Watermelons by James Delingpole, Carl Sagan's Project A119 to detonate nuclear weapons on the Moon, and the errors in his "nuclear winter" hype against Reagan's intimidation of the USSR
The previous post, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Chapter 14, Effects on Personnel, 2011 revised edition, summarizes the evidence for exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects and false ridicule of cheap, effective countermeasures (click here for link). A clear picture of the facts has now emerged so a paper is being prepared, summarizing material on this blog.
Watermelons, How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Child’s Future, a review of the 2012 book by James Delingpole:
Click here to view Watermelons by James Delingpole (a book review)
(Also available in PDF format on vixra, linked here.)
Click here to view Dirkwood report summary
(Also available in PDF format on another server, linked here.)
Above: the astronomer Dr Carl Sagan who hyped "nuclear winter" deceptions in the 80s, in 1958 was planning to detonate a 1.7 kt W25 nuclear weapon on the Moon as part of Project A119 to produce a flash visible from the Earth to regain attention from the USSR's Sputnik success of 1957. The Moon was already covered in massive radioactive craters from meteor impacts, so nobody would have noticed a few more. What more natural place to test the bomb could you find? Project A119 was led by Leonard Reiffel (now 85), leading to the secret reports: Possible Contribution of Lunar Nuclear Weapons Detonations to the Solution of Some Problems in Planetary Astronomy and Radiological Contamination of the Moon by Nuclear Weapons Detonations. The natural cosmic radiation background on the Moon even at solar minimum is 1 mR/hour or 100 times that in London, due to the lack of an atmosphere on the Moon, because Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres thickness of water. Therefore, bomb testing on the Moon would not have left any long term radioactivity, since the fallout would have decayed to a fraction of background within a year of detonation. (Note that the Abstract of Reiffel's 1959 report AD425380, linked here, states: "Nuclear detonations in the vicinity of the moon are considered in this report along with scientific information which might be obtained from such explosions." Typescript page 198 (PDF reader page 89) calculates the decay curve for the fallout on the Moon, concluding: "... by a month or two, for the detonation of a megaton weapon, the decay rate is down to roughly the order of the primary cosmic ray background.") But despite a knowledge of nuclear weapons effects, Carl Sagan later deceived the world with pseudoscientific claims over "nuclear winter":
Above: the firestorm in Hiroshima merely blocked out sunshine for 25 minutes, hence disproving ‘Nuclear Winter’ deceptions; furthermore, unlike Hiroshima modern cities that are nuclear targets simply do not contain thousands of charcoal braziers in bamboo and paper screen filled wooden houses with black colored air-raid black out curtains in their windows, and thermal shadowing prevents most modern city buildings from being ignited so there can be no firestorm now, let alone any climate change due to nuclear weapons! (Source: Figure 6 (3H) of the Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Volume 1, Office of the Air Surgeon, report NP-3036, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.)
“In From the Cold: ‘Nuclear Winter’ Melts Down,” The National Interest, Fall 1986, pp. 3-17, by Russell Seitz (Visiting Scholar in Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs):
“Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great.” – Carl Sagan, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1983-84.
“Peace-movement strategists wanted something new to dramatize nuclear war’s horrors. As Ralph K. White put it in his book The Fearful Warriors: “Horror is needed. The peace movement cannot do without it.” ... A 1982 special issue of the Swedish environmental science journal Ambio considered the environmental consequences of a nuclear war ... Sagan seized upon an article by Messrs. Paul Crutzen and Steven Birks that raised the question of a “Twilight at Noon” if the fires ignited by nuclear holocaust were to convert much of the fuel in both woodlands and cities into enough soot to enshroud the globe. ... The paper that resulted came to be known as TTAPS ... entailed a long series of conjectures ... “The question of peer review is essential. That is why we have delayed so long in the publication of these dire results,” said Carl Sagan in late 1983. ...
“Despite Mr. Sagan’s claim of responsible delay, before this peculiar review process had even begun, an $80,000 retainer was paid to Porter-Novelli Associates, a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm. More money was spent in the 1984 fiscal year on video and advertising than on doing the science. ... Having premiered on Oct. 30, 1983, as an article by Mr. Sagan in the Sunday supplement Parade, the TTAPS results finally appeared in Science magazine (December 23, 1983). ... Yet what became of the many complex and uncertain variables necessary to operate the Nuclear Winter model? They were not set forth in the text – 136 pages of data were instead reduced to a reference that said, simply, “In preparation.” The critical details were missing. They have languished in unpublished obscurity ever since.
“The readers of Science were still bewildered when, just one week later, another article by Mr. Sagan – “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” – appeared in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Sagan argued ... “What is urgently required is a coherent, mutually agreed upon, long-term policy for dramatic reductions in nuclear armaments...” ... Mr. Sagan made mistakes. While he cited the following passage as coming from a companion piece in Science that he had co-authored, it did not actually appear in the published version of that article: “In almost any realistic case involving nuclear exchanges between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient to cause an extinction event equal to or more severe than that of the close of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs and many other species died out are likely. (Emphasis added).” The ominous rhetoric italicized in this passage puts even the 100 megaton scenario of TTAPS on a par with the 100 million megaton blast of an asteroid striking the Earth.
“This astronomical mega-hype failed to pass peer review and never appeared in Science. Yet, having appeared in Foreign Affairs, it has been repeatedly cited ... Rather than “higher standards of evidence,” Mr. Sagan merely provided testimonials. ... Freeman Dyson ... put it, “It’s (TTAPS) an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight. ...” ... “You know, I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about” (Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman); “They stacked the deck” (Prof. Michael McElroy, Harvard); and, after a journalist’s caution against four-letter words, “ ‘Humbug’ is six [letters]” (Prof. Jonathan Katz, Washington University). ...
“The Politics of the Matter. On January 23, 1986, the leading British scientific journal Nature pronounced on the political erosion of the objectivity vital to the scientific endeavor: “Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent literature on ‘Nuclear Winter,’ research which has become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity.” The Roman historian Livy observed that “where there is less fear, there is generally less danger.” [Fear leads to bad decisions based on panic and irrational groupthink, not careful study. It also minimises the options available by attempting to make alternative ideas heretical, e.g. pseudo-pacifist Cyril Joad's attempt to smear Winston Churchill and all opposers of Hitler as warmongers in his August 1939 ideological bestseller, "Why War?"] Until those who have put activism before objectivity come to apprehend this, nuclear illusions, some spontaneous and some carefully fostered, will continue to haunt the myth-loving animal that is man.”
“Politics enters science
“More than ‘pure science’ is involved when a researcher decides that a particular area is ‘scientifically interesting’. Many features of wider society influence the process of choice of research, including the availability of funding, possible applications, technological infrastructure, ideas prevalent in society and the social position of scientists. Each of these factors played a role in turning nuclear winter into a priority research area in the 1980s. ... the first studies of the effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions on ozone were done in the early 1970s to show that SSTs would not affect ozone significantly [H. M. Foley and M. A. Ruderman, “Stratospheric NO production from past nuclear explosions,” Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 78, 1973, pages 4441-4450] ... In 1981 journalist Jonathan Schell wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker arguing that nuclear war could cause extinction of human life, principally through destruction of stratospheric ozone. ... Yet by the time he made his argument, the basis for massive ozone destruction by nuclear weapons had largely evaporated. ... Because the large multi-megatonne nuclear bombs deployed in the 1950s were being replaced by larger numbers of smaller warheads, not as much nitrogen oxides would be lofted far up into the stratosphere. [American aircraft penetrations of Chinese atmospheric thermonuclear weapon test mushroom clouds in the late 1970s proved the conversion of nitrogen dioxides into harmless nitric acid – which doesn’t affect ozone – by a reaction of nitrogen oxides with atmospheric moisture in the fireball.] ...
“Science enters politics ...
“Nuclear winter has been used as a political ‘resource’ or ‘tool’. Particular individuals and groups have used claims about nuclear winter to pursue explicitly political agendas. ... the key figure at the interface between the researchers and the media has been Carl Sagan, a media personality in his own right. The promotion has included Sagan’s article in Parade [30 October 1983, pages 4-5, 7] (a Sunday newspaper supplement, circulation 30 million) well publicised scientific conferences, press releases and press conferences, meetings with members of Congress, and television appearances. ... tens of thousands of dollars have been devoted to public relations about nuclear winter [John Maddox, “Nuclear winter and carbon dioxide,” Nature, vol. 312, issue13, December 1984, page 593]. ... the reason nuclear winter is perceived as an important issue is precisely because there is a social movement promoting it as such [Armand L. Mauss, Social Problems as Social Movements, Lippincott, 1975]. ... Doom and destruction are staples of media coverage. The more extreme claims of freezing, darkness and extinction have received much more coverage than cautionary comments ... Jonathan Katz, a physicist at Washington University in St Louis, was quoted as saying about nuclear winter, after a journalist's caution against four-letter words, “ ‘Humbug’ is six.” Katz on 22 January 1988 wrote to me that Seitz's quotations attributed to him are correct.”
Note that fanatically anti-civil defense nuclear firestorm quacks (many of whom continue to cite deluded propaganda from the Dresden firestorm peddled by neo-Nazi historian David Irving and other anti-nuclear deceivers) are continuing to use anti-civil defense groupthink delusions to publish outright lies, an abuse of scientific evidence, and ill-informed attacks against the need to protect kids from nuclear terrorism threats by duck and cover civil defense, by loading Wikipedia with drivel-based politically “peer-reviewed” lying groupthink deceptions and claims of nuclear winters which were disproved even in inflammable wooden cities during nuclear attacks on 6 and 9 August 1945, as well as detailed simulations of modern cities which use the shadowing of buildings to disprove the possibility of mass fires, let alone firestorms. Nuclear tests in unobstructed deserts where the thermal flash was not blocked by intervening buildings did not cause firestorms, either.
The 1935 effectively pro-Nazi “pacifist” conspiracy between Labour and Conservatives to pander to popular British pro-disarmament pacifist media sentiments: how politicians lie to win political power
“There is no security in armaments and we shall be no party to piling them up.”
– Labour Party Leader of the Opposition Clement Attlee, 1935 (two years after Hitler took power and began rearming Germany; quotation from Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967). Troubled by the failure of unilateral disarmament to save millions of lives in WWII, Attlee 12 years later as Prime Minister ordered the stockpiling of the first British nuclear weapons to deter WWIII from starting.
“Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm ... I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.”
– Conservative Prime Minister Stanley “the bomber will always get through” Baldwin, who won the 1935 general election with a large majority by lying to get votes for popular pacifism, denying Winston Churchill’s unpopular “warmongering” claims that Hitler was rearming Germany and must be deterred effectively (speech in House of Commons, 12 November 1936). (Some pro-Baldwin historians – not Winston Churchill – claim Baldwin was referring to an earlier non-existing election than 1935, but this makes no difference to the lying.)
Common Purpose communist infiltration of the BBC and British government under the disguise of well-meaning socialists: the road to hell is paved with good intentions
"L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs" - Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. (Literally, "hell is full of good wishes and desires.")
"If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is partly because that is the road they generally start out on." - Stephen Garrard Post, Altruism and altruistic love, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 203.
Above: Rotherham children being snatched from loving foster parents by ex-"Common Purpose" social services director Joyce Thacker, simply because they are members of UKIP, the U.K. Independence Party, which wants Britain to declare itself independent from communist EUSSR run by Germany, French and Greek communists in Brussels. Britain has a trade deficit with Europe, so it imports more than exports. During WWII, Britain went on food rations to stay independent from Hitler's so-called "National Socialism". Today, children are taken away from loving families in Britain just because they want independence. This should stand as a hard warning to all Americans of the dangers of back-door State Marxist/communists/fellow travellers. It's too late for Britain (yet again), but perhaps you can learn lessons from our disasters in Britain.
James Delingpole:
Perhaps the least surprising aspect of the Rotherham childcare story is that Car Crash Commissar and Child Catcher in Chief Joyce Thacker was a member of Common Purpose. The secretive Fabian organisation has been getting quite a bit of media attention, lately, thanks to a bravura investigation conducted by the Daily Mail. Common Purpose has been described as a Left-wing version of the Freemasons ... here's an excerpt from the Mail piece:
"What is interesting is that the same people appear in the same jobs, in different places, as if through a revolving door. They work for local authorities, leave, then come back as freelance “consultants” with huge, inflated fees. They are often mediocre and there is no evidence of how or why they were chosen. They can leave a council with a terrible reputation yet pop up next minute as head of a regulatory body and as a trustee of numerous bodies. It is a real money-spinner. It's also, just like Agenda 21, a way of entrenching the ideology of the communitarian left – in the civil service, in the police, in the media (especially the BBC/Guardian) and, of course, among such local government apparatchiks as Joyce Thacker."
Communitarianism
By Niki Raapana
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233681/Leveson-Inquiry-Mail-dossier-raises-disturbing-questions-influence-quasi-masonic-nexus-people-know-best.html
Sir Bob Kerslake, the recently appointed head of the Home Civil Service and Permanent Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, is a Common Purpose graduate, according to the organisation's website. Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, has a full-page profile on the Common Purpose International website's 'who we are' section.
Jon Williams, the BBC's World News Editor since 2006, is also a graduate of Common Purpose London.
Professor Richard Sambrook, who was the BBC's Head of News and director of the World Service, is quoted praising Common Purpose on the website. He spoke at a Common Purpose event but has denied being otherwise involved.
The BBC has told the Mail that, in a five-year period, it spent more than £126,000 on Common Purpose courses.
But it is Leveson assessor Lord Currie who (as we show later in fuller detail) illustrates the incestuous relationships that intertwine throughout this Inquiry. ...
Davies was told that the Department of Work and Pensions had spent almost £240,000 in five years, on courses which had 'helped foster valuable partnerships in the local community which can be used to improve the service offered to our customers'. The Ministry of Defence had spent more than £300,000 over the same period.
While Common Purpose could do little about this kind of scrutiny, we now come to perhaps the most serious charge against this body: the suppressing and smearing of individual citizens who had lodged Freedom of Information questions about its activities.
On the specious basis that FoI legislation was being abused, causing damage to the charity's reputation, Common Purpose compiled a 'blacklist' of the individuals concerned. Common Purpose officials sent private, personal details of these people to public bodies around the country, with the warning that new FoI requests about the charity from those listed should be treated as 'vexatious'.
In other words, Common Purpose tried to block the legal rights of those individuals and prevent their freedom of expression.
The privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), investigated the affair, following complaints by five of those on the blacklist. ...
In response to a Freedom of Information request from this newspaper, a spokeswoman for the ICO said: 'As far as we are aware, 18 individuals had their personal details disclosed by Common Purpose by way of the list provided to various public bodies.'
She said these details could 'contain their name, and if known, also their address and/or phone number'.
In late 2009, the ICO ruled that Common Purpose was 'unlikely to have complied with provisions in the Data Protection Act 1998 on processing data'. Their spokeswoman confirmed to the Mail: 'In this case, the Act was probably breached.'
The ICO decided not to take 'further action' against Common Purpose 'after the charity confirmed that it no longer distributed the list' and Julia Middleton issued a statement in which she said: 'As an organisation we made a genuine mistake in this instance. But it was in a very rapidly changing legal context ...'
POLITICAL DISCLAIMER: This is a scientific data based post, not a political post favouring one party or political dogma. Scientific objectivity tells you, for example, that wherever competition leads to corruption - like widespread use of illegal methods to win customers from rivals, or cartel agreements between competing firms to keep prices high to profit shareholders at the expense of the public - the public may be better off with nationalization (a traditional socialist policy). This same kind of corruption exists in political party politics, where each party must try to steal potential voters from the other in order to have a chance of getting elected (with a majority adequate to actually be effective in pushing legislation through), by making promises they don't mean or selling out to ideology which promises everything to everyone but always fails to deliver. The huge gap between the richest and poorest actually means very little (more important is the baseline of poverty, which actually improves thanks to technology), because the poor so outnumber the few megarich that if you were to make the world equal by taking all the wealth and dividing it out equally (like the USSR tried to do with the 1930s collectivism which about 40 million, which is more than the Nazis are credited with), the effect is just trivial short-term benefits for the poor but hugely demotivating for rich who run businesses and provide jobs and investments. Last year, 2011, there were a total of 29,700,000 people in the world (out of a total world population of 7,000 million) with a net worth over $1 million each, only 29,000 of which were worth more than $100 million each.
If the numbers of very rich were similar to the numbers of very poor, than the effect of severe measures to equalize wealth would benefit the poor significantly; but they don't. The effect is just to make the rich poor and prevent them from investing in businesses, while not making the poor significantly wealthy. You just take away wealth and inspirational dreams from the poor by this policy. In addition, when sharing out "wealth" equally, you will also have to share out "debt" equally, which will be less popular to the socialists seeing how much debt they run up without any long-term benefit to the poor. (This was what did-in the USSR.) This is a scientifically defensible fact, not a political opinion or polemic. The loss-making Guardian newspaper and the compulsory-licence funded BBC propaganda media can go on pretending otherwise, but it's simply a deception. The "Conservatives" and "Liberals" are just as Marxist as the "Labour" socialists because of their authoritarian attitudes towards scientific facts, their dictatorial and hate-filled attitude to any dissent, their pretense of being progressive just to win votes. Moreover, all political parties are in themselves Marxist "groupthink" by definition. Just joining a political party makes you part of social community with shared values and groupthink prejudices. Objective, scientific, independence of freedom of thought and action is the opposite of the affiliation to any one political party. All forms of affiliation are a source of compromise, leading to self-censorship and observance of customs, taboos, and thus a loss of true freedom. Social interactions are needed for work and love, but we don't need to subscribe to "party politics" as well; they are anti-freedom, anti-democracy, and pro-groupthink.
To see where nationalised industries make sense, take energy suppliers, or cable TV suppliers. If you had an "honest" competition, you would have twenty separate gas mains and TV network cables buried in your street which would be perpetually being dug up to repair the many different cables (with "accidental" damage being done to rival firms cables or pipes in the process). In the more dishonest system, there is only one gas main, but you have twenty different "head offices" all duplicating each other's work to a large extent, and competing to get more customers on their books. This inefficiency in the long term just drives up prices for customers, because it's basically corrupt. There is no genuine competition: it's the same supply of goods through the same pipes, just with duplication of bureaucracy! Sensibly, we don't have replace the British Army, the Royal Navy and RAF, with a "free market" of lots private armies, all competing for government war contracts, in order to try to cut the defence bill. Similarly, we don't have a "free market" of police or fire engines, all competing to catch criminals or put out fires first. It's obvious that competition causes inefficiency, poor ethics, or even corruption in certain industries, which need to be closely policed or else kept national (despite all the problems of pay rises and unions connected with this).
The "free" media is also highly corrupt (especially in scientific areas like nuclear weapons effects) and fails to report taboo subjects that could cost readership, unless the media is corruptly funded and prepared to make a loss (e.g. the Guardian newspaper makes a loss, and BBC funding system is precisely the kind of thing the USSR and Nazi regimes relied on). But even these cases, instead of getting truly independent agenda-less reporting, you get heavy infiltration by the left wing, which keeps making the same old mistakes and refusing pointedly to learn from its mistakes. The reason why the left infiltrates these media is deliberate: they have tried long but failed to get the public interested in honest, good-form propaganda which is clear and bold. But then, instead of giving up or reformulating its policies, it decides to use dishonest, sneaky-propaganda which consists of rigorously censoring those facts out of the media which don't fit into its political agenda. Either it just refuses to confront the facts, or else it uses strawman, ad hominem shoot-the-messenger "arguments", or plain lies, in order to try to "close down the argument" without any discussion. When socialism gets power in the media, it can ban discussions on subjects it knows it cannot win by rational two-way debate. This also occurs with Conservatives and dictatorial Liberals, although they tend to be less dogmatic than socialists (but like all politicians, they don't want a debate on topics where they are simply in the wrong). You see them on TV evading issues, and stalling to waste time when on live TV (deliberately to be saved by editor having to move on to another topic, something that isn't so easy on pre-recorded video).
Melanie Phillips's 1997 bestseller All Must Have Prizes has a chapter on "The Destruction of Morality" where on page 221 she quotes Oxford University philosophy lecturer Marianne Talbot writing in The Sunday Times (24 July 1994):
"Many of the young have been taught to think their opinion is no better than anyone else's, that there is no truth, only truth-for-me. I come across this extreme relativist view constantly - in exams, in discussion and in tutorials ... The young have been taught [by compulsory-funded BBC and loss-making Guardian "subtext" or "subliminal"-type propaganda], or so it seems, that they should never think of the views of others as false, but only as different. They have been taught that to suggest someone else is wrong is at best rude and at worst immoral ... one should never be so arrogant as to believe that one is right" [Emphasis added. Note that it is "rude" to assert 1 + 1 = 2 too confidently. After all, if we switch from base 10 to base 2, we find that 1 + 1 = 10. So you can "prove" anything using smoke and mirrors!]
Melanie Phillips shows this supports Nazism in a beautifully robust analysis on page 222 of All Must Have Prizes:
"... it would say in effect that the Nazi view of the world was merely what the Nazis thought was right and was therefore as valid ... If there is no absolute right, it follows that there can be no absolute wrong, just as if there is no absolute truth, there can be no lies. [Emphasis added. This way of getting rid of lies is very convenient to everybody, which is why it has creeped into society.] ... Moral relativism leads directly to despotism and tyranny. It was no accident that Nietzsche [an anti-Christ], in whose long shadow our relativist society was formed, represented a significant milestone on the road to the Final Solution."
She continues, noting on page 229 that "The bible of the new psychopolitics was a book called The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950 by the Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno and his colleagues. ... Any opposition to the subjective or the imaginative was seen as a form of incipient fascism. ... By defining personality attributes as potentially fascist [rather than oppressive dictatorial behaviour as fascist], it promulgated the belief that merely to hold certain attitudes constituted actual or potential oppression. As commentators have remarked, the tremendous influence of this book turned the western world upside down." On the next page, she notes Lord Devlin's 1959 warning speech Morals and the Criminal War, which stated: "Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures." On page 255 she notes the left's attack on family life: "In 1971 Germaine Greer called women to arms in The Female Eunuch by instructing them to refuse to marry ... she also advocated communal childrearing." On page 269, Phillips notes that this culture led Allan Bloom's students to suffer handicaps: "Bloom's students feared both isolation and attachment and lacked confidence in the future; their enthusiasm was replaced by self-protectiveness." She explains this on page 271: "Every society needs order if it is to survive. To have order, a society must have values. Those values, expressed most vividly in the changes within education and family life, have become fragile ... There has been a breakdown in moral transmission from one generation to the next. ... they display a failure to recognise the need for clear moral judgements, discipline and punishment ... there is no doubt that crime is a worsening social plague. Since the middle of the 1950s, crime rates have rocketed upwards without any sustained periods of decline. In 1950, about 500,000 crimes were recorded, but this has now gone up to nearly six million recorded crimes per year. And recorded crime is merely the tip of an iceberg; the real rate is very much higher."
Melanie Phillips goes on to analyze the failure of the state educational system which engineered this moral relativism and crime epidemic on pages 333-4 (her analysis also applies to quantum field theory and spin-2 graviton classical relativism stress-energy tensor-coupling string theory delusions today):
"This rotten corruption ... is built on telling them a series of lies. The educational system conspires to make them believe that they have achieved when they have not. It sponsors individual self-delusion and national myopia. ... self-esteem does not emerge from lies and self-delusion. ... anything that causes effort or pain is forbidden ... failure is a banished concept altogether. But children are not stupid. They know when they are being sold a pup. ... What is more, it has produced a spiral of madness. ... In Switzerland, for example, a country whose economic success we can merely grasp at, only 12% go to university. This is not held to be a national disaster, because there university is not identified as the one and only criterion of excellence."
Above: Germany's Chancellor made a statement that Britain would "be lonely in that big, bad world" if it left the EUSSR's groupthink, doublethink, and commithink dictatorship. At present, the majority of Britain's new laws are made by a "democratic consensus" of economically-failing, hard-left European socialists/communists in Brussels. Prime Minister David "No-Public-Referendum-on-EUSSR-Membership" Cameron sees this statement as the "velvet glove" on a more sinister iron fist, a EUSSR threat to cut off Eurozone trade with Britain if it leaves EUSSR membership. But Britain currently has a large trade deficit with Eurozone countries, importing more than it exports. This makes Britain's position more powerful than Europe, for if the Eurozone simply banned British imports in retaliation for us leaving the EUSSR, we could ban imports and they would suffer more! During WWII on food rations for freedom, Britain survived without German beer, French wine and cheese, Italian ice cream and pizza, Spanish holidays, and Greek yogurt.
It seems that the Prime Minister has people in his "Eton-old-boys-friends-network" whose livelihoods (and Conservative Party donations/funding) depend entirely on exporting British goods into the Eurozone, so they're fellow-travellers of the EUSSR and refuse a public referendum on EUSSR membership (unless the country is flooded with pro-EUSSR propaganda first, and the referendum questions are fiddled to get the result he wants for his friends). Likewise for the "horsegate" controversy, where Prime Minister Cameron rode on the back of Raisa, the horse owned by News of the World editor Rebecca "Phone Hacking Scandal" Brooks, to get good press coverage in the 2010 election. So Cameron pretends that exit from EUSSR means starvation for Britain, ignoring the fact that most (60%) of Britain's trade is outside the Eurozone even today. Britain can survive, as it did in WWII, using food rationing in the worst case scenario. If Brussels goes mad, it will be just the latest in a series of dictators in Europe, following earlier thugs like Napoleon, the Kaiser, Mussolini, and Hitler. Typical of EUSSR lies is the report in the Irish Industry News on 21 November 2011 that the European Commission provided 35,000,000 Euroes to get 9,000 long-term unemployed workers in the construction industry back to work, but two years after the money had been awarded, not a single unemployed worker had even been contacted. This is worse than the openly communist USSR, which had more integrity that than. So appeasement does not work. He can learn some lessons from Mrs Thatcher's rhetorical diplomacy:
Above: the socialists received fair warning in 1915 (two years before Lenin's bolshevik USSR revolution in Russia) from Edward Adams's book, The Inhumanity of Socialism, which explains on page v: "the theories of good men who are enthralled by its delusions are made the excuse of the wicked who would rather plunder than work; because it stops enterprise, promotes laziness, exhalts inefficiency, inspires hatred, checks production, assures waste and instills into the souls of the unfortunate and the weak hopes impossible of fruition whose inevitable blasting will add to the bitterness of their lot." All of these 1915 findings were confirmed by the history of the USSR and socialist Britain in the 1970s and 2000s. Alan Mass's book The Case for Socialism, Haymarket Books, 3rd edition, 2010, falsely blames capitalism for war, oppression, and alleged environmentalism, claiming that capitalism is "theft" from workers to pay the entrepreneurs who set up the companies and the investors who risk investing money in them! Without free enterprise and invention, you are left with the unproductive state sector who spends taxes without generating any net income. Mass on pages 157-8 stubbornly refuses to see the failure of 1980s socialism in the USSR by attributing it to Stalin's 1930s tyranny:
"To see the [1980s] distintegration of the Soviet Union as a sign of the failure of socialism is to mistake the monstrous tyranny created by Stalin [in the 1930s] for the vision of an egalitarian and democratic society ... We can now reintroduce genuine socialism to a world feeling the sickness of capitalism - its nationalist hatreds [wrong, matey, the nationalism is the socialist Trade Union and narrow minded EUSSR politics, not capitalist free-market world-wide social justice], its perpetual warfare [wrong; it was socialist pacifist pressures for disarmament from the pacifist Labour leader Clement Attlee that forced Baldwin and Chamberlain into appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s, hence causing World War II, as is fully documented for all time by Quintin Hogg's 1945 book The Left Was Never Right], riches for a small number of people in a small number of countries [wrong, everyone apart from communists and socialists in places like Cuba are perpetually getting richer thanks to capitalism, despite mounting national socialist state spending debt], and hunger, homelessness, insecurity for everyone else [as Herman Kahn has explained, if they adopt capitalism, they all get richer as is occurring in China right now]."
So what does this European Union problem mean for nuclear deterrence?
First, no cash for defence, caused by crippling interest on massive national debts in the West, a result of twenty years of borrowing to fuel a bubble of debt. The history of war shows that the misery of debt is the ideal culture to grow the germs of war. The socialists and communists create this situation today, whereas it was capitalist investors (gamblers) in the past (e.g. the global effects of the 1929 Wall Street crash, such as the rise of the Nazis on Hitler's debt bubble which caused him to start WWII to get around the National Socialist/Nazi debt created by solving unemployment by employing a massive army and arms manufacturing industry). The current fashion for socialists to expand the welfare state and taxpayer funded health industry is crippling Britain and much of Europe. We pay an emormous bill for "free" health care, but get treated like dirt by "government paid" doctors who aren't directly being paid by citizens. Half the reason why I, for example, had to wait years to be correctly diagnosed and treated for a simple hearing defect that affected speech and self-confidence as a kid, was the lack of care and responsibility of "government paid" professionals in the "free" teaching and health systems. This takes away any incentive for many of them to be efficient and caring. They get the precisely same pay cheque if they are uncaring and rude or if they are efficient and helpful, and they also have to deal with a lot of people who soak up vast resources such as alcoholics and drug abusers.
Margaret Heffernan reviews the evidence in her book Wilful Blindness (Simon and Schuster, London, 2012), pages 171-173:
"By 1991, mortality rates at Bristol were twice the national average. ... a new paediatric cardiac surgeon had been appointed and on 6 January 1995, he approached Wisheart, asking that he not carry out an operation on an 18-month-old boy, Joshua Loveday. ... Wisheart persevered and the child died. 'Wisheart was the most stubborn man you can imagine,' says Bolsin. 'He never accepted that he should stop doing paediatric cardiac surgery. He was incredibly stubborn, more stubborn than you can ever imagine. ... You can kill children in large numbers but don't shop your colleagues.' ... Frustrated ... Bolsin emigrated to Australia. ... the problem might have remained invisible but for Bolsin's decision first to contribute to a Channel 4 documentary, Broken Hearts, about the hospital and, finally, to report Wisheart to the General Medical Council. 'The GMC rather half-heartedly said to me, "We will have to tell the people you're complaining about." I said I could deal with that. They really didn't want to investigate ... There had been complaints by parents but the GMC had managed to ignore them. ... The GMC only acted when it had to. They really hoped it would go away. I think that is still true today. The profession in the UK has ... never acknowledged my role in improving the standards of health care in the NHS' [thugs won't; like Robin Hood, they're self-deluded about their "professional" morality and "professional" ethics to such an extent that whatever goes wrong, it's always the fault of the patient, never of the "professional"]."
DAILY MAIL, 22 January 2012, By Sophie Borland
Four patients die thirsty or starving EVERY DAY on our hospital wards show damning new statistics
Data shows 1,316 deaths were linked to or directly caused by dehydration and malnutrition in 2010
Figures are far higher than in 2000, when 862 deaths were recorded
One hospital forced to prescribe drinking water for its patients
On 22 January 2012, the Daily Mail reported that four British NHS patients die every day from either thirst or malnutrition, a figure which if those victims of neglect were animals in a zoo, would have caused outrage by both environmentalists and the BBC. Instead, rude indignation by the professionals was the result. (How dare journalists report taboo news?!? How RUDE! What a LACK OF RESPECT FOR CARING PROFESSIONALS!!!) Yet this whole emotional-outrage drivem "professionalism" scam is bogus when you remember that Dr Josef Rudolf Mengele (SS officer and a human experimenter at Auschwitz) had doctorates in both anthropology and medicine. There is sadly a difference between being a member of a nobel-sounding trade union like the BMA, and being a genuinely caring, humane being. In a "National Socialist" environment, even he went wrong. Another example is the Medical Nobel Laureate and gas chamber enthusiast Dr Alexis Carrel, who died awaiting trial for Nazi collaboration. Groupthink kills. If you bring up these examples to rude professionals, you don't get a rational reply, just a paranoid anti-dissent rant or emotional response, betraying deep pseudo-scientific or megalomaniacal narcissism:
http://www.patientsfirst.org.uk/?p=488
The British Medical Association withdrew legal support from a whistleblowing doctor because he refused to sign a gagging clause, The Times has learnt. ... Mark Porter, the head of the BMA, assured MPs on the Health Select Committee last month that his organisation “does not and will not advise people to sign confidentiality agreements in order to keep patient safety matters secret”. However, in a series of e-mails seen by The Times, a BMA-appointed lawyer asked David Drew, a consultant paediatrician, to agree not to “make or publish any derogatory or defamatory remarks” about his former hospital. ... Dr Drew had raised concerns about Manor Hospital in Birmingham, where he worked until 2010 as a consultant. That year he told BBC news that children had developed hypothermia after the hospital’s heating failed. A year later, Dr Drew was dismissed ... The GMC published guidelines last week which emphasised that doctors have a duty not to sign gagging clauses which prevent them raising concerns over substandard patient care. ..."
If people had to pay directly for health care in Britain, you would trust the "care" and you would have real redress, not the thugs in the BMA and groupthink quack "Trade Unions" who sue anyone who speaks out against their fascism, and then get hours of BBC TV coverage - funded by the compulsory licencepayer - to issue propaganda claiming that the "vast majority" of these "professionals" do an excellent job and need a pay rise to improve standards. In other words, they don't give a damn about problems, and wallpaper over the cracks with lies. What is wrong is the USSR-1980s-type "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"-psychological breakdown of the vital linkage between the act of working and the act of getting paid for it. Any attempt by Prime Minister Cameron to introduce any reform of this system that makes it moral and capitalist is opposed by the trade union fascists and liars. While there should be a national safety net health service, soup kitchen and homeless refuge system, it must be run by capitalists, not socialists, and should use rationing with extensions for those with health problems through no fault of their own.
Now let's examine precisely how much fuel there is for a war, i.e. how much debt the pseudo "socialists" who claim to be pacifists have managed to pile up. Debt is a ticking war bomb in two different ways. First, countries that go bankrupt and destitute under escalating debt may fall into riots and civil war, or desperately end up with an "elected" dictatorship (like Hitler in 1933) or military coup, then an outward war in an effort to either find a military solution to debt or else to detract attention from internal problems by starting a war. Second, the ticking timebomb of debt leads to more borrowing just to pay the interest, and when interest rates go up, the debt spirals so far out of control that the country defaults on the interest repayments. This causes the country's credit rating to drop through the floor, preventing it from getting any more loans to "pay" debt interest from the existing debt, apart from emergency loans at high interest rates.
The country is soon in a financial crisis and is forced to make massive cutbacks, which kill its economy and lead to poverty for millions, but worse than that, the military security of the country - the first duty of the government - must be cut because there is no cash to pay the army, the weapons industry, etc. So all those military experts and scientists who think that political corruption is "not their department" then feel the consequences. By then, however, it is far too late to protest, or to come up with alternative ideas. Socialist spending sprees are then a threat to military security. Remember that Britain cut back on its military in 1933 - the year Hitler gained power - not purely due to pacifism, but due to financial constraints originating from the 1929 economic crash. This must never be forgotten. Democracy is at its weakest militarily when it is economically so poor that all around can see it can't possibly afford a war. The new (October 2012) book by Douglas Carswell, MP, The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy points out on page 14 that in 1900 American and British households spent 5-15% of their earnings on the government, compared to 43-51% today:
"Fifth-century France was ruled by a dynasty of Merovingian Kings. ... successive Merovingian monarchs parcelled power out to courtiers ... By the sixth century, the Merovingians had become ceremonial figureheads. Their presence on the throne lent legitimacy to decisions made by others who sat behind it. In our own time something similar has happened [witness, for example, the secrecy of unelected officialdom which is now controlling public data on nuclear weapons effects, and the disaster it caused when it made secret the effects of gas bombs on people inside houses during pacifist gas bombing propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s, when the data was desperately needed to kill appeasement policies that helped the Nazis!] ... Civil servants and technocrats make more and more of the decisions [usually by selectively withholding key "technical" scientific reports from elected ministers, in order to delibertaly prejudice the outcome of decisions in the way they prefer]."
- Douglas Carswell, MP, The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, page 76.
"In 2010, the American government spent $1,900 billion more than it collected in tax. A year later, the US government borrowed $100 billion each month just to pay the bills. ... Against ... $70,000 annual income, every American is liable for $131,368 of public debt, plus a further $1,031,131 to pay for all those unfunded promises their government has made. If you thought America was mired in debt, take a look at Britain and Europe. Britain's total public and private debts are proportionately even bigger at more than 5 times her entire annual economic output. In Spain, France and Italy, total debt is between 3-4 times annual output. Public debt in Greece is 132% output, Italy 111%, France 90%, Ireland 85%, Germany 83% ... the interest payments on the debt begin to grow faster than they can be paid back."Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have reached this stage ... private lenders have stopped lending to them. Other countries [themselves heavily in debt] have had to step in to bail them out. The US government debt interest bill already means that every US citizen faces the equivalent of $11,000 in interest payments alone each year. ... governments begin to confiscate ever more wealth to pay ... For every $100 that the average American worker earns, $36 is spent on buying government - $29 directly in various payroll taxes and $7 in various consumption taxes ... In Britain, the average worker buys £46 of government for every £100 earned. In Japan, it is Y33 for every Y100 earned. In France and Germany ... 59 Euroes [in every 100 earned, pays] for government ..."
Carswell on page 134 calculates future American debt interest spiralling out of control if socialism continues to dominate over capitalist values: in 2020 America will spend about 15-20% of its tax revenue just servicing its debt interest (more than it spends on defense!), by 2030 the figure will have spiralled to 36%, by 2040 to 58% and by 2050 to 85%. Carswell notes depressingly that in 1788 Louis XVI's French Government was spending 60% of its tax revenue on debt interest servicing (Louis XVI was of course beheaded in 1793 as a result of the French Revolution). America is presently in a better state than Greece and Britain, but it's still headed at full steam towards the very same iceberg with its eyes tightly closed.
The future will bring us daily referendums online. Greek City State “democracy” was a daily referendum of all citizens on all issues, rather than one election for a choice between two clones every four years! The secure database technology is here already: internet banking database technology is more secure and tamper-proof than very expensive-to-process paper ballots in election boxes (which also require time-consuming journeys to election stations, with all the hassle of parking congestion or parking charges), and it is far cheaper! Like the compulsory switchover to digital TV, it will be cheaper to give the few people who don’t already have internet access a smartphone to vote on, than to keep converting forests into ballot papers and paying for armies of vote counters.
Daily referendums will easily become part of the same technology that will be used for electing politicians in the near future. The British Government’s “ePetition” website that (since 2010) has automatically scheduled a House of Commons debate on an online petition issue once it receives 100,000 signatures can simply be linked into the daily referendum computer database system, so that everyone in the country will be forced to vote at say 7pm each evening on the daily referendum issues, which will cut out the time wasting of Parliament and speed up the democratic process. It will also restore everybody’s faith in democracy, which requires a faith in the common human being which today’s “no referendum on EUSSR membership” politicians like “Dave-please-don’t-call-me-Hitler-Cameron” clearly don’t have. Douglas Carswell MP states on page 200 of “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy”:
“Edmund Burke was sceptical about [real, daily referendum Greek City State type] democracy because he feared – as many do today – that the common people had dangerous and angry passions. Mass democracy, it was feared, would become demagoguery. Unpopular minorities would be subject to the arbitrary rule of the mob [an unreasoning fear of the common human being that makes the paranoid hysteria of modern politicians indistinguishable from the paranoia of the dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam, who are the real dangers, not the common human being who is more reasoning and thus more intelligent than the dictators at the top]. In fact, the evidence is that the precise opposite is happening. iDemocracy is leading to smaller, less arbitrary government. In 2010, the UK government introduced a system of ePetitions. This allows campaigners, citizens and pressure groups to initiate debates and votes in the House of Commons. ... The [paranoid and anti-democratic, Jimmy Saville molester supporting] BBC reported the ePetitions innovation entirely in terms of them being a vehicle that might allow the restoration of capital punishment [Melanie Phillips pointed out on page 271 of her 1997 book “All Must have Prizes” that in 1950 – before Capital Punishment was abolished – there were only 500,000 crimes in Britain, contrasted to almost 6,000,000 per year in the 1990s after the Capital deterrent was abolished].”
Carswell concludes on page 262:
"Europeanism, environmentalism, Keynesianism, monetarism ... The dogmas invoked to justify intervention in the affairs of men may vary, but the conceit of the interventionists remains the same. Until now. The digital revolution will reinvigorate the West, limiting once again the size of government and in the process helping make the West more truly Western. It will enable us to constrain those with power once again. The digital revolution will do to grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to the socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc."
What happened in Greece when disaster struck is that the people, who had elected lying and high-spending socialists and communists to waste vast amounts of borrowed money before and after Greece joined the Euro, rioted against the government when it was too late. They had no complaints when times were good and the debt was going out of control. Having voted in quacks, they rioted against the government after the damage was done, when it was too late to save their economy. The same is occurring in Britain, where the Civil Service allowed unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown MP to ruin Britain's economy with massive debts and selling half the gold standard at rock bottom price, without the public being fully informed. Brown now profits from prestige he does not deserve, leaving the current government to try to sort out the mess and take the blame. To some extent, the current British government failed while in opposition to infiltrate (or bribe) the Civil Service to "leak" the secret-classified economic facts and publish them, to cut Brown's reign of havoc, and it is now obfuscating with claims now to be "reducing debt" when it is merely making an insignificant reduction in the rate of increase of debt, not reducting debt (the debt is still increasing).
If interest rates were to rise sharply due to other economies coming out of recession faster than Britain, Britain would be unable to borrow more due to interest repayments, and could be economically ruined, like Greece today. If Britain should have to fight a major war under such circumstances, Britain may not be able to fund a war. It might not be able to rely on the USA, either, to to its debt. The decision for a democracy to go to war is essentially down to enemy actions, and they will deliberately take account of Britain's financial situation when deciding to be provocative. In other words, massive debt has military preparedness and responsiveness consequences, invites danger, and increases the risk of war. It is the duty of the military to take account of not only enemies abroad who are a threat to national security, but also those at home who break the bank and make the nation vulnerable to enemy coercion that way.
This economic factor behind war is something that the biased pseudo-pacifist "historians" will remain "wilfully blind" towards. Similarly, you won't find many modern historians even considering how exaggerations of the "power" of big guns in the Kaiser's Germany 1912 led in 1914 to WWI. They show "wilful blindness" towards the German General Staff's 1912 neglect of the simple, cheap defensive trenches used successfully against the "Dictator mortars" during the American Civil War (known in 1865), which would have shown them the reason why they would not win WWI within three months as planned (the war wouldn't have started if trench countermeasures to explosives were taken as seriously as they should have been). Nor will you find much credit being given by such biased pseudo-historians to the role of the exaggeration of weapons and war effects in the 1920s and 1930s by "pacifists" in causing the appeasement of Hitler which led to WWII. In order to deter war you must be in a position to afford to fight a war, or your bluff will be called. It costs money to keep equipment and personnel prepared for war. The nuclear weapons debt problem is that in times of massive national debt, the nuclear bomb is a cheaper option than paying for megatons of conventional weapons like TNT, and is also cheaper than paying for the conscription of millions of soldiers to go and fight. So the nuclear bomb gets dusted down and rattled about. This worked for Eisenhower in 1953, when he used the nuclear bomb threat as a coercive tool to force a truce in the Korean War. But it didn't work as safely for Kennedy in October 1962 when the Cuban thermonuclear IRBMs were discovered, and Kennedy found that there were no proof tested civil defense plans in place to evacuate cities in range of the missiles. Thus, you need civil defense for nuclear deterrence to work safely and reliably. There is always some risk of your bluff being called, or even a surprise attack from nuclear-armed terrorists.
Above: lying BBC cigarette propaganda film, repeatedly claiming that everybody loves cigarettes and smoking (not true, many including myself hate it) and that cigarettes and smoking are "more deadly than war". Not true if by "war" the BBC means the kind of holocaust that would occur if the public believed its lying anti-nuclear weapons propaganda films, that superimpose the bang on film of the flash to communicate the lie that the blast wave travels at the velocity of light and that therefore (according to the BBC deceivers), there is no time to duct and cover from the blast after seeing the flash. It's also not true that lung cancer is either solely due due to cigarette smoking or independent of the amount smoked or rate of smoking. The fact is that 15% of UK lung cancers are not due to smoking, that people have to smoke 274,000 cigarettes (15 cigarettes/day for 50 years) to increase their natural lung cancer risk by a factor of 23 (a 0.008% increase in the natural lung cancer risk per cigarette smoked at the high dose rate and high total dose from 15 cigarettes/day for 50 years), and the risk per cigarette is reduced at lower smoking rates are smaller because damage repair is more effective. Scare-mongering lies backfire, because some people who smoke heavily are lucky and don't get lung cancer. Instead of lying about the risks, cigarettes should be banned like addictive drugs, since lung cancer treatment should be reserved for the 15% of cases which are natural lung cancers unrelated to self-harming smoking. The key point is that scare-mongering risk lying is immoral, unethical, counterproductive, and a failure. Official lying is a bad policy in a supposedly free democracy.
Another BBC "fact reporting" example is the endlessly simplistic lying advice that children:
(1) should be exposed to sunshine for vitamin D production to help calcium absorption from diet (preventing bone rickets from inadequate calcium) and
(2) should not be exposed to sunshine due to skin cancer risks.
Because non-quantitative, pseudo-scientific "good" and "bad" consensus on each "side" of every debate is substituted for scientific facts, i.e. quantitative data, on nuclear weapons, radiation, cigarettes, sunshine risks and benefits, and CO2 injections, no scientific resolution is ever presented to anything except by "expert consensus" (which is precisely Feynman's definition of groupthink religion, pseudoscience). All the BBC does is to confuse people and to make them distrust science generally, or substitute political opinions for scientific facts (precisely what the BBC aims to do). No factual scientific data based resolution to scientific matters is ever presented, since the advice (1) comes from experts who don't work in the same department as those issuing advice (2), and neither department of "experts" is particularly moral or concerned with ethics, so they simply ignore the conflict and don't do the type of quantitative analysis needed to resolve the two risk factors.
What is key here is that there are always counter-risks to any action. You can't eliminate risk. People who quit smoking completely may end up drinking or eating to excess instead, and some may end up with an overall risk factor much higher than that from the cigarette smoking. This is a holistic risk fact, something that the "expert crusaders" in any one department will never consider, because their whole pseudo-scientific "methodology" is based on analysis, i.e. considering a problem in bits by breaking it down into small pieces and assuming that the whole problem is simply the sum of the parts and nothing more. In the real world, if someone addicted to one thing stops, the risk does not drop in line with the simplistic statistics, because they switch to something else, they have a breakdown, or in extreme cases jump off a cliff. "Scientific" analysis by breaking problems down into lots of small parts creates professional myopia; the short-sightedness of experts entrenched in getting funding and publicity to such an extent that they end in making lies using the "precautionary principle" which James Delingpole so neatly debunks in his book. "Sunshine causes skin cancer, that's the important risk." "Lack of sunshine causes bone rickets, that's the important risk."
THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
Allan Bloom writes on pages 25-26 of The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
"There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. ... Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged - a combination of disbelief and indignation ... The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. ... The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think ... The students ... point out all the opinions and cultures ... What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, 'If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,' they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. ... Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. ... Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle."
This "moral relativism" is discussed by Stephen Law on page 10 in his book Humanism, which points out that it began with the agnostic Greek philosopher Protagoras (490-420 BC), whose anti-objective, subjective or "relativistic" doctrine was that:
"Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and the unreality of those which are not."
Plato's book Theaetetus attacked Protagoras's relativism by pointing out that human beliefs by themselves do not control reality: you cannot fly or turn by the tide by wishful thinking alone, so the natural world is not controlled directly by the human brain. If you wish to fly, for example, you need to do more than think. You need to build aircraft. In 2005 Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope) declared during the Homily at the Mass for the election of the Roman Pontiff:
"We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."
Stephen Law's Humanism on page 11 quotes the Chief Executive of the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Nick Tate, stating on 15 January 1996:
"If ever a dragon needed slaying, it is the dragon of relativism."
Unfortunately, Law's book degenerates thereafter into pseudo-scientific attacks on God, dressed-up as an objective handling of the creationism-versus-evolution "debate". In fact, creationism and evolution are as comparable as chalk and cheese; for Bertrand Russell famously said that we cannot disprove the theory that God created the universe 5 minutes ago, complete with false memories of the "past" and a splendid false "fossil record" for human amusement! Scientific "proof" always depends on assumptions. You cannot prove anything without setting up some assumptions and axioms which are open to criticism. The dishonest approach of trying to "cover up" the assumptions in order to try to make your excellent theory enter the world of religious orthodoxy is pseudoscience. Law finally sells out to pseudoscience and tries to nail creationism by quoting from page 300 of Professor Paul Davies' 2007 "anthropic principle" obfuscating book The Goldilocks Engima:
"... the designer need bear no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism [religions don't make definite statements about the nature of God, so Davies appears to be confusing God with Santa Claus]. The 'designing agency' can be a committee of gods, for example [er, doesn't this violate Occam's Razor of simplicity or least action?]. The designer can be a natural being or beings, such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a previous universe [capable of designing a 1055 megaton yield "device"], or in another section of our universe, which made our universe using super-technology [a 1055 matter-antimatter "superbomb," with a small residual matter production due to the asymmetry created by the left-handedness of weak interactions, presumably?]. The designer can also be some sort of superdupercomputer simulating this universe [wrong, because Occam's Razor says it's much far easier and faster to have a universe than to similate every single lepton and quark in a computer; the computer would be slower and more costly]. So invoking a super-intellect ... is fraught with problems [but he fails to emphasise that the alternative, the "anthropic self-selection" of our universe from the "cosmic landscape" of 10500 parallel universes in M-theory, is fraught with bigger problems; it totally violates Occam's Razor by multiplying the number of universes by a factor of 10500 while making no checkable predictions and postulating huge numbers of unobserved particles which detract the attention of physicists from the more realistic, confirmed predictions of alternatives]."
We can see the pseudoscience of Stephen Law and his "humanism" associates in his approach to the nature of science on page 30 of Humanism, where he claims that a scientist "may point out that ... it is a law of nature that water freezes below zero degrees Celsius." The freezing point of water depends on its pressure; at sea level it is at one atmosphere and this determines the freezing temperature. The lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point. This is precisely why you can use pressure to condense gases into liquids at any given temperature. There is no "law" of nature which controls anything in the universe. Even gravity is due to the exchange of field quanta (gravitons), not a human mathematical "law". Maybe the reason why Stephen Law writes with such admiration of a physics "law" has something to do with his surname? (Or is this hypothesis so "simplistic" it must be dismissed in preference for some more contrived explanation?)
The urgency of the problem of publishing the nuclear weapons effects and civil defense effectiveness facts for all in democracies to see
By moral relativism, the great public has been deluded by commies into a "shoot the messenger" lynch mob mentality of denouncing as warmongers anybody who speaks the facts. This happened to Herman Kahn when he demanded civil defense to save lives in the event of an Russian button-pushing "accident" or deliberate provocation during the Cold War. However, this aggression by mad "pacifists" goes back to before WWII, when repeated sadistic liars who won Nobel Peace Prizes (like the egotistical, lie-obsessed, anti-civil defense politicians Sir Normal Angell and his friend the so-called "Lord of Evil") exaggerated weapons effects and war effects to enable Hitler to remain unopposed until it was too late to stop he from murdering millions. Until we expose the truth about this, "pacifists" will go on effectively slaughtering millions and millions of innocent kids using lying self-aggrandisement and fear-mongering for unachievable utopian ideals.
Harvard Professor Howard Gardner's book Unschooled Mind
On page 3 in the 2011 edition of his book Unschooled Mind, Professor Gardner provides hard evidence from peer-reviewed published research on physics education that it is now obsessed by obfuscating textbook authority and mathematical epicycle dogma and orthodoxy, thus producing honors physics students who lack a basic intuitive and mechanical understanding of their science:
"In this book I contend that even when school appears to be successful, even when it elicits the performances for which it has apparently been designed, it typically fails to achieve its most important missions. Evidence for this startling claim comes from a by now overwhelming body of educational research ... students who have been well trained and who exhibit all the overt signs of success - faithful attendance ... high grades ... accolades ... typically do not display adequate understanding of the materials and concepts ... Researchers at John Hopkins, M.I.T., and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basis problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested. [References: J. Clement, "Students' Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics", American Journal of Physics, vol. 50, 1982, pp. 66-71, and J. Clement, "A Conceptual Model Discussed by Galileo and used Intuitively by Physics Students," in D. Gentner and A. Stevens, editors, Mental Models, 1983.]"
A revolution in physics teaching is needed, therefore, to reverse this situation and produce a physics environment in which people can intuitively grasp the mechanisms of civl defense - that the bigger the explosion, the more time is available at any peak overpressure for someone to lie down or "dock and cover" to avoid the blast and radiation. Gardner explains some of the mechanisms for the failure of modern educational systems. First, the manufacture of cogs for gearboxes: you must define "quality" as similarity since industry wants clones (conformity), not individuals or originality. Second, in order to extremely expensive "education" or brainwashing "justifiable" financially, you must make the learning process something done by the teacher and teaching establishment, so that the teacher and the teacher's establishment - not the student - takes as much credit as possible for being the driving force behind the student's thinking. Free-thinking, where the student reads and studies without direction, must be carefully controlled or it can lead to progress via the "wrong channels". Gardner puts this clearly on page 2:
"During the first years of life, youngsters all over the world master a breathtaking array of competences with little formal tutelage. They become proficient at singing songs, riding bikes, executing dances, keeping scrupulous track of dozens of objects in their home, on the road, or along the countryside. In addition, though less visibly, they develop powerful theories of how the world works and how their own minds work. They are able to anticipate which manipulations will keep a machine from functioning properly; they can propel an catch balls hurled under various conditions; they are able to deceive someone else in a game even as they can recognize when someone is trying to play a trick on them. They evolve clear senses of truth and falsity, good and evil, beautiful and ugly - senses that may not always be consistent with communal standards but that prove remarkably serviceable and robust."
“… when innovations creep into their games and constant changes are made in them, the children cease to have a sure standard of what is right … There can be no worse evil … Change … is most dangerous …”
- Plato (429-347 B.C.), The Laws, Book VII, 360 B.C. (A general defense of authoritative despotism.)
“Fallible as we may be in our upbringing of children, we now cherish and defend their freedom to develop their own minds. It seems unnatural to us that these growing minds, in which the future of the human race lies, should be subjected to gross manipulation at the hands of propagandists. People who are inclined to say that we could be just as well off under the ****s should pause to reflect … For if you want children’s minds to develop, you must not poison them with important illusions. You must let their minds be free to observe and judge.”
- Dr Edward Glover, The Psychology of Fear and Courage, Penguin, 1940, pp. 125-6.
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind …”
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.
“The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”
- Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379.
“The student … is accustomed to being told what he should believe, and to the arbitration of authority. … Ultimately, self-confidence requires a rational foundation. … we should face our tasks with confidence based upon a dispassionate appreciation of attested merits. It is something gained if we at least escape the domination of inhibiting ideas.”
- Professor Cecil Alec Mace, The Psychology of Study, 1963, p90.
“Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.”
- David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.
“Scepticism is … directed against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one’s own basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas evokes taboo reactions … scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes … one collects ‘facts’ and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it … No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and methodology alone decide – this is what the fairy-tale tells us. … This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else … It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues … and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. … Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way.”
– Professor Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975, final chapter.
“There are two distinct meanings to the word ‘science’. The first meaning is what physicists and mathematicians do. The second meaning is a magical art … What is of harm is the blind faith in an imposed system that is implied. ‘Science says’ has replaced ‘scripture tells us’ but with no more critical reflection on the one than on the other. … reason is no more understandable this year than prayer a thousand years ago. Little Billy may become a scientist as earlier he might have turned priest, and know the sacred texts … The chromed apparatus is blessed by distant authority, the water thrice-filtered for purity, and he wears the white antiseptic gown … But the masses still move by faith. … I have fear of what science says, not the science that is hard-won knowledge but that other science, the faith imposed on people by a self-elected administering priesthood. … In the hands of an unscrupulous and power-grasping priesthood, this efficient tool, just as earlier … has become an instrument of bondage. … A metaphysics that ushered in the Dark Ages is again flourishing. … Natural sciences turned from description to a ruminative scholarship concerned with authority. … On the superstition that reduction to number is the same as abstraction, it permits any arbitrary assemblage of data to be mined for relations that can then be named and reified in the same way as Fritz Mauthner once imagined that myths arise. … Our sales representatives, trained in your tribal taboos, will call on you shortly. You have no choice but to buy. For this is the new rationalism, the new messiah, the new Church, and the new Dark Ages come upon us.”
- Jerome Y. Lettvin, The Second Dark Ages, paper given at the UNESCO Symposium on “Culture and Science”, Paris, 6-10 September 1971 (in Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 141-50).
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunder-standing the simplest arguments … and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
- George Orwell, 1984
“Denialism” can be directed both ways in science. It’s just a vacuous piece of playground name-calling. What matters is the substance of the science, not how fashionable something is. Fashionability matters for getting funding, of course, and this is where Lord Acton’s “All power corrupts…” comes in. Scientists are no more ethical than anyone else.
Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: the Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” in D. A. Goslin, Ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand-McNally, Co., Chicago, 1969, pp. 347-380) has found that peoples go through six stages of ethical development:
(1) Conformity to rules and obediance to authority, to avoid punishment.
(2) Conformity to gain rewards.
(3) Conformity to avoid rejection.
(4) Conformity to avoid censure. (Chimps and baboons.)
(5) Arbitrariness in enforcing rules, for the common good.
(6) Conscious revision and replacement of unhelpful rules.
The same steps could be expected to apply to scientific ethical development. However, the disguised form of politics which exists in science, where decisions are taken behind closed doors and with no public discussion of evidence, stops at stage (4), the level of ethics that chimpanzees and baboons have been observed to achieve socially in the wild.
“… it is once for all clear from the very appearances that the earth is in the middle of the world and all weights move towards it. … Now some people, although they have nothing to oppose to these arguments, agree on something, as they think, more plausible. … the earth as turning on the same axis from west to east very nearly one revolution a day … never would a cloud be seen to move toward the east nor anything else that flew or was thrown into the air. For the earth would always outstrip them in its eastward motion, so that all other bodies would seem to be left behind and to move towards the west.”
– Claudius Ptolemy (100-178 AD), Almagest, Book I, part 7, That the Earth does not in any way move locally. Translated by R. C. Taliaferro, Great Books of the Western World, volume 16, 1952, pp. 11-12.
(This proves that Aristarchus’s solar system was not simply ignored, but was falsely attacked by the mainstream using false, deluded “arguments” which were speculative and built on a basis of fluff or quicksand. Note also that when Bruno was burned at the stake in February 1600 for saying that the earth rotates, he had evidence for the solar system in that the planets Venus and Mars are always observed to be in the same hemisphere as the sun when seen from Earth: neither planet was ever seen in the opposite direction to the sun. This, Bruno argued, is because they orbit the Sun, not the Earth, and are orbiting closer to the sun than the earth. This is the reason Bruno was burned. If he was simply talking without evidence, he would have been ignored, which is the first line of defense of status quo against radical progress. The second line of defense is to ridicule progressives. The third is to burn them. Many politically biased “historians” and “scientists” incorrectly claim that the problem was simply a lack of evidence for the solar system proposed in 250 BC by Aristarchus of Samos. Not so. It was bias. Note in particular that Copernicus failed to get rid of epicycles; he simply applied epicycles to Aristarchus’s solar syetem. It was Kepler in 1609 who began making progress in removing epicycles by replacing them with elliptical orbits which better fitted the motion of the planet Mars as observed carefully by Brahe.)
“Ptolemy and the Peripatetics think that nature must be thrown into confusion, and the whole structure and configuration of our globe destroyed by the Earth’s so rapid rotation … what structure of iron can be imagined so strong, so tough, that it would not be wrecked and shattered to pieces by such a mad and unimaginable velocity? …all atmosphere … rotate with the globe: the space above … is a vacuum; in passing through vacuum even the lightest bodies and those of least coherence are neither hindered nor broken up. Hence the entire terrestrial globe, with all its appurtenances, revolves placidly and meets no resistance.”
– Dr William Gilbert (1540-1603), On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies and on the Great Magnet the Earth, 1600, book 6, chapter 3. (Translation: P. Fleury Mottelay, John Wiley and Sons.)
(This shows how the vacuous arguments attacking a new theory were dismissed. However, the bigoted would simply ignore or dismiss Gilbert’s refutation as being – ironically – “speculative”. This is still the political method used in “science” to censor out alternative ideas from being carefully studied, checked, and discussed. The key problem for status quo is maintaining hegemony, even hubris. It is not the number one priority of status quo to permit radical discussions of the foundations of mainstream theories.)
“It is indeed a most absurd fiction to explain natural phenomena by false causes.”
- J. Kepler, quoted by G. Abetti, History of Astronomy, London, 1974, p. 74.
“… the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992.
“A fascinating article by Mark Musser in American Thinker on one of the pioneers of apocalyptic global warming theory. Turns out – whoulda thunk? – that he was a eugenicist and a Nazi. … the quest for Lebensraum [habitat/living space] did not die with Hitler in his bunker in 1945 …”
- James Delingpole, Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they ARE Eco Nazis, Telegraph.
“After the war in the 1950′s, Guenther Schwab’s brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic ‘peace’ movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.”
- Mark Musser, “The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory”, American Thinker, February 15, 2011.
Sometimes truth hurts and the "solution" to this "problem" is to shoot the messenger, to end the pain. However, when the messenger is armed with a flak jacket and a large stockpile of very powerful bombs, it's not so clever to try to shoot that messenger. And when the messenger is searching for you and threatening to rip you pieces for murdering kids, your manic laughter is soon cut short. Your friends see the torture that you went through to block out reality, and they start to chicken out, and start to listen to the message. And peace returns:
The previous post, Capabilities of Nuclear Weapons, Chapter 14, Effects on Personnel, 2011 revised edition, summarizes the evidence for exaggeration of nuclear weapons effects and false ridicule of cheap, effective countermeasures (click here for link). A clear picture of the facts has now emerged so a paper is being prepared, summarizing material on this blog.
Watermelons, How Environmentalists are Killing the Planet, Destroying the Economy and Stealing Your Child’s Future, a review of the 2012 book by James Delingpole:
Click here to view Watermelons by James Delingpole (a book review)
(Also available in PDF format on vixra, linked here.)Click here to view Dirkwood report summary
(Also available in PDF format on another server, linked here.)Above: the astronomer Dr Carl Sagan who hyped "nuclear winter" deceptions in the 80s, in 1958 was planning to detonate a 1.7 kt W25 nuclear weapon on the Moon as part of Project A119 to produce a flash visible from the Earth to regain attention from the USSR's Sputnik success of 1957. The Moon was already covered in massive radioactive craters from meteor impacts, so nobody would have noticed a few more. What more natural place to test the bomb could you find? Project A119 was led by Leonard Reiffel (now 85), leading to the secret reports: Possible Contribution of Lunar Nuclear Weapons Detonations to the Solution of Some Problems in Planetary Astronomy and Radiological Contamination of the Moon by Nuclear Weapons Detonations. The natural cosmic radiation background on the Moon even at solar minimum is 1 mR/hour or 100 times that in London, due to the lack of an atmosphere on the Moon, because Earth's atmosphere is equivalent to a radiation shield of 10 metres thickness of water. Therefore, bomb testing on the Moon would not have left any long term radioactivity, since the fallout would have decayed to a fraction of background within a year of detonation. (Note that the Abstract of Reiffel's 1959 report AD425380, linked here, states: "Nuclear detonations in the vicinity of the moon are considered in this report along with scientific information which might be obtained from such explosions." Typescript page 198 (PDF reader page 89) calculates the decay curve for the fallout on the Moon, concluding: "... by a month or two, for the detonation of a megaton weapon, the decay rate is down to roughly the order of the primary cosmic ray background.") But despite a knowledge of nuclear weapons effects, Carl Sagan later deceived the world with pseudoscientific claims over "nuclear winter":
Above: the firestorm in Hiroshima merely blocked out sunshine for 25 minutes, hence disproving ‘Nuclear Winter’ deceptions; furthermore, unlike Hiroshima modern cities that are nuclear targets simply do not contain thousands of charcoal braziers in bamboo and paper screen filled wooden houses with black colored air-raid black out curtains in their windows, and thermal shadowing prevents most modern city buildings from being ignited so there can be no firestorm now, let alone any climate change due to nuclear weapons! (Source: Figure 6 (3H) of the Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan, Volume 1, Office of the Air Surgeon, report NP-3036, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.)
“In From the Cold: ‘Nuclear Winter’ Melts Down,” The National Interest, Fall 1986, pp. 3-17, by Russell Seitz (Visiting Scholar in Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs):
“Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great.” – Carl Sagan, Foreign Affairs, Winter 1983-84.
“Peace-movement strategists wanted something new to dramatize nuclear war’s horrors. As Ralph K. White put it in his book The Fearful Warriors: “Horror is needed. The peace movement cannot do without it.” ... A 1982 special issue of the Swedish environmental science journal Ambio considered the environmental consequences of a nuclear war ... Sagan seized upon an article by Messrs. Paul Crutzen and Steven Birks that raised the question of a “Twilight at Noon” if the fires ignited by nuclear holocaust were to convert much of the fuel in both woodlands and cities into enough soot to enshroud the globe. ... The paper that resulted came to be known as TTAPS ... entailed a long series of conjectures ... “The question of peer review is essential. That is why we have delayed so long in the publication of these dire results,” said Carl Sagan in late 1983. ...
“Despite Mr. Sagan’s claim of responsible delay, before this peculiar review process had even begun, an $80,000 retainer was paid to Porter-Novelli Associates, a Washington, D.C., public-relations firm. More money was spent in the 1984 fiscal year on video and advertising than on doing the science. ... Having premiered on Oct. 30, 1983, as an article by Mr. Sagan in the Sunday supplement Parade, the TTAPS results finally appeared in Science magazine (December 23, 1983). ... Yet what became of the many complex and uncertain variables necessary to operate the Nuclear Winter model? They were not set forth in the text – 136 pages of data were instead reduced to a reference that said, simply, “In preparation.” The critical details were missing. They have languished in unpublished obscurity ever since.
“The readers of Science were still bewildered when, just one week later, another article by Mr. Sagan – “Nuclear War and Climatic Catastrophe” – appeared in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Sagan argued ... “What is urgently required is a coherent, mutually agreed upon, long-term policy for dramatic reductions in nuclear armaments...” ... Mr. Sagan made mistakes. While he cited the following passage as coming from a companion piece in Science that he had co-authored, it did not actually appear in the published version of that article: “In almost any realistic case involving nuclear exchanges between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient to cause an extinction event equal to or more severe than that of the close of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs and many other species died out are likely. (Emphasis added).” The ominous rhetoric italicized in this passage puts even the 100 megaton scenario of TTAPS on a par with the 100 million megaton blast of an asteroid striking the Earth.
“This astronomical mega-hype failed to pass peer review and never appeared in Science. Yet, having appeared in Foreign Affairs, it has been repeatedly cited ... Rather than “higher standards of evidence,” Mr. Sagan merely provided testimonials. ... Freeman Dyson ... put it, “It’s (TTAPS) an absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight. ...” ... “You know, I really don’t think these guys know what they’re talking about” (Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman); “They stacked the deck” (Prof. Michael McElroy, Harvard); and, after a journalist’s caution against four-letter words, “ ‘Humbug’ is six [letters]” (Prof. Jonathan Katz, Washington University). ...
“The Politics of the Matter. On January 23, 1986, the leading British scientific journal Nature pronounced on the political erosion of the objectivity vital to the scientific endeavor: “Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent literature on ‘Nuclear Winter,’ research which has become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity.” The Roman historian Livy observed that “where there is less fear, there is generally less danger.” [Fear leads to bad decisions based on panic and irrational groupthink, not careful study. It also minimises the options available by attempting to make alternative ideas heretical, e.g. pseudo-pacifist Cyril Joad's attempt to smear Winston Churchill and all opposers of Hitler as warmongers in his August 1939 ideological bestseller, "Why War?"] Until those who have put activism before objectivity come to apprehend this, nuclear illusions, some spontaneous and some carefully fostered, will continue to haunt the myth-loving animal that is man.”
“Politics enters science
“More than ‘pure science’ is involved when a researcher decides that a particular area is ‘scientifically interesting’. Many features of wider society influence the process of choice of research, including the availability of funding, possible applications, technological infrastructure, ideas prevalent in society and the social position of scientists. Each of these factors played a role in turning nuclear winter into a priority research area in the 1980s. ... the first studies of the effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions on ozone were done in the early 1970s to show that SSTs would not affect ozone significantly [H. M. Foley and M. A. Ruderman, “Stratospheric NO production from past nuclear explosions,” Journal of Geophysical Research, vol. 78, 1973, pages 4441-4450] ... In 1981 journalist Jonathan Schell wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker arguing that nuclear war could cause extinction of human life, principally through destruction of stratospheric ozone. ... Yet by the time he made his argument, the basis for massive ozone destruction by nuclear weapons had largely evaporated. ... Because the large multi-megatonne nuclear bombs deployed in the 1950s were being replaced by larger numbers of smaller warheads, not as much nitrogen oxides would be lofted far up into the stratosphere. [American aircraft penetrations of Chinese atmospheric thermonuclear weapon test mushroom clouds in the late 1970s proved the conversion of nitrogen dioxides into harmless nitric acid – which doesn’t affect ozone – by a reaction of nitrogen oxides with atmospheric moisture in the fireball.] ...
“Science enters politics ...
“Nuclear winter has been used as a political ‘resource’ or ‘tool’. Particular individuals and groups have used claims about nuclear winter to pursue explicitly political agendas. ... the key figure at the interface between the researchers and the media has been Carl Sagan, a media personality in his own right. The promotion has included Sagan’s article in Parade [30 October 1983, pages 4-5, 7] (a Sunday newspaper supplement, circulation 30 million) well publicised scientific conferences, press releases and press conferences, meetings with members of Congress, and television appearances. ... tens of thousands of dollars have been devoted to public relations about nuclear winter [John Maddox, “Nuclear winter and carbon dioxide,” Nature, vol. 312, issue13, December 1984, page 593]. ... the reason nuclear winter is perceived as an important issue is precisely because there is a social movement promoting it as such [Armand L. Mauss, Social Problems as Social Movements, Lippincott, 1975]. ... Doom and destruction are staples of media coverage. The more extreme claims of freezing, darkness and extinction have received much more coverage than cautionary comments ... Jonathan Katz, a physicist at Washington University in St Louis, was quoted as saying about nuclear winter, after a journalist's caution against four-letter words, “ ‘Humbug’ is six.” Katz on 22 January 1988 wrote to me that Seitz's quotations attributed to him are correct.”
Note that fanatically anti-civil defense nuclear firestorm quacks (many of whom continue to cite deluded propaganda from the Dresden firestorm peddled by neo-Nazi historian David Irving and other anti-nuclear deceivers) are continuing to use anti-civil defense groupthink delusions to publish outright lies, an abuse of scientific evidence, and ill-informed attacks against the need to protect kids from nuclear terrorism threats by duck and cover civil defense, by loading Wikipedia with drivel-based politically “peer-reviewed” lying groupthink deceptions and claims of nuclear winters which were disproved even in inflammable wooden cities during nuclear attacks on 6 and 9 August 1945, as well as detailed simulations of modern cities which use the shadowing of buildings to disprove the possibility of mass fires, let alone firestorms. Nuclear tests in unobstructed deserts where the thermal flash was not blocked by intervening buildings did not cause firestorms, either.
The 1935 effectively pro-Nazi “pacifist” conspiracy between Labour and Conservatives to pander to popular British pro-disarmament pacifist media sentiments: how politicians lie to win political power
“There is no security in armaments and we shall be no party to piling them up.”
– Labour Party Leader of the Opposition Clement Attlee, 1935 (two years after Hitler took power and began rearming Germany; quotation from Gilbert and Gott, The Appeasers, 1967). Troubled by the failure of unilateral disarmament to save millions of lives in WWII, Attlee 12 years later as Prime Minister ordered the stockpiling of the first British nuclear weapons to deter WWIII from starting.
“Supposing I had gone to the country and said that Germany was rearming and that we must rearm ... I cannot think of anything that would have made the loss of the election from my point of view more certain.”
– Conservative Prime Minister Stanley “the bomber will always get through” Baldwin, who won the 1935 general election with a large majority by lying to get votes for popular pacifism, denying Winston Churchill’s unpopular “warmongering” claims that Hitler was rearming Germany and must be deterred effectively (speech in House of Commons, 12 November 1936). (Some pro-Baldwin historians – not Winston Churchill – claim Baldwin was referring to an earlier non-existing election than 1935, but this makes no difference to the lying.)
Common Purpose communist infiltration of the BBC and British government under the disguise of well-meaning socialists: the road to hell is paved with good intentions
"L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs" - Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. (Literally, "hell is full of good wishes and desires.")
"If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, it is partly because that is the road they generally start out on." - Stephen Garrard Post, Altruism and altruistic love, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 203.
Above: Rotherham children being snatched from loving foster parents by ex-"Common Purpose" social services director Joyce Thacker, simply because they are members of UKIP, the U.K. Independence Party, which wants Britain to declare itself independent from communist EUSSR run by Germany, French and Greek communists in Brussels. Britain has a trade deficit with Europe, so it imports more than exports. During WWII, Britain went on food rations to stay independent from Hitler's so-called "National Socialism". Today, children are taken away from loving families in Britain just because they want independence. This should stand as a hard warning to all Americans of the dangers of back-door State Marxist/communists/fellow travellers. It's too late for Britain (yet again), but perhaps you can learn lessons from our disasters in Britain.James Delingpole:
Perhaps the least surprising aspect of the Rotherham childcare story is that Car Crash Commissar and Child Catcher in Chief Joyce Thacker was a member of Common Purpose. The secretive Fabian organisation has been getting quite a bit of media attention, lately, thanks to a bravura investigation conducted by the Daily Mail. Common Purpose has been described as a Left-wing version of the Freemasons ... here's an excerpt from the Mail piece:"What is interesting is that the same people appear in the same jobs, in different places, as if through a revolving door. They work for local authorities, leave, then come back as freelance “consultants” with huge, inflated fees. They are often mediocre and there is no evidence of how or why they were chosen. They can leave a council with a terrible reputation yet pop up next minute as head of a regulatory body and as a trustee of numerous bodies. It is a real money-spinner. It's also, just like Agenda 21, a way of entrenching the ideology of the communitarian left – in the civil service, in the police, in the media (especially the BBC/Guardian) and, of course, among such local government apparatchiks as Joyce Thacker."
Communitarianism
By Niki Raapana
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2233681/Leveson-Inquiry-Mail-dossier-raises-disturbing-questions-influence-quasi-masonic-nexus-people-know-best.html
Sir Bob Kerslake, the recently appointed head of the Home Civil Service and Permanent Secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, is a Common Purpose graduate, according to the organisation's website. Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust, has a full-page profile on the Common Purpose International website's 'who we are' section.
Jon Williams, the BBC's World News Editor since 2006, is also a graduate of Common Purpose London.
Professor Richard Sambrook, who was the BBC's Head of News and director of the World Service, is quoted praising Common Purpose on the website. He spoke at a Common Purpose event but has denied being otherwise involved.
The BBC has told the Mail that, in a five-year period, it spent more than £126,000 on Common Purpose courses.
But it is Leveson assessor Lord Currie who (as we show later in fuller detail) illustrates the incestuous relationships that intertwine throughout this Inquiry. ...
Davies was told that the Department of Work and Pensions had spent almost £240,000 in five years, on courses which had 'helped foster valuable partnerships in the local community which can be used to improve the service offered to our customers'. The Ministry of Defence had spent more than £300,000 over the same period.
While Common Purpose could do little about this kind of scrutiny, we now come to perhaps the most serious charge against this body: the suppressing and smearing of individual citizens who had lodged Freedom of Information questions about its activities.
On the specious basis that FoI legislation was being abused, causing damage to the charity's reputation, Common Purpose compiled a 'blacklist' of the individuals concerned. Common Purpose officials sent private, personal details of these people to public bodies around the country, with the warning that new FoI requests about the charity from those listed should be treated as 'vexatious'.
In other words, Common Purpose tried to block the legal rights of those individuals and prevent their freedom of expression.
The privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), investigated the affair, following complaints by five of those on the blacklist. ...
In response to a Freedom of Information request from this newspaper, a spokeswoman for the ICO said: 'As far as we are aware, 18 individuals had their personal details disclosed by Common Purpose by way of the list provided to various public bodies.'
She said these details could 'contain their name, and if known, also their address and/or phone number'.
In late 2009, the ICO ruled that Common Purpose was 'unlikely to have complied with provisions in the Data Protection Act 1998 on processing data'. Their spokeswoman confirmed to the Mail: 'In this case, the Act was probably breached.'
The ICO decided not to take 'further action' against Common Purpose 'after the charity confirmed that it no longer distributed the list' and Julia Middleton issued a statement in which she said: 'As an organisation we made a genuine mistake in this instance. But it was in a very rapidly changing legal context ...'
POLITICAL DISCLAIMER: This is a scientific data based post, not a political post favouring one party or political dogma. Scientific objectivity tells you, for example, that wherever competition leads to corruption - like widespread use of illegal methods to win customers from rivals, or cartel agreements between competing firms to keep prices high to profit shareholders at the expense of the public - the public may be better off with nationalization (a traditional socialist policy). This same kind of corruption exists in political party politics, where each party must try to steal potential voters from the other in order to have a chance of getting elected (with a majority adequate to actually be effective in pushing legislation through), by making promises they don't mean or selling out to ideology which promises everything to everyone but always fails to deliver. The huge gap between the richest and poorest actually means very little (more important is the baseline of poverty, which actually improves thanks to technology), because the poor so outnumber the few megarich that if you were to make the world equal by taking all the wealth and dividing it out equally (like the USSR tried to do with the 1930s collectivism which about 40 million, which is more than the Nazis are credited with), the effect is just trivial short-term benefits for the poor but hugely demotivating for rich who run businesses and provide jobs and investments. Last year, 2011, there were a total of 29,700,000 people in the world (out of a total world population of 7,000 million) with a net worth over $1 million each, only 29,000 of which were worth more than $100 million each.
If the numbers of very rich were similar to the numbers of very poor, than the effect of severe measures to equalize wealth would benefit the poor significantly; but they don't. The effect is just to make the rich poor and prevent them from investing in businesses, while not making the poor significantly wealthy. You just take away wealth and inspirational dreams from the poor by this policy. In addition, when sharing out "wealth" equally, you will also have to share out "debt" equally, which will be less popular to the socialists seeing how much debt they run up without any long-term benefit to the poor. (This was what did-in the USSR.) This is a scientifically defensible fact, not a political opinion or polemic. The loss-making Guardian newspaper and the compulsory-licence funded BBC propaganda media can go on pretending otherwise, but it's simply a deception. The "Conservatives" and "Liberals" are just as Marxist as the "Labour" socialists because of their authoritarian attitudes towards scientific facts, their dictatorial and hate-filled attitude to any dissent, their pretense of being progressive just to win votes. Moreover, all political parties are in themselves Marxist "groupthink" by definition. Just joining a political party makes you part of social community with shared values and groupthink prejudices. Objective, scientific, independence of freedom of thought and action is the opposite of the affiliation to any one political party. All forms of affiliation are a source of compromise, leading to self-censorship and observance of customs, taboos, and thus a loss of true freedom. Social interactions are needed for work and love, but we don't need to subscribe to "party politics" as well; they are anti-freedom, anti-democracy, and pro-groupthink.
To see where nationalised industries make sense, take energy suppliers, or cable TV suppliers. If you had an "honest" competition, you would have twenty separate gas mains and TV network cables buried in your street which would be perpetually being dug up to repair the many different cables (with "accidental" damage being done to rival firms cables or pipes in the process). In the more dishonest system, there is only one gas main, but you have twenty different "head offices" all duplicating each other's work to a large extent, and competing to get more customers on their books. This inefficiency in the long term just drives up prices for customers, because it's basically corrupt. There is no genuine competition: it's the same supply of goods through the same pipes, just with duplication of bureaucracy! Sensibly, we don't have replace the British Army, the Royal Navy and RAF, with a "free market" of lots private armies, all competing for government war contracts, in order to try to cut the defence bill. Similarly, we don't have a "free market" of police or fire engines, all competing to catch criminals or put out fires first. It's obvious that competition causes inefficiency, poor ethics, or even corruption in certain industries, which need to be closely policed or else kept national (despite all the problems of pay rises and unions connected with this).
The "free" media is also highly corrupt (especially in scientific areas like nuclear weapons effects) and fails to report taboo subjects that could cost readership, unless the media is corruptly funded and prepared to make a loss (e.g. the Guardian newspaper makes a loss, and BBC funding system is precisely the kind of thing the USSR and Nazi regimes relied on). But even these cases, instead of getting truly independent agenda-less reporting, you get heavy infiltration by the left wing, which keeps making the same old mistakes and refusing pointedly to learn from its mistakes. The reason why the left infiltrates these media is deliberate: they have tried long but failed to get the public interested in honest, good-form propaganda which is clear and bold. But then, instead of giving up or reformulating its policies, it decides to use dishonest, sneaky-propaganda which consists of rigorously censoring those facts out of the media which don't fit into its political agenda. Either it just refuses to confront the facts, or else it uses strawman, ad hominem shoot-the-messenger "arguments", or plain lies, in order to try to "close down the argument" without any discussion. When socialism gets power in the media, it can ban discussions on subjects it knows it cannot win by rational two-way debate. This also occurs with Conservatives and dictatorial Liberals, although they tend to be less dogmatic than socialists (but like all politicians, they don't want a debate on topics where they are simply in the wrong). You see them on TV evading issues, and stalling to waste time when on live TV (deliberately to be saved by editor having to move on to another topic, something that isn't so easy on pre-recorded video).
Melanie Phillips's 1997 bestseller All Must Have Prizes has a chapter on "The Destruction of Morality" where on page 221 she quotes Oxford University philosophy lecturer Marianne Talbot writing in The Sunday Times (24 July 1994):
"Many of the young have been taught to think their opinion is no better than anyone else's, that there is no truth, only truth-for-me. I come across this extreme relativist view constantly - in exams, in discussion and in tutorials ... The young have been taught [by compulsory-funded BBC and loss-making Guardian "subtext" or "subliminal"-type propaganda], or so it seems, that they should never think of the views of others as false, but only as different. They have been taught that to suggest someone else is wrong is at best rude and at worst immoral ... one should never be so arrogant as to believe that one is right" [Emphasis added. Note that it is "rude" to assert 1 + 1 = 2 too confidently. After all, if we switch from base 10 to base 2, we find that 1 + 1 = 10. So you can "prove" anything using smoke and mirrors!]
Melanie Phillips shows this supports Nazism in a beautifully robust analysis on page 222 of All Must Have Prizes:
"... it would say in effect that the Nazi view of the world was merely what the Nazis thought was right and was therefore as valid ... If there is no absolute right, it follows that there can be no absolute wrong, just as if there is no absolute truth, there can be no lies. [Emphasis added. This way of getting rid of lies is very convenient to everybody, which is why it has creeped into society.] ... Moral relativism leads directly to despotism and tyranny. It was no accident that Nietzsche [an anti-Christ], in whose long shadow our relativist society was formed, represented a significant milestone on the road to the Final Solution."
She continues, noting on page 229 that "The bible of the new psychopolitics was a book called The Authoritarian Personality, which was published in 1950 by the Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno and his colleagues. ... Any opposition to the subjective or the imaginative was seen as a form of incipient fascism. ... By defining personality attributes as potentially fascist [rather than oppressive dictatorial behaviour as fascist], it promulgated the belief that merely to hold certain attitudes constituted actual or potential oppression. As commentators have remarked, the tremendous influence of this book turned the western world upside down." On the next page, she notes Lord Devlin's 1959 warning speech Morals and the Criminal War, which stated: "Societies disintegrate from within more frequently than they are broken up by external pressures." On page 255 she notes the left's attack on family life: "In 1971 Germaine Greer called women to arms in The Female Eunuch by instructing them to refuse to marry ... she also advocated communal childrearing." On page 269, Phillips notes that this culture led Allan Bloom's students to suffer handicaps: "Bloom's students feared both isolation and attachment and lacked confidence in the future; their enthusiasm was replaced by self-protectiveness." She explains this on page 271: "Every society needs order if it is to survive. To have order, a society must have values. Those values, expressed most vividly in the changes within education and family life, have become fragile ... There has been a breakdown in moral transmission from one generation to the next. ... they display a failure to recognise the need for clear moral judgements, discipline and punishment ... there is no doubt that crime is a worsening social plague. Since the middle of the 1950s, crime rates have rocketed upwards without any sustained periods of decline. In 1950, about 500,000 crimes were recorded, but this has now gone up to nearly six million recorded crimes per year. And recorded crime is merely the tip of an iceberg; the real rate is very much higher."
Melanie Phillips goes on to analyze the failure of the state educational system which engineered this moral relativism and crime epidemic on pages 333-4 (her analysis also applies to quantum field theory and spin-2 graviton classical relativism stress-energy tensor-coupling string theory delusions today):
"This rotten corruption ... is built on telling them a series of lies. The educational system conspires to make them believe that they have achieved when they have not. It sponsors individual self-delusion and national myopia. ... self-esteem does not emerge from lies and self-delusion. ... anything that causes effort or pain is forbidden ... failure is a banished concept altogether. But children are not stupid. They know when they are being sold a pup. ... What is more, it has produced a spiral of madness. ... In Switzerland, for example, a country whose economic success we can merely grasp at, only 12% go to university. This is not held to be a national disaster, because there university is not identified as the one and only criterion of excellence."
Above: Germany's Chancellor made a statement that Britain would "be lonely in that big, bad world" if it left the EUSSR's groupthink, doublethink, and commithink dictatorship. At present, the majority of Britain's new laws are made by a "democratic consensus" of economically-failing, hard-left European socialists/communists in Brussels. Prime Minister David "No-Public-Referendum-on-EUSSR-Membership" Cameron sees this statement as the "velvet glove" on a more sinister iron fist, a EUSSR threat to cut off Eurozone trade with Britain if it leaves EUSSR membership. But Britain currently has a large trade deficit with Eurozone countries, importing more than it exports. This makes Britain's position more powerful than Europe, for if the Eurozone simply banned British imports in retaliation for us leaving the EUSSR, we could ban imports and they would suffer more! During WWII on food rations for freedom, Britain survived without German beer, French wine and cheese, Italian ice cream and pizza, Spanish holidays, and Greek yogurt.
It seems that the Prime Minister has people in his "Eton-old-boys-friends-network" whose livelihoods (and Conservative Party donations/funding) depend entirely on exporting British goods into the Eurozone, so they're fellow-travellers of the EUSSR and refuse a public referendum on EUSSR membership (unless the country is flooded with pro-EUSSR propaganda first, and the referendum questions are fiddled to get the result he wants for his friends). Likewise for the "horsegate" controversy, where Prime Minister Cameron rode on the back of Raisa, the horse owned by News of the World editor Rebecca "Phone Hacking Scandal" Brooks, to get good press coverage in the 2010 election. So Cameron pretends that exit from EUSSR means starvation for Britain, ignoring the fact that most (60%) of Britain's trade is outside the Eurozone even today. Britain can survive, as it did in WWII, using food rationing in the worst case scenario. If Brussels goes mad, it will be just the latest in a series of dictators in Europe, following earlier thugs like Napoleon, the Kaiser, Mussolini, and Hitler. Typical of EUSSR lies is the report in the Irish Industry News on 21 November 2011 that the European Commission provided 35,000,000 Euroes to get 9,000 long-term unemployed workers in the construction industry back to work, but two years after the money had been awarded, not a single unemployed worker had even been contacted. This is worse than the openly communist USSR, which had more integrity that than. So appeasement does not work. He can learn some lessons from Mrs Thatcher's rhetorical diplomacy:
Above: the socialists received fair warning in 1915 (two years before Lenin's bolshevik USSR revolution in Russia) from Edward Adams's book, The Inhumanity of Socialism, which explains on page v: "the theories of good men who are enthralled by its delusions are made the excuse of the wicked who would rather plunder than work; because it stops enterprise, promotes laziness, exhalts inefficiency, inspires hatred, checks production, assures waste and instills into the souls of the unfortunate and the weak hopes impossible of fruition whose inevitable blasting will add to the bitterness of their lot." All of these 1915 findings were confirmed by the history of the USSR and socialist Britain in the 1970s and 2000s. Alan Mass's book The Case for Socialism, Haymarket Books, 3rd edition, 2010, falsely blames capitalism for war, oppression, and alleged environmentalism, claiming that capitalism is "theft" from workers to pay the entrepreneurs who set up the companies and the investors who risk investing money in them! Without free enterprise and invention, you are left with the unproductive state sector who spends taxes without generating any net income. Mass on pages 157-8 stubbornly refuses to see the failure of 1980s socialism in the USSR by attributing it to Stalin's 1930s tyranny:
"To see the [1980s] distintegration of the Soviet Union as a sign of the failure of socialism is to mistake the monstrous tyranny created by Stalin [in the 1930s] for the vision of an egalitarian and democratic society ... We can now reintroduce genuine socialism to a world feeling the sickness of capitalism - its nationalist hatreds [wrong, matey, the nationalism is the socialist Trade Union and narrow minded EUSSR politics, not capitalist free-market world-wide social justice], its perpetual warfare [wrong; it was socialist pacifist pressures for disarmament from the pacifist Labour leader Clement Attlee that forced Baldwin and Chamberlain into appeasement of the Nazis in the 1930s, hence causing World War II, as is fully documented for all time by Quintin Hogg's 1945 book The Left Was Never Right], riches for a small number of people in a small number of countries [wrong, everyone apart from communists and socialists in places like Cuba are perpetually getting richer thanks to capitalism, despite mounting national socialist state spending debt], and hunger, homelessness, insecurity for everyone else [as Herman Kahn has explained, if they adopt capitalism, they all get richer as is occurring in China right now]."
So what does this European Union problem mean for nuclear deterrence?
First, no cash for defence, caused by crippling interest on massive national debts in the West, a result of twenty years of borrowing to fuel a bubble of debt. The history of war shows that the misery of debt is the ideal culture to grow the germs of war. The socialists and communists create this situation today, whereas it was capitalist investors (gamblers) in the past (e.g. the global effects of the 1929 Wall Street crash, such as the rise of the Nazis on Hitler's debt bubble which caused him to start WWII to get around the National Socialist/Nazi debt created by solving unemployment by employing a massive army and arms manufacturing industry). The current fashion for socialists to expand the welfare state and taxpayer funded health industry is crippling Britain and much of Europe. We pay an emormous bill for "free" health care, but get treated like dirt by "government paid" doctors who aren't directly being paid by citizens. Half the reason why I, for example, had to wait years to be correctly diagnosed and treated for a simple hearing defect that affected speech and self-confidence as a kid, was the lack of care and responsibility of "government paid" professionals in the "free" teaching and health systems. This takes away any incentive for many of them to be efficient and caring. They get the precisely same pay cheque if they are uncaring and rude or if they are efficient and helpful, and they also have to deal with a lot of people who soak up vast resources such as alcoholics and drug abusers.
Margaret Heffernan reviews the evidence in her book Wilful Blindness (Simon and Schuster, London, 2012), pages 171-173:
"By 1991, mortality rates at Bristol were twice the national average. ... a new paediatric cardiac surgeon had been appointed and on 6 January 1995, he approached Wisheart, asking that he not carry out an operation on an 18-month-old boy, Joshua Loveday. ... Wisheart persevered and the child died. 'Wisheart was the most stubborn man you can imagine,' says Bolsin. 'He never accepted that he should stop doing paediatric cardiac surgery. He was incredibly stubborn, more stubborn than you can ever imagine. ... You can kill children in large numbers but don't shop your colleagues.' ... Frustrated ... Bolsin emigrated to Australia. ... the problem might have remained invisible but for Bolsin's decision first to contribute to a Channel 4 documentary, Broken Hearts, about the hospital and, finally, to report Wisheart to the General Medical Council. 'The GMC rather half-heartedly said to me, "We will have to tell the people you're complaining about." I said I could deal with that. They really didn't want to investigate ... There had been complaints by parents but the GMC had managed to ignore them. ... The GMC only acted when it had to. They really hoped it would go away. I think that is still true today. The profession in the UK has ... never acknowledged my role in improving the standards of health care in the NHS' [thugs won't; like Robin Hood, they're self-deluded about their "professional" morality and "professional" ethics to such an extent that whatever goes wrong, it's always the fault of the patient, never of the "professional"]."
DAILY MAIL, 22 January 2012, By Sophie Borland
Four patients die thirsty or starving EVERY DAY on our hospital wards show damning new statistics
Data shows 1,316 deaths were linked to or directly caused by dehydration and malnutrition in 2010
Figures are far higher than in 2000, when 862 deaths were recorded
One hospital forced to prescribe drinking water for its patients
On 22 January 2012, the Daily Mail reported that four British NHS patients die every day from either thirst or malnutrition, a figure which if those victims of neglect were animals in a zoo, would have caused outrage by both environmentalists and the BBC. Instead, rude indignation by the professionals was the result. (How dare journalists report taboo news?!? How RUDE! What a LACK OF RESPECT FOR CARING PROFESSIONALS!!!) Yet this whole emotional-outrage drivem "professionalism" scam is bogus when you remember that Dr Josef Rudolf Mengele (SS officer and a human experimenter at Auschwitz) had doctorates in both anthropology and medicine. There is sadly a difference between being a member of a nobel-sounding trade union like the BMA, and being a genuinely caring, humane being. In a "National Socialist" environment, even he went wrong. Another example is the Medical Nobel Laureate and gas chamber enthusiast Dr Alexis Carrel, who died awaiting trial for Nazi collaboration. Groupthink kills. If you bring up these examples to rude professionals, you don't get a rational reply, just a paranoid anti-dissent rant or emotional response, betraying deep pseudo-scientific or megalomaniacal narcissism:
http://www.patientsfirst.org.uk/?p=488
The British Medical Association withdrew legal support from a whistleblowing doctor because he refused to sign a gagging clause, The Times has learnt. ... Mark Porter, the head of the BMA, assured MPs on the Health Select Committee last month that his organisation “does not and will not advise people to sign confidentiality agreements in order to keep patient safety matters secret”. However, in a series of e-mails seen by The Times, a BMA-appointed lawyer asked David Drew, a consultant paediatrician, to agree not to “make or publish any derogatory or defamatory remarks” about his former hospital. ... Dr Drew had raised concerns about Manor Hospital in Birmingham, where he worked until 2010 as a consultant. That year he told BBC news that children had developed hypothermia after the hospital’s heating failed. A year later, Dr Drew was dismissed ... The GMC published guidelines last week which emphasised that doctors have a duty not to sign gagging clauses which prevent them raising concerns over substandard patient care. ..."
If people had to pay directly for health care in Britain, you would trust the "care" and you would have real redress, not the thugs in the BMA and groupthink quack "Trade Unions" who sue anyone who speaks out against their fascism, and then get hours of BBC TV coverage - funded by the compulsory licencepayer - to issue propaganda claiming that the "vast majority" of these "professionals" do an excellent job and need a pay rise to improve standards. In other words, they don't give a damn about problems, and wallpaper over the cracks with lies. What is wrong is the USSR-1980s-type "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us"-psychological breakdown of the vital linkage between the act of working and the act of getting paid for it. Any attempt by Prime Minister Cameron to introduce any reform of this system that makes it moral and capitalist is opposed by the trade union fascists and liars. While there should be a national safety net health service, soup kitchen and homeless refuge system, it must be run by capitalists, not socialists, and should use rationing with extensions for those with health problems through no fault of their own.
Now let's examine precisely how much fuel there is for a war, i.e. how much debt the pseudo "socialists" who claim to be pacifists have managed to pile up. Debt is a ticking war bomb in two different ways. First, countries that go bankrupt and destitute under escalating debt may fall into riots and civil war, or desperately end up with an "elected" dictatorship (like Hitler in 1933) or military coup, then an outward war in an effort to either find a military solution to debt or else to detract attention from internal problems by starting a war. Second, the ticking timebomb of debt leads to more borrowing just to pay the interest, and when interest rates go up, the debt spirals so far out of control that the country defaults on the interest repayments. This causes the country's credit rating to drop through the floor, preventing it from getting any more loans to "pay" debt interest from the existing debt, apart from emergency loans at high interest rates.
The country is soon in a financial crisis and is forced to make massive cutbacks, which kill its economy and lead to poverty for millions, but worse than that, the military security of the country - the first duty of the government - must be cut because there is no cash to pay the army, the weapons industry, etc. So all those military experts and scientists who think that political corruption is "not their department" then feel the consequences. By then, however, it is far too late to protest, or to come up with alternative ideas. Socialist spending sprees are then a threat to military security. Remember that Britain cut back on its military in 1933 - the year Hitler gained power - not purely due to pacifism, but due to financial constraints originating from the 1929 economic crash. This must never be forgotten. Democracy is at its weakest militarily when it is economically so poor that all around can see it can't possibly afford a war. The new (October 2012) book by Douglas Carswell, MP, The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy points out on page 14 that in 1900 American and British households spent 5-15% of their earnings on the government, compared to 43-51% today:
"Fifth-century France was ruled by a dynasty of Merovingian Kings. ... successive Merovingian monarchs parcelled power out to courtiers ... By the sixth century, the Merovingians had become ceremonial figureheads. Their presence on the throne lent legitimacy to decisions made by others who sat behind it. In our own time something similar has happened [witness, for example, the secrecy of unelected officialdom which is now controlling public data on nuclear weapons effects, and the disaster it caused when it made secret the effects of gas bombs on people inside houses during pacifist gas bombing propaganda in the 1920s and 1930s, when the data was desperately needed to kill appeasement policies that helped the Nazis!] ... Civil servants and technocrats make more and more of the decisions [usually by selectively withholding key "technical" scientific reports from elected ministers, in order to delibertaly prejudice the outcome of decisions in the way they prefer]."
- Douglas Carswell, MP, The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy, page 76.
"In 2010, the American government spent $1,900 billion more than it collected in tax. A year later, the US government borrowed $100 billion each month just to pay the bills. ... Against ... $70,000 annual income, every American is liable for $131,368 of public debt, plus a further $1,031,131 to pay for all those unfunded promises their government has made. If you thought America was mired in debt, take a look at Britain and Europe. Britain's total public and private debts are proportionately even bigger at more than 5 times her entire annual economic output. In Spain, France and Italy, total debt is between 3-4 times annual output. Public debt in Greece is 132% output, Italy 111%, France 90%, Ireland 85%, Germany 83% ... the interest payments on the debt begin to grow faster than they can be paid back."Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal have reached this stage ... private lenders have stopped lending to them. Other countries [themselves heavily in debt] have had to step in to bail them out. The US government debt interest bill already means that every US citizen faces the equivalent of $11,000 in interest payments alone each year. ... governments begin to confiscate ever more wealth to pay ... For every $100 that the average American worker earns, $36 is spent on buying government - $29 directly in various payroll taxes and $7 in various consumption taxes ... In Britain, the average worker buys £46 of government for every £100 earned. In Japan, it is Y33 for every Y100 earned. In France and Germany ... 59 Euroes [in every 100 earned, pays] for government ..."
Carswell on page 134 calculates future American debt interest spiralling out of control if socialism continues to dominate over capitalist values: in 2020 America will spend about 15-20% of its tax revenue just servicing its debt interest (more than it spends on defense!), by 2030 the figure will have spiralled to 36%, by 2040 to 58% and by 2050 to 85%. Carswell notes depressingly that in 1788 Louis XVI's French Government was spending 60% of its tax revenue on debt interest servicing (Louis XVI was of course beheaded in 1793 as a result of the French Revolution). America is presently in a better state than Greece and Britain, but it's still headed at full steam towards the very same iceberg with its eyes tightly closed.
The future will bring us daily referendums online. Greek City State “democracy” was a daily referendum of all citizens on all issues, rather than one election for a choice between two clones every four years! The secure database technology is here already: internet banking database technology is more secure and tamper-proof than very expensive-to-process paper ballots in election boxes (which also require time-consuming journeys to election stations, with all the hassle of parking congestion or parking charges), and it is far cheaper! Like the compulsory switchover to digital TV, it will be cheaper to give the few people who don’t already have internet access a smartphone to vote on, than to keep converting forests into ballot papers and paying for armies of vote counters.
Daily referendums will easily become part of the same technology that will be used for electing politicians in the near future. The British Government’s “ePetition” website that (since 2010) has automatically scheduled a House of Commons debate on an online petition issue once it receives 100,000 signatures can simply be linked into the daily referendum computer database system, so that everyone in the country will be forced to vote at say 7pm each evening on the daily referendum issues, which will cut out the time wasting of Parliament and speed up the democratic process. It will also restore everybody’s faith in democracy, which requires a faith in the common human being which today’s “no referendum on EUSSR membership” politicians like “Dave-please-don’t-call-me-Hitler-Cameron” clearly don’t have. Douglas Carswell MP states on page 200 of “The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy”:
“Edmund Burke was sceptical about [real, daily referendum Greek City State type] democracy because he feared – as many do today – that the common people had dangerous and angry passions. Mass democracy, it was feared, would become demagoguery. Unpopular minorities would be subject to the arbitrary rule of the mob [an unreasoning fear of the common human being that makes the paranoid hysteria of modern politicians indistinguishable from the paranoia of the dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam, who are the real dangers, not the common human being who is more reasoning and thus more intelligent than the dictators at the top]. In fact, the evidence is that the precise opposite is happening. iDemocracy is leading to smaller, less arbitrary government. In 2010, the UK government introduced a system of ePetitions. This allows campaigners, citizens and pressure groups to initiate debates and votes in the House of Commons. ... The [paranoid and anti-democratic, Jimmy Saville molester supporting] BBC reported the ePetitions innovation entirely in terms of them being a vehicle that might allow the restoration of capital punishment [Melanie Phillips pointed out on page 271 of her 1997 book “All Must have Prizes” that in 1950 – before Capital Punishment was abolished – there were only 500,000 crimes in Britain, contrasted to almost 6,000,000 per year in the 1990s after the Capital deterrent was abolished].”
Carswell concludes on page 262:
"Europeanism, environmentalism, Keynesianism, monetarism ... The dogmas invoked to justify intervention in the affairs of men may vary, but the conceit of the interventionists remains the same. Until now. The digital revolution will reinvigorate the West, limiting once again the size of government and in the process helping make the West more truly Western. It will enable us to constrain those with power once again. The digital revolution will do to grand planners in the West what the collapse of Communism did to the socialist planners in the old Soviet bloc."
What happened in Greece when disaster struck is that the people, who had elected lying and high-spending socialists and communists to waste vast amounts of borrowed money before and after Greece joined the Euro, rioted against the government when it was too late. They had no complaints when times were good and the debt was going out of control. Having voted in quacks, they rioted against the government after the damage was done, when it was too late to save their economy. The same is occurring in Britain, where the Civil Service allowed unelected Prime Minister Gordon Brown MP to ruin Britain's economy with massive debts and selling half the gold standard at rock bottom price, without the public being fully informed. Brown now profits from prestige he does not deserve, leaving the current government to try to sort out the mess and take the blame. To some extent, the current British government failed while in opposition to infiltrate (or bribe) the Civil Service to "leak" the secret-classified economic facts and publish them, to cut Brown's reign of havoc, and it is now obfuscating with claims now to be "reducing debt" when it is merely making an insignificant reduction in the rate of increase of debt, not reducting debt (the debt is still increasing).
If interest rates were to rise sharply due to other economies coming out of recession faster than Britain, Britain would be unable to borrow more due to interest repayments, and could be economically ruined, like Greece today. If Britain should have to fight a major war under such circumstances, Britain may not be able to fund a war. It might not be able to rely on the USA, either, to to its debt. The decision for a democracy to go to war is essentially down to enemy actions, and they will deliberately take account of Britain's financial situation when deciding to be provocative. In other words, massive debt has military preparedness and responsiveness consequences, invites danger, and increases the risk of war. It is the duty of the military to take account of not only enemies abroad who are a threat to national security, but also those at home who break the bank and make the nation vulnerable to enemy coercion that way.
This economic factor behind war is something that the biased pseudo-pacifist "historians" will remain "wilfully blind" towards. Similarly, you won't find many modern historians even considering how exaggerations of the "power" of big guns in the Kaiser's Germany 1912 led in 1914 to WWI. They show "wilful blindness" towards the German General Staff's 1912 neglect of the simple, cheap defensive trenches used successfully against the "Dictator mortars" during the American Civil War (known in 1865), which would have shown them the reason why they would not win WWI within three months as planned (the war wouldn't have started if trench countermeasures to explosives were taken as seriously as they should have been). Nor will you find much credit being given by such biased pseudo-historians to the role of the exaggeration of weapons and war effects in the 1920s and 1930s by "pacifists" in causing the appeasement of Hitler which led to WWII. In order to deter war you must be in a position to afford to fight a war, or your bluff will be called. It costs money to keep equipment and personnel prepared for war. The nuclear weapons debt problem is that in times of massive national debt, the nuclear bomb is a cheaper option than paying for megatons of conventional weapons like TNT, and is also cheaper than paying for the conscription of millions of soldiers to go and fight. So the nuclear bomb gets dusted down and rattled about. This worked for Eisenhower in 1953, when he used the nuclear bomb threat as a coercive tool to force a truce in the Korean War. But it didn't work as safely for Kennedy in October 1962 when the Cuban thermonuclear IRBMs were discovered, and Kennedy found that there were no proof tested civil defense plans in place to evacuate cities in range of the missiles. Thus, you need civil defense for nuclear deterrence to work safely and reliably. There is always some risk of your bluff being called, or even a surprise attack from nuclear-armed terrorists.
Above: lying BBC cigarette propaganda film, repeatedly claiming that everybody loves cigarettes and smoking (not true, many including myself hate it) and that cigarettes and smoking are "more deadly than war". Not true if by "war" the BBC means the kind of holocaust that would occur if the public believed its lying anti-nuclear weapons propaganda films, that superimpose the bang on film of the flash to communicate the lie that the blast wave travels at the velocity of light and that therefore (according to the BBC deceivers), there is no time to duct and cover from the blast after seeing the flash. It's also not true that lung cancer is either solely due due to cigarette smoking or independent of the amount smoked or rate of smoking. The fact is that 15% of UK lung cancers are not due to smoking, that people have to smoke 274,000 cigarettes (15 cigarettes/day for 50 years) to increase their natural lung cancer risk by a factor of 23 (a 0.008% increase in the natural lung cancer risk per cigarette smoked at the high dose rate and high total dose from 15 cigarettes/day for 50 years), and the risk per cigarette is reduced at lower smoking rates are smaller because damage repair is more effective. Scare-mongering lies backfire, because some people who smoke heavily are lucky and don't get lung cancer. Instead of lying about the risks, cigarettes should be banned like addictive drugs, since lung cancer treatment should be reserved for the 15% of cases which are natural lung cancers unrelated to self-harming smoking. The key point is that scare-mongering risk lying is immoral, unethical, counterproductive, and a failure. Official lying is a bad policy in a supposedly free democracy.
Another BBC "fact reporting" example is the endlessly simplistic lying advice that children:
(1) should be exposed to sunshine for vitamin D production to help calcium absorption from diet (preventing bone rickets from inadequate calcium) and
(2) should not be exposed to sunshine due to skin cancer risks.
Because non-quantitative, pseudo-scientific "good" and "bad" consensus on each "side" of every debate is substituted for scientific facts, i.e. quantitative data, on nuclear weapons, radiation, cigarettes, sunshine risks and benefits, and CO2 injections, no scientific resolution is ever presented to anything except by "expert consensus" (which is precisely Feynman's definition of groupthink religion, pseudoscience). All the BBC does is to confuse people and to make them distrust science generally, or substitute political opinions for scientific facts (precisely what the BBC aims to do). No factual scientific data based resolution to scientific matters is ever presented, since the advice (1) comes from experts who don't work in the same department as those issuing advice (2), and neither department of "experts" is particularly moral or concerned with ethics, so they simply ignore the conflict and don't do the type of quantitative analysis needed to resolve the two risk factors.
What is key here is that there are always counter-risks to any action. You can't eliminate risk. People who quit smoking completely may end up drinking or eating to excess instead, and some may end up with an overall risk factor much higher than that from the cigarette smoking. This is a holistic risk fact, something that the "expert crusaders" in any one department will never consider, because their whole pseudo-scientific "methodology" is based on analysis, i.e. considering a problem in bits by breaking it down into small pieces and assuming that the whole problem is simply the sum of the parts and nothing more. In the real world, if someone addicted to one thing stops, the risk does not drop in line with the simplistic statistics, because they switch to something else, they have a breakdown, or in extreme cases jump off a cliff. "Scientific" analysis by breaking problems down into lots of small parts creates professional myopia; the short-sightedness of experts entrenched in getting funding and publicity to such an extent that they end in making lies using the "precautionary principle" which James Delingpole so neatly debunks in his book. "Sunshine causes skin cancer, that's the important risk." "Lack of sunshine causes bone rickets, that's the important risk."
THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND
Allan Bloom writes on pages 25-26 of The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
"There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. ... Some are religious, some atheists; some are to the Left, some to the Right; some intend to be scientists, some humanists or professionals or businessmen; some are poor, some rich. They are unified only in their relativism and in their allegiance to equality. And the two are related in a moral intention. The relativity of truth is not a theoretical insight but a moral postulate, the condition of a free society, or so they see it. They have all been equipped with this framework early on, and it is the modern replacement for the inalienable natural rights that used to be the traditional American grounds for a free society. That it is a moral issue for students is revealed by the character of their response when challenged - a combination of disbelief and indignation ... The danger they have been taught to fear from absolutism is not error but intolerance. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. ... The study of history and of culture teaches that all the world was mad in the past; men always thought they were right, and that led to wars, persecutions, slavery, xenophobia, racism, and chauvinism. The point is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather it is not to think ... The students ... point out all the opinions and cultures ... What right, they ask, do I or anyone else have to say one is better than the others? If I pose the routine questions designed to confute them and make them think, such as, 'If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,' they either remain silent or reply that the British should never have been there in the first place. ... Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. ... Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle."
This "moral relativism" is discussed by Stephen Law on page 10 in his book Humanism, which points out that it began with the agnostic Greek philosopher Protagoras (490-420 BC), whose anti-objective, subjective or "relativistic" doctrine was that:
"Man is the measure of all things, of the reality of those which are, and the unreality of those which are not."
Plato's book Theaetetus attacked Protagoras's relativism by pointing out that human beliefs by themselves do not control reality: you cannot fly or turn by the tide by wishful thinking alone, so the natural world is not controlled directly by the human brain. If you wish to fly, for example, you need to do more than think. You need to build aircraft. In 2005 Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope) declared during the Homily at the Mass for the election of the Roman Pontiff:
"We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognise anything for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires."
Stephen Law's Humanism on page 11 quotes the Chief Executive of the UK's Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, Nick Tate, stating on 15 January 1996:
"If ever a dragon needed slaying, it is the dragon of relativism."
Unfortunately, Law's book degenerates thereafter into pseudo-scientific attacks on God, dressed-up as an objective handling of the creationism-versus-evolution "debate". In fact, creationism and evolution are as comparable as chalk and cheese; for Bertrand Russell famously said that we cannot disprove the theory that God created the universe 5 minutes ago, complete with false memories of the "past" and a splendid false "fossil record" for human amusement! Scientific "proof" always depends on assumptions. You cannot prove anything without setting up some assumptions and axioms which are open to criticism. The dishonest approach of trying to "cover up" the assumptions in order to try to make your excellent theory enter the world of religious orthodoxy is pseudoscience. Law finally sells out to pseudoscience and tries to nail creationism by quoting from page 300 of Professor Paul Davies' 2007 "anthropic principle" obfuscating book The Goldilocks Engima:
"... the designer need bear no relation at all to the God of traditional monotheism [religions don't make definite statements about the nature of God, so Davies appears to be confusing God with Santa Claus]. The 'designing agency' can be a committee of gods, for example [er, doesn't this violate Occam's Razor of simplicity or least action?]. The designer can be a natural being or beings, such as an evolved super-mind or super-civilization existing in a previous universe [capable of designing a 1055 megaton yield "device"], or in another section of our universe, which made our universe using super-technology [a 1055 matter-antimatter "superbomb," with a small residual matter production due to the asymmetry created by the left-handedness of weak interactions, presumably?]. The designer can also be some sort of superdupercomputer simulating this universe [wrong, because Occam's Razor says it's much far easier and faster to have a universe than to similate every single lepton and quark in a computer; the computer would be slower and more costly]. So invoking a super-intellect ... is fraught with problems [but he fails to emphasise that the alternative, the "anthropic self-selection" of our universe from the "cosmic landscape" of 10500 parallel universes in M-theory, is fraught with bigger problems; it totally violates Occam's Razor by multiplying the number of universes by a factor of 10500 while making no checkable predictions and postulating huge numbers of unobserved particles which detract the attention of physicists from the more realistic, confirmed predictions of alternatives]."
We can see the pseudoscience of Stephen Law and his "humanism" associates in his approach to the nature of science on page 30 of Humanism, where he claims that a scientist "may point out that ... it is a law of nature that water freezes below zero degrees Celsius." The freezing point of water depends on its pressure; at sea level it is at one atmosphere and this determines the freezing temperature. The lower the pressure, the lower the boiling point. This is precisely why you can use pressure to condense gases into liquids at any given temperature. There is no "law" of nature which controls anything in the universe. Even gravity is due to the exchange of field quanta (gravitons), not a human mathematical "law". Maybe the reason why Stephen Law writes with such admiration of a physics "law" has something to do with his surname? (Or is this hypothesis so "simplistic" it must be dismissed in preference for some more contrived explanation?)
The urgency of the problem of publishing the nuclear weapons effects and civil defense effectiveness facts for all in democracies to see
By moral relativism, the great public has been deluded by commies into a "shoot the messenger" lynch mob mentality of denouncing as warmongers anybody who speaks the facts. This happened to Herman Kahn when he demanded civil defense to save lives in the event of an Russian button-pushing "accident" or deliberate provocation during the Cold War. However, this aggression by mad "pacifists" goes back to before WWII, when repeated sadistic liars who won Nobel Peace Prizes (like the egotistical, lie-obsessed, anti-civil defense politicians Sir Normal Angell and his friend the so-called "Lord of Evil") exaggerated weapons effects and war effects to enable Hitler to remain unopposed until it was too late to stop he from murdering millions. Until we expose the truth about this, "pacifists" will go on effectively slaughtering millions and millions of innocent kids using lying self-aggrandisement and fear-mongering for unachievable utopian ideals.
Harvard Professor Howard Gardner's book Unschooled Mind
On page 3 in the 2011 edition of his book Unschooled Mind, Professor Gardner provides hard evidence from peer-reviewed published research on physics education that it is now obsessed by obfuscating textbook authority and mathematical epicycle dogma and orthodoxy, thus producing honors physics students who lack a basic intuitive and mechanical understanding of their science:
"In this book I contend that even when school appears to be successful, even when it elicits the performances for which it has apparently been designed, it typically fails to achieve its most important missions. Evidence for this startling claim comes from a by now overwhelming body of educational research ... students who have been well trained and who exhibit all the overt signs of success - faithful attendance ... high grades ... accolades ... typically do not display adequate understanding of the materials and concepts ... Researchers at John Hopkins, M.I.T., and other well-regarded universities have documented that students who receive honor grades in college-level physics courses are frequently unable to solve basis problems and questions encountered in a form slightly different from that on which they have been formally instructed and tested. [References: J. Clement, "Students' Preconceptions in Introductory Mechanics", American Journal of Physics, vol. 50, 1982, pp. 66-71, and J. Clement, "A Conceptual Model Discussed by Galileo and used Intuitively by Physics Students," in D. Gentner and A. Stevens, editors, Mental Models, 1983.]"
A revolution in physics teaching is needed, therefore, to reverse this situation and produce a physics environment in which people can intuitively grasp the mechanisms of civl defense - that the bigger the explosion, the more time is available at any peak overpressure for someone to lie down or "dock and cover" to avoid the blast and radiation. Gardner explains some of the mechanisms for the failure of modern educational systems. First, the manufacture of cogs for gearboxes: you must define "quality" as similarity since industry wants clones (conformity), not individuals or originality. Second, in order to extremely expensive "education" or brainwashing "justifiable" financially, you must make the learning process something done by the teacher and teaching establishment, so that the teacher and the teacher's establishment - not the student - takes as much credit as possible for being the driving force behind the student's thinking. Free-thinking, where the student reads and studies without direction, must be carefully controlled or it can lead to progress via the "wrong channels". Gardner puts this clearly on page 2:
"During the first years of life, youngsters all over the world master a breathtaking array of competences with little formal tutelage. They become proficient at singing songs, riding bikes, executing dances, keeping scrupulous track of dozens of objects in their home, on the road, or along the countryside. In addition, though less visibly, they develop powerful theories of how the world works and how their own minds work. They are able to anticipate which manipulations will keep a machine from functioning properly; they can propel an catch balls hurled under various conditions; they are able to deceive someone else in a game even as they can recognize when someone is trying to play a trick on them. They evolve clear senses of truth and falsity, good and evil, beautiful and ugly - senses that may not always be consistent with communal standards but that prove remarkably serviceable and robust."
“… when innovations creep into their games and constant changes are made in them, the children cease to have a sure standard of what is right … There can be no worse evil … Change … is most dangerous …”
- Plato (429-347 B.C.), The Laws, Book VII, 360 B.C. (A general defense of authoritative despotism.)
“Fallible as we may be in our upbringing of children, we now cherish and defend their freedom to develop their own minds. It seems unnatural to us that these growing minds, in which the future of the human race lies, should be subjected to gross manipulation at the hands of propagandists. People who are inclined to say that we could be just as well off under the ****s should pause to reflect … For if you want children’s minds to develop, you must not poison them with important illusions. You must let their minds be free to observe and judge.”
- Dr Edward Glover, The Psychology of Fear and Courage, Penguin, 1940, pp. 125-6.
“A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation; in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind …”
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.
“The very magnitude of the power over men’s minds that a highly centralised and government-dominated system of education places in the hands of the authorities ought to make one hesitant before accepting it too readily.”
- Professor F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1960, p. 379.
“The student … is accustomed to being told what he should believe, and to the arbitration of authority. … Ultimately, self-confidence requires a rational foundation. … we should face our tasks with confidence based upon a dispassionate appreciation of attested merits. It is something gained if we at least escape the domination of inhibiting ideas.”
- Professor Cecil Alec Mace, The Psychology of Study, 1963, p90.
“Children lose interest … because a natural interest in the world around them has been replaced by an unnatural acceptance of the soundness of certain views, the correctness of particular opinions and the validity of specific claims.”
- David Lewis, You can teach your child intelligence, Book Club Associates, London, 1982, p. 258.
“Scepticism is … directed against the view of the opposition and against minor ramifications of one’s own basic ideas, never against the basic ideas themselves. Attacking the basic ideas evokes taboo reactions … scientists only rarely solve their problems, they make lots of mistakes … one collects ‘facts’ and prejudices, one discusses the matter, and one finally votes. But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it … No scientist will admit that voting plays a role in his subject. Facts, logic, and methodology alone decide – this is what the fairy-tale tells us. … This is how scientists have deceived themselves and everyone else … It is the vote of everyone concerned that decides fundamental issues … and not the authority of big-shots hiding behind a non-existing methodology. … Science itself uses the method of ballot, discussion, vote, though without a clear grasp of its mechanism, and in a heavily biased way.”
– Professor Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 1975, final chapter.
“There are two distinct meanings to the word ‘science’. The first meaning is what physicists and mathematicians do. The second meaning is a magical art … What is of harm is the blind faith in an imposed system that is implied. ‘Science says’ has replaced ‘scripture tells us’ but with no more critical reflection on the one than on the other. … reason is no more understandable this year than prayer a thousand years ago. Little Billy may become a scientist as earlier he might have turned priest, and know the sacred texts … The chromed apparatus is blessed by distant authority, the water thrice-filtered for purity, and he wears the white antiseptic gown … But the masses still move by faith. … I have fear of what science says, not the science that is hard-won knowledge but that other science, the faith imposed on people by a self-elected administering priesthood. … In the hands of an unscrupulous and power-grasping priesthood, this efficient tool, just as earlier … has become an instrument of bondage. … A metaphysics that ushered in the Dark Ages is again flourishing. … Natural sciences turned from description to a ruminative scholarship concerned with authority. … On the superstition that reduction to number is the same as abstraction, it permits any arbitrary assemblage of data to be mined for relations that can then be named and reified in the same way as Fritz Mauthner once imagined that myths arise. … Our sales representatives, trained in your tribal taboos, will call on you shortly. You have no choice but to buy. For this is the new rationalism, the new messiah, the new Church, and the new Dark Ages come upon us.”
- Jerome Y. Lettvin, The Second Dark Ages, paper given at the UNESCO Symposium on “Culture and Science”, Paris, 6-10 September 1971 (in Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 141-50).
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunder-standing the simplest arguments … and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
- George Orwell, 1984
“Denialism” can be directed both ways in science. It’s just a vacuous piece of playground name-calling. What matters is the substance of the science, not how fashionable something is. Fashionability matters for getting funding, of course, and this is where Lord Acton’s “All power corrupts…” comes in. Scientists are no more ethical than anyone else.
Educational psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg (Lawrence Kohlberg, “Stage and Sequence: the Cognitive Development Approach to Socialization,” in D. A. Goslin, Ed., Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand-McNally, Co., Chicago, 1969, pp. 347-380) has found that peoples go through six stages of ethical development:
(1) Conformity to rules and obediance to authority, to avoid punishment.
(2) Conformity to gain rewards.
(3) Conformity to avoid rejection.
(4) Conformity to avoid censure. (Chimps and baboons.)
(5) Arbitrariness in enforcing rules, for the common good.
(6) Conscious revision and replacement of unhelpful rules.
The same steps could be expected to apply to scientific ethical development. However, the disguised form of politics which exists in science, where decisions are taken behind closed doors and with no public discussion of evidence, stops at stage (4), the level of ethics that chimpanzees and baboons have been observed to achieve socially in the wild.
“… it is once for all clear from the very appearances that the earth is in the middle of the world and all weights move towards it. … Now some people, although they have nothing to oppose to these arguments, agree on something, as they think, more plausible. … the earth as turning on the same axis from west to east very nearly one revolution a day … never would a cloud be seen to move toward the east nor anything else that flew or was thrown into the air. For the earth would always outstrip them in its eastward motion, so that all other bodies would seem to be left behind and to move towards the west.”
– Claudius Ptolemy (100-178 AD), Almagest, Book I, part 7, That the Earth does not in any way move locally. Translated by R. C. Taliaferro, Great Books of the Western World, volume 16, 1952, pp. 11-12.
(This proves that Aristarchus’s solar system was not simply ignored, but was falsely attacked by the mainstream using false, deluded “arguments” which were speculative and built on a basis of fluff or quicksand. Note also that when Bruno was burned at the stake in February 1600 for saying that the earth rotates, he had evidence for the solar system in that the planets Venus and Mars are always observed to be in the same hemisphere as the sun when seen from Earth: neither planet was ever seen in the opposite direction to the sun. This, Bruno argued, is because they orbit the Sun, not the Earth, and are orbiting closer to the sun than the earth. This is the reason Bruno was burned. If he was simply talking without evidence, he would have been ignored, which is the first line of defense of status quo against radical progress. The second line of defense is to ridicule progressives. The third is to burn them. Many politically biased “historians” and “scientists” incorrectly claim that the problem was simply a lack of evidence for the solar system proposed in 250 BC by Aristarchus of Samos. Not so. It was bias. Note in particular that Copernicus failed to get rid of epicycles; he simply applied epicycles to Aristarchus’s solar syetem. It was Kepler in 1609 who began making progress in removing epicycles by replacing them with elliptical orbits which better fitted the motion of the planet Mars as observed carefully by Brahe.)
“Ptolemy and the Peripatetics think that nature must be thrown into confusion, and the whole structure and configuration of our globe destroyed by the Earth’s so rapid rotation … what structure of iron can be imagined so strong, so tough, that it would not be wrecked and shattered to pieces by such a mad and unimaginable velocity? …all atmosphere … rotate with the globe: the space above … is a vacuum; in passing through vacuum even the lightest bodies and those of least coherence are neither hindered nor broken up. Hence the entire terrestrial globe, with all its appurtenances, revolves placidly and meets no resistance.”
– Dr William Gilbert (1540-1603), On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies and on the Great Magnet the Earth, 1600, book 6, chapter 3. (Translation: P. Fleury Mottelay, John Wiley and Sons.)
(This shows how the vacuous arguments attacking a new theory were dismissed. However, the bigoted would simply ignore or dismiss Gilbert’s refutation as being – ironically – “speculative”. This is still the political method used in “science” to censor out alternative ideas from being carefully studied, checked, and discussed. The key problem for status quo is maintaining hegemony, even hubris. It is not the number one priority of status quo to permit radical discussions of the foundations of mainstream theories.)
“It is indeed a most absurd fiction to explain natural phenomena by false causes.”
- J. Kepler, quoted by G. Abetti, History of Astronomy, London, 1974, p. 74.
“… the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.”
- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance, 1992.
“A fascinating article by Mark Musser in American Thinker on one of the pioneers of apocalyptic global warming theory. Turns out – whoulda thunk? – that he was a eugenicist and a Nazi. … the quest for Lebensraum [habitat/living space] did not die with Hitler in his bunker in 1945 …”
- James Delingpole, Why do I call them Eco Nazis? Because they ARE Eco Nazis, Telegraph.
“After the war in the 1950′s, Guenther Schwab’s brand of environmentalism also played a fundamental role in the development of the green anti-nuclear movement in West Germany. The dropping of the atom bomb and the nuclear fallout of the Cold War helped to globalize the greens into an apocalyptic ‘peace’ movement with Guenther Schwab being one of its original spokesmen. The unprecedented destruction in Germany brought on by industrialized warfare never before seen in the history of the world only served to radicalize the German greens into an apocalyptic movement. Their hatred toward global capitalism became even more vitriolic precisely because the capitalists were now in charge of a dangerous nuclear arsenal that threatened the entire planet.”
- Mark Musser, “The Nazi Origins of Apocalyptic Global Warming Theory”, American Thinker, February 15, 2011.
Sometimes truth hurts and the "solution" to this "problem" is to shoot the messenger, to end the pain. However, when the messenger is armed with a flak jacket and a large stockpile of very powerful bombs, it's not so clever to try to shoot that messenger. And when the messenger is searching for you and threatening to rip you pieces for murdering kids, your manic laughter is soon cut short. Your friends see the torture that you went through to block out reality, and they start to chicken out, and start to listen to the message. And peace returns: