"to deal with the problem of climate change, energy bills are likely to rise"
                        Ed Miliband 2009, speaking as energy minister and creator of the Climate change Act

"the next Labour government will freeze gas and electricity prices until the start of 2017. Your bills will not rise. It will benefit millions of families and millions of businesses"
                                                        Ed Miliband's latest election promise

    Clearly the latter is a cynical lying promise. He has no slightest intention of reducing or eve slowing the rise in electricity prices to the promised £3,000 per family by 2030.

    Indeed, if he knows anything at all about economics (he studied PPE at Oxford so he must know something about the "E") he knows that the only effect of this freeze, which likely means generators being ordered to supply at below cost) can be to persuade investors that British energy generation is not a sensible investment.

     (He has made an even more damaging threat to seize housing developer's land without compensation so this seems a general threat.)

    He therefore provably knows that this threat will increase the energy catastrophe and cause the, quite deliberate, killing of 10s of thousands of pensioners.

    Since this is unarguably true it follows that every honest Labour MP & MSP has publicly admitted it. But only those honest ones who are not, like their leader, cynically corrupt murderous liars.

 Lower line is global temperature, upper is CO2. from 1950 to 2020. The lack of correlation is obvious.

    I was at professor Salby's lecture yesterday. It is dealt with by Mike Haseler on the SCEF blog and I cannot improve on that.

But having seen the case put forward by Prof Salby I cannot reasonably say “I assume the rise was man-made”. But much worse! Without properly assessing the evidence I cannot properly say he is right – that the CO2 rise does not appear man-made.

..... I could well do without another finding another bit of climate “science” which is rubbish. Another aspect of the global warming argument that is junk. Another aspect I will have to research. Another hold-the-nose and try not to breath in stench filled crawl through the hateful underbelly of global warming non-science trying to find any kind of evidence against what Prof Murry Salby said.

    This is from comments placed by me and Wm Connolloy, the guy paid by the US government to, apparently full time, rewrite wikipedia articles to exclude any hint of scepticism:

"(the lecture was about) the rate of CO2 emission correlates almost perfectly with temperature and barely in any way with human production. This means it is a natural phenomenon not a man made one.

Those who approach a scientific question by saying in advance they “know” the answer or that discussion is “impossible” with anybody who doubts they are right are, by definition, not scientists. (things he an another said)

The lecture was videoed and I assume will be online in due course.

Connolly said 

   Is media coverage of UKIP being deliberately censored? This is from a (well actually the) recent Scotsman article about the party which says the opposite. The Scotsman being nominally the free marketist newspaper in Scotland, should represent the zenith of media toleration of UKIP.

It may be that Ukip’s rise – fuelled in large part by abundant dollops of free publicity – proves temporary. The party’s ability to command media attention out of all proportion to its electoral success cannot last indefinitely. Familiarity may yet breed indifference. Moreover, a good deal of the attention Ukip receives is due to the fact it is a party with plenty of crackpot policies that crackpots find appealing. It often seems to be an organisation founded to appeal to the kinds of people who frequent online comment threads. A party of cranks, malcontents and angry old men, then. This helps win media attention but it comes at a price.

    So to test this disproportionate coverage I sent in this letter:

     The PR claim by the CBI that membership of the EU will cost us £3,000 a year per family does not seem to have been explained. It must rely on the ludicrous claim put forward by a number of politician's, most enthusiastically Clegg, that if we quite the EU will cut off all trade with us (despite the rest of the EU having a positive trade balance with us, and the trade they carry on with the rest of the world & that it would break GATT rules).

     Why have the CBI which is supposed to be the representative of big business, so eager to support the political class against the interests of business.

      I did answer on a couple of blogs that it is a sign that in a society where government is very powerful, as in Britain where government spends nearly half of national income and regulates the equivalent of 100% of what we have out of existence, any big business needs the friendship of the state and therefore has to be willing to say what they want.

      Few on either side of politics realise (or at least acknowledge) how the power lies with the state not big business (which in any case is run by those who march to the tune of money not power).

     On the other had Dan Hannan has come up with another answer which I had not been cynical enough to believe.

      The CBI is a government sock puppet/fakecharity.

I once attended a regional CBI conference in my constituency. I'm pretty certain that the businesses – in the sense of organisations that had to make profits – were outnumbered by the charities, local government agencies and NGOs. There was even, I remember, a local Scout group. Yet this is the organisation which is represented by the BBC as the voice of British industry

If the majority of members are government funded agencies, charities and government owned "Non-Governmental Organisations" and paying dues then by definition it is government funded.

       The Royal Society have become a sock puppet, the BBC always really were. 9 out of the 10 biggest "environmental" charities are. And on and on and on.

       But to find that the CBI have succumbed to the "long march of the institutions through the left"*

       It looks like the default assumption must now be that any organisation pushing the state line is a sock puppet u7ntil proven otherwise.


* The phrase is normally given in reverse "left" are seizing the institutions but it is the trend of government empire building which led to them funding "leftist" "charities" to "raise awareness" of the need for more government that5 is the driving force and in the process has changed the "old left" out of all recognition - old lefists were pro-industry, anti-luddism, anti-EU, pro-progress, anti-immigration at least when used to undercut workers wages, pro-coal power & thus anti-windmills (or at least would have been had anybody been stipid enough to propose them) and not at all politically correct.

 I'm sure Indians will be, rightly, proud today. As the Register says:

"India's delayed Mars mission is on the countdown for launch, and barring further delays or mishaps, will begin its trip on Tuesday, November 5, from a southern coastal island near Chennai.
The Mangalyaan (Mars Orbiter Mission probe) was announced in August 2012, with a combined objective to prove that India has the technological ability to get to Mars, and to collect data for future missions.
The Mars probe would be, at least, a remarkable achievement of economy: at 450 crore Rupees, or about US$74 million, (£45m) the price is more like that of a new university campus than a Mars mission.

However, unlike current US efforts, India isn't attempting to land on the Red Planet, but to reach orbit. The orbiter will be riding a PLSV C25 launch vehicle, due to lift off at 2.38 pm on November 5 (local time), with a 40 minute flight that will get it to Earth orbit.

The mission will spend between 20 and 25 days in Earth orbit before being pointed at Mars to spend nine months in travel, arriving in late September 2014"

    Price comparable to the original estimate I made for a Scottish asteroid landing X-Prize.

    The depressing thing is that the British obedient media seem to have made this largely a story about usgi8ving foreign aid to India.

    This is a spiteful and mean attitude. India is still a country of enormous poverty. Our "aid" comes to about 22p per head and will stop in 2015 anyway. I'm not convinced that "aid" does or is even meant to aid - sometimes it is to secure deals; sometimes it is to ensure our favoured dictators stay friendly. If helping the 3rd world were the real intent we would quit the EU, allowing us to buy their food at a lower price than within the EU but a higher price than they get for it. That would do far more to develop their economies. And if we were giving aid to do good then India, where there is a very good growth rate and less corruption than elsewhere, is where we would give it.

   The subtext to our media's coverage is "how dare these brown people we brought civilisation to and patronised endlessly now engage in a technological venture we haven't" and that is a shameful attitude.

    The shame is that we could be doing it, yet we spend virtually nothing on space (granted we spend £330m on ESA but that is not going on space - it is going on bureaucracy and ensuring that a proportionate number of favoured companies in each country get a bit of the pork barrel).

     We could, if we put that money into space development in the way everybody knows would be most effective, ie an X-Prize Foundation easily outpace India and perhaps even the USA. But our ruling class and obedient media would rather engage in meanspirited racism.
 

   I have previously referred to various technological ideas of Joseph Friedlander. This is about him and a link to various articles which I thoroughly recommend

----------------------

Joseph Friedlander

Joseph Friedlander is a thinker in the pattern of Herman Kahn or David South, who takes a theoretical construct and reduces it to detailed scenarios for action, with an emphasis on the immediately achievable and the practical that can be settled for in the very near term as a foundation for greater achievements later on.

Joseph has a degree in business, certificates in computer aided design, tool and die work, information science, and other technical areas and wide background familiarity with astrophysics and chemistry.

His reading is wide-ranging (some would say encyclopedic). Among his favorite authors are those who concentrate on the links between industry, government and military, society and prosperity, in particular Jane Jacobs, Seymour Melman, Herman Kahn, and Kevin A. Carson.

Joseph is an inventor and consultant who writes and speaks often on space industrialization and settlement as well as future industrial possibilities on Earth and the ways these things could change our lives. He is a member of the World Economics Association.

He authored In Praise of Large Payloads for Space, Joseph Friedlander’s Thoughts Inspired By Alexander Bolonkin’s Writings On How To Catalyze Innovation And Technical Progress, Hyperwealth and Alternative Futures, Tyler Cowen’s “Great Stagnation” — Joseph Friedlander Perspective and Thoughts on Related Subjects, What was the best way to use the Saturn V to reach the Moon — in retrospect?, A summary of Dr. Bruce Cordell’s 21stCenturyWaves.com Maslow Window Model, and The Friedlander Cold Crown — A Cold Trap For The Lunar Poles — Solid Oxygen For Lunar Capture And Export.

Read his LinkedIn profile.

       Was there a real Jesus? 

       I do not doubt that there was a real Moses because his name is Egyptian and who would invent a national founder of a different nationality? The same applies to the name Heracles who, in all the stories, was tormented by Hera. Jesus was so common a name if you threw a rock in any Judean street you were likely to hit a Jesus or Mary.

        The Dead Sea Scrolls also refer to a Messiah who had lived a few generations back, despite them being contemporary with or predating the biblical Jesus.

        On the other hand the Beatitudes rhyme in Aramaic, but not in the Greek it was written in, which means they were said by an Aramaic speaking teacher.

         Wikipedia's article on the Historicity of Jesus  says almost all the biblical scholars agree he did, but then they have an incentive to don't they.

        But they have another Christ Myth article, which lists opponents and their views and in fact most of them are willing to accept there was a guy it is just that most of the stories are accretions, which I am comfortable with.

        However I ran across this list on Listverse, of 8 reasons he existed.



2 Modern Religion


        Of them I find #8 convincing. Paul's Epistles are accepted as historical letters and Paul refers not just to meeting and not getting on with St James but of him being Jesus' brother. Since James was the leader of a rival faction (more committed to having a primarily Jewish cult) there is no way he would have acknowledged the link if he could disputed it. 

        One writer who started doubting his reality came round to accepting Jesus as the author of what is called the Q document - something which is a common source of the 4 gospels. The common source seems difficult to doubt but the fact that no trace of such a document exists has always been  a problem.

        However if  it was not a written record but an oral one of the actual words of Jesus then there is no problem. Remember this is an era before mass literacy when Homer was passed on orally for most of a millennium.

       These are the bits of the bible generally attributed to the Q document:

The Beatitudes Love your enemies Golden Rule[42][43] Judge not, lest ye be judged The Test of a Good Person The Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders The Parable of the Lost Sheep

The Parable of the Wedding Feast The Parable of the Talents The Parable of the Leaven The Parable of the blind leading the blind The Lord's Prayer Expounding of the Law The Birds of Heaven and The Lilies in the Field