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February 2013

In which I am laughing like a drain

Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save,

Eh?

The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils.

Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.

But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.

British peatland stores at least 3.2?billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.

Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change.

Which leads us to the concept of carbon payback time. Sure, there\’s going to be emissions in making the towers and the concrete to plant them in and the soil ripped up to drive roads through. And this is just inevitable: using either steel or aluminium in the towers themselves means carbon emissions. Yes, even if you use electric power in the smelters. For you have to use carbon for the chemical reaction in both cases, not just power. And so on for ripping up soil etc.

And with these new peat numbers we find that the payback time is longer than the lifetime of the actual windmills. Thus the installation and running of them increases, rather than diminishes, CO2 emissions.

Gurgle, gurgle.

Immigration rules and deportation: Yes, EU rules do trump Westminster

This judge here: he\’s doing absolutely nothing at all other than applying the law correctly.

The country\’s most senior immigration judge has openly defied the Home Secretary by insisting that Parliament’s attempt to get tough on human rights abuses by foreign criminals is outweighed by the European Court.

This is simply true. EU law outweighs UK law. There is no way around this simple fact.

Dominic Raab, the Tory MP who has campaigned for tougher rules, said: “This chronic judicial legislation has undermined public protection and usurped the democratic will of Parliament.

“We now have around 200 Article Eight cases a year, so it is vital and urgent that Parliament amends the law to mandate deportation and brush aside these spurious challenges to the rule of law.”

Raab is simply being an ignorant fool here. The judge is applying the rule of law. Whether it\’s the ECJ (the EU) or the ECHR (Council of Europe) their judgements over ride statutory English law. And the reason they do is because Parliament has decided, in its wisdom, that they do.

End of.

And if you want to be in the EU then you must be in the Council of Europe and thus subject to the ECHR.

Thus there is only one possible solution if you wish to write immigration law in the manner that May or Raab seem to want. You must leave the EU. There just isn\’t any other way to do it.

My personal opinion is that these 200 Article Eight cases a year are a triviality and not worth the effort. Despite my thinking that we should leave the EU (indeed, that the EU should not exist at all) for any number of other reasons.

but leaving aside such opinions about immigration, deportation and so on. What is it about the fuckwits at Westminster that makes them entirely ignore the basics of this situation? You don\’t have the power to impose such laws because you\’ve already signed away the right to make such laws to the EU and ECHR. That\’s what the fucking treaties mean you morons!

More evidence that politics is showbusiness for ugly people

This Lib Dem stuff all does have a ring to it, doesn\’t it?

More allegations of inappropriate conduct were levelled at Lord Rennard, the former party chief executive, including claims that female candidates who wanted access to funding had to put up with harassment.

One woman claimed that she was molested at a party for Nick Clegg’s victory as Lib Dem leader, and there were also claims that MPs knew that women were the targets of harassment.

A former party worker claimed that it was “common knowledge” that Lord Rennard had tried to talk a young activist into bed, which was known in Lib Dem circles as the “Peterborough incident”.

\”If you\’d just like to take your knickers off and sit over on that couch there then we\’ll get on with the casting session dear\” doesn\’t immediately strike me as being all that different from \”so you\’d like to be a candiadate, would you?\”.

One wonders rather what the going tariff was. In the movies it has been said that a well timed blow job could upgrade an extra into a speaking role. Would this be true of, say, moving from the Parish Council elections to the County ones?

One other parallel suggests itself as well: the apocryphal actress who exclaimed \”Who do I have to fuck to get off this movie?\”. As both Mark Oaten and Jeremy Thorpe showed, it\’s not that simple in the Lib Dems. You\’ve got to be found out too.

And of course, there\’s a decent dose of paranoia about it all:

In the febrile atmosphere there were even rumours that the emergence of a number of women alleging misconduct was due to a dirty-tricks campaign launched by Mr Huhne or his friends to disrupt the Lib Dem campaign in Eastleigh.

Purely a personal opinion of course but I wouldn\’t pout it past him.

Arbitrage and speculation

You\’ll never get rid of it you know:

While Speight, seen above, was being processed at police headquarters, he “was found to be in possession of 100 bags of heroin which were concealed in his anus and undetectable at the scene.” Police estimated the heroin’s vale at $1000 in New York City, and $2000 in upstate New York, “where both subjects were traveling to.”

A note to those who would ban speculation in food. Even if you succeed in making it illegal you\’ll still not manage to stop it.

Well, that was rather close, eh?

Of course, it matters only a little that England wins. Far more important that France loses.

Not just about rugby of course, as a general rule for life.

But until the Frogs started changing their team around, sending on the replacements, I thought they were going to win. They certainly looked the better team for the first half.

How strange to see the barmaid profiled in a national newspaper

Laurie Lee\’s daughter, Jessy.

Of course, the profile\’s because she\’s Laurie Lee\’s daughter, not because she was the barmaid at the pub I frequented when I lived in Cheltenham. But still, slightly odd to read it. Despite having written for the papers on and off for a bit now I still rather have this idea that there\’s the real world, of people you know, and that everyone on the TV, in the paper, is off in some other world. One that\’s not real: which is why it\’s always ever so slightly odd to find the two mixing.

Yes, that\’ll work. German Socialist tells Italians what to do

Underlining wariness of Berlusconi outside of Italy, Mr Schulz, who the media tycoon once compared to a Nazi concentration camp guard, on warned Italians not to vote for him.

\”Silvio Berlusconi has already sent Italy into a tailspin with irresponsible behaviour in government and personal escapades,\” Schulz was quoted as saying in German daily Bild.

Schulz is the latest in a line of German politicians to express fears about a possible Berlusconi comeback largely due to worries he will halt Rome\’s reform drive that has helped to lift investor confidence in the eurozone.

They weren\’t all that overjoyed with German socialists telling them what to do last time around really.

Now this is a surprise, isn\’t it?

Circle Holdings became the only private company running an NHS hospital last year when it began a 10 year contract to run Hinchingbrooke Hospital, Cambridgeshire.

But new NHS figures show it is now ranked as one of the highest for patient happiness and has also recorded shorter waiting times.

Circle Holdings, whose operating subsidiary is 49.9pc owned by a staff partnership, has also dramatically cut losses at the hospital by 60 per cent and will soon begin to pay off burgeoning debts racked up from years of mismanagement.

Just astonishing.

According to new figures, patient satisfaction has risen to 85 per cent, placing Hinchingbrooke in the top six of the East of England’s 46 hospitals. It was previously recorded one of the lowest rankings.

When Circle started managing the hospital, it also consistently ranked near the bottom of the 46 trusts for waiting times, with many patients forced to endure more than four hours in A&E.

It now tops the list for short waiting times, seeing 98.2 per cent of patients within the required window, according to the newspaper.

Cancer testing has also increased while millions of pounds has been saved from cutting paperwork.

Really, what can have happened? It\’s almost as though who say that incentives matter are correct. And if that\’s true then where does that leave the NHS, that wonder of the world?

Guess the subject taught by this professor

From Liberal Conspiracy:

The Sussex University sit-in against privatisation is in its third week. Josie Long and Mark Steel have performed on-site. Will Self and the university’s MP Caroline Lucas have been to speak.

Support has come from Billy Bragg and Frankie Boyle, not to mention professors and public figures worldwide. Owen Jones and Laurie Penny come next week. Even Malcolm Tucker has sent his best wishes!

Sussex University proposes mass outsourcing of 10% of the workforce, 235 individuals, and vital services like security, care of student residences and catering. Every day hundreds are part of the occupation. They hear a stream of lectures by supportive academics from Sussex and elsewhere. And they dance. Affected staff send food, letters, and call in, in contrast to the management claim that the 235 oppose those occupying on their behalf.

The occupation is a last resort. It’s a widespread topic of discussion at Sussex that there’s no meaningful consultation. Adult education has been closed down, a high-prestige research unit moved from its specially designed building, and 112 employees made redundant three years ago. In these cases staff feel discussions with them started after the decisions were made, or not at all.

Staff and student unions feel that managers had decided on outsourcing before talking to them. Meetings seem to be so the management can say they’ve had them, but empty of substance. The sit-in is searching for dialogue. They invited the Vice-Chancellor to their hub for talks. There’s no sign of him yet.

There isn’t much evidence of, well, evidence behind the proposals. The management say there’ll be no redundancies. Yet the 235 have been offered severance and retirement. They say pay and conditions will stay the same. But admit that pensions will be much worse. After staff have transferred, new contractors are free to hire on lower wages and holidays or sack employees.

The management say the change is to free up funds for more students. Yet applications to universities are plummeting because of the eye-watering fees being charged.

Sussex is renowned for community. But outsourcing would create a divided university: its own employees, workers transferred to contractors, transient staff provided by private operators like G4S, and students becoming customers rather than citizens of the university. Services would be accountable to external privateers, not the campus society.

It’s the thin end of the wedge. Outsourcing across universities will follow. It will expand to education where only courses that turn a profit will run. This will restrict learning to the rich and rule out what doesn’t make big bucks. Don’t plan on taking a degree that involves thinking critically. Or support the sit-in, which does.

Go on, guess what subject this person teaches.

Go on.

….

…..

……

Yup, you guessed right:

Luke Martell is Professor of Sociology at Sussex University

Can someone technical help me out here?

I\’ve tried cutting a specific graph out of this .pdf and I just cannot work out how to do it at all.

It entirely boggles me that cut and paste works with text and not with an image. Why?

Anyway, does anyone know how, or would anyone do it for me, to get Figure 4, on page 12 of this ,pdf, into a JPEG or whatever that I can then place in a WordPress blog post?

 

UPDATE: This problem has now been solved, see comment 1. Ta!

 

And to those telling me to use the \”Edit\” menu. What edit menu? My version of Adobe doesn\’t seem to have one.

Yes. This.

As I would put it we\’re ruled by fuckers who\’ve never done a day\’s work in their lives.

Not real work. They simply have no idea.

Which is why we\’re ruled so damn badly.

And the Mandarinate. Have you seen the tests you have to pass to get into the EU bureaucracy? As an example, being monolingual is an immediate and total disqualifier. Immediately 80-90% of the population are excluded from that Mandarinate (they do mean fluent in more than one language, not just being able to chat in more than one).

Linguistic ability is placed abouve maths, economics, engineering, absolutely anything else. Which is another reason we\’re ruled so damn ba……

How did we end up being ruled by out and out liars?

Will the tax be borne by ordinary citizens? We have taken every measure to ensure that it isn\’t. This is a tax on the financial sector, and 85% of liable transactions are purely between financial institutions. Day-to-day financial activities of citizens and businesses are outside its scope. Even if the financial sector passed on some costs to clients, the outcome would not be disproportionate. For example, anyone buying, €10,000 in shares should be able to afford a €10 tax on the transaction.

You\’re either lying or ignorant you fuckwit Semeta.

The route to the pockets of the citizenry is via the higher cost of capital for corporates leading to less capital investment. As your own fucking EU briefing paper pointed out.

Will the tax hamper growth in the EU? No. Our economic studies show that it will have no impact on jobs, and could even have a positive impact on growth if revenues are reinvested wisely. The tax rates proposed are very low, to prevent an increased cost of capital affecting the real economy, and the activities of central banks and public debt managers are exempt.

You\’re lying. Your own fucking briefing paper says the opposite. The tax will reduce GDP. Through that higher cost of capital. You ghastly little shit.

A small discourse on the libel laws is called for here. The accusation that someone is lying can indeed be libellous. This does not apply to politicians of course as truth is an absolute defence to libel claims. Which neatly covers \”shit\” and \”fuckwit\” too.

Simon Jenkins is wrong here. Because jury nullification

Yes, yes, large numbers of jurors are fools, just like large sections of the population are (how else to explain the Labour Party?).

And yes, most certainly, it would be more efficient to have it all done by judges and magistrates and never the common people get a look see.

However, at root here, we\’re talking about freedom and liberty. Things which are not entirely amenable to that pure efficiency argument.

And the real, ultimate, power that juries have is the ability to say:

\”Yup, bang to rights, you\’ve proved he did it, guilty as sin of the accusation. However, fuck off matey for that shouldn\’t be a crime. Not Guilty!\”

This is rare, I agree. Perhaps so rare as to be almost unknown.

Yet I know of one case in my own adult lifetime where this did indeed happen. And it led to the wholesale rewriting of the Offical Secrets Act too. For the citizen jury clearly and obviously (although we\’re not really supposed to say so, for the defendant was found not guilty and was thus not guilty as sin) said that yes, the law says that that is a crime and we don\’t think it should be. Fuck off.

And that is the real point of the jury system. It\’s the final bulwark between us, the citizenry, and those who rule us. And that\’s why it should not be abolished. For abolition would leave us entirely naked and defenceless against the political classes.

A fate which the history of certain other countries has shown us is one not to be desired.

I\’m against the death penalty but

This is ludicrous:

As Georgia struggles to find new sources of pentobarbital or alternatives, death penalty abolitionists will be watching closely for any signs that they are turning to compounding pharmacies to make up the drugs for them. In October, South Dakota executed Eric Robert using a batch of pentobarbital that it had obtained from a local pharmacy.

Tests that were done on the batch showed that it was contaminated with fungus, in an echo of the 2012 outbreak of fungal meningitis that was tracked down to a compounding centre in Massachusetts.

I don\’t think that complaining that a corpse might get a fungal infection is really going to work you know.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance. They Are Tossers, Ain\’t They?

My word, shale gas won\’t be a game changer at all. Nope, the people who support renewables tell us so.

Exploitation of the UK’s significant shale gas resources is unlikely to result in low natural gas prices, according to new research by leading energy analysts Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The cost of shale gas extraction in the UK is likely to be significantly higher than in the US, and the rate of exploitation insufficient to offset the decline in conventional gas production, meaning market prices will continue to be set by imported gas.

So that\’s that then, eh? Windmills it is for all.

Except, well:

Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that the cost of shale gas extraction in the UK will be between $7.10 and $12.20/MMBtu, against comparable costs for dry US plays of $4.54 to $4.83/MMBtu. These figures are based on capital expenditure estimates from leading oil and gas engineering companies that suggest that wells in Europe will cost 2-3 times their US counterparts, coupled with ranges in possible flow rates based on comparable US sites. It should be noted that these UK cost estimates exclude the potential additional costs of building local pipelines and processing equipment to get gas to market. In the event that the UK plays are not dry (i.e. they produce liquids that can sell into the oil market), the additional capital cost of infrastructure would be significant.

That last sentence is rather important really. For if they are indeed wet, if they do indeed produce liquids as well, then yes, there will be additional expenses. There will also be additional revenues which they have, amazingly, failed to take into account. And the revenues from a wet play can indeed be substantial.

Our cost range of $7.10 to $12.20/MMBtu is similar to the range of market prices for natural gas seen in the UK during the course of 2012.

SDomething which is interesting, whether true or not. They then go on to tell us that of course this won\’t mean a decline in UK gas costs.

But then so what? All the projections we have, the ones that are being used to plan windmills and the rest, assume that gas prices rise into the future. Prices staying static is actually a win.

Compared with the US, the UK has a higher population density, a stronger environmental movement and tougher local planning rules. In addition, the structure of mineral rights differs from the US, where subsurface rights are generally the property of landowners. In the UK, state approval will be required to exploit each new resource; even if this is expedited by the proposed Office for Unconventional Oil and Gas, landowners will have little incentive to welcome development. The net effect will be a slower development of shale gas in the UK than that seen in the US – a rate that will not eliminate the need to import gas.

And that\’s really very odd indeed. That the gas belongs to the Crown means that, if said Crown so desires, the permitting process can be fasdter than having to negotiate with individual land owners. You\’ve only got to have permissions for the drill pad, not from each and all of the land owners above the reserve.

Can\’t say I\’m greatly impressed with this.

On the public shaming of tax evaders

A hairdresser, a coach operator and a knitwear manufacturer were on a list of nine “deliberate tax defaulters” published by HM Revenue and Customs.

Ministers and tax specialists said the move showed there was “increasingly no place to hide from the taxman”.

OK.

But there were no large corporations on the list and the total amount owed came to less than £1 million.

Excellent. And here it comes, eh?

The move comes after evidence of minimal UK corporation tax payments by multinationals such as Starbucks and Amazon has catapulted tax to the top of the political agenda.

Margaret Hodge, who chairs the Commons public accounts committee, said the publication of the list was an “amazing” step forward by the taxman.

“Publicly naming and shaming does act as a deterrent, as we demonstrated over the Starbucks and Amazon hearing,” she said.

“But I hope they’re not just focusing on individuals and small businesses. Whilst they should pay all tax due, I think the general public does not want to see big global corporations getting away with it.”

Margaret, Lady Hodge, is either ignorant here or lying for political advantage. For absolutely no one at all is claiming, no not even Ritchie, that those corporations are evading tax in a manner that breaks the law of the land. The two things are not the same. Flouting the law of the land is one thing, obeying it another.

You cow.

On those Lib Dem sexual harrassment allegations

A couple of things come to mind here:

Several Lib Dem women told Channel Four News on Thursday that while he was chief executive, Lord Rennard had touched them inappropriately or propositioned them.

The first being how nice to find a Lib Dem attempting something as innocent as simple heterosexual adultery. Beats the glass table and the rent boy hands down.

The second is this confusion about sex inside political parties. Given that everyone is in training to fuck the country why one earth would we be surprised that they attempt to fuck each other?

The latest attempted bombing campaign

In a first for the UK, bombmaker Naseer, a pharmacy graduate, planned to extract ammonium nitrate – used as a main explosive – from sports injury cold packs.


The mind boggles
, it really does.

Sounds about as sensible a plan as extracting the americium from fire alarms to create a dirty bomb. With the added excitement that they would almost certainly blow themselves up trying to do the processing.

The stories we hear about these would be jihadis do show that they\’re wholly unimaginative. There\’s so many dangerous things already extant in an industrial society that could be used instead of 1960s style IRA derv and ammonium nitrate.