RedStateEclectic

Silver (or should I say gold) lining for Ron Paul’s 2nd place finish

 

With all the talk in the media about how important the Ames Straw Poll results between Bachmann and Pawlenty were going to be (while at the same time hedging their bets by minimizing the meaning of a possible Ron Paul win) a VERY close second place finish by the good doctor is probably the best thing that could have happened.  The media can’t say this is a huge plus for Bachmann while at the same time saying that the 152 vote difference second place finisher means that the poll is meaningless...especially when the separation to third place was well over 2,000 votes.

Another huge plus is that the predictions were that a large turnout was going to be bad for Paul because of his “devoted grass-roots army of supporters who are unlikely to support other candidates, but ALWAYS has trouble expanding beyond that hard-core group.”  He came within an eyelash of winning WITH a large turnout, which by the media’s own reasoning means his “small but energetic base” is in fact growing!

 

Free Spirits Descending on Omaha

In honor of Laura’s hard work for the upcoming LibertyFest. Must be some interesting personalities out there.

Earth Day, April 22, 1995 - Remember?

What did you do on 22 April, 1995, or on that day 25 years earlier?

April 22 [1995] marks the 25th anniversary of Earth Day.  Now as then its message is spiritually uplifting.  But all reasonable persons who look at the statistical evidence now available must agree that Earth Day’s scientific premises are entirely wrong.

During the first great Earth Week in 1970 there was panic.  The public’s outlook for the planet was unrelievedly gloomy.  The doomsaying environmentalists–of whom the dominant figure was Paul Ehrlich–raised the alarm: The oceans and the Great Lakes were dying; impending great famines would be seen on television starting in 1975; the death rate would quickly increase due to pollution; and rising prices of increasingly-scarce raw materials would lead to a reversal in the past centuries’ progress in the standard of living.

The media trumpeted the bad news in headlines and front-page stories.  Professor Ehrlich was on the Johnny Carson show for an unprecedented full hour–twice.  Classes were given by television to tens of thousands of university students.

It is hard for those who did not experience it to imagine the national excitement then.  Even those who never read a newspaper joined in efforts to clean up streams, and the most unrepentant slobs refrained from littering for a few weeks.  Population growth was the great bugaboo.

Every ill was the result of too many people in the U. S. and abroad.  The remedy doomsayers urged was government-coerced birth control, abroad and even at home.

On the evening before Earth Day I spoke on a panel at the jam-packed auditorium at the University of Illinois.  The organizers had invited me for “balance,” to show that all points of view would be heard. I spoke then exactly the same ideas that I write today; some of the very words are the same.

Of the 2,000 persons in attendance, probably fewer than a dozen concluded that anything I said made sense.  A panelist denounced me as a religious nut, attributing to me weird beliefs such as that murder was the equivalent of celibacy.  My ten-minute talk so enraged people that it led to a physical brawl with another professor.

Every statement I made in 1970 about the trends in resource scarcity and environmental cleanliness turned out to be correct. Every prediction has been validated by events.  Yet the environmental organizations and the Clinton administration–especially Vice President Al Gore, the State Department, and the CIA –still take as doctrine exactly the same ideas expressed by the doomsayers in 1970, despite their being discredited by recent history.  And the press overwhelmingly endorses that viewpoint.

Here are the facts: On average, people throughout the world have been living longer and eating better than ever before.  Fewer people die of famine nowadays than in earlier centuries.  The real prices of food and of every other raw material are lower now than in earlier decades and centuries, indicating a trend of increased natural-resource availability rather than increased scarcity.  The major air and water pollutions in the advanced countries have been lessening rather than worsening.

In short, every single measure of material and environmental welfare in the United States has improved rather than deteriorated. This is also true of the world taken as a whole.  All the long-run trends point in exactly the opposite direction from the projections of the doomsayers.  There have been, and always will be, temporary and local exceptions to these broad trends.  But astonishing as it may seem, there are no data showing that conditions are deteriorating.

Read the entire piece by Julian Simon, in which he challenges Bill Clinton and Al Gore to a wager.

Mark Perry of Carpe Diem offers a readable column piece on Earth Day. See also The Courage to Think.

German Greening (1)

In the local dialect spoken here in the western part of the palatinate region, "ü" isn't pronounced; instead of "grün," it's "grie(n)" - sounding in English similar to "gree(n)," and meaning just that. So "ü" isn't difficult for foreigners alone, many Germans find it hard to pronounce the diphtong.

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain ..." - "es grünt so grün ... it's greening so greenly" is the German rendering of Prof. Higgins' pronounciation test for Eliza, a Cockney flower girl who is in the habit of "dropping aitches everywhere."

While spring has arrived, not only biologically has it been "greening so greenly" over here.

P. Gosselin, an American living in Germany, writes in his NoTricksZone blog about his fear that "... Germany is headed for a Green 1933."

Geez – can’t these volks just be happy having normal prosperous lives? Life has never been better for Germans – ever.

Yet, an elitist few have to concoct ways to mess it all up – getting many Germans to believe the end of the world is coming because they are too happy and comfortable, and that the only way to avert the end of the world is to let the elitist few dictate how everyone else lives.

Everywhere in the media today the news is about Germany’s Green Party soaring to record high popularity in the opinion polls, climbing to the number 2 position in opinion polls not far behind Angela Merkel’s CDU party – reaching almost 30%! The jump is due to recent environmental hysteria sparked by the Fukushima accident. When fear spreads, the Greens profit.

Sure this is different than 1933 – but there are plenty of disturbing similarities and signs, all showing it is all headed towards tyranny and authoritarianism. Don’t be fooled by all the green moral righteousness. The green movement is a wolf dressed up as grandma.

The Greens’ rise to this level of power, like in back in the 1930s, is all based on raw irrational fear and hysteria, spurred on by hysterical and scandalous junk science. Whereas in 1933 Hitler’s rise to power was based on the junk science of eugenics and xenophobia, today’s rise of the Greens is based on climate-phobia, CO2-phobia and nuclear-phobia (add to this BSE phobia, gene-food phobia, fine particle phobia, golden rice phobia, tipping point-phobia, etc. etc. etc.), all based on crackpot science.

Make sure to read the entire, short and incisive article at the source.

See also my post Ecofascism - The Nazi Roots, The Bully "Sciences" of a Politicised World, Epistemic Consequences of Totalitarian Democracy, and The Sun Queen of Germany.

Chernobyl Revisited

I believe, the only international event that ever caused me a sense of personal panic was the nuclear power station disaster that occurred on April 28, 1986. I was at the London office of an American bulge bracket investment bank, when I heard the news. For days, I felt spells of extreme disquietude bubbling up in me.

The world has advanced enormously, since then. Thanks to the internet, it is much easier to discern credible from noncredible information, today.

As the serious incident at Fukushima et al shows, unfortunately, for many people time has stopped on April 28, 1986.

The concerted efforts to distort by untruthful hysteria causes and consequences of the events at the distressed nuclear plants in Japan are a time-lapse variant (a deluge of false information compressed into the time span of a few days) of the (thematically different) global warming propaganda onslaught perpetrated against us over years on end.

It is amazing how much almost any random interlocutor (here in Germany) knows about the medical and other scientific findings that have been produced with respect to the consequences of the Chernobyl accident and nuclear power in general - without ever having studied any research of the pertinent type.

It is all the more illuminating to read a paper by a scientist who has devoted decades of his life to studying the Chernobyl disaster from the moment of its occurrence to this day.

Thus, consider this article on the Chernobyl accident and the beneficial health effects of low level radiation, written by Zbigniew Jaworowski, the former chair of the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation.

Chernobyl was the worst possible catastrophe. It happened in a dangerously constructed nuclear power reactor with a total meltdown of the core and 10 days of free emission of radionuclides into the atmosphere.

Probably nothing worse could happen. Yet, the resulting human losses, although tragic, were minute in comparison with catastrophes from other energy sources.

Highly sensitive monitoring systems that had been developed in many countries for the detection of fallout from nuclear weapons enabled easy detection of minute amounts of Chernobyl dust, even in remote corners of the world. This added to global epidemics of fear induced by the accident. [...]

[At Chernobyl, G.T.] a vast environmental dispersion of radioactivity occurred that did not cause any scientifically confirmed fatalities in the general population. The worst harm to the population was caused not by radiation, and not to flesh, but to minds.

The article's conclusion:

It is reassuring, however, that 16 years after the Chernobyl catastrophe, another group, composed of four U.N. organizations—the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP),the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affaires (UNOCHA)—dared to state in its 2002 report, based on UNSCEAR studies, that a great part of the billions of dollars used to mitigate the consequences of the Chernobyl accident was spent incorrectly. The dollars spent in these efforts did not improve, but actually worsened, a deteriorating situation for 7 million socalled “victims of Chernobyl” and solidified the psychological effects of the catastrophe and the wrong decisions of the authorities.

The report (UNDP 2002) recommended that the three post-Soviet countries and the international organizations abandon the current policy. The misguided basis of this policy, i.e. expectation of mass radiation health effects, was responsible for the enormous and uselessly expended resources sacrificed for remediation efforts. Instead, the report presented 35 practical recommendations needed to stop the vicious cycle of Chernobyl frustrations, social degradation, pauperization, and the epidemic of psychosomatic disorders.

The recommendations suggest a reversal of the policy of concentrating attention on nonexistent radiation hazards, and propose that relocated individuals be allowed to return to their old settlements. That is, that essentially all of the restrictions should be removed. *

But here we enter a political mine-field. How well will people accept losing the mass benefits (equivalent to about $40 a month) that they poetically call a “coffin bonus”?

How can it be explained to them that they were made to believe that they were the “victims” of a nonexistent hazard; that the mass evacuations were an irresponsible error; that for 20 years, people were unnecessarily exposed to suffering and need; that vast areas of land were unnecessarily barred from use; and that their countries’ resources were incredibly squandered?

Would fulfilling the recommendations of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 2000 report again result in a political catharsis and perhaps induce violent reactions? Probably not in Russia, where a more rational approach to Chernobyl prevails. But the political classes of Belarus and Ukraine have for years demonstrated a much more emotional approach. When the UNSCEAR 2000a report, documenting the low incidence of serious health hazards resulting from the Chernobyl accident, was presented to the U.N. General Assembly, the Belarus and Ukraine delegations lodged a fulminating protest.

This set the stage for the Chernobyl Forum in 2002, and helped to focus its agenda. Today, the Chernobyl rumble and emotions are beginning to settle down. In the centuries to come, the catastrophe will be remembered as a proof that nuclear power is a safe means of energy production.

Making the Difference

I doubt this kind of project could even commence in Germany. We have regulations. The state makes the difference. Think of the nails, the hazards of the sea, the torment of child labour ...

 

Cacofonix and the Nuclear Issue

The image depicts Heino, a singer of German folk music, whom many adore, while others think him a nuisance.

Below is an interview with a sensible gentleman from Australia, with whom I do not agree on a number of issues, especially his dislike of fossil fuel and CO2, but he does say many valuable things about Fukushima - and I am sure it would be a pleasure to have a debate with such a civil and bright opponent.

Laura, dear fellow-bloggers, dear readers, should you feel I am publishing too much stuff on Fukushima, do step on the brake - and make me feel like Cacofonix:

Cacofonix is the village bard. He is usually only a supporting character, but has a major part in the plots of some albums (see Asterix and the Normans, Asterix the Gladiator, Asterix and the Magic Carpet and Asterix and the Secret Weapon). He loves singing and playing his lyre, and jumps at every opportunity to do so. He also plays the bagpipes, drum and a Celtic trumpet resembling a boar called a Carnyx. While he can accompany traditional dances, and conducts a village band, his singing is unbearable. In Asterix and the Normans it is so unbearable that it teaches the fearless Normans the meaning of fear. In recent albums his music is so spectacularly horrible that it actually starts thunderstorms (even indoors), because of an old French saying that bad singing causes rain.

For his part, Cacofonix considers himself a genius and a superb singer, and he is angrily offended when people criticize his singing, to the point of dismissing them as barbarians.

Some villagers go to extreme lengths to avoid hearing Cacofonix's music. Most notably, Fulliautomatix, the village smith, bangs him on the head at the merest hint of breaking into a song, and has destroyed his lyre on a number of occasions, at one point being called the "ancestor of music critics". As a running gag, Cacofonix is generally tied up and gagged during the banquet at the end of most albums to allow the other villagers to have a good time without having to keep him from singing. He is nonetheless well liked when not singing.

The source.

The clip is from the blog of the interviewee, Professor Barry Brook.

Fukushima - A Blessing in Disguise?

Worried about radiation levels at the West Coast or at other places in the US? Check for yourself, here.

Consider this excellent source, both on general issues and the ongoing situation at Fukushima.

In an article summarising as well as analysing the Fukushima incident as of March 18th, 2011, Lewis Page concludes:

The Fukushima reactors actually came through the quake with flying colours despite the fact that it was five times stronger than they had been built to withstand. Only with the following tsunami – again, bigger than the design allowed for – did problems develop, and these problems seem likely to end in insignificant consequences. The Nos 1, 2 and 3 reactors at Daiichi may never produce power again – though this is not certain – but the likelihood is that Nos 4, 5 and 6 will return to service behind a bigger tsunami barrier.

The lesson to learn here is that if your country is hit by a monster earthquake and tsunami, one of the safest places to be is at the local nuclear powerplant. Other Japanese nuclear powerplants in the quake-stricken area, in fact, are sheltering homeless refugees in their buildings – which are some of the few in the region left standing at all, let alone with heating, water and other amenities.

Nothing else in the quake-stricken area has come through anything like as well as the nuclear power stations, or with so little harm to the population. All other forms of infrastructure – transport, housing, industries – have failed the people in and around them comprehensively, leading to deaths most probably in the tens of thousands. Fires, explosions and tank/pipeline ruptures all across the region will have done incalculably more environmental damage, distributed hugely greater amounts of carcinogens than Fukushima Daiichi – which has so far emitted almost nothing but radioactive steam (which becomes non-radioactive within minutes of being generated).

And yet nobody will say after this: "don't build roads; don't build towns; don't build ships or chemical plants or oil refineries or railways". That would be ridiculous, of course, even though having all those things has actually led to terrible loss of life, destruction and pollution in the quake's wake.

But far and away more ridiculously, a lot of people are already saying that Fukushima with its probable zero consequences means that no new nuclear powerplants should ever be built again.

Make sure to read the entire article.

P. Gosselin at NoTricksZone argues:

I believe the disaster in Japan will act as a blessing is disguise. I say this because many lessons will be learned from this incident. This is not to say we are pleased about any injury or death resulting there – that’s tragic. I’m saying we have the chance to learn from it. It’s already quite impressive that the Fukushima facility survived the 9.0 mega-earthquake and was done in only by the ensuing mega-tsunami. Fukushima was subjected to an extreme natural event and the results will lead to many valuable findings. It’s up to us if they will be applied to future power plants. It’s a chance to improve our lives.

The source.

A Meltdown of Reason

Icon of the Apocalypse

Keith Yost writes about what happened at the Fukushima reactor:

As a nuclear engineer, it is depressing to read the recent reports on the Fukushima nuclear incident — not because of the incident itself (at this point I strongly believe that we will remember Fukushima as evidence of how safe nuclear power is when done right) — but because the media coverage of the event has been rife with errors so glaring that I have to wonder if anyone in the world of journalism has ever taken a physics class. My favorite: in one article, boric acid was described as a “nutrient absorber” instead of a “neutron absorber.” How many editors signed off on that line without asking, “Why would a nuclear reactor need to absorb nutrients?”

Whether it is confusion of radiation with radioactive material, flailing comparisons to past accidents, or hopeless misuse of terminology, reporting on Fukushima has been a mix of hype and speculation entirely devoid of useful information. Let’s set the record straight: the situation is under control, it is unlikely that the nuclear fuel has melted, the risk to the public is effectively zero, and, depending on whether facts on the ground have been reported correctly, it is possible that the reactors will remain capable of producing power in the future.

The Nuclear Basics

A nuclear reactor is effectively a big device for boiling water ...

Read the rest at the source.

See also at spiked Five Lessons from Fukushima by Rob Lyons, and Making Mountains Out of Meltdowns, where Ben Pile comments on this rash statement made within hours of the incident at Fukushima:

‘This is going to go down in history as one of the three greatest nuclear incidents, if it stops now.’

But if the accident really does get recorded as the third-worst civil nuclear accident, it will be yet further testament to the safety of nuclear power. Even the second-worst event, the partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979, caused no deaths, and exposed people nearby to a dose of radiation no more significant than an x-ray at a hospital. In spite of Chernobyl, nuclear power - even after an earthquake measuring 8.9 on the Richter scale, a resulting tsunami, and numerous powerful after-shocks on a nuclear plant about to celebrate its fortieth birthday - remains safer than many other, routine aspects of daily life.

This must say something about a hugely distorted perception of disaster, and an unchallenged desire to exploit it. The earthquake and tsunami have been far worse for Japan than Chernobyl was for people in the former Soviet Union. Only around 50 deaths can definitively attributed to Chernobyl. An official report into the aftermath in 2006 suggested that perhaps as many as 9,000 more might eventually result, over the course of decades, but this was at best an educated guess. Very little damage was done to basic infrastructure outside of the plant and the other three reactors at the Chernobyl site were up-and-running again after just seven months. Compare that to the thousands of deaths already confirmed and the sight of whole towns being swept away by last week’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Yet the media and anti-nuclear campaigners seem bent on priming themselves and their audience for ‘another Chernobyl’, as though it would somehow be worse than the events that have preceded it. Forget the scale of destruction and human cost caused by the earthquake and tsunami ...

For serious reporting about the unfolding situation in Fukushima consult Bravenewclimate and MIT NSE Nuclear Information Hub.

See my post Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant - Five Essential Pages on What Is Going On, updated at my source here.

See also my post (and further links contained in it) Polluted Minds.

Unions and the Base Buffooneries of Mob Eloquence

See also this very instructive article.

Writes Don Boudreaux:

Like most members of the species homo electedofficialus, Obama’s expertise lies not in actually distinguishing real from imaginary problems, and then in forthrightly and sensibly addressing these.  Instead, he is expert only in what Plutarch called “the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob eloquence.”*

The source.

Politically privileged unions outside of the rule of law, exist thanks to a lack of fundamental economic and moral education and make a perfect object for "the base and dishonest buffooneries of mob eloquence."

Under the conditions of a modern society, to make sense of what is moral and what is not, you need to do some abstract thinking and, in particular, ought to understand economics (see below).

Unions in their prevalent form are a bad alternative to thinking, and thus to moral integrity.

Absent policy protection, employers will hire additional labor when the value of the extra output this labor can produce exceeds the compensation the labor would require to voluntarily supply this effort. Any policy that raise labor’s cost above this level means that employers will hire fewer people and produce an inefficiently low level of output, or produce in an inefficient manner by substituting relatively expensive capital for what could be relatively cheap labor.

Given this economic reality, why does anyone support policies that protect unions?

Presumably, to redistribute income to union members. Protections for unions indeed have this effect, but this kind of redistribution makes no sense.

Union protections do not help the truly poor; they raise the wage of those who would earn a moderate wage without union protections. Indeed, by encouraging firms to hire fewer people, unions mean increased income for some but a zero income for others, thus exacerbating poverty. In extreme cases, union protections drive businesses overseas in search of cheaper labor, meaning large reductions in employment.

Union protections also raise the cost of goods and services in unionized sectors by increasing the cost of production. This means that everyone, including the poor, face higher prices for cars, houses, transportation, and so on. In the public arena, union protections mean higher costs of government services, which adversely affects everyone but especially the poor.

The source.

Also see Government Unions - A Vicious Cycle, and W.H. Hutt on Unions.