A Place to Stand

This was sent to the Herald & the Daily Record & published by the Record on Wednesday

The Chinese recently surfaced an undetected submarine in the middle of a US carrier group thereby "accidentally" proving that carriers can be sunk almost at will. There are other weapons systems that make carriers obsolete. If the real purpose of spending £5 billion on them is to save 4,000 jobs, as the statements of Scottish politicians would indicate, we could save far more, across all of Scotland, by accepting the cancellation & seeking a few hundred million extra regional aid as compensation.

Spiked does a lot of interesting articles. They, in a previous incarnation did the article revealing that IRN had faked, allegedly accidentally, their Bosnian "Concentration Camp" Video which ITN successfully sued them for - the court finding that what they had said was "essentially true" & thus found against them. They did not appeal but were not bankrupted & the assumption must be that an agreement was readied whereby they would not have to pay but would agree to steer clear of the subject in future.

There was a recent article, by a Swede, on objections to a "right winger" getting a Nobel for Literature & pointing out a number of artists who have supported dubious left wingers. Among them was the mention of Harold Pinter supporting Milosevic. So i sent in this - it is a bit ranty & unpolished because I, considering what I have just said, I didn't expect to see it published & was agreeably surprised when it was.

Norberg writes that Harold Pinter supported Slobodan Milošević. This is a curious one seeing as the allegation in Norberg’s article is that Vargas Llosa’s leftie critics have not objected to extreme left wingers winning the Nobel Prize. But unless the entire British media are wholly and completely corrupt, Milošević was so extremely right wing that he was described by the press as ‘another Hitler’.

Of course there is no actual evidence of that, nor of Milošević being an extreme leftist – perhaps he was simply a national leader from a socialist party with such a liberal nature that he went to great lengths to placate terrorist organisations openly committed to genocide (the KLA, Croatian ex-Nazis, Bosnian Muslim ex-Nazis, NATO, Germany, the Vatican the US and UK governments etc).

Is it contended here that Pinter is open to criticism because he supported a left winger or because he supported a right winger? If so, why not include the entire run of media celebrities who went round to Downing Street for drinks whenever Tony Blair, a man who is by the standards used at Nuremberg a war criminal and practitioner of racial genocide, called. By any objective standards they supported someone far worse than Milošević.

That I both support our own country having a credible defence & oppose using it to commit war crimes may make it difficult to pigeonhole me in the current political system. That is because i am a traditional liberal - a theory so successful that most parties want to claim the title despite the fact that none of them are entitled to it.

Labels: British politics, letters, Yugoslavia

Lord Tebbits blog is one well worth following. Apart from being the "greatest Prime Minister we never had" I regard him as the ablest electoral tactician in politics (not excluding Mandelson). He also spends about half of each post answering his numerous commenters which shows old fashioned courtesy & answers them well which shows competence.

Back when I was a Lib Dem I was annoyed at his calling the LDs "a dustbin for wasted votes" which seemed to show a greater appreciation of the tactical advantage of an electoral system which could be fiddled in the Tory interest (as I still see it) than for the damage to democracy & political honesty & general limitation on choice a disproportionate representation system produces.

So when he said this on his blog

It rather reminded me of my first conference as Party Chairman in 1985, when in the car on the way home, I observed to my political adviser Michael Dobbs: “Phew! We got away with that, but only just. Next year we will make sure that the only possible story the press can write is the one we want.”

I made the not entirely supportive comment

I realise the problem with finessing conferences, for all parties, to prevent the media pulling up some delegate's off the wall remark & making it a headline.

Nonetheless I regret that conferences no longer discuss policy or are anything but razzamatazz. I think this is part of the long term problem that ordinary members, correctly*, feel they have no influence. No wonder the membership of all formerly mass parties is being hollowed out. If there is something worse for the long term future of democracy I don't know what it is.

*eg Cameron's disastrous decision, clearly against the wishes of the overwhelming majority of members & probably MPs, to break the "cast iron" promise that the Conservatives would hold a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. It became official policy purely because he said it. There is no other real mechanism to decide or even maintain policy. 10/11/2010 11:54 AM

To which he responded positively

Sadly, neilcraig was right about party conferences. They no longer discuss policy. The centralisation of control particularly in Labour and Conservative Parties, has led to a massive loss of grass roots membership (despite Labour’s slight increase in recent weeks). In my day as Chairman we had a live political discussion organised through “the two way movement of ideas” in which activists could contribute to policy formation. I fear Big Brother has replaced the Big Party.

If Lord Tebbit is convinced that the way back to mass membership parties is through there being a genuine role for members in deciding policy I think others should take his advice seriously.

Labels: British politics

Hunterston & 11 of the 1300 windmills needed for the same power

Another Scotsman letter. )

That Councillor Euan McLeod echoes Scottish Renewables claim that all possible power options will result in higher electricity prices so we had better just get used to subsidising Scottish Renewables doesn't make it any less untrue than it was originally.

In previous long discussion here it was acknowledged that the French nuclear figure of 1.3p a unit was indisputable. Dr John Etherington then pointed out that in quoting windmill power being promised to fall from 9 to 8p I had forgotten the renewable certificate subsidy of 5.5p (letter 30th Oct 2008). Thus the cost of nuclear is slightly less than 1/10th of wind - it is also more reliable & produces much less CO2. This was not at the time disputed by any "renewable" supporters. Instead it appears their, relatively successful, tactic has been to wait a while & come back with the same old untruths trusting that repetition & their more ready access to the media will trump mere facts.

When government funded "fakecharities" & organisations existing to obtain government subsidy get their basic facts wrong in letters it does not inspire confidence

Edited bit in bold. No problem with deleting the word "old" or the date which both tighten it up. As edited the last sentence is less meaningful since Scottish Renewables is not, or not officially, a government organisation but is one existing to obtain subsidy. Even more interesting is the removal of the word fakecharity which has also been edited out of other published letters. The term means an alleged charity whose money, or at least enough of whose money to match their advertising budget, comes from the government. Fakecharities are a growing threat to our liberty because it creates an apparently trustworthy outlet for government propaganda. Whenever the BBC run a news item on a "report" from a charity, invariably calling for bigger government, it is equally invariabley a government fakecharity.

This term has been widely used by bloggers & is yet another example of something wgich the MSM simply refuse to mention in any way.

I also did one to the Herald at the same time suggesting that there was a free market alternative to the big state socialism repeatedly proposed in the letters they published but, as always, they didn't publish it ;-

Labels: eco-fascism, letters, nuclear

Should the UK government continue with 2 aircraft carriers, being started in Scotland, costed at £5 billion, when government spending & in particular the military budget is being significantly cut? This is a major question in Scotland - or rather it isn't since all the Holyrood parties & the Scottish media are untied in saying they should. At £5 billion to keep 4,000 jobs going for a few years it may seem a very expensive jobs creation programme but shipbuilding has an iconic status in the socialist movement & probably still a status out of proportion to its size among ordinary Scots.

On the other hand the prime purpose of government defence spending is supposed to be effective national defence not job creation. Such defence is the prime duty of government. Are such carriers cost effective?

I have previously argued that they aren't. That the ability of a Chinese submarine to surface in the middle of a US carrier fleet indicates that they can nowadays be sunk almost at will & that the fact that mobile lasers can shoot down shells & therefore aircraft also renders them obsolete before they are completed.

2 other vulnerabilities;

China is developing an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on a variant of the CSS-5 medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) as a component of its anti-access strategy. The missile has a range in excess of 1,500 km and, when incorporated into a sophisticated command and control system, is a key component of China’s anti-access strategy to provide the PLA the capability to attack ships at sea, including aircraft carriers, from great distances.

the Thor system

The system described in the 2003 United States Air Force (USAF) report was that of 20-foot-long, 1-foot-diameter tungsten rods, that are satellite controlled, and have global strike capability, with impact speeds of Mach 10, and strike 25-foot accuracy...

The weapon would be very hard to defend against. It has a very high closing velocity and a small radar cross-section. Launch is difficult to detect. Any infra-red launch signature occurs in orbit, at no fixed position.

Personally if I had responsibility for UK military capacity & "You could have 40 "Rods from God" orbiting for the cost of" $0.5 bn) ((£300 million) I would be doing that instead & making sure that new naval combat vessels were submarines.

Of course politics being what it is sometimes money gets spent on marginal constituencies whatever the official story. On the other hand Glasgow Govan, or even Scotland, isn't exactly a Tory marginal so it is difficult to see them getting thanks for this - indeed it might just encourage people to vote Labour come the next election when these contracts will be winding down.

However there is a quid pro quo the government could do which makes infinitely more sense in economic & if successful, electoral terms.


I have previously discussed Ocean Thermal Energy Convertors (OTECs) & the floating island concept. The cost of 1 x 100MW OTEC has been given at $1.573 bn. This is a relatively high tech oceanic construct to which Scottish shipbuilders would be well suited. An OTEC, with accompanying floating equatorial deep sea community (where bad weather is unknown) would be able to produce power using the heat differential between surface & deep water. As a side effect it brings up enormous quantities of nutrient rich waters allowing the growth of plankton, fish, e in the near future oil producing algae. Since plankton growth absorbs CO2, some of which is bound to sink, it provides the only CO2 negative method of power generation. Because OTECs have to be very large to be efficient this is the sort of breakthrough that requires the sort of money government has for an initial investment but would be self sustaining after the seedcorn has been planted. The total number of such settlements feasible are in the 10s of thousands since there is a lot of ocean out there. It would certainly be in Britain's & indeed Scotland's interests to have a commanding lead in this.

If the technological assessment as described here is correct there seems no downside either financially or, in anything but the very short term, electorally to putting a small part of the resources for these carriers into something more constructive. This much smaller investment would be likely to produce at least as many short term jobs & infinitely more long term ones. It has been suggested that cancelling the contracts will be expensive (though it can also be suggested that the official price may rise, as indeed it already has & thus the comparison invalid). I have seen no serious dispute of the overall concept though it has been subject to rigorous investigation which suggests manufacturing the parts of the floating island would be best done from conventional materials ashore,

If it is done the lead it will give Scotland in this technology will be an enormous economic advantage & it is difficult to see any patriotic Scot being opposed to that.

Labels: British politics, Science/technology, Scottish politics

Hal Lewis, Emeritus professor of Physics at UCLA has resigned from the American Physical Society & his blistering letter cites the organisation having been corrupted by government money into supporting the global warming fraud. Watts Up With That says any blog interested in science should report his letter & compares it with Luther's nailing up of his 95 theses on the Cathedral door. I think the comparison not really valid because the theses proving catastrophic warming to be false have been in circulation for a long time. Also while a physics professor at UCLA is a reasonable analogue to being a Cardinal in the Vatican there is no great shortage of eminent emeritus (retired) professors to have denounced the scam. That only the retired speak out proves statistically, to anybody open to proof, that it is government control of funding & careers alone that keeps the scam going. We even have eminent scientists saying, on retiral, that they are only free to speak once they retire.

Still Lewis' attack is blistering & I assume unanswerable but I will be interested to see if any scientist, including the leaders of the APS, make a serious attempt to answer it. Here it is
============================

When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).

Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?

How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.

It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.

So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:

1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate

2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.

3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.

4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.

5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.

6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.

APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?

I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.

I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.

Hal

====================================
I have highlighted what I think the most important parts. These show not only that catastrophic warming is a fraud but that it is a fraud created & promoted by government spending.

He regards the driving force in this corruption of science as being government funding of science & "scientific" institutions (the Royal Society for example gets £45 million annually). I think he is right & that this is proven by the fact that while there is an overwhelming consensus among the minority of government paid scientists nobody, worldwide, has been able to name 2 independent scientists who support the scam. Such a coincidence is obviously statistically impossible.

This strikes me as an extreme proof of the findings of an OECD report "The Sources of Economic Growth in OECD Countries," that the only useful R&D came from private sources and that public R&D funding tended to have negative consequences. "regressions including separate variables for business-performed R&D and that performed by other institutions (mainly public research institutes) suggest
that it is the former that drives the positive association between total R&D
intensity and output growth" p84 which is a, perhaps deliberately, abstruse way of saying it.

I think science, being vital to progress, must be promoted by any remotely progressive society. However what seems to be happening is another example of Pournelle's dictum that the prime purpose of any government programme is to pay government workers & their friends & in this case also to promote whatever story government would, today, like to be covered with a sheen of being "the science". The answer should be that government spending on science should be entirely hands off - a mixture of automatic tax deductions for R&D, without political favouritism & X-Prizes, offered from a fund run by independent technologically informed people, for actual achievements.
=================================

An interesting example of how politicians support science funding according to their political prejudices is this remark from Congressman Edward Markey, chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming on the recent prize awarded by the X-Prize Foundation for a car achieving more than 100mpg.

"That's why this contest, this X Prize, is the most important thing that is happening in our country and in the world."

If such importance of the this prize is accepted, to cut oil use, the magnitudes greater importance of space development prizes seems beyond argument. However to many politicos spending money to cut oil use, or perhaps just to give the appearance of wanting to cut oil use is green & nice & approved of while the future of the human race is nasty & technological & black magic.

Labels: global warming, Government parasitism, Science/technology, X-Prizes

This list of fallacious arguments is worth linking to though I have not linked them to thye individual entries. It will show you what tricks politicians, journalists & eco-fascists are using.

Ad Hominem (Argument To The Man)
Affirming The Consequent
Amazing Familiarity
Ambiguous Assertion
Appeal To Anonymous Authority
Appeal To Authority
Appeal To Coincidence
Appeal To Complexity
Appeal To False Authority
Appeal To Force
Appeal To Pity (Appeal to Sympathy, The Galileo Argument)
Appeal To Widespread Belief (Bandwagon Argument, Peer Pressure, Appeal To Common Practice)
Argument By Dismissal
Argument By Emotive Language (Appeal To The People)
Argument By Fast Talking
Argument By Generalization
Argument By Gibberish (Bafflement)
Argument By Half Truth (Suppressed Evidence)
Argument By Laziness (Argument By Uninformed Opinion)
Argument By Personal Charm
Argument By Pigheadedness (Doggedness)
Argument By Poetic Language
Argument By Prestigious Jargon
Argument By Question
Argument By Repetition (Argument Ad Nauseam)
Argument by Rhetorical Question
Argument By Scenario
Argument By Selective Observation
Argument By Selective Reading
Argument By Slogan
Argument By Vehemence
Argument From Adverse Consequences (Appeal To Fear, Scare Tactics)
Argument From Age (Wisdom of the Ancients)
Argument From Authority
Argument From False Authority
Argument From Small Numbers
Argument From Spurious Similarity
Argument Of The Beard
Argument To The Future
Bad Analogy
Begging The Question (Assuming The Answer, Tautology)
Burden Of Proof
Causal Reductionism (Complex Cause)
Changing The Subject (Digression, Red Herring, Misdirection, False Emphasis)
Cliche Thinking
Common Sense
Complex Question (Tying)
Confusing Correlation And Causation
Disproof By Fallacy
Equivocation
Error Of Fact
Euphemism
Exception That Proves The Rule
Excluded Middle (False Dichotomy, Faulty Dilemma, Bifurcation)
Extended Analogy
Failure To State
Fallacy Of Composition
Fallacy Of Division
Fallacy Of The General Rule
Fallacy Of The Crucial Experiment
False Cause
False Compromise
Genetic Fallacy (Fallacy of Origins, Fallacy of Virtue)
Having Your Cake (Failure To Assert, or Diminished Claim)
Hypothesis Contrary To Fact
Inconsistency
Inflation Of Conflict
Internal Contradiction
Least Plausible Hypothesis
Lies
Meaningless Questions
Misunderstanding The Nature Of Statistics (Innumeracy)
Moving The Goalposts (Raising The Bar, Argument By Demanding Impossible Perfection)
Needling
Non Sequitur
Not Invented Here
Outdated Information
Pious Fraud
Poisoning The Wells
Psychogenetic Fallacy
Reductio Ad Absurdum
Reductive Fallacy (Oversimplification)
Reifying
Short Term Versus Long Term
Slippery Slope Fallacy (Camel's Nose)
Special Pleading (Stacking The Deck)
Statement Of Conversion
Stolen Concept
Straw Man (Fallacy Of Extension)
Two Wrongs Make A Right (Tu Quoque, You Too)
Weasel Wording

Pournelle mention

Scotland's energy future

23/09/2010

Scotland's renewable electricity target for the next decade is being raised from 50 per cent to 80 per cent, First Minister Alex Salmond announced today.

The FM confirmed the Scottish Government's increased national target - now 80 per cent of Scottish electricity consumption to come from renewables by 2020 - ahead of a major international conference in Edinburgh next week to help accelerate investment in the growing low carbon economy.

So with about 20% of our power coming from nuclear which Salmond wants to close we are going to have to replace almost all our current electricity generation with windmillery.

This is, of course, impossible: windmills only work at about 27% of rated capacity so, even if we assume a windmill capacity twice the total generating capacity needed this will still mean that the back up will be producing about half of all our power. That back up must be gas because only gas can be turned on & off fast enough to hope to make up for the unreliability of wind.

It also assumes that the inherent variability of wind power, which will make the entire system unstable & likely to crash at any moment if wind provides much more than 10% of capacity, can be ended simply by politicians wanting it. This is, of course, impossible.

Perhaps the Scottish government are relying on the sea turbine X-Prize, to be awarded some time after 2015, being so successful that by 2010 10s of thousands of them will have been built, without teething troubles & be producing intermittent but reliable power. Despite the faith in X-Prizes this demonstrates there is no reason to believe a commercial sea turbine is possible at all (in which case no prize should be awarded if it is a genuine X-Prize). The timescale is, of course, impossible.

Calling these people not intelligent & incompetent is clearly understating it. These inhabitants of the Holyrood Insane Asylum are clearly, 1 & all, unfitted to be trusted to tie their own shoe laces. In fairness it is possible to argue that, since Nicol Stephen previous LudDim leader, is leaving Holyrood at the next election to take up a well paid job with the renewables industry for which he has no apparent qualification these people are not wholly moronic, merely wholly corrupt.

Meanwhile the Scottish media continue to give free reign to lunacy while censoring anything remotely honest. This is a letter which in this & an earlier draft, I sent to the Scotsman, nominally the only part of our media marginally sceptical about windmillery, when they twice let Scottish Renewables & then a a rent a mouth Councillor make the 100% dishonest claim that there is no method of power generation which will not produce massive increases in electricity costs.

That Cllr Euan McLeod echoes Scottish Renewables claim that all possible power options will result in higher electricity prices so we had better just get used to subsidising Scottish Renewables doesn't make it any less untrue than it was originally.

In previous long discussion here it was acknowledged that the French nuclear figure of 1.3p a unit was indisputable. Dr John Etherington then pointed out that in quoting windmill power being promised to fall from 9 to 8p I had forgotten the renewable certificate subsidy of 5.5p (letter 30th Oct 2008). Thus the cost of nuclear is slightly less than 1/10th of wind - it is also more reliable & produces much less CO2. This was not at the time disputed by any "renewable" supporters. Instead it appears their, relatively successful, tactic has been to wait a while & come back with the same old untruths trusting that repetition & their more ready access to the media will trump mere facts.

This is why no politician who is in any way honest can claim to be opposed to both fuel poverty & mass nuclear power. Granted politicians in Holyrood who are, to some degree, honest appear to be an extinct breed.

Since we see the opinions of quangos, organisations formed to campaign for government subsidy & government funded "fakecharities" prominent among "reader's" letters may we hope, for balance, to see fewer of their press releases being used, uncritically, to form "news" items?

It is not just that the Scotsman did not allow my reply but that while promoting what they knew to be total & deliberate lies from a Scottish Renewables they thus know to be wholly & completely corrupt they censored any other letter from any honest person telling the truth.

Labels: eco-fascism, Scottish politics, Unpublished letters