A Place to Stand

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.

"After a decade of study of the subject, I can assert that DDT has no adverse effects on human health, period.” - Also shows even the claim of it thinning eggshells was a fraud.

Meanwhile the eco-Nazis continue to 1.5 million people (mainly African kids so nobody cares) every year.
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The medieval warm period in Japan. The Japanese consider cherry blossom as a national symbol and have always celebrated, and recorded, the day each year it appears. Shows beyond dispute that the ecofascists, who always claimed it was only a European phenomenon (on the basis that European records only recorded it in Europe) were, once again, lying.
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Rather fun - a reservoir has been emptied because a kid peed in it. The management acknowledge that they regularly find animal's bodies there, presumably some of them have peed to at some time. This lunacy is drawn from the way the opponents of the nuclear industry are unable (or unwilling) to understand the concept of dilution. It is the application of the false LNT theory in a new area and inevitably, as with nuclear, means ignoring far "worse" instances that have always occurred naturally.

   An indication of the way public sector engineering is now done by political apparatchiks not engineers. Some time there will be an unamusing tragedy.
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The magnificent Matt Ridley showing that e-cigarettes save lives by getting people off the far more lethal normal cigarettes. This, of course, is opposed by the ban-everything fascists, whose smoking ban has always been about power and care nothing about health. That means thousands of unnecessary deaths annually but that is not the tragedy I mentioned but, as Stalin said, only a statistic.

"If somebody invented a pill that could cure a disease that kills five million people a year worldwide, 100,000 of them in this country, the medical powers that be would surely encourage it, pay for it, perhaps even make it compulsory. They certainly would not stand in its way.

....... In Britain alone two million now use these devices regularly. In study after study, scientists are finding e-cigarettes to be effective at helping people quit, to show no signs of luring non-smokers into tobacco use and to be much safer than their noxious competitors.....

The NHS is confident that these devices are about 1,000 times less harmful than cigarettes. The government confirmed this figure in a parliamentary answer to me. It’s the tar in smoke that kills, not the nicotine — a substance that is about as harmful as caffeine.

.... e-cigarettes proved 60 per cent more successful as a method of quitting than nicotine patches, gums or going cold turkey. By a country mile, free enterprise devices are outstripping the health results of medicinally regulated devices. And for many vested interests that is the problem...

Do the maths. If e-cigarettes are 1,000 times less harmful than cigarettes, then for every youngster who goes from smoking to vaping, there would have be a thousand going the other way before there is net harm
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Shale could add £50 bn to the UK economy if the bastards would let it.
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According to our government approved media abortionists are always good and black people are always the nice victims. Here is news where even the media have difficulty supporting the black abortionist.
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EU becoming even less energy competitive
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900 year study shows no sign at all of current warming. Both Mediaeval warming and Little Ice Age do show up.
 

     As I have said before I think there is a place for rail, if we get it running fully automated, with lighter vehicles and a braking system that would allow trains to run close together. All of that is currently technologically possible. If not probably best to tarmac them over and call them roads.

    This, from Transport Watch, is a listing of current technological specs. It is damning:

1. Capacity and use

(a) Rail has one third to one quarter the capacity to move people compared with motor roads managed to avoid congestion - go look at Waterloo.
(b) National Rail carries an average flow per track equivalent to only 300 buses plus lorries per day. It is difficult to find a minor road anywhere in the country so lightly loaded in terms of vehicles.
(c) The density of use achieved by the National Rail system is one third to one fifth that obtained from the Motorway or from the Trunk road and motorway network.
(d) Only 3% of passenger journeys go by national rail corresponding to just 6% of all motorized passenger miles. (Now, August 2013,  7.5%)

2. Energy consumption

In 2003 the fuel consumption of national rail in the UK was equivalent between 280 and 298 million UK gallons of diesel - passenger rail returning 115 passenger-miles per gallon and rail freight 181 tonne-miles per gallon, ignoring the drag in and out to the rail head, and 144 tonne miles per gallon if the drag in and out is 10 miles at each end of the line haul. In comparison:
(a)  An express coach may return 10 miles per gallon in uncongested conditions. With 20 people aboard that yields 200 passenger miles per uk gallon
(b)  A lorry may return 8 miles per gallon and deliver and average of 15 Tonnes (30 tonnes out back empty). That yields 120 tonne-miles per UK gallon
Applying those values to the national rail function yields 222 million gallons - 20-25 % less than by rail.
New data is available at facts sheet 5, leaving the conclusion in tact

3. Journey lengths, speed and fares

(a) Dividing passenger-km by passenger journeys available from Transport Statistics Great Britain yields an average passenger journey length of 41 km (25 miles).
(b) The 2004 National Travel Survey data shows that 50% of passenger rail journeys are less than 30 km (19 miles) long and that 90% are less those 120 km (75 miles) long. For most of those journeys the express coach, given the right of way, would match the train for journey time particularly after taking account of a service frequency up to 12 times greater.
(b) Fares by express coach are often a fraction of those by train despite the coach paying taxes and making a profit. If rail were to operate without subsidy fares would have to double at least without loss of passengers.

4. Safety

The railway lobby has embedded in the public mind the notion that rail is overwhelming safe compared with road. That has been achieved by (a) ignoring usage, so exaggerating the relative safety of rail by a factor of 18 and (b) comparing passengers killed in so-called "train accidents" with all those killed system-wide on the road network. E.g.
In contrast to that we find that (a) if ordinary traffic, void of motorcycles, pedestrians and cyclists were to be transferred to railway alignments, then the deaths per passenger-km (the death rate) would be similar to, or below, that imposed on society by the railways and (b) if rail passengers transferred to express coaches using rail's rights of way the death rate suffered by those passengers would be halved - see facts sheet 2  (This now out of date.  We now believe deaths to passengers are so few in number and so variable, by either rail or express coach as to make comparisons impossible, See facts sheet 2)

5. Widths and headroom  (See Facts sheet 3)

Despite many examples of successful conversions the railway lobby pretends railways are too narrow and lack adequate headroom to be converted to roads. The reality is that although greater widths may be desirable:
(a) A two-track railway typically offers room for a UK standard 7.3-metre carriageway with one-metre marginal strips but no other verges.
(b) On the approaches to towns and cities there is often room for a dual two or three lane highway.
(c) Where there is overhead electrification headroom would often be adequate for a triple-decker.

6. Costs

(a) The annual capital cost of rail passenger rolling stock is 3 times as high as equivalent floor space in express buses.
(b) Track maintenance for rail costs are between 5 and 10 times that required by road transport.
(c) The cost per track-km of the West Coast Main-Line Modernisation programme is 10 times higher than the cost per lane-km of building the M1 built from scratch including the cost of land.
(d) The net tax revenue per lane-mile for the Motorway and Trunk Road network has the range £(275-360) thousand per year. In contrast the 20,000 miles of rail track is being subsidised to perhaps £5 billion per year or at the rate of £250 thousand per track-mile.
(e) The rail Modernisation Programme was to cost over £60 billion. Its target was to increase passengers by 50%, e.g.. from 6% to 9% of passenger-km, and to increase rail freight from 11% to 17% of tonne-km. However, that could have only a negligible effect on traffic - reducing growth from 15% to 13% over 10 years. Further, despite the Government's guarantee Railtrack's share price collapsed prior to receivership. Hence, in purely financial terms, the £60 billion was and is being almost entirely wasted - equivalent to burning the residential accommodation for a city of 1.5 million people.
(f) In contrast, replacing the railway lines by a road surface managed to avoid congestion would cost at most £12 billion. The effect would be to offer faster journey times for all but the longest journeys at fares a fraction of those charged to most by rail passengers.
For more detail see the facts sheets 7 to 9

Wp ref. Website/Topic 2

This links to the Telegraph's collection of worldwide Earthlights - nightime photos from orbit.
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James Delingpole on Why we fight the EcoFascists
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The Holyrood Magazine interview with Nigel Farage. Nigel even gets a few words in though obviously not as many as the interviewer.
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Westminster Parliamentary candidate suspended for pointing out that Hitler was a National Socialist, leader of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany. The party that suspended her for thus bringing down the good name of socialism was the Conservatives.

    Hayek also wrote a considerable amount about how the Nazis and Fascists were an offshoot of socialism - many of their leaders and followers being "ex-socialists" and both committed to centralised state control of the economy in the interests of their own supporters. His point was that the socialists promoted the interests of the industrial workers whereas the Fascists promoted those of the lower middle classes, particularly the bureaucracy, and thus had a somewhat stronger base. Thus when the socialists had made state control popular their displacement by others also wanting the state run for their benefit is the inevitable consequence. Looking at the current Labour party, in which there are no working class people to be seen bow that Prescott has gone, who could disagree? As he pointed out it is only classic liberalism that is diametrically opposed to fascism, though nowadays even the name liberal has been corrupted by its foes using the word but meaning the opposite.

   I presume Hayek's writings have also been barred by the Tory party.
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  For anybody who thinks there could be even a smidgen of truth in the various ecofascist claims about us exceeding the earth's carrying capacity comes this http://www.cesaremarchetti.org/archive/scan/MARCHETTI-076.pdf . It works out what is the true capacity, with current or near current technology, the carrying capacity actually is. It comes to a minimum of 1,000,000,000,000 (170 times current) with an average standard of living matching that of those on about £100,000 a year now ($100,000 a couple of decades ago).

   This is without any space development at all. Thus I see this as very much a minimum.
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  Just when you think the British press must be the world's most corrupt Jerry Pournelle links to this article in the Daily Mail as the best reporting of the truth behind Obama's actions, or rather lack thereof, during the Benghazi attack.
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“I doubt that we will be investing the kind of money we have been investing unless there are propositions which attract not only us but also enable other capital lenders to come into the market place.



“The UK government needs to understand that capital is a scarce resource.” Ministers say £110bn of investment in new power plants is needed to keep the lights on over the next decade

     What a delightful world Ministers live in where money is no problem and they can artificially push up the cost of power stations to £110 billion without worrying.
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You can see why they like the EU then

Brussels out of control - E200 billion Green subsidies

http://www.vitamindwiki.com/Diseases+which+are+related+due+to+vitamin+D+deficiency

  Abstract of "An estimate of the economic burden and premature deaths due to vitamin D deficiency in Canada." from Canada's National Centre for Biotechnology Information
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20352622
Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to many diseases and conditions in addition to bone diseases, including many types of cancer, several bacterial and viral infections, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and adverse pregnancy outcomes. ......

    It is estimated that the death rate could fall by 37,000 deaths (22,300-52,300 deaths), representing 16.1% (9.7-22.7%) of annuals deaths and the economic burden by 6.9% (3.8-10.0%) or $14.4 billion ($8.0 billion-$20.1 billion) less the cost of the program. It is recommended that Canadian health policy leaders consider measures to increase serum 25(OH)D levels for all Canadians.

       Canada's population is 34 million so on a population basis that would average around just over 5,000 deaths annually. I assume the economic costs are based on welfare spending not GDP but proportionate to population that would be over £1 bn.

      Actually the vast majority of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border (54th parallel) which goes through ---- so Scotland is worse off, indded with, because we, particularly the west, are warmed by the Gulf Stream, which creates clouds, quite a bit worse off.

The citizens of Scotland have a very poor health record and a life expectancy that is one of the lowest in the Western world. This poor health record holds true for all social classes. It is now known that living in Scotland also results in extreme Vitamin D deficiency due to chronic lack of sunlight. (164) While deficiency in the UK is widespread the situation in Scotland is worse than for the rest of the country.


Scotland receives 30-50% less ultraviolet radiation (UVB) from the sun than the rest of the UK due to its high latitude and persistent low cloud cover. Vitamin D levels are consistently found to be even lower in Scotland than the rest of the UK. (168)(165)(166) (167)


Indeed, Glasgow, with one of most cloudy climates receives a similar amount of UVB as Kiruna in Northern Sweden which is way above the Arctic Circle.....


Experts in Vitamin D now suggest that Scotland's poor health record is a direct consequence of Vitamin D deficiency particularly in childhood.
To maintain an adequate level of vitamin D in Scotland there is little choice but to take supplements. Normal levels of Vitamin D cannot be achieved through diet alone.
http://www.vitamind3uk.com/VitaminD_Scotland_deficiency.html


book length pdf by Doctor Oliver Gillie
Scotland's Health Deficit: An Explanation and a Plan
http://www.healthresearchforum.org.uk/reports/scotland.pdf

in Australia only, manufacturers must add vitamin D to edible oil spreads (e.g. margarine); http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumerinformation/fortification.cfm

I had previously suggested adding it to salt, to which iodine has been added in several countries for similar purposes. Also salt is something that every human eats to roughly the same extent so that it would seem appropriate if you want to reach everybody. However this is a technical matter and I would be perfectly willing to accept some other staple food.


"We found a highly significant relationship between MS patient-linked admissions and latitude (r weighted by standard error (rsw) = 0.75, p = 0.002). There was no significant relationship between smoking prevalence and MS patient-linked admissions.

This metasurvey  (ie combining all the results from all published surveys) of mortality amonng people taking supplements showed "The summary relative risk for mortality from any cause was 0.93 (95% confidence interval, 0.87-0.99)"  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17846391 ie a 7% reduction in mortality. Note, however, that this is for all published research, relatively little of which will have taken place in anywhere nearly as sunless as Scotland so the effect in the country with the highest MS rate in the world is virtually certain to be greater.

There is a definite latitudinal effect on MS risk across Scotland"
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0014606

MS prevalence worldwide http://www.whilesciencesleeps.com/pdf/354.pdf
Canada a prevalence of MS averaging around 90 per 100,000
Rochdale, close to the 54th paralle that forms Canada's southern border - 112 per 100,000
Scotland "highest anywhere in the world for large populations" - 187 per 100,000
Orkney 193 per 100,000 - world's highest

Taking the estimate that 37,000 deaths could be saved in Canada by D supplements, based on Canda's 34 million and Scotland's 5 million population, and assuming the full range of harm caused by lack of vitamin D is proportional to the MS rate, we come to the best estimate that adding sufficient supplements would save 11,000 lives annually.

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

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

UK needs 330 billion pounds energy investments by 2030

If we stick to the official doctrine of windmillery.

Isn't it only recently that we were being told it would be £200 bn.

But for 1/10th of the price we could build 40 new nuclear plants and replace virtually all our current generators.
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Blaming Hurricane Sandy on the greedy and industrious is just as mad as blaming it on gays (or witches)


--------------- Bananas will replace potatoes as a staple food - gone in 24 hours global warming nonsense story of the week. No evidence, no research, but if you mention "climate change"the media will give some parasitic "academic" his 15 minutes of fame. -------------------------------   Peter Lilley, sceptical and very smart MP (so not in the government then) complaint about how the BBC ambushed him in what they laughlingly call "debate". They told him it would be about the economics of fighting CAGW and made him agree that he would not in any circumstances criticise the "science\" that warming is happening - then deliberately turned it into a piece about alleged "new research" which they knew wasn't new & was evidence free, saying the "science" was more alarming than previously pretended. -----------------------------   Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, came forward to “take responsibility overall” for the attacks  at Benghazi, but per Ed Klein we now know behind the scenes Bill Clinton advised his wife  to resign over the possible criminal fallout of the Benghazi massacre.  Today we learn from sources  that not only did Hillary ask for added security, and was denied, but her closest advisers strongly suggested she seek legal counsel just days after the attack.     Move along - the media says nothing to see here. ------------------------------------   Germany is dumping electricity on its unwilling neighbors and by wintertime the feud should come to a head. The power grids in Eastern Europe are stretched to their limits and face potential blackouts when output surges from German wind turbines.

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The Unbalance Sheet - An essay by John Brignall on how politics works

Rather long but worth it. An excerpt
 "a three-cornered conspiracy of selective silence between three parties – the zealots, the media and the political class. Consider the case of the hug-a-husky stunt. A politician seeking to raise his public profile arranges a highly choreographed sledge trek, accompanied by reporters and photographers, to view a retreating glacier. Any unbiased journalist worth his salt would have checked whether this phenomenon was the norm. Perhaps some did, but there was no mention in the media that he could have visited several other glaciers in the same country that are advancing, as are many throughout the world. The media, however, had their scare story, the politician got his splash and the climate scaremongers got their propaganda coup."
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James Woudhuysen

The idiocy of the New Catastrophists

The disparity between commentators’ warnings of doom and their proposed social solutions is hilarious.
You might not know it, but we have just 50 months to pull the Earth back from an irreversible tipping-point that will likely lead to ‘climate disaster’.

One of the best writers on Spiked

"He described a surgery harvesting a heart from a Serb prisoner at a location near (the northern Albanian town of) Kukes in the late 1990s," and transporting the organ to the Rinas airport near the capital Tirana, the prosecutor said"

    There is no question that NATO police carried out these atrocities under the authority and with the active participation of our own leaders. The evidence is clearer and more prosecutable than for Hitler's preknowledge of the Holocaust.

    By definition, every single British or NATO jurist who is not personally a wholly corrupt Nazi must have publicly called for the NATO funded ICTY to prosecute, with full vigour, up to the highest level ie Clinton & Blair . The fact that not a single one of them has done so does not in any way diminsh the logical certainty of that.
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  John Brignall lists things  "universities" are trying to sell degrees in:    Acting, Activity leadership, Acupuncture. Advertising. Advice work, African, Alternative medicine, Alternative theatre, Alternative therapies, Antiques, Applied theatre, Art direction, Art therapy, Beauty therapy, Biodiversity, Book arts, Broadcast presentation, Calligraphy, Campaigning,Casino operations, Child protection, Chinese Medicine (traditional), Citizenship, Climate, Clothing Engineering, Clothing studies, Community development, Complementary therapies, Costume, Crime scene, Culinary arts, Culture, Customer service, Dance, Entertainment technology, Entrepreneurship, European marketing, Families, Fashion promotion, Fire safety, Fire studies, Fitness studies, Floristry, Foot health, Football, Footwear design, Furniture production management, Garden design, Gender/sexuality studies, Golf studies, Greenkeeping, Hairdressing, Health and safety, Home economics, Jewellery, Knitwear design, Leadership, Leisure studies, Licensed retailing, Lighting studies, Machine management, Media studies, Office communication, Packaging, Play leadership, Renewable energy, Residential development, Retailing, Song writing, Sport performance, Sports journalism, Supply chain management, Surface pattern, Sustainability, Tableware design, Tourism management,  Yacht operations ................................................................

Tim Worstall proves that, on yet another issue, this time food production, the eco-Nazis care not in the smallest degree about the people they claim to care about. In this case the term "eco-Nazis" is certainly justified because what they want to do would certainly deliberately kill large numbers of people:

those poor countries need to move to the higher-tech food collection, processing and distribution systems that we ourselves use. Which is excellent news for us, obviously, as we already do it we know exactly how to do it.




Except for just the one little point. When you read around the reports from the World Development Movement, Oxfam, Action Aid and the neo-peasants of the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and the Nef, you find that all of these things are exactly what they campaign against. We must fight against the agricultural commodity giants because they're, umm, well they're capitalist I think is the complaint. Certainly we must have a Robin Hood Tax, if not an outright ban on financial speculation in food: thus killing such companies' ability to manage their risk. Processed food is just not on at all, we must all be soaking our own lentils overnight and supermarkets are the very death of community. Aren't they?


That is, the very people who worry that there's going to be a food shortage campaign against the very solutions that their own research tells us will and does work. At which point words fail me.

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   Going round the climate sanity blogsphere - Despite the fact that the EU signed up to the Aarhus Convention, legally requiring them to make decisions on climate open transparent and evidence based they have quite obviously refused to do so.

    I assume this Convention was originally introduced to allow Greens to meddle in and hold up any decisions they didn't like. Hoist by their own petard.

    This Convention must thereby render Scotland's Climate change Acy non-legal since it is centred around the deliberate fabricatio0n od quotes alleged to be from the Stern Report. Where is Big Oil when you need them to spend £100,000 ( about 0.00001 of what the government spend on promoting the fraud annually) to mount the necessary legal challenge.
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   Spiked on the movement to ban Israeli dancers on Scotland.

    Clearly whatever is accused against Israel, & repeatedly anti-Islael stories have been subsequentlyy proven lies without any of the liars apologising, is not nearly as serious as our and NATO's atrocitiries against the Yugoslavs, which are also of more direct relevance to us.

     That is why every single person in the anti-Israel movement who is not personally a Nazi has publicly called for a boycott of all NATO country dancers, goods etc.

   Anybody know of any anti-Israel campaigners not motivated by Nazism?

 If we want to improve education in the UK, why not do what we know actually works? – TIM WORSTALL Telegraph Blogs
Nothing Jerry Pournelle hasn't long spotted (he puts this recommendation on his blog) but Worstall puts it well. I find his columns normally worth it.
"Or as PJ O’Rourke once pointed out (and my own early experience confirmed) anyone who has ever dated an Education major knows what the problem in teaching is: it’s not an occupation attracting the clever.
What’s really remarkable about this empirical evidence is that the three things that seem to be important are the three things that would and do produce fits of the vapours in our educational experts and the teaching unions. But maybe it’s just a result of that third problem: they’re really not all that bright."
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   Windmill induced fluctuations in the grid are worrying Germany.

   But fortunately our glorious We Eck has no such worries, the laws of physics applying differently here.

"The rolling mill's highly sensitive monitor stopped production so abruptly that the aluminium belts snagged. They hit the machines and destroyed a piece of the mill. The reason: The voltage off the electricity grid weakened for just a millisecond.
Workers had to free half-finished aluminium rolls from the machines, and several hours passed before they could be restarted. The damage to the machines cost some €10,000 ($12,300).
In the following three weeks, the voltage weakened at the Hamburg factory two more times, each time for a fraction of second
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Via Bishop Hill - evidence given to Parliament & undisputed by them, that windmills mixed with combined gas turbines actually produce more CO2 than ordinary gas, which doesn't have to be so flexible if it isn't working as "back up" to windmills and is thus more efficient.

[A]s wind rarely produces more than 25% of its faceplate capacity it needs 75% backup - which due to the necessity of fast response times needs OCGT generation (CCGT can respond quickly but the heat-exchanger systems upon which their increased efficiency relies, cannot - so CCGT behaves like OCGT under these circumstances). CCGT produces 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per MWh, OCGT produces 0.6 tonnes. Thus 0.6 tonnes x 75% = 0.45 tonnes. Conclusion: Wind + OCGT backup produces more 0.05 tonnes of CO2 per MWh than continuous CCGT.

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   Again via Bishop Hill - rather long but the bottom line - the BBC claimed their opinions on catastrophic warming were formed by discussions with "leading scientists".

    They continue to maintain this and it must thus be classed as the very highest standard of honesty to which the BBC ever aspire. On the other hand  there is a lot of evidence that this is a total lie & they only asked ecofascist activists.

    The BBC could prove themselves honest, or dishonest at any time by answering a Freedom of Information inquiry on the subject but have always refused to.

    4 years of attempts to make them do so have finally been dismissed.
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  Jo Nova on how the various warmist and  "environmentalist" scare predictions compare with subsequent reality. Obviously the governments, media and ecofascists have been wrong on virtually all points.

The data presented here is impeccably sourced, very relevant, publicly available, and from our best instruments. Yet it never appears in the mainstream media – have you ever seen anything like any of the figures here in the mainstream media? That alone tells you that the “debate” is about politics and power, and not about science or truth
This is an unusual political issue, because there is a right and a wrong answer and everyone will know what it is eventually. People are going ahead and emitting CO2 anyway, so we are doing the experiment: either the world heats up by several degrees by 2050 or so, or it doesn’t.

Notice that the skeptics agree with the government climate scientists about the direct effect of CO2; they just disagree just about the feedbacks. The climate debate is all about the feedbacks; everything else is merely a sideshow. Yet hardly anyone knows that.

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More Scots in fuel poverty than in any other UK region

Herald Scotland   Fortunately every Holyrood politician who isn't personally wholly corrupt has publicly acknowledged this is their fault. Unfortunately there is no single Holyrood politician who is not personally wholly corrupt. ------------------------------- UK Can Run Power Grid for 500 Years On Current Waste Plutonium Stores see above item ------------------------------- Cost of energy bills have increased 140% in 8 years. ----------------------------- Wikipedia article on Land value Tax. Considering Wikipedia's generally reactionary big state stance they are surprisingly unable to find any downside of a tax the world's government (except Singapore) refuse to use. --------------------------------   And finally noblesse oblige requires us gentlemen to charitably help lesbians reform.

At first I was overwhelmed, and a little depressed, about how many of my lesbian clients and friends were rarely -- if ever -- having sex with their partners. But when I started doing research on this subject, I found reason to hope. There's some evidence that a minority (maybe 20 percent) of long-term lesbian partners sustain sexual intimacy after 10 or 20 or more years together.

 Poor things.
HT Steve Sailer.

  Glaswegian scientists photograph entangled particles
  From The Register. We have folks as Bright as Sheldon here.

 And more sociable.

Professor Colin McInnes, a key player in developing sails for space missions were the first three senior winners of The Royal Society of Edinburgh’s RSE Prize

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  For Heinlein fans (HT Steve Sailer) - including his advice to Niven and Pournelle on how to make Mote Light into a classic SF book - Change the name to something more awe inspiring, perhaps out of the Bible.
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  People who call themselves "Keynsians" keep insisting that the great Depression was ended in America by printing endless amounts of money & that the British politicians who insisted on cuts made it worse. In fact it was over far faster in Britain because our politicians (that time) got it right. Dan Hannan explains.
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  Children with pets grow up more healthy and socialised. Obvious if you think about it but not something we usually think about. I once blogged the same about pets helping socialise people in prison.
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Average Chinese person's carbon footprint now equal to average European's. And good luck to them. That means they may be slightly improving the weather and are certainly improving crop growth and biodiversity by about 25%.

Could there possibly be any connection with the fact that China is growing at 10% a year while Europe is in recession and that it won't be long before the average income is equal too?
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Following the Batman film shootings in America our media played up gun ownership as the cause. Surprisingly enough they never mentioned last year's Cumbria shooting had left the same number of dead.
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Amount of CO2 being absorbed from the atmosphere has doubled in 50 years. This will include absorption into the ocean and other things otherwise the estimate, above, that CO2 had increased crop growth by 25% would be hopelessly low.
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Müller Lite: Why Every Scientist Needs a Classical Training  Lord Monckton cheerfully eviscerates Muller's BEST climate fraud.
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"They saw a television documentary story that condemned the inhumane practice of trafficking human organs. But as Walter's health deteriorated, his relatives saw saviors in the villains. Since the television show named no names, they asked the author of the story to provide them with contact information."

Republic of Kosovo is considered the "capital" of the illegal trade in human organs. Initially it was caused by the war launched by the leading powers of Europe and the U.S. that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Organs were removed from the killed or captured Serbs for transplants for wealthy customers. This was the birth of an illegal business - trading in human organs. Until 2008, the surgeries with illegal organ transplants were carried out in Pristina."

  And so the atrocities our governments authorised in Kosovo continue. Does anybody think the (German) documentary producer was being somewhat hypocritical in their outrage at this business when they then acted as middlemen for potential customers.

It is not easy for a modern Englishman, who can pass in a day from his club in St. James's Street to his shooting box among the Grampians, and who finds in his shooting box all the comforts and luxuries of his club, to believe that, in the time of his greatgrandfathers, St. James's Street had as little connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In the south of our island scarcely any thing was known about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but contempt and loathing. The crags and the glens, the woods and the waters, were indeed the same that now swarm every autumn with admiring gazers and stretchers. ... Yet none of these sights had power, till a recent period, to attract a single poet or painter from more opulent and more tranquil regions. Indeed, law and police, trade and industry, have done far more than people of romantic dispositions will readily admit, to develope in our minds a sense of the wilder beauties of nature. A traveller must be freed from all apprehension of being murdered or starved before he can be charmed by the bold outlines and rich tints of the hills. He is not likely to be thrown into ecstasies by the abruptness of a precipice from which he is in imminent danger of falling two thousand feet perpendicular; by the boiling waves of a torrent which suddenly whirls away his baggage and forces him to run for his life; by the gloomy grandeur of a pass where he finds a corpse which marauders have just stripped and mangled; or by the screams of those eagles whose next meal may probably be on his own eyes. ...


[The poet Oliver] Goldsmith was one of the very few Saxons who, more than a century ago, ventured to explore the Highlands. He was disgusted by the hideous wilderness, and declared that he greatly preferred the charming country round Leyden, the vast expanse of verdant meadow, and the villas with their statues and grottoes, trim flower beds, and rectilinear avenues. Yet it is difficult to believe that the author of the Traveller and of the Deserted Village was naturally inferior in taste and sensibility to the thousands of clerks and milliners who are now thrown into raptures by the sight of Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond.

His feelings may easily be explained. It was not till roads had been cut out of the rocks, till bridges had been flung over the courses of the rivulets, till inns had succeeded to dens of robbers, till there was as little danger of being slain or plundered in the wildest defile of Badenoch or Lochaber as in Cornhill, that strangers could be enchanted by the blue dimples of the lakes and by the rainbows which overhung the waterfalls, and could derive a solemn pleasure even from the clouds and tempests which lowered on the mountain tops.

The change in the feeling with which the Lowlanders regarded the highland scenery was closely connected with a change not less remarkable in the feeling with which they regarded the Highland race. It is not strange that the Wild Scotch, as they were sometimes called, should, in the seventeenth century, have been considered by the Saxons as mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered as savages, they should not have been objects of interest and curiosity. The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the manners of rude nations separated from our island by great continents and oceans. Numerous books were printed describing the laws, the superstitions, the cabins, the repasts, the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of Laplanders and Hottentots, Mohawks and Malays. The plays and poems of that age are full of allusions to the usages of the black men of Africa and of the red men of America. The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to have any information was the Highlander. ...

In the reign of George the First, a work was published which professed to give a most exact account of Scotland; and in this work, consisting of more than three hundred pages, two contemptuous paragraphs were thought sufficient for the Highlands and the Highlanders. We may well doubt whether, in 1689, one in twenty of the well read gentlemen who assembled at Will's coffeehouse knew that, within the four seas, and at the distance of less than five hundred miles from London, were many miniature courts, in each of which a petty prince, attended by guards, by armour bearers, by musicians, by a hereditary orator, by a hereditary poet laureate, kept a rude state, dispensed a rude justice, waged wars, and concluded treaties. While the old Gaelic institutions were in full vigour, no account of them was given by any observer, qualified to judge of them fairly.

Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders, he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the good and the bad qualities of an uncivilised nation. He would have found that the people had no love for their country or for their king; that they had no attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to any magistrate superior to the chief. He would have found that life was governed by a code of morality and honour widely different from that which is established in peaceful and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab in the back, or a shot from behind a fragment of rock, were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults. He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or their fathers had wreaked on hereditary enemies in a neighbouring valley such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the Thirty Years' War shudder. He would have found that robbery was held to be a calling, not merely innocent, but honourable. He would have seen, wherever he turned, that dislike of steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker sex the heaviest part of manual labour, which are characteristic of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon, or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their pregnant wives, their tender daughters, were reaping the scanty harvest of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot. In their view it was quite fit that a man, especially if he assumed the aristocratic title of Duinhe Wassel and adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease, except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention the name of such a man in connection with commerce or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was indeed less despised. Yet a highborn warrior was much more becomingly employed in plundering the land of others than in tilling his own.

The religion of the greater part of the Highlands was a rude mixture of Popery and Paganism. The symbol of redemption was associated with heathen sacrifices and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale to one Daemon, and set out drink offerings of milk for another. Seers wrapped themselves up in bulls' hides, and awaited, in that vesture, the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to preserve the memory of past events, an enquirer would have found very few who could read. In truth, he might easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he would have had to pay for his knowledge of the country would have been heavy. He would have had to endure hardships as great as if he had sojourned among the Esquimaux or the Samoyeds. Here and there, indeed, at the castle of some great lord who had a seat in the Parliament and Privy Council, and who was accustomed to pass a large part of his life in the cities of the South, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats, plate and fine linen, lace and jewels, French dishes and French wines. But, in general, the traveller would have been forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay the very hair and skin of his hosts, would have put his philosophy to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in a hut of which every nook would have swarmed with vermin. He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat smoke, and foul with a hundred noisome exhalations. At supper grain fit only for horses would have been set before him, accompanied by a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some of the company with which he would have feasted would have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather might be; and from that couch he would have risen half poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf, and half mad with the itch.

This is not an attractive picture. And yet an enlightened and dispassionate observer would have found in the character and manners of this rude people something which might well excite admiration and a good hope. Their courage was what great exploits achieved in all the four quarters of the globe have since proved it to be. Their intense attachment to their own tribe and to their own patriarch, though politically a great evil, partook of the nature of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated; but still it was heroic. There must be some elevation of soul in a man who loves the society of which he is a member and the leader whom he follows with a love stronger than the love of life. It was true that the Highlander had few scruples about shedding the blood of an enemy: but it was not less true that he had high notions of the duty of observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the commonwealth. Yet those erred greatly who imagined that he bore any resemblance to villains who, in rich and well governed communities, live by stealing. When he drove before him the herds of Lowland farmers up the pass which led to his native glen, he no more considered himself as a thief than the Raleighs and Drakes considered themselves as thieves when they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior seizing lawful prize of war, of war never once intermitted during the thirty-five generations which had passed away since the Teutonic invaders had driven the children of the soil to the mountains. That, if he was caught robbing on such principles, he should, for the protection of peaceful industry, be punished with the utmost rigour of the law was perfectly just. But it was not just to class him morally with the pickpockets who infested Drury Lane Theatre, or the highwaymen who stopped coaches on Blackheath. His inordinate pride of birth and his contempt for labour and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and had done far more than the inclemency of the air and the sterility of the soil to keep his country poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation. It must in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues were not less widely diffused among the population of the Highlands than the patrician vices. As there was no other part of the island where men, sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed, indulged themselves to such a degree in the idle sauntering habits of an aristocracy, so there was no other part of the island where such men had in such a degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity of manner, self respect, and that noble sensibility which makes dishonour more terrible than death. A gentleman of this sort, whose clothes were begrimed with the accumulated filth of years, and whose hovel smelt worse than an English hogstye, would often do the honours of that hovel with a lofty courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles.

Though he had as little booklearning as the most stupid ploughboys of England, it would have been a great error to put him in the same intellectual rank with such ploughboys. It is indeed only by reading that men can become profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of poetry and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind, in an age in which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown. ...

There was therefore even then evidence sufficient to justify the belief that no natural inferiority had kept the Celt far behind the Saxon. It might safely have been predicted that, if ever an efficient police should make it impossible for the Highlander to avenge his wrongs by violence and to supply his wants by rapine, if ever his faculties should be developed by the civilising influence of the Protestant religion and of the English language, if ever he should transfer to his country and to her lawful magistrates the affection and respect with which he had been taught to regard his own petty community and his own petty prince, the kingdom would obtain an immense accession of strength for all the purposes both of peace and of war.

Such would doubtless have been the decision of a well informed and impartial judge. But no such judge was then to be found. The Saxons who dwelt far from the Gaelic provinces could not be well informed. The Saxons who dwelt near those provinces could not be impartial. National enmities have always been fiercest among borderers; and the enmity between the Highland borderer and the Lowland borderer along the whole frontier was the growth of ages, and was kept fresh by constant injuries. One day many square miles of pasture land were swept bare by armed plunderers from the hills. Another day a score of plaids dangled in a row on the gallows of Crieff or Stirling. Fairs were indeed held on the debatable land for the necessary interchange of commodities. But to those fairs both parties came prepared for battle; and the day often ended in bloodshed. Thus the Highlander was an object of hatred to his Saxon neighbours; and from his Saxon neighbours those Saxons who dwelt far from him learned the very little that they cared to know about his habits. When the English condescended to think of him at all,—and it was seldom that they did so,—they considered him as a filthy abject savage, a slave, a Papist, a cutthroat, and a thief.

This contemptuous loathing lasted till the year 1745 [when Bonnie Prince Charlie, Pretender to the throne lost by the Stuarts in 1688, led an invading Highland army to within 100 miles of London], and was then for a moment succeeded by intense fear and rage. England, thoroughly alarmed, put forth her whole strength. The Highlands were subjugated rapidly, completely, and for ever. During a short time the English nation, still heated by the recent conflict, breathed nothing but vengeance. The slaughter on the field of battle and on the scaffold was not sufficient to slake the public thirst for blood. The sight of the tartan inflamed the populace of London with hatred, which showed itself by unmanly outrages to defenceless captives. A political and social revolution took place through the whole Celtic region. The power of the chiefs was destroyed: the people were disarmed: the use of the old national garb was interdicted: the old predatory habits were effectually broken; and scarcely had this change been accomplished when a strange reflux of public feeling began.

Pity succeeded to aversion. The nation execrated the cruelties which had been committed on the Highlanders, and forgot that for those cruelties it was itself answerable. Those very Londoners, who, while the memory of the march to Derby was still fresh, had thronged to hoot and pelt the rebel prisoners, now fastened on the prince who had put down the rebellion the nickname of Butcher. Those barbarous institutions and usages, which, while they were in full force, no Saxon had thought worthy of serious examination, or had mentioned except with contempt, had no sooner ceased to exist than they became objects of curiosity, of interest, even of admiration. Scarcely had the chiefs been turned into mere landlords, when it became the fashion to draw invidious comparisons between the rapacity of the landlord and the indulgence of the chief. Men seemed to have forgotten that the ancient Gaelic polity had been found to be incompatible with the authority of law, had obstructed the progress of civilisation, had more than once brought on the empire the curse of civil war. As they had formerly seen only the odious side of that polity, they could now see only the pleasing side. The old tie, they said, had been parental: the new tie was purely commercial. What could be more lamentable than that the head of a tribe should eject, for a paltry arrear of rent, tenants who were his own flesh and blood, tenants whose forefathers had often with their bodies covered his forefathers on the field of battle?

As long as there were Gaelic marauders, they had been regarded by the Saxon population as hateful vermin who ought to be exterminated without mercy. As soon as the extermination had been accomplished, as soon as cattle were as safe in the Perthshire passes as in Smithfield market, the freebooter was exalted into a hero of romance. As long as the Gaelic dress was worn, the Saxons had pronounced it hideous, ridiculous, nay, grossly indecent. Soon after it had been prohibited, they discovered that it was the most graceful drapery in Europe. The Gaelic monuments, the Gaelic usages, the Gaelic superstitions, the Gaelic verses, disdainfully neglected during many ages, began to attract the attention of the learned from the moment at which the peculiarities of the Gaelic race began to disappear.

So strong was this impulse that, where the Highlands were concerned, men of sense gave ready credence to stories without evidence, and men of taste gave rapturous applause to compositions without merit. Epic poems, which any skilful and dispassionate critic would at a glance have perceived to be almost entirely modern, and which, if they had been published as modern, would have instantly found their proper place in company with Blackmore's Alfred and Wilkie's Epigoniad, were pronounced to be fifteen hundred years old, and were gravely classed with the Iliad [e.g., James MacPherson's hoax epic Ossian, published around 1760]. Writers of a very different order from the impostor who fabricated these forgeries saw how striking an effect might be produced by skilful pictures of the old Highland life [e.g., Sir Walter Scott]. Whatever was repulsive was softened down: whatever was graceful and noble was brought prominently forward. Some of these works were executed with such admirable art that, like the historical plays of Shakspeare, they superseded history. The visions of the poet were realities to his readers. The places which he described became holy ground, and were visited by thousands of pilgrims.

Soon the vulgar imagination was so completely occupied by plaids, targets, and claymores, that, by most Englishmen, Scotchman and Highlander were regarded as synonymous words. Few people seemed to be aware that, at no remote period, a Macdonald or a Macgregor in his tartan was to a citizen of Edinburgh or Glasgow what an Indian hunter in his war paint is to an inhabitant of Philadelphia or Boston. Artists and actors represented Bruce and Douglas in striped petticoats. They might as well have represented Washington brandishing a tomahawk, and girt with a string of scalps. At length this fashion reached a point beyond which it was not easy to proceed. The last British King who held a court in Holyrood thought that he could not give a more striking proof of his respect for the usages which had prevailed in Scotland before the Union, than by disguising himself in what, before the Union, was considered by nine Scotchmen out of ten as the dress of a thief.

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   Via the estimable Steve Sailer who has a talent for finding interesting things across the board and having unusual things to say about them. 

  Beyond shale gas - development work proceeding on extracting methane hydrate gas reserves. Keep us going at tiny prices for 1,000+ years
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HL Mencken quotes
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The "debunking" of cold fusion, aka LENR, aka quantum fusion, was largely based on scientific fraud committed at MIT in 1989. This is the allegation of the head of MIT's science information office at the time, the late Dr. Eugene Mallove. He alleges this fraud was perpetrated to ensure that MIT continued to receive tens of millions of dollars for its thermonuclear fusion program ("hot fusion"). The report containing this allegation is quite long but the documentation to support the charge is extensive and well worth the read.


MIT and Cold Fusion: A Special Report

This doesn't prove "cold fusion" is genuine but it certainly supports the view.
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Acknowledged that Labour, the teacher's unions and the "education experts" deliberately lied to pretend the kids education was not getting worse.  This is child abuse worse than anything merely sexual but we all know known of these obscenities will be punished.
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Mental control of a robot hundreds of kilometres away. This will be a massive force multiplier when we start working orbital and lunar industries.
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Love Of Theory Is The Root Of All Evil

Love of truth, on the other hand, is the root of all that is good.

essay
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List of Scottish Green groups funded by the wind subsidy industry.
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US changes patent laws - the independent inventor loses out again.
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Tech $Billionaires Want to Be Space $Trillionaires - Asteroid mining will make $trillions of resources available. So far this is beyond the reach of any government so who are they going to pay taxes to?

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India's food problem - they have to much to be able to store!  Is this technological progress or is it increased CO2 in the atmosphere. I think both.  Isn't it a wonderful world we live in?
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Evidence that establishing life is even more difficult than previous reinterpretations of the Drake Equation suggest. So it is more likely that (A) we are alone & (B) the difficult bit of human progress is already done.

The long-term diversity of life in the sea depends on the sea-level set by plate tectonics and the local supernova rate set by the astrophysics, and on virtually nothing else.
The long-term primary productivity of life in the sea – the net growth of photosynthetic microbes – depends on the supernova rate, and on virtually nothing else.
Exceptionally close supernovae account for short-lived falls in sea-level during the past 500 million years, long-known to geophysicists but never convincingly explained..
As the geological and astronomical records converge, the match between climate and supernova rates gets better and better, with high rates bringing icy times.

Spiked article on the anniversary of the Japanese Tsunami (45.9 million items) & Fukushima (62.9 million) comparing deaths.

From the Fukushima radiation "disaster" itself - 0 deaths
Within the reactor site from the tsunami but prior to  and unconnected with the "disaster" - 2 deaths
From the anti-nuclear scare - 48-68 (depending on whether you count 26 who died much later because of electricity shortages)

overreaction to a problem can be worse than the original problem. For example, it was reported that 45 patients died after the botched and hurried evacuation of a hospital in the Fukushima prefecture, and this was not the only such case. One centenarian committed suicide rather than be forced from his home in the exclusion zone.
Most of Japan’s nuclear-power plants were shut down for testing after the accident or kept offline after maintenance for longer than expected. A country with hot summers like Japan has become reliant on air conditioning. With power supplies reduced, more people seemed to be affected by heatstroke. In July, it was reported that 26 people had died from heatstroke in the spring and early summer, compared to six people the year before. These may not all have been down to the problems caused by the nuclear shutdown, but it can’t have helped that people were being constantly nagged to reduce their power usage. Ironically, two workers at the plant, wearing very heavy protective suits to protect them against the radiation, died from heatstroke.

21,000 app on the less newsworthy event of the tsunami itself.
By comparison - 200,000 in the Indian ocean tsunami of 2004, which happened in less technologically advanced countries.

     Proving the Luddites are enormously more dangerous to the human race than nuclear power or any similar anti-technology scare they promote. At least proving it to anybody susceptible to evidence.That they and most of our media aren't susceptible to evidence is the big problem.
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Bishop Hill has an article about one of the "due balance" BBC "reporters" called Gaia Vince, which I assume was not his birth name, pushing a scare story about "peak indium". Andrew also has a graph of long term prices proving it is another evidence free fraud.
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The EU nomenklatura in a tizzy because Hungary has replaced its communist era constitution for something less politically correct. One doesn't hear much about this here - perhaps our nomenklatura are worried that people would approve.
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"We've got to get rid of the Medieval warm period" to quote one of the snake oi salesmen masquerading as "scientists" at the CRU. Quoted from a Climategate email. The fact is

The idea of a medieval warm period was formulated for the first time in 1965 by the English climatologist Hubert H. Lamb [1]. Lamb, who founded the UK Climate Research Unit (CRU) in 1971, saw the peak of the warming period from 1000 to 1300, i.e. in the High Middle Ages. He estimated that temperatures then were 1-2 ° C above the normal period of 1931-1960. In the high North, it was even up to 4 degrees warmer. The regular voyages of the Vikings between Iceland and Greenland were rarely hindered by ice, and many burial places of the Vikings in Greenland still lie in the permafrost.

Glaciers were smaller than today

Also the global retreat of glaciers that occurred in the period between about 900 to 1300 [2] speaks for the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. An interesting detail is that many glaciers pulling back since 1850 reveal plant remnants from the Middle Ages, which is a clear proof that the extent of the glaciers at that time was lower than today

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  During WW2 there was a serious plan to feed Britain from locally grown plankton. It turned out not to be feasible at the time because the technology wasn't good enough (& not very tasty either). However the technology has moved on. The sites were almost all in Scotland. I assume this is because colder water contains more oxygen and can thus grow more.

ten, 30sq m nets could in 12 hours catch enough plankton to feed 357 people

   That equates to 1.18 million people per square kilometre.


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  Startram - linear accelerater to space for $40 billion. So about 25 times the cost of a tram from Edinburgh airport to about a mile from the city centre.
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Bishop Hill again on an academic report on how "environmental science" is done

The idea is that normally you should not propose legislation until you’ve got the evidence to justify it. But there, you had the prime ministers and heads of state signing up to a target that no-one had done any impact assessment at all . . . they got them to sign up to these targets, 20% renewables and 10% biofuels, and then only later in the year did they do the impact assessment. And basically they said they didn’t need to [properly] impact-assess the 10% because it had already been approved by the heads of state! . . .”
As Sharman and Holmes pithily comment:

"The fact that the EC was endorsing a target without having seen a full impact assessment provides the first indication that motivations other than scientific evidence related to environmental sustainability and GHG emissions reductions played a part in the policy decision to establish the 10% target."

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  How the US shale boom will change the world. I see no reason why it will be a purely US boom and no reason other than Luddism why it won't work across Europe.

  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. 

First prototype built from MIT’s effort to construct houses for $1,000 each. Probably slightly more basic than a British new build.
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London’s Jubilee line cost £3.4bn to build, but raised land values in adjoining areas by close to £14bn. Looks like the thousands of times greater areas of the Highlands and Islands could thus easily provide enough added value for the £1 billion needed for the Scottish Tunnel Project.
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The fractions of a second that could be saved in automated trading by having a sales centre half way between New york and London might be enough to fund seasteding. Personally I doubt it would be enough on its own but it is an added economic bonus on the plus side of the ledger.
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Spiked article by Colin McInnes on Germany being forced to give up its electricity supply by the ecofascists being the route to serfdom.
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Canadians (52%) and Americans (49%) say that that global warming is a fact and is mostly caused by emissions from vehicles and industrial facilities. Only 43 per cent of Britons (-4) agree with this assessment.

  Maybe there is something to be said for having media so obviously propagandist liars that nobody believes them. The USSR used to show the same effect at the end.
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Pournelle' immediate jobs programme

My general principle is that economic growth happens when energy is cheap and there is a maximum of economic freedom, and of those two, economic freedom is probably the more important.
First, 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.
Second, repeal Dodd Frank. It is estimated that Dodd Frank costs a hundred billion dollars a year. We have already seen that many banks find they have more people working in regulation compliance than in banking. Dodd Frank doesn’t do what it was supposed to do, and we got along without it before we enacted it. It hasn’t worked, and it ought to go.
Third, repeal Sarbanes Oxley. That’s another that costs too much and doesn’t accomplish what it set out to do.
Fourth, establish two commissions whose job is to recommend federal practices that ought to be eliminated on the grounds that we can’t afford them, or never needed them in the first place. The commissioners should not be government employees, and ought to be paid no more than $150 a day consulting fee and $50 a day expenses. Let it be a typical commission, with three members appointed by the President, three by the Speaker, and three by the President pro tem of the Senate. 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 the Congress. If Congress doesn’t restore the position, that position is redundant and that task is no longer performed.
That’s one commission. There ought to be a second Bunny Inspector Commission. This one is to consist of 100 persons, one from each State and fifty to be selected regardless of state. 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 the District of Columbia, 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 federal regulatory activity is needless, then that activity is defunded, and those who perform that service are declared redundant. (Civil service rules for redundant federal employees apply.) Congress 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.
Apply all these immediately, and there will be an immediate effect on jobs.
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Christopher Booker  - a 17-year-old girl, five months pregnant, who fled to Ireland with her parents, after receiving a letter from a social worker she had never met to say her baby would be seized the moment it was born.
After the birth, all seemed to go well, despite relentless efforts by the English social workers to persuade their Irish counterparts to return the baby to England. ....After a series of interviews with the family, the Irish social workers were satisfied that the baby was in good hands and that there were no grounds for further intervention. ... Buoyed up by a glowing appraisal from the Irish social workers, they decided to return to England.
All went well until the young mother registered her baby with a GP, who reported to social workers that she was back in this country. The social workers were soon on the doorstep, threatening the girl that, unless she moved out immediately, leaving her child with its grandmother, they would take her baby.

....the social workers arrived at 8.30 in the morning, supposedly to check that “the house was carpeted”. One barged into a room upstairs, where the grandfather, semi-naked, was talking to his 21-year-old son. He told the woman in no uncertain terms to leave, and banged the door behind her. The grandmother was on the landing, holding the baby.
That evening the social workers returned, with four policemen, to remove the baby. They claimed that when the door had been slammed, the child “might have been injured”. They applied for an order to put her into foster care. As so often in such cases, the solicitors recommended by the council to represent the family refused to object, saying nothing.
Three times recently, in the weekly “contacts” with the baby which the mother and grandmother are allowed in the social services office, they have been horrified to see their formerly healthy, cheerful child covered in bruises (legs, thighs, knees, shins, forehead and arms) of which they have pictures. The social workers refuse to explain how such injuries could have arisen.

The "caring professions" need victims to care for whether they want it or not.
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On the other hand once they have decided not to investigate a paedophile ring they will go to any lengths, including attempting to Section the victim's mother, not to acknowledge their failure.

"Elish Angiolini prevented any police action taking place." a woman I have referred to before in relation to her protection of politically powerful politicians legally responsible for mass murder, child rape and worse.
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An Iraqi Assyrian Christian says that the great age of Islamic culture was not the product of Moslems, they found it when they got there. Their contribution was merely conquest. Hardly impartial and i am not an expert on the other hand no glaring inaccuracies. If true it removes Islam's sole claim to have been a constructive rather than purely destructive religion.
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Morally preening ecofascists provably 6 times less honest than the average person.

"[those]who bought green products appeared less willing to share with others a set amount of money than those who bought conventional products. When the green consumers were given the chance to boost their money by cheating on a computer game and then given the opportunity to lie about it – in other words, steal – they did, while the conventional consumers did not. Later, in an honour system in which participants were asked to take money from an envelope to pay themselves their spoils, the greens were six times more likely to steal than the conventionals.