Obama finally mans up...sort of

It might be French jets in the skies over Libya, but they are only part of a coalition lead by the US and NATO who are finally acting to blunt Gadafi's murderous warfare against his own people. Naturally, Obama didn't want to hand another PR victory to Al Quaeda by having American planes strike the first blow, though they could have long ago. By spreading the risk around and forcing the Europeans and even the Arab League countries to be part of this operation it leaves the US far less exposed and less on the hook for potential problems down the line. Critics of Obama will criticize absolutely any action he takes no matter what as they always have. If he had intervened they would have preached the virtue of doing exactly what he is doing now, which is coalition building and working with allies. So naturally, now Obama's opponents insist that he should have been more of a cowboy and acted weeks sooner before there were any UN resolutions or public commitments from other countries to help out.

The reality is that if the US had decided to act alone, before others were ready, then this would have removed all the pressure from other countries and their participation would have evaporated. The US should not have to fix all world problems, and we need the rest of the world to get used to that. Europeans will have to act, especially in their own backyard, if they regard the threat as grave enough.

BTW, this conflict is far from over. There are still all kinds of problems, including the potential destruction of huge amounts of oil production infrastructure, which could make the price of gas go through the roof again. I hope that Obama prosecutes price-fixers this time. Bush certainly wouldn't/didn't because he was in bed with them as an oil tycoon himself.

Mexicans didn't steal my job and education didn't bankrupt the state

I have a friend who is an English teacher, who is convinced that illegal Mexican immigrants are out to "steal his job". I told him, Jim (not his real name), you're an ENGLISH teacher. How is a mexican worker, who doesn't even speak ENGLISH, going to steal YOUR job as an ENGLISH teacher? Of course, the delusional often have answers. Jim thinks that they will do it through "bilingual education", which he insists is not BI-lingual at all, but just an attempt to replace English with Spanish as our official language. I must not have noticed how, according to him, we are being prohibited from speaking English in this country and instead being forced to speak Spanish for all official transactions.

Perhaps he should be more worried about the right-wing assault on teacher pay and attempts to do away with all job security for teachers, where they can be fired instantly, without due process, and seniority will count for nothing. These are the people trying to steal jobs from teachers and trying to take money out of their paychecks, and their pensions to boot.

Some argue that the state has the right to cut teacher pay and take money away from their pensions because those jobs are paid for by taxpayers. Well teachers are taxpayers too, so they have as much interest as any other taxpayer in whether the government uses the money wisely. However, the law says that students have to attend school and the wages they pay to teachers in public schools are less than the wages that most private schools pay. Therefore, if anything, the taxpayers are getting a bargain.

Furthermore, the fact that taxpayers are paying for something doesn't mean that the government is entitled to cheat the person doing the work. If the government contracts with a person to build a bridge and then politicians get together an vote that they only want to pay the contractor half of already agreed upon price, then they can't justify this on the grounds that "the taxpayers are paying for it", or even that "taxes are too high already". It may be that taxpayers are cash strapped, but the bridge still needs to be built and the materials still cost what they cost. You can't vote to repeal either one of these facts.

The same applies to education. It still costs a certain amount to train a person who is willing to endure day-long abuse by teachers, administrators, parents, etc while delivering all the most up-to-date educational material and following all the rules required of them (by the government/taxpayers). You passed laws which demanded that we teach the way we teach. You passed laws that said we had to have certain amounts of training. You spelled out in minute detail every single area you wanted us to cover in the educational standards. You asked for it and we gave it to you at a price we already agreed upon. You can't now turn around and say that you didn't really want all those things and you don't want to pay us for the work we did because you think taxes are too high.

It's not the fault of teachers that taxes are too high, and this wouldn't be an excuse to cheat us out of our salaries and pensions anyway. Sure, the government spent money on our salaries and pensions, just like they spent money on lots of other things. However, that doesn't prove that teachers are the ones to blame for the governments financial woes.

Some people say, but education is a huge part of the state budget, and this is true. But that doesn't prove that we created the mess. If you lower taxes and have other economic mismanagement, reducing revenues, education will still be a large chunk of the budget. However, the reason for the reduction in revenues is not because of education spending. It's because of those other things, like cutting taxes in the middle of a recession, and investing state funds poorly. I understand that other taxpayers are also hurting in a recession. But that doesn't entitle them to get together and vote to raid my bank account so that they can all have a nice vacation. That's money that I saved out of my paycheck, which I already noted is a smaller paycheck than many private schools pay out.

Likewise, the money that I put into pension funds is largely my money, even if my employer made some contributions too. I dare say that I have put far more of my money into my teacher pension, as both a teacher and taxpayer, than the average taxpayer is. These same people who begrudge me my pension, despite the fact that I serve the public and educate their children, get pensions of their own. If the government had no pension then it is unlikely that they would be able to attract teachers in the first place. We would instead work for private companies who offered these pensions. So the government has to offer comparable benefits to get us to work for them.

This all part of the social contract which so-called conservatives want to abruptly rip to shreds after decades and even centuries of agreement about what constituted a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. That doesn't sound very "conservative" to me. It sounds like an untested scheme that is likely to fail along with many other gimmicks and quick fixes that often get proposed as shortcuts to dealing with difficult problems.

Jim's brother hates government too, even though Jim's brother Bruce worked as a police officer for 20 years before retiring on a state pension. He too thinks that the government is trying to pick his pocket and that immigrants are here to take the part time job that he still has to work as an emergency dispatcher to make ends meet.

I asked Bruce, if you want to prevent immigrants from taking your jobs, how do you propose to shut down all the internet and telephone communications in the country. Bruce wasn't sure what I meant, but I pointed out to him that he works in the telecommunications industry and there are plenty of people in India and elsewhere in the world who are also being hired by US firms to handle call center traffic. We call this outsourcing.

If Bruce is worried about all the immigrants trying to take his job, what about the "digital immigrants" who can work from half a world away for less than half of what they pay Bruce? Furthermore, how will the US government collect tax revenues on the digital immigrants living in India. They won't of course, because they are Indian citizens, not American citizens. But these jobs used to be done by American workers whom they could tax. Even illegal immigrants who were here physically, often ended up paying taxes, albeit into a social security account that was not actually their own. These illegal immigrants in the flesh often had tax deductions taken out of their paychecks, but they know that they cannot attempt to collect them, because then the government might discover that they are undocumented workers and send them back. So the government gets money from them, but never has to give them refunds or social security benefits.

This isn't true of digital workers. In fact, I have also heard people make the modest proposal that we could save a lot of money if we just hired people from India to teach in our public schools, via the internet. The only question I have for these people, aside from the one's raised above, is how they expect Mister Depak to maintain order in the classroom and keep the kids on task and not killing each other from half a world away? When Johnny isn't learning and says he doesn't understand what Mr. Deepak from Bangalore is trying to teach him, what are we going to do then? Call in Mr. Chang from Bejing perhaps?

Maybe a better idea would be to try to ditch the silly schemes to nickel and dime teachers in this country, stop all the constant interference, and let us do our jobs. I know that virtually every person who is not a teacher thinks that he or she can teach better than the people who actually are the teachers, but I don't come to McDonalds and tell you you're flipping burgers wrong, so why don't you stop coming to school and giving me bad advice on how to teach.

And stop worrying about Mexicans trying to take your job. They prefer tacos, not burgers, and fast food isn't much of a job to steal in the first place. Neither is making beds in a hotel or picking cotton. Even hundreds of years ago Americans didn't want to do that, which is why they imported slaves to do it for them. Now the (wage) slaves are coming here voluntarily, and we say the (wage) slaves are stealing our job. Sorry, I don't want a slave job. If that's the kind of job they are stealing then I feel sorry for the (wage) slave, but I certainly don't lament the fact that an American no longer has to work it. I wish the (wage) slave didn't have to work it either.

It's RadioACTIVITY not Radiation, people!

I hate to have to do this, and it seems almost as pointless as trying to get George W. Bush to stop saying, "nukUler", but almost every major newspaper and TV report keeps talking about "radiation leaks" and detecting "radiation traces" in California, and generally worrying about "radiation". The correct term is radioACTIVITY. Radiation is electrons and neutrons. Light is a form of electromagnetic "radiation", because it *RADIATES* in all directions from a source. Radio waves are another form of radiation. We do not say that "radiation" leaks out of a light bulb or the antenna of a radio. Furthermore, the "radiation" from a light bulb, in the form of light, will not set off a geiger counter, nor do we say that the light is "radioactive".

On the other hand, there are RADIOACTIVE materials. These include plutonium and uranium (some types more than others), for example. These materials, when they decay, DO emit "radiation", the most harmful of which can be *ionizing* radiation. If these material get inside your body then they will continue to emit harmful radiation, because they are are radioactive. People take supplements like potassium iodide (KI) to block the uptake of a radioactive form of iodine into the thyroid.

Other materials may be only slightly radioactive. For example, radioACTIVE steam was released from the reactors in Japan early on, in an attempt to help cool them. This radioACTIVE material quickly dissipated in the air. The mildly radioactive material is still there, but it spreads out so that it is less concentrated and therefore less harmful in smaller doses.

Here is a summary: Radiation does not equal radioactive. Radioactive does equal radiation.

Radiation itself is not necessarily harmful. Many things radiate (and therefore constitute "radiation"), such as light and radio waves. The "radiation" produced by nuclear (no not nucUler) reactors in Japan, like the light from a light bulb in Japan, cannot travel very far without becoming very faint. Airborne radioACTIVE materials, on the other hand, from the Japanese reactor may indeed travel a much greater distance. A few particles can make it all the way across the Pacific Ocean, though, it is very very very (very very ...) improbable that large number of particles will make it all the way to California. It is far far far (far far...) more likely that the radioactive material which may be released will stay in Japan. For example, when the US bombed Hiroshima (and Nagasaki) we didn't worry about the (don't say radiation) radioACTIVE material from the bomb crossing back over the Pacific Ocean and "getting us". Most all of the radioactive material stayed in a close region around the site of the bomb. We used to conduct above ground nuclear tests in the desert southwestern US. In fact, the first such one was at Trinity, New Mexico. We also exploded nuclear devices on or near islands in the Pacific. All of these threw radioACTIVE materials into the air which circulated all over the place. If we have so much time on our hands that we want to worry about utter nonsense, then it would be better to worry about those, because they produced far more radioactive materials. Chernobyl likewise released a great amount of radioactive material, but not much of it made it to the US mainland.

I know it won't stop the constant, almost intentional misuse of these terms for me to point all this out, but it feels good to do it anyway. In fact, as with "nucUler", people will probably decide to make the mistake more than ever before and push for a redefinition of the terms so that they can finally be correct about something.

In japanese "it is difficult" means "no effin way"

Just in case people haven't picked up on this, in Japanese culture and etiquette, they avoid saying that no or declaring that something is impossible. Instead they often use the euphemism "it is difficult". Therefore, when the prime minister says the situation there is "extreme difficult", what he is really saying is that it is effed up beyond belief and that they have no clue how to fix it. Take the two nuclear reactors that are melting down. They keep making these excuses that say things like , "gosh we can't be sure that the core has really melted, because we haven't been able to look inside and see". Well no kidding. But would we really accept this kind of idiotically evasive answer from anyone in our own country if a reactor near us had its cooling equipment explode and emergency efforts looked partially effective at best. There is absolutely no chance that some melting of the rods has not occurred. Cesium monitoring stations are reporting high levels of radioactivity. Let's not try to sugar coat this or hide behind the smokescreen of uncertainty that always exists in any emergency. Minimizing the situation will not change it or prevent the facts from coming to light in the not-at-all distant future anway..

Nuclear Power's Cheating Heart

I know that many people, especially of the completely uninformed right-wing variety, are in love with nuclear power. In their one-size-fits-all world, it should produce 100% of all power. It must really be a b*tch to see absolute and unequivocal proof that their lover has strayed again, in this case, in Japan at the the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Facility, where the cooling system failed, following a massive earthquake. This caused the cooling water to rise above the boiling point and released about 1000 times the normal level of radioactivity.

That was before the cooling system exploded, crumbling the walls of the reactor containment facility and leaking even more radioactive material. These are the same containment facilities that we are constantly assured could take a direct hit from a 747 or withstand the strongest earthquakes. In fact the building did withstand the earthquake, it that turns out not to matter, because it set off a chain of events where the potential for much more serious problems, including a partial meltdown, are possible.

Of course, it is possible that things will be brought back under control. The plan is now to flood the reactor with seawater before temperatures can get high enough for the rods to melt. Perhaps a Japanese Chernobyl will be avoided. Perhaps it will remain only be a Japanese Three Mile Island. However, like the TMI incident, it is questionable whether this multi-billion dollar facility will ever operate again. Three other reactors in Japan also shut down, BTW, though presumably they shut down safely. Hopefully there will not be 4 Japanese Three Mile Island incidents. The quake was devastating enough without additional man-made disasters compounding the situation.

Imagine if a wind or solar generation facility that cost billions of dollars just suddenly and unpredictably became unusable. Imagine if a 20 kilometer radius around it had to be evacuated indefinitely. Imagine if three other billion dollar alternative energy plants also shut down indefinitely.

Nuclear power boosters, after licking their wounds for a while and declaring everyone else to have over-reacted, often sit around nursing their broken hearts. Nuclear power lets them down again and again, but like battered housewives, they dutifully return to it, and in relatively short order. They always talk about the good that they see in it. They talk about the latest, greatest, fancy, high-tech reactors that cannot possibly let them down the way the current ones seem to. They talk about all the times that things didn't go wrong, and how this is just a minor blip.

Of course, if we were getting 100% of our power from this type of nuclear facility then it would be a blip multiplied at least 10 fold. Instead of only having a near disaster every couple decades, we might have only every couple years. And the odds of a near disaster turning into a total disaster also increase.

I believe that the newest, safest forms of nuclear fission should continue to be investigated, but it should only be part of the power mix, not anywhere near 100%. The main reason is cost, and the next major reason is that fact that these facilities are never as safe in practice as they are claimed to be in theory. The latest generation reactors, such as Pebble Bed Moderated Reactors (PBMB) or even Liquid Fluoride Thorium Moderated Reactors (LFTMR) supposedly cannot melt down the same way. PBMRs, are not even cooled with water, and supposedly the encased "pebble" fuel would stop producing heat efficiently without the circulation of a coolant. LFTMRs also avoid the buildup of Xenon, and have no fuel rods at all. Yet these are never the reactors that seem to get built, perhaps because they would be way more expensive than the older, mass-producible generations of reactors we have today.

It is, simple put, 100% false that there are no credible alternatives to nuclear. The same amount of money and time spent drilling super-deep geothermal wells would likewise produce huge amounts of power that was always available, for example. However, the main issue is avoiding one-size-fits-all thinking. Having multiple, diversified power sources makes things more robust, not less. The wind doesn't blow all the time, but it's always blowing somewhere and the sun is pretty predictable too, especially in the desert.

Demand for power itself is variable, so it is acceptable to have variable sources of generation. The problem with nuclear is that it does not vary easily with demand and therefore a lot of power generated at low peak times must be stored. Without certain renewables, like hydro power, nuclear would be even more wasteful than it is already, because there would be no practical way to store this excess production.

The point is that we not put all our eggs in one nuclear basket. All but the most blinded by love should be able to see that now, one would hope.

If Wisconsin dirty trick was legal.....

If it was possible for Republicans to pass a bill with no democrats present .... then that proves that people criticizing democrats for obstruction don't know what they're talking about. After all, right wingers, who wanted democrats to return so that they could be steam rollered kept screaming about how the legislators weren't doing their jobs, but now these same republicans say that it wasn't even necessary for democrats to be there in the first place to pass legislation. If it was legal for Republicans to act as they did, which is highly doubtful, given strict open-meeting laws in Wisconsin, then clearly these Republicans were incompetent at their own job, because they didn't act for three weeks when they had the power to do so.

They need to get their story straight. Besides, these missing democrats are doing a better job of representing the interests of their constituents than they would if they were just going to be automatically voted down anyway. The republicans who want the democrats to return are not the constituents of these representatives anyway.

It is also worth noting that Walker has tried to manufacture this kind of phony crisis before, when he tried to bust courthouse unions in Milwaukee in favor of a fat-cat crony deal with Wackenhut. He failed to follow the law then as well, however, and now Milwaukee has to pay back pay to all their courthouse security, as well as pay for the private contract.

This phony $137 million budget "crisis" is as transparently fraudulent as they get. Even in New Mexico we have a budget shortfall of larger than that and our total operating budget is far less. Every year legislators deal with gaps bigger than this and routinely plug them without abolisihing the rights of public employee unions.

On top of that, Walker offered about as much in tax breaks to businesses as the total amount of the alleged "shortfall". If there was really a budget crisis then all he would have to do to plug it would be to rescind the tax breaks, rather than demand that public workers take what amounts to an 8% pay cut.

Against senority? Tell the rest of the world.

When it comes to teachers and other public employees, it seems that today's crop of "reformers" wants to take away every right in sight including the job security which comes with senority. Strangely, they don't seem to think that giving deference to senority is a problem in just about any other profession. In fact, I suspect that most people, in most jobs, would be appalled if they saw companies discarding 20 and 30-year veterans like yesterday's garbage and replacing them with people who have five minutes of job experience. It is not just teachers and public employees who have systems based upon senority. It is embedded in the entire fabric of the labor market throughout this nation and, in fact, throughout most of the world. Abolishing these practices amounts to a voiding of the social contract that society has with those who work to build it and keep it going.