[TheForge] now Japanese nuke plants OT: POL:

[Andrew Vida]

Hoss McGregor wrote:
> While we're stopping dangerous things, let quit driving cars. Course
> horses were more dangerous. We can stop steamships and go back to
> sailing. We can stop a whole lot of stuff because it might be
> dangerous.

In most cases I am in full agreement with you.  In this particular case 
I am not so sure.  I don't care if you get together with your buddy in 
your basement and play russian roulette with a .38.  Doing it with a 
100# charge of Amitol, OTOH, is likely to take me up in the cloud with 
you.  To that I take some stern exception.

The way things appear to be shaping up in Japan, the boys that have been 
rolling the dice with the lives of millions of people now appear to be 
tossing a lot of consecutive snake eyes.  If there is a significant 
release of the wrong substances, Japan is going to face its own little 
"holocaust" in a few years as the cancer cases could reach into the tens 
of millions.  This is happening in Tokyo's backyard - one of the most 
densely populated regions on the planet.  If they are hit with that many 
terminally ill people at once, their economy will not likely withstand it.

I understand your position - I share it - but ask yourself this: would 
you feel quite the same were you, your wife, and your children were to 
find yourselves in a terminal ward in the wake of a similar disaster - 
one imposed upon you without having been consulted?  Consider your 
answer to yourself very carefully.
> 
> New tech for nuke planets is safer. Yes there is still the waste
> issue, but some of the newer technology doesn't produce as much. All
> in all, it's more efficient than windmills ever will be(there's a
> reason we stopped using them). Hoss

Safer, sure - but safe enough?  Can it ever be safe enough?  I don't 
know the answer.  That aside, how many people may one group of people 
legitimately sacrifice to death and disease in the name of... whatever 
is the reason for which they do it?  One?  Ten?  A million?  I cannot 
speak for anyone else, but I am not that fond of others placing my life 
at risk without at least asking my opinion on the matter.  That is the 
sort of thing for which people have been killing each other for 
thousands of years.  It is a violation of the natural boundaries that 
lie around each of us and that are sacrosanct, yet people appear more 
than happy to violate at a whim.  Churches, monarchs, oligarchs, and all 
manner of other vermin have employed a core toolkit of fallacious 
beliefs and bullshit to foist and justify the violation of the natural 
interpersonal boundaries that exist between all individuals.  Sadly, far 
too many people have been far too eager to accept the various lines of 
shit fed to them by their esteemed and fearless leaders.  It is an old 
saw and never right, but so long as killing your neighbors was limited 
by the strength and endurance of your arms, as well as your skill and 
perhaps a little luck, the range of devastation one man could wreak upon 
the world was of limited scope, both materially and temporally.  Today 
we can lay waste to vast stretches of the earth for generations by 
pushing a button or when something in our machinery goes <pop> <crunch> 
<pow>.  All well and good for those who sign up for it, but what of 
everyone else?  What do you say to them?  Oops?  Accidents will happen?

This is bad shit and it stands to get a lot worse in ways most people 
currently fail to see.  For example, consider that Japan is the second 
largest consumer of US Treasury bonds.  They are now likely to become 
cash strapped as they respond to this immense disaster.  They could dump 
huge volumes of these securities onto the market, depressing prices 
sharply, resulting in a glut and an inability for the US government to 
sell more, and those they do sell would be going at stiff discounts and 
probably correspondingly high returns.  That screws our economy further 
into the dirt.  What little substance Obama's phony baloney "recovery" 
has will evaporate and then we may see the fun start.

Shit like the Japanese situation do not occur in-vacuo.  The effects 
radiate outward, in this case like the blast front of a high yield bomb.

Nuke enery *may* be viable in geologically stable locations, but the 
ring of fire?  You cannot seriously believe that the decision to build 
nuclear plants in Japan, of all places, was rooted in honest and sane 
consideration of the circumstances.  Either the people who decided this 
were barking mad or as crooked as the day is long at the poles.  The 
possibly breaching containment is the apodictic testament to the truth 
of this.

But who knows... I may be wrong about it all.