A smashing idea

Here is a detail of the London Underground Map:

The yellow line is The Circle Line. And that gives rise to this story:

Hadron Collider II planned for Circle Line
By Steve Connor


London Underground is in talks with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) about the possibility of using the 23km tunnel of the Circle Line to house a new type of particle accelerator similar to the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva.


Particle physicists believe the existing tunnel can be adapted to take a small-scale "atom smasher" alongside the passenger line at a fraction of the cost of building a new tunnel elsewhere in Europe. They are understood to have approached London Underground with a view to announcing a feasibility study later this year.


Specialist engineers commissioned by Cern have already produced a preliminary report, seen by The Independent, which proposes installing supercooled magnets and collision detectors at strategic positions on the Circle Line. The main collision experiment will be sited at the newly refurbished Westminster Station, directly below Portcullis House, the offices of more than 200 MPs.


Although there are still considerable technical problems to overcome, such as a geo-magnetic "kink" in the circuitry at Edgware Road station, Cern is quietly confident that it will be able to convince London Underground of the merits of the scheme, which should result in the first air-conditioned underground line as a spin-off of installing supercooled magnets below ground.


The idea was initially mooted in the mid-1980s as an alternative site to the 27km tunnel below Geneva but the idea was dropped. Now, with improvements in technology and miniaturisation of the equipment, Cern believes it can build a successor to the Large Hadron Collider within the Circle line by 2020.


It would mean that two beams of protons would be travelling in clockwise and counterclockwise directions at 99.999999 per cent of the speed of light, within feet of Circle line passengers stuck in perpetual immobility.


However, health and safety advisers to London Underground are understood to be concerned about the proposal, and have raised the prospect of a mini black hole being created at Westminster when the two proton beams collide to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang.


A spokesman for London Underground said the proposal is not as foolish as it first seems: "It has merits."


Dateline 1 April 2010

This would be pretty convenient for a member of my tribe who is completing a Physics PhD just up the road from a Circle Line station.

Political fragments

I was asked this by a super-intelligent young lady whom I accuse of being brainwashed into her illiberal liberalism:

Btw, I'd be genuinely interested to read your manifesto if you're willing to engage in debate without using ad hominem arguments or suggesting I'm brainwashed.

I'd be particularly interested to hear how your system deals with natural monopolies (air traffic, transport, broadband, post, police, courts, army)
and things that affect the vulnerable (health care for poor children/parents, education) and whether you legislate for and enforce laws around things like farming of animals, insider trading.

So I dashed off this fragment:

Air traffic - not a natural monopoly.
transport - ditto.
broadband - ditto
post- ditto

If you're thinking of the 'pipeline' for broadband, water, power, etc as a natural monopoly then one way to handle it is as it's done now - combination of public regulator and private franchisee monopolist, but it's a technical rather than political question.

Air traffic control may be a natural monopoly and should be state regulated tho privately run perhaps.

Courts should be in the public sector, but have become corrupted by social engineers in the Anglosphere, cf atrocities like Roe v Wade, atrocious for it's substance, yes, but intellectually atrocious as having no basis in law other than an invented right to privacy which is then tendentiously extended to the right of a mother to kill her baby as tho any of the Framers would have contemplated anything of the sort.

Police should be in the public sector probably, tho not necessarily. Again control by social engineers has been disastrous.

Army ditto.

The question is not whether a private corporation runs something, but who appropriately regulates that corporation - the free market or the state. The principle is that all activities should be free from state interference other than enforceability of voluntary contracts.

The exceptions should be few and have compelling ideological or practical justification such as 'the state should have the monopoly of force' or 'children must be protected.'

The reason for that is ideological - freedom is an absolute good - and practical - the government is sometimes useless, but more often worse than useless at effecting good results. It has neither the skills nor the correct motivation. Your suggestion that the answer to that is better government has been so comprehensively disproved in practice and theory, in history and in the present, all over the world and probably on Jupiter, that it takes cognitive dissonance to persist with it.

Children are the reason for society to exist and should be protected consistent with minimal displacement of the family by the state.

Other animals should be protected by law. Factory farming and vivisection should be crimes. How to get from here to there is discussable, but that's what 'there' looks like.

Insider trading is fine providing everyone knows it might happen and there are no voluntary contracts - eg contracts of employment - to bar it. Risks are far more manageable when they are in the open.

I'd add that anybody should be sackable for any reason and there should be no state healthcare other than fallback provision for children and those injured in the front line of military service.

Yes the government should ensure that water is clean and power stations don't blow up.

This will sound ruthless to you, but the outcomes are much better spiritually, politically and practically except IN ONE RESPECT: it doesn't allow liberals to feel good about themselves at others' expense. But that's not a bug, it's a feature.

Our local public library in London, SE1

Public libraries were central to my developement. I'd go down every single shelf, picking out books to skim for utterly subjective reasons. The green and red Loeb Classics for example will be in my heavenly library, just because of the Greek or Latin text directly opposite the translation. Anyway it's been decades since I've been in a UK pubic library, so I sidled warily into John Harvard Library (Harvard's founder grew up in Southwark) with a bookish and be-scootered young lady from New Jersey. A few impressions:

1. Staff were helpful, smiley, bright and willing.
2. Enrolment was a doddle.
3. 15 books per member! No call to liberate any folio'd friends.
4. Computerised self-withdrawal system was almost excellent. Just a couple of glitches for 'differently' catalogued items.
5. It was child-friendly up the wazoo! loads of noise, relaxed atmosphere, bright light. That's at odds with my idea of a library as a place of study, but has its plusses.
6. There just aren't that many books.
7. The children's section is passable.
8. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender section is in the Adult section for now and apparently exists due to public demand (I enquired). The demand must be superb since LGBT shelf space = the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
9. The public demand for Black History must be even more superb, since that subject's shelf space is 2x the size of the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
10. The public demand for Social Science must be superbly superb, since that subject's shelf space is 5x the size of the whole of Science, Technology and Natural History.
11. I couldn't find the Loeb Classics.

I guess I just wasn't made for these times, but a black sense of humour does help along with whisky and Frank Zappa to which and to whom I reach for consolation. I suspect John Harvard would feel the same.

History for Affirmative Action Presidents

At Powerline Paul argues:

In my opinion, President Obama's tilt towards the Palestinians is rooted in ideology, a considerably softer version of the ideology espoused by Jeremiah Wright . The facts that matter to this president do not pertain to the PA's intentions. Rather, I suspect the key facts are these: compared to Israelis, Palestinians are downtrodden and non-Western. They are what leftist academics call "the other." And promoting the interests of "the other" is a big deal for Obama -- indeed, this imperative seems like the closest thing he has to a religion.

If I'm right, then Netanyahu will never be able to placate Obama. And he should not try.

He's wrong only in the phrase "considerably softer version of the ideology espoused by Jeremiah Wright" which would better read "muted version", but Paul's being polite or evading the cruel truth that America is now governed by the intellectual spawn of 1960's hippie revolutionaries. In truth Israel has a special role in this religion. Israel is "the other" and the founding high points of modern terrorism against the West are attacks on Israel - Jewish, modern, victorious, free Israel. Among the plane hijackings, the Munich massacre, the murder of children which figure in Obamans' pyschogeography as revolutionary acts of the downtrodden, I wonder if Obama has even heard of Operation Entebbe:

Operation Entebbe was a counter-terrorism hostage-rescue mission carried out by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) at Entebbe Airport in Uganda on July 4, 1976.[1] A week earlier, on June 27, an Air France plane with 300 passengers was hijacked by Palestinian terrorists and flown to Entebbe, near Kampala, the capital of Uganda. Shortly after landing, all non-Jewish passengers were released.
The IDF acted on intelligence provided by Israeli secret agency Mossad. In the wake of the hijacking by members of the militant organizations Revolutionary Cells and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, along with the hijackers' threats to kill the hostages if their prisoner release demands were not met, the rescue operation was planned. These plans included preparation of armed resistance from Ugandan military troops.
Led by [a] 30-year-old commander ..... the operation took place under cover of darkness, as Israeli transport planes carried 100 elite commandos over 2,500 miles to Uganda for the rescue operation. The operation, which took a week of planning, lasted 90 minutes and 103 hostages were rescued. Five Israeli commandos were wounded and the only death was of [the] commander... All the hijackers, three hostages and 45 Ugandan soldiers were killed, and 11 Russian-built MiG fighters of Uganda's air force were destroyed. A fourth hostage was murdered by Ugandan army officers at a nearby hospital.

The dead Israeli commander was Yonatan Netanyahu, the older brother of Benjamin Netanyahu whom Obama, Community Organizer in Chief, hosted with open contempt last week. Things change.

Shard shots

The Shard of Glass, tallest building in the UK or Europe is being built at London Bridge Station near my apartment. The borough is Borough (whence Chaucer's Pilgrims set off to Canterbury) and the area is Southwark where Shakespeare lived, worked and made pots of money at the Globe Theatre. Here are some shots of the work in progress taken in late afternoon gloom. The core is now the same height as the vile piece of concrete brutalism across the road known as Guy's Hospital, a filing cabinet to die in. So vile and so brutal is Guy's that I want it preserved as counterpoint to The Shard. Anyway for lovers of big cranes:

Correspondence with a minor devil (my nephew at college in Boston)

Hey Mark,

Just wanted to know your opinion on the fact that UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE IS ABOUT TO BE SIGNED INTO LAW!!!!

- Your nephew, Wormwood

P.S. - Looks like Obama is getting stuff done while the conservatives have been too busy having tea parties.



Nephew,

I emphasize the Party of Death/Party of Life contrast here, but that's because of Stupak's role.

Health care will become a government dept. I'm agin it in principle because it's the very big nose of a humongous camel snuffling into my tent and I'm agin it because I've known about a National Health Service all my life. It's ghastly, costly, murderous and infectious. And smells bad.

In terms of modern history it may be a good thing, as was Obama becoming President a good thing. It crystallizes the issues around big government so that America is confronted with socialism in its face and has to make a choice. Right now the polls and the energy are all on the side of the self-reliant version of your country. Obamacare just heightens the disgust of real America. But who knows, maybe you'll become like Belgium yet, tho I doubt it.

It's still strange to me how intelligent young men like you get taken in. I suppose your world view was formed by Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart and Tina Fey. Eric Cartman is a better role model.

I differ from most conservatives on government health care. My policy is that there shouldn't be any government health care except for children and front-line military. The rest is one's own responsibility + one's family + voluntary charity as opposed to the involuntary charity of you, Ebenezer Whippersnapper Wormwood, saying: "Weird Uncle Mark, you may be a senior devil but I know how to spend your money better than you, so I'll tax you and give your money to what I say are worthy causes, AIDS in Africa, say, or healthcare for illegal immigrants, AND AND AND on top of that I get to feel good about myself."

Well apart from me wanting to kill you for being sanctimonious at my expense, it turns out that most people get worse health your way. Human Motivation 101. But that doesn't matter because you get to feel virtuous.

Finally you want to regulate my life far more than I want to regulate yours. That places a heavy burden of proof on you.

Your Weird Uncle Mark

The Party of Death

Mr. Stupak and his Democrat followers have now clarified that you cannot be pro-life and be a Democrat. If abortion was truly their biggest issue, they wouldn't willfully align themselves with the Party of Death. This vote will expose the myth of the 'pro-life Democrat.' With this single vote, the Democratic Party will divide our nation into the Party of Death and the Party of Life, and future elections will never be the same.

Phyllis Schafly

The Abortion President

It's a few hours before the House votes on Obamacare. All the mood music is that Democrats will muster the 216 votes, probably by inducing defections from Stupak's small group of anti-abortionists. If by a miracle this disgusting bill fails, let it be remembered what Obama is and why his Presidency failed in its signature legislation: Obama is The Abortion President, the man who wriggled, squirmed and lied to deny 'healthcare' to babies who survive abortion.

Fire and Ice

At the end of April I'll be touring Iceland with another photographer, so I'm happy to read that a volcano's erupted. It's right beside this glacier where I was in 2007:



Our trip will head first for Snæfellsjökull, the highest mountain and the entrance for Jules Verne's 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth'.

The Nobel Prize for Taking the Piss

Re that earthquake in Hawaii:

• It's true, Hawaii and Haiti both have 2 i's.
• Obama may have been born in Hawaii, so it seems peculiar that he'd confuse it with a different one of the 57 states, but, look, he hasn't been back there for nearly 3 months.
• He claims that the great Hawaii Earthquake of 2010 will be covered for federal aid because of the Louisiana Purchase in his Healthcare Bill, but it won't because that provision is explicitly limited to Louisiana, which makes sense because it was an La. senator's vote being purchased, not the vote of Senator Papa Doc Duvalier from Hawaii.
• So this isn't just a lie, it's a multi-layered, nuanced, Harvard Law School, Potemkin Village, alternate reality, supercallifragilsticexpialidocious, Krakatoa of a lie….an Obaman lie.
• All together now, to the tune of The Star Spangle Banner: "WHAT IF BUSH HAD SAID THIS?"

Blame Bush

Really. Bush should have bombed the Iranian nukes, as Cheney seems to have advocated, and worked to undermine a barbaric regime that's committed many acts of war against the US. Instead Bush's good nature told him to leave that decision to the next President, realizing the problem of inheriting a direct conflict with Iran. But a more cold-blooded thinker would have taken Obama at his and his associates' word and presumed that Obama would betray Israel. And so it came to pass. Blame Bush and blame the Jews who voted for Obama.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.