Friday, May 29, 2009
DALGETY BAY - PRESS & JOURNAL LETTER
This letter & also a press release went out to all & sundry across the UK press & broadcasters. I later got an acknowledgement from Channel 5 for the release which suggests they at least thought about it & a phone call form Aberdeen's PRESS & JOURNAL just to check I was who I said I was. It is in today unedited (the online edition is missing a sentence but is in the paper version. I don't know if it is anywhere else. I am pleased that "scientific illiteracy" among others wasn't edited into something more laid back. I doubt if SEPA will dare to respond but here's hoping.
Dear Editor,
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) have recently claimed, as part of their scare campaign about alleged artificial radium at Dalgety Bay to have found "Radium & its associated daughters" mixed together. They are clearly ignorant of the fact that the "daughter element" produced by the breakdown of Radium is Radon an essentially unreactive gas which could not possibly be found mixed with solid radium. The scientific illiteracy of this untruth is staggering & not only disproves the claim to have found manmade radium but shows that SEPA lack scientific competence.
According to one report SEPA paid for "the highest reading recorded at Dalgety Bay was still less than 2/3rds that found in a typical Aberdeen street." There should be a thorough, independent & public investigation into the entire expensive organisation.
Neil Craig
References http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/search?q=dalgety+bay
HUSTINGS POINTS
I went to an EU hustings at Hillhead Library which turned out to be being recorded for local radio broadcasts though the BBC had, for some reason, turned it down. The questions were, in Question Time manner, pre-set with members of the audience allowed to read them out but Lesley, the chairperson was keen to have remarks from the audience & indeed for the audience to appear more active & larger than it was. The SNP, Labour, Conservative & LibDim candidates were seated on the platform & the UKIP candidate (#2) on their list was occasionally allowed to speak from the audience & may been able to do so more than the 3 times I did.
First was when a Moslem socialist sitting in front of me said we had to get rid of capitalism, that the recession proved it had failed....you know the drill. I said "rubbish" rather loudly & was invited to speak & said that we had to realise that free enterprise works & that North Korea is starving while South Korea is a successful growing economy. That we should use the system that works.
Second was similarly when the SNP candidate said that Scotland's future is to be creating 100s of thousands of "green" jobs & I said that we simply cannot build a successful sustainable (in the true meaning of the word) on jobs that do & always will depend on massive subsidy. (This idiot is from the party running the place!)
After that the chair was, perfectly reasonably, seeking out people who hadn't spoken before. However the 3rd time came at the end of a question & discussion on what action the EU should be taking against the Israelis for all their atrocities in Gaza (including a claim that they allowed dogs to eat the bodies of children which I would require some evidence for). At the end Lesley asked if anybody wished to speak on the other side & the Moslem socialist in front put up our hands but it turned out, unsurprisingly, that he just wished to agree & be slightly more anti-Semitic than the average. On the other hand I said that we should compare the Israeli's actions with our own in setting up the KLA as "police" & allowing them to kidnap 1,300 Serbs & while they were still alive cut them open & remove the organs for western hospitals & that this was far....... at this point I was stopped & Lesley said that being from Northern Ireland she was not going to allow "whataboutery" (each side justifying its case by reciting atrocities against them) & that my statement had been "unhelpful". Considering that we had just had 10 minutes of anti-Jewish "whataboutery" I was not in the least surprised to be stopped. The anti-Semitic Moslem socialist turned round & proved himself to be a lying genocidal Nazi by saying that that had never happened. I mention him only to show how closely linked extreme socialism, Nazism & Moslem racism are.
At he end I had a few words with the UKIP candidate & a fan came up & asked me if I had stood for the 2 1/2% Growth party, which 2 years on is pretty good going.
It is possible that my remarks will be edited out but, because Lesley had asked for comments from the not Israel bashing side I think that would require editing out the entire part of that discussion since anything else would clearly be anti-Semitic racism.
First was when a Moslem socialist sitting in front of me said we had to get rid of capitalism, that the recession proved it had failed....you know the drill. I said "rubbish" rather loudly & was invited to speak & said that we had to realise that free enterprise works & that North Korea is starving while South Korea is a successful growing economy. That we should use the system that works.
Second was similarly when the SNP candidate said that Scotland's future is to be creating 100s of thousands of "green" jobs & I said that we simply cannot build a successful sustainable (in the true meaning of the word) on jobs that do & always will depend on massive subsidy. (This idiot is from the party running the place!)
After that the chair was, perfectly reasonably, seeking out people who hadn't spoken before. However the 3rd time came at the end of a question & discussion on what action the EU should be taking against the Israelis for all their atrocities in Gaza (including a claim that they allowed dogs to eat the bodies of children which I would require some evidence for). At the end Lesley asked if anybody wished to speak on the other side & the Moslem socialist in front put up our hands but it turned out, unsurprisingly, that he just wished to agree & be slightly more anti-Semitic than the average. On the other hand I said that we should compare the Israeli's actions with our own in setting up the KLA as "police" & allowing them to kidnap 1,300 Serbs & while they were still alive cut them open & remove the organs for western hospitals & that this was far....... at this point I was stopped & Lesley said that being from Northern Ireland she was not going to allow "whataboutery" (each side justifying its case by reciting atrocities against them) & that my statement had been "unhelpful". Considering that we had just had 10 minutes of anti-Jewish "whataboutery" I was not in the least surprised to be stopped. The anti-Semitic Moslem socialist turned round & proved himself to be a lying genocidal Nazi by saying that that had never happened. I mention him only to show how closely linked extreme socialism, Nazism & Moslem racism are.
At he end I had a few words with the UKIP candidate & a fan came up & asked me if I had stood for the 2 1/2% Growth party, which 2 years on is pretty good going.
It is possible that my remarks will be edited out but, because Lesley had asked for comments from the not Israel bashing side I think that would require editing out the entire part of that discussion since anything else would clearly be anti-Semitic racism.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
SPONTANEOUS OUTPOURINGS OF PUBLIC SUPPORT
This is all ripped off from Devil's Kitchen & the full article about government using fakecharities to produce an appearance of public support for their next ban. The full thing is worth reading but I am going to just put up a few excerpts:
On greater control over pubs
Wonder if they would be willing to pay me to distribute postcards ashing "Fed up with useless bans introduced by the parasites in Westminster & Holyrood so they can provide the illusion of activity to justify taking most of the countries wealth into their paws"? Perhaps not but the entire article is worth reading because if enough people know how blatantly we are being lied to by these fascist organleggers it will be much more difficult for them to do it.
And we all know the BBC, state broadcaster to these genocidal fascist war criminals, will report these frauds in whatever way the government wants.
Mr Johnson boasted that the (cigarette) display ban was favoured by an "overwhelming majority" of 96,000 responses to a six-month public consultation on the subject.While the Tobacco Retailers Alliance - a coalition of shopkeepers funded by the tobacco industry (yes I know, boo, hiss etc.) - is not even mentioned in the consultation document despite their having spent a year gathering together its response.
Yet only a handful of those 96,000 respondents came from individuals submitting their personal views. Almost 70,000 came from those collected by pressure groups entirely funded by the Department for Health.
"We are not listed as one of the respondents although our response was submitted by email and also sent by post, so we can be certain it was received. For some reason the views of 25,000 shopkeepers just seem to have been air-brushed out of the consultation report."
On greater control over pubs
The consultation attracted 2,336 responses. Almost 2,000 of these came either from a survey by Alcohol Concern, a charity which last year was given almost £400,000 by the Department for Health and raised nothing through fundraising, or postcards distributed by the Department itself, which posed the question:
"Fed up with alcohol problems where you live?"
Wonder if they would be willing to pay me to distribute postcards ashing "Fed up with useless bans introduced by the parasites in Westminster & Holyrood so they can provide the illusion of activity to justify taking most of the countries wealth into their paws"? Perhaps not but the entire article is worth reading because if enough people know how blatantly we are being lied to by these fascist organleggers it will be much more difficult for them to do it.
And we all know the BBC, state broadcaster to these genocidal fascist war criminals, will report these frauds in whatever way the government wants.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
RADIUM AT DALGETY BAY - GUEST ARTICLE ON THE SCIENCE
BY STEUART CAMPBELL
It seems that what was used in the aircraft dials was a radioluminescent paint, i.e. one that contains a radioactive isotope combined with a radioluminescent substance. It appears that the radioactive isotope used was radium-226, although is undermined by a parallel claim (in Wikipedia) that the preferred emissions were beta particles because they do not penetrate an enclosure (e.g. the glass cover of the dial). Unfortunately, radium-226 is an emitter of alpha particles, which certainly cannot penetrate glass. However it takes 6 mm of aluminium to stop beta particles. So my guess is that it was radium-226 that was the radionuclide.
According to Wikipedia, the dangers in using Ra-226 were recognized in the 1920s and 30s and were replaced by safer alternatives (‘progressively’) in the ‘second half of the 20th century’ (i.e. after the war). So when were these luminous dials made? Rob Edwards’s 1997 article (New Scientist) claims that radium-226 was used before 1960 in paints to make aircraft dials glow in the dark.
Ra-226 decays into radon (Rd) 222 by alpha particle emission and Rd-222 is also an alpha particle emitter.
Ra-226 also results from the decay of U-238 (U-238>Th-234>Pa-234>U-234>Th-230>Ra-226). Ra-226 decays to stable lead via its ‘daughters’ (Ra-226>Rn-222>Po-218>Pb-214>Pb-210>Bi-210>Po-210>Pb-216).
Instruments are available that will record various alpha, beta and gamma emissions, but they will not identify the radionuclide responsible. There are hand-held instruments available for radionuclide identification but they are all gamma-sensing instruments (gamma spectrometers) that identify respective radionuclides by the energies of the gamma rays emitted and detected. It seems that all radioactive decay is accompanies by some gamma radiation. Consequently, a gamma spectrometer could be used to identify radionuclides. However, this process could not tell how the radionuclide arose. I do not see how anyone could determine that a particular emission came from a natural radionuclide rather than an artificial one. Of course ‘artificial’ here merely means that the radionuclide was used in some product; it must have a natural origin ultimately.
Notes
Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1600 years.
Rd-222 has a half-life of only 3.8 days.
Ra-226 is one of the decay product of uranium or thorium
A layer of soil 30 cm deep and 1.6 km square would contain on average 1 g of radium (depends on locality, moisture content and the presence of buildings and roads. It would also contain ~3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium. The Ra concentration is about one part in a trillion.
The radiation dose from typical ground is on average ~350 μSv per year.
[Neil - highlights are mine; since the "daughter" element of radium is radon (Rn) which is one the Noble gasses it could not be found mixed with radium & SEPA's claim is ridiculous; if they can't identify separate nuclides then they simply cannot say it isn't natural; 1,6km square is 1 mile square)]
Steuart Campbell is a science writer. He was in the LibDems indeed he was the other speaker in the Conference debate on nuclear I spoke at & found his membership untenable as they got less liberal & more Luddite. He is a regular contributor to the letter columns of the Scotsman in the pro-nuclear cause & a fellow member of SONE. He also rang in & spoke on the Radio Scotland programme where SEPA's lies started this investigation & I would like to thank him for the scientific facts which have so thoroughly proven SEPA's dishonesty.
It seems that what was used in the aircraft dials was a radioluminescent paint, i.e. one that contains a radioactive isotope combined with a radioluminescent substance. It appears that the radioactive isotope used was radium-226, although is undermined by a parallel claim (in Wikipedia) that the preferred emissions were beta particles because they do not penetrate an enclosure (e.g. the glass cover of the dial). Unfortunately, radium-226 is an emitter of alpha particles, which certainly cannot penetrate glass. However it takes 6 mm of aluminium to stop beta particles. So my guess is that it was radium-226 that was the radionuclide.
According to Wikipedia, the dangers in using Ra-226 were recognized in the 1920s and 30s and were replaced by safer alternatives (‘progressively’) in the ‘second half of the 20th century’ (i.e. after the war). So when were these luminous dials made? Rob Edwards’s 1997 article (New Scientist) claims that radium-226 was used before 1960 in paints to make aircraft dials glow in the dark.
Ra-226 decays into radon (Rd) 222 by alpha particle emission and Rd-222 is also an alpha particle emitter.
Ra-226 also results from the decay of U-238 (U-238>Th-234>Pa-234>U-234>Th-230>Ra-226). Ra-226 decays to stable lead via its ‘daughters’ (Ra-226>Rn-222>Po-218>Pb-214>Pb-210>Bi-210>Po-210>Pb-216).
Instruments are available that will record various alpha, beta and gamma emissions, but they will not identify the radionuclide responsible. There are hand-held instruments available for radionuclide identification but they are all gamma-sensing instruments (gamma spectrometers) that identify respective radionuclides by the energies of the gamma rays emitted and detected. It seems that all radioactive decay is accompanies by some gamma radiation. Consequently, a gamma spectrometer could be used to identify radionuclides. However, this process could not tell how the radionuclide arose. I do not see how anyone could determine that a particular emission came from a natural radionuclide rather than an artificial one. Of course ‘artificial’ here merely means that the radionuclide was used in some product; it must have a natural origin ultimately.
Notes
Radium-226 has a half-life of about 1600 years.
Rd-222 has a half-life of only 3.8 days.
Ra-226 is one of the decay product of uranium or thorium
A layer of soil 30 cm deep and 1.6 km square would contain on average 1 g of radium (depends on locality, moisture content and the presence of buildings and roads. It would also contain ~3 tonnes of uranium and 6 tonnes of thorium. The Ra concentration is about one part in a trillion.
The radiation dose from typical ground is on average ~350 μSv per year.
[Neil - highlights are mine; since the "daughter" element of radium is radon (Rn) which is one the Noble gasses it could not be found mixed with radium & SEPA's claim is ridiculous; if they can't identify separate nuclides then they simply cannot say it isn't natural; 1,6km square is 1 mile square)]
Steuart Campbell is a science writer. He was in the LibDems indeed he was the other speaker in the Conference debate on nuclear I spoke at & found his membership untenable as they got less liberal & more Luddite. He is a regular contributor to the letter columns of the Scotsman in the pro-nuclear cause & a fellow member of SONE. He also rang in & spoke on the Radio Scotland programme where SEPA's lies started this investigation & I would like to thank him for the scientific facts which have so thoroughly proven SEPA's dishonesty.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
ALAN JOHNSTONE CALLS FOR PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION - IS HE AIMING FOR THE TOP JOB & COULD LABOUR WIN ON A PR PLATFORM
Alan Johnson's Times article:
This debate cannot exclude the central question of electoral reform. But on this aspect the heavy lifting has already been done. The Plant Commission — the joint work of Robin Cook and Robert McLennan — and the Jenkins Report have all been completed. Nothing has changed in the meantime apart from the public mood. We have the mandate to pursue the issue of electoral reform and to hold a referendum on a specific new system.
Jenkins produced an elegant solution — Alternative Vote Plus. This system maintains the constituency link so that voters have a local MP that is directly responsible to them, but it also ensures that all votes count, irrespective of whether or not they were cast in the “safe seat” of one particular party.
Here’s the gist of how it would work. On polling day, a voter would have two ballot papers. The first would be for choosing the constituency MP: the voter marks his preferences (1, 2, 3 and so on) against the candidates. If one candidate gets more than half of the first preference votes cast, he or she is duly returned. If not, the candidate with the lowest tally is knocked out, and the second (and then third, etc) preferences are redistributed until finally one candidate reaches the magical 50 per cent mark.
On the second ballot paper, the voter simply marks which party she wants to give her vote to. All these votes are tallied up and those parties that exceed the threshold (say 5 per cent) get a proportionate number of seats. The majority of those sitting on the green benches, however, would be constituency MPs.
The adoption of AV+ would shift the political focus currently concentrated almost exclusively on a few swing voters in a handful of marginal seats. It would end the perversity of the party with the most votes nationally forming the opposition rather than the government, as has happened twice since the war.
Labour is the only party ever to win under First Past the Post (FPTP) and then use its majority to explore a change to the system that elected them. I recognise that Jenkins is gathering dust because we lost the will to carry it through — but that was at a time when it could legitimately be said that there was no public interest and when narrow party political advantage dominated our internal debate in the Labour Party.
I have omitted a certain amount of necessary genuflecting towards how wonderful Brown is & how well Labour is doing, particularly in the health area which is his responsibility. It is a matter of record that Johnson has been in favour of PR for ages, although not as loudly. The difference now is that MPs have been thoroughly discredited & there is clearly a public feeling for doing something significant to clean out the place. Everybody has always known that the present electoral system is corrupt. It corrupts the pure choice of the people into an entirely artificial majority for 1 of the 2 main parities. This puts power in the hands of party machines & takes it from MPs. If the desire is genuinely to restore power to Parliament I can think of no better way than for no single party to have a majority.
Is Johnson making a bid for the top job - Yes. Even if he doesn't formally challenge if he can get his party to endorse this policy which Brown has so long opposed he is de facto party leader & the title would follow whatever happens. Matthew Parris endorsed Johnson as party leader 3 years ago & many Labour MPs must now be sorry he never tried when Blair went.
More interestingly could Labour, under Johnson win for the 4th time running on a programme of introducing PR - I believe it could. While Labour is trailing in the polls it is because they are, correctly, seen as awful not because either Cameron or indeed Clegg, are seem as any good. I have previously said that Brown is the best person in the cabinet & I am not changing that, or at least not much. Johnson has an attractive air, without appearing as slimy as Blair was, but I have seen no reason to think he is any more competent than Brown turned out not to be. Nonetheless he is new broom & the public demand for a new broom is currently overwhelming so, fair or not, I think him taking over would create a substantial bounce for Labour. Beyond that I think that right now PR would be overwhelmingly popular & have set up petitions to find out. I have proposed 2 on the Downing St site - 1 for supporting PR & 1 for opposing. If accepted they will be on here. Labour would also pick up votes from UKIP, LibDems, Greens & even BNP who support this as the way of getting their own parties to no longer be effectively disenfranchised.
Two problems:
Firstly many people, including myself, would have some doubts that Labour would not break any promise as soon as they got in. After all they have done so before both over their Manifesto promise on a referendum on the Constitreaty & as Johnston mentions, on their previous Manifesto promise of a PR referendum in 1997. With previous like this they would have to think us very stupid simply to take their word on it. I think for this to be trusted the referendum would have to happen before any election & indeed there is nothing so complicated that a democratic electoral system could not be in force within a year - ie for the next election. Moving from the current system to the top up system recommended would only involve pairing existing constituencies & grouping them into regions for the top up. No actual changes in boundaries at all. After all this was quickly & easily done in Scotland & Wales. Since Labour is currently in power they could legislate this easily. Of course this does mean that Labour would not be able to hold the electorate to ransom on the basis of this promise - my guess is that the electorate are not in the mood to be held to ransom & wouldn't believe a Labour cheque if it was obviously post dated but that if treated honestly would show appreciation of such treatment. It is not as if the electorate like the alternatives.
Second problemm, from the point of view of Labourists, would be that the Conservatives might also come out for PR. Cameron's recent call for "radical" reform to "empower" people is, so far, limited to calling for fixed term Parliaments which is a pretty minor reform & in a Parliamentary rather than Presidential system probably impossible because there has to be some system for calling early elections if nobody can form a government. Nonetheless he has generally been ahead of Labour over the present scandal & could well get in ahead of them on this if he recognises public feeling. That, of course, is not an argument for Johnson not going ahead - quite the reverse. Over recent years the FPTP system has worked badly against the Conservatives & right now unless they are about 10% ahead of Labour would be unlikely to win. Their commitment to maintaining this disproportional representation system is either incredibly noble or incredibly stupid.
This debate cannot exclude the central question of electoral reform. But on this aspect the heavy lifting has already been done. The Plant Commission — the joint work of Robin Cook and Robert McLennan — and the Jenkins Report have all been completed. Nothing has changed in the meantime apart from the public mood. We have the mandate to pursue the issue of electoral reform and to hold a referendum on a specific new system.
Jenkins produced an elegant solution — Alternative Vote Plus. This system maintains the constituency link so that voters have a local MP that is directly responsible to them, but it also ensures that all votes count, irrespective of whether or not they were cast in the “safe seat” of one particular party.
Here’s the gist of how it would work. On polling day, a voter would have two ballot papers. The first would be for choosing the constituency MP: the voter marks his preferences (1, 2, 3 and so on) against the candidates. If one candidate gets more than half of the first preference votes cast, he or she is duly returned. If not, the candidate with the lowest tally is knocked out, and the second (and then third, etc) preferences are redistributed until finally one candidate reaches the magical 50 per cent mark.
On the second ballot paper, the voter simply marks which party she wants to give her vote to. All these votes are tallied up and those parties that exceed the threshold (say 5 per cent) get a proportionate number of seats. The majority of those sitting on the green benches, however, would be constituency MPs.
The adoption of AV+ would shift the political focus currently concentrated almost exclusively on a few swing voters in a handful of marginal seats. It would end the perversity of the party with the most votes nationally forming the opposition rather than the government, as has happened twice since the war.
Labour is the only party ever to win under First Past the Post (FPTP) and then use its majority to explore a change to the system that elected them. I recognise that Jenkins is gathering dust because we lost the will to carry it through — but that was at a time when it could legitimately be said that there was no public interest and when narrow party political advantage dominated our internal debate in the Labour Party.
I have omitted a certain amount of necessary genuflecting towards how wonderful Brown is & how well Labour is doing, particularly in the health area which is his responsibility. It is a matter of record that Johnson has been in favour of PR for ages, although not as loudly. The difference now is that MPs have been thoroughly discredited & there is clearly a public feeling for doing something significant to clean out the place. Everybody has always known that the present electoral system is corrupt. It corrupts the pure choice of the people into an entirely artificial majority for 1 of the 2 main parities. This puts power in the hands of party machines & takes it from MPs. If the desire is genuinely to restore power to Parliament I can think of no better way than for no single party to have a majority.
Is Johnson making a bid for the top job - Yes. Even if he doesn't formally challenge if he can get his party to endorse this policy which Brown has so long opposed he is de facto party leader & the title would follow whatever happens. Matthew Parris endorsed Johnson as party leader 3 years ago & many Labour MPs must now be sorry he never tried when Blair went.
More interestingly could Labour, under Johnson win for the 4th time running on a programme of introducing PR - I believe it could. While Labour is trailing in the polls it is because they are, correctly, seen as awful not because either Cameron or indeed Clegg, are seem as any good. I have previously said that Brown is the best person in the cabinet & I am not changing that, or at least not much. Johnson has an attractive air, without appearing as slimy as Blair was, but I have seen no reason to think he is any more competent than Brown turned out not to be. Nonetheless he is new broom & the public demand for a new broom is currently overwhelming so, fair or not, I think him taking over would create a substantial bounce for Labour. Beyond that I think that right now PR would be overwhelmingly popular & have set up petitions to find out. I have proposed 2 on the Downing St site - 1 for supporting PR & 1 for opposing. If accepted they will be on here. Labour would also pick up votes from UKIP, LibDems, Greens & even BNP who support this as the way of getting their own parties to no longer be effectively disenfranchised.
Two problems:
Firstly many people, including myself, would have some doubts that Labour would not break any promise as soon as they got in. After all they have done so before both over their Manifesto promise on a referendum on the Constitreaty & as Johnston mentions, on their previous Manifesto promise of a PR referendum in 1997. With previous like this they would have to think us very stupid simply to take their word on it. I think for this to be trusted the referendum would have to happen before any election & indeed there is nothing so complicated that a democratic electoral system could not be in force within a year - ie for the next election. Moving from the current system to the top up system recommended would only involve pairing existing constituencies & grouping them into regions for the top up. No actual changes in boundaries at all. After all this was quickly & easily done in Scotland & Wales. Since Labour is currently in power they could legislate this easily. Of course this does mean that Labour would not be able to hold the electorate to ransom on the basis of this promise - my guess is that the electorate are not in the mood to be held to ransom & wouldn't believe a Labour cheque if it was obviously post dated but that if treated honestly would show appreciation of such treatment. It is not as if the electorate like the alternatives.
Second problemm, from the point of view of Labourists, would be that the Conservatives might also come out for PR. Cameron's recent call for "radical" reform to "empower" people is, so far, limited to calling for fixed term Parliaments which is a pretty minor reform & in a Parliamentary rather than Presidential system probably impossible because there has to be some system for calling early elections if nobody can form a government. Nonetheless he has generally been ahead of Labour over the present scandal & could well get in ahead of them on this if he recognises public feeling. That, of course, is not an argument for Johnson not going ahead - quite the reverse. Over recent years the FPTP system has worked badly against the Conservatives & right now unless they are about 10% ahead of Labour would be unlikely to win. Their commitment to maintaining this disproportional representation system is either incredibly noble or incredibly stupid.
HERALD PRO NUCLEAR ANTI GREENERY LETTER
Herald letter today. Edited where marked [ ]:
David Hansen (letter Monday) says just over eight Whitelees [(largest windfarm in Europe)] would be needed to equal one Longannet while Andrew Mitchell, more accurately says 15. However both are wrong [because] while those windmills might theoretically produce the same power, because wind is a widespread phenomenon. overall all 15 would be likely to be becalmed at the same time. That is why even Scottish Renewables have said that wind can only be a back up to genuine baseload. Thus the alternative to Longannet is 15 massive windfarms plus Longannet or if we are to use carbon capture, which is inherently less efficient the alternative would be 15 massive windfarms & 1.4 Longannets. Another alternative would be a 2 new Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors which can be built in 3 years (plus bureaucracy time) at zero cost to the taxpayer [& since CCS is expected only to capture about 90% of CO2,] at a far smaller fraction of the carbon footprint.
That the "Green" movement wants the expensive, ugly, environmentally intrusive, [nanny state] option not the reliable, inexpensive, safer, free enterprise, low carbon one suggests they are not as convinced of their catastrophic warming scare stories or indeed of caring for the environment as [they pretend].
Most of the editing tightens it up but I regret the deletion of the "nanny state" option, in direct comparison with nuclear being the free enterprise one & that my accustation that the Greems "pretend" to care about the environment has beed downgrade to them "stating" it.
David Hansen (letter Monday) says just over eight Whitelees [(largest windfarm in Europe)] would be needed to equal one Longannet while Andrew Mitchell, more accurately says 15. However both are wrong [because] while those windmills might theoretically produce the same power, because wind is a widespread phenomenon. overall all 15 would be likely to be becalmed at the same time. That is why even Scottish Renewables have said that wind can only be a back up to genuine baseload. Thus the alternative to Longannet is 15 massive windfarms plus Longannet or if we are to use carbon capture, which is inherently less efficient the alternative would be 15 massive windfarms & 1.4 Longannets. Another alternative would be a 2 new Westinghouse AP 1000 reactors which can be built in 3 years (plus bureaucracy time) at zero cost to the taxpayer [& since CCS is expected only to capture about 90% of CO2,] at a far smaller fraction of the carbon footprint.
That the "Green" movement wants the expensive, ugly, environmentally intrusive, [nanny state] option not the reliable, inexpensive, safer, free enterprise, low carbon one suggests they are not as convinced of their catastrophic warming scare stories or indeed of caring for the environment as [they pretend].
Most of the editing tightens it up but I regret the deletion of the "nanny state" option, in direct comparison with nuclear being the free enterprise one & that my accustation that the Greems "pretend" to care about the environment has beed downgrade to them "stating" it.
Monday, May 25, 2009
EINSTEIN SAID - NO HE DIDN'T
A Google search for things Eisnstein is alleged to have said produced this long list of things there is no particular reason to think he would ever have said. Am example of the phenomeno that allows earming alarmists to say the 99% or 99.9% or all scientists support their scaremongering.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/interest.asp Einstein and Compound Interest6 Nov 2006 ... Did Albert Einstein declare compound interest to be 'the most powerful force in the universe'? NO
www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/interest.asp - Did Einstein say that if bees disappeared wec would be gone in 4 years No
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=26613 Einstein said WW4 will be fought with rocks. TRUE
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=101;t=000400;p=0 Einstein said "Fellatio is the ultimate act of trust"
Nope
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/3/8/131531/0658 Einstein said "compiund interest is the most powerful force in the universe" No
http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=einstein+said&sp-a=00062d45-sp00000000&sp-advanced=1&sp-p=all&sp-w-control=1&sp-w=alike&sp-date-range=-1&sp-x=any&sp-c=100&sp-m=1&sp-s=0 Einstein onec proved an atheist professor wrong. No
Einstein once swopped places with his chauffeur & nobody noticed No & obviously so it you think about it.
http://urbansemiotic.com/2008/05/15/einstein-and-the-vatican-rock-the-secular-universe/ Einstein said God exists. No
Sunday, May 24, 2009
WE'RE HERE BECAUSE WE'RE HERE BECAUSE WE'RE HERE
I had not expected Spiked, a very worthy bunch of people who started as Marxist freethinkers & grew up to be traditional liberals to take this & thus would get an excuse to put it here myself but they have. On the other hand it is so pretentious & I am so pleased with it, even though I have said similar before, that I am going to use it anyway. The original is here & is a response to an article about James Lovelock's Gaia theory which correctly says his theory's use shows the silly mysticism of the eco movement but assumes Lovelock himself intended it as mystical rather than having lucked into coming up with a concept that fitted the times:
Lovelock was right to point out the statistical improbability of the Earth developing in a way that would keep it continuously habitable. He is using essentially the same argument that Intelligent Designers use, namely, that if the basic parameters of the universe (gravity, strong and weak atomic forces, magnetism) had been even marginally different, the degree of complexity needed for life to form would not have existed. In both cases the existence of a designer explains existence in a way which the traditional atheistic random universe simply cannot.
However, since Lovelock developed this we have seen the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.
Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.
Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable.
Title is a WW1 soldier's song
Lovelock was right to point out the statistical improbability of the Earth developing in a way that would keep it continuously habitable. He is using essentially the same argument that Intelligent Designers use, namely, that if the basic parameters of the universe (gravity, strong and weak atomic forces, magnetism) had been even marginally different, the degree of complexity needed for life to form would not have existed. In both cases the existence of a designer explains existence in a way which the traditional atheistic random universe simply cannot.
However, since Lovelock developed this we have seen the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.
Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.
Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable.
Title is a WW1 soldier's song
