Bushfires in Australia

It's now 6 January 2020.  Australia had disastrous bushfires in the past week or two and some are still going.  About 3.5 million Hectares were scorched, at least 20 people are dead, the army is apparently helping to bury 100,000 dead cattle and more than 1,500 homes were burned down.  The prime minister, Scott Morrison promised a two bilion dollar recovery package.  The actual cost of the fires will, of course, only be known later.

Here are some resources confirming the above figures:

• Seven TV Network
• BBC A Visual Guide 
• The Guardian - Australian Edition

In the winter of 2019, I was in a car driving through the Mount Hotham area in Victoria.   There were masses of deadwood on the forest floor as far as one could see.  And it didn't stop as one drove along.  "This is a bushfire waiting to happen," I told my friend.  The order to evacuate Hotham came on the 3rd of January.

It's hard to set a Eucalyptus tree ablaze.  In New Zealand, we used to start the woodfires using pine and only then added the Eucalyptus wood.  One needs a lot of kindling to set fire to Eucalyptus wood.  This kindling is in plentiful supply in the woods of Australia.  And the authorities do nothing about it.  They have no incentive - they are never held accountable.  To say they were derelict in their duty would be a euphemism.  Gross negligence is closer to the mark.  And still, the law protects them.

The CSIRO did a study on wildfires in Tasmania which you can get here.  They studied three plans of action:

1. Do nothing - popular with those living on the taxpayer dollar the world over.
2. A maximal treatment, with the most possible prescribed burning within ecological constraints.
3. 12 hypothetically more implementable state-wide prescribed-burning plans.

 Of the third option they said:

Leverage analysis of the 12 more-realistic implementable plans indicated that such prescribed burning would have only a minimal effect, if any, on fire extent and that none of these prescribed-burning plans substantially reduced fire intensity. 

This means it won't work.

Of the second option they said:

Statistical modelling showed that an unrealistically large maximal treatment scenario could reduce fire intensity in three flammable vegetation types, and reduce fire probability in almost every vegetation type.

My point is that bushfires are so devastating that expensive, large-scale preventative measures are justified.

Keeping that in mind, option two is clearly the way to go.  But they are already making excuses stating backburning won't work.  One of the problems is it can only be done in the right weather conditions.  They didn't say it, but I say it, backburns can get and have got out of hand.  So, if backburns are not the way to go, what is?

Finland had a decrease in forest fires over the past few decades.  They fare much better as far as forest fires are concerned than neighbouring Sweden.  The do clear deadwood from the forest floor and they go so far as to clean the forest floor of combustible material after cutting down trees.

It is justified to use armies of prisoners and able welfare recipients to clear the ground in Australian bushland.  It may not be politically correct, but political correctness should yield to reality.  And these bushfires were and are very real.  Of course, if anything is preferable to violating the principles of political correctness, go for the bushfires.

Getting the kindling out of the woods is most likely the most important thing to do that will yield results the soonest.  One should focus on the big gains first.

Jamestown, South Australia Grid Battery - How Long Can it Supply South Australia?

The 129MWh storage capacity Tesla battery in Jamestown, South Australia brought tears of joy to the eyes of the politically-correct, greenie retards. Just look at how they celebrate this. And here's more.

Little do they know, it's only good for topping up the electricity supply during times of peak demand. A battery can discharge quickly without preparation when needed. This battery is totally useless for coping with sizeable blackouts.

Let me explain some things so you will quickly know more than the Minister of Energy about electricity.  For our purposes we are interested in a unit of used electricity.  Household electricity is paid per kWh - kilowatt hour.  A kWh represents an amount of work done.  A watt is the rate of work made possible by the input of a certain amount of energy - a watt of electricity. Say your kettle is marked as 1,000W - one Kw.  If you boil that kettle continuously for one hour you will have used 1kWh of electricity.  A kWh is a unit of electricity used to make a certain amount of work possible, say cool your room for x minutes, light up a certain area for y hours, etc.  When it comes to mass consumption a kWh is too small a unit and 1,000 of them are lumped together to make a MWh (megawatt hour) and 1,000MWh are lumped together to make a GWh (gigawatt hour).  1,000kWh = 1MWh.  1,000MWh = 1GWh.
 
What does 129MWh mean? It means they can supply 129MWatts for an hour. As the battery's maximum discharge capacity is 100MWatt/Hr it means the battery can actually go on for about 75 minutes discharging at 100MWatts/hour.

You will find much of what's in the paragraph above on the linked-to pages. But you won't find what it actually means as the media monkeys don't understand numbers. They don't answer the question of how long can it supply electricity to how many people. I wanted to see how long it can supply Adelaide with electricity but I could not find Adelaide's electricity usage. My guess for Adelaide was less than 10 minutes. I did find this AEMO pdf document online. It gives the electricity usage for the whole of South Australia.

On page 18 you will see that in 2017-18 South Australia used 12,203 GWh. Giga is 1000 Mega. So, with minimal rounding, it comes out that South Australia used 33,433MWh/day, 1,393MWh/hour and 23MWh/minute in 2017-18. 23MW/h means 23MW delivered for an hour.  But they need that delivered per minute.  So, they need a supply of 1,380MW/h for business as usual.  The supply rate of the battery is not remotely up to that - it's only 100MW/h.  Immediately, it's going to hit the fan big-time.  Now say the supply rate can be upped to the required 1,380MW/h, how long can SA keep running?  That's easy, the battery capacity is 129MWh.  Per-minute they need 23MWh.   So, the battery can supply South Australia with less than 6 minutes worth of electricity.  But, as already shown, even these six minutes won't happen. Only a few islands of light will be able to last the six minutes. And these must be decided in advance.  Who will get the electricity and who won't?  That'll be the night the lights went out in South Australia. Those backwoods, southern yokels will be crying into their beer for their battery to save them, but it won't.

Adelaide has about 515,000 homes.  This battery can run 8,000 houses for 24 hours. That's 0.0155% of Adelaide's homes.

I wonder how many of the numerically and reality-challenged politicians in the various governments know this.  I would not be surprised if the answer is none.

This is typical of this world – the world is mostly populated by retards led by their noses by the arts-and-humanities monkeys in governments using the arts-and-humanities monkeys in the media to disseminate their propaganda to the great unwashed. All three these groups have but a tenuous hold on reality and don't understand our technical world. That's the world we live in – the hoi-polloi crying out to be deceived and the politicians and their flunkies, the politically-correct media people, are all too ready to oblige.

Who Created God?

In an interview featuring Roger Penrose and William Lane Craig the former said a higher intelligence, like God, as the agent responsible for the Universe, is not a satisfactory explanation.  Roger Penrose wants a reason for the higher intellect as well.

Before Edwin Hubble demonstrated redshift in the nineteen-twenties, most people were happy that the Universe had just always been there.  In Stephen Hawking's last book, Brief Answers to Big Questions, he states that with the Law of Gravity in place, the Universe could have just happened.  Now the Law of Gravity had to be there for all time.  Others say that fluctuations in a quantum vacuum or quantum space were responsible for the existence of the Universe.  That means the quantum something must just always have been there.

So it's clear - most people are happy with something just always being there, as long as it's not a higher power to whom they are most likely accountable.  A few come right out and say so, to their credit.  But most are not that honest.  They have to invent a "scientific" reason for their disbelief in a higher power.  Their big question is if God created the Universe, who created God?  Richard Dawkins asks that question frequently.

First, let's get our heads around what a chain of causation is.  Say Y created Z, then the immediate question is who created Y?  Why X of course.  And who created X, you ask.  That's W.  And so on and so on.  If we travel back along this chain of causation, we will eventually reach A.

In our quest to discover who created the Universe, we can start with anything in the Universe and then travel back along this chain of causation.  There are only two possibilities.  This chain can be:
1) Circular
2) Non-circular

If the chain is circular, we will eventually get to something that was created by something that it had created - the chicken came from the egg that the chicken had laid.  That's Wheeler's Participatory Universe.  In short, the Universe was created by intelligence the Universe had created.  This concept has to do with particles acting like waves if not observed but acting like particles if observed.  That means that the act of observing them after their creation made them go back in time and influence their own nature so they act like particles.  That's enough to give anybody a headache and, not surprisingly, this explanation for the Universe's existence hasn't really caught on.

If the chain is not circular, there are only two possibilities:
1) Infinite regression - we never get to the ultimate creator, which will mean nothing can exist.  We know this is not the state of things.
2) Somewhere we run smack-bang into an uncaused cause - the higher intelligence.

There are only these three possibilities:
1) The Participatory Universe possibility
2) Nothing exists because there's no ultimate creator.
3) The uncaused cause is behind everything.

One cannot ask where the Uncaused Cause came from - that's a stupid question.  Just like people were happy to accept that the Universe was eternal and Stephen Hawking was happy to believe that the Law of Gravity was eternal and those of the Quantum faith have no problems with something quantum being eternal we have to accept that there may be an infinite higher intellect.  Not only that, an eternal higher intelligence is by far the most satisfying explanation.  After all, who would want the Law of Gravity or something like a quantum field as their God?

Trump won, liberals lost, suck it up.

It takes pride of place on the news - liberals and Muslims protesting against Trump. The LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) and artistic communities are outraged. It seems the whole of the film industry had their haemorrhoids prolapse and thrombose. Not surprisingly, this motley lot is joined by many politicians from many countries declaring their condemnation for what Trump is doing. At the same time, this sorry lot, the politicians included, are displaying their hypocrisy in the media of the world. Liberals are always loudly in favour of democracy, except if the vote goes against them.

Furthermore, this sorry lot is also displaying to the world that they are sore losers. They whine and complain and carry on like a hypochondriac told there's nothing wrong with her. This is really very bad style. When did conservatives go on like this after they had lost an election? I can't recall them ever taking to the streets and making such a sorry spectacle of themselves. Shame on you liberals. But come to think about it, this is just what can be expected of you, given you are such sore losers and hypocrites. My advice to you is to act with style and dignity - very hard for two-faced liberals. Suck it up. Prepare for the next election. Who knows, maybe...

And as for the Muslims, what did you expect? There are very few things as well established on this Earth as the link between Islam and terrorism. Don't try to convince us that Islam is a religion of peace - the evidence says differently. First convince your fellow Muslims of it and get them to act on this Islam is a religion of peace, which, given the present facts, only the most obtuse will believe. Maybe then it won't be dangerous having Muslims around.

Against Democracy

There are only two things wrong with democracy. They are:

• Those who vote
• Those they vote for

Those who vote

The average intelligence of the general population of every country is average. But don't let the word average fool you. It really means that on average, humanity's as thick as two short planks. When it comes to voting, the small percentage of intelligent people doesn't matter. Those who matter are the great unwashed. And this group has only a tenuous grip on reality. We all know the Greeks have been living beyond their means on borrowed money for years. When it finally caught up with them and they needed to curb their lifestyles and get their hands dirty and work, they demonstrated and had protest marches. They wanted to keep on living beyond their means on borrowed money forever and ever. How they saw that as possible, they didn't say.

When the French government recently wanted to introduce legislation to make French industry more competitive by giving greater power to employers, the French took to the streets. They demanded that their jobs stay highly paid, secure and with generous perks. They didn't say how they planned to be competitive with mostly Eastern countries where workers don't have it so well.

The whole democracy issue is best summarised by a quote attributed to Robert Heinlein; Once the monkeys learn they can vote themselves bananas, they'll never climb another tree. Benjamin Franklin said much the same; When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic. And this is the crux of the matter, the great unwashed will want what they want irrespective of whether what they want is reasonable and realistic. And they will vote for those promising them what they want.

In Australia, young people from all over the world come on extended holidays. They don't have much money, so they stay in modest accommodation known as backpacker lodges. They themselves are referred to as backpackers. Many of them take up menial work to supplement their funds, mostly things like fruit picking in season. Australians don't want to do this kind of work. As much of this work is on a cash basis, the government doesn't get what they regard as their fair share of this money. Just now, on TV, a politician, maybe the relevant minister, talked about financing government. Back-packers featured prominently. The government considered introducing a flat tax on them, but reconsidered as they thought it would discourage backpackers coming to Australia and doing really essential work and spending some money here. This politician bemoaned the fact that Australians won't take up this work, in which case these workers would be on the books and could be taxed. In addition, these people would then not rely on Centrelink to keep them in the pink and in booze with enough left over for the horses, the poker machines (pokies), and the many kinds of sports betting available in Australia. This politician said the government is deliberating how they can change things so that Australians will take up these jobs.

Of course, laws could be changed to implement Paul's dictum : The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat. But that will ensure that whichever party is in opposition will promise to undo these changes if they come into power. The opposition will then be elected at the next election as sure as politicians have very generous perks. It is, therefore, safe to say that Australians won't take up this lowly paid, hard work. Legalise compulsory higher wages for this work and the products generated won't be competitive in the world markets.

Working mothers of newborns in Australia can get paid parental leave amounting to AUD672.60 per week before tax for a maximum of 18 weeks. 18 Weeks amount to four months. Not only can new mothers get paid parental leave, there is also a Dad and Partner paid parental leave for the same amount, but only for two weeks. Needless to say, there is a clamour to make these perks even more generous.

And that's not all, Domestic Violence Leave is also much in play in Australia. In fact, the perpetrators may be entitled to paid domestic violence leave . This will surely make Australia more competitive in the world's markets and ensure jobs into the future.

In Australia, like in much of the West, manufacturing is on the ropes. The export of manufacturing jobs to Eastern countries is going strong, however. It's widely accepted that the car manufacturing industry will go. All the remaining three big manufacturers will close in either 2016 or 2017. In fact, the Ford factory closed on Friday the 7th of October 2016. The story is very similar to the British Motor Industry. Jaguar is owned by the Indian Car Manufacturer, Tata, Rolls-Royce Motor Cars Limited is owned by BMW, Austin is gone, Morris is gone, and the list goes on and on. Recently, a contract for new railway carriages for the NSW railways went to South Korea, despite the fact that there is a concern that manufactures rolling stock in Newcastle, NSW. The relevant government said that the South Korean bid was 25% lower and that there are no quality concerns. In fact, as regards to quality... Thank the unions, thank democracy. For a while, the workers had it very good. But they were, as the great unwashed always is, unable to see what was real and sustainable and what was only a socialist dream leading to a rude awakening. As there was so little brain to wash, brainwashing them was an easy job. Pie in the sky seemed so real.

The only qualification needed to vote is to have reached the voting age. As if age brings intelligence.

When all is said and done, a true democracy where the great masses get their wishes is nothing but mob rule.

Those getting the votes

Before an aspirant politician can become a fully fledged politician, he or she must get enough votes to be elected. That means he or she must be able to convince enough of the great unwashed to vote for him. That means, first of all, he must maneuver himself into a position to become a candidate for the party with the best chance of winning his constituency. Of course, he may stand as an independent, but that greatly diminishes his chances of getting elected. All that is needed depends on appearances. The ability to get elected has nothing to do with the ability to manage a country or part thereof. A minister of a portfolio needs no knowledge of his portfolio. A hairdresser is often better qualified for her job than a minister of a portfolio for his portfolio. The people attracted to politics are by nature snake oil salesmen and women - all they need to do is to charm and smooth talk enough people to support them when they need that support. They must know how to lead the fickle great unwashed by its collective dirty snout. The ones who can see through them don't matter. There are too few of those.

Democracy is not to be found in any field needing knowledge. How would you feel if the surgeon going to operate on you were elected by the great unwashed from among any group of candidates who thought they'd like the pay of a surgeon? Say the pilot of the plane in which you're going to fly were also elected. And the engineers who designed and supervised the building of the huge bridge that's supposed to carry hundreds of thousands of cars a day had been elected. How come it's fine that those at the head of a country need no knowledge? All they need is enough of the great unwashed to vote for them. Does this make sense?

Being so dependent on the fickle masses makes a politician vulnerable. Anybody who can deliver on anything that can sway the great unwashed will have much influence with a politician. Enter the lobbyists who control too few votes to make a difference at election time but have enough money which a cunning politician can use to sway votes his way.

A few months ago, the NSW state government banned dog racing when it was discovered that there was much animal cruelty involved in it. Of course, there was the usual outcry by those involved in this shady (gambling) industry. Just today (11 October 2016), TV news reported that the NSW government was going to reverse this ban. I immediately wondered what the gambling bosses did to engineer the reversing of this ban. Of course, we can expect no in depth reporting on what happened behind the scenes. There will be the usual claptrap providing a reason - stepped up supervision, promises to eradicate cruelty from the industry, etc. But what will be offered won't be the real reason. The nature of elected government officials is such that by far the majority of people in whichever country expect them to behave dishonestly. It is no surprise therefore that people are sceptical in a situation such as this.

By far the majority of elected officials desperately want to keep their jobs. They want to remain where the pickings are rich and the pasture is lush. To succeed in this, they must convince the voting cattle to give them enough votes come election time. And for the voting cattle, being who they are, it's all about appearances. And the politicians, being who they are, appearances is the one thing about which they are very good. Reality takes a back seat.

Politicians will do whatever is needed to stay in the pound seats - collude with whoever can turn the odds their way, promise the voting cattle whatever is needed to make them vote for the party or politician concerned, even if it will bankrupt the country or kill off industry. Ask the Greeks and the English.

What else?

Most people will now ask, what is better than democracy? There is something, a country with a clear constitution and with laws flowing from that constitution. The biggest part of this constitution will be the same for all countries as people are people. There will be parts addressing the particular circumstances of the individual countries. This constitution should address everything, like the best way the particular country can be economically viable, given its strenghts and weaknesses. The constitution should embody what is best for the country and the people, not what the hoi polloi wants.

The above will never happen, though. It will prevent predators, like gambling bosses, booze barons, drug pushers, confidence tricksters and whore masters preying on the all too prevalent simple minded. And the simple minded will always be there in great numbers and those eager to prey on them, too. So, don't hold your breath. This is a world of predators and prey, with the blessing of the government of whichever country you are in.

Scientists and Logic

It's to be expected that your average person should make logical mistakes in his arguments. It's even to be expected that those with training in the arts, humanities, philosophy, theology and other non-scientific disciplines should make mistakes in logic. But I'm disappointed to see people with scientific training make mistakes in logic. And they do. Much more often than I would like to see. It's like seeing a man parking badly - they're letting the side down.

Still, it seems they are just like everybody else; if something is in line with what they believe, they demand little or no evidence before accepting it. But if it is in any way contrary to what they believe nothing but absolute mathematically certain evidence will do. And in most cases not even that.

Stephen Hawking said: "on the face of it, life does seem to be too unlikely to be just a coincidence." Then he goes on, trying to find ways to show that what he just said is not true, after all. He invokes parallel universes to get past the astronomical odds against 'just by chance.' There is absolutely no evidence supporting parallel universes. The astronomical odds are a certainty. Stephen Hawking should know one cannot invoke speculation as evidence to change a factual reality. One can also not invoke what amounts to magic - here we are, so it must have happened. Is Stephen Hawking so committed to atheism that he abandons logic to defend it? What a disappointment.

I'm reading a book called Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout by Patrick Moore. Patrick Moore has a PhD in environmental science. While attending a conference in Nairobi, he had a Damascus Road experience. He saw that Greenpeace was a movement more in line with ideals and convictions than reality. In fact, he went over to the other side to such an extent that he even doubts that man-made green-house gases are in any way responsible for the documented increase in global temperatures. He does not doubt the increase in green-house gases and the global heating up, just the connection between the two. He uses the analogy of the correlation between increased ice-cream consumption and an increase in shark attacks on humans. He does mention that there is no known direct connection between ice-cream consumption and shark attacks, which is of course true. There is no evidence that either humans having eaten ice-cream or ice-cream itself attracts sharks. However, Patrick Moore should know this is not an apt analogy to use to illustrate the connection between an increase of hot house gases and an increased global temperature - it is well known that hot house gases prevent heat from being lost. Therefore, it can be said with certainty that the increase in hot house gases is at least to some extent responsible for the increased global temperature. There may be other candidates also responsible for this, like sun spots. But in the absence of other candidates as clearly related to a temperature increase as hot house gases, it is justified to declare hot house gases the number one contender for the lion's share of the responsibility for the increased global temperature. This is not rocket science. I cannot see why Patrick Moore and others can't see this.

Patrick Moore is also heavily into atheism and evolution. Nevertheless, he says he bases his realities on science. In his own words: "The real strength of science is that it is based on two things: observable facts that can be repeated and logic." Then he goes on to say, not on the same page, of course, that whales come from hippopotamus-like animals that swam down rivers, ended up in the oceans and became whales. In the light of the total absence of any evidence for this, this qualifies as complete nonsense. Where are the "observable facts that can be repeated" that is his requirement for anything to be established as a fact? Or is such nonsense acceptable to him because it supports evolution? One should be consistent.

As for evolution, the starting point of evolution is the development of life purely by chance. If this cannot happen, evolution does not even get out of the starting blocks. The Internet is full of discussions about this. Everybody agrees that the chance of life coming about by random chance is less than one out of a figure bigger than the number of all the atoms in the Universe. Evolutionists have a few ways they try to get past that, among those life seeded from outer space (but how did life get there?) or the claim that the process wasn't really random. Exactly what it was, they don't say. The only way one can defeat such overwhelming odds is a brute force attack - try all combinations. But a brute force attack is not a random process. One should try one combination only once. Even if that is possible through random means, the numbers still are too large. And it isn't. So, purely mathematically speaking, the probability of life coming to be by random means runs up against insurmountable odds. So, mathematically speaking it is impossible that life can come about by itself by random means. This is a fact. There are no "observable facts that can be repeated" to show how life can come about by itself. To be consistent, anyone who claims to go only by science and logic should admit that evolution is a mathematical impossibility. As life developing by itself by random processes is a mathematical impossibility, it is a mathematical necessity that there should be something or someone behind the development of life. Again, this is not rocket science.

It is disappointing that people with scientific training make easily avoidable, logical mistakes. What is even more disappointing is that they so often talk absolute nonsense. This, unfortunately, is not as rare as it should be. Let me stress that no amount of speculation can prevent anything from being nonsense.

Barack Obama Speaks out Against Democracy

Yesterday, on PBS Newshour broadcast here in Australia, Barack Obama had much to say against Crimea going with Russia. My point is that as a liberal Barack Obama is strongly in favour of democracy - it put him in a cushy job and all liberals have to be in favour of democracy. Barack Obama knows that the Crimeans voted overwhelmingly in favour of going with Russia and he never disputed that. Even before the voting took place it was widely expected that this was the way the vote was going to go. So, from a democratic viewpoint, the Crimea going with Russia is the wish of the people.

Nearly 60% of Crimeans are Russian. Only 25% are Ukranian. 77% of Crimeans say Russian is their native language and only 10% say Ukranian is their native language. The Crimea was part of Russia until 1954 when it was added to the Ukranian Soviet Socialist Republic, also with strong ties to Russia. The Ukraine went independent only in 1991. So, both the Crimean people and the recent history of the Crimea show strong ties to Russia. Nobody should have been surprised when the Crimea changed hands again. As this happened with the overwhelming support of its people, the liberals should have applauded. But no, this champion of democracy, Barack Obama, spits fire and threatens and looks generally unhappy about it. How is this possible? After all, this is an expression of democracy and Barack is such a big supporter of democracy. Well, the thing is, like all liberals, Barack Obama is a hypocrite.

It works like this, all liberals are supporters of 'freedom of opinion.' You can have any viewpoint or opinion as long as your viewpoint or opinion does not fly in the face of the manifests of the GCPC (Global Council for Political Correctness), the MFM (Militant Feminist Movement), or GALRO (Gay and Lesbian Rights Organisation.) You can have any opinion on legalised gay marriage, as long as it's for, you can have any opinion on capital punishment, as long as it's against. Most likely you are starting to see things clearly now.

Let's further explore the hypocrisy of the liberals. They were as a man for self rule of African countries. Now that Africa is a total mess with many millions dead as a result of African self government, these same liberals are deadly quiet. Once in a while one of them will quietly condemn an African despot (Mugabe was popular for this a while back) which they had helped to bring to power.

This is what I'm on about, the utter hypocrisy of liberals. And nobody says a thing about that. I'm neutral about this Crimean thing, it will work itself out. In reality it will most likely be better for Crimeans in the short run to go with Russia rather than a bankrupt Ukraine. Russia will be generous for a while to show them they voted the right way. I hope Russia will accuse all these hypocrites of being hypocrites. There's really nothing they can say about it in this instance. They people have voted and these liberals have expressed their opinions against the will of the people. And them such staunch democrats.