A Place to Stand

  The big news yesterday was that SNP Minister Alex Neil promised. to spend £60 billion on infrastructure to get us out of recession.

   Over the next 20 years.

   Which suggests he expects a rather long recession and that he will be in power for a long time too. One might expect the former to reduce his slim chance of the later.

   Looking at the "key points" it seems to be dualling the A9 which has been on everybody's "first priority" list since before devolution, next generation broadband to all by 2020, largely the work of the free market and available already in places like Singapore, asking England to build a railway and rebuilding Scotland's millions of homes to keep them warm without being heated - at a rate of  6,000 a year.

    Fortunately this is all obvious political flannel.

    I say fortunately because, while infrastructure building is one of the very few ways governments can help an economy grow (mainly the best thing they can do is get out of the way) but in Britain government infrastructure spending is, by an overwhelming margin, wasted. The previous Forth Bridge cost £19.5 million, £320m in today's money, but the new one will cost £2,300 million. This means 7/8th of the price is going missing. I like, being a trusting sort, to think it is going into paperwork, but going it certainly is. Nor is this an unusual example. We have a parliament building that went more than 10 times over budget. Trams which, at the original price would have been 5 times more expensive than if built elsewhere but will now be half the length and twice the price.

    I did put in an FoI on the subject asking why and was told that this is because such government projects have an automatic inflation rate of 4% per annum above inflation which, while it explains an 8 fold increase in bridge costs over 53 years almost exactly, rather begs the question so I put in another FoI

FoI request, exactly why the Scottish civil service believes that inflation in their costs in tunnelling projects; bridge building projects, other construction projects; and those other areas of government who claim this applies, insist that the very long term rate of cost increases for things they do simply cannot ever be reduced to less than 4% above what applies to the rest of the world.

      To which I have now received another reply. The nearest it gets to giving a reason is that "over the last decade the construction industry has faced higher costs with significantly higher oil prices" which (A) applies to everybody and so does not explain why the government bureaucracy has a higher "inflation rate" & (B) doesn't explain over 50 years of it. I am, also helpfully advised that the growth in the costs of government projects is proven (I never doubted it the question was is there an excuse) and "evidenced by research carried out recently by Transport Scotland" which "is yet to be published".

     There have been cases where I have made FoIs where I was and am certain the failure to reply or provide information was deliberate. However I don't think this is one of them.

    I believe the inability to produce any outside justification for the cost of government work increasing 4% more than the rest of the world's is a responsive answer. There simply is no slightest excuse for this massive state parasitism and there is no slightest intention to control it. Not only is it expected that costs will be 8 times higher than they could be the rise in wastefulness is intended to continue. In another 5 years it will be 10 times and so on ad finitum.

     In which case there are no circumstances whatsoever under which it would be a good thing if Alex Neil's promises were to be worthwhile. In 20 years time government parasitism will be taking 17 times more than the engineering costs of projects. Overall, if government were actually to take £60 billion out of the economy or add it to the next generation's debts the benefit it would produce would be well under £6 billion. That is not a way to grow an economy it is (yet another as if our government hadn't produced enough of them) way to impoverish us.

     Now if the government actually wanted to grow the economy and had £60 billion to spare over the next 20 years all they would have to do is halve corporation tax (£1 bn a year), halve business rates (£1 bn) and cut income tax by "the Tartan Tax" 3p (£1 bn) and keep at it for 20 years. That would grow the economy even under Scotland's political nomenklatura.

     I will repeat what I said would be the inevitable conclusion if there were no technical reason for this price increase since clearly there isn't and thus clearly there is no other conclusion possible .

    

One obvious answer would be an enormous growth of government employees whose work adds zero, or less, to productivity. Another would be massive fraud. I do not insist it be either but it is clearly, at least in this case, not in any way an engineering cost and there must be otherwise some enormous, irreducable and generationally continuing reason or reasons for this....

Obviously this effect does suggest, overwhelmingly, that, whatever the reason, no activity should ever be left in government's hands over the long term where it could possibly be put into the free market, even if there were cases where government appeared to be currently doing it at less cost.

  I am pleased to say that Brian Monteith has chosen my suggested 24 point plan to get out of recession for his ThinkScotland site. This is despite the fact that it is really a UK plan not specifically a Scottish one. Please put any comments there.

    This plan and earlier versions has been around for several years and no elected politician, Westminster or Holyrood party, thinktank or media outlet to whom I have sent it has chosen to express an opinion.

    I had privately suggested that this may be because it is obviously wrong or, depending on how one views our political class, because it is unanswerably right, I don't see any other option being feasible.

   To anybody who accepts the overwhelming statistical evidence that economic freedom strongly correlates with economic success here or here there can be no dispute that Brian Monteith is the most economically competent person to ever serve as a Member of the Scottish Parliament so if he decides it isn't "obviously wrong" it obviously isn't.

   Brian has shown he is a genuine patriot with the integrity to stand, alone if necessary, for sense and against ripping off the Scottish people. After he left, the "parcel of rogues" who make up Holyrood voted unanimously to destroy the Scottish economy and sell the Scottish people into debt slavery, purely to get patted on the head by the UK/EU nomenklatura on the basis of what they all know to be a fraudulent scare. It is clearly impossible for any honest person to suggest that the treasonous and cynical Salmond, or any crony MSP possesses 1/1,000th as much true patriotism as he.

  This letter in the Scotsman today

Dr John Cameron writes scathingly of the alleged radiation hazard at Dalgety Bay. SEPA's own consultants years ago told them that the radiation level there was "less than 2/3rds that of the typical Aberdeen Street"; that the amount of radium in the (water soluble) paint 60 years ago needed to paint all the numbers on the dials of these planes is likely to be well short of a gram; whereas in a foot of topsoil over any square mile anywhere there averages 8 tonnes of uranium and thorium and 1 gram of radium.

Despite SEPA's claims to have found "radium and its daughter elements" (radium's sole daughter element is radon, a gas which could not remain there) no actual chemical proof of radium has been found. The radiation at Dalgety Bay is overwhelmingly and possibly entirely background radiation, and far from the highest level found naturally. SEPA have been playing on an entirely unfounded public hysteria about radiation and ignorance thereof which has been promoted by political "environmentalists" for decades. 

  I have kept in a couple of very minor editings which improved it by tightening it up. Thank you Scotsman for at last publishing.

Herman Cain, a professional mathematician and successful self made entrepreneur  - when did America or any western nation last have a more qualified leader, but not invulnerable to false smears.

  A few weeks ago Herman Cain was the front running candidate for the Republican nomination. His 9-9-9 tax reform )9% income tax, VAT and corporation tax which would certainly let America's economy grow fast) was popular, practical and hated by the parasites dependent on ever more government largess.

  Then out of the blue came some remarkably unspecific and unsupported allegations of "sexual misconduct" a long time ago.

   The allegers said there were 5 separate women claiming something but 2 are entirely unidentified which makes disputing any claims they might have made if they actually exist and are making claims, problematic.. 1 of the others amounts to making an unsubtle pass. 1 is of "making a gesture indicating his wife's height by holding his palm flat" which is a version of sex i am unfamiliar with. The last is a woman claiming to have had a 13 year affair with him. However it is difficult to believe such an affair would never have been witnessed or produced any evidence and when there is more attention and money making opportunities available to anybody making obviously ridiculous claims here than to anybody claiming to have been abducted by space aliens it is only surprising that there have been more of the latter..

   It is claimed that 2 of them  received severance settlements greater than they were legally due however in  However in America (& Britain) it is common to settle baseless dismissal suits with some pay off since that is cheaper than fighting and winning and neither payment is claimed to be above, or even matching the legal costs of winning such a case.

    So there it would stand. No evidence; no credible allegations; no history (as there was with DSK); no avocado stains; nothing but 2 non-credible allegations only the least so involving actual sex.

    That this non-story becomes the major "newsworthy" item in a campaign to decide the government of the USA, in a campaign where there are real policies being put forward (unlike so many campaigns) would seem to be a remarkable indictment of the triviality of the American media, not to say its obvious bias since it treated far more credible allegations against Clinton (also true ones) as unimportant as well as ones strongly supported by evidence of Obama's fraudulently getting money from Chicago's leading political/mobster lawyer.

    Were it not for some genuine investigative journalism from Ann Coulter.

Herman Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country -- Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but never in Chicago.
So it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere David Axelrod.

The reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual misconduct against them.
John Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.
Meanwhile, as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator -- allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent.
One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader.
But then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.
From then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent. During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.
Hull's substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.
Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced.
Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).
With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.
And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)
Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.
In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."
Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."

  The Daley-controlled Illinois Rerataurant Association works hand-in-glove with the National RA. And strangely enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have been a sexual predator....


Herman Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod! And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.
Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless.
Within 24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle."

Axelrod's courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them -- over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be tracked down and shot).
With a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent, Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate election, winning with a 43 percent margin.
And that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush was not divorced.)
Axelrod destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.
In 2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece (on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the story."
Some had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."
This time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must be a racist.

     So while there is absolutely no actual evidence of any wrongdoing by Cain whatsoever there is overwhelming evidence of a statistically impossible presence of Obama's "hired muscle" being behind the scenes here. There is overwhelming statistical certainty that on 3 separate occasions Obama's hired muscle has been used to dispose of opponents using largely or entirely false claims and in one occasion in a deliberate perversion of the law (ie breaching court records). Theoretically it is possible that the hired muscle acted without his boss's consent buy this is clearly far less likely, 3 times, than it was with Watergate & I don't find that remotely credible.

   Anybody think that is not hundreds of times more important for someone holding the office of President that he is found to be a politically corrupt, lawbreaking, liar, in league with what is widely g=known to be a gangster related political machine (Chicago's) than anything Cain has been even accused of?

   Anybody expect the US (or indeed British as it is reported here) media will not continue to censor, giving far less airtime to the real story than the smear, to promote the crook? Obama may be a gangster but he could not get away with this if the US media were not lying and censoring to help him.

    This is proving to be a dirty election. The thieving, lying, murdering nomenklatura who control the US government and media are fighting for their political  futures. Expect more and more such lies from Obama and his creatures. Next.

  How many more human sacrifices must there be?

WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND WORSE: DEBATE THE DRAGODAN MASSACRE, THE DISSECTION OF 1,800 LIVING PEOPLE, ETHNIC CLEANSING OF 350,000 AND THE MEDIA CENSORSHIP OF IT.
When NATO occupied Kosovo we undertook to run a secure non-racist regime, disarm the KLA and prevent them carrying out atrocities. Instead we immediately swore them in as police, allowed to carry out massacres, such as the murder of 210 civilans outside the British Military HQ at Dragodan, in the British occupation zone (acknowledged in Parliament and under the FoI http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/01/dragodan-massacre-freedom-of_23.html ); the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 civilians; kidnapping thousands of schoolgirls and boys to sell to brothels (attested by a British officer and, years later, by Amnesty Int); and the dissection, while still alive, of 1,800 people to sell body parts (now acknowledged by the Council of Europe). Parliament should acknowledge and debate such atrocities & consider whether the war against Yugoslavia was in any way defencive, since otherwise, under the principles we endorsed at the Nuremburg Trials, it is unambigouusly criminal.
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  I put this up on 1th Oct, 10th Oct, 14th Oct, 28th Oct, 18th Nov and 29th Nov.  It was officially rejected twice and disappeared on the other occasions. The official and different reasons for rejection are posted below and readers may decide for themselves if they are valid.

Your e-petition "WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND WORSE: DEBATE THE DRAGODAN MASSACRE, THE DISSECTION OF 1,800 LIVING PEOPLE, ETHNIC CLEANSING OF 350,000 AND THE MEDIA CENSORS" hasn't been accepted.
E-petitions cannot be used to request action on issues that are outside the responsibility of the government. This includes:
party political material

and then

commercial endorsements including the promotion of any product, service or publication

issues that are dealt with by devolved bodies, eg The Scottish Parliament
correspondence on personal issues

I hope you will sign it. In any case these facts are is now up on a UK government forum

  On Wednesday Gordon Brown had his adjournment debate on the Dalgety Bay "radium". He spoke, a couple of backbench Labour MPs asked supportive questions and Andrew Robathan, Parlaimentary Under Secretary for defence gave an emollient response confirming that the MoD have already paid £750,000 on this nonsense and are prepared to pay more but not unlimitedly more. He made no specific suggestion that it is natural radioactivity nor that most of it wasn't though he did appear to admit radium had been found..

This is the first time we have had any official statement of the cost spent on this bureaucratic lie. My guess would be that SEPA, being the active party in this must have spent several times more so we will be talking about a minimum of £4 million blown in propping up various people's bank balances.

Here is some stuff from Brown's speech, much of which was clearly a SEPA handout:
____________________________
"in the past six weeks, materials that were dumped there by the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s—aircraft dials, aircraft paint and other materials—have been discovered, with radioactive levels that are 10 times anything witnessed before." not true - no radioactive dials nor radioactive paint particles have ever been found in the past and the current claims are just about "particles" and "a piece of metal"

"aircraft dials, materials used for painting dials and other instruments, were broken up and dumped at Dalgety Bay. On that land houses were built " so the main site of any putative radium would not be on the beach at all but on the land built on. Reinforces the assumption that this is either natural rock concentrated by lighter soil being washed away from the beach or alternately material being swept onto the beach from the sea bottom*.


"the ambient radiation dose rate values were within normal levels and calculated that the highest ambient dose rate found at Dalgety Bay was only two thirds of that found naturally in the granite in Aberdeen" actually the report said "less than 2/3rds" - I suspect this damaging point would not have appeared in his speech had I not previously dug it out.

"radium contamination was present not as a layer in the sediment, but randomly distributed as particles" the difference between a layer and a random distribution is clearly a matter of the word you choose to use


"the maximum fatal risk per year from inhaling or swallowing a radioactive particle to any user of the area surveyed was negligible; it was calculated as clearly “less than one in a million” I assume "clearly less" means "far less" so zero to by any real world use of the term

"The chances of ingestion…is highly unlikely, around one in half a million per year” so considerably less than the chance of being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger their, though the tiger attack would likely be fatal while eating one particle almost certainly wouldn't

"“recontamination of the beach continued, indicating that either the ash horizon was not the only potential host material, or that”—other—“sources continued to be present…and continued to re-contaminate the beach.” ie in either case it is not primarily, if at all, dial radium but naturally occurring background, probably including stuff from the sea bottom routinely deposited by the sea*

"128 particles, 48 were recovered from investigations of the ash bed, 28 from clearance surveys of the beach and coastal path, and 51 from regular visits" so 37.5% from the only area where dial radiation, if it existed, would be likely to be (also the area where they were looking hardest, and 62.5% where natural radiation only would be expected

"SEPA again wrote to the MOD asking for a commitment to undertake appropriate remediation and

“the delivery of a plan” with“sufficient resources and funds to enable work to be undertaken”." which is basically SEPA putting the onus on the MoD to make an unlimited commitment to pay for unspecified action in response to an undetectably small alleged threat for which there is no evidence they are responsible

The second part of his speech seems to be less taken from a SEPA handout and makes a number of statements that ain't so or are meaningless "is a radioactivity level higher than anything that has been seen before" no we have 3 particles, but the background level is unchanged and much lower than elsewhere

"the MOD contractor removed 33 sources, SEPA has removed 442 separate particles" if that were comparable level of effort we would expect SEPA to have spent 13 times more - £10 million - on this nonsense but I am willing to assume they have merely been removing less radioactive particles

The Undersecretary's response is memorable only for this "SEPA has recently found higher activity sourced at some depth—about 75cm, or 2 feet for those who deal in old-fashioned measurements" actually 2 1/2 feet  - perhaps a nitpick but both the exposure to the public and the likelihood of them having been put there less than geological ages ago are sharply reduced by increased depth.

Brown ends with this telling point "The Ministry of defence has been told by the Scottish environmental Protection agency that a remedial action plan is needed. It has the power to designate the land and require the Ministry of Defence to do this. It will not change its mind about whether a remedial action plan is needed" - ie the issue does not come down to whether there is any actual danger or even any actual radioactivity beyond what God laid down but simply that SEPA has the power to designate any land anywhere "radioactive" and permanently sealed off, irrespective of whether they actually have found the non-existent "daughter elements" of radium or anything else of scientific validity.

This simply comes down to SEPA holding the community hostage to extort money from the MoD.

Brown is doing his constituents no good by supporting the use of them this way.
===============
  There is also a rather good letter from a radioactivity expert on the subject in the Scotsman today and remarkably 3 of the 4 comments  entirely agree with him that

There are amoebae on Mars with a greater knowledge of physics than Gordon Brown and he should return to his self- imposed purdah and not ramp up silly scare stories

the effect of hormesis on the feline population of Aberdeen??

  This letter in today's Scotsman. Not often I disagree with Brian and in fact here I don't much. He was making the point that the government employee strikers were being greedy in trying to keep better terms than the productive sector can afford, which is not wrong and I am saying that if they do exercise their right to strike the government has a duty to show the same determination to oppose them that any commercial manager would. Sometimes it is worth putting 2 sides of a free market debate rather than letting discussion just be between pro and anti strikers. I suspect Brian was showing more support of the Cameron government's position than he actually feels.

   Perhaps the Scotsman decided to use this, which I do not regard as one of my best, because of their (& every other paper's) refusal to publish any of my letters on the Dalgety Bay "radiation" hazard being background and "less than 2/3rds that of a typical Aberdeen street" according to SEPA's  own consultants which I would consider more newsworthy. 

For once I would like to disagree with Brian Monteith’s criticism of the government workers’ strike (Perspective, 28 November).
Striking is an inherent right in a free society.
However, that comes with certain consequences. It is also the duty of elected politicians to serve the interests of the electorate, who pay for it, rather than the government employees.
Mass trade unionism survives alone in the public sector because the politicians, unlike the managers of other businesses, support it for purely political reasons.
By striking, the unions have shown it is government’s duty to be as concerned about getting value for money and making unproductive workers redundant as any other employer. Nobody is forced to work for the state, and they have no right to better conditions than the rest of us.