A Place to Stand

  Via Next Big Future comes this from Westinghouse, the manufacturer of the industry standard AP1000 nuclear generator that they are planning to mass produce a new line. The Westinghouse SMR. >225MWe. Passive safety systems and an extension of the AP1000 technology.

  What really gets me is

"The Rail-Shippable scale allows for efficient factory fabrication and delivery allows quality control unattainable with on-site construction...

The most economical
Simple compact system configuration reduces operations and maintenance and cost.

The most rapid project development
...modular approach provides for rapid project development and installation [elsewhere stated as 18 months]

   Since the AP1000 costs around $1.8bn but in quantity $1.2bn (£800 m) so when these are being mass produced if they cost less we are talking of not more than £200m a shot. Because they are tall objects designed to be buried 4 of them should only take up about as much space as 1 conventional reactor. This does look like being a breakthrough and one which it will be difficult for the Luddites to regulate out of existence. Requiring no on site building & rail portable makes it easy to set up and at this power level even quite small communities can run them. And once they are being widely used it will become increasingly difficult to persuade people they shouldn't have one, or not to let them realise when 90% of the cost isn't actually being paid for the engineering but for the political regulatory parasitism.

   The biggest problem with nuclear has always been the political parasites. Because it has been such a big structure taking 3 years (plus political parasite time) to build it has been very vulnerable to changes in the political wind.

    We see the same effect in comparing the housing industry to the car industry. A century ago houses and cars cost the same. Houses have increased fourfold in real terms and car prices reduced because local authorities can control the land and thus the building of houses but you can just drive up in a new car. If that comes about in the nuclear industry and it becomes possible to just buy a transportable reactor off the shelf we should see the same effect. The manufacturers will not have to kowtow to political parasites - they just wait till the next customer rolls up.

     Since "Economic Freedom + Cheap Energy = Success" it may become impossible for the Luddites and parasites to retain at least half of the cause of the current recession.

    Admittedly they are unlikely to have this going in less than 18 months so it won't close the gap in our immediate blackout problems but the future is clear.

  Happy New Year. 

Malaria remains a major public health challenge in many countries. 2008 WHO estimates were 243 million cases, and 863,000 deaths. About 89% of these deaths occur in Africa, and mostly to children under the age of 5...

Once the mainstay of anti-malaria campaigns, as of 2008 only 12 countries used DDT, including India and some southern African states...

Effectiveness of DDT against malaria When it was first introduced in World War II, DDT was very effective in reducing malaria morbidity and mortality. The WHO's anti-malaria campaign, which consisted mostly of spraying DDT, was initially very successful as well. For example, in Sri Lanka, the program reduced cases from about 3 million per year before spraying to just 29 in 1964. Thereafter the program was halted to save money and malaria rebounded to 600,000 cases in 1968
===========================

  There is no question that DDT use in the 1950s did reduce deaths from around 1 1/2 million a year to 10s of thousands and that the total differential since then amounts to around 70 million.

  Nor, despite Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the decades of subsequent scare stories about DDT, that it has never been definitely proven to have killed a single human being. Indeed that it has sometimes been used as a medicine

   The arguments against using DDT in a massive way are (A) that it is very dangerous and (B) that extensive use will bring about reduced effectiveness.

   (A) is clearly a false ecofascist scare story. This article 100 Things You Should Know about DDT must be be read by anybody wishing to pontificate on the subject and with the remotest interest in not killing more millions of people.  There is no serrious evidence of danger, even to birds where the most serious claims have been made. There is no possibility that even unknown effects could render it 1,000th as damaging as the disease it prevents. In terms of human life the DDT ecofascist fraud has been even more damaging than the Linear No Threshold radiation ecofascist fraud which, in turn, has been more damaging that the current catastrophic warming ecofascist scare.

   (B) is not altogether false. Almost any chemical used in quantity will, over time, through evolution, cause some reduced effectiveness. However firstly it appears to be being considerably exaggerated since it is now the sole credible argument opponents have. Secondly it is not so much an argument against using it at all, as an argument for using it in large doses, quickly. In particular - small doses are most guaranteed to breed resistance since it is bound not to have a total effect.


. Also if long term breeding of resistance is a fear then ending the problem quickly is the obvious choice.

  Therefore if we really want to effectively end these deaths I propose a massive international campaign of malaria eradication using DDT to a full extent.

   Perhaps this might not entirely eliminate it everywhere, as smallpox was, because there are natural reservoirs of malaria whereas smallpox needed to live in humans. On the other hand the history is on our side. Malaria has been very much more extensive than it is currently. Malaria used to kill 10s of thousands in Britain. The same, but moreso, applied to the USA, making the southern states a death trap for white men. Even within the Arctic circle it killed 10s of thousands around Murmansk in northern Russia during WW1. It is effectively extinct in all of these now. There were other reasons than DDT, indeed it disappeared in Britain before DDT was discovered but that is all the more reason for believing it can be eradicated. The example of  Sri Lanka given above does suggest that only a little more effort in 1964 would have cut the last 0.001%.

    The world is far richer than in 1964 and medicine far better developed. Clearly if we could come that close then it will be far easier now. It would be a big programme but we could save many millions of lives.

    If the political will is there.

  I have just been reading a book King Arthur The true story by Phillips and Keatman. Graham Philips  Arthurian website is here.They conclude that Arthur was a real person who fought his major battle in raising the siege of a hill fort at Badon Hill [ Badon then being pronounced Bathon and being the site of the only warm water volcanic springs in Britain ie Bath} around 518.

    This fits such historic records as we have which are clear about the battle, though the earliest ones don't say who was in charge but do agree it was very decisive. Later ones say Arther killed 960 Saxons personally [ancient records often claim to have killed or beaten about 10 times what modern scholars think]. The archaeological record also shows that the Saxon kingdom of Sussex was essentially destroyed then, not being reformed for nearly a century. Looking at a map you will see that had they controlled Badon/Bath they would have been within a few miles of the Severn and isolated the remaining British tribes between Cornwall and Wales.

   There is no archaeological evidence of the battle site, not unexpected, but everything fits there. This is from the book's timeline:

460 AD - Ambrosius becomes leader of the British forces British defences are reorganised. There is an imperialist revival in Britain


470 A British contingent fights for Emperor Anthemius in northern France.


476 Odovacer defeats Emperor Romulus Augustubulus and proclaims himself king of Italy. The final collapse of the Western Roman empire occurs.


480 There is a military stalemate between the Britons and the Saxons in the south of England. The Angles Suffer defeat in the nothr. Cunorix is buried in Virconium.


485 Aelle defeats the British at Mearcredesburna.


485-8 Arthur fights for Ambrosius against the Angles.


488 Hengist dies and is succeeded by Octha. Arthur succeeds Ambrosius.


488-93 The Arthurian campaigns.


491 Aelle beseiges the fort at Anderida (Pevensey) and establishes the kingdom of Susse.


493 Arthur defeats Aelle and Octha at the Battle of Badon. The Anglo-Saxons retreat into south-east England.


495 Cerdic [Saxon} lands in Hampshire, possibly as a mercenary.


508 Cerdic achieves victory over a [local] British king named Natanleod, and establishes control over an area roughly the size of modern |Hampshire. An alliance is made between Cerdic and Cunomorus [Cunomourus is certainly also called Mark and there is evidence that Mark was the historical Modred - the alliance includes Cerdic marrying a Briton, assumed to be Modred's daughter].


519 The battle of Certicesford [safely identified as modern Charford near Salisbury].The Battle of Camlann {Arthur's final battle and presumably they are the same battle]. The death of Arthur [this being the book's position, assuming Arthur was a Briton king - I am assuming he was either wounded or that after 34 years and the British alliance falling apart as Britons and Saxons intermarried, decided to go home].


520 Virconium is abandoned [the book takes Virconium in Powys as Arthur's Camelot



    The book names Arthur as an alternate name for a Welsh king of Powys and Gwynedd recorded as Owain Ddantgwyn, whose capital was probably Viroconium, dismissing the alternative that he was a Brito-Roman named Artorius and assuming that the name derives from the celtic word for Bear used as a title {in the same way that Pendragon is certainly a title meaning chief dragon", the dragon being the symbol of Gwynedd which they had taken from the Romans).

     I like Artorius and want to put what I think is a credible variant.

    There is evidence that though the Romans had left Britain in the 470s the British tribes sent some auxiliaries to help the Roman army. Considering they were being exterminated by the Saxon invaders at the time this either indicates an enormous degree of loyalty to the Rome that had deserted them or that they wanted some Roman help in return. With the Empire being officially dissolved in 476 this is quite a good time for some remaining elements of the Roman army to leave for Britain as loyal Romans carrying Roman traditions into exile/The Roman army honourably sending aid to loyal savages begging for help/unemployed soldiers taking a job as mercenaries, according to taste. There are quite a few such examples in history.

      The British chiefs wanted a Roman general, tactically more sophisticated than them, and some elite troops (cavalry or trained and armoured infantry of which  both Britons and Saxons were short).

        A young officer called Artorius and a unit of auxiliary cavalry drawn from the Sarmatian tribes go, at the invitation of the British king Ambrosius to help stop the Saxon advance. [The Sarmatian horsemen, of whom the Ossetians are the descendants, definitely had the concept of drawing a sword from the ground as their symbol of leadership. They also had a particular story of a dying warrior who demands that his best friend destroy his sword by throwing it in the water, but the friend, not wishing to destroy a beautiful weapon, twice, doesn't but the friend twigs and on the 3rd occasion the sword is caught by a woman's hand]  Now here is what I believe is an original connection - "Artorius" is not merely a Roman name it is an ancient Etruscan one and there is a reference to Arthur, in a scene carved on the Cathedral of Modena in Italy which slightly predates the medieval knowledge of the character. Modena is nowhere close to Britain but it is in Etruscan territory. Just as somebody called Neil, living in the UK, is more likely than not to be Scots, or Northern Irish even though we have been part of Britain for centuries it is more than likely that a man named Artorius was a local of the Etruscan lands, of which Modena is the heart.

ARTUS for Modena cathedral

    So Artorius landed in Britain in 485 in command of a cohort of Sarmatian auxiliaries. Rome's army could spare them particularly since the Britons would be paying and nobody else was paying Romans. It would not be the first time an Empire sent a tribe whose loyalty was not primarily to Rome well away from where they might meet some fellow tribesmen.

     Arthur is recorded as having fought 11 victorious battles. These battles were all across the country as far away as Scotland which fits with commanding a cavalry force in combination with whatever local tribal leaders/kings could raise [One telling argument against him being a Celtic king is that, despite the title given him later, the early records quite specifically refer to him not as a King but as the "war leader" of "the British kings" not even "other British kings". One can see why the British "kings" would vote to accept a Roman officer, tactically far more sophisticated than them and in command of cavalry forces that could put more fear into the Saxons at least as happily as they would accept a "king" who was another tribal leader. Just as the Phillipinos accepted MacArthur as their leader in WW2.

     King Arthur's Round Table, enters the written record shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his book, in a follow up written by a poet called Wace. However his writing was done near Cornwall, at a time we know the common people there still revered Arthur, so it is credible that he did not invent this but took a local legend. That doesn't necessarily mean to me that there was a physical Round Table but that there was a consensus that there was no order of precedence in the war council, not even for Arthur. That suggests Arthur as "dux bellorum" (literally war leader) was not the most powerful king and, at least until he won, considered almost a hired hand.

     History is replete with national heroes who actually come from an adjoining culture, usually a more sophisticated one and unite the nation they are founders, but not members of . Moses is an Egyptian name; Napoleon was Corsican; Hitler - Austrian; Stalin - Georgian; Alexander - Macedonian rather than true Greek; El Cid at least part Islamic; Herman from a family that had served the Romans; Che - Argentinian not Cuban;  Skanderbeg - Serb not Albanian; Bruce - as Norman as Scots. For Arthur to have been been just the most powerful British king is historically less likely.

     The other thing all the early records agree on is that they don't know where Arthur was buried. It is a major part of his mythic status. Arthur, having established a golden age of peace after decades of Saxon massacres, is, we are often told, going to return when the country needs him. The burial location of a king is an important thing at the time in the opposite way. It adds to the status of his successors, being able to provide physical proof of their right to rule as lawful descendants of such a king. Surely if Arthur had been Owain his descendants would made a big thing of where he was buried?

       The book suggests that Camlann, Arthur's final battle credibly placed in 519 and something close to a draw, was against an alliance of new Saxon invaders in Wessex in marriage coalition with Modred the king of Devon/Cornwall and a genuine historic figure. I suppose that he was wounded then and decided it was time to retire, back to Modena. In which case he did indeed depart with the Britons hoping for a return. Shortly thereafter archaeology suggests the British chiefs did fall to fighting each other. 70 years later the "Anglo Saxons" did renew their advance but the history of the Wessex Saxons family whose leader Cerdic was followed by a son whose name was part Saxon, part Briton and a grandson with a wholly Briton name suggests it was a melding rather than the genocide it had been.

      Though there is a lack of historical record of him there is a lack of historical record of  EVERYBODY at the beginning of the British Dark Ages. However there is record of a number of different British kings calling their children Arthur - a name previously unknown.  This means there must have been a real Arthur.

      I am not certain on this but it appears these subsequent Arthurs appear in several different royal families which, in another point I have not seen suggested elsewhere, suggests the original Arthur was not the king of any local dynasty, with whom each of the others were competing. That means not a dominant Briton tribal king. There is no question that the time Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote of him and he entered literary recognition Arthur was still a popular heroic figure to the entire population not just, or even particularly, of the people of Powys.

      Is all of this correct - unlikely. However I would stand by most of it being and certainly of arthur being a genuine historical figure and I think every single fact here is more likely than anmy single alternative.

       A cocktail party theory I would not stand by is of Camelot not being Viroconium but Colchester in Essex. The big thing in favour of it is that in the Roman era its name was Camulodunum which would clrearly have been spoken commonly as Camelot. The big thing against is that its location is in Essex, the heart of the main apparently undefeated Saxon kingdom, which I grant is a big "against". However if we assume Badon was such a great victory that the Arthurian forces did indeed defeat and occupy all the Saxon lands then Colchester would have been a good place for a Roman Arthur to set up his military headquarters, though if he was king of Powys then such a relocation becomes unlikely. Certainly Arthur's court has more the feel of a military order than a civil capital city. Some support for this is given by the fact that, despite Camelot now being the magnificent capital city out of myth it was not Arthur's capital in the original story by Geoffrey of Monmouth. "The castle is mentioned for the first time in Chrétien de Troyes' poem Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart, dating to the 1170s ...Nothing in Chrétien's poem suggests the level of importance Camelot would have in later romances. For Chrétien, Arthur's chief court was in Caerleon in Wales; this was the king's primary base in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and subsequent literature." Geoffrey was native to Caerleon so his identification of it as Camelot looks more like local pride than reality but nonetheless for anywhere other than Camelot to have been seen as the capital is at least consistent with it being a forward military base.
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     I once visited Tintagel Castle [according to legend Arthur's birthplace, his father being "both" the king of Devon/Cornwall and Uther Pendragon king of Gwyned/Powys. Possibly both kings, or rather their successors, had agreed to "adopt" him as their sons, a practise common with Roman Emperors too]. The castle ruins there were medieval and put there so that the local lord could bask in the association. But there are late Roman remains and it is defensible. And on the highest rock there is the carved image of a foot - a common Celtic symbol that the true king's foot will fit that footprint. {there is one on Dumbarton Rock capital of ancient Strathclyde in Scotland too and the idea of the Stone of destiny is clearly a development of that].

    So Arthur did, in a few short years bring a last, post Roman, golden age of peace, did decisively win a battle which, if lost would have put the Britons beyond hope of recovery and ensured that the country that eventually  developed was a culture of mixtures rather than extermination.

    I hope Arthur got back to the sunshine and grape juice of Modena. The fact that 6 centuries later he was recorded, in a frieze in Modena Cathedral and nowhere else so remote strongly suggests that he, or at least his friends did and the story became famous there. I have no idea what if the records there, if any, compare with those of Britain of the time, but it might be a fruitful area of research.

Solsbury/Badon Hill - overlooking Bath/Bathon/Badon and site of an iron age fort

  Last Saturday I wrote of a book discussing why we Scots, at least in Scotland though expatriates are quite the opposite, tend to back off form trying to achieve things. I must admit getting to new chapters at the end of the book I find the author wittering about how we can feel good without economic growth, living in harmony with the planet and maintaining enforced equality which suggests she has gone native. However the worth of a thought does not necessarily determine the worth of the thinker.

   As Pournelle says "free people aren't equal, equal people aren't free" which is self evidently true. Economic growth does not itself guarantee happiness but being better off certainly helps, though the law of diminishing returns applies. However economic success, personal achievement and happiness all have personal freedom as a major cause. Growth is so obviously popular that every politician claims to have it as their first priority, even those who have no slightest intention of doing so. Thus any government that doesn't achieve growth is, by definition, either opposed to the people's wishes or incompetent (or both) and unworthy of trust in any other objective.

    So anyway here is a list of some ideas (many offered here previously as ways of improving the economy) of increasing Scotland's self confidence, entrpreneurialism and achievement.:

1. Cut Income Tax by 3p as allowed under devolution. (other proposals originally on this link)
2. Add vitamin D to staple foods sold here.
3. Fire everybody in BBC Scotland. Their attitude of politically correct miserabilism rots our collective (or individual) souls.
4. Run TV series about the achievements of great successful Scots across history. What better way is there of making people both feel good about their country and that they personally can contribute? The amount of money needed to pay for a TV series in nothing in a national budget.
5. A space X-Prise. Even something as simple as the asteroid landing prise would produce a sense of achievement.
6. Require any Scottish X-Prise competition vehicle to carry a saltiire prominently.
7. Propose knighthoods and other such titles to people who have actually achieved something not just  parasitic civil servants, union leaders, retiring politicos and party donors.
8. Get rid of destructive, jobsworth civil servants.
9. Give prises to pupils (and to teachers) when they produce good results.
10. Put a couple of white lasers in Glasgow and Edinburgh with their beams crossing overhead, visible across much of the central belt - just to show we can.
11. Sponsor an annual Road From the Isles hovercraft race. (#28)
12. Make a DVD of Scotland's history & post it to Scots, or those with Scots names, over the world. Include links encouraging Scottish tourism.
13. A schools voucher system would improve personal freedom.
14. No new politically correct vindictive bans. The smoking ban was NOT in manifestos at the last election.
15. Introduce a right to referendums on motions that would not increase government power as UKIP have called for.
16. The smoking ban is an illiberal restriction on individual freedom. End it.
17. End fuel poverty. France produces 80% nuclear at 2p a unit. We can do the same or indeed better.
18. Reform planning regulations so that people can build houses when and how they want rather than spending more time and money on sucking up to "civil servants" than actually building.
19. Build the Scottish Tunnel Project. Being able to travel freely around your own country is a blessing.
20. Fire any social worker kidnapping children or otherwise increasing human misery to build their empires.

   “There is nothing more practical than a good theory.” — Kurt Lewin

   The corollary of this must be that there is nothing so damaging as a false theory, about something vital to civilisation, which is generally accepted and enforced by government worldwide.

   That is why I have been so persistent in disputing the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation damage. There is not and never has been any actual evidence for it. This fact is not disputed even by supporters, they have merely said that, for low level radiation it is so statistically difficult to provide certain evidence against it that it is an unfalsifiable theory and thus must be accepted.

   This is not a scientific attitude since it is axiomatic that a theory which cannot be falsified cannot be scientific. But it does have the advantage of being enforced and accepted. I have previously said I doubt  any theory is wholly unfalsifiable it merely that there are some whose proponents will not recognise any.

    The entire anti-nuclear movement depends on being able to scare people that tiny amounts of radiation, at virtually homoeopathic levels can still kill because there is "no threshold" level at which it is safe.Without that radiation releases at a very low level would not be a fear. Without that the Dalgety Bay fraud would have nothing to work with. Without that the alleged fear that it could be dangerous to store radioactive "waste" (most of it is actually highly valuable) deep underground because it might, in infinitesimal quantities, leak thousands of feet upwards would be a matter of no importance.

   Without that "unfalsifiable" claim the hysteria against nuclear power and its suppression could not have been justified. It has left humanity with no more than 40% of the electricity and therefore wealth we would have had  if the trend before suppression had continued.


   However science goes on and even the most "unfalsifiable" ignorance based claims fall victim to scientific progress from a new direction.

   Which is why this, while the result is in now way unexpected to believers in science, is such a game changer it ought to be headlined worldwide. (OK I know it won't but it would if the media were uncorrupt) -


     The LNT theory was always political rather than scientific. The theory absolutely requires that there be no repair mechanism for radiation damage which, is contrary to experience with almost all other injuries to living systems. This looks like conclusive proof LNT is wrong. This does not prove hormesis, that low level stimulation to the system is beneficial, correct but is certainly consistent with it. Particularly the evidence that long term exposure is less troubling than a burst exposure, which was always intuitively reasonable.

The Vanishing Hitchhiker

A friend of a friend and his daughter were driving along a lonely country road at night and happened upon a female hitchhiker. The woman asked for a ride to her home just a few miles up the road. The travellers obliged and continued on with the woman riding silently in the backseat. As they approached their destination, the driver turned to inform the passenger they were arriving, only to discover she had vanished from the backseat without a trace! Thoroughly spooked, the travellers inquired at the house and learned that a woman matching the description of the hitchhiker had indeed once lived there, but died several years earlier in an automobile accident. Her ghost, they were told, was sometimes seen wandering beside the highway...
.......................
    So how old is the story. Hitchhiking requires cars so one might expect it to be about the 1920s/30s when cars became widespread and the collected stories do seem to start around then. But there are earlier versions from the time of carts and..
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Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles[a] from Jerusalem. 14 They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. 15 As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; 16 but they were kept from recognising him.


17 He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”
They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?”
19 “What things?” he asked.
“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. 20 The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; 21 but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. 22 In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning 23 but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. 24 Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but they did not see Jesus.”
25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.
28 As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus continued on as if he were going farther. 29 But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.
30 When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. 31 Then their eyes were opened and they recognised him, and he disappeared from their sight. 32 They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”
                            Luke 24:13-32 On the Road to Emmaus
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  That is the Vanishing Hitchhiker story in all essentials - Meeting a traveller. Gives mysterious prophecy. Disappears, in this case literally before their eyes, Turns out to have been dead all along. It is even part of a subgenre where the traveller is a local godlike figure.

  The story is also told in much less detail in Mark 16; 12-13

  Snopes also reports a section of Acts which they regard as another variant on the hitchhiker story - Acts 8; 27-39 . This involves a disciple meeting a high Ethiopian official, hitching a ride on his chariot and converting and baptising him. Personally, despite the use of a vehicle to hitch on I don't regard this as a true VH story since both parties are identified and living so there is no inherent mystery.

  I don't know don't know enough mythology to tell if there are any other such. Is there a section in the Epic of Gilgamesh where he looks down and finds an unnoticed Hook or dragon's claw in his chariot wheel. Wouldn't be surprised.

  Some time ago I wrote about how to solve the Korea problem, following an article by the not then late Colonel Gadaffi. This was my plan 

My opinion is that it depends on making sure nobody in power in the North has greatly fear union.
The South should offer to pay the salaries of every Northern government official for life, so long as they aren't earning more elsewhere. They also guarantee an amnesty for any NK official who may be chargeable with "war crimes". China would also guarantee this and to provide residence for any NK official who wanted to leave and who would still receive salary from the South. These guarantees have to be formidable and credible precisely because various western promises, from those to Pinochet to Karadzic have proven false. It may not be abstract justice that some leaders may get away with things we don't like. though abstract justice would certainly not be served by a "prosecution" influenced by NATO states whose own leaders are certainly guilty of war crimes, genocide and organlegging. However as an alternative to starvation for the northern people and possible nuclear war for everybody it seems preferable.

In return for paying salaries they get a gradual loosening of the Northern dictatorship. A veto on promotions and new appointments. Taxes could be drastically reduced since they were being already paid.. Road, rail and telecommunication links between the 2 (I suspect the South even more than the North would fear free movement of peoples since 10s of millions of refugees would be unwelcome). Trade between the 2 be made free. The right of Northerners to take up free market jobs and the right of such jobs to exist without government regulation. The desired end result would be a zero tax, minimal regulation zone governed, through leaders appointed by the South to which many southern and indeed international companies would outsource much of their production and which would grow faster than the South could. It would probably take decades for the North to reach Southern levels of affluence and political sophistication, after all it took the South decades in the first place, but it would be done without deaths, refugees and war.
The cost to the South would be less than they presently spend on defence. Paying the full salaries of everybody would cost no more than $9 billion assuming the NK currency is valued correctly.

  It depended then and depends now on the NK leadership accepting it. However, in Kim III's seat it looks increasingly attractive. Despite having a nuclear bomb or 2 NK is going nowhere in a continent where everybody else's economy is growing at 10%

   It says a lot about the power of modern states that they have been able to hold the dam so long - that the people are not killing their masters. A recent news report said that the relatively few escapees overwhelmingly come from the border regions where they can see wealthier neighbours which suggests most of the population really don't know how the world has changed. Even the BBC don't aspire to that sort of control*. However communication devices are getting smaller and more pervasive and the dam is inevitably going to come under ever more pressure. Then there is Kim IIIrd himself - he was educated in Switzerland and personally knows how backward his country is.

    Also, assuming his father's death was as reported and I think it was, he died of a heart attack at 69. That is not, even nowadays, an incredibly young age but I very much doubt if many leaders, or even middle ranking functionaries, of a wealthy country, able to fly across the world for the very best health care isn't going to live longer. Longevity is as ultimate a benefit of modern technology as there is.

    So, even as absolute dictator of his own country, the life of a multimillionaire in Shanghai must look pretty attractive. The moreso the further down the ranks one goes. Give him, or them access to something like the Ibrahim Prize and there could be a deal.

    Kim III has one advantage over his father - he hasn't been long in power and would not credibly by chargeable with crimes against humanity. I wouldn't take this very far since such charges bear little relation to the culpability of the chargee - Milosevic was so clearly innocent he had to be poisoned; Vojilsav Seselj", who was an opposition politician in Yugoslavia during the wars, rather than being in government, was indicted 2 weeks before he was plainly going to win a democratic election and whose trial was stopped purely because there was no evidence against him is, after 8 1/2 years, still imprisoned; whereas Snake Thaci (our Kosovo President and clearly guilty of genocide, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and dissecting living human beings) hasn't been arrested; neither; neither has Bill Clinton (guilty of planning aggressive war and using his command authority to appoint Thaci as his policeman and send him to commit genocide); and almost all western politicians who supported that war and who are thus personally complicit in war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and such cannibalism, albeit at a lower level).

  As a matter of law there is no evidence whatsoever against Kim IIIrd of any crime 100oth as criminal as what Obama, Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and co are certainly guilty of. However International Law is not enforced and is instead used simply as an excuse for atrocities by the big countries.

   Fortunately for Kim China is now one of the big countries. He would be unwise to and I am certain will not, under any circumstances relinquish power if there is any doubt of  China's willingness and ability to permanently uphold promises of his security in face of NATO/"International Criminal Court" criminality.

   One other point worth making is that though NK has a nuke there are new military technologies developing. Curently there is being developed a remotely pilioted military aircraft the size of a hummingbird. In fact it is, visulally, a hummingbird. It currently has a short range and no weapons but that is bound to change and I can think of no defence the NK government could produce that would stop such an assassination weapon being used, in a few years, against them.

* Perhaps I underestimated the degree of control the BBC operates. Checking out Seselj's case I find that, over nearly a decade the BBC have managed to censor any single mention of his arrest, "trial" , innocnece and continued imprisonment.

  The purpose of government programmes is to pat government employees and their friends. The nominal purpose is, at best, secondary.  - Pournelle's Iron Law.

  I have written of this many many times, mainly in the economic sphere for that is where I feel spectacular progress is most obviously easy. However Christopher Booker has long been writing not just on the subject of warming alarmism but also a scandal which should, if our MSM were in any way whatsoever interested in journalism rather than censorship, have the public crying in the aisles.

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of children are being taken from caring, loving competent parents and sentenced, without due process, to the living hell of "social work carers". Twenty-three percent of the adult prison population has spent time in care yet to an ever increasing extent the child abusing "caring professions" are ensuring that it is ever more difficult for them to reach the limited escape of foster homes. The only possible reasons for doing do is so that the obscene subhuman filth who make their living as "the caring professions" (A) get off on torturing children and their parents & (B)  its a living and indeed a better one than being a guard at Auschwitz.

   It may be argued that there most be some decent people in social work (or indeed Auschwitz) . However does anybody know of a social worker, or indeed judge, ever dobbing in a fellow worker for kidnapping a child or perjuring themselves in testimony on the reason for it. Any social worker involved in such actions has vitiated any legal document "allowing" them to kidnap and is as guilty of the crime as any ki8dnapper without a warrant signed by a judge - and should be punished accordingly. Moreover any judge who signs such a "warrant" without properly satisfying themselves personally that it is justified and immediately afterwards talking to the kid to verify it is also personally guilty of kidnapping children.

   And any judge who deliberately threatens any journalist or member of the public to keep such a crime secret (a very common practice as Booker has pointed out, on a demi monde where habeus corpus is unknown) is themself an accomplice to kidnapping and also guilty of perverting the course of justice.

   Every last one of these obscene child abusers should be locked up for decades. Give the nonces somebody to look down on.

how many months Booker has been beating this drum, and no one could now deny that there is a case to answer by social services, the police, the court system and the legal profession – to say nothing of the politicians.
Most of all though, there is an issue here about the media. This is the industry which professes to be concerned with people's rights and in freedoms yet not a single newspaper has followed up on Booker's work and developed a campaign – which is what is desperately needed.
It is thus left to Booker to plod on, in his own little ghetto, becoming the last repository for desperate parents, who are increasingly directed to him as the only journalist prepared to listen to their stories.

Booker's Articles
Foreigners are an easy target

Behind a wall of secrecy, parents who lost their children are now in jail


Our family courts repeat the error that jailed Dreyfus


Couple denied legal help while lawyers make £1m removing their children  Iron Law - this would not  happened if we weren't paying the child abusers £3.5 billion for their pleasure.

How a mother who fled to Ireland to save her baby was caught on her return.


And so on and on

For legal reason comments are not allowed by the Telegraph there but perhaps there is somebody in the childcare community who would like either to justify such actions (or the Orkney "satanic" case or others in Scotland) or alternately apologise for abusing children and their parents this way. Perhaps pigs may fly too.

The Space Settlement FAQ - a useful roundup of terms
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China celebrates first docking of its space station modules. Not widely reported here, or indeed almost at all, but a necessary achievement on the way to a permanent foothold in space.
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the recent nuclear thermal rocket variants are described. They are estimated to require 5 years of technological development and could have launch costs of $85-150/kg for a single stage to orbit vehicle.  These are launch from Earth's surface vehicles but involve superheated water etc as exhaust not radioactive material.
----------------------
An Awful lot of asteroids out there for us to mine.

So far, the mission has observed more than 60,000 asteroids, both Main Belt and near-Earth objects. Most were known before, but more than 11,000 are new.
"Our data pipeline is bursting with asteroids," said WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright of UCLA. "We are discovering about a hundred a day, mostly in the Main Belt."

-------------------------------
  Interview on the Mach Effect reactionless drive. 

Question "I saw the prediction of a 15-25 year development timeline."
At the rate we are going, 15-to-25 years may be optimistic now, for we have been able to generate zero outside support for this M-E effort at DARPA and NASA. The idea of extracting energy and momentum from the gravinertial field for power and propulsion is just too new, foreign & quackish to most folks who control the R&D coins

-----------------------------------------
 Discussion of light sails
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Wikipedia history of Project Orion atomic bomb powered spacecraft.
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NYT "Interview" with Presidential; front runner Newt Gingrich. Actually what he says barely gets mentioned
and the author spends her time trying to make fun of him having some vision and supporting space development, and in my opinion merely making herself look small. Almost the only sentence of his given in full is praise of Jerry Pournelle.

  Just been looking through Carol Craig's book The Scots Crisis of Confidence. She says that the Scots tradition of equality, a fine thing when it is equality of opportunity as it used to be ( "The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The Man's the gowd for a' that"), has become a lack of respect for individuality and a stultifying culture of conformity, which is inevitable when we redefine equality to mean "equality of outcome".

   The Enterprise section is introduced with an old Russian joke - Peasant Ivan is jealous of Boris because Boris has a goat and he doesn't. Fairy gives him a single wish for whatever he wants which, rather than anything for himself, is that "Boris' goat should drop dead".

     Now that is something socialists often approve of and indeed have occasionally actually said - they would rather see the poor stay poor as long as the rich don't get richer.

     While in theory Scots should be reasonably good at starting businesses in fact we are at half the level of similar small nations. What the book finds is not merely that Scots in Scotland have a very low TEA (Total Enterprise Activity, sorry)  of 3.9 as opposed to 12.7 for English but that when we go abroad we develop a very high rate. People of Scots ancestry in the US makes up 1.7% of the population but 9.3% of millionaires! The Scots figure there is also 3 times better than that of English ancestry. Scots also have a higher rate of references to scientific papers (the best measure of real scientific achievement rather than just publishing to keep the numbers up) per capita than any other country with the possible exception of Switzerland.

      Putting all that together it is not a problem of our personal culture but must be one of the national culture.

      That is to say we are being stifled by the useless bunch of parasitic big statists numpties, of all parties, that make up our political class.

       Pretty much what I have been saying for a while but good to have some evidence that seems impossible to interpret any other way.

       So we have a particular problem to fix - produce a national culture where we do not feel under pressure to stifle our proven individual abilities. In the long term hanging everybody in Holyrood using the intestines of every civil service manager would be beneficial. Everybody interested in improving the country should start thinking of others. Our culture is not going to reverse itself quickly and there are doubtless many individual actions that would help.

      However inculcating a spirit of enterprise or indeed hard work can be done by rewarding it.. The traditionally successful way of encouraging anything [dependency, dishonesty, scare stories, aggression and entrepreneurism] is to reward it. So lets reduce income tax in Scotland by the 3p of the Tartan Tax.

      The whole thesis of Scotland's automatic cultural cringe is proven by the fact that that though Westminster gave us the power to do this and though it would certainly have a strongly positive economic effect, as well as the cultural effect I refer to today, no party in Holyrood, neither the one that pretends to believe in free markets nor the one that pretends to want to use powers England denies us to improve the economy, has dared to suggest that we cut income tax*. This despite that they are all quite certain that they have more than twice that much money spare than the £1 billion a year that would cost, to blow on windmills, cycle paths and teaching van drivers to drive slowly. Only if Boris was on the dole and paying no income tax would he believe that it is better to blow billions on windmills than to cut income tax - if he had any sort of job he would behave smarter and more constructively than the average Holyrood politician.
      Which is why it should be a major policy of any true progressive in Scots politics.

*To be fair to the LudDims they did come out for cutting a penny (without saying where it would come from so clearly just a PR stunt) and thereby caused the budget of the minority SNP to fall. To continue being fair they, on seeing it work they immediately dropped the policy and obediently put through the budget.

22/9 - 4/10 £22.5 MILLION FOR A BARRACKS THE MoD INTEND TO SPEND £400 MILLION ON

The government propose spending £400 million on a new barracks in Scotland.
Keetwonen is the name of the biggest container city in the world. Living in a converted shipping container was a new concept in the Netherlands when launched, but the city of Amsterdam took the courageous step to contract to go and realise 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
These converted containers are publicly advertised at £2500 each housing 4 or 2 with a separate room.
With 3,000 units 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
Ask ordinary soldiers if the Keetwonen facilities are as good as, or better than normal barracks. Let Parliament debate whether spending £400 million or £22.5 million is better.

===================
22/9, 28/10, 18/11 ORION NUCLEAR PULSE SPACE ROCKET - 10,000 tons to orbit, "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970"

The Orion nuclear pulse rocket was first proposed in the early 1960s. It would have been able to put 10,000 tons of material in orbit at a tiny fraction of the cost of the Shuttle. Their motto was "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970". British born Freeman Dyson, who worked on it as a young man and is now arguably the greatest living physicist has confirmed it would still work.
It was costed then at $100 million annually for 12 years. With inflation now £450 million annually. We now spend this on the NERC quango annually (one of several whose main function is "raising awareness" of "catastrophic global warming"). The ideal launch site is South Georgia or one of the South Sandwich Islands, British territory. This is because they are not only thousands of miles from inhabited land but the wind pattern, eastward round and round Antarctica, would mean radiation release anywhere inhabited would be less than 1,000th of natural background radiation.

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22/9 m 26/9, 28/10, 18/11,21/11 ABOLISH THE HEALTH AND SAFETY BUREAUCRACY

Economist's Rule of Thumb is that government inspectors cost the industries inspected 20 times as much as they cost the government to employ them. Thus the 200,000 assorted "safety" inspectors destroy the productive work of 4 million workers or about 1/7th of the workforce. We all know of deaths that happened because the HandS people wouldn't allow rescues. Beyond that the strongest correlation with safety is national income. Each 1% increase in national wealth saves 21 lives per 100,000 people. So even in its own terms the HandS organisation kill about 1,000 times more people than they save.

Rejected because "E-petitions cannot be used to request action on issues that are outside the responsibility of the government. This includes:
party political material

commercial endorsements including the promotion of any product, service or publication

issues that are dealt with by devolved bodies, eg The Scottish Parliament

correspondence on personal issues "

I can only assume this is saying that the "Health and Safety" regulations are entirely "outside the responsibility of government" ie entirely the responsibility of the sovereihn power - the EU.

Rejected again - interestingly for the entirely different reason that petitions are rejected if they "contain offensive, joke or nonsense content


use language which may cause offence, is provocative or extreme in its views

use wording that is impossible to understand

include statements that amount to advertisements"

Rejecterd again for the same alleged reason.
"I must ask you to state which particular part of the epetition is a joke, incomprehensible, an advertisement or alternately why any reduction in government regulation is considered too erxtreme for the public to be allowed to consider it?"

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29/9 28/10, 18/11 PARLIAMENT SHOULD DEBATE WHY BRITISH PUBLIC PROJECTS ROUTINELY COST MANY TIMES WHAT THEY COULD

The Norwegians have cut hundreds of kilometres of tunnels at 4m per km yet London's Crossrail, which not much more than 26 miles of tunnel is costed at 16 bn. Richard Rogers is on record as saying that of the #670 million the Millenium Dome cost only 46 million was spent building it. Our railways are far more expensive than continental ones because the infrastructure building and repair costs many times more. There are 2 possible explanations - incompetence and corruption. If there are more perhaps someone could say. Either way Parliament should be able to debate it and provide an answer. This is, historically, what they exist for.

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28/10/11, 18/11 EU COST BENEFIT ANALYSIS

We call on Parliament to debate getting an internationally respected firm of independent accountants to calculate a cost benefit analysis of our membership of the EU. This has meny times been proposed but for unknown reasons been rejected by governments of all parties. By producing actual facts it would make the EU debate more reasoned and less argumentative, which all sides should wish.

Rejected becuase this petition covers it. Please sign it.
=================================
18/11, 29/11 CENSORSHIP OF E-PETITION SITE

Parliament should debate the rountine refusal of the e-petition site to process various petitions, without notification, or to reject them as being "party political material or commercial endorsements" when they neither endorse anything commercial nor are taken from any party material let alone referring to any party and arguably, as in the petition about the censorship of the acknowledged murder of 210 unarmed civilians at Dragodan by our police, do not even refer to anything any UK political party is even willing to discuss, let alone have a policy on.

==================================
21/11 INTRODUCE FAILURE STANDARDS FOR GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

This was proposed in the series Yes Minister in the 1970s. Parliament should at least get the opportunity to say why not ---------"He proposes that every council official responsible for a new project would have to list the criteria for failure before he's given the go ahead.

I didn't grasp the implications of this at first. But I've discussed it with Annie & she tells me it's what's called the "scientific method.  I've never really come across that before since my early training was in sociology & economics. But "the scientific method" apparently means that you first establish a method of measuring the success or failure of an experiment. A proposal would have to say: "The scheme will be a failure if it takes longer than this" or "costs more than that" or "employs more staff than these" or "fails to meet those pre-set performance standards!.

Fantastic. We'll get going on this right away. he only thing is, I can't understand why this hasn't been done before."

Rejected because it "contain offensive, joke or nonsense content


use language which may cause offence, is provocative or extreme in its views

use wording that is impossible to understand

include statements that amount to advertisements "

===========================
22/11, 29/11 EQUIP OUR ARMED FORCES WITH THE TACTICAL HIGH ENERGY LASER

  The Israelis and Americans developed this mobile laser system. In November 4, 2002, THEL shot down an incoming artillery shell. A mobile version has completed successful testing. During a test conducted on August 24, 2004 the system successfully shot down multiple mortar rounds. Anything that can do that can do the same against aircraft which are larger, far more expensive and slower moving. Armed forces with lots of aircraft have been understandably unwilling to make extensive use of a weapon that makes them obsolete, but obsolete they are. At "$3000 per kill" they are clearly far better value than the Eurofighter at $20 billion for 232 planes and available immediately off the shelf. Unfortunately British military procurers have a long record of paying billions for the development of weapon systems when cheaper alternatives are already available off the shelf. It is proposed Parliament should debate making the purchase of such weapons a top priority.
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23/11 BBC's LICENCE FEE DEPENDS ON MAINTAINING THE CHARTER DUTY OF "BALANCE"

The BBC's Charter requires that their reporting show "balance". Parliament should debate whether the BBC' has breached their Charter. For example giving more coverage to deaths in the Gaza war than the 1,800 civilians killed by being dissected to have their body parts sold, by our policemen in Kosovo. Equally we have the BBC deciding that anybody doubting that we are experiencing catastrophic global warming should almost never be reported because they allege their is a consensus the other way, though the BBC have repeatedly refused to name a single scientist anywhere in the world, from the majority not employed by the state, who supports their alleged consensus. Closer to home we have the BBC giving 40 times more coverage to 1 political party, almost entirely supportive, per vote received than to another, almost entirely opposed. Parliament should therefore debate when the BBC broke their Charter and how they could best repay the licence fee vitiated by that breach.
==========================

 WE COULD BE OUT OF RECESSION  IN DAYS - LET PARLIAMENT DEBATE WHY THEY DON'T WANT TO

A 24 point proposal has been made to get out of recession within days and into fast growth - see here  http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2011/11/we-could-get-out-of-recession-in-days.html Not MP has been willing to say that even one of these proposals would not work

let alone all 24. Politicians of all parties  seem resigned to at least 6 more years of recession and claim not to know of any way to achieve growth (while the rest of the world continues with 5% annual growth & China & India with 10%). They should, at least, be willing to debate such an option and say why they reject it.  Since the programme involves cutting parasitic government spending, regualyion and controls of our lives and dropping the Luddism all parties are adicted to it is understandable they do not want to. However the public has a right to know if they have any non-self serving reasons to reject a growing economy.
=======================

  Here are another batch of E-Petitions I have put on the government's site. This links to the full run of them. Please sign any you agree with. We don't get that many chances to have even a tiny influence on government.

  This proposal has been made for expanding Amsterdam downwards but presumably could apply to any city built on clay soil rather than rock, which certainly includes London and probably most of those built on river estuaries, which is most of them.

Architect Moshé Zwarts says ""There has always been a lack of space in the city, so what we are doing is building a city under the city by using a new construction technique, which will not interfere with street traffic."- by draining and then building under the canals....

The engineers say it is doable. "It is both feasible and sustainable, creating a city beneath the city is not futuristic, it is a necessity in this day and age." Zwarts says the geology is great for this. "Amsterdam sits on a 30-metre layer of waterproof clay which will be used together with concrete and sand to make new walls. Once we have resealed the canal floor, we will be able to carry on working underneath while pouring water back into the canals. It's an easy technique and it doesn't create issues with drilling noises on the streets."

 The "environmentalists " agree it is feasible and are against it so that is a strong strike in its favour.

"This scheme and its underlying drivers, fly in the face of every responsible principle of sustainability and current trends. The architects also claim that the proposal is CO2 neutral but when questioned by WAN, Professor Zwarts acknowledged that his calculations omitted the carbon generated by construction, which in a mammoth scheme like would take many decades to recoup, if ever.....That this project is technically achievable is not in doubt, but that does not justify its flawed concept."

   It is unlikely that this will, currently, be worthwhile in smaller cities since it depends on a lack of affordable land for it to be economic. It fits Professor John McCarthy's suggestion that the problems of car parking can be solved by providing virtually unlimited parking spaces under the roads. and with the general improvement in technology of tunnelling.

   The problem for Britain is that our engineering costs are dwarfed, around eightfold, by governmental bureaucracy costs. For this reason the cost of public projects has gone up 4% above the rate of inflation annually for 52 years, for reasons which no civil servant can, officially, explain.
 
    Another example I recently found out about is the Thames Tunnel, a 34km sewage outflow tunnel (which is why it doesn't get discussed) from London which is costing £3.6 billion. This is £105 per km for something the Norwegians are doing at £4 m per km - probably it is reasonable that, cutting under London, it might cost more than in Norway but 26 times! .
 
    However this is simply bureaucracy costs and could be ended at any time the political will is there. The engineering is clearly "doable".
 
 PS I found this idea through this list of 10 megaprojects of which 10,9,6,4   are "renewable" based rather than economic, 8,5,2 & 1 are a close to things I have proposed, this is 7. ~3 - using genetically modified coral to save Venice and build in the sea is cool.

  Both from The Register, which for reliable news comes ahead of anything from the dead tree press or main broadcasters. 

A Date For Humanity's Diary

NASA has announced that - all being well - the first mission to the International Space Station by a privately built and operated spacecraft will lift off on February 7. The craft will be a Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket, both made and handled by techbiz visionary Elon Musk's new company SpaceX.

  We really can be that close to a commercial space Singularity.

The term "technological singularity" was originally coined by Vernor Vinge, who made an analogy between the breakdown in our ability to predict what would happen after the development of superintelligence and the breakdown of the predictive ability of modern physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole. Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies

    That and Presidential front runner Newt Gingrich proudly defending his support of space industrialisation from a disingenuous attack by Romney on a national, TV debate  (Romney must note that Newt supports X-Prizes not the conventional and wasteful funding of NASA.) 
    Can anybody imagine any main party leader showing such vision and commitment in a party debate here. To be fair John Redwood has written in favour of space and I can well imagine UKIP doing so, but they haven't yet.


Mars Goldilocks Zone May be Larger Than Earth's

A group of Australian scientists have created a “whole of planet” model that suggests large parts of Mars are capable of supporting life – as long as it doesn’t mind living underground.
Instead of the piecemeal approach followed by most astrobiologists – which, it must be said, is fair enough since the various probes sent to the Red Planet have only sampled tiny areas – the Australian National University team led by Dr Charlie Lineweaver sought to compare what’s known about the whole planet to Earth’s environment.
They focused on two characteristics, comparing the temperature and pressure conditions here to those likely to exist on Mars. Their estimate comes up with a surprise: while only one percent of Earth’s entire volume falls under the heading “habitable”, Mars beats us at three percent.

  I would never have thought of this but in retrospect it is obvious that Mars, with a lower gravity will have a much lower pressure gradient. This doesn't mean anything but microbes and may not mean that since an input of some highly organised form of power (ie light) seems necessary for energy using life. But if life is at all common across the universe it will be there. The options are that it is life related to us - ie that either light pressure or meteors brought it from one planet to the other; that it is life unrelated to us - it is conceivable that life only developed once in the universe but not only twice; that it isn't there - which makes life anywhere else that much less likely; or the not thought of yet option.

   Whatever , if this isn't worth orders of magnitude more than anything we could get from Afghanistan there isn't intelligent life on Earth.

  There has been a certain amount of negative reporting of a recent Audit Scotland report saying that Alex Salmond's programme of cutting CO2 production will cost £11 billion over the next 8 years.

   Personally I was surprised it could be so low and checked the report which says

The Climate Audit did not consider renewable energy (or a few other things - Appendix 1 p15)

    So this £11 billion £1.4 bn annually) is in addition to the +£1 bn a year poured into windmill subsidies or the several billion caused by the fact that electricity costs could be only 7% of what they are, or the fact that we are only in recession because of this Luddite thievery.
 
    Since this isn't about the basic production of energy we are simply dealing with Lagging housing and producing more expensive building standards - £4.5-4.8 billion

   Transport policies - £3.8 billion - including getting buses and taxis to reduce their emissions at £1.1 bn - putting £1.1 bn into "cycling and walking infrastructure" (all p 11 # 40)  - there is also £6 million going to train van drivers to drive using less fuel! (p12 #46)

    Obviously this is complete nonsense which will not achieve anything significant, compared to the cost. If people wanted houses which cost several hundred thousand extra to build but cut power bills by 20% the market would produce them without subsidy. If van drivers wanted to drive slowly and cautiously they would not need a government parasite to tell them it could be done.

    On the other hand it will give ever more money for thieving parasitic traitors like Salmond to hand out /split with his cronies.

    I previously suggested that instead of subsidising windmills that £1 billion could be put into cutting income tax by 3p. Well that goes in spades for this nonsense. Does anybody believe that we would be out of recession if we cut income tax by 3p, cut corporatio9n tax by 50% (or offered rebates for 50% which gets round the fact that CT is officially still a Westminster matter) and cut business rates by half - each one costing £1 billion. Those 3 together would cost £3 billion - possibly marginally above the subsidies discussed but certainly lower than the subsidies plus even a tiny increase in the revenues from a tax base growing because of it (as described in the Laffer Curve).

   Let us not, under any circumstances whatsoever, accept any claims from the SNP that there is any real problem with such cuts when they are wasting and stealing from us like this. Let us not under any circumstances accept that any politician who supports this and claims to be against "cuts in essential services to the poor" is ever in the remotest degree honest or cares is the tiniest degree about the poor as they steal billions form us.

a thieving fascist traitor gives us a sign

   While we are at it here is Hondurus going for an idea I suggested for Islay years ago and more generally here, which could also get us a spare £6 billion annually, should that be desired.

20 May 2008

City of Edinburgh council and tram project promoter Transport Initiatives Edinburgh announced on May 14 that contracts worth £512m had been placed for the 18·5 km tram network being developed in the Scottish capital.

The BBS consortium of Bilfinger Berger and Siemens has a €350m (£299m) fixed-price construction contract, under which consortium leader Bilfinger Berger will be responsible for civil works valued at €190m ((£162m) while electrical and mechanical equipment will be supplied by Siemens.

Spanish rolling stock manufacturer CAF was formally awarded the €170m (£145m) contract to supply and maintain 27 trams.

The first tracks are expected to be laid by September, and opening of the line from the airport through the city centre to Newhaven is planned for mid-2011, with Transdev as operator.

And then

2 September 2011

Councillors in Edinburgh have voted to rescue plans to build a tram line into the city, which could eventually cost £1bn.

Eight days after residents were told the council had voted to stop the trams two miles short of the city centre, it agreed by a majority to reinstate the longer route at an emergency meeting on Friday....

Bungled decisions and setbacks have increased the project's official costs from £520m in 2008 to the latest figure of £776m. The new line to St Andrew's Square in the New Town will cost the city about £86m per mile, but that figure too is expected to rise.

Although officials hope to strike a more competitive deal with the contractors or get more government funding, the city will have to borrow up to £231m to build the extra section of line.

The costs of that loan over the next 30 years would push the total figure beyond £1bn.
That money will be spent on building a line that will still end eight stops short of the destination agreed in 2008

 There has been little public discus ion of the officially annou8nced "fixed price2 nature of the contract. Was it always a total and deliberate lie ot did TIE deliberately vitiate that contract by adding to it. I suspect the latter. Either way some group of civil servants, possibly also councillors and MSPs, engaged in deliberate financial fraud on a a massive scale ripping us off for hundreds of millions of pounds.

Yet so corrupt is Scotland's political class that not only is there no prospect of any of the thieves going to jail; not only is there no prospect of any of the thieves even being fired; but there is no prospect of any Scottish "journalist" reporting what happened.

  Admitted that there have been 1,500 accidents and 4 deaths in British windfarms over the last 5 years. That is 4 more than at Fukushima ; twice as many as have happened, worldwide, over the last 20 years, in the nuclear industry; 8% of all the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, which is worse than even the theoretically worst accident possible with modern reactor designs. On the other hand it is only 12% of the deaths in the recent outbreak of e-colli in a German organic farm.

  That is why every remotely honest broadcaster and newspaper gives hundreds of times more space to stories about windfarms being dangerous than nuclear reactors, and thousands more to organic farms. But only every singer honest one.
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  And talking of wholly corrupt Fascist broadcasters Christopher Booker has done well researched and footnoted report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation showing how corrupt the BBC is.

   Not reported by the BBC
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 Anthony Jay creator of Yes Minister (mentioned many times by me) has also damned the BBC and explained how they censor and lie without technically lying.  "If you believe in a free country and a free press, why do we have a state broadcasting system at all?’ he said.

We were masters of the techniques of promoting our point of view under the cloak of impartiality. The simplest was to hold a discussion between a fluent and persuasive proponent of the view you favoured, and a humourless bigot representing the other side. With a big story, like shale gas for example, you would choose the aspect where your case was strongest: the dangers of subsidence and water pollution, say, rather than the transformation of Britain’s energy supplies and the abandonment of wind farms and nuclear power stations. And you could have a ‘balanced’ summary with the view you favoured coming last: not “the opposition claim that this will just make the rich richer, but the government point out that it will create 10,000 new jobs” but “the government claim it will create 10,000 new jobs, but the opposition point out that it will just make the rich richer.” It is the last thought that stays in the mind. It is curiously satisfying to find all these techniques still being regularly used forty seven years after I left the BBC.

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  Cameron says of the refusal to sign the new EU treaty "It is not easy when you are in a room where people are pressing you to sign up to things because they say it is in all our interests....‘I cannot do that, it is not in our national interest, I don't want to put that in front of my parliament ” which shows that, ignoring his claims to acting out of principle, that he knows he couldn't get his party top vote it through. Had half his backbenchers not voted for a referendum he would not have done that. Had over 100,000 people not signed the e-petition producing that debate and many thousands of individuals not written/emailed/phoned their MPs to get them to stand up and had all the Tory MPs not known that UKIP were able to pick up thousands of votes in their constituencies that rebellion would not have succeeded.

   Occasionally, even in our "democracy", ordinary citizens can have an effect.
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The Euro default is not so new, nor the nor so much the end of the world, nor need it be stopped by a common currency.

WSJ article on the 1841 default by 8 American states. It did reduce the creditworthiness of all state governments but the US (and British banks who had put up most of the money) survived it.
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Spiked on how Scotland's "anti-sectarian" law is simply an attack on both freedom of speech  and the football loving working classes by Scotland's unconnected political elite.
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More fraud by global warming alarmists - this time to fake a rise in sea level.

In 2003 the satellite altimetry record was mysteriously tilted upwards to imply a sudden sea level rise rate of 2.3mm per year. When I criticised this dishonest adjustment at a global warming conference in Moscow, a British member of the IPCC delegation admitted in public the reason for this new calibration: ‘We had to do so, otherwise there would be no trend.’

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  LudDims boasting of how donations have risen from "£571,715 in the third quarter of 2006" to "£1,199,623 between July and September this year".

  Perhaps this is because of some unnoticed great rise in the party's real popularity, or because the economy is growing so well that people have more money to give away. If not the only other explanation I can think of it that at least half of all donations to parties are because the donors are buying access to those in power and the LudDims, hated as they now are, didn't have a sniff of power before. I don't like the idea of parties being funded by government on the basis of the votes they get. On the other hand I much less like the idea of them being funded by businesses, lobbyists and individuals buying the friendship of lawmakers. I love to hear of a 3rd option.
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  American Democrat party strategy seems to be fixed on getting the votes of the non-employed and the civil servant class, having lost a majority of the workers and just geting to get out the loyal vote. In Britain the "workers party" seems equally intent on ignoring the remaining workers, on the other hand so do the Tories, particularly in Scotland. Call it forward to basics.

Will the president hold sufficient support among communities of color, educated whites, Millennials, single women, and seculars and avoid a catastrophic meltdown among white working-class voters?

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Scary

  It has been proven that when it comes to technical innovation offering prizes is 33-100 times more effective than conventional grant government funding. That governments nonetheless choose overwhelmingly to go for grants or government construction programmes suggests that "paying government employees and their friends" ) Pournelles's Iron Law, is indeed overwhelmingly the primary aim of government projects and the nominal aim no more than 3% as important.

   Prizes have the advantage of being available to anybody who can do the job and does not involve them having any government employee looking over their shoulder telling them how to do it. This incidentally proves that the Saltire Prize for developing a "commercial" sea turbine, though sold by Alex Salmond as an X-Prize isn't - the civil servants are involved at all stages in testing, their appears to be no technical specification of what "commercially viable" means (& I doubt such is possible) and a prize is going to be awarded to somebody come what may.

   So lets look at use of prizes in some other fields.

Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership
Awarded by the Mo Ibrahim Foundation to African heads of state who deliver security, health, education and economic development to their constituents, and who democratically transfer power to their successor. It was sponsored by Mo Ibrahim, a businessman born in Sudan. According to Ibrahim, "Good governance is crucial." With a $5 million initial payment, plus $200,000 a year for life,

  Awarded
 2007 Joaquim Chissano for "his role in leading Mozambique from conflict to peace and democracy."
2008 Festus Mogae “President Mogae’s outstanding leadership has ensured Botswana’s continued stability and prosperity in the face of an HIV/AIDS pandemic which threatened the future of his country and people."

2009, 2010 No award

2011 Pedro Pires' "role in making Cape Verde a "model of democracy, stability and increased prosperity".

    Which at $15 million has probably done more to produce what passes for democracy and prosperity in Africa than most of the hundreds of billions in western "aid" has over the decades. A considerably smaller amount than Tony Blair, alone has received on the US lecture circuit and elsewhere from people who approve of his support for the invasion of Iraq, but arguably Britain is more important than all of Africa.

Jerry Pounrnelle did propose, perhaps not in complete earnest, that had America, instead of invading Iraq, offered a $1 billion prize to the winner of the first democratic election in Iraq it would have become a democracy without having to spend over a trillion dollars killing people.




Crimestoppers. It Works .

when an innovative Albuquerque police officer offered a reward and the promise of anonymity for any person who could provide information to help solve a local murder, Crimestoppers was born.

The non-profit, citizen-run organization spread quickly throughout the country and beyond the borders of the United States. Today, there are Crimestoppers organizations in all 50 states and in nearly 25 countries throughout the world.

The Greater New Orleans Crimestoppers was formed in 1981, serving Orleans, Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. Bernard, St. John the Baptish, St. Charles, Plaquemines, and St. James parishes. In 26 years, the organization has helped solve more than 12,000 felony crimes and paid out more than $1,750,000 in cash rewards.

By comparison New Orleans proposes a "$119.6 million agency budget next year".  So by comparison, even if we assumed the bulk of the £1.75 million was paid in the last year the conventional policing budget would be 1000 times the reward budget. By comparison Felony crimes in NO reached "a peak of 4,100 in the first half of 2009" so over 26 years around 200,000 ie 16 times the ones crimestoppers was involved in.

    Now obviously this may not be a fair comparison - the police were also involved in making the arrests crimestoppers found out about and indeed in finding supporting evidence. I suspect that the crimestoppers crimes would average more serious, if only because that means more people would know about them, but I suppose it might be the opposite. There is also always the risk of "grasses" making something up for the reward, but then that risk is probably less than that of people doing so to get early release from prison. So it would be wrong to say this proves prizes in law enforcement are 62,5 times more effective (1000/16).

    But I think it does prove that it is likely to be considerably more effective and that if we want to clear up the more serious sorts of crime increasing rewards 10 fold would be more effective than doubling the number of beat policeman. Also much cheaper.

Scientific Integrity Act

I have written on this before. This is a scientific X-Prize but of a different nature to what is normally meant.

The prize is given for finding a mathematically based technical flaw in a hypothesis which it has been proposed government policy should be based on. The obvious example is catastrophic global warming - had such a prize been available Stephen McIntyre would have won it for demolishing Mann's "Hockey Stick" theory on which the IPCC based an entire "report" except that had such a prize been available it is highly likely that somebody else would have actually checked it, not least some of the IPCC scientists, before it was officially adopted.

Nobels, Pulitzers, Turner Prize, Booker Prize, Oscars etc

  These generally are not X-Prizes in that no specific technical achievement is solicited up front, nor can there be. Nonetheless they are very successful at what they do. Because they are awarded for subjective achievement they are likely to encourage the field to move in the direction the prize awarders wish and this is what we see. Personally I would say that the Oscars do tend to improve the standard of film making- most of which is, after all, aimed at the buck of hormonal teenagers. I would also say that the Turners encourage crap. These are subjective opinions (but perhaps not purely held by me). What is less subjective is that they generally succeed in doing it.

    What these prizes also do is reflect lustre on both the entire field and on the sponsors of the prize. If you want to get stamp collecting recognised as a high art or Al Gore as trustworthy the best way of doing it is to set up, a prize, of significant financial worth and an honourable name, invite the media and ensure it goes to the world's best stamp collector or whoever. The question of who will win makes it intrinsically more interesting than just hearing somebody has been given a bonus. This may encourage givingb the appearance of a competition when it is arranged in advance. For example when the RIBA held their architecture prize award in Edinburgh and the widow of the architect flew in in advance it was hardly a surprise that the prize awarded there was to our ludicrously useless Holyrood Parliament building.

   The fact that they get sponsored shows the sponsors think it better than advertising. The fact that people can believe there is an incentive to fix shows everybody thinks they work.

Here is the very limited total of mentions of X-Prizes in out Parliament

A worthwhile pdf on the potential of privately sponsored prizes

And a very worthwhile paper on why government chose grants over prizes

   Prizes were a common way to patronize basic research in the eighteenth century. Science historians say grants then won over prizes because grants are a superior institution. If different patron types tend to use different patronage forms, however, perhaps the patron types who tend to use grants just became more common. To test this hypothesis, I estimate the use of prize-like vs. grant-like funding among eighteenth century scientific societies. Societies with non-autocratic, non-local government patrons were especially likely to use grant-like funding. As these are today’s dominant patrons of basic research, eighteenth century data successfully predicts current patronage forms....

a statistical model has been constructed to predict the combinations of grant-like and prize-like patronage among eighteenth century scientific societies. This model successfully predicts today’s dominant form of basic research patronage, mostly grant-like and not prize-like, and such predictions rely more on patron types than on a proxy for scientific professionalization....I have suggested that such governments might prefer grant-like funding to prize-like funding because they were susceptible to distributive pressures from leaders of scientific societies, who preferred the “pork” of increased discretion over the money that passed through theirhands.

   My conclusion is that prizes generally are a superior way of achieving objective than government prepayment. There are building projects where there is one site and a choice must be made in advance, where fixed price contracts are the only applicable option. There are cases, like High Court Judges, where one would not wish money to be a consideration in decision making. However in general prizes should be the preferred option and in almost all fields some expansion of the proportion of resources spent on prizes vis a vis conventional funding should be made.

UPDATE - Jerry Pournelle, from whom I & I suspect everybody else, first learned of X-Prizes has linked to this and also given me a 2nd mention today.