If we can somehow discount the opinion of proglodytes on matters in which they use only emotion and completely discount science, basic economics, and reality, perhaps we can finally move our energy resources towards the future.
You wouldn’t know it from the press, but the nuclear industry is far and away the safest industry in America, with the fewest injuries, no deaths, the best safety record, and the least lost-work hours. Nuclear even has the best environmental record of all industries.
By any measure, nuclear outshines all other work places. But that never seems to be enough, and nuclear workers feel frustrated at the common misrepresentations and onerous requirements that keep being piled on them, post-Fukushima additions being the latest round.
Unfortunately, Fukushima has ended the modern debate for nuclear power despite not really being the disaster that activists really wanted it to be. CNN on a WHO report concerning the fallout from the meltdown:
As Fukushima Daiichi unraveled in global public view with fire, explosions and radioactive emissions for weeks, people living nearby were exposed to radiation and trauma.
The trauma was worse, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday on the health effects of the “Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami.”
The lifetime risk of contracting certain types of cancer rose slightly for a small group of people because they were exposed to radiation from the nuclear disaster, the WHO said Thursday.
The notable exception was young emergency workers at the plant, who inhaled high doses of radioactive iodine, probably raising their risk of developing thyroid cancer. But since the thyroid is relatively resistant to cancer, the overall risk for these people remains low, the report said.
Otherwise, any increase in human disease after the partial meltdown triggered by the March 2011 tsunami is “likely to remain below detectable levels,” the WHO said in its report.
People exposed as children in towns close to the Daiichi power plant are slightly more likely to contract leukemia, breast or thyroid cancer in the course of their lives than the general population, the WHO said.
[. . .]
Those living in hardest-hit areas of Fukushima prefecture were exposed to radiation levels of 12 to 25 milliseverts (mSv) in the first year since the disaster, the WHO reported.
That’s equivalent to one or two CAT scans, according to the American College of Radiology. Even on the upper end of the scale, that barely raises the risk of dying from cancer, the college says.
According to United Nations nuclear experts, exposure to less than 1,000 mSv annually causes no meaningful increase in the risk of getting cancer.
The worst side effect of the Fukushima “disaster” (it would seem to me that a disaster would have more than 0 deaths) is that because radiation leaked in to the sea, people ought to avoid eating fish from the immediate area. Those who had some exposure didn’t even have enough exposure to raise the risk of dying of those who already had cancer. Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t be concerned about potential contamination, but that we must remember that this is the worst “disaster” in the nuclear industry since Chernobyl and not a single person has died from the initial meltdown. No one has even gotten so much as sick from radiation exposure. Yet because of the fear that has been elicited in proglodytes and other environmental activists based on nothing but emotional appeals, the most efficient, cleanest, and historically safest form of energy we have has been virtually dismissed as a possibility, when the only thing to have been learned from Fukushima is that building anything on the shoreline in an earthquake zone with a propensity to tsunamis is probably a bad idea.
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It’s amazing how quickly media coverage will change depending on who the victim of government overreach is. Glenn Greenwald:
Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ’s attack on AP’s news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign.
snip . . .
You don’t say! The Washington Post’s breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama’s civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: “I’m disgusted with this president.” In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a “better-late-than-never” outlook regarding this newfound media awakening.
As a result of the last week, there is an undeniable and quite substantial sea change in how the establishment media is thinking and speaking about Obama. The ultimate purveyors of Beltway media conventional wisdom (CW), Politico’s Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei, published an article yesterday headlined “DC turns on Obama”, writing that “the town is turning on President Obama – and this is very bad news for this White House” and “reporters are tripping over themselves to condemn lies, bullying and shadiness in the Obama administration.” The Washington Post’s political reporter, Dan Balz, another CW bellwether, wrote that these controversies “reflect questions about the administration that predate the revelations of the past few days”. About the AP story, Balz wrote that “no one can recall anything as far-reaching as what the Justice Department apparently did in secretly gathering information about the work of AP journalists.”
This morning, the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about the AP story and the broader War on Whistleblowers, and said that Obama’s presidency is “turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press.”
[. . .]
The New York Times itself editorialized today that “the Obama administration, which has a chilling zeal for investigating leaks and prosecuting leakers, has failed to offer a credible justification” for its “spying on the AP”; the NYT editors also quoted a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Attorney General Holder stating that the AP spying “calls into question the very integrity” of the administration’s policy toward the press. The New Yorker this morning published an article by its general counsel, Lynn Oberlander, denouncing the DOJ’s conduct as “cowardly”; she wrote: “Even beyond the outrageous and overreaching action against the journalists, this is a blatant attempt to avoid the oversight function of the courts.” Former New York Times general counsel James Goodale, who represented the paper during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, said in an interview yesterday that Obama is worse than Nixon when it comes to press freedoms.
Those are all media venues generally sympathetic to and supportive of Obama. But this anger has infected even the most Obama-loyal circles. Journalist Jonathan Alter, who has literally written books using what he touts as his “unmatched access” that are paens to Obama’s greatness and Goodness, yesterday demanded: “Obama should simply apologize to the AP and its reporters. It’s the least he can do to show he still believes in the First Amendment.” Even at MSNBC, its most influential host, Rachel Maddow, broadcast a 20-minute segment vehemently condemning the Obama DOJ on the AP matter that featured an interview with an AP lawyer and used Nixon’s attacks on Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg as the historical context. Maddow then broadcast another segment on the IRS’ targeting of right-wing groups in which she correctly pointed out that there is no evidence of Obama’s personal role in that targeting but that it will create serious problems for his administration. Even Harry Reid – the Senate’s top Democrat – denounced the DOJ’s actions as “inexcusable”, saying “there is no way to justify this.”
There are two significant points to make from these events. First, it is remarkable how media reactions to civil liberties assaults are shaped almost entirely by who the victims are. For years, the Obama administration has been engaged in pervasive spying on American Muslim communities and dissident groups. It demanded a reform-free renewal of the Patriot Act and the Fisa Amendments Act of 2008, both of which codify immense powers of warrantless eavesdropping, including ones that can be used against journalists. It has prosecuted double the number of whistleblowers under espionage statutes as all previous administrations combined, threatened to criminalize WikiLeaks, and abused Bradley Manning to the point that a formal UN investigation denounced his treatment as “cruel and inhuman”.
But, with a few noble exceptions, most major media outlets said little about any of this, except in those cases when they supported it. It took a direct and blatant attack on them for them to really get worked up, denounce these assaults, and acknowledge this administration’s true character. That is redolent of how the general public reacted with rage over privacy invasions only when new TSA airport searches targeted not just Muslims but themselves: what they perceive as “regular Americans”. Or how former Democratic Rep. Jane Harman – once the most vocal defender of Bush’s vast warrantless eavesdropping programs – suddenly began sounding like a shrill and outraged privacy advocate once it was revealed that her own conversations with Aipac representatives were recorded by the government.
Leave to the side how morally grotesque it is to oppose rights assaults only when they affect you. The pragmatic point is that it is vital to oppose such assaults in the first instance no matter who is targeted because such assaults, when unopposed, become institutionalized. Once that happens, they are impossible to stop when – as inevitably occurs – they expand beyond the group originally targeted. We should have been seeing this type of media outrage over the last four years as the Obama administration targeted non-media groups with these kinds of abuses (to say nothing of the conduct of the Bush administration before that). It shouldn’t take an attack on media outlets for them to start caring this much.
I agree with Greenwald in that it’s better late than never for the media to finally call the Obama administration out on his bullshit, but that it took them over 4 years and an attack on the media to do it is fucking shameful. Perhaps had they not been actively carrying water for Obama during his entire presidency, they would have done their jobs and stopped his bullshit before they were the victims of inevitable government abuse. Apparently the only way to get journalists to do their job is to either elect a Republican, or actively spy on them, igniting their ire.
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Price controls suck. The Guardian:
First milk, butter, coffee and cornmeal ran short. Now Venezuela is running out of the most basic of necessities – toilet paper.
Blaming political opponents for the shortfall, as it does for other shortages, the government says it will import 50m rolls to boost supplies.
That was little comfort to consumers struggling to find toilet paper on Wednesday.
“This is the last straw,” said Manuel Fagundes, a shopper hunting for tissue in Caracas. “I’m 71 years old and this is the first time I’ve seen this.”
One supermarket visited by the Associated Press in the capital on Wednesday was out of toilet paper. Another had just received a fresh batch, and it quickly filled up with shoppers as the word spread.
“I’ve been looking for it for two weeks,” said Cristina Ramos. “I was told that they had some here and now I’m in line.”
Economists say Venezuela’s shortages stem from price controls meant to make basic goods available to the poorest parts of society and the government’s controls on foreign currency.
“State-controlled prices – prices that are set below market-clearing price – always result in shortages. The shortage problem will only get worse, as it did over the years in the Soviet Union,” said Steve Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University.
Not being able to get TP is pretty fucking crappy. When will governments learn that price controls never work?
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J.D. Tucille of Reason:
The founders, for all of their many flaws, understood that coercive power is inevitably abused, which is why they didn’t trust us with anything like the “awesome authority” that is currently wielded by the government. It’s impossible to believe that veterans of the stamp tax and the trial of John Peter Zenger would have been even slightly surprised by the use of tax collectors against political targets, or by the targeting of journalists.
And yet here we are, with a president who simultaneously professes the goodness of government even as that government misuses power in all the old familiar ways, changing only to adapt to new technology.
So, as we prepare to hand authority over our health care system to a tax agency that has, time and again, wielded its power for political purposes on behalf of whoever is currently in power, we owe thanks. Thank you, Mr. President, for demonstrating that you’re just as untrustworthy a bastard as all of your predecessors. Thank you for reminding us that, no matter the public assurances we receive, every iota of power given to the government will be misused. We repeatedly forget these lessons, and we need our reminders.
Many of us didn’t need a reminder that government is nothing but legally entrenched coercive power, but it’s good to have one for those who have heretofore bought what Obama, and the media, have been selling the population since 08. Government is NOT good, and in the end it will bite the hand of even those who support it most.
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“The IRS shifts the burden of proof from the tinfoil behatted to the government by targeting the Tea Party and other conservative groups.” Jon Stewart of The Daily Show:
Don’t worry, government is good and benevolent. There’s no way that government would ever abuse its power.
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I wonder how long it’ll take until the left starts calling West an Uncle Tom/house nigger/lawn jockey as it is wont to do with other prominent blacks who dare criticize Democrat policy. Common Dreams:
In an interview with the Guardian published on Sunday, renowned professor and prolific critic of the “military-industrial-complex” and rampant “plutocracy” in the U.S. and around the world, Dr. Cornel West explained his views on the state of America today and his fall from grace, by design, with President Barack Obama: “He’s just too tied to Wall Street. And at this point he is a war criminal.”
I don’t agree much with West’s policy prescriptions, but his diagnosis is right on.
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Sounds from the tolerant left.
I don’t know anything at all about this election as it isn’t my state and I have no say in anything that happens in South Carolina. But if a Republican beating a well-known liberal whose entire campaign was based on being Steven Colbert’s sister can expose the self proclaimed tolerant left as the utter hypocrites they are, I’m all for it.
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The lesson to be learned here is that food in rich countries is a fuck-ton more expensive than food in poor countries.
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Maybe Obamacare has a silver lining afterall. Politico:
The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty.
If Obamacare leads to a downsizing in government sector jobs, bravo. Especially considering that this is the type of shit that the private sector is dealing with too. And here I was thinking that government workers are selfless individuals who work for nothing but the good of civilization whose jobs are of paramount importance to the continuance of society. Dinah Wisenberg Brin at Entrepreneur:
The Affordable Care Act is certainly not affordable for us as a small business in America,” said Marsha Newberry, owner of a business in Grand Prairie, Texas, in a post dated last Friday. “I do understand what President Obama is trying to do, however I do not believe this is the correct answer.”
“This has caused our company to examine our projects and reduce our employee numbers by eliminating the labor intense projects,” she added. “All this to avoid mandated healthcare by the federal government. So we slow and or reduce our company growth to avoid complete closure of the company. Neither of these are a good solution for small business in America.
Sounds great.
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In the event any of you were wondering, this is what mendacity looks like. President Obama:
And we also recognize that most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States[.] I think many of you know that in America, our Constitution guarantees our individual right to bear arms, and as president, I swore an oath to uphold that right and I always will.
But at the same time, as I’ve said in the United States, I will continue to do everything in my power to [pass] common-sense reforms that keep guns out of the hands of criminals and dangerous people, that can save lives here in Mexico and back home in the United States. It’s the right thing to do.
I’m sure he’ll work Fast and Furious on these “common sense” reform laws. You know, the ones where he will use the result of his own policies that purposefully transferred guns from American gun shops in the southwest to violent drug cartels in order to justify.
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If only the rest of us were fortunate enough to have stuidity hurt the emitters as much as it hurts those at which said stupidity is directed. The Hill:
Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to “transactional sex” for survival.
The weather makes women whores? Wait, what? They don’t have individual agency? Women are nothing more than pawns in nature?
The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.
Is it your contention, Democrats, that men don’t fucking eat, and that men wouldn’t be hurt by decreased agricultural output?
“[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health,” it says.
Oh, okay. “Food insecure women” are the ones at risk. Gee, that isn’t misogynist at all. Also, climate change gave me AIDS? Really? That Team BLUE is trying to turn the greenhouse effect global warming climate change in to another front on the so-called “war on women” shows that they know the gig is up. They’re desperate, and they’re willing to exploit any avenue they can in order to try and enforce their socialist agenda.
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What could go wrong?
Bradshaw is readying a hotline and is planning public service announcements to encourage local citizens to report their neighbors, friends or family members if they fear they could harm themselves or others.
And do you really need a $1M hotline? Is 911 or the non-emergency number for your local police department not sufficient?
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Another wrench thrown in to the machine of global warming. The Register:
Another powerful negative-feedback mechanism which acts to reduce the effects of global warming has been identified, as scientists say that rising temperatures cause plants to emit higher levels of planet-cooling aerosols.
“Aerosol effects on climate are one of the main uncertainties in climate models,” explains Pauli Paasonen of Helsinki uni. “Understanding this mechanism could help us reduce those uncertainties and make the models better.”
[. . .]
Paasonen and his colleagues’ new work indicates that there is and will be a lot more aerosol in the air and cooling the planet than had been thought, as they have carried out detailed measurements showing that a slightly warmer climate makes plants give off much increased amounts of cooling aerosols. This had long been suspected, but previous studies had been able to identify such an effect only in very specific and limited locations: Paasonen and his colleagues have now shown that the feedback acts on continental scales, overcoming earlier difficulties in accounting for the always tricky effects of the boundary layer where the atmosphere interacts with the surface beneath.
[. . .]
On its own, according to Paasonen, this newly quantified feedback would not wipe out global warming (logically enough, as it needs some warming before it appears). But he and his colleagues consider that it means forecasts should be adjusted downward by around a degree, which is a big deal in global-warming terms. Various other previously unknown cooling or negative-feedback effects have been identified in recent research – for instance, melting ice sheets are said to create a massive carbon sink and the mysterious “Criegee intermediates” are also thought to be a powerful planet coolant.
Such mechanisms may help to explain why global warming has been on hold for the past decade and more, and why some projections now suggest much lower levels of near-future warming than had been feared.
And for those of you who would question the source as an inherent “denier” who wants to see the earth burn so that oil companies can squeeze another dime in their bank account,
Paasonen and his colleagues’ new paper is published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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The most important article you’ll read today.
More important, to Verleger’s way of thinking, the peak-oil battle has become irrelevant. Verleger, a former economic official in the Ford and Carter administrations, is now a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C. Since Hubbert’s time, the dispute has focused on “conventional” petroleum, the type found in regular oil wells, most of which is in the Middle East and controlled by OPEC. Production of conventional oil has indeed plateaued, as Hubbertians warned: OPEC’s output has remained roughly flat since 2005. In part, the slowdown reflects the diminishing supply of this kind of oil. Another part is due to the global recession, which has stalled demand. But a third factor is that OPEC’s conventional petroleum is being supplemented—and possibly supplanted—by what the industry calls “unconventional” petroleum, which for the moment mainly means oil and natural gas from fracking. Fracking, Verleger says, is creating “the biggest change in energy in almost 100 years—a revolution.” That revolution, in his view, will have a big winner: the United States.
The argument is simple. The need to import expensive foreign oil has been a political and economic burden on the United States for decades. Today, though, fracking is unleashing torrents of oil in North Dakota and Texas—it may create a second boom in the San Joaquin Valley—and floods of natural gas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio. So bright are the fracking prospects that the U.S. may become, if only briefly, the world’s top petroleum producer. (“Saudi America,” crowed The Wall Street Journal. But the parallel is inexact, because the U.S. is likely to consume most of its bonanza at home, rather than exporting it.) Oil may cost more than in the past, but prices will surely stabilize. No more spikes! Still more important, this nation is fracking so much natural gas that its price today is less than a third of its price in Europe and Asia—a big cost advantage for American industry. As companies switch to cheap natural gas, a Citigroup report argued last year, the U.S. petroleum boom could add as much as 3.3 percent to America’s GDP in the next seven years.
[. . .]
The fracking-led oil-and-gas boom, Philip Verleger said in January, will lead to an American “economic Renaissance.” The United States will at last escape the world made by Churchill, at least for a while.
Fracking is the future for US energy. Period. Until the costs come down to a reasonable on so-called renewables, we will use fossil fuels for our energy needs. It’s that simple.
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Were I to have given the Tsarnaev family over $100k to subsidize their living costs over the decade which led up to their bombing of the Boston Marathon, there’s no question that I would be arrested for aiding terrorism. So why isn’t the state of Massachusetts? The Boston Herald:
The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.
“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.
The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.
I though the idea of “transitional assistance” was to provide help over a limited support of time. So what’s up with this 10 year bullshit?
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I thought that the biggest danger we face as a nation was the threat from those crazy right wingers . . .
Family Research Council (FRC) officials released video of federal investigators questioning convicted domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins II, who explained that he attacked the group’s headquarters because the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) identified them as a “hate group” due to their traditional marriage views.
“Southern Poverty Law lists anti-gay groups,” Corkins tells interrogators in the video, which FRC obtained from the FBI. “I found them online, did a little research, went to the website, stuff like that.”
The Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reported that Corkins, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, said in court that he hoped to “kill as many as possible and smear the Chick-Fil-A sandwiches in victims’ faces, and kill the guard.” As Bedard explained, “the shooting occurred after an executive with Chick-Fil-A announced his support for traditional marriage, angering same-sex marriage proponents.”
So much for that thread in the narrative.
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This kind of stupid burns.
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