It will never take off

(Payerne, Switzerland)

On the morning of the 8th July a solar plane piloted by André Borschberg and financed by billionaire Doctor Bertrand Piccard landed after a 26-hour flight. Through its 12,000 solar cells it had collected enough solar energy to fly all night, becoming the first plane to do so.

To quote directly from the website:

But we succeed! Not only in staying airborne right through the night, but in making our discourse credible.

At the sun came up, there were still several hours of energy reserves in the batteries. Yes, renewable energies and cleantechs can do the impossible! We were right to bet on our conviction.

It is no surprise that this plane has been designed, built and tested entirely with private money. Governments do not have that sort of money; nor can they justify such supposed extravagance at a time when people are losing their jobs and banks are putting people out of their homes. Not only that: billionaires can be entrepreneurs who develop systems like this and then make phenomenal amounts of money selling the idea to governments, but from the other angle it can be said that governments wait around for people with enough money to do what they can’t afford to do and then take the expertise off them. It is yet another form of taxation.

Neither will it be a surprise that this idea will never become commercial. Solar power, tidal power and wind power can all be harnessed in many more places than fossil fuels, simply to different degrees of efficiency depending on the geographical location, and even though coastal areas do belong to governments wind and sun belong to no-one. They do not exist in limited quantities under the land of states with smaller armies than the USA or the UK and will therefore not be coveted by greedy Western governments.

In short, without the incentive of making profitable wars Western governments will never allow this scheme to take off.

Supremely guilty

(Al Amarrah, Iraq)

This week the British Supreme Court ruled that British troops are not protected by human rights laws on the battlefield, concluding a case in which the family of a private who died of heatstroke argued that the government was responsible for protecting their troops in foreign wars.

An army is an organisation which is sponsored by a government to kill civilians in other countries. If you join an army you are declaring that you are prepared to go to another country and kill somebody you have never met before on the whim of a politician you have never met before either.

Armies are on a par with governments and organised religions as organisations that show the utmost disdain for human rights, but they are perhaps the most effective at actually suppressing those rights. The British army has trampled over the rights of millions of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan during the last decade, killing hundreds of thousands of them.

However, while it is difficult to summon any sympathy for a man who takes a gun to another country and kills a family in an unprovoked attack – whether the private who died of heatstroke did this or not is moot because individuals are complicit in the murders of a homogenous group – it is true that the ultimate responsibility for the welfare of the employees of the state lies with the state.

The faceless – and shameless – bureaucrats who send young men to a pointless and unjustifiable war should not be allowed to throw off the responsibility for the deaths of either their own soldiers or of the civilians murdered by their soldiers. They should be brought to justice for any deaths, be they from a bullet or from the heat of the desert.

The judges who fail to recognise this are as complicit in these deaths as the politicians and are guilty of perverting the idea of justice, and here the Supreme Court is supremely guilty.