4. UNCOOL: LOT OF HEAT FROM GLOBAL-WARMING DENIERS.
Suppose, I asked myself, that the deniers are right and the CO2 thing is a mistake? What will happen if the world takes the CO2 thing seriously, adopting common sense measures to counter anthropogenic warming and there never was any warming in the first place? 1) there will more non-renewable resources to leave to our progeny; 2) we will breath cleaner air and see the stars again, the way we saw them half a century ago; 3) we could stop paving over the planet, and 4) cut down on the number of billionaires. If we’re wrong we could have a party. We could have a party either way.

Robert L. Park, What's New, July 25, 2008

At Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, see also: "Starbucks controversy: The Way I See It #289 (global warming)"

Yesterday, Dr. Herberman sent a memo to faculty and staff warning them them to limit the use of cell phones because of the cancer risk.  Although the risk has not been conclusively proven, he is telling people to err on the side of caution, based on results from unpublished data.

"Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later, "Dr. Herberman told The Associated Press.

He is particularly concerned that children be protected while their brains are still developing.  He advises adults to switch sides regularly while talking on a cell phone.

Dr. Herberman's warning holds no worries for me, although I am concerned for my wife, stepdaughter, stepson, other relatives and friends.  I have the rare distinction of being someone who has never owned a cell phone.  For me, no telephone call is that important that it cannot wait until I can use a landline phone and, if the truth were told, the same probably holds good for most people.

As a road user, I welcome Dr. Herberman's warning.  Maybe people will follow his advice and desist from having to make, or take, a call while driving. It scares me when I see, usually women -- I am sorry girls but you do seem unable to resist the lure of a telephone chat while driving -- trying to make a maneuver with one hand on the steering wheel and the other clutching a cell phone to their ear.  Are they really concentrating 100 percent on the road?  Of course, they would probably counter that, unlike men, they are perfectly capable of simultaneously performing two tasks.

And what will happen to daily life if the link between brain tumors and cell phones turns out to be true?  "It's life, Jim, but not as we know it" to borrow the Star Trek line.

Supermarket shopping will revert back to the days of shopping lists scribbled down on the back of an envelope.  Cell phones have turned grocery shopping into something resembling a space mission.

"Command, I have entered the pet food aisle. Please advise."

"Proceed two-thirds of the way down and you will find Doggomeat on the left.  Remove 10 cans from the shelf.  Proceed two yards further.  Down at the bottom, you should see the large Doggobix.  Place one bag in the trolley."

"Okay command.  I am proceeding."

In restaurants, the air will return to being filled with the babble of normal conversation rather than having to listen to the details of Aunty Mimi's hysterectomy and subsequent progress.  Why is it people suddenly have to speak louder when they are talking into a cell phone than they would if it were an office or home phone?  For a lot of people the cell phone is superflous, their conversations are loud enough to be heard 20 miles away.

In the light of Dr. Herberman's warning, and while the link between cell phones and brain tumors is still inconclusive, all the British need is for some third-rate entertainer, someone by the name of Jim Fort say, to blame his brain tumor on performing in clubs where the audience talked on their cell phones throughout his act because it was so bad.  A few appearances by Jolly Jim on TV chat shows and the dangers of passive cell phone calls will become embedded in the public's psyche.

Even if honest scientific study fails to establish the danger posed by passive cell phone calls, junk science will gladly step into the breach and fuel the call for a ban on cell phone use in bars and restaurants, shops, offices, cinemas, airports, airliners, sports stadia, public buildings and outside public buildings.  The Californians will insist that it extends to beaches and parks.  "Hey dude!  That electromagnetic radiation is serious stuff.  It's a killer, man."

Pity the poor doctors who have suspended their belief in rational scientific analysis to argue about the dangers posed by passive smoking.  I will wager that they are all cell phone users to a man, or woman.  How will they cope with their newly acquired pariah status, one they have inflicted on smokers over the years?  Could the prophetic Dr. Herberman be their nemesis?  As a smoker, forgive me if I have the wry smile of schadenfreude on my face.

[Based on reports by The New York Times and BBC News.]

Discussion on smoking bans vs. property rights

You should also check out the radio interview that followed mine, where show guest Dr. John Dunn of the Heartland Institute attacks the junk science behind Surgeon General Carmona's claims that "there are no safe levels of secondhand smoke":

The other side's opinion on secondhand smoke

I just want to take this opportunity to thank Pat and the folks over at WSAU for airing the other side of the smoking ban issue.

So, can you blame them when they trumpet that a major organization like the American Physical Society reverses its stand on global warming, and publishes a paper by a fellow usually considered a hoax and tinfoil hat favorite, Lord Monckton?

Well, yes, you can blame them. That's not at all what happened. It turns out that a division of APS simply opened a discussion on global warming, and in doing that, they published Monckton's piece for discussion.

With this issue of Physics & Society, we kick off a debate concerning one of the main conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body which, together with Al Gore, recently won the Nobel Prize for its work concerning climate change research. There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion. This editor (JJM) invited several people to contribute articles that were either pro or con. Christopher Monckton responded with this issue's article that argues against the correctness of the IPCC conclusion, and a pair from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz, responded with this issue's article in favor of the IPCC conclusion. We, the editors of P&S, invite reasoned rebuttals from the authors as well as further contributions from the physics community. Please contact me (jjmarque@sbcglobal.net) if you wish to jump into this fray with comments or articles that are scientific in nature. However, we will not publish articles that are political or polemical in nature. Stick to the science! (JJM)

Newsbusters, a right-wing, tinfoil hat driver site announced this morning that APS has abandoned its long-time position on climate change. Anthony Watts couldn't wait to talk about it as a major hole in the case for doing something to clean up air pollution.  "Myth of Consensus Explodes" Daily Tech breathlessly exclaimed.

By this afternoon, APS had warning labels up at their site to advise the unwary who might have been misled by the deniers:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article's conclusions.

Bob Parks, former APS spokescurmudgeon, wrote about it in his weekly news comment, What's New:

1. GOOD LORD! GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS VANDALIZE APS.
Science is open. If better information becomes available scientists rewrite the textbooks with scarcely a backward glance. The Forum on Physics and Society of the APS exists to help us examine all the information on issues such as global climate change. There are physicists who think we don’t have warming right, I know one myself. It is therefore entirely appropriate for the Forum to conduct a debate on the pages of its newsletter. A couple of highly-respected physicists ably argued the warming side. Good start. However, on the denier’s side was Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, who inherited his father’s peerage in 2006. Lord Monckton is not a scientist, his degree is in journalism and he’s a reporter for the Evening Standard, an English tabloid. Whatever it is that Viscounts do, he may do very well, but he doesn’t know squat about physics and his journalism suffers from it. Worse, somebody fed the media the line that Monckton’s rubbish meant the APS had changed its position on warming; of course it has not. Few media outlets took the story seriously.

How desperate are the anti-Gore-ites? They are desperate enough they'll turn off their bovine excrement detectors, and claim Monckton's goofy stuff is a new position for APS, without bothering to check the facts.

How long will this hoax survive on the internet?

Other resources:

• APS Climate Change Statement
  APS Position Remains Unchanged

  The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

  "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."

  An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that "Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum."  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

• Why Monckton is considered good for the tinfoil hat business
• Tim Lambert on Monckton fantasies and deceptions before the U.S. Congress (for a very thorough vetting of Monckton, go to Lambert's blog and do a search for "Monckton")
• A serious case against the conclusions of human causation for global warming, by Pat Frank, published in Skeptic's online site, "A Climate of Belief."  Dr. Frank is a careful and generally rigorous thinker, a physicist with no axes to grind against anyone involved, who has made a good case that we cannot conclude human causation; in discussions I've had with Dr. Frank, he's limited his criticisms to the science.  I'm more of an effects guy myself -- but this is the one article that keeps me hoping for more, better evidence (while we make plans to reduce emissions, of course -- whether warming is human caused or not, we need cleaner air).

Douglas Wilson (Blog and Mablog) has been recently posting on a topic very much on my mind lately: food. For whatever reason, the Lord has surrounded me with dear people who seem to care a great deal about food. Is it organic? Natural? Does it have refined sugar? Artificial dye? MSG?

I don't share this concern. I want to be a good steward of the physical body the Lord has given me, and I want to eat reasonably healthy... but, I just cannot make myself care about whether or not my ground beef came from a hormone-injected cow, or my spinach was sprayed with pesticides.

Honestly, these kinds of food concerns have always bugged me a little, but I've never been able to exactly articulate why. It's not an issue I press with most people, precisely because it is not an important issue to me and it's certainly not an issue I want to strain a relationship over. (And, I should note, none of the food worriers I know have inappropriately pressed the issue on me.)

Pastor Wilson's recent postings on the topic have helped me a great deal in figuring this whole issue out. To check out the conversation, look for the posts with the topic "Creation and Food". (I particularly enjoyed Hippie Mama Free-Range Macaroni, Little Robot Bees and The Corporations are Way Ahead of You.) Here are some snippets:

One of (sic) saddest features (or funniest, depending) of contemporary food snobbery is the notion that rich people are getting in touch with the rythyms of the earth when they shop at the Whole Foods market. Paying three times as much for a really good apple is a fine thing to do, so long as you know that you are doing it. But if you think that you are a humble creature of the soil because you are whooping it up on luxuries is one of the oddest things that I have ever seen in my life.

-----

Now this means that we cannot point to anything in the created order and justify its use in a particular way simply on the basis of its being "natural." Nor can we reject anything on the basis of it having been "processed." The creation around us is a damaged good, and this means that when we point to a particular aspect of it, we are not yet clear whether we are pointing to an aboriginal good, or to one of the defects introduced by the Fall. When we approach a particular food for the first time, knowing nothing about it other than that it is "natural," we still don't know if it is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. A worm-ridden apple is natural. And the same thing goes for processed foods. It could be good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, depending. Because God has commanded us to exercise dominion in a world where those who are to exercise dominion are participants in the Fall, this means that we can screw it up. So then, natural is not automatically good or bad. Processed is not automatically good or bad.

[...]

So those Christians who use "natural" and "organic" as terms of praise, and who eschew the use of "chemicals" in food preparation are failing at two places. First, as I have noted, they are not applying the doctrine of the Fall. They are not capable of finding any food in this world that has an unfallen nature, for which natural would work as a term of unqualified praise. And second, they are not able to find a food anywhere that is not made out of chemicals. Chemical-free food would a sight to behold, and a miracle in its own right. In the first instance, they are not really thinking in Christ. In the second, they are just following along with popular jargon and not really thinking at all.

-----

When someone objects to "chemical additives" but loudly applauds "nutritional supplements," we should be forgiven if we believe that some obfuscatory handwaving is going on. Now, please note that I am not saying that all chemical additives are good or that all nutritional supplements are bad. I am saying that, so far as our definitions have gone, they are the same thing, some of them good and some of them bad. Nothing is bad because a factory put it in a bottle, and nothing is good for the same reason.

According to Dr. Bob Harmon, the director of the Duval County Health Department, "Tobacco and smoking are public health enemy number one and this brown plague must be brought under control."

Emotive use of words there, Bob.  Plague kind of implies that someone standing 25 yards away from a person smoking a cigarette is likely to be stricken instantly, or within a few days, by some deadly disease.  I wonder if Bob can back that up with some hard scientific facts?

He would be right out of luck if he was looking to the World Health Organization.  It conducted a study, just over a decade ago, to look at the link between passive smoking and lung cancer in seven European countries.  The report was suppressed in 1998, according to The Daily Telegraph and The Economist, when it emerged that there was no statistical evidence that passive smoking caused lung cancer.  WHO immediately issued a press release saying that the British media had "misrepresented" the report and yet when the study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in October 1998, it showed a statistically insignificant small risk from spousal and workplace Environmental Tobacco Smoke and that ETS exposure during childhood was not associated with an increased risk of lung cancer.

In 2003, a study by Dr. James Enstrom and Professor Geoffrey Kabat appeared in the British Medical Journal.  The study looked at the wives and husbands of 35,000 smokers over a period of 40 years and concluded that the link between passive smoking and disease "may be considerably weaker than generally believed."  Their research did not support the anti-smoking lobby's claim that passive smoking causes a 20 percent increased risk of lung cancer and a 30 percent increased risk of heart disease in people who live with smokers.

"Exposure to environmental tobacco smoke could not plausibly cause a 30 percent increase in risk of coronary heart disease," Enstrom and Kabat concluded.  "It seems premature to conclude that environmental tobacco smoke causes death from coronary heart disease and lung cancer."

The American Cancer Society, whose data had been used by Enstrom and Kabat, levelled charges of scientific misconduct against Dr. Enstrom.  A subsequent investigation by the University of California cleared Dr. Enstrom of the charges.  The American Cancer Society did not apologize.

In 2007, Dr. Enstrom defended his research in Epidemiologic Perspectives & Innovations and showed that it was not "fatally flawed" or that he made "inappropriate use" of the underlying database. His paper also refutes the erroneous statements made by powerful U.S. epidemiologists and activists about him and his research, and defends legitimate research against illegitimate criticism by those who have attempted to suppress and discredit it because it does not support their ideological and political agendas. 

But when someone is on a crusade, getting wrong results does not pose too much of a problem and the truth is all too easily jettisoned.  There is plenty of junk science for the anti-smoking zealots to seize upon, although it is frightening when the members of the medical profession suspend their critical faculties and allow prejudice to hold sway.

The hospital ban elicited a response yesterday from Timothy Davlantes, M.D., president of the Florida Academy of Family Physicians, on the Letters Page of The Jacksonville Joke aka The Florida Times-Union.

Dr. Davlantes wrote, "I would like to applaud these Jacksonville healthcare facilities for their decision to protect employees, patients and visitors by implementing a campus-wide tobacco-free policy."

Protect them from what?  Oh, it must be the "brown plague" the other good doctor was talking about.

It is a pity Dr. Davlantes did not use his letter to the editor to condemn the export of $158 million of cigarettes to Iran during the years George W. Bush has been in office.  I guess his Hippocratic oath and anti-smoking zeal do not apply outside the United States.

Is that cigarette smoke I smell?  No, just the whiff of hypocrisy and an attack on personal freedom.  Maybe it is time to heed the warning by John Stuart Mill in 1859 of the danger posed to liberty by "the tyranny of the majority."

Or should that, in the 21st Century, be the tyranny of the medical profession?  Doctors do have a tendency to come across as being all-knowing but the plain truth is that medicine is not a precise science governed by immutable laws.  It is based on science, uses science but, in essence, is an art.

A doctor may say that he or she thinks something may be occurring or may have an effect but cannot say with 100 percent certainty it is the case.  Take, for example, the recent acknowledgement that certain chemotherapy used in the past had no beneficial effect on patients.  Sounds to me that when doctors started using it, they must have been just stabbing in the dark.  But once a doctor dons the white coat, the rest of society assumes that they have god-like status and know all the answers.

Yes, it is true doctors can perform incredible things to save lives and the application of their skill relieves pain and suffering but they are not infallible; if they were, medical malpractice attorneys would not be in business.  And if doctors such as Harmon and Davlantes have got it so right, how come they can often be proved wrong?

A few days ago, The Daily Telegraph carried an interview with actress Diana Rigg, the delightful Emma Peel in The Avengers televison series.  The article revealed that Ms. Rigg, even at the age of 70, was still smoking 20 cigarettes a day.  According to medical thinking, she should have been dead 10, 15 or 20 years ago.  It may well be that lung cancer or heart disease eventually claims her but she will not have been cut down in her prime, unless 75 has become the new 35.

Her eventual death will, of course, be smoking related.  The way medical statistics are compiled, if I were to die tomorrow in a road accident, my death would somehow end up as being a smoking-related death because my health records show that I am a smoker.

Now, don't get me wrong about this hospital ban on smoking.  I would not want to see nurses and doctors walking along a hospital corridor, puffing on a cigarette.  I would be appalled if a surgeon conducted open-heart surgery with a Winston stuck in the corner of his mouth.  But banning smoking in the hospital grounds is just another curtailing of personal freedom, with no justification other than the wish by some people to eradicate tobacco from society.

It was Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, who said, "If repeated often enough, a lie will become the new truth."  The anti-smoking Nazis have learned that and learned it well.

[Joe Jackson, the English singer and musician, has written an excellent essay --  http://www.joejackson.com/smoking.php -- on anti-smoking hysteria and debunks the myths surrounding passive smoking.  Forces International -- http://www.forces.org/evidence/index.htm -- exposes the junk science used by the anti-smoking lobby to persecute people who happen to enjoy smoking cigarettes.  The United Pro Choice Smokers Newsletter -- http://www.smokersclubinc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4191 -- documents the Dr. Enstrom saga.]

It should be obvious to even the most causual of observers and Globular Worming will cause more kidney stones.  I have now been vindicated by the University of Texas.

I mean, they've written a paper on it and everything so it must be true right?  In fact, they rarely put their stuff up for critical review before releasing it to the news media because the odds of getting anything wrong (including the basic premises) is so infinitesimally small that it is smaller than Britney's common sense.

Global warming may increase kidney stones: researchers
Jul 14 05:08 PM US/Eastern

More Americans are likely to suffer from kidney stones in the coming years as a result of global warming, according to researchers at the University of Texas.

Kidney stones, which are formed from dissolved minerals in the urine and can be extremely painful, are often caused by caused by dehydration, either by not drinking enough liquid or losing too much due to high heat conditions.

If global warming trends continue as projected by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007, the United States can expect as much as a 30 percent growth in kidney stone disease in some of its driest areas, said the findings published in Monday's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The increased incidence of disease would represent between 1.6 million and 2.2 million cases by 2050, costing the US economy as much as one billion dollars in treatment costs.

"This study is one of the first examples of global warming causing a direct medical consequence for humans," said Margaret Pearle, professor of urology at University of Texas Southwestern and senior author of the paper.

God, I hope you noticed that my words were dripping with enough sarcasm to drown a Missouri mule.

I suppose it's too much for someone to actually look at the hypothetical good things that could come out of a hypothetical Globular Worming?

But no, we have to scream to the rooftops all of the bad things - trenchfoot, suppurating brain lesions, necrotic eardrums, spontaneous tongue bifurcations, nasal polyps, rectal itching, bloodshot eyes, unibrows, arthritis of the sternum, giant sucking head wounds, narcolepsy, double-jointedness, mismatched earlobes, earwax deficits, alimentary canal reversals (liberals only), and chapped eyelids.

~~~~~~~~~~~~****~~~~~~~~~~~~

More in the morning... I'm done working for the evening -

it's 1:30AM - do you know where your cat is?

]]> http://banthebanwisconsin.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/spin-alert/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:52:00 +0000 Ryan http://banthebanwisconsin.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/spin-alert/ The American Lung Association has taken a CDC report and spun it into a doomsday message. Shame on the CDC for their alarmist and otherwise uninteresting report; but for the ALA to take this and run with it as they have is pure fear mongering and a blatant attempt to spin reality to push for anti-smoking laws.

You can read the whole ugly press release here, but this is my favorite part, and really sums up the whole thing quite nicely:

"While the number of U.S. smokers has shown a decline in recent years, those still affected by the dangerous health implications of secondhand smoke exposure continues to remain steady at remarkably high levels," said Bernadette A. Toomey, President and CEO of the American Lung Association. "Our organization is poised to take significant and immediate action to end the needless and tragic cycle of disease that affects thousands of nonsmokers each year."

Dare I even ask what the "significant and immediate action" is? Should we expect storm troopers and outright prohibition against tobacco and smoking? I tell you, this sort of thing concerns me because these monsters not only have the power of public health on their side, they operate behind the curtain of doing good which quite honestly scares the hell out of me.

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens launched a media blitz this week to announce his plan for us "to escape the grip of foreign oil." Now he’s got himself stuck between a crock and a wind farm.

Announced via TV commercials, media interviews, a July 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed and a Web site, Pickens wants to substitute wind power for the natural gas used to produce about 22 percent of our electricity and then to substitute natural gas for the conventional gasoline used to power vehicles.

Pickens claims this plan can be accomplished within 10 years, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce the cost of transportation, create thousands of jobs, reduce our carbon footprint and "build a bridge to the future, giving us time to develop new technologies."

It sounds great and gets even better, according to Pickens. Don’t sweat the cost, he says, "It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation." What’s not to like?

First, it’s worth noting Pickens’ claim made in the op-ed that his plan requires no new government regulation. Two sentences later, however, he calls on Congress to "mandate'' wind power and its subsidies. Next, Pickens relies on a 2008 Department of Energy study claiming the U.S. could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind by 2030.

Setting aside the fact that the report was produced in consultation with the wind industry, the 20-by-2030 goal is quite fanciful.

Even if wind technology significantly improves, electrical transmission systems (how electricity gets from the power source to you) are greatly expanded and environmental obstacles (such as environmentalists who protest wind turbines as eyesores and bird-killing machines) can be overcome, the viability of wind power depends on where, when and how strong the wind blows — none of which is predictable.

Wind farm-siting depends on the long-term forecasting of wind patterns, but climate is always changing. When it comes to wind power, it is not simply "build it and the wind will come." Even the momentary loss of wind can be a problem. As Reuters reported on Feb. 27, "Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency."

The electric grid operator was forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers within 10 minutes. Wind isn’t a standalone power source. It needs a Plan B for when the wind "just don’t blow."

This contrasts with coal- or gas-fired electrical power, which can be produced on demand and as needed. A great benefit of modern technology is that it liberates us from Mother Nature’s harsh whims. Pickens wants to re-enslave us with 12th century technology.

Then there’s the cost of the 20-by-2030 goal — $43 billion more than the cost of non-wind assets, according to the DOE — and this doesn’t include many billions of dollars more for additional transmission lines. Could the 20-by-2030 goal even be accomplished?

According to Electric Utility Week on June 9, a DOE official informed attendees at a June wind industry meeting that reaching the goal would entail replicating the entire existing U.S. wind system (about 17,000 megawatts of capacity constructed over the past decade) every year starting in 2018.

What about Pickens’ plan to shift us into natural gas vehicles? Well, they cost a lot more: an extra $3,000 to $6,000 for cars and $30,000 to $40,000 for buses and trucks. There are only about 1,300 natural gas refueling stations in the U.S., as compared with about 180,000 conventional gas stations — that’s a lot of infrastructure to build and finance. Will Pickens’ plan reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Doubtful.

Even if the fleet of natural gas-powered vehicles is enlarged, the bulk of existing and new vehicles will continue to depend for the foreseeable future on gasoline. Americans own about 260 million vehicles, a total that grows by more than 3 million vehicles every year.

Turnover is low as about 60 percent are owned for more than seven years. Besides, as demand for natural gas increases, so will prices. In the Washington, D.C., area, natural gas is already about two-thirds as costly as gasoline — and that’s with hardly any demand.

None of these facts and circumstances are new to Pickens. So what’s up with him?

Not only does Pickens’ firm, BP capital, have significant investments in natural gas, but last June he announced plans to build the world’s largest wind farm in west Texas, capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

The federal government subsidizes wind farm operators with a tax credit worth 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour — potentially making for a tidy annual taxpayer gift to Pickens based on his anticipated capacity. But all is not well in Wind Subsidy-land.

Since Congress didn’t renew the wind subsidy as part of the 2007 energy bill, it will expire at the end of this year unless reauthorized. Subsidies are perhaps more important to the wind industry than wind itself. Without them, wind can’t compete against fossil fuel-generated power.

As pointed out by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on July 9, "In 1999, 2001 and 2003, when Congress temporarily killed the credits, the number of new turbines dropped dramatically."

It’s little wonder that Pickens is waging a $58 million PR campaign to promote his plan. If it works, his short-term gain will be saving the tax credit and his wind farm investment.

In the long-term, he stands to line his already overflowing pockets with hard-earned taxpayer dollars. What will the rest of us get from this T. Boone-doggle? That’s anybody’s guess, but it probably won’t be cheaper energy, energy independence or a cleaner environment.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The National Children's Bureau, which receives £12 million a year, mainly from Government funded organisations, has issued guidance to play leaders and nursery teachers advising them to be alert for racist incidents among youngsters in their care.

This could include a child of as young as three who says "yuk" in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food.

Other signs of racism in toddlers include insisting on wearing booties equipped with hobnails, obsessions with pastels or white laces on their clothes, being born with little or no visible hair in the skinhead tradition and being unable to distinguish objects in color and preferring black and white, separated contrasts.