Costing our nuclear future? - by Richard... Sunday, March 20, 2011

Costing our nuclear future? - by Richard... Sunday, March 20, 2011

There is no parallel between Fukushima and Chernobyl at all, says Booker , who notes that the scaremongers have been out in force, with talk of "meltdown" and claims that the Japanese nuclear power plant emergency threatened a disaster "worse than Chernobyl".

There is, of course, says our man, no parallel with Chernobyl at all. The problem at Fukushima was not the explosion of a working nuclear reactor (all its reactors had been automatically shut down). The main problem was the lack of water to cool spent fuel rods.

Then, even if the overheating rods caught fire, the worst-case scenario was never more than that some radioactive particles, given an unfavourable wind, might reach as far as Tokyo. There was never any chance that this could compare with Chernobyl, although even the long-term effects of that 1986 disaster, as it turned out, were very much less serious than scaremongers at the time predicted.

Booker makes the point that the excessive stockpiling of fuel rods at Fukushima has arisen because pressure from anti-nuclear groups has made the safe dispersal of nuclear waste so difficult. This means, in a sense, the Greens are partly responsible for the problems – not that they will ever admit it. Greens never take responsibility for anything – everything is always someone else's fault.

The big problem though is that the effects of this unique accident on the renewed drive for the nuclear energy that the world so desperately needs may be seriously damaging. In the forefront of those countries which have now responded by closing down reactors or abandoning plans for new ones is Germany, where Angela Merkel was booed in the Bundestag for suggesting that we should move on to "the age of renewable energy as soon as possible".

At least here in Britain our energy secretary, Chris Huhne, has so far refrained from saying anything so fatuous; although how he is going to persuade our German and French-owned electricity companies to build the nuclear power plants needed to keep Britain's lights on will be more of a puzzle than ever.

Really though, there are enough complications to our energy policy already, without adding this – which is something we as well as the Japanese could have done without.

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The storm gathers? - by Richard... Saturday, March 19, 2011

You can tell that the situation in Japan is under control, simply from the headlines ... or the absence of them. Now that Fukushima hasn't blown sky high within the attention span of a retarded gnat, the babies of the media have moved on to play with their latest hystérie du jour.

It is The Times here which leads the way with a portentous headline, redolent of the darkest days before the Second World War: "The Storm Gathers", as the media shows pictures of a Libyan jet crashing and burning (or it could be a jet-on-a-stick, which they've set fire to?) and action pictures of French AlpaJet trainers, for heaven's sake.

Are we on the brink of world war? Does Armageddon beckon? Nah ... we have a poxy, two-bit dictator in a poxy, fly-blown strip of desert, taking the piss and – as Arab dictators always do – slaughtering his people. And we are to send in a clutch of aeroplanes and maybe do a bit of derring do, on a scale that wouldn't even make a decent Sunday afternoon airshow.

But that's the babies of the media for you – incapable of reporting the news accurately or honestly, totally losing it when it comes to a sense of proportion and out to lunch when it comes to reporting anything complicated or which requires intelligent analysis.

Meanwhile, Spiked online adds it weight to the litany of condemnation of the babies, while Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent puts the boot in, but in a measured and informative way:

Irish residents in Japan have been emailing me accounts of the incredible calm and social concern of the Japanese people, and their own disgust at the foreign media frenzy, which is making it seem as if the entire archipelago is in danger of "nuclear meltdown".

But the dogs have barked and the caravan has moved on ... already the BBC stars and the forty or so reporters and the hundreds of hangers-on will be packing up in Japan and booking their passages to some warm Mediterranean location, where they can spout their breathless garbage, endlessly waving their hands in approved BBC fashion, to emphasise their vapid mouthings.

And nothing they say can be trusted – nothing they say is of any value, until it has been checked, compared, the sources examined and the implications discussed. From useful sources of information, the collective media howl is just noises off – raw, unprocessed outpourings adding to the background noise.

Occasionally, I have had doubts about the value of blogging. Not any more – we are small, only slightly insane, but by comparison, a haven of calm, clinical analysis. And that, dear readers, is a measure of how bad it has become.

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Second-rate minds - by Richard...

I wrote this on 16 August 2009 – arguing for an engineering solution in Sangin, where the setup of the town prevented effective or safe policing. Over 100 soldiers have since died there - I've lost count. And now, yesterday, we read this:

In a war where winning the hearts and minds of Afghans is the ultimate goal, damaging homes with powerful explosives and bulldozing a mosque and scores of other buildings may not sound like a wise idea.

But U.S. Marines in this key Taliban sanctuary say that's sometimes the only way to make progress, even if it risks angering the same people whose loyalties are required for success — a difficult trade-off that troops have grappled with throughout Afghanistan.

"We are here to rebuild, but sometimes that takes destruction," said Capt. Matthew Peterson, a company commander whose Marines were tasked in late December with clearing a key part of southern Helmand province's Sangin district.

The whole piece is worth a read – it is not very long – and then my piece linked above. What is particularly depressing is the experience at Wishtan – about which we wrote, on many occasions, where too many British soldiers were killed.

This current article tells us that the Marines initially opted not to use the base at Wishtan — part of a broader strategy to free up troops to do more patrolling. But they eventually decided it was critical to controlling key terrain, forcing them to launch their own operation to clear the area.

Since then, the Marines have managed to keep the main road clear and have yet to suffer a serious casualty in the base since the operation began in late December. They do say, though, that fighting has dropped throughout Sangin during the winter months – as it often does.

But the fact remains that the USMC are adopting the "engineering solution" that I was suggesting nearly two years ago, and are seeing a drop in casualties – even though they have not gone to the full extent I would prefer. We need to get rid of those walls (above) - all of them.

However, in 2009, my suggestions pointed in the right direction. They went up as high as they could go at the time, but the obstacles, mainly in the minds of men who call themselves soldiers, were more formidable than any the enemy could erect. And so we withdrew from Sangin – as we had done elsewhere in Afghanistan, and before that from Iraq.

Wars are won and lost in the minds of men. We have second-rate men, with second-rate minds. That is why we lost in Iraq, and that is why we will lose in Afghanistan. In this one instance, the USMC are showing us how we could have won.

But with the people we have, we cannot win - they cannot learn the lessons. They are incapable of learning. That is why there is not a great deal of point in writing about the campaign - other than occasionally to place a marker on our journey to defeat. And that we have done in this piece today.

But, as the Boy Slime gallops off to war in Libya, would be too much to hope for that he could finish losing the last one, before he so gaily starts the next? Can't we just lose one war at a time?

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Theft is all around us. - by Pete... Friday, March 18, 2011

It isn't just the government, local councils and the police who are indulging in collective micturition - the abstraction thereof. Legitimized theft is now an everyday fact of life. I have just put the phone down on a customer "service" individual, or rather they hung up on me, as I attempted to explain why the taking of monies for no service provided is by anyone's estimation, theft.

You've all seen it. In this instance, it was www.quickcreditscore.co.uk. You go through their sign up procedure, for a "free trial period", as all of them require, before you can get what you need. Only then do you find their system cannot find your details and thus cannot provide you with a service. But when you to check your account, you find that they have taken the money anyway.

Now comes the fun bit: you ring up for a refund to be told by a brainless automaton, masquerading as a human being that there is an implied membership renewal, by way of signing up with them. You may not have realised it, but since you did not call in order cancel it, you are not entitled to a refund. Another player in this game is www.lovefilm.com, which does exactly the same.

And although in this case, it is only a matter of fifteen pounds, the effect is quite disproportionate to the amount. A lesser mortal might contemplate locating their offices (if indeed they're in the UK and not just a registered PO box) and shoving a burning rag through the letter box. But our kind of people don't do this. We might briefly in our imaginations rehearse rampaging though their offices, floor by floor, pumping magazine after magazine into anything that moves, Terminator style. Such is the value of a good education.

But people like us don't do such things. We do not resort to violence. We're the nice people who go to trading standards, taking weeks to be told that these thieves have a perfect legal right to steal our money. So we smile sweetly and wait for the next gang of thieves to steal our money. We know that if we protest too much, it is us, not them who end up with the criminal record.

However, even nice people like us do not have endless patience. And while we would never dream of storming down to the offices of the thieves and ripping throats out - in the immortal terms of that age-old advert - we know a man who can.