Our global pig-sty
von Heinz Gupta
For the sake of political correctness, let me say straight away: I have nothing against cows; they are charming useful and often tasty creatures.
What I am against is the fact that every few weeks a new “sacred cow” is hauled out of a cow-shed somewhere and paraded through our global village.
When this happens, the rumours and opinions that are spread are often not scientifically sound but only serve to polish the reputation of the authors, to worry ordinary citizens or to damage a particular industry. And these rumours are eagerly propagated by the equally stupid media.
Don’t you remember the Green’s crusade against plastics in general and especially against PVC?
How many years did it take and how much money did it cost, to convince these half educated types that plastics save much more energy in use than is used in their production and that using plastics means that less other resources such as wood from trees need to be consumed.
In my opinion the over inflated myth of CO2 being the guilty party for the earth’s warming is completely untenable. Anyone, who has flown in an aeroplane, will have seen from the reports given during the flight that at altitudes above 2.000 – 3.000 m awful minus temperatures are recorded.
That surely does not equate to a greenhouse. The reason for the ice is melting is quite different. We will go into that in another report. And then there is bird flu; bad, very bad for the thousands of birds that have been killed and probably no more people have died than would unfortunately die each year from “normal flu”.
Now we come to swine flu. The pharmaceutical companies are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of the uncountable numbers of vaccinations that will probably be needed. Even many doctors are sceptical about the necessity for and the effectiveness of vaccinations. Naturally governments jump on the band wagon of fear, because they don’t want anyone to be able to say of them later that they didn’t do anything for their citizens.
Next year we will probably have a sheep or camel flu, for which the same vaccine can probably be sold at a different dosage. A new source of panic rumours to frighten the population has been found in nano particles. The horror stories in some media are based on a very thorough and meticulous review of these materials from the federal environment office (UBA), in which the known advantages and potential for technical and medical developments, as well as the possible hazards for health and the environment, are summarised.
However, all these hazards have not yet been investigated, as the UBA states in its paper. Nevertheless these hazards in particular have been emphasised by several newspapers; following the journalistic maxim “bad news is good news” without considering that normal people are alarmed by this.
It is always the same with such warnings: if the predictions do not come about, they are quickly forgotten and we can breathe out again. If they do come to pass, then we always knew about it.
Your Heinz Gupta