitched battles in such wars usually are, put a new cousin on the throne & "ensuring British control of Afghanistan's foreign policy in exchange for protection and a subsidy. Abandoning the provocative policy of maintaining a British resident in Kabul, but having achieved all their other objectives, the British withdrew." So we gave them some money & everybody left everybody alone. After all the posturing we may come to the same again.

But we had casualties then too. I don't know what it was for the whole war but in one battle, Maiwand casualties, excluding Indian soldiers, were

E/B Battery, Royal Horse Artillery: 14 dead 13 wounded
HM 66th Foot 286 dead 32 wounded
1st Grenadiers 366 dead 61 wounded

More than twice our losses in the entire current conflict. And we did not decide we had to give up. And that is the point.


Achieving things takes risks & as a society we take enormous steps to minimise doing anything that involves individual risk. This war is an example. The way the Shuttles were grounded is another. The "precautionary principle" being used to prevent GM crops is another, the use of the undoubtedly wrong LNT theory to ramp up fear of all things nuclear is yet another. A society that will never allow any risks (& by any objective standards life is orders of magnitude safer than ever in history) will never accomplish anything & will be replaced by societies that do (not necessarily militarily but through being out competed).

And this squeamishness doesn't save lives. We have 25,000 die unnecessarily annually from fuel poverty. We know that increasing GNP 1% saves far more lives than lost in any accident. We know that the number who die because new medicines take decades to get approval is orders of magnitude greater than would in any credible accident. But nobody is responsible for anything that happens through inaction.

Labels: International politics, Science/technology, Social

From Foreign Policy Magazine:

There is a very simple reason why some of Africa's bloodiest, most brutal wars never seem to end: They are not really wars. Not in the traditional sense, at least. The combatants don't have much of an ideology; they don't have clear goals. They couldn't care less about taking over capitals or major cities -- in fact, they prefer the deep bush, where it is far easier to commit crimes. Today's rebels seem especially uninterested in winning converts, content instead to steal other people's children, stick Kalashnikovs or axes in their hands, and make them do the killing. Look closely at some of the continent's most intractable conflicts, from the rebel-laden creeks of the Niger Delta to the inferno in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and this is what you will find.

What we are seeing is the decline of the classic African liberation movement and the proliferation of something else -- something wilder, messier, more violent, and harder to wrap our heads around. If you'd like to call this war, fine. But what is spreading across Africa like a viral pandemic is actually just opportunistic, heavily armed banditry...

nearly half of the continent's 53 countries are home to an active conflict or a recently ended one... Add together the casualties in just the dozen countries that I cover, and you have a death toll of tens of thousands of civilians each year. More than 5 million have died in Congo alone since 1998, the International Rescue Committee has estimated...

Even if you could coax these men out of their jungle lairs and get them to the negotiating table, there is very little to offer them. They don't want ministries or tracts of land to govern. Their armies are often traumatized children, with experience and skills (if you can call them that) totally unsuited for civilian life. All they want is cash, guns, and a license to rampage. And they've already got all three. How do you negotiate with that?

The short answer is you don't. The only way to stop today's rebels for real is to capture or kill their leaders. Many are uniquely devious characters whose organizations would likely disappear as soon as they do. That's what happened in Angola when the diamond-smuggling rebel leader Jonas Savimbi was shot, bringing a sudden end to one of the Cold War's most intense conflicts. In Liberia, the moment that warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor was arrested in 2006 was the same moment that the curtain dropped on the gruesome circus

We cannot & should not try yo run Africa - it is not in our interests & ultimately it is not in theirs. However if there are cases where a relatively small effort on our part can steer hundreds of millions of people into a better life then we should do it. I have previously suggested giving Africa a good mobile telephone system (the main driver of the growth the continent is seeing) as spin off of our own space development. I have commented on Douglas Carswell's remarks about that phone system being able to morph into a banking system which would not be subject to the confiscatory inflation that the inept & parasitic African governments are even more prone to than our own.

However for success a country has to have a rule of law. Making governments more respectful of the law may be at least encouraged by a telecommunications system that lets the world see what is happening. However bandits are not so susceptible. Ultimately only a military option will suffice. However conventional forces are expensive & ineffective facing guerrillas who can vanish into the bush.

But one unconventional force is having considerable success at just that conflict. As I have previously written

The Americans are using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) not just as observers but to kill Taliban. There have been some amazing successes here, with many of the leaders dead... If current UAVs are invisible to the locals because they fly at 20,000 feet future ones will be the size of medium sized birds & able to track individuals. This ability to hit and run before being seen was a large part of what made the 20thC the century of the guerrilla

I was & am very uncomfortable with the way UAVs are changing the balance of power between the state & low tech rebels but we must use the tools we have. It would not take many UAFs, without any risk to western personnel, to search the bush & find the camps of such bandit leaders. If killing a few selected leaders is the way to end these conflicts as the article says then UAVs could achieve this with minimum (not zero, that is never an option) collateral casualties where an entire conventional army might not, even with mass casualties. I suspect the article is right about the small number of real leaders - organisations run for purely selfish motives, ie loot, tend not to outlast their leaders.

We could do this relatively easily, certainly we could bring relative peace to the continent of Africa for a tiny fraction of the cost, in both money & lives of whatever it is we are doing in Afghanistan.

However if it is not just to be neocolonialism it must be done without playing favourites. If you are going to play God, bringing death from the skies, you must do it without partiality. This means Darfur as well. There has been a massive western media campaign to tell us how dreadful the Sudanese government are & how nobly the insurgents. This has culminated in the politically controlled ICC "indicting" Sudan's leader. I have seen no evidence that he is worse than his opponents & think that the main crime that brought western opprobrium was cutting a deal to have Sudan's oil drilled by Chinese oil companies rather than the traditional Seven Sisters. The widely unreported thing that most convinces me that the insurgents are not the "goodies" here is that they have split into at least 3 groups - all against all. That is not how real national liberation movements behave, it is how bandit gangs do.

And better to do it now, under UN or at least Security Council auspices than to wait till China offers to do it for us.

Labels: International politics, Science/technology

From Serbianna News but not the BBC (I know which I consider more trustworthy - some may not agree):

"In 2009, EULEX, EUs law and order mission to Kosovo province, took over the so-called Dossier HPQ 215/2002, a collection of UN documents with evidence that the most senior ethnic Albanian separatist leaders have been and some are still involved in crime ranging from human traffic to organ extraction, illegal organ transplants, drug and slave trade…

One EULEX official said that there “exist photographs, witnesses and even evidence of blood”.

Intelligence reports also point that these senior ethnic Albanian officials, such as the former so-called Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, are capos of huge drug cartels.

The UN documents also note that certain Kosovo clinics, especially in the city of Pristina, use enormous amounts of blood.

These clinics, ran by a Kosovo separatist official close to the acting so-called prime minister Hashim Thaci, are believed to be locations where illegal organ transplants take place.

Recently, an ethnic Albanian, Nazim Blaca, voluntarily confessed to EULEX that he was a hired killer for Hashim Thaci and that he was involved in murder of 17 individuals.

Nearly all of today’s Albanian separatists officials were once members of the terror organization, the KLA, that managed these varying criminal enterprises."
...............................

From the highlighted part I conclude that the dissection of living people that NATO police carried out when we took over is still going on today & that the western authorities running the place are perfectly well aware of this. The only other conclusion would be that these gangsters have metamorphosed into managers of world class surgical hospitals.

The gangsters, pimps, secret police torturers & baby dissectors our governments deliberately hired & organised to commit genocide, under the title KLA, to justify our aggression have never had either the ethical or organisational capacity to run anything more complex than a criminal gang. All their instincts run to gang loyalty. NATO may allow President "Snake" Thaci the nominal title of "sovereign ruler of an independent country" but at every level EU officials do the actual running & government funding is entirely western. When genocide & worse takes place it is because our governments will it.

I have previously remarked on the censorship of not only reporting of government genocide but of public letters on the subject. When I first started writing letters to newspapers the large majority, on any subject got published, now it is a minority & almost zero on subjects such as this. One answer would be that my writing skills have markedly decreased over the years. Another would be a blacklist. If someone can think of a 3rd please let me know. The fact that a Green candidate at the last election could pick me out of a crowd as somebody who "regularly writes letters in the Herald on supporting nuclear power" (in fact the Herald, my local paper, hadn't published such a letter for 11 months) suggests that the quality & memorability of my writing is not the issue (at least not lack thereof).

Knowing this I have probably burned some more boats by sending this letter yesterday to every significant newspaper & broadcaster in Scotland & Britain & to the US national papers.

Currently "HPQ 215/2002" for a Google news search shows 4 Greek or Balkan mentions of this worldwide so no printing of my letter anywhere & a Google web search also shows only the Serbianna mention & a number of foreign language ones.

I mean every word of this letter & I think the obvious censorship of it proves that every word I say against the obscene, subhuman, monsters who work for the mainstream media is more than wholly justified.

To whom it may concern,
When NATO first took over Kosovo they appointed the NATO armed & organised KLA as our police. At least part of the reason for this was to get round the occupation agreement under which we promised to disarm the KLA, whom even our Foreign Secretary acknowledged (2 months before going to war to help them) had been proven to be engaged in racial genocide & to maintain law & order in a racially neutral way. Appointing the KLA as police did this, or at least as much of it as NATO intended. As a result our police were allowed free reign to engage in massacres (e.g. the widely unreported murder of at least 210 unarmed civilians beside Britain's main base in the suburb of Dragodan); the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people of Serb, Gypsy, Jewish & indeed Christian Albanian extraction; the kidnapping of thousands of schoolchildren (mainly girls) to serve as sex slaves in western & occupation brothels; & the dissection of 1,300 civilians & their dissection, while still alive, to provide body organs for western hospitals.

The western media have, with almost total unanimity censored mention of these atrocities even to the extent of censoring any letters from the public mentioning them, as I can testify from personal experience. I would except only the Morning Star, in Britain & America, as having maintained some willingness to support press freedom on the issue of censoring racial genocide. I had assumed that at least some of the self justification editors had used for this is that, with the exception of the child sexual slavery, it was now finished & not worth stirring up. I was wrong.

It turns out that a UN Dossier HPQ 215/2002 confirms not only that the most senior ethnic Albanian separatist leaders have been and some are still involved in crime ranging from human traffic to organ extraction, illegal organ transplants, drug and slave trade…

One EULEX official said that there “exist photographs, witnesses and even evidence of blood”.

Intelligence reports also point that these senior ethnic Albanian officials, such as the former so-called Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj, are capos of huge drug cartels. The UN documents also note that certain Kosovo clinics, especially in the city of Pristina, use enormous amounts of blood.

Note the use of the present tense. These "enormous quantities of blood" which can only be for keeping people alive as they are dissected, is being done right now & the NATO/EU/UN authorities (often the same bureaucrats under 3 hats) are aware of it & deliberately assisting by keeping silent.

Kosovo is a NATO/EU occupied colony. Nominally we have let the KLA drug lords, sex slavers & baby dissectors such as President "Snake" Thaci claim to be running an independent state but at all levels EU "mentors" do the actual governing protecting the "state" & allowing the nominal leaders to murder as they wish. Everybody knows this "independence is a legalistic fiction, though not even legal under international law.

In terms of actual murders the NATO actions against the Yugoslavs over the last 2 decades, which according to Lord Ashdown (a supporter of them) has caused the deaths of half a million people fall short, by 2 orders of magnitude, of the atrocities of Hitler. On the other hand numbers are not everything. By comparison with our government's dissection of living people the gas chambers at Auschwitz were a gentle & painless death. Hitler, even assuming his sanity, was engaged in what he believed to be a war of national survival (albeit one entirely of his own making). In such wars humane behaviour is always rare. By comparison NATO's wars against Yugoslavia have are like small boys torturing small animals to death. There was never any hint of threat from Yugoslavia it was simply that, even after the cold war, Russia was rather too powerful a nation to treat so - thus we killed Serbs as proxies.

Hitler certainly killed far more - 6 million Jews, 24 million Soviets, 2 million Yugoslavs & to ever increasing degrees it has become politically correct that we commemorate the Jews (since we were then pointing thousands of nuclear bombs at Soviet cities disapproving of the genocide of slavs has not been encouraged). Nonetheless when comparing the balance of evil & excuse it is clear that no NATO leader involved - not Blair or Clinton, Brown or Bush or Obama - can claim not to significantly exceed Adolf Hitler in evil in that balance.

In the same way that somebody who eats meat cannot claim moral superiority to the butcher so editors, broadcasters & indeed journalists who continue to censor the news to assist in the continued assembly line dissection of living people to steal their body organs cannot claim moral superiority to the staff of Auschwitz. Indeed it is doubtful if any of them can claim equality.

I hope that decent people will at least cease the censorship of these atrocities. Our leaders have got away with genocide & worse, for 2 decades. Let it not be 3.

Sincerely
Neil Craig

Ref - the UN documents are quoted in this report http://serbianna.com/news/?p=4651&cpage=1 "The UN documents also note that certain Kosovo clinics, especially in the city of Pristina, use enormous amounts of blood."

FoI information on Dragodan massacre http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/01/dragodan-massacre-freedom-of_23.html widely unreported.

If there is another credible (or incredible) interpretation for the use of blood in such quantities you should mention it in reporting of this. In any case you should report it. Nato's atrocities are unquestionably hundreds of times worse than anything Israel is accused of & NATO has at least 10s of thousands of times less defensive justification. Any western news medium which is not provably overwhelmingly both pro-Nazi & anti-Semitic cannot fail to give far more coverage to NATO's genocide than to anything relating to Gaza.

I do understand that you may wish to edit this letter, though the basic facts, if not credibly deniable, must be reported.

I would, of course, also understand in a different way if you decided to censor this to assist in its continuance.

If you have any specific questions or would like to do a more comprehensive article on the subject I would be happy to assist. Under the heading YUGOSLAVIA on my online index http://neilsindex.blogspot.com/ you will find extensive information on many different aspects of NATO's genocide & further links proving it all & more

If anybody sees this published, presumably in an abbreviated form, please let me know. If I find it I will update this entry.

Labels: International politics, Media, Yugoslavia

I have just found that I have a large number of online comments which, for reasons I do not understand were shunted sideways rather than my being notified of them. I am publishing all those which are not adverts for visiting penis enlargement sites et al, over a few days & where a reply was due & it has not been made irrelevent by subsequent events I will reply.

My profound apologies to all those who wrote & didn't get it published. Your comments are indeed welcome.

I have wanted to put this phrase of Pournelle's up for some time It strikes me as a profoundly accurate way of assessing how the world works. The remark about credentialism also ties in with the 2nd part of Saturday's posting about how scientific organisations & government have preferred to pay chosen researchers by their approval rating from scientific organisations & government (ie their credentials) though grants than by results (ie their results).

----------------------------

Russell Kirk taught us that we ought to approach defects in our nations as we would the wounds of a father. The neocons were useful allies during the Cold War... American Conservatives have some common interests with neocons, but we should not forget theit Trotskyite origins... Most of the neo-cons were Trotskyites or came from Trotskyite families (many being too young to have any notion of what things were like back in the Glory Days of the Trotskyites) and when they left their affiliations they didn't give up the notion that the world could be remade by dedicated revolutionaries and social engineering; that if they got control of the government they could do something wonderful. Give me the sword of state and I will make a more beautiful world.

Real conservatives understand that control of government isn't the key to making a wonderful world. At best we can get rid of some obstacles and give people opportunities to improve their lives. One would think that a study of history would show that, but apparently a lot of smart people continue to believe that they can remake not just their city, or county, or state, or nation, but the whole world, and all they need is control of the army and the tax collectors. Actually they don't think that way: they think about the wonderful things they can do, and forget that to do them they need tax collectors, and to support the tax collectors they need police, and behind the police stands the Army, prison, and the hangman. (Of course we don't have hangmen any more. We're more humane now. Progress.)

Government can protect some people from bad guys. It doesn't always do that and never does it perfectly, but it can, sometimes, do that. It can, sometimes, as Adam Smith notes, undertake projects that have great benefit to all with little benefit to any one person -- he had in mind roads and canals and fire departments, not the over-all direction of the economy. Alas, it doesn't take a lot of bad thinking to expand that list, and everyone does. After all, if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can give every child a world class university prep education, can't we? Not just in the United States, but everywhere. And guess what: all the university professors, both tenured and wannabe, agree completely, and rub their hands in anticipation -- since of course they won't be paid by those who will benefit from universal university education, but by the taxpayers who won't be asked what they think about having everyone go to university and get a degree if they want to become a manager at Jack In The Box. The largest joke is that even the taxpayers can't pony up enough, and everyone who goes to these overpaid institutions will get to pony up a grand a month for the rest of their lives; this in exchange for the pretended education they get in order to get the credentials that prove they are educated and worthy of having a job. Of course that credential can lead to one of the coveted positions among the governing class.

Now if we just had some means for certification of expertise that didn't require credentials, things might change. I don't look for that to happen soon. THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNMENT IS TO PAY GOVERNMENT WORKERS AND THEIR ALLIES; which means the real purpose of government is to collect the money to pay government workers and their allies. Just as the purpose of the school system is to pay members of the teachers unions.

Labels: Fixing the economy, Government parasitism, Social

Last year I proposed as Big Engineering #40 creation of a computer programme to provide impartial judgement in international law.

the establishment of an open source computer programme which could determine the legality of national actions under international law.

It seems the EU are largely there ahead of me. They have created such a beast for ruling on EU laws & regulation. Since such regulations are far more extensive than the relatively small number of treaties & precedents (Nuremberg Trials etc) applying any programme that can do the former can certainly issue judgements over the latter.

The EU's programme

European researchers have created a legal analysis query engine that combines artificial intelligence, game theory and semantics to offer advice, conflict prevention and dispute settlement for European law, and it even supports policy.

European law is complex, many layered and expanding. There are thousands of regulations, so many that compliance is difficult, time-consuming and expensive...

A lawyer called ALIS

Thankfully, help is at hand. The ALIS project has developed a computerised platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI), game theory and semantic technologies to ‘understand’ and track the regulations in a large, and expanding area of expertise – in this case IPR.

ALIS sought to develop a working system in IPR to tackle the fundamental technological challenges before expanding it to more areas later on.

The system is much more than a simple database of relevant legal regulations. It uses insights from game theory to help contentious parties come to an amicable agreement, either through conflict prevention or dispute resolution, and it can assist lawmaking too.

Game theory looks at how strategic interactions between rational people lead to outcomes reflecting real player preferences. In the Ultimatum game, for example, two players decide how a sum is to be divided. The proposer suggests what the split should be, the responder either can accept or reject this offer. But if the responder rejects the split, both players get nothing.

Researchers have found that often proposers offer 50:50, even though the responder might accept less. They also found that responders always reject splits where they get less than 20 percent. In economics, this would be considered irrational, because the responder loses too, but this illustrates that fairness is a very important element in strategic interactions.

These types of interactions can be rendered mathematically thanks to game theory, and the concept is so powerful that it has migrated from applied mathematics to social sciences like economics, political science, international relations and philosophy, as well as hard sciences like biology, engineering and computer science.

Game theory can be used to develop algorithms that find equilibria in games, markets, computational auctions, peer-to-peer systems, security and information markets. And, now with ALIS, it is available for legal systems too. This concept of equilibria supports conflict prevention, dispute resolution and offers decision support for lawmaking.

A key factor in the system is its test for regulatory compliance. This is very powerful. It can help citizens, companies and lawyers quickly scan the relevant legal corpus to discover if they are compliant. It is a key factor for the other roles in the ALIS system as well.

For conflict prevention, dispute resolution and lawmaking, the ALIS first establishes if the parties, or the proposed legislation, are compliant with current law. Once compliance is established, the system can present a series of options based on an analysis of the potential conflict or dispute, or it can provide information to further assist lawmakers to formulate policy.

I am sending a copy of this article yo the International Court of Justice at http://www.icj-cij.org/homepage/index.php?m=contact & will publish their response.

That seems to be the Iranian nuclear crisis solved then & almost every other international dispute. :-)

Or perhaps governments won't actually be interested in finding just solutions to international crisis since, to quote Mencken "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" & it is only government which is the problem. But to think that would be dreadfully cynical.

I will publish the response of anybody from the International Court & we will see.

In any case things can rarely be uninvented & the very fact that we now know that just, verifyably monitored & impartial judgement is available will mitigate against any nation or alliance that refuses to ask for it. If it doesn't happen immediately we at least know that any such decisions will in future be subjected to such tests.

I would certainly be interested in seeing if such a programme could support the International Court's decision that they could not render judgement on the legality of NATO's attack on Yugoslavian purely because Yugoslavia having been expelled from the UN was not at the time member, while being willing to render judgement on Yugoslavia's actions in Bosnia & Hercegovina, which was not at the time & never had been a member of the UN.

If impartial justice is technologically available & the International Court is one the bodies that refuse it so much the worse for that "court".

Labels: International politics, Social, Yugoslavia