It’s insanity to try the same failed thing and expect a different outcome. So the pro-nuclear crowd seems to be trying a variant. They’re not crazy, calling nukes a success, because Fukushima’s reactors aren’t failures.

I’m seeing stuff like: “Oh, but it’s only in earthquake zones that nuclear can be a bit of a problem — and then only a teeny tiny one!” “Oh, stop bellyaching about radiation. There’s less of it than flying cross-country.” “Oh, yes, some of the fuel melted, but it was only a teeny tiny bit. And look! It didn’t turn into the worst disaster imaginable! Nuclear energy is a success!”

Um, how should I put this politely? If nuclear energy is so disaster-prone that an absence of catastrophic failure can be construed as success, then we really, really, really don’t want to use nuclear energy.

Anti-nuclear as I am, I would set the bar for success higher than that. If everything goes right, nukes can produce energy for a few decades without blowing up. It’s also true that if everything goes right, little radiation escapes.

If everything goes right.

Reactors are hugely complex technology with hundreds of potential failure points. Whether it’s an earthquake, tsunami, hurricane, rust, power failure, human error, terrorist smuggling, or poor interface design — there are hundreds of different cascades of events that can destroy multiply redundant backup systems and end in disaster. What will fail in any given case will be different.

The important issue is not whether there could be an earthquake here or an erroring human being there. The important issue is that such a hugely complex system has hundreds of ways to fail. It can never be safe.

Sometimes, when there’s no other way to do something vital or fascinating, it’s worth doing despite the risk. The space program is one example.

Nuclear energy, on the other hand, is an expensive way to run vast risks that are totally unnecessary.

There’s an expanded list of the points below, but here’s the summary. ■ Useful uranium stocks will run out about the same time as or shortly after oil. ■ The plants take so long to build, it’s physically impossible for them to be an actual solution to energy shortages. ■ They will, however, provide a waste problem forever.

These things are all facts of the simple, do-the-math variety. Uranium is finite. Plants take ±five years to build. Half-lives of radioactive elements are known to the femtosecond.

And then comes the biggest fact of all: NUCLEAR ENERGY IS NOT OUR ONLY CHOICE.

For 2% of global GDP (pdf) we could switch over, by 2050 (pdf), to efficiency, solar, wind, and other sustainable, renewable, and clean energies. And that’s for ALL our energy needs. (Nuclear, in contrast, has no realistic chance of even maintaining it’s current contribution, as you can see in the details below.)

Two percent of your income, if you make a median per capita US income of about $24,000, is $480. That’s less than many people in the US spend on phone bills.

For less than the yearly cost of a phone, we could have a world that’s not going to hell in a handbasket. So the choice is obvious, right?

Let’s all pile into the handbasket.

If you’re like me, you boggle that anyone supports a total loser proposition like nuclear power. What is wrong with these people? Are they nuts?

Well, yes and no. Remember that it costs some $10 billion to build a reactor. That gets paid to somebody. That somebody is getting that huge pile of money, risk-free, courtesy of taxpayers. What’s not to like?

The radioactivity? The waste? The unnecessary risks? The small amount of actual power produced? Somebody else’s problem. The billionaires pushing the boondoggle don’t plan to live downwind.

For the sake of raking in megabucks now, everybody else in time and space can be damned.

Is that insane?

Yes.

News of the protests in Madison is so absent, everybody is starting to notice. I worry about the protesters, I wanted to know how they were doing. I checked Saturday on CNN, NYtimes, and a string of other web sites I don’t remember. Nothing noticeable. That’s odd, I thought. You’d think this would be the biggest story in the country. We devoted a lot of time to Egypt.

Sunday I knew there was a deadline to evict the protesters from the Madison Capitol. I was anxious how that would go down and tried to find out.

Nothing. That was more than odd. That was bizarre. “Showdown at the Capitol” had to be newsworthy for our infantile media. But apparently it wasn’t. That made no sense.

So I started searching around. I discovered First Draft, reporting from the ground. It was sounding more like Egypt every day, in the organization of the protesters and the sympathy of the ones behind the guns. Susie Madrak noted a march, 100,000 strong, a hundred thousand, had taken place on Saturday in temperatures well below freezing. Huh? And that hadn’t been anywhere near the front page? What was this? A conspiracy of silence?

And then more and more people pointed it out. Corrente, Digby, also here. Now Krugman pointed out how much this feels like the media chorus leading up to the Iraq War.

This is a chorus of silence, but it’s also a chorus of misdirection, just like that earlier massive failure. They say, “It’s about money.” No, the unions agreed to the outrageous pay cuts to finance tax cuts for Governor Walker’s campaign contributors. They’re refusing to give up collective bargaining rights. It’s about rights, not money. “It’s about greedy unions.” No, it’s not. it’s about greedy Governors and their millionaire beneficiaries. We either hear no news, or we hear the wrong news.

As I mentioned a while ago, I come from a Russian family. I visited the Soviet Union back in the day. Friends there told us how you had to crouch over the faint voice of the BBC on a shortwave radio to get any news. That, or perhaps you’d hear something in letters from friends or the occasional leaflet. And now, here we are. The only difference that I can see is that the Russians all knew they were being lied to.

These are the people who work for your kids. Teachers. Go read one of the most powerful essays I’ve seen on any topic, anywhere.

Brandi Martin, Learning from the LuminousPage:

I Ruined Everything (& Why It Was More Work Than You Thought) @INTERNETTAXTROLLS

…

To earn this $20k I taught art on a cart to 850 kids at 3 different schools every week. Almost every kid was on free lunch. My budget was $1.50 per child per year. … We made puppets, paper mache, tissue snowflakes, and lots of chalk and tempera paintings. I loved going to work every day. I loved festooning each little school with the happy art.

…

I feel less and less that way when I read angry tweets and newspaper comments about my profession. Maybe I shouldn’t read what angry tax paying trolls write and say on the internet, but I’m so appalled I keep checking to see if it’s still there. I’m told I’m ungrateful. I read that I am greedy, or a tool of greedy union bosses. I am a selfish son of a bitch, one guy informed me, when I was trying to explain the details and the facts of current legislation. I read that everyone’s life is going down the toilet, because I am breaking their backs. I have ruined everything. Everything is ruined.

Please know it did not feel like ruining everything. It felt like sitting in a tiny plastic chair at a tiny table, cajoling an autistic preschooler into brushing watercolor across a white wax face i had pre drawn, then watching him laugh at the big reveal. It felt like receiving a drawing as a gift from a talented little boy who drew like an adult, but suffered crippling arthritis in his hands and for whom i had arranged free classes at SAIC. … It feels like a 6’2 kid standing up from his computer animation to announce loudly “I AM AN ARTIST”.

…

After you take every tool and incentive and support away from me, and millions like me, you won’t suddenly have anything great that you don’t already have. And then you will be terribly disappointed to find out that this isn’t a scam after all.

…

Go read her post and see how it all comes out in the end. Really. Go.

Mary Rogers [2015: link broken. article reposted here.] has made one of the saddest statements I’ve read on the horrible treatment of CNN’s Lara Logan. The gut-wrenching sexism of some of the commentary is sad. One more reminder that we’ve indeed “come a long way, baby.” A long way backward. That such commentary is considered normal — crude, but normal — is sadder. We should, by now, be in a place where it’s unacceptable to think such crap, let alone say it. But the saddest thing of all is a sentence in her article about the crime.

She knows the situation.

If you are a woman living in Cairo, chances are you have been sexually harassed. It happens on the streets, on crowded buses, in the workplace, in schools, and even in a doctor’s office. … 98 percent of foreign women and 83 percent of Egyptian women have been sexually harassed. [That’s the number who would acknowledge they’d been harassed.] … what happened in 1994, shortly after I moved here. … A man walked up to me, reached out, and casually grabbed my breast.

In a flash, I understood what the expression to “see red” meant. … But the satisfaction of striking back quickly dissipated. By the time I walked away, I was feeling dirty and humiliated. After a couple of years enduring this kind harassment, I pretty much stopped walking to and from work.

Of course, harassment comes in many forms. … At times it can be dangerous. … I was walking on the street, when a car came hurtling towards me. Aiming for me!

… women who have been sexually harassed here have been too afraid or ashamed to speak up.

Any woman who’s not in denial doesn’t need to have the situation explained to her. For those men who don’t get it, try this thought experiment. You live in a world where you’re only allowed to go outside naked. No way to hide erections. No way to hide the fact that you’re male. Then, because you’re male, it’s an understood thing that anyone on the street can grab your ass, or poke an umbrella between your legs, or laugh when you double up in pain.

That is not sexy. That is not normal. That is not women expressing their hormones.

It’s a power trip. That’s all. It’s saying, “I’ll put you down because I can. And if you don’t hide, I’ll do it again.”

So, like Mary Rogers, you stop walking to work. You may have rights on paper, but you can only go where you’re allowed to go or people can grope your penis any time they feel like it. (No, you can’t just beat them up. The uppity sometimes get their bits sliced off.) Without freedom of movement, your whole world is limited. There are jobs you can’t do, raises you won’t get, recognition you’ll never see. The price of hiding is that nobody knows you’re there. The price of being a target is that you have no actual rights, no matter what it says on paper.

And don’t forget, being a man, you have to tough it out and pretend none of it matters. If you stop hiding, the humiliation will get worse. Much worse.

One more thing: being a man, you represent half the population.

With all that in mind, I come to the saddest thing Rogers said.

A law regarding sexual harassment will have to wait. The country has greater concerns now — forming a new government; writing a new constitution….

Greater concerns? Greater concerns than the basic human rights of half the human race? Say what?

What chance is there anyone’s going to get it, if even people who aren’t in denial can’t figure out which way is up?

Until people understand what human rights are, they can write constitutions till they’re blue in the face and it’ll just be sound and fury, signifying nothing. After the next round of kleptocrats, they can do it again, and it’ll still signify nothing.

The headline of Rogers’ article is “Egypt’s harassed women need their own revolution.” No, they don’t. The people who need it, of any gender, are the ones who think human rights don’t matter enough to put first.

Now comes the hard part.

Mohammed El-Baradei talked about the “joy and happiness of every Egyptian at the restoration of our humanity and our freedom.”

Unfortunately, no. The regime is out. The restoration is yet to happen. If the Egyptians manage that, too, then I’ll be really exhilarated. Maybe then they can show us how to do it.

Meanwhile, I’m hoping and hoping that the parking on the left doesn’t just turn into parking on the right.

I feel like starting this by saying “Once upon a time” because it turned into a saga for me, a quest, and a struggle with dragons. Unfortunately, unlike the better class of fairy tales, the dragons are winning. So far.

The first step is the content. It took me two years to write this particular book (Re-imagining Democracy). That was the easy part. Then I tried to find out how to turn it into an ebook. I keep seeing offhand comments on the web from authors who posted their opus in a matter of hours. It sounded like a minor matter.

Hah.
Read more »

(The title is inspired by Historiann’s excellent post. Also a note: unlike most of the things I blog about, teaching is what I’ve done professionally for decades. I taught in universities, not schools, but the two aren’t totally unrelated.)
Part I, Part II

If you need a metaphor for education it’s not work or play or a factory or a ladder. It’s a journey. People join at different points, and leave at any point. No power on earth can keep them on it if their minds don’t want to go. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s mind-altering, sometimes it’s a real slog, and sometimes the fleas force a change of plan. The same people are guides or need guides for different things at different times. Sometimes the travellers learn things on the road that are useful in the next village. Sometimes they climb mountains and see the whole world spread out before them.

Certification — whether it’s a cosmetology degree, a B.A,. or an M.D. — is the commuter traffic of that journey. The roads used, however, still have to be in good condition. Better, if anything, to withstand all that traffic. The necessary aspects of education still have to be done right, even if all anyone wants is a piece of paper for the wall. Where that’s most important is at the foundation: in schools. Read more »

(The title is inspired by Historiann’s excellent post. Also a note: unlike most of the things I blog about, teaching is what I’ve done professionally for decades. I taught in universities, not schools, but the two aren’t totally unrelated.)

Let’s face it. The war on teachers is about money. People want to pay less and get more.

Sometimes you can do that. Solar power and energy efficiency instead of nukes and oil come to mind. In that case paying less and getting more is the sign of an intelligent choice. But when the low price comes from a flimflam artist selling cheap hope, falling for it is the mark of a fool. So, really, the first order of business is to see how low the price can go and still give you what you’re paying for.

So what are we paying for? What is learning, really? And, for that matter, teaching? Read more »

(The title is inspired by Historiann’s excellent post. Also a note: unlike most of the things I blog about, teaching is what I’ve done professionally for decades. I taught in universities, not schools, but the two aren’t totally unrelated.)

Every time you turn around, there’s a new front opened in the war on teachers. They don’t work hard enough. They get paid too much They’re not accountable. They can’t be fired. Their unions protect dead wood.

If we could just find the right stick to smash the cabal, the teachers would have to be good workers. Then, like good workers, they’d produce what they’re supposed to, which is good students.

So various fixes have been tried over the years. Read more »

If you check back sometimes, despite the long silences I fall into, you already know I think current US politics are worthless. So I haven’t mustered up the energy to say anything about the impending rearrangement of deck chairs on our Titanic. However, I see on The Distant Ocean that Thomas Kenny has made the only comment needed:

Heaven forbid that the Republicans win on Nov. 2!

• They might escalate in Afghanistan and fake a withdrawal from Iraq.
• They might pass a bogus health reform law written by the insurers, thereby entrenching them in the system for many years to come.
• They might put EFCA (labor rights reform) on a back burner.
• They might step up deportations of undocumented workers.
• They might expand the military budget to an all–time high.
• They might retain Bush’s apparatus of repression, including torture and assassination of US citizens by White House fiat.
• They might keep Guantanamo open and tighten the blockade of Cuba.
• They might threaten war with Iran.
• They might cave in to Israel and the Israel lobby, and neglect Palestinian rights.
• They might throw billions of our tax dollars at mega-bankers, but do little or nothing for ordinary homeowners.
• They might tolerate a 10 percent unemployment rate, with jobless rates double or triple that for youth of color.
• They might start overthrowing lawful elected governments in Central America.
• They might start raiding the homes of leftwing antiwar activists.

He did forget a huge one:

• They might trade away the right to control one’s own body for votes from theocrats.

In the inimitable words of vastleft: The Democrats, a roach motel for progressive energies.

I’ve been watching, like everyone else. I don’t think I remember such a glad time since the Berlin Wall came down. Humanity at our best.

from BBC

So much so, I didn’t even mind President Pinera showing up forever where nobody needed him that much. He really cared, and not just about the cameras. So much so, that even the flag waving didn’t bother me. Usually it does. But this time, honestly, the Chileans have a lot to be proud of. The way they searched for the miners without giving up, without worrying about how much it cost, or even mentioning it. The way the miners held on, the way their families and friends waited. And waited, and waited.

People say of the final rescue, the bringing up of each miner, one by one, the meetings of the people whose love had kept them alive, people say that the whole media angle was minutely managed.

I think that’s true. The media were managed. They weren’t allowed to overwhelm the quiet dignity and the unassuming humanity of all the people involved. That was Chile’s biggest gift to all of us.

You know, one of the side effects is going to be an increase in tourism. There have to be lots of people like me, who are now fascinated by the country. I want to go see it for myself. I want to see these remarkable people. I want to find out how they pulled themselves out of such a deep dark hole.

Although, if the secret ingredient is modest people who soldier on, people who can control even the media, that’s maybe not so good. They seem to be in short supply. But still, after this, I feel hope:

(Was: Q.barrales, Wikimedia. Now no longer there.)

We’re on a collision course with technology. Free speech is being killed in order to save it.

Something is always boiling up that involves free speech. Cartoons are drawn of the “wrong” person, somebody is jailed for speaking out and gets the Nobel prize, there are plans to build a mosque in the “wrong” place. And some people picket funerals to gloat.

All of these things are a step too far for some people. Others insist that we can’t draw any lines without sliding down a slippery slope of more and more lines until there’s no free speech left.

The dilemma doesn’t actually seem intractable to me. Try a thought experiment. You’re in a huge room with 10,000 other people. Nobody can say anything. There’s total silence except for the occasional suppressed cough. Is there any freedom of speech?

Now you’re in the same room, but anyone can speak and anyone can say anything. Everybody’s talking — shouting, really, to make themselves heard. You can’t even hear yourself speak. Is there any freedom of speech?

We’re not in the first situation anymore. When the great thinkers of the 1700s were articulating the essential freedoms, few people had the means to disseminate their ideas to begin with, so there weren’t many voices. Nor was there the technology to din at people 24/7/365. So noise was not a large concern. They worried about silencing.

Silencing was and is a crime against inalienable rights and has to be prevented.

But noise can kill a message just as dead as silence. Either way, you can’t hear it. Either way, we lose the freedom of speech. Either way, the loss is just as lethal to a free society.

Insisting that everyone, everywhere, for any purpose, has an equal right to speak hasn’t preserved freedom of speech. It’s killing it. When everybody can shout as loud as they can about whatever they want, you either can’t hear anything or the biggest voices will dominate. It’s right back to the king having the only voice. The fact that it’s not literally a monarch these days doesn’t make it all right.

Yes, I know. If speech is limited we have to — horrors! — draw some limits. Well, … we already do, and that hasn’t killed free speech. That promotes it. Unless the signal to noise ratio favors signal, there is no signal. That’s not exactly hard to figure out.

So, let’s start with the easy cases, the ones where limits have long been applied and clearly don’t lead to disaster. Free speech doesn’t confer a right to perjury, to wrong answers on exams, to yelling “fire” for nothing in crowded theaters, or to incitement to riot. Truth in advertising laws say it’s unacceptable to lie in order to extract money. None of these limits has led to thought control. It is possible to apply limits on speech without losing freedom. As a matter of fact, we’d lose freedom if they were not applied.

If some limits work, then limits work, and people can stop pitching a fit every time there’s talk of limits. The rational response is, “What are the best limits for preserving freedom of speech?”

Half the answer is contained in the question. Anything that remains murky after our best efforts to find the limits gets the benefit of the doubt and is covered by freedom of speech. That part’s not hard to figure out either.

The hard part is updating the limits for a technological age in which everybody can shout their point of view. If everybody gets veto power, nothing can be said. If there’s no way to draw the line, nothing can be heard. There has to be a better way.

There’s a common denominator to the limits that work. If everyone claimed the right to the forbidden kinds of speech, chaos would ensue. If everybody lied, incited to riot, and yelled fire in crowded theaters, life would become impossible. Those kinds of speech require double standards. Only some people can use them and only some of them time. Everybody else has to keep the system working. Double standards have no place in a democratic society, so that kind of speech not only can be but must be forbidden. It’s noise. Bad noise. (Discussed at greater length in Free Speech vs. Noise.)

So, how does that help us resolve any of the disputes? Let me give it a whirl.

• Publishing cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper explicitly to make the point that Muslims cannot dictate what is published in secular papers. This one belongs in the “Well, duh!” category. Religious people don’t have to read secular papers. This is not an in-your-face exercise. If one side can veto the other’s reading material, then in a world without double standards, secular people could object to anyone reading about God in a holy book. Everything rapidly descends into absurdity when that kind of veto power is allowed.
• Building a cultural center containing a mosque near Ground Zero. If there is to be freedom of religion, there have to be places of worship. Some areas are certainly not appropriate. For instance, in a secular government that separates church and state, it would be wrong to worship in or next to government buildings. (I’m sure protests about the Congressional Chaplain will break out shortly.) But to start limiting worship with no basis in justifiable principles ultimately means the end of freedom of religion. And, again, if one side can suppress another’s beliefs, it can go in the other direction too. That way lies madness. There’s plenty of proof all over the world.
• Pro-democracy activist in China should not be jailed for speaking out. Okay. Seriously Duh! (And that goes double for his wife!)
• And then there’s the Phelpses and their crusade against queers. Do they have a right to speak out? Of course. Do they have a right to be sure they know what God thinks? Just as much as anyone else does. Is somebody else’s funeral their only avenue to expression? No. No, no, no, no, no. They can make websites, write books, sing songs in their churches, fulminate there, parade, start radio shows. Their freedom of expression is not limited.

  What’s limited is their right to use it in a way that deprives someone else of their own rights. Political speech is very heavily protected, but you can’t use it within 200 feet of a polling station on election day. Because that would interfere with people’s right to vote. It would be a relatively minor annoyance, but it’s still illegal. If interfering with voting is enough to place a limit on free speech, how much more so interfering with the even more basic human right to bury one’s dead in peace.

When everywhere else is a venue for free expression, it’s idiotic to insist that crashing a stranger’s funeral is the only thing that will do. Of course, the Phelpses are idiotic, so that’s no surprise. The rest of us shouldn’t be as confused as they are about where the limits lie.

You’ve all heard by now that Google and Verizon will take care of it. They will come to an agreement between them that will ensure the best use of bandwidth for everyone.

And what we’re arguing about is whether their agreement preserves enough net neutrality.

Net neutrality is a question of rights. Who determines the content of the public airwaves? Who determines the extent of your right to see or hear what you choose? Who determines what you can choose to see and hear?

Since when do businesses decide questions of rights? That is a function of government.

Does the government fit into such a tiny tub by now that we no longer have any idea what it’s for?

Let me just get this straight.

On one side: a few small people who have killed nobody but may have endangered some in the interests of having a real democracy.

On the other side: some enormous people who’ve killed thousands in the interests of creating a friendly country. (Don’t ask me why they’re so worried about comparatively minor intelligence failures when that one’s right out there for anyone to see.)

So who are the bad guys here?

The enormous people, right? They will now be hounded by the media and internationally until they’re brought to justice and stop their evil deeds.

(Why are you laughing?)

When reports of heat waves started back in June, a countdown timer started in my head. The media would start yammering in 3 … 2 … 1 …, “ZOMG! Global warming!”

Fools.

The hallmarks of greenhouse gas-induced climate change are, in approximately this order:

• higher night time temperatures and warming at high latitudes (Arctic and Antarctic)
• ocean acidification and thermal expansion (that cause one type of rising sea level)
• reduced rainfall in dry areas, increased in wet areas
• desertification of continental interiors, including hotter summers, droughts, water shortages, and the rest….

We’ve had the first two sets for a couple of decades already. But that wasn’t a problem because nobody felt hot, except maybe a few polar bears and glaciers.

(There were also a bunch of scientists running around with their hair on fire, but scientists do boring stuff like talk about evidence and numbers –even when their heads are burning — so that didn’t count.)

Now we’re well into the phase where warming starts to bite. Floods and droughts seem to be larger, longer, and harsher. Russia is burning. Desertification in China is proceeding on schedule. Huge dust storms blanket Beijing and dump Chinese particulates all the way over here, where I live, near Los Angeles.

Now the media are starting to notice, now that they had to turn up the A/C. Hell, now Presidents are starting to get a vague sense that maybe, perhaps, there’s a problem here somewhere.

The Russian President has been shocked — shocked! — to find his country in a huge heat wave that’s ruined at least a third of the grain crop and fosters wildfires. Last year, he said, “We will not let anyone cut our development potential.”

Sure.

Floods, fire, and famine are cheap.

You’ve probably seen this McClatchy report by now.

Gulf spill raises questions about role of oil consultants

The names, locations and geographical coordinates are different. Otherwise the drilling plans for three oil companies in the Gulf of Mexico contain identical fonts, footnotes, overly optimistic projections and even typographical errors. [emphasis added] …

Department of Interior officials said that federal regulators didn’t oversee third-party consultants and oil companies were “ultimately responsible for the information they submit.” …

Three of the plans that R.E.M. [one of the consulting firms] prepared — for Rooster Petroleum, Tana Exploration and Marathon Oil, all of Houston — used the same language to say that the risk of a major oil spill was minimal, the companies were equipped to respond to a disaster and drilling activities posed little or no risk to marine life or fisheries. …

Reached by phone, Goers [R.E.M. founder] declined to answer questions about her company or the plans it had prepared and referred a McClatchy reporter to her clients. “You’ll have to talk to the operators,” she said. …

The American Petroleum Institute, a lobbying group that represents oil and gas companies, said it wasn’t familiar with the consultants’ work … . “Of course, the documents they help prepare are ultimately reviewed by regulators whose responsibility is to judge their adequacy,” said Bill Bush, a spokesman for the group.

There’s something there, I’m not sure what, that gives me the sense that the oil industry and their buddies in government don’t care about the environment.

No, wait. That’s not right. They don’t even see it. It’s just a heap of annoying rocks and water standing between you and your money.