I am going to try to be a little more restrained than I was last night and perhaps lend a quieter hand to the debate.

If you open the studies proffered by McGrath, you will find nothing but hokum and political satire passed off as a medical study. If you get as far down as the first page and click to the reponse comments by a "Federal Spokesman" you get a cartoon of the well-known three monkeys. This is propaganda, and I personally resent any person passing off this tripe as a "serious study". I should point out that one of my degrees is a Masters in Safety and Environmental Management from one of the leading universities in that field, West Virginia University (due to the problems with extractive industries such as coal mining, brown fields, and a host of coal-related problems.

My Masters thesis was a study of the protective measures practiced during Weapons of Mass Destruction drills to ensure that what was practiced had real world value, and that the training was appropriate to the actual level of threat. This was while I was working for the VA's Emergency Management Strategic Healthcare Group, which is the interface between the VA hospitals and DoD in war or between FEMA and the VA in case of a declared natural disaster.

It is my feeling that if individuals who proffer hokum or a TV special as proof of their arguement, and who cannot, off the top of their head tell you what the Stafford Plan is, or give you one ESF from the FRP and define the agency responsible, they need to keep their benighted blatherings to themselves. If they have never had graduate-level statistics, and don't know what the p level of significance is, or whether it was a one or two tailed test, they again should stay in the shallow end of the pool.

Don Firth is a well-spring of musical knowledge, and I defer to him frequently on those issues (I do not know McGraths or GUESTs contribution to the musical world). But go to WMD and you are in my 'hood, so just whistle as you pass through.