James Delingpole is now daily on Breibart (online news provider) rather than the Telegraph blogsite. Worth your almost daily reading. Another nail in the coffin of the MSM.
================================
   Dan Hannan on why we have a liberal society (& can lose it):

The real question is not why some places are corrupt but why some aren’t. How did we create a society where, for want of more monstrous malfeasances, we have the luxury of fulminating over an MP claiming a bath plug on expenses?

The short answer is that we evolved law-based institutions which, uniquely, reward production over predation. Property rights, enforceable contracts, personal liberty and representative government: these things make it harder to live by extortion. In an open market, unlike in rival systems, you prosper by offering a service which other people want to buy, not by sucking up to emperors or commissars or high priests. That’s not to say that free enterprise is perfect, simply that it works better than any alternative yet tried.

Constitutional freedom is rare outside Europe and the Anglosphere; rare, too, outside nation-states. Representative government and the rule of law operate best when everybody – or almost everybody – accepts the legitimacy of the state. When a significant body of the population wants to belong to a different country, or is otherwise alienated from the official institutions, you get Ukraine or Syria or Congo.
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  An actual tape recording of the Irish bankers deliberately boasting of lying to their government that only a small bailout would be required so that they would get them on the hook for more subsequent payments until, as happened, they virtually bankrupted the country.

  Of course, while Britain also bailed out bankers to a far greater extent than initially said was needed you wouldn't catch the British government falling for something like that.

 See also initial budget promises for HS2, Scottish parliament, trams, windmills, the EU, Olympics, etc. etc.
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A rather good letter in the Scotsman (not mine) on the falsity of radiation scares.
=================================
Renfrewshire SNP councillors and the "Health & Safety" Mafia clearly neither have real jobs to do if they can spend their days fighting over the flying flags.

"Fuming SNP councillors hit out yesterday after they were ordered to remove the flag of Scotland from their office...because it breaks health and safety rules.

The Nationalists had proudly displayed the Saltire in the window of their base at Renfrewshire Council’s HQ in Cotton Street, Paisley, but were left stunned when officials told them to take it down.....

“As you will be aware, council offices operate a clear office and clean desk policy to promote good information management/security, good health and safety practice and efficient and effective cleaning and maintenance of the buildings, windows and general office environment.
“Part of this is to keep the office windows clear and employees, trades unions, political groups and organisations who are tenants of the council should all be aware of this.”

   To be fair to the SNP are clearly, while not doing anything useful, doing no harm and the H&S stated reason, that they need to be able to escape through windows, is clearly a total 100% deliberate lie being promoted for purely totalitarian political reasons.

   It is, of course, conceivable, that there are parts of the H&S industry which are not 100% corrupt totalitarian parasites using H&S as a false excuse for their makework busybodying. In which case all of them will have publicly dissociated themselves from these parasites. Any bets? 
=================================
  One of the "Non"-Government Organisations, paid by the US Government, puts up this interesting list of the very small portion of the $5 bn the US has admitted they spent supporting democracy in Ukraine by paying people to overthrow the elected government.

    I can see how $35K would "facilitate cooperation between NGOs & the media". It does here too.
=================================
    The media (well state owned BBC) giving prominence to the Green Party NGO calling for a purge of anybody in government not committed to the catastrophic warming fraud.

    In their cooperative manner the BBC promote this totalitarian demand and manage to avoid any mention of how Stalinist it is.

   Note that this is only the Greens of England and Wales. It would be nice to think that our local lot are in some way less totalitarian but suspect that it is simply because the SNP, who have been busy politicising our "civil service" have already done all the Stalinist purging without having to be prodded.
=================================

Environment Agency – a large pension fund with more than 11,000 staff attached

"Although the book is not what the advertising promises, it really does provide an accurate picture of life inside CIA. Its exclusive focus on how bureaucrats jostle and feel about one another is entirely consistent with my eight years of experience dealing with CIA’s top levels on the U.S. Senate’s behalf. The substance of any matter notwithstanding, it always came down to which bureaucrat would gain or lose what. The bureaucrats’ personal interests come first. The welfare and reputation of the agency come second. Everything else is incidental. This book seems to describe a collective human ice cream cone licking itself."
===================================
AGENDA 21 - UN proposals to wipe out 90% of us.

All massive bureaucracies have some committed loonies and I wouldn't be entirely certain that everybody in the UN and the governments that pay it feel the same.

On the other hand not everybody in the German government wanted to exterminate all the Jews (Goering actively protected Jewish pilots). All that is required is an enthusiastic minority and a majority unwilling to make the, relatively easy, effort of  opposing them.

... A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples.
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Lord Rees, Astronomer Royal says it is better to read good science fiction than bad science.

Lord Rees does expect to see soon however, is the exploration of moons and asteroids by a flotilla of miniaturised robots as well as huge solar energy collectors assembled under zero-gravity. As for humanity, our future lies in a "post-human" stage of evolution: "Post-humans will evolve from our species not via natural selection but by design. They could be silicon-based, or they could be organic creatures who had won the battle with death, or perfected the techniques of hibernation."
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Tim Worstall on the Adam Smith Institute site links to the evidence from Next Big Future that Chinese reactors are 1/4 the price of equivalent UK ones - actually accountants would make it considerably less if they factor in our 10 years before earning anything compared t6o China's - actually it seems likely considerably less than that of the Chinese were building Chinese reactors - actually considerably less than that if they were being mass produced.
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Dan Hannan on how free markets are better at providing equality than state "socialism"
------------------------------------------------------

Dellers says
"the Greens (and that includes small "g" greens too) are not our friends. I'm not saying they are intrinsically bad people; I know that in many cases that they are motivated by the highest of ideals. The problem is that the consequences of their noble lies and their warped ideology invariably involve economic recession, higher prices, constrained freedom, thwarted aspirations and widespread human suffering. I don't call those results good. I'd say they're downright evil."

I put on a comment saying that it is impossible that the leaders are not aware  that they are lying and that thus they are personally evil,
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Here is Wikipedia's list of driverless trains. The list includes both trains without any driver and the greater number where the "driver" (or can be called conducter") only presses a button to open and close doors - something which could obviously be done remotely or automatically so the only purpose of having a driver is to employ drivers.

Glasgow subway is listed as such.
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Built from 5cm cubes and launched into orbit for the price of a family car, a Glaswegian entrepreneur has built what may be the world's cheapest satellite, launched from revamped Russian missiles
-------------------------------------------------
Alex Salmond wasted £20,000 of public money trying to stop the Scottish Information Commissioner's Office from revealing that he'd not taken legal advice on a post-independence Scotland's eligibility for European Union membership.
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The world's first human trials of synthetic blood will take place in Scotland, it has been reported.

   I've recently been going through much of the politically incorrect Greg Cochran's site. Here is some stuff of interest:

   How doctors are not good at spotting anomalies and thus in spotting potential scientific breakthroughs. This means that there must be potential "low hanging fruit" if we look.

   I would also add that the regulatory burden on medicines is so heavy that it must be holding back or indeed preventing research in new medicines. This is to prevent horrors like thalidomide but, at about £1 billion just to get a new medicine accepted, I am certain a cost benefit analysis would show lives saved by not having thalidomide would be a fraction of those lost by not having hundreds of useful medicines.

    I would suggest that restrictions on testing should be entirely lifted for subjects of 60 or over and that medicines not tested up to government level should be available, clearly labelled as such, I suspect that other institutions would spring up willing to test more cheaply & quickly than government and that companies would be happy to put them on the label.

   Specifically any successful medicine against Alzheimers (there are a number of candidates) will not be available for at least 10 years and I am certain a lot of people, seeing early onset, would risk it.
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we were discussing per-pupil expenditure by state in primary and secondary education. Utah is famous for having the lowest per-pupil funding in the country. We are right next to and similar in many ways to Wyoming, which has one of the highest funding levels in the country. The dollars per student are $7,200 in Utah and $18,000 in Wyoming according to this source. Caution is always in order, of course, but these numbers are in broad agreement with other sources and other years.
What does Wyoming get for the extra $11,000 per student? A quick assay is to look at NAEP scores. Here are eighth grade math scores for white students over the last two decades:

A quick look shows that Wyoming is getting nothing at all for their extra $11,000

    So spending has between little or nothing to do with success. This, incidentally, explains how Habits of Highly Successful Countries could find there was no correlation between education budgets and economic success.
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The standard belief in the academy is that there are no such personality differences between ethnic groups and races.  It’s not that they have some kind of argument based on genetics and selection and prehistory that makes such differences super-unlikely: no, it can’t be true because it would hurt their feelings.

You know, the people populating the social sciences are bound to be right about something, eventually.

This is why he is politically incorrect.
----------------------------------------------------
One fairly obvious, little-discussed variety of low-hanging technological fruit are those ideas and devices that are already known – to but a few.  Secrets.

Sometimes important secrets are deliberately kept for a long time.  Consider the Chamberlen family.
Peter Chamberlen the elder [1560-1631] was the son of a Huguenot surgeon who had left France in 1576. He invented obstetric forceps , a surgical instrument similar to a pair of tongs, useful in extracting the baby in a  difficult birth.   He, his brother, and  his brother’s descendants preserved and prospered from their private technology for 125 years.

Sometimes the future is already here, but not generally known.  Sometimes it’s hidden, sometimes it’s forgotten, sometimes it’s in Latin. There have to be better ways of finding and disseminating those secrets.

I have discussed this and the Chamberlens before. I put up this comment.

This is a strong argument for either watertight patent laws, which I don’t think is possible, or a significant part of gdp going to technology prizes.

I've read that 3rd parties get 3 times as much value from inventions as the inventors do which means prizes should be about 3 times the value obtained by patents. This is difficult to estimate but looks like at least 6% of gdp.

You may be interested in http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/did-patents-create-step-change-in.html
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Even marginal success in research delaying aging is a better investment than cancer, heart disease research

An analysis, from top scientists at USC, Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Illinois at Chicago and other institutions, assumes research investment would conservatively lead to a 1.25 percent reduction in the likelihood of age-related diseases. In contrast to treatments for fatal diseases, slowing aging would have no health returns initially, but would have significant benefits over the long term. With even modest gains in our scientific understanding of how to slow the aging process, an additional 5 percent of adults over the age of 65 would be healthy rather than disabled every year from 2030 to 2060
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China, Russia, India, S Korea all building reactors at about 1/3rd the European cost.

China's nuclear reactors tend to cost from $1500 to $2500 per KW. This is a far lower cost than in Europe or the US. Controlled cost is a good reason that China is building about 28 out of the 69 nuclear reactors under construction in the world. China, Russia, India and South Korea are where 50 out of the 69 world nuclear reactors are being built. They all have construction costs under control and tend to be 2 to 3 times cheaper than in Europe or the USA.

    Since the RAE figures show British nuclear is about 40% of the cost of the average of the basket we use (probably less as prices rise) combined with it being possible to drop the prices by 2/3rds means the cost of our electricity bills not only could be reduced by about 90% but that this is happening elsewhere in the world.

   If reactors were allowed to be mass produced the cost would certainly fall furt
her - mass production always means that.
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   Jerry Pournelle publishes my opinion in why Parliament was right not to support bombing Syria

(I have already published the wording as an unpublished letter)
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Cubesats in Glasgow and
Glasgow University's space probe
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"If my three kids ask about science … I cannot honestly praise British science and suggest they seek a career there. As a science graduate, I wou
ld like to be able to say “yes a science degree is a good thing”. But the reality is that academic science is so politically motivated and so appalling at delivering anything useful to those doing degrees or to society in general … that whilst I would prefer a scientifically literate society, I cannot in all honesty recommend British science to anyone."
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Scientific Alliance newsletter and Scottish Branch set up
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Best energy ideas for tomorrow
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Genes changing but not through direct inheritance?

A scientist has tested the genetic effect of swapping baby sweet tempered European honeybees with aggressive African killer bees. (H/T Chris Phoenix)

They took 250 of the youngest bees from each hive, and painted marks on the bees’ tiny backs. Then they switched each set of newborns into the hive of the other subspecies.

He didn’t expect the bees’ actual DNA to change: Random mutations aside, genes generally don’t change during an organism’s lifetime. Rather, he suspected the bees’ genes would behave differently in their new homes—wildly differently.....

 When Alaux looked at the gene-expression profiles of the bees exposed again and again to alarm pheromone, he and Robinson saw why: With repeated alarms, hundreds of genes—genes that previous studies had associated with aggression—grew progressively busier. The rise in gene expression neatly matched the rise in the aggressiveness of the bees’ response to threats.
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  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

---------------------------
  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.
---------------------------
  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.
--------------------------
  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.
---------------------------------
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?
---------------------------------------
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.

  America's first woman in space, Sally Ride, from the shuttle era dies.Not hust the first generation astronauts going now.
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Viking found life on Mars - more
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SpaceX will make a share offering in 2013 I think he will do very well indeed.
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Elon Musk interview
"Question: What missions will you be doing in 10 years?

Musk: Our goal is to revolutionize space transport. So we'll be doing every kind of space transport, except for suborbital. We'll launch satellites of all shapes and sizes, servicing the space station with cargo and crew, and then the long term objective is to develop a space transport system that will enable humanity to become a multi-planet species.
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Spaceport Sweden
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Virginia gives tax break to attract space industry
The Virginia General Assembly is soon to consider a bill that will allow an income tax deduction of up to $8,000 (£5,100) for burials in space, WTVR reports.
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Nuclear Thermal Rockets Since there is no contact between the reactor and air this does not, except in the event of catastrophic failure, release radioactivity to the atmosphere. Even catastrophe would only mean "it is highly unlikely that a reactor's fuel elements would be spread over a wide area. They are composed of very strong materials, either carbon composites or carbides, and normally coated with zirconium hydride. The solid core NTR fuel itself is conventionally a small percentage of U-235 buried well inside an extremely strong carbon or carbide mixture. Unless the physically small reactors have been run for an extended period, the radioactivity of these elements is quite low and would pose a minimal hazard."
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Reaction Engines Ltd a UK company whose new engine is "a breakthrough in aerospace technology that is now allowing the development of engines that will propel aircraft at speeds of up to five times the speed of sound or directly into Earth orbit."
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The Register with a tough but fair assessment of what our space industry really is & what government actively isn't doing about it.
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Infinite growth on a finite planet - easy peasy Tim Worstall explains why growth is a function of technology not of mineral resources and that there is thus no limitation on this planet. This is what Julian Simon long said and it is certainly true. Not a space article but the obvious corollary is that in an infinite universe our growth capability is infinity squared - can't be bad unless you're against human progress.

Which unfortunately so many parasites are.

Compared to the average three year life span of a common rat, the 10 to 30 year life of the naked mole rat, a subterranean rodent native to East Africa, is impressive. And compared to the human body, the body of this rodent shows little decline due to aging, maintaining high activity, bone health, reproductive capacity, and cognitive ability throughout its lifetime. Now a collaborative of researchers in Israel and the United States is working to uncover the secret to the small mammal's long — and active — lifespan.
Researchers are working to determine whether the naked mole rat's unusually high levels of NRG-1, a neuroprotecting protein, is behind the naked mole rat's three-decade life span. Because rodents have an 85 percent genetic similarity to humans, it may hold the key to a longer and healthier life for us as well.

NRG-1 is a minor compound in humans too, with little clearly identified purpose.
###########################

  John Brignall of Numberwatch gives as good as explanation of the Euro crisis as I have seen.

The Euro is not suffering a series of crises. From the moment of its launch in 1999, it has been haunted by a steady divergence of the economies that subscribe to it. The successive crises occur in the fields of politics and the markets, human activities controlled by emotion rather than logic. It was predictable and widely predicted that the concept of One Size Fits All (OSFA) would prove to be fatally flawed. As the divergence progressed it was amplified by positive feedback mechanisms: for example, as some economies thrived because they had the advantage of an undervalued currency (much as China has benefited), so others found that they were handicapped by an overvalued currency, though it was the same currency. Thus resources were gradually diverted from the weak to the strong and on the graph of economic health the individual national lines fanned out wider and wider. Borrowing is easier with an overvalued currency, so the tendency to take on debt as a means of “keeping up with the Joneses” was irresistible to naïve politicians and individuals, piling feedback upon feedback. The continual stream of diktats, of varying degrees of irrationality, pouring out of the Brussels Kremlin, exacerbated the deterioration, while political straitjackets, such as the Common Agricultural Policy, handicapped the weak more than they did the strong.
####################################

  Good article in American Thinker of the radiation Linear No Threshold fraud.
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  See the cars and people, or any other sign of life? No? This is one of a number of pictures from China of whole cities that have been built by speculative builders and have no actual inhabitants. With the Broad group now also able to build better, higher and cheaper it looks like China may have a massive housing bubble.

HT Chaos Manor
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Joseph Friedlander's article on the amount of radiation released by atom bomb tests.

1.87% of all warheads ever built were detonated. I don’t believe this statistic has ever been written up anywhere, an Next Big Future original.
This is more detonations than a full scale Orion (atomic launch of 10,000 tons to orbit or better) flight just to lend perspective, and of far higher yield on average. So we paid the price in fallout and instead of a solar system wide empire, we just got strutting politicians and only by a miracle avoided a nuclear war.
###############################==
It was, in the words of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, the “tipping point” in the Syria conflict: a savage massacre of over 90 people, predominantly women and children, for which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed by virtually the entirety of the Western media.



Within days of the first reports of the Houla massacre, the U.S., France, Great Britain, Germany, and several other Western countries announced that they were expelling Syria’s ambassadors in protest.
But according to a new report in Germany’s leading daily, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the Houla massacre was in fact committed by anti-Assad Sunni militants, and the bulk of the victims were member of the Alawi and Shia minorities, which have been largely supportive of Assad.

  While this massacre got extensive coverage on our state propaganda broadcaster (infinitely more than the wholly censored Fragodan massacre of at least 210 unarmed civilians carried out by our police) the important question has to be who carried it our. If the victims were Assad's allies then obviously the perpetarors were ours.

    Clearly nobody at the BBC would have difficulty denouncing the Jews for killing Germans at Auschwitz if the party line required it.
####################################
  Toni Mcleod had here child taken from her because the "Social Work" Fascists decided that in her household it was likely to be exposed to political ideas Fascists don't approve of and possibly grow to not be fully loyal to the state.

Spiked has a longer article. what I find most dangerous is that either almost our entire media think that government siezing children from birth purely to prevent them ever having political thoughts the GFascists don't like is a matter so unimportant as not to be worth reporting or they almost all accept it is so important it has to be censored.
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     Scientific censorship to promote the clearly  fraudulent scare that pollition from vehicles kills..

Dr. James Enstrom had been terminated from his research position in UCLA’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences following a secret faculty vote. After Enstrom’s 34 years of service to the university, what could have led the faculty to such a radical decision?

...his research did not align with the “academic mission” of UCLA’s School of Public Health. The University’s statement is in reference to a peer-reviewed study led by Dr. Enstrom — one that challenged previous research by some of his colleagues who claimed that fine diesel particulate matter was associated with an increase in mortality.
The results that Enstrom challenged were used by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), part of the California Environmental Protection Agency, to justify new regulations ...

 as his own research demonstrated, there was no association between diesel fuel emissions and mortality.
Furthermore, Dr. Enstrom uncovered the truth about the lead author of the CARB Report — that instead of having earned a doctorate in statistics from the University of California, Hien T. Tran had misrepresented his credentials. He actually obtained a Ph.D. by paying $1,000 to a diploma mill called “Thornhill University.”


.....while UCLA took harsh measures against Dr. Enstrom, the CARB “scientist” who faked his academic credentials was issued nothing more than a slap on the wrist: He was temporarily suspended for misconduct.
“If academic freedom means anything, it should permit a professor to challenge bad science and expose scientific misconduct,” points out David French, senior counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is filing the suit on Dr. Enstrom’s behalf. “Yet UCLA appears more committed to a political agenda than to free and open inquiry.”
###############################

 
Via Jo Nova - The funding of the Royal Society. No wonder they push governments "hobgoblin" lies..
#############################
From The Inquirer
Minister for Universities and Science David Willetts  - "The UK space industry is worth an estimated £7.5 billion and is an important driver for economic growth," he said. "This is why we've earmarked £10 million in the Budget to start a national space technology programme and committed to reducing the regulatory burden on industry."
However, he was looser of lip in an interview with the Daily Mail, where he explained that Scotland is already earmarked as the launch site for any space holidays, and that Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic is the preferred carrier of choice.
"It would be great to see vehicles being launched from the UK again - to see Virgin Galactic launched from Lossiemouth, for example," said Willetts

On John Redwood regarding whether growth or cutting the deficit is more important.

We have had 2 years of this government. If, during that period we had reached only the, non-Eu, world average growth rate of 6% we would now be 12.4% better off. With the Exchequer’s takings up 12.4% (it would probably be marginally better) the deficit would be down by £60 bn to an acceptable about 3% of GNP (actually it would be better than that because we would be able to print money equal to 12.4% of our money supply without causing inflation).
That we could achieve considerably better than the world average, if the political classes wanted it, us not factually disputed.

========================
Redwood on keeping the lights on

The BBC typically reported the windmill subsidy as “subsidy for new nuclear & wind” which then metamorphosed into a “nuclear subsidy”. Clearly there is no lie too outrageous or obvious for our state broadcaster to tell.
In fact the AP1000 reactor is available, off the shelf from Westinghouse (a company owned by British nuclear until the Labour government bankrupted it by regulatory fiat) for £6-800 m. As John points out the fuel costs of nuclear are negligible and since it is so automated that they can run for several years without a human hand, the genuine running costs are also negligible.
All the rest is government imposed parasitism.

=========================
Douglas Carswell on currency competition

I don't think we will see a lot of currencies in widespread use because it is just too complicated. For the same reason Wikipedia has cornered its own niche market. However competition will mean that the currency that gets accepted will be one that is stable. & run on sensible banking lines not leveraged until it crashes. My bets would be on the Facebook credit, the AT&T dollar or the Swiss Franc.

=======================
Mark Wadsworth on how house prices have not only gone up faster then the RPI but even faster than incomes.

If the inherent cost of manufacturing housing were the dominant factor the proper comparison would be the RPI since there is no technical reason why housebuilding is not subject to the technical improvement everything else is.
If it were a perfectly monopolistic market (which it cannot be except where the councils giving planning permission are wholly corrupt) charging all the people will bear, or a totally government controlled one with the government imposing all the parasitism the people will bear house prices would be expected to rise in line with incomes.
Achieving results even more expensive than total government parasitism can only be put down to people eager to "invest" in houses because real money investments are getting inflated away by a government which has a monopoly on printing the stuff.

=======================
One of Steve Sailer's apolitical threads - are the British better at English than the Americans - he thinks so but commenters incline otherwise.

Very flattering, possibly true - I will have to think on it. On the other hand I once blogged comparing speeches by British PM Gordon Brown, whose PR team proclaimed him, probably correctly, as the intellectual highlight of the British Labour Party & Sarah Palin.
No comparison. Palin had well thought out informed positions. Brown had unthought cliches.

===========================
Channel 4's Snowblog discusses "Syria's inconvenient truth"

No comment from me because it was censored - which says as much as anybody needs to know about C4's commitment to truths of the inconvenient sort.
==============================
John Redwood's on the Euro

I’m a bit of a heretic on this. I think the primary problem is the EU and the Euro is more of a symptom. The EU has a range of antigrowth policies built around bureaucratic regulation and Luddism. This is why the EU area has been in recession while the rest of humanity grows at 6%. The borrowing, quantitative easing and so on that the weaker economies have been doing is to simulate the growth they refuse to have in reality.
With Germany now in the process of closing down its nuclear plants it, though it was the intrinsically strongest economy, has also doomed itself and not all the fiscal measures in the world will prevent it – though they can delay it & make it worse.
Had the EU zone been growing at the world average none of these countries would have had to exceed their 3% of GBP borrowing limits and the, admittedly ramshackle, Euro would not have been under the stresses that pull it apart.
The good news is that, just as we could be out of recession and into fast growth in days if the political elite wanted it, the entire EU could in months – this will require the replacement, or damascene conversion, of the majority of our MPs, which, on the one hand looks quite an ask & on the other looks like something the large majority of voters would be very happy with.

===========================
Telegraph blog on Sock Puppetry

This is a classic positive feedback effect driving parasitic government spending (the non-parasitic bits will be using their money usefully). No mechanical system except bombs use positive feedback, indeed negative feedback is always used to prevent machinery destroying itself - this applies to social systems in precisely the same way as mechanical ones.
As the report later points out such government funding of charity is virtually always given to unpopular causes useful to politicians (popular ones wouldn't need it) such as catastrophic warming - 90% of "environmental" charities get 70% of their funding direct from the state, and an uncertain but large amount of the rest from less direct payments. This is not democracy it is the negation of it.

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

The inability to fire parasites and idiots in the civil service makes a mockery of democratic sovereignty and makes clear who is in charge. This is why they can prevent politicos getting spending under control.
"Motivation's easy - you just get rid of the unmotivated." quoted approvingly by Sarah Palin

sorry original site unknown
==========================
As part of a discussion where somebody said government spending/investment could never improve an economy On a slightly theoretical manner

I think it is possible for government to create jobs by funding technology prizes. This works because patent law is not & inherently probably cannot, allow inventors to get proportionately as much of the value they produce as capitalists and workers.
This is theoretical because, in practice, politicians don't do it because their primary concern is not national well being but obtaining patronage for their friends. The last time our government put up an X-prize was in the 18thC - the Longitude Prize. Since that directly resulted in Australia being British it must be one of the best investments ever made, at least Mr Delingpole must think so.

=============================
Daniel Hannan on how most Tories would rather have a pact with UKIP than the LudDims

This would almost automatically mean a lot of Tories keeping their seats and relatively few UKIPers. The corollary of that, with UKIP now reaching 46% of the declining Conservative support in the polls, would have to mean UKIP dominating policy.
Personally I think that if the party members were offered a deal whereby they supported a fairly run referendum; an enquiry into whether the BBC have vitiated their Charter duty of "balance" by giving only 1/40th as much coverage to UKIP, per vote, as to the "lefty" Greens; an end to the catastrophic global warming fraud and all the attendant carbon nonsense; a free market in energy with a level regulatory playing field; cutting back the state; and all the pointless and damaging regulations and thus among for at least the average growth rate of the rest of the world (6%) then the large majority of Tory activists would jump at it.
In fact I think the majority of Tory activists would like that simply for its own sake, it is just that "their leaders" don't.
I also happen to think that is a programme which a large majority of the British public would go for which is the real point.

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On EU Referendum - a discussion on how the "left" infiltrated the government institutions -

I believe the opposite has happened. I do not believe the normal "right wing" theory that what has happened has been some conspiratorial infiltration of our institutions by the "left" It is less organised and conspiratorial than that though just as real.
What has happened is the reverse - the co-option of "leftist" rhetoric by the institutions. As Pournelle's Iron Law puts it - every unchecked institution comes to be run, not by those dedicated to its nominal aims but to enhancing its power and imperial ambitions.

"Leftist" rhetoric and ecofascist scare stories are obviously better for enhancing government bureaucracy than anything free marketist.

But if you look at the people - Cameron, Clegg etc - they have no history or reason to be closet leftists - they are entirely of the hereditary ruling class. Also if you look at the old left - Scargill and co - you will find that they have nothing in common with the "new left". The old Labour party would have fought to the bitter end to throw as much subsidy as needed at the coal mines because that was in their political DNA. When New Labour came to power they didn't waste a minute on that but went straight into subsidising windmillery on the basis of the warming fraud.
At worst the "right" is still fighting, the old "left" has been zombiefied by the bureaucrats and Luddites.

This is also the answer to Booker's other theme. The "caring professions" are not run by those who work hard, doing there best for the kids, though there probably still are a few. They are run by and for empire building parasites who exist only for their own self aggrandisement. Iron Law in action.
The only solution is to cut down the size of government to its necessary components. Then the people in it will be working at their official duties rather than getting 10s of billions to "raise awareness" of all the scare stories they need to justify the money the parasites get from us. During the Victorian era government spent as little as 6% of GNP.

  Mark Wadsworth highlights how our PC Puritans are banning again. 

A London university could ban the sale of alcohol from parts of its campus because some students consider it to be "immoral".
Malcolm Gillies, vice chancellor of London Metropolitan University, said he was considering the move because a “high percentage” of his students see alcohol as “negative”.

  This has family resonance for me & I commented

My father, about 1950, was the Student president of Glasgow University Union. According to the history it was he who persuaded the worthies of the University Court to allow the Union to open a bar on the floor below the tearoom. Merely as a temporary experiment in the interests of science you understand, to test whether there was enough demand to match that for tea.

The experiment was never concluded, but anecdotally, the market does seem to exist.

Who would have thought that the 60s generation and their successors who now run things would have turned into po-faced puritans who would make the 1950s look like a rave?

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On EU Referendum

 I think these scares are inherent in the maintenance of massive government bureaucracy and state parasitism. To quote Mencken (as I am fond of doing ) "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."
The failure of scare stories will mean the collapse of governments taking half the nation's money. We can see this in the American elections where Tea partyists set the agenda and may well beat Obama. Even if they don't achieve a majority this time it is clearly coming.
Just as the state's method of solving the debt crises is more debt their solution to the failure of their scare stories is bigger scare stories. Such trends cannot continue forever. So far their is no sign of anything more fearsome than the discredited CAGW fraud so I hope we are on the cusp of reducing government from a fearful master to a useful servant.

[Since I wrote this it looks virtually certain that Mitt Romney will win the republican nomination. He was not my choice but he is a self made billionaire, which bespeaks considerable competence. Ann Coultar, who supported him from the beginning, points out he was the "conservative" runner against McCain (who brought in Palin) 4 years ago, so there is no reason to suppose he is an overly soft option. She is an intelligent woman who does not fear to oppose the "consensus" and I have previously discussed here support of the radiation hormesis theory and of her discovery that Obama's hit man was behind the smearing of Cain.]
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On John Redwood on the growth of China:

“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: All the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.” 
Adam Smith
China’s growth has been almost exactly 10% on average since 1980. Electricity production went up from 240 TWH to 2400 TWH between 1980 and 2005 – a rate of 9.64% annually. That correlation over that period of time is remarkable by any standards. China during this period has become a distinctly free market economy, unforced or restrained by overgovernment.
The future may be China’s for the taking but they have not done anything difficult. We could have & indeed still could do the same and since it has been historically easier for richer economies to grow than poorer ones we could still outpace China.
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Al Fin does an article on railguns as replacements for conventional weaponry. I comment:

This looks like it would work for purely kinetic (no explosive) bullets. These should be invulnerable to laser systems designed to destroy shells in flight (or aircraft). If so this would be not one but 2 qualitative leaps beyond what western armies, other than Israel, have.
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John Redwood on infrastructure building. I answer:

The government’s role in energy is entirely and very strongly negative, which is rather a shame because any possibility of getting out of recession depends on cheap energy. It is possible, though not likely, that with Huhne gone his promise to stifle the shale gas industry may no longer be operative.Shale gas is what is bringing the US economy out of recession but the EU generally seems to be intent on preventing that here.
Their role in airports is similarly entirely Luddite.
The problem with roads is that the transport budget is largely devoted, for purely ideological reasons, to rail whereas almost all travel is by road. If road funding were given most of the money taken in road taxes and run at arms length (whether through private companies or a quango) it could be properly funded.
However almost all government infrastructure projects suffer from the fact that around 7/8ths of their budget go to governmental bureaucratic parasitism (or alternately a combination of government parasitism and outright fraud). This is shown in the fact that the new Forth Bridge is 8 times the cost of last one even after correcting for inflation and that the London sewage outflow tunnel costs £100m per km when Norway can cut & outfit road tunnels at £5m per km.

[A Luddite regular on there asserted that America's growth is nothing to do with the shale gas exploitation, which is happening now, like the growth, but entirely to Obama's $1 trillion stimuli, which happened earlier, as recession continued. When pressed he, as is normally the case with such, declined to produce any evidence,]

Mutual Approval: If Jerry Pournelle were simply one of the world's best SF writers, he is much more, saying I edit well would be praise indeed. For him to call this blog "good stuff" is no end of a bonus.

If you are looking for some good short snippets to read, try http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2010/02/economic-political-wisdom-jerry.html which is, of all things, a compilation of ‘the wisdom of Jerry Pournelle’. Needless to say I didn’t do it, but I rather like what has been done. It’s a number of snippets of things I have said, mostly in the old View and Mail columns before we moved to Bluehost, and some of them are pretty good. This was good editing. There’s also other good stuff on that site.

    What I aim at in these collections is to get, in a few words, the basic principles. They are usually being applied to discussion of some current event, which will mean nothing in years to come - but the principle will.
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   If  the BBC, which so often starts "news" with "Scientists say  global warming may be worse than previously thought" were a news organisation this would be heavily reported by the MSM. Of course if anybody at all among the Beeboids was as willing to buck the bosses for honest journalism as these people the fraud would have died years ago.

Challenging statements from NASA that man is causing climate change, the [49] former NASA executives demanded in a letter to Administrator Charles Bolden that he and the agency “refrain from including unproven remarks” supporting global warming in the media.
“We feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate,” they wrote. “At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.”
The letter was signed by seven Apollo astronauts, a deputy associate administrator, several scientists, and even the deputy director of the space shuttle program.

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  While NASA scientists are putting their reputations on the line the corrupt thieving parasites in our Foreign Office are complicit in stealing millions from us to pay for eco-nazi propaganda against the politicians of Texas.

Did you know that you're paying for Texans to endorse anthropogenic climate change?

Rick Perry rightly criticises the British Foreign Office for attempting to change Texan minds on climate change

  This is how the corrupt international ecofascist nomenklatura help keep each other in the saddle.
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   Government planning to roll back our rights under the Freedom of Information Act.
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An elderly woman was ordered to find a new GP because the “carbon footprint” of her two-mile round trips to the surgery where she had been treated for 30 years was too large.


   Actually I suspect the doctor simply found her, as an elderly patient, one of those who took a bit of work, thereby leaving him less time for golf. However the very fact that scum like that can use ecofascism as an excuse and expect to get away with it speaks volumes.
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  The EU is about to engage in a war, albeit only a trade war, against the US, China, Russia, India and 19 other countries, over whether we are going to tax foreigners for burning carbon abroad.

In February, the two Asian giants, along with 21 other countries including the United States, signed up to the Moscow Declaration, a strategic blueprint for global trade ‘war’. It has a single aim: to make sure the EU’s Airline Tax never gets off the ground.
While the EU’s unelected Climate Czar Connie Hedegaard bullishly dismisses threats from the Moscow group of nations as “hypothetical” – exactly how is a cancelled order for planes “hypothetical” Connie? – actual elected leaders in European capitals are unlikely to remain as sanguine. Well before the first payment Airline Tax invoices are mailed in 2013 it becomes clear just how economically damaging a global trade war would be to European national economies.

  Obviously us getting into a trade war with the rest of the world is not only important but potentially disastrous. Which is why currently none of the relatively few MSM outlets to report it are in the EU.

    Last night the BBC, doing its bit for our glorious leader, currently in Indonesia, boasted of how "he" had got orders for a handful of Airbuses. Because of this fiasco "China has already cancelled orders for 35 European Airbus A330 jets, and is threatening to cancel on 10 more" but that isn't news we plebs are supposed to hear.
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Lord Tebbit agrees with me that

The common ground is where voters of all persuasions find themselves. Very often that is on issues which are central to Conservative philosophy. Those issues should be emphasised by the Tories to pull Labour voters towards them, or as neilcraig put it these are the issues where the Tories are, or should be, on the same side as most people.

  I had singled out getting the economy growing, an EU referendum, freedom from nanny statism, cutting crime and cutting immigration. I think he is optimistic if he thinks that they are more at home in the Conservative party or even that they once were.
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   Discussing my support of off site manufactured housing, allowing housing to be produced more cheaply, my brother, who lives in New Zealand, mentioned Habode, a home which can be delivered on the back of a lorry and open out to nearly 900 square foot (3 times the lorry size).

  Anywhere
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A Short History of Fuel Substitution in the UK - Proving, yet again, that peak oil.gas/coal/wood/whale oil etc. is simply an old lie whose details occasionally change.

   I particularly wish to draw your attention to this assessment of what getting a one off reduction in gas prices from North Sea gas (before we gad the oil) would do.

E] They assessed the likely overall economic benefit to the economy from cheaper energy as a one off gain of between ten and twenty percent in GDP over the ten years of conversion and might well create growth of half a percent per annum thereafter for many years as new customers came on line.

  I have been pushing the line that CHEAP ENERGY MEANS FAST GROWTH.

   If this was provably known back in the 1960s when the government were first promoting the development of North Sea gas then they know it now. Lets not let anybody connected to government ever, under any circumstances, claim that "renewables" were not deliberately promoted to put us into recession or that a single one of these thieving parasites was not personally fully aware of this.

  This is a pyramid of debating tactics. It came from a post on "scienecblogs" asking why it was so difficult to get real intellectual debate online.

It is a reasonable question and leads me to the conclusion that moderation of blogs to keep out the bottom 3 classes there may often be a public benefit.

The site author got his question answered when no "scienceblogs" regular proved capable of answering me on any but the bottom 3 levels and proved the genuineness of his commitment to real debate by having not a word to say against such tactics when used by warming alarmists that site supports.
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Next Big Future on areas where we may expect serious improvement over the next few years
1. Pro-growth Policies


2. Energy Efficiency - superconductors, thermoelectrics, improved grid

3. Energy Revolution - Mass produced fission, fusion, and maybe cold fusion

4. Additive manufacturing

5. Not so mundane - neuromorphic chips, quantum computers, photonics

6. Automated transportation (leading to robotic cars and planes)

7. Urbanization MegaCities

8. Urbanization Broad Group skyscrapers, Tata flat packed buildings

9. Robotics

10. Hyperbroadband

11. Supermaterials

12. Improve medicine and public health

13. Space

14. Synthetic biology and recombineering

15. Sensors everywhere

16. Education transformed and accelerated innovation

17. Supersmartphones, exoskeletons and wearable systems
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Technologies we were promised but never delivered - less serious
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Model planes potential as terrorist weapons - the flip side of military UAV's changing war
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Windmills simply cannot compete with shale gas in a free market society - good article by GWPF member
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Incredibly a sensible article on radiation has slipped by the BBC censors:

The standard measure of the biological effect of radiation is the sievert. One sievert is a heck of a big dose, but one tenth of a millionth of a sievert, or 0.1 micro sieverts, is roughly the dose from eating one banana.
So we can use one banana as our basic unit and convert other radiation exposures to so many bananas.
Radiation Dose Chart

But why bother converting this to bananas? Partly because it's hoped BED is friendlier than sieverts and grays and rads and rems, and all the other paraphernalia. I'd agree. Though not everyone likes the BED because of problems counting changing level of exposure from the radiation in a banana as it passes through the body.
But I reckon the BED is useful for several reasons. First, it reminds us that radiation is commonplace. You can't get much more ordinary than a banana.

Second, we know eating one banana won't kill us. Not even nearly. Not without extreme violence. This affirms an age-old point about toxicity - that danger is in the dose. In other words most things, radiation included, are only dangerous in sufficient quantities. The distinction between toxic and safe is not really a distinction of kind, but of quantity. That goes for just about everything from water and vitamins to arsenic

Radiation dose at the boundary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on March 16: 1.9 millisieverts (mSv) per hour (note this is the boundary of the power station not of the exclusion zones 10 and 20 km away)



Maximum allowable exposure for U.S. radiation workers: 50 mSv per year
  That is 1.9 bananas an hour and 50 bananas eaten in a year respectively.
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Green Party controlled Brighton Council buys a new fleet of gritters to combat the snow children born in recent years have, if government ecofascist claims are in any way truthful, never seen.
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Another scientist elected to mem,bership of the Union of Concerned Scientists - Kenji Watts
Kenjii has a family relatio9nship to Anthony Watts - he is his pet cat.

Undoubtedly every honest alarmist who denounced the Oregon Petition because alarmists had managed to sneak Dr Geri Halliwell onto their roles (temporarily) will now denounce the UCS. Yep every last one of them who is honest - ie zero.
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Larger scale here
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If we are concerned with the inadequate rate of economic growth, we must recognize that the single greatest impediment to economic growth is the size and scope of the Federal government. Unless we can reduce the extent of regulation and introduce some economic rationality to important regulations, we cannot hope to see incomes rise to provide a better future for our children and future generations.

  A comment from Dr Philip Bratby on Bishop Hill which is chilling enough to repeat. It is clearly a significant threat both because of lack of capacity and because throwing intermittent wind power into it destabilises the grid.:

Arguably the most important piece of infrastructure in the country is the grid (transmission and distribution). If it fails the economic damage will be enormous and people will die by the thousand. How long can most people survive with no electricity (for most people this means no shops, no travelling, no frozen food, no cooking, no heating, no work, etc etc). So you would think that the most important job of the energy ministers would be maintaining the integrity of the grid. This means ensuring that the grid code is rigorously applied, i.e. that generators connected to the grid enhance its stability and integrity. So what do we find? Well of course the grid code is relaxed so that harmful generators like wind turbines can be connected to the grid. And what does our chief energy minister think of a policy designed to destroy this most important piece of infrastructure? He thinks wind turbines are pretty and beautiful. Truly we are governed by buffoons.

  I have posted this on 10 "LibDem" sites. We will see how many, if any, don't censor it.
-
In fact only 4 out of 10 wholly censored it. One even had the courtesy to give an answer, non-factual though it was.
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  UKIP have what appears to be not so much a hile in the "warming consensus" scam as ots virtual disintigration:

 50 scientists named as part of the IPCC consensus who have openly denounced the fraud.
Starting with saying that the vital phrase the scientists agreed on "“The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected” was censored from the policy document by non-scientists.

  A major story which will be censored by the MSM
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Gore faked a film experiment
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The most recent excuse for warming alarmism - ocean "acidification" is a fraud - proven elsewhere previously but worth the confirmation.
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40% of scientists don't work for the government (actually 30.0 + 4.9 + 5.9 =41.1%). Useful because iit gives figures to the statistical unliklihood of not one of them (1,992,528 in America alone) supports the alleged consensus. Not vital but some alarmists on "scienceblogs" had claimed to doubt it .
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Low Carbon Crony Investment Conference
Alex Salmond says of Scots taxpayer subsidies for sea turbines ""It's a turning point like the discovery of a new world or the change from hunter gathering to agriculture,"  "paradigm shift", "great leap forward for mankind". He predicted 130,000 jobs will be created in the low carbon sector - since economists say each subsidy dependent "green job" destroys 3.7 he is actually saying he intends to destroy 480,000 jobs.
 
The engineer while naturally being enthusiastic admitted "We have got to get the cost down. The industry's technology is still relatively immature." and the government' current subsidy £35m fund was a "drop in the ocean"
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Climate change is certainly not an exact science. In fact, if the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World is anything to go by, it appears to be a wildly inaccurate science. Spiked

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More than one in four people in the capital are currently unable to meet their energy bills as rising prices and welfare reforms threaten to send even more into fuel poverty.


A report by London Councils today warns that rising fuel prices means that fuel poverty could be a key issue this winter.
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Catastrophic weather events over the last 2000 years. Nowadays we don't know when we have it easy. G/T Pournelle
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There is potential for shale gas elsewhere: in the south-eastern county of Kent, the south coast, the Mendip Hills in the west, the east Midlands, and Scotland's Midland Valley.

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And on a different scare story - the anti-nuclear LNT one:

However, research from eminent scientists worldwide, including radiation experts at Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute (LRRI) -- the only facility in the world dedicated to respiratory research -- debunks the LNT hypothesis, especially as it relates to lung cancer.
Now, a mathematical tool developed at LRRI will help scientists measure those health benefits. Through their research, they support a proven alternative to LNT, which is called low-dose-radiation-activated natural protection (ANP). Using a hormetic relative risk (HRR) model, they can actually show that ANP provides a radiation benefit.

  These are some comments U have made on various sites:

If the alarmists truthfully believed a word of their alarmist story they would be begging for the building of many new nuclear plants since this is the only way to seriously cut CO2 (wind by comparison barely does anything).
They don’t proving they know it is a total and deliberate lie intended to promote their and government’s parasitism. http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/2011/09/20/a-question-for-mr-huhne/#comment-63461
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Harmless Sky on the BBC "Science Policy review"
Altho, as you say, only a few pages are devoted specifically to warming it is clear that is the entire point of having this.
I put in a submission to Professor Jones on the subject of BBC re reporting of nuclear power. It didn’t even get the courtesy of a dishonest dismissal in writing that yours did and I can’t say that was a surprise.
However the conclusions of his report, if taken as the serious consideration of science coverage in general, as it claims to be, rather than a warmist defence, would have a major effect on their reporting of nuclear power.
He concludes that the BBC should only report the “consensus” particularly the consensus of “experts” employed in the business – ie “climate scientists” for warming..
However in the nuclear industry all nuclear engineers employed by the industry without, so far as I know, any exception acknowledge that nuclear power is the safest, most reliable, least polluting and at least in engineering costs, least expensive way of producing power. Indeed I would be prepared to guess that at least “97%” of all qualified engineers across the board willing to express an opinion would say that. You really have to go to “independent experts” employed by Greenpeace and the like or wholly ignorant politicians to hear different.
Of course the BBC have always gone to such “independent experts” and politicians first and even when a real expert is asked they always “balance” it with someone of that ilk.
However if the Jones “review of science coverage” were honestly about science coverage they would now have to be considerably less willing to interview anti-nuclearists than they are catastrophic warming sceptics, since we sceptics do, at worst, represent a serious part of the scientific community (including Nobel Physics winners) and the alarmist “science”us not within orders of magnitude as well tested as nuclear engineering.
Of course that would only apply if prof Jones and the BBC staff, management and assorted hangers on were something other than 100% (… snip …) with a £140,000 piece of anti-science propaganda (… snip – see blog rules …) that serves the politicians.
. So far no change at all in BBC nuclear science coverage.
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Next Big Future on a Siberia/Alaska tunnel
High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power line.This can move electricity thousands of KMs with relatively low loses and could be the start of a worldwide grid. Electricity prices vary massively worldwide(in China and Russia it seems to be about 1/4 of ours) and are a key factor in growth.
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On the Adam Smith Institute energy discussion

Low price elasticity tends to mean the product is a necessity or that it is cheap. Possibly energy isn't cheap compared to history, since government is busy pushing up the price. However both of these suggest that energy availability is indeed central to economic success and that the correlation of 10% annual growth in electricity supply and in GNP demonstrated over the last 30 years in China could be replicated here if the government would allow it. Conversely that their policy of making electricity ever more expensive is certain to prevent us getting out of recession.

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David Friedman on global warming
There is one way we can be effectively certain of a benefit. Increasing CO2 has a measured effect on plant growth
http://www.omafra.gov.on.ca/english/crops/facts/00-077.htm
This has already increased growth 25%, altho the rate of of increase is starting to tail off. This is highly beneficial to everything that eats food which includes not only us but the entire biosphere the "environmentalists" claim to care about.

A subsequent comment gave this important observation
"World agriculture production is 6% of world GDP. World GDP is about 60T dollars. So CO2 production has increased just the agriculture portion of world GDP by around half a trillion dollars a year. Thats a massive effect."
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Martin Findlay on how winning in Libya will mean oil prices fall
had we not decided to replace Gaddafi with an unstable mixture of his ex-intelligence chief (who would have had to run the Lockerbie bombing in Libya was involved), people who haven't lived there for decades and our former and future al Quaeda allies (one of whom we apparently rendited to Gaddaffi who wasn't smart or brutal enough to kill him), the oil price would never have gone up in the first place.
On the other hand these televised gladiatorial games with the lives of far away people are useful for distracting the plebeians.
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Douglas Carswell says competing currencies should be allowed
I assume that competing currencies would include currencies issued by non-state organisations such as the IMF, Santander, Barclays, Paypal, BT, Orange, you and me. If so I see where you are going and so long as nobody is forced to take any of it and the laws are strong enough against forgery, I agree.
It would reduce the parasitic power of the state and end inflation.
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Spiked article making fun of politically approved writers doing short stories promoting warming alarmism
All one can say, indeed all one ought to waste time saying, is that all those authors from Margaret Atwood to David Mitchell are deluded. The evidence that we are not experiencing catastrophic warming is as unequivocal as that which says we are not experiencing an ice age.
The green lobby have been proven liars time after time and nobody can honestly claim to believe a word they say.
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John Redwood stresses the importance of inequality but
John, in this thread you seem to have accepted the “left’s definition of poverty. Poverty used to be & properly still is lack of money or income. The “left” has redefined it as income inequality. Thus, by their definition North Korea and Cuba have less “poverty” than South Korea and Hong Kong because although people are starving there almost everybody is starving so nobody is “poor”.
A job of government should be reducing poverty by allowing increase of national wealth. ANYBODY, including Guardianistas who says this should take 2nd (or later) place to reducing inequality is, by definition, opposing reducing poverty. The “right” should not be browbeaten into accepting this Newspeak definition of the word and should make it quite clear that we, not they, are opposed to real poverty.
The evidence is quite unequivocal that economic freedom, including freedom in energy production, leads to wealth and state interference, to produce equality or otherwise, tends to reduce this. An extra 1% growth will, in not many years, give even the poorest, more money than any practical redistribution could.
Whether, or rather how much, it is the state’s duty to reduce income inequality is an arguable question. Machiavelli and many other historical thinkers were of the opinion that gross income inequality tends to produce a less effective society (eg the later Roman Empire). On the other hand few have said that total equality is either possible or desirable. Pournelle is clearly right to point out the ultimate dichotomy of what state power used for this objective could achieve – “Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
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EU Referendum on our corrupt media
I think you are optimistic to think that modern western societies, not being technically totalitarian, are marginally less likely to fall for state propaganda than in Hitler's day. It may well be that the pure amount of centralised "news" we get and the power and immediacy of TV images are much more effective than anything available to Adolf, or Joe.
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Al Fin - can the scientific method be restored
Probably the first such in the modern strain of perversions of science was when the bureaucrats produced the Linear no Threshold (LNT) theory of radiation damage because it made it easy to produce regulations without knowing anything more than arithmetic. With a few years it had become "official" and is now OFFICIAL, without any evidence, indeed against both previous theory (that the dose makes the poison) or evidence (there is massive evidence that at low levels, ie anything well above Fukushima, radiation is beneficial).
There are a number of other cases in which the scientific process has given way to "post-normal science", including catastrophic warming but that is, I believe, the first modern one and the most destructive. World electricity production being 40% and thus GNP under 50% of what it would have been had the geometric growth in nuclear plants not been halted..