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Saturday, June 05, 2010

ASH - EASYJEY FINDS THE ANSWER, GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY STILL MOST OF THE PROBLEM


Previously I said that the ash cloud from Iceland was likely to have a disastrous effect on flights across Europe for many months.

Then I acknowledged I had got it wrong by putting trust in the government regulators who had said this ash cloud was dangerous. This has proven to be the ravings of government bureaucratic empire builders & there is no sign whatsoever of any significant actual damage caused by the ash (as distinct from the hundreds of millions of £s destroyed by the bureaucrats.

However I was wrong there too. Just because the ash itself has proven harmless this has not stopped the occasional government closing of airports. If the adjoining & larger Katlya volcano erupts, as historically it has following every such eruption, then the ash cloud will become much heavier & the opportunity to ban things therefore much greater.

On the other hand I was right about one thing. The correct solution.
On the grounds that the solution to technological problems is improved technology we should be looking that way
According to the ever excellent EU Referendum
Technology may be about to resolve the problem of volcanic ash, thus rescuing the hard-pressed airline industry – which is as it always has been. This is through the use of a system called AVOID (Airborne Volcanic Object Identifier and Detector), which has been around for some time, but has never previously got off the ground – so to speak.

The equipment – in essence, modified infra-red detectors which can pick up volcanic dust clouds, relying on their IR absorbency characteristics – is to be trialled by easyJet, which has put £1 million into a research pot in the hope that its use will minimise future disruption from volcanic ash.

These data provided by the kit will, in theory, enable pilots to detect ash clouds up to 62 miles (100 kilometres) ahead of and at altitudes between 5,000 and 50,000 ft, allowing pilots to make adjustments to flight paths if needed. Data can also be transmitted to a ground station, allowing real-time plots of ash-clouds to be built up, reducing the reliance on Met Office predictions.

The technology had yet to be fully validated for commercial use, much less approved by safety regulators, but the attempt by easyJet to find a solution makes for a interesting contrast with the Civil Aviation Authority, which is actually charged with the job of ensuring the safety of UK airspace...

And there you have the classic divergence in attitude. The industry, which has to keep the show on the road in order to make money, gets on with finding solutions to problems, while the regulator concentrates on covering its own arse and bitching that the industry has not been doing enough.
Not the specific solution I suggested but that is the what improving the technology means. Three cheers for Easyjet then. Developing systems that help everybody is somewhere that, in theory, government should be better at than individual entrepreneurs. In theory the CCA should have been putting up £1 million, preferably in the form of a prize, out of their small change, to test something like this. Practice indicates, yet again how very poor established bureaucracies are at innovation. Note that even within the market it is Easyjet, the newest, least bureaucratic & least government supported that has done this.

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Friday, June 04, 2010

STRAWS BLOWING IN THE WIND

That the intellectual battle between libertarianism/traditional liberalism & traditional conservatism is over. Now for the main event - taking on the overweening state 7 its hangers on. The concept of needing ever larger government has been intellectually defeated - all that remains is the actuality.


Norman Tebbit, probably the best PM we never had & an intellectual Conservative runs a very thoughtful blog under the heading
The era of Big Government is coming to an end. But do we really know what is next?
government has grown so big – that it regulates, licenses, forbids, encourages, subsidises, taxes, moralises, employs, delivers services, on such a scale, across such a wide spectrum of society and the economy. It is really hard these days not to be told what to do, or what not to do, by some agency of the State every day of our lives. As ever, those who are sufficiently upset, dissatisfied, or feel short-changed by what government delivers to them are likely to be more vociferous than those left reasonably content.

The result is a near permanent atmosphere of dissatisfaction simply because we all feel bossed around and let down. Mr. Cameron’s plea for “a bigger society and a smaller state” is a rational, even if as yet a shapeless response to this problem.

We need to ask ourselves what are the things which a government must deliver in order for a nation to function effectively because we cannot do them for ourselves, what are the things which it may be able to deliver better than anyone else, and what it should not do.

First of all, for a nation to exist and to enjoy the benefits of its homeland territory, its government must be able to defend its borders against any unwelcome intruders. We simply cannot do that for ourselves. It is first the first duty and priority of government. Second, the government must preserve “the Queen’s Peace”. That is more than just law and order. It is the right of the subject to go about his lawful business in peace. That requires a system of criminal law and the means of enforcing it, including the judiciary and the police. Third, the government must provide a system of civil law for the settlement of disputes between individuals or groups.

From here on we begin to move from the absolutely mandatory towards the highly desirable. At the top of that list is the provision of a stable currency to be used as a medium of exchange and a store of value. Then there follows a structure of commercial law and regulation, and the provision of infrastructure, or the facilitation of that provision by others.

After those comes a long list of desirables which are increasingly not absolutely necessary for a state to exist. Indeed there was a perfectly viable state and an effective government before they began to be provided by the state.

Universal education is highly desirable, but it does not have to be provided by government. The same is true of health care. Ignorance and disease can both be threats to a society or nation. So too can be poverty and policies to reduce poverty are highly desirable too...

Smaller government has at least a chance of being better government. Bigger government is bound to be worse government.
This is a thoughtful analysis of the role of government. It differs from what he & the Thatcherites did in government. In theory they also were against big government but in practice they found expanding the central power of government the quickest way to reform, as indeed it is. However, although Thatcher ended her rule with government out of the direct ownership of industry she did not leave it severely cut back & it was free to growth, through regulatory excess, which is even more damaging than ownership because it has less responsibility. Thus under Labour it was possible for direct government to reach 53% of the economy. In his autobiography Lord Tebbit made some rather cutting remarks about the libertarian wing of the Tory party (ie Conservative student organisation of the time) not really being intellectual because their answer to every question was less government. Now he has not reversed himself on this (& indeed there are some libertarians who do feel that & I am not one) but his direction of aim is clearly much more towards a very deliberate rolling back of state power as far as it can reasonably go.

A libertarian rolling back of government has moved from a somewhat weird position to being the intellectual opposition position. Officially it is even the government position since David Cameron also says 'I'll roll back Labour's Big Brother state" but that is more a sign of the intellectual incoherence governments always have than a trustworthy commitment. Government is always a balancing act whereas it is oppositions who push ideas. In this sense Labour show no sign of becoming an opposition - the real opposition will be on the conservative back benches where both David Davis & John Redwood have been helpfully left, & in UKIP.


The other straw is UKIP. They have just announced appointing Christopher Monckton has been appointed deputy leader of UKIP. Lord Monckton is reputed to have been the backroom policy wonk who came up with the idea of selling people their council houses - the Thatcher government's most popular & socially constructive measure - so popular that all the leftist parties, who hated it at the time, now at least pretend to support it. More recently he has been one of the global leaders in fighting the catastrophic warming fraud & an exceptionally proficient speaker in the process.

This certainly makes UKIP much more than a 1 issue party. Mind you when the one issue is leaving the EU & even the BBC admit most of us do & the other parties all have deliberately lied about allowing us a referendum on the subject, that is a good issue. He is certainly the sort of technophile needed in government & a first rate intellectual mind, willing & able to speak out.

Always assuming the globe does not actually start this long promised catastrophic warming I think we can assume that UKIP will prosper with this added impetus & that parties which have spent so long enforcing ever more state parasitism on us through this lie will lose support. It is not the end of state parasitism but as El Alamien was once described "it is perhaps the end of the beginning".

Another couple of points
- In America Arthur Robinson, the eminent scientist who masterminded the Oregon Petition, in which 31,000 scientists have said that not only is catastrophic warming a fraud but that more CO2 is likely to be beneficial, has won the Republican primary in Oregon. That does not guarantee he will beat the democrat in November but he certainly has a fighting chance & enough people supported this libertarian scientist to give him the nomination.

- UKIP are handing out free memberships. Doesn't actually cost them anything since they are non-voting & only postage costs are emails but we could actually see a mass political party forming again in this country. Anyone can join. I did.

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Thursday, June 03, 2010

FORTH BRIDGE - REPAIR & EXPANSION - ANOTHER OPTION NOT DISCUSSED


This is the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. To build it cost $32 million (US $201 million in 2006 prices)(£140 million) & it is 2,277.64 m long. Not bad compared to our proposed £2,300 million new Forth crossing at 2.2km. However the cost of just building it is not the issue I wish to raise. This bridge has not only been subsequently recabled - the alleged reason we need a new bridge is the alleged inability to do this - but with stronger cabling underwent a considerable expansion
From the outset the bridge was designed to carry a road and a lower railway deck and it would have been the longest such bridge had this been implemented at construction. However, it was only in summer 1999 that the lower railway deck was ready for use after major preparatory works which included the fitting of additional cables and the widening of the roadway to six lanes, as well as re-painting of the bridge. The "retro-fit" of the railway track was the largest such project undertaken on a bridge in the world. The rail deck is below the road carriageway and was completed by hauling construction materials up to it, to avoid disruption of road traffic.
Recabling a bridge is obviously a very simple & virtually routine matter compared to building it. In the period since the original bridge the strengths of available materials has increased enormously, indeed we are now able to make carbon nanotubes able to, at least theoretically, construct a space elevator 33,0000 miles long so strengthening such a bridge would be a doddle allowing double decking the present bridge. My suspicion is that they will find it possible to recable shortly after work starts on the new bridge & explain, correctly, that the current bridge is so overloaded that we need both.

The only question then is whether the towers are strong enough to take the extra weight. They are - The suspension cables are the only part of the original structure that has not been enhanced or replaced. The towers and box girders carrying the deck have been massively strengthened over the years. The hanger cables have been renewed as have many of the bolts so it only leaves the suspension cables.

A simple expansion would be to would be to replace the cables & add a fifth lane which, comparing to the Lisbon bridge would cost £10 million at 1996 prices plus inflation.

A fifth carriage would allow for 3 lanes of traffic in the direction of travel at rush hour thereby increasing capacity by 1/3rd at peak times. If cutting a tunnel it will be cheaper & quicker to cut one tunnel at a time & the single completed one can be limited at peak time to traffic in the dominant direction. Matching the full expansion of the Portuguese bridge bridge (5 lanes & 2 railroad/automated light rail/2 extra road lanes) would probably cost a bit more but I can see no way that an expanded current bridge together with a 4 lanes of tunnel (previously est £40 million) totaling 11 lanes of traffic, need cost as much as £100 million.

The attempt to get £2,300 million out of us for this is clearly fraudulent. There may be questions as to who is doing the fraud but as Harry Truman pointed out the buck stops with the government & the Holyrood "numptocracy" MSPs who vote for it. It is far from overstating the case to say that they have a duty to the people they asked to vote for them not to be complicit in defrauding us over over £2 billion. Compared to this their £380 million cost overrun on the Scottish Parliament which has already made Scotland a laughing stock was a minor thing.

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Wednesday, June 02, 2010

THE MORNING STAR AGAIN ALONE, REFUSES TO CENSOR IN THE NAZI CAUSE - LETTER


Just a small example of NATO's purpose

Once again the Morning Star, Britain's "communist" newspaper has, alone, been willing to publish a letter about the dissections still currently going on under our government control in Kosovo. And the rest of the Anglo-American press & broadcasters are deliberately censoring it.
This is a shorter version of my recent article because the Star emailed me saying they wished to publish but needed it cut down to 300 words so I did so.
Why silence on dissection horrors?
Monday 31 May 2010 Printable Email When Nato first took over Kosovo it armed and organised the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as its police.

The KLA was allowed free reign to engage in massacres and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Gypsies, Jews and non-racist Albanians and kidnapped thousands of schoolchildren - mainly girls - to serve in Western and occupation brothels.

Kidnapped too were 1,300 civilians whose bodies were used for dissection, while still alive, to provide body organs for Western hospitals.

The British and US media have with almost total unanimity censored mention of these atrocities, the Morning Star excepted.

Now a UN Dossier HPQ 215/2002 confirms the bureaucrats know all this.

What is much worse is that they know that the dissection of living people is continuing to this day.

The dossier states that "certain Kosovo clinics, especially in the city of Pristina, use enormous amounts of blood." Note the use of the present tense.

This can only be for keeping people alive as they are dissected and government bureaucrats are assisting by keeping silent.

We have let the KLA drug lords, sex slavers and baby dissectors claim to be running an independent Kosovan state - but at all levels European Union "mentors" do the actual governing.

Everybody knows independence is a fiction.

By comparison with the dissection of living people the gas chambers at Auschwitz was a painless death and Hitler, even if his sanity is to be questioned, was engaged in what he believed to be a war of national survival.

NATO never had such excuse for its mugging of Yugoslavia and the most obscene atrocities occurred during our "peaceful" occupation.

Those who eat meat cannot claim moral superiority to the butcher.

Editors, broadcasters and indeed journalists who continue to censor the news to assist in the continued assembly line dissection of living people to steal their body organs cannot claim moral superiority to the staff of Auschwitz.

Neil Craig
Glasgow
Though this genocide is a very important issue, the western media censorship of it is an equally important issue. It cannot now be seriously disputed that the entire Anglo-American media virtually without any other exception is corrupt & willing to censor in the cause of their master's criminality, genocide, & modern cannibalism in the Nazi cause. Compare & contrast this with their coverage of the Israeli blockade fiasco. I also sent a letter on that subject making the comparison. Anybody reading the news or selected letters & comparing them with coverage of our government's acts. Not only has it not been published but almost no letters appear which are not on the anti-Semitic side. Of course if the media have no compunction on lying to assist in racial genocide there can be no subject whatsoever for which they have any scruples about racist lying.

Unpublished
Legally there is no question that Israel has every right to blockade a territory which is not only at war with it but regularly launches unprovoked rocket attacks aimed purely at the genocide of civilians & with no military intent. Anybody saying otherwise must say why the precedent of the allied blockade during WW2 should not be equally denounced.

More seriously is the obvious reporting bias in Britain. When the Croatian Nazi regime's army, under de facto US/UK command, murdered dozens of UN peacekeepers in their invasion of Krajina it got not 100th as much cover. When the NATO police (formerly the KLA who we went to war for to assist in genocide) kidnapped & dissected, while still alive, 1,800 local civilians it got not 1,000th as much in the NATO countries' media.coverage

It can thus be stated that every single news organisation which gives serious coverage to this but censors our own far more serious killings has demonstrated a strong bias towards people with Nazi antecedents & an equally strong anti-Semitic bias. This obviously also applies to any politician who criticises the Jews for action not 1,000th as genocidal as their own.
Letter sent about the Israeli enforcement of blockade. I have seen no similarly balanced letters allowed in the MSM (or obvious opinions on TV).

Once again my article got a mention in Britblog roundup(albeit implying it was the "Kosovo government's" fault not ours) but, despite a much smaller pool to choose from, not in in Scottish Roundup.

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Tuesday, June 01, 2010

SCOTTISH SEWAGE PUTS THE GULF OIL SPILL IN THE SHADE

The release of about 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, all of it biodegradable, very little of which has reached land & much of which is being immediately recaptured, is dominating the American news media. Not only that it is a major news story in the UK.
The media continues to attempt to portray this disaster as "the apocalypse of the century", yet a much larger spill, Ixtoc, was cleared from the Bay of Campeche by natural forces within two years after the 10 month extended gusher was capped.

Academics, politicians, and faux environmentalists with their inflated tales of doom have been placed into the center of attention by a media intent on making a disaster into a total cataclysm.
Our TV news has shown the eagerness with which camera teams are scouring hundreds of miles of shores to find very minor brown streaks coming ashore.

Meanwhile in Scotland
Scottish beaches are suffering from a six-year decline in standards and 35% are poised to fail international tests in 2015, a new report by the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) said.

Thirteen Scottish beaches have been dropped from the MCS’s Recommended list, including Carnoustie in Angus and Yellowcraigs in East Lothian.

A total of 13 others failed tests on water quality, including ?Barassie and Heads of Ayr in South Ayrshire and Saltcoats and Irvine in North Ayrshire. Ettrick Bay in Argyll and Bute and Lower Largo in Fife also failed...

Unless the downward trend is reversed, the tough new regulations could deal a blow to tourism by failing 28 Scottish beaches on the grounds that the water is unclean...

MCS coastal pollution officer Thomas Bell said that planned investment programmes by Scottish Water over the next five years would improve bathing waters north of the border and added that combined sewer overflows (CSOs) would now be at the centre of his organisation’s efforts.

“Scotland has a large network of these pipes on the coast, which are designed to carry sewage out of flooded sewer systems and deposit it in rivers or the sea,” he said.

“There are many places where they don’t cause a problem but 63% of tested beaches aren’t recommended by MCS because of pollution, a percentage that is set to go higher with tougher standards from 2015. We believe that CSOs are partly to blame.”

Of 105 beaches tested in Scotland between June and December 2009, 39 have been recommended for excellent water quality.

Some of the best beaches were found far from population centres, as might be expected.

Several urban beaches scored highly on the list, however, including Portobello Central, near Edinburgh, and St Andrews in Fife...

A Scottish Water spokesman said that a multi-million-pound investment programme was under way to improve the water quality in Troon, Irvine, Meadowhead and Stevenston, including £750,000 to install a new outfall pipe at Irvine’s South Beach.

A further £290,000 is funding maintenance projects near beaches such as Barassie and Fairlie.

This isn't rocket science. It isn't remotely as difficult to extend sewer pipes far enough out to sea. Portobello is listed as particularly clean & it notoriously used not to be. When "environmentalists" are castigating BP for what will clearly be billions in costs & pushing the Scottish Parliament into destroying £100s of billions (half our economy within 10 years) on fighting non-existent "catastrophic global warming" the few millions, if that, needed to keep our beaches clean of a pollution considerably nastier, at least for human beings, than oil is being delayed.

It shows that the "environmental movement" cares not a jot about the real environment & is simply a cover for Luddites, who don't understand technology & wouldn't like it if they did, to pose under. Scots who really care about the environment, of which I am one, consider this much more impotrant news to us than the Gulf spill. Most "Green" activists & all journalists do not.

Oil, in oil rich areas, has been seeping into the sea since before human beings evolved. By comparison can anybody deny that the Scottish problem is worse, likely to continue far longer, able to be solved by existing technology (longer pipes) at under 1/100th the cost & of little to no interest to media "environmentalists". 11 news mentions of Scots beaches against 20,836 for the oil.

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Sunday, May 30, 2010

RADIATION HORMESIS - THOMAS D. LUCKEY


Author

Two very interesting things about this book.

Firstly the book itself which is clearly a very thoroughly researched & almost irrefutable amassing of evidence for the radiation hormesis effect rather than the government enforced "consensus" LNT, that low level radiation is harmful. Unfortunately this Google books link will only give you limited access for perfectly reasonable copyright reasons.

Secondly the fact that it is out of print. According to ABE this 1991 hardback is available at £206.25 (the Amazon price in dollars is higher). The laws of supply & demand would at least suggest that there is significant demand for it - enough to make a reprint, let alone a paperback, profitable. Perhaps publishers feel under some pressure not to. Perhaps this is only paranoia on my part & another explanation is available. If so I look forward to hearing it.

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