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Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 12:31 am
Tim Dunlop celebrates:
I just received a review copy of Helen Caldicott’s new book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else (catchy!) from the publishers, Melbourne University Press. So all my whingeing about publishers not recognising the blogosphere has finally paid off!
Er, no it hasn’t.
“The world’s leading spokesperson for the antinuclear movement, Dr Helen Caldicott is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, the recipient of the 2003 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom and the inaugural Australian Peace Prize awarded by the Peace Organisation of Australia, 2006.”
That’s not Vladimir “Lannan”, is it?
To tell the truth, I didn’t know the old harpy was still alive. Seems like she’s been fulminating against fission for ages. Isn’t it about time for her to pass on the cadmium rod or whatever to a new generation of flat earth cranks?
He thinks they should have gotten supportive quotes from *real people* instead of Streep and Sheen. What are they? Fake people? I know, he probably meant educated people, but you’ve still got to love when he notes “I know Meryl Streep played Karen Silkwood in a movie…,” as if that qualifies her as an expert on nuclear power.
Posted by EmilyJones on 2006 07 10 at 02:15 PM • permalink
#5: Wasn’t it Meryl Streep who also testified before a congressional committee on the “dangers” of alar (the stuff they used to spray apples with)? And I recall, for a while there back in the 70’s and ‘80’s, there was a steady parade of non-experts testifying on matters concerning which they had no professional knowledge at all(e.g., Jack Klugman and Allen Alda testified on health care or some such thing, I suppose because they played doctors on TV).
#7, Stigwald: Is there a word for pathological aversion to nuclear power?
Stupidity.
Posted by Bruce Lagasse on 2006 07 10 at 04:18 PM • permalink
#7: Sorry, didn’t mean to mispell your name. (Sigivald, Sigivald, Sigivald . . . for 100 times)
Posted by Bruce Lagasse on 2006 07 10 at 04:22 PM • permalink
I remember some congressional committee had Sisey Spacek (or was it Sally Field?) testify in hearings about farm subsidies, because she had played a farmer. I thought it was rather testimony about the education of the committee members and the prevalent relativist and nominalist philosophies infecting the humanities departments of every major university at the time. Hey, if Walt Disney can draw it, or a screenwriter can imagine it, it must be real!
To tell the truth, I didn’t know the old harpy was still alive. Seems like she’s been fulminating against fission for ages. Isn’t it about time for her to pass on the cadmium rod or whatever to a new generation of flat earth cranks?
I, too, hadn’t thought of her for years, but according to the old harpy Caldicott’s website: The Smithsonian Institute has named Dr Caldicott as one of the most influential women of the 20th Century.
Yes indeed, she’s been enormously influential as witnessed by the disarmament of the world’s nuclear powers and the world-wide ban on nuclear energy.
Caldicott’s another of those gloomsday promoters who warned us in the 70’s that if we didn’t change our proliferative ways, we were doomed, I tell you, doomed as both a species and a planet. This apparently is her real sphere of influence:
“A timely warning, at a critical moment in world history, of the horrible consequences of nuclear warfare.” Walter Cronkite
“She showed me what one set-on-fire human being can do to shift the consciousness of the world.” Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking
“Helen Caldicott has been my inspiration to speak out.” Meryl Streep
Posted by Kyda Sylvester on 2006 07 10 at 05:07 PM • permalink
“She showed me what one set-on-fire human being can do to shift the consciousness of the world.”
So, Sister Prejean thinks Caldicott is a sort of Joan of Arc, eh? Well, “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em”.
I see old gasbag Cronkite got into the act, too. His imprimatur can almost always be taken as prima facieevidence that a given assertion is pure baloney.
“A timely warning, at a critical moment in world history, of the horrible consequences of nuclear warfare.” Walter Cronkite
‘Coz Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t enough.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2006 07 10 at 05:41 PM • permalink
Caldicott has been a magnificent anti-nuclear warrior but sad to say her days are numbered. She once said that the new research reactor at Lucas Heights would open over her dead body, and the project is now nearing completion…
Posted by Margos Maid on 2006 07 10 at 06:45 PM • permalink
- From Daimnation:
http://www.damianpenny.com/archived/002917.htmlHelen Caldicott, of course, was a useful idiot for the USSR long before Matthew Parris (see below). But even I was taken aback by this article, which reveals the degree to which she openly cooperated not only with Soviet front organizations, but with the Soviet government during the 1980s: [The post that was here, that was lifted in its entirety from the above-linked blog, has been removed. Copying entire blog posts, comments, articles, and what-have-you, is not allowed in the comments. If you wish to read what was here, visit the link above. Since a source link was provided, the commenter has not been banned, but he has been warned. By the way, the site linked above is run by a Canadian lawyer. I don’t know Damian Penny’s area of expertise, but it’s not a very good idea to lift things from a practicing lawyer’s site. That is all. The Management.]Posted by niobium2000 on 2006 07 10 at 06:56 PM • permalink
Melbourne was my university. Why does our University Press publish such ridiculous books? I think we also put out the Latham “Diaries.” I suspect that Louise Adler, the highly intelligent but dependably misguided partner of Max Gillies, is mostly to blame. Well, that and the original sin of having published Manning Clarke’s six-volume fantasy series A History of Australia.
I just received a review copy of Helen Caldicott’s new book, Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer to Global Warming or Anything Else (catchy!) from the publishers, Melbourne University Press. So all my whingeing about publishers not recognising the blogosphere has finally paid off!
No Tim D, there’s no payoff until someone actually buys this worthless dingbat’s book. You know, for actual money.
What are the odds that some other tenured dingbat will make this tome of fecal smearings a prescribed text so that unfortunate MU students will be forced to pay for it?
Posted by Mr Hackenbacker on 2006 07 10 at 08:51 PM • permalink
actually not all their titles are a waste of time – http://www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/catalogue/0-522-85284-X.html
Please note that the article on the Damian Penny site was itself lifted from an Australian website that does not exist anymore.
Posted by niobium2000 on 2006 07 10 at 09:24 PM • permalink
In the 80s the HR manager of a Ford Motor subsidiary (in Australia) where I worked was one of Caldicott’s cousins. He said the all the relatives – the whole family – regarded her as a loony.
Seems it was all downhill from there.
Posted by walterplinge on 2006 07 10 at 10:03 PM • permalink
To tell the truth, I didn’t know the old harpy was still alive.
It’s a half-life. She still shines, but it’s a dim bulb…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2006 07 10 at 10:27 PM • permalink
My memory isn’t the best, but wasn’t her husband (Richard Caldicott) on the news after the North Korean missile tests denying that North Korea was a threat to world peace and stating that the US was the real problem?
I bet anti-nuclear Helen feels that the North’s nuclear ambitions are justified too…
Posted by Art Vandelay on 2006 07 10 at 10:31 PM • permalink
Please note that the article on the Damian Penny site was itself lifted from an Australian website that does not exist anymore.
niobium, that’s no reason to continue the practice.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2006 07 10 at 11:24 PM • permalink
“niobium, that’s no reason to continue the practice”
Agreed.
Posted by niobium2000 on 2006 07 11 at 02:09 AM • permalink
Isn’t it amazing the number of truly evil people who are held up as exemplars? This woman’s work kept nuclear power plants from being built, and her kin at heart kept any power plants from being built. Or refineries. They are a huge part of the equation in the situation we face today in the Middle East. She has blood on her hands, but you’d never convince her, or any of the rest of them, of that fact.
And yes, Kyda, she was a part of tha Alar scare, which was a wholly bogus bit of theater that cost millions upon millions, caused the destruction of almost an entire harvest, and kept people from eating a perfectly healthy food.
Destruction all around her. And she wins awards and accolades. Something’s not right.
In the 80s the HR manager of a Ford Motor subsidiary (in Australia) where I worked was one of Caldicott’s cousins. He said the all the relatives – the whole family – regarded her as a loony.
I think you’ll find that a lot of the family are loony. Alison Broinowski her daughter, Richard Broinowski her son-in-law, Anna Broinowski her niece. This is what they invented gene-therapy for.
Posted by Mr Hackenbacker on 2006 07 11 at 11:47 PM • permalink
- The Age of course loves to run pieces by Helen Caldicott. Her latest diatribe in April attracted this rather blunt response:
19/4/06
Exquisite ignorance
HELEN Caldicott’s article (Opinion, 17/4) was nonsense. She claims that the noble gases xenon, krypton, argon are “deemed ‘inert’ by the nuclear industry”. They are deemed inert in every chemistry textbook. She has also forgotten (or more probably didn’t know about) the other three in this group – neon, helium and radon. No doubt she will now become scared of neon lights, party balloons and plasma screens. And the way she equated gamma rays with X-rays shows that her exquisite ignorance of chemistry is matched by her spectacular misunderstanding of physics…
Peter Cohen, OrmondhelenHelen responds inter alia:
Gases are dangerous
PETER Cohen (Letters, 19/4) rudely accuses me (Opinion, 17/4) of “exquisite ignorance”. Perhaps he needs to examine his own ignorance. The noble gases, argon, krypton and xenon, which emit high-energy gamma radiation (non particulate ionising radiation similar to X-rays) are chemically inert, a fact used by the nuclear industry to justify its uncontrolled “routine” daily release from reactors. However, they are readily absorbed through the lungs, and because of their high fat solubility, they migrate to fatty tissue where they irradiate adjacent organs with mutagenic and carcinogenic radiation. As such, they are biologically dangerous.
I’m not qualified to adjudicate but my gut feel is that Peter Cohen is not bluffing.
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Full of himself, isn’t he?