Saturday, April 05, 2008
SNP'S X-PRIZE FOR RENEWABLES - HERALD LETTER
In the Herald today:
I have not been a supporter of renewables before but the SNP is to be congratulated for the announcement of a £10m prize for the creation of a successful sea turbine. I may not be persuaded that any "commercially viable" turbine working on renewable power is possible, certainly compared with the low cost of nuclear electricity, but this will encourage cutting-edge engineering companies to set up in Scotland. Also, unlike most government projects, if nobody achieves the target it costs nothing.
Such prizes for technology projects (known as X-Prizes) have not been used often in history but Alex Salmond is right to say that "the history of such innovation prizes shows that they repay their investment many, many times over".
Lindbergh's solo Atlantic flight was as a result of such a prize put up by a French hotelier. The international flight industry was enormously enhanced by that achievement. John Harrison's discovery of a way to measure longitude was a result of a prize put up by the British government. The flight of Spaceship One, which led to the Virgin Galactic project was inspired by a private prize of £5m.
This government has shown more initiative in this one action than its predecessors did in eight years. A bit more progressive thinking like this could not only help make Scotland prosperous but also a world engineering leader again.
We still have to see the details of the competition - mainly will it be awarded purely for achieving a technical specification, rather than by a committee of like minded people, will there be no award if nothing achieves spec - but Alex Salmond clearly understand X-Prizes & what they have done & is promoting it on that basis. I have serious hopes, if this proves popular, that this will be seen as an inspiration both to space & more valuable technical achievements & for other countries or indeed states within countries.
Reader reaction was positive, including from somebody who doesn't generally agree with me.
It is so sad that the Liberal Democrats refused to even contemplate this, as indeed they refused to contemplate going for Irish style growth, back when I tried to get them discussed.
Not only was this, in my view, a betrayal of what liberalism is but at the time they were the 2nd party in Scotland & they could now be where the SNP are.
See also www.xprize.org/
The only piece of editing was removing what I regard as the very first X-Prize - "Even Archimedes' Eureka moment was inspired by a reward offered by his king."
I have not been a supporter of renewables before but the SNP is to be congratulated for the announcement of a £10m prize for the creation of a successful sea turbine. I may not be persuaded that any "commercially viable" turbine working on renewable power is possible, certainly compared with the low cost of nuclear electricity, but this will encourage cutting-edge engineering companies to set up in Scotland. Also, unlike most government projects, if nobody achieves the target it costs nothing.
Such prizes for technology projects (known as X-Prizes) have not been used often in history but Alex Salmond is right to say that "the history of such innovation prizes shows that they repay their investment many, many times over".
Lindbergh's solo Atlantic flight was as a result of such a prize put up by a French hotelier. The international flight industry was enormously enhanced by that achievement. John Harrison's discovery of a way to measure longitude was a result of a prize put up by the British government. The flight of Spaceship One, which led to the Virgin Galactic project was inspired by a private prize of £5m.
This government has shown more initiative in this one action than its predecessors did in eight years. A bit more progressive thinking like this could not only help make Scotland prosperous but also a world engineering leader again.
We still have to see the details of the competition - mainly will it be awarded purely for achieving a technical specification, rather than by a committee of like minded people, will there be no award if nothing achieves spec - but Alex Salmond clearly understand X-Prizes & what they have done & is promoting it on that basis. I have serious hopes, if this proves popular, that this will be seen as an inspiration both to space & more valuable technical achievements & for other countries or indeed states within countries.
Reader reaction was positive, including from somebody who doesn't generally agree with me.
It is so sad that the Liberal Democrats refused to even contemplate this, as indeed they refused to contemplate going for Irish style growth, back when I tried to get them discussed.
Not only was this, in my view, a betrayal of what liberalism is but at the time they were the 2nd party in Scotland & they could now be where the SNP are.
See also www.xprize.org/
The only piece of editing was removing what I regard as the very first X-Prize - "Even Archimedes' Eureka moment was inspired by a reward offered by his king."
Friday, April 04, 2008
ORGANLEGGING UNDER NATO RULE
Every time I start to think our government can't get more obscene in their behaviour in Yugoslavia - they do. But even so this shocked me.
The KLA. trained, armed & organised by NATO for the deliberate purpose of committing genocide have been kidnapping Serb teenagers, dissecting them & selling their body parts to authorities in NATO countries. Carla del Ponte, the "prosecutor" of the NATO funded war crimes "court" has quietly admitted this deep in her autobiography published yesterday. Presumably she hopes this will free her from accusations of having deliberately covered this up for 8 years & that the western press can be guaranteed to censor it. Our media have indeed censored it though it has been reported in Serbia & Russia where, apparently, the press is not obedient to NATO leaders, as a Google search proves.
Independent Beta news agency carried excerpts from Del Ponte's book, 'Hunt, Me and War Criminals', in which she says that in the course of her investigations she learned that some 300 Serbs were abducted and killed for organ trafficking in 1999. The abductions were allegedly the work of Kosovo Albanians.
'We are checking the informal information that two trucks with imprisoned Serbs from Kosovo went to Albania in 1999,' Serbia's War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told reporters at a press conference last week where he confirmed the opening of an investigation.
'The informal information on that transfer and the possibility that the imprisoned people were killed so that their organs could be sold to international traffickers came from The Hague tribunal prosecutors,' he added......
According to excerpts from Del Ponte's book, that is to hit the bookshops Apr. 3, her team of investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking after being transferred from Kosovo to the small town Burrel, 91 kilometres north of Albanian capital Tirana.
A room in a 'yellow house' outside the town was used as the operation theatre. Organs were extracted from young people there, taken to Tirana airport, and trafficked abroad. Those people were later killed and secretly buried, according to information she cites.
Del Ponte says her team found the house in Burrel in 2003, following leads by 'reliable journalists' and by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) administration.
But despite finding traces of blood in the house which had been re-painted white in the meantime, as well as remains of old, used medical material (gauze, a used syringe, two plastic infusion bags hardened in mud, empty drug bottles, among them of drugs used for muscle relaxation), 'we decided the evidence was not enough. Without bodies or firm evidence that would link any suspects with the crimes, all the possibilities for further investigation for the tribunal's prosecution were closed,' Del Ponte wrote.
'It is devastating for us now to read about this,' head of the Alliance of Families of Serbs Disappeared in Kosovo, Simo Spasic, told IPS. The alliance represents families of the 1,300 Kosovo Serbs whose fate is still unknown since 1998-99.
'On one side, it kills all our hopes to learn what happened to our dearest; on the other hand, why did she wait so long to speak about this particular issue?'
According to Spasic, he met with Del Ponte and her team of investigators in 2001 to plead the Alliance's case. In 2004, he received a call from the Prosecutor's office with information that 'all people you are looking for are dead'.
There can be no question that the NATO leaders knew all about this. Albania was full of NATO troops (Nazi Ashdown spent the war in Albania giving the KLA the benefit of his SBS experience in guerrilla war rather than leading his party) & intelligence services & the fact that "reliable journalists" ie western ones, knew all about it means the politicians did to. When NATO took over the KLA were sworn in en masse as NATO police so this was done by our police.
The ICTY's alleged inability to find evidence is clearly a lie. Parts of a corpse were recently found on Arbroath beach but the policeman did not immediately say "Oh dear there is no signed & notarised confession attached therefore no evidence, better just forget it". It would be easy to trace the owners of record of the house, interview locals etc.
Even easier would be to trace the air flights carrying the body parts. If we have, as a minimum, 300 people (since there are officially 1,300 missing & in fact many more) we are talking about at least 3,000 body parts flown out. Flight records in Europe are easily available, as are customs records which would certainly record this - and the recipients. There cannot be a major surgical hospital in Europe (possibly also the US though flight times would be longer) which was not offered a supply of young body parts, consistent in blood group & rejection spectra, with Serbs, from Albania. To ensure that they did not "go off" sale must have been negotiated prior to dissection. The hospital administrators & doctors could not fail to have been aware that they were soliciting murder yet either not a single one of them went to the police or the police in the NATO countries deliberately decided to protect the KLA.
Tracing the suppliers through the contacts made & money paid would be a straightforward piece of police work infinitely easier than tracking drug dealers.
Even Hitler never practiced this obscenity. One may argue that he would if it had been technically possible but that is irrelevant. There can be no question any more than there is with Hitler, that Blair, Brown, Robertson, Cook the Clinton's, & all the other NATO leaders know of this, as they provably knew the KLA was committed to genocide, & are deliberately guilty of crimes that make common murder & genocide look pleasant.
Equally there can be no doubt that our corrupt media knew of it or that they are deliberately censoring any reporting of it now.
These obscene racist murdering genocidal Nazi cannibal can never, under any circumstances, be allowed to act as moral arbiters on anything. The very best of these cannibal savages & their supporters cannot claim 1/10th the civilisation of Robert Mugabe, 1/1000th that of the Chinese leaders or 1/1,000,000th that of Slobodan Milosevic.
PS There were also numbers of Serb civilians identified as having been in but now missing from missing from camps in Bosnia whom the ICTY have been "unable" to trace. I fear the same happened to them.
The KLA. trained, armed & organised by NATO for the deliberate purpose of committing genocide have been kidnapping Serb teenagers, dissecting them & selling their body parts to authorities in NATO countries. Carla del Ponte, the "prosecutor" of the NATO funded war crimes "court" has quietly admitted this deep in her autobiography published yesterday. Presumably she hopes this will free her from accusations of having deliberately covered this up for 8 years & that the western press can be guaranteed to censor it. Our media have indeed censored it though it has been reported in Serbia & Russia where, apparently, the press is not obedient to NATO leaders, as a Google search proves.
Independent Beta news agency carried excerpts from Del Ponte's book, 'Hunt, Me and War Criminals', in which she says that in the course of her investigations she learned that some 300 Serbs were abducted and killed for organ trafficking in 1999. The abductions were allegedly the work of Kosovo Albanians.
'We are checking the informal information that two trucks with imprisoned Serbs from Kosovo went to Albania in 1999,' Serbia's War Crimes Prosecutor Vladimir Vukcevic told reporters at a press conference last week where he confirmed the opening of an investigation.
'The informal information on that transfer and the possibility that the imprisoned people were killed so that their organs could be sold to international traffickers came from The Hague tribunal prosecutors,' he added......
According to excerpts from Del Ponte's book, that is to hit the bookshops Apr. 3, her team of investigators had been informed that some 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking after being transferred from Kosovo to the small town Burrel, 91 kilometres north of Albanian capital Tirana.
A room in a 'yellow house' outside the town was used as the operation theatre. Organs were extracted from young people there, taken to Tirana airport, and trafficked abroad. Those people were later killed and secretly buried, according to information she cites.
Del Ponte says her team found the house in Burrel in 2003, following leads by 'reliable journalists' and by the United Nations Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) administration.
But despite finding traces of blood in the house which had been re-painted white in the meantime, as well as remains of old, used medical material (gauze, a used syringe, two plastic infusion bags hardened in mud, empty drug bottles, among them of drugs used for muscle relaxation), 'we decided the evidence was not enough. Without bodies or firm evidence that would link any suspects with the crimes, all the possibilities for further investigation for the tribunal's prosecution were closed,' Del Ponte wrote.
'It is devastating for us now to read about this,' head of the Alliance of Families of Serbs Disappeared in Kosovo, Simo Spasic, told IPS. The alliance represents families of the 1,300 Kosovo Serbs whose fate is still unknown since 1998-99.
'On one side, it kills all our hopes to learn what happened to our dearest; on the other hand, why did she wait so long to speak about this particular issue?'
According to Spasic, he met with Del Ponte and her team of investigators in 2001 to plead the Alliance's case. In 2004, he received a call from the Prosecutor's office with information that 'all people you are looking for are dead'.
There can be no question that the NATO leaders knew all about this. Albania was full of NATO troops (Nazi Ashdown spent the war in Albania giving the KLA the benefit of his SBS experience in guerrilla war rather than leading his party) & intelligence services & the fact that "reliable journalists" ie western ones, knew all about it means the politicians did to. When NATO took over the KLA were sworn in en masse as NATO police so this was done by our police.
The ICTY's alleged inability to find evidence is clearly a lie. Parts of a corpse were recently found on Arbroath beach but the policeman did not immediately say "Oh dear there is no signed & notarised confession attached therefore no evidence, better just forget it". It would be easy to trace the owners of record of the house, interview locals etc.
Even easier would be to trace the air flights carrying the body parts. If we have, as a minimum, 300 people (since there are officially 1,300 missing & in fact many more) we are talking about at least 3,000 body parts flown out. Flight records in Europe are easily available, as are customs records which would certainly record this - and the recipients. There cannot be a major surgical hospital in Europe (possibly also the US though flight times would be longer) which was not offered a supply of young body parts, consistent in blood group & rejection spectra, with Serbs, from Albania. To ensure that they did not "go off" sale must have been negotiated prior to dissection. The hospital administrators & doctors could not fail to have been aware that they were soliciting murder yet either not a single one of them went to the police or the police in the NATO countries deliberately decided to protect the KLA.
Tracing the suppliers through the contacts made & money paid would be a straightforward piece of police work infinitely easier than tracking drug dealers.
Even Hitler never practiced this obscenity. One may argue that he would if it had been technically possible but that is irrelevant. There can be no question any more than there is with Hitler, that Blair, Brown, Robertson, Cook the Clinton's, & all the other NATO leaders know of this, as they provably knew the KLA was committed to genocide, & are deliberately guilty of crimes that make common murder & genocide look pleasant.
Equally there can be no doubt that our corrupt media knew of it or that they are deliberately censoring any reporting of it now.
These obscene racist murdering genocidal Nazi cannibal can never, under any circumstances, be allowed to act as moral arbiters on anything. The very best of these cannibal savages & their supporters cannot claim 1/10th the civilisation of Robert Mugabe, 1/1000th that of the Chinese leaders or 1/1,000,000th that of Slobodan Milosevic.
PS There were also numbers of Serb civilians identified as having been in but now missing from missing from camps in Bosnia whom the ICTY have been "unable" to trace. I fear the same happened to them.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
SCOTTISH X-PRIZE (even if it is only for renewables)
We don't yet know the full details of this prize - will it be for a particular achievement assessed in advance - however this has clearly been thought of as an X-Prize & is being sold in that way.
Lets see if New Mexico (or even old Mexico) or Singapore, or I would love to think Scotland or the UK, might like to put up a more useful X-Prize.
A £10m prize for innovation in renewable marine energy is to be announced by the first minister during his trip to the US....I am unconvinced about the wonders of renewables & very much doubt if anything can be produced which is truly "commercially viable" when compared to nuclear, but for that reason the comparison may not be made. However if it can be done this is the way to do it. Good marks to the SNP for doing this even if they are doing it on the wrong subject. Still if this is seen to be popular it makes it all the more likely that Scotland, or indeed some other state could issue the sort of £20 million X-Prize motion I suggested to the LudDims some years ago for landing a probe on an asteroid, or something similar.
The government hopes its offer of £10m will inspire scientists from across the world to work out new ways of cashing in on marine renewables.
It will be the world's biggest prize in marine renewables and it will be treated extraordinarily seriously
It has been billed as the world's largest single prize for marine power technology.
To be eligible for the prize, innovations must be commercially viable and be demonstrated in Scotland.....
"The history of such innovation prizes shows that they repay their investment many, many times over."
Lets see if New Mexico (or even old Mexico) or Singapore, or I would love to think Scotland or the UK, might like to put up a more useful X-Prize.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
TO COME UNTO EUROPE
Anybody remember a major TV story about how a French aid agency had had been taking children from villages in Chad, calling them orphans from Darfur, & taking them back to France where childless middle class families were snapping them up? Hit all the right emotional buttons.
Six members of the Paris-based L'Arche de Zoe, or Zoe's Ark, were waiting to hear last night whether they would face kidnapping charges. The group maintains that its members, accompanied by three French journalists and seven Spanish air crew due to fly the children to Rheims in France, had acted with the best of intentions and with the knowledge of the Chad government. They claimed the children were orphans fleeing hostilities in Darfur.
However, several of the children were found to have at least one parent and to be from Chad, not Darfur, and that, allegedly, no parental permission had been sought by Zoe's Ark to put them up for adoption in France.........
The organisers of Zoe's Ark are said to be volunteers with no background in running major humanitarian groups. More than 100 would-be foster families in France paid the group between £1,400 and £4,200 as an initial "goodwill" fee to look after the children.
Well today as a very small item I read in the Scotsman
CHAD'S president has pardoned six French aid workers convicted of kidnapping.
The six tried to take 103 children to France claiming humanitarian concern for orphans from Sudan, but investigations showed the children were local and most had at least one parent or close adult relative.
I suppose it was inevitable that this is how it would end. It doesn't say whether local employees are also being released & I don't suppose the French government, or the Chadean, cares. Have all the children been returned to their parents or has it been impossible to find many of them - my guess would be it hasn't? Has the President of Chad become richer - almost certainly? Would the children have had longer happier lives if the kidnapping worked, as previous ones seem to - almost certainly? Did the French parents want the kids more than the African (where large families, many of whom die or disappear, are common - probably?
I don't know what the right thing at any stage would have been but every adult here has behaved immorally. It also says something, not nasty but somewhat sick, about our society's use of money to satisfy the need to be able to give love & the way we put off having children until we can "afford them" unlike the Africans. Something ugly about the disparity in wealth between Europe & sub Saharan Africa. And current non-coverage says a lot about the way the media handle stories for emotional content not to understand.
Six members of the Paris-based L'Arche de Zoe, or Zoe's Ark, were waiting to hear last night whether they would face kidnapping charges. The group maintains that its members, accompanied by three French journalists and seven Spanish air crew due to fly the children to Rheims in France, had acted with the best of intentions and with the knowledge of the Chad government. They claimed the children were orphans fleeing hostilities in Darfur.
However, several of the children were found to have at least one parent and to be from Chad, not Darfur, and that, allegedly, no parental permission had been sought by Zoe's Ark to put them up for adoption in France.........
The organisers of Zoe's Ark are said to be volunteers with no background in running major humanitarian groups. More than 100 would-be foster families in France paid the group between £1,400 and £4,200 as an initial "goodwill" fee to look after the children.
Well today as a very small item I read in the Scotsman
CHAD'S president has pardoned six French aid workers convicted of kidnapping.
The six tried to take 103 children to France claiming humanitarian concern for orphans from Sudan, but investigations showed the children were local and most had at least one parent or close adult relative.
I suppose it was inevitable that this is how it would end. It doesn't say whether local employees are also being released & I don't suppose the French government, or the Chadean, cares. Have all the children been returned to their parents or has it been impossible to find many of them - my guess would be it hasn't? Has the President of Chad become richer - almost certainly? Would the children have had longer happier lives if the kidnapping worked, as previous ones seem to - almost certainly? Did the French parents want the kids more than the African (where large families, many of whom die or disappear, are common - probably?
I don't know what the right thing at any stage would have been but every adult here has behaved immorally. It also says something, not nasty but somewhat sick, about our society's use of money to satisfy the need to be able to give love & the way we put off having children until we can "afford them" unlike the Africans. Something ugly about the disparity in wealth between Europe & sub Saharan Africa. And current non-coverage says a lot about the way the media handle stories for emotional content not to understand.