Letters to the Perthshire Advertiser and Courier - published and mostly
unpublished
Letter to the PA about recycling –
especially of cardboard and urine/sewage
Dear
Editor, - It was so good to read Michael Gallagher's well-informed and
well-reasoned critique of the old Council's decision to go ahead with an
incinerator. (Recycling questions still remain, June 1) If the new Council are open to reason then they should urgently reconsider.
On one
issue it seems to me there has to be scope for speedy progress. Cardboard
reprocessing facilities need not be at all high-tech nor expensive. If well
soaked in a minerals-rich nitrogenous medium - guess which! - and then left to rot under black plastic, local farmers
could receive a useful bonus of fertile compost.
Ever since
the Commission set up after the 'great stink of
This
decision, made against the advice of German chemist, Justus von Liebig,
led the latter to invent chemical fertiliser as
the next best thing, though, alas, his basic NPK model did nothing to make
up for the loss of trace minerals, which are gradually being removed from our
topsoil, and thus also our own bodies.
Even as
late as the fifties several Scottish municipalities used to recycle sewage as
harmless crud for gardeners and farmers to apply to our soil. The
sooner new sewage authorities are set up, separate from Scottish
Water, with mandates to save our precious minerals, the better for soil
and human health alike - and we could save a lot of money on health supplements
too!
At this
time of year many of us find ourselves with too much green matter in our
compost bins. So returning to cardboard, then even if unsoaked
in urine it can be torn up and mixed in with grass and weeds to
ensure a good brown/green balance (carbon/nitrogen).
The above
tip was discovered by research at the Centre for Alternative Technology in
Letter to PA about the politicians approach to 'anti-social behaviour'
Dear Editor,
Living in Craigie I cannot say that current levels of litter, vandalism, graffiti and the dreaded dog fouling amount to quite the scourges that Elizabeth Smith and Alexander Stewart seem to depict in your report, 'Zero tolerance on anti-social problem'.
This said there is always room for improvement, and some people have been seriously upset by predatory bogus callers, among them my Windsor Terrace neighbour, the late John Hardie, whose system took months to recover from one sneak invasion and petty theft.
What perturbs me in the conventional populist bandwaggon against anti-social behaviour are the following:
A) There is a ratcheting up of condemnatory self-righteousness against 'perpetrators', almost as if they were some different (and - in coded fashion - lower class) kind of species altogether, rather than being somebody's presently troubled or momentarily heedless loved one.
This latter realisation opens the way to more compassionate reflections, such as: How has such unhappiness and self-centredness arisen? How can it pass away? And which of us has never trespassed on the forebearance of our neighbours?
These are good thoughts to ponder as we take two minutes to stick broken glass from near the South Inch play area into the womble bag we stick in our pocket each morning. By contrast, I find that fulminating against the wickedness of those responsible merely adds some more glass (metaphoricaly speaking) to my individual psyche and our collective difficulties.
No amount of escalation of our rhetoric of abhorrence will work unless our approach is community-oriented and grounded in compassion and genuine inquiry into how problems arise. What about those who sold or distilled the drink, for instance?
And what about the gender dynamics, which conventional politicians of either sex resolutely ignore? These dynamics trap youngsters on a compulsive anxiety-provoking treadmill of having to keep proving anew the unreal phantom of 'real manhood' by performances such as loud shouting or devil-may-care hurling of bottles to impress their equally insecure mates?
B) Tory and Labour listings of those behaviours which are identified as 'making life intolerable' are remarkably selective. For example it invariably distracts attention from the crimes of the powerful, as 'our boys' sucked into illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to make life truly intolerable for our other brothers and sisters who live there, not least by the release of vast quantitites of 'depleted' uranium which have sent cancer rates through the roof, especially in foetuses and children under five.
This nuclear poison then starts to travel round the world and shows up in steadily rising rates for cancer and other debilitating conditions also here in douce Perth - which one of us does not know of one or more sufferers? (Of course there are many other causes, so much so that we can say that 'the health care crisis' is ultimately a privatised way of experiencing our collective ecological crisis.)
Perhaps if these isotopes of uranium looked like brightly coloured ping pong balls, our would-be people's champions would begin to speak out about the crimes of the powerful and our disaffected youth might begin to respect the political process as something more than an unreal farce based on official pretence and double standards?
C) Speaking
of which a neighbour's daughter was beaten up in
another part of the city, by a lassie out of her mind on hard drugs. As senior
police admitted to me only last week, it is common knowledge that since 'we'
went into
A recent File on Four investigation concluded that much of the heroin entering the UK comes via protected channels - with the biggest traffickers protected by British spooks and customs authorities on the pretext that they are providing 'crucial intelligence in the war against terror/drugs' (when in reality the spook-linked dealers only supply tip offs against freelance tiddlers).
People's
health warning: Denial and Naivety are bad for our health and our common
security - in
Since repeated attempts to get the courts to enforce the law even-handedly against illegal invasions and poisonous 'weapon'-systems have come to nought, the least we can do on May 3rd to protect our universal motherland of peaceful community life is to vote only for parties who try to stand up to all the bullies, uniformed and non-uniformed alike.
Keith Mothersson
Council
Candidate for
2b
783677
07815 653389
[please shorten as required;
NB I think 'prospective candidate' is a phrase which only applies before the election is called and the nominations are finalised.
PS in the late eighties I started the Institute for Law and Peace, and co-founded the World Court Project, which secured an ICJ advisory ruling on (against) the Use and Threat of Nuclear Weapons in 1996.
References: On DU
I wish I
was making this up, or crying wolf unnecssarily. I
should be able to cite you masses of official government studies on
Depleted Uranium if the military industrial complex hadn't blocked Kosovo and
other victim countires - and even WHO - from doing
the necessary epedemiological studies. But even so
there is an immense amount of scholarly and practioner
material, including from DU-suffering veteran Doug Rokke
Ph.D., who headed the US Army's DU Project after the Gulf War ... please see
http://www.traprockpeace.org/depleted_uranium.html
References on drugs and the 'security services' :
the role
of the CIA is notorious, see www.ciadrugs.com/ but MI6 is
almost as bad, and the past record of the
The Opium War
1839 - 1842 between
Letter to PA about the empowerment offered by STV - We make the lists, not the parties! (sent in early a.m of 19th April)
Dear
Editor,
Although
some people find the new multi-member wards confusing, they will
lead
to a wider range of Councillors being available
for us to choose between when a need to contact one or more arises - and a much
greater likelihood than previously that we can resonate on political or
personal grounds with at least one of them.
This will
be all the more likely to occur if voters take full advantage of the
preferential aspect of STV voting. Unlike the Additional member system used to
ensure proportionality in Holyrood elections, in
STV we make the lists, not the parties (whatever the latter may
'suggest')!
This means
that we can choose to vote for a party's number 2 candidate
before their number 1.
As no lower
ranking can impact negatively on our higher rankings, there is no
risk in ranking all the candidates in our ward - hopefully with the
candidates of pro-war parties pushed firmly to the rear!
Unlike with
First Past the Post we need have no fear of 'wasting' our vote on attractive
smaller parties like the Greens. Alternatively we can also seek to
infuse new blood into the Council by plumping for a genuine independent, since
whether the outsider we number first on our list wins or
loses, our second preference vote will still help elect our favourite (or least disfavoured)
candidate from among the 'usual suspects'!
I should
perhaps declare an interest!
Yours
sincerely,
Keith Mothersson
Unaffiliated
candidate for Perth South
2b
PH2 0HH
01738
783677
07815 653389
Letter to Herald about the dangers of
electronic technology in elections (sent in 19th April)
At a time
when millions of people say they don't understand or actively distrust
politics, Alex Orr is surely right to question New Labour's
love affair with e-voting and e-counting (Electronic Voting, April
19).
Our
traditional voting arrangements have only a handful of vulnerablities
to fraud, and known prophylactics, such as all candidates being able to check
that ballot boxes are empty when first sealed. By contrast, postal voting can
be tampered with in dozens of ways, while e-systems have hundreds of
'attack vectors'.
Of course
we are assured by the DRS Ltd and the Scottish Executive that the ballot
counting software has been 'independently tested'.
Assuming
their good faith, how can the rest of us judge whether the 'independent
testers' are themselves people of integrity and
the necessary competence to detect almost undetectable backdoors and bugs,
which can be triggered into operation only when the real votes start
to come in and designed to self-destruct at the end of the day?
As the
Although I
would prefer dispersed participatory-democracy systems for
processing votes locally and publicly phoning the results through to
central returning officers - to be swiftly repeated as often as necessary in
multi-stage STV counts, we can at least be thankful that so far we in Scotland
are only faced with e-counting, not e-voting.
Provided
that any losing candidate can call for a hand-counted paper recount, at no cost
and without any requirement that he or she must be within x votes of the
apparent winner (which could only be an incentive to any vote riggers to rig
the vote by x plus a few), then the risks of e-counting seem to many to be
manageable.
However all
steps towards e-voting and internet voting, etc should be rejected on
principle, the more so as the CIA and the Pentagon have spent billions on
developing ways of exploiting people's trusting faith in authority and 'modern'
technology.
Thus we
find that the top US election companies have had people like Robert Gates and
Frank Carlucci on their boards of directors, and have recruited e-fraudsters
straight out of prison to develop the new techno-devilry which many believe
enabled the Republicans to steal elections from 1996 onwards, when
Nebraskan voters used technology provided by the very company
whose CEO 'won' that election on a mystery late swing!
Keith Mothersson
Candidate
for
2b
07815 653389
PS
to Editor:
With
reference to the following e-mail alert by Black Box Voting legend, Bev Harris,
I have
checked with DRS Ltd and the Returning Officer for
However it
would be great if you could put an investigative reporter onto DRS, which may
have bought a trojan horse when it bought
Also nearly
all postal votes will be counted by Electoral Reform Services, which in 2001
teamed up on an e-voting pilot for Islington Council with Votehere (for which then CIA chief Robert Gates was a
director, who is now head of Pentagon, which is into dominating cyberspace).
So the barbarians are getting closer!
Letter about affordable eco-housing and 'co-housing' (02/04/07) - too long but no longer than some published from John D Stewart, and mine are better-tempered usually! I sent a shorter version a few days later and on 19th April the editor carried a letter she had shortened further, but still very useful, thank you!
Dear Editor,
Sylvia
Latham invites Council candidates to set out our views about how to
respond to 'the present dire housing crisis in
1) Nobody makes the land nor the raw materials of the earth. Both as a noun and as a verb, housing is a human right. Like the
land, housing should ideally never become a source
of profiteering, nor an arena for normalised threats
of violence (clearances, eviction).
2) Council planners have a bad name in some quarters, but at their best are really seeking to enforce the residual communal right of all of us to control the way our collective environment is used for the future (the 'usufruct' of land). We should support and push our planners and Councillors to insist on tougher social conditions on all big money developments, upping the number and value for money of affordable homes which developers must include in their proposals if they want to get their proposals accepted.
3) The Council should level enhanced, not reduced, rates on empty or rarely occupied property, using the proceeds to a) beef up local regulation of the private housing sector, including letting agencies and care homes, b) help and encourage people in larger than needed houses to swap or subdivide and those needing houses to group together in self-build collectives on the lines promoted by Community Self-Build Scotland.
4) Our
present 'little boxes' pattern of building imposes widespread loneliness
and squanders the immense gifts which young and old can bring to each
others' lives. A way forward has been shown by
5) 'Housing' can't be addressed in isolation. For it is our whole pattern of civilisation which is unsustainable and must change - and if we resist change it will come anyway, ready or not! By provoking 'foreign' wars and runaway climate havoc, our present arrangements cannot guarantee even 'developed' Westerners security of food and shelter. Somehow we need to awaken from denial and wrench ourselves free from the seductive clutches of the fantasy that we can all continue living as if we had three or four planets to spare.
By contrast true security lies in the direction of progressively re-inhabiting the fields and forests (now vast and mono-crop) where once scores and hundreds of people wrested diverse livings, but which can now - such 'progress' ! - only provide livelihood for five or ten folk, dependent as we are on high petro-carbon inputs (NPK fertilizers, fuel for machinery, food miles, etc).
Therefore the Council should move in the direction of developing Perth as Scotland's centre for sustainable living, with special emphasis on sustainable horticulture/agro-forestry, and the new patterns of more co-operative land-use, energy-generation and housing which will be needed if we are to make the necessary transition to a superficially austere but actually much more satisfying way of life in which living, working, housing, mutual care and education support each other - and transport too (ideally the new eco-hamlets would cluster round larger settlements served by rail halts.)
6) Such an integrated vision would require Council departments to consult with each other and with self-help and mutual aid groups across Perthshire to develop new priority guidelines for non-profit investment, coupled with packages of assistance, such as provision of funding, training and site and services for self-builders, etc. Such an urgent programme of public investment could be legitimately coupled with constructive conditions, such as non-profiteering from selling of individual homes in newly fashionable eco-hamlets; commitment to work locally; and commitment to take care of each other micro-locally to prevent ordinary needs and hassles of life turning into major problems (rather than phone up The Council or The NHS or The Police) .
7) But where is the Council going to get the money to pay for the surge in public and non-profit house-building that we need? Answer - from thin air, the same place that the Banks get it, only Councils should choose to issue the new money debt-free. Why should the privately owned 'central banks' be socially licensed (NB) to 'make money out of nothing' (Charter of the Bank of England)? Why can't society authorise ourselves directly to control the issue of that which we all need, and thus avoid skewing the priorities of the whole economy and inclining our economic relationships to compulsive 'growth' and mutual hostily? (For if I must pay £110 back for the £100 I have borrowed, some other poor sucker will only have £90 with which to repay their mortgage.)
In short, why can't the Council issue social credit debt-free, backed by the confidence (credit) which people place in any long-term indispensable operation, be it a country, a Council or (potentially) the workforce of a useful industry (as advocated by the Guild Socialists of yesteryear)?
Once Scotland or Perth has the fiscal autonomy to control the (appropriately cautious) expansion of its own debt-free money-supply (IOU's, bonds, etc), then we could escape the Treasury strait-jackets on 'public spending' which have meant that all over Perthshire fit and willing builders have to be paid to rot in unemployment rather than build houses, while such schools, concert halls and etc as are built are subject to the same burdensome system of usury which has meant hundreds of ordinary Council house owners have paid the Banks many times over for the privilege of living in homes their own parents might have built.
Keith Mothersson
prospective independent Council candidate for Perth South
2b
783677
07815 653389
Letter - In Praise of
STV <>(07/03/07)
Dear Editor,
As someone who long campaigned for the Single Transferrable Vote method of voting, I write to express my pleasure that using STV in Council elections will make tactical voting a thing of the past.
STV is not just a a proportional voting system (at the level of our new larger wards) but it is also a preferential system, which enables us to rank candidates in our order of preference, without fear of 'wasting our vote' or queering the pitch for some second favourite candidate.
This could mean voting for a smaller party or independent without fear of penalising our usual mainstream party of preference, since if our long shot horse comes in or is eliminated, in either case his or her surplus votes will be transferred to our usual safe bet candidate.
Alternatively, if we continue to prioritise our usual party, we can still give our second vote to an interesting newcomer party or candidate, since once the former reaches the quota for election, an appropriate percentage of our vote will automatically be transferrred to our second choice - its like having more than one vote!
As well as empowering voters, STV can improve the tone of public life, as it removes the incentive that winner-take-all FTP gave for candidates to exaggerate their chances and run each other down.
Not only will candidates quite likely need to co-operate in coalitions after the election, but given that Party A may well need the second or third preference votes of those who gave their first vote for Party B, unnecessary antagonism to Party B could easily backfire.
Instead of the competitive nastiness which has led so many people to switch off party politics, candidates under STV should see themselves as co-operating in all humility to present an array of voting options to the electorate.
Who knows, by reducing the divisive aspects of politics and eliminating 'safe seat' fiefdoms where results could be predicted in advance, we could even see many disillusioned ex-voters turning up at the polls on May 3rd?
Keith Mothersson
2b
[783677 ]
Letter against Islamophobia
(21/01/07)
Dear Editor, - Many of us will share Stewart Falconer's concern about the intolerant brand of Islam portrayed in Channel 4's 'Dispatches' investigation of Monday 15th - and luridly trailed for days before that. ('Political Correctness Gone Mad', Letters, January 19th)
However such matters seem to me to require a more complex response than just expressing horror and calling Nimby-style for 'immediate deportation' ..... - to some other country which will in turn have to find a way of relating firmly, skilfully and compassionately with the anger and fear which fuel extremism of this and every kind.
Stewart seemed particularly troubled by the phrase '"non-white" Muslims', albeit that there were several nonwhites in the congregations of the Saudi-financed mosques concerned, and no such phrase was used by the speakers depicted.
The kaffaur phrase denotes non-Muslims, similar to some Jews' contemptuous use of 'goyim' , or the term 'unbelievers' when uttered by the likes of Bush'es spiritual adviser, Franklin Graham, who calls Islam 'an evil religion'.
I am sure that if Dispatches were to send undercover teams into Jewish, Christian and Hindu communities, they could eventually find equivalent levels of extremism. But the extremists should certainly not be taken as representative of any of the faiths concerned.
Yet corporate media have singled out Muslim wrongdoing as the flavour of the decade (century?) ever since vicious Islamophobic mythology gained instant unexamined currency about supposed 'Islamic hijackers' having been responsible for the shocking slaughter of September 11th 2001, when three normally indestructible steel-framed buildings were hit by two planes, and fell neatly through themselves - the path of maximum resistance - at the speed of air resistance. (Open-minded readers who may understandably find this hard to believe are invited to breathe deeply and make a note to slowly and thoroughly check out Scholars for Truth website, www.911scholars.org)
Some serious researchers believe that since the 1920's the Western powers have deliberately promoted a hostile and mysogynist version of Islam, as well as 'tame' versions prepared to ignore Western invasions.
Be that as
it may, it is clear that, like the CIA and Mossad, MI6
has often sought to create extremist milieux such as
the notorious
So why did 'the authorities' take no action? The answer to this seeming paradox becomes clear when one considers that being able to infiltrate agents and informers into 'radical' Muslim circles is part of the game plan of the Powers that Be for long term geo-political control.
That way 'radical' groups can be set up and egged on to extremism, thus rendering them susceptible to be used as pawns against governments who resist Western domination (e.g. in Kosovo, Chechya). Alternatively they can then be manipulated to let off the odd bomb to justify the West oming in to 'protect' people ('War on Terror') , or else be positioned as 'patsies' to get the blame (like the US- trained, CIA drug runner and general party animal Mohammed Attah in the run up to 911) .
It is through such Orwellian manouvres that the righteous indignation of good people like Stewart Falconer is harnessed to justify Western intervention in pursuit of oil and global domination. (Nafeez Ahmed's book on The London Bombings sheds a lot of light on these murky depths, as does www.julyseventh.co.uk .)
I notice by the way that Stewart is a keen supporter of the British presence in Afganistan. Perhaps when we in the West really understand the sufffering we have inflicted by invading Muslim lands on trumped up charges (9/11 and the Iraq WMD), and spreading huge amounts of lethal 'depleted' uranium for millions of years, we will hang our heads in shame and the genuine problem to which Stewart draws our attention will begin to fall into a more workable perspective.
At all
events from my own very positive interfaith contacts with our
Keith Mothersson
2b
738677
07815 653389
Letter of Peace towards
Muslims (18/10/06)
Dear Editor, - As Ramadan draws to a close I, a son of the manse and
now a practicing Buddhist, would like to send a message of peace and
solidarity to our fellow citizens who happen to follow Islam, a path
of Peaceful submission to a higher/deeper Divine order.
Recent weeks have seen a feeding frenzy of biased comment and articles in the national press which make Muslims out to be inherently problematical.
It is for this reason that I crave your indulgence, albeit that you are the editor of our local paper, to comment on this hysteria sweeping the nation, lest some of your readers may have started to harden their hearts on the basis of this media barrage.
John Reid's comments, about the need for parents to watch lest their children be drawn towards terrorism, should have been made in an ethnically-neutral environment. After all, with top public health researchers reporting in the Lancet that Iraq has seen around 650,000 [plus or minus 200,000] excess deaths since the Allied invasion (compared to the good old days of Hitler Saddam) - a quarter of whom have been directly at the hands of Coalition forces, how dare British politicians seek to cast the debate in such one-sided ways?
During the Cold War it was the Reds who were blamed for every bombing, but recent research by the Swiss political sociologist Daniele Ganser (Nato's Secret Armies) shows that nearly all atrocities such as the Bologna Railway station massacre of 1980 were carried out by fascists at the instigation of the CIA or MI6.
With the authorities
unaccountably refusing to release video evidence of the '19 hi-jackers' on 9/11, the supposed Madrid bombers on
3/11, the four Leeds men in London on July 7th, am I the only
one to wonder just how many of the current crop of Muslim-blamed atrocities and
scares will turn out to have been 'false-flag operations' ? (As the Express reveals, the powers that
be are also holding back the footage from 17 traffic cameras in
A recent
poll by the 1990 Trust showed only one percent of Muslims supporting the
terrible
Recently two local papers in the North-West of England carried reports about raids on two houses which had yielded a rocket-launcher, weapons, extremist literature, a nuclear-biological suit and the biggest store of explosive-relevant chemicals ever found in Britain. Yet the national press were silent and one policeman saw fit to declare that 'he is not a terrorist'. The men were BNP supporters, not Muslims, so that's all right then.
The up-shot of these double-standards and Muslim-baiting is is
that Muslims are being verbally assaulted and even physically attacked.
Recently, a mosque in Falkirk was fire-bombed, an Imam in a
With a
desperate Bush regime liable to invent pretexts and provoke war on
Readers of
all faiths or none who wish to stand together against Islamophobia,
War and the curtailment of all our civil liberties are invited to a rally
at George Sq in
Keith Mothersson
2b Darnhall cres,
Letter about Prisoners
Rights to Vote (08/02/07)
- the Aberdeen Press and Jornal published a version
of this
Dear Editor, - I was
sorry to see Elizabeth Smith having a go at prisoners' rights to vote, and
equally sad to see your editorial piece agreeing with her in the case of
the most serious offenders.
Though
society needs arrangements in place to protect people from violence, serial
abuse, etc - arrangements which should include deprivation of liberty if,
as a society, we really can't think of better ways to supervise offenders and
help them change course - I fail to see what harm could befall if,
on conviction, the right to vote is retained even by prisoners who have made
terribly harmful mistakes.
I
am shocked how all the mainstream parties have colluded in allowing
prisoners votes to fall through the legislative cracks. The
European Convention on Human Rights, which is quite separate from the
EU, doesn't just bind us all - it also protects us all.
Human
rights are just that, rights we have by virtue of being human beings - of any
kind!
After all,
if only 'good' human beings should have the right to vote, then who would judge
that? There but for the grace of God go all of us.
Instead of
politicians hiding behind each other for fear of the Murdoch
hate-machine, we need true leaders who can
activate the wiser, more generous sides of our natures, and disdain
to stroke our 'unco guid'
meaner pretensions - with 'we the good people' over here and 'those bad
people' over there.
To those
who say: 'What about the rights of victims?' I answer: What's past is
past. As opposed to skilful rehabilitation (which can at least lessen the
number of future vicitims), do stigmatising
and discriminating against prisoners really help heal the hurt of any
bereaved, maimed or abused person? (Let alone help encourage
healing among those who harmed them, and who have often had their own
childhoods blighted by just such fanatical belief in the badness of others?)
Two things
need to happen as a matter of urgency. First, Scottish Parliamentarians of
every party should agree to stop playing politics with this issue if the other lot
will.
Second, faced
by a united appeal from MSPs, MPs in
If three
months is deemed too short a time, they clearly prefer wasting our money
and disenfranchising a sizeable slice of mainly working class voters
to carrying out the legislative duties we pay them to - and the resulting £7m
compensation should come out of the salaries of MPs - or MSPs
if they can't even unite to put that simple demand to Westminster.
Keith Mothersson
2b
PH2 0HH
07815
653389
01738
783677