Read it and weep

Climateer Tim Flannery sacked in Oz

Now we know why they call Australia 'the lucky country'. From here in the UK we can only look on jealously as the new Aussie administration starts to dismantle the climate alarmist gravy train. In the UK, across Europe and the US, the alarmist establishment continues to soak up our money even as the 'consensus' withers and turns to dust. Alarmism is so firmly embedded in the DNA of our political masters (regardless of what party label they attach to themselves) that there is little chance of us learning from the Aussie example. The only thing we can hope is that there are enough second-rank leaders looking and learning so that when the time comes and they step up to leading positions they can be as ruthless in cutting out the rot in the heart of the establishment.

HS2 - Huge Subsidy Too

The recent report from KPMG that suggested that by 2037 the HS2 rail scheme could be benefiting the economy by £15bn a year was pretty much wishful thinking paid for by the quango behind the scheme. The made up numbers were meant to impress, but they've been treated sceptically by pretty much everyone who's commented, aside from the government of course. Interestingly the made up numbers are not based on decreased travel times but by an increase in the number of journeys and an increase in economic activities that this is supposed to magically lead to.

If, for a moment, we ignore the nonsense numbers and accept that more journeys will mean more economic activity, then we have to ask are there cheaper alternatives to HS2? The answer surely has to be yes. How about more road building? How about improving the existing motorway infrastructure? And, given the long time scales involved, we might even try and take a futuristic stance. For example, Google and others are making real strides in the development of autonomous vehicles. If this continues then perhaps we can think about providing special lanes or even separate roads for these vehicles - which will be able to travel more closely together in loosely associated convoys with the ability of individual vehicles to come on/off as required. With continued improvements in control systems, enhancements to engine design for fuel efficiency and other technological advances, we can get the increased journeys, possibly improved journey times and the economic benefits that ensue without the need to pump the billions into HS2.

Better yet, if we make the new roads (or new lanes on existing roads), toll roads, then the users of these vehicles will pay for the privilege of travelling on them.

Ultimately, the problem with long-term substantial infrastructure projects like HS2 is not just the huge cost over-runs and massive tax-payer subsidies, it's that they're always out of date by the time they come on line...

Vivienne Westwood Is An Irrelevant Hag

As you can imagine, I'm not really one for fashion - whether it's politics, music or sartorial - but every so often something will grab the headlines and eventually impinge on my consciousness. Vivienne Westwood was in the news a few weeks ago when she attended the 'anti-fracking' camp at Balcombe. She was dutifully interviewed by the massed ranks of the old media where she gave us the benefit of her vast insights into energy policy, climate science and economics. To call her clueless would be kind. The degree of vacuousness was unbelievable. But still she's a celebrity and had once, for a short while, been considered incredibly radical. Now she was spouting environmentalist drivel and sounding like a doddery old granny on day release from a hospital ward.


Fast forward a couple of weeks and her latest collection is in the news. Gasp! It's so radical again. So engaged. So... Clothes with the words 'Climate' on them! Models with zombie faces to symbolise the death and destruction we've wrought on Gaia. Yawn. This at the time when the climate scare is gasping from lack of oxygen and most people have realised that the game's up. But like a French aristocrat on the eve of the revolution, she has no idea that history is about to leave her and her brand of empty climate alarmism behind.

Thank You Chris Huhne

A big thank you is due to Chris Huhne, all over the papers complaining that the media ruined his life and that being a lying, deceitful and arrogant bastard had nothing to do with it. There was a time when the Lib Dems were seen by many as the 'nice' party. Where the Tories and Labour were the nasty beasts of government - full of scheming, dishonest and conniving careerists and the power-hungry who'd do anything to get into government - the Lib Dems were portrayed as the slightly naive, idealistic and slightly eccentric party that the 'real' politician types would avoid. But thankfully Chris Huhne through his behaviour has shown that the Lib Dems can be as bad as the rest of them - part and parcel of the British political class, no different in kind to the ambitious and ruthless bastards that make their home in the other major parties.

Of course it's not just Huhne, we all know that Lib Dems policies are the epitome of big green thinking - Europhile, statist, collectivist and most of all radically environmentalist. But when it comes to the personal ethics of Lib Dem politicians, Chris Huhne has done us proud. Sadly, that won't stop him prospering from his former position in the political establishment, but we can hope that he's helped make his party unelectable in the future.

The Living Wage

Much has been paid of the report that up to 4.8 million workers are earning below the 'living wage' (currently defined as £8.55 in London and £7.45 outside). If we take it as read that the research, from the think tank the Resolution Foundation, is accurate, and that the amounts set for the living wage are about right, the obvious question is what do we do about it?

Well, there's a simple solution and then there are various shades of complicated solutions which, no doubt, will be the ones discussed by politicians and media commentators. First the simple solution: just take people on minimum wage out of the tax and NI system. You can do this by adjusting tax thresholds appropriately and then you don't need to install new systems of bureaucracy, create new classes of benefit or even track conformance. Just stop taking money away from the people who need it the most. Hell, you don't even need to employ a single addtional civil servant to make this work.

That virtue - simplicity and no additional bureaucracy - means that it's unlikely to happen. So then we look at the other options. First is the relatively simple one of raising the minimum wage. But this has some serious down-sides, like stifling job growth and putting some people out of work. And what do you do about the living wage differential between London and the rest of the UK? Do you institute regional minimum wage scales? Now you're in the realm of additional complexity for employers and having to put new systems of inspection and control in place. The net affect is to add to the costs to the state (in reality to the tax payer, including those on minimum wage...) and to increase the costs of employment.

So, what looks like a simple solution of increasing miminum wage turns into something a bit more complex and expensive. What next? Well, you leave minimum wage where it is and put into place additional benefits. Or you get employers to increase pay then then give the employers some to make the difference. Or... You get the picture - more complexity, more costs and an increasing bureaucratic burden.

Which takes us back to the really simple solution that I first mentioned. If we really believe that people should be paid this living wage, then we can increase the tax thresholds so that people on low wages can get to keep their money. Why do it any other way?

Syria - TFFT

As is usual the defeat of the government in last night's vote on "action" against Syria is widely being replayed as a personal defeat of David Cameron (and to a lesser extent Nick Clegg). It was, of course, but it's more than that. It's one of those rare moments when Parliament has acted as a parliament and has reflected on an issue and how the public feels about it, rather than ignoring us and voting the way they've been told to vote by the whips. It happens all to rarely so we should savour the reminder of what politics could be like if we had more direct control of our politicians. If that had been the case it is unlikely we would have invaded Iraq, or even Afghanistan come to that.

In the meantime, the senseless rush to be seen to be "doing something" for the sake of it can carry on across the water. Heaven forbid that Obama miss an opportunity to claim the moral high ground...

Lab-grown brains and Syria

On the day that scientists reveal that they've grown human brain tissue in the lab, we have our own leaders parading their lack of the stuff. How else do we explain this rush for yet another military intervention? What the hell are these people thinking - indeed, are they thinking?

Reaching for the missiles seems to have become a stock response. The siutation in Syria is appaling, but the complexity of the situation seems too much for our leaders to comprehend. Like all politicians their first response is always to be seen to be doing something. It doesn't matter what that something is, it just needs to be something that means they can't be accused of standing back and doing nothing. And, like it or  not, the simplest way of showing that they're doing something is to drop bombs on people. To make this palatable you need to have a simplistic narrative. You know, something like evil regime versus freedom-loving rebels, good versus bad. Forget the fact that the rebels include jihadists of the worst kind who hate the regime for being soft on religious minorities, women's rights and so on.

Do our leaders think that the these jihadists will show gratitude when the regime falls? Like hell they will. Recent history is littered with jihadists we have supported turning their weapons on us as soon as they get the chance. There are plenty of Syrian rebels who hate the West as much or more than they hate Assad and his clan. Those brain cells grown in the lab? They've got more memory than our brain dead leaders.

We don't know for sure what these chemical weapons were or who fired them. Both sides are capable of such an act, but the Syrian state had more to lose than the rebels in doing such a thing. In any case it seems that it's enough to give us the WMD moment when our sanctimonius leaders can play elder statesmen and bomb another country. And then conveniently look the other way when it helps to lead to the slaughter of Christians and other religious minorities, the institution of Sharia law and the inevitable blood bath as rebel groups fight it out for the spoils.

Lab grown brains? I'd vote for that rather than the brainless morons now in power.

UKIP - Not Serious

While the immediate storm over Godfrey Bloom's 'bongo bongo land' may have disappeared from the front pages, the affair continues to reverberate. From my perspective - not aligned to UKIP but becoming sympathetic over the last few years - the effect has been pretty depressing. Like an awful lot of people in this country I've got little time for the three main parties - there's little to differentiate them and most political discourse runs on predictably tribal lines. I hate our political classes with a vengeance but at the same time I care passionately about politics and where the country is headed. So, in many respects I'm exactly the constituency that UKIP should be appealing to. And at times I've felt that perhaps UKIP was the way to go. Not just on the European Union, but also with respect to climate change, wind farms and a critique of the liberal mindset that predominates in our political and media masters. Even on the economy UKIP seems to be on the side of economic liberalism and free markets - though it has to be said it's often hard to figure out where UKIP stands because it rarely seems to talk about the economy in any substantive way. The bottom line is that on a wide range of issues UKIP seems to offer something that 's different to the main parties and appealing to a libertarian (note the small L).

The one sticking point has been race. Although I vehemently disagree with the ideology of multicuturalism (which elevates difference and segregation to the highest degree), I am an anti-racist and have got no time for racists, whether they are BNP, Islamist or BBC. In the past I've been Paki-bashed by Nazi skinheads, racially abused and suffered from racism and discrimination. That was a long time ago and thankfully my kids haven't had to suffer this kind of treatment. Although the left will never say so, we do live in a very different world to the days when the National Front was out on the streets and casual racism was everywhere. Nowadays things have gone the other way and it's the white working classes who suffer unfair treatment - they are the only people not allowed pride in their culture. Multiculturalism is triumphant and to real anti-racists this is a betrayal of the struggle againt racism.

You would think that this too would make me align to UKIP - and at times it has. But this latest affair from Godfrey Bloom makes me pull back for a number of reasons.

Firstly, I have to say that Bloom comes across as an ignorant bigot. He can spin it how he likes, makes half apologies or attempt to front it out, but he comes over as the sort of half-drunk bar-room racist that I would run a mile to avoid. While I don't want politicians to be all smarm and professional blandness, I do expect them to display some signs of intelligence. Ignorance is not attractive to the voter, any more than dishonesty or disdain for Joe Public. Now the fact is that there was a real point in what he was saying - the discussion on the aid budget is an important one which many people, me included, would agree with him. Listening to interviews with many of Bloom's constituents one is struck by the fact that so many people, of all races, were agreeing with him. But it was also striking how so many criticised him for his language and behaviour. So, the end result is that a point on which he has people agreeing with him has been drowned by the furore over his racist language.

Much worse than this however is the attitude of so many UKIP supporters and indeed the missing leadership from UKIP itself. There are plenty of comments of blogs and forums from UKIP supporters who seem to glory in Bloom's display of ignorance. Maybe it's that frisson of outright racism that they find appealing. Is this what UKIP really wants? To go after the BNP vote?

Let's be clear, if UKIP is a serious political party and not the vehicle of a handful of leaders safely esconced in Brussels, it needs to appeal to a wider range of the electorate. It needs to appeal across racial and class barriers, it needs to appeal to those who look for signs of intelligent policy as well as wanting to have a go at our ruling elites. And it won't do that with people like Godfrey Bloom slurring racist comments to the party faithful.

In the blogosphere I see people like Autonomous Mind and Richard North of EUReferendum having intelligent conversations and discussing policy options to a depth that I don't see from UKIP itself. If there's an issue related to some EU policy in the news, where do I go to gain an understanding of it? It's not to UKIP. So, while some are happy to snigger at the 'bongo bongo land' jibe, I suspect there are plenty more who've decided that perhaps the mass media are right after all and that UKIP is a xenophobic little hub of racists and embittered cranks.

Dirty and Unnecessary

Commenting on news that the one of the companies with a licence to explore shale gas deposits in the UK has reported that they think the fields are even bigger than first imagined (reported on the BBC here) - we get this comment from Friends of the Earth:

Environmental group Friends of the Earth has described fracking as "dirty and unnecessary", arguing that the UK should instead focus on investing in renewable energy.

They, and the rest of the green fraternity, must be having fits as the pressure builds for us to fully exploit fracking. The prospect of cheap and abundant fuels is the anti-thesis of what the environmental movement wants. Forget the stuff about climate change - it's not the real issue. If it were then the greens would be cheer-leading the move to fracking as it leads to lower CO2 emissions, as the experience of the US has shown. No, the real cause is de-industrialisation. Cheap, clean and abundant energy means we can carry on with manufacturing and consuming and raising living standards. The greens want expensive, intermittent and unreliable energy so that we cut back on development and regress rather than progress...

Cyprus Needs To Quit

Whatever happens the Cypriot people are going to be suffering for the next few years - just as they've been having an increasingly hard time in the last few. There's no avoiding the pain. But now is the time to see whether there are any Cypriot politicians with the balls to lead the country out of the Euro. Even better, the Cypriots should take the opportunity to leave the EU completely.

A Euro exit will mean that the newly resurrected Cypriot pound will be lower in value than the Euro. The value of people's savings will drop compared to the Euro, but that's unavoidable. While imports will be more expensive, it does mean that Cypriot exports will become cheap, and that tourism - the biggest sector of the economy outside banking - will become more attractive. In time the influx of tourists and the increase in exports will mean an increase in value for the Cypriot pound. And if banks have to fail, as seems likely, then that's what has to happen. Bleeding the people dry to keep the banks of life support ultimately does the economy no good.

Leaving the EU completely will also mean that Cyrpus would be in a better position regarding the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. It's a simmering issue in Cyrpus, which has had high rates of immigration from Romania, Bulgaria etc. It's precisely the issue which has given rise to the fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece, and the same thing could happen in Cyprus. The Greek Cypriot far-Right has never lost the desire for Enosis with Greece - a resurgent far-Right, whether it's Golden Dawn or some other local variant - will present even bigger problems in the future.

Huhne Down - Who Next?

I'll admit to a certain grim satisfaction in seeing Chris Huhne sentenced to eight months, I also think he's got off relatively lightly given the charges and the way he did everything in his power to deny the truth for so long. There are plenty in the blogosphere who are saying that Huhne should have been charged for crimes against the economy, the environment and science. That's true enough, but it misses the point that political class that Huhne (and Vicky Pryce come to that), remain firmly in control. The green agenda remains at the heart of political power across the western world, even though the scientific rationale is rapidly unravelling. So, given that, what can we do?

The answer is to attack the powers that be with every weapon available to us. And that means focusing on their areas of weakness, such as expenses, corruption, lying and cheating. It means using the law to bring down individual politicians for all of their transgressions. If we can't prosecute for the lies and hypocrisy implicit in their politics, we must prosecute for the lies and hypocrisy in their personal lives and activities.

Remember, Al Capone was brought down not for extortion, murder or violence, but for tax offences.

A strategy like this won't dislodge an ideology directly, but in time if we can clear out the current lot of thieves it may make room for a new generation to emerge and hopefully, just hopefully, a new generation rid of the green poison that our current masters are imbibing.

Jimmy Saville vs Socialist Worker

As a former leftist (yes, I admit it, but I was young, dark-skinned and working class and trapped on a council estate..) I still keep an eye on what the "comrades" are saying. The latest edition of the Socialist Worker (and to be clear, I was never keen on the Trotskyite SWP, especially as an ex-anarchist), includes this snippet from the annual SWP conference:

Julia from Sheffield pointed to the establishment cover-up of the Jimmy Saville case saying that it showed that "the ruling class protect their own".

Who knew that Jimmy Saville was a member of the ruling class? There was me thinking that he was just some creepy light entertainer from up North... Now we know, Saville was a member of the grand bourgeoisie out the keep the proletariat in chains. Still, the comrades of the SWP are on the case. Yep, so long, that is, as the abuser is white and a member of the working classes:

She contrasted it to the racism that has gone along with the discussion of the grooming and abuse of young women.

The moral of this tale is that if you're going to abuse young women make sure you're my colour and not Jimmy Saville.

Thorium Power - In The News Again

I've written about the prospects for thorium power a few times in the past, here for example: http://progcontra.blogspot.co.uk/2006/07/thorium-powered-nuclear-reactors.html.

Periodically the subject rears it's head in the mainstream press, the latest example being a piece by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard at the Telegraph. He finishes his article thus:

If the Chinese can crack thorium, the world will need less oil, coal, and gas than feared. Wind turbines will vanish from our landscape. There will less risk of a global energy crunch, less risk of resource wars, and less risk of a climate tipping point.

Well, forget the nonsense about climate tipping points, the real good news is that cheap power is essential for global economic development. And, as he rightly points out, a cheap source of power - like shale, as well as thorium - could finally tip the balance away from wind farms once and for all. And that's precisely why the greens will do all they can to fight thorium power in the same way they're fighting shale. Some of the more far-sighted environmentalists will even concede the point about wind farms but will advocate we go for fusion power instead - precisely because that's so far from reality.

Still, if does look as though the prospects for commercial thorium power are improving. However, it would be a shame if the cheapness and relative abundance of shale actually ended up stifling thorium research...

No correlation between global temperatures and CO2

For a good start to the New Year how about taking a look at a recent paper published in the journal Earth System Dynamics? Entitled 'Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming' the paper, which is published as open access and can be downloaded for free, the paper uses robust statistical methods to test for spurious correlations between global temperature and the main drivers of the greenhouse effect (eg CO2, aerosols, total solar irradiance).

To quote from the abstract:

We show that although these anthropogenic forcings share a common stochastic trend, this trend is empirically independent of the stochastic trend in temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, greenhouse gas forcing, aerosols, solar irradiance and global temperature are not polynomially cointegrated. This implies that recent global warming is not statistically significantly related to anthropogenic forcing. On the other hand, we find that greenhouse gas forcing might have had a temporary effect on global temperature.

Or from the paper itself:

We have shown that anthropogenic forcings do not polynomially cointegrate with global temperature and solar irradiance. Therefore, data for 1880–2007 do not support the anthropogenic interpretation of global warming during this period.

and:

Given the complexity of Earth’s climate, and our incomplete understanding of it, it is difficult to attribute to carbon emissions and other anthropogenic phenomena the main cause for global warming in the 20th century.

Also worth reading are the reviewers comments, which are very positive, a point to keep in mind when the paper is attacked by the climate faithful. And, as always in these situations, we can only speculate on the orgy of publicity (not least from the BBC) the paper would have generated had the results shown a true correlation between CO2 and global temperatures...

This Must Be Some Kind of Joke

You've got to be fucking kidding, right? Nobody in their right mind would be giving away £2bn of our cash to build windfarms in Africa, would they?

Not only is this a ludicrous waste of money we can ill-afford, it does bugger all to help Africa develop. Instead of a stable and managed power infrastructure, they'll get electricity when the wind blows. And whereas we can do something to ameliorate the uselessness of wind energy by backing them up with gas fired power generation, what will they do in Africa?

Under-developing Africa is a by-product of environmentalism - it's encoded in the DNA of rich white environmental leftists to keep the rest of the world poor while they work hard at dismantling our own economies.

It's nonsense but the green fascists are wetting themselves with delight and begging for more. The noxious scum bags...

Now STFU about Amazon, Starbucks et al

I'm not usually one for quoting people verbatim, but I make an exception in this case because the original is behind the paywall at the Times, and because Tim Worstall makes his point crystal clear:

How can you accuse a company of tax avoidance when it is doing exactly what the law tells it to do?

Logic or common sense does not usually stop the bleatings of politicians but this all-party outrage about big corporations dodging taxes is absolutely ludicrous. The EU, under the single-market rules, positively encourages the business behaviour that is being criticised.

Yes, it is true that Amazon pays a lower rate of corporation tax by basing itself in Luxembourg, and Google and Facebook in Ireland. But doing this is not a sign of corporate chicanery or crafty lawyers exploiting loopholes; rather it is the very point of the Single Market (articles 26, 28, 49, 54 and 56 of the basic European Union Treaty). A company that wants to sell to all 27 EU countries needs to have its European headquarters in only one EU state. VAT is charged (except, oddly, on digital goods) where the delivery is made to, and corporation tax is levied on where that single brass plate is. As HMRC has recently pointed out, this is not avoidance, this is just the way corporation tax works.

It is true that Amazon has warehouses in the UK but we also have a double taxation treaty with Luxembourg — as we have with many other countries — which states that tax is not chargeable on the profits made from sales from warehouses and logistics chains.

It is true that Starbucks pays royalties to a Dutch company, thus apparently dodging UK tax. But EU law (council directive 2003/49/EC ) states that such royalty payments within the EU are not only allowed — it forbids the taxation of the payments in the country sending them.

These companies are not making a mockery of our tax laws: they are obeying the rules and regulations in each and every particular. They are not even avoiding tax, as these companies are doing specifically what the law intends, even to the point that we have laws that forbid national governments from stopping these multinationals doing what they have been doing.

All of which leads to a much more important question: why do we now have such an incompetence of politicians whining about the laws that they have spent the past four decades enacting? They could claim simple ignorance of what they have done but that is hardly a strong defence, is it?

Yet it is still true: they have deliberately built a tax system in which all the things they are complaining about are not actually tax evasion nor even avoidance. They are simply tax compliance — obeying the law of the land as it was intended and written.

Now, will the BBC, the Guardian, the Mail and the rest STFU? If you don't like what's going on then campaign to leave the EU, otherwise live with the fact that these companies are doing exactly what they've been told to do.

How Much Did They Spend Of Our Money?

With perfect timing, sceptic blogger Maurizio Morabito has revealed the list of 28 individuals who attended the BBC climate change seminar in 2006 which lead to their abandoning any pretence at impartiality on the subject. This is the same list that Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky blog has been battling to get through the Freedom of Information Act. The BBC spent a fortune on high profile lawyers in facing Newbery in court - a lone pensioner who represented himself in court. Andrew Orlowski of the Register has covered in some detail here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/07/bbc_is_private_go_away/

Yet again we find that the sceptic blogosphere is creative, persistence and just can't be ignored.

One of the questions that we need answered now is to get an idea of how much the BBC squandered in fighting FOI requests. How much of our cash was wasted trying to hide a document that had previously been published on the web? Who decided it was so important to keep the list - embarassing because of the paucity of scientific expertise present - secret?

Heads ought to roll - how about some of the BBC attendees:

• George Enwistle 
• Helen Boaden
• Peter Rippon
• Steve Mitchell

Funny how those four names are already in the news...

Privatise the BBC

What other response can there be to the on-going 'crisis' at the BBC? What we are seeing is typical of the most poisonous organisation in the UK. The combination of liberal-breast beating, cathartic bouts of self-flagellation and looking after their own is what the BBC does best. Add to which it gives them the chance to do what they like to do at every opportunity, which is to focus inwards.

Let's be honest, the BBC is the most morally corrupt organisation in the country. The real scandal isn't Jimmy Saville, it's the very existence of a state broadcaster that made Stalinist era Pravda look like a beacon of independence. The BBC is the propaganda arm of the liberal establishment. It deserves to die.

UK To End Aid To India

About bloody time...

Now to follow through and cull every aid project anywhere in the world to do with global warming etc. Tackling real problems in poor countries is one thing, handing out money to tackle phantoms is something else altogether.

New Archbishop

I've often thought that the Church of England is the BBC at prayer. After all they share so many similar concerns - global warming, 'economic justice', love for the EU, a belief that the state can solve all problems etc. In which case I should not be surprised by the fact that the new Archbishop is described as follows:

Bishop of Durham Justin Welby, a former oil industry worker, is set to become the next Archbishop of Canterbury.

Oil industry worker conjures images of grimy engineers, burly blokes battling the elements on oil rigs and so on. In fact Eton-educated Justin Welby would more accurately be described as an oil industry executive or manager, but that's so un-BBC...