mirrored file at http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== QUACKGRASS ROOTS Reason, Egoism, Capitalismspreading underground ______________________________________________________________________ Special report: DDP 96 (This was written in 1996. I've edited it mildly for web publication--Michael Miller) The 1996 annual meeting of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness was held in Salt Lake City. Let me get the low point out of the way first. An unlikely story I'd have to put the talk by Christopher Story at the bottom of the list. He spoke on "Soviet-Chinese Strategic Deception," and I began to lose interest when he said, "The vanishing act of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 was, of course, fake." After this clanger, I had trouble taking notes, but will do my best to report the gist. Story's view is that the massive changes in the (former?) Soviet Union are a KGB trick, that the KGB aim, as ever, is destruction of the nation-state, and that a "collective security system" is the highest aim of Soviet policy. Collective security means amalgamation of Western forces with theirs, thereby neutralizing Western forces--the pretext will be anti-terrorism. Story linked these aims with the Gorbachev Foundation ("thoroughly subversive") and with the Rajiv Ghandi Foundation. He regards the "permissive society" as a creation of the KGB. As evidence that the Russians are not yet good guys, he points to the "Mosdok Area" in the northern Caucasus as the largest military area in the world--built by Yeltsin since 1993. My comment? Communism is toast, but the Russians do remain dangerous. When a despotism gets a bit of freedom, it gets a bit of economic growth, and that has military potential. There is precedent for this kind of thing. The fall of the ancien regime in the French Revolution did not make Frenchmen all sweetness and light; it led to the Napoleonic wars! Fortunately, most of the other talks were of far higher caliber, utterly devastating to orthodoxy on a variety of issues. Singer--ozone levels S. Fred Singer, atmospheric scientist and inventor of the instrument used to measure ozone, pointed out that ozone depletion may not exist, likely isn't man-made, and doesn't cause the harm alleged for it. When measurements show "declining ozone," they may in fact be showing nothing more than declining sulfur dioxide! It seems that the instruments can't easily distinguish the two! Greens claim that reduced ozone will cause higher ultraviolet-B (UVB) levels, which will cause more skin cancers. The scare-mongers whine that CFC refrigerants might cause a 10% rise in UVB. But UVB varies normally with latitude, twice as high in El Paso as in Minneapolis. And the dangerous form of skin cancer (melanoma) is caused by ultraviolet-A--which is not absorbed by ozone! Besides, when the very noisy ozone data is smoothed, it correlates strongly with sunspot cycles! This isn't surprising; sunlight shining on the atmosphere created the ozone layer in the first place, and the sun is brighter when there are more sunspots. Baliunas--global warming Sallie Baliunas, noted astrophysicist, spoke on climate. First, 90% of the greenhouse effect is due to good old water vapor! Carbon dioxide, even in total, is a small player, so the effect of changes in carbon dioxide is even smaller. Second, a 0.5% variation in the sun's brightness explains 97% of the variance in observed temperatures--leaving practically no room for man-made global warming. Sunspots cause variations in solar brightness. From AD 1640 to AD 1720, during the "Maunder Minimum," sunspots were rare, and Europe endured the "Little Ice Age." Maunder minima are known to be recurrent features over 7,000 years--there's one every few centuries. When there are few spots, the solar magnetic field is weaker, so more cosmic rays reach the Earth, creating more Carbon-14 and Beryllium-10. This provides a way to track pre-historic sunspot cycles. An astrophysicist who's an expert on sunspots? Yup. Sunlike stars have starspots, just as the sun has sunspots. Baliunas is one of the leading investigators of starspots. She is co-author of a recent article in Scientific American which presents studies of the spot cycles of many sunlike stars. Stars have Maunder minima too, and one has even been caught entering such a period when spots are rare. Studies of starspots have erased much of the mystery which used to surround sunspot cycles. Sunspot cycles are now fairly well understood. Their effects on climate are currently (1998) the subject of a sort of scientific gold rush. Penner--waste incineration Stanford Penner, professor of physics at University of California, presented his experiences with the green crowd while trying to get a waste-burning project considered. The greens were immovably against it, despite its genuine advantages: 90% reduction in volume of waste, clean stack emissions, energy recovery to help cover costs. It conflicts with the green dogma of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Greens prefer composting, though such composting seems to produce significant amounts of VOHCs--volatile organic chlorine compounds. Remember the greenhoax about the harm of showering with chlorinated tap water? VOHCs were the villain of that piece, but composting is sacred green dogma. Jastrow--Ballistic missile defense Robert Jastrow, of Mount Wilson Observatory, spoke on the potential of ballistic missile defense. Despite the fall of the Soviet Union, missile defense is urgent--Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) are becoming common. They have enough range to hit Paris from Algeria. A good starting point for missile defense is an upgrade of Navy Aegis cruiser systems. The crucial factors are interceptor speed and space-based tracking. With technically achievable speeds and space tracking, a cruiser off the Mediterranean coast of North Africa could protect all of Europe including Britain and Scandinavia from a North African launch. With the slower speeds required by the ABM treaty, and mere surface-based tracking, it could protect Sicily and about half of Italy! Yet the US government seems wedded to the US- Soviet ABM treaty. Why?? In apparently genuine bewilderment, Jastrow asked if anyone could explain why a treaty with a defunct power was taking precedence over the security of important allies. Good question! (Jastrow received the Petr Beckmann Award from DDP for promoting truth. It was presented to him by Jane Orient MD. If you think truth is a boring, quaint thing to praise, you should have heard her presentation address! It radiated the moral vibrancy which once sent revolutionaries to the barricades, and may yet again!) Sandquist--Radiation hormesis: is low-level radiation good for you? Gary M. Sandquist, nuclear engineer at University of Utah, Salt Lake, spoke on radiation hormesis. Hormesis is the recognized, although poorly understood, effect by which small doses of a toxin are beneficial. It was observed anciently: Hippocrates noted that small stresses stimulate an organism, while excess stresses inhibit or destroy it. Hormesis is thought to be due to activation of the immune system. Chemical hormesis is not honestly disputed. Radiation hormesis is not fully proved, although evidence is piling up in its favor. A book by Thomas. D. Luckey (Radiation Hormesis, 1991, CRC Press, 320 pages, pricey!) collects the evidence for radiation hormesis. What? Radiation can be good for you? Has this guy been inhaling something illegal? Not at all. Consider the range of radiation dosages, and compare them with some common substances. Between normal background radiation and the fry-the-hair-off-your-head doses which are lethal half the time, there is about a 500,000 fold difference! 500,000 fold is about the difference between taking one aspirin a day (to help prevent heart disease), and chowing down on a full kilogram of aspirin every day! It is about the difference between burning 2,000 calories of food daily to stay alive, and 1 billion calories a day--roughly the output of a 50 megawatt power plant! In between, there is plenty of room for hormetic effects! Besides, when life arose billions of years ago, there was a whole lot more radiation than there is today. Calculating backward from today's amounts of uranium isotopes, using rock-solid knowledge of half-lives, shows that the activity level of uranium in those days was no less than 10,000 times higher than now! About half of natural background radiation is due to uranium and uranium decay products--radon, for example. So that factor of 10,000 means that life arose in a very high radiation environment, and evolved therein for a long, long time. We may be suffering from radiation deficiency! The hormetic optimum dose has been estimated at 5 centiGrays. The western US states' background dose is about 2.1 milliGrays/year, and the US averages about 1.3 mGy/year. Lung cancer rates in the western states are considerably lower than the US average. Too numerous to report! I'm running out of space; even the twice-normal 4 pages I've allowed myself this month. I'll have to leave out: * Stanley Monteith, who unmasked many establishment evasions surrounding AIDS. * Henry I. Miller MD, who presented the estimate that $7 million of government waste costs about one human life--by making men poorer, it drives them to alternatives they'd prefer to avoid, and that are not as healthy for them. * Cresson Kearny, who explained how to protect yourself from the radioactive fallout of (an ever-more- likely) Asian nuclear war. * Edwin York (Manhattan Project alumnus) who described Soviet shelter technologies. * Sharon Packer and Paul Seyfried, who explained how to build a technically competent blast and radiation shelter. (They live near a likely target.) * Gordon Edwards, who exposed the greenhoaxing involved in the myth of DDT causing birds to lay soft-shelled eggs. * Martin Kamen, recipient of the Fermi Award for his discovery of carbon 14. Finally (as a Canadian I really regret leaving this out), Jim Phillips' account of how to survive extreme cold weather in comfort! _______ TAPES! If there are any left, you can order a complete set of audiotapes of DDP96 from: DDP 2509 N. Campbell, Box 272 Tucson, AZ 85719 (502)325-2680 US$99 for the complete set of tapes! _______ DDP is online! Click for info! _______ Quackgrass Press will use all the help it gets. E-gold is the easiest help to give! e-gold Amount of help (US$) ____________________ Help QP instantly! (If you don't know e-gold, find out here.) If you prefer to help by cheque, here's how! Quackgrass Home Quackgrass Articles Quackgrass Roots Deep Thinkers Email: qgrass at quackgrass.com ©1996 by Michael Miller