ECHOES AND UPDATES

As several readers noted, I erred on three items in the December issue, though fortunately they are immaterial for the points I was making.

The Bush administration will include two energy per-sonalities. The good news is Gov. Sununu, future White House chief of staff, for once neither a lawyer nor an investment banker. He is originally a professor of nuclear engineering who drove the anti-nuke saboteurs of the Clam Shell Alliance out of business by merely filing suit against it. It remains to be seen whether he can avoid being broken or bent by the more typical compromising politicians chosen by Bush, such as Attorney General Thornburgh, who proved himself an unprincipled weakling as governor of Pennsylvania during the TMI episode, and who is already crawling before Congress by annulling all of Meese's work to hold the Turkeys to the ethics they demand of others.

Indeed, St. Ralph's Center for Auto Safety has also gone to court: to increase the CAFE standards. And as usual, after raising the carnage on the roads in his war against business, the sleazy impos-tor will strut about as a "consumer advocate."

Ralph Nader's propagandists, who went to court to "protect" uranium miners from radon doses that were a small fraction of what babies were getting in energy-conserving homes, have now committed a new indecency by a personal attack on Dr Bruce Ames, one of America's great scientists. (To appreciate the sig-nificance of the Ames test discovered by him, read "Does nature know best?" $2, ACHS, see "Good Reading" on right). Public Citizen has launched a personal attack against him (among his crimes is adopting "many of [Milton] Friedman's views, which include hostility toward government regulation and . . . faith in the efficacy of the free market"). Ames is maliciously accused of being an alarmist about carcinogens in food, when in fact he merely debunks the alarmism about man-made carcinogens that are far less potent than those in natural foods. When you throw a stone into a gaggle of geese, says a Czech proverb, it is the one that was hit that cackles.

"Dear Petr: Some of your readers might be interested in the minimal cost to participate in Fort Freedom. I have never owned a PC [but I found that] an expensive computer was unnecessary. A used computer store sold me a dumb terminal for $140. It is a GTE XT 300 with built-in modem. My first month's phone bill to Boulder was $25.15 for 181 min . . . FF is fun. It may influence the U.Cal. at Santa Barbara political science dept. where my son is a frosh." Robert Wilson, M.D., Ventura, Calif.

Dear Dr. Wilson: you can cut down the time by a factor of 4 or 8 by getting a 1200 or 2400 baud modem; and more costs can be cut by joining AT&T's "Reach-Out" program (includes voice) or Sprint's "PC-Pursuit" (modem only). Cordially, P.B.