A Place to Stand

From the BBC (ok only their online ghetto):
"EU prosecutors have accused seven people, including doctors and a health official, of trafficking kidneys through a clinic in Kosovo.

International trafficking allegedly took place in 2008 at the Medicus clinic in the capital, Pristina...

The suspects are accused of trafficking in human organs, organised crime, unlawful exercise of medical activities and abusing official authority.

One is described as a "person that previously worked at a senior level in the Ministry of Health".

EU prosecutor Jonathan Ratel is quoted by AP as saying in the indictment that an "organised criminal group" had trafficked persons into Kosovo for the purpose of removing "human organs for transplant to other persons"...

Kosovo has been haunted by another alleged case of organ-trafficking dating back to the war in 1999.

In that case, which has never been proven, Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) militants allegedly trafficked the organs of Serb captives they later killed."
=======================
I like the "never has been proven" line rather like saying Hitler has never been proven to have known about the alleged Holocaust. This is not surprising after all some of these thugs were already known to be involved in dissecting Albanian adults & indeed babies before NATO recruited them as "freedom fighters" let alone before they were reclassified as "police" when NATO occupied Kosovo.

There has been much faux concern in our media about Bush's waterboarding of 3 top terrorists to get information from them. Dissection while alive is undeniably far more damaging than the relatively mild torture of waterboarding - at least 100 times worse. The fact that the Serbs our police murdered were innocent makes it at least 10 times worse than doing it to terrorist leaders. The numbers are, at the very least, 430 greater (this is ignoring the "ordinary" genocide our political leaders sent out "police" to do). Thus we can say with certainty that if the western media is honest it has given 430,000 times more coverage than the 2,751 mentions of the waterboarding.

And if our entire dead tree media are 10% honest that will be 43,000 mentions.

And if our entire "journalistic profession" are only 99% corrupt that will be 4,300 mentions.

And if they are only 99.9& as corrupt as the German media under the late Dr Goebbels (who censored reports of Auschwitz) then that would be 430 mentions.

And if so many as 1 in 10,000 journalists worldwide is honest then that will be 43 news items reporting it.

And if. as a statistically undeniable mathematical fact, a single one of the 24,038 BBC employees (or proportionally among other "news" media) isn't an obscene, lying, genocidal, Nazi piece of filth personally willing to censor anything or lie in any way to assist in racial murder that would be 19 mentions of this atrocity in the English speaking world's media.

The true number today is 6 (though there is another not in English picked). Remember that next time some obscene animal on the mainstream media say we must remember the Holocaust to prevent it happening again.

PE This is a letter I sent to the entire UK & much of the American media. All these obscene Nazis decided to censor it.

"Sir,
Isn't it interesting that George Bush's admission that he authorised waterboarding of 3 terrorist leaders who were certainly involved in atrocities & whose interrogation almost certainly saved many lives gets front page & 1st item on the news coverage.

Compare & contrast with the fact that the British & other NATO governments have known & authorised our police (formerly our KLA allies) to engage in massacres such as the 210 innocent unarmed people murdered in the Dragodan Massacre outside our military HQ in Kosovo, the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people from that province, the kidnap & sale of 10s of thousands of schoolchildren to western brothels & the dissection, while alive, of at least 1,300 Serbs to provide body parts for western hospitals (something which is still going on). These atrocities have obviously, never had 1/1,000th as much media attention as these 3 waterboarding cases in the British media. If that is not deliberate censorship, comparable to anything Dr Goebbels authorised there must be some reason why the human rights of 3 terrorist leaders are thousands of times more important than those of hundreds of thousands of innocent Serbs. Perhaps the editor could enlighten us."

EPDATE A rather, not enormously, more informative treatement by al Jazeera

Labels: Media, Unpublished letters, Yugoslavia

Durkin's film lived up to expectations. I doubt that the Guardian will be using the particular ad hominum attack of calling him a communist again, indeed that particular attack was absent from their review as indeed was anything else factual because "Obviously I have not the time, space or qualifications to consider the validity of this here, but..."

It is available here & I recommend it to my overseas readers to - the principle that economic freedom works transcends borders.

The best, or most awful according to taste, was his interviews with a number of British Labour politicians whom he asked to say how much the current national debt, which they had been responsible for doubling, was. None of them could. The worst flatly refused to give a figure, on saying that is a question for economists. The better ones made a guess at £150-£200 billion - they were probably thinking of the annual increase in it. Cathy Jamieson (MP, MSP & former Scottish Minister for Education & then Justice) has been the butt of sketches on Tadio Scotland which made her appear to be a particularly ignorant wee wifey eg "Aw Bernard (well known interviewer) Quantitative Easing you say. Ah'll tell ye about quantitative easing. When ma man gaes to the toilet he stinks the place oot for an 'oor wi' quantative easing." The real lady appears little better informed. It is difficult to criticise Chinese dictatorship when "democracy" here puts buffoons like that in charge.

While impressed with the programme I think he understated both problem & opportunity. The facts are that not only does the state spend 53% of the economy as he said but that government regulation destroys another 100% of our current economy. 75% of the cost of housing & electricity are due to government restrictions. As a general economic rule the cost to the regulated is 20 times the cost to government of employing regulators. The EU has admitted that their regulations destroy 5.5% of Europe's potential GNP. Taken together, without the parasites the total economy could double.


Much of the latter part of the programme was given over to a comparison with Hong Kong which has been the ideal of economic freedom.

That included an appreciation of the little known Scot (at least little known in Scotland though deeply respected in Hong Kong & China) Sir John Cowperthwaite.

At some point during our first conversation I managed to irk him by suggesting that he was chiefly known "for doing nothing." In fact, he pointed out, keeping the British political busy-bodies from interfering in Hong Kong's economic affairs took up a large portion of his time. Throughout Sir John's tenure in office, the British political elite tried to impose its own ailing socialist economic model on Britain's colonies, including Hong Kong. Sir John managed to quash all such attempts and Hong Kong benefited as a result. In 2004, the World Bank estimated, Hong Kong's per capita income adjusted for purchasing power parity (GNI PPP) was $31,510. Great Britain's 2004 GNI PPP was $31,460.

I conjecture that it was Hong Kong's obviously successful experiment with laissez-faire that helped to steel the nerves of Britain's Iron Lady, Baroness Thatcher, as she prepared to rescue her once-great country from the socialist rot. Hong Kong, a colony, lit the way for Britain, the homeland. Moreover, Hong Kong's success was vital in convincing the Chinese Communist Party that socialism was a historical dead end. Capitalist countries lead best when they lead by example, and what better example for a slave society of over a billion people than an island of freedom and prosperity right on its doorstep? Turning Hong Kong into an example worthy for China to emulate -- that, I believe, is Sir John's greatest legacy.

What about Sir John, the man? One story, I think, says it all. As a senior civil servant, Sir John was once presented with a sum of tax-payer money to upgrade his residence in Hong Kong. He refused. He told me that he could not accept a housing subsidy since that was a largess denied to other residents of the colony. In his personal conduct, just as in his economic policies, Sir John set the standard for future generations of public officials.

Cowperthwaite attended Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh, Scotland, and later studied classics at St Andrews University and Christ's College, Cambridge. Whatever the ignorant buffoons running Scotland say he represents a deeper & longer lasting Scottish cultural tradition than their thieving parasitic "socialism" ever could.

Labels: Fixing the economy, Government parasitism, International politics

I am rather looking forward to this tonight AT 9 pm. From the TV trailer it looks like his answer to Britain's economic stagnation is exactly the same sort of free enterprise, deregulation & getting rid of big government parasitism I have been pushing here.

Martin Durkin explains the full extent of the financial mess the UK is in and presents his argument of what needs to be done to make the economy boom again

By coincidence Tory MP & former "right wing" leadership candidate John Redwood is going to be leading a debate in Parliament today

Today we have the debate on how to secure faster and more consistent economic growth in the UK. I will be proposing a five point plan for the government.

HONEST MONEY
LOWER TAXES
MORE AND BETTER BANKS
LESS AND BETTER REGULATION
MORE PRIVATELY FINANCED INFRASTRUCTURE ...to allow the construction of a new generation of power stations and to permit more privately financed transport provision. It needs to crack on with its plans for faster and better broadband throughout the UK.

I am a former Liberal Democrat expelled when the party decided that traditional liberalism was now "illiberal & incompatible with party membership. The fact that I was opposed to genocide has also been admitted as an underlying motive.

One interesting thing about this is the history of Martin Durkin. In 2007 he produced The Great Global Warming Swindle which is just about the only honest coverage there has ever been of the catastrophic warming we are alleged to be experiencing on UK TV.

When the programme was broadcast the Guardian (a newspaper with a bad record, even by the standards of the UK press, of lying in the Nazi cause during the Yugoslav wars) pulled out every stop to denigrate him. One of those used by George Monbiot & others there was that Durkin had a history of communism. "It emerged that Durkin, the creative force behind this series, was a communist with strong anti-environmentalist views." Moonbat also attacked at the time him for having previously dared to produce a programme saying that the then scare against breast enhancements, something Moonbat had been pushing, was false. Even in 2007 the statistical evidence had proven beyond any reasonable doubt that that was a false scare & George must have known it.

What we now see is that there is no longer any serious dividing line in British & indeed world politics between "left" & "right". The division is between those who support wealth production, human freedom & less government parasitism & technological progress & those who want "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."(Henry Louis Mencken) so that they may enhance state parasitism, mire us in poverty (or at least as much poverty as they can manage) & continue to practice atrocities at will, which, at best, classes them as fascists.

The Fascists have considerable control of the state & media on their side but we have the march of history. Any nation which continues to submit to the eco-fascists is bound to decline so it is not a matter of who will win but of whether we will go down wiyh the fascists.

Labels: British politics, Government parasitism, Media

no its a model powered by conventional bombs

I think the costing of the Project Orion nuclear bomb powered spaceship deserves repetition. Particularly in light of the recent post by Freeman Dyson who, while now opposing it on environmental grounds, expressed no doubt it would work. It perhaps shows how cruel & heartless I am that I consider the environmental cost, the irradiation of a small south Atlantic island for a relatively short while, presumably together with a number of penguins to be well worth it. Note however that highly radioactive material has a short half life & that Bikini atoll, site of numerous far larger blasts, is now well below radioactive safe limits & thriving.

The cost of being able to put 1,000 tons in orbit/quickly establishing a Moon base/reaching "Mars by 2015, Saturn by 2020" or probably all of the above was costed by Dyson, in 1960 dollars as "Dyson gives the astounding figure of $100 million per year as the cost of the proposed twelve-year program [Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper and Row, 1979),
p111] ; surely this does not include development costs for the thousands of items from spacesuits to scientific instruments that such a program would require." Note that most of the ancillary stuff has now been done & indeed done far better than conceivable in the 1960s. In today's money that is $690/£450 million annually or $8.300/£5.400 million over 12 years. That is the same amount per year the UK spends in funding NERC merely one of many quangos existing to promote warming alarmism, less than twice the cost of building a new Forth bridge & 7% of the cost of subsidising the offshore part of our windfarm subsidy programme.

So should we do it. Lets see what people say:

Should we invest £450 million a year in putting 1,000 tons in orbit & reaching "Mars by 2015, Saturn by 2020"
	No, I think the environmental cost to the island is too high
	No, the LNT theory is obviously correct the environmental cost to the world is to high
	No, mankind should not develop space (except for communication weather satellites)
	No it would not be a "peaceful use" allowed by the Test Ban Treaty
	Yes, it is well worth the money
	Yes the future of the human race lies thataway
	Not yes but HELL YES
	Other - I will specify
pollcode.com free polls

Labels: Hormesis, Science/technology, space

I have been reading an article by Michael Fumento, whose list of online articles is well worth checking. The particular article in question comes from his Food Irradiation section. Looking at the list of arguments against food irradiation it is obvious they are all false

WORKERS MAY GET HURT ON THE JOB AT IRRADIATION PLANTS. "While irradiation does kill bacteria, it involves the use of inherently dangerous materials and poses its own risks to workers," CSPI’s Jacobson has declared. Yet there have only been about half a dozen accidents in U.S. irradiation plants over four decades, with no deaths. Conversely, each year, almost two million workers are hurt on the job, and 10,000 killed. Those who harvest our food, farmers, have three times the national job-related death rate.
IRRADIATION CREATES NEW CHEMICALS IN FOOD, AND WE DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT THOSE CHEMICALS ARE. Yes, and the same is true of roasting, frying, broiling, and boiling. We don’t even know the full chemical composition of most foods BEFORE they’re irradiated.
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT SOME OF THE CHEMICALS CREATED DURING IRRADIATION MAY BE CARCINOGENIC. There’s no evidence of this. On the other hand, using rodent testing, ALL traditional methods of cooking food have caused cancerous tumors and mutations. Rats and mice aside, other types of food preservation appear to be clear human carcinogens. The incredible 75 percent drop in stomach cancer rates in this country since the 1930s is generally attributed to a decline in the consumption of cured foods, especially salt-cured ones.
THERE ARE NUTRIENT LOSSES. There is some nutrient loss with irradiation, as with most methods of preserving, refining, and cooking food. When you boil a pot of vegetables and drain the water, much of the vitamins go with it. Heat sterilization can knock out 90 percent of the vitamin B-1 (thiamine) in meats such as pork and ham, while even high-dose irradiation reduces it by less than 20 percent

If, as the article says about 9,000 Americans die annually of food poisoning then proportionally about 1,500 will in Britain. That compares with the 1,000 the BMA said die of passive smoking (though it makes it less than the 1,000 Scotland's First Minister promised in Parliament would be saved in Scotland alone by a smoking ban). Obviously if any of the politicians & activists who put so much effort (& so much of the people's money) into pushing a smoking ban actually cared in the slightest about human health they would have put more effort into promoting food irradiation. Not one of them did.

Not comparable to the 1 1/2 million killed annually by Luddites using scare stories to ban DDT, but still unnecessary deaths.

The eco-Nazis will tell any lie to promote their scare stories. Over time virtually none of them have proven anything other than lies

Not the recycling, because it is so often wasteful, inefficient, or simply not done, or made redundant by better design. Not the DDT, because in fact it is overwhelmingly more beneficial than harmful. Not the nuclear, because it is in fact a marvellous way to generate usable heat. Not the organic farming, because inorganic needs much less land, much less wretched toil, and allows the poor to eat well. Not the acid rain alarm, because it was mostly a false one. Not the ozone layer alarm, because ditto. Not the attack on capitalism, because therein in lies our best hope. Not the peak oil scare (well scares since it has been repeated every couple of years since "Limits to Growth"), not the limits to growth,(Moore's law is purring away), not all the other resources running out as per LtG, not global cooling, not deaths of hundreds of millions from famine, not the need to evacuate coastal regions because of the smell of the death of all sea life (Ehrlich), not extinction of most animal species, not massive pollution, not US life expectancy dropping to a very precise 42 because of pollution caused cancers (Ehrlich), not rising sea levels, not the no lower threshold claim of radiation damage (in fact at low rates it is beneficial),not slowing of the Gulf Stream, not the expansion of the Sahara, not net world deforestation, & I am willing to bet the recently claimed slowing of the world's winds due to more forests &/or climate change will prove a chimera too.

On the other hand the DDT ban alone has killed 70 million people so the Green scarers have far more blood on their hands than Hitler. I think the cartoon is overly generous.

Further than that the eco-Nazis do not actually care about the environment - it is simply a useful false flag, essentially a cuddly animal shield, for them to use to project their false scare stories. One example of the way that not only will the occasional nutter say anything (eg NASA isn't a government funded organisation) & maintain it but more importantly there is no ordinary member of the movement who will, under any circumstances disagree with the most obvious & total lies [again example here & I will let you know if any "environmentalist" anywhere decides to show any slightest trace of honesty.}

As further proof that the eco-Nazis aren't actually motivated by concern for the environment but by Luddism & parasitism see would be mass murderer George Moonbat (h/t to Delingpole) saying precisely that in the Guardian.

Environmentalism is not just about replacing one set of technologies with another. Technological change is important, but it will protect the biosphere only if we also tackle issues such as economic growth, consumerism and corporate power. These are the challenges the green movement asks us to address.

Indeed so, since all the claims about the biosphere being in any danger have turned out to be total lies & since they provably care nothing about human life the only thing the entire movement of liars & thieves actually stand for is impoverishment, reducing freedom of choice & opposing free enterprise, 3 aims which go well together.

Labels: eco-fascism, Government parasitism, Science/technology

Freeman Dyson is a British born American physicist, inventor of the concept of the Dyson Sphere & advocate of building a laser launch system & encouraging individuals to use it. He considers himself proud to be a heretic on some scientific matters, something which all scientists should be willing to be & few are, particularly the catastrophic warming scare. Jerry Pournelle, whose opinions I have made clear I hold in high regard has himself in a similar way expressed a high opinion of him as one of the world's great physicists.

He was also involved as a young member in the Orion nuclear bomb powered rocket designed to reach "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970" of which I have written & although I understood he was no longer enthusiastic I sent him links from my blog on the subject & on the subject of radiation hormesis which, if correct, makes nuclear pulse rockets safe as regards atmospheric pollution. I am more than gratified to have his reply which, with his permission, I here reprint, though we differ on whether the cost in irradiated land is worth it & I think there are projects, mainly space industrial ones, which would benefit from, or indeed only be possible in the near term, with massive payloads.

Just a brief reply. It is true that I do not expect or hope for a revival of Orion. Even if you believe in hormesis (which I find quite likely) the problems of radio-active contamination caused by Orion missions do not go away. And we have done remarkably well using modern instruments and modern communications to
explore the solar system with small payloads. As a scientist, I see no great advantage today arising from thousand-ton payloads.

But, as usual when I disagree with people, I would be delighted to be proved wrong. I am delighted that somebody like you is still excited by the vision that inspired our efforts fifty years ago. If you can prove me wrong and I am still around to enjoy it, I will be happy to celebrate the first launch.

Yours sincerely,
Freeman Dyson.

Labels: Hormesis, Science/technology, space

I read this in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

Public services are never better performed than when their reward comes only in consequence of their being performed & is proportional to the diligence employed in performing them

Book V Chapter 1 Of the expenses of the sovereign or Commonwealth

He is specifically discussing how courts should be paid for but the remark fits X-Prizes even more effectively than it does courts.

I have discussed here how prizes were, before the rise of big government, a common method of encouraging research - at the time funded by individuals rather than government. The practice of governments switching to grant giving appears to be a local proof of Pournelle's law that "the primary purpose of government is to pay government employees" & their friends & the official purpose is secondary at best. As previously calculated prizes appear to be at least 33-100 times more effective at promoting the development of new technology than grants (infinitely better if they don't work because no money is awarded). Use of grants in circumstances where prizes are appropriate cannot be consistent with attempting to maximise technological achievement.

Prizes are not always appropriate, for example if given for "proof" of the global warming hypothesis such proof would certainly emerge, whatever the actualite, but where they can work they should normally replace grants.

Always useful to be able to quote the father of economics in support of your proposal.

Labels: economics, Science/technology, X-Prizes