"If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource."
If you leave enriched Uranium/Plutonium in a pile don't you run the risk of a critical mass. Not that its likely to produce a nuclear bomb but it would seem like a great way to give lethal doses of radiation to anyone in the neighborhood.
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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"The high level wastes are encapsulated in glass or copper in such amounts that there is not enough for that material, or it's decomposited forms to cause a situation of critical mass. Lots of radioactive stuff in one spot can cause quite alot of heat, right?"
So what happens if someone makes a mistake, not that people ever do, that results in a critical mass or a heat buildup that leads to a fire, especially when the facility is full and there are thousands of tons of waste in it.
How impervious to heat and fire are the ceramic/glass casings.
Re:One good reason at least
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"TMI is dramatically overblown. The plant contained the radiation. There was a small and intentional release of contaminated water afterward during the cleanup."
It wasn't overblown. They just got lucky and stopped the meltdown before they had a reactor breach. If they hadn't there would have been a massive radiation release. Just because the consequences were mild doesn't change the fact that it could have easily been a major disaster. Three Mile Island completely shook confidence in the safety of nuclear reactors long before Chernobyl showed the worst case scenario.
"Because adequate cooling was not available, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes which hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the Three Mile Island accident."
Re:One good reason at least
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"Risks! I say, Risks! This new thing is RISKY!"
Unfortunately Three Mile Island and Chernobyl proved they were right. They are risky. They are extremely complex and very fallible.
"After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!"
Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.
Fossil fuel pollution is a slower and harder to quantify risk. Maybe in the end if the Greenhouse effect proves to be real fossil fuels will prove to be even more dangerous and threaten the whole planet, but by the times its an undeniable problem it may be to late to stop it.
An interesting post. The part I find most interesting is "Graphite is an inherently stable material." Pretty stable yes but doesn't graphite burn furiously if its hot enough and it comes in to contact with oxygen. These reactors are using helium gas I believe and its cool they can shut off the coolant gas without a problem but what happens if you replaced the helium with oxygen while pebbles are hot. It sounds as though if the vessel were breached and a hot bed came in to contact with oxygen merry little fire/explosion would ensue. Maybe its not that big a risk but burning graphite in a nuclear reactor evokes images of Chernobyl, and the nuclear industry has zero credibility when they tell everyone their reactors are safe after Three Mile Island and Chernobly in particular.
Here is a link from MIT that gives a few cons especially from a Boston Globe piece:
"But you pay a price, just like in every tradeoff," Kadak said. Because the reactors produce less total heat, they also produce less energy. In addition, the pebble-bed reactor generates greater volumes of radioactive waste material than conventional cores - albeit much less concentrated waste material. What to do with this volume of waste is a significant consideration if PBMRs are to be successful."
"But industry critics are deeply skeptical that the pebble beds are all they're promoted to be. They say the nuclear industry made similar boasts in the 1950s and early 1960s when they promised a safe energy form that would be "too cheap to meter."...
"There is strong debate over proponents' statements that some safety systems - such as concrete and steel containment buildings - won't be needed. Critics say that the pebble bed could burn if a breach in the reactor allows oxygen to come into contact with the graphite inside the reactor. Industry analysts are still studying computer models to see whether or not this is a serious risk."
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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I stand somewhat corrected. Though here is a source that suggests wikipedia is downplaying its danger somewhat. Excerpts are below.
I guess I'll chalk my wrongness up to media and public antipathy to nuclear power. But that antipathy rose for a couple pretty good reasons. Fission reactors have in fact proven very dangerous numerous times so no one trusts them any more, or the people that build them and advocate them. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed fission reactor credibility. Three Mile Island was noteworthy because they came close to a Chernobyl scale accident and the people involved were lieing about the danger and what was happening throughout. Chernobyl's left a dead zone that shows what Three Mile Island could have done if it had gone only slightly further.
The problem is maybe the new designs are safer but at this point no one believes it or is going to trust them. The nuclear industry assured us the old ones were safe and they weren't so they've burned their credibility. The fact is most existing reactors are complex systems, they are extremely fallible and they've proven themselves to be extremely dangerous. How are you going to convince people they are safe at this point. China can do it because they don't have to convince anyone, they can just build them and deal with anyone that complains.
From the LBL source above:
Ingestion of plutonium
For acute radiation poisoning, the lethal dose is estimated to be 500 milligrams (mg), i.e. about 1/2 gram. A common poison, cyanide, requires a dose 5 times smaller to cause death: 100 mg. Thus for ingestion, plutonium is very toxic, but five times less toxic than cyanide. There is also a risk of cancer from ingestion, with a lethal doze (1 cancer) for 480 mg.
Inhalation of plutonium dust
For inhalation, the plutonium can cause death within a month (from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema); that requires 20 mg inhaled. To cause cancer with high probability, the amount that must be inhaled is 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms. The lethal dose for botulism toxin is estimated to be about 0.070 micrograms = 70 nanograms. [1] Thus botulism toxin is over a thousand times more toxic. The statement that plutonium is the most dangerous material known to man is false. But it is very dangerous, at least in dust form.
How easy is it to breathe in 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms? To get to the critical part of the lungs, the particle must be no larger than about 3 microns. A particle of that size has a mass of about 0.140 micrograms. To get to a dose of 80 micrograms requires 80/0.14 = 560 particles. In contrast, the lethal dose for anthrax is estimated to be 10,000 particles of a similar size. Thus plutonium dust, if spread in the air, is more dangerous than anthrax Ð although the effects are not as immediate.
This source also has an interest section on breeder reactors:
Breeder reactors
The Pu-239 is usually not considered nuclear waste, because it can be used itself to run a nuclear reactor. It is nuclear fuel. Moreover, if you put it in a nuclear reactor, you get three neutrons per fission instead of two. In a reactor, operating at constant (not exponentially growing) power, you want only one neutron per fission to produce another fission. What do you do with the extra two neutrons? Answer: put U-238 in the reactor, and make more plutonium.
Thus a reactor can make (out of U-238) more Pu-239 fuel than it consumes! Such a reactor is called a breeder reactor. It has the potential of turning all uranium, not just 0.7% of it, into nuclear fuel, and thereby increase the available fission fuel by a factor of 140.
There has been public opposition to breeder reactors. The two most common objections are:
1. The plutonium economy. Breeder reactors would allow much greater use of nuclear power, but it means that plutonium would be widespread. Besides the fact that plutonium is ra
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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Most of the wastes sites I know about are from uranium mining and weapons manufacturing like Rocky Flats in Colorado and Hanford in Washington. Most of the waste from commercial reactors, spent fuel rods mostly, are sitting in pools of water to cool and shield them, usually at the reactor site, waiting for the feds to transport it all to Yucca Mountain. Something they've been trying to do for decades.
During the 40's and 50's in particular the U.S. was in an extreme hurry to develop the bomb before Hitler did and to build more bombs than Stalin so they were more than a little messy while they were in a hurry. They also processed small mountains of Uranium and hefty quantities of plutonium. Rocky Flats and Hanford were a plutonium reprocessing facilities which are especially messy. If I recall Hanford has a plume of radioactive waste working its way towards the Columbia river which is a water source for major cities in the Northwest. It is a study in A. how hard it is to store radioactive waste safely and B. the danger of letting it just get dumped in the ground as some here have proposed.
There are horror stories about Rocky Flats where they apparently mixed low level waste with water and pumped it into sprinklers to water the grass in out of the way parts of the facility.
I think Rocky Flats is being turned in to a wildlife park as we speak. It is in close proximity to the cities of Denver and Boulder.
I guess I should also point out that yes there are radioactive materials buried in the earth. If you've ever learned that your house is near any uranium, and you basement has dangerous radon levels, which is produced from decaying Uranium you would realize even in its natural and unenriched form it is somewhat dangerous. The waste we are talking about is orders of magnitude worse.
Many of the people who mined the Uranium to feed the U.S. weapons and nuclear energy program have died from the effects of long term radon exposure which often leads to lung cancer. Modern miners wear more protective gear than the old timers so its less of a problem today but even naturally occuring unenriched Uranium isn't something to toy with.
Few things are more corrosive to most metal containers than salt, especially if it gets wet. Set metal containers full of toxic waste in salt water and you will have a pool of uncontained waste in no time.
The key problem with all long term storage sites is you are looking at them in terms of the current climate and a very short historical record. Yucca Mountain is dry now but probably wasn't in the past and may well not be dry in the future especially at the rate our climate is currently changing.
Uh, I did cite the source though I didn't do it in detail. You must have missed this which made it extremely obvious I wasn't claiming it as my own. Not sure which of Mother Jones and Alternet actually published it first. I read it on Mother Jones.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Does any of the Canadian Shield extend in to the U.S.?
What do you think the chances are Canadians are going to tolerate the U.S. and the rest of the world shipping their nuclear waste to Canada for disposal. The problem with nuclear waste is the stigma is so bad no one wants it near them even if someone does figure out a safe way to store it or reprocess it.
I'm a little skeptical any mine shaft will prove long term viable. Its extremely hard to keep them dry, especially if you allow for the possibility that the civilization that has to fund maintaining the storage site may not last as long as the waste.
You are full of crap. If it was that simple why has the U.S. government wasted billions of dollars on Yucca mountain.
Most of the "radioactive materials buried near the earths surface" are unenriched Uranium. It doesn't even register on the toxicity scale compared to plutonium which is a synthetic element. It doesn't exist in nature. Plutonium is the bulk of, but not the only thing we are talking about here.
If a little unenriched uranium reaches the ground water its undesirable but not extremely lethal. If you ingest a few grains of plutonium there is a pretty good chance you are eventually going to die from it.
The idea of mixing it in to mine tailings and dumping is pretty much insane because its eventually going to leech in to the ground water. Your approach to waste disposal is why the U.S. has had to spend billions and billions of dollars trying to clean up toxic waste dumps created by companies that made a fast buck by manufacturing something and dumping all their waste on or in the ground and water. It works for a while but it inevitably migrates in to the water table where people get their drinking and agricultural water. Its a key reason why so many people get and die of cancer in the modern age.
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground. Like most things you dump in the ground there is a high probability some of its going to end up in the ground water which people drink, and is used in agriculture to grow food for people to eat.
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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Chill friend. First off I was pointing out the insanity of someone saying we can just bury it, and the insanity that is Yucca Mountain which is basically just burying it.
Reprocessing it is a whole different and more complicated thing. The issue with reprocessing are so complicated and varied you aren't going to do it justice in a Slashdot thread.
Depending on the methods you choose you still get waste of various forms, different waste sure, but there is still a lot of waste from reprocessing. In particular you are going to get plutonium of various grades from weapons grade to plutonium suitable for fast breeder reactors. The only way you get rid of the plutonium waste in the near term is to put in bombs or burn it in reactors designed to burn it.
A key reason reprocessing has such a stigma attached to it is its historically and still is in some places used to harvest weapons grade plutonium. It is a key avenue for nuclear weapons proliferation and weapons grade plutonium is far more dangerous in the wrong hands than the waste so its not like you want every country on the planet doing it.
There is some value in the way reprocessing its being used in France, India and Japan to recycle the fuel and reuse it in fast breeder reactors but there a whole set of issues with that path two.
Pyroprocessing is the new holy grail and it might prove to be a better route than the current PUREX and UREX reprocessing but its not exactly a proven process and it a potential accident waiting to happen too.
Here is a technical brief on the methods though its written by a pro nuke group and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
You might be able to reduce the dangerous lifespan of a of of waste to 500-1000 years, and burn some of it in reactors but to hold it out as the final solution to nuclear waste is a stretch at this point.
Re:Nuclear energy works!
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"Burying it is perfectly safe"
You gotta be kidding. You must go to the ostrich school of nuclear waste disposal, just bury it, out of sight out of mind, trust us it will be OK.
I'm 100% for nuclear power because its ones of the few ways your going to produce power for this planet once fossil fuels run out but you either need to develop clean fusion power or figure out some way to really deal with the deadly waste from fission reactors. As some have pointed out China's government can probably sweep it under the rug for a while, they can store it wherever they want and imprison anyone who complains, but it is a problem that for all practical purposes never goes away.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years. It will probably outlast civilization as we know which hasn't lasted 10,000 years yet. One of the study issues for Yucca Mountain is how do you mark deadly waste so that someone ten thousand years from now will deduce that is lethal and leave it alone.
There was marked low level waste in a UN sealed site in Iraq from the 1980's. As soon as anarchy broke out after the invasion looters went in and dumped it all over the place in order to steal the barrels, poisoning themselves and the whole area.
The only way you can bury it is to find container technology that will hold it for tens of thousands of years, unattended, and we simply don't have it. As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table and when it reaches the water table it travels and it poisons everything over a wide area. There have been bad attempts to engage in short term storage of waste at most of the nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R and they are littered with case of corroded and ruptured containers. We really haven't been able to store waste 50 years let alone tens of thousands of years.
The U.S. has spent billions studying Yucca Mountain and its failed miserably in meeting the criteria as a long term waste disposal site and in the U.S. there is no alternate sight in consideration.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Repealing the Apocalypse
Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn't a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.
The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry, the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces, would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in "cooling ponds" onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.
For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dumpsites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).
The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states -- Texas and Washington -- had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the "comparative study" never studied anyplace but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied the less suitable it seemed even for the mandated 10,000 years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact tha
If you look at the EPIC site you can see some of the letters from the people being harrassed, including senior citizens who have never had so much as a traffic ticket.
How many, its impossible to tell, its secret. The no fly list has actually existed since 1990, formed under George W.'s dad. It was a tiny list of terrorists managed by the FBI until 9/11. It then was turned over to the TSA, its length exploded and the people run it are either incompetent or malevolent to blacklist "names" with no other identifying data so everyone with that name is harrassed.
Who is being put on the list, by how and by whom is secret. How to get off the list is largely undefined. You typically get bounced between the TSA, the airlines, the FBI and Homeland Security until you give up.
Your ability to stick your head in the sand and pretend everything is OK is exactly how people lose their civil liberties and wake up one day living in a totalitarian state.
EPIC acquired memo's on how the no-fly(don't fly and call law enforcement) and selectee(harass but let fly) lists work. It was so heavily censored that it was meaningless. You can look at them in the link the previous email.
Below are two more stories suggesting activists are being put on the list to punish them. Can you prove it.....the beauty of it is no.....the government can just claim it was a mistake or their name matched an alias of a terrorist.
People are being blacklisted because their name matches a terrorists "assumed" name. I wonder what would happen if a terrorist used George W. Bush, Tom Ridge or John Ashcroft as an alias, though of course they don't have to fly in the nightmare that is civil aviation since 9/11.
The Government's Air Passenger Blacklist
By Dave Lindorff
Barbara Olshansky was in a Newark International Airport departure gate last March when an airline agent at the counter checking her boarding pass called airport security. Olshansky was subjected to a close search and then, though she was in view of other travelers, was ordered to pull her pants down. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have created a new era in airport security, but even so, she was embarrassed and annoyed.
Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention the next time she flew.
And the next time. And the next time.
On one flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.
"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."
Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months, rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."
But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration has acknowledged for the first time that the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances. And the official suggested that Olshansky and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.
"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is composed of names that are provided to us by various government organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS.... We don't ask how they decide who to list. Each agency decides on
You trolling, kidding or do you not follow the news?
You might have heard Senator Edward Kennedy's name or something close to it was added to the no-fly list recently and he was prevented on several occasions from flying between Washington and Boston, something he's been doing for decades. It was in fact a violation of the Constitution which forbids obstructing travel of a Congressman. Maybe it was just an accident and there really is a terrorist named Edward Kennedy or Teddy Kennedy or maybe some sick fuck in the Bush administration though it would be funny to throw his name on it to punish him for his outspoken and often harsh criticism of the Bush administration. How names get put on the list is opaque to most American's and its impossible to get yours off it at present. Kennedy only managed by called Tom Ridge the head of Homeland Security and it still took a while.
Here is a link on the ACLU case against the no fly list since some people are trashing the ACLU in this article. They really are a priceless organization if you value your civil liberties.
Some more on Freedom of Information Act inquiries by EPIC trying to find out if activists really have been black listed from flying based on their political views.
Should I go on.....undocumented.......Nothing about the Patriot act excesses I cited is undocumented its in the law.
Here is a list of the Illinois RNC delegates. Is the Secret Service going to go after the Illinois Leader too?
As nearly as I can tell this is the first year the RNC HASN'T released the delegate list. It really should be a matter of public record so all Republicans know who is representing them at the convention.
Here are a bunch more delegates names and home towns. Some more with pictures. The leaders of all the delegations are names by state and they have features on many of the delegates.
It really is over the top to make this much of a fuss over it. Maybe the hotels where there is staying is a pushing it a little but once you have the names which really are really easy to find out, all you need is a hotel guide of New York to discern where they are staying, and you call the front desk and ask for them by name until you find them.
From the CSPAN coverage I've watched half of them seem to be staying in a hotel that looks out on the 9/11 site which is a really good tool to whip up their patriotic zeal.
George's brother has engaged in a number of bold faced attempts to rig the election in Florida especially by disenfranchising enough blacks to swing the election.....twice.
Did you read the part about Nixon......he was trying to rig the 1972 election when he was caught in Watergate.
Did you read the part about the delay of the Iran hostage release. One reason Carter's first term was a disaster was because the Iran hostage situation was hanging over the entire last year. If they'd been released before the election it might have changed the outcome, though I doubt it. Reagan and Bush senior intentionally kept the hostages in Iran longer than necessary so they could be released the day Reagan took office so he could reap the positive karma of the ending of the cloud that had been hanging over the U.S.
At this point you either have poor reading comprehension or you suffer for the usual cognitive dissonance infection typical of the Republican party in general and Bush's fan boys in particular.
If you want to highlight how stupid the Secret Service reaction is just go to this web site.
"Look up campaign contributors to federal elections by ZIP Code. Get information on contributor name, amount, employer, candidate, party and more. Updated Jul 15 2004."
So why is this database not voter intimidation. You can find the party bias of everyone whose donated to a candidate or party including where they work.
"Hello, these aren't the self-appointed managers of the world any more than the DNC delegates were."
Well actually yes they are. They currently have complete control of the U.S. government with the exception of the courts which take longer to stack. They are running the worlds sole remaining superpower, no longer checked by the U.S.S.R, they are running the world's largest military by far, and a big chunk of the world's economy. They have declared a policy of preemptive warfare which means any nation that crosses the U.S. is a now a potential military target, remember "You are either with us or your agaist us". The U.S. has troops in something around a hundred countries now. How much more of an empire do you need.
The Feds and the city of New York both, run by Republican's are arresting people for nothing more than peaceful protest, you can now be stopped on the street or in a subway station and searched without cause. The Republican's, with Democrat collusion, through the Patriot Act have given themselves the right to see what you read at the library, and arrest a Librarian for not keeping this intrusion secret, or to engage in sneak and peak invasions of your home where they will break and enter to get in to your home, rumage through your things and don't have to show you the warrant or tell you they were there.
They've created a no fly list that is preventing people from traveling because they have names resembling a terroris name or alias, and has in fact been used to keep anti war and anti bush activist from flying. They've made numerous attempts to use computers and mergin of private and government databases to trace every recorded aspect of every persons life. The President just signed an executive order starting the merge of the CIA, the NSA, the DIA. The prospects are high the NSA's massive spying power will be applied against American's, so we can now empathize with the rest of the world, and we will no doubt see a spying agency large and more powerful than any the world has ever seen, with all of the checks against abuse abandoned in the name of "safety".
I'm sorry but it is pretty hard to shed a tear over this litte intrusion in to the privacy of the Republican party's top echelon considering the extent to which their leaders are demolishing everyone else's rights and privacy.
"What exactly leads you to believe the republican party has a "platform of racisism"?"
Its not a platform since that entails that it be stated, obvious and public and that is politically impossible in these politically correct times.
But it is an obvious fact under a thin facade. You really don't have to look any further than crowd shots of the the people in the RNC. It is a sea of white faces. There are a few Asians, a few Hispanics, and a very few token blacks but it is obvious to anyone not wearing blinders that it is a party of white people for white people, especially affluent white protestants. My dad is a die hard Republican, more than a little rascist, and he would never dream of supporting the Democrats because to him they are the party of blacks, gays, trial lawyers and labor unions.
The rascist undercurrent in the Republican party was amplified in the mid sixties when LBJ rammed through the Civil Rights Act. When he did it he told Bill Moyers he feared he was giving the South to the Republicans for a long time to come and he was dead right. When LBJ gave blacks their rights back and put an end to segregation most of the segregationist Democrats jumped ship and landed in the waiting arms of the Republican party and its a key reason they have a lock on the South today. The Democrats in the South were the rascist party before the Civil Rights Act. Now its the Republicans though its obviously somewhat muted compared to the '50s and '60s.
You just need to look some of the Republican parties leading Southern luminaries. Halley Barbour, Trent Lott and Bob Barr have all been linked to segragationists and white supremecists.
Hate to break it to you but the ACLU is about as unbiased as they come. They defend the civil liberties of good people, bad ones, conservatives and liberals. They really are what their names suggests defending civil liberties. Thank God they are there to fight the Patriot Act because its done more to destroy civil liberties in this country than anything since McCarthyism.
CSPAN was airing the ACLU's Fourth of July conference and one of the featured speakers was Bob Barr. He is one of the staunchest conservatives you will find and he's been a proud card caring ACLU member for a long time. You see true conservatives, unlike the phony conservatives currently in power, value their civil liberties, want them protected and that is what the ACLU is all about.
About the only people who hate the ACLU are people who are really in to intrusive government, oppressive law enforcement, or who are fond of inflicting their views, religion and morals on people through force.
I'm guessing you must be fond of the Patriot Act based on your less than enlightened post. Supporters of Bush and Ashcroft tend to be the most vocal critics of the ACLU but that is only because Bush and Ashcroft are engaged in the most concerted effort to destroy civil liberties we've seen in this country in a long while and the ACLU is fighting it tooth and nail. If a Democratic administration were doing the same things they would be fighting it tooth and nail too.
In the case of Carnahan's crash it was attributed to a mysterious failure of a single instrument coupled with less than ideal flight conditions, night and marginal weather.
"Also called the artificial horizon, the attitude indicator reports a plane's position in the air, telling whether a plane is banking and whether the nose is high or low. NTSB investigators concluded that the primary attitude indicator "was not displaying properly at the time of impact," although they could not determine what caused the malfunction."
The crash of JFK Jr's plane was disturbingly similar.
Here is an excellent read on the Wellstone crash. One leading suspect was disruption of the VOR which is a radio beacon. They crashed during an approach in marginal weather and again disruption of the instruments or the landing beacon could easily have produced the crash.
Listen to any Bush stump speech like the one that he just gave to a Veterans group. It was non stop pounding that America is in danger, and he and the Republican's are the only ones that can make you safe. The line was something like "We will never sit down at a peace table" with the implication this war will never end but "we are winning and will win". A few key facts:
- He's bestowed upon himself the power to summarily arrest anyone he chooses, including U.S. citizens, hold them indefinitely without access to their family or a lawyer and is denying them all due process. - He has shipped people to foreign governments so they can be subjected to extreme torture and has either endorsed, condoned or tolerated forms of torture in the U.S., Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially a number of other secret prisons around the world - American's trying to exercise basic free speech rights are being arrested, or ordered in to pens where no one can see them - Add in numerous quotes from Bush that he is being guided by God's will and in particular that he it was God's will he invade Iraq and bring Democracy to them. The man is either insane or a master manipulator of his extremist Christian followers.
You can just look at a brief history of the Republican party to discern a pattern of contempt for the Republic.
The last time they had control of Congress in the early '50's what did we have, McCarthyism, where people, often innocent, had their lives destroyed for nothing more than having different political views from the people in power. People were being coerced to rat on their friends and neighbors in an extraordinary and long running witch hunt in which people, often innocent, had their civil liberties thrown aside.
Read Goldwater's acceptance speech here tto remember how off the deep end he was. He was so extreme America turned on the Republican's and they had to pull in their extremist horns until Reagan unsheathed them again and Bush started goring people again.
Richard Nixon used people out of the CIA to engage in a massive and massively illegal secret campaign to destroy his political opposition.
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated a secret deal with Iran to prevent the release of the hostages before the election for fear it might save Carter's reelection. You know it was no coincidence they were released as Reagan was being innaugerated making him look like some kind of hero. Another key part of this manipulation, arms were sold to Iran, with Israel's help, and the money was used to fund an illegal war against Nicaragua that was in explicit defiance of a bill passed by our elected representatives in Congress who had forbad such a war. It was a blatant contravention of the Constitution, an impeachable offense, and they got off with a slap on the wrist. By contrast Clinton was pilloried for all eight years he was in office, by the same Republicans, was impeached and it was over lieing about sex between consenting adults.
I'm sorry but there is a long running set of facts and justifications that the Republicans are an eliteist party that have contempt for the Constitution, the will of the people and will if they can turn back the clock to the 50's where America was being run by rich, white, Protestant men, blacks will be disenfranchised as Florida again attempted to do this year(see below), gays will be shoved back in the closet, the American military will be taking down one adversary after another, and everyone will be subjected to the moral code, by law, of fundamentalist Christians.
Footnote on Florida from a documentary on the Discover channel. As you probably know Jeb Bush in 2000 misused Florida law to strip voting rights from Blacks in Florida in 2000. For example they tried to deny a black minister access to his right to vote because he name was similar to a convicted felon. Enough blacks were wrongly d
Polls are somewhat inaccurate when applied to primaries using caucuses, but nothing to the extent you are suggesting.
Caucuses are an extremely poor way to vote. Its telling the U.S. wanted to use caucuses to elect the government in Iraq and it was vehemently opposed by key players like Sistani. They are extremely vulnerable to manipulation since a relatively small number of people are willing to endure them, you can swing the outcome with a concerted get out the vote campaign.
Most importantly they aren't anonymous so it is extremely easy to pressure people to vote in ways they wouldn't if it were an anonymous ballot, especially with the probability there are friends, neighbors and employers there watching how you vote. It is a system ripe for last minute swings and manipulation. It is kind of telling that the players in the parties insist that a caucus be the first step in the primary because it is the most easily manipulated to insure the person they want to win the nomination gets a running start.
The media and party players would like you to think polls are just inaccurate but they aren't if properly done.
Dean lost because he stuck his foot in his mouth on four occassions:
- Said the U.S. should be more even handed between Israel and Palastine which is the same as grabbing the 3rd rail in politics - Questioned Bin Laden's role in 9/11 - Made a statement on Saddam that wasn't sufficiently frothing at the mouth - Questioned the Iowa caucus on tape some years earlier and it was played over and over right before Iowa
It really was an attack ad tieing Dean to Bin Laden that turned the tide, though it exploited the dumb things he said. It got almost no air time on the news and only ran in Iowa and New Hampshire so most people are oblivious to it. The Discover Times channel ran it in a documentary they did on the primaries which is the first I'd heard of it. It was a disturbingly viscous attack ad and you can see how it would have turned voters on him as soon as it ran. American's are conditioned to do things good commercials they see on TV tell them to.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you just leave the waste in a pile, it will eventually be a very pure tolerable radiation hazard uranium + plutonium mine and a very valuable resource."
If you leave enriched Uranium/Plutonium in a pile don't you run the risk of a critical mass. Not that its likely to produce a nuclear bomb but it would seem like a great way to give lethal doses of radiation to anyone in the neighborhood.
"The high level wastes are encapsulated in glass or copper in such amounts that there is not enough for that material, or it's decomposited forms to cause a situation of critical mass. Lots of radioactive stuff in one spot can cause quite alot of heat, right?"
So what happens if someone makes a mistake, not that people ever do, that results in a critical mass or a heat buildup that leads to a fire, especially when the facility is full and there are thousands of tons of waste in it.
How impervious to heat and fire are the ceramic/glass casings.
"TMI is dramatically overblown. The plant contained the radiation. There was a small and intentional release of contaminated water afterward during the cleanup."
It wasn't overblown. They just got lucky and stopped the meltdown before they had a reactor breach. If they hadn't there would have been a massive radiation release. Just because the consequences were mild doesn't change the fact that it could have easily been a major disaster. Three Mile Island completely shook confidence in the safety of nuclear reactors long before Chernobyl showed the worst case scenario.
From the NRC report:
"Because adequate cooling was not available, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes which hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about one-half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although the TMI-2 plant suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, it did not produce the worst-case consequences that reactor experts had long feared. In a worst-case accident, the melting of nuclear fuel would lead to a breach of the walls of the containment building and release massive quantities of radiation to the environment. But this did not occur as a result of the Three Mile Island accident."
"Risks! I say, Risks! This new thing is RISKY!"
Unfortunately Three Mile Island and Chernobyl proved they were right. They are risky. They are extremely complex and very fallible.
"After all, burning coal and oil is perfectly safe!"
Obviously it isn't but coal fired power plants don't leave huge uninhabitable dead zones like Chernoybl did and have the risk of killing large numbers of people all at once, or make people flee their homes...forever.
Fossil fuel pollution is a slower and harder to quantify risk. Maybe in the end if the Greenhouse effect proves to be real fossil fuels will prove to be even more dangerous and threaten the whole planet, but by the times its an undeniable problem it may be to late to stop it.
An interesting post. The part I find most interesting is "Graphite is an inherently stable material." Pretty stable yes but doesn't graphite burn furiously if its hot enough and it comes in to contact with oxygen. These reactors are using helium gas I believe and its cool they can shut off the coolant gas without a problem but what happens if you replaced the helium with oxygen while pebbles are hot. It sounds as though if the vessel were breached and a hot bed came in to contact with oxygen merry little fire/explosion would ensue. Maybe its not that big a risk but burning graphite in a nuclear reactor evokes images of Chernobyl, and the nuclear industry has zero credibility when they tell everyone their reactors are safe after Three Mile Island and Chernobly in particular.
...
Here is a link from MIT that gives a few cons especially from a Boston Globe piece:
"But you pay a price, just like in every tradeoff," Kadak said. Because the reactors produce less total heat, they also produce less energy. In addition, the pebble-bed reactor generates greater volumes of radioactive waste material than conventional cores - albeit much less concentrated waste material. What to do with this volume of waste is a significant consideration if PBMRs are to be successful."
"But industry critics are deeply skeptical that the pebble beds are all they're promoted to be. They say the nuclear industry made similar boasts in the 1950s and early 1960s when they promised a safe energy form that would be "too cheap to meter."
"There is strong debate over proponents' statements that some safety systems - such as concrete and steel containment buildings - won't be needed. Critics say that the pebble bed could burn if a breach in the reactor allows oxygen to come into contact with the graphite inside the reactor. Industry analysts are still studying computer models to see whether or not this is a serious risk."
I stand somewhat corrected. Though here is a source that suggests wikipedia is downplaying its danger somewhat. Excerpts are below.
I guess I'll chalk my wrongness up to media and public antipathy to nuclear power. But that antipathy rose for a couple pretty good reasons. Fission reactors have in fact proven very dangerous numerous times so no one trusts them any more, or the people that build them and advocate them. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl killed fission reactor credibility. Three Mile Island was noteworthy because they came close to a Chernobyl scale accident and the people involved were lieing about the danger and what was happening throughout. Chernobyl's left a dead zone that shows what Three Mile Island could have done if it had gone only slightly further.
The problem is maybe the new designs are safer but at this point no one believes it or is going to trust them. The nuclear industry assured us the old ones were safe and they weren't so they've burned their credibility. The fact is most existing reactors are complex systems, they are extremely fallible and they've proven themselves to be extremely dangerous. How are you going to convince people they are safe at this point. China can do it because they don't have to convince anyone, they can just build them and deal with anyone that complains.
From the LBL source above:
Ingestion of plutonium
For acute radiation poisoning, the lethal dose is estimated to be 500 milligrams (mg), i.e. about 1/2 gram. A common poison, cyanide, requires a dose 5 times smaller to cause death: 100 mg. Thus for ingestion, plutonium is very toxic, but five times less toxic than cyanide. There is also a risk of cancer from ingestion, with a lethal doze (1 cancer) for 480 mg.
Inhalation of plutonium dust
For inhalation, the plutonium can cause death within a month (from pulmonary fibrosis or pulmonary edema); that requires 20 mg inhaled. To cause cancer with high probability, the amount that must be inhaled is 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms. The lethal dose for botulism toxin is estimated to be about 0.070 micrograms = 70 nanograms. [1] Thus botulism toxin is over a thousand times more toxic. The statement that plutonium is the most dangerous material known to man is false. But it is very dangerous, at least in dust form.
How easy is it to breathe in 0.08 mg = 80 micrograms? To get to the critical part of the lungs, the particle must be no larger than about 3 microns. A particle of that size has a mass of about 0.140 micrograms. To get to a dose of 80 micrograms requires 80/0.14 = 560 particles. In contrast, the lethal dose for anthrax is estimated to be 10,000 particles of a similar size. Thus plutonium dust, if spread in the air, is more dangerous than anthrax Ð although the effects are not as immediate.
This source also has an interest section on breeder reactors:
Breeder reactors
The Pu-239 is usually not considered nuclear waste, because it can be used itself to run a nuclear reactor. It is nuclear fuel. Moreover, if you put it in a nuclear reactor, you get three neutrons per fission instead of two. In a reactor, operating at constant (not exponentially growing) power, you want only one neutron per fission to produce another fission. What do you do with the extra two neutrons? Answer: put U-238 in the reactor, and make more plutonium.
Thus a reactor can make (out of U-238) more Pu-239 fuel than it consumes! Such a reactor is called a breeder reactor. It has the potential of turning all uranium, not just 0.7% of it, into nuclear fuel, and thereby increase the available fission fuel by a factor of 140.
There has been public opposition to breeder reactors. The two most common objections are:
1. The plutonium economy. Breeder reactors would allow much greater use of nuclear power, but it means that plutonium would be widespread. Besides the fact that plutonium is ra
Most of the wastes sites I know about are from uranium mining and weapons manufacturing like Rocky Flats in Colorado and Hanford in Washington. Most of the waste from commercial reactors, spent fuel rods mostly, are sitting in pools of water to cool and shield them, usually at the reactor site, waiting for the feds to transport it all to Yucca Mountain. Something they've been trying to do for decades.
During the 40's and 50's in particular the U.S. was in an extreme hurry to develop the bomb before Hitler did and to build more bombs than Stalin so they were more than a little messy while they were in a hurry. They also processed small mountains of Uranium and hefty quantities of plutonium. Rocky Flats and Hanford were a plutonium reprocessing facilities which are especially messy. If I recall Hanford has a plume of radioactive waste working its way towards the Columbia river which is a water source for major cities in the Northwest. It is a study in A. how hard it is to store radioactive waste safely and B. the danger of letting it just get dumped in the ground as some here have proposed.
There are horror stories about Rocky Flats where they apparently mixed low level waste with water and pumped it into sprinklers to water the grass in out of the way parts of the facility.
I think Rocky Flats is being turned in to a wildlife park as we speak. It is in close proximity to the cities of Denver and Boulder.
I guess I should also point out that yes there are radioactive materials buried in the earth. If you've ever learned that your house is near any uranium, and you basement has dangerous radon levels, which is produced from decaying Uranium you would realize even in its natural and unenriched form it is somewhat dangerous. The waste we are talking about is orders of magnitude worse.
Many of the people who mined the Uranium to feed the U.S. weapons and nuclear energy program have died from the effects of long term radon exposure which often leads to lung cancer. Modern miners wear more protective gear than the old timers so its less of a problem today but even naturally occuring unenriched Uranium isn't something to toy with.
Few things are more corrosive to most metal containers than salt, especially if it gets wet.
Set metal containers full of toxic waste in salt water and you will have a pool of uncontained waste in no time.
The key problem with all long term storage sites is you are looking at them in terms of the current climate and a very short historical record. Yucca Mountain is dry now but probably wasn't in the past and may well not be dry in the future especially at the rate our climate is currently changing.
Uh, I did cite the source though I didn't do it in detail. You must have missed this which made it extremely obvious I wasn't claiming it as my own. Not sure which of Mother Jones and Alternet actually published it first. I read it on Mother Jones.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Does any of the Canadian Shield extend in to the U.S.?
What do you think the chances are Canadians are going to tolerate the U.S. and the rest of the world shipping their nuclear waste to Canada for disposal. The problem with nuclear waste is the stigma is so bad no one wants it near them even if someone does figure out a safe way to store it or reprocess it.
I'm a little skeptical any mine shaft will prove long term viable. Its extremely hard to keep them dry, especially if you allow for the possibility that the civilization that has to fund maintaining the storage site may not last as long as the waste.
You are full of crap. If it was that simple why has the U.S. government wasted billions of dollars on Yucca mountain.
Most of the "radioactive materials buried near the earths surface" are unenriched Uranium. It doesn't even register on the toxicity scale compared to plutonium which is a synthetic element. It doesn't exist in nature. Plutonium is the bulk of, but not the only thing we are talking about here.
If a little unenriched uranium reaches the ground water its undesirable but not extremely lethal. If you ingest a few grains of plutonium there is a pretty good chance you are eventually going to die from it.
The idea of mixing it in to mine tailings and dumping is pretty much insane because its eventually going to leech in to the ground water. Your approach to waste disposal is why the U.S. has had to spend billions and billions of dollars trying to clean up toxic waste dumps created by companies that made a fast buck by manufacturing something and dumping all their waste on or in the ground and water. It works for a while but it inevitably migrates in to the water table where people get their drinking and agricultural water. Its a key reason why so many people get and die of cancer in the modern age.
Natural uranium is only slightly radioactive. It has to by mined in huge quantities and purified to produce weapons grade uranium and reactor fuel.
Most of the waste we are talking about here isn't uranium, its plutonium and a host of other exotic metals and isotopes. Plutonium is lethal in extremely small quantities, and with reprocessing its highly sought after to produce nuclear weapons or dirty bombs. You can't just dump it back in a whole in the ground. Like most things you dump in the ground there is a high probability some of its going to end up in the ground water which people drink, and is used in agriculture to grow food for people to eat.
Chill friend. First off I was pointing out the insanity of someone saying we can just bury it, and the insanity that is Yucca Mountain which is basically just burying it.
Reprocessing it is a whole different and more complicated thing. The issue with reprocessing are so complicated and varied you aren't going to do it justice in a Slashdot thread.
Depending on the methods you choose you still get waste of various forms, different waste sure, but there is still a lot of waste from reprocessing. In particular you are going to get plutonium of various grades from weapons grade to plutonium suitable for fast breeder reactors. The only way you get rid of the plutonium waste in the near term is to put in bombs or burn it in reactors designed to burn it.
A key reason reprocessing has such a stigma attached to it is its historically and still is in some places used to harvest weapons grade plutonium. It is a key avenue for nuclear weapons proliferation and weapons grade plutonium is far more dangerous in the wrong hands than the waste so its not like you want every country on the planet doing it.
There is some value in the way reprocessing its being used in France, India and Japan to recycle the fuel and reuse it in fast breeder reactors but there a whole set of issues with that path two.
Pyroprocessing is the new holy grail and it might prove to be a better route than the current PUREX and UREX reprocessing but its not exactly a proven process and it a potential accident waiting to happen too.
Here is a technical brief on the methods though its written by a pro nuke group and needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
You might be able to reduce the dangerous lifespan of a of of waste to 500-1000 years, and burn some of it in reactors but to hold it out as the final solution to nuclear waste is a stretch at this point.
"Burying it is perfectly safe"
You gotta be kidding. You must go to the ostrich school of nuclear waste disposal, just bury it, out of sight out of mind, trust us it will be OK.
I'm 100% for nuclear power because its ones of the few ways your going to produce power for this planet once fossil fuels run out but you either need to develop clean fusion power or figure out some way to really deal with the deadly waste from fission reactors. As some have pointed out China's government can probably sweep it under the rug for a while, they can store it wherever they want and imprison anyone who complains, but it is a problem that for all practical purposes never goes away.
Most of the high level toxic waste that was supposed to go to Yucca Mountain will be lethal for up to a quarter million years. It will probably outlast civilization as we know which hasn't lasted 10,000 years yet. One of the study issues for Yucca Mountain is how do you mark deadly waste so that someone ten thousand years from now will deduce that is lethal and leave it alone.
There was marked low level waste in a UN sealed site in Iraq from the 1980's. As soon as anarchy broke out after the invasion looters went in and dumped it all over the place in order to steal the barrels, poisoning themselves and the whole area.
The only way you can bury it is to find container technology that will hold it for tens of thousands of years, unattended, and we simply don't have it. As soon as a container corrodes, cracks or otherwise ruptures that waste is going to be headed for the water table and when it reaches the water table it travels and it poisons everything over a wide area. There have been bad attempts to engage in short term storage of waste at most of the nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R and they are littered with case of corroded and ruptured containers. We really haven't been able to store waste 50 years let alone tens of thousands of years.
The U.S. has spent billions studying Yucca Mountain and its failed miserably in meeting the criteria as a long term waste disposal site and in the U.S. there is no alternate sight in consideration.
From a Mother Jones article on the plight of Nevada and Yucca Mountain:
Repealing the Apocalypse
Once again, it was the water that was the problem, only this time it wasn't a shortage. Yucca Mountain, it turned out, was all wet, and a truly lunatic place to put seventy-seven thousand tons of high-level nuclear waste.
The government created the nuclear power industry with a promise to reactor operators that the essential crisis of the industry, the dangerous, exceedingly long-lived waste it produces, would be taken off their hands. In all the subsequent decades of nuclear power production, spent fuel rods have been piling up in "cooling ponds" onsite, while the operators waited for the government to make good on its promise to get rid of the stuff (mostly located in the population-heavy, resource-light East). Three New England reactors are already suing the government for failing to come up with a dump.
For more than two decades, the Department of Energy (DOE) has done everything it can to create one of the most scientifically dubious dumpsites imaginable, at Yucca Mountain, about ninety miles north of Vegas on the northern edges of the Nevada Test Site, where all those nuclear bombs were detonated (and will be again if Bush has his way).
The initial plan was to compare sites in three western states and choose the safest one, but two of the states -- Texas and Washington -- had the political clout to get out of the competition. So the "comparative study" never studied anyplace but Yucca Mountain, and yet the longer it was studied the less suitable it seemed even for the mandated 10,000 years it was supposed to keep us and the waste apart (forget the quarter million years the stuff would actually remain dangerous). Somehow, this never seemed to stop plans from proceeding. For a lot of geologists, the fact tha
If you look at the EPIC site you can see some of the letters from the people being harrassed, including senior citizens who have never had so much as a traffic ticket.
... We don't ask how they decide who to list. Each agency decides on
How many, its impossible to tell, its secret. The no fly list has actually existed since 1990, formed under George W.'s dad. It was a tiny list of terrorists managed by the FBI until 9/11. It then was turned over to the TSA, its length exploded and the people run it are either incompetent or malevolent to blacklist "names" with no other identifying data so everyone with that name is harrassed.
Who is being put on the list, by how and by whom is secret. How to get off the list is largely undefined. You typically get bounced between the TSA, the airlines, the FBI and Homeland Security until you give up.
Your ability to stick your head in the sand and pretend everything is OK is exactly how people lose their civil liberties and wake up one day living in a totalitarian state.
EPIC acquired memo's on how the no-fly(don't fly and call law enforcement) and selectee(harass but let fly) lists work. It was so heavily censored that it was meaningless. You can look at them in the link the previous email.
Below are two more stories suggesting activists are being put on the list to punish them. Can you prove it.....the beauty of it is no.....the government can just claim it was a mistake or their name matched an alias of a terrorist.
People are being blacklisted because their name matches a terrorists "assumed" name. I wonder what would happen if a terrorist used George W. Bush, Tom Ridge or John Ashcroft as an alias, though of course they don't have to fly in the nightmare that is civil aviation since 9/11.
The Government's Air Passenger Blacklist
By Dave Lindorff
Barbara Olshansky was in a Newark International Airport departure gate last March when an airline agent at the counter checking her boarding pass called airport security. Olshansky was subjected to a close search and then, though she was in view of other travelers, was ordered to pull her pants down. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks may have created a new era in airport security, but even so, she was embarrassed and annoyed.
Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention the next time she flew.
And the next time. And the next time.
On one flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.
"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."
Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months, rumors and anecdotes have circulated among left-wing and other activist groups about people who have been barred from flying or delayed at security gates because they are "on a list."
But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration has acknowledged for the first time that the government has a list of about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed on airplanes under any circumstances. And the official suggested that Olshansky and other political activists may be on a separate list that subjects them to strict scrutiny but allows them to fly.
"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is composed of names that are provided to us by various government organizations like the FBI, CIA and INS.
You trolling, kidding or do you not follow the news?
You might have heard Senator Edward Kennedy's name or something close to it was added to the no-fly list recently and he was prevented on several occasions from flying between Washington and Boston, something he's been doing for decades. It was in fact a violation of the Constitution which forbids obstructing travel of a Congressman. Maybe it was just an accident and there really is a terrorist named Edward Kennedy or Teddy Kennedy or maybe some sick fuck in the Bush administration though it would be funny to throw his name on it to punish him for his outspoken and often harsh criticism of the Bush administration. How names get put on the list is opaque to most American's and its impossible to get yours off it at present. Kennedy only managed by called Tom Ridge the head of Homeland Security and it still took a while.
Here is a link on the ACLU case against the no fly list since some people are trashing the ACLU in this article. They really are a priceless organization if you value your civil liberties.
Some more on Freedom of Information Act inquiries by EPIC trying to find out if activists really have been black listed from flying based on their political views.
Should I go on.....undocumented.......Nothing about the Patriot act excesses I cited is undocumented its in the law.
Here is a list of the Illinois RNC delegates. Is the Secret Service going to go after the Illinois Leader too?
As nearly as I can tell this is the first year the RNC HASN'T released the delegate list. It really should be a matter of public record so all Republicans know who is representing them at the convention.
Here are a bunch more delegates names and home towns. Some more with pictures. The leaders of all the delegations are names by state and they have features on many of the delegates.
It really is over the top to make this much of a fuss over it. Maybe the hotels where there is staying is a pushing it a little but once you have the names which really are really easy to find out, all you need is a hotel guide of New York to discern where they are staying, and you call the front desk and ask for them by name until you find them.
From the CSPAN coverage I've watched half of them seem to be staying in a hotel that looks out on the 9/11 site which is a really good tool to whip up their patriotic zeal.
Did you read the last item.
George's brother has engaged in a number of bold faced attempts to rig the election in Florida especially by disenfranchising enough blacks to swing the election.....twice.
Did you read the part about Nixon......he was trying to rig the 1972 election when he was caught in Watergate.
Did you read the part about the delay of the Iran hostage release. One reason Carter's first term was a disaster was because the Iran hostage situation was hanging over the entire last year. If they'd been released before the election it might have changed the outcome, though I doubt it. Reagan and Bush senior intentionally kept the hostages in Iran longer than necessary so they could be released the day Reagan took office so he could reap the positive karma of the ending of the cloud that had been hanging over the U.S.
At this point you either have poor reading comprehension or you suffer for the usual cognitive dissonance infection typical of the Republican party in general and Bush's fan boys in particular.
If you want to highlight how stupid the Secret Service reaction is just go to this web site.
"Look up campaign contributors to federal elections by ZIP Code. Get information on contributor name, amount, employer, candidate, party and more. Updated Jul 15 2004."
So why is this database not voter intimidation. You can find the party bias of everyone whose donated to a candidate or party including where they work.
"Hello, these aren't the self-appointed managers of the world any more than the DNC delegates were."
Well actually yes they are. They currently have complete control of the U.S. government with the exception of the courts which take longer to stack. They are running the worlds sole remaining superpower, no longer checked by the U.S.S.R, they are running the world's largest military by far, and a big chunk of the world's economy. They have declared a policy of preemptive warfare which means any nation that crosses the U.S. is a now a potential military target, remember "You are either with us or your agaist us". The U.S. has troops in something around a hundred countries now. How much more of an empire do you need.
The Feds and the city of New York both, run by Republican's are arresting people for nothing more than peaceful protest, you can now be stopped on the street or in a subway station and searched without cause. The Republican's, with Democrat collusion, through the Patriot Act have given themselves the right to see what you read at the library, and arrest a Librarian for not keeping this intrusion secret, or to engage in sneak and peak invasions of your home where they will break and enter to get in to your home, rumage through your things and don't have to show you the warrant or tell you they were there.
They've created a no fly list that is preventing people from traveling because they have names resembling a terroris name or alias, and has in fact been used to keep anti war and anti bush activist from flying. They've made numerous attempts to use computers and mergin of private and government databases to trace every recorded aspect of every persons life. The President just signed an executive order starting the merge of the CIA, the NSA, the DIA. The prospects are high the NSA's massive spying power will be applied against American's, so we can now empathize with the rest of the world, and we will no doubt see a spying agency large and more powerful than any the world has ever seen, with all of the checks against abuse abandoned in the name of "safety".
I'm sorry but it is pretty hard to shed a tear over this litte intrusion in to the privacy of the Republican party's top echelon considering the extent to which their leaders are demolishing everyone else's rights and privacy.
"What exactly leads you to believe the republican party has a "platform of racisism"?"
Its not a platform since that entails that it be stated, obvious and public and that is politically impossible in these politically correct times.
But it is an obvious fact under a thin facade. You really don't have to look any further than crowd shots of the the people in the RNC. It is a sea of white faces. There are a few Asians, a few Hispanics, and a very few token blacks but it is obvious to anyone not wearing blinders that it is a party of white people for white people, especially affluent white protestants. My dad is a die hard Republican, more than a little rascist, and he would never dream of supporting the Democrats because to him they are the party of blacks, gays, trial lawyers and labor unions.
The rascist undercurrent in the Republican party was amplified in the mid sixties when LBJ rammed through the Civil Rights Act. When he did it he told Bill Moyers he feared he was giving the South to the Republicans for a long time to come and he was dead right. When LBJ gave blacks their rights back and put an end to segregation most of the segregationist Democrats jumped ship and landed in the waiting arms of the Republican party and its a key reason they have a lock on the South today. The Democrats in the South were the rascist party before the Civil Rights Act. Now its the Republicans though its obviously somewhat muted compared to the '50s and '60s.
You just need to look some of the Republican parties leading Southern luminaries. Halley Barbour, Trent Lott and Bob Barr have all been linked to segragationists and white supremecists.
As you may re
Hate to break it to you but the ACLU is about as unbiased as they come. They defend the civil liberties of good people, bad ones, conservatives and liberals. They really are what their names suggests defending civil liberties. Thank God they are there to fight the Patriot Act because its done more to destroy civil liberties in this country than anything since McCarthyism.
CSPAN was airing the ACLU's Fourth of July conference and one of the featured speakers was Bob Barr. He is one of the staunchest conservatives you will find and he's been a proud card caring ACLU member for a long time. You see true conservatives, unlike the phony conservatives currently in power, value their civil liberties, want them protected and that is what the ACLU is all about.
About the only people who hate the ACLU are people who are really in to intrusive government, oppressive law enforcement, or who are fond of inflicting their views, religion and morals on people through force.
I'm guessing you must be fond of the Patriot Act based on your less than enlightened post. Supporters of Bush and Ashcroft tend to be the most vocal critics of the ACLU but that is only because Bush and Ashcroft are engaged in the most concerted effort to destroy civil liberties we've seen in this country in a long while and the ACLU is fighting it tooth and nail. If a Democratic administration were doing the same things they would be fighting it tooth and nail too.
In the case of Carnahan's crash it was attributed to a mysterious failure of a single instrument coupled with less than ideal flight conditions, night and marginal weather.
"Also called the artificial horizon, the attitude indicator reports a plane's position in the air, telling whether a plane is banking and whether the nose is high or low. NTSB investigators concluded that the primary attitude indicator "was not displaying properly at the time of impact," although they could not determine what caused the malfunction."
The crash of JFK Jr's plane was disturbingly similar.
Here is an excellent read on the Wellstone crash. One leading suspect was disruption of the VOR which is a radio beacon. They crashed during an approach in marginal weather and again disruption of the instruments or the landing beacon could easily have produced the crash.
No facts....no facts.
Listen to any Bush stump speech like the one that he just gave to a Veterans group. It was non stop pounding that America is in danger, and he and the Republican's are the only ones that can make you safe. The line was something like "We will never sit down at a peace table" with the implication this war will never end but "we are winning and will win". A few key facts:
- He's bestowed upon himself the power to summarily arrest anyone he chooses, including U.S. citizens, hold them indefinitely without access to their family or a lawyer and is denying them all due process.
- He has shipped people to foreign governments so they can be subjected to extreme torture and has either endorsed, condoned or tolerated forms of torture in the U.S., Gitmo, Iraq, Afghanistan and potentially a number of other secret prisons around the world
- American's trying to exercise basic free speech rights are being arrested, or ordered in to pens where no one can see them
- Add in numerous quotes from Bush that he is being guided by God's will and in particular that he it was God's will he invade Iraq and bring Democracy to them. The man is either insane or a master manipulator of his extremist Christian followers.
You can just look at a brief history of the Republican party to discern a pattern of contempt for the Republic.
The last time they had control of Congress in the early '50's what did we have, McCarthyism, where people, often innocent, had their lives destroyed for nothing more than having different political views from the people in power. People were being coerced to rat on their friends and neighbors in an extraordinary and long running witch hunt in which people, often innocent, had their civil liberties thrown aside.
Read Goldwater's acceptance speech here tto remember how off the deep end he was. He was so extreme America turned on the Republican's and they had to pull in their extremist horns until Reagan unsheathed them again and Bush started goring people again.
Richard Nixon used people out of the CIA to engage in a massive and massively illegal secret campaign to destroy his political opposition.
Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated a secret deal with Iran to prevent the release of the hostages before the election for fear it might save Carter's reelection. You know it was no coincidence they were released as Reagan was being innaugerated making him look like some kind of hero. Another key part of this manipulation, arms were sold to Iran, with Israel's help, and the money was used to fund an illegal war against Nicaragua that was in explicit defiance of a bill passed by our elected representatives in Congress who had forbad such a war. It was a blatant contravention of the Constitution, an impeachable offense, and they got off with a slap on the wrist. By contrast Clinton was pilloried for all eight years he was in office, by the same Republicans, was impeached and it was over lieing about sex between consenting adults.
I'm sorry but there is a long running set of facts and justifications that the Republicans are an eliteist party that have contempt for the Constitution, the will of the people and will if they can turn back the clock to the 50's where America was being run by rich, white, Protestant men, blacks will be disenfranchised as Florida again attempted to do this year(see below), gays will be shoved back in the closet, the American military will be taking down one adversary after another, and everyone will be subjected to the moral code, by law, of fundamentalist Christians.
Footnote on Florida from a documentary on the Discover channel. As you probably know Jeb Bush in 2000 misused Florida law to strip voting rights from Blacks in Florida in 2000. For example they tried to deny a black minister access to his right to vote because he name was similar to a convicted felon. Enough blacks were wrongly d
Polls are somewhat inaccurate when applied to primaries using caucuses, but nothing to the extent you are suggesting.
Caucuses are an extremely poor way to vote. Its telling the U.S. wanted to use caucuses to elect the government in Iraq and it was vehemently opposed by key players like Sistani. They are extremely vulnerable to manipulation since a relatively small number of people are willing to endure them, you can swing the outcome with a concerted get out the vote campaign.
Most importantly they aren't anonymous so it is extremely easy to pressure people to vote in ways they wouldn't if it were an anonymous ballot, especially with the probability there are friends, neighbors and employers there watching how you vote. It is a system ripe for last minute swings and manipulation. It is kind of telling that the players in the parties insist that a caucus be the first step in the primary because it is the most easily manipulated to insure the person they want to win the nomination gets a running start.
The media and party players would like you to think polls are just inaccurate but they aren't if properly done.
Dean lost because he stuck his foot in his mouth on four occassions:
- Said the U.S. should be more even handed between Israel and Palastine which is the same as grabbing the 3rd rail in politics
- Questioned Bin Laden's role in 9/11
- Made a statement on Saddam that wasn't sufficiently frothing at the mouth
- Questioned the Iowa caucus on tape some years earlier and it was played over and over right before Iowa
It really was an attack ad tieing Dean to Bin Laden that turned the tide, though it exploited the dumb things he said. It got almost no air time on the news and only ran in Iowa and New Hampshire so most people are oblivious to it. The Discover Times channel ran it in a documentary they did on the primaries which is the first I'd heard of it. It was a disturbingly viscous attack ad and you can see how it would have turned voters on him as soon as it ran. American's are conditioned to do things good commercials they see on TV tell them to.
Do a Google search on:
"Howard Dean" Iowa "attack ad" "Bin Laden"