Why Sensationalize an Already Sensational Event?

Scientific American reports, Radiation leaking from Japan's quake-hit nuclear plant as part of the devastation in Japan from the record setting earthquake. Sure, four out of five nuclear facilities immediately shut down safely. But of one unit at the fifth, they say

The blast raised fears of a meltdown at the facility north of Tokyo as officials scrambled to contain what could be the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl explosion in 1986 that shocked the world.

Uh, yeah. Actually, this looks more like the Three Mile Island "disaster" to me. Chernobyl used a reactor technology that was considered too unstable outside of the Manhattan project or the U.S.S.R. that involved a big pile of carbon graphite to regulate the reaction. Graphite burns. Chernobyl burned. Chernobyl also exploded wide open. People stood miles away touristically looking directly into the reactor core, and then dying from the gamma ray exposure. The G.E. reactors in Japan are water filled steel containers. They don't burn.They didn't burst. The reactor was idled within hours. The quake broke the outer concrete containment structure (but not the inner steel one) and also interrupted all three safety backup systems. So the reactor overheated before they got it under control, and they had to vent some probably radioactive steam to prevent the inner containment from also rupturing. I say "probably radioactive" because the cooling water certainly contains tritium (Hydrogen-3) and traces of other isotopes. But so far there are no reports of measurable radiation beyond the reactor premises. I'm sure there will be. Personally, I take this as a sign that we really need to move beyond the 1970's style Cold War reactors to the 1990's style ones now being specified in Europe. These are designed to fail safe even if all the active safety systems fail. Sure, they cost a little more to build. But they are pretty much proof against flood, earthquake, and bomb attacks short of nuclear warheads releasing radiation. I have also advocated building next generation fast neutron reactors that can use depleted uranium, thorium, and most current generation reactors waste as fuel. A past post of mine: Whatever Became of Thorium? These reactors are also inherently safer, because they are using less volatile fuel. This should be an opportunity to discuss the future safer implementation of this inevitable successor to coal power, rather than to propagate, "Gee whiz, isn't noocular power dangerous?"

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How bad is the Gulf? How bad is American media?

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has endorsed Arab news organization Al Jazeera as offering "real news", superior to ersatz U.S. news which is full of commercials, talking-heads and soundbites that are "not particularly informative to us." Perhaps that explains a part of the reason why U.S. audiences are largely unaware of the continuing ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout last year. Al Jazeera, on the other hand, brings us this story of sickness and death on the Gulf Coast.

[caption id="attachment_16980" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Eco-terrorism in Gulf of Mexico. Image via Leoma Lovegrove (creative commons)"][/caption] "I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body," 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. "Yesterday I went to see another doctor to get my blood test results and the nurse said she didn't know how I even got there." Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010. "I swam underwater, then found I had orange slick stuff all over me," Aguinaga said. "At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good. I've been extremely sick ever since."
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How We Got Here: The Debate II

To continue... The Whiskey Rebellion more or less blew up in Alexander Hamilton’s face. The tax he pushed through congress on whiskey that triggered the entire affair was shortly thereafter repealed and it was a while before the federal government tried to impose internal taxes. One of the stated goals of the revolution was to end taxation without representation, but in practical terms this meant an end to taxation, period. The federal government used tariffs and land sales to pay off the debt incurred by the revolutionary war. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was still done by a combination of the two plus borrowing. Generally, tariffs were kept low, to encourage volume of trade. Some high tariffs were employed in the 1820s and 1830s as protectionist measures to level the field with Britain, which was in the midst of its “workshop of the world” period. The South hated these tariffs because it raised the price of manufactures and shipping, which impacted on their trade which was almost entirely agricultural. It was different in the states. Property taxes early became a source of state revenue. The definition of “property” for the purposes of such taxes stretched far beyond the bounds we would recognize or accept today and under Jackson came to include just about anything a person owned. Local reaction to such impositions varied by city and state, but rarely rose to the level of rebellion. Federal internal taxes did not come into play until the Civil War. The need to raise revenue in huge amounts and quickly necessitated the creation of the first income tax, among others, including a vast array of excise taxes and licensing. There were special corporate taxes, stamp taxes for legal documents, and inheritance taxes. Most of these were phased out after the Civil War. Interestingly, the Republicans—a new party formed just before the Civil War which became the second national party, supplanting the archaic Whigs—kept two elements of the new tax system: high tariffs and taxes on liquor and tobacco. High tariffs were protectionist measures. The excises on liquor and tobacco were not greatly challenged because they coincided with the growing Temperance Movement, which was becoming politically significant. [More . . . ]

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How We Got Here: the Debate I

This will be a rather lengthy piece. It is my intention here to examine the historical underpinnings of what is happening today in the fight between the Right and everyone else. This will be part one of a two-part essay. Bear with me, it all does lead somewhere. The talking heads have been bloviating for decades now about the function of government vis a vis a so-called Welfare State. The Right claims that having the government “take care of” people is a violation of the American tradition of independence and self-reliance and will sap our resources, both fiscal and moral. The Left has argued that such government programs are there to protect people who have few resources from the depredations of the wealthy and an economy that fluctuates as a normal element of its functioning and that it is the responsibility of the better-off to aid those who are left without recourse in such a system. That’s the basics of the debate. The Right says no, people should look out for themselves. The Left says many people can’t and it isn’t right to let them starve in the streets. The Right says it has no desire to see anyone starve in the streets but rejects the idea that others are responsible for the perhaps bad choices of individuals who have been unable to take advantage of an open system. The Left counters by pointing out the system is not as open as the Right believes and built in to its workings is the inevitability that a certain number of people simply won’t be able to participate. Even if the Right then agrees, they assert that it is not the job of the State, using tax payer money, to off-set this imbalance. The Left says it is if people vote for it and even if they don’t there’s a moral imperative involved. The Right counters that the State is not the instrument for pursuing moral imperatives. Well. Let me be up front here—I think the Right has it wrong. They base their philosophy, if that’s what it is, on an idea of equality that is unsupportable. In the narrowest sense, they argue that our system is open to the extent that everyone has an equal shot at some measure of success and if they fail it is either because they were lazy, foolish, or unlucky. The government can functionally do nothing about any of that. The argument falls apart on its face. Equality in this country is a principle concerning representation before the State. The State in this sense is the community as a whole, both public and private. The ideas that we are not born to a Station in life which determines at the outset how far an individual might go through his or her own efforts. It was never intended as an assessment of talent or a measure of will or a guarantee of achievement. It is only a promise of access. Because people are not equal as individuals. They aren’t and there’s not much point in arguing about it. Intelligence, physical attributes, proclivities, all these things vary widely throughout any population group and to argue that, if somehow we could take away all social obstacles, everyone would be exactly the same is absurd. The Right seems to argue that because this is true, the rest of us have no responsibility for the fundamentally unequal achievements of any one, or group of, individual. They discount social obstacles. Not completely, because when an individual rises above a certain level, reaches the precincts of success, and has done so from straitened beginnings, many on the Right like to point to that individual as an exemplar of succeeding in spite of the circumstances of his or her life. So there is a tacit recognition that social conditions matter, but only as an ennobling aspect to a Horatio Alger story. The question really is why those conditions keep so many others down, but that, as much as the successful individual’s achievement is credited to personal qualities, is a matter of personal failure, not attributable to anyone else. Which seems to make success and failure a matter of choice. Exclusively. Ergo, the tax payer, through the medium of the State, has no responsibility for such failures. This can only be true if the assertion of equality is true as an innate quality. [More . . . ]

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The sanctity of contracts

Daily Show host John Stewart eviscerates those asking teachers and other unions to make sacrifices in the name of cutting the budget deficit, especially when those same people (literally!) did not ask the same from Wall Street bankers following the trillions of dollars of bailouts and easy money:

Incidentally, much of the rhetoric is centered around asking the unions to "contribute more" towards their benefits package, but how does one contribute more than 100%?

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