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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Glasgow City Council drops George Square Hogmanay party

Glasgow's traditional Hogmanay party in George Square has been scrapped after the city council decided it was no longer delivering value for money...
This year's event will finish at 22:00 and feature music, ceilidh dancing and curling on the George Square ice rink.
The council said with services under pressure it was "imperative that we get the best bang for every Glasgow buck".
Council leader Gordon Matheson said: "At the moment we are being asked to justify spending £34 of public money per head on an event which just isn't delivering value and indeed received a fair amount of negative feedback last year"... "This is on top of the £19 ticket price we are asking the public to pay....
Glasgow's traditional Hogmanay celebrations attracts 4,500 to George Square but the council said this was only "a fraction of those out and about in the city"...
"By promoting Glasgow as a destination we can encourage locals and visitors to use the wide range of top-class facilities, enjoy themselves during their stay and to visit again."
  There is a question which it has never occurred to the BBC official state broadcaster to ask
Dear Glasgow Council,
I see that you have decided to cancel the official George Square Hogmanay celebrations because, on a mere ticket price of £19 per head it has been possible for Glasgow Council to run it at less than a further cost of £34 per head.
I would be interested to know if the opportunity to run this was put out to tender and what the results were. Please treat this as an FoI inquiry.
It strikes me that it would be quite surprising if no commercial organisation thought it possible to run a profitable show at Hogmanay, in the centre of Glasgow, at a venue that doesn't have to be hired when it had already been proven people were willing to pay £19 each.
Or did the Council simply decide that if they, with their well known commercial ability, couldn't make a go of it, it would be embarrassing if some capitalist entrepreneur could and thus decided not to run the risk.
I'll let you know the answer which should be here in 20 working days (or less but they are never less). This assumes that those in charge respect the Freedom of Information Act which, unfortunately, I have found most government departments simply don't.

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Friday, August 26, 2011

More E-Petition Fun

  Here are the petitions relating to space development  on the government's e-petition site.. There are currently 3 of them, all of which I have signed, thereby substantially increasing their popularity. I have some doubts about a UK Space Port, but better than nothing - the mainland UK is too far from the equator for an optimum launch site, which is why I previously proposed one on Ascension Island.

I would assume that any future petitions on space travel will mention space so it is a good word to use when searching.

Please link and sign.

Increase Britain's space involvement

Privatisation of Space



UK Space port
 
  I am also adding some petitions of my own. The site says that it may take a week for them to appear which is a happy coincidence since I am, from Sunday, going to be away for a week. When I come back I will provide links to all petitions on by then.

  If everybody from Britain here and in the various Glasgow space supporting, scientific, science fiction groups & engineering students signed these it would come to several hundreds. If those all around the country did it would come to many thousands, possibly 10s of thousands.

 The bottom place on the first page of petitions (ie 20th place) has 4,932 signatures today.I have no doubt that, with the petitions up for a year anything inn that position will, through sheer momentum and number of views, get the 100,000 necessary to trigger a Parliamentary debate. It is time for those who understand how important space development is to spend less than 5 minutes saying so.

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Government E-Petitions

  Here is the government's list of petitions on the site they put up asking us to suggest things that should be debated in Parliament if they get over 100,000 votes. This is in order of the number of votes cast. There is no promise to carry out any of them, that would be bypassing the role of Parliament. It doesn't even guarantee that they will get a full formal debate, if there is a very good reason, but Parliament has to say why if any of them are refused.

However there clearly is considerable pressure to have a debate where it has been asked for and most politicians would tend to support something that was the obvious public will (or at least pretend to do so). I think this may turn out to be a very useful reform - much more useful than the Cabinet thought when they offered it.

The size of votes are, so far, not overwhelming, and individual voting clearly can help push it up the listing bringing a cascade effect - the difference between the one at the bottom of the 1st page and the one starting the 2nd page is only 167 votes. One can also see that the #2has been reached by a campaign among  a relatively limited number of people (football fans inn Liverpool).

Here are the first 2 pages. I strongly suggest you make use of this. Like voting in elections, it may not change much but it is the most power we can exercise and if we refuse to do what we can we can have no complaint about not being able to do more.I have noted the ones I support and why. I hope most of you will agree with most of them but would be worried if everybody agreed with them all.
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Convicted London rioters should loose all benefits. View 219,765 09/02/2012

Full disclosure of all government documents relating to 1989 Hillsborough disaster View 132,408 09/08/2012

CHEAPER PETROL AND DIESEL, BY ROBERT HALFON MP AND FAIRFUEL UK View 63,478 05/08/2012 Not without problems but fuel costs are a major barrier to a successful economy.

Make financial education a compulsory part of the school curriculum View 49,438 12/02/2012 a remarkably sensible idea. It would be distorted by teachers but even so the basics of the supply and demand curves are so simple and the statistical evidence that freer economies grow better than more controlled ones so clear that it would be almost impossible to totally censor that while teaching. If these were widely understood an awful lot of politician's and Beeboid's inanities would by unmaintainable.

Petition to retain the ban on Capital Punishment View 25,350 04/02/2012

Public & Private Pension Increases - change from RPI to CPI View 22,773 08/05/2012

Britain wants referendum to leave EU View 22,435 04/08/2012 As per Dave's "cast iron" promise. It was also a LudDim promise

Keep Formula 1 Free To Air in the UK View 21,969 04/08/2012

Restore Capital Punishment View 17,499 04/02/2012 I think it deters, in which case it is moral cowardice to refuse it.

Increase policing DONT CUT IT View 10,667 09/02/2012

all rioters convicted should lose their benefits, and if not a british citizen, be deported View 9,522 10/02/2012

Petition In Support of Public Libraries View 7,136 05/02/2012

Legalise cannabis View 6,609 04/08/2012 The damage done by it being criminal and thus funding criminality is clearly greater than any harm the drug causes.

Teach evolution, not creationism View 6,224 12/08/2012

Put Babar Ahmad on trial in the UK View 6,000 10/11/2011

Cashless Scrap Metal Trade - Amendment to Scrap Metal Merchants Act 1964 View 5,924 08/08/2012

Thameslink Protest View 5,123 04/08/2012

The Government should ban the EDL View 5,100 08/11/2011

Remove the ban on gay blood donation View 4,922 04/08/2012

Absolute right to self-defence within ones home View 4,850 04/02/2012

petition against EU Anti-tampering proposed legislation for motorcycles View 4,691 08/11/2011


Hold a referendum on withdrawing from the EU View 4,443 04/08/2012

End mass immigration View 4,237 04/08/2012 If the trend continues the native descended population will be a minority within decades. People aren't just interchangeable cogs and Britain will not exist as more than a geographical expression if that happens.

Restore a rolling 30 year-old exemption to VED, for classic vehicles View 4,177 05/08/2012

withdraw from the european human rights act View 4,164 04/08/2012 It is a mess of platitudes

Ban the introduction of Sharia Law in the United Kingdom View 4,032 04/02/2012

Bring back the death penalty View 3,714 04/11/2011

Do NOT remove all the benefits of convicted London rioters. View 3,507 09/02/2012

Don't let disabled children pay the price for welfare reform: reverse unfair plans to cut support by up to £27 per week for 100,000 disabled children View 3,218 05/08/2012

Return of Hanging for Serious Crimes View 2,884 04/08/2012

Re Nationalise Railways View 2,855 04/08/2012

Stop HS2 View 2,746 04/08/2012

Creation of an English Parliament View 2,657 04/08/2012

Support an Independent Kurdish State View 2,365 04/08/2012

Stop giving aid to India View 2,123 05/08/2012

Proscribe the English Defence League (EDL) View 2,122 09/08/2012

Leave the European Union View 2,087 05/08/2012

Save OUR Maternity Services at Fairfield General Hospital, Bury View 1,995 10/11/2011

Legalise Gay Marriage View 1,973 05/08/2012

Recruit 5000 more NHS midwives in England View 1,927 22/08/2012

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      There is a fair bit of repetition, and I have not voted twice for them. It is remarkable how liberal, in the original sense the results are - the BBC initially came out against this on the grounds that the common people would all vote for hanging but in fact, though I disagree with it, the motion against hanging is more popular. I'm not necessarily opposed to all the ones I didn't vote for but either know nothing or consider them unimportant.

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Wednesday, August 24, 2011

The Psychoses of a Sick Society

  I was rereading Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun written in 1956. The background to this SF murder mystery is that  2 cultures, that of Solaris and Earth are psychotically crippled and have no future.

   Solaris is immensely wealthy with enormous numbers of robots where people live without human contact. Indeed having been brought up by robots they are incapable of human contact.

   But they aren't so psychotic that they believe it possible to bring children up to healthy adults without being willing to spank them as every human culture has since forever.. Indeed an explanation of the "psychological" training a robot has to undergo to be able to smack a child is discussed.

   Earth's psychosis is that everybody lives all the time in giant enclosed cities and the people are incapable of leaving or even looking at nature in the raw or gaze on the naked Sun.

   But at one point the hero, to relieve the stress of having to tell his boss of the psychotic nature of Earth's culture, TAKES OUT HIS PIPE AND SMOKES IT RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. The people of Earth are clearly not so psychotic as to get uptight about "passive smoke" less than 1/10,000th* as dense as smoked smoke.

     Like so much science fiction must inevitably be Asimov is clearly extrapolating/satirising trends in the culture of the time by projecting them many centuries into the future. Yet in a mere 55 years we have developed and made politically correct and legally enforceable psychoses perhaps even stranger and arguably more debilitating than the ones foreseen.

     Never disciplining children must mean that in very many cases, they will grow up without self discipline. We have never had such a society but it is a dangerous experiment to run. Criminalising passive smoking itself may not be so damaging but the sort of society where everybody is constantly subject to such pointless and vindictive rules clearly is.

     To really see yourself you have to stand outside yourself which is why self awareness is so difficult. Thus looking through the prism of the inherent assumptions of  past societies helps.

"Psychosis is a loss of contact with reality, usually including false beliefs about what is taking place or who one is (delusions) and seeing or hearing things that aren't there (hallucinations)."



*Taking the cubic capacity of a mouth as about 5 inches and the volume of a sphere being 4/3 piR^3 a sphere of radius 32 inches is 10,000 times larger so anybody constantly around  2'8" away is going to get only 10,000th as much smoke as a smoker breaths out. That is pretty much elbow to elbow and in most cases people are much further apart. It is clearly therefore lunatic to suggest, without evidence, that passive smoking is a real risk as the BMA and most politicians do.

Suggested other psychoses in British Society
  • That any sort of change to the planet is bad. I don't mean objecting to pollution but that any change in temperature/the number of polar bears/butterflies/CO2 levels/snail darter fish/plant DNA etc etc is inherently awful.
  • That any level of actual sort of  pollution is utterly unacceptable, no matter what the ancillary benefits. An example would be Paul Ehrlich using an expected rise in sulphur dioxide emissions in China as "proof" that things were getting worse irrespective of the massive rise in Chinese living standards, or indeed reduction of pollution of indoor wood smoke or or feces.
  • Health and safety - from the assumption that humans should not go into space in case anybody dies, even though far fewer have done so than in polar exploration - to people being prevented from moving their desks in offices or change a light bulb.
  • Scare of all sorts which depend on numerical illiteracy.
  • Attempts to legislate, for health, reductions in the level of "contaminants" to where they run into laws requiring the presence, for health, of such levels "trace elements"
  • The Linear No Threshold anti-nuclear theory, which has certainly reduced humanity's standard of living, on its own, by over 50%
  • People who don't want to go into space and cause "ecological damage" there until we have totally "cleaned up" the Earth.
  • The criminalisation of any judgement of anybody about anything based on information about them of their race, gender, ethnicity, age etc. Prejudice is literally pre-judgement and everybody has to do it to some extent all the time. When you put salt on your food without a chemical analysis you are prejudging that it is virtually certain to contain salt rather than cyanide.
  • Not being willing to execute murderers even when it is known it will, net, save lives
  If anybody has other signs I would be interested to know.The list is almost certain to be incomplete because we live within the same society. However once stated they appear logically indisputable.

    Kipling had something to say about societies  that behave psychotically. I happen to think that our scientific progress gives us much more leeway than he expected but he had a point.

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins

When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

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Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Gaddafi - Not 1,000 the War Criminal Our Own Organlegging Leaders Are

  What I put on John Redwood, who gas been opposed to the war against Libya. I slightly toned down the remarks about the KLA to say merely that they had been accused by the Council of Europe of atrocities under NATO command rather than that they had done it. John is pernikety about such things at least with our friends.
The “legal” justification for our war was that we were thereby stopping the capture of Libya’s 2nd city which would have inevitably entailed substantial civilian casualties. Regime change was no part of the official remit because attacking countries to change their regimes is, rather obviously, aggression and hence a crime under international law.
We are now assisting in the capture of Libya’s 1st city with inevitable substantial civilian casualties and openly committed to regime change, which remains a crime under international law.
The NATO funded “International Criminal Court” intends to “try” Gaddafi on insubstantial charges amounting to putting down rebellion, which is acknowledged as a prime duty of any government. The US constitution refers to defending against enemies “domestic and foreign” which sums up this war.
While it is clear that the NATO leaders have thus made themselves war criminals the ICC will only be swearing out warrants against them if it has some slightest wish to appear as a real court enforcing law impartially. That seems unlikely. Instead we have proven that the NATO powers are an aggressive threat to peace and that there are no circumstances under which their word can ever be trusted.
This was also the lesson in Kosovo whose current nominal “President” has been accused by the Council of Europe of crimes hundreds of times more obscene than anything Gaddafi is accused of – while under the direct command authority of NATO leaders as our policeman. In which case the NATO leaders are also criminal.
* the justification was only not actually legal because the UN Charter specifically says they do not have any right to interfere in such internal matters.
  That about covers it. We have, yet again we have shown the entire world we continually intend to "pick up a crappy little country and throw it against a wall just to prove we are serious." Once again it has not been over "in weeks not months" as Obama promised. With the NATO countries in recession and the rest of the world averaging 5% growth showing total contempt for international law is seriously dangerous.

   This link explains our meddling in an "Arab Spring" about which even the political leaders are clearly ignorant and about which the only thing we can say for certain about the media reports is that they are lying -because they always are.  

   You do not have to hold any brief for Gaddafi to believe he has been a better leader than the "National Transition Council" whose most competent member appears to be Mossa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelluigence chief. If you believe Libya was involved in the Pan Am bombing (I don't) then he was certainly
the organiser so the hypocrisy of our government in blaming Gaddafi but not Koussa is blatant. In any case the worst you can accuse Gaddafi of is of not being remotely as murderous as not only the "President" we installed in Kosovo but every one of the racist, genocidal, organlegging Nazi NATO leaders, from Clinton and Blair down to the Norwegian murderers.

    Looking at the "National Transition Council" it seems unlikely they will produce order, let alone the "free democracy" that was the alleged hope of the war (I say hope rather than purpose because the alleged purpose was to stop a fight going on within the city of Bengazi. There are layer upon layer of excuses - each one of which turns out on examination tom be a deliberate lie.

    What then is the actual purpose. I do not even think it is to show how powerful we are - the time taken shows the opposite. Nor to grab the oil - probably the very best we can hope for is that 5 years from now NATO citizens drilling for oil there will be as safe as they were before we started this.

    I believe the ultimate reason is to provide the media and people back home with the equivalent of  Roman gladiatorial games except where they killed individuals we kill thousands.

    Yesterday I saw a government minister on TV saying that the NTC were up to running the country because they had run a "very impressive press conference". Looking at the video shows, on the wall behind the rostrum "National Transition Council" in English. The also still get called the "Rebels" although officially we have recognised them as the legal government - but rebel alliances are so much more fun. If that does not prove that this is all western showbiz look at the pictures of SUVs with Schwarzenegger sized cannon driving into the city and kids jumping into the middle of the street and firing automatic rifles from the hip. Both of these are Hollywood warfare not the real thing. One competent soldier, with a rifle, lying down, could kill idiots until his ammo ran out with little chance of any of them accidentally hitting him. The real killing was done by NATO bombers and probably, carefully off camera, our special forces.


shooting upwards is sooo spectacular

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Monday, August 22, 2011

Worlds Near Earth

  Cruithne isn't actually another Moon of Earth it is rather weirder.

Cruithne is approximately 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) in diameter, and its closest approach to Earth is approximately thirty times the separation between Earth and the Moon(12 Gm or twelve million kilometres)., i orbit around the Sun in approximate 1:1 orbital resonance with the Earth. Thus, in relation to Earth it doesn't orbit around us but in a strange horseshoe shape, near us. It was discovered in 1986.

  2006 Rh130 (found in 2006) is another but rather to small to be of interest. as is 2002AA29

There has been a history of announced discoveries of new Moons. Not particularly surprising when you realise how unusual the real one is, being both enormous compared to its primary and alone.

   The best known disappearing planet is Vulcan (no not that one|) which was assumed to be within the orbit of Mercury. The assumption was reasonable since it was based on calculations by the man who discovered Neptune by the same method. 
In the early 1840s the brilliant young mathematician Urbain Le Verrier (1811-71) spent months carrying out painstaking calculations (by hand with ink and paper), analysing the position of Uranus to pinpoint where the hypothetical planet’s effect on Uranus began. (At the same time as he was investigating the anomalous motion of Uranus in the distant outer darkness, he was also studying the innermost Solar System which had a mystery of its own.)

By 1846, Le Verrier completed his calculations, which showed that the planet ought to lie between Aquarius and Capricorn, and posted them to the Berlin Observatory (no French observers were interested, such was the novelty of Le Verrier’s reasoning). Within a day of receiving Le Verrier’s missive German astronomers led by Johann Galle (1812-1910) used his calculations to discover the no longer theoretical planet on 23 September 1846. It was with 1° of the calculated position. The planet was duly named Neptune and Galle and Le Verrier were lauded as the planet’s co-discoverers...

Buoyed by this triumph, he further investigated the inner Solar System anomaly alluded to earlier. Sometimes Mercury wasn’t where it should be! The orbits of the planets could be predicted perfectly- apart from Mercury’s.
Planetary orbits are not circles, but ellipses and Mercury’s orbit was the least circular (or most “eccentric”) known. Mercury varies from as close as 46 million km from the Sun (“perihelion”) before climbing as far as 70 million km from the Sun when it is at the opposite side of its orbit (“aphelion”). This was all in accordance with the laws of planetary motion discovered by Kepler and explained by Newton. The problem was that Mercury kept reaching the low point of its orbit early and the high point late. The discrepancy was tiny (so tiny as to invoke awe for the observational skills of the astronomers of the period who measured it) but disconcerting. Could Newton have been wrong?
Le Verrier said not, but after thoroughly studying observations of Mercury going back to the 1600s, he also proved that Mercury’s odd shifting orbit was not due to the gravitational pulls of Venus, Earth and Mars. Instead a previously unseen planet between Mercury and the Sun must be to blame.



Vulcan was discovered transiting the Sun in March 1859 by a physician and amateur astronomer named Edmond Modeste Lescarbault (1814 -94)....Le Verrier formally announced Vulcan’s discovery in March 1860. In France Le Verrier and Lescarbault were hailed as heroes

  In fact it didn't exist. The even more incredible truth was that Newton could be wrong.  These same calculations were, much later, part of Einstein's proof of Relativity.
  Finally it turns out that Earth has a Trojan satellite.
Lagrangian points, lie along a planet's orbit — one ahead of the planet and one behind it. Drawing straight lines between the Earth, the sun and a Lagrangian point produces a triangle whose sides are equal in length. An asteroid there would hover in the sky at a 60-degree angle from the sun.
Any object that close to the sun would be difficult to see from Earth because it would be overhead mostly during broad daylight, as invisible as the stars.
But Martin Connors, a space scientist at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada, had an idea. Maybe NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, which aims its lens 90 degrees away from the sun, would be able to pick up an oddball Trojan with an eccentric orbit.
Indeed it did. Connors found one candidate whose strange path over six days in late 2010 seemed to match the unevenly elongated orbit typical of Trojans. His team confirmed the Trojan's identity by spotting it a few months later with another telescope in Hawaii.
"This is pretty cool," said Amy Mainzer, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn't involved in the study, which was published online Wednesday (ie 27th July 2011) by the journal Nature. "It's a new class of near-Earth object that's been hypothesized to exist."

And if more Trojan asteroids can be found, researchers said, they could be ideal for astronaut visits and the mining of precious resources. (This particular asteroid is too tilted with respect to the solar system to make a good candidate, Mainzer said.)
 Cool indeed. If there is one there are going to be more. For a long time authors, from Gerry Anderson to John Norman have speculated about a planet on the opposite side of Earth's orbit and thus permanently behind the Sun. Actually that would not be a mathematically stable point and the perturbations of Jupiter would eventually move it out of that position. Depending on the planet's mass (Trojan points are only stable for masses much smaller than the parent body) the effect might be spectacular.

    However with the technology we have now we are perfectly capable of building L5 settlements out of asteroids. We may not have found Earthlike planets but we can build Earthlike settlements.

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Sunday, August 21, 2011

Recent Links

Links I have read recently:

Czech President Vaclav Klaus
In the communist era we lived in a system where politics dominated the economy, which had well-known – extremely detrimental – consequences. What we wanted when communism collapsed was to create an autonomous economic system where politics will have only a marginal role in the economy. We did succeed in changing the economic system fundamentally, central planning and state ownership were dismantled in a very short period of time, the first years were very promising, at least in our country, but politics influences the economy now much more than some of us wanted and expected.
We wanted a free market system but got the very European “soziale Marktwirtschaft”, the social market economy, which is characterized by massive redistribution, paternalism, absence of motivation, excessive regulation, government intervention in all fields, irrational support of suddenly promising but economically not viable ideas and projects, counter-productive labour market rigidities, fiscal deficits, and sluggish economic growth. Moreover, the continuously, almost linearly growing living standards come to be considered a justified claim (or entitlement), almost a human right there.
When there is a “good weather” (in the economic sense), such a system somehow functions. It produces positive rates of economic growth (although much slower than in BRIC countries) and weak, but for some period sustainable fiscal positions of individual countries. When bad weather – due to any endogenous or exogenous negative shock – comes, the rates of growth become negative and fiscal positions unsustainable. This is true regardless of how one or another economic crisis started and who or what was responsible for it.
The problem is aggravated by attempts to fight the crisis by means of huge fiscal injections into the economy to – allegedly – avoid an even greater crisis. We know that this is a mistaken ambition.
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Our media are lying yet again. In this case the Syrian rising is more anemic than we are told  
That same night on July 15, I received news feeds from the AFP announcing a million protestors all over Syria, of which 500,000 in Hama alone.
In Hama however, they could not have been more than 10,000.
This ‘information’ was even more absurd due to the fact that the city of Hama counts only 370,000 inhabitants
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The GWPF produces a paper about the shrinking of the Sahara 
The southern border of the Sahara has been retreating since the early 1980s, making farming viable again in what were some of the most arid parts of Africa. There has been a spectacular regeneration of vegetation in northern Burkina Faso, which was devastated by drought and advancing deserts 20 years ago. It is now growing so much greener that families who fled to wetter coastal regions are starting to come back. There are now more trees, more grassland for livestock and a 70% increase in yields of local cereals

   Which proves the BBC were, yet again lying when they put this deathless prose about the Sahara becoming so much drier that even camel trains were no longer feasible, on their evening "news
With a long, gurgling groan, Lakhmar fell awkwardly to his knees in the roasting hot sand outside the town of Timbuktu
For the past six years he has been making the same gruelling trek across the Sahara desert to the salt mines of Taoudenni in northern Mali.
But each journey is becoming more of a struggle.
Lakhmar, a 10-year-old male camel with a metal ring in his flaring right nostril, left it to his owner, Boujima Handak, to explain their predicament.
Whenever I see a lorry take the salt I am very upset
"It's getting more difficult because the rains aren't coming, the oases are drying up and the camels get tired and thirsty and can't continue
  Reading between the lines it is clear that what is happening is the technology is improving so much that even in the most isolated place in the world lorries are making life easier. That is a positive anti-Luddite story so naturally, knowing how corrupt the obscene genodcideal fascist who make up the BBC are, they lied.
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Unlock Democracy: Incorporating Charter 88. Another government funded fakecharity . Their accounts give an interesting mix of  obvious government funding (European Commission)  and genuine politically connected riches (Joseph Rowantree Trust) but the majority seems to be from government or other fakecharities. An interesting wrinkle is that they offer prizes to small donors totallying 50% of such donors donation. As they pouint out this is twice what the national lottery do and it seems difficult to believe this is economic. It will, however, give the appearance of support from many more gamblers than otherwise.

   I came across them because they sent me an email asking for stories to help them lobby over the "Sustainable Communities Act" whatever that is. So another example of a government subsidised fakecharity using government subsidy to advertise for more government subsidies. Layer upon layer of spending that only enriches those with a handle on it. Not much democracy unlocked there.
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An interesting little blog about how a journalist was ofered a quite blatant bung to get a piece of PR fluff from a windmiller published. She is outarged about it and insistent that no good journalist would ever publish anything without reporting both sides. I put some comments of my own.
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The latest variant of the warming scare (Guardian making no attempt balance their lies with the truthful side) is what warmists call ocean "acidification". It is actually the ph falling from marginal alkiliinity to marginally closer to neutrality but warning about seawater becoming marginally more neutral isn't very scary. This report says
Noting that "seawater pH records that exceed a single decade are not yet available which [time period] is too short to distinguish anthropogenic and natural external forcing and fully understand natural variability of the ocean pH," Liu et al. analyzed the boron isotopic composition (δ11B) of fossil corals in an effort to reconstruct a Holocene history of sea surface pH variations for the South China Sea.


As shown in the accompanying figure, the δ11B-derived pH values for the South China Sea fluctuated between a pH of 7.91 and 8.29 during the past seven thousand years, revealing a large natural fluctuation in this parameter that is nearly four times the 0.1 pH unit decline the acidification alarmists predict should have occurred since pre-industrial times.
  Yet another ecofascist scare story proves to be a lie then
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Every household is paying £500 more than they should in green taxes,

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Only 18 teachers have been fired in the UK for incompetence. Thatb is over the last 40 years
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Head of the Civil Service bending the rules to ensure civil servants apparently guilty of massive fraud go unpunished. I suppose if we assume the purpose of government spending is simply to reward government employees rather than doing any good he is simply doing a good job. I assume that is how he feels and who will tell him no.
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I found this googling "cameron "hug a hoodie". Does he not look scared stiff of being in the presence of such a powerful and intimidating personality
A friend pointed out that  all Ed has to do is flip open his hand and shoot him

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