Some thoughts on electric cars. “The Leaf in Winter”

Some thoughts on electric cars. “The Leaf in Winter”
by the Rev. Philip Foster

1. Ratio of power to weight for the electric ‘fuel’ compared to petrol is about 1:10. ie the battery weight and volume is ten times that of a tank of fuel for the same mileage.

Wikileaks: better late than never

Wikileaks’ domain name may be shut down, but you can still access it at this  address: http://213.251.145.96/

NOW…that’s what I call an idea

Bioluminescent trees.

David Davis

Bet you 50p you’ll see this at David Thompson soon, on Friday Ephemera….

Some very sad news

David Davis

Here, from the USA. H/t Samizdata.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe: “From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution”

Video shot and edited and uploaded by Sean Gabb

PFS 09 Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “From the Malthusian Trap to the Industrial Revolution” from Sean Gabb on Vimeo.

Dustbin ‘o’ Doom.

Fred Bloggs.

In responce to Peter Davis’s weaponised dustbin, i  will post my own WMD ( Weaponized Massive Dustbin).

 

Now just wait till i get hold of that hoover…

Real bread

David Davis

I don’t normally go out of my way to support people who gas on about what we here satirically and ironically call ___“people who really understand their” ___ bread/beans/grain/beef/meat/whatever they are gassing on about in the weekend colour supplements (it just means they are astonishingly expensive and proud of it – a good position to be in) but this just drifted in, and it’s kind of local.

But I shall watch this one as it is up the road, and I’m the Director of Northern Affairs…so I guess there’d better be a few. Some people like bread – I don’t go for it in particular, but (as we also say here) if this was Stalingrad, I would eat it (the bread, I mean, er, not Stalingrad.)

There was an Iragqi woman in the DT Saturday supplement last weekend – she was proferring a _water tap_, at £5,635. We say that  she really understands her taps.

Rewarding Failure

How the internet will be regulated and throttled, at an ISP near you, and soon.

http://www.littlemanwhatnow.com/2009/01/payments-for-failure.html

Mexico coming undone at the seams: why ALL drugs should be legalised absolutely everywhere.

David Davis

We stand aghast, at the possibility of “military intervention by the USA” against – of all places – Mexico. We know that, since “drugs” are grown in Latin America, and since Mexico is in the way of their transfer to “Film Stars” and wannabes in British North America, where these things are officially illegal to have or trade, that therefore mexico will be on the road of transfer.

This is all very well and ought not to matter. Cars and lorries carrying cocaine and other stuff whose names I can’t remember ought to be able to cross Mexico as though it was anywhere. The problem arises because – and only because -  it is locally illegal to have, sell or use these substances, in the points of destination.

This has several effects:-

(1) It makes the substances themselves more desirable in the eyes of certain people. They will want it more because “The State” says they shouldn’t have any at all at all at all, for their own good at all at all at all .   Nsty useless Hollywood delinquents film stars will leak details of their use of it, and because they are pretty and shaggable (and that’s just the men) you will want to do it too, as you are sheeple because the liberals Stalinists have told you to become so.

(2) It makes it risky and unprofitable and demoralising, for legitimate businesses to supply the stuff. If you wozz an off-licence, would YOU want to supply cocaine to any willing buyer, if you got raided every week by the rozzers for doing it, and had your shop smashed up by them (rozzers) and were put in jug?

(3) It makes the risks of supplying it worthwhile, for shysters and hoods, who don’t mind having to shoulder the boring business of killing people including police and soldiers, in the course of securing their hold on the distribution of of their stuff, to you. The £5-a-day habit, if the stuff was legally sold through chemists even including the impost of State Taxation, becomes the £100-a-day habit if you have to buy it through hoods who have to insure themselves – at your cost -  for their own risk against both the State and against other hoods who want to compete, for what is really a rather small niche sector.

(4) it makes jobs for Police rozzers. Rozzers are inherently tormented people, who ought not to have got like that; they need psychiatric help, and quickly.  Just as you ought not to want to be a criminal, also you ought not to want to be a policeman in the 21st century: what does that desire say about you, and your morals, and world-view, as a person?

So the way forward is quite clear. ALL drugs have to be legalised, in all jurisdictions, preferably by yesterday. This will have a number of good effects:-

(1A) The “Police”, currently a pantomime collection of gamma-minus droids unfortunately increasingly supplied with real guns as opposed to things that shoot out a flag which says “bang”, and who are “employed” by their “states”  not in chasing real muggers, robbers, burglars and killers but in harrassing “drug dealers”, “motorists”, “paedophiles”, “racists”, “terrorists”, “non-payers of council tax”, “TV-license-evaders” and “climate-change-deniers”, will find that their workload is decreased alarmingly. We will “need” fewer of them. Good.

The main solution to civilisation’s ills is

fewer Laws,

and more and better people.

There may even be “calls for” “FEWER POLICE ON THE STREETS”. I think that in a civilised society, the police ought to be invisible: see poll below.

(2A) The use of “drugs”, which is to say substances currently classified as drugs”, by all people, will fall dramatically. or it may not: I do not know. But I think it will fall.

(3A) The legalisation of “drugs” will mean that Galxo-Smith-Klein, Schering-Plough, Ciba-Geigy, and all the others, will be abot to compete legally for whatever market they think they can get. Adverttisisng will be allowed. Advertising is the best way to garotte bad stuff fast. The purity and quality of products will thus rise, and the price will fall to the point where the “State” will come in.

(4A) The “State” will take a take. Where GSK wants to sell you your Ecstasy for 50p a go, via the chemist down the road in Shaky-street (PR8  . . . ) , the State will take £4 or so, making it about the price of 20 fags. What’s the point of going and doing crime, if it’s only that much? You can get it from your dosh you that get “on the sick”.

OK so the “State” wins, win-win in the short run. But it’s got to justify how it needs to spend so much less on policing, since there’s so much much less less petty crime going on down.

That in itself will be tremendous fun to watch.

Sean Gabb in German

Sean Gabb

Many thanks to Robert Groezinger for this most able translation:

http://ef-magazin.de/2009/01/11/883-neujahrsausblick-der-westen-kommt-glimpflich-davon

 

Neujahrsausblick: Der Westen kommt glimpflich davon

von Sean Gabb

Wenn ein Abgleiten in den Totalitarismus verhindert werden kann

Es besteht wenig Zweifel daran, dass überall dort, wo Politiker Einfluss haben, 2009 ein schlechtes Jahr sein wird. In England wird möglicherweise vor dem Sommer eine Wahl stattfinden. Wenn dies geschieht, und wenn die Stimmen ordnungsgemäß gezählt werden oder wenn die Polizei beschließt, nicht alle Oppositionsführer festzunehmen, werden Gordon Brown und seine Labour Partei aus dem Amt geschmissen. Im vergangenen Jahrzehnt hat er dazu beigetragen, dieses Land von einem von den Konservativen errichteten Polizeistaat im Anfangsstadium in einen wahrhaften Polizeistaat zu verwandeln, der nur aufgrund des Spotts gemäßigt wird, den wir auf seine Pläneschmiede noch häufen dürfen. Es wäre schön, diese Leute ihrer Ämter verlustig zu sehen – insbesondere, weil sie unmöglich wiedergewählt werden würden, und ein Amt das einzige ist, was sie im Leben jemals wollten. Aber es gibt keinen Grund für die Annahme, dass die Konservativen viel tun werden, um unser endgültiges Abgleiten in den Totalitarismus zu verhindern. Sie haben zu viele eigene niederträchtige Neigungen, um den riesigen Kontrollapparat zu zerschlagen, der von Labour nahezu perfektioniert worden ist. Selbst wenn dem nicht so wäre, sind sie entweder zu dumm oder zu faul um zu wissen, wie man ihn zerschlägt. …[More]

 

GAS: RUSSIA. North Sea. Britain should just turn it off. Do not masturbate in front of Russia while talking about gas.

David Davis

I hear a nasty rumour that “the EU” will take “our” gas. This is because the EUmonsters masturbated with Russia the USSR on screen, and have come unstuck. Do not masturbate with Russia the USSR on your screen. Bad things will come to you. Russia the USSR is not exactly anybody’s friend at present, until we have done régime change there, and it has become liberalised and Putin is out of office.

Press ENTER to liberalise Russia the USSR. This may take some minutes, and you will need a paypal account.

In the meantime, go to http://www.libertarian.co.uk and give us some money. In the long run (very long I fear) this will help us to liberalise Russia the USSR. Then, the gas won’t be turned off by them, just because they think we don’t like them – or because they think we might just slightly like Israel.

Burning women? NO! … Smoke your own foods? YES!

David Davis

Thought you might all like this. In case it ever goes off, I’ve put on the whole thing. Libertarians ought to be concerned about the creeping State campaign to abolish food that tastes of anything whatsoever. Also, as bought food becomes scarcer owning to clampdowns on lilberal capitalism and free sale of goods without rationing, people will need to know how to grow, farm, gather or otherwise get their own food, and then how to make it taste nice and also LAST LONGER (there is likely to be less electricity to run fridges, even those which survive the coming endarkenment and are still working:-

Smoked foods: how to make your own

It may be illegal to light up a cigarette in a pub, but home-smoked foods are a trend that’s being ignited.

By Rose Prince
Last Updated: 4:38PM GMT 06 Jan 2009

Home smoking: Rose Prince with a plate of trout and prawns Photo: Andrew Crowley

My father used to smoke Player’s Perfectos. They were short, plump and fantastically strong. I knew this last bit first hand, having stolen a handful when inadmissibly young, and tried them out in a hollow box hedge in the garden. He stopped keeping his cigarettes in a box after that.

I didn’t really resent the smoking – as far as I knew he had been born with a cigarette in his hand – except in the car. Our family car had no back seat belts and, in addition to the wind up windows, little sail-shaped vents that opened outwards; especially convenient for smokers to flick their ash, but ineffective ventilators. On long car journeys, we four children bounced around on the back seat, gradually kippered.

I miss cigarettes in pubs, or at least those people who like a cigarette with a drink. Most days the tumbleweed blows through our local, even though it sells quite decent food. In September this year, the British Beer and Pub Association reported that between January and June, there were 36 pubs closing each week, five per day. It is impossible to predict, with fuel and beer prices so high, what proportion of the blame falls upon the government’s decision to ban smoking in pubs. But why did the pubs kill themselves by never installing proper ventilation? Most just stank.

The only smoke to be sniffed now in restaurants is a whiff of it wafting off a slice of smoked salmon. Occasionally, however, something more interesting is going on with chefs “home-smoking” their own fish, pork and duck. The latest trend is to hot-smoke food over burning tea. ‘Lapsang smoked’ is the thing, turning up in a number of restaurants as a long-lost Chinese method. Salad of tea smoked venison with parsnip and quince was an inviting item on a recent Claridge’s menu.

It does not work, of course. Most recipes for tea smoking insist you combine the tea leaves with rice and sugar and the food tastes like it was stuffed up the chimney of a waste incinerator. I tried smoking over the leaves alone, only to get a less confused, mildly smoky tang. It all became rather expensive, too. For any real effect you need lots.

Using wood chips might not be innovative, but their vaporising resins genuinely transform something relatively humble, like trout or pheasant, into an elegant delicacy. Buy a cheap stove-top smoker (see below), or sacrifice an old roasting pan and metal rack to the tar, using foil for a lid. It is all very easy. A whole fish can take as little as fifteen minutes and a duck breast about 30-40 minutes.

But which foods work and which do not? With raw prawns, I found only the shells tasted smoky. Far better were foods like whole fish and breast fillets from game and poultry, all of which benefit from gentle cooking, after which they taste delicately of the oils in the smoke and are unusually juicy. Slices of aubergine also taste good, if dressed after smoking with olive oil, ricotta cheese and a few toasted sourdough breadcrumbs.

Remember that the hot smoking method ‘cooks’ the food – you will not end up with transparent slices of fish, as with cold smoked salmon. And, once you start smoking your own food, it is a good idea to keep a record of your successes and their related weights and timings, variety of wood chips and any additional herbs or spices.

If there is anything left to say about this easy cooking method, it is the bleeding obvious: remember to open the window.

• rose.prince@telegraph.co.uk

• www.roseprince.co.uk

SHOPPING BASKET

You can build your own stove-top smoker by placing wood chips in the bottom of a roasting pan, a sheet of foil on top, a wire rack on top of that – for the food – and finally a lid made from foil. I found it better, in the end, to buy a purpose built type.

Stovetop Smoker with Lid costs £43.99 from Nisbets, which can home deliver (0845 1405555; www.nisbets.com This spacious, simple gadget is made from stainless steel that holds the smoke inside without allowing it to escape. It made a good job of my brown trout (see recipe) and duck breasts. As it’s made of steel it warps slightly when hot, which makes the sliding lid a bit sticky, but it is otherwise practical and cleanable. Put the wood chips in the bottom of the pan, lay over a specially designed tray followed by a rack. Oil the rack, put the food on top and then the lid. Place over a medium heat – timings for cooking are provided. Four varieties of wood chip are available: alder, cherry, hickory and white oak – £5.49.

The delicate flavour of brown trout, cooked over alder smoke, turns out to be quite extraordinarily gentle and subtle. Waitrose is the place to go for brown trout from an organic British farm.

Franklins (01767 627644 for prices; www.franklins.co.uk sells duck breasts, quail, game birds and chicken. John Franklin rears, kills and dresses poultry on his Bedfordshire farm. Visit the farm shop or ask for home delivery.

Tungsten light bulbs: buy them now…..

…while you can.

David Davis

Chris Taylor, of Shakespeare Street Southport, tel 01704 544047, still has them, for a bit.

….and Knirirr has something to say about sockets and fittings, and the EU or at least how the EU is projected to people by shops….. (the second one may get you diect to the paragraph.)

HOW TO DISPOSE OF CFL/modern/low energy light bulbs:-

(NOTE: I had in fact typed a carefully-worked out series of instrictions, for how to inconvenience bureaucrats in the course of their “business”, for this slot. But the blog would probably get shut down if I published it.

So, what you should do instead, is (a) smash the bulb, and (b) put the remains in your wheely-bin.)

After Gaza, something to cheer us up on a cold morning…..and a worrying update on war….

…and Malcolm Rifkind is surprisingly sensble, here. Although I don’t agree that “palestinians” are a people – they are a post-modern construct,  invented for socialist imperialist reasons, to combat Western-liberal-pluralist democracies in places where lefties don’t want them, such as Israel and Lebanon. Jordan will be next perhaps.

And this seems to be what people think here. I guess I’m in a minority of two then (read Guido, who has got >421 comments putting him in very hot water…I’m not supporting the Israelis because Guido does – but because I think they are doing the right thing.)

UPDATE:- An “immediate ceasefire”, so as to give the useless western “peace-bureaucrats” such as Gordon Brown abd Tony Blair (where is he, by the way?) something expensive and travel-fun to do, and which is to say, an “Armistice”, will not solve the problem. Hamas, and all its friends, whether they be in Westminster, on the BBC, in Brussels or Moscow or Washington, will still want Israel “wiped off the map” – eventually – so it’s no use for us all to pretend that “a resumption of the peace process” will solve the major strategic problem for either side – one that just wants to exist, and the other that wants it not to. Just wait and see.

In a war, there are two exit strategies. They are victory and defeat. Libertarians shun war, and rightly. If there were no Big-States, the probability and destructiveness of all wars would be lessened. I cannot tell how much, but it’d be a lot. Libertarians tend to invoke the principle of consent, which of course arises from discussion and negotiation – but wars happen when one side is asked to give up something which is non-negotiable, such as life. (I wanted that in red but wordpress won’t let me…)

David Davis

Some pictures of processor chips here. I didn’t know that the AMD latest quad-core has about 758 million transistors in it…..

…..but I hope Israel decides not to get off the pot this time, until the sad but needful job is done. What ungrateful sods Hamas must be, to whine when the power is turned off (apparently having been supplied by the enemy it’s trying to eraze. What absolute socialist ***** Hamas must be in their hearts – if they have any.) The link provides you wilthe normal daily dose of “Western” “Liberal” handwringing “opinion” and instructions to Israel to lie down and die. *****.

Snooker and skill: this is so clever, and thanks to Steven!

David Davis

Just incredible skill: which I’d leanred how to be as good as that while I had the chance at school:-

Musingsonliberty: another interesting new blog spotted.

David Davis

Might be interesting. Here it is.

ShootinPutin187 plays with gas-tap and naked (de)lights, makes wargaming threats….

David Davis

Apparently he’s turned off the gas to the Ukraine…..again….because he can’t shag its PM I expect. I should have known. He’s done it before, here.

Of course, one could argue that it’s “his” gas: well, not in terms of strict property-title perhaps, since it belongs to GazProm until it’s been paid for by someone. There is a grain – but only a grain – of truth in the supposition that he can set light to the entire stock of Siberia’s gas if he wishes: it’s none of Ukraine’s, or “Europe’s” business if he does, so long as they’ve not yet paid for the burnt stuff.

But I can’t help thinking that we should take less seriously on the “world stage” such a man, and that we should move towards showing him up in front of “his” people…why?  For the self-publicising little gun-toting clown that he is. The people of the USSR Russia deserve better than ShootinPutin187, on the way to not having to host any of the f*****g buggers at all, when the poor wretched downtrodden sods are finally libertarianised.  He has similar forebears, here, and the political-development-parallels between the two buggers are uncomfortably congruent.

And to annoy ShootinPutin187 even more, you can send money to PizzaIDF.org, on the link. Hat tip Guido Fawkes.

State databases and intrusion: 100% it’s the database that matters and not whichever gestapo is in charge of it.

David Davis

For once, the Quislingraph has got something (a bit) right.

The strategic problem about State bureaucrats is that they must make reasons for their existence, or they are redundant. Stalin understood this unstated but fundamental axiom perfectly: the logical conclusion of the existence of any given bureaucrat is to be able to “plan” and to “decide” whether you live or die. All other stuff he decides about and “plans” is just practising along the way to ultimate and absolute power. In the end, you live if you are a useful “resource” for the “plan”; you die if the “planner” has no practical use for you at all: what is the point of your life logically, for him? You are a mere cog, a slave.

Therefore, to continue to attain higher planes of existence, a bureaucrat simply must, must, has to, attain higher and higher levels omniscience about “his” population of masses.

Like the dog who sucks and licks his own penis “because he can” – I believe it’s called a “blow job”, though why so, I can’t fathom, nor the supposed attraction of it – bureaucrats have been “empowered” in this century more than ever before. And this was by the very technology that was in the beginning going to help individuals to circumvent the bastards and their wickedness entirely. I recall a lecture in the very early 80s by someone called Bernard Adamcziewski (I think? Please help?) at the Adam Smith Club in the IEA, (NOT the ASI !! ) on this very subject: it made us all so optimistic about the future.

Bureaucrats – many for sure – now probably want all this data because it is going to be so easy in theory to gather: in addition, there will be many, many “private sector firms” (I didn’t know there was any other kind?) whose directors and staff know nothing and care even less about issues of liberty, who will of coure )of course they will!) fall oevr themselves to help out. They think work is just a meal ticket, and not something that ought to have moral dimensions.

The Devil in the end tries to corrupt everything we touch. Although the Internet, for example, was initially created for military and government purposes as we know, out of evil came good and free protocols for ordinary sovereign individuals to be able to distribute and share data on a scale and speed unheard of in all the history of the world. Now of course, “Andy” “Burnham” wants it regulated and censored – but he’s not the first nor the last, although a more threatening one than the usual temporal crowd, for he’s a bloody clever bugger and his words are so honeyed, and will be bought by people like “million moms against guns” or whatever.

It does not matter whether the data is “secure”, or can only be “accessed” on the say-so of a “Minister”. If stuff “gets out”, this is the least of our worries. A leak will contain so very, very much stuff, such as on a “lost computer” or a “momory stickj (they are very big now as we all know, a gigabyte is almost free, 8 of them is about £1 apiece) that it will take even the putrescently-minded moles of the “News of the World” decades if not centuries to trawl through it.

No: the risk is that the database “project” may, possibly work – to time and to budget, well, more or less. What’s a few billion Sterling overspend between (state) friends? It’s just one delayed aircraft-carrier, or about three diversity-co-ordinator advertisements in the Guardian for a single “Police” “Force”. It’s irrelevant whether it works by 2012, by 2020, or by 2030. People are people. What they do, where they go, who they phone, who they email, and what about, is nobody’s damn business except their own.

And I’m not at all suggesting that it ought to be stopped by methods that could work – such as death-threats to directors of “private sector partners” – who ought to be old enough to know better than to tender anyway since the task itself is morally reprehensible – or even by well-planned and co-ordinated assaults on known data sites, designed to effectively destroy the data beyond recovery.

I should remind people that there are precedents for the punishment of some of the above actions. At Nuremberg in 1946, directors of firms that had tendered for and supplied things like “gas ovens”, incinerators and Zyklon-B, were either imprisoned or hanged. It’s all in “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by W. Shirer, as you all no doubt know.

Either way, you’d better not do any of that threatening of tenderers, you people, as libertarians are peaceable chaps who get stuff accomplished by persuasion and liberal discourse. Apart rom anything, we might want the compugeek-buggers to work for us after victory, unravelling government computer chaos set up by themselves, and finding out what the State knew about whom and how, so that such intrusion could be stymied in the future.

But I have to admit: the only time I malleted a hard disk, ever – it exploded satisfyingly. I would never want to do it again, though, since I now know so much more about the intricacies and wonderfulness of its workings.

Sometimes there is hope.

David Davis

Get a load of these pictures!

Hat tip Samizdata.

Very important

David Davis

Nuclear fusion possibly around the corner…a hundred years or so?

It’s soon enough but nowish would be better, to silence all the global-warm-Nazis… so they HAVE TO resort to their guns after all, and their open hatred of Mankind…..before they are really really ready and truly in charge.