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Saturday, May 14, 2005

GEORGE MONBIOT ON CHANNEL 4 V BELLAMY

Thursday C4 News did a fight between David Bellamy & George Monbiot, based on a Guardian article which I am afraid the latter won by the expedient of being rude about Lyndon LaRouche & thereby tarnishing all skeptics by association, also, to be fair, Bellamy had not mastered his brief & couldn't name websites.

I wrote this to the Guardian. Obviously they didn't publish it or anything from the same side. Monbiot's claim about 99.9% of scientists is in no way truthful:

In his defence of the article published by George Monbiot today on Channel 4 he said that "99%" & a couple of minutes later "99.9%" of climate scientists believed in the threat of global warming to our lives.

A recent survey by Professor Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers show impressively that the much- repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human activities and CO2 emissions. If 25% of European (who are after all the believers in this nonsense) don't believe it even exists I would be interested to know what makes Mr Monbiot think that 99.9% of them think it is so disasterous as to justify the $500 million a day Kyoto costs.

Throughout his article Mr Monbiot concentrates on what he, probably correctly, believes to be a typing error (555 glaciers expanding instead of 55%) & on the fact that Mr LaRouche, of whom he disapproves, also disbelieves global warming. This is an example of playing the man rather than the ball (the ball being that roughly as many glaciers are growing as shrinking) & is unworthy of a serious comentator.

LETTER PUBLISHED ABOUT MASSACRE

Letter in Today's Herald . It may appear elsewhere since I submitted it to virtually every national newspaper. On the other hand, bearing in mind previous trends, it may not.

I am, however, rather proud of this since it is a news item which should most definitely be told & the lies & censorship practiced by all our media over the last 5 (or indeed 15) years would not be out of place under the late Joe Stalin.

As you will see there has been slight censorship of the 2nd last paragraph ( marked <>) to, somewhat clumsily, dilute my reference to the media's censorship.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Sir,
Denis McShane has publically expressed regret that the media have given so little coverage to the finding of 1,500 bodies found in a mass grave in Iraq.

several years ago<, as a result of a query I had put to my local Labour MP >that same Mr McShane, then a junior Foreign Office minister, wrote to me to confirm the existence of a mass grave. This particular grave was in Dragodan a mostly Albanian suburb of Pristina in the British occupation zone & was easily the largest ever found in Kosovo. 210 bodies had by then been recovered from it, mostly unidentifiable but many of them identified as Serbians who were proven to have been alive at the time NATO occupied the place & started handing out police uniforms to our KLA friends.

I had read about this on the net <& been unsure of its veracity since >it had not been reported by our conventional media. If Mr McShane feels that the media should give more coverage to the discovery of mass graves I would agree with him. If he is only calling for coverage of mass graves for which his government is not responsible I would strongly disagree.

In a follow up letter I asked him what measures were being taken to bring the perpetrators of the Dragodan Massacre to justice but received no reply.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig

Thursday, May 12, 2005

I NEVER KNEW BRITAIN WENT TO SPACE

I was having a drink with my brother the other day when the conversation turned, as it does (with us anyway), to space travel. He told me that in the 70s Britain launched our own satellite but Whitehall, being Whitehall, never mentioned it.

Being somewhat flabbergasted I asked him for a link & here it is:

http://www.spaceuk.org/introduction.htm
What of the Black Knight development? The Black Arrow project was put into hand. Prototypes were built. Then this too was cancelled. A satellite was launched in 1971 with the hardware left over. British Government involvement in space research came effectively to an end at that point. There was to be a Services satellite communication system, Skynet, that relied on US launchers, but that was it.

There are several infuriating aspects to all of this. To produce a missile, and then realise it was the wrong missile. To convert it to a satellite launcher, one that looked to be highly successful, and then to cancel again. And the cancellation took place in the late 60s, when the uses of satellites in TV [the Tokyo Olympics of '64 were the first to be transmitted by satellite], telephone communications, weather observation were becoming apparent and obvious.
I like the understatement about several infuriating aspects. To be fair to Whitehall this programme was always aimed at giving us a nuclear capacity against the USSR. The problem with this (well the technological problem) is that Britain is a geographically small country 4 minutes missile time from Russia (the US is 15). To make a retaliatory strike, since there is no way a launch could be made before theirs got here, would require serious numbers of hardened silos spread around our island, some of which would inevitably be near cities. Polaris, when it became available, was a better option.

Of course if you regard the technological future of humanity as important then it is still well worth doing.

Amazing the things that don't get reported.

If this tickles you may I recommend Ministry of Space graphic novel

Wednesday, May 11, 2005

X-PRIZE

NASA & to a lesser extent the US as a whole is developing a very dog-in-the-manger attitude about space. They don't know what to do about it but they subconsciously know it is the most important territorial expansion of the human race since we left Africa & they don't want anybody else to have it.

Thus NASA is enforcing useless regulations on private US companies trying to go into space & the US as far as possible is doing the same to foreign ones. See how they are holding Virgin back.

What to do about it (more from Jerrypournelle.com hope you follow it):
Going back to the Moon is important but developing capabilities is even more so; and if we go back to the Moon by building another standing army to absorb all our space resources?

Let me say it again: the best way to get some of those capabilities is to define them, decide what they are worth, and give prizes to the first (or first and second) American company to develop those capabilities and demonstrate them. Five billion dollars to the first company that sends the same ship to circular Low Earth Orbit 24 times in one year with a payload of 5,000 pounds. Twenty billion to the first company that puts 31 Americans on the Moon and keeps them there alive and well for 3 years and a day. Ten billion to the first American company that builds 10 space ships with a payload of 10,000 pounds and uses those ships to deliver 100,000 pounds of anything at all to LEO in a period of 2 months. I'm making up these numbers as I write this, but surely the point is clear? Surely it would be worth that much in each case? And since it costs nothing unless the goal is achieved, why not post those prizes? What harm will it do?

Just translate dollars into pounds & American company into British - we could literally have the moon for less than WE spent on Iraq, probably less than the UK share of taking & holding Kossovo. Britain is, along with Canada in second place of X-Prize runners (3 entrants) . If we don't have enough clout with Washington to insist that they put no obstacles in the way of Branson & other entrepreneurs then what has Blair spent the last 3 years doing?

The long term benefits from this make the phrase "the sky's the limit" look mundane. In under 50 years, perhaps a lot under, asteroid gold will cost less than the same weight of titanium foam girders (you can only keep bubbles in metal in zero G) & both will be common.

This is something freemarketist organisations like the Adam Smith Institute are in a unique position in British politics to encourage.

LETTER REPORTING GENOCIDE ACTUALLY PUBLISHED

Letter in Today's Herald. It may appear elsewhere since I submitted it to virtually every national newspaper. On the other hand, bearing in mind previous trends, it may not.

I am, however, rather proud of this since it is a news item which should most definitely be told & the lies & censorship practiced by all our media over the last 5 (or indeed 15) years would not be out of place under the late Joe Stalin.

As you will see there has been slight censorship of the 2nd last paragraph ( marked <>) to, somewhat clumsily, dilute my reference to the media's censorship.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Sir,
Denis McShane has publically expressed regret that the media have given so little coverage to the finding of 1,500 bodies found in a mass grave in Iraq.

several years ago<, as a result of a query I had put to my local Labour MP >that same Mr McShane, then a junior Foreign Office minister, wrote to me to confirm the existence of a mass grave. This particular grave was in Dragodan a mostly Albanian suburb of Pristina in the British occupation zone & was easily the largest ever found in Kosovo. 210 bodies had by then been recovered from it, mostly unidentifiable but many of them identified as Serbians who were proven to have been alive at the time NATO occupied the place & started handing out police uniforms to our KLA friends.

I had read about this on the net <& been unsure of its veracity since >it had not been reported by our conventional media. If Mr McShane feels that the media should give more coverage to the discovery of mass graves I would agree with him. If he is only calling for coverage of mass graves for which his government is not responsible I would strongly disagree.

In a follow up letter I asked him what measures were being taken to bring the perpetrators of the Dragodan Massacre to justice but received no reply.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

ALWAYS LEAVE THEM WANTING MORE

When I wrote to Jim Wallace, as an ordinary party member whom he had met, to strongly disagree with the party position on new nuclear power he wrote back to me personally. Indeed he replied 3 times to follow up letters. That was a courtesy which I did not expect. He is a gentleman.

On the other hand when I emailed him about my enterprise motion which had been turned down for debate (similar to the growth policy the SNP are now proposing) he replied that he would have liked seen it debated. However when my consitituency refused to put it up again a few months ago this was, I was told, because those in charge didn't want it debated. Jim can also be pretty brutal.

On the third hand he was wrong about nuclear, & while he was a good justice minister he is generally agreed to have achieved little on growth.

He was able to lead the party without divisions, which as my example proves is not easy & he led them to the greatest success in Scotland since LLoyd George. It is said that every political career ends in failure but he has disproven that. It is an example many (you know who) could learn from. The Americans have a rule about serving only 2 terms at the top & it is a good one. Since he is a respected QC he will now be in a position to prove that successful politicians do not generally, or indeed almost ever, go into it for the money.

And he's only bloody 52.

Monday, May 09, 2005

PRO-NUCLEAR ANTI-WINDFARM LETTER ALSO NOT PUBLISHED BY THE INDIE

Do I see a trend here:
Dear Sir,
Your correspondents have every right to believe that covering Britain with 10s of thousands of windmills will enhance the landscape (letters 23rd April) - beauty is after all in the eye of the beholder. They do not have the right to claim that windmills will solve the problem of CO2 release - the "renewables" industry have publicly admitted that windmills cannot provide any part of our baseload because they only work on average 28% of the time thus most of our CO2 producing capacity must be retained. Equally they cannot honestly claim that wind is "cheap" - in fact it costs an average of 8p a unit whereas nuclear costs 2.3p. Again it is not truthful to claim that high level nuclear waste will last for "thousands of generations" - in fact such radioactivity will be down to official safe levels (the real safe level is much higher) within 50 years & down to the level of the ore it was mined from in a few hundred.

These facts are not difficult to determine & it is quite improper to claim as facts things that clearly aren't. Should they wish to enjoy the delights of windmills to the horizon in every direction Greens should offer to pay for them themselves. 24,000 pensioners die every year because of fuel poverty - it is positively immoral to charge them more for useless windmills merely to improve the view.

It is equally improper to claim to support windmills on the grounds of global warming. It is a fact that, as well as being safe, reliable & cheap, nuclear is the only way currently feasible to cut a large proportion of CO2 release.
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig

LETTER AGAINST THE INDEPENDENT'S ANTI-SEMITISM - NOT PUBLISHED

Letter to Independent - as you will see at the end I didn't expect them to publish & they didn't - neither did they publish any other letter on the same anti-anti-semitic line:

Dear Sir,
The Association of University Teachers is considering boycotting Israeli institutions because they are alleged to be involved in driving Palestinians from their homes (20th April). Clearly the AUT are motivated by humanitarianism.

Nato, collectively plus the US, German, British & indeed Vatican governments were implicated in the Croatian Nazi government's driving 560,000 Serbs from their homes, almost exactly the same number as the Palestinians originally driven from Israel.

We can therefore, with certainty, look forward to the AUT equally proposing a boycott of the institutions connected to these states which are equally guilty of ethnic cleansing. After all they would surely never treat Jews worse than Nazis?
Yours Faithfully
Neil Craig
PS When you don't publish this I will look forward to seeing if you publish ANY letter seriously questioning the anti-Jewish line.

SREBRENICA MASSACRE

Copy of a letter I sent to the Chicago Sun/Times following an article about the Srebrinica massacre, it was not published which is par for the course:

Dear Sir,
Your article on the mystery of the Srebrenica massacre omits mention of 2 particularly important unsolved questions.

Firstly what size was the garrison? When the Moslem leader first announced that a massacre had happened he said that the entire garrison was missing. At the time it was widely reported that the garrison numbered 7,500 male adults. Subsequently it turned out that large numbers of men had indeed reached Moslem lines & immediately transferred to the northern front under orders not to write to their families to say they were alive. The Tribunal now acknowlde that about 7,000 men made it to safety but that the garrison was actually 15,000.

Secondly what happened to the bodies of the Serb victims of genocide? Prior to the Serb forces moving into the town they had attempted to maintain a ceasefire. Unfortunately the Moslem forces under commander Nasir Oric had continuously carried out raids against surrounding villages. Since it was wartime most adult males were away but the population of women, children & the elderly were there. Oric's forces murdered thousands of them. This continued even after a ceasefire under which Dutch troops guaranteed to disarm Oric's forces & separate them. Officially the 4,000 bodies of adults & children recovered, all near the villages where Oric committed genocide rather than in the mass graves originally claimed by the western powers, are those of the Moslem militia, which leaves open the question of where the Serb bodies are. There is no question that Oric engaged in this genocide since he personally showed videos of him beheading civilians, taken from his extensive home video collection, to reporters from the Toronto Star & Washington Post. He is currently awaiting trial before the Tribunal on separate charges.

The Serbs, of course, have obvious answers to all these questions & it required the full power of Gauletier Ashdown to suppress their report. The fact that, for the last 10 years, no major western media outlet has even published both sides of this question is a standing indictment to the journalistic integrity of the entire western media.

Sunday, May 08, 2005

PR V FTPT the ANGLO AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

I have been asked by Bill Keezer of Bill's Comments why I consider the first past the post (FTPT) system compared to proportional representation (PR) so dreadful when it appears not to be disapproved of in the US. Since I do indeed consider it corrupting that is a very good question.

Thursday's election here led to Labour gaining 55% of seats & thus a comfortable majority on 35.9% of the vote. The Tories got 30% on 33% & the Liberal Democrats got 10% on 22.5%. Paradoxically the Scottish National Party got 1% on 1.5% of the UKwide vote proving that FTPT is less destructive of localised parties, a point I will raise again at the end.

Under FTPT if the vote was perfectly evenly spread then Labour would get 35.9% in every constituency & all the seats. Fortunately perfection does not happen in the real world. Actually there is a further wrinkle in that Labour's vote, being disproportionately urban working class tends to be somewhat more concentrated & these tend to be shrinking constituencies (we also have movement to suburbia) so they actually do rather better than they ought to. Had the Tories got 35.9% & Labour 33% there would have been no overall majority & Labour would still have been the largest party.

It is obvious that this is unfair & undemocratic. I believe it also leads to bad & corrupting government. All parties represent their voter's interests. When they have 51% of the vote it is usually assumed that they represent a fair approxiamation of the general interest (this is clearly not so in places where there are tribally divided communities such as Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq & traditionally the southern USA & I think democrats should be giving this problem much more thought). A party which represents only 37% is clearly not able to preside in this way & the large majority of people feel, correctly, that they are disenfranchised. FTPT also destroys small parties & makes the 2 large parties fight only over the areas where their policies abut. This means that new ideas tend not to surface & I believe there is no field of human endeavour where there is more of a shortage of new ideas than politics. The one argument for FTPT which, in my opinion, holds weight is that it allows new parties to grow when they should not - the National Socialists are the prime example. I would say however that there is at least as much risk of a traditional party being captured by entryism under FPTP (the religious right threaten the Republicans thus & Labour had a serious problem once with a well organised Trotskite group) & that the democracy ultimately stand or falls on whether the electorate feel involved.

It also heightens geographical divisions. For example there is a common belief held by Scots, of whom I am one, that we are socialistically inclined. This is because even during the height of Thatcherism (she won repeatedly on 42%) Scotland returned 85% Labour MPs. However Labour never actually got as much as 50% of the vote here & by most measurements we are only about 3% to the left - this myth has nonetheless entered the national psyche. This all leads to a great deal of cynicism in politics. It is also extremely difficult to change because the party in government is, by definition, doing very well out of it. Scotland provides an interesting example in that recently we have gained a state government which is run by PR. This means that the government is an alliance of Labour & Liberals. While it would be wrong to suggest that we have become enthusiastic about our leaders the election results in Scotland show that people think the Liberal influence on government has been beneficial & the historic logjam in Scots politics is clearly breaking.

If it is so dreadful why doesn't everybody (ie the US) want to be free of it?

Partly happenstance - it is only fairly recently that this has become such an important issue here - the 1945 election is the last one where the winner had a majority but with most winners in the high forties it did not seem so important.

Partly that Americans are justifiably proud of their founding fathers & slow to change their constituion - in the 18thC PR did not exist, it requires a greater degree of state organisation than was common then. I strongly suspect that if it had been an option it would have been chosen for at least one House (possibly not both because separation of power is a cornerstone of the constitution).

Partly also I think, that the US has a Presidential system so that parties are less important & less disciplined. Presidents could also be elected by PR, either by use of a transferable vote or, by a run off by the leading candidates, both of which ensure the winner has, eventually, most of the votes, but, since somebody has to drive it is not so obvious a problem as in a parliamentary system which is supposed to be built on concensous. While there have been many 3rd parties they tend not to survive failure. Since WW2 their have been 4 significant 3rd parties - the Progressives of Henry Wallace, George Wallace's states rightists, Ross Perot & Nadar's greens. Had all of those survived US politics would be considerably more diverse & interesting.

Does this really matter that much for good governance. I actively do not want to put PR forward as a magic bullet - there are many badly run countries with PR & Singapore is well run on FTPT. Nonetheless I have 3 examples, 1 from the UK & 2 from the US where FTPT was disasterous. At the end of WW2 the UK Liberal party disintigrated under an electoral squeeze - this meant that Lloyd George was excluded from power - since he had been considerably more important to winning WW1 than Churchill to WW2, wanted an Empire Free Trade area, pressed for Keynsian economics during the Depression & pressed for acceptance of Russia's offer of alliance before WW2 broke out this loss is obvious. The US examples are that of Teddy Roosevelt, whose fight with Taft split the Republican party & allowed Wilson in during WW1. With a transferrable vote Roosevelt would certainly have been President & would have sorted out the war (he was that sort of guy) before Russia revolted & established a workable "League of Peace". Finally, & as an example of the geographical divisions FTPT produces, Abraham Lincoln was elected as part of a 4 way split in which he got a small majority of northern votes & virtually no southern ones - he thus came to power on about 40% of the vote in a manner which was seen as unfair in the southern states. The rest is history.

Further reading;
Electoral Reform Society

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