The NRA is mad

"Guns don't kill people . People do".

That is the mantra of the US National Rifle Association (NRA).

It is a lie.

Death by guns needs two factors: Guns and idiots.

Availability of guns contributes to death by guns.

The US has lots of guns, and lots of gun deaths.

Two events were carried out by toddlers aged two and three.

A 2-year-old boy accidentally shot and killed his mother after he reached into her purse at a northern Idaho Wal-Mart and her concealed gun fired.

3-year-old toddler shoots himself dead with mum's handgun

It was the availability of these guns which enabled these two deaths. The NRA will respond that the guns were not adequately protected. But the NRA also argues that every one should be armed and ready to "defend themselves" by firing their guns at terrorists (without hitting bystanders), so they have got to be available instantly.

NRA says these deaths would not happen if everyone was armed. A soldier shot dead three colleagues and injured 16 others at the US Army's Fort Hood base in Texas before killing himself, Not enough guns there then?

The NRA is mad.Insane.

Guns kill people by being available. 

End of.

Should Airlines get compensation for volcanic ash airspace closures?

Branson's Rash Bash at Cash for Ash will not Wash.

"Sir" Richard Branson demands compensation from the taxpayer for the losses caused by the Eyja&c volcano. Well, he can stuff his demands right up his exhaust vent. The airlines have only themselves to blame for the blanket ban, because they have had nearly 30 years to work out tolerable levels of volcanic ash, and they have failed to do so.

The Civil Aviation Authority has a review paper on volcanic ash. In it we learn that in the last 12 years, there have been 60 close encounters with volcaninc ash, resulting in 7 engine failures. All cases restarted when the plane dropped below the ash cloud, but this happy outcome requires that the failure occurs at height. It's only a matter of time.

In 1982 the International Civil Aviation Authority set up a Volcanic Ash Warnings Group. There was a Symposium on Volcanic Ash and Airline Safety in Seattle in July 1991.  How come standards of ash tolerability were not set up by these groups? Did none of the highly-paid and knowledgeable  experts there think to consider what levels of ash were flyable and what were not? Clearly, the assembled company decided against setting up a regulation level, and we can reasonably suppose that this is due to a free market, low-regulation mindset on the part of the industry.

Levels of ash must be set with a wide margin of error. Within areas that have been declared within the limits of toleration, there will be areas of higher density, and an aircraft with the misfortune of hitting such a stratum might exceed tolerable levels. Present in-flight radar cannot detect such layers. So it would seem sensible to design and fit a small device, maybe using laser-back-scatter, as an ash density detector on all aircraft in these troubled times.

There is a striking parallel with what is happening at the Deepwater rig right now. Oil companies know that blowouts occur, but they treat each new blow-out as a one-off surprise. "Blimey! We're leaking! Quick, someone design a coffer dam to try to cope with it. No, damn, that doesn't work. Let's put a pipe in and suck it out!"

Industry has got to learn to think ahead, and it will only do that if it learns some painful lessons. I like anyone who smiles a lot, and Richard Branson has a ready smile. I believe he has a genuine if rudimentary concern about the environment, but he is mad to expect any compensation for the no-fly rule.  "Lord" Adonis, the Labour transport man, said at the height of his powers that he would be inclined to compensate. Let's hope this is one Labour spending decision that falls to the cutting room floor. It will be a test of the new Government's commitment to fiscal prudence to see whether they can resist the temptation to rob from the poor and give to the Rich.

The Unions giveth, the Unions taketh away, Blinkered be the name of the Unions

Unite Union is on course for a strike to enliven our Easter holidays. RMT is lined up for strike action over health and safety on the railways.

[update 26th March: Great. Now British Gas is threatening to strike too.  ]

The unions' action in the run up to a General Election,  where a Conservative victory looms over our heads like a mushroom cloud of death, really strains the cock-up theory of politics to the limit.
Do the Unions not realise that they are playing into the hands of the Tories, bringing back into power the party that destroyed the unions' influence? Do they really not realise that they are helping the Tories? Is it really beyond the wit and intelligence of Union bosses to postpone their disputes for two pathetic little months, until May 7th? 


Or could it be that Conservative Party Central office has been nudging the managers of BA and Network Rail &c to provoke the unions into action?

No, of course not. I just don't do conspiracy theory.  These strikes are just the result of common or garden combined stupidity brought to us courtesy of a joint effort of unions and management. Thanks a bunch, guys.

Proof that climate change denial is not funny

How many AGW deniers does it take to change a light bulb?

None, because there is no proof that the lightbulb needs to be changed. It might be a power cut, or a wiring fault, and in any case those new commie low energy lightbulbs contain mercury and osmium and kryptonium and they cost a lot and what about the jobs in the tungsten filament industry and they are really expensive and the old ones warm up the room and anyway we should be free to waste our money if we want to and so on ad infinitum.

Why did the climate change denier cross the road?

Because he thought he could get across before the car got to him and anyway he didn't hear it coming and there aren't many cars on that road normally, and anyway he had private health insurance.

How do you tell if there is a climate change denier in your fridge?

Because you can hear him mumbling about how cold it is, which proves that man-made global warming is a huge fraud conspiracy on the part of Al Gore so that he can get rich.

Click here if you are looking for proof that man-made emissions are producing climate change.

The cuts agenda triple whammy

The cuts agenda is a brilliant diversion from the real crisis, says Seumas Milne in The Guardian.
Amen to that. This is how it has gone:
1 Unregulated casino economy crashes through stupidity and cupidity.
2 We the people, through our elected representatives, give them £175,000,000,000 to enable them to continue in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.
3 The political debate is now over by how much our public services should be cut.

Answer:
1 cut Trident, thus saving £75,000,000,000 (or £97 billion, if you prefer not to be suckered by Government figures) over 30 years.
2 Plug the offshore tax haven leak, saving £25,000,000,000 a year.
3 Bring in efficiency savings in public (and indeed private) enterprises, by means of the old Suggestion Box.

Harry Patch his epitaph

Harry Patch, veteran of WWI

Thousands of gallons of sentimental outpourings today from the corporate media about the nobility and courage of Harry Patch, the last British Great War veteran from the trenches. The journalists almost, but not quite, manage to quote his feelings about the futility of war. You can hear his words sticking in their throats. His comrade in experience, Henry Allingham, captured the philosophy of the old soldier, distilled from the charnel-house of the trenches into the line, "War is stupid. Nobody wins".

That is the only wisdom that a soldier can bring back from war. Mostly, they do not talk about it, they just shut it away in a locked tin trunk in the attic of their consciousness, knowing that people who have not seen war will not understand their views, and those who have seen war do not need to hear them.

The world does not want to know what the old soldiers know because the near-universal belief that war is inevitable, an irremovable part of political reality.

Three thousand years ago, the necessity of the regular and orderly sacrifice of human beings to propitiate the gods was also a universal belief. Then some began to question it. It began with those like Abraham, or like Kaveh, who had handed over their sons and daughters to the priests, and watched the golden knife slash the neck of their loved ones. They began to question the absolute wisdom of the priests. They began to think independently of the masses and the respected leaders of the time. They began to talk. Many of them would have been arrested for thinking irreligious thoughts, and no doubt many of the sceptics were sacrificed to the gods in their turn. The priests would have scorned them, and castigated them for undermining the very fabric of civilisation. "The gods will kill us if we do not give them the sacrifices that are due to them". Kings would have passed decrees outlawing any critics of human sacrifice.

But in the end, human sensibility defeated the artificial reasoning of the priesthood, and by the 6th century BC most human civilisations had got over the idea of the necessity of human sacrifice. But just as the old gods survived into Christianity redressed as saints, so also human sacrifice survives in the guise of warfare. Instead of ritualised killing of one or two a week, thousands of young men and women are initiated into the orderly rituals of the military parade, and then slaughtered in the chaotic mess of battle. Instead of being immolated on the altar of the nation's god, they are sacrificed on the altar of national security. Instead of obeying the psychotic ideation of some crazed arch-priest, they obey the orders stemming from the projected belief of George W Bush and Tony Blair that the demon Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

It doesn't have to be like this. As Harry and Henry said, wars always end in talks. Real talks can prevent war. Frameworks can be set up that make it more difficult for dictators to emerge. Separatist aspirations, which are behind about one in three of the wars burning in the world at the moment, can be discussed under the aegis and authority of the United Nations.

It will take a long time to break the power of the military industrial complex, just as it took a long time to prise the sacrificial knife out of the hand of the priests. It is a long journey to make, but the longest journey begins with a single step, and that first step is for us to stop giving head room to the belief that war is inevitable.

Let this be the epitaph of Henry Allingham and Harry Patch and all their comrades:

"War is stupid. Nobody wins".

Afghanistan War: Is it worth it? What is the way out?

Seven British soldiers killed in seven days.
Seven families plunged into the agonised tunnel of grief. 176 families over the last 8 years. Thousands of Britons affected. Thousands of Afghan lives lost, many innocent civilians. Hundreds of Afghans plunged into grief and despair. Mutilation, pain, disability, anger, resentment, madness.

Millions of minds in Britain that entertain a wispy subconscious thought:

"What is it all for? Is it ever worth it?"

Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth is ready with his answer : "...the conflict in Afghanistan would be hard and dangerous...Let us be under no illusion. The situation in Afghanistan is serious, and not yet decided. The way forward is hard and dangerous. More lives will be lost and our resolve will be tested...No single or simple solution will work. [is he thinking of the proposal to medicalise the poppy crop here??]...Success will be achieved incrementally. Step by step and over time, the Afghans themselves will take full responsibility for their own security and their own governance... If we are to succeed, we will need both the courage and the patience to see it through. There is no defined end date – only an end state....if Nato forces left now, the Taliban will take control and al-Qaida will return...We must stay and finish the job. There is a long way to go, but we are getting there".

The old BST in other words. Blood, Sweat and Tears.

But Bob Ainsworth ain't no Churchill, and Afghanistan ain't the white cliffs of Dover exactly either. Bob has to build a cognitive bridge to remind the Man on the Clapham Omnibus that Al-Quaeda lives in Afghanistan (and Pakistan too of course) and would Come and Get Us if our troops weren't there not looking for him.

Man on the Clapham Omnibus: "Afghanistan was where what's his name used to live, Goldfinger, no not him, the name will come to me in a minute, hang about, in those Tora Bora caves. Did it have to do with Pearl Harbour, no, that was before, it was 9/11 wasn't it, that's why we are there. When the Towers got hit. Bin Laden, that's the one. Our lads are out there to catch Bin...no, he lives at the other end of the country. No, our lads are out there to stop the Taleban because they hate our Parliamentary Democracy, and might come over here and and abuse our lovely MPs. They're out there to defend our banks from a takeover by Islamic banks because Islamic banks are intrinsically more stable. Oh I give up. Why are they there?"

Bob Ainsworth: (paraphrasing here - RL) They are there, dear voter, in order to set up a stable, non-corrupt, efficient and democratic Afghan state, one that will keep terrorists fully in check. Which means defeating the Taliban, because they would give refuge to Al-Qaeda. Defeating the Taleban is difficult, because they make a lot of money by selling opium that ends up in the arms of our young people like that pale and thin young man nodding off in the seat behind you. The poppy farmers depend on the Taleban to buy their crop so they do not co-operate with our troops. We cannot just rip up the crop because that would infuriate the people who depend on it for a livelihood.

Man on the Clapham Omnibus: (Who has suddenly begun to take an interest) So why do you not buy the poppy off the farmers? Then the Taleban have no support from the people. The farmers would be eager to help you when you are their customer. The financial and social carpet is pulled out from under the Taleban. The beauty of it is, you could turn the opium into medicine for people in the Third World, you know.

Bob Ainsworth: No single or simple solution will work.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: C'mon Bob, you can do better than that.
Bob Ainsworth: Some of the stuff we buy might end up on the black market.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: It's all going there now. Eejit.
Bob Ainsworth: The Afghan Government has no control over the area.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: It would have if it was running a marketing operation.
Bob Ainsworth: No single or simple solution will work.
Man on the Clapham Omnibus: Are you that one who put in for a Duck House?

Only it's not funny. People are dying over there, and they do not need to be dying. Not just dying from poor kit: dying because of piss-poor policy too. The British Army knows that to win over an insurgency, you have to win hearts and minds. Legalising the poppy crop is definitely the way to go. It is not just this blog saying this, it is the European Green Party, it has been agreed by the European Parliament, and several NGOs including the Red Cross agree it is the way to go.

There must be a few soldiers out there who would agree that we should buy the opium crop.

More on this

Government's mortgage rescue schme has only assisted one family

Government's mortgage rescue scheme has only assisted one family: "It was announced with much fanfare in September at the height of the banking crisis - the government's big idea to stop vulnerable people being thrown out of their homes. But yesterday it emerged that the mortgage protection scheme has so far helped just one family across the whole of the UK.
...

The shadow housing spokesman, Grant Schapps, seized on the figures, saying they revealed the rescue scheme, which was expected to cost £285m and help 6,000 families over the next two years, to be a sham. 'Thousands of families have looked to Gordon Brown for help to survive his recession and he's looked the other way. He got us into this mess and he needs to help ordinary families through it,' he said.

A government spokesman said local councils were now actively considering applications for the scheme from more than 450 other families, and insisted it had always expected it to take three months to get off the ground.

Under the scheme, homeowners struggling with their repayments should be able to sell a share of their property - or all of it - to a social landlord and rent it back, enabling them to stay in their home instead of facing repossession.

The basic idea is perfectly straightforward and simple, and is Green Party Policy, called the Right to Rent. You lose your job, you cannot afford the mortgage, the Government takes over the mortgage, you pay an affordable rent, and get to stay in your house. The mortgage still gets paid, so the mortgage lenders do not collapse under the weight of their derivative "guarantees". Everyone is happy.

Except it has not been rolled out. Why not? I do not know the answer, but the word "Incompetence" springs to mind. Government has shovelled billions into the banks, but cannot get it together to direct a few millions into the real economy.

Sustainability? Never mind the reasoning, just feel the poople!

Good luck to the Sustainable Development UK 09 Conference which is taking place today in London. They say "Soaring oil prices, global food shortages and rising carbon emissions mean now is the time for decisive action by all those concerned with the role that sustainability plays in the future safety and security of the UK".

This attracts the attention of the Today Programme, and our John interviews Prof Beddington.

John Humphreys takes the line that there is nothing we can do about population increase, energy, food and water. I know he does not mean it (or maybe he does), he is just being adversarial, which is presumably in his job contract: Para3.5.4: "If an interviewee makes any statement, you are obliged, not to seek clarification, but to put the opposite point of view".

The result of adversarial interviewing is a sense of confusion and frustration in the listeners, going on to nihilism. This, in my view, is not helpful especially when dealing with serious global problems. We need to be solution-oriented.

How much better it would be if John Humphrys had said,
Population is a very emotive issue, but would it not be sensible for Governments to say to their citizens, "We will undertake to feed you, if you will undertake to restrict your offspring to replacement levels".

Even this would draw criticism from some listeners, but at least it is a constructive approach that suggests the idea that we are not all doomed, and there is nothing we can do.

Prof Beddington said, first, recognise there is a problem. This in itself is difficult enough. Denialism is rampant, whether primary denialism, not wanting to face up to the fact that humanity is in deep doo-doo unless it makes radical changes in the way it goes about things, or secondary denialism, because the radical changes required clash with deeply held beliefs regarding the need for the privileged few to live their individual live lives free of any restraint on doing exactly what they want to do.

We face a clash between logic and emotion, reason and ideology.
Logic says that since the trends on water, food, and energy show that we are on a course that ends in disaster, it follows that we should take action.
Emotion says that to change the habit of a lifetime is a drag, and it would be better to continue as we are doing, and hope for the best.
Reason says that decarbonising our economy is possible, but will take a huge effort, so we had best start today.
Ideology says that decarbonising our economy is a challenge to free market fundamentalism, so should be deferred as long as possible.
Logic says that human population cannot expand forever into a finite space, but ideology says that the Pope and the Hadith both agree that God/Allah want Catholic and Muslim populations to expand forever, even if it means widespread starvation, eco-degradation and war.

It would be easy to get a bit depressed and cynical over all of this. However, it takes a long time and many nautical miles to turn a supertanker around, and this may explain why it is taking so long to get any action on population, water management, food production and distribution and global warming. I have been in the Green Party for 30 years, and I can say that never have our concerns been so high up on the political and scientific agenda, nor at so high a level of the political pyramid. The Green Party in the UK is still to a very great extent shut out of the political and mass media process, but our time will come. Politicians and corporate media can feel some of the poople some of the time, and they can poop on some of the fools all of the time, but they cannot pop all of the feebles all of the time. Something like that.

Anyway, it's a lovely day, and I'm off out to plant some seeds.

Obama's withdrawal plan. Now: peace in Afghanistan

Great. Obama sets a time to withdraw from Iraq. We must hope that Iraq stays peaceful and is able to reconstruct itself after Georg W's orgy of destruction.

Now Obama has to sort Afghanistan out. He is aiming for a surge, a doubling of the US troops towards 60,000. It is going to take more than brute force though. If NATO win militarily in Afghanistan it will be the first time in history that anyone has won there. At present, things are not promising that the US is going to buck the trend.

Opium is the key. The trade funds the Taleban war effort, and stops Western troops winning hearts and minds. The answer is very clear indeed: buy the opium, turn it into medical morphine and heroin, and use it to relieve terminal pain from cancer and HIV in Africa and other places where millions die in miserable pain every year.

The Senlis council, the Afghan Crescent, the Italian Red Cross, the Green Party of England and Wales, the European Green Party, the European Green Party, and the European Parliament (part of) have all endorsed the policy of buying the opium and turning it to medical use.

The closest to a substantive argument against the policy that I have yet encountered is that the Afghan Government does not have the competence to administer such an operation. Well, bloody well teach them and empower them to do it! It's a chicken and egg problem: the Afghan Government's writ does not run in Helmand, because the opium is illegal. Make it legal, and their writ will run.

Is it that the Afghan Government does not have the will to do it? If so, they are dancing to a tune that only they can hear, because a legal medical opium trade will get the Afghan economy up and running, so it is a no-brainer in terms of political and economic rationality. Maybe the tune they are dancing to is played by Hamid Karzai's brother .

The people who have leverage (excuse the expression) on this situation are the American Green Party. Marnie or anyone, if you read this, please get in touch and let's get this show on the road; let's persuade Obama to look seriously at legitimising the opium crop so that it is used to relieve suffering, not to cause it. This is an issue that we can win. Yes, we can!

Afghanistan: the medical way out

The NATO operation in Afghanistan is in deep sh*t. The Taleban are making advances, and the Australian Defence Minister is honest about poor prospects of defeating them. The US-Karzai relationship is at a low ebb, with Joe Biden, Obama's vice president and foreign policy wonk, reportedly storming out of a meeting with Afghan President Karzai, exasperated at not getting "straight answers" on drugs and corruption.

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's written statement to Congress during her confirmation hearing called Afghanistan a "narco-state" that was "plagued by limited capacity and widespread corruption".

General James L Jones of the Atlantic Council of the United States says that Afghanistan is close to being a failed state.

Karzai (whose brother is reputed to be into the drugs trade) is muttering that if the US will not give him the boys toys he wants, he will ask the Russians, who in turn are saying that the NATO invasion is going the same way as their ten-year stay in Afghanistan.

So the US is pumping more grunts into the country. They have 30,000 now, the generals want to double that, and 17,000 more are on their way now. They want NATO to send more. They are critical of the British troops, who are snide, and keep asking the USAF to bomb them out of trouble.


So things are really not good, but the Government is humming bravely to itself. Lord Malloch Brown, in a letter to the Leader of the Green Party dated 6th February, writes "All concerned know that the battle against opium in Afghanistan will be a long one, however, we hope that it will be ultimately successful, in Pakistan and Thailand".

To be charitable, I think his secretary has left out "as" between the comma and the in.
Even so, it shows that the good Lord did not read the letter that the civil servants put before him, so he obviously feels that he needs more letters on the subject before he starts taking it more seriously.

So. SNAFU in Afghanistan. Our troops find themselves located in a severely sewage-polluted watery inlet without any means of propulsion. My military advisor tells me that the technical term for this is "embuggerment".

What to do?

Buy the opium crop! Purchase it from the farmers!! Give them money for it, thus

• turning the Afghan economy around,
  
• putting the Afghan Government in charge of its nominal country,
  
• pulling the Oriental prayer mat out from under the Taleban,
  
• reducing one of the main pretexts for corruption in the country,
  
• slashing the heroin addiction problem in Europe, and last but not least,
  
• providing pain relief for the 6 million people who die in agony from cancer in the Global South.

You would think that Government would see that, wouldn't you? Like they might have seen the unsustainablity of the Brown Bank Boom?

Boom Boom! as Basil Brush would say.

Please write to your MP today.

NHS computers - a record failure at the Royal Free?

BBC NEWS : NHS boss attacks e-records system: "A new NHS computerised medical records system on trial at a London hospital has been criticised by a hospital boss for causing 'heartache and hard work'.

Andrew Way, chief executive of London's Royal Free Hospital, said technical problems had cost the trust £10m and meant fewer patients could be seen."

This is not a unique failure. See here:

IT system failures continued to plague the U.K. government this week, when as many as 80,000 civil servants working for the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) had to deal with what is being described in the local press as the biggest computer crash in government history. ..The IT failure was only the latest in a string of serious computer system problems experienced by the department. The DWP's Child Support Agency (CSA) has been struggling with a £456 million system from EDS that has made payments to only one in eight single parents awaiting them. Last week, Johnson told a House of Commons Parliamentary Select Committee that he is considering shutting down the child-support case management and telephony system, and Doug Smith, the chief executive of the CSA, resigned from his job.

Then there is the famous Wessex Ambulance Trust computer fiasco.

This all reminds me of my medical training, on the "Undhere Syndrome", where the patient says "I have a pain here, and here, and here and..." When you get that, be prepared to have a long consultation.

To avoid carrying on the list, they are all collected and docuented under the title of IT Project Mismanagement Disasters by Derek J. Smith, who is to be thanked most sincerely for his work.

Our GP practice was among the first to computerise (with a BBC computer), and we progressed to Vision, which is a good Windows based system, but a constant source of annoyance with unwanted time-wasting dialogue boxes, and a serious deficiency in the "Search" department.
If I wanted to know when a patient was first given SEROXAT (for instance) I would have to scroll down looking with my eyeballs. I mean, WHAAT!!? I asked IPS/Vision to fix it (how long would it have taken? two hours?) and they said they were too busy attending to new Government demands to meet the needs of the GPs.

We trialled the beta version of a GP email system called X400. It quickly (or should that be slowly?) became apparent that it took 13 key clicks to send an email. Not good. I phoned the local IT manager to tell him about it. With tears in his voice he said "I know, I know, please send in numerous reports, not just one, we have to kill this thing, I have told them but they
are trying to stay with it". In the end, we won, and X400 died, but it took a lot of work.

And another thing. If a patient moves from one computerised practice to another, all the records are printed off on reams of paper, and then copied out into the new system. The various GP systems cannot talk to each other. In fact, even identical GP systems cannot talk to each other. So vital data like drug allergies can be left off, or mis-copied in the transcription process.

GPs have led the way with computerisation, with the hospitals languishing about 20 years behind - understandably, because of the greater size and complexity for a hospital computer.

So what is the Government's response to all this? They have dreamed up a huge Supercomputer called "The Spine" where everything will be integrated (no doubt with the police records into the bargain). Though it may be foiled by the bank bailout.

The Spine is estimated to cost £30 billion.

What do we learn from all this? That Civil Servants are not good at purchasing good, effective mega computer systems.

I think the problem starts in the boardrooms of big software Companies, thusly:

Chair: Item 4: The Megatherian BallsUp software. Clearly a heap of dingoes kidneys, totally screwed up, we have to cut our losses and scrap it. All agreed? Yes, Smithers?
Smithers: Chair, I know a high up Civil Servant, and he has a budget of £30 billion for an new computer system. Shall I try him before we make a decision to to ditch this project?
Chair: Excellent, Smithers, well done, we will advance you £200 for a lunch with your Civil Servant friend. All agreed? Good. Next item...

Deep inside, I have a little voice screaming "B*ll*cks", but I am managing to stay calm on the surface. Medicine is hard work, but satisfying work, and I love medicine, but I do not love the managerialisationism that has dumped this heap of crud on the NHS. NHS workers are lions led by donkeys.

Drugs ABC: Ecstasy, Tickly Cough, Ketamine

Just been looking at theHome Office drugs classification.

Class A: Ecstasy, LSD, heroin, cocaine, crack, magic mushrooms, amphetamines (if prepared for injection). 7 years if caught in possession.

Class B: Amphetamines, Cannabis, Methylphenidate (Ritalin), Pholcodine.
Up to 5 years.

Class C: Tranquilisers, some painkillers, Gamma hydroxybutyrate (GHB), Ketamine. 2 years.

Well, well, well.

I shall have to warn patients with severe non productive cough that the Pholcodine cough medicine I prescribe should not be sold to anyone, otherwise they could get up to 14 years for dealing.

I have seen ugly, violent confusional behaviour from someone on Ketamine, (an also quite a few people on alcohol) but this in the estimation of Government is less of a threat to the fabric of society than the loved-up behaviour of someone on Ecstasy.

It is well known that journalists and politicians are fond of alcohol. Maybe they have taken a liking to Ketamine also. It would explain their thinking. Nothing else does.

I'm at a loss for words. Have to leave it to Shakespeare:
Lord, what fools these Home Office policy makers be!

Post Officers walking slowly over a cliff, followed by dumb reporters

The Communication Workers' Union is planning a strike on December 19th (nice timing) in Liverpool, Coventry, Stockport, Oldham, Oxford, Crewe and Bolton. The cause of the dispute is not clear from the CWU site, but we have to assume that the newly ordered 4mph postal delivery "walk speed" is in there somewhere. Any skuleboy kno that 4mph is a comfortable walk speed on the flat, but that is in steady conditions, not when stopping to shove paper through spring loaded finger traps with canine teeth snip-snapping on the other side. Why Royal Mail does not supply its workers with a Scotter is beyond me. More to the point is why the CWU and the media does not point out clearly that posties are not going for a steady stroll, but are stopping and posting, and also ringing bells and waiting for people to pull their trousers up to get to the door to sign for things, so to average 4 mph they need to run all the way. Taking this zero-mph time into account means that the 4mph speed it completely unrealistic, dreamed up by a committee of managerialzationists who said "2.4 mph? I can do 4 mph no problem". Or maybe it is the Pegasus computer software that is behind it, and the committee just rubber stamped the Pegasus decision because the members have not yet progressed beyond a Sinclair ZX.

It is normal for the media to ignore these blindingly obvious facts, because the role of the media in any strike is to churn out stories of how Jo Public has been inconvenienced by the strike, but for the CWU to fail to make this argument is beyond comprehension.

Cameron Speech HSE falsehood shock

re: That Conservative Party Conference 2008 Keynote Speech.


Ah Cameron, come in. Pull up a chair. Won't keep you a minute, young chap, you've had a busy day.

Nice speech, Cameron.

Nice but boring. I'd blame the policy wonks if I were you - they don't let you express yourself, do they? I suppose they red-crayoned all the jokes.

They let you down a bit on the Health and Safety bit, though.

That bit about the teachers? You remember? Can't put a plaster on a child's knee?

It isn't true.

It is a myth.

An untruth, Cameron. A little porkie pie. A falsehood. A wee fairy tale, a nasty little rumour put about by some tabloid hack no doubt.

Here it is. A poster. From the HSE site.


[Click in the box above to see poster. Sorry, you just can't get the programmers nowadays, can you?]

And here is the text from the HSE site.

We’ve often heard of teachers, volunteers and carers being told to ask parents for permission, or even requiring parents to drive over and put the plaster on themselves. This persistent myth causes a lot of unnecessary hassle and worry.

There is no rule that says a responsible adult can’t put a plaster on a child's minor cut. Some children do have an allergy to normal plasters. If you know a child is allergic you can use the Hypo-allergenic type of plaster. The important thing is to clean and cover the cut to stop it getting infected.

So. There we have it, in black and white. Sensible advice with which the medical profession will happily concur.

I hope you are going to get up in Assembly and say sorry to the school for slurring the good name of the Health and Safety Executive who generally do a good job. Except that they totally failed to do their duty at the Newbury By Pass Resistance actions.

As for the crack against "human rights", David. I am a bit disappointed. I just want you to bring me 1000 words this time next week on "Why it is not good practice for aspiring Head Prefects to produce sound bites denigrating Human Rights".

So, Cameron. Only 3/10 for the speech.

I know you can and will do better.


That's all. You may go now.

A tale of three Presidents

The story so far:

1 South Ossetia and Abkhazia are examples of the 100+ regions in the world where the people seek autonomy or independence from the state that they have been assigned to.
2 President Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia has made an immense mistake by trying to take control of South Ossetia by force. It is alleged that his troops killed civilians.
2 Russian President Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev has driven President Saakashvili out of South Ossetia, and may have plans concerning his future as President of Georgia.
3 Although he was democratically elected, President Saakashvili is such an idiot that regime change might not seem such a bad idea (though that depends on who replaces him)
4 President George W.Bush is offering humanitarian aid in the shape of military aircraft. Great.

to be continued...

Arms spending - Britain's shame

The list below shows the amount that each country spent on weapons in 2005 US dollars and the share of world arms expenditures.

1. United States, $528.7 billion, 46 per cent
2. Britain, $59.2 billion, 5 per cent
3. France, $53.1 billion, 5 per cent
4. China, $49.5 billion, 4 per cent
5. Japan, $43.7 billion, 4 per cent
6. Germany, $37.0 billion, 3 per cent
7. Russia, $34.7 billion, 3 per cent
8. Italy, $29.9 billion, 3 per cent
9. Saudi Arabia, $29.0 billion, 3 per cent
10. India, $23.9 billion, 2 per cent

This amounts to 78% of total world's spending. The total figure is about $1.7 trillion.

We can save the world from global warming, or we can have militarism. We cannot have both.

Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq | UK News | The Observer

Blair knew US had no post-war plan for Iraq | UK News | The Observer

Calm waters over Trident

Feels like I've spent all day researching solar stills.

Take home fact: an 18' by 27' solar still in a tropical area should produce about 360 litres of drinking water a day. Not a lot you may say, but that is 131,000 litres a year, all from one greenhouse.

If one still costs, say, £1000, the UK could build 35,000 stills a week in Africa. If we stopped spending it all on paying for Trident to sail aimlessly around in the deep Atlantic, waiting to kill 50 million people with its payload, that would produce 229,250 million litres of clean water a year.

The lunatics have most definitely taken over the asylum. Yet I sit here calmly typing, and you sit there calmly reading. Ho Hum.

UK Government PV Infanticide Shock

Correspondence with Government

I would like to log my protest at the reduction in the subsidy for PV.

I have put down a deposit for a 3 KW system, but the recent decision to cap at £2,500 has totally thrown the planning in disarray. There is a clear contradiction between Governments words about climate change and their action.

Dr Lawson

I am sure you are well aware that since the launch of the Low Carbon Buildings Programme (LCBP) Phase 1 in April 2006, there has been significant demand, in particular for the household funding stream. From a £36m pot of funding, we have now set aside over half of this (£18.7m) to household projects. To date, we have committed over 50% of the total committed (£6.7m) to PV alone, with the PV industry and householders having benefited considerably. Taking into account previous schemes, we have injected a further £35m of Government funding into the PV industry since 2002. We believe this to be a considerable amount of Government money.

As the LCBP was designed to demonstrate a range of low carbon technologies on a range of low carbon buildings, what we are trying to achieve by introducing a £2.5k cap is a simple a fair way of allocating funds to installations across all technologies. By introducing a maximum grant level for each household, we can use the limited funds available to support an increased number of microgeneration installations which is a fundamental aim of a demonstration programme such as this.

With regard to the fact you have already put down a deposit on your PV system, we strongly advise any applicants to only obtain quotes from installers and not pay deposits prior to receiving a formal LCBP grant offer. For any applicant, we cannot guarantee that a grant offer will be made, and it is high risk to pay a deposit on a PV system without having received the go-ahead for the grant from the programme.

I am sorry that you feel that the changes we are making to the programme will sway your decision over whether to proceed with your installation, but I hope you understand that we have limited funds, and want to ensure a more even distribution of funding across all technologies.

Regards,

Robert

Dear Robert

Thank you for your informative email.

£6.7 million is approximately equivalent to 1 day's spending on the Trident WMD system.

An increase in PV funding, rather than a savage decrease, would help the PV industry achieve the economies of scale necessary to get it to be equivalent to average grid prices. I have already pointed out the enormous historic and ongoing subsidies - orders of magnitude greater than the 6.7 million you quote - which have gone to nuclear power.

The PV subsidy stimulates high tech job production and also helps us achieve energy independence.

While this cut is happening, the Energy White Paper is proclaiming the Government's commitment to renewable energy.

I have to express a sense of intense frustration bordering on despair.

Richard

Richard

I take on board your point relating to PV vs Nuclear and the funding for each. However, I do not believe you are comparing like for like.

The PV industry is still in its infancy, and one of the things we are trying to achieve with this grant programme is to demonstrate that the technologies, whether it be PV or a.n.other are ready for deployment. It could be questioned that after the past few years of funding PV, we already have a fair idea, but it has been development process. We started with the PV field trials which ended this year. We then launched the PV Major Demonstration Programme, with this ending last year, and we now have the LCBP - all rprogrammes have set out to demonstrate the use of the technologies, with only Phase 2 of the scheme now looking towards deployment, driving down costs in the process.

As time has gone on, we have attempted to move away from simply offering capital grants to householders amongst others, as we do not believe that grants are the best way to support, promote and develop an industry such as this. It can and does skew the market, and makes individuals, in particular householders do as they did recently when we introduced the monthly cap - hold fire with installing microgen in the hope of receiving a grant. By issuing grants, it is also difficult to control where the money goes, and that the right people benefit from the Government subsidy.

By limiting grants to £2.5k per household, it will enable us to support more projects with the limited household funds we have. In the short time since re-launch, we have already seen a much more even spread across the technologies, and we will be analysing this going forward. All are aware that this form of grant will cease once the pot runs dry, and it is now a question of when that will be, given that we have recently introduced these new measures. One thing we do want to achieve whether there is a grant programme or not, is people committed to microgeneration, but the Government also has to show their commitment, so we have other measures on the way, including EEC3, stamp duty reductions, and much more besides. I can provide more details, if you want them. The key thing is that we (industry & Government) look beyond the grant programme and onto other measures that help incentivise people like you and me to consider both energy efficiency measures and microgeneration technologies as viable options for reducing our carbon footprint in the most economically viable way. However, this is a lengthy process, and I believe with microgeneration we are only at the beginning of this journey.

I'm happy to discuss this in more detail if you wish. Alternatively, my suggestion to you would be to write to your local MP, who could then raise the issue with the Secretary of State or Energy Ministers.

Many thanks for taking such a keen interest in microgeneration.

Robert

Robert

Thank you for your reply.

"Not comparing like to like". Our minds are able to make comparisons and discern differences, and any two objects in the universe can be compared and contrasted. Nuclear power and PV are alike in that they both produce electricity. The are unlike each other in that nuclear power can produce the material for nuclear weapons and PV cannot. It is no doubt this property that enables nuclear power to receive such huge subsidies from Government. Greenpeace calculate that the Nuclear industry received £11.5 billion from Government in the period 1990-1995 alone. This is 300 times greater than the figure you quoted as subsidy for renewables.

I bought a poorly insulated house in September, and have taken a lot of time, trouble and expense in insulating it to a high standard in order to be ready to apply PV. I have installed a high efficiency wood burner, and have just fitted thermal solar - I fitted my previous house with this in 1990 - and was planning to fit PV, in the knowledge that a financial payback is pretty uncertain, unless the cost of grid electricity really takes off, but as a conscious choice to spend the money anyway because of the carbon payback, and in order to play my part in stimulating the growth of a benign means of producing electricity. I knew that PV would become more cheap in the future, as technologies improved and mass marketing came into play, but I was prepared to make a donation of my hard earned capital savings (I am a retired GP) to help provide a low carbon future for us all.

I now have to review and revise my plans. It is pretty unlikely that I will decide to go ahead. Thousands of potential customers in the UK will be in the same quandary. The UK PV market has taken a body blow. You say the PV industry is in its infancy. This is true, and the Government has just placed the infant on its front, against the best advice, thus putting it at risk of cot death.

I was a Green district councillor in the 1990s when Mrs Thatcher slashed the subsidies for home insulation. I still have the figures (somewhere) showing the precipitous fall in installation of insulation. To this day, 10% of homes in our benighted and backward country have no insulation at all.

The UK market for PV is bound to fall back as a result of this decision. Maybe Sharp will have to close its Wrexham PV factory, with loss of more manufacturing jobs, and loss of expertise. Then, down the line, as things become more serious (think a great flood of London together with a core meltdown at a nuclear plant due to terrorist attack) the Government will panic-react to the situation by trying to install more domestic PV panels, and will discover that we will have to import them at inflated prices because the rest of the world wants them at the same time.

In short, the UK PV industry is being killed off by Government just as it killed off the UK wave power industry with falsified figured for the Salter duck. Just as we have the best wind resource in Europe, but are importing Danish and German turbines.

I fully understand that the demand for PV panels is taking money from other technologies. The rational and reasonable response to that situation would have been to increase the overall allocation, not to cut the allocation at a time when renewable energy is beginning to move.

I will take up your suggestion about sending a representation to my MP, not because I have a positive rational expectation that anything that ordinary people say has any impact whatsoever on this or any UK Government, but because if we stop protesting, things will become even worse than they already are.

The feeling in this email is not directed at you personally, but at the deeply flawed system of which you have the misfortune to be a part.

Best wishes
Richard Lawson
Joint International Coordinator
Green Party, England and Wales