MichaelMcGuire
MichaelMcGuire's JournalUnfounded Fears: German Wolves Prefer Wildlife to Livestock
(Nice Dug)
Despite the fears of rural residents, the wolves that have migrated into Germany in the last decade only rarely kill livestock, a new study has found. Instead, nearly all of of the predator's diet consists of wild animals, mainly deer and wild boar, say researchers who inspected more than 3,000 droppings.
For over 150 years, there were no wolves in Germany. They had been hunted to extinction and banished to the pages of fairy tale books, where they remained a firm part of the country's forest folklore, making children shudder in the night.
In 2000, the beasts returned. A pair of wolves was spotted in the eastern state of Saxony after migrating from neighbouring Poland, and as the population slowly grew and spread westward, old fears resurfaced. Many a sheep farmer would have preferred to chase them back over the border.
But researchers have reported findings that should at least allay fears that wolves feed on livestock. Scientists at the Senckenberg Society for Natural Research have completed a comprehensive study of the eating habits of wolves in the Lausitz region of Saxony, based on an analysis of their droppings over a number of years, and have concluded that livestock accounts for less than one percent of their diet.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,821013,00.html
Setback for nuclear test veterans as UK Supreme Court dismisses damages bid
Veterans who claim to have endured illnesses after being exposed to radiation from the UK’s Christmas Island test explosions in the 50s have lost the latest round of their fight for damages.
The UK Supreme Court today ruled that over one thousand ex-servicemen who claim that radiation from nuclear tests carried out in the Pacific from 1952 to 1958 led to illnesses including cancer, leukaemia and infertility, could not seek damages from the MoD.
The 1,000+ claimants involving over 70 Scottish families - including some who visited the Scottish Parliament at the end of last year to hear a debate on the issue - have been fighting their case for over two years.
However today the Supreme Court ruled by 4 to 3 in favour of the MoD which means that a majority of the cases cannot proceed due, say judges, to a lack of evidence proving links between the illnesses and the tests. The judges also explained that some of the claims had been made too late.
http://www.newsnetscotland.com/index.php/scottish-news/4551-setback-for-nuclear-test-veterans-as-uk-supreme-court-dismisses-damages-bid
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Also on
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17364359
Olympics 2012 security: welcome to lockdown London
The imminent Olympics will take place in a city still recovering from riots that the Guardian-LSE Reading the Riots project showed were partly fuelled by resentment at their lavish cost. Last week, the UK spending watchdog warned that the overall costs of the Games were set to be at least £11bn – £2 bn over even recently inflated budgets. When major infrastructure projects such as Crossrail, speeded up for the Games, are factored in, the figure may be as high as £24bn, according to Sky News. The estimated cost put forward only seven years ago when the Games were won was £2.37 bn.With the required numbers of security staff more than doubling in the last year, estimates of the Games' immediate security costs have doubled from £282m to £553m. Even these figures are likely to end up as dramatic underestimates: the final security budget of the 2004 Athens Olympics were around £1bn.
All this in a city convulsed by massive welfare, housing benefit and legal aid cuts, spiralling unemployment and rising social protests. It is darkly ironic, indeed, that large swaths of London and the UK are being thrown into ever deeper insecurity while being asked to pay for a massive security operation, of unprecedented scale, largely to protect wealthy and powerful people and corporations.Critics of the Olympics have not been slow to point out the dark ironies surrounding the police Wenlock figure. "Water cannon and steel cordon sold separately," mocks Dan Hancox on the influential Games Monitor website. "Baton rounds may be unsuitable for small children."In addition to the concentration of sporting talent and global media, the London Olympics will host the biggest mobilisation of military and security forces seen in the UK since the second world war. More troops – around 13,500 – will be deployed than are currently at war in Afghanistan. The growing security force is being estimated at anything between 24,000 and 49,000 in total. Such is the secrecy that no one seems to know for sure.
During the Games an aircraft carrier will dock on the Thames. Surface-to-air missile systems will scan the skies. Unmanned drones, thankfully without lethal missiles, will loiter above the gleaming stadiums and opening and closing ceremonies. RAF Typhoon Eurofighters will fly from RAF Northolt. A thousand armed US diplomatic and FBI agents and 55 dog teams will patrol an Olympic zone partitioned off from the wider city by an 11-mile, £80m, 5,000-volt electric fence.Beyond these security spectaculars, more stealthy changes are underway. New, punitive and potentially invasive laws such as the London Olympic Games Act 2006 are in force. These legitimise the use of force, potentially by private security companies, to proscribe Occupy-style protests. They also allow Olympic security personnel to deal forcibly with the display of any commercial material that is deemed to challenge the complete management of London as a "clean city" to be branded for the global TV audience wholly by prime corporate sponsors (including McDonald's, Visa and Dow Chemical).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/mar/12/london-olympics-security-lockdown-london?newsfeed=true
Creative Ambassador: Lou Hickey
An impressive independent solo career already behind her, Lou has supported the likes of Martha Wainwright, Suzanne Vega and Imelda May, and has performed at the Connect Festival, Club Noir, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, as well as Scotland’s largest music festival T in the Park.Lou has joined National Collective and expressed her support for Scottish independence, saying it would allow Scotland to “nurture and support our own creative and talented minds.”
She said: ”I love Scotland. I love our many accents. I love our tartans. I love our quiet hillsides and our bustling cities. I love the fact we make some of the best whisky and gin in the world. I even love our ever-changing weather. Scotland has a unique cultural identity. We have so much to offer the world.“I believe independence is the way to a better future for Scotland. We need to have control to focus on the issues that are top of our priority list. We need to be able to benefit from our country’s assets. We need to be able to nurture and support our own creative and talented minds.
“From recent conversations, I am finding that people know very little about the benefits of Scottish independence. Their political views are often stuck in the past with family tradition. I have joined National Collective, as I feel it is a wonderful tool to help spread the positive opportunities independence could bring to Scotland.
“With nearly all our major newspapers and broadcasting tied up to British national companies, it is becoming increasingly difficult to positively promote Scottish independence and discuss it fairly. National Collective offers a great opportunity for creative voices in Scotland to discuss independence without any affiliation to political parties.
Continue reading: http://nationalcollective.com/2012/03/11/creative-ambassador-lou-hickey/
They Might Be Giants: Social Justice and the Forgotten Scotland
By Gerry Hassan
A new vogue has swept across the globe: concern about inequality.
From the Davos World Economic Forum to Occupy Wall Street, from Barack Obama to David Cameron and Ed Miliband, there is an acute awareness of this issue, from talking about the superabundant wealth of the top 1% to the constant political chatter about ‘fairness’.
The world is perilously unequal and growing more so. One billion people per day go hungry while another one billion are obese. GDP per capita of the richest and poorest tenths of the world has a ratio of 39:1, between households of 98:1.
The last quarter of the 20th century saw a spiralling of increasing inequality. Sub-Saharan Africa saw its GDP per capita fall by 0.5% per annum on average between 1975 and 2005. Central and Southern America saw by 2000 average incomes at 84% of 1980 levels; and in Eastern Europe and Central Asia that figure over the same period fell to 70% of 1980 value.
In the same period, the UK and the US have become two of the most unequal countries in the developed world; the US the second most unequal and the UK the fourth, with Singapore in first place and Portugal third
read on: http://www.gerryhassan.com/uncategorized/they-might-be-giants-social-justice-and-the-forgotten-scotland/#more-2209
Fear Merchants
By Fiona MacInnes
{SNIP} What is it we fear? What is it they want us to fear? Is it poverty, failure, military weakness? If you have never bought the pension myth, think on those souls who put their present in hawk over fear of future material poverty and all the while impoverish their day to day family life and relationships. And then think on those who bind themselves to a 9 to 5 slavery of mortgage indenture that taints the bulk of their active life, for a time of distant ‘security’ when they must queue for a hip-replacement. For those who are already poor, it is a state of being which they can only hope will get better. If there are upsides to poverty, these might be found in a perverted kind of inclusion in communal lack.
I speak from relative comfort, but when you extrapolate the hypothetical fear of anything and boil it down to its constituent parts, that fear becomes manageable, but firstly, as with arachnophobia it needs examined. We need a snapshot of the fear presented from a distance at which we can poke and prod before we can take the horror in our hands and stoke it.
Having dodged and dived through these years of rampant capitalism, at times playing the capitalists at their own game in order to survive, I confess to having been a survival hooker, selling myself in their system. In mitigation I can only hope that using their system and operating with their rules, I have done so in a more compassionate and fair way. Still I have no admiration for that system that places market above humanity but can understand now, in a world that demanded my personal adaptation to Jackess of many trades, that the confidence to design a project or a business that might provide collective benefit beyond one’s own immediate needs, takes a lack of fear of ‘the market’ underpinned by the reality-check of failure. {SNIP}
{SNIP} Capitalism has duped us into thinking that money is God, that stuff will stave off unhappiness, and we must work on the hamster wheel of material accumulation to inoculate ourselves from lack. At both ends of the scale we are anaesthetised by alcohol, where those who fall through the net are numbed with addiction. ‘Schooling’ which we call education plays its part too, with the factory model corralling young people into prolonged infancy, in a siding of society with a fiction of education only serving to better prepare them to embrace the rampant money and acquisitive culture that we are told is the only option. {SNIP}
Full piece http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2012/03/11/fear-merchants/#more-5617
English 'would bomb our airports'
GLASGOW and Edinburgh airports, in an independent Scotland, could be bombed by an English government if it was threatened by an unfriendly country, a former deputy leader of the UK Conservative Party has warned.
Lord Fraser of Carmyllie also warned that SNP policies removing nuclear forces from Scottish bases and reducing Scotland's navy "essentially" to fishery protection vessels could make Scotland a war zone. He said a country with a few fishery protection vessels was "asking to be invaded".
The former Lord Advocate and Solicitor General said he did not see who might have "evil intentions" against England but he had missed "the import of the Balkan crisis and the ramifications of 9/11" and would hesitate "to predict the crises even in the rest of the century".
He foresaw the possibility of an enemy commander ordering the runways at Scottish airports to be cleared because his planes would be landing and "if that were to happen what alternative would England have but to come and bomb the hell out of Glasgow airport and Edinburgh airport".
continue: http://www.heraldscotland.com/politics/political-news/english-would-bomb-our-airports.17005697
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Who needs enemies, with friends like this?
Trident is a colossal waste of money that will encourage further nuclear proliferation
By James Bloodworth
I have several problems with the popular notion that there’s no money left. I think the first time the absurdity of it struck me was when I heard the incredibly wealthy entrepreneur Deborah Meaden saying it on Question Time during a debate about striking teachers and dinner ladies. I recall looking round a room of friends, wondering who would be the first to guffaw at the gargantuan level of irony in the statement. No money left? Well, she certainly seemed to be doing ok.
There are other occasions too when the language of austerity jars with reality, most notably when it comes to the renewal of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Trident was excluded from the government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review in October 2010; and despite murmurings from some Liberal Democrats (aren’t there always murmurings from Liberal Democrats?), the coalition seems intent on spending £20 billion-plus renewing a weapons system which, if ever deployed, would result in the deaths of thousands, if not millions of human beings.
Twenty billion is just a figure of course. To put it into some kind of perspective, George Osborne’s first budget planned for cuts of six billion pounds; and public sector workers currently face a three per cent rise in their pension contributions to save the state just under two billion. A modern hospital costs in the region of £90 million (which, as it happens, would save thousands of lives a year, rather than stand-by ready to exterminate them), and a state-of-the-art environmentally friendly school costs between five and £10 million. To give free school dinners to every primary school child in the country would cost a further one billion pounds.
All of the above, as you might have noticed, are a pittance compared to the gigantic sum set aside for the renewal of Trident. In order to justify a spend three times that of George Osborne’s first year of budget cuts, you would at least expect Trident to have a substantial argument behind it. It doesn’t.
Read on: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/03/09/trident-is-a-colossal-waste-of-money-that-will-encourage-further-nuclear-proliferation/
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On the same webpage the author quoted John Hersey’s book Hiroshima. I want to include it, due to the reality of what happens to a populous.
“Mr Tanimoto found about twenty men and women in the sandpit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, ‘These are human beings’.”
"We the English...".....
The Economics of Scottish Independence
ASHLEY HUSBAND POWTON
‘We English, who are a marvellous people, are really very generous to Scotland.’
-- Margaret Thatcher, 1990
The popular delusion of Scotland’s inability to afford independence must be exposed so that the independence campaign can progress uncorrupted by the desperate scaremongering and mass public deception around which the entire ‘No Campaign’ is shamelessly structured.
Challenge the myriad myths propagated in the British media, and ignore the lamenting of UK politicians. This is the reality: Scotland is not subsidised by the UK and. in actual fact, Scotland subsidises the UK. The Scottish economy is in surplus, the UK economy is in deficit. As an independent nation, not only would Scotland survive economically, she would positively flourish. This fiscal reality - based on the official national accounts of the respective governments - was illustrated conclusively in a guest lecture by Professor Hughes-Hallett at St. Andrews last Tuesday evening in School II of St. Salvator’s Quad. He is an economist ranked in the top 1% worldwide,[1] a professor who divides his time between the University of St Andrews and George Mason University in Virginia, and, having previously acted as a consultant for the World Bank, the IMF, the Federal Reserve Board, the UN, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the European Commission, and central banks around the world, is currently a member of the Council of Economic Advisers to the Scottish Government, appointed by the First Minister. An alumnus of the University of St Andrews and himself an economist, First Minister Alex Salmond recently delivered a lecture at the London School of Economics, in which he too demonstrated that Scotland receives no net subsidy from the UK, and illustrated the stronger fiscal position of Scotland relative to the UK as a whole (to the tune of £7.2 billion between 2005 and 2010), before proceeding to show beyond doubt the positive and prosperous financial future within the sterling zone which awaits an independent Scotland.[2] Hughes-Hallett and Scott’s 2010 paper ‘Trial budget under Fiscal Autonomy’ predicts a surplus of £219m, or 0.3% GDP, compared with a UK deficit of 2.8% GDP.
The claims that Scotland could be prevented from remaining within the sterling zone are equally deluded: no nation can stop another nation from using a fully trade-able currency. Furthermore an independent Scotland has title to part ownership of both the Bank of England and the pound sterling. Aside from this, the rest of the UK has much to gain from the emergence of a secure and prosperous northern ally: oil and gas production boosted the UK’s balance of payments by £32 billion in 2010, almost halving the UK’s deficit, and Scotland’s whisky exports are likely to contribute almost £4 billion in 2011, on top of another estimated £20 billion of other Scottish exports. Professor Hughes-Hallett encapsulated this point during his aforementioned lecture when he said, “Why they [UK government] don’t want to pursue this [Scottish fiscal autonomy] is not clear to me.”[3]
The wondrous, sparsely populated wilderness of Scotland boasts oil and gas reserves together with an unparalleled potential in renewable energy, be it wind, water, or tidal. Scotland is also home to a highly skilled population, world class universities, and a modern, diverse economy. The oft-quoted unionist claim that the economy of an independent Scotland would be perched precariously, and solely, on the additional revenue from North Sea oil is yet another fantasy. Rather, a fiscally autonomous Scotland would enhance and develop the solid foundations of an already stable and prosperous economy. Control over policy levers to foster economic growth and employment, and the ability to tailor economic policy to Scotland’s specific needs would increase this stability, instead of being dictated to by a volatile and ever decreasing Westminster-allocated budget. Indeed, the most volatile source of current revenue for Scotland is not North Sea oil, but the block grant from the UK Exchequer.
Read on: http://www.theregulus.co.uk/domestic-politics/we-the-english
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