A Place to Stand

   Some years ago I did a number of articles about bringing water to deserts. In particular was this one on Greening of Central Asia. Taking the 650 cubic km a year from Lake Baikal and, instead of letting it flow into the Arctic Ocean, redirecting it through a series of tunnels along the Mongolian & Chinese borders into and across the central Asian republics to the Caspian Sea.

    That is a lot of water. More than 7 times the Nile's output.

    Something I have only fairly recently realised is that western China's water basin is largely unconnected to China's coastal region. Which means water in that area would, if there was enough of it, would ultimately flow west too.


This map shows ground levels fairly well. Lake Baikal at the top has both yellow and green coloured land beside it so must be almost exactly on the line between the 2. So tunnels or canals could carry water across any of the yellow areas.

       The distance from Baikal to the point on the Mongolian southern border where the highest ground is is 1,000 km. I'm not sure whether there is or isn't land above the Baikal level all the way or a few miles where an aqueduct would be required. From there the distance to the Tarim basin (the oblong at the west bordered by the Himalayas and a row of mountains on  the western end) is about 700 km.

        The Tarim basin is one of the driest areas in the world. Rain doesn't get in (or out) from the central Asia region because of those mountains. The river Tarim (the longest) and others are some of the few rivers in the world that never wander down to the sea. Instead they peter out in the Lop Nor salt marshes (sufficiently unattractive the Chinese once used them for their nuclear tests). This is what it looks like now:




  However, as the map shows, much of this land is at the green level, below the level of Baikal. A couple of year's flow from there (ie 1300 cubic km) would make a big difference. The major green zone there looks like about 50,000 square km but I don't think any of it would end up more that a few tens of meters deep. 650 cubic km would fill that to an average of 10m in 9 months but probably at least twice that as dry ground soaks up water.  Because of the mountains that stop moisture getting in, we could expect moisture to stay in the area and get a decent rainfall. After that the water can be drained into the green zone to its north and then, by tunnel through the mountains to the green zone above and then in turn back across the Chinese border to Russia and rejoining the line from Baikal to Kazakhstan which I previously wrote of.

    The absolutely enormous amount of water available means that while it might take 4 years longer for the water to reach the Caspian there is plenty to go round. This would not have been the case if the water had drained eastward towards the sea, but it doesn't.

   That means a total of  about 1,800 km of tunnels. At Norwegian costs of £4m per km it would be about £8bn but I suspect the tunnels would have to be wider, or even duplicated and the total would be several times that. Still pretty minor for such a great increase in the fertility of the worlds most populous and now richest state. Less, possibly much less, than running a railway to Bradford.

    Of course the real expense is buying the water from Russia. Russia and Mongolia would reasonably want quite well paid. China might feel they are now strong enough to grab it. On previous cases I have said that the way to deal with political issues on these Big Engineering articles is simply to ignore them and treat the question as purely what can be done in engineering terms. I'm going to do that again but lets be clear - it is a big issue.

UPDATE
I have this comment which is of importance:

Hi Neil - an impressive idea, though I find the numbers a bit daunting. 650 cubic kilometres per annum requires an AVERAGE flow of 20,610 cubic metres per second. Our river Tay is the largest in the UK by annual discharge and it's peak flow is about 1,965 cubic metres per second. A typical 8 metre internal diameter tunnel has a cross section area of about 50 square metres , so even if the water was flowing at a whopping 10 metres per second (36 km per hour)you would require 42 such tunnels.Remember also you wish to use gravity as much as possible and to cover the distances you are talking about the cross sectional area of the aquaduct has to increase greatly as the flow rate needs must be slow for such a distance from a limited drop in elevation. Without pumping of some sort you are not talking of a few tunnels, but a broad canal possibly 30 times the combined width and depth of the Tay at Perth
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     That is an issue.

     We could double the diameter to quadruple cross section area but the wider it gets the weaker it is so we can go up to the size of the Norwegian ship tunnel but anything else is going to need expensive reinforcing. I think the flow would be considerably lower than 10 meters because the gradient over the entire distance is low.

      Even assuming major economies of scale that sounds like app £80 bn rather than £8 bn. Still that is inexpensive for more than a million square km. It would also mean that it would take more than a year or 2 to put it in place.

      It might well turn out, bearing in mind that the depth here is not to great, that it would be cheaper to cut down from the surface and create an artificial canal. The aqueduct might also be replaced by an above ground canal held there by dams. All a matter of the most cost effective way.

   I disagreed with the estimable, but sometimes wrong, EU Referendum on the subject of illegal immigration from, mainly, Africa. Dr Richard North there said that deaths of boat people trying to enter Europe are a tragedy (true) and that several times as many must die trying to cross the Sahara (also true). The problem is that tragedy, as Greek tragedy constantly showed, was not avoided by good intentions.

   Allowing increased immigration would simply encourage more and do nothing to fix the problem. A problem for the entire human race is that demographic growth is fastest in failed states and cultures and exporting people exports failure to the more successful.

   So what can we do to make Africa less of a failure? We have poured trillions into it in "aid" without success and it has tended just to reinforce divisions and kleptocracy.

So here are   some ideas, mostly ones I have written on before, and mostly very inexpensive compared to our annual £12bn a year "aid" budget, now collected in 1 place:

1 - Quit the EU. Getting out would allow us to buy food, which Africa can produce. Outside the EU trade barriers we could buy cheap (by our standards) food from them at high (by their standards) prices. By encouraging market solutions this would, alone, almost certainly do far more than our entire "aid" budget now does.

2 - Use our international influence to support the greatly increased use of DDT. The DDT ban has killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined (app 1 1/2 million a year) - yet before the western campaign started deaths were down to 50,000 a year.

3 - Use our international influence to support Golden Rice. Genetically modified rice with extra protein, which ends the protein deficiency diseases that leave survivors intellectually stunted. The eco-fascists have been responsible for obscene suffering simply because of their Luddite opposition to science.

4 - Support construction of a massive geosynchronous satellite in orbit over Europe/Africa (2 others should follow) able to provide virtually unlimited telecommunications traffic. It is believed that a, probably the, major reason for economic growth in Africa is that mobile phones have allowed people to negotiate trade with each other.

5 - Once such a system exists it will be possible to create a computerised teaching system able to provide a basic but good (QandA) education in the remotest village.

6 - Use the satellite to photo record all land and make computerised records of land ownership. Poor or no title to land is one of the major factors preventing the raising of investment capital across the 3rd world.

7 - Keep a record of speech, pictures and video footage of crime, sent up by mobile phones. I don't expect this to end corruption and brutality quickly but it will provide pressure. Who would have thought starving Africans could have mobile video cameras but such is our modern world.

8 - Where there are guerrilla wars against moderately sensible governments provide drone aircraft to hunt them down.

9 - Use this same network as a banking system using a non-national virtual currency exchangable through mobiles. A prudent banker can make this inflation free simply by not inflating the quantity of money beyond demand (and still make a vast profit).

10 - I have said we should be building a factory mass producing small nuclear reactors. If maximum production exceeds demand we should give/auction excess ones to 3rd world countries. This has the advantage from our point of view that we are guaranteeing they will all sell, even if only at cost prices, rather than making the market entirely subject to political bans.

11 - Build Aquarius style floating islands powered by OTECs. One spin off is deep ocean water that can be used to grow protein rich algae which can, in turn, be supplied as a protein additive.

12 - Lifestraws - a way of cleaning water that the PC brigade hate. These, if mass produced in the hundreds of millions, would have very low marginal cost.

13 - Cut a tunnel under the Chad mountains and divert most of the water from the Congo's tributary, into Lake Chad and from there, through canals and other tunnels, across the Sahara creating lakes (2 virtually inland seas) along the way. My guess is it would be a century before it reached Tunisia but by then the Sahara would be revitalised by a century worth of water and as fertile as it was during the "catastrophic global warming" of 7,000 BC when we have cave paintings from the centre of the, now, desert, showing hippos.

14 - Open the Qattara Depression to seawater - make electricity and use much of it to refine Manganese and other minerals in sea water.

15 - Build a linear accelerator good space launcher from the top of Kilimanjaro (Bifrost here).

16 - A major programme of disease eradication. Africa is subject to a much greater disease reservoir than almost all the rest of the planet. Tackling them needs a continent wide programme. Matt Ridley  gives a number of examples here - for example:

There are 2,500 species of mosquito in the world and only one of them — Aedes aegypti — is responsible for carrying dengue fever, a disease that currently afflicts nearly 400 million people and rising.... Last month the Brazilian government gave an Oxford-based company called Oxitec a licence to release into the wild genetically engineered male A aegypti mosquitoes. They carry two extra genes that render their offspring incapable of breeding. Release enough of them in an area and the species all but dies out locally. The beauty of this scheme is that the rarer the species gets, the better the chance that the genetically engineered males you release will mate with any available females, so the technique becomes more effective, not less, as local extinction approaches

     There are a lot of diseases there. This plays to our strength of technological knowledge. It should not be allowed to play to our weakness - ecofascism. The "Greens" would certainly oppose curing disease that way but they, in turn, must be opposed.
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I would also, like the crime videoing programme, have a programme of recording all the languages, songs, dances, religions and perhaps most important, ballads of every tribe in Africa through the mobiles programme. The brothers Grimm did a little of that for Europe but we don't know how much we have lost, and in a few generations Africa will have suffered the same cultural loss.

I would also like DNA records (ie frozen blood) to the same extent. It may be 50 years before we know what it all means, but we will still have it then.
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     Most of these are relatively inexpensive (quitting the EU) or have spin off benefits (guaranteeing sale of small nuclear reactors/space craft). None of them involve more than the minimum direct interaction with local governments. Thus none of them rely on money we pay being passed on successfully. None of them have the obscenity of us telling locals that if they want us to provide power it will only be the most expensive and unreliable windmills, to satisfy political parasites and their friends back here, rather than attempting to maximise any benefit to "aid recipients".

     However, even if all this saves millions of lives and makes it far better for a billion, it won't make life in Africa as good as here so it won't stop attempts at economic immigration. The only thing that can do that is stopping it. Japan and South Korea have immigration rates of 0.00% so it can be done, but only if the will is there.

Good Fences - an academic investigation into how different ethnic communities have lived together successfully in Switzerland - because they have a strong cantonal system of government and good geographical barriers stopping overspill (& general social agreement against it as well), so no community feels it has to grab power to protect itself or gain advantage.

Perhaps obvious but important to have it verified.
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Review of book about the Yugoslav war. The author was clearly surprised to find our openly genocidal (ex-)Nazi allies were openly genocidal ex-Nazis or that the NATO powers accidentally didn't notice it. Err by automatically assuming, without looking at the evidence, that the Serbs were comparably evil or that NATO's crimes were carried out through ignorance. Half right then, which puts it far ahead of what our media claim.
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Inside Venice's secession movement. If the Scottish separatists were remotely as libertarian we could have a good future doing the same - but they aren't, they are big state parasites, Luddites and nihilists, who cannot be trusted to run a whelk stall let alone the most scientifically advanced country in the world (well matching Switzerland),
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"John Oliver's viral video: the best climate debate you'll ever see" - not worth watching - included only because the link leads the that Guardian headline. I do not believe every Guardian journalist or sub-editor is so ignorant as to not know that a "debate" is something in which 2 sides participate. Thus we must assume that they are deliberately lying/giving words a different meaning for what they have/copying Orwell's 1984.

So when they say they are a "liberal paper" we may assume the conventional meaning they arte hiding under that word is "lying, thieving murdering Nazi propaganda sheet for whom nobody with more humanity than a rabid dog works". No offence to any of the animals.
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EU immigration to Britain rises by 43,000. Cameron refuses to say whether his manifesto promise/lie to cut immigration to "10s not 100s of thousands" will be in the next manifesto too.
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The immensely amusing incident where John Snow on C4 introduced a Rumanian woman purely to denounce Farage and UKIP for saying he wouldn't like Rumanian Roma living next door. She said bloody right, neither would I, what a sensible politician. Don't expect C4 to broadcast anything similarly balanced except by more ignorance.
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ITV poll (so any bias is warmist) says 62% of people in Britain don't believe the warming scare - moreover the more educated and scientifically literate people are the more they see through it. Another case of an obvious result but the important thing being it is proven.
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Why do so many Proposed "Solutions to World or National Problems" Suck even in the Design Phase ? Or Fail to solve the stated problem after implementation ? from Next Big Future
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Via Steve Sailer

"Burisma Holdings, Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, has expanded its Board of Directors by bringing on Mr. R Hunter Biden as a new director.

From the Register:

China will become the world's biggest economy this year, overtaking the United States in GDP. As the FT drily notes, "Most economists previously thought China would pull ahead in 2019."
So China powers on, at a greater pace than had been predicted by Western economic experts, who are supposed to know about these things. But our leaders still can't seem to figure out why.

   Which shows the power of compound growth.  Back in 2008 I discussed this, pointing out that at 10% growth gdp doubles in 7 years and that by 21 years from then (15 from now) they would have reached our current per person wealth.

    Of course we could have had such growth any time we wanted as I have been saying since starting this blog. Indeed since then I have come to the conclusion we could have grown more easily and faster than China, had the political parasites in charge wanted it. But they don't.

     The Register goes on to say why China is managing this - because they are competent people just as capable of innovation as we are (or were) which is true but not the whole story.

  The graphs don't cover exactly the same period, though the trend is unmistakable but if we take the 1990 to 2002 period electricity production goes up just under 3 fold and gdp went up just under 3 fold. Who woulda thought? Allegedly absolutely nobody in our political class (except in Holyrood where it is provable they know.

"In modern times the main driver of economic growth has been, and continues to be, energy" - Jim Mather, SNP minister. Jim was the only competent and patriotic SNP MEP but unfortunately has now retired.

     This article was put up on Next Big Future a few days ago:

Rolls-Royce (RR/) Holdings Plc is designing unmanned cargo ships.

Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel’s bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships.

Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says.

The company’s schematics show vessels loaded with containers from front to back, without the bridge structure where the crew lives. By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage -- with more cargo, ships can cut costs and boost revenue, Levander said. The ships would be 5 percent lighter before loading cargo and would burn 12 percent to 15 percent less fuel, he said.

Crew costs of $3,299 a day account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant and consultant.

Unmanned ships are currently illegal under international conventions that set minimum crew requirements, said Simon Bennett, a spokesman for the London-based International Chamber of Shipping, an industry association representing more than 80 percent of the global fleet.

Nextbigfuture proposed solutions to problems of Drone Container ships

* have minimum crews operate as parking valet crews to hop onto the ship just outside the territorial waters of a port that requires minimum crews.

* Use some cost savings to fund rapid security deployment teams [mercenaries] to retake any pirated ship or hacked drone ship. A pirated ship can only get about 500 miles in one day

Need to have a hackproof way to stop the ship - a safety stall switch

There needs to be a hackproof way to stop the ship safely.

This would prevent the ship from being used to blackmail the ship owner or others by ramming it into something that would cause a lot of life loss and expensive damage.

Stealing containers not that big a deal

Attempts to board the ship and remove containers is not that meaningful. It would be difficult to unload the ship quickly.

 It would be easy and affordable to put tracking beacons on each of the different containers. This would also be useful for rapid wireless inventory.


         The proposal is technically not entirely automated sailing since the land base will direct it and "hundreds" of others. But it is close as dammit and I'm sure the remaining under 1% could be automated too if required.

         The cost savings listed are pretty substantial. Ships 5% lighter, fuel savings app 12.5%, other operating expenses down 44%. Comes to 50% of the industry's $375 bn costs.

         I can see no reason why cranes loading and unloading could not be more easily computerised.

         I have previously, several times, written of automated trains, which could deliver single container carriages anywhere with rail connection. We also have automated driving systems which may, as soon as politics allows, become commonplace.

        The net effect of this is that, pretty much as soon as it is allowed, it will be possible to dial up the uplifting of a container in any developed country and its fairly speedy delivery anywhere in the world, untouched by human hands and at a much reduced, almost token, cost. Long distance sea freight is already easily the cheapest transport we have so halving it would be astonishing. But easy.

        On piracy - note that ransoming the crews is a large part, possibly the main part of their profits. That will go and I don't see anybody being able to unload hundreds of containers in a Somali fishing village.

      As the underlined bit shows the barrier is political agreements on crew levels. Can't criticise that in the past - it looked like and probably was a decent bit of regulatory welfare. However, as the technology always moves far faster then politics we are left with it being an absolute ban on progress. Perhaps the rules will be very quickly removed, or perhaps we will see all the bureaucracies fighting an unrestrained battle to hold onto their jobs and power - and since it is international agreements it is likely to be easy to pass the blame for footdragging around till "nobody is to blame". In which case libertarians should be prepared to take up cudgels too.   

     This hasn't had much coverage in Scotland, though the Catalan independence movement always did.

Over 89 percent of residents in Italy's Veneto region have voted in an unofficial referendum in favor of independence from the rest of the country as Venetians seek to restore the glory of the old days by creating a state of their own.

Over two million residents of Veneto – the region of Italy surrounding Venice – took part in the so-called 'Veneto independence referendum' that lasted from Sunday to Friday. The survey, conducted online and backed by the region’s independence parties, has no legal power but aims to gather support for a bill calling for a referendum.

The poll also asked residents if they want the region to keep the euro and remain part of the European Union and NATO if it declares its independence. More than 55 percent of voters said they would prefer an independent Veneto to remain part of the EU, and over 51 percent said they want to remain in the eurozone. Over 64.5 percent said they want Veneto to be part of NATO.

The results of the vote were announced Friday in the city of Treviso, where hundreds of pro-independence activists gathered for a demonstration, waving the flags of the old Venetian Republic.

      I suspect they don't know what to make of it. Catalonia is nation sized; it has been a "leftist" cause since the Spanish Civil War and people know where it is. Veneto on the other hand is a new story; it looks like it would be energetically free market; and somewhat more difficult to define on a map.
   I assume the province of Friulia, along the Slovenian border, would go with Veneto, since it would no longer have any link to Italy. Trentino is a more nationalistically dodgy problem since it is largely Austrian, having been given to Italy, against the rule of nationality, because it was the price of Italian entry to WW1. Perhaps it would become a separate country or be linked with predominantly German speaking Switzerland.

    If the comparison between Scotland and Catalonia is well established the obvious one with Veneto is Slovenia, with which it shares a border. Both are areas feeling held back by being the northern and richest tip of a comparatively poor southern state. Of the 2 Veneto is wealthier, has the larger population and has, by a very long way, the greater history as an independent state.

   I have no doubt an independent Veneto, particularly as a culturally entrepreneurial society, would be a success. Considering they are surrounded by the EU, with whom they would trade, and that the issue has not come up strongly yet, I am quite surprised that only 55% want to stay in  the EU for now. They would be very good Europeans but I suspect uncomfortable EUropeans.

    The really important thing about this is that it confirms the direction of travel of statehood in the world. For centuries countries grew larger - the union of Italy in 1866 was part of that trend. Now, a century and a half later the Venetians want to reinvent themselves as an independent state. In all previous such break ups it was a rickety colonial structure (Singapore, South Sudan, east Timor), or a failed state falling apart (USSR, Czechoslovakia) or active foreign intervention (Yugoslavia, Crimea). This is a successful western European economy and indeed probably the most successful part, feeling, not that Italy is failing but just that they can do better on their own. it is a complete repudiation of what appeared to be the march of history, such as few have envisaged (ie Heinlein) and whatever sort of world society it develops into, it will be something different from anything previously known.

  The lessons for Scotland are equivocal. Of course we can have separation if we wish, but it will also enhance the feeling that what would happen would us be giving England their independence from us. I would have no worries about Scottish independence if I thought our government was going to be a competent, rational, market orientated one but that is obviously not on offer.

  The other message is that separation doesn't stop at the divisions everybody expects. Scotland has only been a fully unified country since 1746 (crushing of the Jacobites). Orkney and Shetland ("its our oil"), the Western Isles, the Highlands as a whole or indeed the Borders are likely, even if 51% of Scots vote for separation, to have a majority for union (or possibly separate separation). If that was all that was left a lot of Edinburghers would look askance at being in a union that consisted mainly of Greater Glasgow.

   A matter of some importance to the US as well. They fought a bloody war against secession but having accepted the principle over Yugoslavia, Ukraine, South Sudan etc it would now be hard to deny it to Americans.

  

 

       This is from an article Newt Gingerich did recently.












    Not exactly an absolute correlation. Also one must make allowances for the variation in average national income - Greece & Portugal are less than half as well of as us so it is obvious minimum wage would have to be half as well (though this does rather make a nonsense of the theories that minimum wage laws either produce fairness or increase earnings. US minimums well below those of European states that they are richer than are also going to cause less interference in the market.

   In theory low minimum wages should do as little harm as no minimum wages because neither discourage people from paying the amounts of money real employers are willing to  pay.

   But overall there is a clear trend that those countries with no minimum wage laws, or with minimums, low compared to national income, have generally lower levels of unemployment.

   Who would have guessed?

  But it is better to have evidence. 

     The estimable Register provides this 3 page review of what may have happened to the Malay Airlines plane. It shows that the plane must be on or near a circle, centred on the satellite that recorded the engine signals. It runs from north of Afghanistan through Burma, omits Sumatra and Java, presumably because that has already been gone over and across the south Pacific. I initially thought it had landed in the Sumatra jungle and am still not certain  it hasn't. Otherwise the Golden Triangle area of Burma is a possibility though it would have had to cross Burmese airspace without notice. I don't think it could have come near Afghanistan without lighting up radars.

     But the odds increasingly look like it is at the bottom of the Indian ocean.

     The Register glosses over the evidence that it rose to 45,000 feet when it first went off course. That could be a cockpit fight but, if combined with deliberate depressurising of the passenger space. would, as the Mail says in this otherwise very good assessment that this could be to "knock out" the passengers.

     Or to kill them if maintained. Which would explain why they didn't get on their mobile phones.

     I'm afraid that is what happened. Meanwhile the captain's semi-estranged wife and family are still missing. Did they flee to somewhere where he could meet them after successfully pulling off the crime of the century or did he kill them first? It is unlikely they could still be in Malaysia unnoticed. Could they have gone abroad without passing a video camera or have they literally vanished from the face of the Earth?

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    The Register also highlights the recent observations said to have confirmed what likely happened at the Big Bang.

    It also seems to confirm that we must list in an Everitt sort of multiverse.

What the BICEP2 experiment discovered is a polarisation – primordial B-mode polarisation – that it believes demonstrates the existence of an inflationary period in the universe. This inflation was predicted and explored by luminaries such as Alan Guth and Andrei Linde back in the 1980s.

If the BICEP2 results are correct – remembering that they're still to go through peer review – they would constitute the best observational evidence so far to support the inflationary model.

The reason BICEP2 implies inflation is that the polarisation is present fairly uniformly across the whole of the cosmic background radiation. In other words: whatever caused the polarisation represents sufficient energy to make the mathematics of cosmic inflation stack up.

And it was a tweet of a comment by Linde – that “If inflation is there, then the multiverse is there” – that captured The Register's interest.

As Dr Tucker explained, in the “generic inflation” model, in order to create enough energy and space for our universe to undergo that inflationary period, “you imply an infinite amount of energy and space.”

Even though our universe is big, “an infinite amount” of energy and space leaves a lot left over to be explained.

Hence the multiverse hypothesis: it balances the scales. The inflationary period, followed by a gravitational collapse into the universe we can observe, gives us the 13.8 billion years of universe history we can observe – leaving the excess energy and space beyond the reach of we inside the bubble.

“To get inflation, you have to have a vast amount of vacuum energy,” Dr Tucker explained.

UPDATE

I was wrong in believing his wife and family had disappeared. She did move out the day before, which may indicate a fight but went to her sister's. I had assumed the fact that our media didn't mention her meant they didn't know where she was.

It is now reported that satellite photos taken 4 days ago at t the southern tip of the range showed what may be large debris, probably a wing and most of another. That would mean the plane landed successfully on the sea. Being empty of fuel it is unsurprising that wings would float. However if you were going to rendezvous with somebody, equatorial waters, & somewhere you could reach well before the fuel ran out, would be infinitely safer than the storm lashed Antarctic Ocean so it still looks like a nasty way to commit suicide.

UPDATE 2

Jerry Pournelle broadly supports this assessment - that the plane was redirected to the nearest landing field and then the pilots overcome with smoke, from a burning wheel. Not sure but worth considering. If so I would expect the plane to have continued in the direction of its initial direction change and I get the impression there was a later redirection due south, but this impression may be wrong. Einstein said that an explanation should be as simple as possible to explain the evidence but no simpler and this may be it.

   Jerry Pournelle listed this:

FYI from Wikipedia:

• 1944 to 1947 & 1951: 1.5 million Poles were deported from the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union into the western territories, which Soviets transferred from Germany to Poland. By 1950, 1.6 million Poles from the eastern territories annexed by the Soviet Union had been settled in what the government called the Regained Territories.

• 1944 to 1948: Flight and expulsion of Germans after World War II. Between 13.5 and 16.5 million Germans were expelled, evacuated or fled from Central and Eastern Europe, making this the largest single instance of ethnic cleansing in recorded history. Estimated number of those who died in the process is being debated by historians and estimated between 500,000 and 3,000,000.^[44]

• November and December 1944: more than 200,000 Danube Swabians in Yugoslavia were expelled from their homes and interned in starvation and concentration camps for the old, young and disabled. Some 30,000 workers were expelled to Russia as slave laborers for war reparations.^[45]

        
         Though I have long promoted more reporting of the atrocities "our side" & NATO police carried out in the wars against Yugoslavia, it is worth, for balance, remembering that atrocities get carried out by all sides.

        Though our schools and media airbrush these out of history.

         If you read up about the Danube Swabians they certainly did side with Hitler against their neighbours in the atrocities he committed. It is difficult to think of a way in which  locals, assuming they were not saintly, would not have expelled them. Nonetheless they should not be forgotten.

         Also worth noting the enormous dubiety about the number of death. This demonstrates one of the obscene things about genocide - since it is a crime that eliminates the witnesses, and even moreso, tends to eliminate those with an interest in the crimes being known, the numbers quoted in almost all such, owe more to politics than reality.

        This, of course, does not apply to the Jewish Holocaust where the number of 6 million is enforced by both historians and police as being certain. Though in earlier times figures between 3 & 11 million were common. This is fortunate for the western countries since they were able to justify WW2 as being against a uniquely barbaric regime without having to mention that the Germans killed 24 million Soviet citizens (something they would have had difficulty in denouncing as bad during the cold war when we were threatening to wipe out 200 million of them).

       

      Jerry Pournelle recently published a comment from me. He had previously been discussing Russian population decline and said that Putin's aim in Crimea/Ukraine is a desperate search, not for territory but for more Russians. That is a reasonable position but I considered that there is a better way to get people.
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Putin Needs Russians 

Presumably he doesn’t really understand how free enterprise works much better than Obama. He has plenty of money. all he has to do is put lots of it into child support, probably only of children who have at least 2 ethnic Russian grandparents though that would get a lot of western fingerwagging. 

If you tax something you will get less of it. if you subsidize it, enough, you will get more. 

That would be cheaper than wars. 

One of the lessons of wars since the industrial revolution is that a nation no longer gets powerful by grabbing the territory of unfriendly neighbors if you have to keep their recalcitrant population too. Britain learned this in Ireland and India & learned the opposite lesson about the strength of friends in Australia and Canada (& despite a little carelessness in 1776 in the US too). 

I once calculated that by 2050, at present rates of population growth <http://www.geographyiq.com/ranking/ranking_Population_growth_Rate_dall.htm> [my article http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/demographic-population-growth-war.html ] Yemen will have a larger population and a more aggressive population than Russia (more aggressive because poorer, more crowded and large families make young men more expendable). Not problems I wish on either.  

Best Wishes
Neil Craig

I am quite certain that Mr. Putin understands family incentives and tax breaks. And not wanting recalcitrant minorities is likely to look very high in his calculations. In the case of the Crimea the benefits of annexation outweigh the costs.  In the cast of the ‘stans’, it is better to lure the Russians to Russia; the land is not really wanted. With the Ukraine itself things get complicated.  I suspect Russians are quite capable of rational analysis on these issues.
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      I like his gentle chiding of the possibility that Obama and his circle might have not an infinitely worse understanding of free markets than the ex-KGB colonel Putin has. Having read some speeches from both I have to accept he is probably right. Ditto on a whole range of other subjects.

      Jerry's site is one that should be read by anybody who is philosophically interested in politics rather than simply as a way of using tribalism to fleece the voters and by anybody who supports human progress. I am proud to say that his site and earlier writings are probably my primary political influence so you know who to blame.

        This letter of mine was in the Metro on Monday. The bit in italics was edited out but it remained well above the average length of a Metro letter so that is fair. The letter went out to all our major papers and this is not the first time I have found the Metro more willing to publish unapproved opinions than the "quality" press are.:

The Crimeans are holding a referendum to quit Ukraine and join Russia.

    A couple of comments I have made elsewhere regarding the Ukrainian mess:

   Roger Helmer said "Both Russia and the EU benefit enormously from the trade in Russian gas.  Russia supplies around 30% of Europe’s gas demand, with some half of that coming through Ukraine.  The UK gets little Russian gas directly, but any loss of gas to the EU as a whole would clearly impact on our supplies from elsewhere.

Fortunately we’ve had a warmish winter, and it’s nearly Spring, so immediate pressure on supplies is not too severe.  Several European countries (though not the UK) have built new gas storage, in large part to anticipate supply problems and reduce the immediacy of their dependence on Russia.
If the situation deteriorates, and a shooting war commences, the impact could be very serious indeed, both for prices and for security of supply.  In the UK, we have created a situation where over the next decade or so, gas is the only generating capacity we can build in the time-scale to keep the lights on.

 We’re locked-in, at a time when one of Europe’s major gas suppliers seems to be on the brink of war."

& I commented


and in reply to this article on Stratfor

 

      This article in which an African economist calls for an end of "aid" to Africa strikes home.

      For us in Scotland it is also of equal interest when we see that Scotland gets more money per head through the Barnet formula than the rest of the UK (by purest coincidence the excess we get matches fairly closely to the tax paid on what would be Scotland's share of the North Sea Oil.

   "Huge bureaucracies are financed (with the aid money), corruption and complacency are promoted, Africans are taught to be beggars and not to be independent. In addition, development aid weakens the local markets everywhere and dampens the spirit of entrepreneurship that we so desperately need. As absurd as it may sound: Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid....

 A portion of the corn often goes directly into the hands of unscrupulous politicians who then pass it on to their own tribe to boost their next election campaign.

.....our politicians were overwhelmed with money, and they try to siphon off as much as possible. The late tyrant of the Central African Republic, Jean Bedel Bokassa, cynically summed it up by saying: "The French government pays for everything in our country. We ask the French for money. We get it, and then we waste it."

     Turning down money isn't exactly easy but the comparison between Emperor Bokassa and our own Fat Controller is fairly obvious as is the demand that ever more money be available for the special interest groups that our ruling cartel support. If the billions spent on windmills, qangos, anti-smoking officers and campaigns and on our NHS, which spends 25% more per head than in England but with worse health outcomes, normal Scots wouldn't notice either

     One way of doing that would be the SNP way of separation (though they expect a separate England would still want to pay for our windmills). Another and in my view better one, would be to allow the economy to grow (only the greens publicly admit they want recession but the actions of the others prove they do to) and cut income tax by at least 3p (what we subsidise windmills by). As Scotland grows to be the richest and lowest taxed part of Great Britain we would see accounts moving into balance.

   Steve Sailer has recently been writing more, and far more accurately, than our own beloved state media about the Ukrainian situation. He largely blames a continuing campaign by the US/NATO/EU to destabilise the place simply to be rude to the Russians.
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the rise of anti-Russian jingoism in the American media is apparent to both the right and the left. In The Nation, NYU Russian Studies professor Stephen F. Cohen lamented about the press’s run-up to the Sochi Winter Games:

American media on Russia today are less objective, less balanced, more conformist and scarcely less ideological than when they covered Soviet Russia during the Cold War.

The US media’s ideological justifications for its anti-Russianism involve gay rights (”World War G”) and democracy (“World War D”). But those concepts don’t appear much in evidence in scenes from central Kiev, where the City Hall of the embattled pro-Russian government had been occupied since December by masked men swinging iron bars. Maybe I’m just stereotyping, but the soccer hooligan Right Sector and Dynamo Kiev ultras who have done much of the fighting against the government—the lads who consider opposition leader Vitali Klitschko, the retired heavyweight champ, a wimp—don’t give off a particularly gay-friendly vibe.....

Putin has recently attempted to furnish his subjects with a conservative nationalist ideology to counter aggressive American globalist liberalism. The ex-KGB man recognizes that liberalism—in the reigning sense of minoritarianism—is suffering from diminishing marginal returns, with ever-tinier minorities the subject of its obsessions, as we see with World War G moving on to World War T. (Of course, globalist liberalism doesn’t seem to actually make countries more equal; indeed, inequality of wealth has exploded during this period of minoritarian triumph.)

Much of the American press’s anger at Russia stems from the feeling that maybe Putin is on to something. (if so Russia being attacked for decades for having a left wing ideology is now being attacked for having a right wing one - its a funny old world)

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Another reason for going for them is that those in power like to have some enemy to keep us scared and we have had Islamic terrorists for sufficiently long now to be boring

"America's Global War of Terror has been a huge moneymaker for Washington's Beltway, but it's starting to get a little old. Looking to the future, why not a replay of a tried and true honeypot: an arms race with Russia?

   We hardly seem to gear about these games without the $50 bn pricetag being mentioned. Usually with the implication or outright claim that it is all going into Putin and his friend's pockets. So is it:

 Although few stories mention it, the source of that estimate was Dmitry Kozak, a deputy prime minister who headed Russia’s Olympic preparatory commission, which was charged with supervising the work in Sochi. Last February, Kozak told reporters in Moscow that Russia was prepared to invest 1.5 trillion rubles in Sochi, which was the equivalent of $50 billion.

But like most large round numbers, this one needs a few caveats and asterisks.....estimating the cost of the Games depends on how, and what, is counted.

Kozak said that the Russian government would spend $6.7 billion on Olympic facilities. He said Russia would invest another $16.7 billion in upgrading rails, roads and other infrastructure surrounding Sochi. That comes to $23.4 billion in 2013 money — massive, but not even halfway to $50 billion.

The rest of his projection included private, speculative investment by Olympic sponsors, including billionaire friends of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin. Russia hopes the Olympic stimulus will turn the Sochi area into a year-round tourist magnet long after the Olympics are over, and it encouraged investment in hotels and other facilities in the region.

But not all of this spending was directly related to the Olympics, such as the construction of a Formula One racetrack in Sochi that reportedly cost $350 million. And as Kozak noted, some of this money would have been spent by public and private sources without the Olympics.

     So $6.7bn - just over £4bn - for the actual facilities. Hardly extortionate compared to our £2bn £9bn £14bn £20bn. The rest looks like sensible commercial spending on not just building a new town but a spectacular on designed to be a one of the world's big holiday resorts. I don't know how much it would cost to build Benidorm in one go but I suspect it would be of that order.

    It certainly seems unlikely that the billionaires are investing $26.6 bn in the expectation it will disappear into fraud - that is not how you become a billionaire.

    If you are going to invest in building a holiday centre can you think of a better way of getting it the publicity that distinguishes good from world class than hanging it round an Olympics.

    But mentioning that doesn't fit the agenda of our state owned censoring media who want to ramp up fear and hatred of the Russians for having an undemocratic government (much more democratic support than ours) with a state owned censoring media (mostly less state owned than us and with legal rights for small parties to get coverage*).

* Granted we also have a legal right, as part of the BBC Charter, that our state owned broadcasters must get "balanced" coverage proportional to their support - its just that the law is worthless if those in charge ignore it.   

    The Suez Canal has always been a choke point in world trade. The earliest link was under the Pharoahs who constructed a link from the mouth of the Nile
  There is an existing record from the time of an Egyptian expedition that sailed into the Red Sea and much later returned through the Mediterranean, having circumnavigated Africa. This is added credibility because it describes the noon Sun as moving to the north of the sky as they passed the equator, something they couldn't have expected without experiencing it.

     The Victorian canal did indeed cut travel times to India, making it the lynchpin of the Empire.

    Since then the size of ships have grown and grown and grown again. Most of the world's oil is transported in tankers with a capacity of about 1 million tons. Container ships, while much smaller are still enormous. This means that many of them have to take the longer route round Africa.

    The great advantage this canal has over the Panama version is that it is through flat land, relatively easy to dig and requiring no locks. As such it should be comparatively simple to expand.

    I suggest simply increasing the number of dredgers so that, rather than keeping pace with silting they roll back the canal edges and bottoms. A permanent process but not a particularly complex one.

   There have been promises over the years to begin a widening process time after time but not much in the way of action. This says it will start in 1982 and this that it will be completed in 2010.

     Looking at the map it seems also possible that the canal could be substantially shortened by cutting through surrounding sea/march lands. 


     Also worth pointing out that Singapore built its economy on being on a massive world trade route, perfectly located to be a transhipment and warehousing dock. One end or other should be even more perfectly located. Possibly at the Red sea end where the seaways are not being used for other purposes.

      It has just been announced that the Chinese are going to finance a new Americas canal through Nicaragua for $40 bn (£24bn) but that is technically orders of magnitude more complex than what I am proposing.

      Perhaps now is the  time for an international repurchase of the Suez Canal, with satisfactory extraterritoriality guarantees. The Egyptian government have not run it that well; have other things to concentrate on now; definitely need the money; and should appreciate the jobs such a transhipment port could bring.

   Bjorn Lomberg has a listing of the 10 signs of how our problems are changing over time. On most of them - health, environmentalism, longevity etc etc we are doing very well. Here are 2 on which we are doing better than recently but in the first not as well as in the period up to WW1 & in the second the same as then.







   Trade barriers is not the whole story since the main factor in trade is shipping cost which has dropped enormously with the advent of shipping containers and keeps dropping as ship design and their increasing size keeps making them more efficient. The non-political cost of shipping something from China to Liverpool is now often less than driving it from Liverpool to here.

    Nonetheless it is important to remember that even though anything driven by technology is getting much better, politically driven stuff, of which war is the most obvious, is more equivocal.

    Our political systems are not only backward compared to technical ones, they are barely improving.

     This is a couple of my comments and couple of replies on a thread by Boris Johnson about how Germany was the primary cause of WW1. I went OTT, in my normal way about the more recent Yugoslav wars.  Though OTT by the standards of "acceptable debate" everything I say is, of course, entirely true.

Nothing particularly new here - the reason I am highlighting it is that one of the other comments is wholly supportive and though the other isn't, even he admits the western power's "rectifications" were wrongful