Solar Flares Could Fry Reactor Safeties, Nuke Us Dead

Truthout has published a genuinely scary special report on a hitherto-undisclosed risk implicit in nuclear reactors. Entitled “Four Hundred Chernobyls: Solar Flares, Electromagnetic Pulses and Nuclear Armageddon,” it should be required reading for every anti-nuclear activist on the planet. 

Alas, it probably won't be. Truthout's relatively limited readership combines with a by-permission-only restriction on additional dissemination that seemingly guarantees the report's vital revelations will remain under-publicized.

Nevertheless – invoking “fair use” – I offer the following quote from the report's text:

“In the past 152 years, Earth has been struck by roughly 100 solar storms, causing significant geomagnetic disturbances (GMD), two of which were powerful enough to rank as "extreme GMDs." If an extreme GMD of such magnitude were to occur today, in all likelihood, it would initiate a chain of events leading to catastrophic failures at the vast majority of our world's nuclear reactors, similar to but over 100 times worse than, the disasters at both Chernobyl and Fukushima.”

Meanwhile a more recent report circulated via Reader Supported News warns us the Fukushima debacle is infinitely worse than we are being told – that it could literally become an extinction-level event: 

“Japanese diplomat Akio Matsumura...warned that the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant may ultimately turn into an event capable of extinguishing all life on Earth.”

Perhaps because I have witnessed firsthand the nightmare fragility of our astonishingly presumptuous technology, I felt no need to add to the discussion threads generated by these glow-in-the-dark warnings of our suicidal nuclear folly. Besides, what came to mind after I read “Four Hundred Chernobyls” would have required I first apologize for paraphrasing T.S. Eliot and then explain to the illiterates why the apology was due:

This is how world ends: not with a bang but a shimmer.

*****

Case Study: Bribery Suppresses Innovation, Loots Our Pocketbooks

A courageous investigative-reporting service called United Republic, which does an exceptionally good job of showing how capitalism and tyranny are synonymous, recently published an exposé entitled “Corruption Responsible for 80 Percent of Your Cell Phone Bill.”

The report reveals why U.S. cell phone service – frustratingly bad and oppressively expensive – will probably remain so forever. It also provides a superb example – one of the best I have yet seen – of how (real) capitalism operates through capitalist governance to destroy the innovation and competition (theoretical) capitalism claims as the cornerstone of its alleged success. Thus we learn how (real) capitalism reduces (theoretical) capitalism to a Big Lie, a scam in which the One Percent always prosper and the rest of us are invariably ripped off.

“Last year,” says the report, “a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon...The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends...”

“And how much does this cost you?  Take your phone bill, and cut it by 80%.  That’s how much you should be paying.  You see, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, people in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Finland pay on average less than $130 a year for cell phone service.  Americans pay $635.85 a year.  That $500 a year difference...(is) the cost of corruption...the return on (the phone monopolies') campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.”

Because the report is complete unto itself, I added nothing to its comment thread. But that thread is of at least clinical interest: note the vehement, even fanatical denials characteristic of the disciples of capitalism, an ideology so evil it requires compulsive lying merely to function.

*****

Stealth Theocracy: Tennessee Would Let Teachers Be Preachers

A Ruling Class Media report picked up by Reader Supported News informs us the Tennessee legislature has overwhelmingly approved a law that would allow fanatical Christians who are also public school teachers to preach in their classrooms against climate change and evolution.

The bill's opponents argue the measure gives legal protection to the state's many teachers – probably a significant majority – who would abandon science and in its place teach fundamentalist doctrine that rejects evolution and either denies the reality of climate change or describes it as divine punishment inflicted on humanity and Nature by the Christians' sadistic god.

As I said on the comment thread: 

Having had the extreme misfortune to have spent three of my four public high school years in Tennessee, I know the state's K-12 "education" system is dominated by Bible-thumpers.

These are not just the "church twice on Sunday and once in the middle of the week" fundamentalists of country-music fame. They are raging fanatics who regard the separation of church and state as a hateful imposition by "the Yankee tyrants" who won the Civil War. Thus too "the Saturday Night Men's Bible Study Class," the colloquial name for the Ku Klux Klan.

Given these realities, what the legislature has enacted is a de facto ban on the teaching of evolution and climate change, a new, stealth version of the anti-evolution law that made the state infamous. 

Which reminds me of something a fellow New Yorker said when he returned from a visit to the land of the Scopes Monkey Trial: “I'd rather be a peasant in Brooklyn than a king in Tennessee.”

And where is Clarence Darrow now that we so desperately need him?

*****

In Transit: the Long Ago Origin of OAN's Newest Feature

“In Transit” is what its name implies: anecdotes – most humorous, some poignant, a few troubling – collected during rides on public transport. The material will mostly be new, appearing here whenever events warrant, but the idea to collect and write such vignettes is one of my older professional impulses. It came to me back in the Stone Age 1960s, when I was a young journalist in Manhattan and often rode the train to visit a then-lover in Asheville. For various reasons, mainly the long-since-remedied absence of a local airfield capable of accommodating jets, the trip to North Carolina's unpublicized bohemian enclave took (only) 12 hours by rail: you boarded at the original Penn Station, switched to a Southern Railroad express train in Washington, D.C., then switched again to an over-mountain local at Greensboro. Compared to an air-odyssey of about 26 hours with at least three and maybe four changes of planes, it was a comfortable, relatively quick trip.
 

The Pennsylvania Railroad train – I believe it was the Congressional Limited – departed at 5:30 p.m. It was powered by a GGI, a piece of functional sculpture, probably the finest and surely now the most legendary type of electric locomotive ever built.

On the Southern (the train known as The Southerner), we sped over the route immortalized by “The Wreck of the Old 97,” and my first time on that leg of the trip I was a bit surprised to realize I was singing the lyrics in my head: “it's a long long road from Monroe to Danville and she's lined on a three mile grade.” Later when I mentioned it to my lover, herself a folk singer of considerable skill, she laughed and said “Well, what did you expect? It's a real song.” She meant in her southern verbal shorthand the song was powerful because of its basis in historical fact – the crash of a speeding mail-train that killed 11 railroaders and severely injured nine others. She also meant my proximity to the accident's locale and my general Celtic sensitivity to such things had probably opened me to some subtle residue of the Old 97's gory denouement.

Riding the over-mountain local – a combination of coaches and freight cars called the Asheville Special – was also a novel experience. As I remember, we left Greensboro at 3 a.m. and arrived in Asheville four hours later. As we were pulling out of the station, the conductor passed out menus: eggs, bacon, sausage, fried grits, sliced tomatoes, toast, pancakes and syrup, biscuits and gravy, coffee, tea, milk. The train stopped briefly at High Point so he could radio the orders ahead to a trackside café – don't remember whether it was at Statesville or Hickory – where we halted just long enough to pick up the hot food in covered, cafeteria-style trays that, emptied, would be dropped off on the return trip. (I always ordered eggs over easy, bacon, grits, tomatoes, toast, coffee – and yes it was always delicious.) Then as we ate our breakfasts the train continued westward into the mountains, eventually passing another place of railroad legend and song: Swannanoa Tunnel, built by convicts, nearly all of them Blacks, at the cost of uncounted deaths: the estimates vary from 120 to 400 men killed.

(If you link to the video, note how the the singer subtly identifies himself as a ghost, implying he was one of the many slain by the frequent cave-ins that plagued the tunnel's construction. “I'm goin back to Swannanoa Tunnel,” he sings, “cause that's my home.” Note too how the melody of the opening words echoes the incomparable wail of a steam locomotive's whistle, a haunting, heart-rending wellspring-of-the-blues sound known to nearly all my generation but now, like some phantom train dwindling into eternal night, sadly ever more distant from collective memory.)

The gray-haired conductor on the over-mountain local lamented the loss of steam engines more eloquently than anyone I've ever met. He had been with the railroad his entire worklife, “nigh onto 50 year,” and as a younger man he'd been a steam locomotive engineer. “Them engines were alive,” he said, his blue eyes alight with recollected joy. “Fireman gets yore firebox right an ye find the sweet spot on yore throttle, that stack she'll talk to ye.” For a telepathic instant I was with him in his cab, heard not just the harsh edgy rhythm of the exhaust but the entire symphony of hiss and roar and clank and rumble, felt the throbbing tempo of the locomotive and the heat of its cindery breath. Far ahead is a grade crossing. Now for an instant the engineer is a denim-overalled virtuoso, his solo a long minor-keyed riff in white steam notation. Then he waves from the cab window to a few children walking the red clay road home from school, my boyhood self amongst them. Finally he's beyond our vision, a soot-begrimed shepherd of human lives and cargo, his smoke-wreathed passage a momentary epic of fire and thunder and the song of the banshee, dwindling, gone. “Aint nothin like it anymore,” he said. “Damn diesels jes machines, no life in em at all.”
 

On one of my trips south a talkative, ostentatiously effeminate young man hopped aboard just as we were leaving Manhattan, announced to everyone within earshot he was bound for Asheville, then explained how his concern for a sick friend there was forcing him to “abandon civilization” for “at least a week among the cross-burning barbarians.” Though at first his sarcastic monologue about the South was genuinely funny, by the time we crossed the Potomac River into Virginia it had become wearying, even potentially offensive, so much so a few of us were concerned he might provoke some die-hard Southron to real violence. As we rolled into Asheville, he began pacing back and forth the length of the car, seemingly anxious about where he might exit the train. Finally he asked the conductor: “Which end do we get off?”

The old railroad man – who several times in the interest of maintaining peace had asked the outspoken passenger to please keep his prejudices to himself – glared in combined perplexity and disgust, then answered in a classic Southern Appalachian basso: “Well, either end I reckon. By god they both stop.”

LB/19 April 2012

-30-