A Place to Stand

I started this blog in November 2004, actually on the 14th, by putting up Milosevic's opening "trial" speech , some previous stuff from another page & a set of 12 programme suggestions made in response to a radio request for ideas. These still fit pretty well with what I am pushing now & are largely still things the MSM won't discuss. Some years later Ms Riddoch used 1 of them, a discussion of why Ireland's economy is growing & gave me an on air acknowledgement.

Looking back virtually everything holds up. Things I got factually wrong - I thought the Sun must have had Mark Oaten's outing on file for years & used it as a deliberate spoiler & the climate hoax. Falling for the hoax is the only thing which got me mentioned on Australian media but by holding up my hands to it & following up on it redeemed myself - certainly, as I pointed out at the time, the MSM fall for much more obvious hoaxes & don't hold their hands up. On balance I'm sure it did much more to discredit alarmist hoaxers than real science. I have been wrong several times in trusting to politicians. I was enthusiastic for the SNP's alleged conversion to Irish style growth. While there are people in the party who sincerely want that, the leader & deputy are quite obviously not & nothing has been done. I also thought Gordon Brown had the capacity to be a really very good PM. However in both cases they could have been & it was their error not mine. Still it makes me more cynical about politicians. Out of about 1.300 posts, almost all of them saying something controversial, that isn't bad.

Beyond those, while there are very many things which I said which weren't politically correct then & still aren't I cannot see anything on which I was actually wrong & not even anything on which opinion has clearly moved against me.

And that is the purpose of this blog. "Give me a place to stand & I will move the world" said Archimedes & he had got the orbital mechanics right, but to do it you have to get your fulcrum right & pull for a long time without any measurable movement. But once you change an orbit even slightly it can take an entirely new direction.

There has certainly been movement on nuclear power (all parties were opposed when I started); Yugoslavia (progressives now tend to think our leaders were wrong & nobody is willing to defend it, merely to censor); commercial space & X-Prizes; global warming (now rebranded climate change since it isn't warming); eco-fascism generally; the media (we have seen the net growing as a general & trusted source of news & the MSM deservedly failing); even on growth Irish style while we have only seen Brown take 2% off corporation tax it has become a subject of limited public debate & the Conservatives are, sort of, promising more. Whether on the blog or newspaper letters or comments on other blogs like John Redwood, Iain Dale, Mark Wadsworth & Douglas Carswell I have helped is impossible to say. The fact that Scotland's politicians are the most Luddite in UK on nuclear & warming would suggest not but I am not sure they are representative. In the process I have been banned from C4 discussion board, the Guardian, Herald, Scotsman, Your Scotland board, Sun & alternative history board (the last called me a liar for saying the Dargodan Massacre & Dissections happened in a thread discussing an alternate Kosovo war). Probably the one thing I can definitely say I achieved myself (well with Steuart Campbell's help) was the coverage of SEPA's fraud in claiming to have found radium at Dalgety bay which they are no longer pushing & which has probably spun off into the more limited cover recently of a similar lie about Dounraey. My expulsion from the LibDems coincided with their high water mark, having just been the 2nd party in Scotland in votes & in government & widely seen as more competent than the leading Labour party. I think their collapse has been for the same reason as my expulsion - divesting themselves of all liberal principles - but no newspaper has been willing to report my expulsion so I can take little credit. Had the party gone up as much as they have gone down they would be looking at being the government shortly.

I am proudest of having the first & still almost only news coverage of the Dragodan Massacre & of making myself unwelcome on various papers by saying they should report NATO's dissections of living people to steal their body parts. Following that would mainly be the engineering & science stuff - radiation hormesis - the various Big Engineering items - X-Prizes & a foundation - stuff on the Multiverse - Ascension Island spaceport - Scottish Tunnel Project - nuclear pulse launches. These don't generate as much reaction as I would like but there is a significant amount of original stuff there & it can all change the world in a massive way.

Over the years readership has risen to about 7,000 a month. This is not much compared to Dan Hannan's 80,000 or Iain Dale's quarter of a million but that can be multiplied by comments on other blogs etc & I am doing something more eclectic. I rarely do breaking news & am more interested in stuff which will be important in 1,000 years than today's headlines. For example if humanity survives to then & we have not cybernetically enhanced ourselves so much that we no longer use language the question of whether the language spoken by humans in star systems 10s of light years away will be derived from English or Chinese is being settled today by space development, with few headlines & fewer sensible ones, probably in China's favour.

My biggest disappointments are the things which everybody informed knows are lies but still monopolise the press. Yugoslavia, global warming, anti-nuclear lies, AIDS etc. To choose 1 - radiation hormesis which is the fact that at low levels not only is radiation not harmful, as the normal theory supposes, but that it is beneficial. I first wrote about this in May 2004 before I started this blog (it is on the "earlier stuff" section) & in my naivety really thought I had found something little known which would revolutionise attitudes to nuclear power saying

there can no longer be any intellectual doubt whatsoever. Radioactivity, up to 50mSv, is good for us.

This is reminiscent of the time when Galileo turned his telescope to the skies & for all time disproved the, then politically correct though scientifically shaky, theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth. True the Pope of the time forced him to recant or be dealt with as heretics then were. True it took a long time to bury. However from the time of Galileo's observations the official theory was dead. Unlike normal life, in science the truth always wins in the end though sometimes the end can be a long time coming & much pain may be caused in the interim. This is because while opinions change repeatable science results remain the same - that is the nature of the universe.

The effect of this proof on our nuclear power industries can hardly be underestimated since with the collapse of the theory go most of the fears that have so crippled it.

I still believe that but the end is clearly decades away. I found out that (A) nobody in the media was remotely interested in reporting truths, however exciting & I consider this infinitely more exciting than duckponds, which the establishment has invested political capital in the falsehood; (B) that nobody running government scientific institutions was more than marginally interested & such interest as they had was to blow smoke across the results & change the subject (many individual scientists are interested); & (C) that this had been thoroughly proven at least 4 decades before.

Take that as an example of a general condition. Pournelle's Iron Law , that organisations without competition come to be run by corrupt parasites, applies to government institution including political parties & the allegedly free media. But that people chosen randomly average pretty decent, real scientists much moreso. That while we are being bombarded by false scare "hobgoblins" there are no real problems that we cannot solve. And that we have barely entered the Age of Progress.

Neil's Index

Labels: Errata, Fear, Science/technology