Not the blood money paid to release a CIA operative from Pakistani “justice”. If we can’t compel a purported ally to conform to established diplomatic law, then a few million bucks is nothing. Rather, that the poor families will likely be compelled to “donate” this windfall to certain NGOs and end up even poorer than before, and American money will go on to wreak further havoc -– against our interests..
Not the unfolding crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuke plant. Japan has many of the world’s finest engineers, and if anyone can design for and mitigate a reliance on nuclear power in the middle of a complex earthquake zone, they can. Rather, that the workers fixing it live by default in an earthquake-ravaged area, and no doubt some of them are laboring to avoid a catastrophe without ever having the chance to recover personally from the destruction and loss brought by the tsunami.
Not that we aren’t helping the Libyan rebellion. As sympathetic as we must be to the people who’ve broken away from their murderous dictator, we absolutely don’t need to get bogged down fixing yet another failed nation only to end up further hated for our meddling (never mind what the Arab League says today). Rather, that the great Western powers knew this all along and have only made a show of talking about it in order to fool the public into thinking they’re doing something -– and people believe that.
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8 comments:
How can we know what to believe though? Like today I read that absolutely we in Cali don't have to worry one bit about radioactive material from Japan affecting us. Hmm. Oh, and the San Onofre thing is PERFECTLY SAFE cuz it was built for a 7 and we probably won't have more than a 7 here, probably. OK.
San Onofre safe? HA! Any nuke facilities safe? I don't believe a word of it.
Safety will always be relative. Our choices are basically
1 - Greenhouse gases
2 - Nuclear energy
3 - Widespread poverty
Meanwhile why doesn't the Arab League stand up to their own words and use the planes we give them? Or the French? What's up with them? Talking without acting is how you lose your place in history.
Which fact should worry Americans greatly.
The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant was not required to include earthquakes in its emergency response plan. After local activists and environmental lawyers sued the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over that fact the case make its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., where a 5-4 majority -- including current Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former Clinton independent counsel Kenneth Starr -- ruled that earthquakes did not have to be included in the plant's emergency response plans. How many ways can you spell STUPID?
Safety and sustainability come first and we do have choices.
1- solar
2- wind
3- innovation
Ps. History is written by the survivors. The wise learn from their own mistakes.
Agreed. And reliance on solar / wind / innovation is what underwrites what I simplify as widespread poverty. Not that it's a bad thing, if by poverty I don't mean a contracted economy that leads through history's inevitable cycles to domination by less democratic forces. Man, this is the engineer's one-bullet slide on a hundred-volume tract, I tell ya.
Also agree it's ridiculous not to design a nuke plant for every three hundred, if not five hundred, year earthquake / tsunami. The Japanese did pretty well, but no one's perfect.
As a former wind energy technician, I really do prefer passive power generation. It just doesn't add up numerically, not until all humans can reduce their ergs by ninety percent without feeling as though they are making a sacrifice -- which, as I aver above, is not just hard, but dangerous.
It just doesn't add up numerically, not until all humans can reduce their ergs by ninety percent without feeling as though they are making a sacrifice
I predict that the day will come when reducing our ergs by some ungodly amount will be viewed as a good thing rather than a spoiled brat inconvenience. And it will almost surely be a last minute, touch and go conversion of global proportions after "Mother" Nature, who is not a "democratic force", forces Man to rethink his assumption of entitlement. I am not looking forward to this day but it is coming, in geological time, in less than a second.
It's not really a spoiled brat inconvenience. Food, housing, medical care for the mass of humanity requires cheap energy transport and conversion. This only exists with fossil fuels and nukes. The non-democratic force that will force the rethink might be a catastrophic climatic change, but is far more likely to be a catastrophic political upheaval, when the citizenry of one global alliance, not able to give up their century and a half of relative prosperity, and the citizenry of another, not willing to give up their increasing access to same, clash over limited resources. This is and always has been the true cause of war, and barring workable agreements as to the nature of trade, is going to happen a lot sooner than any ire of Mother Nature. Of course, from my standpoint, the imperfect but workable mechanisms of real capitalism (not the nationalist capitalism that created United Fruit et al, but real unfettered trade) will even it out better than the decrees of supposedly united nations. It is through capitalist greed that the 3rd world is most effectively improving its standard of living, with all the problems attached thereto. But personally I think increased expectations are a good thing. A radical rollback from fossils and nukes is needed to preserve the planet, yet will create tensions that could pollute the planet even more (i.e. warfare). I don't have any answers but for open trade, faith in Mankind when freed from ideology, and of course the vast power of blogging and of writing long crazy comment streams.
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