Our magnificent Boys in Blue….

At last the British Bobby has regained his resolve. Confronted on April 1st by a crowd of G20 protesters, many of whom being desperate pensioners – but some as young as 75 – the British Bobby made up for previous shortcomings. Recall that during the London Islamic riots – er, sorry, peaceful protests about Gaza - of 10th January in Kensington, a cowering phalanx of Boys in Blue retreated before violent Muslim hooligans – er, sorry, justifiably Enraged British Youth – and indeed suffered injuries. Boys in Blue: 3 down. And they watched discretely from the sidelines while a respected member of the British Respect Party urged the mob to trash shops in the High Street – which of course the mob proceeded dutifully to do, without let or hindrance.

But our Guardians of the Peace really did their duty on April 1st. As the Guarniad reported,
“at least 10 protesters sitting down in the street close to the Bank of England were left with bloody head wounds after being charged by officers with batons at around 4.30pm. One woman, said to be an Italian student, was carried off unconscious.” Tally so far for our brave Caribinieri? Blue casualties:0. Red casualties:10. And I am not counting the subsequent toll; “Injured demonstrators with bleeding heads and necks were ushered through the crowd while others handed out milk so that people could wash the pepper spray from their eyes and mouths.”

How’s that for “proportionality”? My mathematician friends tell me that this gives a ratio of – infinity in favour of the Blues! Israel–so-called-Defense Forces, eat your hearts out!

Let this be a warning to future Hunt protesters, unemployed marchers, bankrupt pensioners, indeed any peaceful protest.

But somehow I don’t think our Enraged British Youth have anything to worry about.

It’s all the fault of the physicists..

About 50 years ago, when I was a fresh graduate student, I wrote to the eminent nuclear physicist Amasa S. Bishop , who worked in fusion research, for advice on embarking on a career in nuclear fusion. He told me not to bother “The solution is not for your lifetime”.

Maybe he was right. When he died in 1997, fusion research was in progress, but still as far as ever from accomplishing the holy grail of getting more energy out of controlled fusion than one put in. In the year of his death, the Joint European Torus (JET) produced 16MW output equivalent to 65% of input power for half a second. Recent reports about the ITER
Reactor[1] are more hopeful. It now appears that a working reactor may be on line in 2018.

What has this got to do with the “Jewish Question”?

The reason why I posed my question as a starry-eyed student to Bishop so many years ago was that we had just witnessed the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1956. And even then it was clear to me that if the world had the limitless clean energy promised by fusion power, the trump card for Arab blackmail of the West – oil – would disappear, leaving room for an equitable solution to what subsequently proved to be an ongoing crisis.

To be fair to the physicists, just like space exploration, this is an engineering problem. The physics of fusion is well-established, just as the maths for space travel was solved by Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. So had the United States been as far-sighted as I all these years ago, and put as much effort into the fusion problem as they subsequently did into Space Research, they would have avoided all the problems of the Middle East which have caused so much bloodshed and trauma, not least to the Americans.

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[1] ITER was an acronym of International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, but political correctness concerning the negative connotations of the word "thermonuclear" led officials to change the official provenance of the name, attributing it instead to the Latin word for "the way".