The incontrovertible truth is that Iraq would have been a better place without Blair

July 6, 2016

There will be reams written about Chilcot but my view of Tony Blair does not change very much. If anything, I am more than ever convinced of Blair’s poodle-like fawning in Bush’s presence and his glorified image of himself.

“Flawed intelligence” and “actions in good faith” are Tony Blair’s defence. Certainly Blair’s character was (and still is) seriously flawed. That he has native cunning and intelligence is apparent but it is seriously skewed. Greed and self-glorification would seem to be his primary goals. “Good faith” is defined as being based on “sincere beliefs or motives without any malice or the desire to defraud others” and that certainly does not apply. He had malice aplenty and he wanted to impress Bush. His own country and his own soldiers and all of Iraq’s population were just collateral damage along the way to satisfying his enormous ego.

Would Iraq have been better off today with Saddam still around? That is impossible to answer. In fact, that is the wrong question. But it is incontrovertible that Iraq would have been better off without Tony Blair or George Bush.

Just as the real question today is whether the Ukraine or the Middle East would not have been better off without the sanctimonious interference of the EU, Obama and Kerry?

 

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Australia has the slowest election results in the world

July 6, 2016

Now 5 days after the Australian election the only clarity is that Labour will not be able to form a government and the Liberal coalition (with some independent support) may be able to just cobble together a majority.

It isn’t that electrons move slower in the Southern Hemisphere.  The Australian Electoral Commission just does not use electrons. It isn’t that Australians are sluggish in winter. It isn’t that they still use pigeon post in the bush (for pigeons are a lot faster than the AEC). Or that they still use dak runners. It isn’t that with the compulsory voting used in Australia, that the AEC first identifies all the “criminals” who haven’t voted before beginning the count. It isn’t – as vicious rumour would have it – that the unions insist that all vote counters must be permitted a tea-break for every 100 votes counted. It isn’t that every count has to be done in triplicate. It isn’t that the Australian Parliament does not have a Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, but that is a body driven entirely by its fears and is not particularly courageous.

Or that the AEC is  grossly understaffed and has only 3 vote counters who are qualified.

Temporary Australian Electoral Commission workers

But whatever it is, results from a general election in Australia are the slowest in the world. All the seats in Parliament may not be settled for another 2 weeks. The Senate results may not be known till August. The Philippines, Bangladesh, India and even Rwanda are faster.

ABC News: “The fact the country has ground to a halt, as a result of a labour-intensive process that consumes nearly 75,000 people, to arrive at a result that could potentially be delivered in minutes electronically is intensely frustrating,” Dr David Glance, head of University of Western Australia Centre for Software Practice (UWACSP), said.

It is not that there are no suggestions as to how the medieval system used by the AEC could be improved (it is difficult to imagine any action which could make it worse). There are many countries which still use paper ballots but they all include some form of electronic enhancement of the counting process.

Veri.vote:

Distrust of full electronic voting has seen the nation persist with pencil-and-paper methods primary schools and community halls, though the issue has been considered after every federal election since 2001. In the 2000 US presidential election, punched card machines failed spectacularly after 170,000 votes were rejected as unreadable in parts of Florida. The voting debacle in that state was considered pivotal to the ­victory of George Bush over Democrat candidate Al Gore.

The veri.vote team say electoral commissions around Australia might now look more favourably on their technology, given the ­agonising delay of several days — or weeks in the case of the Senate — before winners are known.

Rumours are also emerging the Australian Electoral Commission faces irregularities on top of counting a remaining 3 million votes, including 1.5 million postal votes.

Veri.vote co-founder Cam ­Sinclair says such problems raise memories of the catastrophic WA Senate election, which was re-run in 2014 after 1370 ballot papers went missing. He says he was a scrutineer watching as 200 volunteers spent three weeks counting a second round of votes, in an antiquated system dating to the late 1800s.

“It’s such a cumbersome process of manual counting and handling large bits of paper,” he says. “That experience solidified my belief that there’s a better way.”

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters held 20 hearings and reviewed more than 200 submissions before deciding ­Australia should stick to its largely paper-based system.

“Millions of Australians are now holding their breath to hear their nation’s fate, but the results literally move at the speed of paper,” says Mr Newnham. “With our system, you could get a result and a sausage sizzle on the same day.”

 

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Hillary Clinton being “extremely careless” passes the test for criminal “gross negligence”

July 6, 2016

This is the Director of the FBI about a Secretary of State

“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”

By any standard of exercise of professional competence this is tantamount to a description of gross negligence.

The Legal Dictionary: Gross negligence is a conscious and voluntary disregard of the need to use reasonable care, which is likely to cause foreseeable grave injury or harm to persons, property, or both. It is conduct that is extreme when compared with ordinary Negligence, which is a mere failure to exercise reasonable care. Ordinary negligence and gross negligence differ in degree of inattention, while both differ from willful and wanton conduct, which is conduct that is reasonably considered to cause injury. 

Clinton Free Pass

That Hillary Clinton gets away with gross negligence can only confirm for those of the anti-establishment persuasion that the system is rigged and plays right into Donald Trump’s narrative. In this case receiving no formal censure can actually be worse for Hillary Clinton than being formally charged with some relatively trivial misdemeanour.

As always with a case amounting to gross negligence – in any field – it is a matter of incompetence.

Andrew Mccarthy writes in the National Review:

There is no way of getting around this:

According to Director James Comey (disclosure: a former colleague and longtime friend of mine), Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18): With lawful access to highly classified information she acted with gross negligence in removing and causing it to be removed it from its proper place of custody, and she transmitted it and caused it to be transmitted to others not authorized to have it, in patent violation of her trust. Director Comey even conceded that former Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” and strongly suggested that her recklessness very likely led to communications (her own and those she corresponded with) being intercepted by foreign intelligence services. Yet, Director Comey recommended against prosecution of the law violations he clearly found on the ground that there was no intent to harm the United States.

In essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute, inserting an intent element that Congress did not require. The added intent element, moreover, makes no sense: The point of having a statute that criminalizes gross negligence is to underscore that government officials have a special obligation to safeguard national defense secrets; when they fail to carry out that obligation due to gross negligence, they are guilty of serious wrongdoing. The lack of intent to harm our country is irrelevant. People never intend the bad things that happen due to gross negligence.

There are two take-aways here:

  1. Hillary Clinton has been given a “free pass” by the establishment for a clear case of a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code (Title 18), and
  2. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton displayed incompetence.

 

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Wimbledon trivia – but elegant

July 4, 2016

Mathematics trivia – but I do like the elegant solution.

At Wimbledon the men’s and women’s tournaments each start with 128 players. The question somebody asked yesterday was how many matches would be played in each tournament. Of course the winner would play 7 matches in 7 rounds (27 = 128).

The long-winded solution to the total number of matches = 64+32+16+8+4+2+1 = 127

But the elegant solution is, of course, that with 128 players and one winner there are only 127 losers and therefore 127 matches are necessary and sufficient for them to lose.

Clearly with 2n participants there must be  2n-1 matches.

And more generally, formulated as a matter of logic,

“In any knockout tournament, the number of matches is one per loser and therefore one less than the number of contestants”

 

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Bangladeshi militants are trying to “prove” themselves to ISIS

July 4, 2016

Sunni Muslim fanatics from Bangladesh come very low within the racial hierarchy that is inherent within ISIS. They are considered inferior fighters and in Iraq and Syria they are never given any command responsibilities. “They are usually housed in groups in small barracks and are paid less than the Arab fighters and are provided inferior equipment”  but they provide convenient “cannon fodder” (suicide missions), The racial hierarchy within ISIS (all Sunni) seems to be:

  1. Arabs from the “home countries” (S. Arabia, Syria, Iraq, Gulf states)
  2. North African “Maghrebian” Arabs ( Morocco, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt)
  3. “Light skinned” Muslims from central Asia (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan….)
  4. South Asian Muslims (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia..)
  5. African (dark-skinned) Muslims (Somalia, Nigeria …)

The Bangladesh government insists that the spate of Islamic atrocities and the hacking to death of foreigners, intellectuals, hindus, christians and secularists are not being “directed” by ISIS. Some think this is denial on the part of the government, but I think the government is probably correct. ISIS may be vaguely aware of the activities of these maniacs and gives them some encouragement but probably does not “direct” them. ISIS is not that concerned or interested in Bangladeshi affairs. In fact the “disinterest” shown by ISIS in the Bangladeshis is probably a key part of their motivation to get some attention from ISIS.

france24: Eighteen of the 20 civilians who were killed in the Holey Artisan Bakery were foreigners. Nearly all were hacked to death with machetes, even though the hostage-takers had plenty of firearms. The attack was even more shocking as it came on the final weekend of Ramadan, with survivors describing how the hostage-takers made clear their targets were non-Muslims, separating locals from the foreigners.

Around 90 percent of Bangladesh’s 160 million people are Muslims but the state is officially secular. “By hacking people to death… they wanted to show the world that they can go to any extent for jihad,” said K G Suresh, a senior fellow at New Delhi’s Vivekananda International Foundation think-tank. “Once they attack a restaurant popular with foreigners on a Friday night their message is clear who they want to go after. By sparing Muslims, they wanted to send out the message that they are only against Westerners.”

According to the monitoring group SITE, the Islamic State organisation claimed responsibility for the attack which it said had targeted “citizens of crusader states”. But Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s secular government has long insisted neither IS nor Al-Qaeda have gained a foothold in Bangladesh despite both groups claiming many previous attacks.

I suspect that Bangladeshi Muslim fanatics are going for increasingly “spectacular” atrocities, where their “success” is measured by how much attention they manage to get from ISIS. Ultimately their atrocities are driven by their own perception of racial inferiority to their Arab role-models.

 

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Juncker’s days seem numbered as Merkel cracks the whip

July 3, 2016

About a week ago I wondered why Jean-Claude Juncker hadn’t resigned after the Brexit vote.  He is not unaware that much of the “leave” motivation is linked to the behaviour of Brussels bureaucrats and that his name is high on that list.

I wrote then:

The President of the European Commission – a former PM of Luxembourg – is the living face of the privileged, protected, arrogant, unaccountable bureaucracy that is Brussels. The EC – more than anybody – else is the reason for the deep and widespread dissatisfaction in Europe with the way in which the EU operates and where it is headed.

It is time for Jean-Claude Juncker to resign. And that means that the leaders of the core countries need to tell him to go.

The politicians are now realising that Juncker is part of the problem. It would seem that Jean-Claude is not Angela Merkel’s favourite person at the moment. Juncker particularly riled the Germans, the French and the Spanish when he invited Nicola Sturgeon to came calling and then went on German TV to talk about independence for Scotland and N Ireland. The French and Spanish will not thank him for encouraging talk of Catalonia and the Basque country. Moreover it seems Merkel wants to keep the Brexit negotiations at the political level and to keep the Brussels bureaucrats away from the key decisions. If the reports in the Sunday Times, Express and Telegraph, among others, are correct, Juncker will be gone within 12 months.

The Telegraph: Angela Merkel could move to oust Europe’s federalist chief Jean-Claude Juncker ‘within the next year’, a Germany government minister has said, in a sign of deepening European divisions over how to respond to Britain’s Brexit vote.

The German chancellor’s frustration with the European Commission chief came as Europe split over whether to use the Brexit negotiations as a trigger to deepen European integration or take a more pragmatic approach to Britain as it heads for the exit door.

“The pressure on him [Juncker] to resign will only become greater and Chancellor Merkel will eventually have to deal with this next year,” an unnamed German minister told The Sunday Times, adding that Berlin had been furious with Mr Juncker “gloating” over the UK referendum result.

Mr Juncker’s constant and unabashed calls for “more Europe”, as well as his reported drinking problem has led to several of Europe other dissenting members – including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – to lay some of the blame for Brexit at his door.

Since the June 23 vote both the Czech and Polish foreign ministers have called publicly for Mr Juncker to resign – moves that one senior EU official dismissed last week as “predictable”. However, the rumblings from Berlin now represent a much more serious threat to Mr Juncker’s tenure. …….

“Everyone is determined that this negotiation is handled in the European Council – i.e. between the 27 heads of government – and not by the Commission, the eurocrats and the EU ‘theologians’ in Brussels,” a senior UK source told The Telegraph.

In a signal that battle has partly already been won, Mrs Merkel pointedly met with French and Italian leaders in Berlin last week, excluding Mr Juncker from the conversation.

Sunday Express: The fuming German chancellor is planning to wield the axe on the bungling bureaucrat, who is facing calls from across the continent to resign. Senior ministers in Berlin have been dismayed by Mr Juncker’s confrontational approach to Britain over the last fortnight and now believe he is “part of the problem”. 

…… In particular there is fury and bewilderment in Berlin at his decision to welcome Nicola Sturgeon to Brussels and then talk openly on German television encouraging Scottish and Northern Irish independence. ………… 

Support for the beleaguered Brussels chief appears to be ebbing away fast in Germany with the influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper urging him to resign in a recent editorial. It wrote: “Juncker once again shows in a fatal way how little he sees himself to be a president of the Commission that represents the whole of the EU.”

That UK newspapers are contemptuous of Juncker is not all that surprising. But even the Letzebuerg Privat from his home country is pretty damning today:

There are three good reasons for a political resignation: a glaring failure in office, a scandal or a dramatic loss of acceptance. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker meets all three conditions for his overdue resignation. 

Disastrous Juncker

The EU needs deep reform in many areas. But most of all it needs to puncture the bloated egos of its many arrogant, privileged and protected bureaucrats.

And Jean-Claude Juncker’s name leads all the rest.

 

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Corbyn on a string – or two

July 2, 2016

I wish I could draw.

My crude attempt to show what the once admirable Labour party has become after it has been hijacked by the loony left who have no other home to doss down in.

Jeremy Corbyn was put in there by the rabble and they are still pulling all his strings.

Squatter’s rights I suppose.

corbyn on a string or two

 

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Philippines president’s policies go into effect as police shoot 6 suspected pushers dead

July 2, 2016

Within 24 hours of President Duterte being  sworn in, six suspected drug pushers were shot and killed by policemen in separate operations in Bulacan province. This was Duterte yesterday:

Following a measured speech after taking his oath before a small audience inside the presidential palace, the outspoken leader paid an evening visit to a Manila slum and unleashed profanity-laden threats against drug traffickers in front of a crowd of about 500 people

“These sons of whores are destroying our children. I warn you, don’t go into that, even if you’re a policeman, because I will really kill you,” the head of state told the audience. “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”

Location in the Philippines

And now the police react:

One of the fatalities was identified as Lauro Reyes who was out on bail due to drug charges. Police said they were conducting a search warrant at his house in Barangay Iba-Ibayo in Hagonoy town when Reyes’ companion identified as Lamberto Morales fired at the police. Police said Reyes and Morales were also linked with robbery cases in Bulacan.

In San Ildefonso town, Oliver dela Cruz was killed in a buy-bust operation in Barangay Pala-pala at 1 a.m. Friday.

In Norzagaray town, police were serving a search warrant when a suspected drug pusher identified as Keith Gibson fired at the police at around 1:45 a.m.

In the City of Malolos, an armed suspected drug pusher was killed when he fired at the policemen in a buy-bust operation along the Diversion Road in Barangay Mojon at 1:45 a.m.

In Guiguinto town, Mayor Ambrocio Cruz said a suspected drug pusher fired at the police in a buy-bust operation, prompting the policemen to shoot and kill him.

The police now have a carte blanche against suspected drug pushers. It is not difficult to see where this might lead.

Bulacan is a province in the Philippines, located in the Central Luzon Region and part of the Metro Luzon Urban Beltway Super Region. Bulacan was established on August 15, 1578. In the 2015 census, Bulacan had a population of 3,292,071 people, the 2nd most populous in the Philippines. Bulacan’s most populated city is San Jose del Monte.

Rodrigo Duterte image AP

Rodrigo Duterte image AP

 

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UN evades responsibility for at least 9,000 cholera deaths (supported by Obama)

June 30, 2016

Haiti-cholera-UN1

The UN introduced cholera to Haiti which caused the deaths of at least 9,000 (officially 9,000, unofficially about 30,000 and with a possibility of being up to 100,000 deaths). The UN culpability and incompetence is clear. The outbreak could have been prevented “if the UN had spent just $2,000 for advance health checks and preventive antibiotics for their troops from Nepal who carried the disease. The cost of the UN incompetence in addition to the 9,000 lives lost is now estimated to be over $2 billion”. But the UN denies responsibility. In March this year came reports that “the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has been chastised by five of the UN’s own human rights experts who accuse him of undermining the world body’s credibility and reputation by denying responsibility for the devastating outbreak of cholera in Haiti. In a withering letter to the UN chief, the five special rapporteurs say that his refusal to allow cholera victims any effective remedy for their suffering has stripped thousands of Haitians of their fundamental right to justice”.

The US has been supporting Ban Ki-moon both in his denial of responsibility and in his claim of immunity for all UN actions. “Naturally anybody on UN duty is immune from any prosecution – even for blatant incompetence or gross negligence”.

Now The Guardian reports that a bipartisan group of 158 members of Congress have criticised Obama for his stance:

A bipartisan group of 158 members of Congress has accused the Obama administration of a failure of leadership over the cholera scandal in Haiti in which at least 30,000 people have died as a result of an epidemic caused by the United Nations for which the world body refuses to accept responsibility.

A joint letter highly critical of US policy – and devastatingly critical of the UN – has been sent to the US secretary of state, John Kerry, signed by 12 Republican and 146 Democratic members of Congress. Led by John Conyers, a Democratic congressman from Michigan, and Mia Love, a Republican congresswoman from Utah, the letter’s signatories include many of the most senior voices on foreign affairs on Capitol Hill.

The missive takes the Obama administration to task for failing to admonish the UN for its refusal to accept responsibility for the cholera outbreak. “We are deeply concerned that the State Department’s failure to take more leadership in the diplomatic realm might be perceived by our constituents and the world as a limited commitment to an accountable and credible UN,” the letter says.

It continues: “We respectfully urge the Department of State to treat the issue of a just and accountable UN response to Haiti’s cholera with the urgency that 10,000-100,000 deaths and catastrophic damage to the UN’s credibility deserves.”

….. As part of the UN’s dogged denial of culpability, the organization has made a blanket rejection of calls for compensation contained in a class action lawsuit filed in New York by victims of the disaster. The world body is claiming immunity from damages in the case. The US government chose to represent the UN’s defense in the litigation in front of the federal second circuit appeals court. That prompted the three-member panel of judges to question US lawyers over the Obama administration’s apparent unwillingness to use its diplomatic muscle to force the UN to shift its contentious position. …..

With cholera still raging in parts of Haiti, and aid groups on the ground reporting ongoing suffering amid inadequate provision of medical help and sanitation, the Congress members called on the state department to “immediately and unreservedly exercise its leadership … Each day that passes without an appropriate UN response is a tragedy for Haitian cholera victims, and a stain on the UN’s reputation.”

Of course the US claims the same kind of immunity for its troops on active missions abroad (and the US has even tried to claim that kind of immunity for those accused of rape on Okinawa but had to give way eventually). So perhaps the Obama government’s defence of Ban Ki-moon is just a self-serving but unprincipled exercise to protect their own position regarding the responsibility of their troops when abroad.

But it is a shameful position.

 

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New exploration technique finds massive Helium reserve in Tanzania

June 28, 2016

The dwindling availability of helium and because it is so scarce in the earth’s atmosphere has led to conceptual plans – if not yet projects – for the extraction of Helium from the lunar topsoil.

Helium(4He) is the second most abundant element in the known Universe (after hydrogen) but only makes up 5.2 parts per million (ppm) of the Earth’s atmosphere. Helium-3 (3He) is an isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron. It is not radioactive and very rare on Earth (7 parts per trillion) but exists in recoverable concentrations in the lunar topsoil (in the top 2 -3 m of lunar regolith). It is even more abundant on the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

But a new exploration technique has been used to find old helium, trapped in ancient rocks underground, which after being released by volcanic activity, moves into shallower gas fields closer to the surface. Earth scientists from Oxford and Durham universities working together with Norwegian helium exploration company Helium One have found a vast reserve of Helium underground at the Rukwa Basin in the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley.

Helium One has applied for and secured 20 Prospecting Licences with a further two applications submitted. All licences are held 100% by the Company, have exclusive rights for helium and can be renewed for up to 9 years.

Within the portfolio are 3 distinct project areas, these are referred to as Rukwa, Eyasi and Balangida. All contain known helium occurrences with concentrations ranging between 2.5% – 10.5% helium and demonstrate the ideal geological conditions for large gas accumulations to be present.

Rukwa Basin – map Helium One

Helium One estimates a “Prospective Recoverable Helium Resource (P50) of 54.2 billion standard cubic feet. This resource occurs in 27 leads, defined by 2D seismic and is supported by data from two legacy exploration wells.”

ScienceAlert writes:

The find – estimated to be nearly seven times the total amount of helium consumed globally every year – will help allay concerns over Earth’s dwindling known supplies of the natural resource, which is crucial for things like MRI scanners, nuclear energy, and detecting industrial leaks.

…. Earth scientists from Oxford and Durham universities worked together with Norwegian helium exploration company Helium One in the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley. …. “We show that volcanoes in the Rift play an important role in the formation of viable helium reserves,” said researcher Diveena Danabalan from Durham University. “Volcanic activity likely provides the heat necessary to release the helium accumulated in ancient crustal rocks.”

But while the volcanoes help to free the trapped helium, depending on their proximity to the gas reserves, they can also end up wasting the precious element. …

…. “[I]ndependent experts have calculated a probable resource of 54 Billion Cubic Feet (BCf) (1.5 billion cubic metres) in just one part of the Rift Valley,” said Oxford University’s Chris Ballentine. “This is enough to fill over 1.2 million medical MRI scanners.”

“To put this discovery into perspective,” he added, “global consumption of helium is about 8 BCf per year (226 million cubic metres) and the United States Federal Helium Reserve, which is the world’s largest supplier, has a current reserve of just 24.2 BCf (685 million cubic metres). Total known reserves in the USA are around 153 BCf (4.3 billion cubic metres).”

But despite the massive potential of the new gas field, even more exciting is that the way we found it. Before now, helium had always been discovered accidentally, but with what the scientists now understand about volcanoes and helium geochemistry, researchers can now go looking for the gas, meaning Rift Valley could soon be followed by other massive hauls.

The team’s research is being presented this week at the Goldschmidt 2016 geochemistry conference in Yokohama, Japan.

 

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