A Place to Stand

I am more than a little annoyed at the Herald for refusing to publish a reply to 3 letters on Tuesday replying to mine on Monday. 2 of them singled mine out & 1 accused me, correctly as it turned out, of an error. When anybody is accused of being wrong & makes no attempt to explain the assumption must, as with the BBC, that one has no answer. By censoring my reply the Herald have deliberately & falsely given that wrong impression. They have not answered my email, for example asking for a shorter letter. This is not the first time they have done so & I must take it further.

Here is the correct most recent (as far as I know) figures Ben had referred to.

As sent to the Herald ----- I see that once again my letter in reply to criticism has gone unpublished & I again repost it, marginally tweaked. The editorial duty to allow such replies has been accepted by the PCC. I quote

"The newspaper published reader's letters which named the complainant and challenged him to reply to questions. The second letter was headlined "Answers, please" and there is no doubt that the editor was under an obligation to publish the complainant's answers. The complaint against the Derby Evening Telegraph is upheld. T9605-1983"

No doubt there are several more recent acknowledgements of the duty but 1 suffices.

I find it strange that when unconnected opposing writers single my contribution out & previously a prospective MP has done so as being particularly well informed, you do not welcome my reply, on purely commercial grounds.

Unless you intend to publish in Friday's edition I must insist on a response.
=====================================
Sir,
Firstly I must acknowledge that Dan Hansen is correct - that I had not realised the figures I had extrapolated were out of date & I apologise. His source (Scottish Government - Staristics/Browse/Business/Trend/Data ) does indeed show wind & other "alternatives" up to 8.6% of our electricity (still less than the 11% previously said) which is still a very small return for £1 bn a year subsidy. In another way the current figures are worse than I thought. I had said that Holyrood's unanimous & in my opinion insane, decision to cut half our CO2 producing power over the next 10 years, to ameliorate the "catastrophic global warming they allege we are experiencing today. Including all our nuclear I thought that would mean losing "only" 50% in total. However by the figures Dan provided it is actually 58% (nuclear now being 31% & pumped storage in practice being powered by off peak nuclear) of our electric capacity that will be destroyed. If a decade of subsidising windmills can raise it to only 8.6% it is unwise in the extreme to hope that the next decade will produce another 58%.

By comparison with the unending windmill subsidies, since nuclear plants are available worldwide for £1 billion a shot, they need zero public subsidy to achieve what windmills promise but cannot achieve for so many billions.

There is also the letter from Scottish Renewables, nominally the "renewable industry" lobby organisation, but because so many government quangos & organisations appear on its list of funders, effectively a government propaganda organisation itself. The lady says that more that 1/5th of our electricity comes from renewables (the figures given above say 18%) which is within hailing distance of the "nearly a quarter" she claimed in a letter here in March. I can assure her I represent none of the "vested interests" she says are promoting "myths" unless it is the common interest of us all that we have power which is not only competitively priced but, even more importantly will, fail when we have a completely windless fortnight as happened in February 2009. Her claim that windpower, which is far more expensive than coal, gas or nuclear can have any significant role in an "optimum" power supply is clearly itself a myth presented by the "vested interest" that employs he since "most expensive & unreliable" is not optimum.

I cannot add to the letter from Brian Samuel. It is unfortunate that people like him, who represent the best engineering traditions of Scotland & who have kept our lights on for decades do not receive the public respect that seems to be given by the media to hired lobbyists, anti-technology activists & even MSPs.

I apologise to readers for the numerous & confusing figures (even I find them confusing). Unfortunately power policy depends on figures rather than wishes & the results of pretending otherwise will be catastrophic.

Neil Craig

Labels: Media, nuclear, Unpublished letters

Where I sent these to a lot of sources some of these may have been published without me seeing but no Google search has shown them.

25th Nov to Scotsman

Dear Editor,
I see Councillor Debra Storr says that her expulsion from the Liberal Democrats *19th Nov) showed the party is "increasingly intolerant & illiberal" for wanting rid of her because she has been involved in trying to prevent the people of Aberdeenshire getting thousands of jobs & £1 billion of local investment.

A few years ago she was part of the party Executive & voted for my expulsion on the grounds that I supported lower taxes as a stimulus to growth & felt we need nuclear power if we wish to keep the lights on. This was officially "illiberal" & "too right wing" to even think about. As part of the Executive's evidence of wrongdoing, they said that the reason the party had refused to debate tax cutting at conference was because my motion had been badly drafted. Ms Storr concurred despite the fact that the final draft of the motion had been made, at my constituency's request, by Ms Storr herself, since she was officially the expert in the legalese required for such motions.

In due course I was expelled, in duer course the SNP adopted a similar policy of Irish style tax cuts & won the election (though I regret they have made little move to carry it out). Just this summer Nick Clegg & subsequently Tavish Scott promised that as soon as they took power they would cut taxes, this now being a "liberal" principle.

My commiseration's to Ms Storr for having to suffer Liberal Democrat illiberalism.

4th Dec Scotsman

The letter from Patrick Harvie of the Green Party saying his party has no responsibility for fuel poverty is at variance with the facts. Firstly he claims that his party wants to spend £100 million on insulation. This would only be a useful contribution if his party were willing to say that they intended to raise this mony by raising Scottish income tax by 0.5p or some similar method.. In any case £100 million will barely buy half an hours insulation fitting time for each of us. He cannot honestly say this will reverse the effects of recent price increases.

Secondly Mr Harvie says that to cut prices we must go from oil & coal to "renewables". Previous discussion in these columns has proven that nuclear power at 1/3rd of the cost of oil is 1/10th that of windmill electricity. Is Mr Harvie so ignorant of the prime policy his party stands for as to be unaware of this?

Of course this whole campaign is based on the claim that we are currently suffering from catastrophic global warming. As the leader of the only party to stand in the last election expressing scepticism on that question & calling for a 3p cut in income tax paid for by ending windmill subsidies (& ignored by the entire media) may I point out that the fall in global temperature over the last decade is such that it is now back to where it was when James Hansen started the scare by promising a 1 C rise by today.

11th Dec Scotsman

Congratulations to the Scottish government on spotting that the current Forth Bridge can be repaired, as many people said a couple of years ago, & that a new bridge can be built for £2 billion. The cost of the first bridge was £19 million which, adjusting for inflation, is £320 million.

Now if only they would notice that the Norwegians, who have been cutting tunnels for decades & the engineers who cut the tunnels at the Glendoe power station, could produce a Forth crossing for tens of millions.

13th Dec Scotsman, Herald, Sunday Times

The annoyance that Labour has released inaccurate figure of knife crime is widely reported. Should there not be equally disapproval of their claims that they are doing their best in face of a "world recession." There is no world recession. According to a recent World Bank report the world economy is growing at 2.5% this year, down from 5% in previous years & expected to manage 0.9% next.

The recession is in Europe & America & possibly Japan. All countries where, not coincidentally, ever increasing government regulation is preventing the use of improved technology. "Environmentalists" have said that, for example, they support the EU purely because its overwhelming regulations can prevent the "continous economic expansion" they abhor. This non-worldwide recession is the triumph of government "environmental" policies & of those Luddites who have been telling us for years that we must make do with less. It is quite improper of the government to blame it on other nations, most of whom are not in recession.

15th Dec - Herald

Thanks to tom & William (letters Mondy) on giving figures for bridges, comparable to the Forth crossing, elsewhere in the May I also compare it with the current bridge.. The cost of the first bridge was £19 million which, adjusting for inflation, is £320 million.

Even better would be if our government would notice that the Norwegians, who have been cutting tunnels for decades & the engineers who cut the tunnels at the Glendoe power station, could produce a Forth crossing for tens of millions.

21st Dec - Herald

Because of the decline of the pound we should give up petrol & rely on windmill power according to Craig Potter (letter Monday). Has he not considered that the reason for the decline in the pound & in our economy generally is the vast amounts taken from the productive economy & handed out to favoured Luddite lobbies by government. It is a matter of record that our economy would be nearly twice its current size if we had maintained the rate of growth before the "environmentalists" started banning everything & that we would all be paying 1/4 of the present price for our electricity if we had nuclear plants instead of the £1 billion a year we waste subsidising windmills.

23rd Dec - Herald, Scotsman etc

Keeping the 2 Titians is going to cost over £220 million including both the money we will, involuntarily, pay for them & the tax on sales foregone. £10 million is being put up by the SNP government.

An X-Prize of £660 million ($1 bn) would be enough to stimulate designing & building a commercial spaceplane able to fly to orbit for a price comparable to flying to Australia. Since no payment is due if such a ship cannot be designed nobody can use the excuse that it won't work. The choice is stark - whether 2 Renaisance paintings are of more value than human progress. Since the money is forthcoming for this boondoggle but nothing for X-Prizes it is undeniable that those running this country have absolutely no interest in progress. Titian would not understand such philistines.

3rd Jan - Herald

I was very sorry to see the disgraceful letter from former Labour Councillor Bashir Maan on Friday. His letter is an explicit attack not merely on Israel but on Jews & a failure to denounce such words would indeed "bode ill for Jews all over the world" or at least in countries where such people have influence. May I ask where, over the last 8 years, were his call for attacks on Moslems for Hamas' unprovoked campaign of rocket attacks aimed purely at Israeli civilians? Had a prominent former member of the BNP been published by a newspaper calling for the "reviving" of attacks on citizens of Pakistani origin because of the Mumbai atrocity I think the authorities would, rightly, have been concerned about a breach of the law, but the parallel is precise.

The fact is that Israel is defending itself from people who, for 8 years have been launching attacks on their civilians & that it is Hamas, not Israel, which refuses to cease fire. Nonetheless Israel is making prodigious efforts to minimise civilian casualties, even though Hamas is using its own people as human shields. Compare & contrast this with the behaviour of NATO supported by the Labour party of which Mr Maan was a member & also the Liberal Democrats & Conservatives who participated in the genocide & ethnic cleansing of half a million Serbs from Croatia, a million from western Bosnia & 350,000 from Kosovo. Note their bombing was done to support unrepentant (ex-)Nazis publicly committed to genocide (many of them former members of the less attractive units of Hitler's SS). Under our authority they engaged not only in genocide but also child sex slavery & the dissection of living Serbian teenagers to provide organs for our hospitals. Note also that markedly unlike in Gaza, 80% of the people murdered in our government's criminal bombing were civilians. Such actions by our leaders obviously attract far less media attention than Israel's but the facts are indisputable.

Whatever the rights & wrongs of Israel's actions there are absolutely no circumstances in which any British politician who supported such actions is fit to cast the first stone against Israel. Mr Maan should, instead of threatening Jews; acknowlege the Israelis have shown so much more respect for human rights than our leaders.

& 6th Jan

I note the Herald has yet another letter from Bashir Maan today (Tues) following his previous one on Friday inciting "reviving & spreading anti-Semitism in the world". This indeed, as he said "bodes ill for Jews all over the world". Even more ill is that the Herald, having decided to publish this disgraceful threat, decided not to publish any letter disagreeing that pogroms in Britain were the way to go.

I think we can see why Israel wishes to defend itself rather than accomodating itself to the EU's convenience.

13th Jan - Scotsman (variants to others0

If "Paki" a diminutive of Pakistani is offensive but Asian, as in the BBC report "Asian & Chinese youths clashed..." is politically correct how does Scot as a diminutive of Scotsman (sorry Scottish person) work nowadays?

May we look forward to this newspaper being retitled the North Britain to avoid giving offense?

17th Jan - Herald

The long letter from "Stop Climate Chaos" (that used to be known as weather bases its demand for ever more restrictions on us, ever more subsidies & taxes & ever more expensive ways of doing anything on the claim that "Climate change remains the greatest threat to our societies. Arctic sea ice is melting beyond the point of no return."

"Climate change" is hysterical propaganda which makes Medieval witchburnings look rational. The rebranding from calling it global warming followed the failure of the globe over the last 10 years to warm, indeed it is cooling. Arctic ice coverage is increasing, ITN recently promised to have their camera crew follow Lewis Pugh as he canoed to the previously ice free North Pole & ceased coverage just before he was stopped by ice.

29th Jan - Scotsman

I have some difficulty in believing that a letter basing its thesis on the fact that the writer "cannot believe" plain facts (in this case that French electricity is less than 1/3rd of the cost here) & then repeating, without any attempt to produce evidence, that nuclear simply must be more expensive, whatever the evidence, was considered killing a few tree branches for. The evidence has been produced, in these columns, time after time & there is no factual doubt that nuclear electricity can be, because it is being, produced for 1.4p a unit & that windmills cost 10 times as much.

2nd Feb - Scotsman

As I look out my window at the snow I read "hundreds of millions of people in some of the world's poorest countries are already feeling the devastating effects of climate change" (or global warming as it used to be known) (Monday letter). Perhaps we should be told where this catastrophic warming is? Global temperature is declining & the scammers have been caught spending trillions of our money on this fraud.

3rd Feb Scotsman

Once again Professor Salter has produced a dubious figure in the nuclear debate in his letter today (Tuesday). Previously he asserted that my figure of 1.3p per kwh for French nuclear was "dishonest" & produced his own (letter 25th Oct). It turned out that my figure was correct (& a tenth that of windmills) & his mistaken. Now he admits that nuclear is lower in CO2 production than conventional power, but only by 3 fold. He does not say where this figure came from but it is certainly not undisputed. A conventional calculation from the University of Wisconsin College of Engineering shows that for every 10 tons on CO2 produced by nuclear power, gas releases 469 & coal 974. Wind produces 14. http://www.fusion.org.uk/socioecon/Kulcinski1.pdf p 16

Of course if the present cooling of the globe, due to lack of sunspots, continues we may soon expect the antinuclear movement to be demanding no more nuclear plants because they produce insufficient CO2 needed to offset the threat of a new ice age. Environmentalists, like James Hansen, were keen on this threat 3 decades ago & it now looks a more likely catastrophe if one is needed

3rd Feb - everybody

The great & good have decided to spend £50 million on the first of two 500 year old Italian paintings. It would cost us only 7 times that much for an X-Prize that delivered a fleet of space planes able to make Earth orbit available at a cost comparable with a flight to Australia. Alternately it would cost zero for an X-Prize that didn't work - that being the nature of prizes that aren't won. Does it not show how far from intellectual endeavour & into a new dark age we have already fallen that there is money for ancient trophies but not for new triumphs?

5th Feb - several

It seems that government spending is now 50% of the UK economy & rising (probably approaching 60% of Scotland's). This section is very largely unproductive, indeed since regulations cost the citizen £20 for every £1 spent on enforcing them it is likely that the net economic value of government is well under zero. Does anybody really think it is possible to get out of recession let alone ever have a successful country struggling along in this one lunged fashion? Does anybody doubt that if we invested the £200 billion, above the inflationary increase, that the budget has risen in the last 12 years we would not only not be facing Depression but growing as fast as India & China still are?

6th Feb - everybody

The Greens insulation pork barreling will be wasted on hotlines, civil servants & piles of forms to be filled in & would have been even more wasted had they got even more of our money to play with. It is cynical of the Greens to pretend they care for helping the poor & even moreso to pretend they want to rebuild the economy by ever more government spending paid for by the remaining 40% of the Scots economy that isn't the government. I assume the Greens will not be happy till 100% of the economy is such government programmes.

If they really cared for the poor they would let them have nuclear electricity, at half the present price rather than seeking to double it with more windmills. If they truly believed in CO2 being responsible for the catastrophic warming we are all alleged to be sweltering under they would support nuclear which they know is the only practical method of producing power while reducing CO2. Of course they don't all they believe in is Ludditism & ensuring none of us ever again suffer from the "continuous economic expansion" we used to have.

7th Feb - Scotsman

Just as Professor Salter was selective in his previous choice of figures giving nuclear as only producing 3 times less CO2 than conventional sources, rather than several hundred times less & plain wrong when he accused me of "dishonesty" in saying that France produces nuclear electricity at 1.3p per kwh so he is again being selective in the figures he gives for the cost of decommissioning. He ought to know that the first ever reactor decommissioned at Shippingport in the USA cost $100 million (£70 m) to decommission. At that rate we could do all ours for under £3 billion. Anything above that is pure bureaucratic empire building.

The bottom line in engineering is that if something has been done at a particular cost then it is possible to do it again at that cost, irrespective of all the figures plucked from the air by politicians, or grant recipients, with an agenda.

12th Feb - Herald

We are told that Dutch MP Geert Wilders is to be banned from this country because some think his criticisms of Islam could "incite violence". How fortunate that the Herald showed more liberal standards when they decided to publish 2 letters from Bashir Mann during the Gaza fighting which provided justification for violence against British Jews. Unfortunate, however that you weren't liberal enough to also publish letters disagreeing with him.

19th Feb - Herald

The letter (Thurs) saying that we are going to run out of nuclear fuel by 2040 is out by a significant amount. It works on the assumption that the only uranium in the world is that, already proven, in mines currently in use. In fact uranium is not a particularly uncommon metal even near the surface of the Earth & further down has provided enough excess heat to keep most of the planet molten for 4 billion years. Some years ago Professor Cohen of Pittsburg calculated that merely by mining it from seawater (not the optimum source but for which figures are undeniable) we could get enough to keep our civilisation going for 5 billion years, at which time the Sun will have become a Red Giant. I think we have more urgent worries.

The entire anti-nuclear movement depends on the continuous repetition of scare stories such as that disposal of waste is difficult (in fact due to its small volume it is easy) or that it is dangerous (the safety record is orders of magnitude better than alternatives, even wind). All such scare stories have been disproven time & again. By comparison none of these Luddites are in the slightest worried about the 24,000 pensioners who die, unnecessarily, of fuel poverty each winter or the far greater number who will when the lights go out - unnecessarily because we could have unlimited nuclear electricity at the current French price of 1.3p a unit.

20th Feb - Herald

Regarding today's (Friday's) article on the SNP' enthusiasm for blackouts as the alternative to nuclear electricity perhaps consideration of the cost would be useful.

The UK produces 371 billion kwh of electricity a year. Taking our average production cost as 4p a unit(higher than coal or our nuclear but 1/3rd of windmill electricity) compared to the 1.4p a kwh France is producing its nuclear electricity at gives us an extra production cost of £9.6 billion. Retail cost must be about double that. Since France produces 44% more electricity than us with an economy & population almost exactly the same as ours & indeed with warmer weather we should assume that, if we had a free market in electricity production we would be producing at least 50% more. All in all that means our Luddite approach is directly costing the country £29 billion a year.

That makes no allowance for the loss of industry, due to our higher manufacturing costs, for example the current closing of the Llanwern steel plant because the nearby nuclear plant is closing.

Taking everything we have lost over the last 3 1/2 decades since France went nuclear we see the total direct costs come to £1 trillion in today's money. By comparison our economy amounts to £1.4 trillion annually, of which now only 50% (40% in Scotland) isn't government spending. This is not the sole reason for our economic woes but it is something we must change if we ever want success. I grant not everybody wants success - "green" politicians of every party have been ranting for years about how dreadful a growing economy is & it seems they have now achieved the paradise they wished.

So a relatively high ratio of unpublished to published letters. Partly because the Herald have publiched none of them & partly because letters sent to the London Press have not to the best of my knowledge been published the latter being not unusual. Also a zero score on letters about how to get out of the recession, supportive of Israel & about Dalgety Bay - the first of which I am surprised at since it seems a subject of some interest. The Herald's attitude to publishing Mashir Mann's anti-Jewish letters may have influenced their overall policy. The refusal to report the evidence that SEPA lied over Dalgety Bay is quite wrong.

Iain Dale put this up this picture 10 days ago so it is hardly news except in the MSM. What can be quite clearly seen here & was dissected by Liberal Conspiracy is that it is clearly a fake. The white around the signature, particularly the early part of the signature shows it has been lifted from a different, white, piece of paper & added to the Houses of Parliament manuscript paper the adulatory bit is written on. It is thus an obvious forgery. Ms Butler MP has changed the story a bit since she started it & the official line is now that he signed it at a 10 minute meeting she wangled in downing St with him. Her people & his people agreed the wording in advance & then her people wrote it for him to sign. Exactly how stupid would that make him to agree to sign a paper saying that he had met her & he had met her & that she was both bright & intelligent! No lawyer he to sign such stuff before in advance.

In my naivete I thought that this that this piece of stupid fraud would get picked up by the MSM. Even though no fivers changed hands we are, after all talking about as open, obvious & blatant a fraud as any MP could engage in. That her party would have to, at the very least, discipline her & probably disown her. My comment on Iain's blog was

I assume Obama's office has been emailed about this. After all if there were any truth to it it would make Obama look like a complete idiot. I think he is going to have to say something about even if it is "Mr Obama has no recollection of the incident".

I found Unity's review convincing:

The signature was originally written on a white piece of paper & electronically added to the rest of the letter, which Dawn now admits writing.

I'm not sure whether to be more appalled by the complete dishonesty or complete stupidity.

I also emailed Obama's office for such a something. But no - not a chirp from Obama, from her party & barely one from the media - with the exception of this extremely chirpy piece from the BBC "Labour MP gets Barack's backing" which treats it as unquestionably genuine. Exactly who do you have to kill to be unfit to be a Labour MP? The only thing we can conclude from this is that there is absolutely no sort of obvious lie that is beneath that party, that Obama has relatively little self respect & that our media can be relied on not to report anything embarrassing.

Once again we see it is impossible to get a factual letter published in the UK or US media on Yugoslacia. Goebbels would have approved.

21st April, Scotsman on NUCLEAR:

We are assured that nuclear power will not work because uranium is going to run out within decades (letter Tues., JB Elliot) & complains that it is impossible to get such "useful information" from those working in the industry but is only available from unnamed "independent research organisations." So it should be because it is rubbish. Uranium is more plentiful than silver & antimony & as plentiful as molybdenum so in the very small quantities needed there is no shortage. Indeed Professor Cohen of Pittsburgh proved, may years ago, that enough would be available from seawater alone to keep us going for billions of years & his figures have never been disputed. It hardly seems necessary to point out that Thorium, which can also be used, is 4 times more common.

The fact that the "information" from "environmentalists" has, time after time over decades, proven to be not even close to factual should give us pause.

6th April, Herald - Scottish Tunnel Project

Regarding discussion of Islay & its decline due to its remoteness. A millennium ago Islay was the capital of the Lordship of the Isles, an area as important in international trade as mainland Scotland. The reason for this was that the sea was the main communication system & Glasgow was closer, in sailing time, to Islay, than it was in walking time to Edinburgh.

There is an easy way to reverse this decline. The Norwegians have cut over 750 km of tunnels at an average cost of £7 million per km. The Scottish Tunnel Project is a proposal to do the same here. Tunnels from Gourock to Dunoon, under Loch Fyne & from Kintyre to Islay or possibly to Jura & then Islay are perfectly feasible. & would make the island about 70 miles from Glasgow. Treating Glasgow as the centre of the universe this would leave Islay more remote than Edinburgh, but only slightly so. Similar tunnels to Mull, the Hebrides, Northern ireland & the Isle of Man could be cut. So could one under the Forth if the politicos were not intent on spending billions on a bridge.

I can think of little which would do more to revitalise the entire Scottish economy which is the objective, or at least the declared objective, of most political parties.


31st March - entire media, US & UK keeps censoring genocide (resent 11th April after BBC report):

It is not often that the first anniversary of the publication of a bureaucrat's biography deserves discussion, however this is one. A year ago Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal published her biography. In it she confirmed having, 8 years previously, investigated reports from western journalists that NATO "police," formerly known as the KLA, had kidnapped & dissected, while still alive, at least 1,300 Serb teenagers & that the presumably 10s of thousands of body parts had been flown out of Tirana airports to western destinations. Her team had indeed found a building where 300 of these murders took place together with forensic evidence proving this atrocity. Then she stopped the investigation.

Since then there have been further investigations proving that such dissections were more extensive than thought & still going on. The EU even appointed a lawyer to look into the matter.

Over the last year we have seen leader writers & front page articles denouncing the Chinese government for their "heavy handed" breaking up of riots in Tibet in which less than 2 dozen died, most of them ethnic Chinese. We have seen headlines & denunciations of Russia's action which prevented a Georgian attempt to "ethnically cleanse" the entire South Ossetian population. We have seen massive reporting of the Israeli war against Hammers in which about 800 people died, overwhelmingly Hammers combatants.

How shameful that atrocities worse in numbers, infinitely worse in cruelty & forming only a part of the crimes carried out under NATO authority have gone virtually entirely unreported by British Press & broadcasters.

References Del Ponte's initial report http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm
Subsequent investigation http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/dcn100108.htm

PS Its OK I don't expect you to publish this. The only paper to publish even one previous letter on the subject was the Scotsman. The late Josef Goebbels managed a similar level, of censorship but then he could send journalists to concentration camps. How fortunate that today's journalists are sufficiently sensitive not to such threats to prevent them reporting.

27th march, Scotsman on MAJOR PARIIES' COMPLICI IN NAZI WAR CRIMES:

The public are told to ask BNP candidates about WW2 (Hutchen's letter Fri). Should we expect candidates for the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties, guilty of a more recent criminal war, fought largely by bombing Yugoslav civilians for the purpose of helping a KLA with Nazi antecedents openly engaged in genocide, to say why they favour such practices? Under NATO rule the KLA, enrolled as "police," have been responsible for massacres, such as Dragodan where 210 unarmed civilians were killed a few hundred yards from our HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap & sale to western brothels of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls; & the dissection while still alive, of thousands of Serb teens to sell the parts to our hospitals. A|ll of these are matters of public record, though the dissections only became so when NATO Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte made them public a year ago. The refusal of these parties to answer such questions is matched only by the refusal of our media to report them. I do not think that any member of the BNP need feel any shame in the presence of members of parties who commit such atrocities.


20th March my previouc how to end recession letter retreaded. Still no UK paper is willing to publish any letter fiving a real solution.

19th March. This went out to all & sundry & was published in the Daily Record (I found a number of other letters i had sent listed there):

Since the will of the people is paramount lets have a referendum on the ban on smoking in pubs. If the SNP really believe such things are proof of democracy they can have no problem with this. Though the political elite were united on this bit of onanism polls showed that as much as 80% of us were against it. I suspect the turnout would be comparable with that for Holyrood & far better than for council or EU elections.

California has plebiscites on issues which a sufficiently large number of people can put on the ballot. I think that would improve democracy here & is certainly something the SNP should support if their position on a referendum is as principled as they say.


17th Mar on GLOBAL NON-WARMING:

It is quite wrong to talk of "faster-than-expected Arctic melt, higher-than-anticipated sea levels and much-reduced efficiency of carbon sinks" al William Ross does (let Tues). The fact is that we have had the coldest winter for 20 years, Arctic ice was much more extensive this winter than it has been for 20 years & Antarctic ice has always been increasing, sea levels are not rising significantly faster than they have for the last 10,000 years & the CO2 absorbing properties of water are the same as they have always been whereas forests worldwide, the other carbon sink, are expanding faster worldwide than they are contracting.

After all these ridiculous scare stories his reassuring assertion that all this global warming will only cost 1-2% of GNP is rather like telling a lobster that the water is only warming a little bit. Over the last 40 years GNP growth in western countries has been at least 1 1/2% less than it could have been because of eco-nannying, an effect clearly not seen in China. That means we would all be more than 80% better off without their care & attention & all the many previous scare stories, such as peak oil & an ice age before 2000. Promises that "this won't hurt next time" & are "good for you" ring hollow because we know they weren't true preciously.


14th March - letter to UK papers on quangos & fakecharities funding mainstream political parties (well the LibDems)
9th Mar to Glasgow newspapers:

Stephen Purcell is getting in with the public employees who make up the overwhelming bulk activists in a Labour party who once claimed to represent the entire working class. The claim that this can be paid for simply by asking the council workers to turn up for their jobs is clearly nonsense. It would work only if they were going to cut the number of employees on the assumption that them actually being there would make up for it. There is no intention to cut employees therefore either council tax will go up or services to Glaswegians will be reduced. My bet is on the latter since they have already signed up to an agreement with Holyrood not to raise charges.

It is an example of Pournelle's law that the purpose of government is to pay government workers and their allies & that their official job takes, at best, 2nd place.

This is particularly disgusting when ordinary people are losing their jobs & seeing their pension funds eroded in great numbers while those with the party clout not only keep their jobs & padded state funded pensions but are getting raises.

All the claim that this can be funded by a crackdown in absenteeism proves is how grossly padded with lazy but unsackable parasites our public "services" are. At a time when government spending is passing 50% of UK GNP & 60% of Scotland's such behaviour will ensure that the current recession goes on forever

6th mar to the Herald:

In considering the threat of fascism & its relationship to the BNP (Gordon McNeill's letter Friday)it is worth pointing out that the Labour, Liberal Democrat & Conservative parties participated in the civilian bombing of Yugoslavia to promote a KLA known by them to be carrying out genocide in an attempt to recreate Adolf Hitler's final solution to the Yugoslav problem. Subsequently these politicians provided the KLA with police uniforms & sent them out to carry out massacres, such as Dragodan, the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 people & to fund these horrors by kidnapping & selling 10s of thousands of schoolgirls to western brothels & by kidnapping thousands of Serb teenagers, dissecting them while still alive & flying the body parts to western hospitals.

Since the BNP opposed that war, let alone the atrocities our "police" carried out I do not think it can honestly be claimed that all 12,000 BNP members put together have been as responsible for Nazi atrocities as each single loyal Labour, Lib Dem or Conservative MP is personally. I think the BNP are owed an apology for the comparison.

I am not a BNP supporter & would be concerned, if they ever gained power, that they might control the media to an extent where such obscenities might not receive the unanimous front page coverage that they would in any free & honest media.

2nd Mar to all & sundry MILOSEVIC "TRIAL":

The NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.

While there have been widespread expressions of doubt that the Iraq War was legal under international law the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia has not been questioned by an alleged War crimes court set up up specificly to bring those who broke international law to justice. That war was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the British Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. The fact that the "court" is being funded by the states which committed that breach of international law may account for its refusal to prosecute its paymasters.

The history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior NATO politician would indeed be far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.

Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.

If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world those who have participated in war crimes 7 genocide must be brought to trial - & that does not just mean those who weren't obeying (let alone giving) orders from America or NATO


27th Feb to all & sundry on NATO WAR CRIMES:

One explanation fitting Jack Straw's decision that the public should not know of the Cabinet's discussions preceding the Iraq war is that politicians everywhere are becoming more concerned that they may, in future, be held to account for apparent war crimes.

Coincidentally the NATO funded Yugoslav War crimes "court" has found Serbian President Milan Milutinovic innocent of war crimes purely because in a long trial no actual evidence could be produced against him. Only 3 years ago, as his blood test showing the presence of Rifampicine proves, when they were equally unable, in 4 1/2 years of "trial" to produce any evidence against Milosevic, persons unknown poisoned him in his cell.

This concern for future justice may also explain why, though our government made public the Attorney General's advice on the legality of the Iraq War they have refused to make public advice on the legality of whether the apparently even more dubious bombing of Yugoslavia was lawful or criminal. It was, after all, aimed 80% at civilians far from Kosovo in a democratic country whose territorial integrity we have, under the Helsinki Treaty, guaranteed to uphold & to support a KLA which even the Foreign Secretary had previously admitted was committing genocide. Indeed the government have refused even to say whether they ever bothered to seek such advice which must raise suspicions that they already knew it was criminal.

In any case the history of Kosovo under our occupation - numerous massacres of civilians such as the 210 murdered in the Dragodan Massacre a few hundred yards from the British military HQ; the ethnic cleansing of 350,000; the kidnap of 10s of thousands of schoolgirls (& boys) & their sale to western brothels: the kidnap & dissection of at least 1,300 Serb teens & their sale, in bits, to our hospitals - all carried out by the KLA helpfully signed up as our "police" by NATO proves that almost every senior British politician would indeed by far more vulnerable than any Serb if called before a court they hadn't paid for. It is unfortunate & almost inexplicable that these atrocities, some of them at least matching any act of Hitler have gone essentially unreported by our media.

Meanwhile many innocent people, like the popular moderate Bosnian Moslem politician Fikret Abdic, whose only "crimes" were to support the survival of a multicultural state & to oppose the press gangs of al Quaeda, who were then our convenient allies in dismembering the country & were shipping home boxes of human heads to Saudi, languishes in jail.

If we are ever to have a safe & peaceful world we all desperately need the sort of international courts Mr Straw & co so fear.

References
Rifampicine in Milosevic's blood test http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=NOR20060601&articleId=2542

Response to FoI request on he government's legal advice on whether the war was legal http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/2005/04/was-war-against-yugoslavia-legal.html

Foreign Secretary's statement to Parliament that the KLA, not the Yugoslavs were engaged inn genocide http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199899/cmhansrd/vo990118/debtext/90118-06.htm

Our atrocities in Kosovo http://a-place-to-stand.blogspot.com/search?q=dragodan & http://www.slobodan-milosevic.org/news/ips040108.htm

Fikret Abdic http://www.antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-j072001.html

Labels: BBC, letters, Media, Unpublished letters

A few days ago I put up an item on the claim by Labour MP Graham Stringer that dyslexia as a medical condition was nonexistent being merely an excuse by the education establishment for them letting so many kids leave school functionally illiterate.

This was reported by Jerry Pournelle which produced a discussion from which excerpts are put below. It is clear he exaggerated but not by much - there are very occasional medical conditions but it could be thousandths as many as claimed.

Note the extent & manner of coverage. At least 90% of it has been openly opposing him as a Google-search shows. It has been filled with quotes from the educational mafia but, with the exception of his original remarks, none from him. Certainly no hint of debate, impartiality or anything but denigration on the grounds that it is "absurd & offensive", or “plain wrong” or "shows this ignorance exists at the very highest levels in the country" without any real attempt to say why (though the last does explain of dyslexia

"The cross party group on dyslexia has been working hard on coming up with a definition of dyslexia that all 32 local authorities across Scotland will recognise,” Colin said.

“Because no two people are the same it makes it very hard to define it.

Apparently I am not alone in thinking that is not a useful definition of any illness but just a grab-bag excuse. This seems a common response because the article then explains "“When you tell them that no two dyslexics are the same it raises eyebrows.”
Indeed.

What we are seeing is the establishment & their trained media mobbing a politician doing what is his plain duty - to try to improve our educational system.


Here is a letter I sent to the Herald (& a couple of variants to others). Despite having published 2 letters attacking Stringer they published neither mine nor any other disagreeing.

Graham Stringer MP's brave (one might say suicidal) decision to say that dyslexia is a fraud used to provide protection for incompetent "educators" brings out 2 letters today (Friday) disagreeing. Both are from educators & neither explains why dyslexia is so relatively unknown in Nicaragua & Korea, the examples Mr Stringer uses.

I heard a long & sympathetic interview on BBC radio on Wednesday with an educator answering that precise point. She said Mr Stringer's point that dyslexia could not be inherent because it doesn't occur (at least at anything approaching our rates) in Nicaragua & Korea was wrong because Korean & Spanish are so structured that that, among their speakers alone, dyslexia is impossible. While the interviewer accepted this without question I must admit I found it unconvincing.

The alternative would be that he is right and that, however hysterical the "educators" get the facts are against them

Now maybe that letter isn't up to the usual literary standard og Heral letters or as logically argued but I don't think so. The only other option is that they decided not to print anything siding with Stringer quite deliberately.
#######################
From Pournelle's blog:

"There have also been some interesting studies which purported to show genetic markers associated with specific kinds of dyslexia. It's far too early to say categorically that any of the types of dyslexia are genetic in origin (or rather, that individuals are genetically pre-disposed to dyslexia), but it's a promising area of research. There's a good overview at http://jmg.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/44/5/289.
Of course, that's not to say "oh, he's dyslexic" isn't used as an excuse from parents for the poor reading skills of their children. But Mr Stringer's assertion that it's a "fictional malady" invented by teachers to cover up poor teaching is, basically, bunk."

"Actual neurological dyslexia exists and there are varieties as well as a distribution of severities. The simplest is difficulty in distinguishing between the letter p and q, and d and b. There are training techniques which will allow many of those which this difficulty to learn how to overcome it. The prevalence of actual physiological dyslexia is not certain but one study found a fairly small number of such in examining a large number of students diagnosed as dyslexic. Mrs. Pournelle as the reading teacher of last resort in the LA County juvenile justice system received hundreds of "dyslexic" students. They all learned to read. Some of those cases took hard work. Others were a bit simpler: the child needed spectacles. One could call poor but correctable eyesight "dyslexia" and be perfectly correct, in that the cause was physiological and the student couldn't read, but I don't see how that's useful.

Roberta would receive inch thick files showing that the school system had not failed: this kid couldn't read because the kid "had" dyslexia. The diagnosis is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy: since the child is dyslexic he can't learn to read, so it would be a waste of time to try to teach him, so -- The fortunate ones were incarcerated by the courts and ended up in Roberta's classroom where they learned to read."

"the "diagnosis: dyslexia means nothing other than "he can't read." If there were some "disease" called dyslexia you did nothing to cure it, yet the student made progress. While true neurological dyslexia exists, it is rare, and requires different techniques from teaching reading to other students........ Dyslexia is not a useful diagnosis because it says nothing about why the student can't read (in your case the problem was letter discrimination -- was his eyesight tested?)"

"My quarrel is not with the concept that there are physiological factors in failure to learn to read, but with the term "dyslexia" which says the kid can't read, but it can't possibly be because the kid was never taught to read. It's not the teacher's fault that this kid is poor protoplasm."

Mrs Pournelle's reading programme which, since it can teach virtually all these kids in prison to read must be the real deal.

My letter in this weeks West End Mail - this may not have the kudos of a Scotsman letter but, since it is provided free theoughout the area, it probably doesn't have a much lower print run. I put this in because I was a bit annoyed by a puff piece about the commitment of the local MP to alternative power. I hope somebody on the sustainababble side takes up the cudgels since I have no doubt they will lose:

Your 13th July edition contained an item about a lobby group, the Sustainable Energy Partnership, approving our local MP's support of micro-generation (essentially covering our rooftops with windmills).

55% of Scotland's electricity is provided by 2 nuclear plants, the more extensive of which, Hunterston, is to close in 2011.

Windmills only provide 0.3% of our power & micro-generation , as the name suggests, can do only a small fraction of even that. This is not a serious solution.

Nuclear is reliable, non-polluting, CO2 free & at 2.3p per unit (or less for new reactors) easily the most economical power source.

According to Help the Aged figures 24,000 pensioners die each year in the UK from fuel poverty.

If we do not replace our current nuclear plants with at least equal capacity we are going to have massive blackouts & even more deaths.

Our MPs have a duty to do something serious about this not playing around with token & subsidised windmills unnecessarily pushing up our electricity bills.

Lenin once said that socialism would be achieved by "Soviet power & the electrification of the whole country" - it is unfortunate to see the present generation of "socialists" instead embracing Ludditism to usher in a new dark age.

// posted by neil craig @ 12:25 am 2 comments

It is regretable how many times newspapers not only publish letters which are untruthful but much more importantly censor anything which rebuts by pointing out the facts. Stuff about Yugoslavia, of course, continues to be censored.

15/12/9 to the Telegraph - wrong to say nuclear power is not far cheaper

Dr Wolff is wrong (letter Tues) is wrong to say nuclear power is not far cheaper than what we have now. Despite reports written by opponents & quoted to each other ad nauseam the fact is that Franc's electricity, 85% of which is nuclear, is as low as 1/4 of our price & they happily & profitably sell to all their neighbours. Anyone can say A costs less than B but finding B on sale at a lower price trumps all the spin.

French nuclear is costed at 1.7P a unit & that is using last generation's equipment. If it were done here without unnecesarily expensive regulation a new generation of plants need not be in any way more expensive.

14/12 Herald - no actual evidence whatsoever for catastrophic global warming

Your lead letter today from Dr Richard Dixon (letters Monday) of WWF give a lengthy case for increasing the £500 million a day the world currently spends on the Kyoto process.

However the fact is that there is no actual evidence whatsoever for catastrophic global warming (computers models are a dubious theory not evidence). Moreover we now see concrete evidence of "juggling the figures" to "hide the decline" in temperature by the government funded CRU (£13.7 million to Professor Jones alone. Government here & abroad has poured 10s of billions into "research" trying to justify the trillions cost of extra regulations & taxes on us to stop nature. They have spent at least as much on advertising, including cartoons of crying bunny rabbits to promote this false fear hysteria.

Readers may also be interested to know that WWF also receives substantial amounts of money from government.

In light of the claims there is a "scientific consensus" on this despite 10s of thousands of real scientists signing petitions against this I have repeatedly asked politicians & lobbyists to name 2 real scientists, not funded by government or lobbyists, who say we are suffering catastrophic warming & are not funded by government or lobbyists but without success. Perhaps Dr Dixon can help?

12/12 Telegraph - is Sir Brian Hoskins actually saying he sees catastrophic warming?

Though it gives a fearsome impression I am not sure whether Sir Brian Hoskins is actually saying whether he sees catastrophic global warming or not. He says he believes the world is warming but, even if it were true & the net cooling over recent years were not to count, this is of little effect unless we are agreed on how much CO2 is warming the planet. Best calculations put it at about an extra 0.3 C if CO2 doubles. Since, as recent Greenland ice core measurements have also confirmed, the Medieval warming was a full degree warmer than currently that is hardly grounds for panic. Sir Brian does mention that a 4 degree warming would mean 30% more rainfall but doesn't say if he is predicting this, let alone if there is any evidence to do so. Incidentally 4 C warmer is what we had during the Climate Optimum of 9,000-5,000 BC & that increased rainfall may explain why hippopotamuses could live in the middle of what is now the Sahara. It is questionable how bad that was. He, quite properly, says recent floods are not linked to climate change even though the BBC, in years of flooding, have said it is, while in the year of drought said climate change would cause drought.

His conclusion "The impacts of climate change go far wider than coral reefs, however important they are" is probably not something the most sceptical could disagree with but surely, before we are asked to make war on fire to the extent of destroying anything up to 80% of our power generating & therefore economic capacity we ought to be very sure indeed that it is to stop something more certain & serious than that. For catastrophic warming to be true surely we should have credible promises of something catastrophic.

7/12 Scotsman - Simply untrue that the emails only leaked a week ago

John Webster (letter Monday) says that the fact that the news of the leaked "climategate" emails & orther documentation only came out a week before the Copenhagen meeting proves they must be disinformation. In fact I first blogged on it on 21st november when it was starting to become massive news on the blogsphere. This gave Professor Jones & co ample time to cry fake & the best they have done is saying that using a "trick to hide the decline" of global temperature merely meant he had done something clever. In fact the news has been around long enough for investigators to have shown there was nothing particularly clever or spohisticated in their data use, merely fraudulent. If the British media have taken a very long time to manage even the minimal reporting this has received, bearing in mind that in proving catastrophic global warming a sham it is as important as all the alarmist stories produced over the years put together, this failure can hardly be blamed on the sceptics.

28/11 Everybody - I swear I pulled every trick out of my sleeve trying to milk something

For years we have been told that there was a "consensus" on global warming. We see from the leaked email scandal that "climate scientists" have conspired to prevent publication of sceptical research, even to getting editors fired to pervert the "peer review" system. This is not how real science is done. It has also been known that the largest single expression of scientific opinion, the widely unreported petition of over 31,000 scientists, says that not only is there no catastrophic warming but that increasing CO2 is BENEFICIAL, because CO2 helps crops grow. It has long been obvious that a disproportionate number of scientists putting their heads above the parapet against warming were emeritus (retired) professors which raises questions answered by Dr Joanne Simpson (1st female President of the American Meteorological Society & has one of NASA's Cray supercomputers named after her) when she said on retiral “Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receive any funding, I can speak quite frankly" & proceeded to demolish the alarmist case.

I have asked on a number of alarmist websites if it is possible to name 2 scientists not paid, directly or indirectly, by government or the likes of Greenpeace who actually say that catastrophic warming is real. So far none of them have produced even a single name so I appeal through your pages to see if anybody can. It is time to have an open & public enquiry, as with Iraq, taking evidence under oath to investigate all aspects of this campaign.

18/11 Herald - "As a young graduate engineer"

Duncan McLaren Chief executive of Friends of the Earth showed his credentials to claim impartiality in his opposition to nuclear power by saying "As a young graduate engineer, I believed in the technology" (letter 11th Nov). According to his entry on the FoE website he got an MBA in Business Administration in 2002 & became Chief Executive, Friends of the Earth Scotland in May 2003 http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/duncan-mclaren/4/808/882 . Unless he completed that engineering degree in a few months rather than years, which would be a spectacular achievement it seems the "environmentalist" movement has, yet again, made personal statements apparently irreconcilable with the facts in the same way they continuously make scientific & numerical claims that cannot be reconciled with truth in these areas.

Indeed in the same letter McLaren asserts that, even after we lose half our electricity capacity over the next few years we will still run no risk of blackouts & even be able to export some of the little remaining. There seems to be no way to reconcile this claim with the rules of arithmetic.

18/11 Times - MP's duty to push warming alarmism?

Bob Ward signs himself as being an employee of a government funded climate alarmist organisation. By doing so he entirely disproves his own thesis that "newspapers and broadcasters give disproportionately wide coverage to so-called “sceptics” who peddle inaccurate and misleading information." In fact coverage is overwhelmingly given to alarmists. Even the BBC, legally required to show balance, admits (Newsnight editor) that they deliberately do not show "due scepticism & balance" about catastrophic global warming scares. A balanced report would at least give equal mention to the fact that the globe is now cooling. As regards inaccurate & misleading information may I point him to the video of the alarmist guru Al Gore claiming that the Earth's temperature 2 km down is "millions of degrees" (it is actually well under 100 C).

In his letter Mr Ward makes no attempt to produce any evidence that such catastrophic warming is on the horizon merely asserting it. Nor did this government funded PR flack attempt to do so when he recently lectured Douglas Carswell MP on his blog that it was his duty to support warming alarmism.

While there may be a consensus among politicians & PR people that we are suffering catastrophic warming that is not the case among scientists. Indeed there is barely a scientist, not funded by government who claims it. On the other hand Nobel prizewinning scientist Kary Mullis says "“Global warmers predict that global warming is coming, and our emissions are to blame. They do that to keep us worried about our role in the whole thing. If we aren't worried and guilty, we might not pay their salaries. It's that simple” so perhaps less unanimity than claimed.

(Douglas Carswell subsequently pointed oput how, a few days later after the email leak, Bob Ward made a statement about how we should all be sceptical, though not to sceptical)

17/11 Herald - Lets answer "indefensible"

The Israeli operation in Gaza was embarked on purely because Hamas refused to stop firing rockets at civilian settlements. This was not war because they were aiming only to kill civilians because of their race, which, as both international law & history makes clear, is genocide. Yet Paul Scott says that for Israel to move was "indefensible." At the very least it is incumbent on anybody saying so to explain exactly what they propose Israel could have done to stop genocidal attacks on its own civilians but I know of no critic who has done so. As for "indefensible" - let Colonel Richard Kemp, former British commander in Afghanistan who may know a thing or 2 about war, make the defence:

"During
Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the
rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of
warfare.

Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its
military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.

...The IDF faces a challenge that we British do not have to face to the same
extent. It is the automatic, Pavlovian presumption by many in the
international media, and international human rights groups, that the IDF are
in the wrong, that they are abusing human rights.

The truth is that the IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians
notice of targeted areas, dropping over 2 million leaflets, and making over
100,000 phone calls. Many missions that could have taken out Hamas military
capability were aborted to prevent civilian casualties. During the conflict,
the IDF allowed huge amounts of humanitarian aid into Gaza. To deliver aid
virtually into your enemy's hands is, to the military tactician, normally
quite unthinkable. But the IDF took on those risks.

...More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas's
way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians."

Compare & contrast the words of a real soldier with those of the political appointees of the UN. Compare & contrast also the complaints of British politicians of Israeli self defence with their enthusiastic involvement in a war waged overwhelmingly against civilians in Yugoslavia. That war was carried out mainly by bombing Yugoslav cities (80% of the casualties being civilians) & when NATO occupied Kosovo we enrolled the KLA, the only genocidal organisation in that province, as "police" & sent them out to ethnically cleanse, engage in massacres (e.g. the murder of at least 210 unarmed civilians outside our military HQ in Dragodan), ethnically cleanse 350,000, kidnap schoolgirls to sell to brothels & kidnap & dissect, while still alive, at least 1,300 civilians to sell as organs to our hospitals. That last, alone is more people than died in Gaza & should have had far more coverage.

Israel could, if it were so minded, ethnically cleanse the west bank as we cleansed Kosovo (& earlier Krajina). Let us be glad that under infinitely worse provocation, no Israeli politician has shown themselves 1,000th as uncivilised as almost all of ours have done.

16/11 Everybody - party has reported a major Nazi style atrocity

It is good to see that one political party has, at last, reported on its website news of a major Nazi style atrocity in Europe which has been on the record for a year & a half. That is when Carla del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor of the Yugoslav war crime tribunal, that she had known for 8 years that NATO police, formerly the KLA, had been involved in kidnapping Serbs & Gypsies & cutting them up, while still alive, to steal their body organs for European hospitals. NATO, by grabbing Kosovo & earlier Croatia & Bosnia from Yugoslavia were following in Hitler's footsteps. The decision to effectively censor mention of this obscenity, at least comparable in evil though not numbers, to Auschwitz, by our major politicians & by the BBC, ITN & major newspapers has been a disgusting action by politicians who have thereby shown themselves to be genocide deniers working in Hitler's cause.

The BNP, as the party who finally mentioned this on their website, are to be congratulated as the only major party that can claim not to have censored to promote genocide in the Nazi cause.

14/11 Times - ministry's figures do not add up

Your report of 13th Nov shows the Ministry of Defence claiming "There are currently 85,730 civil servants .. the majority earned less than £20,000 a year, and the bonus (£287 million) accounted for less than 3 per cent of the staffing bill." Taking that £20,000 as the average the entire staffing bill would be £1.7 billion, 3% of which is £51 million. The nicest thing one can say is that the ministry's figures do not add up.

13/11 - Everybody - Subject: vote for the fascists at Springburn

The vote for the fascists at the Springburn by-election was only to be expected. It has long been said that this was the sort of loyal Labour constituency where you could put up a donkey in their rosette & it would win & once again this has been proven. The fact is that the Labour. Conservative, SNP & LibDem parties are essentially one group imposing fascism not through 1 leader but an amorphous political classwith similar attribute to the old Soviet "nomenklatura".. When Mussolini came to power he changed the system to give an automatic majority to the largest party even though it had only minority support & with the SNP & LDs dissenting, our political class supports a similarly corrupt electoral system here - they know that the only thing that gets people voting for them is that an anlternative vote is "wasted". These parties are also united in their commitment to an undemocratic empire controlling Europe; in their contempt for the electors, cynically making manifesto or "cast iron" promises of our right to a democratic referendum on the country's future & then cynically breaking them; in their enthusiasm for war crimes, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, the sexual enslavement of children & the dissection of Serbian "Untermensch" while still alive, for their body parts, all to support (ex-)Nazis) (to be fair the SNP were divided on these atrocities); this nomenklatura are united in spending £92 billion of our money on jobs for the boys quangos which cause immense economic destruction, though all of them promise a "bonfire of the quangos" & all of them break the promise after the election; they are unanimously committed to destroying half our economy, but subsidising their friends, in the name of "fighting global warming" when they know this is a lie designed merely to scare us & the globe is cooling; they all know how to end recession, by stopping their own parasitism which amounts to 75% of our entire economic potential; they are all committed to deepening the recession by preventing "continuous economic growth" (though only the Greens are honest enough to say so).

However this under the surface fascist alliance can depend on the total, loyalty of the media, not merely the directly state owned BBC with their enthusiasm for "lynchings" of politicians outside the nomenklatura. It is therefore unsurprising that the fascists took the first 3 places in the Springburn election though gratifying that their 4th segment, the "Liberal Democrats" (a party who have made it a condition of membership that one on no account support free market liberalism but are required to support war crimes & genocide) placed 6th. Such a party is clearly less entitled to the name "liberal" than Hitler was entitled to call his "Socialist Workers." Nonetheless the abysmal turnout proves that though they may be able to smear the opposition they can, under no circumstances, inspire the trust of the people.

11/11 Scotsman - a law to destroy 42% of our CO2 emitting energy

Friends of the Earth's assertion that blackouts will never happen because an "independent energy consultant" says so (letter Weds) should be taken no more seriously than the flattery by King Canute's advisors that the tide wasn't coming in. Their expert, Garrard Hassan advertises himself as the "worlds leading renewable energy consultant," a position he would clearly be unlikely to retain if he were to be independent enough to admit that the whole "alternative" energy business is a scam whose practitioners make far more money from subsidy, paid by the taxpayer, than from actually producing power. In fact I suggest he is totally dependent on this "industry."

The fact is that 1/3rd of our electricity comes from nuclear power & another 6th from coal power which will close in 2015 when new EU emission controls come in. The Scottish Parliament has made this worse by voting, unanimously, for a law to destroy 42% of our CO2 emitting energy over the next 11 years on the grounds that this will cut the world's CO2 release by less than one ten thousandth. This would have no remotely measurable effect on global temperature even if the globe were not in fact cooling. However such is the relationship between electricity & national wealth that the deliberate destruction of, at an absolute minimum, half our power production will destroy half of our national wealth.

I remember seeing the then leader of the Green Party publicly explaining his party had gone from "small is beautiful" to supporting a massive EU bureaucracy because they had decided that this bureaucracy was the only thing that would stop the "continuous economic growth" we were allegedly suffering from. While one may appreciate the dedication that has brought them the success of the current (& continuing) recession one need not support this aim. The same Luddite principles, combined with an anti-environmentalist desire to disfigure the countryside with pylons & windmills are clearly the driving force behind the self styled "Friends of the Earth."

4/11 Everybody - Not just whether we want a referendum but whether we want lied to

We have what he has described as a "cast iron promise" from David Cameron that we will actually get a chance to say, through a referendum, whether we want to be under the Lisbon Treaty. That goes with the manifesto promises of a referendum from the Labour & LibDem parties at the last election. There can be no more important promise from any political leader than an unequivocal promise, at election time, to maintain Britain's constitution & democratic freedom.

Now all of them have cynically broken their most solemn promise. There is not even the excuse George Bush Snr had when he broke his word on "no new taxes" - that he needed the money - for which the American electors, correctly, never forgave him. Compared to this the expenses row is nothing - that was merely money. It is now impossible for any member of any of our major parties ever to say that any promise they make, manifesto promises or just the ordinary sort, can ever be trusted at all. It is not even a matter of whether one wants a vote in the country's future but of whether one wants to be lied to. It is clearly impossible for anybody with any respect for democracy, or even any self respect, to vote for any of these parties.

30/10 Scotsman - Government takes up 80% of the economy

The old "socialist"nonsence is trotted out again by David Fiddimore when he says the voter and the private sector have opposed interests that only the state can hold together. This is the same thing that Mussolini said when he used this argument to support an overbearing state & it is even more wrong now than then. The private sector makes up less than half of Britain's spending (40% of Scotland's) yet provides all the wealth. Indeed the state. through regulation, actually has a net negative effect on wealth creation whether through the quadrupling of our electricity, housing & nursery school costs or the 5% of GNP the EU admits its regulations destroy. The best estimate is that the amount of wealth destroyed by regulation is equal to everything that remains. Thus our non-governmental economy is 20% of what it could be - no wonder we have a recession. It would obviously be in the interest of us voters/consumers to have a more productive private sector & a less parasitic state sector.

Wealth creation is clearly in the interests of those of us who do not wish poverty, which I suggest includes almost all of the voters. Their interest, like the interest of the private sector is not for an overbearing nanny state reducing freedom & increasing poverty. Both voters & the private sector have a joint interest in reducing the overwhelming degree of parasitism the government imposes on both of us. More freedom, more wealth & more progress, economic & otherwise, is the true interest of everybody - except those in charge.

24/1 Everybody - deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration"

A senior Labour advisor has let the cat out of the bag about recent immigration. Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett has said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were reluctant to discuss such a move deliberately intended "to rub the Right's nose in diversity" publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

Since we have just seen the BBC's Question Time wholly devoted to attacking Nick Griffin over his past (while ignoring the colourful opinions of the youthfall Jack Straw when he was a communist backed NUS leader) may we now expect next week's QT to be devoted to a lynching of the Labour representative for that dishonest & destructive fraud against the people? Or will it turn out that the BBC decide such things are not what their viewers would want to know about?

18/11 Scotsman - SNP aim for pork barrelling

The SNP consider it right, even sensible, to try to persuade people to vote for them on the grounds that if we have a hung Westminster Parliament they will be able to get vast amounts of pork barrelling money for Scotland. Since virtually all the seats they aim at are from non-Tory parties they can only hope for a hung Parliament if they think that without their intervention the Conservatives are not heading for a majority. The opposite side of that is that they are inviting a Conservative government which does not need their help (something the vast majority of observers expect) to take away all the extra money we already get as a "Union dividend" & invite them to girn as much as they want. Scotland out of the union may not look like an option with much downside to Westminster Conservatives.

12/10 Scotsman - Space has been a massive net profit to humanity

The imprisonment of a man for letting a child smoke is a perversion of the law. The legal charge was of "exposing a child in a manner likely to cause suffering or injury to health." Nobody disputes that smoking 40 a day for 40 years produces as strong possibility, though not more than that, of killing. Even then the risk drops dramatically if the smoking stops.

I challenge anybody involved in the case to produce any evidence that the kid, who was clearly perfectly happy since she was asking for more, has suffered measurable "suffering or injury to health." I also challenge them to explain why they don't believe locking him up won't cause emotional harm to the girl. If they can't then perhaps we should hear why any prosecution witness who said it would hasn't committed perjury.

Demonisation (or "denormalisation" as the PC brigade call it) of any group in society is not something governments in free societies exist to do. Perverting the existing law to make an example of one person to frighten everybody is disgusting. Anybody who believes in individual freedom must oppose this.

Labels: Unpublished letters

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SPEECH TO SCOTTISH LIBERAL CONFERENCE 30/3/01 BY NEIL CRAIGSINCE THE PRINCIPLES IN THIS MOTION ARE SUCH THAT IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT FOR ANYBODY IN OUR PARTY OR EVEN THE LABOUR & TORIES TO DISAGREE I INTEND TO GO BEYOND THE AGREED MOTION.IN DECEMBER 1991 ALL THE E.U. STATES EXCEPT GERMANY VOTED AGAINST RECOGNITIONOF CROATIA AND BOSNIA BUT GERMANY, WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE BILDERBERG GROUP AND THE VATICAN, WAS ABLE TO LEAN ON EVERYBODY ELSE, THIS WAS DESPITE THE FACT THAT UNDER INTERNATIONAL LAW (I AM REFERRING TO THE COMPACT OF MONTEVIDEO) NEITHER COUNTRY FULFILLED ANY OF THE THREE CONDITIONS REQUIRED FOR LEGAL RECOGNITION.THERE USED TO BE 581,000 SERBS (12% OF THE POPULATION) LIVING IN CROATIA.THEY ARN'T THERE ANYMORE.YUGOSLAVIA & SRBSKA HAVE 300,000 REFUGEES FROM CROATIA LEAVING 250,000 MISSING.THE UNITED STATES HAS ADMITTED TO HAVING SENT OFFICERS TO TRAIN AND DE FACTOLEAD THE CROATIAN NATZIS IN THE KRAJINA HOLOCAUST. THE U.K. FOREIGN OFFICE HAS REFUSED TO DENY THAT WE ALSO SENT OFFICERS. NATO ALSO PROVIDED SOME TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE.INDEPENDENT EXPERTS ALMOST ALL AGREED THAT TO CREATE A BOSNIAN STATE WAS,DUE TO THE INTERMIXING OF COMMUNITIES, BOUND TO CAUSE AN INTERNECINE WAR LIKELY TO BRINGABOUT THE DEATHS OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE (290,000 IS THE CURRENT FIGURE).NOBODY SUGGESTS THAT ANY OF THE E.U. POLITICIANS INVOLVED IN THIS DECISION RECEIVEDDIFFERENT ADVICE FROM THEIR OWN EXPERTS.THE BOSNIAN MOSLEM LEADER MR IZETBEGOVIC HAS BEEN WIDELY STATED IN THE MEDIA TO BE A LIBERAL MINDED MAN TRYING TO CREATE A MULTI-CULTURAL STATE. IN FACT ITZEBEGOVIC IS KNOWN TO HAVE BEEN A MEMBER OF THE "YOUNG MUSLIMS" WHICH SUPPORTED THE NAZI OCCUPATION. TO BE FAIR I HAVE ONLY ONE SOURCE WHICH SAYS HE WAS ACTUALLY A MEMBER OF THE WAFFEN SS "HANDZAR DIVISION" WHICH COMMITTED GENOCIDE ON SUCH A SCALE THAT OTHER GERMAN UNITS COMPLAINED, BUT IT IS A MATTER OF RECORD THAT WHEN HE CAME TO POWER HE ESTABLISHED A BODYGUARD UNIT WHICH HE NAMED THE "HANDZAR DIVISION".IN 1970 HE PUBLISHED HIS BOOK ENTITLED " ISLAMIC DECLARATION "WHICH WAS REPUBLISHED AGAIN IN SARAJEVO IN 1990 IN IT HE MAKES A CLEAR AND RINGING STATEMENT:" THERE CAN BE NEITHER PEACE NOR CO-EXISTENCE BETWEEN THE ISLAMIC RELIGION AND NON-ISLAMIC SOCIAL & POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS".WE HAVE BOMBED VILLAGES AND SCHOOLS THROUGHOUT SERBSKA FOR THIS MAN & HIS CAUSE.WESTERN REPORTING OF THE YUGOSLAV WARS HAS BEEN UNIFORMLY SLANTED, THE CENSORSHIP OF MR IZETBEGOVIC'S VIEWS AND PAST IS BUT ONE EXAMPLE. ITN'S ACCIDENTALLY FAKED "CONCENTRATION CAMP" FILM IS ANOTHER.ALTHOUGH ITN WON THEIR LIBEL CASE, TO QUOTE FROM THE JUDGES SUMMING UP, & I AM CAREFULLY ONLY GOING TO QUOTE FROM THIS, NOT ONLY HAD ITN'S JOURNALISTS "CONTRADICTED THEMSELVES" ON OATH BUT LM MAGAZINE'S ALLEGATIONS OF FAKERY WERE "ESSENTIALLY TRUE" & EVEN MORE FRIGHTENINGLY HE SAID "THIS DOESN'T MATTER". ITN DID NOT FEEL ABLE TO ACT AGAINST THE ARTICLE'S ORIGINAL GERMAN PUBLISHER'S WHICH WOULD HAVE ENTAILED SUING UNDER GERMAN LAW.I WOULD LIKE TO THANK WWW.EMPERORS-CLOTHES.COM FOR REPORTING THIS CASE BETTER THAN THE BRITISH MEDIA HAS, AS WELL AS MAKING AVAILABLE A MASSIVE INDEX OF INFORMATIVE ARTICLES ON YUGOSLAVIA.WESTERN REPORTING ALSO UNCRITICALLY PUSHED MR IZETBEGOVIC'S CLAIMS ABOUT RAPE CAMPS (60,000 WOMEN ACCORDING TO HIM, 20,000 ACCORDING TO THE EU) BUT DID NOT REPORT THE SUBSEQUENT U.N. INVESTIGATION WHICH FOUND ONLY 126 CASES. IN A COUNTRY SLIGHTLY SMALLER THAN SCOTLAND, THIS SHOWS THAT SERB MEN, IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR, HAVE SHOWN MORE RESPECT FOR MOSLEM WOMEN THAN BRITISH MEN STATISTICALLY SHOW BRITISH WOMEN.THE RAPE CAMPS STORY WAS ALWAYS LESS THAN CREDIBLE. IT IS A VARIANT ON PROPAGANDA HITLER USED AGAINST THE JEWS, SOUTHERNERS USED TO LYNCH BLACKS, BRITONS USED AGAINST INDIAN SEPOYS & INDEED, IN A MORE CIVILIZED FORM, GREEKS USED AGAINST TROJANS. IT IS AN ANCIENT & EASY LIE TO STIR UP RACE HATRED WITH & IT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN PUSHED BY OUR MEDIA.AS FOR THE SERBRINICA "MASSACRE" (NOT THE MANY EARLIER ONES CARRIED OUT BY THE MOSLEM MILITIA ON LOCAL VILLAGES, OF WHICH YOU HAVEN'T HEARD). IT IS NOW KNOWN THAT 7000 SOLDIERS, WHO REACHED MOSLEM LINES WERE IMMEDIATELY SECRETLY TRANSFERRED ACCROSS THE COUNTRY. SO SECRETLY THAT EVEN THEIR FAMILIES DIDN'T KNOW. THIS HAPPENED WHILE MR IZETBEGOVIC WAS CLAIMING THEY HAD ALL BEEN MASSACRED. THERE IS IN FACT NO SERIOUS EVIDENCE THAT THIS "MASSCRE" EVER HAPPENED & QUITE A LOT THAT IT DIDN'T. THIS HAS NOT PREVENTED THE WAR CRIMES COMMISSION TREATING IT AS GENUINE, BUT THEIR RECORD IS, TO SAY THE LEAST, ONE SIDED. THEY HAVE ONLY POSTUMOUSLY ACCUSED MR TUDJMAN OF BEING THE "BUTCHER OF MOSTAR" WHILE, OVER KRAJINA, A NUMERICALLY FAR WORSE ATTROCITY THEIR PRIME INDICTMENT IS AGAINST THE KRAJINA LEADER FOR ATTACKING CROATIA. THIS IS PRECISELY EQUIVALENT TO CHARGING THE SURVIVORS OF THE WARSAW GHETTO WITH ATTACKING THEIR SS GUARDS. HE IS ACCUSED OF FIRING 1,REPEAT 1, ROCKET AT ZAGREB. THE SAME COMMISSION HAVE DECIDED THAT MSSRS. CLINTON, BLAIR & CO WHO FIRED THOUSANDS AT NORTHERN YUGOSLAV CITIES DID NOTHING WRONG.THE POSITION OF THE COMMISSION IS SLIGHTLY UNDERMINED BY THEIR FINANCING.SUCCESSFUL JUDICIAL SYSTEMS WORK ON THE PRINCIPLE THAT INTERESTED PARTIES SHOULD NOT MAKE A PAYMENT TO THE JUDGE. FOR THIS REASON WHEN IT WAS SET UP IT'S ARTICLES CLEARLY STATED THAT IT WOULD BE FUNDED BY THE U.N.. THE COMMISSION IS CURRENTLY BEING FUNDED BY, AMONG OTHERS, THE U.S. STATE DEPT. & BILLIONAIRES ASSOCIATED WITH THE BILDERBERG GROUP SUCH AS THE ROCKEFELLER TRUST & MR GEORGE SOROS.ON TO THE RECENT WAR OVER KOSSOVO. HISTORICALLY THE KLA HAD BEEN A VERY MINOR TERRORIST GROUP, LESS THAN 1/10TH AS DESTRUCTIVE AS THE I.R.A.. AFTER THE DAYTON AGREEMENT THEY BEGAN RECEIVING LARGE QUANTITIES OF MONEY, WEAPONRY & MILITARY EQUIPMENT, LIKE THE GERMAN UNIFORM PARKAS WORN IN A KLA PROMOTIONAL VIDEO. THE SOURCE OF THIS LARGESS HAS YET TO BE OFFICIALLY DETERMINED.IN JANUARY 1990, 2 MONTHS BEFORE GOING TO WAR FOREIGN SECRETARY ROBIN COOK TOLD PARLIAMENT THAT THE MAJORITY OF KILLINGS IN KOSSOVO WERE CIVILIANS KILLED BY THE KLA. THIS PROVES 2 THINGS. FIRSTLY, SINCE THE KLA WERE FAR WEAKER THAN THE YUGOSLAV ARMY & THE VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE IN THE AREA WERE ALBANIAN THE KLA, BUT NOT THE YUGOSLAVS, MUST HAVE BEEN DELIBERATELY KILLING PEOPLE ON A RACIAL BASIS (THIS IS TECHNICALLY KNOWN AS GENOCIDE). SECONDLY IT PROVES THAT THE CABINET KNEW THEY WERE GOING TO WAR SPECIFICALLY TO SUPPORT A CAMPAIGN OF GENOCIDE. SINCE NATO TOOK RESPONSIBILITY FOR KOSSOVO THE KLA HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO MURDER OR DISAPPEAR APPROXIAMATELY 3000 CIVILIANS OF ALL NATIONALITIES, INCLUDING ALBANIAN. THIS GENOCIDE HAS GONE LARGELY UNREPORTED. FOR EXAMPLE LAST AUGUST A MASS GRAVE OF 160 PEOPLE WAS DISCOVERED IN THE UK'S ZONE. THESE PEOPLE HAD BEEN MURDERED SINCE N.A.T.O.S OCCUPATION. THIS, THE SECOND LARGEST SINGLE MURDER CASE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH HISTORY, AFTER LOCKERBIE, HAS NEVER MADE EITHER THE BBC OR ITN NIGHTLY NEWS. THEY WOULD BOTH DENY THAT THEY PRACTICE CENSORSHIP. IF SO THEY HONESTLY BELIEVE MASS RACE MURDER CARRIED OUT WITHIN OUR AUTHORITY IS TO UNIMPORTANT TO REPORT. I HOPE THERE IS NOBODY AT THIS CONFERENCE WHO WOULD AGREE.I ASK YOU TO SUPPORT THIS MOTION. KILLINGS ARE CONTINUING IN KOSSOV AT AN AVERAGE OF 5 PER DAY. IF THE MOST WE CAN DO HERE TODAY CAN SAY IS TO SAY THAT THIS IS WRONG THEN THAT IS THE LEAST WE SHOULD DO.A FINAL WORD ON THE RECENT ATTACK ON MACEDONIA. THOSE WHO HAVE DEMONISED THE SERBS & MR MILOSOVIC AS AGGRESSIVE HAVE IGNORED HIS TREATMENT OF MACEDONIA. ALTHOUGH IT IS OBVIOUS MACEDONIA'S MOVE TO INDEPENDENCE OWES LESS TO AN OUTBREAK OF NATIONAL FEELING THAN TO THE E.U.'S ECONOMIIC BLACKMAIL MR MILOSOVIC DID NOT DISRUPT IT.TODAY WE HAVE AN INSTANCE OF A AN AGGRESSION PLANNED & LAUNCHED FROM N.A.T.O. TERRITORY AGAINST A FRIENDLY COUNTRY. THIS IS THE VERY DEFINITION OF A WAR CRIME. IF THE WAR CRIMES COMMISSION IS TO CLAIM THE SLIGHTEST SIMILARITY TO A JUDICIAL BODY THEY WILL ISSUE AN INDICTMENT AT LEAST AS QUICKLY AS THE ONE THEY ISSUED AGAINST MR MILOSOVIC IN RESPONSE TO N.A.T.O.'S ATTACK ON HIM.WHEN N.A.T.O OCCUPIED KOSSOVO WE HAD PREVIOUSLY UNDERTAKEN UNDER CLAUSE 1 OF THE HELSINKI TREATY TO "REFRAIN FROM ANY ACTION AGAINST THE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY" OF YUGOSLAVIA. UNDER THE OCCUPATION AGREEMENT WE UNDERTOOK NOT ONLY TO MAINTAIN THE RULE OF LAW IN KOSSOVO BUT ALSO TO DISARM THE KLA.IF WE HAD KEPT OUR WORD ON ANY OF THESE 3 POINTS PEOPLE IN KOSSOVO & MACEDONIA WOULD NOT TONIGHT BE DYING.MOTION WORDING:War Crimes in Former YugoslaviaSince international law cannot properly be applied selectively on a racial basis and since indictments have been issued overwhelmingly against Serbs, this Conference calls on the War Crimes Commission for former Yugoslavia to report as a matter of urgency on: 1 whether there is evidence that the late President Tudjman of Croatia and members of his cabinet are criminally responsible for the ethnic cleansing of approximately 500,000 Serbs from ethnically Serbian territory seized by Croatian forces; 2 the fate of the large proportion of the people above who have not been recorded as arriving in Yugoslavia or Republika Srbska as refugees; 3 the 'disappearance' of over 2,500 persons from Kosovo since NATO took over responsibility for that territory together with the continuing involuntary migration of large numbers of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, Macedonians and other minority ethnic groups; 4 the feasibility of prosecuting those KLA leaders involved in the large majority of killings in pre-war Kosovo; and 5 the identification and indictment of the leaders of the countries which, in clear violation of international law, supplied the KLA with vast quantities of weapons whilst they were an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation. THE MOTION WAS UNANIMOUSLY PASSED DESPITE THE FACT THAT THE LEADERS REFERRED TO IN PART 5 CERTAINLY INCLUDE BILL CLINTON & HELMUT KOHL. SCOTTISH PARTY LEADERSHIP HAS IGNORED IT.------------------------------------------------This is a letter I sent to my MP on 12/10/01 Ann McKechin MP House of Commons Westminster Dear Mrs Mckechin I am writing to you to ask you to take a stand on a matter of human rights. I was present at your hustings meeting when you said that as a matter of principle you were still opposed to nuclear weapons. I hope you will be equally opposed to genocide. In the last 2 1/3 years the KLA in Kossovo have been permitted to murder & disappear over 4000 non-Albanians. They have also dealt similarly with an unknown number of Albanians of a more democratic persuasion. I am enclosing various documents explaining what is going on but I would urge you, if you have any doubts about what I am writing, to check WWW-EMPERORS-CLOTHES.COM or the book TO KILL A NATION by Michael Parenti & whatever other sources you trust. I advise you I have yet to find anybody from Mr Blair down who can point to any matter of fact on which I am wrong. The genocide in Krajina is continuing every day (& has now been allowed to spread to Macedonia). Apart from the deaths the situation in Macedonia is particularly dangerous since Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia & Albania all have ethnic interests there for which they have historically been prepared to fight, in any possible combination. NATO's behaviour here shows their crass refusal to accept any responsibility for their actions. In particular I am asking you to ask the government how the investigation into the Dragodan massacre is proceeding. I have enclosed details of the discovery of the mass grave there, which is in the British sector. This makes it not only easily the largest mass grave found in Kossovo but also the second biggest single murder enquiry in contemporary British history, after Lockerbie. Or at least the largest single murder to be enquired into. I would like to think an enquiry is going on. Since the NATO appointed local police are virtually exclusively drawn from the ranks of the KLA I doubt they will be active. In 1995 I wrote to your predecessor Mrs Fyfe asking her to register some disapproval of the Krajina holocaust then taking place. She wrote back to me effectively stating her approval of Tudjman & his Croatian Nazis. The reason she gave for this was because of the story of 60,000/30,000 women being held in rape camps. Mrs Fyfe was, of course, either aware that this story was a complete & deliberate lie, or was unconcerned about the truth. Nonetheless, while intellectually it is difficult to say that genocide is less objectionable than rape I do acknowledge that, on a deep level, sexual slavery is particularly repugnant. For that reason I would like to draw your attention to the article quoting the Royal Greenjackets Major Plummer. The KLA's practice of abducting schoolgirls to sell into sexual slavery is repugnant. The fact that their victims are Albanian does not affect the moral question although it does prove that any claim to be a genuine liberation movement is a lie. The fact that NATO leaders, including Mr Blair are winking at this proves that at no time were NATO honestly engaged in humanitarian bombing. IT IS NOW TIME FOR EVERYONE TO DECIDE WHETHER THEY WILL, OR WILL NOT SUPPORT GENOCIDE & HUMAN SEXUAL CHILD SLAVERY. Shortly after I got a reply from junior FO minister Dennis McShane saying that so far 210 bodies had been found at Dragodan, that at least some of them were Serbs who had been alive when Nato took over & that these 210 bodies were not being counted legally as a mass grave but as 210 single graves in the same place & that it was all the fault of Milosevic anyway. Ms McKechin added a covering letter saying she I was pleased! I wrote back: Dear Mr McShane I thank you for yours of 12th Nov sent to me by Ann McKechin. Your reply implies (though it does not specifically confirm) that the victims in this, which I had thought to be easily the largest mass grave in Kossovo, were victims of Nato's allies the KLA operating under Nato command authority. This is assuming that the Serbs were not ethnically cleansing Serbs or that the Albanian victims were among the large number of Albanians killed by your KLA friends for belonging to political parties, protesting against such actions by your friends as the kidnapping & selling of schoolgirls or losing what among your friends passes for political debate. Do you wish to repudiate your response? I take it some of the victims relatives say they were alive at the start of the occupation. Since you did not answer the first time I would like to know how the criminal investigation is going on. Since this is (only just) the second biggest murder case in contemporary British history, after Lockerbie. How many British police officers are assigned to it full time? You say that in Natospeak this is not a mass grave although since it is unquestionably a mass of human bodies buried together for those of us who speak normal English it is a mass grave. This leads to 3 obvious questions. Firstly in what other statements are you using Natospeak in a way likely to mislead someone used to English. Secondly, how many other similar mass graves but not mass graves filled under British or other Nato command authority are there. Thirdly, since Nato normally claims 2 bodies as constituting a mass grave what precisely is the Natospeak definition of the term? I very much regret that you have not been able to dispute that the KLA, under British government authority are being allowed to sell schoolgirls into slavery. Can you make any undertaking whatsoever that at any point the current government will find it useful to act with full strength against this practice? I personally regret that the British government no longer subscribes to the pre-Victorian values of William Wilberforce. I note that you do not dispute the accuracy of my allegations except insofar as I was unaware of the full extent of this act of genocide. In your reference to Macedonia you say that you are encouraging talks between all legitimate parties. The leader of the allegedly disarmed KLA invasion of Macedonia launched from Nato controlled Kossovo was, at the time, a serving officer in Nato's locally recruited police force, officially on holiday. Does this qualify him as a legitimate party. In your hand written addendum to your letter you refered to this genocide as being the fault of the Milosovic Era. There are people who hold the Jews responsible for the Jewish Holocaust. These people are normally referred to as Nazis. This act took place under the Nato Era. To blame the leader of the victims for their own murder is similarly racist. On reflection you may wish to apologise for this remark. ---------------Neither Labour MP has replied to this, neither has at any time raised any objection to their role in genocide, ethnic cleansing & child sex slavery & of course our media are still censoring the subject. No arrests in the Dragodan Massacre "investigation" have been announced.__________________________________________________SPEECH TO LIB-DEM CONFERENCE 27/10/1 NEIL CRAIGI wish to speak specifically against the amendment to this motion.Unlike the motion itself which gives reasons for its case, the amendment simply states as a matter of doctrine that nuclear energy must be disposed of.Since this means the loss of 40% of Scotland's electricity within 10 or, with a certain amount of juggling, 15 years I think we are owed a solid justification.Since the main motion hopes for an increase from 11 to 21% of our wind, water & solar capacity this still leaves an overall reduction of 30% on our current capacity. Assuming that over the next 10 years the economy will grow at 2.5% we will have a shortfall of nearly 60% of current capacity. The only option other than rationing is a massive programme of building coal, gas & oil generators & which would obviously involve tearing up the Koyoto Treaty.For the Scottish Liberal Democrats to vote for such a policy would be, & would be seen to be, grossly irresponsible.The example of California should be a warning. There the richest part of the richest society in the world is suffering regular power blackouts because for the last 20 years political considerations have prevented the building of generating capacity.At the slight risk of being burned at the stake as a heretic I now intend to speak in favour of nuclear power.It has been calculated by Professor Cohen of Pittsburgh that, even if there were no other source, uranium particles recovered from seawater could keep our present nuclear power industry going for 5 billion years, whereas the sun is expected to explode in 5½. It must therefore be considered as pretty sustainable. In general terms nuclear energy is competitive with coal & significantly cheaper than oil or gas. The French are currently generating 77% of their power atomically. They are also profitably selling power to all their neighbours, including us. The basic arguments used against following their example are the risk caused by accidents, waste disposal & leakage of low level radiation. They are all wrong.The worst accident was at Chernobyl in 1986 caused by the Soviet notorious neglect of safety. As a result 10/20,000 deaths were predicted. Despite the most minute tracking of variations in cancer rates the total currently stands at 45. By comparison in another Soviet accident, in 1989, 570 people on a train died in a gas pipeline explosion. The total of deaths in the following 15 years is 2, in Japan. Bearing in mind that we are talking about creating nearly 20% of all humanity's energy for that period this is a safety record not even approached by any other industry in human history.At the same time to mine coal we tolerate the deaths of hundreds of thousands annually worldwide from black lung & an unquantified but large number from emphysema when we burn it.Waste disposal is truly a non-problem. Reactor waste is very nasty stuff but there is no technical difficulty in turning it into glass producing an entire cubic metre per reactor year. This can be stored in a very deep hole where it will be safe for millions of years. This is not even a problem for our remote descendants since a highly radioactive material is, by definition, one with a relatively short half-life. After 10 years reactor waste radioactivity is reduced a thousandfold. After 500 it is less radioactive than the ore originally mined. This is also why decommissioning reactors is normally unnecessary. Just lock the door & leave it. Recent research on radiation has shown it is not the threat we thought. Classically estimates of the danger of low level radiation have been based on the theory that there was a linear progression from say 5000milliSieverts (a level which will kill 50% of people within a month) to zero with no safe limit in between. Purely because it was a very conservative assumption it was proper to use it when we had no better model. We do now.Following the failure of Chernobyl to satisfy the theoretical predictions statistical examinations have been made of victims of the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs, people who worked with radium & most importantly hundreds of thousands of tests of radon in homes. The results have consistently shown that at low levels, below 150 milliSvs radiation has no bad effect. Indeed the radon tests have actually shown a negative correlation between radioactivity & cancer. This is not as strange as it seems. Many things are dangerous in large dose but beneficial in small. 1 aspirin may cure you but 1000 will kill. By comparison you & I will normally have a dose of 2mSvs a year, nuclear workers & uranium miners get 2.5 & airline pilots, because they work at high altitude, get about 6.In conclusion it is clear that the only thing we have to fear from nuclear electricity is fear itself. This is not a good reason to prepare ourselves for blackouts. The human race has an unlimited future if we will only reach out for it.Anyone who wants to check what I have said should surf www.world-nuclear.org or www.formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/ nuclear------------------------------------------------Letter in Scotsman 20th AugustThe road to economic health Your report on the declining position of Scotland's economy (Business, 15 August) makes depressing reading. Economic growth has vastly more long-term importance in ending poverty than any form of redistribution. Unfortunately, the SNP's solution of casting loose the sinking Scottish economy from the relatively buoyant UK one does not seem entirely sensible. Among the things which could be done to encourage an entrepreneurial culture are the following: Drastically reduce red tape, by setting up a parliamentary committee with the sole duty of proposing the abolition, in whole or part, of economically damaging regulations. Cut business rates to 42.6p in the pound, as in Wales, at a cost of about £80 million. Reduce business water rates to the UK average. Any company offering to purchase Scottish Water and guaranteeing reduced rates should be given consideration. Grant automatic 100 per cent tax and rate rebates to start-up companies for the first three years. Ease the building and zoning restrictions in the manner that has been done in Ireland. Fund a 10 per cent cut in corporation tax in Scotland, at a cost of less than £300 million. Improve air, road and rail links, and provide better rural internet access. --------------------------------------------------Scotsman 9th oct in reply to a discussion about independanceHigh price of war on Yugoslavia Iain Hall (Letters, 4 October) asks: would an independent Scotland have invaded Iraq? While my critique of separation was about the economic case, I am happy to reply that I do not think that a fully independent United Kingdom would have invaded Iraq. Alas, the virtue of a nationalist regime is not such a simple matter. Observe the bombing of Yugoslavia, a matter which, in international law and morality, was vastly more criminal than the recent attack on Iraq. The former SNP leader Alex Salmond maintained a consistent and honourable opposition to that war. However, the SNP's current leader, John Swinney, not only supported the war, but he attacked the Labour government for showing insufficient contempt for international law, calling on it to attack Yugoslavia and even neutral civil shipping in international waters. As a direct result of that war, the Kosovo Liberation Army, many now supplied with Nato police uniforms, have been able to engage in the ethnic cleansing of 350,000 Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, etc, and even Albanian Christians. They have also engaged in the genocide of about 8,000 un-armed civilians and the kidnap and sale of thousands of schoolchildren, mainly female, into sexual slavery. In the circumstances, Mr Swinney's party is hardly in a position to claim peace and righteousness as its particular province. .................................................letter to the HeraldDear Editor, Italy is now the second major nation to suffer a massive power blackout. In both cases it is because of a failure to build electricity generating capacity & hoping that something will turn up.In Britain softly voiced warnings of blackouts this winter are being heard & a number of companies are being offered rebates to agree to be allowed to be switched off.The real problem however is not going to be this year. It takes many years to build new capacity. In the case of nuclear power it takes about 12 years in the UK, though the Japanese can do it in 4 where the problem is primarily engineering rather than politics.It is largely political nimbyism, particularly regarding nuclear generating capacity, that is preventing us replacing our power supply let alone increasing it in line with economic growth. Windmills, whatever their aesthetics, are to unreliable to depend on. If we are to build them then we must also build at least 900kilowatts spare capacity of conventional capacity for every megawatt of windpower.In Scotland we have a very serious problem. 44% of our electricity comes from nuclear generators at Hunterston & Torness which are due to close in 2010 & 2017 respectively. Nobody appears to have any idea what we will use to keep the lights on. In the south of England they are importing the equivalent of 5% of UK capacity from nuclear plants in France but this is impractical up here.If we do not do something quickly & Koyoto means that "something" means building modern nuclear power stations we are quite certainly going to have blackouts, probably massive blackouts. When they start it will be much to late to start building power plants then._______________________________________________12/11/3 Thread which I placed on the Channel 4 discussion group which looks likely to be deleted again:Posted by Neil C on November 10, 2003, 11:31 pm The Channel 4 discussion group, which I have previously found to be remarkably uncensored, has removed a thread on the ongoing genocide in Kosovo & the quite remarkable failure of the media to report it.Since my replacement thread may well disappear tomorrow I thought it would be worth letting you know:posted 10-11-03 23:23 I note that this evening my thread of news items of genocide being carried out under our & Nato's authority in Kosovo by our KLA hirelings has disappeared.I had not said anything untrue or used obscene language & it had not gone off message.I had put a link to www.slobodan-milosevic.org including a link to a photograph of identifiable KLA allies collecting human heads & various murders. Also to David Owen's evidence to the Milosevic "trial" that Milosevic was not a racist, not an aggressor & sincerely seeking peace.There appears to be no dispute whatsoever from C4, or anybody else, that these statements are true. Why therefore does C4 think that we, both on this thread & on the national news, should be protected from the truth?SINCE THEN I A AM NOW (24/11/3) ON THE 3RD POSTING 1 & 2 HAVING BEEN DELETED also unreported news:The secretary general of the Serbian Radical Party (SRS), Aleksandar Vucic, confirmed today that one of the two young men whose heads were severed by OVK (Kosovo Liberation Army) members, and whose photo was published in Vecernje novosti, is Aleksandar Njegovic, a Yugoslav Army volunteer and SRS member. "We demand that state and republican bodies urgently launch an investigation into persons who committed crimes against Serbs in Kosovo-Metohija and demand that the criminals are extradited to the relevant bodies," Vucic told a news conference. Vucic said that the SRS deputies forwarded a proposal to the assembly of the Serbia-Montenegro state union that the assembly discuss a Serbia-Montenegro strategy towards Kosovo-Metoyha______________________________________________LETTER TO THE HERALD 24/11/3FEATURES - IN THIS SECTION PREV / NEXT ITEM Money wasted on iconic footbridge THE powers that be in Glasgow have decided to spend £40m of our money on a footbridge at Broomielaw. Mind you, it will be an "iconic" footbridge. I think that means it will not be built on the old-fashioned engineering principle of doing the best job for the best price but on the new public works architectural principle of adding as many bells and whistles as somebody spending other people's money can be talked into. This is one-tenth of the cost of a parliament building or the full price offered for building a parliament on Leith waterfront. It is 20 times the cost of a monorail from Glasgow Airport to Paisley Gilmour Street or from Central to Queen Street. It is enough fully to automate our Underground, thus substantially increasing capacity, and to run it free to the public for 10 years (which would obviously do far more than a bridge to give southsiders the benefit of visiting the west end the ostensible purpose of the bridge). It would pay for fixing five litter bins to every lampost, which I grant would be overkill. It would pay for building an arcology (a posh name for single building not only housing a lot of people but providing shops, pubs, restaurants, etc, to create a community unlike the traditional filing cabinets in the sky) providing homes for 1000 families, though this would make a profit for the ratepayers when sold. It could give a home computer to every Glasgow family with a kid under 15. It could provide a £10,000 rates holiday to 4000 new business start-ups. It could even, heavens forfend, produce a cut in the rates equal to £70 for every man, woman, and child. We are now within the very short window between the project being only a feasibility study, so the public should not know about it, and the stage where the public should not be asked because it is to late to stop. Now is the time to decide if £40m for a footbridge a few hundred yards from the George V and Bell's bridges is a good idea. This, of course, assumes that the promised £40m will be kept to. Scottish Labour does not exactly have a good record in this area. Neil Craig, 27 Woodlands Drive, Glasgow.-----------------------------------------------Letter in Scotsman 26th Dec {this is the original letter - there are parts the paper cut - it was quite long - which are shown in brackets:Dear Sir,Your leading article on the proposed trial of Saddam & the ongoing Milosevic tribunal makes one good point. That "Milosevic's trial shows the difficulty in bringing dictators to justice. Evidence is needed". Indeed. Mr Nelson's article then repeats most of the lies which have been used against Milosevic without any concern for producing such evidence.Let us start with the claim that he was a dictator. {This is simply an abuse of the English language.} It is a matter of fact that he was repeatedly democratically elected. Your newspaper is entitled to disapprove of the Yugoslav people's electoral choice, just as, I suspect, we may both disapprove of the British people's choice, but that does not make either leader a dictator.The statement that his former allies are testifying against him at the Nato funded "trial" is untrue. The only person in any way close to him who has been called to testify is Rade Markovic who, on reaching the witness stand, said that his statement had been extracted from him by named Nato officers by what amounts to torture.In mentioning Srebrinca there is no discussion of the very serious problems with the Nato case. It is undeniable that that the chief UN officer on site at the time said there had been no such massacre. It also the case that most of the bodies were found not where Nato originally said they were but near various Serbian villages.It is equally undeniable that the Moslem commander Nasir Oric had not merely boasted of his genocide of thousands of Serbs in these same villages but showed western journalists clips from his extensive home video collection, of his committing such murders & that these "different" bodies have not been found. Though Mr Oric is currently awaiting trial on lesser charges the tribunal have not questioned him on the contents of his videos. {It is also the case that the Red Cross reported that 1500 of the former garrison were serving as in Tuzla after their alleged demise.}It is also implied that it is unfair that it should be neccessary to prove a direct link between a killing & the leader of the controling nation. If that were so Richard Nixon would have been held personally liable for the My Lai massacre.{ More directly relevant the largest mass grave in Kosovo, at Dragodan, containing 210 bodies was created AFTER Nato took over Kosovo by our KLA allies. By such reasoning Messrs Clinton & Bush would be imprisoned for this attrocity without further trial rather than for such things as the bombing of civilians for which the paper trail is abundently clear.}It is also unfair for a representative of the media to criticise Milosevic for the fact that the western media have refused to report what they called the "trial of the century" until it became obvious that Milosevic could "run rings round" the prosecution, not because of his brilliance but because the prosecution have absolutely no evidence. It is hardly Milosevic's fault that the media refused to report the evidence of Lord Owen, { hardly an anti-western subversive, }that Milosevic was the only national leader seeking peace & that Milosevic is resolutely opposed to racism.{ This explains why, of all former Yugoslav states, only Serbia remains a multi-ethnic community with 150,000 moslems, including 50,000 Albanians living in Belgrade alone, the city Mr Nelson untruthfully describes Milosevic as the "butcher of".}(there were no replies to this letter)------------------------------------------------Letter in Scotsman 16th Jan 04 (this was in response to a prat from Scottish Renewables who said that though wind was only available 33% of the time hydro/coal etc are only used 39% of the time):Jason Ormiston should know better. His comparison of the efficiency of wind farms at 33 per cent, with hydroelectric at 39 per cent and nuclear at up to 75 per cent is not comparing like with like. By political fiat, wind energy is automatically purchased, therefore the 33 per cent figure is the amount they can produce depending on how windy it is. This policy of total purchase has led the Danes to buy wind electricity during the small off-peak hours and then feed it into the German grid without payment, since neither nation actually has a use for it at the time. The other figures are for the amount of what is offered that the grid chooses to accept, depending on demand and marginal price. This leads to an unfair comparison with hydro, where water behind a dam rarely disappears but can be kept for use at the best time. Hydro can be turned on and off in seconds, and the fact that nuclear has such high usage shows how competitive its marginal cost is. NEIL CRAIG -----------------------------------------------Letter in Scotsman 7th March (Note this is my original draft as it was considerably shortened & not in my opinion improved for publication)Letters Editor.Dear Donald Ross,One should not lightly disagree with Bill Jamieson on economic matters. Nonetheless I think his prediction of a forthcoming collapse of house prices is, in the current regulatory system, wrong.Certainly an 18% annual increase cannot continue or a house in Corstorphine will, in little over 40 years, have escalated to the current cost of a Parliament building.This, however, does not imply a reduction. It is common knowledge that when demand increases & prices go up production also goes up until a new balance is reached. Demand for homes is rising & is set to continue rising as long as fewer of us are living in families. House building, however, is not increasing. Despite sharply rising prices house building amounts to significantly less than 1% of stock, the commonly accepted replacement level. So long as demand is rising faster than supply prices are bound to have a long term real increase.Nobody seems to be willing to say why building is so restricted in this boom. However the Kemp Commission in the USA reported 20 years ago that 40% of housebuilding costs are down to regulatory requirements (primarily requiring building methods & materials which were old when the Model T Ford was new. It seems unlikely that regulation is less in Scotland now. There is also the fact that, partly since vacant land attracts no land value taxation, developers can make more money with less expense, from getting planning permision for brownfield land & sitting on it, than from building.It has been calculated that it would take the building of 250,000 homes a year to stop house inflation - this equates to about 20,000 in Scotland. During the Bosnian war the US released what purported to be satellite photos taken 24 hours apart, of the creation of a mass grave near Srebrinica. At the time astute observers noticed a house had been built on what had been empty land 24 hours previously. If we have not been lied to 60 teams of Serbian brickies could easily solve our housing problems. Personally I think modern off site construction techniques could, if allowed, do almost equally well.In any case so long as we have the present regulatory regime we need have no fear of a permanent reduction in house prices.Yours SincerelyNeil Craig see http://www.heritage.org/Research/Regulation/BG848.cfm__________________________________________________Letter in the Herald Fri 11th March(I was extremely gratified to find that this letter was reprinted in its entirety in Jerry Pournelle's site linked below)Dear Sir,Both Barry Lees & Alex McKechan say that burying nuclear waste does not count as dealing with it. Why not? What evidence is there that burying a few cubic feet of metal with a half life so short that it will reach the background level in a few decades, in a sealed container so strong that you can drive a train at it full speed without damage, could harm even the most enthusiastic lemming? Is it really neccessary to mention that all that radioactive material used to be, in the form of uranium which has a much longer half life, lying in the ground sealed off by nothing more than soil? Such waste obviously does not pose a fraction as much risk as the millions of tons of sulphur dioxide the coal industry dumps in the air we breathe & does not endanger Golden Eagles in the gruesome manner windfarms do.As regards the cost the latest reactors & I grant ours are far from being the latest, can produce power at 2.4p per unit (something which I must admit I am reminded of every time a bill comes through my door). The worst thing about wind is not that it is merely about 3 times the cost, which is why the government has to force utilities to buy it, but that it is completely unreliable. Scottish renewables wind spokesman recently admitted that wind was unable to provide any part of our baseload power...............................................SPEECH NOT GIVEN AT EASTER 04 LIB DEM CONFERENCE (TO MANY SPEAKERS) BUT WHICH I SENT TO NICOL-STEPHENS & MAY ACTUALLY BEAR SOME FRUITTRANSPORT MOTIONArthur has spoken very ably on the motion as a whole. I wish to speak only to section 4 H here.Most of you will probably not have heard the term ABS or Automatic Beam System before but it is a simple concept. It refers to any transport system which is rail guided & for which it is thus nowadays extremely easy to computerise the entire driving system. This can be applied to conventional rail systems (Docklands Light Rail is a good example of such a driverless system) or to overhead monorails. Such systems have the advantage that, because they are limited only by numbers of self propelled carriages not be drivers, it is possible to send out units every few minutes where a conventional driven train may be limited to every half hour. With buses running costs are normally 50-70% of drivers wages. Efficiency is obviously another major advantage.Computer controlled mass road systems are currently being developed in many countries. Such rail systems are obviously thousands of times simpler & produce no insoluble engineering problems.Many of you, like me, may be just old enough to remember when it was common for upmarket businesses to provide drivers for lifts. Drivers for trains are a similar anachronism.The best places to immediately try such a system would be simple, fairly short, single route, high volume destinations like Docklands. I have 3 suggestions. A 1 mile monorail from Glasgow Airport to Paisley, Gilmour St should cost not much more than £1 million & be installed far more quickly than any conventional rail link. A monorail from Glasgow Central to Queen St would similarly link Scotland's rail transport systems together (it is worth noting that the platforms at both Paisley & Queen St are elevated, ideal for an overhead monorail). If Turnhouse also got a train station on the line passing it, as was done at Prestwick, this would put all 3 of Scotland's main airports within easy contact of each other. It is difficult to think of a more integrated transport system. The 3rd suggestion is Glasgow Underground. Where, with an automated system, it should be possible to put on more trains, keep them running longer & drastically reduce prices. The social, as well as economic effects on the city would be enormous.Scotland's poor transport system is widely accepted as a brake on economic development. With ever increasing road congestion, pollution & need for easy transport from home & the growing power of automation this is a system whose time has come. Scotland could be a leader in a technology which will obviously be used worldwide in due course. I therefore commend the motion to you................................................SPEECH GIVEN THE NEXT DAY ON THE AVIATION MOTION - THE BIN LADEN ON TIREE LINE GOT A VERY GOOD LAUGH BUT LONDON ARE CURRENTLY INSISTING ON MAINTAINING THE EXPENSIVE SECURITY CHARGES WHICH ARE PART OF WHAT MAKES ACTUALLY USING THESE AIRPORTS UNNECCESSARILY UNECONOMICAVIATION MOTIONI spoke earlier in favour of an automatic beam system (ABS) rail linking our airports through Glasgow so please take my support of section D here as given.I wish now to speak particularly in favour of section A of the motion about Highlands & Islands airports.Currently we subsidise these airports by 2/3rds of their operating costs & have done so for years with no disapproval from the EU. The rest is raised from landing charges. Unfortunately traffic at these airports is so small that the landing charges per person are nonetheless prohibitive. I checked recently & found that a flight to Barra would cost £27 but it would cost £33 to land.Much of the cost of these airports is because they have the same regulatory framework as larger airports. For example approximately 20% of running costs are for security. This, for example means £16.62 is spent per head on keeping bin Laden out of Tiree. Equally each airport is required to keep its own fire brigade. Firemen at Heathrow expect to go through their entire working lives without having to attend a fire – nonetheless when dealing with 30,000 people a day this is a necessary cost. I would argue that it is not when dealing with 5,000 people a year. There are other ways to save expense such as putting the management out to tender & putting runway maintenance in the lands of local authority roads depts. If we could reduce running expenses by 1/3rd these airports could be run with no landing charges at allThe Scottish Parliament has authority over this regulatory regime. The whole point about devolution is that from a nearer perspective it is possible to produce solutions which would not be apparent from London. This is a clear example & we should use it.High landing charges are the main thing detering low cost airlines. In the example I gave earlier the total cost was £60. Were there to be no landing charges it would be £27. Were a no frills airline involved I expect it would roughly halve & were the number of passengers to skyrocket, as seems likely it could halve again. Here we get to the point where, assuming a monorail connection to Glasgow as I suggested earlier, it would be possible to get to Barra from Glasgow for roughly the price it now takes to get a taxi to Glasgow airport.2/3rds of Highland Air passengers are tourists who, quite reasonably, complain about the fact that it is more expensive than flying to Paris. The benefits to the Highlands & Islands & to our share of the world's fastest growing industry, tourism, of making travel accessible can hardly be underestimated. Certainly Barra can never hope to match the attractions of Eurodisney but we should not be so modest as to forget that, for a significant portion of the populations of Europe & America, Eurodisney can never hope to match the attractions of Barra.Consequently I ask you to support the motion & I hope our party in government will make use of such a mandate................................................LETTER IN SCOTSMAN 31/5/4 Political contempt Being a bit of a political anorak, I went to the hustings meeting in Glasgow last week. All but two of the candidates - Elspeth Atwooll (Liberal Democrat) and, more equivocally, Alan Smyth (SNP) - came out firmly against a growing economy. Even Struan Stevenson (Conservative), from whose party we might expect more stodgy common sense, weighed in with the opinion that it just allowed the Chinese to buy more of our concrete rather than conveniently starving as they used to. There was a time when politicians were, at least publically, committed to reducing poverty. This matters more to the really poor of Shettleston, who are thereby robbed of a future, than to the chattering classes of Hyndland, who already have it. Nonetheless it shows a contempt for ordinary people among the political class that feels it proper to make people's lives harder. ...............................................letter sent to all UK national papers & published only by Pravda & www.JerryPournelle.com whose comments are undernoted:I would thoroughly reccomend Dr Pournelle's site, sometimes called the first blog, for anybody who is interested in new ideas & politics. Spoiler warning - if you break out in hives at anything considered right wing this is not for you. In any case a couple of words of praise from him means a lot to me.Neil Craig...............................................................................................Dear Editor, In 1983 a group of 180 apartment buildings was completed in Taiwan. Somebody had made a serious mistake. They had mixed into the concrete a considerable amount of highly radioactive cobalt 60. This meant that ultimately 10,000 people lived in buildings for from 9 to 20 years so radioactive that they received an average of 74 mSv of radiation per year in 1983, declining thereafter as cobalt 60 has a half life of 5 ½ years. This compares with a rate of 0.5 mSv above background which is the normal maximum exposure for radiation workers & total of 15 mSv maximum safe limit for land fit for habitation according to US government standards. According to the linear no threshold (LNT) theory currently in use world-wide for assessing nuclear risks there is no lower limit to the level at which radioactivity kills (hence the term "no threshold") & this, inhabited for a decade & a half before the radioactivity was traced & measured, should be the site of a truly massive cancer death rate. It isn't. A thorough & methodical tracing of all the 4,000 families by a team led by W. L Chen of Taiwan's Director of Medical Radiation Technology of Taiwan's National Yang-Ming University (the full report is available in English on http://www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf ) has resulted in an unequivocal & spectacular result. Cancer rates in that highly radioactive building are down to 3.6% of prevailing Taiwanese rates. For many years there has been an unfashionable alternative to the LNT theory called hormesis. This is an effect, long observed in plants & cultures, whereby intermediate level radioactivity actually stimulates life & improves health. There has been significant evidence for this (the deaths at Hiroshima did not appear to fit the LNT pattern, there are places in India & Iran with background radiation of 15mSv or higher with no observed increase in cancer & numerous studies of radon in homes have found a reverse correlation between radon levels & cancer). Nonetheless, such has been our fear of all things nuclear that the LNT theory has been absolutely accepted despite the fact that there has NEVER been any actual evidence for it. This study, however, is so detailed, has such well-defined boundary conditions & in proving a reduction in cancers of 96.4% has such a clear result that there can no longer be any intellectual doubt whatsoever. Radioactivity, up to 50mSv, is good for us. This is reminiscent of the time when Gallileo turned his telescope to the skies & for all time disproved the, then politically correct though scientifically shaky, theory that the Sun revolved around the Earth. True the Pope of the time forced him to recant or be dealt with as heretics then were. True it took a long time to bury. However from the time of Galileo's observations the official theory was dead. Unlike normal life, in science the truth always wins in the end though sometimes the end can be a long time coming & much pain may be caused in the interim. This is because while opinions change repeatable science results remain the same - that is the nature of the universe. The effect of this proof on our nuclear power industries can hardly be underestimated since with the collapse of the theory go most of the fears that have so crippled it. The effect on medicine however cannot even begin to be estimated as the way is now open for serious research on how hormesis works & how it can be used to serve mankind. It is interesting to note that the healing water from the world's great spas has always been mildly radioactive & medicine has heretofore been unable to find out why - I wonder what the future holds for such places. Yours Sincerely Neil Craig ...........................................................................................................................Thank you for a cogent summary. More on this can be found at http://cnts.wpi.edu/rsh/ for those interested. For many years the NRDC and other "pro-environment" groups have insisted that all radiation is dangerous no matter what the level, and cumulative as well, so that the only safe action is to eliminate radiation. Of course there is natural radiation, which varies from place to place; sealing one's house allows radon to accumulate, raising the radiation in the house, sometimes to surprising levels; and going to higher altitudes always results in higher exposures, so much so that airline crews get quite a lot of radiation exposure, enough to be of concern.The NRDC hasn't quite said that we must evacuate Denver and Colorado Springs as dangerous radiation hazards, but such a policy would be logical, given their "scientific" assumptions.The alternative theories of radiation are the ancient pharmaceutical doctrine "The dose makes the poison," (i.e. that a some low enough level radiation is irrelevant), and "hormesis", which combines the "dose makes the poison" doctrine with the not entirely intuitive discovery that at low enough levels, radiation is actually good for you.The hormesis hypothesis has been confirmed many times. One study was by the Swedish Army, which accumulated data on conscripts (Sweden has universal manhood conscription) from areas of known high radiation and compared their health statistics to recruits from areas matched in other characteristics. The conclusion was very much in favor of the hormesis theory. One participant in the study was Claes-Gustav Nordquist, the Surgeon Colonel of the Lifeguards Regiment who was until his retirement one of the leading oncologists in Sweden. There have been many others, but Claes is an old friend so I learned a good bit about the details of that study.Despite the plethora of data confirming hormesis, the "environmental" movement continues to insist on the LNT (Linear, No Threshold) theory and this is one of their reasons for opposition to nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels.This means that for every watt of windpower we construct we must build a watt of workhorse capacity which will be switched off when it gets windy & switched back on a few hours later. It should be obvious to even the most convinced Green that this is an insane system. Moreso since switching on & off reduces efficiency & thus the alleged CO2 or millionth of a gram of uranium savings.Yours FaithfullyNeil Craig-----------------------------------------------Scoptsman Wed 14 Jul 2004 Nuclear option While the suggestion by JRD Stewart (Letters, 12 July) of subsidising coal-powered electricity would certainly be a cheaper method of producing power than subsidising wind farms and such "alternatives", there is an another option. Not subsidising but merely not preventing, penalising, de-laying or requiring the switching off during periods when it is actually windy of nuclear power would, in a free market, allow the production of as much safe, clean, non-CO2-producing power as even the most dynamic economy could want at 2.3p (wholesale) per unit. Coal, by comparison is a dangerous, ugly polluting system that condemned millions to an appalling lifestyle and hundreds of thousands to death by black lung. It is only distance that can lend it any charm. --------------------------Now this one I am proud ofLetter published in this week's (21/8/4) New Scientist.Unfortunately they cut out my mention of the Taiwan incident which contradicts the LNT theory that there is no safe lower radiation limit:-"Let me set his mind even further at ease. A recent statistical examination of 10,000 people in Taiwan who lived for a period of 20 years in apartments, the concrete of which had accidentally been contaminated by cobalt 60, has proved beyond any question whatsoever that the Linear No Threshold theory of radiation damage is wrong. These people lived in radiation levels initially 5 times our official "safe levels" (it declined quite substantially since Cobalt 60 has a half-life of 5.5 years). The result of this is that cancers were 97% LESS among these people than among the general population. This proves that the hormesis theory, that relatively small doses are beneficial is clearly true. This appears to have been intuitively known by generations of spa water imbibers. OUR NUCLEAR FUTUREThe letter on the cost of nuclear power from Peter Jennings deserves an answer (31 July, p 24). For 40 years, he has been waiting to hear of a permanent method of disposing of nuclear waste. He has missed the boat. It has, for many years, been perfectly possible to glassify waste and bury it thousands of feet below ground.The only objection to this, endorsed by the UK government in its report Managing Radioactive Waste Safely, was that this would make it impossible to recover material when it became valuable - an objection that supporters of nuclear power can endorse, but which is hardly consistent with the position of objectors. The report mentioned, but specifically did not endorse, the suggestion that relatively heavy radioactive particles would escape from state-of-the-art sealed containers and make their way back, via groundwater, in sufficient quantities to increase the background radiation.It is also possible to bury the material in areas where the mantle is being subducted towards the Earth's core. If buried in this way it is unlikely it would be recycled to the surface within the lifetime of our planet - though this seems a degree of overkill.On cost, let me put Jennings's mind at ease. The cost of burying a few tens of cubic metres of waste is insignificant compared with the cost of dismantling the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of windmills we would need to replace nuclear power. The major cost of removing windmills is not, as he imagines, dismantling the tower, but removing up to 1000 tonnes of poured concrete making up the foundation. The wind industry has guaranteed to remove this but, unlike the nuclear industry, is not required to lay aside money for it.Let me set his mind further at ease. He refers to the problems of storing high-level waste for 100,000 years. Since high-level waste has, almost by definition, a short half-life, almost all such waste including retired reactors themselves will be down to safe levels within 50 years and indistinguishable from background levels within a few hundred. Nuclear power is not only cheaper, more reliable and less polluting than the alternatives, but the only arguments against it turn out to owe more to hysteria and Luddism than good science.-------------------------SPEECH TO LIB DEM CONF 2/10/04 On motion to ban smoking in public placesSection (a) of this motion calls on us to support it only if the case is clearly proven.It isn't.A BMJ statistical analysis found only slight statistical significance when 48 studies were combined. Looked at separately only seven showed significant excesses of lung cancer meaning 41 did not.Further the combined risk was merely 24 percent, also called a "relative risk" of 1.24.Such tiny relative risks are considered meaningless, given the myriad pitfalls in epidemiological studies.. "As a general rule of thumb" says the editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine Marcia Angell, "we are looking for a relative risk of 3 or more" before even accepting a paper for publication.According to the National Cancer Institute "Relative risks of less than 2 are considered small & are usually difficult to interpret. Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias or the effect of some other not evident."The main exception to that rule comes when the study is extremely large, but such was not the case with the BMJ analysis. The studies showing excess disease comprised only 1,388 people in total. By contrast a recent study implicating obesity as a cause of early death contained more than three hundred & twenty THOUSAND subjects.So where does this leave us? Do we know passive smoking doesn't cause lung cancer. No. But we do knowthat either it does not, or that if it does the risk is so tiny as to be unmeasureable. Does this mean that passive smoking poses no health risks? No. It makes sense that it would aggravate asthma if nothing else. Does it mean that just because smokers arn't murdering other people, they're not still engaged in a nasty, expensive habit that greatly increases their own chances of sickness & premature death? Definitely not.But it does mean that we cannot legitimately limit people's freedom on the basis of this alleged risk to others.Over the next few years Ireland & New York will be able to produce substantial statistical populations & they may prove the banner's case. Or they may disprove it. Or & this is my bet, modern air extraction systems, which can remove 96% of smoke, may be proven effective. We shall see.Some years ago, to the obvious embarassment of the leadership, the federal party voted to examine lightening the criminal burden on cannabisusers. I remember a TV news programme immediately after in which a Mr Michael Howard we were wrong because nobody should ever, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever even think about thinking about any sort of reform. With it's well known commitment to balance the BBC then interviewed his shadow, Mr Jack Straw who said his opinion was a little more hardline than that.(pause for laughter - none came - this is a tough audience)He has clearly changed his mind.I was very proud of our party that day. It seemed to me that we were acting in the best traditions of classic Liberalism. Having been the first to call for some decriminalisation of cannabis, despite some dubious medical claims, I would be sorry to see us leading the way towards the effective criminalisation of tobacco.Thus I urge you to reject this motion.(they passed it by a large majority - we will see)(I would like to acknowledge that the section "A BMJ ......... Definitely not" was listed almost verbatim from http://www.sepp.org/reality/pseudosci.htmla site I reccomend to anybody who believes themselves a free thinker on environmental subjects)________________________________________________31/10/4 New Scientist online have published a slightly amended version of my letter on the evidence that low & intermediate level nuclear radiation is not only not harmful but actually beneficial to health.(LETTER TEXT - LARGELY THE SAME AS ABOVE Radiation thresholds In the light of the series of letters you have published on nuclear power, a study that calls into question the "linear no-threshold" (LNT) theory of radiation may be of interest.In 1983 a group of 180 apartment buildings was completed in Taiwan. Somebody had made a serious mistake. They had mixed into the concrete a considerable amount of highly radioactive cobalt-60. This meant that ultimately, for a period of between 9 and 20 years, 10,000 people lived in buildings so radioactive that when it started they were receiving an average of 74 millisieverts of radiation per year, a level that declined thereafter because cobalt-60 has a half-life of 5.27 years. Compare this with the rate of 0.5 mSv above background--the normal maximum exposure for radiation workers--or a total of 15 mSv, the maximum safe limit for land fit for habitation, according to US government standards. With the LNT theory, which is currently in use worldwide for assessing nuclear risks, there is no lower limit for the level at which radioactivity is lethal for humans (hence the term "no threshold"). So these buildings, inhabited for a decade and a half before the radioactivity was traced and measured, should be the site of a truly massive cancer death rate. They aren't. A thorough and methodical tracing of all the 4000 families by a team led by W. L. Chen of Taiwan, director of medical radiation technology at Taiwan's National Yang Ming University has resulted in an unequivocal and spectacular result. Cancer rates of people who had lived in those highly radioactive buildings are down to 3.6 per cent of prevailing Taiwanese rates. The full report is available in English on www.jpands.org/vol9no1/chen.pdf. For many years there has been an unfashionable alternative to the LNT theory called hormesis. This claims that intermediate level radioactivity actually stimulates life and improves health. There has been significant evidence for this (the deaths at Hiroshima did not appear to fit the LNT pattern, there are places in India and Iran with background radiation of 15 mSv or higher and with no observed increase in cancer, and numerous studies of radon in homes have found a reverse correlation between radon levels and cancer rates). Nonetheless, such has been our fear of all things nuclear that the LNT theory has been absolutely accepted, despite the fact that there has never been any actual evidence for it. This study, however, is so detailed, has such well-defined boundary conditions, and has such a clear result (proving a reduction in cancers of 96.4 per cent) that there can no longer be any intellectual doubt whatsoever. Radioactivity in low doses is good for us. The effect of this proof on our nuclear power industries can hardly be underestimated, since with the collapse of the LNT go most of the fears that have so crippled them. The implications for medicine, however, cannot even begin to be estimated, as the way is now open for serious research on how hormesis works and how it can be used to serve us. It is interesting to note that the healing water from the world's great spas has always been mildly radioactive and that medicine has up to this point been unable to find out why. I wonder what the future holds for such places.)The backstory to the publication is that this letter did the rounds of every paper I could find last May & was published only by Pravda & www.jerrypournelle.com.A couple of months ago I did another letter to New Scientist, also, you will have guessed, on nuclear being safe & costing only 2.3p a unit. A complete idiot replied saying that the cost didn't include decommissioning & that anyway nuclear power stations produced between 376 & 1300 billion tons of CO2 each per annum!! This got a reply from BNFL which said it did, they didn't & including the word "ludicrous'". The magazine acknowledged the error. I took the opportunity to remind the editor of my previous letter & he said that it had only not been published because New Scientist were intending to do a feature on the Taiwanese experience but that since that had fallen through they would do my letter - but only on the online version.Still I am extremely pleased to see this "controversial" but virtually unarguable science published anywhere & look forward to see if any other idiot will step up to bat.