A Place to Stand

     This was the result of the Cowdenbeath by election.

Party		Candidate	Votes	%	±%
	Labour	Alex Rowley	11,192	55.78	+9.28
	SNP	Natalie McGarry	5,704	28.43	-13.17
	Conservative	Dave Dempsey	1,893	9.44	+2.44
	UKIP	Denise Baykal	610	3.04	N/A
	Liberal Democrats	Jade Holden	425	2.12	-1.78

     On the one hand we thrashed the "LibDems" and the Greens didn't even dare to stand so that makes us clear 4th, despite never having stood there before. On the other hand the Tories actually gained votes and the overall turnout at 38.41% was abysmal and makes "they're all crap" the real winner.

     "It would have been nice if UKIP had beaten the Tories too but the party recently went through a reorganisation here and weren't at our best. Also the fact that the BBC "balanced - our Charter legally requires it" deliberately excluded UKIP from debate and included the LDs must have cost a few % points.

Expect a public apology from the BBC, invitations on a few dozen programmes and an assurance that they will not censor against UKIP & in favour of the LDs as soon as the BBC obey the law and stop being a wholly corrupt state propaganda instrument. But don't expect that any time soon.

Pity the Greens, who get massive, entirely supportive, coverage from the state broadcaster were scared to stand since we have long outpolled them 3:1."

       On the Newsnight debate for the previous by election they included 5 candidates though, as Peter Adams pointed out on air, the beeboid managed to avoid inviting him to answer as he did the others. This time they just kept it to 4 which clearly was "unbalanced".

      I suspect this does show that there are an awful lot of votes out there but we have to offer some real policy meat, directed specifically at Scotland. Bearing in mind how totally devoid of ideas Scottish politicians are I think that is not a difficult problem. Apart from having the world's most destructive "Climate Change Act", an idea unanimously endorsed by all 5 old parties and deliberately intended to push up prices and fuel poverty, new ideas are scarce among the old parties. - the only one I can think of off hand was the SNP promise to cut corporation tax to Irish levels at the election before last, which they ignored after winning and have essentially dropped.

     However I do think the BBC and others, who at least pretend to impartiality, will now take a little care about showing their bias. It is now impossible to invite either the LDs or Greens but not UKIP without displaying total bias. Cynically I suspect this means the LDs will be less often on air (as has previously happened to the Greens, rather than actually allowing Britain's 3rd party to speak. Newsnight's next "debate" may be limited to 3 players. And next tear to 2 as we pass the Conservatives.
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  On what some may think the major issue the SNP 13% fall us obviously disastrous. Beyond that, their tactics for the referendum have been to focus on the poorest on a "what have you got to lose" desperation strategy. If there is that sort of swing against them in traditional Labour country that suggests it isn't working.

    This is a graph of world temperatures:



    I find this of interest in relation to the alleged catastrophic warming scare.

   Basically if the scare were true we could all, on average, expect to move to the next warmer band - 5 C warmer.

   If James Hansen's famous prediction in 1988 - 3-9 Fahrenheit warmer and a 1-4 ft sea level rise by 2025/50 - had in any way been true we would surely have noticed 26 years later (with 11-36 years to go), indeed be at least half way there.

   As a Scot I would now expect us to have the sort of climate previously seen on the border between
the yellow & brown zones - western France, Benidorm in Spain, Monte Carlo, central Greece.

   Can't say I have noticed it.

   To be fair I can see that a 5 C rise - from the massive Brown zone to the very small red spots in New Guinea, south Sahara & Andes would make a major change, unless, of course, Hansen's prediction that the increase would be greater at the poles and less near the equator, were true.

    But obviously reality shows none of it is.


























 

   Some time ago I published this graph as part of an article and series of graphs from Mike Haseler.

   However it is so beautiful that it deserves a post devoted to it alone,

   When he gave his talk he explained how the initial figures, which had included only officially produced figures had come to a less satisfactory result - then he added cooking fires across the world and it all fitted into place. That sort of elegance emerging from chaos does tend to mean something profound (E=MC^2 being an example).

     You just don't get data correlations as close as this if you are measuring different things. Thus energy use and wealth simply are the same things.

    This is a world figure - the correlation is less close nationally/ Partly because it is colder in Canada than Equador. partly because the local energy availability (usually oil or hydro power both of which Canada have) varies. However this also shows that where one country prevents people using energy the effect is to move the industry elsewhere in the world.

    I also find the slight variations from perfection of the curve fascinating:

1 - From about 1890-1930 energy use slightly leads growth. That era up till WW1 is indeed often held up as the era when most technological change in people's lives occurred. Also fascinating that WW1, the depression and WW2, all of which are treated as massive changes, usually for the worst, simply do not register on either energy or wealth.

2 - Then just before 1950 we get a significant increase in the rate of growth of both. It isn't an immediate post war boom - a few years late for that. Nor the production of commercial nuclear power - to early for that. Conceivably it is the cold war turning hot in Korea leading the US to encourage the reindustrialisation of Japan but that seems to minor. Whatever it is in economic terms this is the most important literal economic turning point of the 20thC.

3 - Which in turn shows how the graph is close to but not exactly a classic S curve:


   If there had not been the 1950 turn it would be a perfect fit for an S curve which would suggest we still have quite a way to go before hitting the top - anywhere between another 30 years and forever before we hit top. And though it isn't a perfect S curve it is as close as real economics is going to produce, so that conclusion is still very reasonable.

4 - Around 1962 we get another minor acceleration. Possibly this is nuclear coming on line. possibly not.

5 - From 1962 to 1980 we also see energy use slightly leading wealth growth. I'd be fairly confident in putting that down to nuclear (the anti-nuclear movement became effective about 1970 but because of the lead time in building plants this only means that plants would only stop coming online about 1980.

    Note that when it comes to cause and effect, causes must always lead effect. Thus the growth in energy in the 1890-1930 & 1962-80 period can only be a cause not an effect of wealth increase.

6 - After the mid 1980s it switches over. Wealth growth continues at the same rate as from 1962 (possibly even marginally faster between 1982-4) whereas growth in world energy use starts to lag it significantly. That does look entirely like the effect of the Luddite movement. It has certainly had an enormous effect across the western world, where most of the Luddism is, and if it were to start affecting China etc., could then have a serious effect on the wealth of the entire human race.
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    My feeling is that, unless we embrace Luddism, the start of topping of the S curve for world energy use/gdp will be at least as far ahead as 1950 was behind. Moreover by then there will be 2 graphs - World GDP/Energy and Human GDP/Energy. By 2078 a lot, perhaps most human energy use will be in the off planet economy, and that it will be increasing at an even faster rate, around twice as fast, as terrestrial energy use has increased for since 1950.

   Up till we start using anti-matter to power interstellar craft - which will need at least an order of magnitude more energy again. 

"Dems want Networks to Manipulate Climate Change Coverage Like the BBC" http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/011514-686516-bbc-covers-up-secret-green-propaganda-training.htm?p=full

Isn't that nice. US politicians acknowledging Britain's media is a corrupt fascist propaganda instrument and complaining their's are aren't.
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Chinese scientists report they've cultivated a high-yield, salt-resistant rice variety that boosts output to almost 2 1/2 tons per acre....

Researchers inserted a salt-resistant gene from a wild plant into a normal rice variety six years ago, and after years of screening obtained the 18 salt-resistant varieties. ....More than one-quarter of the world's land is saline-alkali soil and another 20 percent of farmland is at risk of salination, Wang Cailin, chief scientist of the rice-breeding program, said. More beneficial to humanity than all the political "achievements" of western politicians and eco-fascists put together.
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Theoretically this scientific news from China is even more beneficial to the progress of the  human race but I find it chilling.

BGI (used to be Beijing Genomics Institute) expect that within a decade their research into intelligence genes will be used to screen embryos during in vitro fertilization, boosting the IQ of unborn children by up to 20 points. Based on studies of twins, siblings, and adoption, contemporary estimates put the heritability of IQ at 50 to 80 percent, and recent studies that measure the genetic similarity of unrelated people seem to have pushed the estimate to the high end of that range.
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Party Before Country is an interesting attempt to arrange vote swapping between constituencies where the Conservatives are ahead and those where UKIP is. I will be interested to see how this develops. It would certainly be incompatible with any claim that Britain is a democracy if Labour got a majority on 30% of the vote. There is also the possibility that if they fell slightly short of a majority but made it up with the LibDems they could get a majority on under 40% for the 2 parties.

Theoretically the LDs, being committed to proportional representation and having said at the last election that they would feel constitutionally bound to seek a coalition with the largest first, could never do this. In practice....
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Everybody should read Booker's article about how the recent floods are not only not blameable on "climate change" but are directly caused by our eco-fascist politicians and their refusal to maintain dredging of watercourses.
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Dan Hannan blogs on how the world is getting better - correctly. I commented:

  This indicates the extent gas prices in the US have been reduced by shale. From basically being in tandem with oil prices they have now dropped to 1/6th


   And here is a potential new breakthrough that can allow inexpensive transmutation of gas into oil:

The white pellets are a catalyst developed by the Silicon Valley startup Siluria, which has raised $63.5 million in venture capital. If the catalysts work as well in a large, commercial scale plant as they do in tests, Siluria says, the company could produce gasoline from natural gas at about half the cost of making it from crude oil—at least at today’s cheap natural-gas prices.

     I am not 100% sure this process will turn out to be the one but I am 100% sure somebody is going to do it.
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     Meanwhile our own political classes are trying to talk down shale:

Finally George Osborne seems unable to resist repeating one of the most pervasive myths of shale gas extraction in the UK: that it will deliver significantly cheaper energy bills, as in the USA.

Differences in geology, extraction rights and the market realities (including the fact that the UK is plugged into a European market many times larger than itself, whereas the US is currently unable to export shale) mean experts have repeatedly warned that this is unlikely to be the case.

They include the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, David MacKay, who said that “the effect of UK shale gas production on gas prices is likely to be small.”

      The claim that something new cannot be done is obviously useful to the Luddites and is usually wrong. The claim that something which has been done for years, as in extraction of shale gas in the US, cannot be done is clearly, always, a lie. Which does not stop our rulers making it.

     However it is often the case that when you look at what the ecofascists are claiming there is a beneficial corollary which they absolutely refuse to mention but which must be the case if their initial claim is close to true.  Just as attractive things usually have secondary effects which may be damaging, Luddite scares are equally likely to have beneficial secondary effects (eg CO2 increasing crop growth). Thus I commented:

The automatic corollary of the claim that shale won’t reduce gas prices because the EU market is insatiable is that there will be an insatiable market for our gas at current prices, which means we will have an incredibly favourable trade gap.

If we just allow the effort to be made.

Inexplicably none of those pushing the “it won’t reduce prices” argument, including our state broadcaster, ever mention the “the high prices mean vast amounts of money” corollary.

     On the other hand a bit of bad news. Poland, which was pushing to be a major player in the shale gas stakes, is failing. Possibly partly because the geological structure is not as favourable as thought (though the gas still seems to be there so I doubt the extent of that), but primarily because the branch of government pushing this does not know or is unable to influence the regulatory morass the other hand of government is pushing the industry into.

     And talking of parasites - we have the entire EU:

The gap in energy costs between Europe and its leading trading partners is widening, according to an official paper to be released by Brussels that shows industrial electricity prices in the region are more than double those in the US and 20 per cent higher than China’s.

Industrial gas prices are three to four times higher in the EU than comparable US and Russian prices, and 12 per cent higher than in China, says the European Commission paper, based on the most comprehensive official analysis of EU energy prices and costs to date.

   This is a letter I sent out a few days ago comparing and contrasting Lord Rennard's continued membership of the Pseudo-Liberals with my being expelled from the same party some years ago, charged with being a traditional liberal.

   It went out to the UK press en masse and does not appear to have been published. Perhaps this is because Lord Rennard's hijinks simply isn't newsworthy by the intellectual and rarefied standards our approved media apply. That or it isn't as well written as even the silliest letters they publish.

   The only alternative would be deliberate censorship by our totalitarian media of anything that promotes UKIP or does down the Pseudo-Libs and who could possibly believe that?

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      Dan Hannan highlights this report on the influence of Britain in the world. 


    It relates our global reach to Universities, major cities, military and intelligence reach etc.

    OK the elephant in the room of national power is gdp, as I have always said, and our poor growth rate (our economy was recently passed by Brazil's) is abysmal.

    But high measures by other standards do strongly suggest we are a world leader in many fields and, if we get the economy right, have the potential to be so widely.

    That wouldn't matter if we were doing well just by this measurement (which looks arguably self selecting to me - for example the historic best universities may be cruising on their record while Asian ones are working on current achievement).

    However I have previously noted how, by measurement of scientific citations Britain is not only 2nd overall worldwide but doing twice as well per capita as the USA and ahead of all but a small number of very small countries.

    Or if you go to the Worldmapper site, where where the size of countries is distorted to make them match not geography but other qualities the UK is almost always far larger than its geographical size. It is also consistently smaller than the USA, which means we are competing in the same fields, but better than 1/5th the size of the USA on almost everything though that is our population ratio.

   Except on gdp where we are close to the 5:1 ratio and electricity production where the US outpowers us by 11.27:1.

   The evidence that gdp is very closely related to energy & particularly energy use seems not seriously disputed (though it is studiously ignored by our political class). If we had the same electricity use to production ratio as they do (ie building about 50 x 1 GW nuclear power stations costing inder £800 bn each) we could expect gdp to rise 2.25 times.

   I have previously said that government regulatory parasitism quadruples the cost of housing and child care, increases electricity costs at least 90% etc etc and thereby robs us at least another 100% of the gdp we actually have & perhaps 300%.

   I have previously put forward my 24 point plan out of recession which would, if the combined decision of experts not to dispute it would work, is any clue, certainly get us into a growth rate unmatched by any other country.

CONCLUSION

   Britain is a world leader in so many scientific and cultural fields that it is our relative economic failure that is the outlier not the others. That means it should be relatively easy to fix.

   If we aimed to maximise gdp growth we could expect to move to the sort of gdp ratio that we have for other cultural factors. Indeed if we are being held back by our poor economy, as one would expect, the cultural benchmark would move up as our economy grows.

   By the listing in the graph we are doing 2.43 times better than the USA per capita, though we only have 1/5th the population. By gdp to energy use we are producing  2.25 times as much. By my estimate of the cost of state parasitism we could be 2-4 times better off. By scientific citations we are 1.76 times better than the USA per capita.

   And the USA provides the benchmark to which, on most measures, nobody else (except maybe Singapore & Hong Kong) comes close to matching across the board.

   Far from Britain being a "2nd class" power or "a small offshore island" as our political class so often say as an excuse for their own failure -

   BRITAIN CAN BE THE WORLD'S LEADING NATION, AT LEAST PER CAPITA & BY MANY MEASURES IN ABSOLUTE TERMS, ANY TIME OUR POLITICAL CLASS STOP PREVENTING IT.

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   Personally, being an ambitious sort I think if we also put a national effort into an X-Prize Foundation across the fields of science, space development, Orion (or more likely more modern nuclear spaceships), floating equatorial islands, mass manufacturing of nuclear plants there is virtually no field in which we could not lead the world into a wealth, educated and peaceful future. But am willing to start small with is just increasing gdp 2.4 times.