A rat is smelt - by Richard... Friday, September 24, 2010

A rat is smelt - by Richard... Friday, September 24, 2010

On the face of it, we should be delighted with the news here that a bonfire of quangos is being planned.

However, while we may be looking a gift horse in the mouth, to commit the cardinal sin of mixing metaphors, I smell a rat. Having spent more of my life energy than I would care to admit researching the theory of deregulation (so much so that I never got round to publishing), my crucial finding was that every cyclical bout of deregulation presaged a further spate of regulation.

The dynamics are so locked together that there is good evidence to suggest that each leap forward in state control actually requires a period of deregulation, that being used as the scapegoat for all government failings and thus the justification for more and greater controls.

Thus, the way the progression works is that you have a spell of regulation (with the creation enforcement and administration bodies) and then a reaction, which leads to a partial deregulation. This, however, simply acts as a step towards a new bout of regulation, giving the march towards authoritarianism a jagged, "staircase" profile.

Just abolishing quangos, therefore, is of little avail – unless you address the reasons why these bodies were created in the first place. Otherwise, all that happens is that the bodies transform themselves into different structures, but do not actually disappear (either that, or they go into hiding for a few years).

And what is not visible is any attempt to address those reasons – the root cause of excessive regulation and officialdom, which probably means that this highly publicised initiative is just window dressing.

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The scam spreads - by Richard... Thursday, September 23, 2010

Via the blogs, we learn that feed-in tariffs are a total rip-off. But how can that message possibly prevail when the BBC's "take" is that buying in to the scam offers "a great return on investment!" And, needless to say, the Beeb is also talking up the news that the world's biggest offshore wind farm off the Kent coast has been officially opened.

As always, the BBC sprays out figures, but no information. We get told that there are 100 turbines in the £780m wind farm, and that these "are expected to generate enough electricity to power 240,000 homes" – perhaps the most dishonest way going of describing the capacity of these machines.

In fact, getting proper statistics from the media is a losing battle, but Vattenfall, the project owner, has it on its website that there are 100 Vestas V90 wind turbines, with a total capacity of 300 MW. This is sufficient, it says, to supply more than 200,000 homes per year with clean energy.

By the time you take in the load factors (about 26 percent), however, and apply the rather understated government-inspired domestic consumption factor, you actually get 131,000 homes – but even then the figure is fiction. On cold, windless days, the number is zero. On a breezy summer night, when the power isn't needed anyway and the National Grid is having to pay suppliers not to produce electricity, it could be a lot more. Such are the games they play.

But there are no games when it comes to the subsidies. On top of the £40 million in electricity sales, Vattenfall will collect at least £60 million a year in Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) top-sliced from our electricity bills so that we do not notice the theft. And theft it is, an undisclosed tax paid to these rip-off merchants for producing unsustainable electricity.

Over term for the 20 years these turbines are suppose to last, we are looking at a public subsidy of £1.2 billion – enough to build a 1GW nuclear power station – a plant with a deliverable capacity more than 13 times this wind array. That is the extent of the rip-off to which we are being subjected.

And for that, it appears, we get 21 full-time green jobs. But if we gave them a million each and told them to get lost, that is not even a rounding error on the amount we are dealing with. We would get to "save" (i.e., not spend) £1.2 billion, less £0.021 billion. Instead, we pay - effectively - nearly £60m per job for the 20 years. These must be the most expensive jobs on the planet - we could even have 20 David Camerons for the price of each worker.

As with my previous thread, I ask why we tolerate this. That much, of course, is rhetoric. We tolerate it because, individually, we are powerless against the might of the state. But that will not always be the case. We need to make it so before the state ruins us.

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It's not them, it's us - by Richard...

The headline almost speaks for itself ... Ban Ki Moon, that thieving little autocrat heading one of the biggest kleptocracies in the history of man – barring the previous one – wants governments to pledge £25.5bn to eradicate world poverty.

It is not a coincidence that, below this one, we have a piece which records that, since 2003, we've spent £30 bn in "aid" to Afghanistan. And have we eradicated poverty, even in that benighted country? Or is it a fact that the country is poorer than it ever has been, that the rich are richer, that the violence is at an historic high and there are thousands of overpaid tranzies feeding at the tit of international money?

But you would expect a thieving tranzie such us Ban Ki Moon to be holding out his hands for more money ... that is what he does for a living. But it does not excuse the likes of Nick Clegg – an ocean-going moron if ever there was one – from supporting these thieves.

Back home, though, we support these people – defer to them – elect them ever ... "we" being the generic, of course. I'd sooner cut off my leg and feed it to the cat than vote for any of these ... (insert suitable description here). In fact, after a visit from the bailiff yesterday, I may well have to anyway.

Why do we allow these morons to get away with it? What is with the collective stupidity of the "civilised" world that we allow these brain-dead fantasists to run our government, to waste our money and to spread misery, discord and discontent around the world, all in the name of convincing us that they really are as stupid as they look?

It is us, collectively, who allow this to happen. We need our brains examined.

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The heart rejoices - by Richard...

... to see this report in Der Speigel. But what took it so long? I recall writing a whole series of postsin 2008 addressing such issues, and in one of the series, I quoted the award-winning journalist Fariba Nawa and her 2006 report on the reconstruction programme in Afghanistan. In it, she wrote:

Afghans are losing their faith in the development experts whose job is to reconstruct and rebuild their country. While the quality of life for most is modestly improved, they were promised much more. What the people see is a handful of foreign companies setting priorities for reconstruction that make the companies wealthy, yet are sometimes absurdly contrary to what is necessary.

Then, last year, we had the famous Ferris wheel which gave eloquent testimony to the bankruptcy of the programme.

Nearly $40 billion (€30 billion) in development aid has flowed into Afghanistan since the start of the war. It goes into an industry which is also concerned with securing its own posts and functions, with the hard-to-criticize justification that it is doing good.

Yet there is no one with any understanding of the situation in Afghanistan who will tell you that the NGOs are anything other than pure poison, along with most of the government aid programmes. They are doing more harm than good - incalculable harm - and will continue to do so for as long as we support them.

"Aid organizations are businesses dressed up like Mother Teresa," writes the Dutch journalist Linda Polman in her no-holds-barred exposé "The Crisis Caravan: What's Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?" And this is not new information – as we ourselves show. But still it goes on, and on and on.

That is the curse of modern society (and perhaps even of society in general). Long after you know something is a crock of sh*t, it still goes on because there seems to be no way of stopping it. But why are we so surprised that Afghanistan is going belly up? We would be mad to expect any other outcome ... stark, staring, raving mad.

There you have it - a kind of incurable madness grips us all. We allow this insanity in our name. We listen to the politicians justify it, and do not slaughter them, even despite the fact that their ignorance and sloth will cause the slaughter of many, all with our money.

The international community is digging a multibillion-dollar grave for itself - and us. This is decadence of a higher form, and we should be ashamed.

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