GET A BRAIN, MORANS!

GET A BRAIN, MORANS! or Doubling Down on Crazy


Those of you who frequent progressive websites like commondreams.org, dailykos.com, truthdig.com, alternet.org are familiar with the former statement which appeared on a sign carried by a smug, smiling young Teapartier. It speaks to the abysmal level of political discourse in America today.


The other seminal statement of regressive moranic politics; ‘Keep the government’s hands off my Medicare’, was shouted out by an old geezer at a town hall meeting held by his congressman.


Considering how well-liked Medicare is even amongst Repuglicans, even amongst idiot wingnuts who don’t even know it’s equivalent to socialized medicine, you’d think Repug leaders in congress would tread lightly when considering changes to the program. But no, they’re so full of themselves and giddy from their victory in the last congressional elections they’ve completely lost touch with reality and so Rep. Paul Ryan, head of the house budget committee, has come up with a grand plan to ‘save’ Medicare and reduce government expenditures by thoroughly gutting the program.


His plan, touted by the mainstream media and conservative punditocracy as a bold move to balance the budget involves replacing government guaranteed benefits with a voucher system in which seniors receive a fixed (inadequate) amount of money and are sent out into the private insurance market to get coverage. The fact that the medical insurance companies are widely despised by the population doesn’t seem to register with the Repugs so they voted en masse, in both the House and Senate, to back Ryan’s Medicare disaster.


The reason why they needed to gut Medicare was so they’d have the money to provide additional tax breaks to the corpses and the wealthy, supposedly to create jobs. Considering the many corporations that are enjoying record profits today that are not only not paying taxes but getting refunds, how much lower can taxes go? Moreover, American corpses are sitting on $1.6 trillion of cash reserves they don’t know what to do with because so many of the people who ordinarily buy things don’t have any money. When they do create jobs they’re mostly in other countries.


The US now has the greatest income disparity of any developed country. The wealthy have so much more than they can productively use, that most of it goes to speculation. Americans can thank tax policy that favors the flush for a large portion of high gas and food prices. Whereas in normal times most commodities futures contracts are purchased by end users, today 70% are bought by speculators.


Oh, I forgot, the reason why the Repugs want to slash any program that has anything to do with helping the people at large is because the budget is out of balance and the deficit needs to be tamed. That’s also why they want to reduce taxes on the wealthy… Aha! You don’t get the connection between lowering taxes and balancing the budget? Don’t worry, it’s called Voodoo Economics and thus a bit complicated for those of us non-morans.


In order for the Repugs to play to their dingbat base they’re getting themselves so far out on a limb, it’ll take a heroic rescue on Obama’s part to save them from electoral disaster. But not to worry, Mr. O is so good at compromising principles he either never had or only pretended to have for the purpose of campaigning, he’ll do a fine job at either saving the Repugs’ asses or giving up so much to wingnut fanaticism it’ll be the same as them winning.


Whereas Ryan’s budget doesn’t even pretend to balance the budget for another 50 years or so, there is a plan put forth by the 81 member congressional progressive caucus that would get the country’s books in order in about ten years. It’s simple really; tax stock transactions, capital gains, corporations and the wealthy; reduce military spending; set up a public option for health care and negotiate better prices for prescription drugs and presto, just like magic, the budget is fixed. Chances are, if you get your news from the corporate media, you’ve never heard of it: It doesn’t fit their worldview so gets no air time.


Seems to me the captains of the ship America must have a strong compulsion to run it aground, not to mention trash the world at large, because they can’t all believe the drivel coming out of their mouths, can they? I mean, true morans aren’t that stupid, are they?

Climate Change

Climate Change

Tepco, the operator of the Fukushima nukes has finally admitted that three of its reactors suffered meltdowns in the aftermath of the earthquake-tsunami. In fact, one of them started melting down from the earthquake alone before the tsunami hit. They keep pouring water into the reactors to try to cool what’s left of the fuel rods but there are leaks so the contaminated water is entering the environment. Radioactivity is 50 times normal in seaweed in the ocean near the plant.


The whole scenario was played up as totally unexpected and impossibly unlikely so not worth considering in the construction of the plants or for that matter in the development of the surrounding urbanized areas. People, unfortunately have short institutional memories. Up on the hillsides facing the ocean in northeast Japan there are stone markers, some dating back to the 1600’s, which clearly state, Do not build below this line. Still, in a densely populated country like Japan, it’s hard to imagine they’d leave large areas of their coastal plains to low-value land uses such as farms, forests and recreation because of events that might happen only once every 300 or 400 years.


But they do happen and all indicators point to them happening with increasing frequency. That includes the frequency and intensity of earthquakes which some scientists believe are exacerbated by global warming. But not to worry, according to the fossil fuel industry, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Repuglican Party, climate change is either a hoax or something that’s a lot cheaper and easier to adapt to than change our lifestyles for. You know, if it gets too hot you just crank up your air-conditioner. If that means burning more coal, well, it’s the cheapest source of energy so we can’t forego its benefits just because it intensifies the effects of global warming.


Last winter America experienced its largest winter storm ever, but what’s the big deal; everybody gets a vacation from school or work and gets a little exercise shoveling snow. It may be blizzarding outside but you’ve got your fossil-fueled heater to snuggle up to.


The Mississippi River is experiencing a 100 year flood but events of that severity are likely to become regular occurrences so maybe the people there should adapt by raising all the buildings in the flood plain up on stilts. There’s probably only ten or twenty million of them. Of course, there’s always the small matter of surviving massive tornados in which houses on stilts wouldn’t fare too well. You’d probably need to rebuild all the structures in tornado prone areas with steel and concrete… hmmm, adapting seems not so simple.


Anyway, in order for the vast majority to live the good, profligate, carbon-rich life a small fraction will have to be sacrificed to the weather gods. It’s probably not worth spending all that money adapting to something that might happen only every 20 or 50 or 100 years, let alone try to reverse the march of global warming, so the answer, I guess, is to pray you’re not counted amongst the unlucky ones… Dear God, If it’s going to happen, please let somebody else get the shaft.

Standard and Poor' Gets Religion

S & P, one of a handful of international rating agencies, has downgraded America’s status based on its $14 trillion national debt and $1.6 trillion 2011 deficit and the political inability to do anything about it. This is rich coming from an outfit that gave top rating to every toxic, junk-status mortgage backed security that came its way before the crash. It’s to be expected that you give a high rating to someone who’s paying you to rate them, otherwise they’ll find someone else to pay off for their Triple-A. All that aside, being craven and duplicitous most of the time doesn’t totally detract from your voice if you happen to get it right once in a while, so let’s take it from there.

Both parties objected to S &P’s downgrading, insisting they have plans to tackle the deficit. The Repugs want to save $400 billion a year by eviscerating, emasculating and slashing to the bone every federal program that has anything to do with helping anybody but the top few percent of income earners, who in fact get a tax cut. How cutting taxes for people who already have far more than they know what to do with can be part of a deficit reduction plan is something only a true believer Repug can understand. We know they are full of crazy, but that’s who the people elected, so that’s where the US is at.

Obama wants to save $360 billion a year by reinstating income tax rates for everybody earning over $250,000 that were in place before the Bush tax cuts. Either way that only deals with a quarter of the deficit. The Repug plan projects a deficit of $23 trillion in 2021, Obama’s plan about the same. Moreover, both plans are wildly optimistic in projecting a far healthier economy than anybody outside of government and in their right mind would dare to, but that’s part of the game.

Neither side wishes to deal forthrightly with the problem because nobody in politics wants to take credit for raising taxes. It’s not hard to understand why since it’s far easier to borrow to make the economy temporarily look good than tell the truth to the American people and be voted out of office at the next election. Sure, everything will look hunky-dory when you are spending borrowed money, but it’s like heroin addiction. You feel really great when you are high so that in contrast everyday life is hard to deal with so you cannot stop, you have to have more. You also build up a tolerance, so need ever increasing doses. At a certain point, the only thing that can save your life or sanity is cold turkey.

So instead of being realistic or practical it’s all left to the future to sort out. Think about that number, $23,000,000,000,000. Interest rates are relatively low now, but the US government and the Fed are making every possible move in the direction of increasing rates. That isn’t their stated purpose, but when you print shiploads of money and issue vast amounts of debt you lessen its value and increased interest rates is the only logical, possible outcome. So, figure a modest average of 5% interest on the debt and you come up with $1.25 trillion a year in debt service. If the administration’s (seeming) goal of cheapening the value of the dollar jacks up interest rates an additional two or three percent then service of the debt will amount to half of the current budget and an obviously untenable situation.

There are four, more or less equal parts to America’s $1.6 trillion budget deficit. The first is the military. Since 2000 the defense budget has doubled, amounting to about $400 billion. Obama recently announced, to great fanfare, a $78 billion reduction in military spending; except when you looked at the fine print it didn’t actually reduce the amount spent, only the projected increase was less than planned. So clearly not serious about deficit reduction.

A second part is health care spending – Medicare, Medicaid and prescription drug benefits. That one’s easy; single payer would save about $400 billion in overall health spending. Admittedly, not all of that is direct federal savings but a lot of it is.

The third part is Bush’s tax cuts. Obama wants to end the cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that’s another $400 billion. But really, there’s so much money sloshing around at the top, the entire deficit could be erased if corporations and the wealthy were obliged to pay their fair share of the tax burden. A combination of raising the top rate for millionaires and billionaires, a financial transaction tax, taxing capital gains the same as ordinary income, a corporate income tax which corporations actually paid and a wealth tax on the richest Americans would easily and painlessly completely eliminate the deficit. Considering the top 1% is sitting on assets of $19 trillion, just an 8% wealth tax alone would balance this year’s budget deficit of $1.6 trillion.

Finally, there’s the recession which has reduced tax revenue. Yes, corporate profits and the stock markets (headed for soon-to-burst bubble territory) are way up but they don’t pay much in taxes so that doesn’t help the budget much. There’s nothing on the horizon which suggests an end to the recession in the next few years, but at $400 billion that’s a deficit charge that’s relatively easy to sustain. Besides, that’s the only part of the deficit that is legitimate, the rest is all based on a lack of political will and common sense combined with cockamamie wingnut anti-tax insanity.

Instead of actually doing something to rein in the deficit, Obama and the Repugs will take a chainsaw to slash Social Security, Medicare and every program that benefits everybody below the top few percent. Why do I group Obama with the Repugs? Of the two people he chose to head his bi-partisan deficit commission, one, former senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming, positively despises Social Security, the other, Erskine Bowles, the nominal Democrat who served in the Clinton administration, is a fellow traveler. So even though SS has absolutely nothing to do with the deficit, they suggested serious cutbacks to the program. With $2 trillion in the bank, SS has all the money it needs for another 25 years and a little tweaking of tax rates will carry it decades further in the future. Obama talks about taking a stand to protect SS and other programs, but I don’t believe him for a minute. The only things he is good at are oratory and compromise.

The US is blithely and obliviously headed for a morass of its own making that could ultimately destabilize the whole world economy.

Fukushima Casualties

Fukushima Casualties

There are two socio-economic casualties of the Fukushima aside from the obvious spread of radiation. First a few comments on that. It’s disingenuous to compare CT scans and X-rays to atmospheric radiation since a one time zap is completely different than having a radioactive particle lodged in your body. Once ingested each different element migrates to a specific part of the body – radioactive Iodine, for instance, goes to the thyroid – and continually and cumulatively discharges its carcinogens.

We also often find exposure compared to background radiation, as if it’s no big deal. What they don’t mention is that most background radiation is a result of nuclear testing; it’s not something people have always lived with, and, as mentioned previously, there is no safe level of exposure. All radiation causes cancer; minimal exposure causes minimal cancers, but since it’s all cumulative, every little bit increases your chances of developing the disease.

One casualty of Fukushima is globalization itself. The concept of globalization encourages manufacturers to scour the globe for the cheapest and best possible location for fabricating and/or assembling each individual part of a complex whole. This has caused a lot of grief for Toyota, which has had to stop or slow production of its vehicles in plants around the world because of the earthquake/tsunami. Sometimes a part is manufactured in only one location and if that one plant gets washed away in a giant tsunami, well everything shuts down.

Toyota also pioneered just-in-time manufacturing. Instead of producing and then storing parts in warehouses for eventual use, parts are delivered to the assembly line just minutes before they are to be used. As a result there is no leeway, if any part of the supply chain breaks down the whole edifice shuts down. It’s a very efficient method of manufacturing, but as we see subject to total breakdown when things don’t go exactly according to plan.

The other casualty is the Nuclear Renaissance, the return to the purportedly ‘green’ energy source, which has been dead in the water for decades because of a multiplicity of factors. Fukushima won’t stop China and other countries, rich and poor, from building nukes but it will certainly slow the process. It will also increase dependency on fossil fuels just when we are approaching peak oil crunch time.

As we are now seeing, in the frantic attempt to sustain the endless growth paradigm, ever more delicate, difficult and dangerously placed reserves are being developed. While BP was guilty of gross negligence in the Gulf of Mexico blowout, the proliferation of drilling around the world in those marginal areas will almost certainly result in additional catastrophic pollution events. That’s in addition to the damage done in some processes even when all goes according to plan, as in the poisoning of groundwater that results from using hydraulic fracturing in extraction of gas from shale deposits.

All in all the environment is in for some serious thrashing and trashing.

Obama the Disappointer

Obama has declared his candidacy for the 2012 elections... and it’s only 18 months before the poll takes place. America’s excruciatingly long and drawn out election season is one of the tell-tale signs of American political ossification. The process is hopeless; I can’t see anything good or reasonable or logical coming out of the congress or the president today. To do it right there needs to be regional primaries so candidates can focus on one area instead of wasting time and energy jetting back and forth across the country. One per month for four months starting in May of election year would allow campaigning to start at the beginning of 2012 instead of spring of 2011. Makes too much sense so can’t happen.

Mr O has three things going for him. For one, he’s a great ambassador to the world. He’s a very calm, steady and likeable guy and, as a representative of a long exploited and repressed minority, a great testament to the potential of American democracy. Compared to Bush in this regard, he’s a minor deity.

He’ll appoint decent people to the judiciary. If a Repug gets elected, it’ll mean another generation or two of feed the rich, starve the poor decisions from the bench.

Finally, most of his competition ranges from the laughable to the risible. The ones that are halfway reasonable and/or competent will have a difficult time getting through the tea-party electoral gauntlet. If a thoughtful, charismatic, moderate Repug showed up he or she’s likely to be toast.

At this point, I can’t see many thinking progressive people voting for Obama; rather, as true of every election for decades, they’ll be voting against the fearsome and/or cartoony right-wing opposition. I can’t think of a single major political initiative or stance that Obama’s taken that meets my standard of forward looking or compassionate. After compromising and kowtowing to the opposition while slamming and slandering his base, the people who worked for and voted for him, the so-called enthusiasm gap is wider than ever. Once again, Democrats, progressives, people who care will have a choice between crap and disaster.

The epitome of Obama’s disconnect from the reality of the common folk, the people who elected him was his choice of Jeffery Imelt, CEO of General Electric, to head his commission on jobs and competitiveness. GE is good at creating jobs, only most are in other countries, not in the US. The one area they have been hiring in is accountants who jobs it is to find legal loopholes to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. And at that they’ve been doing a great job. GE enjoyed profits of over $14 billion last year – five million earned in the US - but not only isn’t pay any taxes but getting a $3 billion refund.

There are all kinds of reasons why the US government thinks it needs to subsidize one of the largest, most profitable corporations in the world, but none of them are good. All of them are based on the wholesale purchase of government by the wealthy and powerful. They have their cockamamie supply-side theories and arguments for feeding the rich – they’ll create more jobs – but that has repeatedly shown to be ridiculously off the mark. Right now the country’s wealthiest citizens are sitting on $19 trillion of assets, while the corporations have nearly $2 trillion of cash reserves. How shoveling more money at them is suddenly going to create jobs is a conundrum only a wingnut teabagger could grasp.

GE also got billions from the bailout money since at one point they were making half their profits from financial services. So, funding for food stamps, Medicaid for the poor, Pell grants to enable more people to attend college, relief for people suckered into taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford to pay back, aid to the states who are in dire financial straits? Nope, we just don’t have the cash. Welfare for the world’s richest corporations and tax breaks for the already fantastically wealthy when the government is running a deficit equal to 12% of GDP; no problem, they obviously deserve it.

If deficit reduction is one’s goal, there is no way any amount of cutbacks on programs for the people at large can make up for the wealthy and corporations not paying their fare share of the cost of government. Neither can any amount of economic growth make up the difference without raising taxes on those who can afford to pay. Moreover, it’s living in Fantasyland to think the US can continue to run huge budget and trade deficits while printing oceans of money without the bill someday coming due.

Since I began writing this post Obama has gotten populist. Just after he declares his candidacy he says we’re going to tax the rich. (Where’s he been since his election in 2008?) We’re going to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion in 12 years, he says. Why stretch it out over 12 years, you ask, why not just say $340 billion a year? Well, I guess, because $340 billion doesn’t sound like much against a $1.6 trillion deficit, not even 25%, in fact.

Obama’s not leveling with the people – he obviously thinks it’s not politically tenable to tell the truth, assuming he does understand the situation – but that’s not anywhere near enough to tackle the deficit. Concurrently, deficits are also good for politicians since they make it seem the economy is doing a lot better than it really is. I mean, if I could borrow ten thousand dollars to gild my lifestyle, I’d be feeling great... until the bill came due. At this point the bill will not only be a crushing debt burden but a wholesale crash of the economy.

The catalyst for the coming financial implosion will come from rising commodity prices. As the value of the dollar slides, the price of commodities, since they are priced in dollars, will rise and increase inflation in America. As the price of oil, the largest component of America’s trade deficit, also moves up because of instability in producing regions combined with resource depletion, those rises will be intensified and the US will run hard up against an intractable, unsustainable situation. Rising inflation, according to current economic thinking, will require rising interest rates which will then increase the burden of servicing America’s huge debt.

Obama’s now only tinkering with the problem when the situation is just dire, which only makes it worse in the long run. When the situation becomes catastrophic, because it wasn’t dealt with when only dire, nothing less than great sacrifice on everyone’s part will make a difference. For every dollar of ease gained from borrowing, there’ll be equivalent pain in paying it back.

There only alternative to repaying loans is printing money and thus cheapening its value, which then brings an inflation death spiral. 2012 will be a tough year economically and an albatross around Obama’s electoral neck, but the Repugs will only have their failed policies of the past to cling to and thus look even worse than Obama.

The one thing the Repugs are good at is stealing elections and since no prominent Dumbocrat has ever had the courage or commonsense to call them to account for their thievery, not even those who’ve had elections stolen right out from under them, you can bet if the election is close the Repug will win.

I’m not optimistic. My cynicallity quotient is in the stratosphere. I’d hardly vote for Obama because he’s a likable guy and will appoint a few judges. Better to give the whole government to the Repugs and hope for a revolutionary backlash. If the people of Yemen can rise up, why not Americans?

Fukushima Going Down

Excessive radiation has been found 50 kilometers from the plant, the exclusion zone, however, is only 20 k. If they expand to 40 k, 170,000 people will have to be evacuated, probably permanently. The exclusion Zone around Chernobyl is half the size of New Jersey. Moreover that excessive radiation found outside the Fukushima exclusion zone would be over the limit allowed inside the Chernobyl zone. In other words, they are being very lax about their citizens’ safety.

Previously Japan’s sacrificial plant workers were limited to 100 millisieverts of exposure. At that level, one in a thousand will develop cancer. At the new limit of 250, that proportion goes down to one in four hundred. That’s not bad odds, or wouldn’t be if it was the only toxin people were subject to in their daily lives. But add up all the nasties in water, food and air and give them a couple of decades to do their damage and the proportion goes down to 1 in 7. It wouldn’t be such a big deal if cancer was a quick and easy death, rather than the long drawn out and debilitatingly painful one that it is. However, the plant workers are being compensated; previously earning $100 to $200 per day, they are now receiving $4000 per day. Hopefully they’ll live long enough to enjoy their new found riches.

In the process of dousing the stricken reactors with large amounts of water, one thing they are doing is creating radioactive steam, evidently able to spread far and wide. They’ve also been creating contaminated water, part of which they need to store and somehow dispose of safely, another part is seeping into groundwater and a lot of it is draining into the sea.

Three hundred thirty meters from shore the water was, at last report, more than 4000 times over the limit and that number is growing every day. That seems very far from shore to be so contaminated and must entail a gusher of a leak. Radiation twice the limit has been found 40 kilometers from the shore so a massive contamination of the sea. No problem, the authorities say, the ocean will dilute it. Yes but how many mutant fish will emerge in the meantime?

Latest news is they found a crack in one of the containment vessels which might be the source of the leak, or maybe at least one source. They really don’t know for sure where it’s coming from. And it’s too dangerous to be able to spend the time, get up close and really find out why it’s leaking. It may go on for a long time. It may render a large part of the Japanese coast off limits to fishing on a permanent basis.

If a country wished to take a chance on permanently polluting its land, that would be their choice, but radiation knows no national boundaries. If Japan, one of the world’s most technologically advanced nations can’t keep it together, how can the world possibly be safe with a whole bevy of developing countries embracing nukes?

To me, nuclear power is emblematic of the idiocy and insanity of modern corporate life and its sway over government of all stripes. Nukes are now more expensive than wind. It takes five to ten years to bring one on line compared to one year for wind. There isn’t a single privately financed nuke in the entire world, because no deep pocket financial institution in its right mind would put up the money without 100% guarantees from government. There isn’t a single insurance company that will cover the full costs of a nuclear meltdown. There is still no way to permanently dispose of nuclear waste and though the radiation in spent fuel is just as dangerous as that in nuclear cores, the spent fuel is housed in tin sheds rather than the foot thick steel walls of the containment vessel for the nuclear core.

There’s no CO2 produced in a nuke, but a large amount is produced in the mining and processing of Uranium and the people who work in that area have a much greater risk of cancer than the general population.

It doesn’t make any sense and it never has, but still, even after Fukushima, there are a lot of people who’re still pushing for nukes and a lot of countries that’ll continue to pursue the ultimate disaster of nuclear power.

Tsunami Warning

I haven’t had much time to keep up with the blog lately as I’ve been working on a new book, Hitchhiker’s Guide to Enlightenment, but I had to take a little time off to comment on the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan.

It’s ironic that Japan, the country that’s suffered most from radiation has relied so heavily - 30% of its electricity - on nuclear power. It is also, of all countries, most subject to strong earthquakes. Something like 20% of all earthquakes over magnitude 6 on the Richter scale happen in Japan. As you’d expect, with that background, Japan is, relatively speaking, very well prepared for quakes. Forty story buildings in Tokyo swayed like palm trees but didn’t crumble.

However, at 9.0 that was the 4th strongest quake recorded since 1900, and the strongest in Japan in 300 years. It moved the entire country 4 meters to the east. That was not something you’d ever expect, at least not in your lifetime, so not something Japanese officials cared to plan for. But they do happen and with the consequences of nuclear meltdown so grave, even a 1000 year event should’ve been taken into account.

Moreover, with the very word tsunami derived from the Japanese, that’s also something they should’ve considered. There again, this wave was so outsized nobody there would’ve believed it could’ve ever happened. Nevertheless, when dealing with nuclear meltdown, the worst case scenario has to be part of the calculation. It’s not like when a windmill crashes and all you have to do is recycle the metal.

The government had been saying that radiation releases have been small and not dangerous, but now they are admitting spikes of unhealthy levels of radiation. One slick move made by the Japanese government was to lower standards for allowable radiation exposure when workers at the plant were getting over the maximum limit, otherwise they would’ve had to stop working. No big deal unless you’re one of the workers who might die from that exposure. More recently, they announced levels of radiation in food produced in the general area that were over allowable limits, but then said it wasn’t dangerous. Then why have a limit if there’s no harm in going over it? Some people feel there is no safe limit, that any amount is harmful.

The conventional wisdom has it that there was little radiation released at Three Mile Island and nobody died from it, in spite of the fact that cancers in the area spiked for a whole generation. It boggles the mind how the industry and their government enablers either believe their own lies or don’t care as long as there are profits to be made. After all, they have to breathe the same contaminated air as everyone.

Moreover, the industry, aligned with western governments is pushing nukes all over the world. Turkey, China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, amongst several other countries, are all planning on developing nukes, so further meltdowns are inevitable. Take India for instance, it’s a great country with a lot going for it, but they haven’t been able to figure out how to provide toilets for more than half their population so those people just shit around, even in the big cities, so how the hell could they be trusted to safely operate a nuke?

Fortunately, this will force a rethink of nuclear power plans around the world, though many countries are certain to go ahead with them anyway. Not one single nuke would exist in the world today without government subsidies and exemption from full liability insurance in case of an accident. Not one single bank or investor in the entire world will finance a nuclear power plant without 100% guarantees. They take 6 to 10 years to build and cost a fantasic amount of money and now their power is more expensive than wind power. Still, many countries will continue to build them.

Meanwhile, four different units in the Fukashima complex have experienced serious explosions. The great irony is that the problem stemmed from the breakdown of the conventional pumping systems. The tsunami wiped out the electricity used to operate the pumps as well as the backup diesel generators. Now they are dumping in sea water. These are Hail Mary passes, acts of desperation, last ditch attempts to avoid meltdowns because once the containment vessel is covered in sea water it’s toast as a power facility. Billions of dollars down the drain and the country is experiencing rolling black outs because they now have a shortage of power.

Having four reactors out of control at the same time also seriously complicates matters because it’s hard to work on any one of them with the others so close by spewing their nasty stuff all around you. Moreover, the greatest danger comes not from the reactor cores themselves but the spent fuel rods. They may be spent for the purposes of use in the reactor, but they still contain a lot of radioactivity and generate a lot of heat and require water to be constantly circulating to keep them cool. And further, the spent fuel rods are not enclosed in thick steel containment vessels as the reactor core is and thus in case of overheating will spread their radiation very easily.

There area around those plants will become a permanent exclusion zone. Without protective clothing, nobody will be able to safely go near those plants as far in the future as one can imagine.

There’s been a feeling on the part of climate scientists for several years that global warming could have an impact on earthquake activity. If you remove heavy land ice in places thus lightening up those areas, while adding water to the oceans making them heavier, that may well increase frequency and intensity of quakes. I’m also convinced that withdrawing vast amounts of fossil fuels and water from the earth’s crust has an impact. Finally, the latest natural gas extraction technology – hydraulic fracturing – has shown to be exacerbating earthquake tendencies. The idea is to break up layers of shale to get the gas out. If you take a strong solid shale formation and shatter it into a lot of pieces it has to be destabilizing.

So it can only get worse. The world should prepare, however much it’s possible, for a wave of 100 year, 500 year, 1000 year natural events. And tough luck if you gamble on nuclear power and lose.