A Place to Stand

OK 28gate remains censored by the BBC state broadcaster; and by ITN which is state regulated; and has been absent from the "news" pages of papers, though appearing in a few commentator's pages, all sensible sceptics.

But readers letters pages aren't even meant to be editorialised. They are meant to be "readers letters" though an inordinate number of representatives of government sock puppets get chosen, without the state attribution being mentioned.

They are meant to reflect the letters received.

Anybody seen any mentions there of 28gate?

Here are 8 separate letters. A total of around  have sent out to papers in Britain and the US. A total of around 341 letters. A search on Google News show only 1 publication - the online Shetland news. Not a single dead tree publication. Now the average paper publishes over 10 letters a day so the odds against not one being chosen, if they are of only average interest and literary quality must be up there with winning the lottery. At least those are the odds if we are not seeing not only deliberate censorship but censorship so total it is impossible to suggest any part of the MSM is in any way honest.

  I flatter myself my writing is above average. It is no flatttery to say that 28gate is news of far greater importance than the savile scandal or at least 99% of what appears in our media.

    There seems to be no dispute that 28gate proves that the BBC, virtually every department, has continually and deliberately lied, censored and fabricated to promote a totalitarian fascist propaganda lie over many years, and that everybody in any sort of authority has known, at least to a large extent, that it is a totalitarian fascist lie.

     Indeed what this proves is that there literally is no dispute. Rather than disputing it, it is simply censored.

     Rather puts in perspective the alleged fuss about whether Levison us a threat to a free press. The dead tree press has proven, with absolute certainty, that it is already in no possible way free.

    I will be sending this to those papers asking if they wish to suggest any possible circumstances under which even a single  letter, not even a news report, involving a scandal which proves beyond any question, that our broadcasters are wholly corrupt totalitarian propagandists will be published.

##########################

13th November
Sir,


In the midst of a storm of scandals about the BBC a new one runs the risk of not receiving the coverage it is surely due. Certainly the BBC is reticent in reporting it.

For years (since 2006) the BBC have claimed that their propagandistic position of promoting the catastrophic global warming fraud, censoring the appearance of dissenters and even getting rid of anybody who refused to push the party line (e.g. Johnny Ball, Peter Sissons and the still very popular David Belay) was justified. The justification for this was that they claimed to have called, in 2006, a meeting of the country's 28 'best scientific experts" who had unanimously told them that there was no scientific doubt that we were experiencing catastrophic warming.

Tony Newberry, a retired viewer and sceptic sent the BBC a Freedom of Information Act request to know who these "leading scientists" were. The BBC refused to say. Since then in appeal after appeal the BBC have spent 10s, possibly hundreds of thousands of £s, employing top barristers to prevent us knowing who the leading scientists they had chosen to ask really were. The BBC asserted that telling anybody would be a breach of their ethics and of journalistic secrecy. In the climate sceptic community this produced ...well, scepticism.


Then on Monday somebody found the names. The BBC who had spent so much ot our money to prevent us knowing the strength of their case, had sent it to the International Broadcasting Trust who had put the 'secret list" online. Perhaps somebody had not told them about the BBC version of "journalistic integrity".


So who are Britain's 28 "leading scientists". There is a recently published list of Britain's 100 leading scientists and none of them are on it. There is an MP, a Church of England devine, representatives of Greenpeace (2), Stop Climate Chaos, the US government, BP, a "renewables" company director, and other "environmental" activists. Of the very few of these "leading scientists" who have any claim to being scientists one is a gentleman who has gone on record as saying what he does, which he calls "post normal science" is simply to tell those in power whatever they want to hear.
Such fraudulent propagandising would have embarrassed the old Soviet Union. What part of the BBC's claims which are truthful?


A recent World Bank report examined the role of government ownership of broadcasting. They found that the degree of ownership closely correlated with authoritarianism, corruption, government incompetence, national, poverty and even things like poor healthcare. In its way this is unsurprising - the argument for a free press has always been that it means that failure gets noticed and something is done. Britain has one of the highest levels of state ownership of broadcasting in the developed world and indeed in the English speaking world.


The BBC's justification is that they are different. Their charter requires them to be "balanced". That is indeed what the law says. It is not what the BBC does. On a whole range of subjects, a few of them now becoming public. The give the Greens 40 times more coverage per vote, all of it deeply supportive, than UKIP, almost all critical. They play up hatred of whichever country the government wants to bomb and largely cwensor mention of the atrocities that follow our "liberation" of them - e.g. giving almost no mention of the dissection of thousands of living human beings by our "police" formerly the KLA in Kosovo, or of the fact that no actual tangible evidence was actually found against Milosevic. The "hacking scandal" became first item on BBC news, for months on end, just when Murdoch was planning to expand Sky TV & give them real competition. On almost every occasion the BBC will primarily or only interview people from government organisations or, more often nowadays, "charities" actually funded by government, who, without fail, demand more government regulation, civil servants and taxes.


We literally cannot have a free society without free media. The BBC is so arrogant and totalitarian it cannot now be reformed. If we wish freedom it must be abolished.


Neil Craig  (about 40)

References - Bishop Hill on the breaking news http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/11/12/bbc-climate-28-revealed.html

The list of the 28 "leading scientists" http://omnologos.com/full-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-seminar-on-26-january-2006/

100 leading UK scientists listing http://physicsworld.com/blog/2010/10/100_top_uk_scientists_revealed.html


You have my permission to edit if necessary. I suggest the 2nd last paragraph could be edited without losing the main track because it is background information (though I would argue important background).    20th November Sir,


The 28 Gate scandal, which broke last Monday & has gone viral across the internet shows that the BBC have lied, repeatedly, indeed continuously, for at least 6 years about having advice from 28 of Britain's "leading scientists" about the scare story. In fact they had not got or indeed sought any such advice. Instead they knowingly contacted a group of renewables salespeople, government funded "green" activists, civil servants (1 American) and strangely people from the foreign "aid" industry, with barely any scientific qualifications between them.


By lying about this for so many years the BBC have proven, not only that they consider it their job to lie and censor to promote a state "big lie" but also that there is no scientific foundation behind the warming scare. If the BBC had thought that they could find real 28 scientists, out of the hundreds of thousands in Britain willing to give them the advice they sought they would obviously have done so.

This fits well with the previous calls I have made for any proponent of catastrophic warming to name a single scientist anywhere in the world who supports the scare & isn't paid by politicians using our money. Nobody has been able to name even one.

The Savile scandal, which involved a relatively small number of officials apparently not noticing his decades of underage sex with hundreds of girls, can barely be 1,000th as bad as the entire BBC organisation, continuously lying to promote what they knew to be a false scare that has cost every person in Britain thousands of pounds in "eco" subsidising.

The BBC charter legally requires that they show "balance". Obviously over warming they have shown nothing but the most complete and dishonest bias for decades. This is not the only subject on which they have done so. They have therefore obviously vitiated their charter. Moreover in the various legal cases, in which they employed platoons of barristers, to try and prevent the facts coming out, it is difficult to see how claims that they had the "best scientific advice" from "leading scientists" can be anything but perjury.

The BBC are still censoring any reporting of 28 gate from the media they control. They are also enthusing over the charging of some News International staff for the legally as well as morally, lesser crime of obtaining information illicitly. Perhaps a little more contriteness might be in order.

Neil Craig  (about 50) Pub by Shetland news which is an online publication

22nd November Sir,
That "greenhouse gases", essentially CO2 whose main effect is to improve plant growth, contributing to the enormous increase in food production, are increasing is not in dispute.


However that this is in any way catastrophic is very much in dispute.


The BBC's 28gate scandal has proven that the BBC lied to us for 6 years that their unstinted propagandising of the catastrophic warming scare had the backing of 28 "leading scientists" when in fact all but 2 weren't scientists at all but an amalgam of "green" activists, "renewables" salesmen and foreign "aid" workers. By comparison the Savile scandal can, arguably, be put down to mere avoidance of the truth.

However if it has proven impossible for even the BBC, with all its resources and previous prestige, to find 28 real scientists anywhere willing to sign up to the catastrophic warming scare then it is difficult, despite the hundreds of billions spent on it, to take it seriously.

Neil Craig  (about 50)

24th November Sir,


It will be interesting to see what Lord Hall, as new chairman of the BBC does. The BBC have been discredited not only by their looking the other way for decades at what Savile was doing under their roof but by positive dishonesty.


If he is to have any credibility his first act should be to apologise for the BBC defending their outrageous bias, propagandising and censoring of dissent about the catastrophic global warming we are alleged to be experiencing by now, dishonestly.


For years their defence of this was that they had organised a seminar of 26 "leading scientists" to provide the "best scientific evidence" about warming. They did indeed say that this was a subject on which these scientists were unanimous thus allowing the BBC to claim their legal charter requirement of "balance" did not apply.


Somewhat suspiciously the BBC, while maintaining this claim even to courts, spent vast amounts of our money to prevent them having to obey freedom of information requests to know who those leading scientists were. Nearly 2 weeks ago an independent blogger found the list and "28gate" as it is known went viral online because only 2 of the 28 were scientists (both paid to promote catastrophic warming, one Danish). The rest were a weird mixture of Greenpeace and other "environmental" activists, civil servants, including one from the US, "renewables" salespeople & for some reason, foreign aid administrators.


That the BBC, with all their prestige and money, could not find 28 real scientists, worldwide, to support them says volumes about the catastrophic warming scare.


That thus lie, involving staff from tight across the spectrum of BBC departments, was maintained, indeed staunchly defended in court, for so many years says all anybody needs to know about the integrity of the entire organisation.


If Lord Hall can change this he will have my considerable admiration, but so far he has not even taken the first step to show he wants to. Research has shown, not surprisingly, there is a very strong correlation between government authoritarianism & its ability to hide incompetence and state ownership of broadcasting. If the BBC cannot, very quickly, be made to honestly adhere to its lawful duty of "balance" the alternative is abolition.


Neil Craig  (about 50)

26th November
Brian Monteith's article today drew an apt comparison between the BBC's 28gate scandal about their alleged reason for banning dissent over alleged catastrophic warming and a hypothetical one of the BBC deciding whether to allow supporters of independence on air as a result of the collective opinion of a conference to which they invited only the most died in the wool unionists.



There are 3 points on which I believe the censorship is even worse than that would have been.


The 28gate meeting was alleged to be of "leading scientists" able to give the "best scientific advice". That is raising the bar of alleged authority far higher and it is thus far more dishonest of the BBC to make the claim when only 2 or 3 out of 28 were scientists.


At the time the BBC held the meeting in 2006 they were already long accused of producing hysterical and slanted coverage of warming. In inviting only alarmists to speak they were clearly trying to cover themselves by not merely stacking the deck but replacing it with 28 aces. To feel the need to do that shows the entire organisation have always known their coverage was propaganda.


Thirdly we find that this BBC meeting was not merely a BBC meeting at all. It was arranged jointly with the IBT which is an "environmental" activist organisation. Rather as if they hypothetical meeting on coverage of the independence debate were run by the Tory party (or coverage of EU affairs was arranged by EU bureaucrats, which, for all we know, may be the case).


It is worth pointing out that since the BBC were clearly intending to fix the meeting in advance that they could not find 28 scientists anywhere in the world (one of the 2 unambiguously scientists is Danish) who would say their coverage of alleged catastrophic warming was unbiased does destroys the claim there was evwer a "scientific consesnsus".


Despite the relative lack of press coverage, perhaps because unlike the Savile story there is no sex or celebrities, this scandal is tens of times more serious.


The BBC's charter legally requires that they show "balance" in their coverage. State ownership of broadcasting has been shown worldwide to closely correlate with authoritarianism and government incompetence. The only justification for the continued BBC state ownership of broadcasting was that it, uniquely, maintained this legal duty.


The BBC have vitiated their Charter and it should not be restored.


Neil Craig (Scotsman alone)

27th November Sir,
The BBC's 28gate meeting was alleged to be of "leading scientists" able to give the "best scientific advice" when only 2 or 3 out of 28 were scientists. The rest being paid environmental "activists", renewables salespeople and, to ensure support from the highest authority, somebody from the church of england and another from the US embassy


At the time the BBC held the meeting in 2006 they were already long accused of producing hysterical and slanted coverage of warming. In inviting only alarmists to speak they were clearly trying to cover themselves by not merely stacking the deck but replacing it with 28 aces. To feel the need to do that shows the entire organisation have always known their coverage was propaganda.


This BBC meeting was not merely a BBC meeting at all. It was arranged jointly with the IBT which is an "environmental" activist organisation. Rather as if a hypothetical meeting on coverage of the independence debate were run by the Tory party, or coverage of EU affairs was arranged by EU bureaucrats, which, for all we know, may be the case.


The BBC were clearly intending to fix the meeting in advance. Yet they could not find 28 real scientists anywhere in the world (one of the 2 unambiguously scientists is Danish) who would say their coverage of alleged catastrophic warming was unbiased does destroys the claim there was evwer a "scientific consesnsus". Both scientists actually found were already being paid by organisations committed to warming alarmism.


Despite the relative lack of press coverage, perhaps because unlike the Savile story there is no sex or celebrities, this scandal is tens of times more serious.


The BBC's charter legally requires that they show "balance" in their coverage. State ownership of broadcasting has been shown worldwide to closely correlate with authoritarianism and government incompetence. The only justification for the continued BBC state ownership of broadcasting was that it, uniquely, maintained this legal duty.


The BBC have vitiated their Charter and it should not be restored.


Neil Craig (about 50)

28th November Sir,
On this morning's news I saw the BBC is making a big thing of the fact that a Chinese newspaper fell for a spoof story about the North Korean leader being named "Sexiest Man Alive 2012."

This is the same BBC who for years, defended their lack of "any pretence of impartiality" (Paxman) about alleged catastrophic global warming that they had run a symposium of the 28 "leading scientists" who all assured them there was no doubt on the subject, the list of "scientists" has become public. They 28 were actually a mixture of "environmental activists," renewables salesmen, foreign aid workers (the organisation they got to arrange the meeting is a professional environmental and foreign aid lobbyist) & to ensure the support of higher authority, representatives from the Church of England and the US embassy.


Though this story, known as 28gate, has gone viral on the net, with at least 3 million links the BBC decided that, unlike a silly story in a Chinese paper, this is not worth reporting, though objectively that is a far more deliberate & important scandal than the Savile one.


Incidentally looking this up online I found that a South Korean paper made the same mistake but it isn't included in the BBC report. What a great thing it is to live in a country where the media aren't controlled


Neil Craig (to about 50 papers)
BBC version http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20518929

version that mentions both papers http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/the-onion-kim-jong-un-sexiest-man-alive-south-korea-china

28gate http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/19/the_virus_that_ate_the_bbc/29th Nov   Sir,
The 28gate scandal - that the BBC symposium of the 28 "leading scientists" giving the "best scientific advice" was, in fact no such thing has gone vural online, though little reported, compared to the far less important Savile scandal, by most traditional British media. It was simply a meeting with overwhelmingly non-scientific renewable salesmen, government paid warming hacktivists & international "aid" agents (it was organised by an environmental and international aid lobbyist "charity"). Since people from across the BBC, even the head of comedy, were present there can be no question that the entire BBC organisation knew that the claim it was scientists, while representing the very highest standard of honesty to which the BBC has aspired for the last 6 years, was a complete, total and deliberate lie in no way ethically superior to the "big lie" as used by Joseph Goebbels.

The BBC is a wholly and completely corrupt fascist propaganda organisation willing to tell absolutely any lie whatsoever in the cause of Big Government totalitarianism. This is not, indeed cannot, by definition, be denied by any informed and honest observer

Neil Craig (about 50)

"The UK Space Agency is to invest £1.2bn in a range of space projects.



The aim, said the Government Agency is to "provide the UK with increased leadership in a rapidly growing global sector and building on the British space industry’s £9.1bn contribution to the economy."

No actually it isn't. This is indeed £1.2 bn new money beyond the £300 million a year we already provide to ESA but it isn't going directly to "invest" in the British Space industry

Britain’s investment in European space projects was agreed by the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts as he finalised negotiations for the UK at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Ministerial Council in Naples, this week.

  Yes its going to European bureaucracy.

     OK some of it will not stick in their sticky hands but come back to, under European administration, be spent by favoured British companies.

      Some of that returned investment will even do some good.

Reaction Engines Ltd believes its Sabre engine, which would operate like a jet engine in the atmosphere and a rocket in space, could displace rockets for space access and transform air travel by bringing any destination on Earth to no more than four hours away.

That ambition was given a boost on Wednesday by ESA, which has acted as an independent auditor on the Sabre test program.


"ESA are satisfied that the tests demonstrate the technology required for the Sabre engine development," the agency's head of propulsion engineering Mark Ford told a news conference.


"One of the major obstacles to a re-usable vehicle has been removed," he said. "The gateway is now open to move beyond the jet age."


The space plane, dubbed Skylon, only exists on paper. What the company has right now is a remarkable heat exchanger that is able to cool air sucked into the engine at high speed from 1,000 degrees Celsius to minus 150 degrees in one hundredth of a second.....

The firm has so far received 90 percent of its funding from private sources, mainly rich individuals including chairman Nigel McNair Scott, the former mining industry executive who also chairs property developer Helical Bar.

Chief executive Tim Hayter told Reuters he would welcome government investment in the company, mainly because of the credibility that would add to the project.


But the focus will be on raising the majority of the 250 million pounds it needs now from a mix of institutional investors, high net worth individuals and possibly potential partners in the aerospace industry.

   So 90% private means no more than £25 million from ESA. Not that good a return on our "investment" of £1,200 million.

  The "credibility" bit is, however, of considerable interest. Reaction Engines is Alan Bond eho designed the HOTOL space shuttle project years ago. Nobody doubts it would have worked but there was no government support for it.

   So does credibility mean that businessmen with money to invest are more convinced of the ability to understand this technology and its applications than they themselves are and so need the civil servants to assure them it works?

   Of course not. What it means is that the real investors have to be assured the government aren't going to wreck it. Call a commission of enquiry; enforce a (fracking) ban; spend 5 years refusing planning permission (eg Trump); build a windmill at thje end of the runway (eg trump); bring in a windfall tax when its working; nationalise it etc etc.

    Which shows how far from a free market we are, even when it looks like a market decision. Technical and business decisions take 2nd place, at best, to whether the government is on board. This is also why Virgin has given up using Lossiemouth for their launch site and gone to Sweden - nobody in the Scottish government was willing to say they wanted it and would fight the bureaucracy to stop them screwing it up.

   It, in turn, proves that had our government not been preventing it we could have had a free market space industry by now.

   Look, for example, at Bristol Space's Ascender. For years theyn have been able to build their suborbital Ascender for £50 million. 4% of the extra we are giving Europe's bureaucrats. This could have been raised by private investors if government had given it the nod years ago.

   More proof, if it were needed, of 2 things:

1 - that "the primary purpose of government spending is to pay government employees and their friends - the nominal purpose is secondary, at best" - in this case that they money raised in the name of space is cynucally never intended to be mainly used for that purpose, it is intended for European government employees, but it very much easier if it is called a "space development budget" rather than a "European fat cat development budget".

2 - the only way to fund space development, if that were really the intention, would be X-Prizes. If it is possible to raise 90% of the money commercially and if we accept thjat NASA, ESA etc are wasteful compared to private schemes then the estimate of X-Prizes being 33-100 times more cost effective than normal government contracts seems proven. Actually if we included the fact that British government projects are consistently 8 times more expensive than the engineering costs it would almost certainly be over well 100 times.


   Taking it as 100 times this £1.2 billion would be worth £120 bn ($200 bn)(20 years of NASA's budget) and the £300 million a year we are already providing would be 5 times NASA's annual budget.

   Now where would Britain's already fastest growing industry (10% a year & £10 bn) be by now if it had actually been given that much support - as UKIP, alone of all the parties, wants.

Dear Messrs Cameron & Osborne,
                                                       In discussing yesterday's economic review we heard:

David Cameron said yesterday that it was difficult to kickstart growth: ‘If there was a button you could push in Whitehall which just said “right, growth comes” I would have pushed it long ago.

&

Mr Osborne admitted the economic outlook remained uncertain but insisted there were some positive signs.
He said: ‘Our economy is healing – jobs are being created, manufacturing and exports have grown as a share of our economy, our trade with the emerging world is soaring, inflation is down, much of the necessary deleveraging in our banking system has been achieved, and the world is once again investing in Britain.

‘But the scale of the challenge is so great there are no quick fixes or easy routes to recovery.

   Perhaps you can explain, indeed you will certainly be able to if the claims are true, why reducing energy costs dramatically by ending the various windmill subsidies, ending all government restrictions on development of shale gas and allowing the immediate building of as many nuclear plants as there is a market for, with no more regulatory costs than is fitting for what is, by orders of magnitude, the safest way of producing power, would not be expected to produce growth?

CHEAP ENERGY + ECONOMIC FREEDOM = FAST GROWTH
something which does not seem to be disputed.

Then simply allowing the market to work, an action which since it involves taking no regulatory action, involves less government activity than pushing a button, is certainly an "easy route" would indeed have produced the growth you are allegedly attempting to produce long ago.

    Hopefully you will be able to explain why cheap energy is not such a "fix" within a day or 2, since the information should be well known to you.. If not please regard this as an FoI for the specific evidence you have received proving that it wouldn't work & I will expect it in 20 working days.

 New article up on ThinkScotland - please put comments there

   Holyrood has decided that Hunterston Nuclear Power Station should not, after all, be closed in 2016 as previously intended.

ONE of the UK ’s oldest nuclear power stations has been allowed to operate in Scotland for another seven years.


Hunterston B nuclear power station in Ayrshire, which was due to be decommissioned in 2016, has had its operational licence extended until 2023.

The decision by the UK Government, which will safeguard hundreds of jobs at Hunterston, was criticised by opposition politicans who called on the SNP to “stand up to” Westminster and energy giant EDF.

In 2008 SNP, Liberal Democrat and Green MSPs all voted to oppose new-build nuclear stations.

However the Scottish Government said today that it had also made clear that it was not against extending the operating life of Scotland’s existing nuclear stations “to help maintain security of supply” during the transition to renewables.

  What is interestingly missing from the reporting is that it was not originally intended to be "decommissioned in 2016" but in 2011. But Holyrood, including the Greens, voted in 2007 to extend its life by another 5 years. Now 5 years later they intend to extend it another 7.

   Using only the revised date makes this look less like desperation and is exactly what one might have expected of Orwell's Ministry of Truth (& yes the BBC did misreport it this way too). Also as I started writing this the BBC broadcast another of their interminable, supportive interviews with the Scottish Green party (1-2% in polls) leader on how dreadful nuclear is. The BBC being legally bound to provide "balance" obviously did not interview, supportively or otherwise, anybody supporting nuclear, such as UKIP (4-8% in polls).

   Which reminds me of the 2nd speech I made at a LibDem conference, back when I still thought that party had at least the potential to be liberal and long before I joined UKIP.

     It was about nuclear power being an option that the LibDems should not absolutely reject any opening to, and in particular that keeping the lights on would be difficult if Hunterston was closed down in 2011 as promised. I and Steuart Campbell were the only speakers for nuclear and the party leadership pulled out all the stops to get the motion passed but we still got 1/3rd of delgates to vote for at least not totally excluding sanity. I still think the speech reads well though some time later I was expelled from the party on charges of being a liberal and supporting nuclear power. Steuart was also driven out.

   Clearly despite the official commitment to insanity of all the Holyrood parties, in practice, because it is the only way to maintain "security of supply" our masters are not quite as insane as they pretend to be.

   Nonetheless Hunterston is ageing. It is running at way under its design capacity. It is expected to limp on for 12 years beyond its design life.

   If anybody trusted the politicians actually believed any of the scare stories they tell about nuclear being dangerous or there being a risk of radioactive release they would find it impossible to explain why it is being allowed to continue so far beyond its design life.

   In fact new reactors are cheaper to run, more secure and have far more failsafes. It would be cheaper, more reliable and far more satisfactory to build (or rather for the politicians to allow somebody else to build) new nuclear plants for the same reasons that most people chosse to drive relatively new cars rather than keeping the one they had in the 1960s going.

   Some bits from my 2001 speech:

    "the amendment simply states as a matter of doctrine that nuclear energy must be disposed of. Since this means the loss of 40% of Scotland's electricity within 10 or, with a certain amount of juggling, 15 years I think we are owed a solid justification. Since the main motion hopes for an increase from 11 to 21% of our wind, water & solar capacity this still leaves an overall reduction of 30% on our current capacity. Assuming that over the next 10 years the economy will grow at 2.5% we will have a shortfall of nearly 60% of current capacity...For the Scottish Liberal Democrats to vote for such a policy would be, & would be seen to be, grossly irresponsible. The example of California should be a warning. There the richest part of the richest society in the world is suffering regular power blackouts because for the last 20 years political considerations have prevented the building of generating capacity.

....uranium particles recovered from seawater could keep our present nuclear power industry going for 5 billion years, whereas the sun is expected to explode in five & a half. It must therefore be considered as pretty sustainable...

[Chernobyl] 10/20,000 deaths were predicted. Despite the most minute tracking of variations in cancer rates the total currently stands at 45. By comparison in another Soviet accident, in 1989, 570 people on a train died in a gas pipeline explosion. The total of deaths in the following 15 years is 2, in Japan. Bearing in mind that we are talking about creating nearly 20% of all humanity's energy for that period this is a safety record not even approached by any other industry in human history...

to mine coal we tolerate the deaths of hundreds of thousands annually worldwide from black lung & an unquantified but large number from emphysema when we burn it....
10 years reactor waste radioactivity is reduced a thousandfold. After 500 it is less radioactive than the ore originally mined. This is also why decommissioning reactors is normally unnecessary. Just lock the door & leave it. Recent research on radiation has shown it is not the threat we thought. Classically estimates of the danger of low level radiation have been based on the theory that there was a linear progression from say 5000milliSieverts (a level which will kill 50% of people within a month) to zero with no safe limit in between. Purely because it was a very conservative assumption it was proper to use it when we had no better model. We do now. Following the failure of Chernobyl to satisfy the theoretical predictions statistical examinations have been made of victims of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs, people who worked with radium & most importantly hundreds of thousands of tests of radon in homes. The results have consistently shown that at low levels, below 150 milliSvs radiation has no bad effect....

The human race has an unlimited future if we will only reach out for it."
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   All of that was true 11 years ago - and known by any politician interested in facts. It is true today, though since technology has progressed we could probably produce better, cheaper, more failsafe reactors now built faste, than then.

   At 27,000 pensioner deaths from fuel poverty annually  nearly 300,000 people have been unnecessarily killed since then - every last one of them the deliberately by our political class.

   11 years have been quite deliberately wasted, at least in western countries - the rest of the world economy has doubled since then, China's has nearly quadrupled.

   But we still have that unlimited future any time we get rid of the parasites riding our shoulders.

  I think this that John Redwood put on his blog today is of importance:

The best boost the Chancellor could give to the UK economy would be cheaper energy....


Maybe Mr Osborne is now able and willing to do this. He should say “Drill Davey, drill”.

He has long supported lower energy prices but this is the first time he has said this would be the "best" way to get growth.

I have long been saying Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Fast Growth (OK Pournelle said it first)


and while no politician denies it they don't accept it either they simply refuse to discuss the cost of energy as the cause of the recession. Redwood is not somebody who can be ignored by the party.

I commented:

““Drill Davey, drill”

Thank You John.

That is a magnificent line.


US gas prices are now as low as 1/4 of ours and it is why the US economy is growing (& almost certainly though undeservedly what got Obama back in).


This is an issue on which the Tory party should state unequivocally that they wish to massively cut electricity prices as the best way out of recession.


Either the LudDims will fold or the Tories should be prepared to break with them on it.


It would open up a clear divide between the Conservatives/UKIP and Libs/Labour and whatever the “environmentally aware” beeboids and government funded “charities” say, one on which most of the population would be on the side of growth.

  Alex Salmond's wind farm delusion.
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Global Grain Production at Record High Despite Extreme Climatic Events
Good news for the human race being downplayed. The facts are that (A) there is no evidence of increased "extreme weather" just more reporting of it and (B) one factor, obviously unreported, is that CO2 levels are up and tus plant growth probably 25% up.
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Emirates, Saudis drive for nuclear power
When the medieval Saudio monarchy is more progressive than our own beloved leaders you can see how backward they are.
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The Happy Pontist
This guy discusses bridges worldwide - big, small, new old - so long as there is some techjnical or even artistic interest. Bridges may be the ultimate mixture so far of good large scale engineering and beauty.
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Medium scale engineering and beauty. A motorbike that can drive sideways.

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Booker on "that great Europhile, Roy Jenkins. “There are only two coherent British attitudes to Europe. One is to participate fully, and to endeavour to exercise as much influence and gain as much benefit as possible from the inside. The other is to recognise that Britain’s history, national psychology and political culture may be such that we can never be anything but a foot-dragging and constantly complaining member, and that it would be better, and would certainly produce less friction, to accept this and to move towards an orderly, and if possible, reasonably amicable separation.”
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Lord Monckton on how religious belief may be a necessity to maintain some moral values in what scientists do. I don't agree but it is a thoughtful as well as intellectual article, in the proper sense of that word.   I do not think any modern politician (probably since Churchill) in any of the other could claim the intellectual breadth he has though I personally would put in a good word for John Redwood.

  A couple of points about the economy & hiow to fix it

  Firstly the Scottish economy is considerably underperforming the UK one. Although our political class, all traditional parties, is ignoring this for the navel gazing of the "independence" referendum (which isn't about independence from the Brussels Parliament that makes 75% of our laws) it is bound to be the determining factor in that debate. The Greens alone have said that we should vote for separation in the expectation that we will then spend the next 10 years in recession. The SNP are more sensibly reticent about admiting it but that is obviously also their intention.

The decline in Scotland's economy is similar to that of Spain, according to a global accountancy firm.


A report by Ernst & Young said Scotland's overall output decline of 4% over the past four years put it on par with the troubled Spanish economy.

This will be the third year in five in which the economy shrank.

The report predicted growth of just 0.7% next year - which it said was "well below normal" and lower than the expected UK figure of 1.2%.

Ernst & Young also found that Scotland's economy remained in an "unenviable" position, with exports "uncomfortably" low in the world rankings.

And the country faces "an extended period of convalescence" ahead, it stated.

The firm estimated that 60,000 jobs will have been shed in the Scottish public sector between the start of the 2008 financial crisis and the end of its forecast in 2015.

   While the growth rate in the rest of the world excluding the EU remains at a very creditable 6%. Nobody has ever attempted to seriously argue that Scotland or Britain could not manage to be at least average were it not that our political class is actively preventing growth.

   The reason for this is because of the deliberate policy of the SNP - to destroy our energy and thus industrial capacity (& the capacity of hundreds of thousands of pensioners for survival.)

  Which brings us to the 2nd point. That ECONOMIC FREEDOM + CHEAP ENERGY = FAST GROWTH

  I have tried to get some politician to say why, since they oppose the 2nd and usually the first of these policies. The fact that none of them will strongly suggests they know the answer and it is discreditable.

  The nearest I have got is this, underlined, from John Redwood. John had done a lecture on what we need to get out of recession. 6 good points on economic freedom, but nothing on energy. I commented and he replied:

Neil Craig

Posted November 25, 2012 at 2:09 pm

Obviously I regret that you did not mention energy prices and availability as something consistently showin a 1:1 correlation with growth in economically free economies and a still very close relation in those where government artificially restricts supply and increases prices, such as ours.

   This is, as Spengler explains, a major development in international relations. The American/NATO "New World Order" has become very much the second class power across half the world.

   What is equally, perhaps more, important for those living in Britain and the US is that it has been almost entirely censored from US news reports (minor mention in WSJ & Chicago Tribune) and entirely so by ours.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.


President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States. As 3 billion Asians become prosperous, interest fades in the prospective contribution of 300million Americans - especially when those Americans decline to take risks on new technologies. America's great economic strength, namely its capacity to innovate, exists mainly in memory four years after the 2008 economic crisis.

  Anybody relying on our press and broadcsters to keep informed is, byu definition, ignorant. I suppose it was always like this but nowadays the net gives us the option of being informed.

  You will get more real news in the Asia Times than in a dozen British newspapers.

   If Australia and New Zealand choose a Chinese club in preference to a western one things have clearly changed.
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   And incidentally the Asia Times is one of only 3 papers worldwide, to deal with something I raised (the others being Brian Monteith in the Scotsman & James Delingpole in the online Telegraph).:

Meanwhile, a letter writer by the name of Neil Craig from the United Kingdom to Asia Times Online on March 17th points out:


We see the "environmentalists" are eager to talk about the Japanese catastrophe. Not the earthquake and tsunami which looks to have killed 10,000 people, but the consequent reactor failure which has caused neither death not injury to anybody. This ten thousandfold lack of balance is typical of the way the word "nuclear" is reported as if it were a form of black magic ... The LNT hypothesis has never been anything but an evidence free scare story. Despite its "official" acceptance by government apparatchiks in both the Soviet and "democratic" worlds it has never had any scientific evidence whatsoever behind it.

  LNT & the inaccuracy of nuclear scares is another of those subjects that western newspapers not only simply won't report, but also which they censor even in letters pages which are supposed to rpresent the various views of readers not of owners.

  What is the meaning of the term "free press" when they censor so continuously and blatantly?