Running scared? - by Richard... Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Running scared? - by Richard... Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Two men were sentenced to four years in jail for inciting disorder through Facebook, even though no one answered their online calls to riot. Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, both from Cheshire, were handed the longest sentences so far after last week’s riots, despite both being of previous good character.

Blackshaw created an event on the site entitled "Smash Down Northwich Town", while Sutcliffe-Keenan encouraged a riot on the same site. No one apart from the police, who were monitoring the page, turned up at the pre-arranged meeting point outside a McDonalds restaurant. Blackshaw was promptly arrested.

Predictably and, I think rightly, The Guardian is airing concerns about "disproportionate sentencing", something which might reach the ears of Mr Nick Clegg ... who seems to have had a little history himself.

The details are here, with the relevant extract here:

First, though, I want to know if this readiness to please means he'll confess to the unvarnished truth about an episode he once passed off as 'a drunken prank'. My understanding is that it was much more than that.

It was arson, actually. He could have gone to jail, ending his chances of a political career before it had even begun. The property he destroyed, deliberately, was priceless. Can we talk about the cactus?

"Oh, the cactus", he says, placing his head in his hands for a moment, then rubbing his face. "I just behaved very, very badly. I was on an exchange in Germany and I drank far, far, far too much. I was a teenager. I lost it, really".

Lost it? He does seem genuinely agitated. "What I mean is I was drunk..." Yes, he said that. What on? "They had this beer brewed in monasteries near Munich. Kloster Andechs. Unbelievably strong. Which clearly I couldn't take".

Clegg was 16 years old, a public schoolboy abroad. So what happened? "Yeah... I, erm, I was at a party and I drifted into a greenhouse with a friend, saw it was full of cacti and lit a match to find our way, as there were no lights on. The flame accidentally touched one of the cacti, which glowed rather beautifully".

Was it an accident, then? He looks at me. Only at first, it seems. "We did that to a fair number of the cacti. Not really knowing what we'd done".

I can't help but laugh, at the story and the look on his face, but he objects. He treated this like a joke when, cleverly, he made it public at a fringe meeting in 2007, before the leadership election. He doesn't think it's so funny now. "No, it's not... I mean, genuinely. It was the leading collection of cacti in Germany".

The greenhouse belonged to a professor of botany whose life's work had been to gather and nurture exotic specimens from all over the world. 'He'd been to the jungles of Brazil and stuff to find these cacti.'

The boys weren't arrested, because they ran away. "We didn't know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we'd drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, 'We know you did this'. I came clean".

The boys were taken off to see the professor, who was livid, but he was somehow persuaded not to press charges. "Instead they created a kind of community punishment for us. Me and the other bloke ended up having to dig communal flower beds in the baking sun.

Then I spent the summer with my mum, going round one specialised garden centre after another, trying to replace some of the cacti. Of course they were tiny, and his were all large".

On the Facebook issue, one does rather get a hint of the smell of fear from The Man, but given Clegg's record - to say nothing of the Bullington boys - one might think that he should display a little "empathy" with the current round of offenders.

But, when it comes to hypocrisy, there is nothing to beat a gobshite Lib-Dim. "Sheer criminality," the "hilariously indiscreet" Mr Clegg intones, as he sees the rioters carted off to jail, for him then to return home in his £300,000 armoured limousine, paid-for by the ever-willing taxpayer.

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The price of wind - by Richard...

David Shukman, the BBC's environmental correspondent is getting excited about the completion of the Ormonde subsidy farm - thirty 5MW bird choppers planted off the coast near Barrow-in-Furness, rated at 150MW installed capacity.

What is remarkable about this project is the massive cost. Built at an estimated £500m, that is equivalent to roughly £3.3 billion per GW of installed capacity. Furthermore, while the developers - the Swedish power company Vattenfall – are claiming an optimistic load factor of 38 percent, with the annual production of 500 GWh, that still works out at less than half the average load factor of a nuclear installation, giving a net equivalent cost of £7.4 billion per GW.

If one were to deliver the entire renewables quota of 20 percent by this means – roughly 20GW delivered – the cost by 2020 would be in the order of £150 billion, not counting the infrastructure cost and the provision of spooling back-up – bringing the overall total close to £180 billion.

By comparison, the capital cost of nuclear plant to deliver the same net capacity would equate to about £3 billion (at its most pessimistic), something like a third of the total cost of offshore wind provision, or one sixth if relative life spans are taking into account – sixty years as against the 30 for a wind turbine.

Wind, of course, does not have an ongoing fuel cost, but a working surmise is that the massively expensive maintenance and component renewal over life will be roughly equivalent to the running cost of a nuclear plant, which explains the continued need for a massive subsidy for wind-generated electricity.

With the ROC currently standing at £39.99 per KWh – and a double ROC paid for offshore generation – the annual subsidy for this development will be in the order of £40 million, if they meet their 38 percent load factor. That means that this Swedish company will be extracting from the pockets of British electricity consumers.

One gets so used to large sums of money that a "mere" £40 million a year seems chicken-feed. To put it in perspective, the cost of running a medium-sized hospital trust is about £300 million a year and in the current environment of "cuts", one of the largest trusts, Oxfordshire, is having to slash itsstaff budget by £100 million over four years. During that time, this one wind farm will soak up £160 million in subsidies - £1.2 billion over its full life of 30 years.

Strangely enough, while the BBC is keen enough to supply data on building costs, it provides no details on the subsides extracted and certainly makes no comparisons with health funding.

It would take little imagination, though, to anticipate the outrage if people realised that their hard-pressed health trusts were having to shed staff and turn away patients, while offshore subsidy farms, Europe-wide are soaking up the equivalent of £800 million a year, and as much again to come, with the plants under construction.

This obscenity has to stop – but then so many things should stop. Our masters are no more responsive to this than they are to anything else, but it should be made very clear to the general population that, as long as NHS funding is being cut back and wind subsidies increased, the price of wind is death.

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A fundamental truth - by Richard... Tuesday, August 16, 2011

"Anyone who has so much as glanced at British policing policy over the last two decades would be hard pressed to argue which party on the streets of London, the thugs or the cops, is more irredeemably stupid", writes Mark Steyn.

There is not a person with a brain who would disagree with that, yet the politicians are planning to give the plods still more powers. Are our politicians themselves really so stupid that they cannot understand that the police are part of the problem and that, given new powers, they will abuse them in exactly the same way they abuse their current powers?