[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Anti-Empire Report, May 12, 2010
E.Wayne Johnson
ewj at pigs.ag
Thu May 13 23:32:10 CDT 2010
I personally think that the notion of anthropogenic global warming is just plain silly. I do think that we need to take care of the environment we live in.
I dont agree with you about global warming, Mort, but that doesnt make you wrong about the war.
----- Original Message -----
From: Brussel Morton K.
To: C. G. Estabrook
Cc: Peace-discuss Discuss
Sent: Friday, May 14, 2010 11:47 AM
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Fwd: Anti-Empire Report, May 12, 2010
The quotation still stands. I've read much of what Chomsky has said and written, especially recently, and his derision of those who deny global warning is undeniable, as the quotation states.
I am convinced that you know very little about nuclear matters, but are confident in spouting off about them. The fear about the atmosphere igniting is in the same league as the fear that when the new accelerator at CERN gets going colliding particles together, it may cause a mini black hole that will expand and gobble us all up. There are obvious answers to that one based on physics theory and observations. As to the Trinity test, here is a quotation:
" At the time of the first nuclear test in 1945, there was indeed some speculation that the test could ignite the earth’s atmosphere by causing the fusion of the nitrogen atoms in a reaction that would not stop until the atmosphere had been completely depleted and the earth wiped clean by the massive explosion in the process. The hypothesis that this could happen was put forward by Edward Teller - a scientist known for having a flare for the dramatic. (he also put on sun tan lotion before the test.) Before the test of the weapon a few simple calculations were done which showed that this reaction could not occur and even if there were some fusion of nitrogen atoms, it could not sustain itself to grow into a major reaction. Thus the fear was quashed before the test even was conducted. "
Furthermore, here is an intelligent response from (theoretical physicist) Michael Barnett, interviewed about the possibility of the CERN accelerator experiments gobbling up the earth, relevant also to the igniting of the atmosphere by the Trinity test.
"When I spoke with Michael Barnett about the various worst-case scenarios that had been suggested for the LHC—mini stable black holes, killer strangelets, a cosmic phase shift that evaporates time and space—he was unequivocal in his insistence that the risk posed by the collider is nil. When I gently protested that I had seen other physicists quoted as saying the risk was infinitesimal, but still greater than zero, he stopped me short."
"OK...this is something in the nature of scientists. There is a possibility that all the air in this room will be moved to that half and there will be none here, and you and I will be dead. It's never going to happen, but there is a possibility.... The problem is, the public can't see the difference. If you say there's a very small chance of something, they're thinking 1 percent, because they can't think of anything smaller. There's 99 percent and there's 1 percent. That's it. And in reality, well...I don't think that way, first of all. I don't think there's a small chance that all the air in the room is going to go to that side and we're going to die. There's never been a room in the history of mankind where that's happened. So, the chance is zero, actually. But if you want to talk about it from a scientist's point of view, they can make up some stupid number which has no meaning."
The "stupid number" in the case of the first nuclear test explosion was something like 1/3,000,000 as floated by Teller. In fact it was essentially zero. There are always uncertainties which could make it infinitesimal but not zero, as the example given by Barnett above.
The abstract written by Teller and coauthors, declassified only in 1979, corroborates this. You can find it under a Wikipedia article on the Manhattan Project, reference number 15..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project
The bottom line is that there is much ignorant alarmist propaganda about nuclear matters and nuclear power fed by inordinate fear and distrust.
--mkb
On May 13, 2010, at 2:50 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
Are you purposely ignoring what Chomsky said about the the relation of Limbaugh/Palin/et al. to the teaparty movement? Or didn't you read it?
The frightening ignorance of American experts on nuclear power from the beginning is a matter of record. On the eve of the Trinity experiment, members of Oppenheimer's crew that thought there was a possibility that it would ignite the atmosphere. They didn't know, but went ahead with the test.
But there is a lot of (public) money to be made from nuclear power. Whom are its promoters paid by?
On 5/12/10 11:51 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
If you'll pardon the expression, what is pure crap. The only scientists
I know who suggested such things were Edward Teller's acolytes; the
great majority of the science experts, physicists, thought it was nutty.
And of course, it should be noted that Cockburn thinks the climate issue
is a non issue—one of the deniers. Is he paid by Exxon-Mobile or BP or…?
On another line, i thought you, and others, might be interested in what
Chomsky has to say about science and a Tea party heroine . Among his
comments:
Listen to talk radio sometimes, which I do a lot when I'm driving. It's
a segment of popular opinion. I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh
interviewing Sarah Palin. For anybody who cares about possible survival,
it's pretty frightening. It was all leading questions, "Sarah, what do
you think of global warming?" "Oh, that's just made up by elitist
liberals who are taking our jobs who don't care about us poor people.
It's nothing like that. Look out the window, do you see any palm trees?
Well, that takes care of global warming."
For the rest of the Chomsky interview, see
http://www.zcommunications.org/government-involvement-with-science-and-art-by-noam-chomsky
--mkb
P.S., You ignored my question…
On May 12, 2010, at 11:32 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
I think perhaps Cockburn might return the compliment.
I'm appalled at the recent liberal cave-in on nuclear power (except
for Iranians) and glad that Cockburn points it out. (As a secondary
school student I interviewed people at the AEC who described how
"experts" would make it possible to dredge harbors with atomic bombs
while providing safe, clean, and virtually free power.) Fool me once,
as G. Bush said...
This seems about right to me: <http://www.spectacle.org/0510/seger.html>.
On 5/12/10 10:56 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
I guess I have used lawyers a couple of times (once when I was
fighting for
my job at a research reactor, and then more recently as I'm coming to
the end
of my line ):=)), so that makes me a member of the upper middle
class. But I
don't believe in rigid demarkations insofar as class is concerned.
But how about you, Carl?
And as for Cockburn, he is ignorant about societies' real problems and
opportunities concerning energy issues and more than ignorant about
nuclear
power and its "irrefutable" dangers. I know whereof I speak. Too often,
Cockburn's just nutty and self absorbed.
--mkb
On May 12, 2010, at 10:10 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
...This brings us to the American class system, which Russell Baker once
beautifully defined in terms of access to lawyers. Having a lawyer on
permanent retainer "is the very essence of richness." That's the upper
class. Those in the upper middle class hire a lawyer when they feel they
need one to handle wills, contracts and so forth. Middle-class
people know
they ought to employ lawyers but can't quite afford them. Members of the
lower middle class believe they can defend themselves better than any
lawyer, and can't afford one anyway. To lower-class folk, public
defender
and prosecutor look identical.
The lower middle class is what we're focusing on here, the people
who own
auto repair shops, bakeries, bicycle shops, plant stores, dry cleaners,
fish stores and all the other small businesses across America - in
sum, the
"petite bourgeoisie," stomped by regulators and bureaucrats while
the big
fry get zoning variances and special clause exemptions. The left always
hated the petite bourgeoisie because it wasn't the urban proletariat and
thus the designated agent of revolutionary change. Today's left no
longer
believes in revolutionary change but despises the petite bourgeoisie
out of
inherited political disposition and class outlook. Ninety-five
percent of
all the firms in America hire fewer than ten people. There's your petite
bourgeoisie for you: not frightening, not terrifying and in fact quite
indispensable.
And the petit bourgeois are legitimately pissed off. Whatever
backwash they
got from the stimulus often wasn't readily apparent. They can't afford
health plans for themselves or their employees. They're three or four
payrolls away from the edge of the cliff, and when they read about
trillions in handouts for bankers, trillions in impending deficits,
blueprints for green energy regs that will put them out of business,
what
they hear is the ocean surge pounding away at the bottom of that same
cliff.
The conventional parties have nothing to offer them. The left disdains
them. But here comes the tea party, whose spirit is very well caught by
David Barstow, the Times reporter whose long piece on February 16
prompted
[Frank] Rich's mad column[s].
Rich refers to Barstow's "chilling, months-long investigation of the tea
party movement," as though the reporter had gone undercover,
watching Klan
rituals through binoculars somewhere in a cow pasture. This is a silly
mischaracterization of Barstow's perceptive and rather sympathetic
account
of tea partydom, in which he significantly doesn't quote the SPLC
but pops
in, right at the end, an obligatory quote from an Idaho lawyer who
sued the
Hayden Lake Aryans into extinction.
Of course, there are many flavors in the tea party blend. There are nuts
and opportunists, as in any political formation. You can trace some
of its
ideology back to the nineteenth-century Know-Nothings, a typical
platform
of which, in 1841, called for extending the term of naturalization to
twenty-one years, restricting public office to the native-born (there's
your birther movement), keeping the Bible in schools and resisting "the
encroachment of a foreign civil and spiritual power upon the
institutions
of our country." Back then this meant the Vatican; today it's Davos,
Bilderberg, the UN, the IPCC.
At this point leftists invariably start quoting Richard Hofstadter's
1964
essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." They should put
aside that
snotty essay and reflect on their own dismal failures. Under the
leadership
of Obama - cheered into office by 99.9 percent of the left - and a
Democratic Congress, we have a whole new war and no antiwar movement
of any
heft; a bailout for Wall Street; an awful health bill connived at by
both
parties; the prospect of loan guarantees for new nuclear energy
plants; a
huge hike in defense spending, particularly nuclear weapons; and, at
least
at the rhetorical level, an impending onslaught on Social Security.
Constitutional abuses endorsed or instigated by the White House
continue in
a straight sequence from the Bush years.
Response from the left? No twitch in the morgue. The AFL-CIO was
bought off
from resistance to the health bill by getting relief on its Cadillac
health
plans. Because of alleged anthropologically prompted global warming, the
green movement has sat on its hands, hopelessly split on nuclear power,
whose real, baneful effects have been irrefutably demonstrated, starting
with nuclear waste. There's been near total silence on the huge nuclear
weapons budget boost (the largest for Los Alamos since 1944). Total
silence
on the Patriot Act, reauthorized February 27. What to do? Rally
round the
flag and scaremonger about the right, where's there's actual political
ferment.
[That's Alex Cockburn on class and the tea party. Where do you belong on
the class scale by Russell Baker's calculus, Mort? --CGE]
On 5/12/10 9:41 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
I would suggest a) that there are similar aspects to the current
situation and what has passed before, but there are also
differences too,
as always — Blum brought out similarities; b) he did not infer or say
that /*all*/ people are stupid (or ignorant), but there are plenty of
them and they come out of the woods periodically. This was his point I
think, and people should understand it.
As for Chomsky's mistaken? remark: I would say there are /*some*/
grievances which are legitimate, clearly not all, and it is unclear
to me
that those motivating the current movement are legitimate. You can pick
and choose (socialism? government? Obama's birth?, immigration? taxes?
bailouts?…). Mostly, they seem to be missing the boat.
I think a degree of contempt is justifiable, but one should certainly
not dismiss them as a "movement", however illformed and ill informed it
is.
You mean by "petit bourgeois" that they are mostly shopkeepers, small
business, "middle-class" people? Or are they salaried or
unemployed? How
many union people join them? Immigrants? I suspect that there are even
fairly well off Repubs among them, those who hate Dems, Obama and other
despicables who want to spread their wealth.
Sometimes contempt is appropriate, but, again, one should try to
enlighten and organize for better ends as much as possible. I'm not
optimistic here, but good luck. (Admission: I hung out with them once
with flyers showing that their precious tax dollars were being diverted
to killing, and was ignored for the most part.)
--mkb
On May 12, 2010, at 8:11 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
I think it would be a mistake to include either (a) there's nothing
unique about the current political situation or (b) it's all because
people are stupid. There certainly are parallels between
anti-communism
and anti-terrorism - but that's because they were both massive
propaganda enterprises of the American ascendancy.
Chomsky's comments have certainly been misinterpreted. He makes two
points, both correct it seems to me: (a) the grievances motivating the
teaparty movement are real; and (b) the Left in this country has
allowed the Right to offer (mad and dangerous) interpretations of
those grievances.
Simply ridiculing the teaparty movement - or dismissing it with
contempt as simply low-class racism - is also mad and dangerous. A
flood of (quite legitimate) popular distress - dammed up by liberal
indifference and denied a political spillway - will burst through in
crazy and far more dangerous ways.
Of course the tea party movement is not a working class uprising. The
teapartiers are, in classical terms, mainly petty bourgeois - but with
substantial appeal to the working class, as the Nazis were. The
crucial point about them is that, while they amount to about 18%
of the
population (according to a NYT survey), 48% of the population
sympathize with their attitudes and beliefs (as compared with 44% for
Obama).
What the left should be doing is what it did in the 1930s, when there
was also a very dangerous nativist movement, but it was countered by
working class organizing - not contempt for the stupidity of the
masses. --CGE
On 5/12/10 6:19 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
... *Anti-Empire Report *May 12, 2010 William Blum
www.killinghope.org <http://www.killinghope.org>
<http://www.killinghope.org>
<http://www.killinghope.org/> *Terminally-dumb people have always
been with us of course. It can’t be that we’ve suddenly gone
stupid.* ... If you shake your head and roll your eyes at the
nonsense coming out of the Teabagger followers of Sarah “Africa is
a country” Palin and other intellectual giants like Glenn Beck and
Rush Limbaugh ... If you have thoughts of moving abroad after the
latest silly lies and fantasies like “Obama the Marxist” and “Obama
the antichrist” ... If you share Noam Chomsky’s feeling: "I have
never seen anything like this in my lifetime” ... keep in mind that
the right wing has long been at least as stupid and as
mean-spirited...
--
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