BHOPAL DISASTER IN INDIA, 25th ANNIVERSARY

Its 25 years since the Bhopal disaster killed 4,000 people in the first day where they lived and worked. . The death toll ultimately stood at over 9,000 within three years. The survivors'children are being born with terrible disabilities. One 22 year old is only the size of a ten year old. Despite orders from the Supreme Court for removal of all waste from the site, the ruin still stands and well water contaminated by the site hss levels tens of thousands of times the safe level of carbon tetrachloride which is known to damage the kidneys and cause cancer.

Thousands of people are still affected or afflicted by this monstrosity yet amazingly no one has been successfully prosecuted for what happened. There have been demos, marches, and countless calls for resignations of leading figures involved directly or indirectly with the disaster but to no avail. The Bhopal disaster is a terrible example of how super rich western companies operating in the third world can literally walk away from any problems they cause leaving the shit behind them. To call Union Carbide a disgusting nest of scumbags is to be charitable. If there is such a place as hell, i feel pretty sure they are headed for it.

For those who think I have exaggerated the scale and repercussions of the disaster, why not Google Bhopal Disaster and you will be amazed and appalled by what you read. A good start would be to visit this site. http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1203/p06s04-wosc.html

VOLUNTARY I D CARDS IN MANCHESTER = TURKEYS VOTE FOR CHRISTMAS.

Our stupid Government who always thinks it knows best and listens to nobody unless there is money it in for them initiated the "Voluntary" ID Card scheme in Manchester today and of course whenever there is a Christmas, there is always a Turkey to vote for it. Up steps a "reporter" from the Manchester Evening News, the paper that appears to support fluoride and any other old tosh that the Government comes up with.

Its been like this in Manchester for many years. Back in the day when a Council Leader Graham Stringer and his gang The Stringalongs was busy removing demonstrators who like most sane people were objecting to the Manchester Ringway Airports latest runway, nailed his colours to the mast and decided a runway was much better than boring old fuddy duddy villages like Styal. Or good air quality or integrated transport with real trains, Of such common sense and resolve are future ministers made.

Remember the congestion charges fiasco. It was going to bring lots of dosh into the city and reduce traffic, congestion and the terrible emissions which were killing us all. Best of all, all this dosh would be invested in super-duper new public transport. Perhaps the good folks of Manchester (and here i can reveail i was born and bred there)remembered the pledges and promises of proper and fully integrated transport nationwide which Johnny Presscot was going to bring. He even said we were to hold him to it. Surprise surprise, it just didnt happen, he didnt even do diddly squat. Result Manchester with its ring roads and motorways is more congested than ever. But the good folks of Manchester remembered the broken promises and gave the congestion charge the bums rush.

Naturally the toadies jumped at the chance when Fluoridation of the water was announced. Step forward the Manchester Evening News which even orchestrated an anti-bottled water campaign. Even United Utilities joined in the fun attempting to rubbish bottled water on grounds of expense and pollution. Naturally they hadnt bothered with anything so trivial as research which could have shown them that with all its weaknesses and pollution problems bottle water would always win out over tap water with fluoride in it. In fact any old bucket of crap would. Even the plastic bottles could be recycled and new sources of oil to make them with could actually be sustainable if they were made from corn oil or hemp.

They overlooked another little thing too in their haste to do their masters bidding. United Utilities were also purveyors of water of course, a monopolistic legacy of the dark days of Thatcherism. but even she knew that compettition and choice are important to consumers and and governments who need votes and, though it may be permissable to advertise that your water is better than the oppositions, its not permissable to claim that the compettitors water is a pile of crap. Imagine for example, ASDA producing adverts saying dont shop at Sainsburys. When me learned friends were tipped off and a few phone calls were received, the bottled water hate campaign evaporated faster than the water itself in a heatwave.

So here they are again. the MEN has found a bimbo reporter to appear on the BBC and say how wonderful ID Cards really are, even despite in the nightfall of New Labour project the Card scheme voluntary or otherwise will be scrapped whether the Tories or the Lib Dems take power and believe me, it cannot happen fast enough. Would i like to get rid of New Labour, yes i would most certainly, I could handle a dose of Real Labour though with public services not stuffed with quangos and PCTs and assorted suits and seat pollishers serving their time and waiting for their gongs.

And no ministers like the incompetent Jack (i am against fluoridation but not enough to ever dare say anything against it now I am in government) and his bully boys. And certainly we dont need toadies like Andy Gis'a Job Burnham who will do anything say anything and go anywhere to further his ignominious career and bank account and of course, lets not forget the Home Sec, Alan Johnson who no doubt thinks that ID Cards will be very popular once the population have swallowed enough fluoride. Bad news guys, we dont want ID Cards and wont be turning ourselves in at the police station voluntarily on the off chance we may have inadvertently broken some petty new law the government thought up because it might be a vote winner. And of course last but not least Fluoride itself, seeing as you like it so much guys, why dont you drink it yourself, all of it and as soon as possible and then jump into a bin bag or wheelie bin. Dont worry, it will be collected in a fortnight or so and no one will ever know you were there.

FLUORIDE? CLIMATE CHANGE?. GM FOODS? IT'S ALL THE SAME RULES TO INDUSTRY AND GOVERNMENT

PROFESSOR NUTT LOCKS ANTLERS WITH GORDON BROWN

The row between Professor Nutt the chair of the Brown Governments Drugs Advisory Committee intensified on BBC radio four this morning and i make no secret of my support for the Professor. I do however differ over one point he made about the government. He said that Browns Government was the first to ignore scienfic advice of its own appointed experts. In their conclusions the York Revew noted a dearth of detailed and reliable studies in the past and could not categorically recommend an expansion of water fluoridation in the UK and said much needed to be done to establish safety and efficacy.

Despite this the Tony Blair Government decided to push new legislation through parliament to make it possible to force water providers to add fluoride to water supplies. The York Review had not recommended this. Therefore the Brown Governement was at least the second government to think it knew better than its experts.

The issues of assorted drugs most notably cannabis have been studied closely but never the less the government has ignored the science or medical advice except where it was convenient to do so and has thus politicised what should have been a science bassed decision in law making. Drug use and health issues should not be enshrined in law by politicians who are for the most part rather stupid on such matters. The Governments record on disasterous IT decisions is a glaring example and untill Brown intellectually challenged and scientificall illiterate bunch of plonkers learns to discriminated between science and politics, we wil all be at the mercy of blinkered and vested intrests who will continue to tell us what we can and cannot ingest and worst of all, will continue to force us to take substances which we never wanted and certainly never voted for. Fluoride being the most toxic example to date.

So professor Nutt, you are correct in practically every detail except one. Browns Government really is not the first to talk through its arse and then formulate law from its own flatulence.

FAREWELL PROFESSOR NUTT

It seems like only yesterday and in fact it was only yesterday that I posted about another outburst of common sense from Professor David Nutt, the chair of the Governments drug advisory panel. He was yet again desperately trying to hammer home the message that the Government had got it all wrong yet again. They had completely failed to get the drug problem in perspective by first reducing the classification of cannabis and then only months later re-classifying it. He had simply reminded them that the real enemies were alcohol and tobacco which were killing of tens of thousands of people every year. He dared to go further and famously said that horse riding was more dangerous than taking LSD.

Of course the government knew better. It didnt care for mind expanding substances because its minds, or what passed for them in the cabinet, were as usual, closed to all except more expenses claims and sucking up to big business because of the tax benefits this yielded. For example, It had only recently relaxed alcohol licensing laws to allow 24 hour drinking and did nothing to stem the endless supply of cheap plonk available in the supermarkets. It then began a long process of hand wringing about "binge drinking" which a cursory glance at real life policing in our towns would convince anyone that we now had a plonk pandemic. True it may be that the tax proceeds from the sale of alcohol were huge, but they were soon whittled down when the real costs of police and courts man hours, the overflowing A and E units of hospitals at weekends, the carnage on the roads and crimes of violence were taken into consideration.

Quite obviously David Nutt was a real thorn in their side. A government that believes it knows everything and is never wrong, hates to be reminded publicly that it frequently is. A good first step would be for the Government to simply stop referring to "Drink and Drugs" as though there was some kind of difference when any fuel doth know that there is none, Alcohol and tobacco are drugs, and very clearly some of the most dangerous and injurious to health and o f course very addictive. An artist friend of mine developed a heroine addiction, living and working with it for more than fifteen years. At last tired of the expense, the poor quality of the drug which was frequently cut by all kinds of dangerous white powders and his consequent physical and mental decline, decided to go Cold Turkey. He stopped literally overnight and never looked back. When i next saw him i congratulated him on his resolve and strength of character to be able to do this when so many were unable to do so. He grinned and shook his head and said, if was as you say such a strong character i would also be able to give up cigarettes. Not only have i not managed to stop smoking, I am a chain smoker and cannot even cut down let alone stop. Tobacco, he said was much worse than heroine.


So today Professor Nutt was given the bums rush. This will prove to be a pyrrhic victory however and as one pundit on TV only a couple of hours ago yet again pointed out, this will come back and bite them in the lower cheeks. However did we manage to elect idiots like Home Sec, Alan Brown and Health Minister (sic) Andy Burnham whose collective intellectual stature does not even come up to the shoulders of a garden gnome?? Saddest of all is the worrying fact that waiting in the wings is yet another bunch of intellectual dwarves and self-seekers. As the Hippies used to say apparently with some justification, "whoever you vote for, the Government gets in !"

PS..... SORRY ABOUT THE LACK OF PARAGRAPHS BUT BLOGGER SEEMS TO HAVE FORGOTTEN HOW TO DO THEM.

HOW STUPID IS THE UK GOVERNMENT ?

The words associated with stupidity in the Thesaurus include absurdity, apathy, asininity, battiness, brainlessness, doltishness, fatuity, fatuousness, feeble-mindedness, idiocy, ignorance, imbecility, imprudence, incapacity, ineptitude, injudiciousness, insensibility, lunacy, nitwittedness, nonsense, obtuseness, puerility, shallowness, silliness, simplicity, slowness. It is of course difficult to quantify stupidity as such a definition would depend on the time and the place. At an early stage of human development when humans first climbed down from the trees, stupidity would be obvious to the humans of today due to the accidents caused by trial and error ending in disappointment, today and here in the technical and scientific vastness of the future it is less easy to determine. It can be disguised by various forms of artifice to appear as wisdom when in fact its a load of bollocks.

This reaches a pinnacle when it becomes enshrined in orthodoxy and appears as dogma. The Governments attitude to water fluoridation exhibits this very clearly and can therefore be seen for the stupidity it really is. But this is nothing new and today's news from the Governments own chief drug advisor demonstrates all of the above rather well.

Professor David Nutt (Nutt by name but clearly not by nature) today again condemned the Governments re-classification of Cannabis as a class B drug when it had originally determined that it was in fact a class C substance and therefore comparatively innocuous when compared with the evils of alcohol, tobacco, LSD Heroine and crack cocaine. Professor Nutt, chairman of the Governments Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and his colleagues, must be getting pretty sick and tired of being ignored and rubbished by Government front benchers who appear to know little about anything of importance.

The Brown Gov sets up the Advisory Council to look at drug classification then of course because it does not like the councils findings, first implements them then at the behest of the hyenas and snakes in the Tabloids, decides to do a U turn, creating confusion amongst the minds of young users and of course making it more desirable. It behaved in a similar cavalier fashion over its York Review on Fluoride which recommended no further expansion of water fluoridation because research was poor and their were too many dangerous unknowns. The Government even rewrote the conclusion to make it appear that the York panel were in favour when of course they were not. When Governments behave in such a dishonest way, is it any wonder that no one trusts them any more about anything.

To emphasis this lets briefly look at the MP expenses. Not only have they been milking the system en masse for many years, they behave as though they are amazed that anyone else is amazed let alone annoyed. Now they are wondering why they are being forced to pay it all back and why the British public have no sympathy for their plight. Perhaps they have merely demonstrated publicly that the crap always floats to the top as a quick listing of the current cabinet seems to prove. Both New Labour and the Conservatives should remember that opposition parties DO NOT WIN ELECTIONS but GOVERNMENTS DO LOSE THEM.

As a child of the 60's I am not unacquainted with drugs of various kinds. Alcohol made me sick and made me think i was brilliant as i fell on my face in public. Intelligent and sophisticated friends and colleagues turned into slobbering animals in front of me and when cannabis came on the scene i found it a blessed relief to remain coherent whilst intoxicated. I used it regularly and even passed two driving tests whilst under its influence. This was at a time when the Police broke down doors, wrecked homes and stole property whilst searching for only a roach. Looking back on it dope smokers or eaters were seemingly treated with the same hatred as we today save for paedophiles.

For the Love Generation this was Tough Love indeed. Even today when Pot smoking or growing a plant for personal use should elicit only a caution from the Bill, we find a local Plod breaking down doors to do just this. Ignorance seems to start at the top and work its way down until it manifests as arrogant assumptions based on little other than personal bias and ignorance.

Fluorine is undoubtedly a very dangerous and toxic substance and cannabis comparatively harmless but when you have a government and ministers of the appalling standard currently in power and who think exactly the opposite, its little wonder that many of my friends ask when why I even bother to try to explain the true facts on fluoride. Clearly There are none so blind as those who will not see. I recall what the late great and sadly missed DJ John Peel said to me when i was campaigning to stop the damage being done to the BBC by the John Birt media terrorists. He read out my letters on his program and then wrote back to me privately wishing me well with my campaigns and i clearly remember his parting shot. "The best of luck with your campaigns but don't ever forget that you are battling dickheads." We still are John, we still are.

REFERENDA ON FLUORIDE ARE NOT THE ANSWER

I strongly agree with Elizabeth McDonagh's comments about Referenda and i know that i am not alone. Its ok to make a statement and generate publicity by demonstrating the strength of public opinon against fluoridation but this has already been done countless times across the UK. A referendum fails to tackle the central fact that mass medication is the imposition of medication on a group or even an individual without their consent. This would be the case even if it was "safe and effective" and actually worked. The idea of fluoridation ignores and punishes those who in a democracy should not only have a right to refuse and vote against an idea but also to refuse medical treatment.except possibly in a case where an individual becomes a danger to others. As far as i am aware, tooth decay is not contagious.

Compulsory Fluoridation is a betrayal of democracy for which our parents and grand parents fought in world wars to uphold. Flawed it may be but its probably the best of the options currently available and it should therefore be strengthened rather than weakened. . Even now our sons and daughters are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to uphold and protect the principles and freedoms of democracy yet seemingly our own government does not see fit to allow its own citizens here in the UK to experience the benefits.

Not one single person should be forced to take fluoride without their individual consent, not even by a doctor and very certainly not by an elected MP or Government Minister with absolutely no medical qualifications and in many cases, little evidence of common sense or self preservation as recent events have demonstrated.. If i want to purchase a house i go to an estate agent not a politician, if i want to go on Holiday i visit a travel agent not an MP and if i want a medical examination or a prescription i visit a doctor and certainly not a government minister who one would expect to be busy with affairs of state or indeed a personal expenses claim. Even then I reserve the right to consider a doctors opinion and if i wish, refuse to accept the proffered medidation. A referendum on fluoride would give credibility to fluoride when we all know there is none and this would merely act as a distraction from the central issue.

The judicial review is a useful and important way of highlighting the illegality, and the lack of democracy and genuine consultation processes of fluoridation, but this should not even be necessary in a democracy just as unsafe and ineffective or uneconomic practices should not be used by a Government agency or public water supplier. It is high time that our elected representatives and their agents, realised that they are spending and in many cases, wasting OUR time and OUR money and that we as a nation can no longer afford this. Politicians are elected by all of us who vote, to carry our our wishes and they constantly must be reminded that they are not ordained by God. If you have a toothache and I am forced to take a painkiller, it not only sets a precedent for even more tampering with what should be pure and unadulterated water, it will not help your toothache and may even make me ill. Therefore we must be prepared to say NO to fluoride at the local and National level, not only online but also in the media, the courts of law, and the ballot box.