Comments from Scotland on politics, technology & all related matters (ie everything)/"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."Henry Louis Mencken....WARNING - THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED THAT THIS BLOG IS LIKELY TO BE MISTAKEN FOR AN OFFICIAL PARTY SITE (no really, unanimous decision) I PROMISE IT ISN'T SO ENTER FREELY & OF YOUR OWN WILL
Sunday, June 15, 2014
Look Who Is Lying To Scare Us
"According to recent data compiled by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control CDC), people who eat organic and "natural" foods are eight times as likely as the rest of the population to be attacked by a deadly new strain of E. coli bacteria (0157: H7). This new E. coli is attacking tens of thousands of people per year, all over the world. It is causing permanent liver and kidney damage in many of its victims. The CDC recorded 2,471 confirmed cases of E. coli 0157: H7 in 1996 and estimated that it is causing at least 250 deaths per year in the United States alone.
Consumers of organic food are also more likely to be attacked by a relatively new, more virulent strain of the infamous salmonella bacteria. Salmonella was America’s biggest food-borne death risk until the new E. coli O157 came along.
Organic food is more dangerous than conventionally grown produce because organic farmers use animal manure as the major source of fertilizer for their food crops.....
The real surprise is that nobody is telling the public about the new dangers from organic food, or trying to persuade organic farmers to reduce these risks. Activist groups, government, and the press, all of which have shown no reluctance to organize crusades about matters such as global warming, tobacco addiction, and the use of pesticides are allowing organic farmers to endanger their customers without any publicity whatever." continued
And fairly recently we had an outbreak in Germany which proves it:
Epidemiological fieldwork suggested fresh vegetables were the source of infection. The agriculture minister of Lower Saxony identified an organic farm[2] in Bienenbüttel, Lower Saxony....
In all, 3,950 people were affected and 53 died...." continued
250 organic food deaths in the USA a year suggests 5,000 a year worldwide (this is pretty much seat of the pants because I am quite certain that far more people die that way in the 3rd world but don't realise they are eating "organic food" but merely think it is "food" so lets assume the same rate as the developed world. So over the last 25 years that is 125,000.
Compare that to nuclear power - Fukushima zero deaths; previous Japanese accident 2 deaths Chernobyl 51 deaths.
That makes organic food (125,000/53) 2,358 times more dangerous than nuclear. That should actually be "an absolute minimum of 2,358 times because (A) by including the date of Chernobyl we are bringing the average way up and we should also correct for nuclear providing 20% of the world's electricity while official organic is under 1% of its food so (125,000/2 X 20/1) 1,250,000 times more dangerous is equally defensible but lets not be churlish.
So we can say for certain that any anti-nuclear "protestor" who hasn't spent at least 2,358 times longer protesting against organic food in equally hysterical terms isn't remotely concerned about any alleged health threat but simply a Luddite lying.
The valuable moment in Cabaret, that makes it more important than any 50 mere musicals, is the beautiful child singing Tomorrow Belongs to Me and only once the audience is hooked is it made clear the kid is hitler youth. Real villains do not wear black hats, indeed they may be more willing to claim sainthood than decent people because they are not restrained by decency.
The "Green" movement is unquestionably guilty of at least twice as many killings as the Nazis (DDT, impoverishment, golden rice etc); it is unquestionably corrupt & genocidal; it is unquestionable that the overwhelming majority of its supporters have no slightest trace of honesty or integrity (just ask any of them to dissociate themselves from the most obvious lie by other ecofascists); it is unquestionable that ever one of the dozens of world catastrophe stories put about by these obscene animals has proven to be a lie (CAGW merely the latest); it is unquestionable that it has deliberately robbed every human alive of decades of our birthright of human progress (we could & should have had a couple of decades of power "to cheap to meter" and the settlement of the solar system by now).
Say what you like about Adolf Hitler but at least he was no Jonathan Porritt.
I have made the Hitler and Stalin comparison before so I'm not just speaking up as we are winning, but we are winning - a couple of years ago I would at least have been accused of being not terribly nice.
* Labour and Conservatives are falling over each other in the rush to declare they want lower electricity costs despite previous total unanimity on the Climate Change Act (the UK version costing at least £800 bn and the Scottish one being the single most destructive such in the world) and on wishing £3,000 a year bills (twice the current) by 2020.
* They are all (well except the Greens who are a bit slow) backing away from any responsibility for Grangemouth closure, despite, or because of, the owner saying it is their fault not the union's.
533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012
BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer
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But even if this "hobgoblin" (see the Mencken remark on the masthead) has been killed and those lying totalitarian parasites who pushed retreating in disorder there will be another along in due course as long as big state parasitism is rewarding.
Hinkley Point - £16bn For 2 Generators That Would Cost £4.5bn If The Politicos Would Let It
Hinkley Point C: £16bn nuclear power plant gets go ahead despite criticism over 'strike price'
THE plant in Somerset will begin operating in 2023 but ministers faced criticism over the £92.50 per Megawatt hour that will be paid for electricity produced - around double the current market rate.
Hinkley Point
BRITAIN'S first new nuclear power station in a generation is to be built under a £16 billion project which will create thousands of new jobs.
The move followed an agreement between the Government and French-owned EDF Energy, which will see Hinkley Point C in Somerset begin operating in 2023.
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That's how the Daily Record put it, neatly combining enthusiasm for the project with anti-nuclearist concern for the price and an absence of any mention of who is responsible for the price.
This is a rather long post I put on John Redwood today and which is also going out, slightly edited, as a letter to all and sundry. We will see if any sundry part of the press is less obedient in censoring the facts than I expect:
This is not a good day for the supporters of nuclear because the government have negotiated all their parasitism in place.
The reactor will take 10 years to build. In China they are building them in 3. This means it has no effect on the previous politicians' promises of electricity bills of £2,000 a year by 2020.
The difference in cost is entirely government regulatory parasitism. Thus so is the need for a price guarantee.
But it allows the Luddites to scream "subsidy" (though they are on a sticky wicket in that they approve far greater subsidy on windmills).
Also there is less to the eye on the price guarantee than appears - in 10 years prices will have increased about 40% so the guarantee is the equivalent of about £60. 60 years later, when it closes prices will have increased 8 fold so the "guarantee" will be equal to £12.
This suggests the builders are working on the assumption that they will make back their money in 10 years and hoping that Miliband or some successor doesn't break the contract before then (as Labour bankrupted BNFL by regulatory fiat and forced them to sell off Westinghouse, probably the world's leading reactor builder, at a fire sale price to Japan). This distrust of government and the state parasitism obviously both push up prices beyond reason.
There is no honest debate against the proposition that 90% of our electricity costs are state parasitism (the price differential mentioned above proves it again). Unfortunately there is no honest debate allowed on the subject in our state owned broadcaster or most of the obedient press.
Because of the 1:1 correlation between gdp and energy use it is obvious that the recession is entirely the fault of the political class who make electricity 10 times more expensive than it should be. The 25,000 pensioners who die of fuel poverty every year are also on their consciences.
I am quite sure the Chinese would have been willing to build on purely commercial terms if the government had agreed to remove their parasitism (or to pay them for it). It might be worth a question in the House on that.
A bad day for Britain because state parasitism has been welded even more strongly in place.
"However, the guaranteed price at twice today’s wholesale market price, to come in in 2013 when they start generating power, is also indexed to general prices."
I don't know if this means the indexing starts in 2010, in which case we are stuck with paying the equivalent of £60 forever, or tomorrow in which case it is the equivalent of £92 forever.
In either case an abysmal "deal" at least for the people, designed to hide the amount of government theft (about 90% of total cost) going on.
40th Anniversary of Limits to Growth "Environmentalist" Fraud and How the BBC LIes and Censors in the Fascist Cause
Lets all celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Limits to Growth paper and the massive worldwide PR campaign launched to promote its tale of global catastrophe if we don't embrace Luddism:
It is, of course, possible that some eco-fascist scare story will someday turn out to be more truthful but with the trend so far being hundreds of catastrophe stories proving to be untrue (I am open to and have previously asked for evidence from any Green of any significant scare story that turned out to be true) and none truthful, that the only possible honest default position must be that any Green is lying any time they speak.
I have previously arithmetically calculated the BBC level of honesty by calculating the proportion of times the BBC broadcast UKIP spokespersons to Greens (less than 1 in 10) to the proportion of support shown in polls (8+ to 1 for UKIP) and multiplying them - 1/80th possibly honest or 98.7% totalitarian fascist.
However I made no account for the sort of coverage. Since most interviews with UKIP contain (often start with) a variant of "some people say you are racist" - a question since it is entirely unspecific about both who and why, is designed to be essentially unanswerable.
It strikes me that if the BBC equally started interviews with Green spokesmen by asking "some people say, with evidence, that the green movement has been responsible for more deaths than Hitler and Stalin combined" (the DDT ban alone has increased malaria deaths from 52,000 a year to 1 1/2 million annually for nearly 60 years) that would allow the BBC to claim to be balanced withing that 1.13%.
[ Of course the same applies to interviews with the Labour/Conservative and "LibDem" parties where the question would be "some people have produced evidence that your party are guilty of illegal war, war crimes, mass murder, ethnic cleansing, genocide, the sexual enslavement of children and the dissection of thousands of living people to steal their body organs for western hospitals, selected and arrested because of their race.]
That would certainly allow the BBC to claim not to be mathematically 100% corrupt and if I find it has ever happened I will let you know.
What The British Media Wnn't Report - Unpublished Letter About the SDL - So No Question Who the Fascists Are
This letter went out to the Scotsman in response to a letter from the ASH anti-smoking quango .
As a general rule the letters pages of newspapers are the final refuge in the mainstream media, for any ideas that are not officially approved. After they have been censored from the broadcast media and after they are banned from the news pages, in a society in which any sort of dissent at all is permitted in the media they may still appear in letters pages.
Thus even the most "right wing" Scottish newspaper simply will not allow letters disagreeing with government funded quangos producing Big State advertising against economic freedom, even in the sole section of the paper that is supposed to be reserved for individual readers not "news" placement by government.
It would be interested to know if ANY of the letters or "news" stories they publish promoting Big Government scare frauds, come from anybody who is not a paid government propagandist. The fact that there is not a single scientist, anywhere in the world, who supports the warming fraud without being state paid (despite some claiming such independence and being proven liars) suggests that the assumption should be that anybody promoting such frauds is being paid until they choose to prove otherwise.
------------------------------------ Sir,
I note the letter today (Tues.) from Ash giving as a primary reason that the Adam Smith Institute must be wrong, that it believes in the efficiency of the free market. The fact is that there is a very strong correlation between economic freedom and success, as shown by the fact that Singapore and Hong Kong are now much richer per capita than we are. It is not surprising that such an organisation should hold such an position. It does not depend on raising charity money in the free market since it is very effectively funded by big government, largely for the purpose of "raising awareness" (i.e. advertising) for the need for more government regulation and lobbying that same government for more of this regulation (and more regulators). I'm not sure what other charitable activities take up its time. Am I the only person who believes government funding of political "opposition", whose programme is ever more state control, is the major threat to our freedom? It would be interesting to know how many of reader's letters published in newspapers across the country calling for more government busybodying, whether about smoking, alleged catastrophic global warming or whatever the scare story du jour is actually come not from private persons, such as myself, but from but by those paid by the government at least partly to do so. I have previously pointed out that it is impossible to find a single scientist anywhere in the world who supports the warming scare and is not government funded. It would be good to know many anti-smoking campaigners or "environmentalists", campaigning so loudly, actually work in that free market they appear to so despise.
In their anxiety to suppress technology which can make the world rich the ecofascists have been desperately searching for an argument against shale gas. The only one that has seemed to hold any water is that extracting the gas can cause "earthquakes". This "magnitude 2.3 earthquake" was used to stop the British industry in its tracks, at a time when the American economy is starting back into modest growth purely because this new energy source has cut gas costs to 1/4 of ours.
However the Richter scale works on 10 fold increases for each point.
Below 5 on the Richter scale, which is the magnitude for international reporting, it cannot honestly be called a quake.
Actually a 2.3 tremor is 1/500th of even the dividing line and "not felt but recorded" and there are over a million of them annually. I think one should quake much more about the thought of there being a single elected politician or journalist anywhere in the country willing to pretend that any of the claims of any of the murdering ecofascist parasites, unsupported by overwhelming independent proof, being worth a moment's consideration. In any case the word "quake" can never honestly be used instead of tremor to describe such low magnitude "threats".
On of the sites I regularly comment on is the Scottish Sceptics one. On it there has recently been someone commenting from the alarmist side as well. He goes under the name Scottish Renewables. He regularly makes assertions which he is repeatedly challenged to substantiate factually and is unable to - but this does not stop him maintaining all of the. For example that mass production in the nuclear reactor industry alone could not significantly reduce costs.
It is quite possible for somebody to overstate or even talk nonsense in the heat of the moment but when they continue to maintain the inaccuracies over a long period of time, knowing the facts and unable to produce any factual basis for such claims there can be no possible doubt that the lie is deliberate and premeditated. By definition somebody willing to do so blatantly cannot ever be assumed to be telling the truth in any other case. This is what SR was and still is doing.
When it is done by somebody who knows that the lie they are telling is being done to deliberately results in the death of the 25,000 pensioners who die, unnecessarily, because of fuel poverty annually in Britain who could, in whole or large part, be saved by substantially lower energy costs I do not see that it is possible for anybody to say they are not responsible for the consequences they seek. This applies to every person who knowingly supports fuel poverty.
It would be possible for "environmentalists" to properly argue that the cost of these deaths is justified by the saving to the world in retaining the supplies of uranium in the ground or preventing another Chernobyl (though it would take 500 Chernobyls in Britain alone each year to match the death toll) or some other reason. So far nobody has done so but I would be willing to publish it if they could.
Which brings us to the conundrum in the title here.
Having taken long term advantage of the fact that sceptics are, due to our liberal nature, always willing to allow alarmists a free voice (usually, as here, excluding posts which make no attempt at debate and limit themselves to obscenity and rudeness - something common among those who claim to care about the environment) Scottish Renewables has chosen to make his own clearly well funded site the site of an attack on me claiming I am insane. The ultimate irony being that, obviously having, used sceptic's commitment to free speech to lie and made such a claim SR has censored my reply. In part in one case and in whole in 2 others.
Anybody who wants to can follow the trail of gratuitous lies you used to get to this point. You have repeatedly been asked to proved verification for the claims you made and repeatedly answered not with facts but with ad homs. Even in the reply to the post mentioned you make a medical claim about me. It is possible that you are a qualified doctor but I doubt it. If not then in what way is describing you as a liar inaccurate?
There is no dispute that fuel poverty kills around 25,000 pensioners a year. Nor that it could be effectively ended by a free market in power - which would mean nuclear rather than windmills. The "environmentalists" benefiting from windmill subsidies or paid by the government to promote it cannot deny this. Thus in what way is the term “murdering ecofascist parasite” non-factual?
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Anybody reading here can see you do not & cannot dispute the fact of 25,000 people being killed, quite unnecessarily, every year by fuel poverty. Nor that you are actively promoting the ecofascism that causes it. Therefore, if the English language has meaning you are a hired parasitic murderer and fascist.
You have made no attempt to provide the medical qualifications necessary for your accusation of lunacy to be even theoretically possibly anything other than a fascist lie. I note you have not attempted to withdraw it and must accept it as representing the pinnacle of honesty to which you ever personally aspire. I await your apology.
I note that every single supporter of "environmentalism" here, who possesses any trace of integrity, has had to dissociate themselves from your lies. That there is not a single person in the "Green" movement with any integrity is hardly my fault, but equally hardly disputable.
I tend to assume you will censor this post as you did the last, or moreso. Which only proves that you know you are a wholly corrupt fascist liar whose claims cannot survive honest discussion
And
Unsurprisingly all of the 15 "myths" about the stupidity of windmills are true.
Obviously anybody wishing to "play fair" on the subject, as the article requests, would be willing to allow discussion on the facts but since no "environmental" blog anywhere in the world, let alone either this one or the one delineating the "myths" allows free debate you will just have to accept that they all know for certain their claims are unsustainable.
Should SR feel at any time able to factually dispute anything I have said he is, of course, welcome to do so. Unlike him I do not approve of suppression of free political discussion, regarding that as fascist (as did Mussolini).
Equally should anybody know of any "environmentalist" site anywhere in the English speaking world which does not practice political censorship of discussion I would be very interested to hear of it. That one at least would not be properly described as ecofascist. Having previously asked for a single identifiable prominent supporter of alarmism, not just a "climate scientist" who is not ultimately paid by the state I would also like to extend it to a single identifiable prominent alarmist who is opposed to the fascism of political censorship.
Is there a single solitary "environmentalist" anywhere in the world who posseses a sufficient trace of honesty to be willing to say that anybody who makes deliberately dishonest claims of "lunacy", or claims designed to assist in killing people is doing something wrong? They deserve the chance to prove if there is even 1.
On Wednesday Gordon Brown had his adjournment debate on the Dalgety Bay "radium". He spoke, a couple of backbench Labour MPs asked supportive questions and Andrew Robathan, Parlaimentary Under Secretary for defence gave an emollient response confirming that the MoD have already paid £750,000 on this nonsense and are prepared to pay more but not unlimitedly more. He made no specific suggestion that it is natural radioactivity nor that most of it wasn't though he did appear to admit radium had been found..
This is the first time we have had any official statement of the cost spent on this bureaucratic lie. My guess would be that SEPA, being the active party in this must have spent several times more so we will be talking about a minimum of £4 million blown in propping up various people's bank balances.
Here is some stuff from Brown's speech, much of which was clearly a SEPA handout:
____________________________
"in the past six weeks, materials that were dumped there by the Ministry of Defence in the 1950s—aircraft dials, aircraft paint and other materials—have been discovered, with radioactive levels that are 10 times anything witnessed before." not true - no radioactive dials nor radioactive paint particles have ever been found in the past and the current claims are just about "particles" and "a piece of metal"
"aircraft dials, materials used for painting dials and other instruments, were broken up and dumped at Dalgety Bay. On that land houses were built " so the main site of any putative radium would not be on the beach at all but on the land built on. Reinforces the assumption that this is either natural rock concentrated by lighter soil being washed away from the beach or alternately material being swept onto the beach from the sea bottom*.
"the ambient radiation dose rate values were within normal levels and calculated that the highest ambient dose rate found at Dalgety Bay was only two thirds of that found naturally in the granite in Aberdeen" actually the report said "less than 2/3rds" - I suspect this damaging point would not have appeared in his speech had I not previously dug it out.
"radium contamination was present not as a layer in the sediment, but randomly distributed as particles" the difference between a layer and a random distribution is clearly a matter of the word you choose to use
"the maximum fatal risk per year from inhaling or swallowing a radioactive particle to any user of the area surveyed was negligible; it was calculated as clearly “less than one in a million” I assume "clearly less" means "far less" so zero to by any real world use of the term
"The chances of ingestion…is highly unlikely, around one in half a million per year” so considerably less than the chance of being attacked by a sabre tooth tiger their, though the tiger attack would likely be fatal while eating one particle almost certainly wouldn't
"“recontamination of the beach continued, indicating that either the ash horizon was not the only potential host material, or that”—other—“sources continued to be present…and continued to re-contaminate the beach.” ie in either case it is not primarily, if at all, dial radium but naturally occurring background, probably including stuff from the sea bottom routinely deposited by the sea*
"128 particles, 48 were recovered from investigations of the ash bed, 28 from clearance surveys of the beach and coastal path, and 51 from regular visits" so 37.5% from the only area where dial radiation, if it existed, would be likely to be (also the area where they were looking hardest, and 62.5% where natural radiation only would be expected
"SEPA again wrote to the MOD asking for a commitment to undertake appropriate remediation and
“the delivery of a plan” with“sufficient resources and funds to enable work to be undertaken”." which is basically SEPA putting the onus on the MoD to make an unlimited commitment to pay for unspecified action in response to an undetectably small alleged threat for which there is no evidence they are responsible
The second part of his speech seems to be less taken from a SEPA handout and makes a number of statements that ain't so or are meaningless "is a radioactivity level higher than anything that has been seen before" no we have 3 particles, but the background level is unchanged and much lower than elsewhere
"the MOD contractor removed 33 sources, SEPA has removed 442 separate particles" if that were comparable level of effort we would expect SEPA to have spent 13 times more - £10 million - on this nonsense but I am willing to assume they have merely been removing less radioactive particles
The Undersecretary's response is memorable only for this "SEPA has recently found higher activity sourced at some depth—about 75cm, or 2 feet for those who deal in old-fashioned measurements" actually 2 1/2 feet - perhaps a nitpick but both the exposure to the public and the likelihood of them having been put there less than geological ages ago are sharply reduced by increased depth.
Brown ends with this telling point "The Ministry of defence has been told by the Scottish environmental Protection agency that a remedial action plan is needed. It has the power to designate the land and require the Ministry of Defence to do this. It will not change its mind about whether a remedial action plan is needed" - ie the issue does not come down to whether there is any actual danger or even any actual radioactivity beyond what God laid down but simply that SEPA has the power to designate any land anywhere "radioactive" and permanently sealed off, irrespective of whether they actually have found the non-existent "daughter elements" of radium or anything else of scientific validity.
This simply comes down to SEPA holding the community hostage to extort money from the MoD.
There are amoebae on Mars with a greater knowledge of physics than Gordon Brown and he should return to his self- imposed purdah and not ramp up silly scare stories
the effect of hormesis on the feline population of Aberdeen??
"On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation....
Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L'Astronomie in 1886. Unable to account for the phenomenon, the editor of the journal suggested, rather incredulously, that it must have been caused by birds, insects or dust passing front of the Bonilla's telescope. ....
Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, give a different interpretation. They think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the 'misty' appearance of the pieces and why they were so close together.
But there's much more that Manterola and co have deduced. They point out that nobody else on the planet seems to have seen this comet passing in front of the Sun, even though the nearest observatories in those days were just a few hundred kilometers away.
That can be explained using parallax. If the fragments were close to Earth, parallax would have ensured that they would not have been in line with the Sun even for observers nearby. And since Mexico is at the same latitude as the Sahara, northern India and south-east Asia, it's not hard to imagine that nobody else was looking.
Manterola and pals have used this to place limits on how close the fragments must have been: between 600 km and 8000 km of Earth. That's just a hair's breadth.
What's more, Manterola and co estimate that these objects must have ranged in size from 50 to 800 metres across and that the parent comet must originally have tipped the scales at a billion tons or more, that's huge, approaching the size of Halley's comet....
One puzzle is why nobody else saw this comet. It must have been particularly dull to have escaped observation before and after its close approach. However, Manterola and co suggest that it may have been a comet called Pons-Brooks seen that same year by American astronomers.
Manterola and co end their paper by spelling out just how close Earth may have come to catastrophe that day. They point out that Bonilla observed these objects for about three and a half hours over two days. This implies an average of 131 objects per hour and a total of 3275 objects in the time between observations. Each fragment was at least as big as the one thought to have hit Tunguska. Manterola and co end with this: "So if they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event."
My guess is probably not but only probably. Either he really did have birds flying past the telescope or more likely it was further away but no other astronomers happened to be looking in the right direction. Even so cometary debris passing at a mere 10s of thousands of km would be pretty close. The Earth has a diameter of 8,000 km so in astronomic terms anything closer than the Moon is to close to the bull's eye. Although the dinosaur killer extinctio9n event was 65 million years ago it is quite possible that we have had many more which "only" killed 99% of land animals. IN most cases that would mean populations back to normal with a thousand years of breeding - not enough to even register on a geological record 1os of millions or even millions of years ago but no fun for the 99%v of us.
We need a spacegoing civilisation, to be able to spot these quickly and a large instant launch capability to reach and divert them. Anything less is the human race playing Russian Roulette - perhaps only with 1 chamber in 10,000 loaded but that is still far to much.
I was rereading Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun written in 1956. The background to this SF murder mystery is that 2 cultures, that of Solaris and Earth are psychotically crippled and have no future.
Solaris is immensely wealthy with enormous numbers of robots where people live without human contact. Indeed having been brought up by robots they are incapable of human contact.
But they aren't so psychotic that they believe it possible to bring children up to healthy adults without being willing to spank them as every human culture has since forever.. Indeed an explanation of the "psychological" training a robot has to undergo to be able to smack a child is discussed.
Earth's psychosis is that everybody lives all the time in giant enclosed cities and the people are incapable of leaving or even looking at nature in the raw or gaze on the naked Sun.
But at one point the hero, to relieve the stress of having to tell his boss of the psychotic nature of Earth's culture, TAKES OUT HIS PIPE AND SMOKES IT RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM. The people of Earth are clearly not so psychotic as to get uptight about "passive smoke" less than 1/10,000th* as dense as smoked smoke.
Like so much science fiction must inevitably be Asimov is clearly extrapolating/satirising trends in the culture of the time by projecting them many centuries into the future. Yet in a mere 55 years we have developed and made politically correct and legally enforceable psychoses perhaps even stranger and arguably more debilitating than the ones foreseen.
Never disciplining children must mean that in very many cases, they will grow up without self discipline. We have never had such a society but it is a dangerous experiment to run. Criminalising passive smoking itself may not be so damaging but the sort of society where everybody is constantly subject to such pointless and vindictive rules clearly is.
To really see yourself you have to stand outside yourself which is why self awareness is so difficult. Thus looking through the prism of the inherent assumptions of past societies helps.
*Taking the cubic capacity of a mouth as about 5 inches and the volume of a sphere being 4/3 piR^3 a sphere of radius 32 inches is 10,000 times larger so anybody constantly around 2'8" away is going to get only 10,000th as much smoke as a smoker breaths out. That is pretty much elbow to elbow and in most cases people are much further apart. It is clearly therefore lunatic to suggest, without evidence, that passive smoking is a real risk as the BMA and most politicians do.
Suggested other psychoses in British Society
That any sort of change to the planet is bad. I don't mean objecting to pollution but that any change in temperature/the number of polar bears/butterflies/CO2 levels/snail darter fish/plant DNA etc etc is inherently awful.
That any level of actual sort of pollution is utterly unacceptable, no matter what the ancillary benefits. An example would be Paul Ehrlich using an expected rise in sulphur dioxide emissions in China as "proof" that things were getting worse irrespective of the massive rise in Chinese living standards, or indeed reduction of pollution of indoor wood smoke or or feces.
Health and safety - from the assumption that humans should not go into space in case anybody dies, even though far fewer have done so than in polar exploration - to people being prevented from moving their desks in offices or change a light bulb.
Scare of all sorts which depend on numerical illiteracy.
Attempts to legislate, for health, reductions in the level of "contaminants" to where they run into laws requiring the presence, for health, of such levels "trace elements"
The Linear No Threshold anti-nuclear theory, which has certainly reduced humanity's standard of living, on its own, by over 50%
People who don't want to go into space and cause "ecological damage" there until we have totally "cleaned up" the Earth.
The criminalisation of any judgement of anybody about anything based on information about them of their race, gender, ethnicity, age etc. Prejudice is literally pre-judgement and everybody has to do it to some extent all the time. When you put salt on your food without a chemical analysis you are prejudging that it is virtually certain to contain salt rather than cyanide.
Not being willing to execute murderers even when it is known it will, net, save lives
If anybody has other signs I would be interested to know.The list is almost certain to be incomplete because we live within the same society. However once stated they appear logically indisputable.
Kipling had something to say about societies that behave psychotically. I happen to think that our scientific progress gives us much more leeway than he expected but he had a point.
