Saturday, August 13, 2011
Military Alternatives to Spending £400 Million on a Listed Building
A couple of days ago I wrote of how to save £377.5 million from the military budget by building Scotland's new "superbarracks" from modular units rather than revamping an old building. As expected the MoD haven't responded to this even to the extent of acknowledging the option.
I said then I would have fun suggesting how to spend this (I assume there are other barracks elsewhere abuilding but won't claim any more spare money).
Britain has the 4th, possibly 3rd depending on counting, most expensive military establishment in the world after the US, Japan and China but we don't get much for it.We have nearly as many MoD civil servants administering as we have soldiers, sailors and airforce and I suspect we have an inordinate number of the latter as armchair officers and soldiers. Britain spends 3 times as much per soldier as America does. These MoD administrators regularly administer us to have the most expensive equipment developed in the most expensive way possible (eg eurofighter) when something better is already available off the shelf. We also see the military budget being openly used for porkbarreling (eg Gordon Brown ensuring much of the £4 billion+ wasted on 2 pointless aircraft carriers be spent in his constituency).
If the defence budget was spent by patriots with care we would have a world class military.
I also propose that any of this spending go through a new Ministry of New Military Projects. If we cannot fire everybody in the MoD bureaucracy we should at least shunt it off so that it does not foul up new projects. If the Israel can do procurement on 1/40th as much admin per $ such a new ministry need only take up one room far from any current Mod building - possibly Inverness.
I have a patriotic desire that we have as good a military as we pay for, if not better. I have not changed my position on military adventurism. I don't agree with Madeleine Albright that the military is no use "if you don't het to use it" to kill ordinary people. I still believe that the best thing Britain could do for our long term security would be to adhere to the principles of international law and to bring to trial and where appropriate hang the war criminals personally guilty of war crimes and genocide, not just Blair alone.
10 Ways of Spending About £377.5 Million
1 - HULC is an exoskeleton which will allow the wearer to tun faster and carry far more equipment than conventional soldiers can, or a shield. I have discussed it, with video, before. The only cost figure I can see is "more than $25000 per suit" (ie £15,000). If that is what they are quoting the price would certainly not be more than that for a long production run. So that would equip 25,000 soldiers which is in the area of all the truly front line troops available at any one time..
2 - Unmanned Aerial Vesicles (UAVs). Again something I have written on. These are smaller, less visible and far cheaper than conventional aircraft and more importantly expendable since there is no pilot. American UAV's were their relatively inexpensive contribution to the war against Libya and until they pulled them out, easily the most effective part of that "war".
3 - Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) again previously discussed here. Developed by Israel and the US (the latter's military don't seem very interested - apparently it is unpopular with any service whose current aircraft would be rendered obsolete. It is a mobile laser capable of shooting down incoming shells. This means they can also do missiles and aircraft.
This puts the average world cost as “Nearly 8000 unmanned air-vehicles (UAVs) worth $3.9 billion" which is £300,000 a pop. That means we could buy 1250 of them which certainly gives us capacity only slightly behind the world's superpower.
I can't find a unit cost but it is said to be "$3,000 per kill". I think it would be pessimistic to say the unit will cost more than 1,000 times that, so £1.9 million. That gives us 200 of them which would far more than cover any front line we are going to be defending. Weld 70 of those onto the ships we have and we also have a navy invulnerable to air attack or missiles.
4 - Pay for the development of a considerably scaled up version of THEL, possibly in collaboration with Israel. I would hazard a guess that Israel is smart enough to be already working on this. A handful of these. scaled up 100 fold and able to draw on as much power from the national grid, would be as effective an SDI programme as one can reasonably hope for. Cost is entirely a guess but a guess based on simply scaling up what already exists I I guess it would be less than that of a "superbarracks".
5 - Military X-Prize unit. The American DARPA has acknowledged that offering $3 million in prizes allowed them to develop a purely robotic driving system that went 100km without hitting anything & that they developed in house would have cost $100 million and might not have worked. DARPA have a good reputation not just for developing weapon systems but for keeping America at the technological cutting edge. One such prize I would suggest is for ever smaller or cheaper or stealthed UAVs.
OK from here on the proposals are all space based. Space is the ultimate "high ground" giving military superiority. The Kuwait war was described as the "first space war" since it was planned and run using visuals provided by space satellites and communications run, or jammed, by them. Space observation is perhaps the ultimate force multiplier, as the very low casualty rate, on our side, in that war proved. Britain starting something in this field 20 years later is hardly pushing the envelope but fortunately nobody else has pushed since then.
Since radio transmissions are sort of line of sight satellites, which also cannot be jammed, greatly extend the range that UAV's can be controlled from. In fact it means that large numbers of them can be controlled from anywhere in the world.
6 - Pay SpaceX for one or more of the Heavy Lift Vehicles they they are developing, designed to put the equivalent of a 737 in orbit by 2013/14. The British launch site should be Ascension Island, which, with a little infrastructure and the tax and regulatory structure of some British colonies (Cayman Islands) could easily be turned into the world's largest commercial spaceport.
Since NASA are paying SpaceX $6 bn to develop this to resupply the space station 10%, or £400 million, seems a reasonable amount for 1 or 2 ships from the line.
7 - Thor - Project Thor is an idea for a weapons system that launches kinetic projectiles from Earth orbit to damage targets on the ground. Jerry Pournelle originated the concept while working in operations research at Boeing in the 1950s before becoming a science-fiction writer.
"The most described system is "an orbiting tungsten telephone pole with small fins and a computer in the back for guidance". The weapon can be down-scaled, an orbiting "crowbar" rather than a pole. The system described in the 2003 United States Air Force (USAF) report was that of 20-foot-long (6.1 m), 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m) tungsten rods, that are satellite controlled, and have global strike capability, with impact speeds of Mach 10, and strike 25-foot accuracy."
"You could have 40 "Rods from God" orbiting for the cost of" $0.5 bn) ((£300 million) - so that would be over 50 for our price. If they were delivered into orbit by the Falcon Heavy Lift it should be possible to do more for the price.
8 - Taking the design of the British rocket plane of the 1950s, the SR53, but using modern materials Parliament has been informed it would be possible to build a suborbital space plane for £50 million. This would be considerably lighter and more powerful than was possible back then and should be able to launch rockets, on at least a daily basis, able to put very small satellites in orbit almost instantly.
There are limits to what very small satellites can do but, as with Moore's Law those limits are eroding fast. With 1 mobile phone having more capacity than all the computers in the world in the 1977 I assume, though it will be classified, that a few such satellites could detect more than all the spy satellites of 1977.
9 - If we don't want to buy a launch vehicle from America we could fund our own X-Prize. This would get us a smaller vehicle but, conceivably, could be better for our long term industrial future.
10 - Orion - this would give us the capacity to put 10s of thousands of tons into orbit or indeed far beyond. Britain's defence capacity would extend to the entire solar system. The entire cost of doing this, including flights to Mars and Saturn was, taking 1960 costs and correcting for inflation, £5.4 billion over 12 years. I would propose setting up a joint stock company to which the armed forces would contribute 7% of the capital in the form of the atomic fuel. No commercial company could provide the fuel but so vast are the potential profits I am certain that, once fuel and permission were available, the share offering would be vastly oversubscribed, even if, for security reasons, limited to British investors.
Even the world's most eminent physicist says it would work, if tried.
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Not bad as a series of alternatives to turning a drafty old building into a cramped barracks if I say so myself.
Kirknewton superbarracks building or the solar system - tough choice
Labels: Science/technology, space, X-Prizes
Friday, August 12, 2011
Kosovo - Steve Sailer on How, for the Pleasure of Bombing People, NATO Squandered "the most valuable lesson learned from centuries of war"
I have previously praised the intelligence of Steve Sailer. This is a fisk, in light of what we know now, of an article he did, some years ago, decrying the Kosovo War. This was long before the public acknowledgement of the dissection of living people by NATO "police" though most of the other atrocities were on the record. Clinton, Blair and the other Nazis knew it all, indeed must have known of the previous organlegging by the people they hired and armed to pose as the "Liberation Army" and ultimately appointyed, in complete viopation of the occupation agreement they had just signed, as "police". He came to very much the same conclusion as I of why it is not merely evil but also not in the interest of any of the rest of us who would rather have the safety of a civilised world (so clearly he must be highly intelligent!) He also writes more lucidly than I. I have added further information lin italics not available, at least to the public, at the time all of which narrows the range of possibility of whether the NATO leaders were foolish or evil
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Exactly one year ago, NATO attacked Yugoslavia. It's worth recalling President Bill Clinton's explanation of Why We Fought: "[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multiethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy."
Well ... happy anniversary, Kosovo! Our adventure in "humanitarian warfare" proved a fiasco, as anyone with a firmer grasp of history than Mr. Clinton could have predicted. .....
Ascendant in the '80s, the Albanians began to cleanse Kosovo of its Serbian minority. The New York Times reported in 1987, "Ethnic Albanians in the [Kosovo] government have manipulated public funds and regulations to take over land belonging to Serbs ... Wells have been poisoned ... crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls." ...
Then, last year, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright convened the Rambouillet conference to demand that Milosevic allow NATO's armies to invade not only Kosovo, but Serbia itself. Obviously, no national leader could acquiesce. Milosevic refused to sign; NATO initiated war. it is now known Albright gave an off the record briefing to world media saying she had deliberately set up the negotiations to fail so that bombing could take place...
NATO's aggression backfired as Milosevic responded by expelling roughly a million Albanians. we now know he didn't it was being bombed by NATO, terrorised by NATO's KLA and the thought of being in the midst of a ground invasion and that NATO always knew this ...
Eventually, Milosevic gave in and withdrew his forces from Kosovo. A glorious victory for the forces of multiculturalism over ethnic hatred? Proof that with enough virtue, will power and cluster bombs, we can affirmatively answer the famous question posed by Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" Not exactly. Our Albanian pals in the KLA promptly began ethnically cleansing Serb civilians from Kosovo. While they were at it, they also sent most of Kosovo's Gypsies fleeing ....
There is nothing uniquely evil about the Balkans. In this world, there are several thousand ethnic groups with their own nationalist/separatist movements. Most such movements do not represent a majority of their peoples, being comprised of a few underemployed intellectuals hoping someday to become the rulers of a newly independent Lower Slobbovia.
But the ethnic troublemakers know that if they can provoke the government into repressing their entire group, they might convert their kinsmen to separatism (under their leadership, of course) or simply if they can fake such things and have the ear of the NATO powers....
Mr. Clinton and his comrade, Tony Blair, blundered in the Balkans because they didn't understand that the sanctity of national borders contributes to international peace in the same way that a settled distribution of property rights contributes to domestic peace. The secret to the success of the "Anglosphere's" experiment in self-government since, say, the Magna Carta has been the assurance that property rights, especially in land, will be respected and enforced by the state. If you can't be sure that your land title is secured and respected by the state, then for your own protection you need to cast your lot with your armed extended family. And since a racial group, like the Serbs or the Albanians, is nothing more than an extremely extended family, insecurity of property is an open invitation to ethnic strife.
It's no surprise Clinton and Blair didn't grasp the importance of settled borders -- both for real estate and for nations -- because they've never had to worry about them in Britain or America. Much of what we know about Shakespeare's life comes from the English equivalent of the county registrar of deeds office. His real estate dealings are on file because there has been no major interruption in the security of property in Britain. So when the Peruvian economist Hernando DeSoto visited North America, the leading economists wanted to talk about the money supply, currency devaluations and fiscal deficits; but he kept raising something they had never considered: how do you set up and run a registrar of deeds office?...
If domestic property rights are not secure, bad things follow. People arm themselves and band together with their extended families/clans/ethnic groups/races for self-defence. They shoot first and ask questions later.
Basically, the same things happen when national property rights are not secure. If you are the dictator of a small country, what lessons do you draw from watching NATO pound the hell out of Yugoslavia? The joys of multiculturalism are probably not the first that come to mind. More likely, your thoughts follow the same trajectory as those of a drug dealer when he realizes that the law does not protect his stock in trade. You must arm yourself heavily enough to deter NATO. Missiles, nukes, chemicals, and germs readily suggest themselves. NATO recruited the KLA form several sources but Albanian drug lords was probably the largest
And what about that separatist group that wants to split your country in two? Do you let them go as the Czech Republic let Slovakia go a few years ago, when the Gulf War had seemingly ended the era of international aggression so that nations could be as small as they liked without risking conquest? Hell no. National security will require every draftee and tax dollar you can drag in at gunpoint. After the glorious events of 1991 in Kuwait and Moscow, the world appeared to be entering a pax Americana even more promising than the pax Britannica that helped make the 19th century such an age of human betterment. A world dominated by a single superpower with no territorial ambitions and committed to protecting lawful property. Yet now, less than a decade after the liberation of Kuwait, the West has grown so arrogant that we've squandered away the sanctity of national borders, the most valuable lesson learned from centuries of war.
Still, should the world sit idly by while civil wars cause humanitarian nightmares within sovereign states? Not necessarily. There are certain countries so dysfunctional that they cry out for internationally supervised revision. Yugoslavia might have been one, and Sudan is one. What can the West do? The answer, shockingly enough, is to sponsor ethnic cleansing.
In certain regions, ethnic strife is so endemic that the last resort of wise statesmen must be some form of partition followed by population transfers. The Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 ended hundreds of years of war between Turkey and Greece by uprooting Greeks from Turkey and Turks from Greece. Similarly, the fractious island of Cyprus has been at peace for quarter of a century due to its division into Turkish and Greek zones.
Even the Bosnians have stopped killing each other now that Serbs, Croats, and Muslims each have their own sectors. While heterogeneous Northern Ireland is notorious for sectarian strife, the exit of Protestants has left the Republic free of troubles.
Madeleine Albright's Czechoslovakia expelled millions of Sudeten Germans at the end of the Second World War, permanently ending that source of friction. Overall, we victors in the war agreed to the deportation of at least 12 million Germans from Eastern Europe. According to "A Brief History of Ethnic Cleansing" in a 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, "About 2.1 million of these died from a combination of war, hunger, cold and disease."
The question, however, is how to conduct ethnic cleansing humanely. This is necessary for practical reasons as well as moral ones. Ethnic cleansings that leave the displaced feeling robbed and humiliated are likely to lead to future violence -- e.g., the Palestinians. If property rights have to be violated, compensation should be paid. ...
The simplest way to prevent the 1.8 million Kosovar Albanians from being repressed by the Serbs, for instance, would be to give them independence. But the 200,000 Serbs who lived in Kosovo would have had to be taken care of so that the Albanians didn't oppress them. A big chunk of Northern Kosovo, home of most Kosovar Serbs and Serbia's sacred battlefields, could have been permanently ceded to Serbia. That might have left, say, 100,000 Serbs living in Albanian Kosovo and 100,000 Albanians living in Serbian Northern Kosovo.
These Serbs and Albanians could then have exchanged homes -- NATO chipping in $50,000 per family of four to grease the skids. Then NATO could have paid $2.5 billion to Serbia as compensation for its lost territory. A grand total of $5 billion -- a pittance set against the costs of war. NATO, well officially the US & EU but it is the same thing. have probably spent more than10 times that since to prop up their client regime of genocidal, sex slaving, organlegging "freedom fighters" and to maintain a massive American military base of little other conceivable military use
Further, NATO could have gained a huge degree of leverage in the region by making the compensation payable over a ten-year period, dependent upon good behavior. If Kosovo Albanians violate their contract by, say, trying to destabilize neighbouring Macedonia, the uprooted Albanians families get cut off. The same goes for Serbs. the KLA, with new cap badges hastily sewn on, did invade Macedonia and carry out terrorism in southern Serbia, presumably with NATO approval since members of the "police" were allowed leaves of absence to carry out the invasion I have no idea if Milosevic would have accepted such a deal. But it would have been a more honourable offer than Albright's at Rambouillet. And if Milosevic had rejected it, could he have stayed in power? Again not reported by our media, Milosevic had already done more than that - when Albright demanded as part of the Ramboullet "deal" that NATO should have the right to occupy all of Serbia, take anything not nailed down and destroy anything that was, Milosevic countered by offering to join NATO which would have given NATO forces entrance legally but is a degree of leverage greater than Sailor suggests here but without the pleasure of getting to bomb civilians
These kind of cold-blooded calculations may seem unappealing to all those in the media who whipped themselves into a moralistic frenzy over the crimes of the Serbs. They may feel that Yugoslavia deserves to have its territory stripped away without compensation, and that all those vile Serbs should lose their homes. According to God's scale of justice, they may (or may not) be right.we now know, as the leaders and media did at the time, that the atrocities by the our ex-Nazi allies were at least many times worse that anything the Serbs did.The worst atrocities in Bosnia were when our ex-Nazi Croatian allies represented western civilisation by burning villages of Moslems represented, at least in out media, by the ex-Nazi Moslem Izetbegovic, a representative of western civilisation whose expressed opinions about genocide make his and our ally at the time, bin Laden, look moderate But it's unlikely that the Serbs will view it that way. And those innocent Kosovar Serbs who fled the KLA's lynch mobs are not likely to forgive and forget. People in the Balkans are used to waiting for that sweet moment when they can cry, "Vengeance is mine!"
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This leads to a whole range of Steve Sailer VDARE.COM Articles - while that is the only one on Kosovo they are well worth reading. You will see nothing remotely as informative, or indeed honest, on the MSM
NATO police with human headsin Kosovo
Our al Quaeda allies, flown into Bosnia by the US airforce)Labels: Fear, International politics, Yugoslavia
Thursday, August 11, 2011
£22 Million Alternative to £400 Million Barracks
New army super barracks could cost £400m
Military insiders have said that the cost of the plan, announced by Defence Secretary Liam Fox last week, to build the super barracks on the old glider field at Kirknewton in West Lothian is unlikely to be met by the controversial sell off of the historic Redford and Dreghorn barracks and the Craigiehall headquarters in Edinburgh.
The sell-off could make the Ministry of Defence £70m according to the latest Treasury figures....
At a time when the MoD has had to take the brunt of government austerity measures to plug a £38 billion black hole in its finances, the revelation will cast further doubt over the plans for the new super barracks.It is also understood that despite the huge cost the new barracks will still not include accommodation for married soldiers who will have to live in married quarters housing in Edinburgh and travel each day to Kirknewton....
The army needs to have accommodation for about 6,500 troops in Scotland when the full mobile brigade is in place by 2020 effectively doubling the size of the army north of the Border with soldiers returning from Germany.
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The article doesn't say how many people this will house but since there are to be 1300 at Leuchars I am going to assume not more than 3,000 at this site. Lets look at an alternative.
This is Keetwonen
"Keetwonen is the name of the biggest container city in the world (we know of no other village of shipping containers of this size: do you?). Living in a converted shipping container was a new concept in the Netherlands when launched by Tempohousing, but the city of Amsterdam took the courageous step to contract Tempohousing to go and realize it. It turned out to be a big success among students in Amsterdam and it is now the second most popular student dormitory offered by the student housing corporation "De Key" (www.dekey.nl) in Amsterdam (and they have many). The initial fears of some people that the container homeswould be too small, too noisy, too cold or too hot, all turned out to be unfounded: : they turned out to be spacious, quiet and well insulated and certainly offer value for money, compared to other student homes in the city."
This is it from ground level
And this is how they stack shipping containers/build a modular housing block
And this is one of the units available now
And this is the price given for something similar
FOB Price: US $ 3,700 - 4,000 / Set
Full catalogue
3000 soldiers beds is 750 containers. At $4,000 (£2,500) each that is £1.875 million.
Lets double it to have them outfitted pos22.5 million as opposed to h.
Lets double it to give every man a room, rather than 2 sharing (unless they are married)
Lets not deduct anything for buying in volume.
Lets, very pessimistically, double it for shipping costs and getting it on site.
Lets add 50% for the related facilities.
£22.5 million as against £400 million for revamping or ""vandalism" of some of Edinburgh's historic buildings "
My guess is that the average squadie would find Keetwonen considerably more attractive than the cramped revamped historic building proposed - perhaps somebody should ask them?
Also, since the buildings are quickly available off the shelf, these barracks could be put up in a couple of months (just time for the concrete base to dry and water and gas pipes put in) and with virtually all the budget fixed. This compares very favourably with most government construction programmes which are completed about 3 years later than whenever they were promised for and 2 to 10 times the cost quoted..
Which also, I believe, makes an unassailable case for supporting mass modular housing for everybody, as I have previously suggested.
Another advantage for the military, is that this building can be entirely removed and re-erected wherever and whenever required. It is rather important to military formations that they be able to move around.
(I'll be sending this to the MoD and see. What they say, if anything, will be reported)
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Having done the work of saving them £377.5 million in a day or two I will spend it for them on some hardware that would make a real difference.
Labels: British politics, Science/technology, Scottish politics
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Censoring the Riots - Just Cause You Saw It Doesn't Mean It Can Be Mentioned
We have riots going on nightly in Britain. People have been killed both last night and the night before.. However we are not allowed to discuss who is actually doing it.
Anybody can see, looking at crowd pictures, that the perpetrators are overwhelmingly young Negros. The BBC manage the trick of never mentioning colour but bringing in an inordinate number of West Indian "community leaders" to say that it is all the fault of the government "cuts" meaning they don't get enough money and makework jobs
Last night Newsnight Scotland spent 20 minutes in a self satisfied discussion of why Scots don't riot. Apparently it is due to our more socialistically inclined government & even the Protestant work ethic but almost no mention was made of the fact that we have a very low ratio of West Indian immigrants.
Yesterday I reposted something I had posted on John Redwood. On his site he has replaced part of my post with "(Unproven generalisation about who the looters are removed-ed)"
The other point that should be mentioned, because it isn't being, is that the rioters are overwhelmingly negro street gangs (despite the fact that the cover photo on several papers is of the sole white, or possibly mixed race, rioter). That is very good news because white or Islamic crowds, with political motivations would be a lot tougher. If this looting isn't stopped they will be next time.
John gets baracked by others there for having done the same and defends himself
reply: I am not a believer in censorship, but I have no wish to spend time dealing with complaints that I am allowing unproven allegations on this site which are hurtful to others, or create tensions in communities.
I have some sympathy with this - he could easily get denounced by the PC brigade or even warned by the police. On the other hand if even a very senior "right wing" Conservative politician thinks it is politically inadvisable to tell a truth which is visible with every photo (well almost every one, the papers use the one that isn't ;-) ) then what hope do we have of solving a problem we dare not even discuss.
Funniest interview ever on Sky. Female Sky reporter interviewing a white guy who has had his shops burned. He said to her , the arsonists/looters were all black. She said to him , you can’t say that , there must have been white guys there as well. He thought about and then said , ok they were not all black , i was the only white guy there. Is that ok to say ?This guy states this with a totally dead pan face without a hint of the pc faux pas.
She again corrects him and states nervously you just cant say they were all black , he responds , but they were i was there.
Unbelievable. The interview describes the state of our society in a nut shell.
The whole article is worth reading both where it points out that even the small number of looters actually arrested do not face punishing punishment. Also my comment .
The front page photograph on 3 newspapers yesterday was of one looter walking past a burning car. The gentleman was clearly either white or mixed race. However from the crowd pictures we have seen the vast majority are, to put it gently, of a dark hue.Imagine how many pictures these papers all had to go through to find the one which showed only a white looter. To be fair there are many that show some whites but on a purely statistical basis the odds of a randomly selected picture containing only white rioters must be at least thousands to one against (in fact I suspect there are none showing more than one looter, all of whom are white and that if there had been it would have been used).
Since we have a free rather than centrally controlled press the odds of 3 newspapers independently choosing this picture must be thousands cubed (ie many billions) to one against.
Alternately the chance that our mainstream media is not wholly controlled for the purpose of lying to us in a fascist manner must be many billions to one against. Report Reply Edit
Is there something genetically inherent on Negroes that makes them tend to be more aggressive. Well I certainly couldn't answer that question under UK law but it has been scientifically answered.
PS Last night's news had a breaking item about trouble, involving police, fire brigades and a helicopter, in Felron Young Offender's Institution. Today it has disappeared. Did it happen or was it a mistaken report, The problem with censored media is that we can't know,
Labels: British politics, Media, Social
Tuesday, August 09, 2011
Barbarians Within the Gates - London Riots Could be Ended Instantly
The most unintentionally telling remark I heard on the BBC last night was a reporter saying that where she had been there were 200 police, with horses and dogs but at the other end of the street was a mob of 50 looting.
These are not dense crowds of politically motivated people they are relatively small groups of looters. Total arrests up to last night were 200 but only 36 of them had been charged. Now it is 400 arrests.
London has 32,000 police. The looters probably number little more than a thousand.
My estimate is that a platoon of baton and shield wielding police (about 40) could disperse a thousand such rioters if allowed to.
They are not allowed to. These riots are not the mob showing their power they are the political establishment creating a policing vacuum into which a small group of looters have moved.
The other point that should be mentioned, because it isn't being, is that the rioters are overwhelmingly negro street gangs (despite the fact that the cover photo on several papers is of the sole white, or possibly mixed race, rioter). That is very good news because white or Islamic crowds, with political motivations would be a lot tougher. If this looting isn't stopped they will be next time.
Napoleon came to power because the politicians in charge showed they were scared of the Paris mob, a much more fearsome group, precisely because they were civilised and politically motivated. He dispersed them with a whiff of grapeshot and the people, perhaps rightly, chose competent authoritarian rule to that of incompetent politicians.
The collapse of popular governments into disorder and their replacement with strong authority is one of the repeated cycles of history. If it happens again our political class, whose economic & Luddite incompetence I have repeatedly railed against will have nobody to blame but themselves.
I put the above as a comment on John Redwood
to expand if only 36 out of over 1,000 actually get charged that is not much over 1%. Of those most will probably get non-custodial or short sentences, meanwhile millions of £s worth of goods will have been stolen, 10s of millions worth of material damage done and possibly 10 times that in the intangible effect of driving away tourists and investors. That sort of "punishment" is no sort of deterrent whatsoever.
London is fast turning into Kosovo, where the native population is currently either in a minority or about to be. The only good difference is that the immigrants aren't a homogenous group.
As I said a platoon of police could clear them off the streets and at one time that would have happened. It used to be said of the Canadian Mounties was that with "one riot, one mountie" they could keep order. Our police, while not experiencing such an exuberent population, were of similar standards.
Another historicall example is that in the early days of the Roman Empire Julies Ceaser defeated 350,000 Gauls with 50,000 Romans.When Rome was in decline at the Battle of Adrianople a similar force was wiped out by 60,000 Ostrogoths. When you vear in mind that there are 8 million government workers, of whom about 1 1/2 million are front line ones, equivalent ot police, the 32,000 police in London represent 170,000 government employees yet they can do little against a little over 1,000 disorganised and uncommitted kids.
Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization & wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers. The people who create nothing and who don't appreciate what others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that just exists and that all they have to do is enjoy what they can understand of it - luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What have they got a government for?..... Space Viking by H Beam Piper
The way to end this would be for police in riot gear to chargev them, break heads, arrest everybody, throw the book at them (rioting itself is a serious offence), with additions for racial aggravation and remove citizenship and deport anybody arrested who has dual citizenship. If the political parasites prevent that be4ing done the blame lies with them.
Media's choice picture
Korea - where rioters really know how to fight
Labels: British politics, Media, Social
Monday, August 08, 2011
Blaming the Bankers for Recession - The Road to Fascism
29 Apr 2009
An overwhelming majority of Londoners blame City bankers for the recession and fear the capital is suffering worse than the rest of Britain, a Standard poll shows today.
A total of 85 per cent of voters believed the "greed and short-sighted behaviour" of executives in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf "contributed significantly" to the downturn, the survey found. Only eight per cent believed they were not to blame.
This is simply a lie that the politicians who are really responsible have managed to promote. The fact is that it was politicians, particularly Gordon Brown who printed money and promoted ever rising house prices to produce the appearance of growth, while actually destroying the fundamental basis of it, inexpensive power and economic freedom. In this he had the support of not only his own party but the leadership of the other 2 parties. In America a similar false boom was created by regulations requiring people without assets to get mortgages producing, if anything, even more of a castle in the air economy.
If you think about it is it is obvious that a conspiracy of unrelated individuals, often in competition with each other (bankers, Jews, opposition politicians) is much more difficult than governmental responsibility. After all government holds all the levers of power and by its nature, holds a common view. This is not to say conspiracies outwith government never exist or even that they never succeed (2 entirely separate things as Guy Fawkes found out) but that the odds are long against both. Occam's Razor says that government should be held responsible for things it is officially responsible for. Bankers have little choice but to follow the rules government lays down, individual bankers who don't will likely lose out to the competition, as Fred Goodwin's predecessor did.
Why is it important that honest people nail this lie?
Because (A) if you don't know what actually went wrong you can't fix it , only repeat the same error, as we now see with the stock market falls and what looks like a 2nd recession even before we are out of the first. (B) If we allow ourselves to be lied to we will get liars and worse, people who actually believe it, in power.
[Post WW1 German} opinion that they had not lost the war, they believed that the army had been cheated. (Hitler later phrased this as 'The Stab in the back'). As a consequence of this many germans looked for people to blame. Some lay the blame in the hands of the Kaiser. Others, many others, looked to the new Government. They had immediately sued for peace and accepted the terms of the Armistice. For many Germans this showed that they were largely to blame. Other theories that were popular amongst the former soldiers were that it was the result of Communists or Jews.
'Racist US bankers' to blame for credit crisis
The failure of racist American bankers to provide black home owners with fair mortgages fuelled the financial crisis, Trevor Phillips, the equalities chief, will claim in a major speech this week.
Labels: conspiracies, Government parasitism, Social
Sunday, August 07, 2011
Assorted Links - Things Not As They Seem
Steve Sailer on Andre Breivik - basically he wants to a historical celebrity when the march of history has marched.
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“he was wrong, but made us think.”- How the ecofascist defend all their wholly untrue historical prediction.
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On the BBC's "independent" report saying why the BBC is right to censor doubts that we are all experiencing catastrophic global warming.
-it cost £140,000...
it is an attempt to shut down debate and impose ideological conformity on a highly controversial issue – the extent and likely consequences of man-made global warming.Why Professor Jones was thought a suitable person to conduct the Review at all is not a trivial question. Having long toiled in obscurity on the genetic makeup of snails, Jones owes his sudden metamorphosis into a ‘media tart’ (to use his own phrase) entirely to the BBC, which chose him to deliver the Reith Lectures in 1991.
Numerous further radio and TV appearances followed, and with them book sales of which he could not previously have dream....
It is also worth asking why the Trust decided to blow its money (a little under half of which went on Jones’s fee) on examining its science reporting: there are surely other areas of public policy significance – immigration, for example – where a casual viewer might conclude that BBC coverage can be self-censoringly selective.
Such subjects are uncomfortable, and for that very reason, an objective analysis of the way the corporation handles them is arguably overdue.
But the real problem with the Jones Review is its bewilderingly misleading content. Jones writes that his own knowledge is ‘remarkably broad, but fantastically shallow’.
one of the things Gates’ research has shown – although he doesn’t like to say it flat out because he is trying to maintain some level of civility with the teacher unions – is that you can improve most schools by a factor of two by firing the 10% least competent teachers. This shouldn’t be surprising: it’s the case with most organizations. Weeding out the worst is always an effective means of increasing the efficiency of an organization. Gates has also shown conclusively something that honest education theorists have know for fifty years: class sizes don’t matter much, and spending more money seldom improves schools.
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EU Referendum on massive BBC coverage of the hacking, or at least that part of hacking done by News International, just as the BBC are running scared of them being allowed to compete with the BBC.
I was actually rung by a London-based BBC World Service journalist yesterday, inviting me to go on a discussion programme that evening, to talk about the select committee hearing. "A lot of our overseas listeners", he said, "are amazed at the amount of coverage that was being given to this issue".
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Steve Levitt on his theory that the first generation to grow up when abortion was legalised coincided with a cut in crime rates is cause and effect as unwanted babies ceased to be born.
Steve Sailor disagrees, pointing out that juvenile murders, which should be a marker, did not drop but rose and that the total number of births by these mothers did not greatly drop as they had more babies later.
I do not find either case proven, though i lean slightly towards Sailor. It is something worth research.
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Labels: global warming, Government parasitism, hobgoblins
