A Horizon of Desperate Events

Black holes are unpleasant things to be around, and that's not just because they're places so warped that mathematics means nothing inside them. All the familiar rules get twisted up around them, and if you're not skillful or you're not paying attention it's easy to end up getting your big, shiny starship trapped forever. Given the right black hole, you could cross the event horizon and the only indication would be all the light of the universe winking out behind you. You're perfectly fine, for the moment -- but you're always getting closer to the singularity, the ultimate destructor.

This is kind of how I feel about modern politics, specifically the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union. Seventeen million people decided it would be a totally rad idea to skim the event horizon, and come now, it couldn't possibly be as bad as the rest of the crew was saying. Except now the universe has gone out behind them, and every trajectory in spacetime leads closer to the singularity, and they're realizing that playing chicken with a black hole is, in fact, not the wisest decision anyone has made.

I'm seeing commentary pop up now -- Charles Stross, for one, has a good rundown here -- that the UK may not have crossed the event horizon after all, that there's still a way out of the situation and a way to stay in the European Union. Whether it's a second referendum to say "actually, about that, wasn't that a capital joke, simply capital" or clauses in the Scottish and Northern Irish constitutions that could give them vetos over leaving the EU if you squint, there's a lot of desperation out there to walk it back.

Personally, I think it's not going to happen. Things have already gone too far for that. A wound can be healed, but it can't be uninflicted. Words, once said, cannot be unsaid. Democracy is an axiom of the United Kingdom and the European Union, and saying "whoops, just kidding!" undermines that whole foundation. I know it would be better for everyone for the UK to stay in the EU; my personal preference is for them to stay.

But they can't, not anymore. Look at it this way: if you took a shit on your boss's desk, how well-disposed do you think she would be to your frantic, frenzied apologies, your begging to not be fired, when she discovered you wiping your ass with a dayplanner? We've all experienced times in our lives where we wish more than anything we could rewind time, use the Omega-13 to correct a single mistake, but that never happened for any of us and I highly doubt it's going to happen for the UK.

The EU is not going to take a punch to the face with a smile. They're going to break the UK to the greatest extent they can, pour encourager les autres. Even as someone whose background is English, who knows people over there who are already broken by this -- I honestly can't say I blame the EU, or that I would do any different were I in its place.

In their way, institutions can be as cold and as mechanical as black holes. We forget that to our peril.

What Happens When You Don't Learn from History

Everyone gets nostalgic now and again. Whether it's a comfortable place you can't return to, a fuzzy old sweater that disappeared in a move, or just ordinary pining for the supposed simplicity of years gone by, it's deeply human to look back at the past and be convinced that things were so much better back then. This kind of ordinary, idle nostalgia is common but harmless these days--hell, when it comes to the economy, it's probably more significant than you would think.

It's not all like that, though. It's one thing to be nostalgic for your favorite toys or Saturday morning cartoons from when you were a kid; it's something else entirely to be nostalgic for something that is recognized as more and more loathsome with the passage of history. Things like the European colonial empires! Sure, I could possibly forgive Europeans of the 1960s or so feeling that sense of loss and regret, that they'd been on top of it all and where was the justice? A lot of things have changed in fifty years, many of them for the better.

Conrad Black doesn't think so. After all, the last fifty years saw him spend some time in prison. Now that he's out, he's making up for lost time... and who better to pen a wistful regret for how much better than its post-colonial replacements the British Empire was than an ex-colonial British criminal? When I came across his latest opus, "Post-Colonial Killing Fields" in the National Review, my jaw hung open; I couldn't believe I was actually reading something that had been written in 2012. The tone of the article belongs more to 1912.

"No one could seriously dispute," says good ol' Conrad, "that almost all of sub-Saharan Africa, all of North Africa except Morocco, all of the Middle East except Israel and Jordan and most of the oil-rich states, and the entire former British Indian Empire were better governed by Europeans."

I have no words.

Yeah, because when I think of the British Empire, the first thing I think of is "freedom." Because doesn't everyone associate colonial oppression with freedom?

Conrad's thesis is effectively this--that it doesn't matter how good or bad the Europeans were, because the things that happened after their former colonies gained independence were a lot worse, and so in retrospect the things the Europeans did seem not all that bad. Now, I was brought up with the notion that two wrongs don't make a right, but that's not all that this is. This is willful ignorance. Sure, he can admit all he wants that Belgium was "frequently inexcusably heavy-handed (!!!) in the Congo" - that does not absolve Belgium from responsibility for what its colony became. Witness, for example, the time of the Congo Free State, an absolute monarchy under the thumb of King Leopold II where the logical response to villages not meeting their quota of rubber gathering was execution, where communities were levelled to make room for plantations, and where decades of forced labor killed millions.

That kind of experience can seriously fuck up a country. Is it any surprise that the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in the state it's in today, when it has that in its history?

Conrad similarly glosses over India's experience of being dominated by the United Kingdom, emphasizing the legal and linguistic legacy it left behind in India, but glossing over the negatives--to hear Conrad tell it, the end of British colonial domination in India came "with scarcely any violence, apart from the regrettable episode at Amritsar in 1919, and the sectarian relocations when they left." In other words, the intentional massacre of as many as a thousand people is "regrettable," and the displacement of tens of millions of people and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947 can be summed up as "relocations." Incidentally, Conrad's overview completely ignores other "regrettable episodes" such as the Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre, where British troops murdered hundreds of non-violent protestors in Peshawar, and conveniently ignores the fact that there were already significant independent states in India before they were conquered by Europeans.

As for the French, well, even though they may have been "less benign than the British" they "were splendid city planners in Saigon, Dakar, Casablanca, Beirut..." Yeah, because we all know that if you build nice cities, it totally forgives rapaciousness and conquest and exploitation. He even takes it as far as colonial America--and sure, when you compare notes the Thirteen Colonies weren't treated all that badly, most likely because they were inhabited by white people, but that still doesn't excuse the lack of representation that was one of the big rallying points in the runup to the American Revolution.

Let me sum this up real quickly, here: modern states that were European colonies were not better off when they were European colonies, and there's a simple reason for it that goes beyond the lack of representation, the oppression, and general exploitation. European colonies were run for the benefit of the colonial master, not the colonies themselves - if a certain thing improved the lot of a colony, it would be because the ruling colonial power believed it to be in its own best interest. Choice is sacred, self-determination is vital, and the colonies of Europe had neither.

Seeking Justice in Norway

One hundred and twenty-three years ago today, a boy was born in the Austrian town of Branau am Inn. Fifty years later, the man that boy became launched the bloodiest, most destructive war in the history of the world. Tens of millions died trying to bring him to justice, but in the end he took his own life beneath the ruins of Berlin before justice could catch up to him. There's no physical trace of him left today - the Soviets made sure of that - but in spirit, Adolf Hitler will always be with us; a midnight presence just beyond our vision, an echoing reminder of what humans can do when they sacrifice their humanity. We can't forget him, because to do so would be to invite him back into the light and allow his cycle to start all over again.

I can't help but think of Hitler when I read of the trial of Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed "Justicar Knight" responsible for the murder of seventy-seven people last summer because, in his fundamentally broken mind, he was fighting "anti-European racism" generated by "media and the Marxist elites." I can't recall if the media had enough power by the 1920s for Hitler to fulminate against it in Mein Kampf, but it nevertheless sounds starkly familiar. During his latest day in court, Breivik described hunting down teenagers on Utoya, specifically searching for ones hiding themselves away.

What's clear enough is that Breivik is cold and Breivik is remorseless. There's no question on the verdict that will be handed down at the end of the trial. On Wednesday, articles began to surface that Breivik only sees two "just and fair" ways for it to go; either acquittal, which is about as likely as Germany deciding to celebrate Adolf Hitler Day, or execution.

Hey, just because they said you're going to hang by the neck until dead, it doesn't mean you can't do it in a colorful way. Also, I suspect this might actually be a shoelace.

Norway, like most of the world, has rid itself of capital punishment - for peacetime cases such as Breivik's, judicial executions have been off the books for more than a hundred years, but exceptions were made for cases such as Vidkun Quisling, leader of the collaborationist Norwegian government during the war. Nevertheless, when I first heard of this, my first thought was that Breivik was right in his way, that the only just thing would be to execute him. That he was no longer fully human by virtue of his actions, that he was a monster, a thing that walked and talked and looked like us but was not one of us anymore and could never be one of us again, and that it became our responsibility to deal with him the way one would deal with a rabid dog.

But--I had forgotten that old Klingon proverb, that revenge is a dish best served cold. To say that there will be no measure of revenge in the punishment that's handed down on Breivik would be to ignore the way humans work. But to feed his twisted idea of what is "just and fair" would only let him win, the way Hitler "won" all those years ago. Execution isn't justice, not really. Execution is revenge, and execution enables the condemned to escape justice.

Let's go back to the end of the Second World War. Imagine if things had gone just slightly different... if Adolf Hitler had been captured alive by the Allies. He would have been brought to Nuremberg, he would have been the main event of Nuremberg, and there's absolutely no question that when it was over, Adolf Hitler would hang. Understandable, really - but not full justice, either.

Imagine a different world, where Hitler was captured, tried, and imprisoned for the rest of his life - say a fortress in Scotland or on St. Helena. If Hitler lived to be eighty, he would have died in 1969 - time enough to see the division of Germany, the rise of the Warsaw Pact, the construction of the Berlin Wall. He would not only have seen his dream of a thousand-year empire crumble, he would see Germany ground down and have to live with the knowledge that it was his fault - and only then would he die, an solitary old man, broken and powerless, hated and mocked but never forgotten.

To give Breivik what he wants would be a miscarriage of justice. The only just thing is to do what the law already sets down - to imprison him, and once he's behind bars he won't ever see freedom again. What he will see is a country and a world that goes on, that moves beyond him... that forgets about him. Breivik is no Hitler; while those who died at his hands deserve to be remembered and memorialized, the only just punishment for Anders Behring Breivik is for him to grow old knowing that he was a failure and that he will be forgotten.

Beware of Greeks Gifting Bears

Just when I was beginning to hold out hope that the worst was behind us, that things might finally be on the road to recovery, that my appearing-eventually-in-On Spec story wouldn't be horribly dated by the time it comes out because it supposes the continued existence of the euro and the European Union in the late 21st century, this happens. This, in this case, is Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's snap referendum call - you remember that agreement the Greek government hashed out with the other eurozone leaders a few days ago to keep old Hellas from collapsing into austerity and default and so on? Unless something changes, the birthplace of democracy will decide its future democratically, with the Greek people voting on whether or not they will remain in the eurozone and thereby accept the heavily austere conditions attached to the next EU rescue package... but without it, Greece will literally not have the money to pay its bills in the next few months.

What a way to start off November.

The changing of the guard in Syntagma Square, Athens - March 2000, before there was such a physical thing as a euro and before everything went pear-shaped.

Referenda aren't all that uncommon, granted, but for a situation such as this - they're extraordinary. Generally, in my experience, referenda surround relatively simple questions; the Quebec independence referendum, for a sufficiently broad definition of "simple" when you consider how the question was worded, or British Columbia's keep-the-HST referendum, which went down in flames because people thought it would be a fun time to punish the government without regard to the consequences. It's that, in particular, that concerns me about the idea of the referendum. Public opinion is prone to emotionalism, and all too often public opinion doesn't care about consequences.

This referendum plan the single most monumental example of governmental ass-covering I can think of. From the Prime Minister's perspective, it must be gravy; if the people vote in favor of the austerity - just like how British Columbians voted in a landslide to keep the HST, har har - then the government can abdicate all responsibility for creating this situation to begin with and just dump it in the people's collective lap. If it doesn't, well... to be honest, I'm not entirely certain what would happen then. I don't imagine Athens would ignore the will of the people after going out of its way to ask them, but despite the loathsome nature of the austerity demands themselves - such as the whole "sell your continually profitable assets to pay your creditors now and, incidentally, enrich some banks and corporations" thing - I've never seen any alternatives to this austerity offered in the media.

If it was just Greece, it wouldn't be an earthshaking problem. But it isn't just Greece; this is the reason why globalization was not all that good of an idea. What Greece does will echo across Earth, and do you really think that the rest of the world is just going to stand by while the Greek government aims its torpedoes at recovery because it doesn't want to own up to how much it and its predecessors fucked up? Governments have been forcibly toppled for less.

Of course, there's no assurances things will go even that far. PM Papandreou's government is holding on to power with a razor-thin majority, one that has been steadily weakened by a constant stream of defections. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so by the time it goes live on Thursday morning the situation may well have changed dramatically. That's how these things happen.

There are times when the threat of democracy can make things move... and there are times when the duty of a government is to take responsibility for its own actions. On the latter, Greece is failing rather stupendously.

Defaulting to the Plutocrats

Things are not well in the birthplace of democracy. To be honest, Greece has been on shaky ground for a while; it's only recently, however, that threats of Greece defaulting on its debt, and potentially throwing the "recovery" - such as it is - into jeopardy, have been making headlines. Yesterday, the Hellenic Parliament passed its second austerity vote, necessary to secure a €28 billion bailout from the European Union, despite fierce opposition from the thousands of people on the streets of Athens.

This is, predictably enough, being framed in the media as Greeks being unwilling to lose their state-funded entitlements and wanting to continue to live in the lap of luxury while German and French taxpayers foot the bill. Like many frames the media hangs on the wall, it's a bit crooked. Remember that this isn't the first round of austerity measures that the Greek government has just barely managed to squeeze by - and it's the Greeks that are going to be squeezed as a result.

I picked up this 100-drachma note in 2000, only a couple of years before the euro came into force and all the old currencies of Europe were swept away. Back then, with sovereign control of its own currency, Greece wouldn't be in nearly this bad of a situation. Such is progress!

Nor is it just that. Part of the deal with the bailout is that the Greek government is selling many of its assets - such as its lottery, its 55% stake in Athens International Airport, some of its real estate, and so on. Now, one might think that this perfectly normal; particularly Athens' interest to lessen its stake in the national railway system, which as of May lost €1 billion a year and had a debt of €10 billion. But look it at it realistically - the government isn't going to want to sell something that isn't profitable, or which they think can't be made profitable before the sale. If that was the case, who'd want to buy it?

What I suspect here, what I see here, is another triumph of neoliberal ideology - the same ideology that gave us the wonderful philosophy "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" - such as when a bank makes cash hand over fist it's laissez les bon temps roulez for the bosses and investors, but when it loses a wad on a stupid risk, suddenly it's the taxpayers who have to have to shovel the green back into the money bins.

It's something that's never actually said outright, but is hinted at this way and that by the actions of governments, usually conservative - "the government has no business making money." Witness the 1999 Ontario provincial election, where the government of Mike Harris sold Highway 407 for $4.1 billion, under a ninety-nine year lease, to a group of private investors less than two years after the highway had opened. It could have been a consistent money source for the government, but... there was an opportunity there to balance the budget by getting rid of state assets at fire-sale prices! Other examples aren't hard to find; look at the sale of Chicago's parking meters, for instance, or the noises Rob Ford was making about selling the city's stake in Toronto Hydro during the election.

If Greece was really expected to pay down its debt, it wouldn't be selling - or, perhaps more appropriately, forced to be selling - profitable assets. Without those, the government will have less money to work with in general, and thus be less able to pay back the debt. But this isn't about debt, I don't believe. Greece's debt as a percentage of GDP was 142.8% in 2010 - put bluntly, even if Greece put every single euro it had into paying down its debt this year, it would not be able to. Greece's debt problems have got so bad since joining the Eurozone that I don't think a default of some kind is avoidable anymore.

I doubt I'm the only one who suspects that. Thus, then, I can't see what's going in Greece as an honest attempt to stabilize the country - rather, I see it as an opportunity being taken advantage of by the unfettered psychopaths who have come to dominate the global economy, who care about little except the acquisition of greater and greater wealth. After all, Greece wants money, don't it? So it's a perfect time to pick up great formerly-government assets at bargain basement prices, and tap them ruthlessly for profit! Remember the railway? Don't forget how Reuters reported that "the government will try to sweeten the sale by closing loss-making routes and making other cost cuts."

Who does that sound like it's serving? The Greek people, those who the Greek government exists to serve - or the capitalists?

HEAT-1X Wave

Here's something you won't find in the Globe and Mail. To be honest, I'm having difficulty finding any reporting on it from North American sources; the New York Times may have something, of course, but I haven't read it out of principle since they decided to start their paywall off in Canada and only Canada. But as to what you won't find - it's simple. As of yesterday morning, the Danish space program has taken one step closer to the heavens.

Yes, Denmark has a space program... of a sort, albeit entirely unlike any other space program in the world today. That's because not only is it a private venture by Danish citizens, the Danes in question are also volunteers and amateurs. The non-profit organization Copenhagen Suborbitals organized the project; you may recall that I wrote about their first, ultimately unsuccessful, launch last year.

On Friday, the Danes didn't make it to space - but they did leave the surface. From a launch platform in the Baltic Sea off Bornholm, HEAT-1X successfully launched, went supersonic, and ultimately reached an altitude of 2.8 kilometers; not exactly kissing space, but pretty good for the first shot of a group of volunteer rocket scientists. As the launch occured around 7:30 Pacific Time, I wasn't awake to watch it - so here's a video.


So what does this mean - aside from the fact, of course, that rockets are awesome? For one part, it's a powerful reminder of just how far we've come in the last seventy-five years; Doctor Goddard never had anything this sophisticated, and the German program that would eventually create the V-2 had the resources and backing of a government behind it. We're in a different stage of rocketry now. The big questions have all been solved, thanks mostly to NASA; the challenge has shifted from science to engineering. Building the damn things is the more daunting part of a rocket launch now. This is just the first step in their program; with this success behind them, they're going to build to go higher and farther, with the ultimate goal of sending a human into space.

I don't think anyone really thought there was ever a place for non-governmental or non-corporate rocketry, considering that rockets tend to be beefy and expensive things. The only alternate voice I recall coming across was a short story in, I believe, a 1980s issue of Analog where basically the entire US space program had been run on an amateur basis, resulting in a world where even the Boy Scouts operated their own space station. At the time, I thought the idea was somewhat unrealistic.

If that's the case, then all Copenhagen Suborbitals had to do was change the nature of reality. In some respects, that's exactly what they did. Space launches are no longer something that can "of course" only be done by governments or powerful corporations. With enough support and enough drive, maybe all we need to get beyond the world is each other, working together toward one goal.

It's people such as these - people such as us - who build the road to the future.

What a Day for a Rumfart

No matter how much I dislike the phrase "the sky's the limit," since it betrays its origins in a time when humanity was chained to the ground, the fact of the matter is that except for the space agencies of the United States of America, Russian Federation, and People's Republic of China, it's still pretty accurate. In aiming for space, we on Earth face what's quite possibly the highest barrier to entry we've ever encountered, orders of magnitude beyond even the Polynesian colonization of the Pacific islands by dead reckoning alone. From Sputnik on, space has been a game for governments and corporations - while we can only gawk, us prisoners of gravity.

The twenty-first century doesn't necessarily have to unfold the same way.

Copenhagen Suborbitals, a non-profit Danish rocket group, has recently come to the attention of the news - my only regret is that I didn't write about it sooner, when they were still obscure. Their goal is a modest one - just to build and launch the first crewed Danish space mission, and a private space mission at that. Copenhagen Suborbitals is supported by donations and grants, and with those the people behind it - many of them volunteers - have built HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE.

The rocket's first test was terminated only a few hours ago, when the attempt to launch from a homemade platform in the Baltic Sea - towed there in part by Nautilus, Copenhagen Suborbitals' homemade submarine - was scrubbed by a frozen liquid oxygen valve. Apparently the heating system, a $10 hair dryer, was not up to the task. Also, a bad battery had to be replaced. Still, the rocket itself remains intact, and the launch window remains open for another twelve days.

Twelve days to shatter the paradigm of space travel from 1957 to today.

HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE installed on its launch platform. Photo by Ellinor Stenby, released to the public domain.

Governments have traditionally been the pathfinders for new, experminental, untested, and originally limited-use technologies. The military applications of air forces in the First World War and mail delivery contracts in the 1920s gave the fledgling aeronautics industry the push it needed to keep on rolling to the present day. Likewise, governments invested the vast sums of money necessary for research, development, and proving of increasingly more sophisticated rocket technologies; today, with those lessons and solutions in the books, the doors are open for agencies with more limited resources to give it a go.

Limited resources on one hand, but on the other, limited bureaucracy - NASA is, regrettably, choked by its bureaucracy and utterly dependent on a generally uninterested government. Sure, the engineers and boffins at Cape Canaveral and JPL have come up with tons of great ideas - but the nature of government work is such that good ideas can get buried for lack of resources or lack of will to see them through. Not so for something like Copenhagen Suborbitals, which is fundamentally a hobbyist organization - though some of these hobbyists have worked with NASA and know a thing or two about rocket science. This is a case of people making something for the sake of making it - for the sheer joy of testing these frontiers, in the finest traditions of the human spirit. To me, the story of Copenhagen Suborbitals is even more compelling than that of SpaceX. Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen don't have the resources of Elon Musk, don't have the millions of dollars that are backing up his dream - but they're following the same road anyway.

Today Copenhagen Suborbitals is rattling the cage that we're all trapped in. Sooner or later, the lock is going to give way - and it's going to be an interesting time when that happens. It's been fifty years since the first flight of Yuri Gagarin, and here we are in a place and a time where non-profit hobbyists are zeroing in on a crewed flight into space. What might we see fifty years from now?

Also, if you were wondering, "rumfart" just means "spaceflight" in Danish.

PDP #243: Approaching Capri

The Italian island of Capri, a short jetboat ride from the Sorrento region, is one of the Mediterranean's older tourist draws. For ten years during the reign of Tiberius, it was the seat of the Emperor. I was there on March 12, 1998, and took this picture of the City of Capri, the island's main population center, from the deck of the jetboat that brought us in. My impression at the time was that "[the port of Capri] seems like it belongs on some island in the Caribbean. It is extremely rocky, with very large precipices, and if the stores are not in what is essentially one giant building, they are built into the rock face itself."

Had it been an actual Caribbean island, the sky probably would've been blue. But that's a minor issue.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

After Nuclear Twilight, Germany's New Day

I've heard it described as one of the most boring and bland elections of the twenty-first century. Yesterday, Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel won a second term and fresh mandate from the German people, and in cooperation with the Free Democratic Party will form a majority government. Previously, Merkel's Christian Democratic Union ruled with the support of the Social Democratic Party, but with the SPD down seventy-six seats, things have changed. In particular, now that the SPD is out of the equation, it appears that the German government will re-evaluate the controversial plan to decommission Germany's nuclear generating capacity.

At its height, nineteen nuclear power plants operated in Germany, although like much of the rest of the world the majority of its power is derived from coal-burning power plants, and nuclear's share of the electrical pie has been roughly stable since the mid-1980s. In 2000, despite a 1997 opinion poll which indicated 81% of the German population supported nuclear power, a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens announced that all nuclear power in Germany would be phased out by 2020.

I thought it was ridiculous then, and I still think it's ridiculous. Personally, I'd go so far to say that in the current climate, with the looming threat of climate change never so well known, holding on to a policy like this is evil. It wouldn't be the first time an evil act was committed by people who honestly believed they were doing a good thing.

Of Germany's nineteen nuclear plants in 2000, two have already been shut down. Controversy arose after the closure of the 672-megawatt Stade Nuclear Power Plant in 2003, with the German news site Tageblatt Online reporting on environmentalists opposing the construction of an 800-megawatt coal power plant to replace it. The BUND Kreisgruppe, an environmental organization active in Germany, called for the construction of what appear to be natural gas power plants - Google's translation is not exact - which would generate only half the emissions of a coal-fired power plant.

This is, obviously, far superior environmentally when compared to a nuclear power plant which produces exactly zero emissions.

The problem with modern environmentalism is that its wagon has been hitched to the anti-nuclear movement for quite a few decades, and as such it's at war with itself and with reality. Environmentalist campaigners talk about the need to introduce further renewables into the generation infrastructure, but a modern civilization cannot be fueled by solar and wind alone. There has to be a source of baseload power generation, and unless you're lucky enough to be near a good set of waterfalls or a geothermal zone, only coal and nuclear can effectively provide that. I couldn't consider myself an environmentalist living somewhere other than Ontario; fifty percent of this province's power is nuclear-generated, and much of the rest comes from hydroelectricity, clean and carbon dioxide-free.

It seems to me that a lot of these dedicated environmentalists have not caught up with today's reality. They're still fighting the crusades of the 1970s, still seeing nuclear power in the same jaundiced light cast by the threat of the Cold War. It's well past time for us to leave behind China Syndrome scaremongering, for us to look at nuclear power with eyes unclouded by Three Mile Island or Chernobyl. How many people do you think die every year in coal mine accidents, or from the pollutants spewed into the atmosphere by coal power plants all over the world?

Coal burning is representative of modern industrial barbarism. We owe it to ourselves and to the future to move away from it as soon as possible. Bravo to the new German government for readying itself to go down that road again.

Pickering Nuclear Generating Station - may it bring the light for decades to come