A Place to Stand

The Guardian, naturally enough, is full of publicity for the concerts to push the catastrophic global warming aka climate change scam. I have commented on 2 of them:
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First the minor one - But is such an event really the way to tackle climate change?

What a silly question. Of course it isn't. It is a way of propagandising without the risk of having to discuss the real facts.

We see the BBC publicising this show even to the extent of saying on BBC news last night "Al Gore is a climate scientist" while avoiding ever having to respond to calls for them to broadcast a public debate on the question. As they & Greenpeace who also refuse an call to discuss their Faith, know perfectly well when it was recently publicly debated before the great & good of New York the vote went heavily against this swindle.
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Then the one saying Gore should have chosen poor (& unknown) stars for this shindig:

"Raising awareness" is an example of politicians changing the word to conceal the reality - the word used to be "propagandising". Thus Adolf Hitler spent a lot of time "raising awareness" of the the Jewish problem. Of course his solution involved killing far fewer people than the "environmentalist" movement.

The author criticises Gore's choice of participants basically on the amount of money they have - a common fault among music superstars. He could perhaps have mentioned some other thing which they endorse.

Perhaps I may help Madonna to "raise awareness" of her vital contribution to human wellbeing by the assistance (& publicity) she has given to "Kaballah scientists" to produce magic water capable of, among many other things, neutralising radioactivity.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article614373.eceIt is sad to see that, under the influence of svengali Gore & an awful lot of free publicity, she has fallen from the heights of this immense scientific breakthrough to support palpable nonsense like catastrophic global warming.

Hope the weather stays warm for them.
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Finally lets finish with a bit of the wit & wisdom of Gore's top act, Madonna on her scientific breakthrough. She is presumably, in the eyes of the Guardian, BBC & rest of the media, a role model for how to treat science:

Madonna is said to have approached Downing Street, before being directed to the DTI.....But her campaign became bogged down by Whitehall bureaucracy. “It was a case of pass the parcel,” said the civil servant.

Ritchie, the film director, cold-called BNFL and wrote a series of letters accompanied by scientific papers. A panel of BNFL’s best scientists was tasked with looking into the proposal but could find no scientific basis for the claims.

The lobbying, which took place a few years ago, was part of a campaign by Madonna, who saw it as her mission to rid the world of nuclear waste. She made this clear in newspaper interviews at the time.

“I mean, one of the biggest problems that exists right now in the world is nuclear waste,” she said. “That’s something I’ve been involved with for a while with a group of scientists — finding a way to neutralise radiation, believe it or not.”

...“According to science we aren’t going to have a planet in about 50 years at the rate we’re going with nuclear waste.

“I can write the greatest songs and make the most fabulous films and be a fashion icon and conquer the world, but if there isn’t a world to conquer, what’s the point?

“I’ve just come to a place in my life where I’m trying to really see what the big picture is and where my energy is better spent, and that’s one area I’m really concerned about.”

The Kabbalah Centre is believed to have sponsored Oroz, a “23rd-century” research body in New York that heralded a “breakthrough” in neutralising radioactive waste.

Dr Artur Spokojny, the director of Oroz and a Kabbalah follower, is said to have developed a “revolutionary” decontamination agent called Orodyne, which can reportedly also treat gynaecological problems in cows and sheep.

Three years ago the research centre claimed it had experimented with the agent in Lake Glyboke near Chernobyl and had successfully decontaminated the water.

So nuclear waste is going to destroy the planet in 50 years while it will take 100 until, as the equally eminent government's chief science advisor, Sir David King says "Antarctica is the only habitable continent".

Letter to the BBC Director General
Dear Mark Thompson,
It was with some surprise that I heard BBC News state at 10.15 last night, as part of your promotion of the global warming concerts that "Al Gore is a climate scientist".

Mr Gore is many things.

He is a former US Vice President.

He is a war criminal who supported illegal war & genocide against Serbian Untermensch.

He is a tobacco heir.

He is a film star of an, at least partially, fictional work.

He is an Emmy award winner.

He is the recipient of money from the British government for showing this film to schoolchildren despite it being strictly illegal to do so without providing political balance.

He is man paid millions as an after dinner speaker on alleged global warming.

He is the owner of companies which will, for a price, provide you, or himself, with absolution for your alleged carbon sins by what is called offsetting.

He is somebody with an enormous "carbon footprint" partly due to his 26 room house with heated swimming pool & partly to jetting around the world to proclaim that ordinary people should not jet around the world.

He is someone who has publicly asserted that smoking is major cause of alleged global warming.

What he is not, under any circumstances, is a scientist, climate or otherwise.

If this is an error you will be able to publicly correct this on tonight's news.
If it is not it is deliberate dishonesty as part of the BBC's continuing campaign to promote catastrophic global warming (or as it is now less demandingly described "climate change") while censoring the fact that, since 1998, there has been none.
Faithfully
Neil Craig
PS If the BBC were really impartial on this subject you would, instead of devoting all your time to publicising Gore's current propaganda stunt, you would be willing to broadcast a public debate, like the recent New York one, on the subject.

I heard this mentioned on Radio Scotland yesterday morning (God knows how it slipped by) & looked for more on either the broadcast media or a Google news search.

the discovery of microscopic bits of organic matter retrieved from ice 1.2 miles beneath the surface indicates that the ice fields of southern Greenland may be more resilient to rising global temperatures than has been forecast. The DNA could have been preserved only if the ice layers remained largely intact.

A scenario often raised by global warming specialists is that Greenland's ice trove will turn liquid in the rising temperatures of coming decades, with hundreds of trillions of gallons of water spilling into the Atlantic. This could cause ocean levels worldwide to rise anywhere from 3 to 20 feet, according to computer projections -- bad news for seaport cities like Boston.

But the discovery of organic matter in ice dating from half-a-million years ago offers evidence that the Greenland ice shield remained frozen even during the earth's last "interglacial period" -- some 120,000 years ago -- when average temperatures were 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they are now. That's slightly higher than the average temperatures foreseen by most scientists for the end of this century, although some environmentalists warn it might get even hotter.

If the ice sheets aren't going to melt even at a temperature 5 degrees centigrade above current levels then the most serious part of the warming threat is completely broken.

That this can be buried at the bottom of a few papers & totally excluded from most is disgraceful but unsurprising.

Google News To be fair it is mentioned in the Guardian & Independent. To continue being fair this finding is buried even more effectively by them than by the Boston Globe.

Mrs Mason (60) has nominally been banned for teaching for a year by the General Teacher's Council but in practice that is a permanent firing. The GTC are clearly acting to preserve their power from the literal public gaze.

Angela Mason, 60, used a camera hidden in her handbag to record pupils misbehaving and disrupting the lessons she took while working as a supply teacher in London and north-east England. The film, made between late 2004 and early 2005, was screened in a Channel Five programme entitled Classroom Chaos.

The General Teaching Council ruled that Mrs Mason's public interest defence was not strong enough to justify a breach of trust to her pupils.

I love that line "breach of trust to her pupils"

The committee accepted that the motive behind the filming was to raise public awareness but said that did not justify "the breach of trust implicit in [her] actions, particularly as the deficiencies in her teaching and classroom management give a false impression of the realities".

The lie about who is defending the pupil's rights is shown by her remark

Mrs Mason said that it was known that a minority of pupils "blighted the opportunities of a generation". She had been punished for revealing that. "The GTC has done nothing to help pupils or parents by sanctioning me in this way."

The GTC is not, as one might expect, a public body accountable to anybody else. Should such a body be recognised by the authorities as having a right to bully anybody who wants the public to know the truth.

Welcome
The GTC is the professional body for teaching in England. Our overall purpose is to help improve standards of teaching and the quality of learning in the public interest. We work for children, through teachers.

According to their site. Hiding undisputed evidence that teaching is being made unnecessarily difficult is not in any way "improving standards" or "working for children.

Researching this I ran across

City council honors whistleblower teacher

From New Jersey.

For all the advertising mentality of American democracy it is better than rule by secretive corporatist vested interests here.

George Melly has just died which reminded me of one of the strangest stories to come out of the Irish troubles. As I remembered it he had reported that somebody had approached him in a bar & said that MI5 were seeking to kill him because he had been hired to plant bombs in Dublin to implicate the IRA & that they wanted to dispose of the witness. Shortly thereafter his murdered body was found. Thereafter it entirely disappeared from the media.

It seems memory was combining 2 events. The person Melly met was Kenneth Lennon. The people who said they had been hired to bomb Dublin were the Littlejohn brothers. The bombing in Dublin which was indeed blamed on the IRA though, somewhat unusually, they have always denied it, & did play a major part in persuading the southern government to cooperate against the IRA.

Kenneth Lennon was on the run when he wandered into Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London's Soho district one night earlier this month. He also was drunk. George Melly, a blues singer and former film critic for the Sunday Observer, had never seen him before, but Lennon insisted on buying Melly a brandy. "He seemed pretty frightened," Melly recalls, "but the fear was covered with drink, and drink had given him a certain courage."

Lennon told Melly that he had been an informer for Scotland Yard's Special Branch and had been responsible for sending to prison some friends who were sympathizers of the Irish Republican Army. "I am not getting protection," he muttered. "There are two lots after me, both lots." Melly suggested he tell his story to the National Council for Civil Liberties (N.C.C.L.), and Lennon left with what seemed at the time to be characteristic barroom bravado. Says Melly: "He told me that if I read in the papers that he had been found face down in a puddle, or maybe it was a ditch, I would know he was speaking the truth."

Four days later, Lennon's body was found in a Surrey ditch; he had been shot twice in the back of the head. Police said it looked like an I.R.A. execution. Before he died, Lennon had taken Melly's advice and gone to the N.C.C.L. For six hours the disheveled, unshaven Ulsterman spilled out an incredible story of how he had been blackmailed into becoming an informer on the I.R.A. for British intelligence. He was clearly afraid for his life, recalled Larry Grant, the council's senior legal officer, and feared not only that the vengeful I.R.A. would hunt him down but that "the Special Branch might try to kill him and make it look as though it were an Irish job......"

The case with the Littlejohn brothers was

Shortly before the Bill was due to be debated, bombs exploded at Liberty Hall and Sackville Place, killing two CIE workers and injuring scores of civilians. As word reached the Dail Chambers it was assumed the IRA were responsible. Consequently, Fine Gael abstained and the Bill was carried by 69 votes to 22. Significantly, in August 1973, shortly after the trial of the Littlejohn brothers who claimed to be operating in the Republic of Ireland as British agents, Taoiseach Jack Lynch is reported to have said that both he and the Irish Cabinet had a 'suspicion' that the 1972 bombs had been the work of British Intelligence.

They say that truth is the first casualty of war& it seems likely that some things worthy of LeCarre were going around 1973/4 which have been very actively kept out of or downplayed in the media. It works both ways, Pat Finucane is always claimed to have been merely an innocent lawyer defending the legal rights of IRA soldiers rather than a member of the IRA Army Council.

It may take longer to write the history of this than of bigger but arguably simpler conflicts like WW2 but I would like to think that someday somebody will write a genuine history of this conflict. Probably after everybody is dead & can't sue, or shoot.

The egg industry will not be allowed to show the iconic Go To Work On An Egg ads, which featured Tony Hancock, on TV to mark the 50th anniversary of the British Lion mark.

Eggs are not a food restricted under the new rules on advertising but, despite this, the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) has said the ads cannot be repeated because the concept of eating eggs every day goes against the principle of eating a varied diet.

Everything which is not compulsory will be made illegal.

Hat tip to Numberwatch

Stephen Salter today (letter 18th Jume) wrote that we do not need nuclear & should rely on renewables. May I remind him of the BBC's "Big Debate" on energy between the 2 sides - those who wanted increased renewables & a little nuclear & those who wanted renewables alone. He said that the lives of our current reactors at Hunterston & Torness could be extended for the indefinite future.

It appears he no longer thinks such an extension will be required. This is a fortunate coincidence since it is clear that Hunterston is indeed aging & we cannot rely on extending it.

In saying that nuclear is "not suitable for baseload", a problem he doesn't see in intermittent wind, he seems to be contradicting his fellow speaker in that debate, Nicol Stephen, who said "nuclear is the easy answer". Nicol, who explained his objection as being purely because, if allowed to work, the populace would never be prepared to spend all those billions on subsidising windmills. So which is it - not technologically suitable for the job or so good that it will mean government subsidy cannot be justified?
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Though my letter was unsurprisingly not published a very effective one from Steuart Campbell was:

Professor Stephen Salter claims that 10-20GW can be generated from tidal flows in the Pentland Firth (your report, 23 June), but this optimistic power level was not supported by a University of Edinburgh study last year. The Institute for Energy Systems, commissioned by the Scottish Executive, put the total available capacity from tidal plants at only 0.75GW within a total from all renewables in Scotland of about 6GW.

You report Prof Salter as acknowledging that the Firth is too far from London demand. However, it is even too far from the main Scottish demand centres in the Central Belt. Such a scheme is impracticable. Nor, due to its variability, is tidal generation reliable.

STEUART CAMPBELL, Dovecot Loan, Edinburgh

It greives me to say such things of a Professor of Engineering Design, who clearly is a genuine technologist, but it seems that the decades of political lobbying for ever more money for his Slater's Duck wavepower device has permanently addled his motivation. The Duck is a neat piece of engineering but, after 3 decades of trials it must be obvious that it will never be able to work without massive subsidy & probably never able to survive Scottish winters either.

HERE is a rather long (5 pages) debate on global warming I have had on the Our Scotland discussion group with alleged scientists. Chris on the opposing side put his case well but I am satisfied with the outcome.

From the memorandum from Merkel on how those in charge want to persuade us to go along with the new EU treaty or "tidying up exercise" as Bliar referred to it first time round. Then he accepted the demands from the Tories & Lib Dems for a referendum.

the importance of avoiding the impression which might be given by the symbolism and the title 'Constitution' that the nature of the Union is undergoing radical change. For them this also implies a return to the traditional method of treaty change through an amending treaty, as well a number of changes of terminology, not least the dropping of the title ‘Constitution’.

"Such an approach is not incompatible with the demand from those Member States which have already ratified, that as much of the substance of the Constitutional Treaty as possible should be preserved

Now thats what I call cynicism. Matched only by the apparent about face of the LibDems who no longer want to risk a referendum.

One interesting point is that the SNP were quite thoroughly in favour of a referendum then - indeed one which showed the results for Scotland separately from England. If they too don't do an about face then, with the Tories, there should be a majority for a referendum in Scotland on the notConstitution.

You will see that about half way through there stop being Scotsman comments. This is because I have been cut off by them for not supporting their proven racist lies against the Serbian "Untermensch".

6th June - By the light of the silvery Moon http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=884302007

Putin http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1449612.0.0.php
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2096397,00.html

Water privatisation http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1452777.0.0.php

Housing http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=888262007


Trump's golf course http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=895872007

Putin http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.1459936.0.0.php
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=902612007

Kidnappings http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=902562007

The poor don't need electricity http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/letters.cfm?id=901042007

Warming http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion.cfm?id=906412007

11th Kosovo http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=909722007

Scotland's economy http://www.theherald.co.uk/business/news/display.var.1460797.0.0.php?act=add#comments

Bringing war criminals to trial http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1463534.0.0.php
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/letters.cfm?id=913962007

Hunterston nuclear power stationhttp://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=915592007

War crimes http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=923372007
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/letters.cfm?id=934772007

Libel laws http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2007/06/labour-mp-wins-libel-case.html

Anti-Semitism http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2104440,00.html

Maglev http://www.sundayherald.com/business/businessnews/display.var.1477547.0.0.php

Housing http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/edward_pearce/2007/06/bricks_and_torpor.html
http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.1483312.0.0.php

BBC http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_cox/2007/06/biased_towards_bias.html

Nuclear store http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.1497174.0.0.php

Forth crossing http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/news/display.var.1503091.0.0.php

Statistical validity http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2115422,00.html

Illegal wars http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ian_williams/2007/06/what_weapons.html