On 18 November 2004, Isabelle
Chuine and co-workers published a research paper on global warming.
The paper appeared in Nature,
the world's most highly-regarded scientific journal. (UPDATE - Online here http://www.ipsl.jussieu.fr/~ypsce/papers/chuine432289.pdf) And it gathered some publicity. Chuine et al.
claimed to have developed a method for estimating the summer temperature in Burgundy, France, in any
given year back to 1370 (based on the harvest dates of grapes). Using their method, the authors asserted
that the summer of 2003 was the warmest summer since 1370, in Burgundy.
I had been following global warming studies only as a disinterested outside
spectator (and only occasionally). Someone sent me the paper of
Chuine et al., though, and wondered what I thought of it from a
mathematical perspective. So I had a look.
To study the paper properly, I needed to have the authors' data. (UPDATE - ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/historical/france/burgundy2004.txt ) So I e-mailed
Dr. Chuine, asking for this. The authors, though, were very reluctant to let
me have the data. It me took eight months, tens of e-mails exchanged with the authors,
and two formal complaints to Nature, before I got the data. (Some data was
purchased from Météo France.)
It is obviously inappropriate that such a large effort was necessary.
Looking at the data made it manifest that there are serious problems
with the work of Chuine et al. In particular, the authors' estimate for the
summer temperature of 2003 was higher than the actual temperature by
2.4 °C (about 4.3 °F). This is the primary reason that 2003 seemed,
according to the authors, to be extremely warm.
There is also another reason. The three warmest years on record, prior to 2003,
were 1945, 1947, and 1952. (The instrumental record goes back to
1922, or even 1883 if we accept some inaccuracies.) The estimate of
Chuine et al. for the summer temperature in each of those years
was much lower than the actual temperature.
That is, the authors had developed a method that gave a falsely-high
estimate of temperature in 2003 and falsely-low estimates of temperatures in other
very warm years. They then used those false estimates to proclaim that 2003 was
tremendously warmer than other years.
The above is easy enough to understand. It does not even require any
specialist scientific training. So how could the peer reviewers of the paper not
have seen it? (Peer reviewers
are the scientists
who check a paper prior to its publication.) I asked Dr. Chuine
what data was sent to Nature, when the paper was submitted to the
journal. Dr. Chuine replied, "We never sent data to Nature".
I have since published a short note that details the above problem (reference
below). There are several other problems with the paper of Chuine et al.
as well. I have written a brief survey
of those (for people with an undergraduate-level background in science). As
described in that survey, problems would be obvious to anyone with an
appropriate scientific background, even without the data. In other words, the
peer reviewers could not have had appropriate background.
What is important here is not the truth or falsity of the claim of
Chuine et al. about Burgundy temperatures. Rather, what is important is that a
paper on what is arguably the world's most important scientific topic (global warming)
was published in the world's most prestigious scientific journal with essentially
no checking of the work prior to publication.
Moreover—and crucially—this lack of checking is not the result of some fluke failures in
the publication process. Rather, it is common for researchers to submit papers without
supporting data, and it is frequent that peer reviewers do not have the
requisite mathematical or statistical skills needed to check the work (medical
sciences excepted). In other words, the publication of the work of Chuine et al.
was due to systemic problems in the scientific publication process.
The systemic nature of the problems indicates that there might be many other scientific
papers that, like the paper of Chuine et al., were inappropriately published.
Indeed, that is true and I could list numerous examples. The only thing really unusual
about the paper of Chuine et al. is that the main problem with it
is understandable for people without specialist scientific training. Actually, that is why I
decided to publish about it. In many cases of incorrect research the
authors will try to hide behind an obfuscating smokescreen of complexity and sophistry.
That is not very feasible for Chuine et al. (though the authors did try).
Finally, it is worth noting that Chuine et al. had the data; so they must
have known that their conclusions were unfounded. In other words, there is prima facie
evidence of scientific fraud. What will happen to the researchers as a result of this?
Probably nothing. That is
another systemic problem with the scientific publication process.
Olympic bill rises £1bn Up to 80 businesses and hundreds of residents could be evicted from the London Olympic site next year as part of a huge relocation exercise adding an extra £1 billion to the cost of the 2012 Games.
The total taxpayers’ bill for the 2012 Olympics, which is rising steadily, is now estimated at more than £8 billion, including contingency fees.
Last month it was:
".. is now believed to be approaching £5 billion." (Source)
Originally it was:
£2.4 billion
Costs
* £560 million for new venues, including £250 million for the Olympic Stadium.
* £65 million for the Olympic village.
* £1.5 billion to run the Games.
* £200 million on security.
Revenue
* £1.5 billion from a special Olympic National Lottery game.
* £625 million from a council tax surcharge of £20 per year for London households.
* £560 million from IOC television and marketing deals.
* £450 million from sponsorship and official suppliers.
* £300 million from ticket sales.
* £250 million from the London Development Agency.
* £60 million from licensing.
The bid team believed that London could end the Games with a surplus of more than £100 million
At this rate my original estimate of £10 billion is going to be a wild underestimate. Look just stop - admit it was a bit of a mistake, first loss is the best loss to take and so on. If Paris wants it they can have it other wise they will have to make do with Walthamstow Dog Track for the ceremony....
Soldiers in Scotland's new "super regiment" have to share kilts because of a shortage of the ceremonial dress.
The Royal Regiment of Scotland has 5,000 soldiers but just 320 kilts, just one for every 15 men.
The kilts are worn during ceremonial or public duties.
advertisement
The shortage comes after the Army decided to end its 150-year association with Borders-based kilt makers Robert Noble, which has produced military tartan since 1850.
The Army has put to tender a £1 million contract for the new kilts. It has received 320 "trial" kilts but will not receive a full set until 2008.
When you can't even dress the men then you know defence spending is a disgrace!
This fetching Camo pattern kilt is available from The Kilt Store for £145 and a matching sporran is yours for £65, a total of £200; which is what the MoD is paying per kilt, delivery in 4-6 weeks, not 18 months.....
putting iodine in salt, public health experts say, may be the simplest and most cost-effective health measure in the world. Each ton of salt needs about two ounces of potassium iodate, which costs about $1.15.
Worldwide, about two billion people — a third of the globe — get too little iodine, including hundreds of millions in India and China. Studies show that iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Even moderate deficiency, especially in pregnant women and infants, lowers intelligence by 10 to 15 I.Q. points, shaving incalculable potential off a nation’s development.
The most visible and severe effects — disabling goiters, cretinism and dwarfism — affect a tiny minority, usually in mountain villages. But 16 percent of the world’s people have at least mild goiter, a swollen thyroid gland in the neck. NY Times
“Deadly sprinkles in lunches” and “cheese stick could be killing your children.”
We were told that we are feeding our children things that are going to cause heart attacks and strokes later in life and that the salty foods parents are allowing their children to eat are like feeding them “solid seawater for lunch.”
The evidence for these headlining claims was a recent study .. published in the journal Hypertension. The media echoed the CASH press release, saying this study proves that a modest reduction in salt intake among children can almost immediately cause significant falls in blood pressure, “which in turn could lead to major reductions in the risk of developing stroke, heart attacks and heart failure later in life.”
...
Their press release promised possible “massive population health gains.”
·But this study did not examine a single child.
·It conducted no clinical research to learn how much salt is needed or might be harmful for children.
·It offered no clinical evidence to know if a lower blood pressure reading of 1 point means anything for children’s health or is maintained as a child grows.
·It offered no proof that a blood pressure reading during childhood has any bearing on adult blood pressures or heart disease.
·And worse, it didn’t follow a single child to see if there were any health effects from the salt restrictions they are recommending.
In other words, this study offered no clinically meaningful evidence, only speculations. While controversy, debates and politics have surrounded salt recommendations for decades, as Gary Taubes outlined in the magazine Science, the body of evidence has not demonstrated that low-salt diets result in health benefits for the general population, nor that current salt intakes of Americans pose health risks for the general population. Even a recent Cochrane Library review of the evidence found insufficient information to know what effect salt reduction might have on health and mortality.
Of greatest concern is evidence suggesting that low-salt diets may actually be harmful for most people; increasing heart attacks, mortality and insulin resistance (a precursor to diabetes).
Shouldn’t we have something tenable to go on before experimenting on an entire generation of children? I suspect most parents would think so.
I think I ought to go back to buying the Iodised Cerebos Salt - I stopped because it blackens the silver spoons so, but that is probably a small price to pay to prevent my children becoming morons. (I seem to remember that the word Moron comes from the inhabitants of a small village in the Jura mountains that suffered iodine deficiency and were therefore stupid - can't find confirmation via Google, am I right?)
Update: Thanks to a comment I realise it was Cretin - not Moron I was thinking of:
From the Wikipedia:"The term cretin was brought into medical use in the 18th century from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common ..Endemic cretinism arises from a diet deficient in iodine and has affected far more people worldwide and continues to be a major public health problem in many countries. Iodine is an essential trace element, necessary primarily for the synthesis of thyroid hormones. Although it is found in many foods it is not universally present in all soils in adequate amounts. The soils of many inland areas on all continents are iodine deficient, and plants and animals grown there are correspondingly deficient. Populations living in those areas without outside food sources are most at risk for iodine deficiency diseases.
Iodine deficiency results in the impairments of varying degrees of physical and mental development. It also causes gradual enlargement of the thyroid gland, referred to as a goiter. It is being combatted in many countries by public health campaigns of iodine administration.
Endemic cretinism was especially common in areas of southern Europe around the Alps and was described by Roman writers, and often depicted by medieval artists. Alpine cretinism was described from a medical perspective by several travellers and physicians in the late 18th and early 19th centuries."
Though there is a village called Moron in the Swiss Jura mountains which is probably what confused me....
The former US Vice President Al Gore has told scientists to speak out more on the issue of climate change.
In a keynote address at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, he said it was imperative people understood what was happening to the world...the Democrat politician said efforts to censor "inconvenient truths" should be resisted.
Only to happy to help , Al. Though maybe I sometimes spread the facts you don't want spread I will carry on with the warm glow in my heart it is what you have asked for.
Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, a study says.
A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.
There was no difference in IQ score between strict vegetarians and those who said they were vegetarian but who reported eating fish or chicken.
Researchers said the findings were partly related to better education and higher occupational social class, but it remained statistically significant after adjusting for these factors.
I wish John at Numberwatch had the energy to go through the figures but my cursory look suggests that it is simply that the distribution of meat eaters is across the whole IQ spectrum, including the knuckle-dragger end as well as the "top" end, whereas the prissy veggies, and especially the pretend veggies, concentrate at the Guardian reading point of the IQ scale. And is there anything more pathetic than being a pretend veggie? A pretend Duke or war hero may be reprehensible but at least they wish to be something better than they are....
Moves to tackle climate change may spell the end of the bath.
A London council is set to introduce planning rules encouraging builders to provide only a shower.
Now Tory-run Barnet council ...
If someone failed to check whether a bath could be left out it would be a "material consideration" in deciding whether to grant permission. Schemes that include a bath unnecessarily could be refused.
"Tory run"? I think this justifies the ancient Roman belief that we are a bunch of savages without appreciation of civilisation, with the Green Tories leading the rush back to the stone age as fast as they can...
The inquest into the death of Sergeant Steven Roberts, 33,who had to give his enhanced body armour to a colleague because it was in short supply, His training body armour could not stop the machinegun rounds that killed him in 2003.
Squadron Sergeant-Major Jeffrey Elson, of the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment, told Oxford Coroner’s Court that, unlike in the Cold War, “you do not get the kit on time to do your job, and troops do not have enough time to familiarise themselves with kit before they have to use them”. In the Iraq war, “those not forced to hand back their armour had to slot protective plates into their pockets as they did not have vests needed to hold them in place. Some used black masking-tape.”
Private bus operators will be stripped of their powers to set fares, frequencies and timetables, under proposals aimed at reversing 20 years of decline.
The competition laws will be relaxed ....
If the proposals become law, local authorities will be allowed to establish contracts if they can demonstrate that there is a public interest in removing control from the operators.
No no no - this isn't the creeping hand of socialism, nationalisation and state control, that is all "so last century", this is modern dynamic competitive measures for THE ENVIRONMENT; can't have people travelling willy-nilly as they want in their own cars when they could be forced to queue up in the rain for the privilege of travelling in a stinking diesel smoking monster that takes them where they don't want to go at times that don't suit. It's for the planet, don't you understand?
Parents in a remote Scottish village are so infuriated by a decision to close their primary school that they have raised more than £1 million to buy it.
In an unprecedented initiative, parents in Roybridge, Inverness-shire, have been offered a bank loan and a five-figure private donation to ensure that the small school, which has served their community since Victorian times, remains open.
....
On Thursday the local council will decide whether to support the Roybridge parents, who have drawn up a detailed business plan in an attempt to save their school from closure and have raised £9,000 to pay for surveyors’ appraisals and architects’ plans.
After years of allowing the school to fall into disrepair, the Highland council has announced plans to close it and to amalgamate it with a neighbouring village. ..
Just shows that Parents are the key to education - they want the best for their kids and it is the councils, the government departments and the "Producer Capture" of the teachers that gets in the way and tell them not to worry their little heads with it and not take responsibility. Well they want to, and should do.
(And if any villagers are wavering as to whether to support such a scheme then a school in a village gives a ten percent uplift in property values...)
Rightly boasts that he is "THE MOST SUCCESSFUL ENGLISH ATHLETE IN THE HISTORY OF THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES, holding 15 medals" - but as they were for Pistol Shooting the BBC decided that Top Toff Totty was more worthy.....
BRITAIN will take the first step towards mass medication of the population this week with the publication of proposals to add the vitamin folic acid to bread.
A report commissioned by ministers will recommend the compulsory fortification of flour and bread with folic acid to help prevent babies being born with birth defects.
Don't these people do any research? Don't they know how to use Google?
As any fule knows and I have pointed out before..
...
Our flour is already "fortified" by law and that this doesn't have to be noted on the label, and yes it applies to those lovely organic handmilled on the thighs of Dorset virgin brands as well...
By law, white and brown flour is fortified with calcium, iron, thiamin and niacin. Because it is made from the whole wheat grain, wholemeal flour already contains these vitamins and minerals, although white and brown flour contain more calcium because of fortification.
Calcium carbonate (E170) is added to all brown and white flour products in the UK and has been a legal requirement for almost 5 years. This is carried out to ensure that vulnerable groups receive enough calcium in their diet. On average 20% of the UK dietary calcium intake is accounted for via bread and flour products. Other legally required additives in bread include iron and B-Vitamins.
Mankind has had less effect on global warming than previously supposed, a United Nations report on climate change will claim next year.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there can be little doubt that humans are responsible for warming the planet, but the organisation has reduced its overall estimate of this effect by 25 per cent.
.....predicts that temperatures will rise by up to 4.5 C during the next 100 years, bringing more frequent heat waves and storms.
The panel, however, has lowered predictions of how much sea levels will rise in comparison with its last report in 2001.
....
The authors also state that the climate is almost certain to warm by at least 1.5 C during the next 100 years.
Such a rise would be enough to take average summer temperatures in Britain to those seen during the 2003 heatwave, when August temperatures reached a record-breaking 38 C. Unseasonable warmth this year has left many Alpine resorts without snow by the time the ski season started.
Britain can expect more storms of similar ferocity to those that wreaked havoc across the country last week, even bringing a tornado to north-west London.
The IPCC has been forced to halve its predictions for sea-level rise by 2100, one of the key threats from climate change. It says improved data have reduced the upper estimate from 34 in to 17 in.
It also says that the overall human effect on global warming since the industrial revolution is less than had been thought, due to the unexpected levels of cooling caused by aerosol sprays, which reflect heat from the sun.
Large amounts of heat have been absorbed by the oceans, masking the warming effect...
The report paints a bleak picture for future generations unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. It predicts that the climate will warm by 0.2 C a decade for the next two decades if emissions continue at current levels.
...
Climate change sceptics are expected to seize on the revised figures as evidence that action to combat global warming is less urgent.
Scientists insist that the lower estimates for sea levels and the human impact on global warming are simply a refinement due to better data on how climate works rather than a reduction in the risk posed by global warming
Naughty Telegraph - those who wrote the report are "scientists" those who question are mere "sceptics".
I look forward to seeing this report sceptically examined.....
injurywatch has found a series of secret payments from environmental polluters to the leading Oxford University cancer researcher Sir Richard Doll may have compromised his integrity. By shaping the epidemiological evidence to fit the requirements of his paymasters and failing to stimulate adequate health warnings, Doll's paid-for "evidence" may have protected his proven paymasters in the chemical and asbestos industries and led to the premature deaths of millions of people worldwide. Injury watch Aims and principles
Injurywatch aims to counter the myth that a "compensation culture" exists in Britain today and to presses for the rights of victims to receive the compensation due to them. We campaign against business practices intended to rip-off claimants wherever we find them. We strongly oppose the culture of delay, obfuscation and legal challenge which we believe insurance companies are using in a cynical attempt to limit their liabilities to pay valid claims, particularly to asbestos victims. At the same time we deplore the behaviour of claims handlers who promise no-win-no-fee agreements but dip into compensation rightfully due to the claimant if the case is successful.
A quick WHOIS Query on the domain reveals the unhelpful information:
Registrant: injurywatch.co.uk
Trading as: Legalwatch Ltd
Registrant type: UK Individual
Registrant's address: The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.
(Companies House reveals that Legalwatch ltd is a recent company incorporated 24/7/2006 - that trades from the same address as injurywatch.)
So still no nearer as to who pays for injurywatch's extensive services! It looks like the Groan merely reprinted a PR puff from an organisation funded by an anonymous bunch of compensation solicitors who might be thought to have a declarable interest - though I might be wrong! And the accusation is that Sir Richard Doll took money from an anonymous bunch of companies who might be thought to have a declarable interest - though they might be wrong!
The blunt message from this week's long-awaited UK skills audit, the Leitch Report, which was fully endorsed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his pre-Budget Report. ...The UK is "on track to achieve undistinguished mediocrity" if it fails to upgrade the skills of its workforce by 2020.
It is perhaps part of Britain's problem that the chattering classes are not very interested in skills
His case is that unless we dramatically improve our work-related education, our economy will shrink and our standard of living will fall.
Too many people stop learning far too young. Participation levels in post-16 education and training are below the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) average.
This affects productivity. According to Leitch, the average French worker is 20% more productive per hour than their British counterpart. In Germany they are 13% ahead.
...
With Gordon Brown talking about keeping all young people in education or training until 18,..
the Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, told the Lifelong Learning UK annual conference this week, "we must eliminate all failure".
The message is stark: Underperforming colleges must improve or lose their funding. The Further Education Bill takes new powers to close failing colleges in much the same way as happened with schools.
Employers are the new blue-eyed boys. ...Some hoped the government would require employers to provide, or fund, the training their workers will need, not just in their current job but throughout their careers.
Asked about that this week, Alan Johnson admitted employers might now be in "the last chance saloon".
Yet, while compulsion remains a possibility, Johnson noted that the evidence from abroad suggests that forcing employers to train does not worked. ...
Modern societies treat their children as if they are incapable of bearing the least responsibility until they have finished at least twelve to sixteen years of schooling--sometimes up to twenty-five years of training or longer. This is a huge mistake that is bringing a destructive rot to society from the inside out.
...
Have you ever wondered why there do not seem to be people like Benjamin Franklin around anymore?
At twelve he was bound apprentice to brother James, a printer. After a few years of that, and disliking his brother’s authority, he ran away first to New York and soon after to Philadelphia where he arrived broke at the age of seventeen. Finding work as a printer proved easy, and through his sociable nature and ready curiosity he made acquaintance with men of means. One of these induced Franklin to go to London where he found work as a compositor and once again brought himself to the attention of men of substance. A merchant brought him back to Philadelphia in his early twenties as what might today be called an administrative assistant or personal secretary. From this association, Franklin assembled means to set up his own printing house which published a newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, to which he constantly contributed essays. At twenty-six, he began to issue "Poor Richard’s Almanac,"...
Many college students today lack the reading skills that children in the early US possessed before they ever started school. Are children and college students today really that much stupider--or is the way they are treated today making them seem that way?"
TO ANYONE still sober enough to care, it is either one of the biggest retail blunders of all time or a fiendishly clever piece of internet marketing.
Yesterday, off licence chain Thresher was besieged by customers desperate to cash in 40% discount coupons that were "released in error" to the general public and will reportedly cost the company millions.
But as drinkers stocked up for Christmas, assuming their purchases last that long, an alternative explanation began to emerge.
Some experts believe the vouchers were released "accidentally on purpose" in a bid to gain massive publicity for the firm. And there is virtual unanimity in the view that Thresher, far from losing a fortune, will make millions from the frenzy they have generated. ....
Viral marketing at its very best, give that ponytail an award. (Threshers do a standard 3 for the price of 2 offer which is 33% discount, but who goes rushing to buy there for that?)
A HEROIC soldier who became the most junior serviceman ever to win the Military Cross is to put his medal up for sale.
Liam Armstrong, a Royal Marine serving with Arbroath-based 45 Commando, made history more than three years ago when he was presented with the Military Cross, one of Britain's highest awards for gallantry, aged just 23.
The commando was decorated by the Queen in July 2003, at an investiture ceremony at Buckingham Palace for his outstanding bravery. He had captured nine terrorists and a cache of mortar bombs, rockets and bullets in a raid on a suspected al-Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan. The young Marine broke into the terrorist compound, near the Pakistan border, and took the men prisoner without firing a single shot.
But it was revealed yesterday that Mr Armstrong, now working as a tracklayer for a railway company, has decided to put his award for bravery up for sale to help guarantee a financial future for his long-term partner, Charlene, and two-year-old daughter, Lydia.
There were thirty million English who talked of England's might,
There were twenty broken troopers who lacked a bed for the night.
They had neither food nor money, they had neither service nor trade;
They were only shiftless soldiers, the last of the Light Brigade.
They felt that life was fleeting; they knew not that art was long,
That though they were dying of famine, they lived in deathless song.
They asked for a little money to keep the wolf from the door;
And the thirty million English sent twenty pounds and four !
They laid their heads together that were scarred and lined and grey;
Keen were the Russian sabres, but want was keener than they;
And an old Troop-Sergeant muttered, "Let us go to the man who writes
The things on Balaclava the kiddies at school recites."
They went without bands or colours, a regiment ten-file strong,
To look for the Master-singer who had crowned them all in his song;
And, waiting his servant's order, by the garden gate they stayed,
A desolate little cluster, the last of the Light Brigade.
They strove to stand to attention, to straighen the toil-bowed back;
They drilled on an empty stomach, the loose-knit files fell slack;
With stooping of weary shoulders, in garments tattered and frayed,
They shambled into his presence, the last of the Light Brigade.
The old Troop-Sergeant was spokesman, and "Beggin' your pardon," he said,
"You wrote o' the Light Brigade, sir. Here's all that isn't dead.
An' it's all come true what you wrote, sir, regardin' the mouth of hell;
For we're all of us nigh to the workhouse, an' we thought we'd call an' tell.
"No, thank you, we don't want food, sir; but couldn't you take an' write
A sort of 'to be continued' and 'see next page' o' the fight?
We think that someone has blundered, an' couldn't you tell 'em how?
You wrote we were heroes once, sir. Please, write we are starving now."
The poor little army departed, limping and lean and forlorn.
And the heart of the Master-singer grew hot with "the scorn of scorn."
And he wrote for them wonderful verses that swept the land like flame,
Till the fatted souls of the English were scourged with the thing called Shame.
O thirty million English that babble of England's might,
Behold there are twenty heroes who lack their food to-night;
Our children's children are lisping to "honour the charge they made - "
And we leave to the streets and the workhouse the charge of the Light Brigade!
'The Last of the Light Brigade' was written by Rudyard Kipling to highlight the plight of those who survied the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade
Devizes Opportunity Centre - needs your links as they have just launched a brand new website and want Mr Google to notice them!
They do a fantastic job so if you can help please do!
When I appeared on the Jeremy Vine programme on Wednesday a number of callers disputed my interpretation of the science of climate change. I said the evidence of cause and effect was unambiguous. A number of emails after the programme also disputed the facts and I promised to provide links via my blog to the science. ..
Strangely he doesn't link to this...
World Climate Report which brings to our attention a peer- reviewed paper in a serious scientific publication untainted by any special interest:
The authors place the recent warming into an interesting perspective noting “the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C (of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century)”. Holy cow, can you imagine the letters and e-mails they must have received in response to that conclusion? They even show that over the last 3,000 years, the earth has cooled, or if you look just at the last 1,000 years, the earth has been cooling as well (the earth was in the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago).
Their conclusions with respect to potential policy will more than raise some eyebrows as well as they write “Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4–5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.” They show that the climatic effects of the Kyoto Protocol would be negligible, leading them to state “Thus, the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices). Impact of available human controls will be negligible in comparison with the global forces of nature. Thus, the attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes (and drastic measures prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol) have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful.”
Our World Climate Reports uncover and present interesting results we find in the peer-reviewed professional scientific journals, and as we have seen over and over, there are many absolutely amazing papers published regularly in outstanding journals. The global warming crusade would denounce this paper as outrageous, but it survived rigorous peer-review, the editor elected to publish it, and like it or not, this paper is part of the serious science literature. Dismissing the paper is made more difficult given the affiliation of the authors and the prestige of the journal.
The debate on climate change is never boring, the debate is full of surprises, and anyone claiming the debate is over is simply dismissing a significant number of papers that appear regularly in the major journals.
Reference:
Khilyuk, L.F., and G. V. Chilingar. 2006. On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? Environmental Geology, 50, 899–910.
Royal Marines serving in Afghanistan who were promised a special allowance amounting to about ｣3,000 apiece have instead had the money deducted from their wages in what the Ministry of Defence described as an administrative error....
Navy chiefs were so concerned about the impact of the wage cut on the morale of the troops that they sent out extra human resources staff.
WTF - send out some pen-pushers to counsel them? Let me give you a simpler plan; get some cheque books, a nice comfy chair and a desk and just write out a thousand cheques, and if you have time write - "sorry we cocked up". That is all you need to do.
We reported yesterday the proposed use of a pesticide, Glyphosphate, to destroy opium poppy crops in Afghanistan. This was incorrect. The Afghan government is considering using the herbicide Glyphosate.
Duh! A herbicide is a pesticide - "Under FEPA, a pesticide is any substance, preparation or organism prepared or used, among other uses, to protect plants or wood or other plant products from harmful organisms; to regulate the growth of plants; to give protection against harmful creatures; or to render such creatures harmless.
The term pesticides therefore has a very broad definition which embraces herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, rodenticides, soil-sterilants, wood preservatives and surface biocides among others. " PSD
TONY Blair has ordered all government departments to draw up urgent plans to slash red tape as part of a promise to business to cut regulatory burdens by a quarter.
In his last speech as Prime Minister to a CBI conference, Mr Blair pledged to cut form-filling, inspections and record-keeping requirements by 25 per cent.
And I will believe it when I see it - as far as I can see the red tape burden is a constant ratchet up - and of course with most of it oozing out of the EU there is not a lot Tone can do.
But maybe there is hope in the air - there is now so much Red Tape it is even making the Public Servants ill, and they are the people nuLabour listens to...
Constant political interference is causing stress-induced mental breakdowns in public servants, a consultant psychiatrist has claimed.
"I primarily treat people suffering from stress-induced mental disorders, such as depressive illness and anxiety states," Prof Cantopher writes.
"Twenty years ago most of my clientele were business executives, but they aren't now.
"Businesses have long since recognised that it is in their employees who are at the highest risk of stress related illness and they mostly nurture and protect them.
"Now it is the public servants who form the bulk of my practice."
"What these professions now have in common is that they are all victims of the craze so loved by recent governments for regulation and its attendant bureaucracy.
"Politicians need to be needed and for us to believe that they can stop things going wrong.
"They can't, of course, but they have to be seen to be doing something or their opposite numbers will call them complacent."
He said the big change in the past 20 years had been the growth of a bureaucratic "blame culture", which had been fostered by politicians.
Baton-wielding police officers who left scores of anti-hunt protestors bloodied in one of the most violent London riots in modern memory have been cleared of wrongdoing.
Shocking images of law-abiding demonstrators being clubbed to the ground rocked Westminster in 2004 and prompted a flood of legal complaints.
Pictures of injured rural men, women and teenagers, their faces streaming with blood under a hail of blows from officers in riot-gear triggered a national outcry.
But the official report into the demonstration has refused to endorse claims of police brutality and even accuses the protestors of stoking up the violence...
The IPCC 43-page report.... acknowledges that "some of the people injured in the demonstration were clearly not involved in any disorder", but goes on to conclude that "it is not surprising that police officers chose to use force".
The report's conclusions are all the more surprising given the seriousness with which IPCC chairman Nick Hardwick describes the events of Sep 15 2004.
In the report's foreword, he points out they were the "largest scale disorder" in London for more than a decade. And he accepts "how shocked everybody was" by the footage of the violence.
He says: "The images of injured hunt supporters cast a shadow across the reputation of the Metropolitan Police Service."
The IPCC received an initial 425 complaints, including 54 from people at the demonstration who claimed they were injured by the police. It took 1000 witness statements, and logged 400 exhibits and 25000 documents.
The report concludes: "It is clear that a number of protestors received serious head injuries. The consequences of such acts could have been far more serious."
It agrees that there were examples of "considerable force" used by some officers that led to "a number of serious head injuries".
But it refuses to condemn the actions of the Met officers in Parliament Square and instead limits itself to a number of procedural recommendations, including a suggestion that batons used against demonstrators should be seized on the spot as potential evidence.
You couldn't make it up as that being the sort of pathetic recommendation the pen-pushers would come up with. I will leave it to others to suggest that if the demonstrators hadn't been overwhelmingly white law-abiding British Subjects then the outcome would have been different. The supercilious tones of some Plod on the radio welcoming the report reminds me yet again of the shame that decent folk have lost all respect for the police; and without that respect then "policing by consent" is no longer possible and we take yet another step towards a police state.
The Government wants to set up a database to monitor every child in the country — including their diet. But are our children as obese and unhealthy as we are told? And what about us? Health researchers argue that being overweight is actually beneficial: it's dieting that kills
The US surgeon general has claimed that obesity is 'a greater threat than weapons of mass destruction'
Big Brother has an ambition: to become Big Nanny. The Government wants to introduce a £224 million "Children's Index", a massive database of every child in the country, charting progress from birth to adulthood and flagging up "concerns" about each child's development. Two "flags" on a child's record would trigger an official investigation into his or her family.
Not surprisingly, Parliament's Information Commissioner, in a report last week, was highly critical of the scheme. "Government policy proposes treating all parents as if they cannot be trusted to bring up their children," the report said. Increasingly, this is just what the Government and health campaigners believe. One of the proposed danger signs on the Children's Index, after all, would be if the child were not eating the requisite, government-approved amount of fruit and vegetables each day.
....
Yet the obesity epidemic is a myth manufactured by public health officials in concert with assorted academics and special-interest lobbyists. These crusaders preach a sermon consisting of four obesity myths: that we and our children are fat; that being fat is a certain recipe for early death; that our fatness stems from the manufacturing and marketing practices of the food industry (hence Ofcom's recently announced ban on junk food advertising to children); and that we will lengthen our lives if only we eat less and lose weight. The trouble is, there is no scientific evidence to support these myths.
.....
Obesity crusaders believe that the nanny state has the right to define and enforce a single vision of what constitutes healthy living a good life. The government's judgment is considered inherently superior to any individual's judgment that fatness is at least personally tolerable.
The obesity crusade presumes a nursery nation comprised of docile infant-citizens too uncertain of their own values to be left to make their own way in a world in which an evil Ronald McDonald lurks under every archway. Obesity crusaders believe the individual has an obligation to order his life according to their judgment about health, and that the government may justifiably force him to conform if he demurs.
The lasting legacy of the obesity crusade will be both a much fatter government and a much thinner citizenry.
The government will be fatter through its expanded power to shape inappropriately the lives of its citizens. Britons will be thinner in their capacity for choice, self-government, and personal responsibility.
• Patrick Basham is director of the Democracy Institute and John Luik is a health policy writer. On December 14, the Social Affairs Unit publishes their book, Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade, co-authored with Gio Gori.
“While seated on a bicycle, the external genital nerve and artery are directly compressed. It is possible that chronic compression of the female genital area may lead to compromised blood flow and nerve injury due to disruption of the blood-nerve barrier.”
...male cyclists can suffer from genital numbness and erectile dysfunction. Source
That explains the sour mean faces that Lady Cyclists have as they wobble down the road laden down by Greenpeace stickers and sensible shoes in their organic hemp bags. Apart from the short trip to the range at the Pub, laden down with the Lee Metford on my back, you won't catch me risking the old todger by mounting the iron horse. Funny how the anti-car fascists never point out that cycling ruins your tackle....
(Apologies to any readers who are offended by this story).
Dr Gillian McKeith’s organisation has had to detox its own products after MHRA officers discovered it was advertising and selling goods without legal authorisation whilst making medicinal claims about their efficacy. Dr McKeith’s products, ‘Fast Formula Wild Pink’ for women and ‘Fast Formula Horny’ for men promised to deliver wonders for all in the bedroom.(Source)
Good - she is the mad old bat who pokes people's poo on prime time telly to humiliate them into eating their vegetables. But I'm not sure why her "Dr Gillian McKeith's Fast Formula HORNY Goat Weed Complex for men" needs to be banned - can anyone imagine trying to get the old boy to rise with that ugly mug leering off the package at you?
..."Sorry Scarlett, you and Keira might as well go home now, never happened to me before..."
It’s a Boy’s Own gift that will be stuffed into thousands of Christmas stockings, but a retired brigadier has discovered that the credit card-sized toolkit — complete with 5cm (2in) blade, compass, tweezers and toothpick — could put the recipients on the wrong side of the law.
Tom Foulkes, 56, who spent 35 years working for the Ministry of Defence developing real weapons, was arrested, locked up and had his fingerprints and DNA sample taken after the kit was discovered in his overnight bag by police.
The former Royal Engineer was preparing to board a Paris-bound train at Waterloo when an X-ray machine alarm was triggered by the toolkit. He was hauled from the station, placed in a cage in a van and taken to a police station for questioning. Four hours later he was released and cautioned after admitting to possessing an offensive weapon; Mr Foulkes had seen it as something with which to sharpen pencils and cut off luggage labels, and that his wife occasionally used to pluck her eyebrows.
Mr Foulkes aired his grievance in a letter to The Times. Yesterday he revealed more about his ordeal. “The whole thing was an absolute farce,” he said. “I’m now on the police database. They have photographs of me and records of my DNA and my fingerprints, all because I was carrying this useful little tool.” (The Times)
Sorry Sir - but you are also at fault, not for carrying the blade but for accepting the caution. If you had stood up to the bullies and demanded your day in court then not only would you probably have got away with it but also you would have done your bit to curb their behaviour. Not as easy as accepting a caution, and I'm not saying I would do it either, but that would be the right thing to have done.
(A) rather more general question-mark has been raised over (Solar Panels) value by one of the country's genuine experts, Abu Bakr Bahaj, a senior lecturer in civil engineering, who based his figures on the experience of a large panel installation at his university in Southampton.
Since solar panels in Britain generate, on average, only 20 per cent of their potential maximum output (at a cost of £4,500 per kilowatt of installed capacity), he reported in the journal of the Institute of Civil Engineers that the average pay-back time of solar panels is more than 45 years (although 70 years, he wrote, "is a more realistic figure"). Yet the average life of a photovoltaic cell is only 25 years.
In other words, if taxpayers were not so generous in providing £3,000 per kilowatt of capacity, no one in his right mind would dream of installing them.
So rapidly does any mention of global warming turn people's minds to jelly these days, that I suspect before long we shall see not just 10 Downing Street but the entire Palace of Westminster groaning under the weight of turbines and solar panels: all as useless as the politicians below them, whose electricity they will be doing almost nothing to provide.
...
Contextualizing the recent climate in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere is especially important, as it is across this region that the largest increase in surface air temperature has been both observed during the 20th century and predicted for the 21st century. These ideas highlight the importance of snow cover, its sensitivity to temperature, and its positive feedback to the overlying atmosphere. Higher temperatures in typically snow covered regions may lead to a reduction in snow cover, and in turn, a reduction in the refrigeration of Earth’s atmosphere from beneath, and even greater atmospheric warming. The vision of out-of-control warming in Earth’s frozen regions makes the leap toward a breakdown of the global oceanic circulation system and global sea level rise an easy one. ....
As the popularized side of the debate has led us to expect, the authors found that the coldest year (1863) and the coldest decade (1810s) are early in the record, well before the ballyhooed warming of the 20th century. Problematic from a climate change standpoint is the fact that the two distinct cold periods that made the 1810s the coldest decade followed an 1809 “unidentified” volcanic eruption and the eruption of Tambora in 1815 – unusual geologic events that defined the climate. However, of greater importance is the fact that the researchers found the warmest year on record to be 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades on record. This represents very bad news for climate change alarmists, since the warmest period was NOT the last quarter of the 20th century. In fact, the last two decades of the 20th century (1981-1990 and 1991-2000) were colder across the study area than any of the previous six decades, dating back to the 1900s and 1910s (Table 1). When examining the instrumental records of the stations it is apparent that no net warming has occurred since the warm period of the 1930s and 1940s .... Source
Well that is something I didn't know before, strange what you don't hear on the BBC....
The defence lawyer of a Wisconsin man charged with having sex with a dead deer is claiming he's innocent of any wrongdoing - because a "crimes against sexual morality" statute prohibits sex with animals, but fails to mention carcasses, The Duluth News Tribune reports.
Bryan James Hathaway, 20, of Superior, was arrested on "a misdemeanour charge of sexual gratification with an animal" after indulging in intercourse with said deceased deer on 11 October..
Interpreting the statue to exclude carcasses would, moreover, "also exclude freshly killed animals", Boughner insisted. This, in turn, "could lead to people who commit such acts with animals to kill them".
Boughner's latter point seems to be backed up by Hathaway's previous form, which saw him in April 2005 plead "no contest to one felony charge of mistreatment of an animal for the shooting death of Bambrick, a 26-year-old horse, to have sex with the animal".
The results of this case are being watched with interest in Pewsey, and the wildlife is looking worried..
Thousands of people are in danger of being fined £100 for late tax returns as revenue staff job cuts lead to a backlog of post, it was claimed last night.
Self-assessment tax returns, P45s and tax code letters are going unprocessed because of cutbacks at HM Revenue and Customs, union chiefs said.
More than 40,000 items had been left "for three months or more" with a further 78,331 unprocessed for 40 days, they claimed.
Every week I get a nice letter from the taxman asking for an increasing amount of money and threatening bailiffs and jail if I don't cough up, every week my accountant talks to the taxman he delivered the tax return to, every week the taxman agrees I don't owe anything and the return is just stuck in the system and it will all be sorted. If the got off their bloody arses and stopped sending out and responding to mulcting demands and actually opened their post then I for one would be a lot happier and not facing such a large accountants bill...
Around 60,000 days were lost by Swindon Borough Council to long-term sick leave in one year, a six of which was for "psychological" reasons.
Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that about 500 employees took long-term sick leave between September 2005 and 2006.
Long-term sick leave is defined as being absent for more than 20 days.
The figure the BBC didn't include in their report is that Swindon employs only 5793 Full Time Equivalent people (FTE equals 37 hours a week). So despite an "on-site occupational health service" and a caring employer the Swindon employees are a sorry sick bunch, of course there wouldn't be the hint of any swinging of the lead would there?
European green campaigners vowed to carry on their fight to outlaw the mercury barometer along with the thermometer, the manometer and the sphygmomanometer (for measuring blood pressure), all of which, under the EU directive, are no longer to be made.
On one hand this shows how "adaption" aand the use of new technologies solve environmental problems - who twenty years ago would have forecast that you would be able to buy very accurat electronic thermometers for pocket money? But on the other hand I just have a sneaking thought that the greens really hate us old codgers who tap the barometer each morning and check the silver column on the max/min thermometer and then dismiss their scaremongering - maybe they would like there only to be an official temperature....
Keeping our favourite seasoning off school dinner tables won't necessarily improve children's health, finds Paul Eastham
If last year's villain was the Turkey Twizzler, this year's must be salt. My 14-year-old daughter complains that it has been banned from her school's lunch tables this term – on the orders of the Government
The telegraph is going up in my estimation with this reasoned examination of the killer salt ban alongside its killer climate change articles. The MSM is catching up!
Baseball pitchers warm up with practice pitches before every appearance. Basketball players shoot practice hoops before games. Actors practice emoting before acting, singers practice intervals and runs, surgeons go through the sequence of a major surgery before scrubbing. All of these preliminaries are examples of mental calibration.
Calibrating the brain is a priming operation. The brain can be prepped for specific types of performance. But it is not just professional performers and practitioners of high risk procedures who need to calibrate. Every morning when the brain wakes up, it falls into a new dynamic state. If the brain has to achieve a certain level of performance each day, it must be calibrated for that performance. Otherwise, the level of achievement from day to day is left to chance. That is how most people live, by chance. When has popular culture ever offered anything else?
In Palestine the children are calibrated daily to hate the Jew, as they are in Hizballah controlled Lebanon, and much of the arab muslim lands. Hatred of the proper enemy is too important to be left to chance. If a society wants a ready supply of suicide bombers and guerilla fighters, it must begin calibrating minds at an early age.
Christian fundamentalists begin calibrating the minds of their children quite early as well. Sunday School and church, religious schools, camps, bible schools, and so on. Maintaining the proper religious way of thinking is too important to be left to chance. Early morning mass, confession, liturgy, prayer meetings, revivals. If a group wants the next generation to carry on the traditions of the current one, it must begin calibrating minds very early.
But then, those examples are not really the same thing as calibrating for top performance. They are more like brainwashing. But why do so many parents leave the cultivation of the minds of their children to chance and a largely indifferent culture? Affluent societies so often breed listless and goalless children. Decadence is what happens when one generation leaves the minds of the next generations to chance.
...
Brain calibration can take many forms--from meditation to mental imaging to neuromuscular practice to estimating distances or calculations, then checking the estimates. More complex forms of calibration are needed for more complex thought patterns. Unfortunately, modern educational practices have not kept up with current findings in neuroscience, but have instead regressed to conform with current whims of "political correctness."
Many professors of educational trends are willing to destroy a society in order to see their methods of social engineering "tried out" on new generations of hapless students. Fortunately, there are others who pay attention to scientific findings, who are outside the reach of the fashionable trendsetting PC social engineers.
There is a lot of need for reform in education, thanks to the PC professors who currently rule the universities and schools of education. Whether they like it or not, this reform is coming.
I hope so, not just for our children's sake, for all our sakes.
Via onegoodmove: Speed Bandits
How to stop motorists speeding and leave them smiling
View the movie below the fold - not completely work-safe but hey it is from Denmark!
Now here is a traffic calming campaign I could support...
Roll up roll up - one not to miss. His two parter on the Stern Review really is excellent and commendable.
Possible Error by Monkton?
On a small note Lord Monkton also publishes the email responses to his first article here and I'm unsure if there is an error in one of his responses or not. Maybe you can help me. As a peer with a decent education he drops the odd Latin tag into his writing, and this should be only encouraged. However he uses, "Nutat et Homerus", now as you know "Quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus" is the usual form, my old copy of Kennedy's Latin Eater can't quite square his version - is it my deficient education or has he nodded again?
The EU-funded FIDIS (Future of Identity in the Information Society) project has warned that implementation of the current generation of biometric travel ID will dramatically decrease security and privacy, and increase the risk of identity theft. In the Budapest Declaration, which derives from FIDIS' September meeting in Budapest, FIDIS calls for short-term damage control measures to be taken (because biometric ID is already being rolled out), and for "a new convincing and integrated security concept" to be developed within the next three years.
Children will be compelled to stay in full-time education or training until they reach 18 under proposals being considered by ministers for one of the biggest shake-ups in education for decades.
Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, said that it was unacceptable for children of 16 to be in full-time work, adding that government policy on the school leaving age may be reversed.
Alan Johnson left school at fifteen without a single qualification to his name. His first job was stacking shelves at Tesco, a job which he eventually abandoned when they refused to allow him a lunch break. Then at the age of eighteen in 1968 he decided to move to Slough and become a postman, attracted by the promise of overtime, since he now felt that he needed the money now that he was married and his guitar had been stolen.
So did leaving school early damage him? Does he believe young people are less mature now and that they should be incarcerated as unwilling scholars rather than be allowed to earn a living?
I strongly believe that by that age some kids know that book learning isn't for them at that time, and they will be much happier, more productive and useful members of society if they learn to work instead.
A Texas lawyer shot himself dead after being caught by an internet paedophile sting set up by a television programme.
Louis Conradt Jr, 56, killed himself as police approached his home to serve him with an arrest warrant for soliciting sex from a minor. Police said the former district attorney had gone online to solicit sex from someone he thought was a 13-year-old boy.
The "boy" was a decoy for a sting operation being run by an internet watchdog and Dateline NBC, a news show that includes the series To Catch a Predator, which aims to entrap paedophiles who surf the web for victims.
An NBC camera crew was outside the house ready to film when the fatal shot was fired.
Campaigners have welcomed news that the phone regulator Ofcom has warned four firms about generating "silent calls".
Carphone Warehouse was among the firms which made too many of the calls, which happen when dialling systems generate more calls than staff can handle.
Ofcom's rules ban silent calls and allow only 3% of calls to be accompanied by a recorded message.
The firms have until 6 December to respond, after which Ofcom could fine them from £5,000 to £50,000.
And guess who is another big offender :
A parliamentary answer to a question asked by John Hemming MP has
confirmed that the taxman is still making 4,300 nuisance calls a week.
The maximum fine for each of these silent calls is £50,000 so the tax
man could be asked to pay a fine of over £200 Million a week.
This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.
Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.
Now a detailed researched topical investigation is what the Sunday Papers are for, and so rarely provide! Go read.
Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe's leading road engineers said yesterday.
Residents of the northern Dutch town of Drachten have already been used as guinea-pigs in an experiment which has seen nearly all the traffic lights stripped from their streets....
There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt," he said yesterday.
"It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.
"We only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven't found anywhere where they are useful yet."
Mr Monderman, 61, compared his philosophy of motoring to an ice rink. "Skaters work out things for themselves and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but I don't like rules which are ineffective and street furniture tells people how to behave."
In short, if motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully, he said.
There are small trials of a similar approach in my local town of Devizes and it works! Of course the idea of putting responsibility back onto people's own shoulders and not just putting up more and more hectoring signs is alien to most councils...
Bob Carter: British report the last hurrah of warmaholics | Opinion | The Australian
....
The Stern review has been presented as a rigorous treatment of climate change and its economic effects. In reality, however, the review is a political document whose relation to the truth is about the same as that of the notorious British report on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
The Stern agenda in Britain is to enable Labour to compete for eco-votes with an increasingly green-oriented Tory party. A wider agenda is the imposition of carbon levies for goods and services provided from outside Europe, thereby penalising more efficient competitors elsewhere. The European Union has form on this, and has previously tried to use DDT and genetic engineering of food as bogies to justify trade barriers.
Among a range of possible carbon morality taxes, Stern considers the application of a food-miles levy on produce subjected to lengthy air transport. Subsequent media coverage has concentrated on earlier estimates that flying 1kg of kiwifruit from New Zealand to Europe generates 5kg of carbon dioxide. With delicious irony, it turns out that virtually all NZ kiwifruit are transported by ship, yet arrive in Britain at a price that undercuts local supplies. No wonder a levy is needed.
Australian grape growers are doubtless already resigned to having an extra "noble carbon" levy imposed on their products, to the advantage of their French competitors. For that matter, why not a ballet miles surcharge on tickets at Covent Garden when the Australian Ballet next visits London? And given that most British dildos probably come from overseas, perhaps UK citizens will soon have dildo miles, too.
The Stern review is not about climate change but about economic, technological and trade advantage. Its perpetrators seek power through climate scaremongering.
It says the Stern Report "are merely openings for government to expand its role in allocating investment, raising taxes and otherwise controlling economic decisions. Socialism was supposed to have died with the Soviet Union, but it is making a comeback under the guise of coping with global warming." Sounds about right.
Lomborg says Stern's claim falls apart when one actually reads the report.
He adds it is "selective and its conclusion flawed" and that "its fear-mongering arguments have been sensationalized". Lomborg then tears the Stern report apart piece by piece.
THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: AN APPEAL TO REASON
Nigel Lawson
The third danger is even more profound. Today we are very conscious of the threat
we face from the supreme intolerance of Islamic fundamentalism. It could not be a
worse time to abandon our own traditions of reason and tolerance, and to embrace
instead the irrationality and intolerance of ecofundamentalism, where reasoned
questioning of its mantras is regarded as a form of blasphemy. There is no greater
threat to the people of this planet than the retreat from reason we see all around
us today.
Futerra proudly announce how to stay on message on Climate Change...
In March 2005, Futerra launched The Rules of the Game.,(a guide for communication which would change attitudes towards climate change).Since then we have noted a growing commitment within government, its agencies, local authorities, business and NGOs to actively and consciously encourage behaviour change on climate change. Futerra has been approached (and challenged) many times over the past months for a behaviour change version of ‘The Rules of the Game’.
Therefore, we (have now) produced ‘New Rules: New Game’, a guide to behaviour change communications.
We hope that the many businesses, NGOs, government authorities and international agencies undertaking or planning climate change communication will all be able to use this guide immediately in behaviour change communications.
‘New Rules: New Game’ can be used in three ways:
1. To inspire new communications
2. To check the messages and activities of planned communications
3. To adapt existing communications
.....
Examples include:
2. Forget the climate change detractors
Those who deny climate change science are irritating, but
unimportant. The argument is not about if we should deal with climate
change, but how we should deal with climate change.
3. There is no ‘rational man’
The evidence discredits the ‘rational man’ theory – we rarely weigh
objectively the value of different decisions and then take the clear
self-interested choice.
4. Information can’t work alone
Providing information is not wrong; relying on information alone to
change attitudes is wrong....
14. Raise the status of climate change mitigation
behaviours
Research shows that energy efficiency behaviours can make you
seem poor and unattractive. We must work to overcome these
emotional assumptions.
• Refreeze good behaviours
Once you’ve woken or ‘unfrozen’ people from their sleepwalking behaviour, you can convince them to change. But once they’ve adopted the new behaviours, you need to find a way of ‘refreezing’ them, so the positive behaviour becomes an unconscious habit again.
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever. (1984 - G. Orwell)
The Stern Review Summary
Climate change presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen...
Um - I don't see any evidence presented here, or else where that this is a "market failure" - That bold unsupported assertion seems to be slipped in to justify government intervention.
To meet these requirements, the Review draws on ideas and techniques from most of the important areas of economics, including many recent advances.
And what recent advances are they? Good old fashioned cost/ benefit analysis and discount rates are hardly new, or is there some new tricky stuff you are using?
The stocks of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and a number of gases that arise from industrial processes) are rising, as a result of human activity... These concentrations have already caused the world to warm by more than half a degree Celsius and will lead to at least a further half degree warming over the next few decades, because of the inertia in the climate system...
there is at least a 77% chance - and perhaps up to a 99% chance, depending on the climate model used - of a global average temperature rise exceeding 2°C.
And this is where the fundamental problem with the Stern Review is. The estimate for the global temperature rise is about 0.7 degrees, with large amount of uncertainty. The greenhouse gases he mentions are only one factor, water vapour is far larger "greenhouse gas - a rough approximation is that water vapour contributes 60% of the greenhouse effect, CO2 20% and other gases 20%. There are also other influence such the changing albedo of the earth due to landuse changes, solar radiation, particular pollution etc. So for Stern to boldly claim that our emissions have caused a certain rise is unsupported by the evidence and goes beyond what the IPCC says.
He notes that we are dealing with probabilities - though some might say they are more like bookmaker odds than scientific probabilities as they are based on untested assumptions - and then seems to ignore them. If a future result only has a 77% chance (or whatever figure you choose) of happening, then either the discount rate must take that into account, which he doesn't seem to do or the end analysis must be tempered by it. Otherwise we have the position where "the benefits of" buying a lottery ticket "outweigh the cost" simply because we have forgotten to factor in the odds of not actually picking up the jackpot.
He then dips his toe into what happens if you let the market deal with the problem rather than have central planning solve it - which is the fundamental difference between "adaptation" and "mitigation":
Adaptation is the only response available for the impacts that will occur over the next several decades before mitigation measures can have an effect. Unlike mitigation, adaptation will in most cases provide local benefits, realised without long lead times. Therefore some adaptation will occur autonomously, as individuals respond to market or environmental changes. Some aspects of adaptation, such as major infrastructure decisions, will require greater foresight and planning. There are also some aspects of adaptation that require public goods delivering global benefits, including improved information about the climate system and more climate-resilient crops and technologies..
The challenge of adaptation will be particularly acute in developing countries, where greater vulnerability and poverty will limit the capacity to act. ...
Markets that respond to climate information will stimulate adaptation among individuals and firms. Risk-based insurance schemes, for example, provide strong signals about the size of climate risks and therefore encourage good risk management....
Sustainable development itself brings the diversification, flexibility and human capital which are crucial components of adaptation. Indeed, much adaptation will simply be an extension of good development practice – for example, promoting overall development, better disaster management and emergency response. Adaptation action should be integrated into development policy and planning at every level.
Not much there to disagree with, but that isn't the story the sponsors of his report want to hear. The simple solution is there - help the poor get richer as quickly as they can and they will deal with the problems in a cost effective way by adapting to the changes. From the Baring Sea to Burkino Faso people deal with the different climates by "adaptation". That is a "known"; the extent of change that reducing CO2 emissions in the UK will cause is an "unknown". The effects of changing taxation on us to socially engineer our behaviour and our ability to "pay" for adaptation are "unknown". And to suggest otherwise is wrong and dangerous.
Carbon emissions have already pushed up global temperatures by half a degree Celsius
As far as I can see Stern is far too sensible to make such a statement.
Responses seem to fall into four camps:
We are doomed - there doesn't seem to be any attempt to understand what Stern is arguing with this camp.
We need to tax our way to prosperity. Well sort of, what Stern is arguing is that is a stitch in time saves nine. So spend a little now and we get much more back in the future.
Those who question the whole basis of the scientific "facts" he uses - see JunkScience.com for the comprehensive argument there.
And then a very small camp consisting mainly of Mr Worstall so far who have had the energy and insight to argue the economics.
This last group is the most interesting. It is an argument for another day as to whether the whole anthropogenic climate change science is sound or not, but it is surely reasonable to accept the IPCC report that Stern uses as his basis and then argue his methodology and reasoning is wrong from that.
Tim Worstall makes several points the key one is that the IPCC give a huge range of possible outcomes, and Stern seems to pick the most pessimistic one that responds best to early intervention.
And all his figures depend on the chosen "discount rate". He uses a discount rate of 3% dropping to 2% which is his "chosen" rate rather than the market rate. Change that rate a point or two, change the chosen scenario by a point or two and the whole picture changes.
My own quick reading is that Stern is a very clever man who has built a fantastic castle of recommendations and policy suggestions but that he has not felt it part of his remit to check the foundations he is building on. A common intellectual exercise is to take some assumptions to be correct and then see what that leads to. Fine for academia but disappointing to see little critical review of the science or underlying economic assumptions. And I don't expect to see any intelligent criticism apart from here on the web.
How to reduce "Carbon" emissions - I have a plan..
We know that an average human breathes out about 0.85kg of CO2 each day, or 310kg/year.
Politicians who are talking a lot will produce more - say 1 kg a day.
All we need to do is draw up a little list -
"As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list--I've got a little list
Of society offenders who might well be underground,
And who never would be missed--who never would be missed!"
And I will soon be able to spot hundreds of kg of C02 that are being wastefully produced - any suggestions as who should be on the list...
(For the disturbingly curious, I present the maths:
The average person exhales about 0.5 litres of air with each breath. At 15 breaths per minute, that's about 10,800 L per day.
CO2 makes up about 4% of each exhalation, so we breathe out about 432 L of CO2 daily.
Assuming my chemistry isn't completely dodgy, that works out to about 0.85 kg CO2 per day:
1 mole of gas occupies 22.4L at STP
432 L C02 / 22.4 litres/mole = 19.3 moles CO2.
1 mole of CO2 weighs 44g
19.3 moles CO2 x 44 g/mole = 849g CO2
So 432L CO2/day = 0.85kg CO2/day).
Having exhausted stealth taxes, the Government is reaching for green taxes: levies on flying, driving and household appliances.
The beauty of eco-taxes, from Gordon Brown's point of view, is that people won't want to be seen to be against them.
Those who dispute their efficacy – including this newspaper – will be dismissed as having fallen for tendentious science, or being in the pay of the oil companies, or simply not caring about the viability of the planet.
A few seconds' thought should reveal how asinine these accusations are. Surely we can take it as read that everyone is in favour of life on Earth.....
it is hard to avoid the suspicion that, for many on the Left, Kyoto is a handy way of advancing an agenda that has little to do with the environment: one that seeks always to blame the West, that is hostile to free trade, and that looks instinctively to state intervention.
The trouble is that governments tend to be inefficient. There is no reason to expect the state to be any better at protecting the environment than it was at making cars or running the Millennium Dome.
It is a pity that all three main parties have bought into the idea that state regulation is the answer. Market mechanisms have proved highly effective at delivering green goals.
....taxes should be used soberly, judiciously and reluctantly; never as a way of flaunting one's green credentials.
Take that as a slap in face with a GM farmed kipper Dave.
Pre-publication we are being fed a steady diet of greenery from the Stern Report with Dave, Ming and the other chap all calling for more taxes to save us. And millions of Africans dying is no longer a problem caused by corruption, misgovernment and socialism, it is now our fault for driving large cars. So it is refreshing to clear the palate by reading some of the criticism of the report early:
My comments are largely directed towards a major scientific shortcoming in the current manuscript and a lack of attention to the political and economic milieu influencing global warming science....
Speed camera operators are spending hundreds of thousands of pounds from fines on refurbishing premises and buying plasma television screens and staff T-shirts, new figures reveal.
The "safety camera partnerships", formed by police and local authorities, now spend £95 million running their nationwide network of 4,650 cameras.
Many of their costs are unrelated to road safety, and critics say they have become "fully fledged quangos", wasting huge sums of money and adding to widespread suspicions that speed cameras are merely "revenue-raisers".
I thought I would have a look at my favourite Wiltshire Safety Camera Partnership audit certificate and draw out the numbers.
Oh look - Costs shadow revenue nicely. Looks like a self serving quango to me - I mean if they were actually discouraging speeding surely by now the number caught would be going down wouldn't they?
My father used to say "never employ the same rabbit catcher for more than two years" - if you did he had no incentives to catch all the rabbits, a few breeding pairs would always "escape" wouldn't they. I suggest that it is time to change these "rabbit" catchers as it looks like they are naturally more interested in looking after their own comfort and incomes than anything else....
Health service officials have defended a decision to spend £400,000 on modern art sculptures following criticism.
The artworks have been installed in mental health facilities across Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and the former county of Avon.
James Gray, Conservative MP for North Wilts, said the scheme was "ludicrous" when there was a beds shortage.
The Avon and Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership (AWP) NHS Trust claim the sculptures benefit patients.
... AWP medical director Susan O'Connor said: "The arts can play a vital role in creating a healing environment and this is particularly important in mental health.
"Involving service users and carers in the development of the arts commissions was very important and everyone is delighted with the results."
The health trust has been further criticised for spending £100,000 evaluating the project.
The current Mental Health Review in the area - sets a target:
"To achieve financial balance by
commissioning financially sustainable mental
health services. At present the two PCTs
collectively spend £25.4 million on NHS
mental health services in Kennet, North and
West Wiltshire, the majority of which are
provided by AWP. Currently these local
services cost £2,750,000 more than the
available funding and consequently both
AWP and the PCTs are in deficit. All NHS
organisations are under great pressure to
achieve financial balance and deficits have to
be paid back. Services therefore have to be
delivered differently to achieve a balanced
financial position as well as to meet local and
national needs..."
So the odd half million here or there spunked up the wall on pictures won't matter then as there are still a few beds and nurses left to be cut first. And £100,000 to evaluate how wonderful it all is shows how the managers are running the system for themselves and their form filling...
The British government is preparing to fire a new round of global warming alarmism at the U.S. next week.
Her Majesty’s Treasury is scheduled to release the “Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change,” as it’s called, on Oct. 30.
While the precise contents of Sir Nicholas Stern’s report are not yet available, Stern’s report apparently claims that climate change could cause the worst global recession in recent history, according to a report in the UK newspaper The Guardian (Oct. 26).
This bizarre conclusion – which somehow spins the higher energy prices and reduced energy available associated with greenhouse gas regulation into an economic boon – should come as no surprise...
A key Labour law and order pledge to set up a national non-emergency number to divert calls from the 999 system is to be shelved.
Ministers have decided not to extend the programme beyond pilot areas where it has been running over the summer.
The retreat has been signalled in confidential briefing papers leaked to The Daily Telegraph. They include guidelines to press officers on how to sustain a line that the scheme, which has cost millions to set up, has been a success. They are told to deny to callers that an election promise has been broken because phase one of the network has been introduced.
Interestingly Wiltshire Police in a Briefing Document entitled "CONFIDENTIAL - not for publication" - but put up on the web here reveal how the local Rozzers have already spent £100,000 developing a detailed proposal to apply to run one of these numbers in "Wave 2" and that "it is envisaged that the implementation bid will exceed £1 million and the operational bid will be approximately £850,000 per annum based upon the Home Office target volume of 30% of the population calling once in any one year. Implementation funding will be subject to a cash limit agreed at the outset. Ongoing funding will be paid on the basis of a fixed sum for the first 100,500 calls p.a. (15% of the population) and a sum per call thereafter (likely to be in the region of £3)."
They go on to note a range of potential problems but conclude:
"....however the potential benefits, both financially and customer service-wise, are deemed to outweigh these risks.
Diversity Assessment: There are very significant diversity implications for this project. The service provided will cater for different languages, as well as a range of different ways to contact 101 e.g. phone, e-mail, internet, text and textphone. The project will be aiming to provide levels of service to minority communities that are not currently available
Across the country £1.83 million has been blown on preparing for "Wave 2" - all to written off as yet another Home Office IT fiasco.
This latest scam has hit all the news wires.
What no-one has yet reported is that it is illegal under the 1984 Road Traffic Regulation Act for a local authority to make a profit from the provision of such residents parking places. A levy to cover the administration cost is all that can be charged.
There has been a case ... Camden v Cran before Justice McCullough 1995
The man is a hero yet again for pointing out once more how the councils ride roughshod over the law - why didn't any of the highly paid experts in the papers pick this up?
The cost of residents' parking permits could be linked to the emissions their car produces, under plans from one London borough council.
The Liberal Democrat council in Richmond, south-west London, hopes to make owners of gas-guzzling vehicles pay more to park outside their homes.
The owner of two high-emission cars could pay £750 a year for parking, compared with the £200 they pay now.
But it would cost nothing to park environmentally friendly cars
Am I being as dim as a Liberal Councillor or are the carbon emissions of a parked SUV not the same as those of a Prius or a knitted Tofu bicycle? Nothing, nil, zero?
The Times:PATIENTS with chronic conditions would be given individual budgets worth thousands of pounds to manage their own care, under plans to be put to Tony Blair’s new public services policy group.
In an extension of plans to widen patient choice, people with long-term needs, including palliative care, would receive NHS credit, equivalent to the cost of services provided, conventionally, by the health service. For a diabetic, for example, the sum would be about £2,000 per year.
Patients with such conditions would have a choice between a package of care from the NHS or credit that they could control directly. They could spend some of the money privately if they wished, provided they stayed within the budget.
Now extend that to all patients, and then education and if you make that Labour policy I will be out on the streets waving a red banner saying "Vote Labour" and singing L'Internationale...
It is admitted by recognised authorities that for an entirely unarmed man there is no certain defence against a knife.” So wrote WE Fairbairn in the definitive second world war commando training manual All-In Fighting, and what was true in 1942 is equally true against a malevolent hoodie’s blade today: the only surefire way to avoid being cut is to outrun your attacker.
Knife carrying is so prevalent these days — last year there were 169,400 violent crimes involving knives in England and Wales — that it’s always as well to assume that your menacer is armed.
The key to survival, according to Gary Wragg, a martial arts expert at Wu’s Tai Chi Chuan Academy in Bethnal Green, east London, is awareness. Do not make eye contact with your opponent (which will provoke him) but be mindful of his body language. A hardened streetfighter is likely to conceal his weapon until the last second so never allow him to get within striking distance. If he does, you must act.
If running is not an option, Wragg says, “always fight a weapon with a weapon”. Anything is better than your bare hands — a chair, a bottle, your belt or even your shoe
Readers from the lefthand side of the pond may have different advice to offer to that, but then we live in "the most frightened of youths" nation on earth.
Or at least that is the amount the Dept of Transport will spend to prevent one death on the road - of course on the sacred cow of the railways then nothing is too much - "John Prescott, the deputy prime minister and in charge of public transport, declared he would spend whatever it took to make rail travel safe: money was “no object”. He was true to his word: the European Rail Traffic Management System, intended to stop trains running red lights, is expected to cost between £3 billion and £6 billion. And it will save, on average, a life every 2½ years.
In spite of calls for international assistance to save the Aral Sea, efforts to stop the sea's evaporation by reducing water wastage or reducing irrigation have not yet materialised.
In June 2004, scientists predicted the sea would vanish within 15 years.
Strangely they don't actually bring us up to date - for that turn to the New York Times:
The Aral Sea, which was once drained of 75 percent of its water, has this year taken on millions of cubic feet of new water years ahead of schedule, surpassing even the sunniest predictions made when a new dam was completed last summer.
With each month the water pushes back the desert just a little more.
The Aral Sea's 155-square-mile retreat from its original shoreline is frequently invoked as one of the 20th century's more jaw-dropping ecological catastrophes, a consequence of the Soviet-era policy of diverting the Aral's two main tributary rivers into canals to irrigate cotton plants across Central Asia.
Good news about man's capacity to undo some of the damage he has done - wonder why the BBC couldn't tell us that...
THE town of Dingle yesterday voted overwhelmingly that the Irish Government should give it back its English name.
Eighteen months ago the town became An Daingean — pronounced On Dangun — as part of the Government’s efforts to preserve the Irish language.
...
Votes were counted yesterday after a week-long ballot of about 1,300 residents. Only 70 voted against a return to Dingle/Daingean Uí Chuís.
John Moriarty, a leading restaurateur in Dingle, and at the forefront of the “yes” campaign, was jubilant. “This confirms what we always knew — that the arrogance of politicians is not tolerated by the people of Dingle,” he said.
Kerry County Council will now pass the results to Eamon O Cuiv, the Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs. In a lengthy statement Mr O Cuiv said that the plebiscite had no legal effect because an Order under the Official Languages Act — the law he used to strip Dingle of its English name — could not be revoked.
And politicians wonder at why they are not treated with respect! I hope that the people of Dingle show their respect with a few screwdrivers and pots of paint and return their town to the name they want.
Paul Linford reminds me of "The Aberfan Disaster, which took place 40 years ago" today.
One of my earliest memories - I was the same age as many of the primary children who died that awful day - I can remember my red-eyed mother listening to the news on the Robert's Radio in the kitchen. When you have children you will know how personal the suffering of any child is. BBC NEWS | Wales | Reflecting on a lost generation
The National Coal Board, which owned the mines and tips, tried to claim it was an act of God.
Lord Robens, the board's chairman, blamed a natural spring which had been pouring water into the heart of the tip, but said it was impossible to know it was there.
That was untrue however. It had been common knowledge in the village. People had previously voiced fears about the tip's safety.
Conclusions from a tribunal of inquiry set up to investigate the disaster were scathing. The coal board was condemned for its weaknesses and failures, the government criticised, but no one was ever prosecuted, fined or dismissed
The disaster caused an outpouring of grief, and £1.75m flooded into the village. Then came the second blow.
Afraid the tips that remained could slip again, the villagers wanted them removed. When their demands weren't met they dumped bags of slurry in the Welsh office.
The government finally agreed they should be removed, but the village had to pay £150,000 from the disaster fund towards the work...
"I was scandalised by the behaviour of Lord Robens and chiefs of the coal board, the failure of anyone in authority to understand the traumas of the people of Aberfan and the failures of the government - the most notorious forcing the fund to pay for the removal of the tips."
The cash was eventually repaid 30 years later but without interest payments, and is money the village says is now needed to maintain the graves. .
Street crime and violent robbery continues to rise in England and Wales, according to the latest official figures published yesterday.
But the number of overall offences, especially burglaries and car thefts, has fallen to its lowest level for 15 years, Home Office statistics showed.
Burglaries are down because cheap imports from the far east mean second hand TVs and videos are worthless, and car crime - modern cars have locks that actually work, so nothing there to praise the Home Office for.
The level of street robbery is now almost back to where it was before Tony Blair ordered a crackdown in 2002.
His "street crime initiative" helped to drive down muggings significantly by pouring police into 10 inner city crime hotspots. But since the money for the £80 million scheme dried up last year, the problem has returned.
Shows police on the street actually worked. As David Davis said:
"Instead of being on the streets fighting crime, our police are stuck behind their desks under an ever increasing burden of Labour red tape. In the event an offender is apprehended for violence or theft they are likely to be punished with the equivalent of a parking ticket. This is hardly a deterrent.
"The fact robbery has only recently started to rise since Tony Blair's street crime initiative proves what we have been saying for some time now: that more police on the street can make a difference.
"Now the Government's constantly shifting central targets have reversed that effect."
Where as the Rozzer's response is pure management bollocks.
Ian Johnston, a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: "While violent crime and vehicle crime levels remain stable, robbery continues to be an anxiety, although the rate of increase has now fallen.
Don't slip the word "fallen" in there, my son, in the hope that we may not notice that the rates are still rising.
"Police forces continue to treat robbery as a priority in the areas it occurs, targeting high crime areas and tackling the issues that drive this crime, such as mobile phone ownership, the behaviour of young people and the vulnerability of key locations."
So you are tackling mobile phone ownership eh? What about tackling the toe-rags who commit the crimes.
The mental image I would prefer of Plod is not of him behind a mountain of forms at his desk but more like this young man who may not be playing rugby entirely within the rules but certainly looks to be effectively tackling - with a right hook.
So in those long off days when we were too young to drink at the Pub, and Maudie having been Landlady for 45 years she knew our ages, so we had to sneak off to the New Inn in a neighbouring village. Brian was a year or so older and possessed a Yamaha 250cc bike, we would follow on our push bikes. Now obviously this was tedious so Chas introduced the idea of a length of rope. Brian tied it to the back of his bike and as he drove past the front cyclist would grab it and be dragged to the pub. Brian would return and pick up the rest of the crew one by one.
Of course it was more interesting on the way back when several pints of Mr Wadworth's finest were on board. Big Al was telling me tonight of the time when as he cycled home on his Rudge Whitworth Brian gave him a drag and wondered how bright the dynamo could actually get.
Even though this was 25 years ago Brian was also in the pub tonight as well to confirm the story. As he said he turned off his lights, and as he pressed the throttle the dynamo lights gave a better and better light, so much so he suddenly thought to look down and noticed they were doing sixty.
He shouted to Al to let go of the rope, and as he stopped he watched as Al sailed past feet wide apart, the brake blocks steaming, the chain whirring, and Al missed the turning to the village completely.
Ah, Halcyon days...
(With warning magnified)
So not a toy then? It must be real then....
Further warnings: This cape does not protect against Silver Bullets and Wooden Stakes. Do not expose to Sunlight, Tumble Drying or Crucifixes....
The Times reports:A BOOK that rejects religion and argues for the non- existence of God is heading to be the No 1 bestseller for Christmas.
Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is at the top of the bestseller chart of the online bookseller Amazon, and is climbing up The Times bestseller chart.
With Professor Dawkins about to travel to the US to publicise the book, sources in online sales say that his atheistic rant against all things religious is already trumping celebrity biographies....
Kes Nielsen, Amazon’s head books buyer, said it was rare for a serious scientific or philosophical book to top the UK charts. “It seems as though many people are bored with the superficial world of stardom that’s fascinated us for so long.”
See - people don't just want pap all the time - the book is on the shelf here in line to be read (I have all of his books in first editions, so count me in as a fan).
DRIVERS of small and medium-sized cars are 50 times more likely to be killed in collisions with another car than drivers of 4x4s or people-carriers, according to the Department for Transport.
The safest cars, from the driver’s perspective, are the Land Rover Defender....(Full list)
Of course the usual voices are saying don't listen, buy a fartbox and save the planet - but maybe you might think that your duty to protect your family outways their whining protest, besides with a decent set of Roo bars on the front of the Landy you will not even notice the tree hugger waving a banner, and a quick pressure wash will remove unsightly Tofu stains...
From Saturday 21st October, to coincide with school half term holidays, hunts across the country will be taking part in National Newcomers’ Week. This event is aimed anyone who has always wanted to find out more about hunting but has never known how to go about it, and hunts are issuing an open invitation to everyone.Contact Philippa Mayo on philippa-mayo at countryside-alliance.org for more information of your local meets or click here for a regularly updated list of confirmed meets.
That shows an openness and welcome that many other organisations could copy - so much for it being a secret hobby only open to select members.
....While there is a fashionable queasiness about the big bad corporations influencing children to adopt unhealthy lifestyles, there is little queasiness about TV delivering the Government’s messages. Celebrity endorsements of crisps, cola and sugary food by the likes of Gary Lineker are denounced as a shocking manipulation of children’s minds. But somehow it is not shockingly manipulative when the Food Standards Agency advocates that broadcasters use — guess what — celebrities and cartoon characters to sell children 5 A DAY (five portions of fruit or vegetables a day) messages.
BBC Worldwide uses CBBC characters such as the Teletubbies and the Frimbles to brand food products deemed nutritionally sound. It appears that Ofcom’s problem is not about using cartoon characters or celebrities to influence children’s diet or lifestyle per se. Rather, if they are to be used, they have to endorse the right diet and lifestyle. And what is “right” is increasingly dictated by the State.
Policy placement threatens journalistic integrity and political accountability. When policy issues are the focus of current affairs programmes, the journalists must adhere to strict guidelines of veracity. The Paxmans and Snows keep a rein on the wilder claims of politicians. Such stringent broadcasting criteria do not apply when policy messages are delivered through entertainment formats. Kris Murrin, presenter of the misanthropic Honey We’re Killing the Kids, can get away with terrifying hapless parents into believing they are poisoning their offspring by letting them munch on a bag of crisps, without any cross-examination of her “facts”. Where is the evidence to back up Sainsbury’s poster boy’s litany of ill-founded contemporary prejudices against modern food? Shouldn’t St Jamie be challenged to explain how our digestive systems distinguish between the nutritional content of ciabatta with a drizzle of olive oil versus bread and dripping?
Policy placement is not just about diet. Just when Tony Blair focuses the domestic agenda on “the politics of behaviour”, we have a flurry of reality TV shows about changing people’s behaviour. The message is that private lives need mentoring and monitoring by third party “experts”..... Claire Fox - The Times
I'm sure someone somewhere is adding her name to a re-education course she will be "invited" along to...
Mine Your Own Business - European Premiere
One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA
18:30, 01 November 2006
The Dark Side of Environmentalism...
A documentary by Phelim McAleer & Ann McElhinney.
Mine Your Own Business is a journey through the dark side of environmentalism. It demolishes the cosy consensus that environmentalists are well-meaning, agenda-free activists and shows them to be anti-development ideologues who think the poor are happy being poor and don't want the development that we, in the west, take for granted.
"Hundreds of years after we have become rich and comfortable by removing our forests and exploiting our natural resources such as coal, oil and gold we are now going to the poorest countries on the planet to prevent them from doing what we did and from having what we have. We want them to stay as 'traditional peasants' – a tableau vivant of pre-modern poverty western tourists can come to see on holiday — forgetting all the while that the poor people desperately want progress and desperately want to enjoy the good, healthy and long life we in the west take for granted.
Mine Your Own Business will make a lot of comfortable western people very uncomfortable indeed. It will show them the consequences of their blind faith in our new religion — the religion of radical environmentalism.
Phelim McAleer, Director,
Mine Your Own Business".
6:30pm doors open; 6:45pm Film Premiere; 7:50pm Q&A; 8:15pm Reception
RSVP (ACCEPTANCES ONLY PLEASE) to IEA Reception
either by email: iea@iea.org.uk
or by Fax: 020 7799 2137
or by Phone: 020 7799 8900
A SMALL country house opera company won a landmark Appeal Court battle against the Treasury yesterday over attempts to remove its VAT exemption on ticket sales.
The ruling, in favour of the Gloucestershire-based Longborough Festival Opera, has important implications for hundreds of other arts charities, many of which rely on tax breaks to survive.
Appeal Court judges ruled that Revenue & Customs wrongly stripped the opera company of its “cultural purposes exemption” after accusing Martin Graham, its founding trustee, of having a financial interest in the company because he had offered to underwrite losses in a production of Wagner’s 16-hour epic Ring Cycle. ...
Mr Graham said: “This decision has huge implications for all arts charities nationally right the way up to big organisations like the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne.
“Just about every major arts organisation is a charity, which means that we get all sorts of tax breaks. I suspect HMRC had a sinister motive in chasing such a tiny company on such spurious grounds. Had they been successful in destroying LFO they would have moved against many other much larger arts organisations . . . The attractions of these targets is simply their turnover. Imagine the tax brigands salivating at the prospect of 17.5 per cent of the Royal Opera House takings.”
Mr Graham celebrated yesterday outside court with members of the company dressed as Valkyries carrying the fake corpse of a VAT man. The company, which gives any profits to charity, specialises in productions by Wagner
Off out to play The Ride of the Valkyries full volume on the MP3 player as I walk the dogs!
Whoever thought that serious commentators would want it made illegal to have a row about the weather? One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing ‘climate change denial’. ‘David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial’, she wrote. ‘Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence. It is a crime against humanity, after all.’ (1) Others have suggested that climate change deniers should be put on trial in the future, Nuremberg-style, and made to account for their attempts to cover up the ‘global warming…Holocaust’ (2).
The message is clear: climate change deniers are scum. Their words are so wicked and dangerous that they must be silenced, or criminalised, or forced beyond the pale alongside those other crackpots who claim there was no Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Perhaps climate change deniers should even be killed off, hanged like those evil men who were tried Nuremberg-style the first time around.
Whatever the truth about our warming planet, it is clear there is a tidal wave of intolerance in the debate about climate change which is eroding free speech and melting rational debate.....
Lib Dem councillor Michael Carlile, 41, said: "I urge, if we are truly going to embrace diversity, all members should have compulsory diversity training."
Presumably the diversity embraced doesn't include holding views that diverge from those of the Lib Dems norm in this brave new world...
A woman who killed her retired police officer husband has had her legal battle for a widow's pension dismissed by the Court of Appeal.
I suppose she based her argument on Lizzie Borden's plea that she was now an orphan...
(Lizzie was aquitted of the murders though she was followed everywhere by:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one. )
A man has won his battle to stop refuse collectors entering his street early in the morning and waking residents.
Chris Perry, 60, a part-time teacher, parked his Rover 75 across the entrance to his cul-de-sac in Winchester to stop dustcarts entering at the customary 5.45am.
The binmen threatened to ram the car, but he refused to move it. They called the police, who agreed with Mr Perry that they should not be waking residents so early. Mr Perry agreed to move the car on the condition that the binmen called their bosses at Serco, the council’s contractor. They were told that their rounds should begin no earlier than 7am.
Council officials said that most binmen had second jobs and so needed to finish early to get to other employment.
5:45 in the morning - what sort of time is that to be up and about?
More than 30 councils are fitting microchips to wheelie bins ahead of possible "pay as you throw" schemes.
It is the latest attempt to encourage more recycling to curb the amount of rubbish that ends up in landfill.
Household rubbish would be weighed to within 500 grams on collection trucks and the chips used to identify which property the bin belongs to.
Councils are expecting to get the go-ahead from the government to start using the chips to charge residents.
Many local authorities are in favour of "pay as you throw" and are already anticipating the changes, according to the information uncovered by BBC One's Real Story.
But Paul Bettison, chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, appreciates that certain councils have taken the wrong approach.
"Any council that's issued chipped bins and hasn't informed their residents I would say has scored something of an own goal. We need to work with the public and it's sad that seemingly some councils didn't," he said.
So that is a slap to Kennet Council who slipped the bugs in without telling the residents and then claimed they were only to resolve disputes over bin ownership in cases where the bins had wandered!
But as I reported earlier - Mr Paul Bettison, of the Local Government Association said: 'Removing one of these devices would not break any law as far as I know. But if in the future a local authority decided to charge for taking away rubbish, it would be within its rights to say to that person, "If you don't want to pay, we don't want to provide you with a service."' But he admitted that at the moment no action could be taken against protesters.
So here, as a public service, is a small spanner with rounded jaws 2 cm wide I found in my toolbox, if anyone wants to borrow it...
Section 172 Road Traffic Act 1988 Notice of Intended Prosecution - you don't have to fill it in!
If you have been a naughty boy and driven too fast through our lovely county you are liable to be sent a Notice of Intended Prosecution from the laughingly called Wiltshire Police Safety Camera Partnership.
On the form are various instructions, such as - Part 7. Please complete this part in all cases. This is a requirement under Section 172 Road Traffic Act 1988 .
It is a lie.
The charming Miss Anna Gilder of the Wiltshire Police Safety Camera Partnership has confirmed to me that "There is no legal requirement that this form be used if someone chooses to provide the details in another form this is acceptable."
So nit-pickery on one side and an arrogant dismissal of legalities on the other. A civilised service which respected us would include a form and say, "Please could you use this form as it will help you to fulfil your obligation and help us to process it accurately and easily and this will keep our costs down etc." But no, they hector us with bold black ink orders threatening the full force of the law when they have no right to. No wonder I have replied to her thus:
Miss Anna Gilder
Wiltshire Police Safety Camera Partnership
PO BOX 3025
Devizes
SN10 9AH
Ref xxxxxxxxxxxx
Dear Madam:
Thank you for your speedy reply to my letter, which as it was attached to my completed form I take to be an acknowledgement that you received the form safely.
My apologies if you misunderstood my letter, I merely pointed out that I couldn’t remember driving “like Jehu, the son of Nimshi” (2 Kings 9 – 20). I didn’t deny I was the driver or suggest any other drivers: you also have my signed form in which I say I was the driver and completed my driver details. I am therefore at a loss to understand what grounds you have for suggesting I have failed to provide driver details, but for the avoidance of doubt let me make this statement:
It’s a fair cop, guv., it was me, you have got me bang to rights.
Signed:
Driver xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On a more worrying note I am pleased you acknowledge that the form you send out is wrong and the threat - Part 7. Please complete this part in all cases. This is a requirement under Section 172 Road Traffic Act 1988 - is false. I hope you will confirm that this wording, and the other misleading instructions, including those on your website, will be modified to reflect the truth.
I understand why you wish to plough on with your cases, as is your right; but I would beg you to remember that if the ECHR does rule against the present method of mulcting the motorists, and that we should go back to a rule of law where ancient liberties are recognised and the policing authorities can regain some of the trust and respect that they have frittered away, then I will be looking for this injustice to be righted.
Sometimes I sits and thinks, sometimes I just thinks
Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, flew to Malaysia, South Africa, and Amsterdam on business and took his family on holiday to Slovakia in the past year. This weekend he is on a business trip to Nigeria. His trips are estimated to have generated at least eight tons of CO2.
“This is the dilemma faced by all international organisations, including green ones,” said Juniper. “We do all we can to cut travel but we need to do some flying to make decisions.” (The Times)
There was poor old Newton shut up on his farm in Lincolnshire, unable to travel because of the plague, so he sat down under an apple tree and did some thinking; and came up with a spiffing idea or two. Einstein could only manage a walk in the park when he was holding down a full time job but he managed to scribble down some stuff which exercises the old grey matter. Maybe if the Greens mentioned in the article stopped flying round the world preaching we should all stay at home they might have time to actually do some thinking....
A CORONER has criticised a hospital for offering “despicable” and chaotic treatment after hearing that four elderly patients died in painful and degrading circumstances.... He condemned as “absolutely despicable” the treatment of Watkins Davies, an 84-year-old war veteran, who went into hospital with a fractured hip and contracted MRSA, the hospital superbug, The inquest was told that Mr Watkins, a widower, was the victim of a catalogue of failures in basic nursing care. When he fell out of his chair, while trying to wash himself, no X-ray was carried out to assess any additional injuries.His family claim that he was left to lie in his own waste and was in severe pain for hours because of shortages in nursing staff. His meals were left up to 6ft out of his reach.....
....Mrs Douglas, a voluntary worker from Droyls- den, near Manchester,.. broke her hip when she fell from a hospital trolley without sides. There was no record of the fall.
Edward Douglas, her son, said: “There was one nurse per three beds and the nurse said she could not cope.” He said that medication had been left on the floor.
Recording a verdict of death by natural causes, the coroner said he found this astonishing. “What if that had been vital medication?” he asked. “It is absolutely chaotic.”
A third inquest heard that Raymond Lees, from Ashton-under-Lyne, who died in May, contracted MRSA after undergoing a knee replacement operation. During his time in the hospital his waist shrank by 14 inches.
John Lees, his son, said that it had taken him three hours to discover that his father had not been bathed and that hospital staff did not appear to know his name.
“The nurse said, ‘He gets himself up, dresses himself and does his own teeth’,” Mr Lees said. “In fact, he was wearing the same pyjamas he had been wearing for three days. The nurse was cruel and cynical.”
A fourth inquest was told that James Kelly, a pensioner from Stalybridge, Tameside, was recovering from surgery but died from pneumonia after he was left sitting in his dressing gown in a draught.
Mr Pollard said: “In most of the issues, the nursing care, not the operations or the general medical staff, but the basic care of people, has been in question.....
Andrew Burnham, a Health Minister, said: “I understand that the hospital trust has in place a range of measures to ensure that patients receive the high-quality nursing care they have every right to expect.
In 2000 Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a reform programme for the NHS in England that he believed would once again make it "the healthcare system the world most envies."
For more than a year, Olive Rack lived with the threat of seeing her business ruined – even of losing her liberty – because she diligently carried out her job as a nursery teacher.
Earlier this week, she was cleared of assaulting a toddler in her care and said she wanted to get on with her job running a successful independent school in Kettering, Northants. Magistrates said there was ''no convincing evidence" to sustain the charge. In which case, why had it been brought? These things do not just drop out of the sky. There is a lengthy chain of responsibility here that blighted Mrs Rack's life for 15 months. Are any of those involved in it to be held responsible?
Read the rest of the article for a damning indictment of the systme but if you believe that the answer to the question is "yes" then I've got some bad news about Santa Claus and th Totth Fairy for you.
Sir, The primary chemical exposure of all human beings is not to traces of synthetic chemicals (“Man-made toxins are found even in the best diets”, Sept 21, and letter, Sept 23) but to the thousands of natural pesticides which we eat and consume in our fruit and vegetables every day.
Each fruit or vegetable makes its own unique complement of natural pesticides and with the novel fruits and vegetables currently available in supermarkets, the risk is increased again.
Toxicologically the majority of natural pesticides test as carcinogens; others are nerve toxins, oestrogen mimics, teratogens, chromosome breakers, allergy inducers or damage the blood, skin or thyroid.
These are precisely the same toxicological properties of synthetic chemicals that concern WWF, but natural pesticides are consumed in amounts many tens of thousands of times higher than any synthetic traces. Mankind is not adapted to these natural chemicals; at the appropriate dose they will damage and have done so in the past.
Against this enormous toxic natural background, traces of man-made chemicals are of little or no consequence, but the risks of additive or synergistic effects of natural chemicals are also thousands of times higher.
ANTHONY TREWAVAS
Professor in Plant Biochemistry
University of Edinburgh
Last week’s announcement that the World Health Organization lifted its nearly 30-year ban on the insecticide DDT is perhaps the most promising development in global public health since… well, 1943 when DDT was first used to combat insect-borne diseases like typhus and malaria.
Overlooked in all the hoopla over the announcement, however, is the terrible toll in human lives (tens of millions dead — mostly pregnant women and children under the age of 5), illness (billions sickened) and poverty (more than $1 trillion dollars in lost GDP in sub-Saharan Africa alone) caused by the tragic, decades-long ban.
Much of this human catastrophe was preventable, so why did it happen? Who is responsible? Should the individuals and activist groups who caused the DDT ban be held accountable in some way?...
Business are often held liable and forced to pay monetary damages for defective products and false statements. Why shouldn’t the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense, Sierra Club and other anti-DDT activist groups be held liable for the harm caused by their recklessly defective activism?...
In addition to the day of reckoning and societal rebuke that DDT-ban advocates should face, we should all learn from the DDT tragedy.
With the exception of Rachel Carson (who died in 1964), all of the groups and individuals above mentioned also promote global warming alarmism. If they and others could be so wrong about DDT, why should we trust them now? Should we really put the global economy and the welfare of billions at risk based on their track record?
The percentage of drivers exceeding the speed limit at this site is recorded as 69%.
The above photograph shows the nominal parking place for either the enforcement van or motorcycle.
That's £60 gone from the coffers - the bastards - and yes the road is as empty as that most of the time. When ordinary people have given up even bothering to report all the petty criminality that happens to us because the Police haven't a fecking clue how to sort it out the only evidence we see of the Rozzers at work are these simple cash withdrawal machines. No wonder they have lost the respect of most of us.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has reversed a 30-year policy by endorsing the use of DDT for malaria control.
The chemical is sprayed inside houses to kill malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
DDT has been banned globally for every use except fighting disease because of its environmental impacts and fears for human health.
WHO says there is no health risk, and DDT should rank with bednets and drugs as a tool for combating malaria, which kills more than one million each year.
No system works perfectly all the time, but for something as fundamental as being able to prove who you are and get access to what you’re supposed to be able to do, we need to set things up so there’s a fall-back plan.
Breaking your identity up into pieces is good for security...
Read the rest for a reasoned argument - just don't tell the clowns in Whitehall who think a central database and card are a better idea..
Cyclists who wear protective helmets are more likely to be knocked down by passing vehicles, new research from Bath University suggests.
The study found drivers tend to pass closer when overtaking cyclists wearing helmets than those who are bare-headed.
Dr Ian Walker was struck by a bus and a lorry during the experiment. He was wearing a helmet both times.
But the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents said tests have shown helmets protect against injuries.
To carry out the research, Dr Walker used a bike fitted with a computer and an ultrasonic distance sensor to find drivers were twice as likely to get close to the bicycle, at an average of 8.5cm, when he wore a helmet...
"This study shows that when drivers overtake a cyclist, the margin for error they leave is affected by the cyclist's appearance.
"By leaving the cyclist less room, drivers reduce the safety margin that cyclists need to deal with obstacles in the road, such as drain covers and potholes, as well as the margin for error in their own judgements.
"We know helmets are useful in low-speed falls, and so definitely good for children, but whether they offer any real protection to somebody struck by a car is very controversial.
"Either way, this study suggests wearing a helmet might make a collision more likely in the first place,"
To test another theory, Dr Walker donned a long wig to see whether there was any difference in passing distance when drivers thought they were overtaking what appeared to be a female cyclist.
While wearing the wig, drivers gave him an average of 14cm more space when passing.
In future research, Dr Walker hopes to discover whether this was because female riders are seen as less predictable than male riders or because women are not seen riding bicycles as often as men on the UK's roads.
8.5 cm? That's less than a hand's breadth if my reading of a ruler is correct. I tell you if anyone gets within 8.5 feet of me a cycle back the hill tonight from the pub with my Lee Metford strapped to my back they can expected scratched paintwork at the very least.
Even if you think, as I do, that Huntley's crimes are so horrible that the world would be a better place if he were now dead, there are solid practical reasons for believing that we should not have a policy of punishing killers by cold-bloodedly killing them. If Huntley decides to try to end his own life, however, that is a very different matter. The exercise of state power, which always requires a rational justification, is not involved when he kills himself; it is deployed in forcing him to stay alive. What possible purpose is served by making it impossible for him to commit suicide?
Advocates of forced resuscitation say that it ensures that Huntley cannot "cheat justice". What they don't do is explain how making him live serves the cause of justice. It seems to me to be simply an exercise in sadism. Some people evidently believe that Huntley deserves to be tortured for the rest of his natural life. That response is understandable, it is what I might feel if he had murdered my children, but it's not a call for justice. No sane person thinks that torturing someone until they die can ever be a part of fair and just punishment.
Then there is the factor of cost. Putting Huntley on permanent suicide watch will require, according to the Prisoner Officers' Association (POA), spending between £300,000 and £500,000 extra on him every year. The central difficulty for those who think that money is well spent is to identify the benefit that will be gained by it. There is no benefit to Huntley: he wants to be dead. And there is no benefit to the rest of us either: most of us feel it would be an improvement if he were dead.
Quite - Prison is for rehabilitation, restitution, removal from society or revenge. He can't be rehabilitate, he can't make restitution, dead or alive he is off the streets so the only point of straining to keep him alive is revenge - well if the public want him to be alive like Ian Brady so they can delightfully shiver at the thought of all that evil safely locked up why not go the whole hog and commission Channel Four to make a series of reality revenge programs? I'm sure half an hour a week of watching the scum bag being chased by wild beasts in the Colosseum would be a ratings winner. If you don't want that then leave a bottle with a couple of hundred Paracetamol by the sink in his cell (oh and that is a nasty way to go - don't try it at home).
Apart from the money we would save think of the Carbon Saving - it's for the planet!
Sergeant Neil Haley, from West Yorkshire police, defended the force's actions. He said: "We appreciate that anti-social behaviour can be frustrating for people but they should not take the law into their own hands."
Good little proles should not take an active part in their community trying to make a better place to live, they should lock themselves in their homes and let the men in uniform keep them all warm and cosy.
Once upon a time the Police were there to help the community keep order not to be a total replacement for ordinary people doing the right thing, but that was then and this is now. A spyed on, swabbed and tagged herd of cattle at the whim of our masters, and they won't even allow us bread and circuses without nanny's lecture..
If her swear word was worth £120 then I'm looking at a five figure sum for the blasting I gave a noisy party the other night....
Police have taken a dim view of a man's glowing garden gnome and threatened him with arrest unless he removes it.
The solar-powered policeman figure stands sentinel in the garden of Gordon MacKillop's home in Treovis, near Liskeard.
His neighbour, former policeman John McLean, says the gnome is annoying and upsets buyers viewing his home.
Now police have served Mr MacKillop with a notice for "placing a garden gnome with intent to cause harassment".
Mr MacKillop, 46, was woken in the night (at quarter to midnight) by two officers who warned him that the gnome was offensive to his neighbours.
The notice, under the Protection From Harassment Act 1997, also accuses Mr MacKillop of intimidating potential buyers of Mr McLean's £209,000 cottage.
Mr McLean has told officers that the garden gnome, which comes complete with police dog and solar light, was in an "annoying position".
..
A Devon and Cornwall Police spokeswoman said: "This isn't just a petty issue."
When a felon's not engaged in his employment
Or maturing his felonious little plan
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man
Our feelings we with difficulty smother
When constabulary duties to be done
Taking one consideration with another
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
When constabulary duties to be done, to be done
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
When the enterprising burglar's not a-burgling
When the cutthroat isn't occupied in crime
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling
And listen to the merry village chime
When the coster's finished jumping on his mother
He loves to lie a-basking in the sun
Taking one consideration with another
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
When constabulary duties to be done, to be done
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
When the drunkard shows no sign of where the drink went
He nobly bids all alchohol farewell
When the juvenile delinquent to the clink went
He hung his mother's picture in his cell
When the cardshark's finished wiping out his brother
He buys a rattle for his little son
Taking one consideration with another
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
When constabulary duties to be done, to be done
A policeman's lot is not a happy one
As well as the northward migration, some 70% of species shifted the elevations at which they commonly live, climbing on average by between five and 10 metres per decade.
You may remember from school that temperature .. varies with height and this change, or 'lapse rate', may be as much as 10ｺC per 1000m of ascent for dry air (although in wet conditions it may be much less than this). The usually quoted figure is 6.5ｺC per 1000m of ascent. Source
Crunch those numbers together and an average scamper to the hills of 7.5m is consistent with compensating for a temperature rise of 0.05 degrees in ten years or 0.005 per year.
So the migrating beasts seem to back the half a degree change in a century. I'm not sure how you track with accuracy a decade long ascent of the height of a small house, but at least it shows the scale of the problem. If you want to escape ten years worth of Global Warming climb to the top of your stairs.
Climb every mountain, search high and low
Follow every byway, every path you know.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, 'til you find your dream!
A dream that will need
all the love you can give,
Every day of your life
for as long as you live.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, 'til you find your dream!
Toothpaste is out.
Hairgel is out.
"Topical or rash creams" are out.
Lip gels are out.
Shampoos and conditioners are out.
Personal lubricants are... just fine.
I blink. I find I'm suddenly unsure whether or not that means exactly what I'm certain it does mean, so I google "personal lubricants" and yes, it's talking about exactly what I think it's talking about. Up to 4 oz. of personal lubricants are just fine.... practically the only liquid you can take with you onto a plane.
All Asian children under the age of two should get vitamin D supplements, according to scientists....
According to Dr Christos Zipitis, lead author of the study and a paediatrician, the rate of deficiency in Asian children was one in 117 compared with one in 923 children overall.
He said as well as having increased skin pigmentation, Asian children often had diets low in vitamin D.
The team then analysed the cost of treatment for these 14 patients, covering the cost of medication, hospital care and follow up appointments. It averaged up to £2,505 per patient.
They then looked at the cost of vitamin D supplementation needed to prevent one case of deficiency in the whole population of children, based on their figures.
They did so based on guidelines by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (COMA), which recommend varying levels of vitamin D over the first two years of a child's life. They found it be £47,534 per child.
But when they looked at the cost of preventing one case of deficiency in an Asian child, it came to £2,410.
The BBC fails to note any other possible reasons - unlike a fuller report I have mentioned before. Reuters Health Information (2006-08-04): Vitamin D often low in seemingly healthy girls
... measured vitamin D levels in 14 white and 37 non-white 14-16-year-old girls attending an inner city multi-ethnic girls' school in the UK.
Thirty-seven girls (73 percent) were vitamin D deficient, and nine (17 percent) were severely deficient.
Average vitamin D levels were higher in white girls than in non-white girls.
For the group as a whole, the vitamin D concentration correlated with the estimated duration of daily sunlight exposure and percentage of body surface area exposed, but not with estimated intake of vitamin D.
"This is in keeping with the fact that the main source of vitamin D is that produced by the action of solar ultraviolet B radiation acting on 7-dehydrocholesterol in skin," the team explains. "Only small amounts are obtained from dietary sources."
As they note, "Avoidance of exposure to sunshine for religious and cultural beliefs that encourage wearing of concealing clothing and restriction of outdoor activities has previously been reported as a risk factor for vitamin D deficiency
And judging by the Middle Class' hysterical fear of their darlings playing in the sun it soon won't just be swaddled Asians in trouble.
Women depend on stilettos and stilts for leggy glamour, seduction and fun, but they wear them at their peril. Several experts renewed health warnings against high heels in August that underline the ergonomic argument against these fashion accessories, which centers on the damage they can do to the musculoskeletal system. From Britain comes the news that women are in particular danger if they are wearing stilettos when they have a few drinks “under the belt.”
Spoilsports - they are in danger? What about us poor men when we have a few under the belt and we are face to face with a pair of stilettos - aren't we the ones in all sorts of danger then?
I suppose I'm living up to a stereotype :) In these shoes?:
"Then I met an Englishman
'Oh' he said
'Won't you walk up and down my spine,
It makes me feel strangely alive.'
I said 'In these shoes?
I doubt you'd survive.'
I said 'Honey, let's do it.
THE decision by the Government to pardon Private Harry Farr and the other 304 soldiers executed for cowardice and desertion in the First World War has been attacked by a leading psychiatrist.
Simon Wessely, Professor of Epidemiological and Liaison Psychiatry at King’s College School of Medicine, London, said that the Government was mistaken to pardon the soldiers 90 years after the event.
“We should not succumb to the temptation to rewrite history to make ourselves feel more comfortable about the past,”...
Professor Wessely added that the experts in 1916 were “better placed than we are to make these terrible judgments about character, mental breakdown and duty. We should be thankful we do not have to make those choices”.
Gene therapy has eradicated cancer from two dying men using genetically modified versions of their own cells.
Mark Origer, 53, told The Daily Telegraph last night how, after five years of losing the battle with the disease, he was made well enough to attend his daughter's wedding last year.
"She wanted me to be there for her and she wanted me to be there for me," he said.
Mr Origer was diagnosed with melanoma — the most aggressive form of skin cancer — in 1999.
A cyst which grew on the same area of his back in 2002 was found to have malignant cells and the cancer continued to spread until, in June 2004, it was found in his liver. He underwent various chemical and surgical treatments, but none was found to stop the spread of cancer.
In December 2004, he was given the gene therapy and was discharged the same month. By January 2005, his tumours had shrunk by half and by last September, when he attended his daughter Katie's wedding, one small spot remained in his liver which surgeons removed.
Last week, doctors pronounced him completely clear of cancer cells.
Lisa Weatherley, a spokesperson for Greenpeace UK, says, "Greenpeace opposes all releases of genetically modified organisms into the open environment because of their risks to the environment, eco-systems and health."
So I was wrong, wrong, wrong, and so I have prepared this recantation:
I, The Englishman, arraigned personally before this tribunal, and kneeling before you, Most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors-General against heretical depravity throughout the entire Kennet Council, having before my eyes and touching with my hands, the Holy Gospels, swear that I have always believed, do believe, and by God's help will in the future believe, all that is held, preached, and taught by the Kennet District Council. But whereas -- after an injunction had been judicially intimated to me by this Kennet Council, to the effect that I must altogether abandon the false opinion that the Wheelie Bins are bugged, and that I must not hold, defend, or teach in any way whatsoever, verbally or in writing, the said false doctrine, and after it had been notified to me that the said doctrine was contrary to the word of Cllr Chris Humphries -- I wrote a blog in which I discuss this new doctrine already condemned, and adduce arguments of great cogency in its favour, without presenting any solution of these, and for this reason I have been pronounced by the Kennet Council to be vehemently suspected of heresy, that is to say, of having held and believed that the Wheelie Bins are bugged:
Therefore, desiring to remove from the minds of your Eminences, and of all faithful Citizens, this vehement suspicion, justly conceived against me, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse, and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies, and generally every other error, heresy, and sect whatsoever contrary to the said Kennet Council, and I swear that in the future I will never again say or assert, verbally or in writing, anything that might furnish occasion for a similar suspicion regarding me; but that should I know any heretic, or person suspected of heresy, I will denounce him to this Kennet Council, or to the Inquisitor or Ordinary of the place where I may be. Further, I swear and promise to fulfill and observe in their integrity all penances that have been, or that shall be, imposed upon me by this Kennet Council. And, in the event of my contravening, (which God forbid) any of these my promises and oaths, I submit myself to all the pains and penalties imposed and promulgated in the sacred canons and other constitutions, general and particular, against such delinquents. So help me God, and these His Holy Gospels, which I touch with my hands.
I, the said Englishman, have abjured, sworn, promised, and bound myself as above; and in witness of the truth thereof I have with my own hand subscribed the present document of my abjuration.
I, The Englishman, have abjured as above with my own hand.
Customers who move house and use Royal Mail's redirection service are being bombarded with junk mail because the postal group is selling its customer information to businesses.
The organisation describes the names, addresses and moving dates of customers who sign up for the £35-a-year service as a "unique data source" for direct-marketing companies...
A spokesman said that customers are given the opportunity to tick a box when they fill in the redirection form, if they do not want to receive the mailings.
The group is already under fire for making it difficult for customers to opt out of junk-mail services.
That is why I made the form for opting out of Junk Mail available here - took me ages to find out how to get it out of the bastards.
Opt-out is not acceptable - unless I'm a moron and say "please send me stuff" I do not want it - how can I make this any clearer without having to personally stuff the unwanted junk up Adam Crozier's arse?
There was an excellent freedom of information story on The World at One this lunchtime, about the National Audit Office weakening (or should that be 'sexing down') its draft criticisms of the huge NHS IT programme Connecting for Health.
The final version of the NAO report on this scheme, published in June, was much less critical of Connecting for Health than generally anticipated.
And Private Eye points out that the "blacked out" sections with the really embarrassing stuff can be read by a simple copy and paste of them into another program. I bet BT are really pleased that their £11.6 million penalty has now been made public by Audit Office incompetence.
POLICE inquiry offices in west and north Wiltshire towns are closing to the public.
It means people living in Warminster, Westbury. Bradford on Avon and Corsham will not be able to walk into their local police stations to report crimes or speak to officers.
A statement released by Chief Supt Kirby said: "To enable us to offer consistent and reliable opening hours to the public and be able to afford our inquiry office staff with support which they deserve, we have decided to temporarily close a number of inquiry office facilities.
Well I suppose that being always shut is offering "consistent and reliable opening hours".
And I thought it should be Enquiry not Inquiry - according to AskOxford: What is the distinction between enquire and inquire?
The traditional distinction between enquire and inquire is that enquire is to be used for general senses of 'ask', while inquire is reserved for uses meaning 'make a formal investigation'. In practice, however, enquire (and enquiry) is more common in British English while inquire (and inquiry) is more common in US English, but otherwise there is little discernible distinction in the way the words are used.
A postman who advised people how to stop junk mail being delivered to their home could lose his job after bosses suspended him for misconduct.
If you want to follow my example of being green and cutting down on waste then here's the official badly formatted form to fill out and post back - no interwebbie stuff for them!
(See I'm really very environmentally friendly - or is it I just hate the rubbish? And I think I won't "miss important information from local, national or government publications that are sent using this service" too much.)
|-----------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| ‘Stop Door to Door’ Confirmation Form |
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| To:| Door to Door Opt Outs |
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| | Royal Mail Door to Door |
| | Kingsmead House |
| | Oxpens Road |
| | OXFORD |
| | OX1 1RX |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| | |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| From:| |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Address:| |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| Postcode:| |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| | |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Reference:| Request to stop Door to Door mail being delivered to my address |
|--------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------|
I confirm that I have read and fully understood your letter advising me of the implications of “Opting-Out” of receiving deliveries of Royal Mail unaddressed ‘Door to Door’ items to my address.
I understand that I may miss important information from local, national or government publications that are sent using this service.
From time to time, Royal Mail would like to contact you with information about our products and services that may be of interest to you. If you do not want to be contacted, please tick here.
Name:
Signature: Date: /
These are the official notes -
As a company we are quite happy to put the wheels in motion to arrange the cessation of these deliveries to your premises but before doing so, I need to make you fully aware of the implications of “Opting Out” and once you have considered these, get your final written authorisation to cease deliveries of this nature.
The main areas to be considered are:
· This service only relates to unaddressed mail. Mail bearing your address and “To the Occupier” or any other generic recipient information, Royal Mail is still legally obliged to deliver.
· It is not possible for us to separate advertising material and information that you may want, such as leaflets from Central and Local Government and other public bodies. Opting out from Royal Mail Door to Door stops all unaddressed items.
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The Local Government Association (LGA) has called on the Government to give councils the power to introduce variable waste charging schemes.
Paul Bettison, chair of the LGA environment board, said people who do not recycle should be made to pay more as they are receiving an extra service."
No one would be happier than I if we paid our taxes just for the services we receive - there a huge raft of council services I don't use or want to pay for but that is not how the system works.
"He said: "We tried to persuade people that it is good to recycle. Now we are seeing that not everybody was persuaded and now we have got to really encourage them."
By "encourage" I think he means make them pay through the nose a second time for a service they already pay Council Tax for...
Asked about privacy concerns, he said that collecting general information about the amount of waste created by a community was not a "state or personal secret".
Of course he avoids the point here, the tags monitor the personal amount of waste that a household produces - which is personal data.
And locally..
Peter Evans, of Kennet District Council, which includes Devizes, in Wiltshire, said the tags were mainly being used to settle disputes over bin ownership.
Bollocks
Asked about if people were told of their existence, he said: "A lot of people did not know. We did not broadcast that the information was there for the obvious reason that they might rip them off."
I think he means to say - we kept this secret because we knew the public wouldn't want them - well Peter, judging by the reaction I was hearing in Devizes this morning, most people think Kennet are a bunch of untrustworthy sneaky bastards now. Pleased with that?
Councillor Chris Humphries, Leader of Kennet District Council, boasted that the new bugged wheelie bins had external funding:
"The Council has been very successful in obtaining external funding in the provision of these new services.
Almost all of the capital costs have been provided by external sources and partnership. This way of working has funded most of the Councils operational costs."
But he didn't say who or why they were funded. Has Kennet District Council done a secret deal with Defra?
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spokeswoman said the government is looking at a "range of options" to help the UK meet tough European landfill reduction targets.
She said the department has paid £5 million to councils to fund 40 pilot schemes, which include waste monitoring.
Apologies for the rash of articles on the Kennet District Council Bugging scandal!
Let me just summarise a couple of points.
My big complaint is that that Kennet Council secretly introduced an electronic bug onto my premises - it doesn't matter what the bug can do or is for - that is simply unacceptable.
We will now hear all sort of "reasonable" reasons why the bugs should be there. Here is Kennet's first version:
Source
Martin Smith, head of Environmental Services at Kennet District Council, which covers Devizes, admitted that residents had not been told their bins were electronically tagged. Nor is there any reference in documents about the council's waste-recycling strategy. There is nothing sinister about this,' he said. 'These are simply chips that will enable us to sort out disputes between householders about whose wheelie bin is whose. If there are any arguments we can just send out an officer to scan the chip and settle the argument.
'There is a debate in Government over the possibility of introducing charges but that's not what we had in mind when we ordered the chips.'
And that sounds like complete rubbish to me.
The truth is that the EU is ruling our refuse and the councils are just doing what our European masters want them to - and that means that our bins are going to be policed tighter than our borders.
Neil Parish MEP: News - What a lot of rot! Compost will go to landfill, rather than on the roses via Numberwatch
Pre(com)posterous changes to rules governing green waste will mean tonnes of compost will now have to go to landfill, rather than being spread on gardens and farms - leaving local authorities with the prospect of a multi-million pound fine from the EU for failing to meet recycling targets, Conservative agriculture spokesman in the European Parliament, Neil Parish MEP, has warned.
Until recently, once green waste had been shredded, composted and screened it was classified as 'product' and could be bagged and sold in bulk. However, recent changes now say the material is still waste and cannot be moved without significant additional paperwork. A gardener would now require three separate permits to store, transport and use the compost on his roses!
With costs set to spiral for compost processors, it is almost certain a vast amount of composted waste will go to landfill instead. As Green waste represents around 50 percent of the annual recycling tonnage, many Councils' recycling figures will effectively be cut in half at a time when the European Commission is already threatening the UK government with fines of up to £180 million for its failure to significantly reduce the amount of waste going to landfill.
Sheer bloody madness yet again but it does highlight that the whole Rubbish Emergency which councils are proclaiming so they can bully the householders into line is a pure EU invention - we are not running out of landfill sites, recycling is not always the best option and restricting the official amount of rubbish one can disposes of only means it is dumped unofficially....
Martin Smith, head of Environmental Services at Kennet District Council, which covers Devizes, admitted that residents had not been told their bins were electronically tagged. Nor is there any reference in documents about the council's waste-recycling strategy. There is nothing sinister about this,' he said. 'These are simply chips that will enable us to sort out disputes between householders about whose wheelie bin is whose. If there are any arguments we can just send out an officer to scan the chip and settle the argument.
'There is a debate in Government over the possibility of introducing charges but that's not what we had in mind when we ordered the chips.'
The Tories have already condemned the proposed charge as another New Labour tax-raising measure. And they warn that people will simply start dumping bags in their neighbours' gardens or at the end of the street to avoid paying.
Wiltshire farmer Tom Seaman urged residents to protest by unscrewing the bugs and sending them back to the council. Mr Seaman, who dumped a digger bucket-ful of uncollected bin bags on the town hall steps during last month's heatwave, said: 'This is a disgraceful backdoor policy. Monitoring devices have been secretly installed without a word of consultation or information. People should not damage council property but send these things back to their rightful owners and demand an explanation.'
Kennet Council chairman Gerry Knunkler said neither he nor council tax payers had been told about the true purpose of the bugs. 'I was assured these things were simply to ensure bins could be returned to the right addresses if they got mixed up or drunks rolled them off,' he said.
Kay Twitchen, of the Local Government Association, said: 'This technology would certainly help councils to levy charges on individual householders.'
Anyone who removed a bug and threw it away might not get their bins emptied, warned Paul Bettison, the Association's environment chief.
Mr Bettison, an advocate of charging, said: 'Removing one of these devices would not break any law as far as I know. But if in the future a local authority decided to charge for taking away rubbish, it would be within its rights to say to that person, "If you don't want to pay, we don't want to provide you with a service."'
But he admitted that at the moment no action could be taken against protesters.
As a note I think it is Jerry Kunkler not "Gerry Knunkler" and he is not the leader of the council but then the Politburo style photo of our glorious leader Councillor Chris Humphries seems to have disappeared off the front page of the Kennet web site overnight. And to believe the tags are just to "help" householders be reunited with their bins is charmingly naive - bins already have a unique serial number and most householder prefer to paint their house number on the bin, which seems slightly easier and cheaper to read than having to wait for a man with a RFID reader to do it.
Chips in bins which help councils charge for the weight of rubbish collected could be common across the UK within two years.
Three local councils are about to trial the chipped bins. ....
The weight of rubbish in each bin would be measured by equipment installed in collection trucks.
Mr Bettison said if councils get the go-ahead from government, the weighing schemes could be piloted within the next 12 months and commonplace across the country a year after that.
A Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spokeswoman said the government is looking at a "range of options" to help the UK meet tough European landfill reduction targets.
She said the department has paid £5 million to councils to fund 40 pilot schemes, which include waste monitoring. ....
Privacy campaigners, however, are warning against the "chipped bin" scheme.
Simon Davies, founder of Privacy International, said he had grave concerns about the increasing use of tagging technology to gather information.
"Residents need to be aware that once they accept this there is no turning back," he added. "This just takes it to a new level."
So - "Go ahead" not yet given; councils not being named; cash being splashed and behind it all an EU directive - oh, and an assumption that "residents" will be consulted to give their go ahead!
Ignore that stunning view and keep your eyes on the road because admiring beautiful scenery or dramatic buildings is putting drivers at risk, according to a survey released on Thursday.
Have you ever driven with a farmer? To us every field is a story waiting to be read, every animal is of interest. We are the ones checking the furrows are straight or wondering what the damned fool has done with his straw - by looking out the side window as we wander down the middle of the road at speed.
Not being able to read the countryside must make driving through it very strange and odd.
A RADIO comedy show containing a joke about Rolf Harris drawing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad has been pulled by the BBC because it was deemed too controversial.
The Franz Kafka Big Band, a comedy series commissioned for BBC Radio Scotland, has been withdrawn from the schedule after editors thought that jokes about Israel and Palestine and a sketch in which a cow flies into the World Trade Centre were inappropriate.
The BBC had billed the group’s second series as “sure to surprise even the most unshockable”, but said yesterday that it had asked the writers to rewrite some sketches.
I think we can guess at what sort of the comedy the BBC was pleased to put out to "surprise" the "most unshockable" - but it seems there is still one line that is too tough to cross....
Cows have regional accents like humans, language specialists have confirmed.
They decided to examine the issue after dairy farmers noticed their cows had slightly different moos, depending on which herd they came from.
..
The farmers in Somerset who noticed the phenomenon said it may have been the result of the close bond between them and their animals.
Farmer Lloyd Green, from Glastonbury, said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl.
Yes they might speak softly in a local burr but the sheep is still a liar - I never did.
And in other news the old sport of winding up townies who are drinking cider in the local gains another champion....
Children are being prevented from taking part in activities by over-zealous "health and safety pedants" terrified of taking risks, the chairman of the Health and Safety Commission said yesterday.
Bill Callaghan said that misunderstandings and fear of the "compensation culture" had led to organisations being over-cautious and preventing worthwhile activities and trips....
The Health and Safety Commission launched its Get A Life campaign to counter its image as a public killjoy.
It urged organisations to take "sensible risks" and said there was no need to create bureaucratic mountains of paperwork.
Mr Callaghan said: "We are launching the principles of what risk management should be about.
"It's not about creating a totally risk-free environment or creating useless paperwork mountains. We think poor risk management hampers business and constrains people's freedom.
"We are pretty fed up with the way in which the good work that the Health and Safety Executive's staff do is overshadowed by trivial, petty and wrong stories about us banning conkers or forcing trapeze artists to wear hard hats."
He said many of the bad decisions were made by people within an organisation who were given responsibility for health and safety, but had no training about sensible precautions.
Whenever I have dealt with HSE or RoSPA inspectors they have always been sensible and level headed - it is the self appointed "experts" who are the pain. I was told last week in all seriousness that it was "illegal" to have a tree nearer than 30 feet to a house because of "Health and Safety", when I said "bollocks" there was a pained look of hurt that anyone should insult the sacred god of H&S (PBUH)...
The number of overweight people in the world has overtaken the number of malnourished for the first time,...
And this is being presented as bad news!
For those of us of a certain generation this picture of a Biafran child was seared into our memory. The starving millions are still with us but Malthusian pessimism of the twenty years ago has vanished and the problems are now political not agricultural. The Greens of the day were cheerfully predicting worldwide famine, revolution and pestilence unless we all turned to eating Mung Beans, cultivating our own allotments and resisting evil chemical companies.
They were wrong then and they are wrong now.
To illustrate the rate of change and the blessings of science here are the wheat yield averages of England.
I can remember the first field of wheat I grew that was 10 Tonnes/hectare - a real feeling of triumph - now it is average!
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or
two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew
before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service
to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
- Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Warm Words:
How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?
Author: Gill Ereaut and Nat Segnit
Publication Date: 03 August 2006
Putting in place effective policies to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK is clearly essential, but so too is the use of effective communications.
It is a manual on how a government can lie to its people. It is a prescription for marketing falsehood in the same way as selling soap powder. But this is Blair’s Britain now, and Cameron’s Britain will be no different. Above all, it is the Britain of Orwell’s nightmare. But if people cannot (or will not) see it for what it is, no amount of line-by-line analysis is going to change their minds. Furthermore, for those with the wit to see, these people have tacitly admitted that they (and their clients) are lying.
Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won. This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. This must be done by stepping away from the ‘advocates debate’ described earlier, rather than by stating and re-stating these things as fact.
The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken. The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.
UK 'Gay Police Association' Investigated for 'Faith Crime'
By Randy Hall
CNSNews.com Staff Writer/Editor
July 26, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - Britain's "Gay Police Association" (GPA) is under investigation by Scotland Yard for possibly committing a "faith crime" when it ran a newspaper advertisement claiming that Christianity was the cause of a jump in violence against homosexuals.....
Gay police advert investigated after religious hate complaint
By Andrew Pierce
A CRIMINAL investigation has been started by Scotland Yard into an advertisement from the Gay Police Association (GPA) that blamed religion for a 74 per cent increase in homophobic crime.
The Times has learnt that the inquiry into the advertisement,......
"The Times has learnt" used to mean something - now it seems to mean "I have just come back from a lovely couple of weeks in Tuscany and looking throught my old emails I notice a story I can knock off quickly as I work out my notice?"
LONDON is returning to an era of neighbourliness and low crime in which people are happy to leave their front doors open, according to the country’s most senior policeman.
Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said the work of community-based Safer Neighbourhood Teams was making people feel as safe as they did 25 years ago.
He cited a recent visit to Haringey, North London, where he met two officers who had “adopted” a 19-storey tower block.
“How long is it since police patrolled the corridors of a tower block?” Sir Ian asked.
“It’s as if, when the slums they replaced were flattened, the police stopped patrolling. People are opening their doors, leaving their doors open now, or leaving them unlocked, certainly, in a way they haven’t done for 25 years.”
....
In the year to July, Haringey police dealt with 2,834 burglaries of people’s homes (54 per week) and 6,399 incidents of violence against the person.
Sir Ian is on holiday, do you think he has locked up and set the alarm or not?
Mobile phone companies are well aware how vulnerable their voicemail messages are to eavesdropping. This is how easily it can be done:
Call a mobile phone when the user is unobtainable
When the voicemail message begins, dial the user’s four-digit security code (for O2 phones dial * then the four figures).
Many users never choose a security code and it is left as a factory setting, typically something obvious such as 1234.
Guido was aware that for years it was easy to tap into the voicemails of one mobile phone network's customers - when you got put through to their voicemail you just pressed * and typed the default last 4 digits of their phone number as the pin code. Most people never changed the pin number.
..A commenter added ....default PIN codes on their mobiles,
02 = 8705
Orange = 1111
T-Mobile = 1210
Virgin = 7890
Vodafone = 3333
A teenage medic is in line to become the first female soldier to be decorated for bravery in Iraq after saving her commander's life during a fierce gun battle.
Pte Michelle "Chuck" Norris, 19, who is just 5ft tall, braved heavy sniper fire for three minutes when she climbed on top of a Warrior armoured vehicle to pull her sergeant to safety after he was wounded in the head.
"It was my first casualty since training, which was pretty scary," she said. "On arrival at the scene, we stopped and when I heard 'dings' off the Warrior, I thought it was stones.
"All of a sudden, the driver shouted down to me that my commander had been hit. I didn't know where he'd been shot and how bad it was at this stage.
"So I jumped out the back of the Warrior, climbed up on top of the turret, looked down and saw the extent of his injuries.
"I then heard the crack and a thump of a round going past my head. I was under fire from a sniper. Luckily it just missed me. We managed to cross the turret and get my commander into the back where one of the lads put a sweat rag over him.
The rock band U2 came under criticism yesterday after reports that it has moved a portion of its multi-million-pound business empire out of Ireland for tax reasons.
The band, fronted by Bono, the anti-poverty campaigner, has reportedly transferred some of its publishing company to Holland.
Based in Dublin, U2 have long benefited from the artists' tax exemption introduced by Charles Haughey, the late prime minister. It is reported that the band's move has been made in response to a £170,000 cap on the tax-free incomes introduced in the last Irish budget.
Joan Burton, Irish Labour's finance spokesman, said: "Having listened to Bono on the necessity for the Irish Government to give more money to Ireland Aid, of which I approve, I am surprised that U2 are not prepared to contribute to the Exchequer on a fair basis along with the bulk of Irish taxpayers....
There are words to describe the sanctimonious Mr Bono but this is a family blog and so I won't use them.
This is the whole and only paragraph from Letts "Revise AS& A2 Biology" book about Global Warming. Spot any mistakes? Leaving aside the gases forming a thin layer, look at the maths - 0.035 is obviously larger than 0.1 otherwise they couldn't make the claim that "It is clear that Carbon Dioxide has the greatest overall greenhouse effect."
Don't students and teachers notice this sort of thing, or have they forgotten how to think for themselves?
Symptom of 'fear the sun' propaganda? "Vitamin D often low in seemingly healthy girls" - "NEW YORK - In a study of healthy adolescent girls, researchers found that insufficient vitamin D levels were a relatively common finding, with non-white girls more severely affected.
For once it doesn't seem to be the fear of the sun panic that grips middle class Britain to blame but instead the custom of wearing all covering black clothing for religous reasons - I think you can guess the rest.
The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh will be shut down if actor Mel Smith flouts Scotland's smoking ban, its director has been told. The comedian, who is playing Winston Churchill in a show at the Edinburgh Fringe, is said to be planning to smoke during a performance on Monday. The actor recently vowed to continue to ignore the ban at the Fringe festival.
Venue director William Burdett Coutts said he was in an "extremely serious situation". He said he has also been told he will lose his Fringe licence for good if the actor smokes during his performance.Mr Burdett Coutts said: "We have just been visited by the chief enforcement officer who has told me if Mel Smith smokes on stage then I will be given a £1,000 fine and he will shut down the entire premises. He said he would also never give me a licence again so I'm in an extremely serious situation
They wouldn't get irony if they were hit round the head with a Morphy Richards Jet Steam on the Linen setting would they? You can wave your willy about on stage as much as you like but a play about Churchill, who knew a thing or two about freedom, has to be censored..
"Who knows, maybe I'll light it [the cigar]. Maybe I won't. But maybe I will. I mean, what are they going to do to me? Are they going to extradite me? " Smith, who has ruled out using a fake cigar, added: "I will not have people protecting me from myself. That's the whole problem with this country.
"I've often wondered what the Scottish Parliament does. Maybe this is an opportunity for me to find out. The thing I would like to say about it is that it would have delighted Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler, as you know, was anti-smoking. You couldn't smoke at Adolf Hitler's dining table, so he'd be pleased, wouldn't he? Congratulations Scotland."
A CORONER investigating the death of a woman allegedly starved and deprived of fluids in hospital has been asked to hold an inquest into the death of a patient on the same ward....Last month David Maisey, a consultant physician, astonished the inquest into Mrs Nockels’s death when he said that he saw people die of dehydration “all the time — two or three times a week”. ...Gillian Craig, vice-chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, said: “Any hospital or ward where patients are said to die of dehydration ‘all the time — two or three times a week’ should be the subject of a police inquiry.”
Tony Wright, 52, denied breaching the Hunting Act, when he led the Exmoor Foxhounds on 29 April last year.
But he was fined £500 at Barnstaple Magistrates' Court in a case brought by the League Against Cruel Sports.
He was the first fox huntsman to be summoned to court for defying the law which came into force last year in England and Wales.
Wright, of Exmoor Kennels, Simonsbath in Somerset, said he would appeal and called the Hunting Act a "stupid and pointless law".
He said he had been trying to comply with the law "as I understood it".
He said: "I might have been found guilty, but I certainly don't feel like a criminal.
"If people were confused by the Hunting Act before today, they will be a lot more confused now."
He added: "I was doing my best to follow the rules as they are written down.
"I had no idea I was doing anything illegal."
...
Wright said he had stopped the hounds.
District Judge Paul Palmer told Wright: "I understand the difficulty that everyone has with the act coming into force."
...
The league brought the case at a total cost of more than £100,000 after Avon and Somerset Police declined to take on the case based on the evidence available.
...
The judge awarded the league £250 towards its costs.
A few more victories like that for the League and they will echo Pyrrhus - "One more such victory and I shall be lost!" (in original Greek above)
Looks like the "Cap" at a meet may have to go up a couple of quid..
A commenter takes me to task "Average temperatures can be misleading. Peaks are more interesting.
It is no consolation that average temperatures go down if one day the peak temperature reaches 100DegC, killing everyone above ground.
Misrepresentation of environmental science on the internet is widespread and weblogs are by no means a special case. From deforestation rates in the Amazon to climate change statistics, nothing is necessarily how it appears.
Furthermore, unlike most traditional forms of media that have gatekeepers, people whose job it is validate facts, check copy, exert some sort of quality control; the defining characteristic of the blogosphere is its lack of regulation.
Report Raises New Questions About Climate Change Assessments
Overall, our committee believes that Dr. Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.’
The second headline is the actual report the BBC refers to, but doesn't link to! - go and read the whole thing, don't trust me on it. Remember don't listen to bloggers or do your own research - stick to the BBC and the rest of the MSM where the "gatekeepers" will make sure you get only the facts you ought to.
19.7 is the average July 2006 Temperature you may want to slot into the handy chart I provided here which is the official Met Office Central England Average Temperatures for the last four hundred years and graphs out like this:
Compare and contrast to the official Hockey stick graph:
Update: In response to a comment here are the hottest days graphed out.
The National Counter Terrorism Security Office has launched its new "Secure Your Fertiliser" website, aimed at the farming and growing community.
I'm not sure I noticed this on the site but I think I can now safely say that anyone hanging round my potting shed eyeing up the bag of Lawn Sand may now be considered a potential terrorist and dealt with accordingly...
Update - as they say on the website:
Key attacks in the UK using fertiliser based explosives
1996 - South Quay, London Docklands
1996 - Manchester
1998 – Omagh, Co. Tyrone
2001 – BBC TV Centre, London
2001 – Ealing Broadway, London
2001 – Birmingham (failed to fully detonate)
Overseas
Groups such as FARC (Columbia), ETA (Spain), Hezbollah (Israel and Occupied Territories), Tamil Tigers (Sri Lanka) and Al Qaida (international) have all used fertiliser based explosives, again with devastating results. Notable attacks have included:
1993 – World Trade Centre, New York
1994 – Buenos Aires, Argentina
1995 – Oklahoma City, US
2002 – Bali, Indonesia
2003 – British Consulate, Istanbul
2006 – Mumbai, India
It should be noted that all of these attacks combined (both UK and overseas), which killed over 700 people and caused billions of pounds worth of damage, used a total of less than 12 tonnes of fertiliser. This is only about half a lorry load of fertiliser.
The so-called Queen of Pop brings her show to Rome on Sunday, and Roman Catholic leaders are furious at part of her performance in which she wears a crown of thorns and is apparently crucified.
Cardinal Ersilio Tonino, speaking with the Pope's approval, said: "This is a blasphemous challenge to the faith and a profanation of the Cross. She should be excommunicated. To crucify herself … in the city of popes and martyrs is an act of open hostility. It is nothing short of a scandal and an attempt to generate publicity."
Sometimes, just sometimes, I wish the Vatican acted a bit more like our Mahometan friends. I bet there is one old slapper who wouldn't be so "brave" then.
Vertical drinking, Police in Preston, Lancashire believe, is one of the country’s main causes of public disorder and would like to see it banned in the city’s pubs.
Vertical drinking is a new term for what used to be called standing at the bar, long regarded as the natural refuelling posture
Bloody Hell - Married women, domino players and poofters can sit down in a pub but real men drink vertically until they go horizontal.
At one of my stag parties down the pub before I was off to wed in the morning the sight of Pedro being offered a pint, missing the bar by six feet and falling down with his glass in the air, without spilling a drop - to which the landlord said to his prone figure: "I'll take that as a yes to another then" - almost made the whole debacle worthwhile.
AN NHS hospital has been penalised for treating people too quickly after its local trusts refused to pay the £2.5m cost of clearing a backlog of patients.
Ipswich Hospital had been so successful in reducing its waiting lists that it was able to meet current demand for treatment almost immediately.
However, the acceleration of treatment breached rules set by the Suffolk East Primary Care Trusts (PCTs), which stated that patients must wait at least 122 days, to ensure that its own resources were not exhausted too quickly.
The pride of Britain, eh? Make 'em wait just because, not for any real reason. When the Doc told me I needed an oriface examined last week I didn't even think about joining a queue, just got out the Mastercard and am off to see the specialist today, and I can see from his webpage he hasn't screwed up any of his last 2000 operations, so that's what credit cards are for. Priceless.
THE parents of a toddler who has become deaf in both ears were told by NHS bosses that he could have the hearing restored in one ear, but not in both.
However, after The Times asked North Dorset Primary Care Trust (PCT) to justify the decision, it relented and agreed to operate on both ears. The trust denied that the call from The Times had any influence on the decision, which it says it had been considering carefully for some time.
Kirsten and James Harvey, from Stalbridge, Dorset, were relieved that they would not have to spend £8,000 of their own money so that Matthew, who is 2, could hear in both ears. The trust had argued that one cochlear implant would meet Matthew's clinical needs, but that two was a matter of parental choice, for which it was not prepared to pay.
I think one smack round the back of the head of the Managers involved would fulfill the "clinical needs" but two would be my "parental choice".
With shrewd management, using offshore trusts and companies, Sir Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts paid only 1.6 per cent in tax on earnings of £81.3 million last year.
As they sang on "Hot Rocks" -
The best things in life are free
Look Ill give em to the birds and bees
I want money (thats what I want)
Yeah, thats what I want (oh yeah, thats what I want)
continues in same vein all the way to the bank...
JungleDisk - Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™
All the stuff I need to back up - cost me 3 cents last month! It is missing an automatic backup program at the moment but that is promised soon. If you don't backup off site then don't come crying to me when you have lost the lot.
The average night and day temperature for the UK in July of 17.8C (64.04F) made it the hottest month since such records began in 1914, according to provisional figures from the Met Office yesterday
Um - weren't we being told it was the hottest since 1911 just a week a go - these "records" that are being broken seem to be curiously variable. The Victorians were great recorders of everything and yet the Met Office doesn't seem to be able to use their records, though a series from 1659 is available from their website and for an excellent overview see http://homepage.ntlworld.com/booty.weather/climate/wxevents.htm
SCHOOLS would no longer be required to teach children the difference between right and wrong under plans to revise the core aims of the National Curriculum.
Instead, under a new wording that reflects a world of relative rather than absolute values, teachers would be asked to encourage pupils to develop “secure values and beliefs”.
The draft also purges references to promoting leadership skills and deletes the requirement to teach children about Britain’s cultural heritage.
Whilst the real world has moved on and rejected most of the nonsense that Jacques Derrida and the rest of the French "philosophers" peddled to the drug addled students in the 1970s it is almost touching to see that the Tony Blair generation still clings to their threadbare theories as they rise to the top of the establishment. Of course it is only the children who suffer, but hey, when has the purpose of the DofE been to help children?
The CLA Game Fair - 130,000 country folk enjoying a peaceful day out - lots of guns but not a policeman needed - not a mention on the BBC news website. But they have got room for this...
THERE was outrage and sadness in a Dorset fishing town yesterday as locals mourned the death of a cherished tradition, killed off after complaints from animal rights activists.
Since time immemorial, or at least since 1974, the denizens of Lyme Regis have gathered on the harbour to indulge in the traditional sport of the conger: a game of skill and balance involving a dead eel.
In the annual finale to the town’s Lifeboat Week, nine players or “conger cuddlers”, would mount wooden blocks arrayed in a triangular formation. An opposing team of nine would take turns to swing a dead conger, suspended from a rope, and try to knock their opponents from their perches as if they were human skittles, the crowd assisting with carefully aimed buckets of sea water.
It was, by common consent, the most fun one could have with a dead fish.
Teams of firemen, powerboat racers, fishermen — all were preparing to take their chances against the swinging eel in a tournament that raises about £3,000 for the RNLI. This year, however, an anonymous animal rights activist has scuppered the event after writing to the RNLI, complaining that the event was “disrespectful” to dead animals and threatening to film it and use the footage for a nationwide campaign against conger cuddling.
Rob Michael, chairman of the Lyme Regis Lifeboat Guild, was advised by the RNLI to abandon the conger cuddling. “The RNLI is not prepared to be involved in an event that may be seen by some as a barbaric throwback,” he said.
Give me barbaric throwbacks rather than simpering aquiescence to the politically correct anyday. Shame on the RNLI.
As part of their end-of-term celebrations, pupils at St Mark's School launched their new house system. Each house is named after a famous figure from history. All pupils took part in a vote earlier in the term to decide on titles for the three houses, and chose Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. The colours red, green and yellow have been selected to represent each grouping.
FOR 32 years it prompted little more than a wry smile. But now a pensioner who has a sign on her garden gate warning Jehovah’s Witnesses that their presence could result in them being eaten by dogs has been ordered to take it down.
Hampshire police received a complaint that the notice outside Jean Grove’s cottage, which reads “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses”, was “distressing, offensive and inappropriate”. When officers arrived at the house in Bursledon, near Southampton, Mrs Grove was bewildered. She has only a Jack Russell puppy. She told police that the sign had been put up by her late husband Gordon after he became exasperated with visits from the church. The final straw came when they called on Christmas Day in 1974.
Insisting that the sign was simply a lark, Mrs Grove said yesterday that she had never received any complaints about it. But police ordered her to take it down and her details were taken. Once the officers left she hung the sign back up.
I think I will have the headline made up into a sign to hang on my front door, and see what happens..
Junk mail deliveries are set to mushroom after a landmark pay and conditions deal between Royal Mail and the Communication Workers Union. The agreement sees postmen accepting heavier sacks as the price for better wages....
Junk mail deliveries have until now been limited to three items per house per week but managers wants to expand in this profitable area, which has become the fastestgrowing part of its business.
Last year Royal Mail's unaddressed mail deliveries, branded Door to Door, grew by 12.1pc to 3.3bn items
Isn't there some EU directive that businesses have to take back their old goods? Does this mean that I can get Postie to pick up all the crap he leaves rather than filling my over- regulated Kennet bin?
The Bath Alternative points me to this article from the Bath Chronicle."It sounds like 1945 never happened and that classic wartime film – Went The Day Well? – has actually come to pass."
Devious motorists are thought to be using forged permits to make their way through checkpoints on the closed stretch of the A4.
Security is also being tightened because some drivers travelling between Bath and Bristol through Saltford have been pretending to visit local businesses in order to trick their way through the village's controlled access points.
...
Yesterday, some motorists and businesses were told by checkpoint staff that as of today, they would have to travel all the way around to Keynsham and come in from that end.
Drivers without permits visiting businesses, friends or relatives will still be able to enter from both the Bath and the Saltford ends, but will be expected to leave the same way they came in unless they have very convincing reasons not to.
They will face stiff questioning by staff at the central checkpoint if they try to pass through.
Maybe they are trying to catch the escaped Worstall...
Mr Free Market is looking for a new gun so I'm off to the CLA Gamefair with him today - I will try and persuade him against another plastic camouflaged thingy - proper guns should have lots of old wood and Damascus steel, and the barrels should go across not up and down...
RONALD REAGAN claimed that the scariest words in the English language are: “I’m from the Government and I’m here to help.” Hyperbole, of course, but we got his point. And anyone who didn’t get it then ought to have got it by now. This Government is not merely incapable of devising policies that will help; it is incapable of even implementing them. Most of its “eye-catching initiatives” are quietly shelved after a few million in consulting fees reveal them as ill-conceived.
You might expect repeated failure by successive governments to have infused the political class with a degree of humility....
Then you have underestimated the chutzpah of politicians. They are like tradesmen who make a mess of your bathroom and then bid for the job of renovating your entire house. David Cameron is a human device for detecting the direction of the political wind. And he now claims that the Government should aim to increase not GDP (gross domestic product) but GWB (general wellbeing), or happiness, as those who do not talk in TLAs (three-letter acronyms) might put it.
...
“I’m from the Government and I’m here to make you happy.” Now that is scary. ..
To have been born British is to have won first prize in the lottery of life. This is almost as true now as it was when Cecil Rhodes said it. But not because the British are or ever were the happiest people on earth. It is because, unlike those happy Nigerians, we are prosperous and free. Which means we have just about as much happiness as we want.
Jamie Whyte's full article makes a lot of sense - and as he is a New Zealander I just about forgive him for substituting the word British into Cecil Rhodes' quote - it was of course being born an Englishman that is the first prize.
Tony Blair is willing to use the law to encourage people to adopt a healthier way of life by curbing junk food advertising and requiring supermarkets to improve labelling.
The Prime Minister said that successful anti-smoking campaigns and the drive to make school meals more healthy had changed his mind on the role of the state.
"A few years back, I would have hesitated long and hard over issues like the smoking ban," he said .
Only because he wasn't sure whether he would win the vote, but he then produced an onion from his pocket and turned to the page labelled "It's for the kiddies (tm)"
"Now, and particularly where children are concerned, I have come to the conclusion we need to be tougher and more active in setting standards and enforcing them."
Hey for a lame duck "tougher" and "more active" are the words I have been told to use about everything in the hope they make me look butch.
Mr Blair said the NHS faced crippling costs unless people took more responsibility for their health.
Oh Good, encourage personal responsibility - or maybe not.
"Ten per cent of NHS resources are used to treat diabetes. By 2010 the estimate is that this could double. That is 20 per cent of the entire resources of the NHS - and it's avoidable. Three quarters of diabetics are Type 2 diabetics and two thirds of them have a disease which could be preventable with exercise, diet and more healthy choices."
A "more robust" approach to health would not mean that the NHS refused to treat people who continued to smoke, even though it spent £1.7 billion treating conditions related to smoking. But health care should not be just about treating the sick; it must be about helping people to live healthier lives.
Oh so not personal responsibility at all, but personalised bullying plans and targets to be drawn up.
Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary said: "In January, David Cameron set out Conservative priorities for health. I am glad that Tony Blair accepts our argument.
No surprise there from the nuTories...
So along with the Boy Miliband's ration cards for carbon expect an electronic record to be kept of the sweeties you buy and a visit from Big Doctor if the national ID register notes you are over limit for Sherbet Lemons in a month.
A RETIRED army captain yesterday won the right to sue police who he claims prevented him rescuing heirlooms from his burning home.
Edmund Carlisle, 83, is demanding compensation from Dyfed-Powys Police after the fire destroyed his 16th-century home on the Welsh borders, causing £723,000 of damage. Possessions worth more than £143,000 were also destroyed.
....
He and his wife, Rosemary, 82, had dialled 999 and began rescuing furniture and paintings after fire broke out in the boiler room at their farm at Llanigon, near Hay-on-Wye, Powys.
When police arrived they ordered the couple out of the house for their own safety. When Captain Carlisle refused he was arrested and put into the back of a police van.
And I hope he wins - at the sight of a fire the emergency services get all over-excited - I have nearly been arrested twice for ignoring their instructions - when a neighbour's thatched house was alight , only one end was burning and stuff was being pulled out, I tried to walk over to help and was blocked on the road (so I walked across the field) and after a fire in Marlborough they insisted in closing a carpark quarter of a mile away from a fire that had been put out the previous night - I let my displeasure be known...)
A FAMILY who claimed their elderly mother endured a terrifying death after being deliberately starved by a hospital doctor put their case before a coroner yesterday.
Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital allegedly decided that Olive Knockels, a former school matron who had suffered a stroke, would have no quality of life if she recovered. ..
In a statement to William Armstrong, the coroner, Mrs West said her mother had begged her for something to eat and drink, or a cup of tea, but the request was refused by a nurse, on the doctor’s orders. Her last days were spent with her false teeth and hearing aid removed from her bedside, in a cold hospital room.
She was admitted on September 14, 2003, after a suspected stroke.After two weeks Dr Maisey allegedly told Mrs West that he was surprised her mother was still alive and said that if the family intervened, he would have them arrested.
Mrs West said that on another visit her mother had looked terrified and had tried, unsuccessfully, to tell her something. Three days later she pleaded with her daughter: “Help. Help me please.”
..
In a statement, Christopher West said: “I told Dr Maisey: ‘I wouldn’t treat my dog like that’, and he said it was easier for vets because they . . . can put animals to sleep.”
Obviously this is only an allegation in an ongoing case so I can make no judgement - publically....
But perhaps the lasting legacy of 1976 was that it was the first time that people began to take climate change seriously. Until then scientists had been making dire noises about something going terribly wrong with the weather, but it seemed so . . . well, academic. After all, what was there really to worry about when the 1970s had been mostly the usual mix of cold winters and disappointing summers? So a sensationally hot and dry summer in 1975 came as a rude shock. It could have been written off as a one-off freak, but two successive summers of blistering heat stretched coincidence too far.
No, it was clear to everyone in 1976 that something was untoward.
Rubbish - back in the 1970s there were fears of an impending Ice Age - look at National Geographic, November 1976 article which basically is non committal on which way the climate might turn next - good link well worth an explore -
Scientists agree that we can expect increasingly hot and prolonged heatwaves as climate change bites deep.
Not a hint of any scientist forecasting anything different or actually saying they aren't confident enough in the models to able to forecast as to what to expect.
We may yet find ourselves in the position of Californians, who suffer power blackouts in the summer because of the huge energy demands from air-conditioning.
Those right wind sceptics at the BBC blame something different -
Oh well - facts mustn't get in the way, we are facing disaster!
So, how many more record-breaking heatwaves will it take before we start to take climate change seriously? And when will the Government take the lead? When will it force all new buildings to have their own power generators — solar panels, wind turbines, whatever — and compulsory rain traps to collect rainwater?...We need to be more aware of how much carbon dioxide we use. ... While we’re at it, impose a special carbon tax on airline fares because aviation fuel is untaxed. And tinkering around with a few wind turbines is useless; we need a huge, concerted effort to change our ways.
You said it - useless!
In the intense heatwave of August 2003, more than 2,000 people are reckoned to have died, but still it made no difference. How many more deaths will it take before climate change is taken seriously?
Paul Simons writes the Weather Eye column for The Times
It is strange this 2000 deaths figure - see http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_health/HSQ25.pdf for a full article - the striking quote I noticed was: Excess mortality was much greater than that observed with previous heat waves in the UK. In London it was estimated that the 2003 heat wave was associated with a 42 per cent increase in mortality, compared to an excess of 16 per cent in 1995 and 15 per cent in 1976
Isn't that damning - 1976 which was a long hot summer, not many died but nearly thirty years later they are dropping like flies - what does that tell you about all the wonderful advances we have made in care for our old and sick?
CHILDREN from well-off families who grow up in less densely populated environments — such as big houses in the country — are at higher risk of childhood cancers, research suggests.
..
It is believed widely that many childhood cancers are triggered by a cell mutation developed before birth, followed by an infection in infancy. It is thought that this prompts an abnormal immune response that causes the disease. Scientists from the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (Comare) said that trends of cancer clusters supported this hypothesis. They said that children brought up in too clean an environment either developed impaired immune systems — or, alternatively, “urban” viruses could be finding their way into rural populations, causing the genetic damage that leads to cancer.
In crowded places more people are likely to be exposed to the viruses and become immune to them, according to the theory. An influx of city-dwellers into an isolated community might spread the viruses to individuals who are not resistant to them.
“If you’re wealthy you tend to live in a big house with more land and have contact with fewer people. It’s theoretically believable that if there is a viral component you have less chance of coming across that virus.”
So it is probably all right for the Englishettes to mix with the villagers' children but I should not allow the SUV driving yummy mummies across the drawbridge...
This explanation of cancer clusters is also probably the reason there are clusters around Windscale and other nuclear plants, large numbers of people from all over the place arrived to live in these remote areas, rather than the Tritium that they sloshed all over the landscape.
David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, yesterday backed the idea of carbon rationing for all, based on smart credit cards that record an individual's energy use....
The idea has been floated before, by Elliott Morley when he was an environment minister
Enuff said - if Morley thought of it it is stupid - ergo sum.
In a speech to the Audit Commission last night, Mr Miliband said: "Imagine a country where carbon becomes a new currency. We carry bank cards that store both pounds and carbon points.
"When we buy electricity, gas and fuel, we use our carbon points, as well as pounds. To help reduce carbon emissions, the Government would set limits on the amount of carbon that could be used.
"Imagine your neighbourhood. Each neighbour receives the same free entitlement to a certain number of carbon points.
"The family next door has an SUV and realise they are going to have to buy more carbon points.
"So instead they decide to trade in the SUV for a hybrid car. They save 2.2 tons of carbon each year. They then sell their carbon points back to the bank and share the dividends of environmental growth."
Buzz word bingo - tick for trade, dividends and growth even though he is describing a restrictive rationing scheme. With Big Brother watching every time you buy a gallon of unleaded - "vy are you driving to Salisbury every Wednesday? - what a wondeful world it will be. And of course this scheme will be a lovely huge Government IT project - will it work as well as the Tax Credits or the NHS records system?
...Then, noting that the IPCC (2001) suggested that the increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing over the 20th century was about 0.5 Wm-2, Shaviv calculated that the anthropogenic-induced warming of the globe over this period was approximately 0.14°C (0.5 Wm-2 x 0.28°C per Wm-2). ...
Next, based on information that indicated a solar activity-induced increase in radiative forcing of 1.3 Wm-2 over the 20th century .., plus the work..that indicated a globally-averaged solar luminosity increase of approximately 0.4 Wm-2 over the same period, Shaviv calculated an overall and ultimately solar activity-induced warming of 0.47°C (1.7 Wm-2 x 0.28°C per Wm-2) over the 20th century. Added to the 0.14°C of anthropogenic-induced warming, the calculated total warming of the 20th century thus came to 0.61°C, which was noted by Shaviv to be very close to the 0.57°C temperature increase that was said by the IPCC to have been observed over the past century. Consequently, both Shaviv's and Idso's analyses, which mesh well with real-world data of both the recent and distant past, suggest that only 15-20% (0.10°C/0.57°C) of the observed warming of the 20th-century can be attributed to the concomitant rise in the air's CO2 content.
In light of these real-world-based observations, plus the multitude of studies that indicate most climate changes of the past were clearly associated with changes in solar activity (see Solar Effects in our Subject Index), the case for anthropogenic CO2 emissions playing anything more than a minor role in contemporary global warming would appear to be fading fast.
..the Met Office recommended people stay hydrated in the heatwave conditions.Transport for London repeated its advice to passengers to carry water with them on the Underground. ..
And don't forget to eat enough salt - yes salt. While the BBC won't tell you it in case it offends the health fascists you need more salt when you are sweating like a paedo in a playground, so sprinkle it on, and enjoy your food.
GOVERNMENT attempts to clamp down on “sickies” in Whitehall have failed, with rates of absence higher than ever, according to a survey published today.
While absence rates in the public sector have fallen overall over the past 12 months, they are still rising among civil servants and council workers.
The report, from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), shows that overall rates of sick days in the workplace have dropped, but absenteeism is still 25 per cent higher in the public than in the private sector.
...
However, despite a new regime in Whitehall to reduce absenteeism, the number of sick days taken by civil servants has risen from 9.3 days to 10.5 days, while those for council workers have increased from 10.9 days to 11 days.
The report also claimed that public sector employers were significantly less likely to discipline or dismiss employees because of absence from work.
Poor lambs, all that hard work and the worry of an early pension must take it out of them.
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Class!
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