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Saturday, July 09, 2011

Goodbye Shuttle & Government Parasites - Hello the Individuals Who Want to Make Space Accessible

   Seeing as America's last Shuttle is in orbit and  their government's ability to launch a man into orbit is gone, for the first time since the 1960s, I am posting some links. Optimistically this will be seen as the moment when space development ceased to be primarily or entirely a monopoly of governments, whose prime interest in space is to persuade us to give them money which they then use on pork barreling. eg "less well publicized – it did not, as the Saturn/Apollo approach did, mean the reindustrialization of the South. It was important to the Moon Mission that Lyndon Johnson be on board. ....Johnson insisted that most of the heavy work be done in the South."

How to do it Immediately

Jerry Pournelle on How to Get to Space - X-Programmes, which includes prizes

Lazar launching, both for space and for suborbital travel round the Earth

Magnetic rail launching cargo and high G tolerant cargo only but inexpensive and do-able now

Nuclear pulse launch from underground

Ion engine from Earth orbit to Mars in 39 days

Sea Dragon - a very large conventional ship taking advantage of the square cube law

Can We Build An Elevator To Space? - The Royal Institution Christmas Lecture 2010 - BBC Four   video. Not the sort of thing that gets mentioned on the main news

How it is being done - How Space-X will put a 737 in orbit in 2013/14 and save NASA's bacon bnut Space-X will be in the driving seat

How Government Refuses to Do It

2/3rds of space money comes from the private sector (by comparison 50% of ALL money in Britain is spent by government)

Although governments have made space agencies responsible for commercialisation of space activities, their efforts are not sincere. Most importantly, although they acknowledge that passenger space travel is likely to become the largest commercial activity in space, they are delaying its development by Patrick Collins who came up with this inexpensive sub-orbital craft at £50 million, which our government don't want.

Private Lunar X-Prize drives the new Moon race


Nearly 50 years wasted by Government ecofascist parasites but we are back on track

2 Technological Developments

Moon found to have a liquid core - typical of the British press that only the Daily Mail were interested in reporting it

James Woodward's Mach Effect - if you have mass moving at relativistic velocity inside another mass, then the internal moving mass can make itself heavier or lighter depending on how fast it's moving.


So then if you make the overall system oscillate (surrounding mass), and you time the movements of the inner mass with the oscillations, then you can selectively impart more momentum in one part of the oscillation than in another, for the overall system. This would create a net change in momentum for the system.

In other words a true inertialess space drive

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Friday, July 08, 2011

BBC restrict news reporting to NoTW Hacking - I See if Equality Under the Law Applies

  Last night the BBC news was almost entirely devoted to the hacking story story; followed by Question Time where all the questions selected by the BBC except for 1 in the last 3 minutes were the same; followed by Andrew Neil on the same. 2 1/2 hours on this story and virtually none on the rest of the world’s news That would be justified if we were seeing a breaking news story like 9/11 but for nothing less.
    Broadcasting in Britain is essentially a monopoly of the BBC and people they approve of and this monopoly. legally committed to “balance” is in fact the propaganda arm of the British state (along with the Guardian which survives on government advertising). Murdoch’s attempt to buy all of Sky would weaken that monopoly slightly.

   I do not consider it a coincidence that this scandal, which journalists of all newspapers have been guilty of for years, has suddenly broken on Murdoch’s head alone.

  Yesterday I gave the evidence that the originator of this story, the Guardian, has a record of hacking private communication and the letter I had sent to them. Neither the Guardian nor the PCC have felt able to dispute the accuracy of what I said in any way. Note that hacking emails, something Mr Vulliamy seems to have admitted to and of which the Guardian staff were clearly aware and complicit.

   Today Mr Coulson has been arrested. He appears guilty of perjury in the Sheriden trial. We know that the police have repeatedly accepted bribes and even at the time it was widely commented on how unusual it was to spend millions prosecuting Sheriden for saying things a jury had claimed to believe. I think the Scottish legal establishment including Elish Angiolini, Scotland's former Solicitor General and openly a corrupt fascist accessory in war crimes and genocide  have questions to answer.

    Prosecuting him but not others in the same circumstances looks like perverting the course of justice. This is not to say that Sheriden is innocent - he clearly isn't - but merely to say that Coulson, Angiolini, Blair, Ashdown etc etc should join him behind bars.

   In that cause
          correspondenceunit at attorneygeneral.gsi.gov.uk
Attorney General,
                           I note that arrests have been made in the case of alleged hacking by News International journalists. I hope the law will be allowed to take its course without fear or favour.
In which case it is clearly my duty to draw your attention to a public admission of complicity in theft of emails and probable hacking by another newspaper. The Guardian.
On March 15th 2000, in an article by Ed Vulliamy, the Guardian said
This is the text of an email that came my way from Kekic to Hoey, written after the Nato bombardment of 1995 that produced the Dayton agreement:
....................
. The message was sent from Kekic's electronic address at the Economist Intelligence Unit on September 14, 1995, at 10.11am. Others in the series of emails involve chatter about gainful contact with David Owen and friendly journalists at the BBC and Observer.
This was clearly obtained and published without the owner's consent and appears to be a criminal act.
I have asked the Guardian and indeed the PCC if they can defend this act but neither have chosen to do so in any way.
Though I have experience of your office protecting mass murderers guilty of complicity in racial genocide, child rape and the dissection of living human beings it appears, from the amount of coverage given by the BBC to hacking that it is a more, in some cases infinitely more, serious crime.
I look forward to hearing from you whether the Guardian's criminality will equally be investigated.
And without fear and favour.
Neil Craig
big butt 300x234 How to Get a Smaller Butt
The government cheeck being the important one

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Thursday, July 07, 2011

GUARDIAN BOAST OF THEIR INVOLVEMENT IN HACKING - PRESS COUNCIL REFUSE TO INVESTIGATE

 The News of the World's hacking of  private individuals is, we are told, the big "news" today. Yesterday the first half of the BBC's 10 O'clock News was given over to it and virtually all of Newsnight - a total of almost an hour. The Guardian, which enjoys a very close relationship with the BBC since they are both essentially government financed (BBC through the licence fee, Guardian through disproportionate government advertising) were the first to run with this. Here is my open letter to the editor:
Dear Editor,
                    I notice that Guardian has been heavily promoting the story of the News of the World having  illegally hacked members of the public's electronic communication. Such things should indeed be exposed and condemned. However you have repeatedly suggested that by doing so the NoTW have fallen short of the highest standards to which the Guardian and indeed the British press as a whole aspire.

   For this you owe them a public apology since you know that the Guardian also engage in this practice.

   On March 15th 2000, in an article by Ed Vulliamy, the Guardian said 
This is the text of an email that came my way from Kekic to Hoey, written after the Nato bombardment of 1995 that produced the Dayton agreement:
....................
. The message was sent from Kekic's electronic address at the Economist Intelligence Unit on September 14, 1995, at 10.11am. Others in the series of emails involve chatter about gainful contact with David Owen and friendly journalists at the BBC and Observer.
     This was clearly obtained and published without the owner's consent and appears to be a criminal act.

     As you should know, at the time I put a complaint about this to the Press Complaints Commission who officially represent the highest ethical standards of the British press and who, despite it being a flagrant breach of their "Code of Practice" [Sect 10 "The press must not seek to obtain or publish material acquired by using hidden cameras or clandestine listening devices; or by intercepting private or mobile telephone calls, messages or emails"] declined even to investigate, on the grounds that  I was not the author of the emails.

     We both know that the PCC, while officially representing the very highest standard of honesty to which British journalists ever aspire is willing to repudiate any commitment to any form of integrity, even its own "code of practice", to protect those who pay it. Having once repudiated its code on the grounds, not allowed by the "code", that only the author may bring a complaint. It will be interesting to see if the PCC having, dishonestly repudiated their "code" will repudiate the repudiation in the case of Milly Dowler who will not be putting in her own complaint thereby bringing their lack of integrity full circle.

  However, whatever from of dishonesty the PCC adopt it remains the fact that the NoTW have done nothing which is outwith the practice of the entire British press. Indeed they have not gone to the extreme of publishing selected extracts from these recordings as is obviously the Guardian's practice. You therefore owe them a public apology, taking up as much space as the original allegations confirming that, however heinous intercepting people's private communications may be they have not only done nothing worse than, or even as bad as the practice of the Guardian and indeed the official highest standards of the British press.

Neil Craig
  This has gone out to the Guardian editor and the PCC. If they feel capable of defending their actions i will be happy to publish.
 
   The original article mentioned was a follow up to the ITN/LM "trial" where the judge told the hury that just because everything LM said about ITN faking their "concentration camp" video was "essentially true" they should still still find for ITN (it having been previously said that these lies were justifised because they were in the "western interest". I had put in a previous complaint to the PCC saying that a Guardian claim that anybody who didn't support our Moslem Nazi friends was "anti-semitic" as breaching their rules on racism, as well as truth, but they decided that the "code's" stricture against racism and lying didn't matter either.
 
    Also to, the BBC
 
Sir,
       I note that last night the BBC gave the first half of your evening news over to the NoTW hacking scandal, heavily reported by the Guardian, and virtually the whole of Newsnight too. A total of 1 hour as opposed to 15 minutes for the rest of the universe. 
 
    I know that the BBC take no serious interest in maintaining you legal duty of "due balance" in your reportin where it involves lying or censoring to support state policy or even to promote particualr political parties or factions within parties, however this unbalanced reporting and in particular the repeated mention of the "Murdoch press" is an abuse more directly promoting BBC vested interests. The BBC is currently fighting to get the government to prevent Mr Murdoch taking full control of Sky which, while it would not give his organisation, anything close to the media semi-monopoly the BBC holds, would give you a minor but significant competitor.
 
    The conflict of interest in singling out the "Murdoch Emore" as, in some way falling short of the normal standards of the British media is disgraceful. As you know the Nazi-supporting Guardian, about which the BBC never says a rude word, also hack private communications, indeed more heinously than the NoTW.
 
     If the BBC is to achieve the "due balance" you are legally required to show you must now spend an hour on tonight or tomorrow's evening news' equally denigrating the Guardian's publication of hacked emails.
 
     I await seeing if you will demonstrate the remotest trace of integrity or whether you will continue censoring and propagandising to promote BBC fascism.

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Wednesday, July 06, 2011

Edinburgh Tram Rip Off - Herald Letter (but they leave out the bit about it being the civil servants & politicians fault

  This letter in Today's Herald. It went out to all and sundry so I don't know if it will appear elsewhere as well:

Back in 2007 we were told that the Edinburgh tram project was a "fixed price contract". Subsequently legal action by the contractors led to a decision that 90% of the cost overruns on the elements in question were because of changes made by the officials at TIE. It appears that TIE have not decided to face any further legal action.
In May this year we were told that £411 million had already been spent and the next day that it was £440. Now we are told that cancelling it will cost £750 million and continuing £700 million.
It may indeed be true that TIE's meddling is responsible for at least 90% of the cost overruns but even then I fail to see how stopping the fixed price contract can involve the contractors in more legitimate expense than actually completing the work will. I would welcome some assurances but only from somebody who has not previously assured us of the success of the project/
In any case nobody involved should ever have a job in the public sector which gives them responsibility for 1 penny of public money and that includes the politicians.
When Muir-Russell took the fall for allegedly keeping from Ministers the fact that the Scottish Parliament building costs were also out of control (something evident to everybody else) he was given numerous well paid public jobs by these same politicians. Ultimately he was asked to chair the enquiry into the Climategate leaks & the hiding of the decline in global temperature where he duly found that nobody in charge was guilty of any serious wrongdoing and that the politicians had certainly not known. I would like to think that this will not be repeated.
-------------------------------

Ref - "fixed price" and the rest http://www.arcom.ac.uk/publications/procs/ar2010-1289-1298_Lowe.pdf

- costs given in May http://news.scotsman.com/edinburgh/Tram-spend-so-far-hits.6767568.jp
 
Bits in bold were edited out. The reference to TIE being found in court 90% responsible for the overrun comes from this Herald report so it is perhaps surprising that the Herald felt uncomfortable about repeating it.
 
I can understand the deletion of the stuff about Muir-Russell as it is not immediately part of the tram project. However it is directly relevant to the pattern of a political culture where covering up incompetence or fraud (there was certainly fraud in the Parliament scandal since Dewar made a specific promise it would cost only £490 million which was clearly dishonest).
 
After all it is the job of the media to support those in power by playing down their incompetencies, frauds and thefts isn't it?

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Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Europe: the World's Most Economically Unsuccessful Continent Because..

The climate policy of the European Union is now stuck in a dead end. Europe wanted to be the leader – showing the world the way. ....climate summits in Copenhagen and in Cancun were supposed to herald a successor treaty for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But both summits yielded zero results. Today it is clear that there is going to be no successor agreement....

The emerging economies of Asia, especially, are refusing to allow their possibilities for growth to be curbed by obligatory CO2 reductions. Everywhere across the world, climate laws are being buried for good or put on ice.
Treating the EU promotion of global warming alarmism as a way of asserting Europe as the potential global leader and a good way to be rude to the Americans while weighting the Kyoto rules against them has been a failure. And then some. Arguably the greatest failure since the Battle of Adrianople. OK overstatement but I only said "arguably".

The EU used to be the world's largest economic unit with the USA as only competitor and it still is. .But only just and only because American growth has been very poor too and because when warming alarmism started there were no other real competitors. Over the last decade and a half the world economy has grown at 5% annually, China's at 10% and India's, Russia's etc at about 7-9%. That means, by the rule of 70 the world's GNP has double over a decade and a half, China's has quadrupled; the other faster growing countries have tripled  The EU has barely grown if we include the current recession.We tried to lead the world into a dead end and the world has refused to follow.

   This has political consequences. Nobody is going to be persuaded to follow an EU lead for at least a generation. We no longer have the economic clout to pressure anybody. The dominant body is no longer the G7 but the G20, and even more humiliatingly the G20 is not actually made up of the largest 20 economies as the name implies because several countries, which are members of the EU should be included. Presumably it would be even more humiliating to remove them in a few years.

   Which is why China is now in a position to act against the EU's last feeble effort - carbon taxing other countries airlines. Initially by deciding not to buy from Airbus. Whether they buy or not all that this scheme would do would be for Europe to isolate the rest of the world from it (or rather vice versa).

  Whose fault is it that the EU has done this charge of the Light Brigade style folly (another military disaster metaphor but they are apt)? The fault of our Luddite and incompetent political leaders alone, that is whose. Now can we please get rid of these Luddite parasites. I don't even insist on it being fatal.

  An in a neat twist of irony the latest warming alarmist claim is that the reason claimed for the last decades failure to warm catastrophically, ot at all, is blamed on China's industrialisation putting more particulates in the air. Yes the alarmists are saying that China's failure to cut CO2, indeed increasing it markedly, is to blame for the failure of their scare story.

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Monday, July 04, 2011

£10 Billion Gas Back-Up for £100 Billion worth of Windmills because they don't work. But Even Gas is a Rip Off

   The government have belatedly noticed that windmills don't work all, or even most of the time. So with a plan to provide 1/3rd of our electricity by windmills (17 gigawatts) they have come up with a back-up plan. Back-up gas generators. As Chris Booker and others report
Centrica and other energy companies last week told DECC that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.


We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on "spinning reserve", 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.
  These 17 new gigawatt stations will thus be able to produce all the electricity the windmills are supposed to, revealing that it is acknowledged that sometimes the windmills will produce none and are thus a complete waste of the £100 billion (official current price promise) they  cost.


   However lets look further into this. The AP 1000 nuclear plant costs "AP1000 ..... $1000 per KW construction cost and 3 year construction time" (also discussed here) when ordered in volume. $1 bn is £600 million so 17 of them cost exactly the same as the £10 billion worth of gas generators backing up the £100 billion worth of windmills. However the gas generators require large amounts of fuel (gas) which makes up the large majority of costs whereas nuclear fuel is a tiny part of the total cost (most of the cost being satisfying government regulations and levies).

   More proof that 93% of the cost of electricity is political parasitism. Not only are these politicians thus responsible for most of the 25,000 annual deaths from fuel poverty, 2/3rd of electricity use is non-domestic and this is most of why our industries are being driven to China and other relatively honestly governed countries while we remain in recession.

    British "production of electricity was 393 TWh in 2004" but " declined 11 % in 2009 compared to 2004". Since electricity use is closely related to GNP this explains why we are in recession, despite the entirely artificial "growth" of the Labour years based on borrowing on artificially inflated house prices.

    Costs average
we estimate that £500 buys approximately 3382 kWh of electricity with the local supplier
.  which comes to £58 billion. which is 4.1% of GNP. 93% of that is 3.8% of GNP. Remember that nearly 50% of GNP is already officially government spending, which has a net negative effect on national wealth. None of the 3.8% counts as tax though it is all taken from us by government regulation. So even if government spending has "officially " been reduced below the 50% figure in fact it is above it.This is purely money taken from us. It takes no account of the 50% overall reduction in national wealth caused by a variety of government regulations, including the secondary effects of high power costs.

     The good news is that from all this it is obvious that if we drastically cut the amount stolen by government parasites and allowed a free market to allocate resources we would certainly achieve a growth rate matching or more likely considerably exceeding China's 10%.

     I wish there was a member of the Conservative Party who was willing to say that the insistence of their present leadership in continuing the recession, when they know perfectly well how to get out of it, is not only not in the interests of the country but not even in the interests of the party. Better to be out of power, rid of cameron, rid of the LudDims and able to produce worthwhile policiess while letting Useless Ed take the helm for some months.

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Sunday, July 03, 2011

Links on Various Social

  China will be a democracy by 2017 because all rich countries are democracies. I replied
He is assuming democracy as being the "end of history" ultimate.


Perhaps a lot of people would prefer a competently run autocracy. Singapore, which is the template for much that has happened in China is a democracy but few ever vote for anybody but the ruling party, which is indeed highly competent and professional.

In the most developed countries we are seeing democracy superseded by a badly run but deeply entrenched bureaucratic state spending around 50% of national wealth and having an obedient media preventing real political debate. This is what we see in the US and to a greater degree in the EU, where only thee trappings of democracy remain.

Given a democratic choice I suspect most Chinese would choose Singapore over the EU. This is the choice that Russian people did make when they, freely and by an overwhelming majority, voted for Putin.

Given a truly free choice and free debate between those 2 options how do you think most Americans or Europeans would vote?
Roger Scruton on why environmental controls are better than the urban sprawl of American cities. I am on the other side but he is a very intelligent man and makes a strong case. Everything, including not being an environmentalist (the real sort not Luddites in stolen clothes) has a cost.

The Guardian's hundred greatest books. Mostly written in the last hundred years. 5 on science, not a single one on economics, 17 biographies and memoirs (2 classifications)(all PC types); Germaine Greer is in Heinlein, Wells, Asimov, anybody like that, is out. So the Guardian is for semi-literates then. No surprise.

Religious end of the world prophecies from 30 to 1920 AD.

Prizes for innovative design

Al Fin on pre-natal testosterone exposure and genius, autism etc. I think they are linked and if the price of more genius is more autism I would happily pay it.

Cool pictures of the world's biggest vehicles


Proposal for an X-Prize for a brain-computer interface. I think this is something that a prize would work for. Such a link would change humanity but it is difficult to see that the team who produced it (I'm sure it would take a team) could charge enough to make them all billionaires, which would be a fair share of the profit.

How the Mississippi flooding is not caused by anthropogenic global warming or Man's inability to control nature (2 mutually incompatible ecofascist claims) but by ecofascist vetos over what the US Army Corps of Engineers is allowed to do to prevent it. On a much smaller scale this is what happened to the English village of Cockermouth - the ecofascists and media prevented the river being dredged and then blamed to inevitable flood on global warming; or the fires and floods in Australia )the Greens vetoed undergrowth clearance and dam building).

Will we ever see another Constitutional Amendment? Not because the Constitution isn't being changed but because all that is required to do it is judicial activism. It took an amendment to ban alcohol, merely a law to ban cannabis and the EPA thinks it can ban carbon dioxide by bureaucratic fiat.

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