A Place to Stand

Gingrich Speech, X-Prizes and Britain's Lack ogf Ambition

2012-01-27T12:36:00.000Z

Last night C4 News reported on Newt' Gingrich's speech in Florida calling for a serious space programme, run on commercial lines, with the aim of getting to Mars in his second term and without increasing the space budget, indeed taking 10% of the budget of the useless NASA bureaucracy and putting it into X-Prizes.

   My only problem with that is that, since X-prizes work 33 to 100 times better than conventional funding he should make that 80-90%.

   C4's problem was not that. Indeed in a report which consisted largely of snide remarks about how many other Presidents had promised to do something (the massiver difference being that they all promised it would be done after they had retired) they entirely forgot/censored the bit about X-prizes.

   I have yet to see a serious argument against X-prizes form anybody but if anybody has one please let me know. The Washington Post's argument comes from a resident "expert" who says prizes in the $2 billion range don't work, even though smaller ones do. Since there have never been any prizes of that level this is a perfect demonstration of what is required tom be a media "expert" - being willing to say whatever the media want combined with never needing "no steenking facts".

   This is a comment I made on Mark Wadsworth.

If your ambition is limited to air and a limited amount of food, space industrialisation would be pointless.
If infinite amounts of electric power with minimal to zero running costs were desirable you would want solar power satellites. If communication were of interest you would like communications satellites - the amount of information &/or size of the receiver at our end varies inversely with the size of the satellite. If you fancied unlimited supplies of all those "peak" metals we are about to run out of you would want asteroid mining. If you thought more new materials than have ever been constructed before, put together under zero G might produce some with useful properties you would want space industrialisation. If you wanted the human race to ever aspire to its potential you would certainly want this.
Of course that excludes virtually everybody in British politics - hence our problems.
The only thing wrong with this is that Newt is only promising to put 10% of NASA's budget into X-Prizes.

Next Big Future has an admirable article on the subject with these proposals for future X-Prizes

Prizes that follow up

Have a $60 million prize for a robotic lunar base by 2017.

$300 million prize for more elaborate robotic lunar base by 2018.

$200 million prize for robotic and/or teleoperated base in earth orbit by 2015.

$500 million prize for manned inflatable base at earth orbit by 2016.

$1 billion prize for manned inflatable base at a lagrange point by 2018.

$2 billion prize for manned base on the moon by 2019 (not permanent but weeks at a time.)

$10 billion prize for the permanent manned base by 2020.

Have a lot more sub-prizes for other goals.

That comes to $14 billion which is the budget we give to NERC (a quango you have never heard of - one of a number existing to raise awareness/lie about global warming) over 16 years. So let anybody who says we can't afford it explain that.

An End to Death & Taxes - Well OK Just Taxes

2012-01-26T14:11:00.000Z

Lets make some numbers dance.

Total M4 money supply in Britain £2,100 billion
British GDP £1,600 billion
Ratio 1.31
Maximum theoretical sustainable growth rate 23.8%. OK I will accept that this is theoretical but the theory is unquestioned. In the actual world the highest growth rates, excluding countries coming out of wars or discovering vast quantities of oil are, for sovereign state, Singapore last year at 14.4% and for economic areas, Guandong province in China which has been doing 20% for years so not that far short of theory.
Amount raised by British taxes 36.9% of GDP (app £600 bn)

Amount by which money should be raised if we had 23.8% growth = £1.600bn X 23.8 X 1.31 = £500 million.

Amount in the second year (23.8% higher) £620.

And so on.By the 3rd year we would be getting in £760 bn - roughly current government spending (so no deficit). Obviously also with the GDP base growing there would be absolutely no problem borrowing.

Not saying that we shouldn't be cutting the cost of government - we definitely should if only because big government parasitism is what is preventing growth. Nor that we should rely on that sort of growth rate - nobody sensible relies on best possible outcomes all the time.

But I am saying that deficits, inflation, national bankruptcy etc are not the real issues. All of those are merely the symptoms of the real problem which is that growth is being deliberately prevented by Luddite government parasitism. Solve that, the solution is easy and obvious, and everything else is easy.

24 point out of recession in days plan

Gingrich - The President Western Civilisation Needs

2012-01-25T12:08:00.001Z

Gingrich not only won, but with a convincing majority. Gingrich took 40% of the vote, Romney 28%, Rick Santorum 17% and Ron Paul 13%.

That may not absolutely clinch it but when Ron Paul doesn't win, as Ron Paul has confidently predicted he won't (he is in it more to stir debate on principles than to win, which is an honourable position)(I think Ron Paul would make a great supreme Court judge but a poor chief executive) it would be reasonable to expect at least 99% of his supporters to prefer Gingrich to Romney.

Romney has simply failed to generate any enthusiasm and the only reason for supporting him is that he is so "moderate" that he won't frighten anybody away. There may be a little to that but elections are won by generating at least some support. On this basis the fact that Gingrich has been the debate winner inn most of the TV dabates is important. He may have said

“It is not that I am a great debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest-held values of the American people.”

    but that is not bad debating. When the campaign comes down to ??? V Obama on TV debates and Obama has no teleprompter, if ??? is Gingrich he will win.

   Another point is that Romney has had very gentle media coverage whereas Gingrich has faced literlally hundreds of "ethics" complaints which were so obviously and wholly false that they are all one needs to know about the corruption that not merely exists but is endemic in the party that made them.

   And Gingrich actually wants to do something not merely to get his feet under the table as Obama so obviously did. When Romney said in one of the debates that he disagreed with Gingrich's belief that humanity should be mining the Moon, Gingrich not only didn't downplay it but gave it as a reason to support him. Gingrich understands that X-Prizes can get space industrialisation, and other forms of technological progress, going. He knows that Free Enterprise + Cheap Energy = Growth. Pournelle may not have yet endorsed him but Gingrich has endorsed Pournelle.

    Can one imagine Britain having a prominent leader with as much competence and gumption?

Government Cost Benefit Analysis of Cost of EU Membership - But Not By Our Government

2012-01-17T12:11:00.001Z

For many years various British governments, while asserting that EU membership is economically good for us, have refused to authorise a proper cost benefit analysis of it. Perhaps it is cynical to suggest they know the answer and that is why they won't ask the question.

For some time I have pointed out that the Scottish government could do one for Scotland but obviously they share Westminster's opinion about the benefits of not knowing.

However it turns out that Switzerland did do that analysis & this is the result:

Annual Cost to Switzerland of alternative relationships with EU:

2007-2013

Swiss francs millions Index

Continue Bilateral Agreements 557 million - £1.4bn

Join EEA 737 millon - £1.9 bn

Join EU (net contribution) 3400 million - £8.7 bn

Join EU (gross contribution) 4940 million - £12.7 bn

Converting from Swiss francs to £s (0.69 per £) and our GDP compared to theirs ($2,480bn to $666bn) the figure for Britain if all other things were equal would be 2.57 times higher in £s as shown in Block.

This is actually rather lower than the estimates of British contributions to the EU - usually about £15 bn financial costs. However Switzerland is entirely surrounded by EU countries and thus all its imports and exports, except air cargo, must pass through the EU whereas Britain is entirely surrounded by open sea and does not have that misfortune.

Of course this takes no account of the 5.5% of GNP (or probably much more now if only because of the extension of "climate change" Luddism) the EU "Enterprise" Commissioner said in 2007 was destroyed by economically destructive regulations. 5.5% is about £86 billion annually

Shale Gas Proves Coalition Claims To Want To End RecessionMerely The Highest Standard Of Honesty To Which These Thieving, Murdering Fascist Parasites Ever Aspire.

2012-01-16T13:34:00.000Z

The US economy is back into growth, albeit unspectacular growth, because shale gas is allowing their energy prices to fall.

The era of cheap fossil fuels is over, we are told. But if new unconventional gas sources do to prices here what they have done in the US, that assumption is false. The natural gas price has halved in five years on the US market Nymex, to $3.14/mmBTU, down from a spike of $14 in 2007.

In a new report this week PwC predicts US manufacturing will undergo a renaissance thanks to cheap energy, with shale gas saving industry $11.6bn in lower, not higher bills. By remaining wary of climate change mitigation policies, the US economy seems to have dodged a bullet.

As is the rest of the world.

But in Britain we have already had one freeze in shale gas development caused by ecofascist claims to be afraid of "earthquakes" (actually earth tremors at least 500 times less powerful than quakes). A wholly false scare story.

Drilling for shale gas in the U.K. won’t cause dangerous earthquakes and poses little risk to the environment given appropriate safeguards, scientists said....

“Most geologists think this is a pretty safe activity,” Mike Stephenson, head of energy science at the British Geological Survey, said at a briefing in London yesterday. “We think the risk is pretty low and we have the scientific tools to tell if there is a problem.”....

More Than Iraq

The U.K. could have more shale gas the previously thought, Stephenson said. The British Geological Survey is reviewing its estimates for U.K. onshore shale gas resources. The survey originally estimated that there is about 150 billion cubic meters....

Cuadrilla Resources Ltd. says it’s found more natural gas trapped in the shale rock around Blackpool in northwest England than Iraq has in its entire reserves.

The rock drilled by Cuadrilla, the company that caused last year’s earthquakes, is similar to that found at the country’s major coal-mining sites, suggesting potential tremors will be of a similar or lesser magnitude, he said.

“There’s not an exact analogy to coal mining, but the seismicity is remarkably similar,” Styles said at the briefing organized by the Science Media Center. “If there are going to be others, they will be about this magnitude and because they’re of that magnitude they’re very unlikely to cause damage.”

But our ecofascists need not worry. Britain's Energy and Climate change Minister Chris Huihne has guaranteed that he is going to prevent the development of this new technology in Britain. Not because he claims it is in any way harmful but the exact opposite. He has promised to stop it purely because it will provide us with cheaper energy and thus make his the government subsidised windmill "industry" even more uncompetitive than nature had previously done.

Chris Huhne, energy and climate change secretary, said on Monday evening. “We will not consent so much gas plant so as to endanger our carbon dioxide goals,” he told a fringe meeting at the Liberal Democrats party conference in Birmingham.

   The LudDim/Tory coalition know how to get out of recession easily and absolutely refuse to do it. That obviously cannot be honestly denied.

    The LudDim/Tory coalition claim they want to end the recession. That cannot honestly be denied as representing the very highest standard of honesty to which they aspire.

    The very highest standard of honesty to which the LudDim and Tory parties ever aspire is to complete, total and absolute dishonesty in the cause of fascism, increasing poverty and extending their mass murder of 10s of thousands of pensioners, through fuel poverty, annually. That cannot be honestly denied either.

Some Comments By Me on Other Blogs

2012-01-15T15:17:00.000Z

Some comments from me on other sites which I think even more profound than usual*

On John Redwood's thread about the proposed new £33 billion (£45 bn says TPA) high speed railway.

In Norway over the last 2 decades they have cut 700 km of tunnels at a cost of about £4 million/km> Denmark has done something similar in the Faroe Islands, at a slightly higher cost but it is remote.
If we could match that price and if it has been done engineers can do it, then that would be about £5.5 billion for 2 track tunnels all the way to Scotland. In fact since we have economies of scale and no problems with undersea tunnels it should be much less than that.
What this proves is how enormously parasitic our public projects system is.
In FoIs I have been told that government projects have an inflation rate consistently 4% above everybody else’s and that this has been the case for over 50 years. This explains why British public projects cost around 8 times their engineering cost.
A further FoI elucidated the fact that the civil service’s only possible explanation for this was that in the early 2000s oil prices went up!!!
Clearly the real reason is some mixture of bureaucratic parasitism (like the £200 million mentioned without a spade being turned) and “preferred bidders” getting to charge whatever they want.
I don’t think the business case for this would be good anyway but certainly the best use of government time would be cutting costs to what real costs are rather than preparing to spend £10s of billions wastefully.
Perhaps a Parliamentary question or committee enquiry into why our public projects cost so many multiples of their actual cost might be worthwhile.
--------------------------------------------
Redwood's on an independence referendum

My opinion (I should acknowledge I don’t want separation, at least so long as Scotland’s MSPs are running the country even worse than the UK’s MPs) is that we should have 2 referendums.
Firstly one held by Holyrood, which would be consultative, to authorise them beginning to negotiate the division of assets and liabilities. The UK Parliament should obviously decide that no Scottish MP could serve on their side of the negotiation. Then a binding referendum run, as the Scotland Act requires, by the British state.
Independence is a very serious and irreversible decision which should not be taken lightly and 2 referenda, at different times, one after the technical issues were thrashed out, would ensure that a decision for separation was our settled will. A single referendum with a 51% decision, held on the anniversary date of the Battle of Bannockburn and possibly a lower turnout than for a general election would not demonstrate “settled will” and be as much a fix as the original referendum by which we joined the EEC.
--------------------------------
Pointlessness - somebody who has listed my "how to get out of recession" e-petition as unworkable without, as my reply and his answer makes clear, actually reading it. He censored my follow ups.
----------------------------------
Censored by John Redwood from a thread of his Following Remembrance Day. The quote is from his article. -

“I still cannot accept the way the politicians and generals accepted death on such a huge scale. ”
Not that rare. After all throughout the cold war the politicians and generals accepted Mutual Assured destruction (MAD) which assumed deaths on a scale at least 10 times that of WW1. That was horrible and I think it was wrong because I do not believe the USSR ever wished to start and “win” a war – they just wanted to be left alone too. But if you accept that both the Soviets and the Kaiser were bent on world conquest, as were were told at the times, it is difficult to say we should not have accepted such casualties.

I used to be proud about how we stood against the horrors of Nazism but when we, merely to get German permission to opt out of the Euro, supported criminal regimes run by “ex-”Nazis in former Yugoslavia openly committed to the racial genocide of the Serbs I came to feel that our opposition to Hitler was more accidental and less principled than we are told. Certainly if our schools had taught the history of Nazi genocide against Soviets, Serbs and Gypsies instead of pretending the only victims were our Jewish allies I very much doubt if the British people would have supported our government’s promotion of atrocities against the Serbs more than matching Hitler’s in individual evil if not in pure numbers.
----------------------------
Al Fin on "peer review" being used to discipline "science"

There is an OECD report that found a negative correlation between government funding of science and achievement. Clearly peer review and established bureaucracies are a way by which those at the top can divert government money towards what we might consider the established ideas and thus reduce original research. Or sometimes, as with CAGW, government eliminates the middle man and decides what may be "discovered" by funding only the amenable.
However I do not conclude from that, as some do, that government should not fund any research - technological progress is so important to society that almost nothing else is more deserving of funding - but that such funding should, almost entirely, go through X-Prizes rather than through grants. Thus rewarding & encouraging achievement rather than box ticking.
I suspect the reason the state much prefers grants is that it gives them the power of patronage. The state's interests are not ours & vice versa.
--------------------------------
John Redwood on whether the bureaucrats are trying over the euro

The underlying problem is that when the country runs with people losing jobs for not towing the line but do not for getting it wrong, the country is being wrongly run.

-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the Bank of England control of credit.

Bubbles are created by investment money looking for something to invest in with maximum returns artificially pushing up the value of the property being invested in and creating a circle of growth, up until it bursts.
The best way of preventing bubbles is having something with real value to invest in. For over a decade Britain's governments have been preventing industries with genuine growth potential because they are genuinely capable of producing new wealth (nuclear power, GM foods, modular housing, space industrialisation) for purely Luddite reasons. The BofE went along with that that the real culprits are the politicians.
---------------------------
John Redwood censors a reply to a reply to a comment of mine on a thread of his on the historic British policy in Europe being to oppose the strongest power

The Slovenians probably, by a somewhat greater margin than the Scots do but a smaller one that the Basques and Kurds do. The Croatians wanted a lot more than their own country – they wanted another people’s country – large areas of “Croatia” contained a Serb majority whose populations NATO carefully helped them to “purify” and exterminate. The majority of “Bosnians” never wanted and do not now want a Moslem dictatorship, since they are not Moslems – again the problem was not the separation which every NATO country which was not being racist was equally keen to go to war with Spain and Turkey over, but that they wanted to grab other people’s lands and get rid of the people.
The Albanians already have their own country. It is called Albanian and the current Albanian majority in Kosovo was created by Albanians deciding they did not want to live in Albania but some more prosperous country. I assume you would like to see NATO go to war to ensure the Mexicans get their own country too, in southern Texas and California?
-----------------------------
Douglas Carswell on the failure of the EU. The quoted bit is from him.

"the trade block we joined in the early 1970s which then accounted for 36 percent of world GDP, will account for less than 15 percent in 2020."
The current EU is much larger (Spain, Portugal, Sweden, East Germany, Eastern Europe, Malta, Cyprus, Finland, Baltic states) than the one we joined, which makes its economic failure the more egregious.
That alone is more than good enough reason to leave.
////////////////////////////////////
*As said by Dr Doom in the Superman/Spider-Man 2 comic by Jim Shooter

Are We Alone

2012-01-14T12:14:00.000Z

Are we alone in the universe? It is a, probably the, major question. With the sheer size of the place it seems improbable but the fact that, in the billions of years the planet has existed nobody else has left concrete evidence of existence - something the size of a bus left on the Moon billions of years ago would still be there and would hardly be beyond the capacity of any level 2 civilisation.

John Gribbin has done his own assessment and come to the conclusion that we are alone in the Galaxy for, among other reasons.

Gribbin points to the origin of the Moon by an impact with a Mars-size body over 4 billion years ago as a pivotal and yet very dicey event. The impact itself had to avoid destroying Earth’s spin (as apparently happened at Venus) and yet excavate and launch into space enough material to form an unusually large Moon that could gravitationally anchor Earth’s axial tilt. Without such a Moon our rotation axis would wobble chaotically due to tugs by Jupiter, Venus and other bodies, and undermine the long-term climate stability conducive to the development of high intelligence and civilization.

Certainly the existence of our Moon is so extraordinary that no explanation exists that fully explains it. If intelligent life is that uncommon that would mean either Earth has 2 events which have astronomical odds against or that they are related. Personally I think the variable and high tides the earth has must have greatly eased, or made possible at all, the journey of life from sea to land. There may be other effects.

Dr Bruce Cordell's estimable site has also published his assessment of the odds under the Drake Equation and comes up with a highest estimate which is only a bit more optimistic.

Initial Kepler results plus the Watson/Carter model of intelligence appear to preclude other intelligent ETs in our Galaxy unless their L’s are in the millions of years. This was attained only by our species upper limit, using Gott’s technique; the closest ETs would be ~10,000 light years away. Other high-tech civilisation timescales — species LL, nuclear doomsday, and singularity — are consistent with the Rare Earth Hypothesis

If we are alone in the universe, or at least sufficiently alone that we are never likely to face competition there are philosophical consequences. We alone are the carriers of intelligence. If we destroy ourselves, through comparatively meaningless squabbles, or limit ourselves to never getting off the planet we alone on this small planet will have robbed the universe of meaning.

On the other hand this greatly increases the chance that we will succeed. The simplest answer to the Fermi question and the only one that makes sense over eons, is that intelligent scientific civilisations wipe themselves out as their power increasingly exceeds their self restraint. However if we are alone the question never arises and there is no reason to believe we will not succeed in settling as much of the universe as we wish and achieving the fullest possible understanding and mastery of it.

N.C.S.E. - Nazi Child-Abusers for Suppression of Evidence - the filth that creeps into the US education system

2012-01-13T12:55:00.001Z

   Some time ago I did an article on a catastrophic warming lecture, run by the "Glasgow Skeptics" (an organisation which in the Orwellian manner, is absolutely opposed to scepticism). The lecturer Eugene Scott was totally unable to produce any actual evidence for her claims and I was later told that it was wrong to blame her for her for this because "she isn't really an expert" which seems a curious basis for asking her to pontificate on the subject.

    The real justification for her doing so is that she is the boss of the American NCSE*, - a busybody organisation which originally justified its existence by fighting creationism but which has since clearly found there is a niche for opposing scepticism about catastrophic warming and decided to take advantage of it, undismayed by their ignorance of the subject.

    Some time ago I sent this letter to Ms Scott and the NCSE. They have been unable to despite in any way whatsoever any of the points - specifically that there is no evidence for their claims and that therefore nobody with the remotest respect for science, indeed nobody but an out and Fascist, could support their policy of suppressing free investigation. of the evidence requested and the obscene Nazi whore has not apologised, though she has certainly been given more than enough time.

Dear Ms Eugenie Scott,

I saw your lecture last Thursday in which, among other things, you boasted of the National Center for Science Education's role in prevention Al Gore's film being matched by children being allowed to experience a debate on the subject of alleged catastrophic global warming. By definition a debate, which is itself a balanced process, cannot on its own balance a one sided, indeed repeatedly untruthful lecture. However it would have ameliorated the situation since the children would not have been limited purely to Gore's proven lies.

I assume, since you are lecturing others on the warming scare you are an expert on the subject as well as on the principles of science. As such you must be aware that Mr Gore's film has been proven stuffed with indisputable lies. Clearly you will know that the promotion, indeed exclusive promotion, of indisputable lies is not consistent with any respect whatsoever for the principles of science. Nor does it fit any definition of "education" though it does count as propaganda. Your claim that the public should not be allowed to hear ideas not promoted by those in power, but only state lies, is a major part of the definition of Fascism.

I also publicly asked questions following your lecture.
Any theory, to be scientific, requires to be accepted as falsifiable by some evidence (this is accepted by all who understand science as you claim to), thus catastrophic warming must be falsifiable. So what would you accept as falsifying it. You could produce no such conditions (indeed the fact that Hansen's 1988 1 C rise prediction by now has not come true the theory would already have proven it false it were part of science). Thus attempting to enforce warming alarmism on children is inconsistent with any claim by the NCSE to be scientific.
You were also unable to name a single solitary scientist, anywhere in the world, who supports the catastrophic warming scare and is part of the majority of scientists who are not paid by the state. While, as an open fascist you are enthusiastic about promoting state propaganda, no matter how dishonest, it cannot be honestly denied that a "scientific consensus" cannot exist if none of these scientists are part of it. As such your continued repeating that there is a "consensus" on the subject, while knowing there none of these scientists in it proves you to be wholly, completely and totally dishonest...
I would also be interested to know if you can name any single creationist organisation or individual who has less than 1,000 times as much honesty, human decency and respect for scientific principle than your own Fascist organisation. If you cannot you clearly owe all creationists a public apology for implying some moral superiority over them by lying child abusing Fascists such as yourself
I await your confirmation that you intend to act. I believe I am also entitled to an apology for being lied to by you.
Will all due respect

Neil Craig

* NCSE according to the organisers stands for National Center for Science Education but since they are absolutely opposed to the principles of science and far from supporting education, are resolutely opposed to it this cannot be true. A more factual use of their acronym is Nazi Child-Abusers for Suppression of Education.and I do not think any employee, donor or other person associated with it could dispute the proper title

Should any representative of the organisation wish to say anything with any factual basis (no obscenities or fact free ad homs) I am certainly prepared to publish it.

Economic Boom 2015 - or the Window For One

2012-01-12T14:30:00.002Z

A couple of interesting articles at Next Big Future here and here from Joseph Friedlander on Dr. Bruce Cordell 's theory, looking at Kondratieff waves, that we are due a major economic boom starting about 2012.

Kondratieff waves are a claimed regular (55 year cycle) of innovation. I don't take it as being that predictable. At best, if you watch natural waves coming in at the sea shore you will see that some waves are larger, some almost non-existent and some arrive a little earlier or later than expected. Nature, not being a machine, is more messy than we pattern forming folk living in a mechanical society are comfortable with.

Nonetheless there does seem to be validity to these cycles. Dr Cordell describes the cause as periods of enhanced ebullience, which he calls a Maslow window (after orbital launch windows - because if you miss they they are gone).

About twice per century over the last 200+ years there are extraordinary pulses of great explorations (e.g., Lewis and Clark) and macro-engineering projects (e.g., Panama Canal) that resonate around the world. These “Maslow Windows” are times of extraordinary affluence-induced ebullience similar to “animal spirits” theorized to drive business cycles by British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. In response to ebullience, many in society ascend Maslow’s Hierarchy and, as their world view expands, find that great explorations and MEPs are not only intriguing, but seem momentarily irresistible. This captivating, but short-lived ebullience is triggered by major, twice-per-century economic booms over the last 200+ years that were first described by Kondratieff in the 1920s.

   Purely personal and anecdotal but I do get the feeling that, popularly rather than governmentally, we are entering such a period. People are starting to be willing to optimistic scenarios - that we aren't expecting catastrophic warming; that new technologies can do amazing things; libertarianism - all of these are far more acceptable than even a couple of years ago as Ron Paul's success testifies. I remember the 1970s when the opposite was very much the case - as the success of Paul Ehrlich with his long list of transparently ridiculous disaster claims proved. Pournelle has talked of audiences drowning him out when he told them we weren't doomed, which is something one might expect them to be glad to hear.

     Wouldn't take such cycles too far - if true China has been at the top of its own cycle for 30 years. But well worth watching. There certainly are more than enough new technologies available to provide real growth if we are allowed, or have the confidence to allow ourselves - space development; Moore's Law of computers actually speeding up*; GM crops; shale gas; nuclear power; modular building; "cold fusion"; seasteding - each of which has the potential to cause the equivalent of the industrial revolution.

    Both of the articles are quite long and complicated and well worth the time. Here are a couple of comments I have added.

May I suggest that the cause of such cycles ending cannot be an inherent loss of investment resources since by definition the overall economy has grown in the growth phase. What could happen is that the parasites grow faster than the wealth creators. Historically that could be anything from ne4ighboiring tribes looting the cities of ancient Mesopotamia; the growth of an ever more useless and parasitic aristocracy under Louis XIV the Sun King; to the current state parasitism where tax takes about 50% of the economy and regulatory controls (nuclear regulations, housing restrictions, environmentalism etc) destroy at least 50% of the possible economy reducing what people really get to 25% of the optimum.
Modern governments can afford to extract more than barbarian hordes and absolute monarchs because there is so much more existing now but this in turn means that the potential for growth without the parasitism is very much greater than ever before. This growth in state parasitism may also explain what economists call the "productivity paradox" - that the doubling of computer capacity every 18 months has not improved growth rates (at least not in the "developed" countries though the number of countries achieving 10% annual growth is unprecedented elsewhere.

+

It may well be that success in a Maslow window attracts war.
A significant reason for British and French enmity to Germany before WW1 was that Germany's economy was growing faster than their's. Paradoxically this was also a reason for German enmity to Russia at the same rime since Russian industry was growing fast, albeit from a low rate. In WW2 a major cause of enmity towards the USSR was that it, during the 1920s & 30s, had a remarkable growth rate. Hitler in particular thought that if Germany didn't take Russia's resources (lebensraum) by the 1940s they would become a resource poor backwater (wrongly as post war history showed). The enmity between the northern and southern states of the USA in the 1850s was also fuelled by the disparate growth of the north.
On the question of whether war can have technologically beneficial results I think there is some reason to say yes. Governments waste enormous amounts of productive wealth during wars but they waste it during peace as well. The difference is when there is an existential threat to the state (ie a war more serious than Vietnam) government becomes willing to spend some of those resources on promoting innovation and that is enough. The common explanation for the US getting out of the Depression is wartime spending but if that, alone, were true then when the war was over it would have sunk back into an even deeper Depression. Instead the inventions and infrastructure built to stop the Wehrmacht marching up Pennsylvania Ave made everybody rich.
Compare the literally trillions Obama has put into "stimulus" projects, all of which has gone to cronies or old industries, with the refusal to put anything into X-prizes. 1% of that money put into prizes would have developed a lot of space industry by now and more than ended recession but, without an actual existential threat government has no incentive.
It was only when the USSR collapsed of its own governmental parasitism that the western governments fully adopted the current "environmental" Luddism which has brought us into the current recession - the competition of a rising China is thus good for humanity & probably the average US citizen

This links to Dr Cordell's site - again worth following.

* Finally here is Wikipedia on what is called the "Productivity Paradox" - that, at least in developed countries the massive increase in computer capacity (the Moore's Law doubling time of capacity now reduced to about a year) has not been accompanied by an increase in productivity. The obvious answer, which has escaped the official experts, being that this has allowed and been swallowed up by a matching increase in government parasitism. The possibilities, if we do not let government parasites steal this window from us are without parallel in human history. If we let them the possibility is comparably dire.

UPDATE Dr Cordell has put down a comment which I wish to add here:

"Just 2 brief points:

1) On the above comment, not all explorations that are great are "Great Explorations". Great Explorations always have an international audience that's riveted.
A classic example of an exploration that was great (but not a GE) was a Howard Hughes-like character of the 1800s named Clarence King. The Yale-educated socialite was friends with President Adams, a great explorer of the American West including exposing the Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, and the first director of the US Geological Survey (1879), and yet he is almost unknown today. Compare his celebrity with Dr. David Livingstone ("Dr. Livingstone I presume.") who explored during the mid-19th century Maslow Window and is still a minor pop culture icon even today.

and
2) I initially noticed that the Great Explorations, MEPs, and major wars lined up very well with the Stewart Energy Cycle (it was later that I noticed it also worked well with K-Waves etc.), which is a very well-documented societal energy use cycle that was discovered in 1989 by the prominent nuclear engineer Hugh B. Stewart. You can see the cycle in my ISDC presentation for 2011 -- http://21stcenturywaves.com/the-articles/ It's 3rd from the top on the page."

I assume the immense interest in space exploration from the Sputnik moment to the Moon landings, followed by coverage of later landings allegedly not displacing reruns of I Love Lucy as examples of lack of interest after the Maslow Window closes. Admittedly Sputnik and the Moon landings were more important but not that much so. This would suggest that another reason for the window closing, apart from increased (government) parasitism is that we humans just get bored with success. Such boredom doesn't make much sense but experience supports it. - Neil

Citicorp Dispute Shows "Independence Debate" Isn't Real

2012-01-11T12:30:00.000Z

   This is my latest ThinkScotland article up here now. Please put comments there
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Alex Salmond has been righteously annoyed about a report Citicorp wrote to advise their investors whether to put their money into Scottish windfarms. In fact the report sticks rigidly to the investment opportunities of their clients and steers clear of the political question of what windmillery does to us punters.

   That this can be considered controversial shows how unconcerned with economic, engineering or any other reality the Holyrood "consensus" is.

     The starting point of the report is that both England and Germany can get power far cheaper (essentially French nuclear) than Scotland will ever be able to sell it at and then question whether they will, for political reasons, buy it anyway. They skip that wind is so variable that it can provide no part of baseload (as Scottish Renewables have acknowledged) or that, because of that intermittency, Scotland will be the one dependent on electricity from (or via) England. For obvious reasons, even were price not a factor, most customers would prefer reliable rather than intermittent supplies

    Ignoring the fact that wind power is intermittent is proper for the report if the only consideration is their client's revenue as it should be - Holyrood is where the Scottish people's wellbeing should be considered - and if they can be certain these countries will pay the full price for intermittent power even at times of low demand when they don't need it. This latter assumes a triumph of politics over reality which may or may not be justified..

    Last December only 0.2% of UK power came from wind and a wind powered Scotland would have needed massive supplies, indeed larger supplies than the interconnector can handle and probably much larger than England, if it were also depending on wind, would have had spare, to keep lights and heating on. This is not a consideration for Citicorp but it should be for Holyrood.

    Citicorp's question is who will pay the massiver promised subsidies in the event that Scotland ceases to be part of the UK. They accept that Scotland can't. Their 3 questions are whether, if we become "independent" England will continue to subsidise the windfarms already built; whether they will subsidise as many new ones as Scotland authorises; and whether this can be guaranteed for the next 25 years. Alex may decry them asking this but it is an obvious doubt.

     In fact their answer to the three questions assumes a new English government would sign up to this & is only doubtful on the 3rd part. I find that optimistic but even so my understanding is that "no Parliament can bind its successor" so that the answer to the last has to be No whatever the Parliament of the moment says. What Parliament, 10 years from now, when everybody realises how useless windmills are (or is that 6 months from now) is going to feel bound to pay billions to a foreign country, who no longer has any votes in that Parliament?

   Without subsidies, indeed massive subsidies, even wind turbines already built aren't worth keeping running which is why 14,000 of them already stand, abandoned, in the US. I hope Citicorp's customers know that because it is a question "renewables investors" in Spain are already facing as that country decides it can no longer afford to pay enough for it to be profitable for an "investor" to invest in running a searchlight all night to keep his solar power cells producing.

   Anybody, anywhere in the world relying on governments being elected keen to pour tens of billions into subsidising windmills, for the next 25 years, either has more faith in the promised impending catastrophic warming becoming highly visible or in the electors not rebelling, than I. To rely on the electorates being willing to fork out to help what would be a foreign country seems even more disconnected from reality..

   What this whole episode reveals is that independence is not being treated as a serious issue but merely a standard to wave. A party seriously committed to independence would be able to tell us what currency we would have. A party seriously committed to independence would not be making Scotland totally dependent on England to keep the lights on, if we are lucky. A party seriously interested in independence would not be relying on continuing to receive billions in subsidy after independence.

     On non wconomic matters, a party seriously interested in independence would have some idea of what its future constitution would be - even something as simple as would Scotland be one of the very few countries with a unicameral legislature and power in the hands of the Prime/First minister rather than a President. A party seriously interested in independence would have come up with some serious plans for the state broadcasting organisation. A party suggesting a willingness to compromise on "devo-max" would even be able to say what it was. The refusal to consider these matters suggests they aren't serious and the failure of the other parties to bring them up suggests they also are merely engaged in kabuki theatre.

     I suspect there is nobody more worried about Alex Salmond winning the independence referendum than Alex Salmond. What on Earth would he do then?

      The role of the SNP has always been to threaten to throw their toys out of the pram if Westminster doesn't give them more, which is not something a country should be proud of, and something very destructive of Scotland's sense of self reliance, as we can see.

       If Scotland's political class continue to act as if politics is simply the art of extracting subsidy we may get a Czechoslovak solution. When the Wall came down the Slovak political class metamorphosed into Slovak nationalists, calling for independence but willing to accept more subsidy instead. The Slovaks voted for them on that basis and the Czech leaders forced them to live up to their promises by "letting them go" without a referendum which would certainly not have secured a majority.

      Polls in England show a minority but a growing minority there in favour of Scots independence and a Czechoslovak solution is no longer an impossibility. But what would the SNP, or indeed any of the other parties, for this is very much a race to the bottom, do then?

       I should also point out that the shock of being thrown in at the deep end prompted the Slovaks, long considered a stronghold of old fashioned socialism, to embrace the free market more enthusiastically than their neighbours and have, consequently, prospered. Independence would certainly force us, sooner or later, to acknowledge reality but would any of our current political institutions acknowledge it before national bankruptcy?

      I personally would prefer to remain part of Britain. Britain is, still, one of the world's important countries while Scotland, however successful, won't be Scotland's role in world history, as great a role per capita as any people apart, possibly, from the Jews, is virtually all within the Union.

      Size is not related to running a successful economy. China, the world's largest country is growing at 10% annually, Singapore, one of the smallest, at 14%. India was one of the slowest and now one of the fastest growing without gaining or losing an acre. An independent Scotland, or a Scotland within the Union could easily be the richest or the poorest part of the British Isles. The relevant factor is having competent government and Alex Salmond, attacking Citicorp for, only partially discussing reality, shows what the real problem is.

      A recent poll which shows that 2/3rds of us would choose independence if it were worth £500 a year and only 1/5th if it cost £500 shows that for most people the economy is indeed of far more importance. What I would choose is a federal UK with sufficient fiscal autonomy that Holyrood would be visibly to blame for economic idiocies and visibly rewarded for allowing the economy to grow. Even so it might take a couple of elections for a party committed to competence to appear or evolve.

      A Federal system encourages good government because the well run parts provide a good example and the badly run bits an 'orrible warning (this is feedback, vital to any dynamic system, in politics as much as engineering). It has largely worked for the US and could for Britain.

    If the SNP were serious about "independence" they would welcome Citicorp pointing out what they had apparently not noticed - that we would have to be able to keep the lights on without foreign subsidy.

80% Neo-Fascist Party Vote in Egypt - and Not Egypt Alone

2012-01-10T16:53:00.000Z

Did you see this reported by our media - the impartial free press that have been so enthusiastic about the "Arab Spring"?

Almost 80 percent of Egyptian Muslims in nine provinces voted for radical Islamist parties in the second round of Egypt’s election. Roughly 5 percent voted for a moderate Islamic party and about 15 percent voted for liberal parties.
That says it all. In the overall vote — that is, including the Christian voters — 70 percent supported radical Islamists, 47 percent (4 million) supported the Muslim Brotherhood (86 of 180 available seats so far; they might win more), and 32 percent were for the Salafists (3.2 million; the Washington Post seriously underestimated their votes).
The liberal (but not overtly anti-Islamist) Wafd won 1 million; the liberal Egyptian Bloc won almost 800,000; and the moderate Islamic Wasat Party got 370,000.
Incidentally, the vice-chairman of the Wafd said in an interview last July that the U.S. government carried out the September 11 attacks and Anne Frank’s diary was a fake. At least he doesn’t like Iran, though he thinks it is right about the Holocaust being phony. And he’s the liberal...
Egyptians and foreign observers now have two choices: face reality or retreat into comfortable fantasies about moderate Islamists. The Christian population cannot afford to engage in fantasies so it is increasingly fleeing, as documented by Lucette Lagnado in a moving, detailed article on Coptic refugees in the United States.

    Me neither.I think I keep a pretty good idea on the news but had no idea that the Islamic Brotherhood were getting around 80% of the vote.That is and ought to be worrying for anybody who approves of democracy and freedom as principles or even who just wants to live in a peaceful world.

    One might wonder what the diplomats; the great and genocidal; government experts; and all those politicians we are expected to trust to know what they are doing think about it.

    The answer is Nothing. If you think we are kept ignorant by the government, the government is even more eager to keep itself ignorant.

   As the article's author points out the government has specifically banned this article from the websites it uses to "inform" its own "experts" on the grounds that mentioning the victory of a party with at least significant neo-Nazi views is encouraging hate. It seems certain this is merely the tip of the iceberg of censorship going on there.

   I presume the BBC and the rest of the "responsible" media have adopted a similar, though perhaps slightly less firm, line.

    The practical, as opposed to principled, objection to big brother style censorship is that it prevents even the dictators learning the truth. So long as even those in charge can't find out what is going on they can't do anything to improve things even if they wanted to.

    I have limited interest in how Egypt runs itself, just so long as it doesn't attack other countries. However attempts at the adoption of full scale totalitarian fascism in Britain concerns me greatly.
-------------------------------------
    That this is not alone and that the alleged concern about ethnic niceness is being used to suppress free speech & promote fascism widely in Britain is shown by the recent imprisonment of 17 year old Stephen Birrell as part of the equally evil and equally stupid SNP campaign against free speech. He is, by any normal definition of the term, a political prisoner and has thus earned the support of both Rangers and Celtic fan groups.

It takes a particularly high degree of ineptitude, blinkered devotion to censorship and hyhypocrisy to unite both the practitioners of free speech and its alleged victims in opposition to our leader's inept fascism.

The more we accept the idea that the state should curb harmful and offensive language, the further we retreat from Mill’s plea to protect free speech even when we find words distressing. Mill’s suggestion that adults should be free to say whatever they want, short of causing harm, meant something in societies that defined harm in physical rather than psychological terms and that judged humans as capable of making that distinction.
The society we live in today is very different. A newspaper editor, reacting to my objections to the new laws, recently pointed out to me that Mill and Voltaire are long dead.

Dalgety Bay 2 - Foi Enquiry Response

2012-01-09T16:18:00.000Z

On 28th November I sent an FoI Enquiry to SEPA asking for information on

"Assuming SEPA have been running your investigation into alleged manmade radioactivity at Dalgety Bay in the proper scientific manner the very first thing you must have done is to determine the number of aircraft destroyed at that beach; weight of paint required to paint the numbers on each of the dials in such aircraft; and the proportion of paint that consists of radium ...

Secondly, since any serious scientific investigation of substances requires a control example you must have carried out a similar investigation into the radioactivity level of a comparable and presumably adjoining beach"

Unsurprisingly the answer provided no answer to these. However it does answer the questions of whether SEPA have even attempted to answer these and therefore whether it is even possible for SEPA to have been engaged in a scientific procedure. No and No.

"SEPA is considering these aspects as part of our investigation; however precise data is not available"

"when monitoring for background (control) can be on an area of the site itself",

"SEPA does not hold data on the rate of man hours per particle"

    If SEPA has no precise data on the maximum possible contamination and has made no serious attempt to obtain such data it simply is not engaged in a scientific investigation and is not capable of making any honest assessment pf the site. The answer implies but doe not say, that the MoD have refused to provide the data. The MoD have claimed to be co-operating with this inquiry so one or other is lying. My bet is that it is SEPA but we will see.

     The "control" area being the site itself is clearly nonsense. Warming alarmist claims that we had a particularly warm October depend on looking at previous Octobers. Not even they would say that this October was the warmest October for 11 months. SEPA clearly aspire to being far less scientific than even them.

      If they have no idea how much time has been put into searching for particles (a particle being merely a clump of rock/soil which is significantly more radioactive than the others and random variation is bound to produce a large number of them, then they can have no idea whether such clumps are more, or less, common than elsewhere, though obviously since the average Aberdeen street is more than 50% more radioactive random chance would produce many more clumps of greater radioactivity there.

      SEPA have said that unless the MoD ponies up an unspecified amount of money to take action they resolutely refuse to specify, to prevent a "threat" they are unwilling or unable to produce evidence for, within 3 months (ie at the end of January or early Feb) they will designate the land a "radiation hazard" despite there being no evidence whatsoever that it is more "hazardous" than any other similar piece of land and is agreed as being less radioactive than some. SEPA will do this on the basis that they do not need evidence and "It will not change its mind".

      They have been given the power to ruin this (or any other) thriving community anytime they want, without any scientific justification and this corrupt, lying, entirely parasitic bureaucracy intend to have their fun.

   And neither the local MP, whose legal duty is to his constituents, nor any other elected politician is willing to stand up for the people.

Another enquiry
Dear SEPA,
                    In response to your recent reply to my FoI on Dalgety Bay I would like, under the same rules, to ask for clarification.

Your answer on the first point - what is the theoretical maximum amount of radiation present - implies that the MoD have refused to supply data they must have known. The Mod, however, have said they have co-operated with you. I would therefore like to see a copy of the communication from the MoD refusing this reasonable request - assuming it exists.

I would also like to know what "imprecise" estimate you have been using for all this time and what it was based on?

Since SEPA decline to give even an imprecise estimate of how much effort has been put into this does SEPA accept that the average square mile of land, to a depth of 1 foot, would yield 9 tons or uranium and thorium and 1 gram, vastly more than you have actually found - if SEPA were to put enough effort into searching for it. Obviously much more if it were done in any Aberdeen which is the closest thing SEPA have produced to a control area.

Recent Reading - Philosophy More Than Actions

2012-01-08T16:35:00.000Z

Al Fin on the inherent cultural anti-progressivism of Islam
"United States published 10,481 scientific papers that were frequently cited, while the entire Arab world published only four"

Scary considering the Islamic immigration of Europe.
-------------------------

Frank Furedi on how the "leftist" Luddites are stealing the term "progressive" - having already stolen and debased so many other terms like "liberalism", ""socialism", "science", "environmental", "sustainable", "equality", "freedom" etc etc.
--------------------------
Video of "peaceful protest" to promote their "ideas" by the Occupy thugs.
--------------------------
Some laws of Systemantics

The Primal Scenario or Basic Datum of Experience: Systems in general work poorly or not at all. (Complicated systems seldom exceed five percent efficiency.)   etc

No system works well. The bigger the are the worse they work.
--------------------------
The same as above as seriously applied to science.            H/T Charles Crawford
--------------------------

New Year’s Resolutions For Climate Scientists by Steven Goddard

I will admit that warming has been much slower than we expected etc
They never will.
---------------------------
!982 article on how the De Beers diamond monopoly and Madison Avenue kept up the price of diamonds. Apparently no De Beers senior executive had, then, for 40 years, set foot in the USA to avoid being questioned under anti-trust laws.                         H/T Steve Sailer
----------------------------
Dan Hannan on how the ONLY remaining argument for staying in the EU is that otherwise we might become like Norway or Switzerland - the 2 richest countries on the continent.
---------------------------
Me on Pournelle's

Health Care as a Social Concern
When it comes to infectious diseases we are not individuals. We are all vectors in the disease pool. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the growth of cities which have always been pools for infectious diseases. I suspect this is not unrelated to the growth of welfare states, from Bismarck’s to Roosevelt’s at the time. Nobody, no matter how libertarian, says people in cities should be free to store shit in our apartments. The great Victorian public sanitation systems were carried out by city governments run by unrepentant capitalists.
For the long term i.e. decades not presidential terms, the important fact is that infectious diseases are no longer serious killers (with the possible exception of AIDS) but diseases of age and lifestyle to which we react as individuals not vectors. This means that much of the social basis for welfare is gone.
In some ways I regret this. As a society we are far richer than the Founders could imagine & we can afford to look after people to an extent they couldn’t.

Catastrophic Warming - Rat Deserts Sinking Ship

2012-01-07T14:25:00.001Z

Climate change will be good for British farming, according to Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary

In a speech at the Oxford Farming Conference, she said that, although problems such as droughts would become more frequent, warmer weather would also mean a longer growing season and less frost damage, allowing the introduction of crops such as peaches, maize and sunflowers. Already 10,000 melons are expected to be harvested in Kent this year.
Mrs Spelman said farmers must “seize the opportunities” of increased production ..... “It could also bring longer growing seasons, reduced frost damage, and the opportunity to introduce new crops and livestock species.”
An advice service for farmers will offer tips...

A study commissioned by the conference from the Scottish Agricultural College even suggested that the boost from a warmer climate could help Britain compete in the global market

    The point about this is that Spelman is not some thoughtful free thinker but very much a loyal to whoever is in charge apparatchik. She has held "girlie" posts in foreign aid and environment and fought for the "pro-environmental" policy of fortnightly rather than weekly bin collections. This is pro-environment because it means the money saved goes to fund expensive and wasteful "recycling" rather than keeping real people's environment free of waste and rats.

     She was sufficiently loyal not to get into trouble when she was found to be fraudulently using paying her nanny out of Parliamentary expenses. Obviously she voted for the Climate change Act, which requires the economic destruction of Britain, like a loyal sheep.

   If she is saying "global warming" is not only not catastrophic but to he welcomed that party line has obviously changed.

This fits closely with Osborne's call for "Labour's Climate Change Act" which he and all but an honest handful of Tories, not now in office, voted for should not be enforced more thoroughly than any in any other European country which doesn't have it.

   The catastrophic warming scam goes down the official memory hole, even as some new ecofascist lie is developed, but the government jobs, regulatory ratcheting and overall parasitism remains.

   Of course we will get no apologies from the thieving parasites in Westminster who put it in place. Indeed, since the whole purpose of embracing ecofascism is not about the environment but about keeping us eager to be led to safety there is no contradiction between the government spending billions annually on propagandising ecofascist scare stories to increase their power over us (£450 million to one quango NERC alone) and at the same time spending more on an "advice centre" to promote the advantages of warming. Truth is irrelevant - the common factor is that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

   On the other hand Spelman is not as scientifically illiterate as the NERC board member and Chief Scientific Adviser to Scotland who says global warming will increase day length.

Ms Spelman climbing down

Earthquakes - How "Environmentalists" Use Language to Promote Fear

2012-01-06T15:05:00.001Z

In their anxiety to suppress technology which can make the world rich the ecofascists have been desperately searching for an argument against shale gas. The only one that has seemed to hold any water is that extracting the gas can cause "earthquakes". This "magnitude 2.3 earthquake" was used to stop the British industry in its tracks, at a time when the American economy is starting back into modest growth purely because this new energy source has cut gas costs to 1/4 of ours.

    However the Richter scale works on 10 fold increases for each point.

Below 5 on the Richter scale, which is the magnitude for international reporting, it cannot honestly be called a quake.

"4.0–4.9 Light Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely. 13,000 per year (est.)

5.0–5.9 Moderate Can cause major damage to poorly constructed buildings over small regions. At most slight damage to well-designed buildings. 1,319 per year"

    "Rattling noises" are purely an Earth tremor.

tremor. A shaking or vibrating movement, as of the earth.

    Actually a 2.3 tremor is 1/500th of even the dividing line and "not felt but recorded" and there are over a million of them annually. I think one should quake much more about the thought of there being a single elected politician or journalist anywhere in the country willing to pretend that any of the claims of any of the murdering ecofascist parasites, unsupported by overwhelming independent proof, being worth a moment's consideration. In any case the word "quake" can never honestly be used instead of tremor to describe such low magnitude "threats".

Magnitude - Description Earthquake effects - Frequency of occurrence

Less than 2.0 - Micro Micro earthquakes, not felt.[14] Continual

2.0–2.9 - Minor Generally not felt, but recorded. 1,300,000 per year (est.)

3.0–3.9 - Often felt, but rarely causes damage. 130,000 per year (est.)

4.0–4.9 - Light Noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises. Significant damage unlikely. 13,000 per year (est.)

5.0–5.9 - Moderate Can cause major damage to poorly constructed buildings over small regions. At most slight damage to well-designed buildings. 1,319 per year

6.0–6.9 - Strong Can be destructive in areas up to about 160 kilometres (99 mi) across in populated areas. 134 per year

7.0–7.9 - Major Can cause serious damage over larger areas. 15 per year

8.0–8.9 - Great Can cause serious damage in areas several hundred kilometres across. 1 per year

9.0–9.9 - Devastating in areas several thousand kilometres across. -1 per 10 years (est.)

10.0+ - Massive Never recorded, widespread devastation across very large areas; see below for equivalent seismic energy yield. - Extremely rare (Unknown/May not be possible)

H/T Al Fin

Who Is Responsible for the Lack of "Dialogue" Between Sceptics and Alarmists?

2012-01-05T15:11:00.002Z

On of the sites I regularly comment on is the Scottish Sceptics one. On it there has recently been someone commenting from the alarmist side as well. He goes under the name Scottish Renewables. He regularly makes assertions which he is repeatedly challenged to substantiate factually and is unable to - but this does not stop him maintaining all of the. For example that mass production in the nuclear reactor industry alone could not significantly reduce costs.

   It is quite possible for somebody to overstate or even talk nonsense in the heat of the moment but when they continue to maintain the inaccuracies over a long period of time, knowing the facts and unable to produce any factual basis for such claims there can be no possible doubt that the lie is deliberate and premeditated. By definition somebody willing to do so blatantly cannot ever be assumed to be telling the truth in any other case. This is what SR was and still is doing.

   When it is done by somebody who knows that the lie they are telling is being done to deliberately results in the death of the 25,000 pensioners who die, unnecessarily, because of fuel poverty annually in Britain who could, in whole or large part, be saved by substantially lower energy costs I do not see that it is possible for anybody to say they are not responsible for the consequences they seek. This applies to every person who knowingly supports fuel poverty.

    It would be possible for "environmentalists" to properly argue that the cost of these deaths is justified by the saving to the world in retaining the supplies of uranium in the ground or preventing another Chernobyl (though it would take 500 Chernobyls in Britain alone each year to match the death toll) or some other reason. So far nobody has done so but I would be willing to publish it if they could.

   Which brings us to the conundrum in the title here.

   Having taken long term advantage of the fact that sceptics are, due to our liberal nature, always willing to allow alarmists a free voice (usually, as here, excluding posts which make no attempt at debate and limit themselves to obscenity and rudeness - something common among those who claim to care about the environment) Scottish Renewables has chosen to make his own clearly well funded site the site of an attack on me claiming I am insane. The ultimate irony being that, obviously having, used sceptic's commitment to free speech to lie and made such a claim SR has censored my reply. In part in one case and in whole in 2 others.

   So here they are. And on a different thread

Anybody who wants to can follow the trail of gratuitous lies you used to get to this point. You have repeatedly been asked to proved verification for the claims you made and repeatedly answered not with facts but with ad homs. Even in the reply to the post mentioned you make a medical claim about me. It is possible that you are a qualified doctor but I doubt it. If not then in what way is describing you as a liar inaccurate?

There is no dispute that fuel poverty kills around 25,000 pensioners a year. Nor that it could be effectively ended by a free market in power - which would mean nuclear rather than windmills. The "environmentalists" benefiting from windmill subsidies or paid by the government to promote it cannot deny this. Thus in what way is the term “murdering ecofascist parasite” non-factual?
------------------------------------------

Anybody reading here can see you do not & cannot dispute the fact of 25,000 people being killed, quite unnecessarily, every year by fuel poverty. Nor that you are actively promoting the ecofascism that causes it. Therefore, if the English language has meaning you are a hired parasitic murderer and fascist.

You have made no attempt to provide the medical qualifications necessary for your accusation of lunacy to be even theoretically possibly anything other than a fascist lie. I note you have not attempted to withdraw it and must accept it as representing the pinnacle of honesty to which you ever personally aspire. I await your apology.

I note that every single supporter of "environmentalism" here, who possesses any trace of integrity, has had to dissociate themselves from your lies. That there is not a single person in the "Green" movement with any integrity is hardly my fault, but equally hardly disputable.

I tend to assume you will censor this post as you did the last, or moreso. Which only proves that you know you are a wholly corrupt fascist liar whose claims cannot survive honest discussion

And

Unsurprisingly all of the 15 "myths" about the stupidity of windmills are true.

Obviously anybody wishing to "play fair" on the subject, as the article requests, would be willing to allow discussion on the facts but since no "environmental" blog anywhere in the world, let alone either this one or the one delineating the "myths" allows free debate you will just have to accept that they all know for certain their claims are unsustainable.

Should SR feel at any time able to factually dispute anything I have said he is, of course, welcome to do so. Unlike him I do not approve of suppression of free political discussion, regarding that as fascist (as did Mussolini).

Equally should anybody know of any "environmentalist" site anywhere in the English speaking world which does not practice political censorship of discussion I would be very interested to hear of it. That one at least would not be properly described as ecofascist. Having previously asked for a single identifiable prominent supporter of alarmism, not just a "climate scientist" who is not ultimately paid by the state I would also like to extend it to a single identifiable prominent alarmist who is opposed to the fascism of political censorship.

Is there a single solitary "environmentalist" anywhere in the world who posseses a sufficient trace of honesty to be willing to say that anybody who makes deliberately dishonest claims of "lunacy", or claims designed to assist in killing people is doing something wrong? They deserve the chance to prove if there is even 1.

Predictions for 2012

2012-01-04T12:40:00.000Z

No spectacular changes of direction. Another good year for humanity and bad one for western civilisation. This trend is not permanently sustainable - something will give - but I think the political decline has some space left to run. Cheerful stuff underlined.

Scotland

We will continue to underperform the UK recession. All the main parties in Holyrood will continue to, wrongly, blame Westminster rather than themselves for this. Electricity prices will continue their rise. Some Westminster politician will say that if Scotland becomes independent there will be no requirement to buy expensive electricity from us if cheaper gas is available - this will be denounced as speculation. At first, under their new leader, Conservative support will fall. However after that support for all the main parties will fall in tandem which will merely show as contempt for all Scottish politicians. Those politicians will continue to only discuss "independence" avoiding any real debate.

UK.

The policitaly maintained recession will be maintained. Every MP & MSP will know how to get out of recession in days but only a few "right wing" (according to the BBC) Tories will suggest doing so.

EU

The Euro will be retained in name but in fact for Greece, Italy, Spain & Portugal it will become a separate currency, just as the Swiss and French Francs are different. This will not cause catastrophe but the EU will maintain its recession. One of the Scandinavian countries may decide to hold a referendum on leaving. Anti-EU parties will increase their vote in virtually all members with elections.

America

A progressive (in the sense of supporting progress) candidate will be adopted by the Republicans, probably Gingrich. The campaign will be as dirty as any in US history, with the media and Democrats producing new or revamped scandal stories daily, at least 99% of which will have nothing both new and true in them. Nonetheless Obama will lose, though his last 2 months, after losing, will be nasty. What happens after that, though good, will be for 2013.

World Economy

The world economy may slow slightly but will continue to grow at 4% or more and China's at 8% or more.

World Politics

South Korea will work hand in glove with China over North Korea. Their objectives will be, in order, to prevent disorder and millions of refugees; to prevent a war; to open up NK. A 3 sided war of secession will break out in Iraq with Turkey, Iran and Saudi each intervening to stop their chosen enemies winning. There will be considerable western supported terrorism in Syria, armed stand-offs in Libya and anti-Christian pogroms in Egypt. Pakistani terrorist will carry out atrocities in India and Pakistan

Humanity

SpaceX's commercial spaceship will dock in February with the ISS. By the end of the year commercial space flights will be becoming regular and we will be seeing the start of a major investment boom in space.The EU will be trying to get agreement with the rest of the world to stop it and failing.

Catastrophic global warming will never be referred to and the scare story will largely be about other potential unknown effects of CO2 rising. Some other eco-scare will be being promoted - perhaps species extinction.

World oil/gas production and reserves will rise rapidly. There will be continued technological progress in virtually all scientific fields. There will be uncertainty about whether the Higgs Boson has been discovered and about whether commercial exploitation of low energy nuclear reactions is practical but not about their existence.

Mass Produced Compact Nuclear Reactors with 18 Month Build Time

2011-12-31T17:58:00.000Z

Via Next Big Future comes this from Westinghouse, the manufacturer of the industry standard AP1000 nuclear generator that they are planning to mass produce a new line. The Westinghouse SMR. >225MWe. Passive safety systems and an extension of the AP1000 technology.

What really gets me is

"The Rail-Shippable scale allows for efficient factory fabrication and delivery allows quality control unattainable with on-site construction...

The most economical
Simple compact system configuration reduces operations and maintenance and cost.

The most rapid project development
...modular approach provides for rapid project development and installation [elsewhere stated as 18 months]

   Since the AP1000 costs around $1.8bn but in quantity $1.2bn (£800 m) so when these are being mass produced if they cost less we are talking of not more than £200m a shot. Because they are tall objects designed to be buried 4 of them should only take up about as much space as 1 conventional reactor. This does look like being a breakthrough and one which it will be difficult for the Luddites to regulate out of existence. Requiring no on site building & rail portable makes it easy to set up and at this power level even quite small communities can run them. And once they are being widely used it will become increasingly difficult to persuade people they shouldn't have one, or not to let them realise when 90% of the cost isn't actually being paid for the engineering but for the political regulatory parasitism.

   The biggest problem with nuclear has always been the political parasites. Because it has been such a big structure taking 3 years (plus political parasite time) to build it has been very vulnerable to changes in the political wind.

    We see the same effect in comparing the housing industry to the car industry. A century ago houses and cars cost the same. Houses have increased fourfold in real terms and car prices reduced because local authorities can control the land and thus the building of houses but you can just drive up in a new car. If that comes about in the nuclear industry and it becomes possible to just buy a transportable reactor off the shelf we should see the same effect. The manufacturers will not have to kowtow to political parasites - they just wait till the next customer rolls up.

     Since "Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Success" it may become impossible for the Luddites and parasites to retain at least half of the cause of the current recession.

    Admittedly they are unlikely to have this going in less than 18 months so it won't close the gap in our immediate blackout problems but the future is clear.

Happy New Year.

Big Engineering 48 Worldwide Campaign Against Malaria

2011-12-30T17:38:00.000Z

Malaria remains a major public health challenge in many countries. 2008 WHO estimates were 243 million cases, and 863,000 deaths. About 89% of these deaths occur in Africa, and mostly to children under the age of 5...

Once the mainstay of anti-malaria campaigns, as of 2008 only 12 countries used DDT, including India and some southern African states...

Effectiveness of DDT against malaria When it was first introduced in World War II, DDT was very effective in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality. The WHO's anti-malaria campaign, which consisted mostly of spraying DDT, was initially very successful as well. For example, in Sri Lanka, the program reduced cases from about 3 million per year before spraying to just 29 in 1964. Thereafter the program was halted to save money and malaria rebounded to 600,000 cases in 1968
===========================

There is no question that DDT use in the 1950s did reduce deaths from around 1 1/2 million a year to 10s of thousands and that the total differential since then amounts to around 70 million.

  Nor, despite Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the decades of subsequent scare stories about DDT, that it has never been definitely proven to have killed a single human being. Indeed that it has sometimes been used as a medicine

   The arguments against using DDT in a massive way are (A) that it is very dangerous and (B) that extensive use will bring about reduced effectiveness.

   (A) is clearly a false ecofascist scare story. This article 100 Things You Should Know about DDT must be be read by anybody wishing to pontificate on the subject and with the remotest interest in not killing more millions of people.  There is no serrious evidence of danger, even to birds where the most serious claims have been made. There is no possibility that even unknown effects could render it 1,000th as damaging as the disease it prevents. In terms of human life the DDT ecofascist fraud has been even more damaging than the Linear No Threshold radiation ecofascist fraud which, in turn, has been more damaging that the current catastrophic warming ecofascist scare.

   (B) is not altogether false. Almost any chemical used in quantity will, over time, through evolution, cause some reduced effectiveness. However firstly it appears to be being considerably exaggerated since it is now the sole credible argument opponents have. Secondly it is not so much an argument against using it at all, as an argument for using it in large doses, quickly. In particular - small doses are most guaranteed to breed resistance since it is bound not to have a total effect.

. Also if long term breeding of resistance is a fear then ending the problem quickly is the obvious choice.

Therefore if we really want to effectively end these deaths I propose a massive international campaign of malaria eradication using DDT to a full extent.

   Perhaps this might not entirely eliminate it everywhere, as smallpox was, because there are natural reservoirs of malaria whereas smallpox needed to live in humans. On the other hand the history is on our side. Malaria has been very much more extensive than it is currently. Malaria used to kill 10s of thousands in Britain. The same, but moreso, applied to the USA, making the southern states a death trap for white men. Even within the Arctic circle it killed 10s of thousands around Murmansk in northern Russia during WW1. It is effectively extinct in all of these now. There were other reasons than DDT, indeed it disappeared in Britain before DDT was discovered but that is all the more reason for believing it can be eradicated. The example of Sri Lanka given above does suggest that only a little more effort in 1964 would have cut the last 0.001%.

    The world is far richer than in 1964 and medicine far better developed. Clearly if we could come that close then it will be far easier now. It would be a big programme but we could save many millions of lives.

    If the political will is there.

Arthur - King of the Britons - A New Idea On The Origin Of A Historical Figure

2011-12-24T14:13:00.000Z

I have just been reading a book King Arthur The true story by Phillips and Keatman. Graham Philips Arthurian website is here.They conclude that Arthur was a real person who fought his major battle in raising the siege of a hill fort at Badon Hill [ Badon then being pronounced Bathon and being the site of the only warm water volcanic springs in Britain ie Bath} around 518.

    This fits such historic records as we have which are clear about the battle, though the earliest ones don't say who was in charge but do agree it was very decisive. Later ones say Arther killed 960 Saxons personally [ancient records often claim to have killed or beaten about 10 times what modern scholars think]. The archaeological record also shows that the Saxon kingdom of Sussex was essentially destroyed then, not being reformed for nearly a century. Looking at a map you will see that had they controlled Badon/Bath they would have been within a few miles of the Severn and isolated the remaining British tribes between Cornwall and Wales.

   There is no archaeological evidence of the battle site, not unexpected, but everything fits there. This is from the book's timeline:

460 AD - Ambrosius becomes leader of the British forces British defences are reorganised. There is an imperialist revival in Britain

470 A British contingent fights for Emperor Anthemius in northern France.

476 Odovacer defeats Emperor Romulus Augustubulus and proclaims himself king of Italy. The final collapse of the Western Roman empire occurs.

480 There is a military stalemate between the Britons and the Saxons in the south of England. The Angles Suffer defeat in the nothr. Cunorix is buried in Virconium.

485 Aelle defeats the British at Mearcredesburna.

485-8 Arthur fights for Ambrosius against the Angles.

488 Hengist dies and is succeeded by Octha. Arthur succeeds Ambrosius.

488-93 The Arthurian campaigns.

491 Aelle beseiges the fort at Anderida (Pevensey) and establishes the kingdom of Susse.

493 Arthur defeats Aelle and Octha at the Battle of Badon. The Anglo-Saxons retreat into south-east England.

495 Cerdic [Saxon} lands in Hampshire, possibly as a mercenary.

508 Cerdic achieves victory over a [local] British king named Natanleod, and establishes control over an area roughly the size of modern |Hampshire. An alliance is made between Cerdic and Cunomorus [Cunomourus is certainly also called Mark and there is evidence that Mark was the historical Modred - the alliance includes Cerdic marrying a Briton, assumed to be Modred's daughter].

519 The battle of Certicesford [safely identified as modern Charford near Salisbury].The Battle of Camlann {Arthur's final battle and presumably they are the same battle]. The death of Arthur [this being the book's position, assuming Arthur was a Briton king - I am assuming he was either wounded or that after 34 years and the British alliance falling apart as Britons and Saxons intermarried, decided to go home].

520 Virconium is abandoned [the book takes Virconium in Powys as Arthur's Camelot

    The book names Arthur as an alternate name for a Welsh king of Powys and Gwynedd recorded as Owain Ddantgwyn, whose capital was probably Viroconium, dismissing the alternative that he was a Brito-Roman named Artorius and assuming that the name derives from the celtic word for Bear used as a title {in the same way that Pendragon is certainly a title meaning chief dragon", the dragon being the symbol of Gwynedd which they had taken from the Romans).

     I like Artorius and want to put what I think is a credible variant.

    There is evidence that though the Romans had left Britain in the 470s the British tribes sent some auxiliaries to help the Roman army. Considering they were being exterminated by the Saxon invaders at the time this either indicates an enormous degree of loyalty to the Rome that had deserted them or that they wanted some Roman help in return. With the Empire being officially dissolved in 476 this is quite a good time for some remaining elements of the Roman army to leave for Britain as loyal Romans carrying Roman traditions into exile/The Roman army honourably sending aid to loyal savages begging for help/unemployed soldiers taking a job as mercenaries, according to taste. There are quite a few such examples in history.

     The British chiefs wanted a Roman general, tactically more sophisticated than them, and some elite troops (cavalry or trained and armoured infantry of which both Britons and Saxons were short).

        A young officer called Artorius and a unit of auxiliary cavalry drawn from the Sarmatian tribes go, at the invitation of the British king Ambrosius to help stop the Saxon advance. [The Sarmatian horsemen, of whom the Ossetians are the descendants, definitely had the concept of drawing a sword from the ground as their symbol of leadership. They also had a particular story of a dying warrior who demands that his best friend destroy his sword by throwing it in the water, but the friend, not wishing to destroy a beautiful weapon, twice, doesn't but the friend twigs and on the 3rd occasion the sword is caught by a woman's hand] Now here is what I believe is an original connection - "Artorius" is not merely a Roman name it is an ancient Etruscan one and there is a reference to Arthur, in a scene carved on the Cathedral of Modena in Italy which slightly predates the medieval knowledge of the character. Modena is nowhere close to Britain but it is in Etruscan territory. Just as somebody called Neil, living in the UK, is more likely than not to be Scots, or Northern Irish even though we have been part of Britain for centuries it is more than likely that a man named Artorius was a local of the Etruscan lands, of which Modena is the heart.

ARTUS for Modena cathedral

    So Artorius landed in Britain in 485 in command of a cohort of Sarmatian auxiliaries. Rome's army could spare them particularly since the Britons would be paying and nobody else was paying Romans. It would not be the first time an Empire sent a tribe whose loyalty was not primarily to Rome well away from where they might meet some fellow tribesmen.

     Arthur is recorded as having fought 11 victorious battles. These battles were all across the country as far away as Scotland which fits with commanding a cavalry force in combination with whatever local tribal leaders/kings could raise [One telling argument against him being a Celtic king is that, despite the title given him later, the early records quite specifically refer to him not as a King but as the "war leader" of "the British kings" not even "other British kings". One can see why the British "kings" would vote to accept a Roman officer, tactically far more sophisticated than them and in command of cavalry forces that could put more fear into the Saxons at least as happily as they would accept a "king" who was another tribal leader. Just as the Phillipinos accepted MacArthur as their leader in WW2.

     King Arthur's Round Table, enters the written record shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his book, in a follow up written by a poet called Wace. However his writing was done near Cornwall, at a time we know the common people there still revered Arthur, so it is credible that he did not invent this but took a local legend. That doesn't necessarily mean to me that there was a physical Round Table but that there was a consensus that there was no order of precedence in the war council, not even for Arthur. That suggests Arthur as "dux bellorum" (literally war leader) was not the most powerful king and, at least until he won, considered almost a hired hand.

     History is replete with national heroes who actually come from an adjoining culture, usually a more sophisticated one and unite the nation they are founders, but not members of . Moses is an Egyptian name; Napoleon was Corsican; Hitler - Austrian; Stalin - Georgian; Alexander - Macedonian rather than true Greek; El Cid at least part Islamic; Herman from a family that had served the Romans; Che - Argentinian not Cuban; Skanderbeg - Serb not Albanian; Bruce - as Norman as Scots. For Arthur to have been been just the most powerful British king is historically less likely.

     The other thing all the early records agree on is that they don't know where Arthur was buried. It is a major part of his mythic status. Arthur, having established a golden age of peace after decades of Saxon massacres, is, we are often told, going to return when the country needs him. The burial location of a king is an important thing at the time in the opposite way. It adds to the status of his successors, being able to provide physical proof of their right to rule as lawful descendants of such a king. Surely if Arthur had been Owain his descendants would made a big thing of where he was buried?

       The book suggests that Camlann, Arthur's final battle credibly placed in 519 and something close to a draw, was against an alliance of new Saxon invaders in Wessex in marriage coalition with Modred the king of Devon/Cornwall and a genuine historic figure. I suppose that he was wounded then and decided it was time to retire, back to Modena. In which case he did indeed depart with the Britons hoping for a return. Shortly thereafter archaeology suggests the British chiefs did fall to fighting each other. 70 years later the "Anglo Saxons" did renew their advance but the history of the Wessex Saxons family whose leader Cerdic was followed by a son whose name was part Saxon, part Briton and a grandson with a wholly Briton name suggests it was a melding rather than the genocide it had been.

      Though there is a lack of historical record of him there is a lack of historical record of EVERYBODY at the beginning of the British Dark Ages. However there is record of a number of different British kings calling their children Arthur - a name previously unknown. This means there must have been a real Arthur.

      I am not certain on this but it appears these subsequent Arthurs appear in several different royal families which, in another point I have not seen suggested elsewhere, suggests the original Arthur was not the king of any local dynasty, with whom each of the others were competing. That means not a dominant Briton tribal king. There is no question that the time Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote of him and he entered literary recognition Arthur was still a popular heroic figure to the entire population not just, or even particularly, of the people of Powys.

      Is all of this correct - unlikely. However I would stand by most of it being and certainly of arthur being a genuine historical figure and I think every single fact here is more likely than anmy single alternative.

       A cocktail party theory I would not stand by is of Camelot not being Viroconium but Colchester in Essex. The big thing in favour of it is that in the Roman era its name was Camulodunum which would clrearly have been spoken commonly as Camelot. The big thing against is that its location is in Essex, the heart of the main apparently undefeated Saxon kingdom, which I grant is a big "against". However if we assume Badon was such a great victory that the Arthurian forces did indeed defeat and occupy all the Saxon lands then Colchester would have been a good place for a Roman Arthur to set up his military headquarters, though if he was king of Powys then such a relocation becomes unlikely. Certainly Arthur's court has more the feel of a military order than a civil capital city. Some support for this is given by the fact that, despite Camelot now being the magnificent capital city out of myth it was not Arthur's capital in the original story by Geoffrey of Monmouth. "The castle is mentioned for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes' poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, dating to the 1170s ...Nothing in Chrétien's poem suggests the level of importance Camelot would have in later romances. For Chrétien, Arthur's chief court was in Caerleon in Wales; this was the king's primary base in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and subsequent literature." Geoffrey was native to Caerleon so his identification of it as Camelot looks more like local pride than reality but nonetheless for anywhere other than Camelot to have been seen as the capital is at least consistent with it being a forward military base.
******************************

     I once visited Tintagel Castle [according to legend Arthur's birthplace, his father being "both" the king of Devon/Cornwall and Uther Pendragon king of Gwyned/Powys. Possibly both kings, or rather their successors, had agreed to "adopt" him as their sons, a practise common with Roman Emperors too]. The castle ruins there were medieval and put there so that the local lord could bask in the association. But there are late Roman remains and it is defensible. And on the highest rock there is the carved image of a foot - a common Celtic symbol that the true king's foot will fit that footprint. {there is one on Dumbarton Rock capital of ancient Strathclyde in Scotland too and the idea of the Stone of destiny is clearly a development of that].

    So Arthur did, in a few short years bring a last, post Roman, golden age of peace, did decisively win a battle which, if lost would have put the Britons beyond hope of recovery and ensured that the country that eventually developed was a culture of mixtures rather than extermination.

    I hope Arthur got back to the sunshine and grape juice of Modena. The fact that 6 centuries later he was recorded, in a frieze in Modena Cathedral and nowhere else so remote strongly suggests that he, or at least his friends did and the story became famous there. I have no idea what if the records there, if any, compare with those of Britain of the time, but it might be a fruitful area of research.

Solsbury/Badon Hill - overlooking Bath/Bathon/Badon and site of an iron age fort

Scotland's Cultural Cringe 2 - Doing Something About It

2011-12-23T16:49:00.000Z

Last Saturday I wrote of a book discussing why we Scots, at least in Scotland though expatriates are quite the opposite, tend to back off form trying to achieve things. I must admit getting to new chapters at the end of the book I find the author wittering about how we can feel good without economic growth, living in harmony with the planet and maintaining enforced equality which suggests she has gone native. However the worth of a thought does not necessarily determine the worth of the thinker.

As Pournelle says "free people aren't equal, equal people aren't free" which is self evidently true. Economic growth does not itself guarantee happiness but being better off certainly helps, though the law of diminishing returns applies. However economic success, personal achievement and happiness all have personal freedom as a major cause. Growth is so obviously popular that every politician claims to have it as their first priority, even those who have no slightest intention of doing so. Thus any government that doesn't achieve growth is, by definition, either opposed to the people's wishes or incompetent (or both) and unworthy of trust in any other objective.

So anyway here is a list of some ideas (many offered here previously as ways of improving the economy) of increasing Scotland's self confidence, entrpreneurialism and achievement.:

Cut Income Tax by 3p as allowed under devolution. (other proposals originally on this link)
Add vitamin D to staple foods sold here.
Fire everybody in BBC Scotland. Their attitude of politically correct miserabilism rots our collective (or individual) souls.
Run TV series about the achievements of great successful Scots across history. What better way is there of making people both feel good about their country and that they personally can contribute? The amount of money needed to pay for a TV series in nothing in a national budget.
A space X-Prise. Even something as simple as the asteroid landing prise would produce a sense of achievement.
Require any Scottish X-Prise competition vehicle to carry a saltiire prominently.
Propose knighthoods and other such titles to people who have actually achieved something not just parasitic civil servants, union leaders, retiring politicos and party donors.
Get rid of destructive, jobsworth civil servants.
Give prises to pupils (and to teachers) when they produce good results.
Put a couple of white lasers in Glasgow and Edinburgh with their beams crossing overhead, visible across much of the central belt - just to show we can.
Sponsor an annual Road From the Isles hovercraft race. (#28)
Make a DVD of Scotland's history & post it to Scots, or those with Scots names, over the world. Include links encouraging Scottish tourism.
A schools voucher system would improve personal freedom.
No new politically correct vindictive bans. The smoking ban was NOT in manifestos at the last election.
Introduce a right to referendums on motions that would not increase government power as UKIP have called for.
The smoking ban is an illiberal restriction on individual freedom. End it.
End fuel poverty. France produces 80% nuclear at 2p a unit. We can do the same or indeed better.
Reform planning regulations so that people can build houses when and how they want rather than spending more time and money on sucking up to "civil servants" than actually building.
Build the Scottish Tunnel Project. Being able to travel freely around your own country is a blessing.
Fire any social worker kidnapping children or otherwise increasing human misery to build their empires.

Linear No Threshold Radiation Theory Proven False - After 40 Years of Anti-Nuclear Hysteria Campaigns To Impoverish The World

2011-12-22T15:10:00.002Z

   “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” — Kurt Lewin

   The corollary of this must be that there is nothing so damaging as a false theory, about something vital to civilisation, which is generally accepted and enforced by government worldwide.

   That is why I have been so persistent in disputing the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation damage. There is not and never has been any actual evidence for it. This fact is not disputed even by supporters, they have merely said that, for low level radiation it is so statistically difficult to provide certain evidence against it that it is an unfalsifiable theory and thus must be accepted.

   This is not a scientific attitude since it is axiomatic that a theory which cannot be falsified cannot be scientific. But it does have the advantage of being enforced and accepted. I have previously said I doubt any theory is wholly unfalsifiable it merely that there are some whose proponents will not recognise any.

    The entire anti-nuclear movement depends on being able to scare people that tiny amounts of radiation, at virtually homoeopathic levels can still kill because there is "no threshold" level at which it is safe.Without that radiation releases at a very low level would not be a fear. Without that the Dalgety Bay fraud would have nothing to work with. Without that the alleged fear that it could be dangerous to store radioactive "waste" (most of it is actually highly valuable) deep underground because it might, in infinitesimal quantities, leak thousands of feet upwards would be a matter of no importance.

   Without that "unfalsifiable" claim the hysteria against nuclear power and its suppression could not have been justified. It has left humanity with no more than 40% of the electricity and therefore wealth we would have had if the trend before suppression had continued.

   However science goes on and even the most "unfalsifiable" ignorance based claims fall victim to scientific progress from a new direction.

   Which is why this, while the result is in now way unexpected to believers in science, is such a game changer it ought to be headlined worldwide. (OK I know it won't but it would if the media were uncorrupt) -

Imaging of a cell’s DNA damage response to radiation shows that 1.5 minutes after irradiation, the sizes and intensities of radiation induced foci (RIF) are small and weak, but 30 minutes later damage sites have clustered into larger and brighter RIF, probably reflecting DNA repair centers.
“Our data show that at lower doses of ionizing radiation, DNA repair mechanisms work much better than at higher doses,” says Mina Bissell, a world-renowned breast cancer researcher with Berkeley Lab’s Life Sciences Division. “This non-linear DNA damage response casts doubt on the general assumption that any amount of ionizing radiation is harmful and additive.”

The LNT theory was always political rather than scientific. The theory absolutely requires that there be no repair mechanism for radiation damage which, is contrary to experience with almost all other injuries to living systems. This looks like conclusive proof LNT is wrong. This does not prove hormesis, that low level stimulation to the system is beneficial, correct but is certainly consistent with it. Particularly the evidence that long term exposure is less troubling than a burst exposure, which was always intuitively reasonable.

Urban Legends - How Old Are they?

2011-12-21T12:51:00.000Z

The Vanishing Hitchhiker

A friend of a friend and his daughter were driving along a lonely country road at night and happened upon a female hitchhiker. The woman asked for a ride to her home just a few miles up the road. The travellers obliged and continued on with the woman riding silently in the backseat. As they approached their destination, the driver turned to inform the passenger they were arriving, only to discover she had vanished from the backseat without a trace! Thoroughly spooked, the travellers inquired at the house and learned that a woman matching the description of the hitchhiker had indeed once lived there, but died several years earlier in an automobile accident. Her ghost, they were told, was sometimes seen wandering beside the highway...
.......................
So how old is the story. Hitchhiking requires cars so one might expect it to be about the 1920s/30s when cars became widespread and the collected stories do seem to start around then. But there are earlier versions from the time of carts and..
____________________________

Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles[a] from Jerusalem. 14 They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. 15 As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; 16 but they were kept from recognising him.

17 He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
19 “What things?” he asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. 20 The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; 21 but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. 22 In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning 23 but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. 24 Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
28 As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 29 But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
Luke 24:13-32 On the Road to Emmaus
..............................................
That is the Vanishing Hitchhiker story in all essentials - Meeting a traveller. Gives mysterious prophecy. Disappears, in this case literally before their eyes, Turns out to have been dead all along. It is even part of a subgenre where the traveller is a local godlike figure.

The story is also told in much less detail in Mark 16; 12-13

Snopes also reports a section of Acts which they regard as another variant on the hitchhiker story - Acts 8; 27-39 . This involves a disciple meeting a high Ethiopian official, hitching a ride on his chariot and converting and baptising him. Personally, despite the use of a vehicle to hitch on I don't regard this as a true VH story since both parties are identified and living so there is no inherent mystery.

I don't know don't know enough mythology to tell if there are any other such. Is there a section in the Epic of Gilgamesh where he looks down and finds an unnoticed Hook or dragon's claw in his chariot wheel. Wouldn't be surprised.

Uniting Korea Peacefully Is Possible

2011-12-20T16:49:00.001Z

Some time ago I wrote about how to solve the Korea problem, following an article by the not then late Colonel Gadaffi. This was my plan

My opinion is that it depends on making sure nobody in power in the North has greatly fear union.
The South should offer to pay the salaries of every Northern government official for life, so long as they aren't earning more elsewhere. They also guarantee an amnesty for any NK official who may be chargeable with "war crimes". China would also guarantee this and to provide residence for any NK official who wanted to leave and who would still receive salary from the South. These guarantees have to be formidable and credible precisely because various western promises, from those to Pinochet to Karadzic have proven false. It may not be abstract justice that some leaders may get away with things we don't like. though abstract justice would certainly not be served by a "prosecution" influenced by NATO states whose own leaders are certainly guilty of war crimes, genocide and organlegging. However as an alternative to starvation for the northern people and possible nuclear war for everybody it seems preferable.

In return for paying salaries they get a gradual loosening of the Northern dictatorship. A veto on promotions and new appointments. Taxes could be drastically reduced since they were being already paid.. Road, rail and telecommunication links between the 2 (I suspect the South even more than the North would fear free movement of peoples since 10s of millions of refugees would be unwelcome). Trade between the 2 be made free. The right of Northerners to take up free market jobs and the right of such jobs to exist without government regulation. The desired end result would be a zero tax, minimal regulation zone governed, through leaders appointed by the South to which many southern and indeed international companies would outsource much of their production and which would grow faster than the South could. It would probably take decades for the North to reach Southern levels of affluence and political sophistication, after all it took the South decades in the first place, but it would be done without deaths, refugees and war.
The cost to the South would be less than they presently spend on defence. Paying the full salaries of everybody would cost no more than $9 billion assuming the NK currency is valued correctly.

It depended then and depends now on the NK leadership accepting it. However, in Kim III's seat it looks increasingly attractive. Despite having a nuclear bomb or 2 NK is going nowhere in a continent where everybody else's economy is growing at 10%

   It says a lot about the power of modern states that they have been able to hold the dam so long - that the people are not killing their masters. A recent news report said that the relatively few escapees overwhelmingly come from the border regions where they can see wealthier neighbours which suggests most of the population really don't know how the world has changed. Even the BBC don't aspire to that sort of control*. However communication devices are getting smaller and more pervasive and the dam is inevitably going to come under ever more pressure. Then there is Kim IIIrd himself - he was educated in Switzerland and personally knows how backward his country is.

    Also, assuming his father's death was as reported and I think it was, he died of a heart attack at 69. That is not, even nowadays, an incredibly young age but I very much doubt if many leaders, or even middle ranking functionaries, of a wealthy country, able to fly across the world for the very best health care isn't going to live longer. Longevity is as ultimate a benefit of modern technology as there is.

    So, even as absolute dictator of his own country, the life of a multimillionaire in Shanghai must look pretty attractive. The moreso the further down the ranks one goes. Give him, or them access to something like the Ibrahim Prize and there could be a deal.

    Kim III has one advantage over his father - he hasn't been long in power and would not credibly by chargeable with crimes against humanity. I wouldn't take this very far since such charges bear little relation to the culpability of the chargee - Milosevic was so clearly innocent he had to be poisoned; Vojilsav Seselj", who was an opposition politician in Yugoslavia during the wars, rather than being in government, was indicted 2 weeks before he was plainly going to win a democratic election and whose trial was stopped purely because there was no evidence against him is, after 8 1/2 years, still imprisoned; whereas Snake Thaci (our Kosovo President and clearly guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and dissecting living human beings) hasn't been arrested; neither; neither has Bill Clinton (guilty of planning aggressive war and using his command authority to appoint Thaci as his policeman and send him to commit genocide); and almost all western politicians who supported that war and who are thus personally complicit in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and such cannibalism, albeit at a lower level).

As a matter of law there is no evidence whatsoever against Kim IIIrd of any crime 100oth as criminal as what Obama, Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and co are certainly guilty of. However International Law is not enforced and is instead used simply as an excuse for atrocities by the big countries.

Fortunately for Kim China is now one of the big countries. He would be unwise to and I am certain will not, under any circumstances relinquish power if there is any doubt of China's willingness and ability to permanently uphold promises of his security in face of NATO/"International Criminal Court" criminality.

   One other point worth making is that though NK has a nuke there are new military technologies developing. Curently there is being developed a remotely pilioted military aircraft the size of a hummingbird. In fact it is, visulally, a hummingbird. It currently has a short range and no weapons but that is bound to change and I can think of no defence the NK government could produce that would stop such an assassination weapon being used, in a few years, against them.

* Perhaps I underestimated the degree of control the BBC operates. Checking out Seselj's case I find that, over nearly a decade the BBC have managed to censor any single mention of his arrest, "trial" , innocnece and continued imprisonment.

Christopher Booker's Campaign To Stop Social Workers Abusing Children With The Judges' Help

2011-12-19T15:00:00.001Z

The purpose of government programmes is to pat government employees and their friends. The nominal purpose is, at best, secondary. - Pournelle's Iron Law.

  I have written of this many many times, mainly in the economic sphere for that is where I feel spectacular progress is most obviously easy. However Christopher Booker has long been writing not just on the subject of warming alarmism but also a scandal which should, if our MSM were in any way whatsoever interested in journalism rather than censorship, have the public crying in the aisles.

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children are being taken from caring, loving competent parents and sentenced, without due process, to the living hell of "social work carers". Twenty-three percent of the adult prison population has spent time in care yet to an ever increasing extent the child abusing "caring professions" are ensuring that it is ever more difficult for them to reach the limited escape of foster homes. The only possible reasons for doing do is so that the obscene subhuman filth who make their living as "the caring professions" (A) get off on torturing children and their parents & (B) its a living and indeed a better one than being a guard at Auschwitz.

   It may be argued that there most be some decent people in social work (or indeed Auschwitz) . However does anybody know of a social worker, or indeed judge, ever dobbing in a fellow worker for kidnapping a child or perjuring themselves in testimony on the reason for it. Any social worker involved in such actions has vitiated any legal document "allowing" them to kidnap and is as guilty of the crime as any ki8dnapper without a warrant signed by a judge - and should be punished accordingly. Moreover any judge who signs such a "warrant" without properly satisfying themselves personally that it is justified and immediately afterwards talking to the kid to verify it is also personally guilty of kidnapping children.

   And any judge who deliberately threatens any journalist or member of the public to keep such a crime secret (a very common practice as Booker has pointed out, on a demi monde where habeus corpus is unknown) is themself an accomplice to kidnapping and also guilty of perverting the course of justice.

   Every last one of these obscene child abusers should be locked up for decades. Give the nonces somebody to look down on.

how many months Booker has been beating this drum, and no one could now deny that there is a case to answer by social services, the police, the court system and the legal profession – to say nothing of the politicians.
Most of all though, there is an issue here about the media. This is the industry which professes to be concerned with people's rights and in freedoms yet not a single newspaper has followed up on Booker's work and developed a campaign – which is what is desperately needed.
It is thus left to Booker to plod on, in his own little ghetto, becoming the last repository for desperate parents, who are increasingly directed to him as the only journalist prepared to listen to their stories.

Booker's Articles
Foreigners are an easy target

Behind a wall of secrecy, parents who lost their children are now in jail

Our family courts repeat the error that jailed Dreyfus

Couple denied legal help while lawyers make £1m removing their children Iron Law - this would not happened if we weren't paying the child abusers £3.5 billion for their pleasure.

How a mother who fled to Ireland to save her baby was caught on her return.

And so on and on

For legal reason comments are not allowed by the Telegraph there but perhaps there is somebody in the childcare community who would like either to justify such actions (or the Orkney "satanic" case or others in Scotland) or alternately apologise for abusing children and their parents this way. Perhaps pigs may fly too.

Space Reading

2011-12-18T15:43:00.000Z

The Space Settlement FAQ - a useful roundup of terms
---------------------------
China celebrates first docking of its space station modules. Not widely reported here, or indeed almost at all, but a necessary achievement on the way to a permanent foothold in space.
-----------------
the recent nuclear thermal rocket variants are described. They are estimated to require 5 years of technological development and could have launch costs of $85-150/kg for a single stage to orbit vehicle. These are launch from Earth's surface vehicles but involve superheated water etc as exhaust not radioactive material.
----------------------
An Awful lot of asteroids out there for us to mine.

So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.
"Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids," said WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright of UCLA. "We are discovering about a hundred a day, mostly in the Main Belt."

-------------------------------
Interview on the Mach Effect reactionless drive.

Question "I saw the prediction of a 15-25 year development timeline."
At the rate we are going, 15-to-25 years may be optimistic now, for we have been able to generate zero outside support for this M-E effort at DARPA and NASA. The idea of extracting energy and momentum from the gravinertial field for power and propulsion is just too new, foreign & quackish to most folks who control the R&D coins

-----------------------------------------
Discussion of light sails
------------------------------------
Wikipedia history of Project Orion atomic bomb powered spacecraft.
----------------------------------
NYT "Interview" with Presidential; front runner Newt Gingrich. Actually what he says barely gets mentioned
and the author spends her time trying to make fun of him having some vision and supporting space development, and in my opinion merely making herself look small. Almost the only sentence of his given in full is praise of Jerry Pournelle.

Fixing Scotland's Cultural Cringe

2011-12-17T11:29:00.000Z

Just been looking through Carol Craig's book The Scots Crisis of Confidence. She says that the Scots tradition of equality, a fine thing when it is equality of opportunity as it used to be ( "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The Man's the gowd for a' that"), has become a lack of respect for individuality and a stultifying culture of conformity, which is inevitable when we redefine equality to mean "equality of outcome".

   The Enterprise section is introduced with an old Russian joke - Peasant Ivan is jealous of Boris because Boris has a goat and he doesn't. Fairy gives him a single wish for whatever he wants which, rather than anything for himself, is that "Boris' goat should drop dead".

     Now that is something socialists often approve of and indeed have occasionally actually said - they would rather see the poor stay poor as long as the rich don't get richer.

     While in theory Scots should be reasonably good at starting businesses in fact we are at half the level of similar small nations. What the book finds is not merely that Scots in Scotland have a very low TEA (Total Enterprise Activity, sorry) of 3.9 as opposed to 12.7 for English but that when we go abroad we develop a very high rate. People of Scots ancestry in the US makes up 1.7% of the population but 9.3% of millionaires! The Scots figure there is also 3 times better than that of English ancestry. Scots also have a higher rate of references to scientific papers (the best measure of real scientific achievement rather than just publishing to keep the numbers up) per capita than any other country with the possible exception of Switzerland.

      Putting all that together it is not a problem of our personal culture but must be one of the national culture.

      That is to say we are being stifled by the useless bunch of parasitic big statists numpties, of all parties, that make up our political class.

       Pretty much what I have been saying for a while but good to have some evidence that seems impossible to interpret any other way.

       So we have a particular problem to fix - produce a national culture where we do not feel under pressure to stifle our proven individual abilities. In the long term hanging everybody in Holyrood using the intestines of every civil service manager would be beneficial. Everybody interested in improving the country should start thinking of others. Our culture is not going to reverse itself quickly and there are doubtless many individual actions that would help.

      However inculcating a spirit of enterprise or indeed hard work can be done by rewarding it.. The traditionally successful way of encouraging anything [dependency, dishonesty, scare stories, aggression and entrepreneurism] is to reward it. So lets reduce income tax in Scotland by the 3p of the Tartan Tax.

      The whole thesis of Scotland's automatic cultural cringe is proven by the fact that that though Westminster gave us the power to do this and though it would certainly have a strongly positive economic effect, as well as the cultural effect I refer to today, no party in Holyrood, neither the one that pretends to believe in free markets nor the one that pretends to want to use powers England denies us to improve the economy, has dared to suggest that we cut income tax*. This despite that they are all quite certain that they have more than twice that much money spare than the £1 billion a year that would cost, to blow on windmills, cycle paths and teaching van drivers to drive slowly. Only if Boris was on the dole and paying no income tax would he believe that it is better to blow billions on windmills than to cut income tax - if he had any sort of job he would behave smarter and more constructively than the average Holyrood politician.
      Which is why it should be a major policy of any true progressive in Scots politics.

*To be fair to the LudDims they did come out for cutting a penny (without saying where it would come from so clearly just a PR stunt) and thereby caused the budget of the minority SNP to fall. To continue being fair they, on seeing it work they immediately dropped the policy and obediently put through the budget.

More of My E-Petitions

2011-12-16T15:40:00.000Z

22/9 - 4/10 £22.5 MILLION FOR A BARRACKS THE MoD INTEND TO SPEND £400 MILLION ON

The government propose spending £400 million on a new barracks in Scotland.
Keetwonen is the name of the biggest container city in the world. Living in a converted shipping container was a new concept in the Netherlands when launched, but the city of Amsterdam took the courageous step to contract to go and realise it. It turned out to be a big success among students in Amsterdam and it is now the second most popular student dormitory offered by the student housing corporation
These converted containers are publicly advertised at £2500 each housing 4 or 2 with a separate room.
With 3,000 units lets, very pessimistically, double it for shipping costs and getting it on site.
Lets add 50% for the related facilities.
£22.5 million as against £400 million
Ask ordinary soldiers if the Keetwonen facilities are as good as, or better than normal barracks. Let Parliament debate whether spending £400 million or £22.5 million is better.

===================
22/9, 28/10, 18/11 ORION NUCLEAR PULSE SPACE ROCKET - 10,000 tons to orbit, "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970"

The Orion nuclear pulse rocket was first proposed in the early 1960s. It would have been able to put 10,000 tons of material in orbit at a tiny fraction of the cost of the Shuttle. Their motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970". British born Freeman Dyson, who worked on it as a young man and is now arguably the greatest living physicist has confirmed it would still work.
It was costed then at $100 million annually for 12 years. With inflation now £450 million annually. We now spend this on the NERC quango annually (one of several whose main function is "raising awareness" of "catastrophic global warming"). The ideal launch site is South Georgia or one of the South Sandwich Islands, British territory. This is because they are not only thousands of miles from inhabited land but the wind pattern, eastward round and round Antarctica, would mean radiation release anywhere inhabited would be less than 1,000th of natural background radiation.

===============================
22/9 m 26/9, 28/10, 18/11,21/11 ABOLISH THE HEALTH AND SAFETY BUREAUCRACY

Economist's Rule of Thumb is that government inspectors cost the industries inspected 20 times as much as they cost the government to employ them. Thus the 200,000 assorted "safety" inspectors destroy the productive work of 4 million workers or about 1/7th of the workforce. We all know of deaths that happened because the HandS people wouldn't allow rescues. Beyond that the strongest correlation with safety is national income. Each 1% increase in national wealth saves 21 lives per 100,000 people. So even in its own terms the HandS organisation kill about 1,000 times more people than they save.

Rejected because "E-petitions cannot be used to request action on issues that are outside the responsibility of the government. This includes:
party political material

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

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

correspondence on personal issues "

I can only assume this is saying that the "Health and Safety" regulations are entirely "outside the responsibility of government" ie entirely the responsibility of the sovereihn power - the EU.

Rejected again - interestingly for the entirely different reason that petitions are rejected if they "contain offensive, joke or nonsense content

use language which may cause offence, is provocative or extreme in its views

use wording that is impossible to understand

include statements that amount to advertisements"

Rejecterd again for the same alleged reason.
"I must ask you to state which particular part of the epetition is a joke, incomprehensible, an advertisement or alternately why any reduction in government regulation is considered too erxtreme for the public to be allowed to consider it?"

=======================
29/9 28/10, 18/11 PARLIAMENT SHOULD DEBATE WHY BRITISH PUBLIC PROJECTS ROUTINELY COST MANY TIMES WHAT THEY COULD

The Norwegians have cut hundreds of kilometres of tunnels at 4m per km yet London's Crossrail, which not much more than 26 miles of tunnel is costed at 16 bn. Richard Rogers is on record as saying that of the #670 million the Millenium Dome cost only 46 million was spent building it. Our railways are far more expensive than continental ones because the infrastructure building and repair costs many times more. There are 2 possible explanations - incompetence and corruption. If there are more perhaps someone could say. Either way Parliament should be able to debate it and provide an answer. This is, historically, what they exist for.

=========================
28/10/11, 18/11 EU COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS

We call on Parliament to debate getting an internationally respected firm of independent accountants to calculate a cost benefit analysis of our membership of the EU. This has meny times been proposed but for unknown reasons been rejected by governments of all parties. By producing actual facts it would make the EU debate more reasoned and less argumentative, which all sides should wish.

Rejected becuase this petition covers it. Please sign it.
=================================
18/11, 29/11 CENSORSHIP OF E-PETITION SITE

Parliament should debate the rountine refusal of the e-petition site to process various petitions, without notification, or to reject them as being "party political material or commercial endorsements" when they neither endorse anything commercial nor are taken from any party material let alone referring to any party and arguably, as in the petition about the censorship of the acknowledged murder of 210 unarmed civilians at Dragodan by our police, do not even refer to anything any UK political party is even willing to discuss, let alone have a policy on.

==================================
21/11 INTRODUCE FAILURE STANDARDS FOR GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

This was proposed in the series Yes Minister in the 1970s. Parliament should at least get the opportunity to say why not ---------"He proposes that every council official responsible for a new project would have to list the criteria for failure before he's given the go ahead.

I didn't grasp the implications of this at first. But I've discussed it with Annie & she tells me it's what's called the "scientific method. I've never really come across that before since my early training was in sociology & economics. But "the scientific method" apparently means that you first establish a method of measuring the success or failure of an experiment. A proposal would have to say: "The scheme will be a failure if it takes longer than this" or "costs more than that" or "employs more staff than these" or "fails to meet those pre-set performance standards!.

Fantastic. We'll get going on this right away. he only thing is, I can't understand why this hasn't been done before."

Rejected because it "contain offensive, joke or nonsense content

use language which may cause offence, is provocative or extreme in its views

use wording that is impossible to understand

include statements that amount to advertisements "

===========================
22/11, 29/11 EQUIP OUR ARMED FORCES WITH THE TACTICAL HIGH ENERGY LASER

The Israelis and Americans developed this mobile laser system. In November 4, 2002, THEL shot down an incoming artillery shell. A mobile version has completed successful testing. During a test conducted on August 24, 2004 the system successfully shot down multiple mortar rounds. Anything that can do that can do the same against aircraft which are larger, far more expensive and slower moving. Armed forces with lots of aircraft have been understandably unwilling to make extensive use of a weapon that makes them obsolete, but obsolete they are. At "$3000 per kill" they are clearly far better value than the Eurofighter at $20 billion for 232 planes and available immediately off the shelf. Unfortunately British military procurers have a long record of paying billions for the development of weapon systems when cheaper alternatives are already available off the shelf. It is proposed Parliament should debate making the purchase of such weapons a top priority.
===========================
23/11 BBC's LICENCE FEE DEPENDS ON MAINTAINING THE CHARTER DUTY OF "BALANCE"

The BBC's Charter requires that their reporting show "balance". Parliament should debate whether the BBC' has breached their Charter. For example giving more coverage to deaths in the Gaza war than the 1,800 civilians killed by being dissected to have their body parts sold, by our policemen in Kosovo. Equally we have the BBC deciding that anybody doubting that we are experiencing catastrophic global warming should almost never be reported because they allege their is a consensus the other way, though the BBC have repeatedly refused to name a single scientist anywhere in the world, from the majority not employed by the state, who supports their alleged consensus. Closer to home we have the BBC giving 40 times more coverage to 1 political party, almost entirely supportive, per vote received than to another, almost entirely opposed. Parliament should therefore debate when the BBC broke their Charter and how they could best repay the licence fee vitiated by that breach.
==========================

WE COULD BE OUT OF RECESSION IN DAYS - LET PARLIAMENT DEBATE WHY THEY DON'T WANT TO

A 24 point proposal has been made to get out of recession within days and into fast growth - see here http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/11/we-could-get-out-of-recession-in-days.html Not MP has been willing to say that even one of these proposals would not work

let alone all 24. Politicians of all parties seem resigned to at least 6 more years of recession and claim not to know of any way to achieve growth (while the rest of the world continues with 5% annual growth & China & India with 10%). They should, at least, be willing to debate such an option and say why they reject it. Since the programme involves cutting parasitic government spending, regualyion and controls of our lives and dropping the Luddism all parties are adicted to it is understandable they do not want to. However the public has a right to know if they have any non-self serving reasons to reject a growing economy.
=======================

Here are another batch of E-Petitions I have put on the government's site. This links to the full run of them. Please sign any you agree with. We don't get that many chances to have even a tiny influence on government.

Big Engineering 47 Expanding Cities Downwards

2011-12-15T13:44:00.000Z

This proposal has been made for expanding Amsterdam downwards but presumably could apply to any city built on clay soil rather than rock, which certainly includes London and probably most of those built on river estuaries, which is most of them.

Architect Moshé Zwarts says ""There has always been a lack of space in the city, so what we are doing is building a city under the city by using a new construction technique, which will not interfere with street traffic."- by draining and then building under the canals....

The engineers say it is doable. "It is both feasible and sustainable, creating a city beneath the city is not futuristic, it is a necessity in this day and age." Zwarts says the geology is great for this. "Amsterdam sits on a 30-metre layer of waterproof clay which will be used together with concrete and sand to make new walls. Once we have resealed the canal floor, we will be able to carry on working underneath while pouring water back into the canals. It's an easy technique and it doesn't create issues with drilling noises on the streets."

The "environmentalists " agree it is feasible and are against it so that is a strong strike in its favour.

"This scheme and its underlying drivers, fly in the face of every responsible principle of sustainability and current trends. The architects also claim that the proposal is CO2 neutral but when questioned by WAN, Professor Zwarts acknowledged that his calculations omitted the carbon generated by construction, which in a mammoth scheme like would take many decades to recoup, if ever.....That this project is technically achievable is not in doubt, but that does not justify its flawed concept."

   It is unlikely that this will, currently, be worthwhile in smaller cities since it depends on a lack of affordable land for it to be economic. It fits Professor John McCarthy's suggestion that the problems of car parking can be solved by providing virtually unlimited parking spaces under the roads. and with the general improvement in technology of tunnelling.

   The problem for Britain is that our engineering costs are dwarfed, around eightfold, by governmental bureaucracy costs. For this reason the cost of public projects has gone up 4% above the rate of inflation annually for 52 years, for reasons which no civil servant can, officially, explain.

    Another example I recently found out about is the Thames Tunnel, a 34km sewage outflow tunnel (which is why it doesn't get discussed) from London which is costing £3.6 billion. This is £105 per km for something the Norwegians are doing at £4 m per km - probably it is reasonable that, cutting under London, it might cost more than in Norway but 26 times! .

    However this is simply bureaucracy costs and could be ended at any time the political will is there. The engineering is clearly "doable".

PS I found this idea through this list of 10 megaprojects of which 10,9,6,4   are "renewable" based rather than economic, 8,5,2 & 1 are a close to things I have proposed, this is 7. ~3 - using genetically modified coral to save Venice and build in the sea is cool.

2 Space Items

2011-12-14T14:09:00.000Z

Both from The Register, which for reliable news comes ahead of anything from the dead tree press or main broadcasters.

A Date For Humanity's Diary

NASA has announced that - all being well - the first mission to the International Space Station by a privately built and operated spacecraft will lift off on February 7. The craft will be a Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, both made and handled by techbiz visionary Elon Musk's new company SpaceX.

We really can be that close to a commercial space Singularity.

The term "technological singularity" was originally coined by Vernor Vinge, who made an analogy between the breakdown in our ability to predict what would happen after the development of superintelligence and the breakdown of the predictive ability of modern physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole.Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies

That and Presidential front runner Newt Gingrich proudly defending his support of space industrialisation from a disingenuous attack by Romney on a national, TV debate (Romney must note that Newt supports X-Prizes not the conventional and wasteful funding of NASA.)
Can anybody imagine any main party leader showing such vision and commitment in a party debate here. To be fair John Redwood has written in favour of space and I can well imagine UKIP doing so, but they haven't yet.

Mars Goldilocks Zone May be Larger Than Earth's

A group of Australian scientists have created a “whole of planet” model that suggests large parts of Mars are capable of supporting life – as long as it doesn’t mind living underground.
Instead of the piecemeal approach followed by most astrobiologists – which, it must be said, is fair enough since the various probes sent to the Red Planet have only sampled tiny areas – the Australian National University team led by Dr Charlie Lineweaver sought to compare what’s known about the whole planet to Earth’s environment.
They focused on two characteristics, comparing the temperature and pressure conditions here to those likely to exist on Mars. Their estimate comes up with a surprise: while only one percent of Earth’s entire volume falls under the heading “habitable”, Mars beats us at three percent.

I would never have thought of this but in retrospect it is obvious that Mars, with a lower gravity will have a much lower pressure gradient. This doesn't mean anything but microbes and may not mean that since an input of some highly organised form of power (ie light) seems necessary for energy using life. But if life is at all common across the universe it will be there. The options are that it is life related to us - ie that either light pressure or meteors brought it from one planet to the other; that it is life unrelated to us - it is conceivable that life only developed once in the universe but not only twice; that it isn't there - which makes life anywhere else that much less likely; or the not thought of yet option.

Whatever , if this isn't worth orders of magnitude more than anything we could get from Afghanistan there isn't intelligent life on Earth.

Salmond and the Eco-Nazi Traitors Stealing Another £11 Billion

2011-12-13T15:30:00.001Z

There has been a certain amount of negative reporting of a recent Audit Scotland report saying that Alex Salmond's programme of cutting CO2 production will cost £11 billion over the next 8 years.

Personally I was surprised it could be so low and checked the report which says

The Climate Audit did not consider renewable energy (or a few other things - Appendix 1 p15)

    So this £11 billion £1.4 bn annually) is in addition to the +£1 bn a year poured into windmill subsidies or the several billion caused by the fact that electricity costs could be only 7% of what they are, or the fact that we are only in recession because of this Luddite thievery.

    Since this isn't about the basic production of energy we are simply dealing with Lagging housing and producing more expensive building standards - £4.5-4.8 billion

   Transport policies - £3.8 billion - including getting buses and taxis to reduce their emissions at £1.1 bn - putting £1.1 bn into "cycling and walking infrastructure" (all p 11 # 40) - there is also £6 million going to train van drivers to drive using less fuel! (p12 #46)

    Obviously this is complete nonsense which will not achieve anything significant, compared to the cost. If people wanted houses which cost several hundred thousand extra to build but cut power bills by 20% the market would produce them without subsidy. If van drivers wanted to drive slowly and cautiously they would not need a government parasite to tell them it could be done.

   On the other hand it will give ever more money for thieving parasitic traitors like Salmond to hand out /split with his cronies.

    I previously suggested that instead of subsidising windmills that £1 billion could be put into cutting income tax by 3p. Well that goes in spades for this nonsense. Does anybody believe that we would be out of recession if we cut income tax by 3p, cut corporatio9n tax by 50% (or offered rebates for 50% which gets round the fact that CT is officially still a Westminster matter) and cut business rates by half - each one costing £1 billion. Those 3 together would cost £3 billion - possibly marginally above the subsidies discussed but certainly lower than the subsidies plus even a tiny increase in the revenues from a tax base growing because of it (as described in the Laffer Curve).

   Let us not, under any circumstances whatsoever, accept any claims from the SNP that there is any real problem with such cuts when they are wasting and stealing from us like this. Let us not under any circumstances accept that any politician who supports this and claims to be against "cuts in essential services to the poor" is ever in the remotest degree honest or cares is the tiniest degree about the poor as they steal billions form us.

a thieving fascist traitor gives us a sign

   While we are at it here is Hondurus going for an idea I suggested for Islay years ago and more generally here, which could also get us a spare £6 billion annually, should that be desired.

Trams "Fixed Price Contract" Promise Is Just What We Expect from Our Political Classes

2011-12-12T14:00:00.000Z

20 May 2008

City of Edinburgh council and tram project promoter Transport Initiatives Edinburgh announced on May 14 that contracts worth £512m had been placed for the 18·5 km tram network being developed in the Scottish capital.

The BBS consortium of Bilfinger Berger and Siemens has a €350m (£299m) fixed-price construction contract, under which consortium leader Bilfinger Berger will be responsible for civil works valued at €190m ((£162m) while electrical and mechanical equipment will be supplied by Siemens.

Spanish rolling stock manufacturer CAF was formally awarded the €170m (£145m) contract to supply and maintain 27 trams.

The first tracks are expected to be laid by September, and opening of the line from the airport through the city centre to Newhaven is planned for mid-2011, with Transdev as operator.

And then

2 September 2011

Councillors in Edinburgh have voted to rescue plans to build a tram line into the city, which could eventually cost £1bn.

Eight days after residents were told the council had voted to stop the trams two miles short of the city centre, it agreed by a majority to reinstate the longer route at an emergency meeting on Friday....

Bungled decisions and setbacks have increased the project's official costs from £520m in 2008 to the latest figure of £776m. The new line to St Andrew's Square in the New Town will cost the city about £86m per mile, but that figure too is expected to rise.

Although officials hope to strike a more competitive deal with the contractors or get more government funding, the city will have to borrow up to £231m to build the extra section of line.

The costs of that loan over the next 30 years would push the total figure beyond £1bn.
That money will be spent on building a line that will still end eight stops short of the destination agreed in 2008

There has been little public discus ion of the officially annou8nced "fixed price2 nature of the contract. Was it always a total and deliberate lie ot did TIE deliberately vitiate that contract by adding to it. I suspect the latter. Either way some group of civil servants, possibly also councillors and MSPs, engaged in deliberate financial fraud on a a massive scale ripping us off for hundreds of millions of pounds.

Yet so corrupt is Scotland's political class that not only is there no prospect of any of the thieves going to jail; not only is there no prospect of any of the thieves even being fired; but there is no prospect of any Scottish "journalist" reporting what happened.

Recent Links

2011-12-11T17:01:00.000Z

Admitted that there have been 1,500 accidents and 4 deaths in British windfarms over the last 5 years. That is 4 more than at Fukushima ; twice as many as have happened, worldwide, over the last 20 years, in the nuclear industry; 8% of all the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which is worse than even the theoretically worst accident possible with modern reactor designs. On the other hand it is only 12% of the deaths in the recent outbreak of e-colli in a German organic farm.

That is why every remotely honest broadcaster and newspaper gives hundreds of times more space to stories about windfarms being dangerous than nuclear reactors, and thousands more to organic farms. But only every singer honest one.
-------------------------------------
And talking of wholly corrupt Fascist broadcasters Christopher Booker has done well researched and footnoted report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation showing how corrupt the BBC is.

Not reported by the BBC
--------------------------------------
Anthony Jay creator of Yes Minister (mentioned many times by me) has also damned the BBC and explained how they censor and lie without technically lying. "If you believe in a free country and a free press, why do we have a state broadcasting system at all?’ he said.

We were masters of the techniques of promoting our point of view under the cloak of impartiality. The simplest was to hold a discussion between a fluent and persuasive proponent of the view you favoured, and a humourless bigot representing the other side. With a big story, like shale gas for example, you would choose the aspect where your case was strongest: the dangers of subsidence and water pollution, say, rather than the transformation of Britain’s energy supplies and the abandonment of wind farms and nuclear power stations. And you could have a ‘balanced’ summary with the view you favoured coming last: not “the opposition claim that this will just make the rich richer, but the government point out that it will create 10,000 new jobs” but “the government claim it will create 10,000 new jobs, but the opposition point out that it will just make the rich richer.” It is the last thought that stays in the mind. It is curiously satisfying to find all these techniques still being regularly used forty seven years after I left the BBC.

-------------------------------------
Cameron says of the refusal to sign the new EU treaty "It is not easy when you are in a room where people are pressing you to sign up to things because they say it is in all our interests....‘I cannot do that, it is not in our national interest, I don't want to put that in front of my parliament ” which shows that, ignoring his claims to acting out of principle, that he knows he couldn't get his party top vote it through. Had half his backbenchers not voted for a referendum he would not have done that. Had over 100,000 people not signed the e-petition producing that debate and many thousands of individuals not written/emailed/phoned their MPs to get them to stand up and had all the Tory MPs not known that UKIP were able to pick up thousands of votes in their constituencies that rebellion would not have succeeded.

Occasionally, even in our "democracy", ordinary citizens can have an effect.
-------------------------------------

The Euro default is not so new, nor the nor so much the end of the world, nor need it be stopped by a common currency.

WSJ article on the 1841 default by 8 American states. It did reduce the creditworthiness of all state governments but the US (and British banks who had put up most of the money) survived it.
------------------------------------------
Spiked on how Scotland's "anti-sectarian" law is simply an attack on both freedom of speech and the football loving working classes by Scotland's unconnected political elite.
----------------------------------------
More fraud by global warming alarmists - this time to fake a rise in sea level.

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

--------------------------------------
LudDims boasting of how donations have risen from "£571,715 in the third quarter of 2006" to "£1,199,623 between July and September this year".

Perhaps this is because of some unnoticed great rise in the party's real popularity, or because the economy is growing so well that people have more money to give away. If not the only other explanation I can think of it that at least half of all donations to parties are because the donors are buying access to those in power and the LudDims, hated as they now are, didn't have a sniff of power before. I don't like the idea of parties being funded by government on the basis of the votes they get. On the other hand I much less like the idea of them being funded by businesses, lobbyists and individuals buying the friendship of lawmakers. I love to hear of a 3rd option.
-------------------------------------

American Democrat party strategy seems to be fixed on getting the votes of the non-employed and the civil servant class, having lost a majority of the workers and just geting to get out the loyal vote. In Britain the "workers party" seems equally intent on ignoring the remaining workers, on the other hand so do the Tories, particularly in Scotland. Call it forward to basics.

Will the president hold sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials, single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white working-class voters?

-----------------------------------
Scary

Prizes - In Other Areas - They Work To

2011-12-10T17:50:00.001Z

It has been proven that when it comes to technical innovation offering prizes is 33-100 times more effective than conventional grant government funding. That governments nonetheless choose overwhelmingly to go for grants or government construction programmes suggests that "paying government employees and their friends" ) Pournelles's Iron Law, is indeed overwhelmingly the primary aim of government projects and the nominal aim no more than 3% as important.

   Prizes have the advantage of being available to anybody who can do the job and does not involve them having any government employee looking over their shoulder telling them how to do it. This incidentally proves that the Saltire Prize for developing a "commercial" sea turbine, though sold by Alex Salmond as an X-Prize isn't - the civil servants are involved at all stages in testing, their appears to be no technical specification of what "commercially viable" means (& I doubt such is possible) and a prize is going to be awarded to somebody come what may.

   So lets look at use of prizes in some other fields.

Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership
Awarded by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to African heads of state who deliver security, health, education and economic development to their constituents, and who democratically transfer power to their successor. It was sponsored by Mo Ibrahim, a businessman born in Sudan. According to Ibrahim, "Good governance is crucial." With a $5 million initial payment, plus $200,000 a year for life,

Awarded
2007 Joaquim Chissano for "his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy."
2008 Festus Mogae “President Mogae’s outstanding leadership has ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of an HIV/AIDS pandemic which threatened the future of his country and people."

2009, 2010 No award

2011 Pedro Pires' "role in making Cape Verde a "model of democracy, stability and increased prosperity".

    Which at $15 million has probably done more to produce what passes for democracy and prosperity in Africa than most of the hundreds of billions in western "aid" has over the decades. A considerably smaller amount than Tony Blair, alone has received on the US lecture circuit and elsewhere from people who approve of his support for the invasion of Iraq, but arguably Britain is more important than all of Africa.

Jerry Pounrnelle did propose, perhaps not in complete earnest, that had America, instead of invading Iraq, offered a $1 billion prize to the winner of the first democratic election in Iraq it would have become a democracy without having to spend over a trillion dollars killing people.

Crimestoppers. It Works .

when an innovative Albuquerque police officer offered a reward and the promise of anonymity for any person who could provide information to help solve a local murder, Crimestoppers was born.

The non-profit, citizen-run organization spread quickly throughout the country and beyond the borders of the United States. Today, there are Crimestoppers organizations in all 50 states and in nearly 25 countries throughout the world.

The Greater New Orleans Crimestoppers was formed in 1981, serving Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. John the Baptish, St. Charles, Plaquemines, and St. James parishes. In 26 years, the organization has helped solve more than 12,000 felony crimes and paid out more than $1,750,000 in cash rewards.

By comparison New Orleans proposes a "$119.6 million agency budget next year". So by comparison, even if we assumed the bulk of the £1.75 million was paid in the last year the conventional policing budget would be 1000 times the reward budget. By comparison Felony crimes in NO reached "a peak of 4,100 in the first half of 2009" so over 26 years around 200,000 ie 16 times the ones crimestoppers was involved in.

    Now obviously this may not be a fair comparison - the police were also involved in making the arrests crimestoppers found out about and indeed in finding supporting evidence. I suspect that the crimestoppers crimes would average more serious, if only because that means more people would know about them, but I suppose it might be the opposite. There is also always the risk of "grasses" making something up for the reward, but then that risk is probably less than that of people doing so to get early release from prison. So it would be wrong to say this proves prizes in law enforcement are 62,5 times more effective (1000/16).

    But I think it does prove that it is likely to be considerably more effective and that if we want to clear up the more serious sorts of crime increasing rewards 10 fold would be more effective than doubling the number of beat policeman. Also much cheaper.

Scientific Integrity Act

I have written on this before. This is a scientific X-Prize but of a different nature to what is normally meant.

The prize is given for finding a mathematically based technical flaw in a hypothesis which it has been proposed government policy should be based on. The obvious example is catastrophic global warming - had such a prize been available Stephen McIntyre would have won it for demolishing Mann's "Hockey Stick" theory on which the IPCC based an entire "report" except that had such a prize been available it is highly likely that somebody else would have actually checked it, not least some of the IPCC scientists, before it was officially adopted.

Nobels, Pulitzers, Turner Prize, Booker Prize, Oscars etc

These generally are not X-Prizes in that no specific technical achievement is solicited up front, nor can there be. Nonetheless they are very successful at what they do. Because they are awarded for subjective achievement they are likely to encourage the field to move in the direction the prize awarders wish and this is what we see. Personally I would say that the Oscars do tend to improve the standard of film making- most of which is, after all, aimed at the buck of hormonal teenagers. I would also say that the Turners encourage crap. These are subjective opinions (but perhaps not purely held by me). What is less subjective is that they generally succeed in doing it.

    What these prizes also do is reflect lustre on both the entire field and on the sponsors of the prize. If you want to get stamp collecting recognised as a high art or Al Gore as trustworthy the best way of doing it is to set up, a prize, of significant financial worth and an honourable name, invite the media and ensure it goes to the world's best stamp collector or whoever. The question of who will win makes it intrinsically more interesting than just hearing somebody has been given a bonus. This may encourage givingb the appearance of a competition when it is arranged in advance. For example when the RIBA held their architecture prize award in Edinburgh and the widow of the architect flew in in advance it was hardly a surprise that the prize awarded there was to our ludicrously useless Holyrood Parliament building.

   The fact that they get sponsored shows the sponsors think it better than advertising. The fact that people can believe there is an incentive to fix shows everybody thinks they work.

Here is the very limited total of mentions of X-Prizes in out Parliament

A worthwhile pdf on the potential of privately sponsored prizes

And a very worthwhile paper on why government chose grants over prizes

Prizes were a common way to patronize basic research in the eighteenth century. Science historians say grants then won over prizes because grants are a superior institution. If different patron types tend to use different patronage forms, however, perhaps the patron types who tend to use grants just became more common. To test this hypothesis, I estimate the use of prize-like vs. grant-like funding among eighteenth century scientific societies. Societies with non-autocratic, non-local government patrons were especially likely to use grant-like funding. As these are today’s dominant patrons of basic research, eighteenth century data successfully predicts current patronage forms....

a statistical model has been constructed to predict the combinations of grant-like and prize-like patronage among eighteenth century scientific societies. This model successfully predicts today’s dominant form of basic research patronage, mostly grant-like and not prize-like, and such predictions rely more on patron types than on a proxy for scientific professionalization....I have suggested that such governments might prefer grant-like funding to prize-like funding because they were susceptible to distributive pressures from leaders of scientific societies, who preferred the “pork” of increased discretion over the money that passed through theirhands.

My conclusion is that prizes generally are a superior way of achieving objective than government prepayment. There are building projects where there is one site and a choice must be made in advance, where fixed price contracts are the only applicable option. There are cases, like High Court Judges, where one would not wish money to be a consideration in decision making. However in general prizes should be the preferred option and in almost all fields some expansion of the proportion of resources spent on prizes vis a vis conventional funding should be made.

UPDATE - Jerry Pournelle, from whom I & I suspect everybody else, first learned of X-Prizes has linked to this and also given me a 2nd mention today.

Remember That Irish Economic Collapse?

2011-12-09T14:56:00.000Z

   Remember the coverage it got on our state media? Remember all the statist politicians who were so very smug that Ireland's low corporation tax, light government regulation economy had hit the buffers?

I blogged previously on how Jack McConnell, when asked why, having so often promised to make growing the economy his "first priority|" had not done so, when Ireland had proven 7% annual growth achievable said "3 years ago that would have been a difficult question to answer" but Ireland's recession no longer made it difficult.

   In fact Ireland's collapse was nothing to do with the economic basics. It was because they (A) were stuck in the Euro, which in the good times led to lots of rich Germans deciding it was a good investment and (B) the Irish government making a very silly 100% guarantee of their banks so that when they collapsed the ordinary Irish had to pay off the rich Germans and being in the Euro were unable to devalue as normal countries (including us) do and had to accept lots of German bureaucrats vetoing anything their government wants to do.

   Well despite the collapse (a collapse to a GDP still higher than ours, though they started at 60% of our per capita GNP) and despite an enormous drain from the debt they accepted the basics are still good and growth is still there. Albeit not as high as it used to be but still far better than ours.

There are signs of improvement. Compared with the previous year, exports are up 5.4 per cent for the first nine months of 2011, fuelled by gains from Pfizer, Intel, SAP and other multinational companies that were drawn to Ireland in the 1990s and 2000s by its low taxes, well-educated English-speaking workforce and access to the European market.

New information technology companies like LinkedIn and Facebook have recently arrived.

Prospects for local technology companies are improving, too. Brian Farrell founded Tethras with a partner three years ago to develop mobile applications for smartphones.

He now has 16 employees and hopes to double his workforce in the next 18 months.

Gross domestic product grew 1.2 per cent in the second quarter from a year earlier, compared with a decline of 0.4 per cent for all of 2010 and seven per cent in 2009.

Strangely enough the state controlled British broadcast media has been far less enthusiastic about reporting this evidence of free market success.

Proof that economic freedom always works. There has been excuse after excuse by British politicians for not learning the lesson - Ireland's boom will end soon; they are just playing catch up and will stop when they get to our GNP; yes it would have worked had we started back then when they did but it won't now (Wendy Alexander|).

    For balance I should point out that the Irish government have downgraded their forecasts of growth, though still to better than ours, on the basis that the Euro's problems are not being solved. Britain did downgrade our growth forecasts, following a fall in "growth" but unlike their's our current lower forecasts are predicated on the Euro troubles being solved. Believe whoever you think more competent.

   This is not to say Ireland are doing everything perfectly. They should quit the Euro, let the currency fall and thereby inflate away the debt.

Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Economic Growth

   They have a serious problem that they are one of the very few developed countries with a worse GNP to electricity ratio than us (7.75 as against 6.14) because they are even more anti-nuclear than Britain and pouring money into windmills. If they do nothing this will get worse, if only because some of it comes from Hunterston in Scotland and not only is Scotland going to be short soon but Hunterston was due to close this year and cannot have its life extended by political fiat forever. In the circumstances we are not in a position to enjoy schadenfreude over that.

   However if they could achieve 7% growth for years before entangling them selves in the Euro our politicians have no excuse for not doi8ng the same. And if they were seriously held back by an an energy policy (or more properly anti-energy policy) similar to ours they could change it and achieve even higher growth at any time.

   So could we.

Not Just The Norwegians Who Have Tunnels - Faroe Islands

2011-12-08T14:13:00.000Z

The Faroe Islands are run, autonomously, by Denmark. They are roughly mid way between Scotland, Iceland and Norway. They have a population of 49,276.

  They also have 18 separate tunnels connecting their communities and islands. This is the same number as I have proposed and the Scottish government have refused within Scotland. OK I grant most of mine are dual carriageways and average longer but then again Scotland's population is over 100 times larger.

Here is the list
Hvalbiartunnilin 1963 1,450 4,760 Hvalba and Trongisvágur

Árnafjarðartunnilin 1965 1,680 5,510 Klaksvík and Árnafjørður One of the pair of Borðoyartunlarnir that connect Klaksvík with the eastern side of Borðoy and with the island Viðoy. Single lane, no lights.
Hvannasundstunnilin 1967 2,120 6,960 Árnafjørður and Hvannasund/Norðdepil One of the pair of Borðoyartunlarnir. It has only a single lane and no lights. There's one priority direction, with a series of passing places on the other side.
Sandvíkartunnilin 1969 1,500 4,900 Sandvík and Hvalba
Norðskálatunnilin 1976 2,520 8,270 Norðskáli and the valley Millum Fjarða
Leynartunnilin 1977 760 2,490 Leynar and the valley Kollfjarðardalur
Villingardalstunnilin 1979 1,193 3,914 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Ritudalstunnilin 1980 683 2,241 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Mikladalstunnilin 1980 1,082 3,550 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Trøllanestunnilin 1985 2,248 7,375 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
- 1979–85 220 720 The villages Trøllanes, Mikladalur, Húsar and the uninhabited valley Djúpidalur One of the five Kalsoyartunlarnir
Leirvíkartunnilin 1985 2,238 7,343 Leirvík and Gøta
Kunoyartunnilin 1988 3,031 9,944 Kunoy and Haraldssund
Kollfjarðartunnilin 1992 2,816 9,239 Kollafjørður and Kaldbaksbotnur
Sumbiartunnilin 1997 3,240 10,630 Sumba and Lopra
Vágatunnilin 2002 4,940 16,210 Leynar and Fútaklett
Gásadalstunnilin 2006 1,445 4,741 Gásadalur and Bøur
Norðoyatunnilin 2006 6,186 20,295 Klaksvík and Leirvík
Hovstunnilin 2007 2,435 7,989 Øravík and Hov

Looking at the longest - the recently completed Norðoyatunnilin (Northern Isle's Tunnel) of 6,300 m, which is 2.5 times the length of current Forth Bridge. It connects the city of Klaksvik, pop 4615 with the mere town of Leirvik pop 876. Which sets Edinburgh, presumably a mere village, in its place.

Norðoyatunnilin

   So, bearing in mind that John Swinney said we couldn't cut a Forth tunnel for under £6.6 billion, how much did this tunnel cost. £395 million Danish Kroner which is £45.4 million, (£6.9 million per km) - more expensive than Norway, but then as anybody in the Scottish Highlands knows, costs in remote areas go up with "the freight" and this is very remote compared to even the most remote part of Scotland.. It is still 0.068 of what the Scottish government say they can do a tunnel, half the length but dualled, for beside the capital city.

   Apart from the general pleasure of poking fun at our parasitic political numptocracy who are incapable of matching the achievements of communities less than 100th as large, is the fact that the Norwegian achievement has been matched elsewhere. Norway and Denmark are separate countries, albeit both Scandinavian (a club Salmond is eager to shoehorn Scotland into)and if they can both do it nobody can credibly claim it can't be done here.

  If the will is there.

I know that Mike Russell's public support for tunnels is based on having seen the Faroes example. Perhaps all the Hollyrood MSPs, or at least the Transport Committee, should go and see the reality the civil servants say is impossible for themselves.

Google Faroe tunnels images

£60 Billion Promise From The SNP - What A Load Of Bollocks

2011-12-07T16:12:00.001Z

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

   Over the next 20 years.

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

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

    Fortunately this is all obvious political flannel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Could Get Out Of Recession In Days - 24 Point Programme Published

2011-12-06T12:22:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

Dalgety Bay - Scotsman Letter

2011-12-05T12:03:00.000Z

This letter in the Scotsman today

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

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

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

Herman Cain - A fine Candidate Who Could Only Be Removed by Smear

2011-12-04T16:28:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many more human sacrifices must there be?

E-Petition on Yugoslav War Crimes Finally Accepted.

2011-12-03T13:23:00.000Z

WAR CRIMES, GENOCIDE AND WORSE: DEBATE THE DRAGODAN MASSACRE, THE DISSECTION OF 1,800 LIVING PEOPLE, ETHNIC CLEANSING OF 350,000 AND THE MEDIA CENSORSHIP OF IT.
When NATO occupied Kosovo we undertook to run a secure non-racist regime, disarm the KLA and prevent them carrying out atrocities. Instead we immediately swore them in as police, allowed to carry out massacres, such as the murder of 210 civilans outside the British Military HQ at Dragodan, in the British occupation zone (acknowledged in Parliament and under the FoI http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2008/01/dragodan-massacre-freedom-of_23.html ); the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 civilians; kidnapping thousands of schoolgirls and boys to sell to brothels (attested by a British officer and, years later, by Amnesty Int); and the dissection, while still alive, of 1,800 people to sell body parts (now acknowledged by the Council of Europe). Parliament should acknowledge and debate such atrocities & consider whether the war against Yugoslavia was in any way defencive, since otherwise, under the principles we endorsed at the Nuremburg Trials, it is unambigouusly criminal.
---------------------------------------------------------------

I put this up on 1th Oct, 10th Oct, 14th Oct, 28th Oct, 18th Nov and 29th Nov. It was officially rejected twice and disappeared on the other occasions. The official and different reasons for rejection are posted below and readers may decide for themselves if they are valid.

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

and then

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

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

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

Dalgety Bay - Parliament's Adjournment Debate

2011-12-02T16:32:00.000Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scotsman Letter - Government Have A Duty To Act As Competent Managers

2011-12-01T14:58:00.000Z

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

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

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

We Could Get Out of Recession in Days if the Politicians Wanted - 24 Point Programme

2011-11-30T12:49:00.000Z

   Yesterday's mini-budget says that we aren't going to get rid of the deficit in this Parliament; that we are flatlining rather than growing; that the disastrous ever growing deficit the Conservatives, correctly, predicted Labour would produce has been produced by them; and that their current predictions are based on the improbable assumption that the slow motion collapse of the Euro will stop, otherwise things will get worse than even the OECD's prediction of deepening recession. John Redwood today points out that far from cutting anything the government has actually increased the state sector by 1/2% of GNP and reduced the private one, on which all hopes for growth have been publicly laid, by the same.

   None of this is inevitable. It is perfectly possible to get out of recession within days and all the political leaders know it. I first pointed out how in 2008 in 11 points (and sent it to all the parties, none of whom disputed it would work or indeed noticed it in any other way|) and expanded it to 16 later that year with the same effect. In 2010, following Cameron's promise of a "relentless forensic focus on growth" I sent an updated list of 23 things that would work and a subsequent FoI proved that they had relentlessly refused to give the slightest "forensic" consideration to such growth whatsoever.

   In conclusion there is no dispute whatsoever by any elected politician that these would work and that if even a few of them were done we would be out of recession very quickly. Nor is there the slightest intention to do so. I initially assumed that each one, at least of the 1st 16, would increase growth by at least 2%, based on the Irish experience of cutting corporation tax and building regulations. If all 24 (I have added a new one at the end) were done I'm not sure we would achieve 48% annual growth but it would certainly be world beating.

   Here they are again. I will, again, send them to all the parties and various individual politicians and think tanks and will be happy to publish any responses, including criticisms, any of them feel able to make. If they can't dispute, in any way, that they would work we must assume they agree they would. That implies that all those who have the power to promote this and don't simply and deliberately do not want us out of recession because hard times for us help them "to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety". (Mencken)
________________________________________

1 - Cut the size of government spending - I would go for a no new hires rule & price freeze in the government, probably excluding new doctors & a few other proven front line requirements - this should be about a 5% real reduction year on year. Also completely prune particular departments described later. 5% of the budget is £30 billion so including both actions over a couple of years that is probably about £100 billion. Mark Wadsworth comes up with a similar figure from different directions. This doesn't itself increase the economy, indeed cutting the non-productive £100 billion would cut the economy by £100 billion (ie 7%) but gives us money which can be used with a real multiplier effect & long term growth benefits.
2 - Cut corporation tax to Irish levels - cost about £30 billion & this is the main bit of what got Ireland's growth up from 2% to 7%.
3 - Lets go overboard & cut business rates too - about £20 billion at half the effect.
4 - Gut the Health & Safety Exec - if it saves the work of 4 million workers that is 14% of the economy.
5 - Allow the free market to build as many nuclear plants as the market needs, starting tomorrow. There are arguments for & against the government paying for & owning it but lets keep it simple & at zero cost.
6 - Improve transport - better roads, particularly motorway junctions, allowing airports to expand & the road tunnels project. Cost a few billion. Improving transport infrastructure is one of the things where government expenditure actually works.
7 - Adult job training. Hire retiring plumbers, electricians etc etc to do evening classes in some of the schools empty in the evenings. Adult, particularly male, technical education is the part of education which shows real worthwhile payoff in productivity.
8 - Automate the rail system & introduce lightweight vehicles based on road vehicle technology. My guess is this would be about £10 billion annually but once it is done rail costs go way down & capacity way up.
9 - Quit the EU. The Bruges Group have said the EU costs us £55 billion in direct costs. The EU's Enterprise Commissioner says the regulations alone cost £405 billion - ie £67 billion to us.
10 - Allow almost unrestricted housebuilding & encourage modular methods. This should let them cost about 1/4 the present price. Housebuilding is pretty much the biggest industry in any country & that would give us an enormous boost.
11 - End most of the sort of "environmental" regulations which have stopped Trump investing his £1 billion here for 3 years. This alone has cost the Exchequer £360 billion (£12% a year).
12 - This has already been done, albeit accidentally & need not be extended - Letting the £ drop is a major stimulus to the productive sector though exports. It worked in Major's time too - also accidentally.
13 - An X-Prize foundation & a free market regime on Ascension Island as a British Space base. So long as the Foundation is guaranteed an increasing amount of money at approx 5% above the rate of growth & able to offer prizes based on what the fund will be in future it can offer multiples of the current cost & in turn the gain to the economy will be multiples of that figure. Of course if nobody wins such prizes it has zero cost - that being the worst case scenario. I would suggest £1 billion a year as starting payment which would certainly put us at the top of the space & high technology trees attracting many times that level of investment & even more importantly, many of the world's best brains.
14 - I see that though we have saved £155 billion plus we have only spent about £70 billion. Put the rest into cutting taxes (28p off income tax or equivalent!). I would also support raising alcohol taxes since it discourages something socially damaging whereas most tax discourages productive stuff. It wouldn't take many years of excise duty rising faster than a Chinese style growth rate to pay for all the size of government here.
- These are 2 a bit of a flyer not to be done till we know the economy is recovering:
15 - Build some floating islands, probably around Ascension island, probably about £1 billion each.
16 - Make a purchase guarantee for a factory to mass produce turnkey operation nuclear reactors in Britain, for use here & around the world. If it can be done with a new design & much smaller & hence less economic reactors it can be done for normal 1 gw ones. Invite the best designer, probably Ariva or Westinghouse (which used to be British owned but the government forced British nuclear to sell it off). We guarantee that if they can make a production line turning out one, turnkey operation reactor, a day we will purchase the first 2 years supply at cost if they can't sell them abroad. Assuming £350 million (70% of the current minimum price) a shot that puts us on line for a £255 billion liability & I am working on the assumption that, since there is currently a backlog they would actually sell. That is a bet but a reasonable one & if it works we would lead ourselves & the rest of the world to unequalled prosperity & end up with the sort of role in building the world's electrical power that the US has exercised for decades in world aircraft production.

17 - Government should recognise that, vital though the free market is, a strategy of promoting technology is at least equally so. Strategy of Technology by Possony, Pournelle & Kane should be required reading for anybody involved, as it has been for US officers for many years. It is about the need for society to promote technological goals to achieve military supremacy, as indeed they did when the USSR found it could not match the technology of the SDI programme. The authors had been decisive in promoting SDI. However the same principles apply equally, if not moreso, in the economic field where our most aggressive competitors are China & India & our only major advantage is technology.
18 - Beyond an official technology prizes foundation (#12) mainly orientated on space technology, the government should give extensive tax relief for any privately funded technology prizes. Prizes mean that though government can choose to have winners, simply by putting up enough prizes, they don't have to try to pick the winners in advance as grant funding does. Private prizes have the additional benefit that people thinking outside the traditional government "box" can come up with ideas & promote them. This is less important for space development where the technological challenges are mainly engineering & the problems well understood. By comparison pure science prizes, like the M-Prize whose importance to aging research cannot easily be underestimated, has achieved repeated successes with funding which government would consider insufficient to carry as pocket change.
19 - Adopt as an aim that 2% of our GNP should be available for these private & public X-Prizes. Most of this could come from a reduction in grants, it would certainly lead to a far more than 2% increase in GNP (probably much more than a 2% increase in the annual rate of GNP growth) & would do far more for British status worldwide & long term security than the 3% of GNP spent on the military. The evidence is that prizes are 30-100 times as cost effective as the normal government grants & advance payments. If they don't produce results obviously no prize is awarded so that is infinitely more cost effective :-)
20 - Stop subsidising windmillery. One major driver of successful economics is inexpensive & plentiful energy. Windmills (& other "renewables") are both expensive & intermittent & are virtually a recipe for economic decline. If there were any truth to the catastrophic warming scare far & away the best way of cutting CO2 would be by nuclear power. That the "environmental"/Luddite lobby is overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear is clear & apparently indisputable evidence (at least they refuse to dispute it) that they themselves believe their catastrophe story is untrue.
21 - Encourage the production of an international HVDC grid. Putting up cables immediately to Norway, Iceland, Canada & Russia could be done faster than completing several new reactors & would prevent the probability of blackouts. Since all 4 of these countries have some of the world's cheapest electricity while we have some of the most expensive the advantages of being able to trade are obvious. In the longer term an international grid would have all the advantages & more* that the national grid had over the 1920s local production. *More being that, because demand is closely linked to daytime, off-peak electricity can be sold across time zones. Starting such a grid would not only help the British economy & put us at the centre of a major new trading market, but keep the rest of the world, or at least all countries that chose to participate, out of recession too.
22 - Hold a top level scientific conference, inviting real scientists, including Nobel winners, not administrators, to produce a definitive position on whether the no lower threshold (LNT) theory on radiation damage, or the competing one called hormesis, which says it is beneficial, is true. So long as it was a real scientific, evidence based, symposium I have no doubt that the LNT theory would be discredited since there is no actual evidence for it. The effect of this on discouraging anti-nuclear hysteria can hardly be underestimeated.
23 - Set up a British space base on Thule & use it to launch spacecraft allowing Britain to reach "Mars by 2015, Saturn by 2020" or earlier. This was originally costed at $1 billion in the 1960s & current costs, amortised over a decade, are easily affordable. The economic benefits of controlling the universe are considerable, if difficult to fully quantify immediately.

24 - Remove all specific controls over the exploitation of shale gas; publicly declare that all the evidence is that it is far safer than, for example, windmills; and that the government will use its national interest powers over planning to ensure any shale gas exploration and development will go ahead without interference. The technological brealthrough that has allowed us to reach deep buried shale gas is causing an energy revolution, Brtiain clearly has been gifted with enormous potential in this and we should ensure that no country in the world is a better place for the free market to develop this wealth.

Dalgety Beach Mess - Gordon Brown Steps In

2011-11-29T14:32:00.000Z

Gordon Brown has said he intends to speak in favour of forcing the Armed Forces to pay millions in Danegeld to the SEPA fraudsters "clean up" campaign.

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown will use a parliamentary debate on Wednesday to demand the MoD takes responsibility for radiation found on Dalgety Bay beach.

The article does read like he is a complete stuffed shirt who has been filled up with SEPA's lies and set off. Brown has previous in putting his constituency ahead of the national interest (which to be fair is part of an MP's job but not a Minister's). He authroised the building of 2 new aircraft carriers to be outfitted at Rosyth in his constituency. It was decided, when the Tories came in, that the penalty clauses he had put in would make it more expensive to cancel the carriers than to build them both and immediately mothball one of them at a cost of $4.5 billion. That now seems to have been a false economy.

The UK Government’s plans for a new generation of aircraft carriers have been branded an “eye-watering” mess after a cross-party investigation uncovered billions of pounds in extra costs.
Britain will have no aircraft carrier capability until 2020 and costs have climbed from £3.65bn to more than £6bn....
“We’ll have fewer aircraft carriers and they won’t have full operational capacity until 2030 – what a mess.”....
“Changes to the aircraft carriers and the aircraft flying from them in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review have changed the risks and costs involved in ways that are not fully understood.
“Rather than two carriers, available from 2016 and 2018, at a cost of £3.65bn, we will now spend more than £6bn, get one operational carrier and have no aircraft carrier capability until 2020 – almost a decade.
“The second carrier will be mothballed, while the operational carrier will be available at sea for only 150 to 200 days a year. On top of that, the technology to enable the new aircraft to fly from the carrier is untested.

“The newly constructed ship will have to undergo immediate modification and the costs of this will not be known until December 2012.

His position on this "radium" was announced by the BBC yesterday as being him personally having called a debate though it seems more an end of day statement than a debate.

Wednesday 30 November
At the end of the sitting: Adjournment: Mr Gordon Brown: Radiation at Dalgety Bay.

While fixing the aircraft carrier contracts have probably brought in several million £s in wage packets to his constituency I don't think this scam is in the interests of anybody but the SEPA bureaucratic empire builders. Dalgety Bay is a rather nice, middle class, growing new town. It is a dormitory suburb for Edinburgh, being close to the Forth bridge and attractive to those who work in Edinburgh but wish to live across the Firth from the city.

the town is a regular winner of the Best Kept Small Town title. Its rise in population mirrors its rise in popularity as a coastal commuter town.

The last thing a place like that needs is a fact free and therefore unremovable, permanent reputation as being polluted by an undetectable poison. Such scares are remembered for a long time. It is unlikely that, even if the Armed forces were to spend the necessary millions digging up the beach (and putting the debris where?) that this would do more to convince that the "threat" was over than that there must have been something to it in the first place.

Dalgety Bay - 2 Freedom of Information Queries.

2011-11-28T15:37:00.000Z

From a point raised by Steuart Campbell about what happened to all the other aircraft.

SEPA
Dear Byron Tilly or current occupant,
                                                          Please consider this another Freedom of Information request.

      Assuming SEPA have been running your investigation into alleged manmade radioactivity at Dalgety Bay in the proper scientific manner the very first thing you must have done is to determine the number of aircraft destroyed at that beach; weight of paint required to paint the numbers on each of the dials in such aircraft; and the proportion of paint that consists of radium since this gives a figure for the maximum possible amount of radium released at the time, without which no serious investigation could proceed. Certainly;y the solubility of the paint and/or its removal from the scene in the form of smoke during the burning and erosion and weathering over the subsequent 65 years would be expected to reduce it much further but at least you will have thereby established the maximum possible theoretical exposure. I would therefore like to know these 3 figures.

     Secondly, since any serious scientific investigation of substances requires a control example you must have carried out a similar investigation into the radioactivity level of a comparable and presumably adjoining beach. I would like to know what beach was chosen, what the background reading were at each and the the ratio of man-hours invested to particle found at each. I have previously asked for similar information to this latter part in an FoI but you refused to answer. I wish to point out that you do have a legal duty to give responsive responses to all such queries.

Please also acknowledge receipt of this email.

=============================

Ministry of Defence.
Sir,
      In December 1944 Britain had 14.500 aircraft in Europe. I assume it would be several thousand more before hostilities ended. Almost all of these would have had radioactive paint on their dials that, alone, would make nighttime flight possible. Almost all of these have since been decommissioned. I wish to make a Freedom of Information enquiry to know the sites at which such decommissioning took place and the numbers at each site. I would also like to know if there was any body ensuring that dials from these aircraft were kept separate and sent to the Atomic Energy Authority (or similar body existing at the time) for permanent storage and how many of those they have in storage now.

       I would also like to know the volume of paint and the amount of that that was radium rather than fixative agents, purchased by the RAF during WW2. I realise that unfortunately the large majority of night bombers were lost over various German cities so the amount subsequently decommission would be a fraction of that.
==============================

      It seems likely that if SEPA are correct about Dalgety beach needing to be declared permanently unfit for human beings to visit so must the Ruhr.

Dalgety Bay - Still Less Than 2/3rds As Radioactive As Aberdeen But SEPA Intend to Impose Blight - is anywhere safe?

2011-11-26T14:52:00.001Z

One interesting thing about the Dalgety Bay radiation fraud is that, with the exception of the BBC, who push it relentlessly despite, or possibly because, they know SEPA's history of fraud here, the rest of the media are giving it minimal coverage.

Unfortunately this also means they have the excuse to censor any factual reporting on the subject too. Thus, this letter I sent a few days ago to all and sundry appears to have gone unpublished.

It seems SEPA are now threatening to permanently close off the beach at Dalgety Bay in their empire building campaign to ramp up false fears about radioactivity. SEPA have previously been caught telling at least 2 major lies on the subject.
Firstly claiming, on the BBC, to have made studies of the radioactive materials and chemically proven them to be made of paint. Repeated FoI searches have proven that no such finding of paint particles has ever been made.
Secondly to have found "radium and its daughter elements" in the beach rock. In fact the "daughter element" that radium breaks down into is radon - a gas not a rock. The scientific illiteracy required to make such a silly claim is obvious.
The aforementioned FoI enquiries have brought to light the fact that their consultants did, years ago, tell them that "the highest reading recorded at Dalgety Bay was still less than 2/3rds that found in a typical Aberdeen street".

Everywhere has natural radiation. A square mile of earth at Dalgety Bay will contain 3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium and 1 gram of natural radium because that is what every average square mile on the planet contains. By comparison the possible presence of less than a gram of water soluble paint, only a small fraction of which was actually radium, from the figures on the dials of a few aircraft 66 years ago is immeasurably small. Indeed SEPA have, despite their claims, been wholly unable to find any trace of it.

Beyond that there is no evidence whatsoever that radiation, up to well beyond the higher rates found in Aberdeenshire, causes any harm whatsoever, indeed the balance of scientific evidence strongly supports the view that such levels are beneficial to health. Though the sort of ignorant bureaucrats who do not know the "daughter element" of radium is a gas, have long pushed the theory radiation, even well below the naturally occurring level, being dangerous no honest scientist anywhere in the world agrees.

It is disgraceful that the local people are being frightened and may be permanently deprived of their beach to promote what anybody scientifically literate in SEPA must know to be a false, though newsworthy, scare.

Refs - Dalgety radiation less than 2/3rds background in Aberdeen http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/dalgety-bay-my-reply.html

- Radioactives in soil http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/05/radium-at-dalgety-bay-guest-article-on.html

- scientific illiteracy undenied by SEPA http://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/roundup/articles/2009/06/11/388386

- SEPA threaten publicly funded legal action "reserve its position" if anybody says anything untrue about them http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2009/02/sepas-reaction.html so clearly they accept I haven't.

The problem is that if the Armed Forces refuse to be browbeaten into paying Danegeld out of our limited Defence budget for what they must also know to be a deliberate fraud SEPA may well have painted themselves into the corner of having to permanently close off this beach and subject the entire area to "eco-scare blight". Indeed SEPA seem to be driving full tilt for that scenario.

"SEPA believes that the Ministry of Defence is responsible for the radioactive material present at Dalgety Bay, and as such Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) is the responsible party in terms of remediation. SEPA will continue to work constructively and co-operatively with DIO, but as the regulator SEPA has a specific role under the Radioactive Contaminated Land Regulations (RCL) to assess the fitness of the proposals of the responsible party for the protection of the environment and human health."
If this does not happen, SEPA intends to designate the area as RCL by the end of March 2012.

This is an effect of Scotland having a newspaper industry that is so very far from the perceived role of the press - to report what the powerful and particularly those in government are doing against our interests - and a broadcast media whose "news" exists purely to promote state propaganda, even when they specifically know it to be dishonest.

    This has happened before. After Chernobyl government inspectors inspected sheep farms and found a background radiation level comparable to what might be expected in an Aberdeen street. This was announced to be caused by Chernobyl and the farms were forbidden to sell the mutton until such time as the radiation decreased. Fairly quickly the radiation did decrease at Chernobyl because highly radioactive isotopes do burn out quickly - that is why they are highly radioactive thus in Chernobyl today radiation levels are "less than those of being in an aircraft flying at 30,000 ft". But the sheep farm radiation did not decline this steeply proving it simply could not be from Chernobyl and must be background radiation that has been there for many millions of years. But it is the nature of government that they do not admit error so some of these farmers are still being deprived.

   As with Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and virtually every other instance we find the anti-nuclear scare campaign has been orders of magnitude more damaging than any radiation release.

   To put the silence, implying consent, by the Scottish traditional media in its place, the always sensible online Register is, as always, sensible.

Radiation TERROR on Scottish beach! Except it's quite safe

...Well no, absolutely not: the so-called "contamination" which has been found at Dalgety Bay is insignificant as beach pollution goes. You would create a similar "hazard" by throwing a few thousand completely legal luminous watches into the sea there. You could keep the most radioactive "particle" yet found in your home forever in complete safety. ...

UPDATE Steuart Campbell has made this obvious point I had not thought of.

What I wonder is what happened to all the radioactive dials of other WW2 aircraft. Surely Dalgety Bay was not the repository of all the UK's redundant aircraft.

Constitutional Amendments 15 Public Commissions To Cut Wasteful Government

2011-11-25T16:52:00.001Z

Heinlein once said that the way to be a successful writer was to take ideas from other genres, take them across state lines and file off the numbers (actually his SF could never owe anything important to another genre). In that spirit I am taking an idea straight from Jerry Pournelle and translating it into British:

Establish two commissions whose job is to recommend practices that ought to be eliminated on the grounds that we can’t afford them, or never needed them in the first place.

1 - The commissioners should not be government employees, and ought to be paid no more than £100 a day consulting fee and £30 a day expenses. Let it be a typical commission, with 2 members appointed by the Prime Minister, 1 each from the 3 most important parliamentary committees, 1 by the house of |Lords and one by the finance minister of the fastest growing Commonwealth country (aka Singapore). The whole thing shouldn’t cost more than $2 million a year. Any federal position that a majority of the commission recommends for elimination is automatically unfunded unless explicitly refunded by Parliament. If Parliament doesn’t restore the position, that position is redundant and that task is no longer performed.
2 - A second Jobsworth Commission. This one is to consist of 100 persons, the first 50 chosen to match the population distribution and other fifty to be selected with no such loading. They are to be selected by lot from a pool of volunteers who have high speed Internet connection. The Commission meets on-line once a week for four hours. Once a year it meets in London, expenses to be reimbursed. Each commissioner gets a laptop computer and conferencing software, and the government pays for high speed Internet connectivity for the year. Same rules: if 51 Commissioners agree that a government regulatory activity is needless, then that activity is defunded, and those who perform that service are declared redundant. (Civil service rules for redundant employees apply.) Parliament can restore any of those activities and positions, but if it does not, it goes.

The Commissions probably won’t do a lot, but they will at least get rid of the ridiculously obvious, and over time the various government activities will be examined and debated.

Because so much of the benefit is over time it must be a permanent feature of our constitution.

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

In the same post Jerry also suggested this.

change all the rules for small business exemptions from regulations by doubling the maximum number of employees you can have for the exemption. There are a number of regulations that apply only to businesses with fewer than 10 employees; make that number 20. There are other regulations that apply only to this with more than 50 employees. Make that 100. Etc. The first time I proposed this I got mail saying it was useless because there aren’t any successful small businesses willing to expand but prevented by the threat of regulation. I have considerable evidence to the contrary; and besides, if there are no such businesses, then there won’t be any consequences of adopting this. In fact, though, I am quite sure there are many businesses successful enough to expand that would do so if the regulations weren’t so onerous.

I did enthusiastically agree with this, which quite obviously would be simple; probably very effective; and even if it wasn't, have no economic downside (like X-Prizes). It was gently explained to me that this would be entirely impossible because most of these are required or supported by the EU and they wouldn't allow it.

I accept the logic of that and consider it further proof we would be better off out.

PS When I started this series it was aimed at the US Constitution. However our political system only diverged from their's in 1776 and it fits well here and over time the focus has shifted to what we shoukld be doing. This makes the title outdated but so what.

Dan Hannan says ECONOMIC FREEDOM + CHEAP ENERGY = ECONOMIC GROWTH

2011-11-25T12:34:00.001Z

Last night on Question Time, Dan Hannan MSP and one of the small minority of sane Conservatives. during the answering of BBC selected question whether this government was, as promised, the "greenest ever" (his answer was unfortunately yes) said

to get the economy growing cutting regulations, reducing the size of government, ending planning restriction s would all work but "the one thing guaranteed to produce it is cheap energy"

    He went on to say, correctly, that the only thing giving the American economy any buoyancy is the technical breakthrough allowing them to recover cheap shale gas. He was sufficiently politer not to mention that the energy minister of his own government, Chris Huhne, has gone on record to say he will prevent any extensive development of shale gas in Britain because it would be cheaper than windmill electricity, even after the enormous subsidy.

   There was also discussion of the reduction in the subsidy of "renewable" solar power but unfortunately nobody gave any figures. The current subsidy being anything up to 43.3p per kwh while actually creating nuclear power costs 2.2p a unit.

   Dan's statement seems to be only the 2nd acknowledgement of the fact that ECONOMIC FREEDOM + CHEAP ENERGY = ECONOMIC GROWTH. The other being Jim Mather who is the intelligent Minister in the SNP government (it is possible there is a second but not his equal) but he remains alone in a government specifically committed to destroying the cheapest 80% of our electric power capacity.

    Still an interesting small step towards sanity.

Links Proving "Environmentalists" to be Corrupt Thieving Liars.

2011-11-24T18:23:00.000Z

Imprisonment Costs "£40,000" in the UK, £14,922 USA & £9,775 in Korea

2011-11-23T14:34:00.000Z

On Newsnight Scotland last night Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Minister, said that imprisoning people costs £40,000 a year. I thought I would check if this is the necessary cost by comparing with elsewhere. Not that easy because there seems to be far more material about the cost of imprisonment to those incarcerated than to society. However I found this.

expenditure on the prison system
Australia $124.8 per person/day in Aus dollars = £28,470
Denmark 1307 million crowns among 3597 prisoners= £135,584 = £89,000
Malta LM 590,000 among 200 = £7023
New Zealand NZ35,000 per person = £16,754
South Korea US$337 million among 55.159 = £9775
England and Wales £1509 million among 37.900 = £39,815 in 1995

Scotland "£40,000"
USA $23,876 per person = £14,922

The figures given in the first link are around the mid 1990s so you could probably about double them, though the US ones are more current, which suggests MacAskill's figures only included running costs (the England and Wales ones were total budget which includes new building).

First lets acknowledge that these comparisons aren't very good. Nonetheless it is clear that the costs of imprisoning people in developed countries is extremely variable and that, with the predictable exception of Denmark, ours are very much at the high end - nearly 2.7 that in the US which is not the lowest.

It cannot be assumed that the cost variations are inherent in the general difficulty of imprisoning different nationalities ao it must be the political establishment. We could have far lower imprisonment costs if that were desired.

What doing this article has also shown is how very little transparency there is in such figures. Many of the countries on the first link simply did not give figures and there seems to be nobody currently collating them. I do. Lack of transparency normally goes with price padding. High imprisonment costs are then, with an appearance of reasonability, used to justify not imprisoning people or extremely short sentences. Limited though this comparison has proven to be it is clear that this is another area where British government costs could easily be halved, probably much more, if the will was there.

Perhaps that would mean fewer prisoners being rehabilitated. On the other hand perhaps it would mean more. The penal quangos and fakecharities do keep promising us that another programme will cut crime levels but their last promises don't seem to have worked and promises from people who don't favour transparency on the subject should not be taken seriously.

Engineering Competent Government

2011-11-22T16:04:00.000Z

You can't push rope
You can't pull concrete
Water runs downhill - usually

I was once told that these are the most basic rules of engineering

It strikes me there may be analogs if anybody hopes to make government as reliable as engineering. Actually I suspect these rules go back further than the ancient Greeks so the "science" of government has a long way to go but you start where you are. So lets try.

prepaid grants don't work, prizes do
- Grants mean you pay up front and hope the resuts will appear but human minds, being flexible (like rope)can't be pushed into a result, only pulled by the offer of reward. This fits with Professor Kealey's challenge to find any government funded research which has been profitable and my belief I have answered it with various technology prizes. Almost all government funding is through grants (prizes being open to all means they lose the power of holding a patronage monopoly) and I accept his evidence that they don't work, or even have a negative effect but that does not mean an entirely different state funding system doesn't - and the evidence for prizes, both state and private, seems overwhelming.

you can't hold society together by treating different groups differently
- In the same way that concrete doesn't have the inherent strength to hold itself together putting state money into only one part of society or enforcing the laws so that they don't apply equally to everybody is bound to fracture society. That applies whether we are talking about the Unionists in Northern Ireland; blacks browns and other ethnics sverywhere; women (though a society which fractures entirely on gender has never existed); aristocracy; state employees V free market; or indeed the police arresting the EDL to protect far worse criminality by the Occupists; or the state media censoring UKIP and promoting the much smaller Green party.

States that spend more than they earn run out of other people's money
- This one is so obvious and so well reflected in the headlines as not to need explanation. However just as the instances where engineers find water doesn't run downhill is when they want it to, so sometimes those who have saved not spent find they lose too by the debauching of the currency.

Since the rules of mathematics workm in every discipline I suspect that many of the most basic rules of thumb in many disciplines will have analogs in the "science" of government. If the practice of government were not far more backward than that of any of the real science one would not expect relatively simple comparisons like this to work but it is. I would be interested in examples.

Police Arrested 179 English Defence Leaguers For "Breach Of The Peace" To Protect Government Approved Breachers Of The Peace Whom They Have Ignored For Weeks

2011-11-21T16:23:00.002Z

"Metropolitan Police raided a pub in central London and arrested 179 members of the right-wing, anti-immigrant group the English Defence League (EDL), on the basis that they were planning to attack the occupiers outside St Paul’s Cathedral.

it seems pretty clear that far more repression has been carried out in the name of protecting Occupy London than in the name of attacking it.

Apparently some of them had Facebooked and tweeted about having a punch-up at St Paul’s. Yet as those part-time libertarians who rushed to the aid of that bloke arrested for tweeting about blowing up Robin Hood airport in Nottingham should know, what people say on social-networking sites and what they do in real life are often very different things.

Perhaps the most startling thing about Friday’s mass arrest of political activists who had not committed any crimes is that many St Paul’s occupiers supported it; more than that, they appear to have assisted it....One occupier said of the police, ‘It is fantastic if they are using their resources to try and stop people getting to this site’. He said that at Occupy London’s ‘general assembly’ earlier in the day, the occupiers had been made aware of an allegedly chilling EDL statement, in which ‘they called us all sorts of names’.

Even worse, on Facebook some occupiers are boasting about having informed the police of the EDL’s alleged intentions....‘I and some friends aided in the arrests’.

not so anarchist as not to want the police arresting for "rudeness"

It is virtually impossible to get anything from the EDL site since, according to a Google search there is nobody online representing the EDL. This seems to mean no such sites exist or that Google are deliberately censoring. Actually I made another search later and did reach the EDL site here. using similar search terms.

The closest to an impartial report is this from the Press Association who said

But police said there were no reports of disorder between opposing groups ahead of Friday's arrests.

"All 179 were taken to police stations across London," a Scotland Yard spokesman said.

"Three people were arrested for affray and have been bailed pending further inquiries."
The spokes man said that "176 people were arrested to prevent a breach of the peace - they have since been released".

I assume "affray" means they were resisting being arrested for committing no crime. "Arrested to prevent a breach of the peace" is arrested for nothing on 2 grounds - firstly that breach of the peace defined as "any act which disturbs the public or even one person" is a catch all charge allowing the police, if misused, to arrest anybody or even 179 anybody's. Nobody arrested for any alleged Facebook rudeness, something we know the police would do if there were even the ghost of a case, so I assume there isn't.

Secondly that they weren't even arrested for causing such a breach but "to prevent such a breach" in some unspecified way at some unspecified time in the future. Who, provably, should not be arrested for that?

Clearly the Occupists outside St Pauls have been guilty of far worse for weeks and could have been arrested,presumably much more easily if the police timed it right since at night 90% of the tents are unoccupied while the Occupists stop occupying and go home to feed their cats.

As I have pointed out before, the Occupy movement is not a genuine popular movement but a media and government promoted fraud to give the appearance of a "left" opposition opposed to free enterprise in support of big government collectivism. Now the police have gone from trying to appear "neutral" about enforcing the law to very actively subverting the law to assist the criminal "demonstrators" and arrest those whose only "crime" is not wanting to be arrested.

Norman Tebbit has somewhat gentler things to say about the refusal to enforce the law - assuming it to be cowardice rather than corruption.

UPDATE This story, which I had not previoously noticed, has been pointed out in comments.

A coach full of English Defence League supporters was pelted with missiles after it broke down in east London.
The coach was carrying 44 EDL members when it stopped in Mile End Road, Tower Hamlets.
About 100 Asian teenagers then pelted it with bricks and stones, according to a BBC reporter at the scene.
Police arrested all 44 EDL supporters

To be fair the article later points out that 16 of the 100+ thugs as well as all 44 of the victims were arested. I assume the justification for arresting the victims was that they were in an Islamic no-go area in central London.

New IPCC Report - Who? Us? We Never Even Heard of Catastrophic Warming

2011-11-20T19:52:00.000Z

I thought I would just post the Global Warming Policy Foundation's press release on the new IPCC report on the catastrophic warming we used to have. Don't expect to see any honest reporting of this on the B"due balance"B"catastrophic warming is more thoroughly accepted by the scientific community than the Law of Gravity"C

Natural Variability To Dominate Weather Events Over Coming 20-30 Years
London: For many decades to come, and probably longer, mankind’s influence on the frequency of extreme weather events will be insignificant.

According to a preliminary report released by the IPCC, there will be no detectable influence of mankind’s influence on the Earth’s weather systems for at least thirty years, and possibly not until the end of this century.
The Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation, is in stark contrast to other statements made by the IPCC. It shows that mankind’s influence on the weather is far smaller than natural factors.

If and when mankind’s influence becomes apparent it may be just as likely to reduce the number of extreme weather events as increase them.

Surveying the state of scientific knowledge IPCC scientists say they cannot determine if mankind’s influence will result in more, or fewer, extreme weather events over the next thirty years or more.
The IPCC report says:

"Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain"

"This shows the depth of our ignorance of this subject," says Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of the GWPF. "Whilst it is always important to think about the future in the light of changes we observe to the Earth’s climate, in trying to draw conclusions so far ahead based on what we know, the IPCC scientists are speculating far beyond any reasonable scientific justification."

Even making the questionable assumption that our computer models are good enough to predict what will happen in the future, for projected changes by the end of the 21st century, the uncertainties in those computer models, and the range of natural climatic variability, are far larger than any predicted human-influenced effects.

Extreme weather events have always been with us, and will continue to be so. It is the international community's responsibility to make those likely to be subjected to them become more resilient.
===========================

The BBC being ~~an upstanding honest news reporting organisation have reported this almost as extensively they did the years of threatening us with catastrophic warming~~ corrupt thieving bunch of fascist propagandists willing to tell absolutely any lie and censor absolutely any fact in their bosses cause and have thus kept this almost entirely out of their main programmes and online where such things being wholly missing stand out like a sore thumb have said "IPCC: Climate impact risk set to increase" - the article is worth reading just to see how professional liars go about it selecting the very minor point that the IPCC say there may, possibly, if they are right this time, be some marginal increase in bad weather and ignoring the disappearance of the massive risks previously said ("90% certainty") to be threatening us.

Note also that the justification given in Beeboid Steve Jones £140,000 in house "impartial" assessment of "BBC science reporting" said that the BBC should censor, to an even greater extent, any reporting of anybody who doubts we are experiencing catastrophic global warming because "there is a scientific consensus" and the proof of that is that the IPCC (actually not a scientific body but a politically appointed one) said there is.

Well now the IPCC are pretty much saying the opposite so if there were any possibility of anybody at the BBC not being the sort of obscene animal who would rape his own daughter for money we will see them no longer using this excuse . Of course if that had been the case then as soon as the report came out we would have seen the BBC absolutely refusing to report any ecofascist who said nuclear power wasn't the safest way of generating power because there is a genuine consensus among nuclear power engineers that it is.

How Much Should Society Invest In X-Prizes

2011-11-19T17:29:00.000Z

Some time ago I quoted from a review of Sex, Science and Profits by Terence Kealey, I have been reading it and thoroughly reccommend it though not agreeing with the conclusions that patents should be abolished and that state funding of science never works. It is a history of human progress with market freedom in the role of hero and government parasitism as villain.

He mentions and disagrees with, Edwin Mansfield, who says

"that "primary" producers will underinvest in research because their profits are stolen by "secondary" commercial customers. So, for example, when a seed-breeder (the primary producer) develops a new seed, much of the profit from the new seed is extracted by the farmers (the secondary commercial customers) who plant it. Indeed, surveys have shown that secondary commercial customers can benefit about three times more from innovations than do the primary producers."

   I have previously written on how the patent system does not and probably cannot protect intellectual property rights as well as traditional rights to land, labour and capital are protected by the law though I think that in the long term technological innovators add far more to human wealth than the holders of traditional property rights (cavemen owned far more land per capita than us but were poorer because they didn't have the technology. However is puts a fixed price on the value of intellectual property.

   I believe that it is desirable to protect the rights of wealth creators to much of the wealth they create, not for reasons of justice but because it provides the incentive to do so" I also believe that if inventors were rewarded better than they are now they would be not far from proportionally more productive - this is a point with which Professor Kealey seems to disagree.

That being the case ideally inventors should be getting something close to 4 times the return they do now. I have not been able to find figures for what patent holders worldwide receive and possibly such figures cannot exist because some of their profit comes from licensing and some from their own production. However I do have figures for the amount of world GNP devoted to research and development. It varies between 4% for Israel, 1.7% for the UK and fractions of a % for undeveloped countries but in total comes to $1 trillion out of world GNP of $75 trillion ie 1.33%. I assume that the amount spent on R&D is not greater than the profits on doing it.

  In which case, to bring the return on intellectual property in technological innovation up to what experience suggests is optimum for other factors of production, society should be rewarding researchers and developers with 4% of world GNP (1.33% X 3).

   The problem with doing so, as Professor Kealey says, is that the effect of government funding of science has been, according to an OECD report (and they are unlikely to be biased against government), negative. Government tends to fund the established and politically connected and, as with catastrophic warming, subvert science to the results government wants. Rewarding the R&D community this way would not have the desired effect.

   Professor Kealy challenges "that no one - no one - has shown that the government funding of science stimulates economic growth" and I think I can match that challenge.

   Grants don't do it but prizes do. I do not think anybody could dispute that the Longitude Prize stimulated John Harrison to produce the marine chronometer, leading directly to the discovert of Australia and New Zealand (or that any but the most refined could think this a bad thing). That Prize is one of a substantial list of such prizes which have repeatedly achieved remarkable success. See here ("undue stimulus to competition") and here and here and here and here and here and here (Archimedes, used in the book as an example of free markets is used by me as an example of government prizes).

   In which case, if prizes really are an effective stimulus to technology the optimum would be to put 4% of world GNP ($3 trillion worldwide, £60 billion in the UK) into such prizes even without reducing patents. Arguably proportionately more in wealthy countries since our proportion of GNP invested in T&D is already higher.

   I have previously suggested 1% as a target and being inherently cautious in political criticism (really I am it is just that the idiocies of those in charge are so glaring) I would now only raise that total initially to 2%. Let's see how 2% goes. But I would certainly be confident that 2% is not in any way excessive and would more than pay for itself by increasing Britain's GNP by more than 2%, priobably considerablt more.

    I previously pointed out how X-Prizes, when they work, do so at costs 33-100 times less than government grants (when they don't work they cost zero because no prize is awarded). I have also written of the Harvard paper that said prizewinners normally recoup only 1/3rd of their costs through the prize. This suggests that the benefit of putting up £60 billion annually would be between £180 billion in immediate investment and £6 trillion in foregone government wastefulness. Since the entire economy is £1.5 trillion I would treat the last figure as purely theoretical but the effect looks like a game changer.

Decorum Means Acknowledging Error

2011-11-18T14:36:00.001Z

This is a post that I put on John Redwood's blog. John had written an intelligent post following Armistice Day more in sorry than anger about the waste of WW1 and European wars of the 20th C generally but containing the quoted bit. I intended to suggest that current leaders were not so different and that sometimes the cost of war is inescapable. I did rather expect to be edited on the final paragraph because it is so outspokenly supportive of the Serbs. John having been in cabinet at the time we first intervened in Yugoslavia but was surprised that he took the unusual step of censoring the entire thing.

“I still cannot accept the way the politicians and generals accepted death on such a huge scale. ”

Not that rare. After all throughout the cold war the politicians and generals accepted Mutual Assured destruction (MAD) which assumed deaths on a scale at least 10 times that of WW1. That was horrible and I think it was wrong because I do not believe the USSR ever wished to start and “win” a war – they just wanted to be left alone too. But if you accept that both the Soviets and the Kaiser were bent on world conquest, as were were told at the times, it is difficult to say we should not have accepted such casualties.

I used to be proud about how we stood against the horrors of Nazism but when we, merely to get German permission to opt out of the Euro, supported criminal regimes run by “ex-”Nazis in former Yugoslavia openly committed to the racial genocide of the Serbs I came to feel that our opposition to Hitler was more accidental and less principled than we are told. Certainly if our schools had taught the history of Nazi genocide against Soviets, Serbs and Gypsies instead of pretending the only victims were our Jewish allies I very much doubt if the British people would have supported our government’s promotion of atrocities against the Serbs more than matching Hitler’s in individual evil if not in pure numbers.

Readers will understand that I respect John very much but when anybody is wrong I think they should consider and usually acknowledge it. That is the path to not doing it again.
-------------------------------------
Some years ago in response to another commemoration article by him I suggested that the error in British tactics in WW1 was sending a massive army to the Western Front at all and that we should have instead put our resources into providing the best weapons to the Russian, Serbian and Italian armies - bringing them up to close to a technical equality with the Germans, in which case numbers would have overwhelmed them. That would have included armoured car squadrons to the Russian front where they would have had full room for manoieuvre. That would not have involved death on a mass scale, at least for Brits, but it would have been a policy aimed at success rather than one primarily aimed at lower casualties and the 2 tend to be incompatible. Ut would also have been in line with the traditional policy we pursued in Napoleonic times.

So Not a Cooncillor

2011-11-18T12:44:00.003Z

I'm afraid I got only 36 votes in the Hilhead byelection. It was an abysmal turnout of 13% so that comes to 1.2%

On the good side that is 10 times the proportion UKIP got across Scotland in the Scottish election though obviously that was diluted by areas where we had no membership. So from little acorns....

If it matters the winning faction of the NatLabConDem political machine was the Nat one. On 1st preference SNP 1079, Labour 945, Green 435, Tory 372, LudDim 307, UKIP 36, Britannic 11 I should perhaps point oiut that, at the last election, the BNP/Britannic stood in Maryhill, part of which is Hillhead annd UKIP didn't so getting 3 times their vote is useful.

UPDATE
This is what the press - well online and the only one there - printed

Neil Craig of UK Independence Party (UKIP) picked up one vote between stage one and stage two to go from 36 to 37. Running a science fiction book shop in Woodlands, he said his was the only party in Scotland that believed a ‘free market really works.’ Expelled from the Lib Dems because he believed in a free market, he said, he admitted he’d expected to do better. ‘But I’ve not done this before. It won’t put me off and I plan to run again in May at the Glasgow City Council elections.’ He pointed out that candidates were not allowed to put up posters. ‘That must have depressed the vote for everyone,’ he said.

Which is quite good because it is a couple more lines than any of the others, even the winner, got. The reporter said she had been in the shop before which may explain it. Actually I said "we've not done this before" meaning UKIP in Hillhead rather than me personally.

On the other hand, to the BBC, UKIP weren't there.

Note that only 1 of the 11 redistrubuted Britannic votes came to us - the other 5 parties presumably picking up an average of 2. Not a big statistical population but worth reminding some of them sometime.

"Cameron is an Arse and Will be Kicked Out Next Spring"

2011-11-17T16:31:00.002Z

I heard this on the morning news 3 days ago. The BBC correspondent gave his opinion that Cameron would either have to remove the Conservative Whip from Mercer expelling him from the party or ignore it Any intermediate response would make him look incredibly weak.

A senior Tory MP was last night accused of launching a tirade of abuse against David Cameron in which he allegedly described the Prime Minister as an 'a**e'.

Former Army colonel Patrick Mercer was also claimed to have witheringly dismissed Mr Cameron as 'a despicable creature' and 'the worst politician in British history since William Gladstone'.

The extraordinary remarks were allegedly recorded at a party in Central London last week....

In the recording, obtained by the Sunday People, he claimed the Prime Minister would be ousted by next year.
Asked if backbenchers would launch a leadership coup, Mr Mercer replied: 'He'll go in the spring. He'll resign in the spring.'

According to reports last night, the Newark MP was taped as he attended the annual autumn party of The London Magazine.

....was allegedly recorded saying:

• 'Cameron was an a**e. That's a matter of fact, not politics.'

• 'I would take a beggar off the streets... rather than have Cameron.'

• 'He is the worst politician in British history since William Gladstone.'

• He wished Mr Cameron was never born

     Clearly Cameron has gone for the ignore it option which does indeed make him look incredibly weak. The BBC stuffed it down the memory hole 3 days ago. Granted Mercer has said he never said what he is heard saying on the tape but that is just pro forma. If it had been said if somebody the BBC didn't lie to help into the job of Tory leader imagine how long they would have pushed this. As Lincoln said you can't fool all of the people all of the time, on the other hand Parliamentary democracy means you only have to fool 36% every 5 years.

   Compare this with Howard Flight getting the Whip removed and deselected because he suggested the Tories, in 2005, should cut Labour's spending commitments (something which, in the current situation looks rather restrained). Difficult to claim Mercer is more on message than Flight was.

   Nonetheless all the MPs now know they can openly call for or indeed plot Cameron's removal and he is held in such contempt that he can do nothing. The circling MPs tasted blood in the Referendum debate and have now found that their prey is to weak to defend itself. The Conservative party is well known for its loyalty to leaders right up till they are wounded (eg Thatcher). Mind you, since Cameron has proven himself to have not the slightest trace of personal honesty or integrity whatsoever and managed the almost impossible trick of failing to win an election after Labour had destroyed the economy, only being rescued by the equally unprincipled Lud Dims he thoroughly deserves everything he is going to get.

   Next question - how long will it take the colleagues to start positioning themselves as successors? Next but next question - who gets it?

   Don't know what Mercer has got against Gladstone, a deeply principled and competent Prime Minister of the 19th C and iincomparably better than any current minister or shadow minister..

     Interestingly the online comments in the paper show a very similar degree of dislike of Cameron among these members of the public (and support of Gladstone).
Mercer younger

Singapore's X-Prize

2011-11-16T18:08:00.001Z

It seems that some time ago the government of Singapore put its toe in the water over X-Prizes.

Jan 24, 2007

Singapore Tuesday launched a contest to build a robot that can operate autonomously in urban warfare conditions, moving in and out of buildings to search and destroy targets like a human soldier. The country's Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) said on its website it is offering one million Singapore dollars (652,000 US) to the developers of such a robot that completes a stipulated task in the fastest time.

DSTA said individuals, companies, universities and research institutes are welcome to participate in the contest, dubbed TechX Challenge. Foreigners must to collaborate with local partners to join the contest....

The robot DSTA wants "must, on its own, be able to navigate both indoors and outdoors in an urban landscape and accomplish a set of assigned tasks within a stipulated time," he said.
This robot must be able to negotiate a staircase and use the elevator to dash from one floor to another even without the aid of satellite navigation which may not be available indoors.
Designing a robot that would be able to use an elevator, for example, will be a technological challenge, as not all elevators are designed similarly.

Do tell. $625,000 for what amounts to one of Asimov's positronic robots, except without the aversion to killing looks a bit optimistic to me. Compare this with the US DARPA prize of $3 million for the far simpler task, though still very difficult, of driving, which they admited would have cost $100 million if done by the government.

Sure enough nobody won.

Six teams, mostly sponsored by local schools and universities, battled all-nighters, malfunctioning cameras and total system failures in a competition that required fairly complex robotic maneuvers--navigating around outdoor obstacles, entering a building, climbing stairs, operating an elevator, touching targets and then returning outside--for a cash prize of about $700,000. But after one too many bots found itself stuck behind a trash can or confused by orange traffic cones before hundreds of fans here this weekend, Singapore's Defense Science & Technology Agency (DSTA) decided to split a smaller purse with about $7000 for each finalist.

    But then nobody else, working on traditional government grants has come close to positronic robots either. Not even come far away from them. And it does seem to have made some advances and engendered considerable interest in technology at a cost of $42 (£26 K).

   This reminds me of the Bigelow prize where this hotel magnate offered a prize of $50 million (1/10th of what Jerry Pournelle said would work and about 1/10,000th of what NASA has spent). He also put it up as a limited time prize which is clearly going to discourage many. In that case the suspicion is that it was put up far more to achieve publicity for his space hotel ideas, than for anybody actually winning.

   I suspect the same applies to the Singapore proposal.

    However they demonstrate that prizes are not magic and to work you must offer between 3% and 1% of what normal government grant giving process would require rather than 0.01% at least we have established an effective range.

   And we have demonstrated that even prizes that don't get won and therefore cost close to nothing still produce an impressive amount of interest and ideas.

    However we all have mixed motivations so it must also be assumed that Singapore at least understand X-Prizes and may do it more seriously next time.

UPDATE
Singapore have announced another $1milion TechX Prize 2013

allow the competing teams to address some of the challenges faced during urban operations. The competition will consist of several challenging tasks which simulate an urban operation scenario. The tasks include outdoor navigation, static and dynamic obstacle avoidance, autonomous staircase climbing, static target detection and engagement, and robotic co-operation (if applicable). Each team shall enter one robot or a team of no more than five robots...

DSTA will award One Million Singapore Dollars (SGD $1,000,000.00) to the Team whose robot(s) achieves the highest score beyond the set threshold, and within the maximum allowable time of 120 minutes.

This seems much more realistic than the last one. "Address some of the challenges" & "beyond the set threshold" are much more practical than "must on its own be able negotiate a staircase and use the elevator to dash from one floor to another .... a technological challenge, as not all elevators are designed similarly" and a specific definable "threshold" which "will" result in an award is proper.

Singapore now seems to be dipping most of its foot in the X-Prise paradigm.

Freedom of Information Enquiries - Glasgow Council, SEPA, BBC and the Coalition Break the Law

2011-11-15T12:43:00.002Z

The law says that any member of the public can ask a public body for information and they have a legal duty to provide it, except in unusual situations like national security or material commercially sensitive to independent companies. This has to be done in 20 working days ) ie 28 days and no matter how simple actual answers never take less.Unfortunately it is becoming ever more common to simply ignore them and say the email got lost in the post.

   Back in August I asked Glasgow Council whether they had, before cancelling the Hogmanay celebrations because they were turning a massive loss on it with ticket prices of £19, whether they had offered to franchise it out to any commercial firm who might find £19 a head in an open air venue something they could profitably do?

   In due course the Council wrote back saying they knew nothing about this because they were in no way involved and it is all the responsibility of Glasgow Leisure, which looks exactly like the council Museums and Parks Dept. When the council leader spoke to the BBC on the matter, taking credit for thus saving public money he seemed unaware that he was uninvolved.

    I did contact Glasgow Leisure and have now reminded them that nearly 2 months later, they have not replied.

   Another FoI was to the BBC asking them how often the BBC allowed politicians to speak on air compared to their proven electoral support. In particular on "Brian's Big Debate" and "Question Time" . Have they, for example, had BNP representatives on twice as often as Green ones since the former get twice the vote of the latter.

The BBC refused to answer on the grounds that there is an "artistic" get out clause in the Act and the impartiality of political reporting is an artistic matter. In fact we all know the answer - the BBC have Greens on almost constantly and are given so much obsequious support that they clearly believe they are entitled to it.

"I began, good naturedly, by observing that the climate didn’t seem to be playing ball at the moment, and that we were having a particularly cold winter while carbon emissions were powering ahead.

Miss Lucas reacted as if I’d physically molested her. She was outraged. It was no job of the BBC — the BBC! — to ask questions like that. Didn’t I realise that there could be no argument over the science?"

In fact we all know perfectly well the answer to the questions the BBC refused to answer - the BNP has been on QT once and Brian never, UKIP do slightly better on QT and the Greens appear on both regularly. Despite the BNP getting twice the vote and UKIP four times and neither have experience of being treated as if there could be "no argument" with their policies and the Greens get 40 times more coverage per vote than UKIP

   SEPA have once again been pushing their "radium at Dalgety Bay" fraud which has had a significant amount of coverage by the BBC, who know it is a lie, but not by the papers, who presumably care more about not being seen pushing an obvious lie. I sent them an FoI asking them, yet again to provide the evidence for their claim to have found radioactive paint or "radium and its daughter elements".

   They have, yet again, simply refused to answer the FoI enquiry.pointing to their website.
---------------------------
    Earlier in the year I put up an FoI to the government asking, in light of David Cameron's promise of a "unrelenting forensic" pursuit of growth, what forensic examination of the suggestion for putting money donated to scientific research partly in the form of prizes rather than grants. It has been proven that prizes would promote significantly more growth at no extra cost. The government refused to answer despite numerous repetitions of the enquiry, until I made an official complaint. The final answer was, of course, that though we have Cameron's word that there is an "unrelenting forensic" attempt to find how to grow the economy in truth absolutely no slightest examination of the question whatsoever has been done.
--------------------------------
   Perhaps if the law is to be so continuously defied it is time for the ombudsman to bring an actual prosecution. Certainly any civil servant in any way involved in breaking the law to deny us our rights should be instantly fired, as indeed should any superior who refuses to fire them.

Recent Reading & Some of My Comments

2011-11-14T17:00:00.000Z

Some of why the press support eco-fascist lies?

Bad news is the only good news

Journalists can only be as good as the sources they carefully select

Scientific laziness
----------------------------------
A useful article on shale gas contains this:
In 1865 the English economist William Jevons noted that with energy “almost any feat is possible. … [but] without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times.” The economic history of the last century and a half has confirmed the insight of that observation, year in year out, without exception.
Human ingenuity has led to a dramatic evolution of advanced technologies and modern energy supplies that enable economic development. Similarly, history shows that energy demand not only increases in conjunction with economic growth, but that the types of energy that we rely on also evolve with time.

---------------------------------------
Steve Sailer on research which has found 7 genes, in a genetically undifferentiated population, which correlate strongly with longevity. The most important converts cholesterol.
--------------------------------------
Wearable defibrillator can prevent 91.6% of heart attack deaths which can have 7 to 21% survival rates otherwise
--------------------------------------
MY COMMENTS

Bishop Hill did an article on the Linear No Threshold theory. Other commenters were interested in this from me:

"the calculation of how many deaths one gets per green politician is validly subject to direct linear extrapolation. 25,000 premature deaths from fuel poverty each winter, assume only 50% are preventable by plentiful cheap nuclear or shale power divided by about 640 of the 650 MPs comes to 19-20 unnecesary killings each per year. That is a reasonable extrapolationn because no other factors get in the way. The difference with LNT is that the old rule "the dose makes the poison" applied precisely because we know many substances which kill at large doses are vital trace eleemts/vitamins at small doses. This "hormetic" effect is undeniable in many cases and likely in all.
In particular there is no experimental evidence whatsoever for LNT in radioactivity & never has been, whereas for around a century there has been proof of radiation hormesis in plants, mirobes and small laboratiory animals where such testing is ethical and possible."
--------------------------
John Redwood wrote on growth

“Controlling public spending is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for growth”
Precisely.
The sufficient and in the long term necessary condition for growth is

economic freedom + cheap energy = fast growth
We could have those any time the government wanted."
------------------------------
Steve Sailer has an interesting thought on the rise, since the 1950s of legal conditions that allow small minorities to prevent things going ahead. I think this correlates closely with the rise of ecofascism and the slowdown in western growth. Don't know which is cause and which effect or if they both have a deeper cause.

An interesting thought Steve. the risec of "minoritarianism" coindides with the rise of anti-technology scare stories (eg the LNT radiation theory was officially promulgated between 1959 & '63 though it had supporters before it was official and has become even more enforcably official since). The reinforcing connection is that the more scary theories the courts listen to the smaller the minorities who can claim to believe they are being harmed by allowing something. This leads to the situation where GM foods are largely suppressed on the extreme version of "precautionary principle" that if there is anybody, anywhere who believes there is a danger, albeit they can suggest no mechanism whereby it would work or test of the theory, it must be banned. This would be the reductio ad absurdaum of minority effects, with the minority effected reduced to zero, if it were not where we now are.
As somebody who thinks minority rights a sign of civilisation I can't object to some movement from the early 50s position. However it is easy to demonstrate that the net loss to the community must almost always be greater than the gain to the special interest group.
On the other hand it provides ever more work for lawyers which may explain it all.
----------------------------------
Douglas Carswell suggests we now have less democracy than before the 1832 Reform Act.

That is a very interesting comparison slightly overstated. It took decades of popular will to abolish slavery and establish free trade. I could also point to wars (Crimea, WW1, Sudan campaign) which enjoyed overwhelming initial support and in hindsight were less necessary.
Democracy is quite good at limiting the day to day power of the state. Less so at resisting finding an out group (bankers, Jews, fuzzy wuzzies) to blame, tax and shoot at).
-------------------------------------
From Al Fin on continuing human evolution. - "We're beginning to see that it's an accumulation of small changes. Scientists have recently been able to compare the genomes of Neandertals and modern humans, which reveals just a .004 percent difference. Most of those changes lie in genes involved in sperm, testes, smell, and skin."

That looks like sexual selection being the main, even overwhelming, driver of evolition over the last 25,000 years. This seems not unlikely because such selection (ie the peacock's tail) is dominant in species where selection by being able to escape predators is less important and we reached the top of the food chain about then.

Public Meeting

2011-11-13T14:34:00.000Z

HILLHEAD COUNCIL BY-ELECTION PUBLIC MEETING

UKIP SCOTLAND

Britain's 4th largest political party

NEIL CRAIG

At least 75% and probably as much as 93% of the cost of electricity is governmental. We subsidise up to 36p per kwh for electricity that can be produced by the nuclear industry for 2.2p. It is this that is driving our industry abroad and has put us in recession and any politician who supports subsidy and claims to care about the million Scots homes in fuel poverty cannot be trusted on anything else either.

Clean streets should be a higher priority than keeping the council unions happy.

Neil proposed, as an alternative to the £300 million rail connection from Glasgow airport, a monorail to the main rail way line. When the Transport Minister challenged him to find a company to do so he did and they offered to build it for £20 million. That Labour/LibDem government refused the offer as did the subsequent SNP one who spent £40 million cancelling their predecessor's project.

End the ideological hatred of cars.

"Catastrophic global warming", endorsed by all the traditional parties is clearly false.

TUESDAY 7.30 HILLHEAD PRIMARY

HEAR THE FACTS BECAUSE YOU KNOW THE BBC CENSOR WHAT THE REAL OPPOSITION SAY

VOTE NEIL CRAIG FOR HILLHEAD

2011-11-11T17:03:00.001Z

Neil is the UKIP candidate for Hillhead. Apart from the fact that, as a Libertarian in a Libertarian Party, he has his own ideas free from party dogma Neil is also firmly committed to improving the lives of the people of Hillhead. Here are some reasons below why Neil will bring independent thought and will be the peoples eys and ears in the clone stuffed city chambers.
Neil Craig will be free of the party whip and able to make the decisions for their constituents.
Neil Craig will be free of the ideological hatred of cars that means that the council not only charge as much as the market will bear for parking permits nut use road narrowing and closures to reduce parking spaces. If councils must charge for parking spaces they have a duty to use the money raised to maximise space available.
Neil Craig will work to reduce the job destroying influence if many councillors whose knee jerk reaction to any successful business is to increase its costs.
Neil Craig will not make false promises to "help people save money" on electricity while using their power to push up prices as much as possible. At least 75% and probably as much as 93% of the cost of electricity is governmental regulations. Windmills are horrendously expensive pork barrelling where we subsidies up to 36p per kwh for electricity that is being produced by the nuclear industry for 2.2p. It is this that is driving our industry abroad and has put us in recession and any politician who supports subsidy and claims to care about our electricity bills cannot be trusted on anything else either.
Note that the claim by one candidate that it is the rise in "worldwide" gas prices that is causing electricity prices is false. In many parts if the world gas prices are falling because a technological breakthrough has allowed the use of deep mined gas. Chris Huhne the coalition Energy Minister has said that he will not allow this industry to develop in Britain to an extend to allow prices to fall and make wind, even with the subsidies, more uncompetitive.
Neil Craig would make clean streets a higher priority than keeping the council unions happy. It may not be necessary to outsource such services but it is wrong to disavow ever using the alternative.
Neil Craig would seek to let parents have more control over their children's schools and councillors less.
Neil, Craig, UKIP candidate for Hillhead is a local businessman, living and working in Woodlands, running a science fiction bookshop.
He has previously stood for council representing part of Hillhead three times remaining a traditional economic liberal who regards it as statistically proven that free market institutions normally work more efficiently than those run by party politicians. In Scotland no party but UKIP supports such views that it is such free markets that is giving the BRIC countries 10% growth.
He regards the allegation that we are experiencing catastrophic global warming, endorsed by all the traditional parties as clearly untrue intended to make us more willing to accept more regulation and taxes; that there is a close correlation between energy costs and national wealth; that over 90% of our electricity costs are the fault of politicians, for example, pouring £1 billion annually in Scotland into windmill subsidies when nuclear electricity is currently 1/10th of the cost and could be 1/40th; that with a commitment to cheap power we would be out of recession in days and able to match China's 10% annual growth; and of that real democracy requires that the major parties be held to their manifesto promises to have an EU referendum.
He is proud to stand for UKIP, the only party which now represents the traditional liberal values that once made Scotland the intellectual and industrial leader, not merely of Britain but of the world.
His blog http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com contains many solutions to our current economic woes.
Some previous non-party political issues related to Glasgow and Scotland which Neil Craig has been active on in newspapers and online.
Opposing the original plan to spend £40 million building an "Iconic" footbridge at Tradeston 200 yds from a bridge with a pavement. Eventually they settled for a cheaper design and only wasted £7 million.
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/10/whatever-happened-to-iconic-bridge.html

Neil proposed, as an alternative to the £300 million rail connection from Glasgow airport, a monorail to the main rail way line. When the Transport Minister challenged him to find a company will to do so he did and they offered to build it for £20 million. That Labour/LibDem government refused the offer as did the subsequent SNP one who spent £40 million cancelling their predecessor's project.
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/10/glasgow-airport-link-easy-if.html
Campaigning to find out why the proposed new Forth crossing was costed at £2,300 million when this makes it one of the most expensive in the world and 8 times the cost of the previous bridge at £320 million in today's money (£19.5 m at the time). The closest to an explanation from the civil servants is that "the geology of every site is different."
http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/05/forth-bridge-fraud-i-accuse-hoyrood-of.html
An ongoing campaign, with prominent article in the Scotsman & ThinkScotland, for Scotland to replicate Norway's tunnel building programme - averaging under £4 m per km - which would make Dunoon and Rothesay a short drive from Glasgow and Islay and Iona a realistic one.
http://www.thinkscotland.org/change-scotland/articles.html?read_full=11134&article=www.thinkscotland.org
Neil Craig says "I am convinced that, as a councillor, it would be far easier to get answers about the obvious waste and gross misuse of our money that is endemic across Scotland's political establishment and I ask you to put me in a position where I can do so. If I have been able to do so in a very limited way as a private citizen I hope you will believe I am willing and able to do far more if elected.
On November 17th send shockwaves through the political landscape by voting UKIP in the council election.
-------------------------------------
UKIP have officially launched the campaign for the Hillhead by-election. Our candidate is the local businessman Neil Craig. With the recent turmoil in Europe and the ongoing cosy relationship of the other parties in the City Chambers it is more important than ever that UKIP makes an impact on this council election.
Many people do not realise the impact the EU has on our lives, many decisions made by Glasgow City Council are taken because they have been told to by the EU. This is unacceptable, the electorate should be deciding council policy, not EU technocrats.
Neil is very clear that if elected he will be answerable to the people of Hillhead and will not be dictated to by party politics, EU Diktats or other outside forces. He will be the people of Hillhead's eyes and ears in the City Chambers.

He is the candidate the stale politics of Glasgow needs. Vote UKIP and Neil on November the 17th.
----------------------------------------
Taken from 2 announcements on the UKIP Glasgow site.

We will be holding a public meeting at Hillhead Primary School on Tuesday at 7.30, where i will get the chance to address the assembled throngs of Hillhead. Since it is not only a council election but a council by-election, which do not traditionally bring a big turnout I wil be quite happy with a small one.

BIG ENGINEERING 46 - HYPERSONIC AIRSHIP TO ORBIT

2011-11-10T18:07:00.002Z

Ion-drive dirigibles to orbit from aerial 'Dark Sky' base

From the Register via Jerry Pournelle comes a proposal that the recent achievement of a dirigible flight to 95,085 feet opens the possibility

of enormous, permanently inhabited "Dark Sky Stations" floating high in the atmosphere at the edge of space - to act as bases for radical hypersonic airships which would slowly fly themselves into orbit over a period of days using hybrid ion drive propulsion...

two different types of ship and the intervening aerial base stations are vital as neither craft could survive the flight regime of the other. The vast, flimsy orbital vessels would be torn apart by the dense winds of the lower atmosphere, and the sturdier surface-launched jobs could never reach orbital velocity...

The idea is that the mighty Dark Sky floating spaceports would also carry telecoms equipment and tourist hotels to generate additional revenue on top of that gleaned from orbital launch. Their analysis suggests that the hypersonic airships could haul cargo into space for as little as $100 per pound in the near term and eventually just $1 per pound - and Powell sees manned flights to the Dark Sky region as soon as 2013, and permanent inhabited bases there from 2021.

That is certainly a very reasonable price to orbit, almost matching the Orion nuclear pulse rocket. Taking several days to reach orbit is the sort of time an ocean cruise takes so would be unlikely to discourage anybody but the businessman who used to take Concorde to save a couple of hours across the Atlantic.

Is it technically feasible? . I expect, though an unusual concept, it is.

Can massive gossamer envelopes full of helium gradually boost themselves up to Mach 20+ using slow-acting electrical ion drives (such as those used to keep low-flying satellites up to orbital speed despite drag from the upper traces of the atmosphere)? Even though there's very little air up there, surely a giant, hypersonic rocket airship is a big ask.

Powell recently gave an interview on the subject to nextbigfuture.com, in which he points out that upper-atmosphere weather balloons have already achieved Mach 10 as long ago as the 1960s, so that in his view Mach 20 isn't impossible with modern materials. In fact in his judgement what's called for is not a super-low-thrust but ultra-efficient ion drive, nor a conventional chemical rocket, but rather a hybrid of the two - which he describes as "the most efficient chemical rocket ever, or the least efficient ion rocket". The key issue will be whether enough electrical power can be stored at a low enough weight - either using fuel cells or batteries, solar panels can't do the job - to get the ships up to orbital poke. One cunning aspect of the plan is that the ships will not need any heat shield for re-entry as they will slow down so gradually (using drag in the evanescent upper atmosphere) that no appreciable heating will result.

One point of interest to Britain is that because of the time and maneuvering needed to achieve orbit there seems little advantage in taking off from the equator. Normally that position adds about 6% to launch speed.

In which case, while no cost is given it cannot be more than a few billions, between now and 2021, if the guy is expecting the advertising to make a significant contribution. But it has already been costed as profitable from the start

JP Aerospace never makes a flight unless it will pay for itself, with revenue coming so far from advertising, telecoms experiments and aerospace tests for companies such as Lockheed.

In which case seedcorn money of about 10% would considerably speed up the process. 10% of say $2.5 (£1.5bn) over 10 years is £15 million annually. With 1,162 Quangos at a cost of nearly £64bn, which is an average of £55 million we could fund such a permanent cheap orbital launch system for 1/4the cost of one average quango. I guess its a matter of what priorities our politicians have.

UPDATE - John Powell of http://www.jpaerospace.com/ has commented on questions in the comments section I am not competent to discuss. I find his answers credible. I do not guarantee this as feasible but I do guarantee it is worth those in charge of national space policy finding out. I have sent this blog to a number of our own politicians and look forward to action. Or not as the case may be.

Chris Huhne - As Well As Being An Organlegging Nazi War Criminal Is Also A Liar - Who Expected That?

2011-11-09T16:47:00.000Z

Chris Huhne our widely unrespected "Energy and Environment Minister" (2 remits at complete odds with each other) has an article in the Telegraph telling us what we are supposed to believe about power production. He says

protesters picketing my department, and suggestions that Britain should tear down its wind farms and move the pound to a mythical “shale standard” I'd bet fairly heavily that is a lie, indeed Huhne's diary has previously shown he just doesn't meet opponents of ecofascism

a golden age of cheap energy looks increasingly unlikely – and wind turbines are certainly here to stay the former does follow from the latter but he does know that an age of cheap energy is possible, indeed easy, if he and his fellow thieves don't actively stop the market working

as an alternative to fracking We are keen that the market continues to invest in the capacity, storage and infrastructure to support our import needs, and are working with Ofgem to sharpen the incentives so far from trying to cut prices he is trying to raise "incentives"

World gas prices are up 40 per cent in a year this is a LibDem lie I have previously nailed - there is no "world" price for gas and the price in many places, such as the USA is falling fast because of fracked gas

such higher gas prices are the real reason heating and electricity bills have been going up over the past eight years. a total and deliberate lie

In the US, vast reserves of “unconventional” shale gas have changed everything, cutting gas prices to half of European levels. which is an admission that his claim about "world" prices is a lie - not often a politician makes such an admission within a few lines

those who clamour loudest for “realistic” energy policies would have us hitch our wagon to shale alone. another example of the pinnacle of honesty to which this thieving fascist war criminal and his party aspire - supporters of a realistic policy support both shale gas and nuclear and usually other things to - just not ones with massively bloated costs

At best, it is years away fracked gas is already online in the US and there is no technical reason why it could not be fairly quickly here - perhaps by "at best" he means he would prefer it not be quickly available

Our aim is a policy that is technology-neutral. We want to encourage competitive tension between all forms of generation, to get the best deal for the consumer. So we are reforming the electricity market, to allow us to use whatever blend of low-carbon energy turns out to be cheapest the lowest carbon as well as cheapest is nuclear, building of which he is preventing "competitive tension" is obviously impossible if one system is subsidised, doubly so if there is also a legal requirement that a set % of power must come
from it

And my favourite Government should not pick winners so unless Huhne and all his supporters are unalterably corrupt and there are no circumstances whatsoever under which a word these thieving animals say can be believed he is unalterably opposed to subsidy, quotas, preventing the growth of gas and nuclear and in fact every policy he and his Ministry are diligently engaged in

Dear Mr Huhne,
I note that you say that in energy policy "government should not pick winners". That means (assuming you are not personally wholly and completely corrupt) that you are now publicly opposing all the subsidies provided to politically approved energy producers and restrictions of economic ones - something which has been the entire essence of your ministerial career. I trust you would now publicly agree with any backbench MP who was to say that it is coalition energy policy that "government should not pick winners" and that nobody unwilling to support that should never serve as energy minister.

On the other hand I also note that you claim that, as a supporter of realistic economic policy I support "shale alone" and thus oppose nuclear. If you are in any slightest degree honest and not a disgusting, obscene, corrupt, lying, thieving, fascist parasite you must have some evidence that my beliefs are the opposite of what I believe them to be. What is that evidence.