Click to get your own widget

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Official - Scotland's Politics Some Of The Most Corrupt In the World - Media Too

   On Monday I wrote of my new ThinkScotland article which explains how 7/8ths of the budget of Scottish government projects goes "missing". I said that one obvious explanation is corruption - either straight theft, "preferred bidder status being bought by backhanders, deliberate "hiring" of friends of those in charge to do no productive work etc. etc.

   I also said that if there was any other explanation our Holyrood politicians would be able, and would clearly want, to provide it. The same applies also to our newspapers and broadcasters.

   I have to say, having contacted both, that not one single MSP nor one single Scots journalist has felt there is any other explanation any of them feel able to make of how all these billions of pounds can be disappearing other than their fraud and theft. The MSPs and Executive are legally and morally responsible.

  By comparison with Russia I previously said how the Telegraph reported that the fact that roadbuilding in Russia cost 2.5 times more there than in the EU (£7 mill against £2.9 mill per mile) was due to both theft and bureaucratic parasitism in Russia. Suggesting fraud cost £4.2 mill per mile. The Aberdeen bypass was £23.3 million per mile, suggesting fraud in Scotland takes £20.4 million, meaning corruption is 5 times more serious a problem here than there.

   The Scottish budget is £30 billion. I still believe it is likely that significant parts of it are not subject to being 87% theft.

Labels: , ,


Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Is This How Much The State Spends On Promoting Big Government?

  How much does government spend on propagandising the case for more and bigger government. Omitting the BBC budget.

   Not the sort of information made widely available so this will only be an estimate but this from  the Sock Puppet Report gives a pointer:

Between 1997 and 2005, the combined income of Britain’s charities nearly doubled, from £19.8


billion to £37.9 billion, with the biggest growth coming in grants and contracts from government

departments (Smith and Whittington, 2006, p. 1). According to the Centre for Policy Studies, state

funding rose by 38 per cent in the first years of the twenty-first century while private donations rose

by just seven per cent (ibid.).   1997 Charitable giving + Sock puppetry = £19.8bn 2005 Charitable x 1.07 + Sock puppetry x 1.38 = 37.9bn   Taking off the initial genuine charitable giving from both equations means that 30% of state donations would be £17 billion and total state donations as of 2005 £77 bn, which is clearly mathematically impossible.   So I am just going to assume all the giving in 1997 was genuine and that it rose 7% as declared to £21.2 bn by 2005. Which means the rest - government sock puppetry - came to £16.7 billion.   If the state were already financing any "charities" in 1997, such as the Terrance Higgins AIDS Trust which it was, the real figure would be higher. Lets assume 20%.   If we include the 70% of all "environmental charities" except Greenpeace paid out of the 20% of the EU budget devoted to promoting "environmental" scares it would be bigger than that. Say 20% of the UK government spend.    If there has been an increase, proportionate to inflation, over the last 9 years that would be 20% higher.   Then government departments and quangos spend a lot of money themselves, indeed they are more profligate than charities in doing so. My guess is that they spend in house at least the same as what they hand over to others to spend.   Which comes to £58 billion. That seems extraordinarily high but I have minimised each of the escalators.   £58 Billion As A credible Minimum Of What The Government Spends Persuading Us We Need more Government   End all that and the government's deficit is halved - to a sustainable level of about £60 million where the national debt climbs in line with normal national growth + inflation.   All we need is to make it a firing offence for any official or minister to authorise giving any money to a charity, quango, local authjority or their own press officer or themselves who spend any money on advertising or propagandising, including donaating money to outside parties to do so.    The NHS was not set up to be a self advertising organisation.   This appears to be a signpost of Pournelle's Law that any bureaucracy comes to be controlled by those intent on enhancing the size and power of the organisation, rather than doing what the organisation was nominally set up to do.   (I would also make knowing of making payment for a gagging clause in anybody's golden parachute, as the current NHS boss did to hide the 1.200+ Somerset Hospital deaths)   Or lets go a little further. If UKIP get a share of power make it a requirement that that 0.5% annually of the money spent over the previous 5 years on advertising for big government and Luddism, be required to be donated to charities whose purpose is to propagandise for small government and human progress and against nannystatist totalitarianism. £2.5 billion a year.   I think that would do a lot of good. It would also provide an incentive for the bureaucrats to stop pushing and after 10 years there would be no money being spent on either side. Hopefully.

Labels: , ,


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Stonehenge and the Round Table

  Some time ago I wrote of how I had come up with a theory that King Arthur was probably not merely a Roman officer called Artorius but that he could be identified as coming from the area then and previously known as Etrusca centring on the current city of Modena, where the first known visual representation of King Arthur exists above the doors of the city cathedral.

    Here is what I think is another piece of the Arthur story and how it delineates British culture on a deeper level than previously understood.

   Last Sunday Channel 4 did a programme on new archaeological discoveries at Stonehenge.

   It centred on the post holes that make up an outer circle around the famous stone circle and predates it

The results of his latest investigation:


reveal that the first stones at Stonehenge were put up 500 years earlier than previously thought at around 3000 BC. The monument we see today was not the original Stonehenge;

prove that Stonehenge as it looks today was built 200 years earlier than previously thought, around 2500 BC;

explain the choice of the site on Salisbury Plain;

prove that Stonehenge was once the site of vast communal feasts attended by some 4000 people, a substantial proportion of the British population (then estimated at only tens of thousands), with people coming from as far afield as highland Scotland to celebrate the solstice.

Professor Parker Pearson believes his findings provide compelling evidence that Stonehenge once united the people of Britain. And his analysis of the bodies and grave goods found on and around the site and around it also offers an answer to the mystery of Stonehenge’s decline.

  The 3,000 BC Stonehenge was the outer circle with 53 "bluestones" marking the graves of high status people from all over Britain. Ignore all the modern stuff in the middle - it wasn't there when the place really was an annual winter (Yuletide) celebration site for a large proportion of the entirety of Britain. The bones of animals eaten in the feasting came fom across the British Isles, as far away as Orkney, but not from across the Channel, proving a political or at least cultural unity even 5,000 years ago.

   What the central stones, added 500 years later show is that this site was remembered as being important long after, after the intervening  arrival of the Beaker People in Britain. In many ways very like the way the written record of Arthur in the 12thC is far greater than that of the 5thC but the reality happened in the 5thC.

   When I saw the layout of 53 separate graves round what is now the outer edge of Stonehenge I immediately said "Round Table".and subsequent thought fits with the idea.

   The point about the round table was that it has no head and thus nobody there has the formal leadership role.

   The concept of rulership by a group of people seated in such a way that they are all of equal rights fits this old Stonehenge. In fact it fits it better than in the Arthurian legend because Arthur was the leader (though he was the war leader not a king and certainly not the sort of Feudal king that existed at the time the legend was written down). Round Table as symbol of governance is indeed the complete antithesis of the sort of Feudal monarch Arthur was eventually writtin into being.

   Was there a real round table in the centre of the open space that was/is Stonehenge or was it a metaphorical device? We cannot know because it is long gone but I suspect it is no metaphor and there actually was. Historians have a long record of assuming something was a metaphor when it wasn't - Atlantis, Agamemnon's crown and Troy. The remains of ones ancestors are of great importance in many cultures and common evidence of rights. If there was a central table each of these descendants of the original grave occupiers would be able to sit in front of their own ancestor asserting their hereditary right to be there and acknowledging that of all the others. That is as good a way of maintaining order as I can imagine for any political confederation of that level of technology.

   The Round Table is not mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth's original book about Arthur of about 1236. It appears in Wace's Norman-French version of 1155 and is expanded by Laymon.

    Wace says Arthur created the Round Table to prevent quarrels among his barons, none of whom would accept a lower place than the others.[1] Layamon added to the story when he adapted Wace's work into the Middle English Brut in the early 13th century, saying that the quarrel between Arthur's vassals led to violence at a Yuletide feast. In response a Cornish carpenter built an enormous but easily transportable Round Table to prevent further dispute.[1] Wace claims he was not the source of the Round Table; both he and Layamon credit it instead to the Bretons....

There is some similarity between the chroniclers' description of the Round Table and a custom recorded in Celtic stories, in which warriors sit in a circle around the king or lead warrior, in some cases feuding over the order of precedence as in Layamon.[1]

   The Bretons who settled Brittany had come from Britain when the Saxons were overrunning the country. It is thus in no way surprising that they would know ancient British lore as well as, or perhaps better than the inhabitants of England, who were as Saxon as they were ancient British. Geoffrey might not have heard of it but if Wace was in the process of transforming the Arthur legend from a mythic version of a historic person to an origin myth of the British people that is exactly when we might expect the addition of a Round Table myth (mythic only in the way that Troy used to be mythic) which was and had been for 4,000 years, central to the origin of the British people.

     Many modern people may find it impropable that, without books, a historic story could be preserved for that many generations of bardic retelling. The Iliad was probably written within 1,000 tears of the events described but that is a much shorter time. The Epic of Gilgamesh survives but because it was written. Older stories, such as the Garden of Eden referring to either the Climate Optimum of about 5,000 BC or the flooding of the Black Sea are uncertain.

   But there is something almost that old. The earliest written record of Merlin, written about the time of the historic Arthur, refers to him as having flown the Stones that make up the "modern" Stonehenge from Ireland. Obviously they weren't flown, but floated, and they came from Wales not Ireland, which in both cases can mean - from a little known land far away to the west.  But the fact that they had been brought from such a distance, even by non-magical means, is not a random assumption. Clearly some memory of Stonehenge had been repeated down the millennia.

   In which case a non-magical Round Table is no more difficult to remember.

   With Arthur, finding that his name originated near Modena, where his first visualisation was, gave corroboration.

   In the same way finding Laymon's unanticipated assertion that the Round Table was built to preserve peace at a mid-winter feast, when we know the main use of the early Stonehenge was around a mid-winter feast, seems to me to provide as much corroboration as we can currently expect.

     If culture is important to social stability and progress and there is strong evidence that it is, finding part of a common egalitarian British political culture that has lasted 5,000 years is no small matter.

Labels: , , ,


Monday, March 11, 2013

Forth Bridge - £2,300 Million Taken From The Public - Is There any Explanation Other than The Ovbious.

   Latest ThinkScotland article up. I don't actually use the word "fraud" to describe how Holyrood, almost unanimously, chose to take £460 from every voter for what they knew to be a useless white elephant and ensured that £402 of that ended up in the hands of friends who had not earned it.

   As an openly scandalous misuse of our money this £2,300 useless project goes way beyond the Scottish Parliament building (£430 million) or the tram project (probably £1,000 before it is over) in both cost and uselessness of the original project.

 
I must admit when I heard of this I thought that the media protest would raise the roof. Indeed I thought my letter, sent to a number of papers, from which much of the rest of this article is taken, would be merely one small wave in a torrent of such.

 

Possibly it was but none of them got published. Zilch, nada, barely a cheep from the Scottish media.

 

Does this media uninterest in the selling of a false prospectus costing every man woman and child in Scotland £440 explain why, despite a fairly proportional electoral process that nominally produces relatively low barriers to entry the political system, we have one of the most closed, inbred, useless and unresponsive political classes west of North Korea.

    There may be an explanation other than corruption on a scale that makes Russian politicians and media look like symbols of rectitude.

    If so, since this is going out to these politicos and journalists, they will doubtless, at last, be eager to say what it is and thus explain that they are not personally wholly corrupt..

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Recession Is Deliberate Toralitarian Treason - We Can End It At Anmy Time

I was impressed by this summation from Newt Gingrich

during the past few years the American people have:
Developed desktop 3D-printers which can manufacture almost any object you can imagine within a few minutes. You can buy these devices for roughly the cost of a laptop and print out, in plastic, anything you can design on your computer, or any 3D models from an online library. You can then send away to a website like Shapeways to have the design printed in stainless steel, silver, or ceramic. People are only beginning to understand the enormous possibilities for industry, logistics, education, science and medicine. This video provides is a great short explanation.

Carried regenerative medicine to the point of growing people new organs using their own cells. In fact, we will be able to 3D-print new organs using live cells within the foreseeable future. In this video Dr. Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine explains how they are growing replacement bladders in incubators using patients’ own cells.
Created intelligent, autonomous drones for civilian use. You might have heard of drone military aircraft (especially after Senator Rand Paul’s impressive filibuster this week) but soon civilians will have access to drones of all sizes as well. The potential for cargo shipping, transportation, public safety and more is extraordinary. This video of a University of Pennsylvania lab shows a whole swarm of personal drones.
Pioneered the development of a driverless car. In addition to autonomous aircraft, Americans might soon travel in cars controlled completely by artificial intelligence. Sebastian Thrun at Google leads a team that created a car which has driven hundreds of thousands of miles autonomously on California roads. The implications for safety and quality of life are incalculable. He explains the project in this video. This Audi already parks itself automatically.
Launched private spacecraft, without NASA. Sir Richard Branson and others have independently developed private spacecraft which are prepared to carry paying customers on suborbital flights and beyond. Last week, SpaceX became the first private company to resupply the International Space Station. Branson discusses Virgin Galactic in this video.
Made a high quality education available to everyone online, for free. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, has recorded thousands of hours of free lessons on everything from basic biology to calculus, in a project that started as a way to help his younger cousins catch up in school. Today, his ever-expanding collection of lessons is known as Khan Academy. They have been viewed more than 244 million times. In some schools, teachers now assign students to take the lessons at home and to do their homework in class — where the teacher can help kids if they get stumped. Salman Khan talks about project in this video.

Several of these developments may be at least as important as the computer revolution of the past two decades.

  I would also add shale gas fraccing and the development of algae able to grow oil.

It coalesces well with my feeling that technology, being the foundation of progress, expanding faster than at any time in human history, means that we could achieve economic progress also faster than at any time in human history, if allowed. Particularly because the UK is surpassed in scientific citations per capita only by Switzerland (& Scotland surpasses the UK average).

    Also worth pointing out that 2 of the 5, driverless cars and commercial space development, owe a lot to X-Prizes.

    "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things"
The corollary being that a wealthy state can be reduced to poverty, or in the current state of 5% world growth, can be kept in minor recession until the lowest and most barbaric catch up, by politicians actively trying to do so - as present circumstances prove.


Alex Salmond knows that:

"“The skills, ingenuity, training and expertise of the human capital that you develop will determine the long-term prosperity of the economy, and indeed will determine the long-term prosperity of the world,”

Which means that his deliberate stifling of energy technology in Scotland is not the action of an ignorant fool but of somebody deliberately and treasonously trying to keep us in recession.

    The same applies to David Cameron who has also unquestionably lied that he want's growth while absolutely refusing to do what he knows would achieve it.

   Back in my 9% Growth Party days I opted for (you guessed it) around 9% growth. It could certainly have been achieved. I have shown how, in theory and with some luck, if each point on the programme could add 1% to growth (in some cases that is by far an underestimate) growth would be 24% a year. and it isn't even disputed by any of these parasites that according to all the science of economics, this is the case.

    No wonder UKIP, despite still being censored by the state broadcaster, is now on 17% (63% of the Tory polling) even according to the Observer, and still rising and perhaps even more importantly 56% believe governemnt policies (almost indistinguishable from Labour ones) are harming the economy. The people have rimbeled the thieves and parasites and it is only reqyured for UKIP to close the deal and convince we not only coull (they all could) but would get the economy into world class growth.

Labels: , , , ,


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?

British Blogs.