A Place to Stand

  Glaswegian scientists photograph entangled particles
  From The Register. We have folks as Bright as Sheldon here.

 And more sociable.

Professor Colin McInnes, a key player in developing sails for space missions were the first three senior winners of The Royal Society of Edinburgh’s RSE Prize

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  For Heinlein fans (HT Steve Sailer) - including his advice to Niven and Pournelle on how to make Mote Light into a classic SF book - Change the name to something more awe inspiring, perhaps out of the Bible.
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  People who call themselves "Keynsians" keep insisting that the great Depression was ended in America by printing endless amounts of money & that the British politicians who insisted on cuts made it worse. In fact it was over far faster in Britain because our politicians (that time) got it right. Dan Hannan explains.
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  Children with pets grow up more healthy and socialised. Obvious if you think about it but not something we usually think about. I once blogged the same about pets helping socialise people in prison.
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Average Chinese person's carbon footprint now equal to average European's. And good luck to them. That means they may be slightly improving the weather and are certainly improving crop growth and biodiversity by about 25%.

Could there possibly be any connection with the fact that China is growing at 10% a year while Europe is in recession and that it won't be long before the average income is equal too?
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Following the Batman film shootings in America our media played up gun ownership as the cause. Surprisingly enough they never mentioned last year's Cumbria shooting had left the same number of dead.
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Amount of CO2 being absorbed from the atmosphere has doubled in 50 years. This will include absorption into the ocean and other things otherwise the estimate, above, that CO2 had increased crop growth by 25% would be hopelessly low.
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Müller Lite: Why Every Scientist Needs a Classical Training  Lord Monckton cheerfully eviscerates Muller's BEST climate fraud.
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"They saw a television documentary story that condemned the inhumane practice of trafficking human organs. But as Walter's health deteriorated, his relatives saw saviors in the villains. Since the television show named no names, they asked the author of the story to provide them with contact information."

Republic of Kosovo is considered the "capital" of the illegal trade in human organs. Initially it was caused by the war launched by the leading powers of Europe and the U.S. that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Organs were removed from the killed or captured Serbs for transplants for wealthy customers. This was the birth of an illegal business - trading in human organs. Until 2008, the surgeries with illegal organ transplants were carried out in Pristina."

  And so the atrocities our governments authorised in Kosovo continue. Does anybody think the (German) documentary producer was being somewhat hypocritical in their outrage at this business when they then acted as middlemen for potential customers.

  I had this letter in the Shetland News online.

 On the one hand I think what I have said about the Syrian imbroglio and even moreso, about the Yugoslav wars is something which most definitely should be said and it is something the MSM simply censors. This is only the 2nd time I have ever had a letter published which mentioned Dragodan - the other being in the Herald years ago. I have another letter out to the Scotsman which I suspect they won't print tomorrow.

   On the other it may well distract from what I have been saying there about tunnels.

  But Jean Murray's unctuous letter about how we should be helping people who are foreign hired terrorists rather than local democrats made me see red. Sometimes you can't turn away. No replies so far and it will be interesting to see if she, or anybody else, feels they can do so.
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Jean Urquhart MSP's letter about Syria (Why Syria matters; SN 7/8/12) is correct on one point: what people get away with in one part of the world affects us all. For the rest it reflects the slanted and simplistic view we in Britain are normally fed.

The Syrian "revolution" is not an internal revolution at all, but as Asia Times, an online publication, reports: "A swarm of mercenaries - infiltrated via Jordan - who were supposed to take over the capital had to retreat up north. Now the news cycle is fixated on another faux game-changer - the Battle of Aleppo" - something unnoticed by all the western journalists on site.

The Damascus bomb, far from being a set by "rebels", was a carefully crafted Saudi and US state assassination to which the Syrians have reacted remarkably quickly by in turn assassinating Prince Bandar bin Sultan (now up to 2,900 mentions worldwide) who was appointed Saudi intelligence chief for masterminding it.

It is difficult to see how any part of the Syrian conflict can be understood without knowing this, but because your "rivals" have managed to miss it, here again you have the opportunity of a major scoop.

The Houla massacre of about 100 people was extensively covered by our media. The fact the Syrian regime found the subsequent evidence that the victims were, in fact, Assad's allies and so it must have been the "democrats" rather than him responsible, somehow eluded the British broadcasters.

All of this is reminiscent of the Kosovo war where the same broadcaster cheered NATO bombing of hospitals, TV station and other civilian targets to help our "democratic" KLA thugs and then failed to report when the KLA, newly signed up as NATO police, carried out hundreds of massacres, probably the worst being of 210 civilians killed outside the British HQ in Dragodan, and the kidnapping and dissection, while still alive, of a total of 1,800 people to sell their body organs to western hospitals.

We should indeed, as Ms Urquhart says, "sweep down the walls of oppression" even, or particularly, when the guards on those walls are our own politicians.

Kosovo dissections unmentioned by our media: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2011/02/council-of-europe-adopts-dick-martys-albanian-organ-trafficking-report-investigation-to-be-pursued-marty-must-not-share.html

Dragodan massacre, also unmentioned: http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/dragodan-massacre-freedom-of_23.html

Neil Craig

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.


Theodore Roosevelt

  This quote, slightly mangled, was used by NASA in the news conference after the landing as described here by Spiked. Somewhat inappropriately since NASA have not been the adventurous types in space development, instead they have been a sclerotic government bureaucracy whose main role, if the US President's astonishing inanity is to be believed is to "make Muslims feel good" about themselves.
   In fact the people who have dared mighty things, certainly by comparison to their resources are the likes of Burt Rutan who designed Spaceship One, which succeeded. Also Colin Pillinger, whose Beagle 2 failed but could and should have been repeated, with tweaks at half the cost, since the original design work had been done, until it worked. Instead ESA and the committee of MPs denounced him for not having enough money and ESA were not minded to help Beagle in any way. When it failed they said what a good idea it had been and they would do it over, but bigger and 10 times more expensively. Since then nothing has been done but the money has been spent. What should have been done is let Colin tweak the design a little, which would mean, since the original design work had been done, a mark 2 would probably have cost half as much; have ESA ground monitoring actually monitor and try again for as long as necessary.


   However what really proved how much admiration and respect space activity engenders was this leader from the Guardian

Space science: gamble that paid dividends The latest Mars mission is partly a tentative rehearsal for a long-planned joint US-European smash-and-grab raid

Planetary exploration is expensive – as Curiosity's $2.5bn robotic landing on Mars on Monday morning certainly shows – but it is not an expensive luxury

  The praise is extracted as if with a dentist's drill & they make a really silly shoehorning in mention of environmentalism but when the Guardian are forced to give any praise for something technologically progressive they must know it is popular even with guardianistas. And it is. Look at the comments - pages of them and barely a critical one (except for a moron who thinks its a hoax). My favourite

DisaffectedYouth


6 August 2012 10:01PM
...and here the Guardian is reluctantly writes something positive about the United States. A rare site indeed, and I think we can expect a spate of deeply anti-American articles to make up for it (maybe have a member of the Taliban write something?).

  Space development is immensely popular not just because it is Britain and humanity's fastest growing industry (& barely started) but because we (even guardianistas) are human beings.

  Which, after all, is why politicians spend our money on what they claim are space programmes but, like ESA, above & indeed NASA ("a jobs programme for the southern states that also did some stuff in space")
then disappears. Nobody factually disputes that prizes are at least orders of magnitude more effective at the nominal purpose of space development. This is why space enthusiasts should press not just for government support of space development but, even more importantly, that they not find their enthusiasm is being used to let them grab money for other purposes.

   Last word to Pournelle.

the next step in the conquest of space is a permanent base on the Moon, and more experience in exploiting space resources. Of course compared to Mars the Moon seems fairly dull, but getting to Mars will be a lot simpler when we have a Moon Base and a place where we can test NERVA and other nuclear propulsion systems in vacuum with a machine shop and materials handy. Hohmann orbits are not the key to the planets.

We need Heinlein’s ‘torchships”, but they turn out to be a great deal more difficult than we believed in that golden age. On the other hand, we have tested NERVA and got exhaust velocities double theoretical maxima of chemical rockets. NERVA and a Moon Base can make possible the kind of asteroid commerce I describe in Birth of Fire, High Justice, Exile and Glory, and other works I did in the 1980’s. I have seen nothing to make those stories obsolete, and the only failures we have had are those of nerve. 

  

   Herald Letter

Norwegian ferries are held up as an example for Scotland by Mr Hill (letter Mon) as an alternative to the Rest and be Thankful road link.

However Norway provides a much better example if we want a modern and convenient transport system in Scotland.
Over the last couple of decades Norway has cut 700 km of tunnels at a cost of under £5 million per km. If this is technically possible on that side of the North Sea it is here too. Indeed a Norwegian company offered to cut one tunnel between the Shetland Mainland and Yell for a quoted price of £23 million.



The Scottish Tunnel Project is a proposal that we cut about 160 km of tunnels across Scotland. Gourock-Dunoon; via Rothsay, and across Loch Fyne to Kintyre would make that peninsula less than an hour's drive from Glasgow. Also provide another route to Oban. Other tunnels proposed would link to Islay, Jura, Arran, Lewis, Mull, Orkney, Isle of Man, Ulster. 2 under the Forth and a Tay estuary tunnel.
Together these would cost about £800 million - less in total than the cost of buying and running 4 ferries for 3 decades. And less than 1/3rd of the cost of one new Forth bridge.
This would revolutionise Scotland's transport system, as it has revolutionised Norway's and helped Norway become the second wealthiest country in the world (after Singapore).
This has been adopted by UKIP Scotland as the sort of progressive economic policy Scotland needs. It has also been put to all the Scottish parliamentarians who have seen no reasons why it cannot be done and may even endorse it some day.

Refs http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/tunnel-vision.html     

  I am really pleased that the mention of UKIP was not censored out of the letter as it was in a recent letter on the same subject I had published in the Courier. Mentioning UKIP does generally seem to discourage publication. The highlighted phrase was deleted which is rather a pity.        The letter was in response to a letter so silly in its call for subsidy of ferries that it is difficult not to suspect he is employed to do so but it appears he is simply an artist with a record of wanting us to subsidise his ferry hobbyhorse.

In a sensible country (such as Norway, for instance) we would be looking at a multitude of well equipped ferries criss-crossing the west Highlands and Islands, taking vast amounts of traffic off the roads.

Were the geography of the whole of the UK in anyway similar to the geography of most of Scotland we wouldn't be having this debate. I'm sure if that was the case massive funding provision would be automatically provided for ferries which are actually an alternative and a more efficient part of a sensible transport network

  The idea that ferries could ever be a an alternative in capacity, cost, speed or 24 hour availability to roads or indeed tunnels is clearly ridiculous. They are useful when the distance to an island is to far for a tunnel.

   This is part of my new article on ThinkScotland. It is largely a rehash of what I have previously written here but I am pleased to see it getting a new audience. –

"There is undoubtedly greater PR value in a charity calling for restrictions on liberty than would be the case if the message came directly from a bureaucrat or politician.... This, of course, is precisely why governments prefer to speak through sock puppets and why the concept of charity must be reclaimed for civil society. It should be no surprise that this subverts democracy, for that is exactly what it was designed to do".

All of these revelations come from a recent report by Phillip Snowden on government funded charities, or as he aptly calls them, government Sock Puppets1 which should be read by everybody who wants to know how our government is run so very badly.

I have long been concerned about the extent to which government has been using its (well, our) money to fund ostensible opposition organisations and "raise awareness" of scare stories. The effect is only to promote more government control, regulation, spending & thus more departmental empire building with government spending an ever larger portion of national wealth.

  Please put any comments there rather than here.
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  Going from a published article to an unpublished letter - this is a letter I have sent out twice to about 30 British newspapers and 3 times to the Scotsman. I wrote the first around the then current statement by Osborne about his "relentless" pursuit of growth and the later one about the latest figures of manufacturing decline. I also wrote it to fit the 250 words limit the Scotsman had called for.

    I don't think anything more could have been done to make this publishable and I consider it one of my best letters. Latest figures shoe Britain's reduction in manufactured goods is deepening. Mr Osborne says he is engaged in a "relentless" attempt to find out how to achieve growth.

Throughout the alleged "world recession" the non-EU part of the world has been growing at an average of 6%.

Every serious politician knows how to end recession..

It was set down in, among other places, the Washington Consensus (1989) which has since guided most of the world to unprecedented growth.

To achieve fast growth end deficit, end subsidy of uneconomic projects (windmills), have a broad tax base that does not penalise effort, encourage the free market and end restrictions/regulations that prevent the market choosing the most efficient methods. A particular example in Britain is that electricity prices have more than doubled because we are forced to subsidise windmills when we could have unlimited cheap power from shale gas and nuclear. The correlation between growth in electricity use and the overall economy is as clearly established as anything in economics. 93% of the cost of British electricity is political parasitism.

Only one party, UKIP, actually supports such policies.

Fortunately for the others UKIP is obviously censored by our state owned broadcasters, and in particular mention of their economic policy is censored so none of their opponents are called on to deny this works, or if they cannot, say why they still oppose it.

Even Zimbabwe currently has a 9.3% growth rate. It is impossible to believe that the "relentless" search for how we can get above zero growth has been serious.

Neil Craig

Refs - Washington Consensus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Consensus#List_of_recommendations

93% of electricity cost unnecessary http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/93-of-your-electricity-bill-is.html

Zimbabwe 9.3% growth https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/zi.html

UK manufacturing receession deepens http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/08/01/pmi-britain-manufacturing-idINL6E8J16DC20120801      If it cannot be said to be below the literary standards required of letters in any part of the dead tree media & it is agreed that getting out of recession is a matter to which readers are not indifferent the only remaining alternative is that such discussion is being deliberately censored. Such censorship does strongly support my thesis that each of our masters "knows how to end recession" & that "UKIP is obviously censored by our state owned broadcasters, and in particular mention of their economic policy is censored so none of their opponents are called on to deny this works".

    The fact that nobody has been able to give any reasons why my proposals to get out of recession are in any way wrong does also tend to support the theory that they are known to be absolutely right and consequently that adopting UKIP's or my suggestions would get us out of recession in days if those in charge wanted to do so.  

      I do intend to send this letter out again, slightly edited to suit each new sign of the recession worsening.

UPDATE - Though the letter remains unpublished in the MSM the Letter Writer's Guild, a club of people who regularly write letters in the cause of sanity (I am a member) have nonetheless decided to put it prominently on their website.

   That is certainly unusual if not unique for an unpublished letter & I take it as confirmation that it is certainly considered worthy of publication. 

My thanks.  

   Sometimes people achieve fame by saying something that is absolute rubbish but fits the political/social needs of the time. Paul Ehrlich, whose has achieved fame (& $250,000 "genius" grants) by making dozens of environmental catastrophe predictions, all of them proven by time to be completely wrong, is one such.

   Another is Francis Fukuyama who famously said, when the USSR fell, that this was "the end of history" since, from now own, all governments would simply be administrators of the law and free markets.

   {I suspect he was not deliberately ripping off 1066 and All That, a wonderful satire of history which ended in 1918 with "America thus became Top Nation and History came to a ." *}

   The bit of his article I am going to bring up is not that famous inanity but comes at the end of the article. 

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history...... Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.

 In fact what we have seen is these same allegedly liberal governments becoming ever more controlling as they suck up an ever increasing share of GNP to pay the ever increasing number of government employees and their friends, and then having to find more things to regulate to justify this growth.

   It is increasingly apparent that government is not solving technical problems; not successfully calculating effective economic answers; failing to satisfy consumer demands; and while using environmental concerns to enhance its power, since this is the only field it is even possible to claim government action is worthwhile, merely increasing false concerns, such as CAGW, without achieving any discernible results.
  The fact is that at all the things used to justify "liberal" western big government - the last 20 years have seen the liberal facade collapse and illiberal policies introduced which have consistently failed at the very things Fukuyama said our government was supposed to be committed to and better at.

 If, as Marx said, societies inevitably develop towards the most effective use of the "means of production" western governments have absolutely failed. The things used by Fukuyama to justify government - solving economic, technical & ending real environmental problems - are things at which these governments are clearly heavily counterproductive and free market solution (with "hidden costs" to the environment being properly included in the price system) are obviously more effective.

  Time for the withering away of the state then.

  The other point he has entirely missed is that of technological and particularly space development. It is difficult to imagine that when space development ceases to be prevented by the illiberal and all consuming state & we are exploring Mars, Saturn, Pluto and beyond, that boredom (or a failure to find new philosophies or artistic insights) will be such a problem.

    Or indeed that history will end.


* The punch line to 1066 and All That requires one to know that the dot at the end of a sentence ( . ) known in America as a "period" is known in Britain as a "full stop".  England and America are two countries separated by a common language.