Saturday, May 02, 2009
SWINE FLU - AN OPPORTUNITY
“We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities!” Walt Kelly
On one hand we have never been so susceptible to a major new disease. In previous ages it took months or even years for a disease to cross continents. Now with international air travel we see a Mexican flu strain appearing in Scotland & Australia within weeks of its first appearance in an isolated Mexican hamlet. In another way we are endangered because, unlike earlier generations, we have never known of plagues sweeping the country & killing 10 - 15 - even 30% of the entire population. Beyond that we have a serious problem that many antibiotics have been so widely used that the diseases have evolved past them & they are ceasing to work.
On the other hand we know how diseases spread & the world has the capacity to react fast & virtually anywhere in the world, quarantine, isolate & hunt down infectious disease.
It is a race between the geometric spread of disease & the intelligent directed research & hunting of it. A race where the margin between victory & defeat is very thin & unforgiving.
The important thing to know about a disease is how how & how fast it spreads - this is the disease vector. Anything that interferes with the vector slows or reverses its spread - hence the advice to wash hands, always use a handkerchief & Mexico's masks & closure of sports stadia. None of these will stop it dead but all cut its rate of spread.
If this flu strain, & flu is a particularly infectious disease, infects, on average, 2 people in 3-5 days then the number of people it gets in 90 days is 2 to power 23 =
8,388,608. If by quarantining, changing habits & even curing people it can be reduced to 0.9 people then the number of new cases after 3 months [0.9^23} is less than zero [0.09].
This is why, unlike all the eco-scares which ought to be denounced as fakes when they don't happen, disease scares ought to be treated very seriously even though, if we are lucky, deaths may be in the 10s rather than the millions. The margin between the 2 is very small & SARS, which is now treated with some amusement, could easily have got free & killed 10s of millions rather than hundreds.
That is why it would be wonderful if this strain were to prove a surmountable opportunity. We are unlikely to find a disease more infectious than flu. This strain seems relatively non-lethal, which makes sense since the most successful infections do not kill their hosts for the same reason that the most successful car thieves don't normally crash. The relatively high lethality rate in Mexico seems to contradict this but I am convinced this is because it is actually much more widespread there than acknowledged. The chances, out of a population of 108 million, of the honeymoon couple treated in Scotland, accidentally encountering a disease vector from 1 of only 1,600 officially acknowledged victims would be of the order of 100,000 to 1 against. The chances of it happening more than once to other tourists are very much longer.
However the good news is that, according to the very limited knowledge we actually have, only 2 people have caught the infection from these 2 & other cases inside Britain. That looks like we may keep the infection rate down to much below 1. If, with our knowledge of this strain improving day by day, not least because of our doctors at Monklands hospital, this rate can be achieved worldwide, particularly Mexico, it is theoretically possible this strain could be wiped out. I would give odds against that much success, but not long odds.
The major worry must be that flu is considerably more dangerous during the winter when all our immune systems are weaker & so that even if it is beaten back now it may come back in the winter. Even if it is eliminated in the rest of the world it may remain endemic in Mexico & developed countries, acting in their own interests, should be unstinting in helping Mexico fight it.
On the other hand if we surmount this the human race will have conquered the first of the eternal horsemen of the Apocalypse. We completely eliminated smallpox, but because it exists only in humans it was particularly vulnerable. We eliminated SARS but it was new to humans. To eliminate just 1 strain of flu would be knocking out the champion.
Lets hope this turns out to be a surmountable opportunity.
*We have also pretty nearly eliminated Famine & driven Death back by at least a generation. War still looks fearsome but it is the only horseman created by human beings.
On one hand we have never been so susceptible to a major new disease. In previous ages it took months or even years for a disease to cross continents. Now with international air travel we see a Mexican flu strain appearing in Scotland & Australia within weeks of its first appearance in an isolated Mexican hamlet. In another way we are endangered because, unlike earlier generations, we have never known of plagues sweeping the country & killing 10 - 15 - even 30% of the entire population. Beyond that we have a serious problem that many antibiotics have been so widely used that the diseases have evolved past them & they are ceasing to work.
On the other hand we know how diseases spread & the world has the capacity to react fast & virtually anywhere in the world, quarantine, isolate & hunt down infectious disease.
It is a race between the geometric spread of disease & the intelligent directed research & hunting of it. A race where the margin between victory & defeat is very thin & unforgiving.
The important thing to know about a disease is how how & how fast it spreads - this is the disease vector. Anything that interferes with the vector slows or reverses its spread - hence the advice to wash hands, always use a handkerchief & Mexico's masks & closure of sports stadia. None of these will stop it dead but all cut its rate of spread.
If this flu strain, & flu is a particularly infectious disease, infects, on average, 2 people in 3-5 days then the number of people it gets in 90 days is 2 to power 23 =
8,388,608. If by quarantining, changing habits & even curing people it can be reduced to 0.9 people then the number of new cases after 3 months [0.9^23} is less than zero [0.09].
This is why, unlike all the eco-scares which ought to be denounced as fakes when they don't happen, disease scares ought to be treated very seriously even though, if we are lucky, deaths may be in the 10s rather than the millions. The margin between the 2 is very small & SARS, which is now treated with some amusement, could easily have got free & killed 10s of millions rather than hundreds.
That is why it would be wonderful if this strain were to prove a surmountable opportunity. We are unlikely to find a disease more infectious than flu. This strain seems relatively non-lethal, which makes sense since the most successful infections do not kill their hosts for the same reason that the most successful car thieves don't normally crash. The relatively high lethality rate in Mexico seems to contradict this but I am convinced this is because it is actually much more widespread there than acknowledged. The chances, out of a population of 108 million, of the honeymoon couple treated in Scotland, accidentally encountering a disease vector from 1 of only 1,600 officially acknowledged victims would be of the order of 100,000 to 1 against. The chances of it happening more than once to other tourists are very much longer.
However the good news is that, according to the very limited knowledge we actually have, only 2 people have caught the infection from these 2 & other cases inside Britain. That looks like we may keep the infection rate down to much below 1. If, with our knowledge of this strain improving day by day, not least because of our doctors at Monklands hospital, this rate can be achieved worldwide, particularly Mexico, it is theoretically possible this strain could be wiped out. I would give odds against that much success, but not long odds.
The major worry must be that flu is considerably more dangerous during the winter when all our immune systems are weaker & so that even if it is beaten back now it may come back in the winter. Even if it is eliminated in the rest of the world it may remain endemic in Mexico & developed countries, acting in their own interests, should be unstinting in helping Mexico fight it.
On the other hand if we surmount this the human race will have conquered the first of the eternal horsemen of the Apocalypse. We completely eliminated smallpox, but because it exists only in humans it was particularly vulnerable. We eliminated SARS but it was new to humans. To eliminate just 1 strain of flu would be knocking out the champion.
Lets hope this turns out to be a surmountable opportunity.
*We have also pretty nearly eliminated Famine & driven Death back by at least a generation. War still looks fearsome but it is the only horseman created by human beings.
Friday, May 01, 2009
SHOULD THE NEW YORKER BE SUED FOR LYING?
An interesting example of the extension of legal action.
While I suspect Jared may well have been embellishing to reinforce a PC anthropological view this looks very much like an artificial suit about which the nominal plaintiff wouldn't have cared had he not been put up to it. To quote from Stinkyjournalism
So why am I interested in this nonsense? Well it strikes me there are 350,000 from Kosovo who were ethnically cleansed &/or had their relatives murdered. Ditto half the population of Sarajevo & about half a million from Croatia. Our governments did this, quite deliberately, on the basis of years of lies (eg that the Yugoslavs had killed anything up to 500,000 Albanian men in Kosovo - more than 100% of them - prior to NATO bombing) told by almost the entire western media & politicians.
If I were running the Serbian government or a large contingency fee lawyers firm in New York, London or Brussels I would be looking for some photogenic Serbian clients. If 750,000 people got $1 million apiece this would only be 30 times what various silly American women & their lawyers got in scam breast enlargement suits. Wouldn't it be good if, for once, the law was used to achieve justice for people who have really suffered?
Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.Obviously I know nothing about whether Diamond did actually deliberately "sex-up" the story which the tribesman told him & which he appears now to be claiming he sexed up in the first place. Obviously to do so would a dreadful thing if anthropology were were much od a science. On the other hand he wouldn't have been doing anything that Margaret Mead didn't do a 81 years ago or indeed somebody posing as Homer did in the Odyssey.
...The magazine's Web site describes the April 21, 2008, article as being about a New Guinea tribesman who avenged an uncle's slaying by a neighboring clan by killing his uncle's murderer. The summary didn't identify the tribesman.
The lawsuit was filed Monday in New York state Supreme Court.
While I suspect Jared may well have been embellishing to reinforce a PC anthropological view this looks very much like an artificial suit about which the nominal plaintiff wouldn't have cared had he not been put up to it. To quote from Stinkyjournalism
When Papua New Guinea researcher Michael Kigl, working with StinkyJournalism, went to Daniel Wemp’s Nipa home in the Southern Highlands, in July 2008 to ask him about The New Yorker article, he was shocked. Wemp had no idea that he or people he mentioned to Diamond in random stories about tribal warfare back in 2001-2002, would be publicly named, and worse, erroneously linked to heinous crimesso this guy looks like a cut out for these people & has suffered no real damage himself.
So why am I interested in this nonsense? Well it strikes me there are 350,000 from Kosovo who were ethnically cleansed &/or had their relatives murdered. Ditto half the population of Sarajevo & about half a million from Croatia. Our governments did this, quite deliberately, on the basis of years of lies (eg that the Yugoslavs had killed anything up to 500,000 Albanian men in Kosovo - more than 100% of them - prior to NATO bombing) told by almost the entire western media & politicians.
If I were running the Serbian government or a large contingency fee lawyers firm in New York, London or Brussels I would be looking for some photogenic Serbian clients. If 750,000 people got $1 million apiece this would only be 30 times what various silly American women & their lawyers got in scam breast enlargement suits. Wouldn't it be good if, for once, the law was used to achieve justice for people who have really suffered?
Thursday, April 30, 2009
ROUND UP OF UNPUBLISHED LETTERS
Once again we see it is impossible to get a factual letter published in the UK or US media on Yugoslacia. Goebbels would have approved.
21st April, Scotsman on NUCLEAR:
We are assured that nuclear power will not work because uranium is going to run out within decades (letter Tues., JB Elliot) & complains that it is impossible to get such "useful information" from those working in the industry but is only available from unnamed "independent research organisations." So it should be because it is rubbish. Uranium is more plentiful than silver & antimony & as plentiful as molybdenum so in the very small quantities needed there is no shortage. Indeed Professor Cohen of Pittsburgh proved, may years ago, that enough would be available from seawater alone to keep us going for billions of years & his figures have never been disputed. It hardly seems necessary to point out that Thorium, which can also be used, is 4 times more common.
The fact that the "information" from "environmentalists" has, time after time over decades, proven to be not even close to factual should give us pause.
6th April, Herald - Scottish Tunnel Project
Regarding discussion of Islay & its decline due to its remoteness. A millennium ago Islay was the capital of the Lordship of the Isles, an area as important in international trade as mainland Scotland. The reason for this was that the sea was the main communication system & Glasgow was closer, in sailing time, to Islay, than it was in walking time to Edinburgh.
There is an easy way to reverse this decline. The Norwegians have cut over 750 km of tunnels at an average cost of £7 million per km. The Scottish Tunnel Project is a proposal to do the same here. Tunnels from Gourock to Dunoon, under Loch Fyne & from Kintyre to Islay or possibly to Jura & then Islay are perfectly feasible. & would make the island about 70 miles from Glasgow. Treating Glasgow as the centre of the universe this would leave Islay more remote than Edinburgh, but only slightly so. Similar tunnels to Mull, the Hebrides, Northern ireland & the Isle of Man could be cut. So could one under the Forth if the politicos were not intent on spending billions on a bridge.
I can think of little which would do more to revitalise the entire Scottish economy which is the objective, or at least the declared objective, of most political parties.
31st March - entire media, US & UK keeps censoring genocide (resent 11th April after BBC report):
It is not often that the first anniversary of the publication of a bureaucrat's biography deserves discussion, however this is one. A year ago Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal published her biography. In it she confirmed having, 8 years previously, investigated reports from western journalists that NATO "police," formerly known as the KLA, had kidnapped & dissected, while still alive, at least 1,300 Serb teenagers & that the presumably 10s of thousands of body parts had been flown out of Tirana airports to western destinations. Her team had indeed found a building where 300 of these murders took place together with forensic evidence proving this atrocity. Then she stopped the investigation.
Since then there have been further investigations proving that such dissections were more extensive than thought & still going on. The EU even appointed a lawyer to look into the matter.
Over the last year we have seen leader writers & front page articles denouncing the Chinese government for their "heavy handed" breaking up of riots in Tibet in which less than 2 dozen died, most of them ethnic Chinese. We have seen headlines & denunciations of Russia's action which prevented a Georgian attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the entire South Ossetian population. We have seen massive reporting of the Israeli war against Hammers in which about 800 people died, overwhelmingly Hammers combatants.
How shameful that atrocities worse in numbers, infinitely worse in cruelty & forming only a part of the crimes carried out under NATO authority have gone virtually entirely unreported by British Press & broadcasters.
References Del Ponte's initial report http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Subsequent investigation http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/dcn100108.htm
PS Its OK I don't expect you to publish this. The only paper to publish even one previous letter on the subject was the Scotsman. The late Josef Goebbels managed a similar level, of censorship but then he could send journalists to concentration camps. How fortunate that today's journalists are sufficiently sensitive not to such threats to prevent them reporting.
27th march, Scotsman on MAJOR PARIIES' COMPLICI IN NAZI WAR CRIMES:
The public are told to ask BNP candidates about WW2 (Hutchen's letter Fri). Should we expect candidates for the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties, guilty of a more recent criminal war, fought largely by bombing Yugoslav civilians for the purpose of helping a KLA with Nazi antecedents openly engaged in genocide, to say why they favour such practices? Under NATO rule the KLA, enrolled as "police," have been responsible for massacres, such as Dragodan where 210 unarmed civilians were killed a few hundred yards from our HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap & sale to western brothels of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls; & the dissection while still alive, of thousands of Serb teens to sell the parts to our hospitals. A|ll of these are matters of public record, though the dissections only became so when NATO Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte made them public a year ago. The refusal of these parties to answer such questions is matched only by the refusal of our media to report them. I do not think that any member of the BNP need feel any shame in the presence of members of parties who commit such atrocities.
20th March my previouc how to end recession letter retreaded. Still no UK paper is willing to publish any letter fiving a real solution.
19th March. This went out to all & sundry & was published in the Daily Record (I found a number of other letters i had sent listed there):
Since the will of the people is paramount lets have a referendum on the ban on smoking in pubs. If the SNP really believe such things are proof of democracy they can have no problem with this. Though the political elite were united on this bit of onanism polls showed that as much as 80% of us were against it. I suspect the turnout would be comparable with that for Holyrood & far better than for council or EU elections.
California has plebiscites on issues which a sufficiently large number of people can put on the ballot. I think that would improve democracy here & is certainly something the SNP should support if their position on a referendum is as principled as they say.
17th Mar on GLOBAL NON-WARMING:
It is quite wrong to talk of "faster-than-expected Arctic melt, higher-than-anticipated sea levels and much-reduced efficiency of carbon sinks" al William Ross does (let Tues). The fact is that we have had the coldest winter for 20 years, Arctic ice was much more extensive this winter than it has been for 20 years & Antarctic ice has always been increasing, sea levels are not rising significantly faster than they have for the last 10,000 years & the CO2 absorbing properties of water are the same as they have always been whereas forests worldwide, the other carbon sink, are expanding faster worldwide than they are contracting.
After all these ridiculous scare stories his reassuring assertion that all this global warming will only cost 1-2% of GNP is rather like telling a lobster that the water is only warming a little bit. Over the last 40 years GNP growth in western countries has been at least 1 1/2% less than it could have been because of eco-nannying, an effect clearly not seen in China. That means we would all be more than 80% better off without their care & attention & all the many previous scare stories, such as peak oil & an ice age before 2000. Promises that "this won't hurt next time" & are "good for you" ring hollow because we know they weren't true preciously.
14th March - letter to UK papers on quangos & fakecharities funding mainstream political parties (well the LibDems)
9th Mar to Glasgow newspapers:
Stephen Purcell is getting in with the public employees who make up the overwhelming bulk activists in a Labour party who once claimed to represent the entire working class. The claim that this can be paid for simply by asking the council workers to turn up for their jobs is clearly nonsense. It would work only if they were going to cut the number of employees on the assumption that them actually being there would make up for it. There is no intention to cut employees therefore either council tax will go up or services to Glaswegians will be reduced. My bet is on the latter since they have already signed up to an agreement with Holyrood not to raise charges.
It is an example of Pournelle's law that the purpose of government is to pay government workers and their allies & that their official job takes, at best, 2nd place.
This is particularly disgusting when ordinary people are losing their jobs & seeing their pension funds eroded in great numbers while those with the party clout not only keep their jobs & padded state funded pensions but are getting raises.
All the claim that this can be funded by a crackdown in absenteeism proves is how grossly padded with lazy but unsackable parasites our public "services" are. At a time when government spending is passing 50% of UK GNP & 60% of Scotland's such behaviour will ensure that the current recession goes on forever
6th mar to the Herald:
In considering the threat of fascism & its relationship to the BNP (Gordon McNeill's letter Friday)it is worth pointing out that the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties participated in the civilian bombing of Yugoslavia to promote a KLA known by them to be carrying out genocide in an attempt to recreate Adolf Hitler's final solution to the Yugoslav problem. Subsequently these politicians provided the KLA with police uniforms & sent them out to carry out massacres, such as Dragodan, the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people & to fund these horrors by kidnapping & selling 10s of thousands of schoolgirls to western brothels & by kidnapping thousands of Serb teenagers, dissecting them while still alive & flying the body parts to western hospitals.
Since the BNP opposed that war, let alone the atrocities our "police" carried out I do not think it can honestly be claimed that all 12,000 BNP members put together have been as responsible for Nazi atrocities as each single loyal Labour, Lib Dem or Conservative MP is personally. I think the BNP are owed an apology for the comparison.
I am not a BNP supporter & would be concerned, if they ever gained power, that they might control the media to an extent where such obscenities might not receive the unanimous front page coverage that they would in any free & honest media.
2nd Mar to all & sundry MILOSEVIC "TRIAL":
The NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.
While there have been widespread expressions of doubt that the Iraq War was legal under international law the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia has not been questioned by an alleged War crimes court set up up specificly to bring those who broke international law to justice. That war was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the British Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. The fact that the "court" is being funded by the states which committed that breach of international law may account for its refusal to prosecute its paymasters.
The history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior NATO politician would indeed be far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.
Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.
If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world those who have participated in war crimes 7 genocide must be brought to trial - & that does not just mean those who weren't obeying (let alone giving) orders from America or NATO
27th Feb to all & sundry on NATO WAR CRIMES:
One explanation fitting Jack Straw's decision that the public should not know of the Cabinet's discussions preceding the Iraq war is that politicians everywhere are becoming more concerned that they may, in future, be held to account for apparent war crimes.
Coincidentally the NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.
This concern for future justice may also explain why, though our government made public the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the Iraq War they have refused to make public advice on the legality of whether the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia was lawful or criminal. It was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. Indeed the government have refused even to say whether they ever bothered to seek such advice which must raise suspicions that they already knew it was criminal.
In any case the history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior British politician would indeed by far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.
Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.
If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world we all desperately need the sort of international courts Mr Straw & co so fear.
References
Rifampicine in Milosevic's blood test http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20060601&articleId=2542
Response to FoI request on he government's legal advice on whether the war was legal http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2005/04/was-war-against-yugoslavia-legal.html
Foreign Secretary's statement to Parliament that the KLA, not the Yugoslavs were engaged inn genocide http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990118/debtext/90118-06.htm
Our atrocities in Kosovo http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/search?q=dragodan & http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Fikret Abdic http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j072001.html
21st April, Scotsman on NUCLEAR:
We are assured that nuclear power will not work because uranium is going to run out within decades (letter Tues., JB Elliot) & complains that it is impossible to get such "useful information" from those working in the industry but is only available from unnamed "independent research organisations." So it should be because it is rubbish. Uranium is more plentiful than silver & antimony & as plentiful as molybdenum so in the very small quantities needed there is no shortage. Indeed Professor Cohen of Pittsburgh proved, may years ago, that enough would be available from seawater alone to keep us going for billions of years & his figures have never been disputed. It hardly seems necessary to point out that Thorium, which can also be used, is 4 times more common.
The fact that the "information" from "environmentalists" has, time after time over decades, proven to be not even close to factual should give us pause.
6th April, Herald - Scottish Tunnel Project
Regarding discussion of Islay & its decline due to its remoteness. A millennium ago Islay was the capital of the Lordship of the Isles, an area as important in international trade as mainland Scotland. The reason for this was that the sea was the main communication system & Glasgow was closer, in sailing time, to Islay, than it was in walking time to Edinburgh.
There is an easy way to reverse this decline. The Norwegians have cut over 750 km of tunnels at an average cost of £7 million per km. The Scottish Tunnel Project is a proposal to do the same here. Tunnels from Gourock to Dunoon, under Loch Fyne & from Kintyre to Islay or possibly to Jura & then Islay are perfectly feasible. & would make the island about 70 miles from Glasgow. Treating Glasgow as the centre of the universe this would leave Islay more remote than Edinburgh, but only slightly so. Similar tunnels to Mull, the Hebrides, Northern ireland & the Isle of Man could be cut. So could one under the Forth if the politicos were not intent on spending billions on a bridge.
I can think of little which would do more to revitalise the entire Scottish economy which is the objective, or at least the declared objective, of most political parties.
31st March - entire media, US & UK keeps censoring genocide (resent 11th April after BBC report):
It is not often that the first anniversary of the publication of a bureaucrat's biography deserves discussion, however this is one. A year ago Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal published her biography. In it she confirmed having, 8 years previously, investigated reports from western journalists that NATO "police," formerly known as the KLA, had kidnapped & dissected, while still alive, at least 1,300 Serb teenagers & that the presumably 10s of thousands of body parts had been flown out of Tirana airports to western destinations. Her team had indeed found a building where 300 of these murders took place together with forensic evidence proving this atrocity. Then she stopped the investigation.
Since then there have been further investigations proving that such dissections were more extensive than thought & still going on. The EU even appointed a lawyer to look into the matter.
Over the last year we have seen leader writers & front page articles denouncing the Chinese government for their "heavy handed" breaking up of riots in Tibet in which less than 2 dozen died, most of them ethnic Chinese. We have seen headlines & denunciations of Russia's action which prevented a Georgian attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the entire South Ossetian population. We have seen massive reporting of the Israeli war against Hammers in which about 800 people died, overwhelmingly Hammers combatants.
How shameful that atrocities worse in numbers, infinitely worse in cruelty & forming only a part of the crimes carried out under NATO authority have gone virtually entirely unreported by British Press & broadcasters.
References Del Ponte's initial report http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Subsequent investigation http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/dcn100108.htm
PS Its OK I don't expect you to publish this. The only paper to publish even one previous letter on the subject was the Scotsman. The late Josef Goebbels managed a similar level, of censorship but then he could send journalists to concentration camps. How fortunate that today's journalists are sufficiently sensitive not to such threats to prevent them reporting.
27th march, Scotsman on MAJOR PARIIES' COMPLICI IN NAZI WAR CRIMES:
The public are told to ask BNP candidates about WW2 (Hutchen's letter Fri). Should we expect candidates for the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties, guilty of a more recent criminal war, fought largely by bombing Yugoslav civilians for the purpose of helping a KLA with Nazi antecedents openly engaged in genocide, to say why they favour such practices? Under NATO rule the KLA, enrolled as "police," have been responsible for massacres, such as Dragodan where 210 unarmed civilians were killed a few hundred yards from our HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap & sale to western brothels of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls; & the dissection while still alive, of thousands of Serb teens to sell the parts to our hospitals. A|ll of these are matters of public record, though the dissections only became so when NATO Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte made them public a year ago. The refusal of these parties to answer such questions is matched only by the refusal of our media to report them. I do not think that any member of the BNP need feel any shame in the presence of members of parties who commit such atrocities.
20th March my previouc how to end recession letter retreaded. Still no UK paper is willing to publish any letter fiving a real solution.
19th March. This went out to all & sundry & was published in the Daily Record (I found a number of other letters i had sent listed there):
Since the will of the people is paramount lets have a referendum on the ban on smoking in pubs. If the SNP really believe such things are proof of democracy they can have no problem with this. Though the political elite were united on this bit of onanism polls showed that as much as 80% of us were against it. I suspect the turnout would be comparable with that for Holyrood & far better than for council or EU elections.
California has plebiscites on issues which a sufficiently large number of people can put on the ballot. I think that would improve democracy here & is certainly something the SNP should support if their position on a referendum is as principled as they say.
17th Mar on GLOBAL NON-WARMING:
It is quite wrong to talk of "faster-than-expected Arctic melt, higher-than-anticipated sea levels and much-reduced efficiency of carbon sinks" al William Ross does (let Tues). The fact is that we have had the coldest winter for 20 years, Arctic ice was much more extensive this winter than it has been for 20 years & Antarctic ice has always been increasing, sea levels are not rising significantly faster than they have for the last 10,000 years & the CO2 absorbing properties of water are the same as they have always been whereas forests worldwide, the other carbon sink, are expanding faster worldwide than they are contracting.
After all these ridiculous scare stories his reassuring assertion that all this global warming will only cost 1-2% of GNP is rather like telling a lobster that the water is only warming a little bit. Over the last 40 years GNP growth in western countries has been at least 1 1/2% less than it could have been because of eco-nannying, an effect clearly not seen in China. That means we would all be more than 80% better off without their care & attention & all the many previous scare stories, such as peak oil & an ice age before 2000. Promises that "this won't hurt next time" & are "good for you" ring hollow because we know they weren't true preciously.
14th March - letter to UK papers on quangos & fakecharities funding mainstream political parties (well the LibDems)
9th Mar to Glasgow newspapers:
Stephen Purcell is getting in with the public employees who make up the overwhelming bulk activists in a Labour party who once claimed to represent the entire working class. The claim that this can be paid for simply by asking the council workers to turn up for their jobs is clearly nonsense. It would work only if they were going to cut the number of employees on the assumption that them actually being there would make up for it. There is no intention to cut employees therefore either council tax will go up or services to Glaswegians will be reduced. My bet is on the latter since they have already signed up to an agreement with Holyrood not to raise charges.
It is an example of Pournelle's law that the purpose of government is to pay government workers and their allies & that their official job takes, at best, 2nd place.
This is particularly disgusting when ordinary people are losing their jobs & seeing their pension funds eroded in great numbers while those with the party clout not only keep their jobs & padded state funded pensions but are getting raises.
All the claim that this can be funded by a crackdown in absenteeism proves is how grossly padded with lazy but unsackable parasites our public "services" are. At a time when government spending is passing 50% of UK GNP & 60% of Scotland's such behaviour will ensure that the current recession goes on forever
6th mar to the Herald:
In considering the threat of fascism & its relationship to the BNP (Gordon McNeill's letter Friday)it is worth pointing out that the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties participated in the civilian bombing of Yugoslavia to promote a KLA known by them to be carrying out genocide in an attempt to recreate Adolf Hitler's final solution to the Yugoslav problem. Subsequently these politicians provided the KLA with police uniforms & sent them out to carry out massacres, such as Dragodan, the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people & to fund these horrors by kidnapping & selling 10s of thousands of schoolgirls to western brothels & by kidnapping thousands of Serb teenagers, dissecting them while still alive & flying the body parts to western hospitals.
Since the BNP opposed that war, let alone the atrocities our "police" carried out I do not think it can honestly be claimed that all 12,000 BNP members put together have been as responsible for Nazi atrocities as each single loyal Labour, Lib Dem or Conservative MP is personally. I think the BNP are owed an apology for the comparison.
I am not a BNP supporter & would be concerned, if they ever gained power, that they might control the media to an extent where such obscenities might not receive the unanimous front page coverage that they would in any free & honest media.
2nd Mar to all & sundry MILOSEVIC "TRIAL":
The NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.
While there have been widespread expressions of doubt that the Iraq War was legal under international law the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia has not been questioned by an alleged War crimes court set up up specificly to bring those who broke international law to justice. That war was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the British Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. The fact that the "court" is being funded by the states which committed that breach of international law may account for its refusal to prosecute its paymasters.
The history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior NATO politician would indeed be far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.
Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.
If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world those who have participated in war crimes 7 genocide must be brought to trial - & that does not just mean those who weren't obeying (let alone giving) orders from America or NATO
27th Feb to all & sundry on NATO WAR CRIMES:
One explanation fitting Jack Straw's decision that the public should not know of the Cabinet's discussions preceding the Iraq war is that politicians everywhere are becoming more concerned that they may, in future, be held to account for apparent war crimes.
Coincidentally the NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.
This concern for future justice may also explain why, though our government made public the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the Iraq War they have refused to make public advice on the legality of whether the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia was lawful or criminal. It was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. Indeed the government have refused even to say whether they ever bothered to seek such advice which must raise suspicions that they already knew it was criminal.
In any case the history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior British politician would indeed by far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.
Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.
If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world we all desperately need the sort of international courts Mr Straw & co so fear.
References
Rifampicine in Milosevic's blood test http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20060601&articleId=2542
Response to FoI request on he government's legal advice on whether the war was legal http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2005/04/was-war-against-yugoslavia-legal.html
Foreign Secretary's statement to Parliament that the KLA, not the Yugoslavs were engaged inn genocide http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990118/debtext/90118-06.htm
Our atrocities in Kosovo http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/search?q=dragodan & http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Fikret Abdic http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j072001.html
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
BIG ENGINEERING 32 LASER LAUNCHING
If you want really cheap orbital launching & we can't yet hang a 36,000 km cable without expecting it to break we have laser launching. A laser launcher beams power, usually suggested in a pulsed beam at the back of the "rocket" which vapourises propellant (water/ice( to provide push. We probably only want this for transporting cargo because of high acceleration & the large amounts of power needed for craft carrying people.
To achieve the sort of accelerations needed for Earth-to-orbit, you need about a megawatt per kilogram. So long as you restrain yourself to small cargo launches, say 50kg and under, that kind of laser power is no big deal. (Note that a laser launcher does not use photon thrust -- it uses beamed power to heat rocket propellant.)...the whole point of the
exercise is that the heavy hardware gets to stay on the ground where power
is cheap and weight is unimportant
Theoretically, once the lasers & launch vehicles are built we could be getting stuff to orbit for little more than electricity costs - cheaper than we get fruit air transported from Africa (where investment in airfields & much of the cost of planes has also long since been repaid).
A large X-Prize for getting something up this way or a government guarantee to purchase a set amount of flight time, or a mixture of the 2 should do it.
Thanks to Next Big Future for the illustration & more ideas.
American Institute of Beamed Energy site
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
CLIMATE CHANGE - WHEN IT ISN'T WARMING
The next sunspot cycle still hasn't started
There is no let up in new research findings and news reports about the extraordinary behaviour of our sun... Solar researchers are readily admitting that they do not understand the mechanisms and dynamics that drive solar variability. Nor are they able to predict the timing and the climatic effects of the next solar cycles.
...Solar scientists have been monitoring the sun's activity for many years in an attempt to establish whether or not its variability is correlated with terrestrial temperature changes. Interestingly, the sun was more active during much of the 20th century than it was for the last 1000 years. Yet, as long as the terrestrial warming trend persisted, this discovery was routinely rejected as wholly insignificant.
Now, however, the sun's cyclical behaviour has gone into reverse. And, coinciding with its exceptional inactivity, temperatures around the world have actually begun to stall, if not to drop slightly. The arrest of the warming trend of the late 20th century at a time that solar activity is exceptionally low again raises the key question of climate science: has our star perhaps a much more dominant effect on climate change than is generally assumed?
... There is no doubt, however, that a growing number of scientists are concerned that the next two or three solar cycles may coincide with low solar activity comparable to previous solar minima.
Benny Peiser (via CCNet)
In 2004, NASA scientists started looking forward to a new solar minimum. In 2005, it began. At this time most scientists expected the new solar cycle 24 to begin in late 2006 or early 2007 with a following ramp up in solar activity.
But 2006 and 2007, according to NASA data, passed without any sign of a new solar cycle. During this time, the sun remained unusually quiet. Then, in early 2008, scientists finally found what they were waiting for -- a single sunspot with a reversed magnetic polarity. As a switch in magnetic polarity usually presages an increase in sunspot activity building up to a new solar maximum, scientists around the world proclaimed the new solar cycle had finally begun.
That was written in early 2008. The Sun is still blank & global temperatures still falling. This is so serious that even the MSM are starting to notice, though I reported it long ago. Now I am not trying to ramp up another scare but it is going to get colder. Normally the coldest part of the year is after the shortest day & in the same way we should expect the coldest planet to be some time after the next sunspot cycle starts. The recovery will take as long from the minimum point as to it & all we know is that we are still some way from the low point. When that will be my guess which is as good as yours & almost as good as the astronomers though some of whom were saying this some years ago
Are we heading for a cold spell - Yes.
Are we heading for something like the most stunning interruption on record in the normal pattern of sunspots occurred between the 1640s and about 1715, when the sequence of cycles came to a halt. As sunspots disappeared, the temperature fell: the winter scenes that Brueghel painted so beautifully captured the intensity of cold that Europeans experienced. So did the lines of diarists recalling skating on the Thames. In fact, the river froze hard enough for Londoners to go skating on 14 occasions during that period - Well probably not but only probably.
Are we heading for something much worse - Well very probably not this decade but "Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years" & the last one ended about 9,700 BC so only very probably not this decade & odds must be quite high for sometime this millenium.
Whether warming is a good thing or not can be argued either way, at least if it had got above historic records - if it was only of the 2 degrees of the Roman times history shows it would be a good thing.
There is no debate that cooling would be anything but bad.
What we desperately need is to have a spacegoing civilisation with the capacity, over decades, to produce thousands of square miles of orbital mirrors. That would do it since even the ice age scenario only involves much less than a 1% reduction in solar energy. But such a civilisation will take decades. Will we see the same sort of media campaign to make us spend billions on a fake warming scam as on a real, if hopefully much less hysterical, worry about cooling.
There is no let up in new research findings and news reports about the extraordinary behaviour of our sun... Solar researchers are readily admitting that they do not understand the mechanisms and dynamics that drive solar variability. Nor are they able to predict the timing and the climatic effects of the next solar cycles.
...Solar scientists have been monitoring the sun's activity for many years in an attempt to establish whether or not its variability is correlated with terrestrial temperature changes. Interestingly, the sun was more active during much of the 20th century than it was for the last 1000 years. Yet, as long as the terrestrial warming trend persisted, this discovery was routinely rejected as wholly insignificant.
Now, however, the sun's cyclical behaviour has gone into reverse. And, coinciding with its exceptional inactivity, temperatures around the world have actually begun to stall, if not to drop slightly. The arrest of the warming trend of the late 20th century at a time that solar activity is exceptionally low again raises the key question of climate science: has our star perhaps a much more dominant effect on climate change than is generally assumed?
... There is no doubt, however, that a growing number of scientists are concerned that the next two or three solar cycles may coincide with low solar activity comparable to previous solar minima.
Benny Peiser (via CCNet)
In 2004, NASA scientists started looking forward to a new solar minimum. In 2005, it began. At this time most scientists expected the new solar cycle 24 to begin in late 2006 or early 2007 with a following ramp up in solar activity.
But 2006 and 2007, according to NASA data, passed without any sign of a new solar cycle. During this time, the sun remained unusually quiet. Then, in early 2008, scientists finally found what they were waiting for -- a single sunspot with a reversed magnetic polarity. As a switch in magnetic polarity usually presages an increase in sunspot activity building up to a new solar maximum, scientists around the world proclaimed the new solar cycle had finally begun.
That was written in early 2008. The Sun is still blank & global temperatures still falling. This is so serious that even the MSM are starting to notice, though I reported it long ago. Now I am not trying to ramp up another scare but it is going to get colder. Normally the coldest part of the year is after the shortest day & in the same way we should expect the coldest planet to be some time after the next sunspot cycle starts. The recovery will take as long from the minimum point as to it & all we know is that we are still some way from the low point. When that will be my guess which is as good as yours & almost as good as the astronomers though some of whom were saying this some years ago
a long period of cool climate with its coldest phase around 2030 is to be expected. It is shown that minima in the secular Gleissberg cycle of solar activity, coinciding with periods of cool climate on Earth, are consistently linked to an 83-year cycle in the change of the rotary force driving the sun's oscillatory motion about the centre of mass of the solar system. As the future course of this cycle and its amplitudes can be computed, it can be seen that the Gleissberg minimum around 2030 and another one around 2200 will be of the Maunder minimum type accompanied by severe cooling on Earth. This forecast should prove 'skillful' as other long-range forecasts of climate phenomena, based on cycles in the sun's orbital motion, have turned out correct, as for instance the prediction of the last three El Niños years before the respective event.
Landscheidt T. (2003): New Little Ice Age Instead of Global Warming? Energy & Environment, Volume 14, Numbers 2-3, 1 May 2003, pp. 327-350(24)
Are we heading for a cold spell - Yes.
Are we heading for something like the most stunning interruption on record in the normal pattern of sunspots occurred between the 1640s and about 1715, when the sequence of cycles came to a halt. As sunspots disappeared, the temperature fell: the winter scenes that Brueghel painted so beautifully captured the intensity of cold that Europeans experienced. So did the lines of diarists recalling skating on the Thames. In fact, the river froze hard enough for Londoners to go skating on 14 occasions during that period - Well probably not but only probably.
Are we heading for something much worse - Well very probably not this decade but "Ice cores, ocean sediment cores, the geologic record, and studies of ancient plant and animal populations all demonstrate a regular cyclic pattern of Ice Age glacial maximums which each last about 100,000 years, separated by intervening warm interglacials, each lasting about 12,000 years" & the last one ended about 9,700 BC so only very probably not this decade & odds must be quite high for sometime this millenium.
Whether warming is a good thing or not can be argued either way, at least if it had got above historic records - if it was only of the 2 degrees of the Roman times history shows it would be a good thing.
There is no debate that cooling would be anything but bad.
What we desperately need is to have a spacegoing civilisation with the capacity, over decades, to produce thousands of square miles of orbital mirrors. That would do it since even the ice age scenario only involves much less than a 1% reduction in solar energy. But such a civilisation will take decades. Will we see the same sort of media campaign to make us spend billions on a fake warming scam as on a real, if hopefully much less hysterical, worry about cooling.
Monday, April 27, 2009
YOU CAN SELL AT ALMOST ANY PRICE IF YOU HAVE A SOCIAL AWARENESS PROGRAMME & DISABILITY LIFT
This is a comment somebody put on a thread Douglas Carswell, a Conservative MP with ideas, was doing about the costs of public contracts. It makes it easier to understand why public works are 13 times as expensive as they should be. It also reminds me of one of the very few motions at LibDem conference of which I have actually expressed enthusiastic support. It was to make it easier for small businesses to tender for council contracts & was put up by Antonia Swinson, one of the few people in the party with ideas. It was passed but whether a blind bit of notice of the it becoming officially policy was ever taken of it is a different matter.
Not new - A jobber from Vermont, Jim Fisk by name, during the American civil War "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask."
Fisk had sold a stock of blankets to the War Department at prices three times what the Vermont factory had expected.
My highly successful localised Internet business has been going 10 years now. The ONLY customer we haven't signed up is the local council.
Last year they spent £200,000 on the service we could provide for £5000. The tender documents insisted that we had to be ISO accredited, have a zero carbon certificate, a diversified workforce, disability lifts in our 3rd floor offices, fully documented social awareness programmes, Investors in People certification and full training and development plans.
There are 3 employees in my business ( which includes me).
Not new - A jobber from Vermont, Jim Fisk by name, during the American civil War "You can sell anything to the government at almost any price you've got the guts to ask."
Fisk had sold a stock of blankets to the War Department at prices three times what the Vermont factory had expected.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
CUTTING ROAD SPEED "TO IMPROVE SAFETY"
Proposals to bring down speed limits in areas of Britain where there is a higher risk of accidents have been announced by the government.Are they or are they just a new way of nannying, combined with the eco-fascist agenda of doing absolutely anything to prevent people driving & almost anything to damage the economy. Cutting road speed that much in cities would certainly slow goods deliveries fairly proportionately that would put up costs of any delivered goods a bit in turn.
Reductions from 30mph to 20mph in urban locations and 60mph to 50mph in the countryside are being considered.
Road safety minister Jim Fitzpatrick said the way people learn to drive and are tested is also set for reform.
The plans are part of a new strategy to reduce road deaths in England, Scotland and Wales by one-third by 2020.
So lets look at the facts:
Road deaths in Britain - The total number of deaths in road accidents fell by 7 per cent to 2,946 in 2007 from 3,172 in 2006. However, the number of fatalities has remained fairly constant over the last ten years.
Death rate in Britain - 10.05 per 1,000 = 610,000
Which correlates to 0.52%.
In a week that that is the equivalent of 52 minutes. Don't have figures for it but I suspect the average person, even including retired, unemployed & pre-schoolers spend pretty much that length of time in transport every working day.
By that standard the roads are very much safer than most other places. The most dangerous place is the home which is why you should move in with your neighbours ;-)
If this was really in any way about saving lives government could do far better by fighting MRSA in hospitals or doing something about the 24,000 who die annually of fuel poverty because the same nannyists & "environmentalists" say we aren't allowed nuclear plants.
See this amusing letter for proof that the link between speed & accidents is being artificially linkedin government statistics.
