What a Hoot

The Daleks are Coming

We knew this was coming. When a culture turns away from the Living God it ends up seeing demons everywhere. It becomes fear-riven. Superstitions and phobias begin to abound.

Now there is a deep logic in this. When a culture spurns the Lord, it is left with the dominion of demons; it is face to face with a cruel, malicious, and hostile world. Bad things happen. The world becomes a scary place. Every piece of technology, every engineering advance is feared as a threat, liable to harm and damage humans.

The latest? Wind turbines. It turns out those things are damaging and harmful to human beings--taking their place alongside cancer causing cellphones and high tension wires, fossil fuels, nuclear energy, etc. A new syndrome has been discovered, as reported in the Independent.

Living too close to wind turbines can cause heart disease, tinnitus, vertigo, panic attacks, migraines and sleep deprivation, according to groundbreaking research to be published later this year by an American doctor.

Dr Nina Pierpont, a leading New York paediatrician, has been studying the symptoms displayed by people living near wind turbines in the US, the UK, Italy, Ireland and Canada for more than five years. Her findings have led her to confirm what she has identified as a new health risk, wind turbine syndrome (WTS).

Wind turbines--hitherto promoted as the great white hope to manumit our from slavery to carbon--now (apparently) attack and damage human beings. The list of afflictions is sobering indeed:

They cause problems ranging from internal pulsation, quivering, nervousness, fear, a compulsion to flee, chest tightness and tachycardia – increased heart rate. Turbine noise can also trigger nightmares and other disorders in children as well as harm cognitive development in the young, she claims.

We would suggest that all of these afflictions are of the heart, phobias--which have actual physiological consequences. When you hate the Lord, demons can end up stalking the mind.

We just know how this is going to play out. There will be dark mutterings about all the vested interests who will be portrayed as lining their pockets from wind turbines. Governments will be seen as colluding with big business. Supporters of wind turbines will be accused of funding biased "research" to mask the dangers. So, Dr Piedmont:

There is no doubt that my clinical research shows that the infrasonic to ultrasonic noise and vibrations emitted by wind turbines cause the symptoms which I am calling wind turbine syndrome. There are about 12 different health problems associated with WTS and these range from tachycardia, sleep disturbance, headaches, tinnitus, nausea, visual blurring, panic attacks with sensations of internal quivering to more general irritability.

The wind industry will try to discredit me and disparage me, but I can cope with that. This is not unlike the tobacco industry dismissing health issues from smoking.

We look forward to seeing Greenpeace anarchists chained to wind turbines, protesting their damaging deprivations of the human race. We confidently expect that Sue Kedgley will be calling for a bans on wind turbines within twelve months (after Copenhagen, of course). The construction and commissioning of wind turbines will be cocooned rapidly in rules, regulations, and stipulations that will cause the cost of constructing and maintaining the archaic things to sky rocket, making their already marginal economic value permanently negative.

Nah. Too extreme, we hear you say. Really.

Campaigners have consistently argued that much research hitherto has been based on written complaints to environmental health officers and manufacturers, not on science-based research. But in Denmark, Germany and France, governments are moving towards building new wind farms off-shore because of concern over the potential health and environmental risks. In the UK there are no such controls, and a growing number of lobbyists, noise experts and government officials are also beginning to query the statutory noise levels being given to councils when deciding on planning applications from wind farm manufacturers. Lobbyists claim a new method of measuring is needed.

The wind turbines are coming to a place near you. They will turn out to be the Daleks of our age. They will be a perpetual reminder, memorial stones, of the demonic powers which haunt the mind of the Unbelieving world.

Eco Light Bulbs--More Warnings

Let Them Eat Poison

The law of unintended outcomes is alive and well. As soon as the government announces that it intends to ban incandescent light bulbs and replace them with Compact Fluorescent Lamps (to save the planet, don't you know) the stories start to come out about the dangers of these bulbs.

It looks as if the government will end up being complicit in poisoning its own citizens in its reckless pursuit of environmental redemption. We now have a warning (Hat tip:NZ Conservative) from the Fire Service. When the bulbs get to flickering, we are being advised to replace them because it seems as though they might be causing fires. Now that is bad enough. But it gets worse. It turns out that these little environmental saviours are particularly fragile. Why is that a problem, you ask? Because they contain mercury, as we have posted before. Once broken, the mercury is released.

So, the bulbs contain a noxious poison, and they are fragile. Sounds like a winning combination--just the sort of thing a bunch of environmental bureaucrats would seize upon to save the plant. Maybe it is all part of a clever plan to kill off people, which would be the ultimate environmentally friendly act.

Meanwhile, (Hat Tip: The Briefing Room) WorldNetDaily--that despicable oxymoronic right wing news outlet--has come out with a piece even more alarmist. The Maine Department of Environmental Protection has studied the effects of broken CFL's and concluded that a broken CFL can spike mercury vapour in a room to 300 times the recommended safety level (as stipulated by the Environmental Protection Agency.) Now, we don't know about you, but that seems to be getting a bit "up there." The concentration of mercury vapours is particularly dense at lower levels in the room--sort of the level a child would be at.

Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League institution, has also published research, the findings of which confirm the Maine Study. So, a private sector and a public sector institution appear in agreement on this one. This has led the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to warn that, "Breaking a fluorescent bulb sends mercury vapor levels to unsafe levels for the elderly, pregnant and young – and those levels remain elevated for days."

The research project in Maine also found amazing variation in mercury concentrations within CFL bulbs. The official received wisdom is that a bulb contains (only!) 5mg of mercury. Of the bulbs tested, the range was from 0.9mg to 18mg! Unborn children, young children and the aged are particularly vulnerable to this noxious poison. The Maine study reported:

It is well established that the developing organism may be much more sensitive than the adult to neurotoxic agents. For example, methylmercury exposure can produce devastating effects in the fetus, including cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, and even death, while producing no or minimal effects in the mother.

Infants and toddlers also have a much higher rate of respiration than adults. Therefore they have a higher exposure to similar concentrations. They also are lower to the floor and therefore closer to the source of the exposure and presumably more apt to obtain a concentrated dose of mercury.

Elderly and unhealthy individuals may already be at comprised health and be more susceptible to mercury effects than a healthy individual. For example, mercury does kidney damage which could exacerbate an already existing kidney disease.

The fact that these fragile bulbs are to be put in homes by force represents a quadruple jeopardy: mercury levels are far too high to begin with; the mercury is in vapourised form; the bulbs are fragile; and the poison of a broken bulb will vapourise in a concentrated living space where the young and the elderly are particularly at risk, leading to it being in-breathed. Remember, once mercury is in the system it never leaves, but builds up and "works" for a lifetime.

We believe it is time for some questions to be asked in Parliament along the lines of whether there is any truth to the rumours that government wants to poison the people, or will it be merely one more unintended consequence. Stop the megalomaniac madness that is leading you to rush into solutions that increasingly appear to have the potential to cause far greater harm. Do some more real work, instead of the normal, "Trust us, we know best" lunacy.

At the very least, make sure that there are large print health warnings in place on the packaging of CFL bulbs. Where is Sue Kedgley when you need her? Oh, yes, that's right. We forgot. She is an ardent advocate of these poison pills. Oh, well, we guess that it is a small price to pay for saving the planet--as long as someone else pays. Good one, Sue.

The S-Files

Sue Kedgley: Conduct Unbecoming in the Course of Duty.

Contra Celsum has nominated Sue Kedgley for an S-Award for her “clear and present danger” call over the threat of New Zealand being crippled by global food shortages.

Citation:

Sue Kedgley, Green Party Safe Food spokesperson has blown the trumpet of alarm over rising international food prices. She has called for urgent measures to move New Zealand to self-sufficiency in as many basic staple crops as possible. (NZ Herald, 9th April, 2008)

However, her analysis of the causes of rising food prices is deplorable. Yes—wait for it—she blames “changing climate conditions.” She conveniently neglects to mention that the food crisis is largely man made and caused by environmentalism, by greenism—the very things she stands for. Bluntly, Kedgley and her fellow travellers are the cause of the food shortage.

There are at least two major causes of global food shortages for which geenism is directly responsible.

1.The drive to bio-fuel production. Motivated by a utopian dream of saving the planet millions of hectares of arable land and millions of tonnes of edible crops have now been removed from food production and diverted into fuel production. As Gwynne Dyer recently observed:

“But the worst damage [to food production] is being done by the rage for 'biofuels' that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emisions and fight climate change. (But they don't really—at least not in their present form.) Some 30 percent of this year's US grain harvest will go straight into an ethanol distillery, and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 percent of the fuel used for transport from biofuels by 2010.

“A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people. Rainforest is being cleared to grow more biofuels. A study in the US journal Science calculated that destroying ecosystems to grow corn or sugarcane for ethanol, or oil palms or soybeans for bio-diesel, releases between 17 and 420 times more carbon dioxide than is saved by burning the biofuel grown instead of fossil fuel.

“It's all done in the name of climate change, but the numbers don't add up.

“'If . . . more and more land [is] diverted for industrial biofuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide.' said Vandana Shiva, director of the India-based Resaerch Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resources Policy. 'It'll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than climate change itself.'” (NZ Herald, 10th April, 2008)

But, wait, it gets worse. Vandana Shiva is wrong. Climate change is a phyrric threat. It is not a threatening catastrophe but a gigantic false alarm, as the actual measured evidence is beginning to show. We are left with the deplorable situation that false solutions to what is increasingly showing up to be a non-existent problem are causing a very real global catastrophe. “The wicked flee when no-one pursueth.”

Sue Kedgley is right to call our attention to the looming food crisis. It is, however, utterly duplicitous for her not to confess that she and all her fellow greenists are the cause of the problem. Her continued advocacy and support for the current biofuels mania is deplorable, wrong, scientifically asinine, and a great threat to the world.

At Contra Celsum we are unsure whether Kedgley is acting out of foolish ignorance or her behaviour represents a wilful obscuring of the truth. She is an educated person, so we lean to the latter explanation.

2.The luddite greenist opposition to genetically modified food crops is a further cause of food shortages.

World population rose rapidly in the last half of the twentieth century. However, food production rose at a faster rate, leading to rising living standards around the globe and a decrease in hunger and malnutrition. The cause of the increased production of food was the discovery of genetically modified, disease resistant, higher crop yielding strains of basic cereals. These amazing developments, called—somewhat ironically now—the Green Revolution, resulted in much improved food production.

The greenists' mindless, inveterate opposition to genetically modified crops is a significant factor in food production not being able to keep up with population growth in the past decade. It is a material cause of rising food prices.

Sue Kedgley is like a mother who systematically starves her child, then blames anyone and everyone but herself for the child's demise. There is none so blind as those who will not see. Such cant, such hypocrisy must not go unrecognised. It deserves an S-Award.

Sue Kedgley—S-Award Class II for behaviour that is Stupid, Short Sighted and Stupefied.