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Saturday, July 30, 2011

POLAR BEAR FRAUD PROVEN FRAUD - IS THIS THE END OF THE Warming Scam? It certainly discredits the

symbol of the warming alarmist movement

  Watts Up With That reports how Charles Muttonhead has been suspended. He was responsible for the Polar Bears Face Extinction Due to Global Warming fraud which was used by Al Gore in his fil among many other stories. Watts has published the transcript of the interview on this and the whole thing is nonsense albeit well rewarded nonsense. Muttonhead's is so far out of his depth that it would be hilarious if it were not tragic how much damage is being done by the eco-fascist fraud.
He admits gross incompetence as the only option other than outright fraud but I do not see them as incompatible
Wrong numbers and calculations?
ERIC MAY: Well, what we‟ve been discussing for the last hour.

JEFF RUCH: So this is it?

CHARLES MONNETT: Well, that‟s not scientific misconduct anyway. If anything, it‟s sloppy. I mean, that‟s not – I mean, I mean, the level of criticism that they seem to have leveled here, scientific misconduct, uh, suggests that we did something deliberately to deceive or to, to change it.

   It turns out that the entire case was that he saw 4 polar bears and a week later saw 4 drowned ones, 3 of them tagged. He therefore ASSUMED they were 3 of the original 4, though there was no evidence for it. He then ASSUMED there had been 36 bears in the area, though there was no evidence for it. He then ASSUMED 27 of them must have died. He then ASSUMED the storm that killed them was caused by catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, though there was no evidence for it. He then ASSUMED the same applied to all polar bear populations, though there was no evidence for it.

Thereby "proving" that polar bears face extinction because of global warming.

I think this proves 2 things.
 
1)  The Quality of the Expert "Peers" Within Climate"Science"
 
This fraud was published by a respected journal after being passed by "peer review". Now "peer" review is a 2 way street. It officially exists to prevent low quality papers being published by people who are not the "peers" of the experts in the field. Thus Nature repeatedly refused to publish Stephen McIntyre's paper proving the Hockey Stick wrong because they decided that he was not the "peer" of Nature or its reviewers. Indeed he isn't. If McIntyre's paper, which has since been proven correct was not of the same quality Nature and the climate "science" community aspire to but this ridiculous fraud was, as they accepted it was, then, by definition the entire climate "science" peer group, must be assumed frauds until proven otherwise.
 
"Peer review" is as much a test of the integrity and competence of the members of the discipline as it is of the paper being reviewed. This paper has been proven obviously nonsense,from the start and the entire climate "science" movement as either incompetent or fraudulent, or both.
 
2) That It Is Being Recognised That The Game Is Up
 
 Why did his bosses suddenly decide to jump on him when he made this "discovery" in 2007. This was my answer on Delingpole
One cynical possibility that fits the facts is that BOEMRE have sensitive political antennae. They recognise the warming fraud is on its last legs, as is Obama and wish to be able to say they recognised Monnett's dishonesty (omitting any mention of how long it took them) and got rid of him.If so the story is even more important than it seems because it means the warming fraud is so obviously dead that government bureaucrats are willing to act, ahead of the curve, to abandon the sinking ship (ok I know that mixes metaphors).
which was answered by Suffolkboy
neilcraig Possibly spot on. I have met "scapegoating", whitewashing, blame-shifting, terms-of-reference restriction and all manner of devious scheming to achieve higher management's aims or prevent a perceived "adversary" prevailing. The techniques are honed to their highest level in government. The symptom is that a seemingly minor or irrelevant misdemeanour acquires the role of a weapon or "key trump card" or blackmail that can be rolled out at strategic moments.
This alternative fits extraordinarily well with Watt's subsequent post reporting that BOEMRE are now saying that he was not suspended for the polar bear fraud, even though the above transcript proves they know it is fraudulent, but for some other reason, but they refuse to say what it is. Bureaucrats are twisty turny things. They are not prepared to actually say anything but know not only that this is a fraud (something they must, if remotely competent, have known since its inception in 1977, but that this game is up.
----------------------------

Note that one of the reasons I originally gave for supporting Palin, back in 2008, was that she denounced the polar bear scam, back then when some thought that was. akin to political suicide.


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Friday, July 29, 2011

Benjamin Franklin Quotes

Ben Franklin Quotes
  I have a particular admiration for people who are successful in more than one field of endeavour. Benjamin Franklin started poor yet was a successful leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. If he didn't write the US Consittution he did influence some clauses and as representative to France he did persuade the French government to enter the war against Britain - something without which it is difficult to see how the US could have won the war of independence.

     This level of all round competence has never been demonstraed before or since by any political leader so I think he is qualified to be the smartest politician who ever lived. This may be obscured tom historians because so much of what he wrote was deliberately writen to be undersood by ordinary people and nowadays sounds like "homespun philosophy". Nope - it is very well spun indeed with not a word saying more, or less, than intended.

      A selection:

I think opinions should be judged of by their influences and effects, and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous; which I hope is the case with me.
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Remember that time is money.
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For my own Part, when I am employed in serving others, I do not look upon myself as conferring Favours, but as paying Debts. In my Travels, and since my Settlement, I have received much Kindness from Men, to whom I shall never have any Opportunity of making the least direct Return. And numberless Mercies from God, who is infinitely above being benefited by our Services. Those Kindnesses from Men, I can therefore only Return on their Fellow Men
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Love your Enemies, for they tell you your Faults.
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[on a book promoting aethiesm) I shall only give you my Opinion that tho’ your Reasonings are subtle, and may prevail with some Readers, you will not succeed so as to change the general Sentiments of Mankind on that Subject, and the Consequence of printing this Piece will be a great deal of Odium drawn upon your self, Mischief to you and no Benefit to others. He that spits against the Wind, spits in his own Face. But were you to succeed, do you imagine any Good would be done by it? You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous Life without the Assistance afforded by Religion; you having a clear Perception of the Advantages of Virtue and the Disadvantages of Vice, and possessing a Strength of Resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common Temptations. But think how great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc’d and inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue
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Idleness and Pride Tax with a heavier Hand than Kings and Parliaments; If we can get rid of the former we may easily bear the Latter.
'
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
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They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
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All Wars are Follies, very expensive, and very mischievous ones. When will Mankind be convinced of this, and agree to settle their Differences by Arbitration? Were they to do it, even by the Cast of a Dye, it would be better than by Fighting and destroying each other.
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There never was a good war or a bad peace. {Not personally convinced this is always true but it is good rule of thumb]
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In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, — if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government but what may be a blessing to the people, if well administered; and I believe, farther, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other.
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the honest heretic Dr. Priestly. I do not call him honest by way of distinction; for I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as that would give advantage to their many enemies; and they have not like orthodox sinners, such a number of friends to excuse or justify them. Do not, however mistake me. It is not to my good friend's heresy that I impute his honesty. On the contrary, 'tis his honesty that has brought upon him the character of heretic.
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The art of concluding from experience and observation consists in evaluating probabilities, in estimating if they are high or numerous enough to constitute proof. This type of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than one might think. It demands a great sagacity generally above the power of common people. The success of charlatans, sorcerors, and alchemists — and all those who abuse public credulity — is founded on errors in this type of calculation.
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As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho' it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble.
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Most People dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves, but I give it fair Quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor and to others that are within his Sphere of Action
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So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.
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In reality there is perhaps no one of our natural Passions so hard to subdue as Pride...For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility
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as we enjoy great Advantages from the Inventions of Others, we should be glad of an Opportunity to serve others by any Invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
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Human Felicity is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.

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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Anders Breivik - Unpublished Letter - that it is unpublished proves the point made

   I sent this letter to all and sundry a few days ago and it does not appear to have been published by anybody. Frankly I didn't think it would be precisely because of the point I made- there is no democratic safety valve whereby such real and important political issues can be debated - the press and broadcasters do not allow it. The fact of the letter not being published proves it is correct.

  Even now the BBC totally censor any mention of Andrew Neather's revelation about Labour's deliberate promotion of mass immigration and I have long ago shown that the entire MSM deliberately totally censor mention of our government's genocide and organleging in occupied Kosovo.

Without media willing to report facts that the state does not wish reported there can be no democracy.
our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost”



Thomas Jefferson
And that means a press that wants to be free, not one owned by the government or that self censors in the fascist cause, as we have. Perhaps even more to the point of the recent killings
The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.


Thomas Jefferson
I do not know much about Norway's government and what I do know (they have been able to build hundreds of km of tunnels at 1/200th the cost the frauds, liars and parasites in Britain say can be done and they are not in the EU) suggests they are considerably less tyrannical than ours.  Even if he was right his tactics, killing much of the next generation of Norway's elite (young adults not the "children" the media say) may do more harm than good as the Kirov assassination in Stalin's Russia did.  Whatever one thinks of Breivik he is, by his own lights, undoubtedly a patriot willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for his country.

   I believe in the death penalty and regret that he will not face it. Nonetheless European civilisation would be much the weaker if there were no lone patriots willing to follow their own consciences. Better a country that has such people than one where the "great and good" are corrupt genocidal mass murderers and the press lie and censor to protect them.
Sir,


I do not know if the Norwegian Labour government had gone quite as far as the British Labour one in deliberately but quietly encouraging mass immigration for "social reasons" as has been publicly admitted. Labour apparatchik Andrew Neather publicly boasted this a couple of years ago though the BBC and other "respectable" organs decided it was too unimportant to report -The "social reasons" appear to be a mixture of expecting immigrants to obediently vote for them combined with the Labour nomenklatura wishing to have immigrants to do their gardening and mind their children rather than uppity working class Brits.
It in no way justifies Breivik's killings to say that when a society finds there is no democratic safety valve whereby such real and important political issues can be debated (& immigration is hardly the only one where both opponents and facts are largely undebatable in our mainstream media and parties) contempt and hatred of the out of touch political classes is inevitable. The contempt felt for MPs misusing their expenses is a very long way from the hatred Breivik showed but they are opposite ends of the same spectrum.
If one did wish to justify Breivik's killing it would be possible to point out that almost all NATO leaders, including Norway's, participated in a criminal war against Yugoslavia resulting in NATO controlled police (formerly the NATO organised, armed and trained KLA) ethnically cleansing 350,000; carrying out massacres such as the Dragodan massacre where 210 civilians were killed just outside the British military HQ) and the dissection, while still alive, of 1,3000 entirely apolitical Serb civilians. It is difficult to see why such far greater atrocities have gone largely undiscussed in our mainstream media or that those who condemn Breivik but not these murders are right to do so.

Neil Craig

REF - Neather's original article http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23760073-dont-listen-to-the-whingers---london-needs-immigrants.do since confirmed by migrationwatch FoI enquiry
You already know about the dissections and as your previous decisions to censor news or even letters on the subject proves, they ate indeed largely undiscussable in our censoring media. You may not already be aware that NATO knew of the KLA's predilections before they hired them. http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/smorg051208.htm

A number of links to his manifesto and summaries

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Wednesday, July 27, 2011

So Since the BBC Say they only Report "Scientific Consensii" Why do the Anti-Nuclearists Appear Daily?

 Dear BBC,
                   Last night on the "Hardtalk" programme on the BBC News Channel the BBC conducted what was described as a "debate" on nuclear power. In fact, of course, it was no such thing since the BBC simply refuse to do real debates and what you call "debate" was simply a Beeboid asking largely unfriendly and unanswerable questions of a representative of the nuclear industry representative and simple and largely friendly ones of a German "Green" politician.

      May I remind you that only a few days ago the BBC issued a document saying that the BBC will allow even less than the less than 1 minute to sceptics for every 10,000 given to promoting the catastrophic global warming scare. The justfication for this behaviour is that there is alleged to be a "scentific consensus" on catastrophic warming despite the BBC's repeated failure to be able to name one single indepedent scientist who is part of the alleged consensus. The BBC document, which you have not only accepted but wallowed in specifically described such action as bogus impartiality  
bogus impartiality (mathematician discovers that 2 + 2 = 4; spokesperson for Duodecimal Liberation Front insists that 2 + 2 = 5, presenter sums up that “2 + 2 = something like 4.5 but the debate goes on”) can, perversely, lead to bias in its own right, for it gives disproportionate weight to minority 58 views – and some of the minorities involved are expert in taking advantage of the platform offered. (p 58)

This point about false balance has often been made before, from the 2000 House of Lords Select Committee Report4, which criticised the tendency to pay undue attention to contrarian views “simply because confrontation makes good copy” to the 2010 Science and the Media paper2 that claimed that “applying the adversarial model to science stories has led to seriously misleading reporting”.
and
The presentational style of some coverage since that Impartiality Report has continued to suggest that a real scientific disagreement was present long after a consensus had been reached  (p71)
    I trust that you either do not dispute that there is a consensus among nuclear engineers that nuclear power is, by the standards of any other system, safe, or are able to produce evidence that there isn't. Since the definition of proof of consensus the BBC has adopted is that those in charge have said "
the technical argument was over" (p 61), that an international organisation (in that case the IPCC but in this instance the IAEA) had given their opinion and that "two hundred and fifty members of the US National Academy of Sciences" (p 71) had written a letter even though 31,000 scientists have signed a petition saying that alleged warming is not a threat. 

    I suggest to you that the consensus among experts is far stronher that nuclear power is safe. That far more than 250 nuclear engineers say that it is. That many international scientific organisations have said the same and that it wopuld be impossible for the BBC to name 31,000 scintists, or even 3,100 & probably not 310, acttual scintists willing to say that the safesty record of nuclear power is not far better, per kwh than other power sources, including windmills.

     Of course if you feel that is not an accurate and impartial assessment of the genuine scientific consesnsu you will be able to point to the 3,100 or even 310. If not then that is acknowledgement of this consensus.

     I still call for the BBC to provide that one hour of sceptical programming, which would certainly be within the balance even your own report requires. Please advise when the BBC will provide its first hour  of allowing those whom are sceptical that we are enduring catastrophic warming will be nroadcast. Or, if balancing the 10s of thousnads of hours of alarmist propaganda with 1 hour of scepticism is too close to balance, when the BBC will be broadcasting an hour of genuine formal debate with both sides?

    In any case, assuming you do not produce the 3,100 scintists, or even 310, it cannot be denied that there is a genuine scientific consensus about nuclear power.

    The BBC haviing declared the standards you allege you stand by and the scientific consensus being at least as great as that alleged for catastrophic warming (in the event of you not being able to produce the 310, more than 100 times greater. The BBC is committed, if it is in any way honest, to putting out between 10,000 and 1 million more such programmes reporting that nuclear power is safe, inexpensive, renilable, non-polluting and renewable for billions of years.

    Assuming you seek to achieve this balance within the year that will be between 30 and 3,000 programmes per day. This would be the minimum you wish to do if the BBC is to claim not to be a wholly corrupt fascist organisation or something ot would be possible for a decent human being to be associated with.

  I await your prompt response.

   Neil Craig

PS If producing 30 to 3,000 programmes a night was to stretch the deaprtment's capacity a little i would, at normal commercial rates, be willing to produce 50 or so such programmes. Anything to help.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

MORNING STAR Letter - Nuclear Power - progress, growth and reduction in poverty or a return to medievalism?

  I did not realise this letter on nuclear power had been published by the Morning Star. I did check for about a few days but not long enough and missed it:
I am pleased to see somebody in the anti-nuclear power movement saying exactly what the arguments against it are (M Star May 20).
They are:
1. Safety
2. CO2 being produced by nuclear plants
3. The question whether there is a need for such electricity at all.
Elliot Folan does not dispute that the safety argument is bogus.
Indeed he criticises Unite, not for accepting that it is safe but merely for not being deterred by the other two arguments.
Considering that the world coal industry kills about 150,000 annually and the total death toll from the nuclear generation over the last 20 years is two, nuclear is clearly safer by many orders of magnitude.
The argument that nuclear produces unacceptable amounts of CO2 is false.
Because it does not involve conventional burning, nuclear produces a minuscule amount, indeed much less, per kilowatt, than windmills, which appear to be acceptable to windmill supporters.
The question of a "need" for the electricity is a different sort of argument. That there is a close relationship between electricity use and GNP is undisputed by any economist.
There is no question that we could get out of recession, if those in power wanted it, by allowing the provision of inexpensive nuclear power (at one-tenth or less the cost of windmills). The argument against needing power then is a purely philosophical one.
Do we wish progress, growth and reduction in poverty or do we want a return to medievalism?

Unite, which has a duty to support its members' interests, has no choice but to support progress. Indeed nobody with any respect for the history of socialism could do otherwise.

The traditional "left" should look on that as an opportunity to offer a far better, technologically progressive, alternative.

Neil Craig
  It is another attempt by me to state the traditional socialist position when "progressive" was literally true because the movement supported progress.

    Mr Folan's letter that i reply did indeed, in giving his anti-nuclear argument, say "By welcoming the findings that nuclear power in Britain appears safe, they miss the point" which suggests to me that his definition of "the point" is bizarre. 
    It was replied to the next day which gave 2 new arguments - that a radiation leak from a nuclear plant could be dangerous, implicitly denying that the SO2 or indeed radiation from a coal plant could, and that they can be used to make bombs which most nuclear plants can't just as most passenger aircraft can't drop nuclear bombs. Then on 31st May came another giving as the 4th and remaining reason - nuclear "waste".which cannot be disposed of because though it can be disposed of by "digging a big hole to put it in, the so-called "deep repository." When you consider the thousands of years it will have to be protected, what guarantees are there that during this time climate change won't cause land to shift, tunnels to collapse, water to seep in - and out - carrying its burden of radioactivity?". The answer being that since reactor waste, precisely because it is so radioactive it has a short half life and will be almost all gone in decades rather than thousands of years. Then on 2nd June came a 3rd letter, again dependent on the waste argument, assuring it "has not been solved" because "radioactivity which lasts for years - we don't yet know how long". Well yes we do Radioactive element half lives are elementary.
     I very much regret not having followed the Star further and thus lost the chance, at least for now, to answer such claims.
 
    Particularly so since the Morning Star, Britain's communist newspaper has shown itself far less restrictive and censoring than the "officially approved" media. Hell it has even been more willing to discuss free enterprise options like X-Prizes than the "official" papers. On the Kosovo dissections ;using X-Prizes and the market system rather than central planning (see note at the end); the global warming scam; how the Attorney General's evidence to the Iraq inquiry shows he and Blair relied on having got away with war crimes against Yugoslavia; and others I have previously discussed here.
 
   The full run is here.

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Monday, July 25, 2011

Recent Reading - real news reporting is to be found in the blogsphere and the MSM is mainly confined to rewriting government press releases

catastrophic global warming eh?

During the Bosnian war we were constantly told by the media that the Serbs were racists who persecuted Muslims and fought against the supposedly moderate Bosnian Muslim government of Alijah Izetbegovic. Citizens in the NATO countries believed this media fiction about Bosnia because it was all they heard and saw, or thought they saw. And seeing is believing.


We were told Mr. Izetbegovic was a great moderate, and the Sarajevo weekly magazine, Svijet, supported Mr. Izetbegovic. So isn't it curious that Svijet's pictures and captions, scanned and posted below, fondly remember a World War II Nazi SS Division made up entirely of Islamic Fundamentalists from Bosnia?

This SS division was called Handzar

The latest discovery suggests there are whole “reservoirs” — the term used by the researchers — of moon water, but not on the surface, and not in liquid form. Instead, the researchers said, the water is locked up chemically in the moon’s mantle, the thick layer just beneath the surface crust.


The implications of abundant water could be profound, for water is thought essential not only for human survival, but for replenishing rocket fuel. That would be a big boost for future exploration

why the British economy is in very deep trouble - shows our economy has been debt dependent (11% of GNP) since 2003 and that just assuming growth will get us out of it is not sufficient. I agree but am not pessimistic about the possibility of growth if those in charge cease preventing it.

This is to the report produced by Republika Srpska into the real Srebrenica Massacre on 3,870 Serb civilians, mainly women, children and old people, because the men were safe in combat. Many were beheaded  and Bosnian Nazi leader Nasir Oric has shown journalists videos of the beheading taken from his extensive home video collection. Most of this genocide was done after Oric's troops had been officially disarmed by NATO "peacekeepers" and took place under their official protection.

NATO gaultier, leader of the "Liberal Democrats" and an open Nazi supporter of child rape, genocide and the dissection of living people, Paddy Ashdown attempted to burn every copy of the report but one was  smuggled to safety and has is reprinted here.

Every single member of that party who is t=not themselves a lying racist Nazi, morally equivalent  to the guards at Auschwitz has denounced Ashdown's book burning and other obscenities. That is none of them.

"We are working fulltime to develop a series of suborbital space vehicles designed to pave the way for manned space flight on a micro size spacecraft," they wrote.,,,,
"The space industry is expanding in more and more different ways," Betts told FoxNews.com. He called the rocket "part of a larger picture of different kinds of groups entering into the space arena in different ways."
not bad on a £50,000 budget.

Listing of countries by per capita wealth. - everybody who realises the rest of the world exists should check this. The US has fallen to 7th place, UK to 21st (one place behind Taiwan). Note that Luxemburg's placing depends on counting incomes of people who work there but the per capita excludes those who live over the borders.

Cut taxes to boost economy, IMF tells George Osborne - but allowable political "debate" in the UK and even more in Scotland consists of whether boosting the economy should be achieved by the obviously far less efficient means of more government spending.


Northern Ireland ... there has been a collusion between the authorities and the media to play down the simmering violence that has continued in the years since the Good Friday Agreement. The authorities wanted to portray Northern Ireland as having thrown off terrorism and having moved into a era of peace and prosperity.


The reality on the ground was very different, but outside of Northern Ireland people looking on the BBC NI web pages would have long thought the official line was the truth. - this article from Autonomous Mind is exactly why real news reporting is to be found in the blogsphere and the MSM is mainly confined to rewriting government press releases.

pdf on Thorium reactors - the ecofascists don't think government should support normal nuclear because it is a mature industry and doesn't need it. True all it needs is the freedom to keep the lights on. They oppose supporting thorium research because it is "some way into the future".

"Kosovo is increasingly looking like a stimulus package for more jobs for the police, DEA and FBI.



In all the reports below, there is a reference to the drug operation functioning for “more than a decade.” Gee, what happened just over a decade ago that could have facilitated so many badasses from the Balkans?" - Julia Gorin on the truth about Kosovo which you also won't get on the MSM.

Ignored by the MSM, peers are quietly eviscerating the European Union Bill, intended to provide for referendums on future transfers of power to Brussels....Earlier this week, they voted by 242 to 209, to water down the Bill’s “sovereignty clause” and by 209 to 203 to insert an article which would cause the referendum lock to lapse automatically at the end of this Parliament.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011

Growth Rates Have Been Reduced, Are Being Reduced And Should Be Increased

  This graph, comparing the rate of economic growth of developed and developing countries over the last 60 years comes from Dani Roderick via Tim Worstall. Tim takes it as proof that the Washington Consensus forced the 3rd world to adopt sensible policies and thus achieve growth. I suspect the example of China may also have made them more susceptible to such policies but it seems a fair first approximation.
   The Consensus is that most organisations influencing development push for
1 - Fiscal policy discipline;


2 - Redirection of public spending from subsidies ("especially indiscriminate subsidies") toward broad-based provision of key pro-growth, pro-poor services like primary education, primary health care and infrastructure investment;

3 - Tax reform – broadening the tax base and adopting moderate marginal tax rates;

4 - Interest rates that are market determined and positive (but moderate) in real terms;

5 - Competitive exchange rates;

6 - Trade liberalization – liberalization of imports, with particular emphasis on elimination of quantitative restrictions (licensing, etc.); any trade protection to be provided by low and relatively uniform tariffs;

7 - Liberalization of inward foreign direct investment;

8 - Privatization of state enterprises;

9 - Deregulation – abolition of regulations that impede market entry or restrict competition, except for those justified on safety, environmental and consumer protection grounds, and prudent oversight of financial institutions;

10 - Legal security for property rights.
  All stuff that any classic liberal, such as myself supports and hardly surprising that it works. Also mostly not areas where the developed countries are trying to follow their own principles. In Britain we don't have 1, 2,3,4,or 9 and I could argue that our anti-nuclear policy offends against 10 and through more regulation achieves effective nationalisation (8). We developed countries could try taking our own advice.

----------------------------------------
  However, being part of the developed world I am more interested in the thin line on the graph - showing the developed growth rate and the effects of its decline since 1960.

  From the peak of about 1959 our annual growth rates have fallen from an average of 3.8% to 1.8% that means, that by not maintaining that level, we have lost an average of 1% growth for 52 years. Which means national and personal wealth could have averaged 167% of what it could have been with no fall..

  However up to then we had a growing trend. Since all economic growth depends, in the end, on scientific and technological progress and the trend of technological progress, for example Moore's Law, was rising then and is currently rising faster it would certainly be reasonable to assume that the trend up to 1959 should have been continued, or even increased. Extrapolating on the trend we should have seen growth rising to about 6.1% - an increase of 4.3% annually over current reality. Averaging between the initial unchanged figure and 4.3% we should, following trend, now all average 3 times better off. This fits pretty well with a previous calculation I made  showing we would be 2.4 times better off if we had allowed nuclear to develop.

  Of course if we assume that growth rates would have risen exponentially, as they have throughout history, we would have done much better but lets be conservative in our assumptions.

   1962 saw the publication of Silent Spring; 1958; saw the no lower threshold radiation damage theory introduced by bureaucratic fiat, without any scientific evidence and by the early 1960s it had become accepted "science", still without evidence; This is the period of the Test Ban treaty agitation resulting in the ban in 1963; the mid 60s saw the North America Water and Power Alliance prevented from watering the west because of "environmental" concerns; it is also when nuclear space ships which could have got to "Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970". While the Luddite movement and not coincidentally the movement for ever more government power, regulation and a bigger share of the economy only became large enough to dominate in the 1970s it had been growing and holding back progress since 1959 as tie graph shows as this timeline shows.

    The good news from this is that we could get back to this 6.1% annual growth with no trouble - simply by stopping the Luddite and government parasitism. Indeed since basic science has been progressing for the last 52 years there must be an awful lot of pent up growth available any time free enterprise is unleashed. In the period of catch up doubling that, would probably be achievable even without government taking a pro-active position of supporting economic growth.

  The alliance between the Luddites and the bureaucrats to provide cushy jobs for the latter and the end of economic expansion for the former is admitted even by them in their more honest moments. I consider that dragging us back to the Middle Ages through false scare stories an like Thomas Jefferson "I have sworn eternal enmity before the altar of Almighty God, against all forms of tyranny over the mind of man".

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