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Friday, December 17, 2004

THE HYDROGEN ECONOMY

The hydrogen economy has been one of the Green's Holy Grails for years. Basically if you burn hydrogen rather than petrol the only pollution you get is water vapour. To make the hydrogen in the first place all you need is to run an electric current through water.

What many of the less numerate Greens haven't realised is that you arn't getting electricity free in the first place it has to be generated & the nature of the universe being what it is, you get less energy out than you put in.

Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods, raising the possibility of using nuclear power to indirectly wean the transportation system from its dependence on oil..........Experts cite three big obstacles to a hydrogen economy: manufacturing hydrogen cleanly and at low cost, finding a way to ship it and store it, and reducing the astronomical price of fuel cells.

"This is a breakthrough in the first part," said J. Stephen Herring, a consulting engineer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, which plans to announce the development tomorrow with Cerametec Inc. of Salt Lake City. ..................The heart of the plan is an improvement on the most convenient way to extract hydrogen, which is to run electric current through water, splitting the H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen, called electrolysis.

The new method involves running electricity through water that has a high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen.

The idea is to build a reactor that would heat the cooling medium in the nuclear core, in this case helium gas, to about 1,000 degrees Celsius. The existing generation of reactors, used exclusively for electricity generation, use water for cooling and heat it to only about 300 degrees Celsius.

The hot gas would be used two ways. It would spin a turbine to make electricity, which could be run through the water being separated. And it would heat that water. But if electricity demand on the power grid ran extremely high, the hydrogen production could easily be shut down for a few hours, designers say.

If this works at about twice the efficiency of conventional electrolysis it could very well be that using off peak nuclear power, which already has a very low marginal cost, could produce hydrogen which would be cheaper per energy unit, than petrol. Nuclear power is difficult to switch on & off quickly & the most efficient way to run it is continuously at full power. On the other hand our electricity needs vary. Thus a system which can make use of off peak is desirable.

This puts us in the situation where we can go over to 100% cheap nuclear electricity & end most oil imports on the margins & all much cheaper than invading Iraq.

To be fair all the arguments about producing hydrogen from nuclear work equally well with using off peak wind power - except, of course, that wind could never come close to matching nuclear's & thus oil's cost.

ISN'T DEMOCRACY WONDERFUL

Continuing the stuff about Electoral Calculus (only slightly inspired by the fact that Portaloo just referred to it on the late BBC1 politics show}. Lets have a look at a few more possible results from http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/index.html:


For the Tories to win:

National Prediction: CON majority 4
Party Pred Votes Pred Seats
CON 35.00% 325
NAZI WAR CRIMINAL PARTY 25.00% 229
LIB 19.00% 57
Which means a 10% swing from Nazi to Tory - dream on

For Bliar to get a majority
National Prediction: LAB majority 6
Pred Votes Pred Seats
CON 34.00% 231
NAZI CHILD RAPIST 33.00% 326
LIB 22.00% 58
Considerably less than the polls suggest now.
When Mussolini came to power he passed a law saying that the largest party should automatically get 60% of the seats (fascism was/is the belief that strong government is more important than democratic government). What a piker. The War Criminals Party can get a majority on being the 2nd party with just under 1/3rd of the votes.

& if all 3 parties got the same representation we have

National Prediction: LAB majority 8
Party Pred Votes Pred Seats
BLOODSUCKING NAZI PARTY 30.00% 198
CHILD RAPING NAZI PARTY 30.00% 327
PANTSDOWN CHILD SLAVERS 30.00% 90
Another massive landslide for "New Labour"

To get all 3 parties to have the same representation we need:

National Prediction: CON short 119 of majority
Party Pred Votes Pred Seats
CON 28.38% 205
LAB 25.50% 204
LIB 34.62% 205

Isn't democracy wonderful? & wouldn't it be a nice idea?

Wednesday, December 15, 2004

SPRINGTIME FOR HITLER

The International Court of Justice has just proven itself to consist of the best judges Nato can buy. This means that International Law now absolutely does not exist. The court has decided to ignore every rule under which sovereignty & the rule of law exists:

NATO members, including Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Canada, argued at hearings in April that the United Nations' highest court could not consider Serbia and Montenegro's claim.

The 8 NATO states concerned said at the time their action was justified by what they said was Belgrade's ethnic cleansing of Kosovo's majority ethnic Albanian population. The former Yugoslavia argued the air strikes violated international law.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the former Yugoslavia was not an official member of the United Nations when it initiated the case in April 1999 and as a result was also not a party to the ICJ's statute.

"The court unanimously finds that it has no jurisdiction to entertain the claim made in the application filed by Serbia and Montenegro on the 29th of April, 1999," Judge Shi Jiuyong said.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, made up of Serbia and Montenegro, was recognised as a U.N. member in 2000, ending an ambiguous legal status sparked by the break-up of the Former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Of course the kangaroo judges could have said that 4 years ago, but that would have interfered with the nazi filth making a decision that they did have authority to "judge" on the non-existent Yugoslav invasion of the legally non-existent Bosnian state. No doubt these corrupt racists will, in due course, rule that Yugoslavia is liable for the fact that many Bosnian Serbs refused to submit to genocide.

This decision means that Hitler's attack on Poland was ok because the UN didn't exist at the time & that the survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto owe damages for illegally attacking the SS.

They do not actually say that all the NATO leaders aren't actually guilty of war crimes, genocide & child sex slavery (the evidence is absolutely irrefutable that Blair & his Nazis & the others are) but that it doesn't matter.

Apart from moral qualms the problem with legalising aggressive war & genocide is that, since the law can provide no defence every state has right indeed a duty, to defend itself in any way possible. North Korea has a duty to point nukes at California, bin Laden cannot be blamed for doing anything wrong & the one time SNP spokesman whose policy was that an independent Scotland should buy missiles, load them with anthrax & point them at all European capitals was merely exercising sensible caution. Not good.

Blair is a corrupt genocidal mass murdering nazi child rapist who makes Fred West look like a respectable citizen - everybody knows it & he & his co-conspirators must be brought to justice.


Tuesday, December 14, 2004

ELECTORAL CALCULUS

If there were a General Election tomorrow, what would happen?

Current Prediction: Labour majority 134
Party 2001 Votes 2001 Seats Pred Votes Pred Seats
CON 32.70% 165 31.37% 169
LAB 42.05% 403 37.02% 390
LIB 18.84% 51 21.64% 57

Prediction based on opinion polls from 4 Nov 04 to 5 Dec 04, sampling 8,475 people.

From Electoral Calculus

My guess is that the Lib Dem vote will be a bit higher (Lib Dem votes usually go up a bit near elections because they actually get mentioned on telly) & that the Labour vote will drop a few % because of UKIP & Respect(SSP in Scotland) & the Tories similarly because of UKIP. You can pull me up on this after the day.

What this looks like is a result very similar the last "overwhelming Labour victory" on paper. One difference is that traditionally people have voted not for one party but to keep out the other (not for Blair but to keep out Thatcher) - on this occasion it looks like you can vote for whoever you want & Labour still wins. The Tories would have to do 9% better than (& Labour 9% worse) shows to get a majority & that just ain't gonna happen.

The problem for democracy is that Labour may achieve this on not much more than, or even less than 1/3rd of the vote. The Labour vote is more concentrated so the FPTP system doesn't work quite as well for the Tories (which doesn't stop them looking back on their golden days & supporting a system they know is corrupt but used to be corrupt in their favour).

I personally think that having a government that is heartily disliked by 2/3rds of the people (actually more assuming another dismal turnout) but has essentially unlimited legislative & executive power is not consistent with democracy. But then I think water is wet so what do I know?


SMOKING DEBACLE

The First Minister decided to go it alone even though a Scottish Executive opinion poll - published yesterday - showed that only 13 per cent of Scots supported a total ban in pubs.

In the opinion poll just over a third of the 1,026 people interviewed were against any form of smoking ban in enclosed public places. And even among the 54 per cent of respondents who expressed support for some sort of ban, more than half of those said it should not apply to pubs, while 21 per cent said clubs should be exempt.

It appears that the Executive, by desperately looking for something to do have got themselves in a bit of a mess. When Jack made his Queen's speech at the start of this term his main Bill was to stop female circumcision. A practice which just about everybody can deplore but, since Scotland is not part of sub-saharan Africa, not a major problem. Going for banning smoking has a bit more political credit - on the other hand it is liable to annoy a lot more people. Perhaps he should have stuck to banning only small minority interests - a practice which has been used by power hungry leaders from time immemorial.

It does not say much for Scotland's political class that none of the parties represented the view of up to 87% of Scots (the Tories are now fishing in troubled waters but were not initially on the individual freedom side here).

EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS APPLIES IN IRAQ _ DOES IT APPLY IN EUROPE?

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=7088460

"- In a test case over British troops' alleged abuse of Iraqi civilians, a London court on Tuesday backed demands for an independent inquiry into claims a Basra hotel worker was beaten to death by UK soldiers.

It said the European Convention on Human Rights was valid in British territorial outposts such as prisons, even when they were on another state's territory."

This may be useful for Kosovo where, for 4 years, the UK has been responsible for defending law, providing "protection" & disarming the KLA & has intead assisted in the genocide & ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people. There would appear to be a prima faci case that each of those people can sue the European, tho' not American, members of Nato for certainly 10s & probably 100s of thousands apiece.

A UK defence in any such case would seem to depend on saying that the officially disarmed KLA were the ones doing the murdering & that our government had done everything possible to protect the locals. Since it was us who set up the KLA, didn't disarm them, appointed them as police, looked the other way, occasionally released KLA members caught fleeing the scene (caught by ordeinary squaddies who actually thought they were there for some humanitarian purpose) & of course demonstrated exactly what was possible in the way of bombing to take over Kosovo in the first place. It would take a very corrupt court to support the government in that case so they are clearly in with a chance.

Monday, December 13, 2004

AN IMPROBABLE BUT ACCEPTED CONSPIRACY THEORY

Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko called for a serious investigation to determine how he was poisoned by dioxin, but urged it be conducted after the December 26 presidential run-off election to avoid influencing the results.
[..]
"I don't want this factor to influence the election in some way - either as a plus or a minus," Yuschenko said in Russian as he left the clinic and headed back to Kiev.

It is a matter of record that his Austrian doctor had, up till Sunday, refused to say that he had been poisoned. On Sunday we were told that tests carried out that day proved that he had dioxin (though paradoxically that his liver now contained no dioxins). Why this was verifiable by tests now but not previously wasn't asked. The Scotsman report also said that this use of dioxin as a deliberate poison was "unique".

Ho Hum.

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