A Place to Stand

     One interesting thing about the Dalgety Bay radiation fraud is that, with the exception of the BBC, who push it relentlessly despite, or possibly because, they know SEPA's history of fraud here, the rest of the media are giving it minimal coverage.

    Unfortunately this also means they have the excuse to censor any factual reporting on the subject too. Thus, this letter I sent a few days ago to all and sundry appears to have gone unpublished.

It seems SEPA are now threatening to permanently close off the beach at Dalgety Bay in their empire building campaign to ramp up false fears about radioactivity. SEPA have previously been caught telling at least 2 major lies on the subject.
Firstly claiming, on the BBC, to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made.
Secondly to have found "radium and its daughter elements" in the beach rock. In fact the "daughter element" that radium breaks down into is radon - a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.
The aforementioned FoI enquiries have brought to light the fact that their consultants did, years ago, tell them that "the highest reading recorded at Dalgety Bay was still less than 2/3rds that found in a typical Aberdeen street".

Everywhere has natural radiation. A square mile of earth at Dalgety Bay will contain 3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium and 1 gram of natural radium because that is what every average square mile on the planet contains. By comparison the possible presence of less than a gram of water soluble paint, only a small fraction of which was actually radium, from the figures on the dials of a few aircraft 66 years ago is immeasurably small. Indeed SEPA have, despite their claims, been wholly unable to find any trace of it.

Beyond that there is no evidence whatsoever that radiation, up to well beyond the higher rates found in Aberdeenshire, causes any harm whatsoever, indeed the balance of scientific evidence strongly supports the view that such levels are beneficial to health. Though the sort of ignorant bureaucrats who do not know the "daughter element" of radium is a gas, have long pushed the theory radiation, even well below the naturally occurring level, being dangerous no honest scientist anywhere in the world agrees.

It is disgraceful that the local people are being frightened and may be permanently deprived of their beach to promote what anybody scientifically literate in SEPA must know to be a false, though newsworthy, scare.

Refs - Dalgety radiation less than 2/3rds background in Aberdeen http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/dalgety-bay-my-reply.html

- Radioactives in soil http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/radium-at-dalgety-bay-guest-article-on.html

- scientific illiteracy undenied by SEPA http://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/roundup/articles/2009/06/11/388386

- SEPA threaten publicly funded legal action "reserve its position" if anybody says anything untrue about them http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/02/sepas-reaction.html so clearly they accept I haven't.
 
    The problem is that if the Armed Forces refuse to be browbeaten into paying Danegeld out of our limited Defence budget for what they must also know to be a deliberate fraud SEPA may well have painted themselves into the corner of having to permanently close off this beach and subject the entire area to "eco-scare blight". Indeed SEPA seem to be driving full tilt for that scenario.

"SEPA believes that the Ministry of Defence is responsible for the radioactive material present at Dalgety Bay, and as such Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) is the responsible party in terms of remediation. SEPA will continue to work constructively and co-operatively with DIO, but as the regulator SEPA has a specific role under the Radioactive Contaminated Land Regulations (RCL) to assess the fitness of the proposals of the responsible party for the protection of the environment and human health."
If this does not happen, SEPA intends to designate the area as RCL by the end of March 2012.

  This is an effect of Scotland having a newspaper industry that is so very far from the perceived role of the press - to report what the powerful and particularly those in government are doing against our interests - and a broadcast media whose "news" exists purely to promote state propaganda, even when they specifically know it to be dishonest.

    This has happened before. After Chernobyl government inspectors inspected sheep farms and found a background radiation level comparable to what might be expected in an Aberdeen street. This was announced to be caused by Chernobyl and the farms were forbidden to sell the mutton until such time as the radiation decreased. Fairly quickly the radiation did decrease at Chernobyl because highly radioactive isotopes do burn out quickly - that is why they are highly radioactive thus in Chernobyl today radiation levels are "less than those of being in an aircraft flying at 30,000 ft". But the sheep farm radiation did not decline this steeply proving it simply could not be from Chernobyl and must be background radiation that has been there for many millions of years. But it is the nature of government that they do not admit error so some of these farmers are still being deprived.

   As with Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and virtually every other instance we find the anti-nuclear scare campaign has been orders of magnitude more damaging than any radiation release.

   To put the silence, implying consent, by the Scottish traditional media in its place, the always sensible online Register is, as always, sensible.

Radiation TERROR on Scottish beach! Except it's quite safe

...Well no, absolutely not: the so-called "contamination" which has been found at Dalgety Bay is insignificant as beach pollution goes. You would create a similar "hazard" by throwing a few thousand completely legal luminous watches into the sea there. You could keep the most radioactive "particle" yet found in your home forever in complete safety. ...

UPDATE Steuart Campbell has made this obvious point I had not thought of. 

What I wonder is what happened to all the radioactive dials of other WW2 aircraft. Surely Dalgety Bay was not the repository of all the UK's redundant aircraft.

 Heinlein once said that the way to be a successful writer was to take ideas from other genres, take them across state lines and file off the numbers (actually his SF could never owe anything important to another genre). In that spirit I am taking an idea straight from Jerry Pournelle and translating it into British:

Establish two commissions whose job is to recommend practices that ought to be eliminated on the grounds that we can’t afford them, or never needed them in the first place.

1 - The commissioners should not be government employees, and ought to be paid no more than £100 a day consulting fee and £30 a day expenses. Let it be a typical commission, with 2 members appointed by the Prime Minister, 1 each from the 3 most important parliamentary committees, 1 by the house of |Lords and one by the finance minister of the fastest growing Commonwealth country (aka Singapore). The whole thing shouldn’t cost more than $2 million a year. Any federal position that a majority of the commission recommends for elimination is automatically unfunded unless explicitly refunded by Parliament. If Parliament doesn’t restore the position, that position is redundant and that task is no longer performed.
2 - A second Jobsworth Commission. This one is to consist of 100 persons, the first 50 chosen to match the population distribution and other fifty to be selected with no such loading. They are to be selected by lot from a pool of volunteers who have high speed Internet connection. The Commission meets on-line once a week for four hours. Once a year it meets in London, expenses to be reimbursed. Each commissioner gets a laptop computer and conferencing software, and the government pays for high speed Internet connectivity for the year. Same rules: if 51 Commissioners agree that a government regulatory activity is needless, then that activity is defunded, and those who perform that service are declared redundant. (Civil service rules for redundant employees apply.) Parliament can restore any of those activities and positions, but if it does not, it goes.


The Commissions probably won’t do a lot, but they will at least get rid of the ridiculously obvious, and over time the various government activities will be examined and debated.


Because so much of the benefit is over time it must be a permanent feature of our constitution.


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  In the same post Jerry also suggested this.

change all the rules for small business exemptions from regulations by doubling the maximum number of employees you can have for the exemption. There are a number of regulations that apply only to businesses with fewer than 10 employees; make that number 20. There are other regulations that apply only to this with more than 50 employees. Make that 100. Etc. The first time I proposed this I got mail saying it was useless because there aren’t any successful small businesses willing to expand but prevented by the threat of regulation. I have considerable evidence to the contrary; and besides, if there are no such businesses, then there won’t be any consequences of adopting this. In fact, though, I am quite sure there are many businesses successful enough to expand that would do so if the regulations weren’t so onerous.

  I did enthusiastically agree with this, which quite obviously would be simple; probably very effective; and even if it wasn't, have no economic downside (like X-Prizes). It was gently explained to me that this would be entirely impossible because most of these are required or supported by the EU and they wouldn't allow it.

   I accept the logic of that and consider it further proof we would be better off out.

PS When I started this series it was aimed at the US Constitution. However our political system only diverged from their's in 1776 and it fits well here and over time the focus has shifted to what we shoukld be doing. This makes the title outdated but so what.

 Last night on Question Time, Dan Hannan MSP and one of the small minority of sane Conservatives. during the answering of BBC selected question whether this government was, as promised, the "greenest ever" (his answer was unfortunately yes) said

to get the economy growing cutting regulations, reducing the size of government, ending planning restriction s would all work but "the one thing guaranteed to produce it is cheap energy"

    He went on to say, correctly, that the only thing giving the American economy any buoyancy is the technical breakthrough allowing them to recover cheap shale gas. He was sufficiently politer not to mention that the energy minister of his own government, Chris Huhne, has gone on record to say he will prevent any extensive development of shale gas in Britain because it would be cheaper than windmill electricity, even after the enormous subsidy.

   There was also discussion of the reduction in the subsidy of "renewable" solar power but unfortunately nobody gave any figures. The current subsidy being anything up to 43.3p per kwh while actually creating nuclear power costs 2.2p a unit.

   Dan's statement seems to be only the 2nd acknowledgement of the fact that ECONOMIC FREEDOM + CHEAP ENERGY = ECONOMIC GROWTH. The other being Jim Mather who is the intelligent Minister in the SNP government (it is possible there is a second but not his equal) but he remains alone in a government specifically committed to destroying the cheapest 80% of our electric power capacity.

    Still an interesting small step towards sanity.

"Environmentally concerned" Greenpeace spokesman who promised 400,000 deaths at Fukushima caught using fraudulent scare story to make money retail, when the rest of them do it wholesale
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David Friedman suggests that the "earthquakes" actually earth tremors at the most are as likely to relieve tension of more serious build up as to do any harm.
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James Woudhuysen on the change of political philosophies on the "left" from progressivism to Luddism.
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Spiked on the alleged supporters of science who attack the soft targets to gain credit while supporting the abuse of science called Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. 
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Snow could become a thing of the past in Scotland as climate change drives up temperatures and causes the sea level to rise, according to weather experts. - If the BBC was to be trusted in 2002, or indeed if they haven't acknowledged it was nonsense now, which they haven't.
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Global Warming reduces deaths. Hardly surprising since cold weather is nastier than warm but worth having nailed down.
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the publication of a government-backed report using Met Office predictions that successive hard winters are rare. But the findings of the government-commissioned study were contradicted by Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, who warned that ministers should plan for more cold winters.
  -- From last December. Sir David "Antarctica will be the only habitable continent by 2100" King's timing is clearly impeccable.
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within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".


"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said.
 -  David Viner
Still working for the government "raising awareness" of the lies that these pensioner murdering Nazi parasites tell us (no offence to either Vine or any of the other Nazis parasites in government)
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2 pronged Spanish econazi attack - terrorist bomb and ministerial call for a firing.

"The bomb threat is just the latest intimidation Dr. Calzada has faced since releasing his report and following up with articles in Expansion (a Spanish paper similar to the Financial Times). A minister from Spain’s Socialist government called the rector of King Juan Carlos University — Dr. Calzada’s employer — seeking Calzada’s ouster. Calzada was not fired, but he was stripped of half of his classes at the university"

The Spanish Fascist )nominally socialist) government is now gone. Don't know if the terrorists were arrested.
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There is a big scandal in the US about the large number of windmillery firms Obama has given hundreds of millions of dollars to and who have disappeared/gone bust. In Scotland our scandals are on a smaller scale and the media's willingness to criticise the defrauding of the public is on an absolutely tiny scale.

A WIND turbine manufacturer which received around £15m of support from the Scottish government to set up and expand a manufacturing site at Machrihanish has gone bust.


One of a number of such. The stories disappear.

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What the econazis say, A whole bunch of revealing remarks, for example
"it’d be a little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it."
An opinion which Chris Huhne clearly agrees with as demonstrated in his promise to prevent the development of Shale gas.

  On Newsnight Scotland last night Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister, said that imprisoning people costs £40,000 a year. I thought I would check if this is the necessary cost by comparing with elsewhere. Not that easy because there seems to be far more material about the cost of imprisonment to those incarcerated than to society. However I found this.

expenditure on the prison system
Australia $124.8 per person/day in Aus dollars = £28,470
Denmark 1307 million crowns among 3597 prisoners= £135,584 = £89,000
Malta LM 590,000 among 200 = £7023
New Zealand NZ35,000 per person = £16,754
South Korea US$337 million among 55.159 =  £9775
England and Wales £1509 million among 37.900 = £39,815 in 1995

Scotland "£40,000"
USA $23,876 per person = £14,922

The figures given in the first link are around the mid 1990s so you could probably about double them, though the US ones are more current, which suggests MacAskill's figures only included running costs (the England and Wales ones were total budget which includes new building).

First lets acknowledge that these comparisons aren't very good. Nonetheless it is clear that the costs of imprisoning people in developed countries is extremely variable and that, with the predictable exception of Denmark, ours are very much at the high end - nearly 2.7 that in the US which is not the lowest.

It cannot be assumed that the cost variations are inherent in the general difficulty of imprisoning different nationalities ao it must be the political establishment. We could have far lower imprisonment costs if that were desired.

What doing this article has also shown is how very little transparency there is in such figures. Many of the countries on the first link simply did not give figures and there seems to be nobody currently collating them. I do. Lack of transparency normally goes with price padding. High imprisonment costs are then, with an appearance of reasonability, used to justify not imprisoning people or extremely short sentences. Limited though this comparison has proven to be it is clear that this is another area where British government costs could easily be halved, probably much more, if the will was there.

Perhaps that would mean fewer prisoners being rehabilitated. On the other hand perhaps it would mean more. The penal quangos and fakecharities do keep promising us that another programme will cut crime levels but their last promises don't seem to have worked and promises from people who don't favour transparency on the subject should not be taken seriously.

You can't push rope
You can't pull concrete
Water runs downhill - usually

  I was once told that these are the most basic rules of engineering

It strikes me there may be analogs if anybody hopes to make government as reliable as engineering. Actually I suspect these rules go back further than the ancient Greeks so the "science" of government has a long way to go but you start where you are. So lets try.

prepaid grants don't work, prizes do
 - Grants mean you pay up front and hope the resuts will appear but human minds, being flexible (like rope)can't be pushed into a result, only pulled by the offer of reward. This fits with Professor Kealey's challenge to find any government funded research which has been profitable and my belief I have answered it with various technology prizes. Almost all government funding is through grants (prizes being open to all means they lose the power of holding a patronage monopoly) and I accept his evidence that they don't work, or even have a negative effect but that does not mean an entirely different state funding system doesn't - and the evidence for prizes, both state and private, seems overwhelming.

you can't hold society together by treating different groups differently
 - In the same way that concrete doesn't have the inherent strength to hold itself together putting state money into only one part of society or enforcing the laws so that they don't apply equally to everybody is bound to fracture society. That applies whether we are talking about the Unionists in Northern Ireland; blacks browns and other ethnics sverywhere; women (though a society which fractures entirely on gender has never existed); aristocracy; state employees V free market; or indeed the police arresting the EDL to protect far worse criminality by the Occupists; or the state media censoring UKIP and promoting the much smaller Green party.

States that spend more than they earn run out of other people's money
- This one is so obvious and so well reflected in the headlines as not to need explanation. However just as the instances where engineers find water doesn't run downhill is when they want it to, so sometimes those who have saved not spent find they lose too by the debauching of the currency.

Since the rules of mathematics workm in every discipline I suspect that many of the most basic rules of thumb in many disciplines will have analogs in the "science" of government. If the practice of government were not far more backward than that of any of the real science one would not expect relatively simple comparisons like this to work but it is. I would be interested in examples.

 "Metropolitan Police raided a pub in central London and arrested 179 members of the right-wing, anti-immigrant group the English Defence League (EDL), on the basis that they were planning to attack the occupiers outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

it seems pretty clear that far more repression has been carried out in the name of protecting Occupy London than in the name of attacking it.

Apparently some of them had Facebooked and tweeted about having a punch-up at St Paul’s. Yet as those part-time libertarians who rushed to the aid of that bloke arrested for tweeting about blowing up Robin Hood airport in Nottingham should know, what people say on social-networking sites and what they do in real life are often very different things.

Perhaps the most startling thing about Friday’s mass arrest of political activists who had not committed any crimes is that many St Paul’s occupiers supported it; more than that, they appear to have assisted it....One occupier said of the police, ‘It is fantastic if they are using their resources to try and stop people getting to this site’. He said that at Occupy London’s ‘general assembly’ earlier in the day, the occupiers had been made aware of an allegedly chilling EDL statement, in which ‘they called us all sorts of names’.

Even worse, on Facebook some occupiers are boasting about having informed the police of the EDL’s alleged intentions....‘I and some friends aided in the arrests’.

not so anarchist as not to want the police arresting for "rudeness"

  It is virtually impossible to get anything from the EDL site since, according to a Google search there is nobody online representing the EDL. This seems to mean no such sites exist or that Google are deliberately censoring. Actually I made another search later and did reach the EDL site here. using similar search terms.

   The closest to an impartial report is this from the Press Association who said 

But police said there were no reports of disorder between opposing groups ahead of Friday's arrests.

"All 179 were taken to police stations across London," a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

"Three people were arrested for affray and have been bailed pending further inquiries."
The spokes man said that "176 people were arrested to prevent a breach of the peace - they have since been released".

  I assume "affray" means they were resisting being arrested for committing no crime. "Arrested to prevent a breach of the peace" is arrested for nothing on 2 grounds - firstly that breach of the peace defined as "any act which disturbs the public or even one person" is a catch all charge allowing the police, if misused, to arrest anybody or even 179 anybody's. Nobody arrested for any alleged Facebook rudeness, something we know the police would do if there were even the ghost of a case, so I assume there isn't.

  Secondly that they weren't even arrested for causing such a breach but "to prevent such a breach" in some unspecified way at some unspecified time in the future. Who, provably, should not be arrested for that?

  Clearly the Occupists outside St Pauls have been guilty of far worse for weeks and could have been arrested,presumably much more easily if the police timed it right since at night 90% of the tents are unoccupied while the Occupists stop occupying and go home to feed their cats.

  As I have pointed out before, the Occupy movement is not a genuine popular movement but a media and government promoted fraud to give the appearance of a "left" opposition opposed to free enterprise in support of big government collectivism. Now the police have gone from trying to appear "neutral" about enforcing the law to very actively subverting the law to assist the criminal "demonstrators" and arrest those whose only "crime" is not wanting to be arrested.

   Norman Tebbit has somewhat gentler things to say about the refusal to enforce the law - assuming it to be cowardice rather than corruption.

UPDATE This story, which I had not previoously noticed, has been pointed out in comments.

A coach full of English Defence League supporters was pelted with missiles after it broke down in east London.
The coach was carrying 44 EDL members when it stopped in Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets.
About 100 Asian teenagers then pelted it with bricks and stones, according to a BBC reporter at the scene.
Police arrested all 44 EDL supporters

 To be fair the article later points out that 16 of the 100+ thugs as well as all 44 of the victims were arested. I assume the justification for arresting the victims was that they were in an Islamic no-go area in central London.

I thought I would just post the Global Warming Policy Foundation's press release on the new IPCC report on the catastrophic warming we used to have. Don't expect to see any honest reporting of this on the B"due balance"B"catastrophic warming is more thoroughly accepted by the scientific community than the Law of Gravity"C

Natural Variability To Dominate Weather Events Over Coming 20-30 Years
London: For many decades to come, and probably longer, mankind’s influence on the frequency of extreme weather events will be insignificant.

According to a preliminary report released by the IPCC, there will be no detectable influence of mankind’s influence on the Earth’s weather systems for at least thirty years, and possibly not until the end of this century.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, is in stark contrast to other statements made by the IPCC. It shows that mankind’s influence on the weather is far smaller than natural factors.

If and when mankind’s influence becomes apparent it may be just as likely to reduce the number of extreme weather events as increase them.

Surveying the state of scientific knowledge IPCC scientists say they cannot determine if mankind’s influence will result in more, or fewer, extreme weather events over the next thirty years or more.
The IPCC report says:

"Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain"

"This shows the depth of our ignorance of this subject," says Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of the GWPF. "Whilst it is always important to think about the future in the light of changes we observe to the Earth’s climate, in trying to draw conclusions so far ahead based on what we know, the IPCC scientists are speculating far beyond any reasonable scientific justification."

Even making the questionable assumption that our computer models are good enough to predict what will happen in the future, for projected changes by the end of the 21st century, the uncertainties in those computer models, and the range of natural climatic variability, are far larger than any predicted human-influenced effects.

Extreme weather events have always been with us, and will continue to be so. It is the international community's responsibility to make those likely to be subjected to them become more resilient.
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  The BBC being an upstanding honest news reporting organisation have reported this almost as extensively they did the years of threatening us with catastrophic warming corrupt thieving bunch of fascist propagandists willing to tell absolutely any lie and censor absolutely any fact in their bosses cause and have thus kept this almost entirely out of their main programmes and online where such things being wholly missing stand out like a sore thumb have said "IPCC: Climate impact risk set to increase" - the article is worth reading just to see how professional liars go about it selecting the very minor point that the IPCC say there may, possibly, if they are right this time, be some marginal increase in bad weather and ignoring the disappearance of the massive risks previously said ("90% certainty") to be threatening us.

   Note also that the justification given in Beeboid Steve Jones £140,000 in house "impartial" assessment of "BBC science reporting" said that the BBC should censor, to an even greater extent, any reporting of anybody who doubts we are experiencing catastrophic global warming because "there is a scientific consensus" and the proof of that is that the IPCC (actually not a scientific body but a politically appointed one) said there is.

    Well now the IPCC are pretty much saying the opposite so if there were any possibility of anybody at the BBC not being the sort of obscene animal who would rape his own daughter for money we will see them no longer using this excuse . Of course if that had been the case then as soon as the report came out we would have seen the BBC absolutely refusing to report any ecofascist who said nuclear power wasn't the safest way of generating power because there is a genuine consensus among nuclear power engineers that it is.