Ronin of the Spirt

Well, I am deeply enjoying talking to Tekknorg about the issue of nuclear power. I’m not sure if any one else is reading these posts, but we are having a spirited discussion.

So, I make this (hopefully final) post. Conveniently for me (and my ignored family) this post does not require 4 hours of research.

First, Nuclear weapons. The problem is, they don’t work. I don’t mean they don’t work in a literal sense of physics; they work quite well. I mean they are almost useless as weapons. Atomic warfare is the ultimate kamikaze attack. A big nuke would kill as many of the people shooting it as the people getting hit by it. While the people getting hit would die instantly, and the people doing the hitting would die over a decade, using nuclear weapons is like bulimia: suicide on the installment plan.

I am NOT a pacifist. I believe the statement, “Violence is never an option” is an apology for mass murder and slavery. There are some times when violence is, undoubtedly, the right solution to a problem. There are many times when violence is not the solution and will only make the problem worse, but never the less, sometimes violence is right and good The moral acceptability of violence is rooted in self defense, as part of the larger picture of self determination.

If the defender inflicts as much damage on himself, or the same damage with more suffering, then his act was not moral, but immoral. When violence is inflicted usefully for defense, it is moral. When a defender commits an act of violence so great that both he and the aggressor are harmed equally, then the defender is being ruled not by a reasoned desire for self defense, but a hatred so great his own misery is of no cost as long as the aggressor suffers as well. Vengeance and hate are NOT acceptable reasons for violence.

For this reason I say the use of nuclear weapons is immoral and stupid.

Nuclear weapons are made from nuclear materials. Nuclear materials come from nuclear reactors. Many proponents of nuclear power will claim that is not true, that the kind of nuclear reactors which make electricity don’t make the materials needed for weapons. This is somewhat true. But one reactor’s nuclear waste is another’s fuel for producing heat, electricity, and some weapon’s grade materials.

Fortunately, the reverse is also true. One reactor’s weapon’s grade byproduct is another reactor’s fuel.

Nuclear reactors do not make nuclear weapons. People make nuclear weapons. Nuclear reactors produce materials which people may put to moral or immoral uses depending on their personal temperament, opportunity, and social environment.

Is the nuclear power process dangerous? Absolutely. Does it involve risk? Absolutely. Are there greater risks to not having nuclear power? Absolutely. Soviet Russia was not known for its restraint in dealing with unrest in far off regions or within her own people. There were genocides and wars of opportunity which no democratic society would have embraced. Thousands, perhaps millions of Russia’s own sons and daughters died in Siberia. Aid was given to rebels to destabilize shaky governments. But not once, did the USSR ever deploy a nuclear weapon. Because the Americans had them too.

No chemical is moral or immoral, only people are moral or immoral. Perhaps someday, we, the naked apes, will drop our spears. Until that day, I want to make sure moral men appointed by functioning democracies have access to the same weapons as immoral men who rule by force.

You can no more ask a human being to not make a tool he might need than you can ask a female wolf not to go into heat, or a male ape to not defend his territory. And for the same reason; this is the way these species are. Living in a fantasy where laws and regulations and rules and disapproval can change the behavior of an animal (which man is) is a wonderful place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there. While we are all waiting for man to evolve into the sort of animal that doesn’t need weapons, we sit on a pile of refined nuclear materials.

What do we do with them? We have these metals which if assembled properly can kill every man, woman, and child on earth and possible the earth herself. At any time, they could be stolen by some new dictator, terrorist, or other type of fool. What can we do?

Burn them up. Transmute the admittedly dangerous chemicals into less dangerous ones, and use the surplus power to make electricity. Electricity for all the pointless, useless, life robbing “convinces” which surround us, it’s true. But also electricity for the research labs which create new cures everyday. Electricity for the computers which save billions of hours of human life every day. Electricity for schools, for hospitals, for heat without CO2, and travel without fossil fuels.

I have not said this is the prettiest answer, just the only one which works. I don’t like nuclear power, and I despise nuclear weapons, but I dislike the available alternatives significantly more.

The following is comment by http://tekknorg.wordpress.com/ that I have edited for clarity and made into an entire post.

To my statement that Chernobyl was steam explosion he responded:

Prof. Juli Andrejev (University, Vienna), one of the first liquidators on block IV in 1986 said, that the fuel assembly was destroyed from the inside. this could haver happened through boiler or steam explosion…

Prof Juli Andrejev is physicist, not a nuclear engineer, or a destructive annalist, or a fire investigator. He said that he knew it was nuclear explosion because the fuel tubes had blown from the inside out. Politely, that is absurd. A nuclear reaction would not turn a tube inside out, it would vaporize it. He claims to have made this conclusion while staring into the the open reactor from the destroyed edge of the roof over Reactor 4. (1.) Which is odd to say the least. The graphite in the reactor was on fire for 9 days after the explosion, and when it went out the reactor was covered in 4450 tons of sand. (2.) How did he see into a reactor that was either engulfed in an inferno or covered in 4450 tons of sand?

There is also a British study from 1996 that states, that Chernobyl indeed was an atomic explosion with a yield from 0.2 - 0.3 kilotons. There are atomic bombs which have a lower yield. After much searching I find no evidence of this study. However, Wikipeidia, The Associated Press, The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, The UN, The WHO, The International Atomic Energy Agency, PBS, The BBC, and the TORCH report undertaken by the European Green Party, says that it wasn’t nuclear. I maintain an open mind and would enjoy reading the study. Peer review, however, is clearly NOT supportive of this stance.

400 times more than Hiroshima to be exactly.

I made the point in Nuclear Power II that this is not something that can be expressed exactly, however, again I find no documentation of this “400″ number. I am guessing this is interpolated from the TORCH report, and is not a measure of volume of fallout, but total radioactivity of total emissions. That a burning nuclear source would provide more airborne radioactive matter than a complete nuclear reaction is hardly surprising. Between the steam explosion and the fire, over 2000 tons of material was released. The radioactive gases decayed out in seconds. To quote the TORCH report “Of the cocktail of radionuclides that were released, the fission products iodine-131, caesium-134 and caesium-137 have the most radiological significance. Iodine-131 with its short radioactive half-life 2 of eight days had great radiological impact in the short term because of its doses to the thyroid. Caesium-134 (half-life of 2 years) and caesium-137 (half-life of 30 years) have the greater radiological impacts in the medium and long terms. Relatively small amounts of caesium-134 now remain, but for the first two decades after 1986, it was an important contributor to doses.” Remember that of all the information available the TORCH report is both the most generous and the least peer reviewed.

Some of the material was Pu241 which decays to Americum 5 - over 400 years halflife.

True. And what volume of this was released over what area?

In response to my statement that 3 Mile Island was a non-incedent, he says

Ask the American families, who were fighting for their (health) right at the court and lost, because of the IAEA, who said the same thing you have written.

May I be frank and admit that bureaucratic agencies who are funded to simultaneously police and encourage the same groups concern me deeply. The FDA also shares this impossible job description. I am not saying 3 Mile Island was not frightening for the residents, I am saying that their fright was far more significant a negative health factor than the minuscule amount of radiation released.

A reactor containment dome will support 28,000 kg the weight of a September 11th plane (American Airlines Flight 11 - Boeing
767-223 ER): 82,377 kg - 179,169 kg (max.)

Ah….no. True, the reactor containment is steel shell made to withstand only 200 psi. The missile shield which surrounds it is somewhat heavier, as it is made to resist a direct hit from a missile. Or a plane.

In response to my statement that the nuclear plants which make electricity best are the ones that cannot make anything else he said

5.2 Kg of Plutonium are enough.

I’m not quite sure what that is in reference to. I am assuming he as access to some source of average Plutonium production per reactor, a source I am unable to find. Regardless, plutonium is not “bad”; no chemical is bad. Frank Zappa once said “A drug is neither moral nor immoral…” What people do with them can be bad. Plutonium can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor as well. Plutonium can kill. So can a lack of electricity: mighty hard to run hospitals without electricity.

I say again, a call for total abstinence is absurd. We don’t need to police nuclear knowledge, we need to wiki it. Developing nations want nuclear power for the same reason developing adults want sex: That which is forbidden is attractive. We cannot unlearn nuclear power, we cannot forget how to make plutonium. All we can do is learn to make it work for our species instead of against it.

Refrences:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TORCH_report

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/Chernobyl-15/cherno15_main.shtml

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/chernobyl.html

http://www.richarddnorth.com/journalism/science_risk/chernobyl1996.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/5173310.stm

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/readings/chernobyl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containment_building

Why are people so afraid of nuclear anyway? Read the following taken from here…

…A strong earthquake struck northwestern Japan on Monday, causing a fire and radioactive water leak at the world’s largest nuclear plant

…but the developments at Kashiwazaki triggered fresh concern about the earthquake resistance of Japan’s nuclear power plants, which supply nearly a third of the country’s electricity.

Well, how much radioactive materials? 315 gallons of water.

What kind of water? Water that had 1/1,000,000,000 the amount that they could legally dump in the ocean. A barium enema is significantly more radioactive, and it goes into the city sewer.

The sucking noise you hear is the sound of these people’s empty skulls filling with air.

I’m reading about nuclear power. A fellow blogger wrote a post on the general coolness of pebble bed reactors, and I’ve been trying to “get” the whole nuclear power thing. It’s strange to find what’s out there. I had no idea there were so many types of reactors, or fuel methods, or methods of operation.

And I hate to admit this…they scare me a little.

I pride myself on being able to divorce my emotions from a topic of consideration, but emotions exist for a reason. We tend to think humans are unique in having emotions (we’re not) or that emotions are useless (they’re not). Emotions help us make decisions in the absence of meaningful data. Survivors of traumatic brain injuries who have received injury to the emotive part of the brain find it very difficult to do simple things. They excel at things such as playing chess, but may struggle for hours to do something as simple as step into a room. Without an “Emotioner” they can’t determine the value of the data they receive, so the angle in which they cross a threshold is of equal importance to them as things like oxygen and not starving to death.

So, I am nervous about nuclear power not because I can’t get any data; far from, I am awash in data. The problem is deciding the relative value of each datum.

Some of the most common “facts” about nuclear power are, in fact, bologna. For instance:

Chernobyl was not a nuclear explosion. It was plain, old-fashioned boiler explosion in a pressure vessel which had nuclear materials in it. The same thing would happen if you took World War I locomotive, and put uranium in it, for the same cause and reason: heat something which is cooled by boiling water, let the water run out, and it blows up.

Chernobyl did not release more 30 times fallout of Hiroshima. It didn’t release any “times” more of anything. The differences between the two are large enough you can’t really pin it down with a mathematically precise comparison. You might be able to say “…the calculated mass of fallout from Hiroshima following a nuclear explosion was roughly a 1/30 the calculated mass of the total sum of all the radioactive materials that were vaporized without a nuclear explosion in the steam explosion and following fire at Chernobyl.” But even that is pretty misleading. A lot of the mass of Chernobyl had a half life measured in seconds. That is to say, in less than a minute, it was totally harmless.

Three mile island was a total non issue. Due to stupidity and laziness on the part of both plant designers and plant operators, the first three fail safes didn’t work. The forth kicked in fine, and there was still 5 and 6 to go. Was “radioactive material” released into the environment? Yes. About 6 bananas worth. Every person reading this who isn’t a nuclear scientist just went HUH??? Bananas are full of potassium. Totally naturally, some potassium is radioactive. The amount of radioactivity released was about the same as the total radioactivity of 6 everyday bananas, per capita.

The standard anti-terrorism yardstick is now “747 resistance.” No one will put it in those words, but in all seriousness, it is everybody’s terrorism related question. So yes, reactors are 747 resistant. The part of the reactor made to withstand high-pressure and high temperature from the inside will do about as well from the outside.

The kind of reactors which are the best at making a lot of electricity are totally incapable of making materials for nuclear weapons. This is not because of regulation, this is because of the inescapable laws of physics. You have a better chance of making nuclear materials in your backyard with home made equipment. Read the Radioactive Boyscout if you don’t believe me.

But then there is the other side…

However, the above much touted fact sort of obscures this one: the reactors which are pretty good at making power are also pretty good at making new fissionable materials. Many of these fissionable materials are only useful for electrical production, but some are the type needed for nuclear weapons, and sometimes (depending on the reactor type) these materials are presented in a relatively convenient way. (Note that this is how India got the material to build their bomb. They got this from a totally normal US/Canadian experimental reactor, which makes about 10 Kilograms of Plutonium a year.) England had a reactor commonly called a Magnox reactor. France, and North Korea use an identical design. It makes a lot of electric power and a lot of weapon grade material. The Magnox reactors is what the UK used to build their entire nuclear arsenal.

The reality of nuclear material recycling is this: we can recycle huge quantities of nuclear material. Nuclear physics allows us the near magical ability to transmute waste into fuel and use it again. So called “breeder reactors” are real and usable. In fact, they are used all the time. See above. The insurmountable fact, mentioned above, is the recycling process produces weapons grade materials. Now these weapons grade materials can be used in the right kind of reactor to make electricity, and more waste which can go back to the breeder reactor and continue the process. It’s fascinating, its exciting, and hopefully we can do it some day. But don’t be misled, it does mean weapons grade material.

Reactors ARE NOT “coal plants with nuke plants instead of coal burners.” Yes, the generator side of a nuclear power plant is identical to coal plants. Even the “feed water” pumps, without which, both coal plants and nuke plants will have catastrophic steam explosion are identical. But the differences come up immediately. When coal plants explode, radio active materials are not released into the air. Many reactors operate in non-intuitive ways. The Chernobyl reactor is a good example. If you cooled it off very quickly, it flushed out all the radioactive materials which had damped the reaction, and the reactor suddenly became more reactive. The Chernobyl reactor didn’t explode until they tried to keep it from exploding, after hours spent trying to make it explode. Seriously. Nuke plants are different.

Now this is the non-nuclear part and where my emotions come into play. People are stupid. I believe there is about 1 out of 10,000 people in the world who can truly create. That leaves 9,999 who are all destroyers. And at least 1 out of 10,000 of those disassemblers is a Newton or Einstein in their particular line of work.

When you read about nuclear reactors you will run into the words “Intrinsically Safe.” And that’s stupid. Three Mile Island was considered to be intrinsically safe…until it wasn’t. There is no such thing as “Intrinsically Safe.” My brother worked in a window factory. He ran a machine that had 6 “deadman” controls on it. (A deadman is a switch that shuts off if the person holding it is injured or killed.) This particular machine had a deadman for each foot, each hand, and each knee. You activated the moving part of it with you right knee, after holding down every other switch. In the 50’s this same machine had one foot switch. You loaded the material in and hit the switch. The reason the 90’s version had 6 switches was because consistently, over the years, people somehow kept getting one body part or another somehow injured.

Nuclear power will never be “intrinsically safe”. The cross roads of radioactive isotopes, high pressure/high temperature gases, huge machinery, and human frailty will aways be a dangerous intersection. Nuclear power is risky and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. The question is, “How does the risk of nuclear power stack up against other risks in this crazy life?” Quite well, actually. Thousands of people die every year in coal mining accidents. Around 40,000 die a year from car accidents alone. Life is a constant game of risk management. The winners get to add to the gene pool; the losers do not.

In the end, I guess my observation is this:

You can’t diffuse a bomb after it goes off. Magical thinking tells us that if we wish enough against something it will go away. Nuclear energy will never go away. Ever. If some killer virus killed all the human beings, in x number of years, a new species say, Proboscidea Sapiens (sentient elephants) will develop. They will have their Hiroshima. Even without us, nuclear power will be discovered. We need to accept the fact we have the power to kill ourselves, and choose not to. Prohibiting nuclear weapons while encouraging nuclear energy is not possible. Not because the reactors have to make the material. They don’t. It’s impossible because that’s the way man is.

Abstinence kills. Countries which teach “abstinence only” sex ed to their teens have the highest teen pregnancy. Regions which require total abstinence from hand guns have higher gun crime than nearby regions which are do not have total abstinence from hand guns. Total abstinence from alcohol (a.k.a. The Prohibition) reduced total alchohol consumption by only 60% (remember this was a total ban) and created organized crime. Countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands which have the least restrictions on pornography have some of the lowest crime rates against women.

I say again TOTAL ABSTINENCE KILLS. Total abstinence NEVER, EVER, comes from a rational mind. Total abstinence is an intrinsically unreasonable standpoint which says, “Even a little bit of ‘whatever’ is infinitively worse than anything that might be inflicted upon us to ‘protect’ or ‘free’ us from it.” People have drives. If abstinence doesn’t keep people from smoking, drinking, using drugs, masturbating, hitting women, killing people, or getting pregnant, I doubt, very seriously, it will prevent the drive to dominate a neighboring country and take their stuff by any means necessary.

We don’t need a ban on reactors that can make weapons grade nuclear materials. We need education starting at a grade school level on how energy works, nuclear and otherwise. Raise a generation of rationalists and nuke plants will be built and staffed by good people. Keep doing what we are doing and nuke plants, and anything else we need, will be prevented by legions of superstitions, fearful, illogical people who think they can make a problem go away by not liking it hard enough.

PART I

It is not hard for us as human beings to believe everyone is born with different capacities based on the organs which they receive. If you are born with long, strong legs, a slight build, and heart which responds well to aerobic training, you have the capacity to be a marathon runner. This doesn’t mean you will be a marathon runner, merely that if you chose to, you could be. Where as, if you are born squat, broad, stubby, and with skeletal muscle that responds well to resistance training, you have the capacity to be a Navy seal. This “navy seal” guy might really want to be a marathon runner. He might compete in many marathons and work out 6 days a week. He might become the best bulldog shaped marathon runner ever. But despite his drive, he will regularly get trounced by people who are more physiologically ideal for the task. Ditto if the bean pole guy decides to become a special forces member. Training can only improve our innate capacities; it can not create them. This is seen most clearly in women’s versus men’s athletics. Some women are better athletes than men, but in general women are smaller and weaker, so they compete with other women instead of men.

Evolutionary biologists believe consciousness is a meta organ. Consciousness is like man’s freakishly large brain, or upward pelvis. All have unique attributes that helps us to advance ourselves. Consciousness is not as clearly understood as the angle of the pelvis, however. Our understanding is largely gleaned from things which we understand better in other disciplines.

The brain is a very advanced computer. The mind is ALL the software on the brain at a code level. Consciousness is the operating system which allows the different parts of the mind to relate to each other. The mind presents us with an environment which is subjectively real, but objectively false. For example, when the mind is dreaming, one may dream of people who are long dead. This dream is real. The chemicals and electrical activity that the brain is experiencing during the dream are objectively real. The dreamer’s body responds in an identical way as if the experience were truly happening in that moment. But while the dreaming itself is real, the dream has no counter point in reality.

The consciousness is the buffer between the reality outside the mind and the reality within it.

A classical explanation of consciousness in self awareness. This self awareness is seen as the line of demarcation between man and animal. Realistically, however, consciousness exists as a gradient based on mental function. Higher mammals with advanced social structures, such as wolves, elephants, and chimpanzees, all experience symptoms analogous to mourning when a member of their social construct dies. Mourning is indicative of consciousness, because mourning expresses an inability to rectify the object reality (non-existence) with the subjective reality inside the mind where the loved one continues to exist. Memories of interaction with oneself and another imply a concept of self.

Back in the human experience, psychologists define sanity as a continuum of communication with reality. The deeper the communication with reality, the more sane the person is. In other words, the more effectively the consciousness divides the reality within from the reality without, the greater the person’s sanity. Very few people are profoundly mentally ill. The National Institute for Mental Health says that 1 out of 17 people suffer from serious mental illness. Using this left side of a bell curve, it might be reasonable to believe that around 1 out of 17 people populate the right side of the bell curve. These people represent what can be called hyper realists, who have profound and meaningful communication with reality. The remaining 15 people will fall somewhere between.

The most common manner in which consciousness fails to provide a buffer between the inner and outer realities is known as magical thinking. Wikipedia says magical thinking “…is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity …” More simply, magical thinking is the idea that things in the reality of the mind effect things in the reality outside the mind. Most people engage in magical thinking to some degree, despite the fact it is madness. Indeed, studies have proven a direct link between propensity to magical thinking and propensity to psychosis. (Eckblad & Chapman, 1983, and Thalbourne and French, 1995)

Within man’s social groupings there will be some truly mentally ill, some truly mentally healthy, and many retaining enough mental health to function normally in the reality outside the mind, but suffer from grievous disillusions in the inner reality. A simple example, again from Wikipedia: “31% of Americans polled expressed a belief in astrology and 39% considered it scientific according to another study.” So one out of three people believe magic determines reality to some degree.

Recall the example of mourning: the mourning process is a gradual reduction of distress as the inner reality learns to accept the death which the outer reality has already confirmed. However, perhaps a full third of the population does not feel the need to accept the outer reality of death. They choose to believe instead that death is not real. The loved one has not ended, but merely changed state and continues to live in an unseeable, unprovable reality called the afterlife. If pressed, the bereaved might admit why they believe so strongly in an afterlife: to believe something actively argued against by reality brings them less distress than allowing their mind to agree with reality.

The ramifications of this to man’s social groupings are enormous and terrifying. Man is a highly social animal who forms groups whenever he interacts with other members of his species. These groups will always have a leader. The leader will be the person who offers ideas which cause the least distress, and the ideas which cause the least distress will be the ones farthest removed from reality. To be very clear: The leader of most human groups will be the one who has the deepest internal mental illness, while exhibiting the greatest outer mental health.

A hyper realist will rarely be seen as a leader, for his grip on reality denies him the ability to provide simple answers to the complicated and interconnected problems which plague mankind. The truly mentally ill have an obviously insufficient grip on reality and are not sought to be leaders. As far as “the center of the bell curve” is concerned, the best leader is the one who grips as much reality as possible but has the most heartfelt belief in non-reality. He is the one who can provide simple answers. He is the one who can substitute correlation for cause and make trustworthy sounding fictions.

Imagine, a corporation on the verge of bankruptcy. The stockholders meet together to decide whom of the various executives available is the best candidate for the job. One candidate says, “I have analyzed our situation, I have consulted the world’s leading experts on our situation, I have run every number, and my conclusion is this: We can save this company, but it will be risky and difficult. We will have to do many unpleasant things and be very unpopular with certain groups of people, but I think we may be able to save it.” Another says “I believe in this company! I believe in America and the American system! The great people of this company have pulled together against adversity before and they can do it again!” Most often, the executive who states that it is his personal belief, and the personal beliefs of others, that will make the company work, will receive the job over the executive who takes an honest assessment of the risks.

In short, the cynics cry that we are ruled by madmen is not false, but reasonable and likely. People who are a little mentally ill (which statistically most people are) will be most pleased with a leader who appeals to their latent illness without alienating their overt sanity. Remember the opening line of this blog? “It is not hard for us as human beings to believe everyone is born with different capacities based on the organs which they receive.” It is however, hard to accept, that different consciousness will decide the capacities of a human as well. Some people are prone to be realists, some are prone to be mystics. A mystic might discipline his consciousness to accept realism, and realist might grow up in culture that values mysticism. We all have different capacities based on what we inherited. The humanist hope however, of a wise world, undistracted by beautiful fancies and noble lies, is not to be had anytime soon.

The best we can hope for is rule by realists rather than mystics. If history is any indication, this a rare and unlikely state of affairs. Thankfully, realists are up against, not other realists, but against people who think they can change the world by thinking about it. Realists will prevail eventually. Its just too bad the mystics have to take so many good people with them in their orgiastic self destruction.

Deborah Jeane Palfrey was a somewhat mousy woman, with wispy brown hair a penchant for wearing red lipstick that wasn’t quite the right shade of red. She attended Rollins College in Orlando, where she got her bachelors degree in criminal justice. She attempted to go to law school at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, but left for reasons of her own. While working as a paralegal in San Diego she made extra money as a cocktail waitress. This work brought her in contact with a lot of escorts. She found the working conditions appalling, and decided to go into the business herself, running an escort service. Apparently, she had a hard time paying the bills this way, as she did get caught “hooking” herself and spent 18 months in prison.

After getting out she decided that if this was the way she was going to make a living she was going to do it right. She headed straight for the halls of power and privilege in this country, Washington D.C., and began an escort service called Pamela Martin & Associates. Her idea was to bring college educated and very attractive escorts to D.C. where they could entertain men who had access to the deepest pockets in the world: the tax revenue of the the 300 million richest people on earth. She chose brilliant women, among them Brandy Britton, a former sociology and anthropology professor at the University of Maryland.

It worked fantastically. From 1993 to October 2006 she made a good living of about $160,000 a year. The problem was her home. She had two houses, each worth about $450,000. The IRS suspected trouble. Unfortunately, for the IRS, or fortunately for Ms. Palfrey, there just wasn’t any real evidence. They couldn’t get a warrant. Well, no worries. The IRS doesn’t NEED warrants! Since Ms. Palfrey was selling her house federal investigators could just pretend to be a couple buying her home! Then she would let them in and they could just wander around and look at things all they wanted! It worked.

Then they had everything they needed to get a warrant. The IRS found $500,000 in various accounts. She was now accused of money laundering. In April, 2008 she was found guilty of money laundering. In the process, she outed Randall L. Tobias, US Deputy Secretary of State, Ambassador and Director for US Foreign Aid, and Senator David Vitter. (Both God fearing Republicans, by the way.) If you’ve a dark sense of humor, it might amuse you to know that Randall Tobias was responsible for the United States policy on treating AIDS abroad. While telling the poor of Africa the only way to avoid AIDS was abstinence he was screwing nice, clean, $300 an hour whores. Also, he left a $18.6 billion dollar drug company (and the 18th largest company on Earth) to take on the position of Deputy Secretary of State.

Well, poor Deborah was found guilty, but she refused to take it lying down, if you pardon the pun. She said, “I am sure as heck not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, you know, four to eight years here, because I’m shy about bringing in the deputy secretary of whatever, not for a second. I’ll bring every last one of them in if necessary.” 1

She had 10 to 15 thousand names that she was going put out in the open. 2 If that sounds bluster, 5 lawyers contacted her immediately after she announced that, to keep the names of their clients secret. Whatever was on that list must have really bothered some people. Remember Brandy Britton? She was one of Deborah’s girls. She was called as a witness, but inconveniently, hung herself before she could testify.

Sadly, we will never know what Deborah’s plan was. She hung herself this morning, just like Brandy Britton. Which is odd because she said not long ago, “I guess I’m made of something that Brandy Britton wasn’t made of.” That makes two suicides, both in the exact same manner, on what could have been the case of the century. But the FBI is unconcerned. “… the FBI was notified about the death, “due to the ongoing cases we knew Ms. Palfrey had in the Washington area,” but they are not investigating. ” 1.

Well, I think we can all rest assured there is no foul play here. After all, it’s not like anyone important could possibly have been implicated by her list. Who could possibly gain from her death?

I’ve been writing a lot of buzzword posts lately.  Today is not that post.

Today, I rode my bicycle home from work, a nice reasonable, 6 miles.  I lane shared with traffic which I don’t normally do, because people down here are generally too stupid to avoid running over a cyclist unless he is fearfully hugging the curb.  But today, I did stop light sprints.  This is when you weave up through the lanes of traffic at a light, and drag race off the line.  If you really do it right you can drop the people from the last stoplight at the next one and only get passed by the first 3 cars.  I passed perhaps 100 cars like that.  It feels amazing… to beat people in huge powered boxes with only the strength of your legs and the help of delicate metal frame.

So I was pretty jazzed up when I got home.  Today is also a special day… today I am home without my adorable wife and daughter. Don’t get me wrong, I love them both dearly, but there is something hedonisticly decadent about coming home to an empty house when you are a family man.  Supper is in the crock pot.  So I took my clothes off in the living room as I walked into the kitchen, yup supper is going to be amazing. I went up the stairs. I was still hot from the ride home and I rinsed my head in cold water, then shaved it.  Then I took a nice cool shower.  I came down stairs and cranked up all the music I don’t play in front of my young, impressionable daughter.  My Goth, my hardcore, my death metal.

Some days I am up, some days I am down.  Yesterday morning I was really sad. The problems of this old world were really getting me down.  Injustice everywhere, men unworthy of responsibility vested in them, global warming, bloody knuckled jihad, unholy compromise, and heroes for sale.

But today, I am that sort of delightfully angry.  I am clean, feed, cool, and hungry.  This place I live in a real crap hole.  My wife and I chose it purposefully to save money.  I look around at the decay.  I am the king of my tiny, broken, world.  Right now I feel like I am the change I want to see and that’s good.  I can punch ignorant people in the face and feel no pain right now.

It won’t last, so I will enjoy this whilst I may.

This blows my mind.  Instead of blogging about it like I normally do, I just wanted to present the article in it’s entirety here.  So direct from the London times…

By Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent

RELIGIOUS belief can cause damage to a society, contributing towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published today.

According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

The study counters the view of believers that religion is necessary to provide the moral and ethical foundations of a healthy society.

It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality.

Many liberal Christians and believers of other faiths hold that religious belief is socially beneficial, believing that it helps to lower rates of violent crime, murder, suicide, sexual promiscuity and abortion. The benefits of religious belief to a society have been described as its “spiritual capital”. But the study claims that the devotion of many in the US may actually contribute to its ills.

The paper, published in the Journal of Religion and Society, a US academic journal, reports: “Many Americans agree that their churchgoing nation is an exceptional, God-blessed, shining city on the hill that stands as an impressive example for an increasingly sceptical world.

“In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.

“The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developing democracies, sometimes spectacularly so.”

Gregory Paul, the author of the study and a social scientist, used data from the International Social Survey Programme, Gallup and other research bodies to reach his conclusions.

He compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy.

The study concluded that the US was the world’s only prosperous democracy where murder rates were still high, and that the least devout nations were the least dysfunctional. Mr Paul said that rates of gonorrhoea in adolescents in the US were up to 300 times higher than in less devout democratic countries. The US also suffered from “ uniquely high” adolescent and adult syphilis infection rates, and adolescent abortion rates, the study suggested.

Mr Paul said: “The study shows that England, despite the social ills it has, is actually performing a good deal better than the USA in most indicators, even though it is now a much less religious nation than America.”

He said that the disparity was even greater when the US was compared with other countries, including France, Japan and the Scandinavian countries. These nations had been the most successful in reducing murder rates, early mortality, sexually transmitted diseases and abortion, he added.

Mr Paul delayed releasing the study until now because of Hurricane Katrina. He said that the evidence accumulated by a number of different studies suggested that religion might actually contribute to social ills. “I suspect that Europeans are increasingly repelled by the poor societal performance of the Christian states,” he added.

He said that most Western nations would become more religious only if the theory of evolution could be overturned and the existence of God scientifically proven. Likewise, the theory of evolution would not enjoy majority support in the US unless there was a marked decline in religious belief, Mr Paul said.

“The non-religious, proevolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.

“The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

You might be aware of the impending world food crisis. People in the less affluent world are going to start dropping dead like flies, apparently, because food is too hard to get or too expensive.

There are a number of micro-explanations for this, but pretty much everyone agrees that the macro-explanation is a causal chain which goes like this: America and other rich powers consume too much. This overconsumption causes overconsumption of fossil fuels, as fossil fuels are the backbone of their economies. This fuel consumption causes global warming, which causes climate change, which causes crop failure. Crop failure raises the price of food. Further exacerbating this is the use of food crops as hydrocarbon substitutes, i.e. biofuel. The conversion of land from food to biofuel, and the reduced supply of food, work to further increase the price of food.

In essence, rich nations caused the global food crisis, and it is they who are therefore responsible for fixing it. Ronin says, bullshit.

The whole food process is a series of interlocking non-sequential factors. The following things must exist for the food process to take place.

• There must be local buyers who can get a surplus of calories out of the food, spending less calories working to get it than it provides.
• There must be sub-distributors who can make enough surplus buying it in bulk and selling it to be able to afford their own food.
• There must be a transportation infrastructure that can make enough surplus moving food from rural regions to urban regions and food payment from urban regions to rural regions that they desire to do so.
• There must be farmers who can make enough of a surplus selling their food that they have enough surplus to maintain their farms.
• There must be laborers at every stage who can make enough of a surplus working that they prefer to work.
• The buyers must be able to pay enough that by the time payment gets through the many hands to the farmer, the farmer will have enough of a surplus to desire to sell his grain.
• There must be land and water for the food to grow.

Any failure of the above 7 points will result in famine. If you noticed the word surplus over and over, you might have remembered the other word for surplus is profit. I postulate the following very simple axiom:

The solution to famine is surplus (in a non-money economies) or profit (in money economies).

Evidence offered:

• The worst famines in modern history occurred under Marxist regimes which had completely dismantled Adam Smith’s “guiding hand” of free market and attempted to control every aspect of the economy from a central government. For instance, Mao’s great leap forward (30 million dead.) or the Holodomor famine (3 million dead).
• Famine in Europe during the middle ages was directly related to market distortions caused by the aristocracy.
• The Irish Famine was caused by Protestants not allowing Catholics to own land or learn to read. This created a market distortion where the people who worked the land were not allowed to sell what they produced, but instead had to give it to the landowners without charge.
• The State of Arizona is geophysically incapable of growing its own food. Statistically, all food is imported. Yet there is never a famine. Everyone in the state has access to sufficient resources to pay for food even if a food shortage raises the price.
• No functioning democracy has ever had a famine. There is a correlation between political and economic freedom.
• The Netherlands, which have relied on importation to fully satisfy economic need for over 400 years, have not had a famine in that time (despite numerous famines over Europe during that period.) A complex and rich economy has always allowed them to trade sufficiently with other nations to cover the increased cost of food during a food shortage.

This might lead you to the conclusion that in the coming global food crisis those who have the least surplus will be the most affected. True. Sustenance farmers, who by definition have no surplus, are the group most at risk for famine at any given time. The cost of food is pretty much fixed world wide. World wages are not. A pound of rice is about 25 cents in the US. It’s about that everywhere. It’s just that in, say, Angola, more than half the population makes less than $18 a day. For us in the States, food costs about 15% of our income. For much of the world it costs around 75% of their income.

We don’t have a world food crisis. We have a world capitalism crisis. The question is not “Why is food getting so expensive?” Food gets expensive from time time. The price goes up, which decreases the supply, increasing the demand and thus the price. When the price goes up people buy less, and the supply increases, lowering the price. The question is, “Why isn’t capitalism taking it’s natural course of improving lives in places like Africa, the way it is in places such as India and China?”

The answer is as tragic as it is simple. World aid destroys developing economies. Remember the first 7 points? If the UN brings in grain, that means grain is free. If grain is free, farmers cannot make a living selling grain. They leave their farms to seek their fortunes in the city, exacerbating the grain shortage by removing local grain as well as consuming the aid grain.

The US rose because no one was there to help it. China has refused help. India refused colonization at any cost. As long as there is United Nations Aid presence in these impoverished countries, they will not go through the fire of developing the methods to deal with local crop failures on their own.

The process of economic freedom is the lifeblood that feeds the process of political freedom. It is awfully hard to revolt if you can’t afford any bullets.

Capitalism is the glove on the hand of self-determinism. Economic freedom buys all the other freedoms. Economic freedom buys lobbyists, education, and simply buys opportunity.

Sadly, the United States press has laid the fault of the impending global food crisis on the economic policies which prevent famine in the affluent world (free market and democracy), rather than on the polices which cause famine in the poor world (controlled market and autocracy). Furthermore, they have stated that the solution is reduced economic freedom…

Prices must be fixed, after all it worked so well for Mao.

Biofuel must be stopped. (Even though mixed agricultural economy is what ensures a nation has something valuable to trade for food in a food shortage.)

And of course, Aid must be increased, even though it bankrupts the local economies which receive it.

How many more millions must die to prove the point that wealthy educated people such as the UN, the Soviets, and the Chinese Central Government do not know what is better for poor uneducated people than those people themselves?

Read here for a more scholarly look at the situation: http://fabiusmaximus.wordpress.com/

As I write, I let the music flow through my soul.  I see the little white house at the end of the lane.  I see the row of abandoned cars.  I think about the way people looked at my clothes; the way people asked why my family didn’t do the things that theirs did; the way people laughed at me when I talked about my dreams.

Last night my wife and I had a friend over.  My wife and I are not the people that we married.  People grow, people mature, but we love each other still.  Becky talked about how different she would be if she could go back to where she was but being who she is now.  She wondered aloud if I then would still be interested in her if she was so different now.

Considering this I said, “If you had said, ‘I’ve never met anyone like you before.  I want you. I want more of you.  I want more of all of you. I want to know you better.  I want to see more of your soul and your body.  I want to go deeper and know more of everything that makes you, you.’ I would have melted chocolate-like into your hands.”

Upon hearing this speech our friend remarked, “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever heard. If a man said that to me I would be his.  We would go through the pretense of courtship, but I would just be his in every way.”

So, these are the magic words.  As our friend said “That is the most beautiful thing…” I was suddenly a younger man.  I was not the man I am today.  I did not have my own place, I lived with my folks.  I did not have a new car.  I did not have a good haircut.  I didn’t have any of the outside things that mark me as who I am.  I was just a desperately lonely boy, the seed of a successful life planted but not yet growing.  Many years ago and miles away, I laid my heart of the table with those words “I just want more of you.” It wasn’t a plea for sex, as she well knew.  It was admitting to her that I loved her, as she had told me she loved me tearfully months before.  But I, thinking that a woman wanted a man of integrity, had told her, to wait.  She’d said it while crying over the loss of her boyfriend (my best friend), and I wanted to give her sometime to really think about whether she meant it or not.  She cried then too.  I was so understanding, so mature, so kind.  Yes, of course she would think about it and give me time to think about it.  Anything for me, this man who treated her with so much respect.

And those words, “I want more of you.”  Followed not by a smile, but a sneer.  It was all a mistake, Israel.  As if I would feel that way about you.

I was the same man, the same heart pumping the same blood.  The only thing different now is that I look on the outside like what I always knew I was on the inside.  Hearing ‘today me’ say “I want more of you” a friend says its beautiful.  Hearing ‘then me’ say “I want more of you” a friend says, “You?!”.

Once, I believed that I had forgiven everyone who ever hurt me. This was because I believed forgiveness was pretending everything was cool.  Well, it’s NOT cool.  Some 10 years later it still stings around the edges.  She could see the broken down cars and little shack at the end of the lane, but she couldn’t see the man who was going to rise above it.  She could perhaps see the the brittle brokenness in me, but not the steel at the core.

I’m sneaking up on my life.  I threw it away when I was about 16.  I not quite back to where I should have been when I was 16, but I am sneaking up on it.  So to the chorus of voices who saw the Wal-mart glasses but not the fire behind them, I just want to say one thing for closure to each before I move on.

Your loss.