Anti-nuke people are not skeptical. We should all be skeptical about claims for the viability of nuclear power. No, they are like anti-global warming people--they know the truth and fuck the facts. Most anti-nuke people read Al Gore and watched his movie and are sure Global Climate Change is real. They insist that the government listen to the scientists and do something to avert a catastrophe. All well and good. I agree. But when you ask them to apply the same sceintific rationality to nuclear power, they come up with half-baked crap like this article. Facts exist to support the proposition that nuclear power is horrible and out of bounds. All other facts must be ignored, and the big picture, that it may come down to a bad choice (nuclear power) or a worse choice (runaway climate change) is either ridiculed or left off the table.

We've got to grow up and face the fact that we in all likelihood will not be able to eat our cake and have it, too. Any nuclear disaster will be local (see Chernobyl). The greenhouse effect is global. One may kill thousands, maybe tens of thousands if everything goes wrong. The other will kill millions. If the future is coal or nuclear power, and right now it is, then nuclear power wins hands down.

but I have seen my betters, and they are just as hamstrung by blinkered ideology and myopia as the general electorate. As for a civics test for voting, it's easy to sympathize with that but, pace Grumpus, knowing stuff doesn't make one wise enough to avoid a stupid war like this one. The architects of Iraq, and the proponents of a war against Iran, are disproportionately well educated and could pass any such test with flying colors. What they are is amoral and deeply committed to a vision of American power and control that trumps their intelligence at every turn. In other words, they are very smart but deeply irrational in their need to feel powerful, feared, and deferred to. And most Americans feel this way. They cannot abide the idea that all peoples are created equal. To them, America is not one among many. It is unique; it is exceptional. It is above law, above meaningful criticism. Our elite of policy-makers and investors and CEOs believe these things. No test of facts will weed these people out. Democracy, Republic, or Oligarchy, it makes no difference--these are the guiding ideas of most Americans, ignorant or informed, and I don't see it changing until America lacks the power to perpetuate the myth of its own unique and special greatness.

I'm not sure if we are there yet, but we may very well be facing "We're on the Titannic--it's man the lifeboats time" on the climate change issue. Call me an elitist until you are blue in the face. Somebody's got to think and act Big Picture here. No more eat your cake and have it, too. If thousand have to go without jobs to make sure that millions don't go without food, then the thousands will have to be sacrificed. Steps should and must be taken to help those people, but the welfare of Ohio industiral workers should not and must not get in the way of averting a global catastrophe. If an alternative is available, please, let us know about it, fast. But to complain that one is an "elitist" because you look the gorgon in the face and don't flinch at the implications is silly. And it is terminally short-sighted. Don't you think that climate change will effect those Ohio workers and their children down the next few decades? A few more years on the jobs will only buy them a better cabin when the ship goes down.

For those oh so blase about "fairness" and angered by redistributive tax structures, I posit the following: in America, income has nothing to do with work. That is, if you measure work by how arduous or onerous it is, you have little or no correlation between how much people work and what they earn. The hardest working people I have ever known were the Hispanic residents of Jersey City. These men and women worked like dogs, as laborers, sweatshop seamstresses, office cleaners, trash sorters, you name it. They made shit. Watch "Dirty Jobs" on Discovery Channel--then explain why some guy in a suit working in an air conditioned office and lunching in fine restaurants should make, literally, 500 times more than the guys who clean up the gunk in his factories or hump the stuff to his stores. Tell me true why my heart should bleed for people who make $10 million a year and pay no more as a percentage of their earnings in taxes than my wife and I do with a combined salary of 100k. The notion that people make more money because they "deserve" to because they work oh so hard is bunkum.

An irrefutable tour de force--congratulations. What pisses me off most about these reactionaries is their cowardice. Hell, they don't want to fight their enemies, they want to slaughter unarmed suspects from the safety of the sky. How revealing! How far we have come from "Give me liberty, or give me death" and "live free or die." Now it's "protect my lily white ass from those evil sand devils at any costs" (and that goes especially for Shooter and Elephant man, you gutless stooges--give away your own freedom, but leave mine alone--i don't shit myself in fear of terrorists).

As for John Major, his reminding people that freedom is worth the risk happens to be the most honorable thing I've heard out of any politician in a long time. Kudos to him, too.