The Real World

I realize I’ve been away from the blog for almost a month now. It has been a busy month, but mostly a good one. Your Minor Heretic has projects on top of projects. That aside, I rely on inspiration for my blogging. It shows up or it doesn’t, and I am resisting the lazy practice of posting pieces that say little more than “Hey, look at this!”

I was at the local farmer’s market on Saturday morning. It was a sunny, flawless morning, and the crowds were out. A local folk duo played and sang. A high school kid I know performed juggling and acrobatics to raise money for a circus school scholarship. I bought greens, artisanal cheese, locally baked bread, and a maple glazed cinnamon bun for The Librarian’s lunch.  Bliss.

Part of the market experience is meeting half a dozen friends and having a series of conversations. I met up with an old friend who is a dedicated peace activist and we exchanged greetings. I said something about the glorious day, and then something about how this market, the local meeting place, is what the good life is all about. He agreed, and then made an important point: Part of a living, vibrant community is coming in contact with people you wouldn’t ordinarily, voluntarily associate with. It means dealing with people who annoy you, who disagree with you, and who might find you slightly off-putting in the same way.

He was right. Mixing with everyone, not just your in-group, is important for full personal development and for functional civic life. That’s one thing that Vermont has going for it. Most of us live in small towns. Anonymity is not an option. Clustering with absolutely like-minded people is theoretically possible, but the rest of the population keeps leaking in around the edges. Our geography and small population push us up against each other, but unlike a big city, we are going to see these people again and again. We have to deal with our differences in a civil way.

The same goes double for town meeting. Any moderately sentient resident can stand up and speak. And we do. Unlike the so-called town meetings arbitrarily staged by politicians, we actually have to make some decisions together by meeting’s end. And, unlike those who attend the theatrical forums for posturing and bile, we have to see each other and interact in the days and months after the budget is passed and the church supper is but memory.

I’m a member of our neighborhood online forum. It is restricted to residents of our town, and mostly concerns itself with goods needed and offered, comments on road conditions, wildlife sightings, lost pets, and local events. It is nothing earth shattering in itself, but the key to its virtue is that it engenders a thousand small, face-to-face interactions between people who might otherwise not meet. When I say meet, I mean a real personal meeting, not a nod on the street or a public exchange over a school bond issue. Each meeting is a chance to see another human being as an individual, not an archetype. It humanizes us to each other. It is those endless mundane contacts that provide the glue of a civil society.

My conversation at the market reminded me of a passage from a speech given by the headmaster at The Mountain School, Mac Conard. (I was a student there back in the late 70s) The Mountain School was small, just a few dozen students, isolated on a hilltop farm in Vershire Vermont. We raised a lot of our own food and did most of the physical work around the place. I’ll have to paraphrase what Mac said, but he remarked on the expression, “the real world.” People said to him, “This farm on a hill in the woods is all very nice, but what about teaching these kids about the real world?” Mac responded that this was the real world. Forests and fields, wild and domesticated animals, gardens, chores, and getting along with people you can’t escape – these are the elements of the real world. Cities, high technology, easy mobility and anonymity are common in this country, but these things are also artificial. Ubiquity doesn’t make them any less contrived.

I am concerned with structure. As Herodotus wrote, “Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.” It is the structure of our social institutions, our architecture, our urban design and our daily lives that pushes us this way and that. Anonymity and isolation are seeds of inhumanity. It is important to build into our society the structures that bring us together, face to face, over and over, even when we annoy each other. It is that repetition, those thousands of unremarkable little interactions that convince us of each other’s humanity. Knowing each other allows us to disagree without contempt. Knowing that we will meet again allows us to lose the argument, this time, with some amount of grace.

So here’s to farmer’s markets and concerts on the green. Here’s to the dog walkers in the park and the people taking their own sweet time about their errands downtown. Here’s to town meeting and this meeting and that meeting and that guy I always disagree with. Here’s to benches and porches and parks. Here’s to wide sidewalks and narrow diners. Here’s to potlucks and work parties and the people down the road having a lawn sale. It all adds up to the real world.

Update on Sunday, August 19, 2012 at 10:23PM by Minor Heretic

A big welcome to the people of Venezuela. For some reason this post has been getting a large surge of hits from your country, plus some from Sweden, France, Germany, China, and a dozen other places around the planet. Anybody care to enlighten me as to the why and how of the international popularity of this post? If you have an idea, please respond with a comment. Just curious. Thanks

M.H.

For the want of a nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Proverb, Author Unknown

I’d like to direct your attention to the most important place on earth. It’s not Washington, DC, or Moscow, or Beijing. It’s not Tehran or Damascus or Bagdhad. It’s not even an entire city, but our fates hang on it.

The most important place in the world is a large concrete box about 100 feet above ground level located next to the #4 reactor in Fukushima, Japan. It contains, for the moment, water and hundreds of zirconium clad nuclear fuel rods. The #4 spent fuel pool was damaged by the earthquake and aftershocks of March 11^th last year, and by a hydrogen gas explosion. It is in rough shape. Workers have temporarily reinforced it with steel beams, but all of the observers I have read doubt that the structure would survive another moderate earthquake.

Unfortunately, the earthquake that precipitated this situation has weakened the fault line along the east coast of Japan in the Fukushima area. European seismologists have concluded that the major after shock known as the Iwaki event (magnitude 7) was caused by this weakening. It is virtually certain that another earthquake of this magnitude will occur in the next two or three years.

 What then? The #4 pool will crack open and lose its cooling water, perhaps even spilling fuel rods to the ground. The rods will overheat almost immediately and the zirconium cladding will start them burning like radioactive road flares. That in itself will be a major release, spreading radioactive iodine, cesium, strontium, and uranium in the resulting aerosol. The secondary effect will be the evacuation of the Fukushima site, rendering all work on the other five reactors impossible. Even robots can’t survive such high levels of radiation. These already compromised units will lose their jury rigged cooling schemes, resulting in cascading exposures and fires across the entire site. After 30 days or so the common spent fuel pool next to reactor #4 will lose enough water to expose its rods to the air, with the attendant road flare effect.

From an article in Japan Forum:

“Based on U.S. Energy Department data, I assume a total of 11,138 spent fuel assemblies are being stored at the Daiichi site, nearly all of which is in pools. They contain roughly 336 million curies (~1.2 E+19 Bq) of long-lived radioactivity. About 134 million curies is Cesium-137 - roughly 85 times the amount of Cs-137 released at the Chernobyl accident as estimated by the U.S. National Council on Radiation Protection (NCRP). The total spent reactor fuel inventory at the Fukushima-Daiichi site contains nearly half of the total amount of Cs-137 estimated by the NCRP to have been released by all atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, Chernobyl, and world-wide reprocessing plants (~270 million curies or ~9.9 E+18 Becquerel).”

Consider that for a minute. Eighty-five Chernobyls. Half the world’s cumulative exposure to Cesium-137 over the past 65 years, except that it is released in a month.

What happens to Japan depends upon the wind at the time of the release. Japan was lucky in its misfortune last year as the wind was from the west, blowing most of the radioactivity out over the Pacific. Winter winds from the northwest would drive the plume right into Tokyo. Southern summer winds would drive the plume up the island and over Hokkaido. In any event it would cut off the northern half of Japan from the south with a radioactive no-go zone. Where the cloud goes in the world depends on the nature of the release (steam vs. fire vs. explosion) and the vagaries of seasonal winds.

The problem for the Japanese authorities is that the crane for removing the fuel rods from the #4 pool was destroyed. In fact, the hardware is mostly in the pool, lying on top of the fuel rods. Removal of the rods isn’t scheduled to start until the end of 2013, and it is predicted to take a decade. In the meantime we are relying on the magnanimity of the Pacific tectonic plate. In other words, pure luck.

A few grim questions occur to me.

Evacuate Tokyo? How? To where?

How could Japan function as a nation and an economy after being irradiated and cut in half?

What would the world economy look like if Japan becomes a failed state?

When the ultra-hot radioactive gases from the fire plume up into the jet stream, what happens to Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S.? Or, depending on the wind and altitude, what happens to eastern China and the Korean peninsula? It would all have to fall out somewhere.

There are a number of voices around the world calling for an international effort to stabilize Fukushima. The Japanese government is downplaying the risks and resisting outside interference. Apparently even the Yakuza (Japanese mafia) is making money providing people (with Yakuza debts) to work in the high radiation zones. The emphasis seems to be more on cost control and political damage control than physical damage control. This can’t continue. An earthquake could hit Fukushima tomorrow, next week, six months from now, or two years from now. As the situation now stands the consequences would be world altering.

We need to pressure our government to put pressure on Japan on the following fronts:

• To push aside Tokyo Electric Power Co. and their efforts at cost containment
• To accept foreign assistance and expertise
• To design and deploy emergency containment measures now, in advance of any seismic event

This would be in parallel with:

• A first priority effort to seismically stabilize the Fukushima site
• Acceleration the transfer of radioactive material to dry cask storage

Write or call your senators and representatives:

https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm

SMETFO 2 – GSA vs. FCS

Perhaps by now you have heard about the lavish conference put on by the General Services Administration back in 2010. The GSA lived large in Las Vegas with hired entertainment, gourmet food, commemorative coins, and hotel selection junkets. The final price tag was $823,000.

Jeffery Neely, the official responsible for this debauch, was hauled in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and pleaded the Fifth. Various members of the House, from both parties, took the opportunity to express their shock, disgust, and indignation.

Everybody in Congress is piling on at this point, especially Republicans, who must be secretly rejoicing at this election year gift.

From the Washington Post: Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) called the episode “a stupid and infuriating waste of taxpayer dollars.” House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said it reflects the “waste that exists in a bloated federal government.”

Can’t argue with that, really, except that one man’s bloat is another man’s vital project.

I’d like to direct your attention to the Future Combat System. This was a Department of Defense project, cancelled a few years ago, that promised to link military vehicles with a web of real time positioning information, targeting data and communications that would revolutionize warfare. It failed. It failed right out of the starting gate and got more money thrown at it. It couldn’t pass basic tests of functionality. Test results were fudged and more money was budgeted. It kept failing. This went on for years. It was finally scrapped in 2009. The ultimate cost? Roughly $159 billion.

The hardy partiers of the GSA are austere monks compared to the DoD. I did the math.

The GSA would have to throw a lavish Las Vegas conference every weekend for 3,715 years to equal the amount of money flushed down the Future Combat System. Yes, 3,715 years, 52 booze soaked, commemorative coin flipping weekends per year. Imagine that the GSA had existed in the Early Bronze Age (Circa 1700 B.C.E), when wooly mammoths still roamed Wrangell Island. If Neely’s distant predecessor had started out by milking the Shang Dynasty for performing astrologers and birds nest soup, they’d just be hitting $159 billion right now.

I’m willing to bet that at least four out of five members of congress who have sputtered and fumed about the GSA conference also voted regularly to fund and re-fund the Future Combat System. It’s a good bet, because the military contractors who sucked up that $159 billion cleverly spread out the contracting across 41 states. Change that four out of five to 41/50ths.

Oh right, but the Future Combat System was military waste. That’s different. Military spending is special and magic. Members of congress have argued that government spending on infrastructure doesn’t create jobs, and then argued that pointless and wasteful military contracts (located in their states) shouldn’t be cut because they…wait for it…create jobs.

I will wholeheartedly agree that the GSA Western Regions Conference of 2010 was a waste of time and money. However, its cost was a rounding error on the budget of a moderately sized Pentagon procurement contract. Let’s get our outrage priorities straight.

H372 - SMETFO

Here’s a new acronym for you from the Minor Heretic: SMETFO. It stands for “Spare Me The False Outrage.”

A friend just sent me a link to a Fox News piece about a bill called H372, an amendment to an existing law, Title 18 USC § 1752. The bill was just passed into law and signed by President Obama. Fox had one Judge Napolitano in the guest pundit’s chair, speaking ominously about the end of free speech and protest as we know it. I looked it up online and the interwebs are clogged with wails of anguish about it from all over the political spectrum. Mostly conservative, though, with an epicenter of outrage at Fox.

Thing is, the body of the bill is 150 years old. In summary, it makes it a felony for people to break into a Secret Service designated security area with a deadly weapon or to significantly injure someone in that area. Jump the White House fence with a gun in your hand and you could face up to ten years in prison. Try to whack Mitt Romney at a press conference, likewise. If you crash the security party unarmed and stay peaceful it’s a misdemeanor.

H347 leaves the offenses and the penalties the same. It cleans up some of the language, mentioning the White House grounds and the Vice President’s residence. It also adds the words “without lawful authority.” The original bill had sloppy wording that, if taken literally, would prohibit anyone, including Michelle Obama, from being inside the Secret Service cordon. Oops.

However, from reviewing the chatter from Right Blogostan (and even Daily Kos) you’d think that some shiny new intrusion on our 1^st Amendment rights was in the offing. There are enough real violations of the Constitution going around right now without manufacturing bogus ones. See the text of the original bill and the amendment, below.

And SMETFO.

Title 18 USC § 1752 - Restricted building or grounds

(a) It shall be unlawful for any person or group of persons—

(1) willfully and knowingly to enter or remain in any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting;

(2) willfully and knowingly to enter or remain in any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area of a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance;

(3) willfully, knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, to engage in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any building or grounds described in paragraph (1) or (2) when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;

(4) willfully and knowingly to obstruct or impede ingress or egress to or from any building, grounds, or area described in paragraph (1) or (2); or

(5) willfully and knowingly to engage in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any building, grounds, or area described in paragraph (1) or (2).

(b) Violation of this section, and attempts or conspiracies to commit such violations, shall be punishable by—

(1) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or both, if—

(A) the person, during and in relation to the offense, uses or carries a deadly or dangerous weapon or firearm; or

(B) the offense results in significant bodily injury as defined by section (2118)(e)(3); and

(2) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.

(c) Violation of this section, and attempts or conspiracies to commit such violations, shall be prosecuted by the United States attorney in the Federal district court having jurisdiction of the place where the offense occurred.

(d) None of the laws of the United States or of the several States and the District of Columbia shall be superseded by this section.

(e) As used in this section, the term “other person protected by the Secret Service” means any person whom the United States Secret Service is authorized to protect under section 3056 of this title when such person has not declined such protection.

The amendment, H372:

 SEC. 2. RESTRICTED BUILDING OR GROUNDS.

Section 1752 of title 18, United States Code, is amended to read as follows:

‘(a) Whoever--

‘(1) knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so;

‘(2) knowingly, and with intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, engages in disorderly or disruptive conduct in, or within such proximity to, any restricted building or grounds when, or so that, such conduct, in fact, impedes or disrupts the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions;

‘(3) knowingly, and with the intent to impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions, obstructs or impedes ingress or egress to or from any restricted building or grounds; or

‘(4) knowingly engages in any act of physical violence against any person or property in any restricted building or grounds;

or attempts or conspires to do so, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b).

‘(b) The punishment for a violation of subsection (a) is--

‘(1) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or both, if--

‘(A) the person, during and in relation to the offense, uses or carries a deadly or dangerous weapon or firearm; or

‘(B) the offense results in significant bodily injury as defined by section 2118(e)(3); and

‘(2) a fine under this title or imprisonment for not more than one year, or both, in any other case.

‘(c) In this section--

‘(1) the term ‘restricted buildings or grounds’ means any posted, cordoned off, or otherwise restricted area--

‘(A) of the White House or its grounds, or the Vice President’s official residence or its grounds;

‘(B) of a building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting; or

‘(C) of a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance; and

‘(2) the term ‘other person protected by the Secret Service’ means any person whom the United States Secret Service is authorized to protect under section 3056 of this title or by Presidential memorandum, when such person has not declined such protection.’.

Hume on Zimmerman

"Reason is, and ought to be, only the slave of the passions,"

David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature

The more I read about George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin, the more it looks like a national Rorschach test. The usual factions sprang to sanctify or demonize the persons and actions of the individuals involved. This before any semblance of an investigation was complete.

What really interests me about this incident is public reaction to it. The right hand section of the media has started to demonize Trayvon Martin and justify Zimmerman’s actions. Zimmerman’s self-interested claim of assault and self-defense has become fact for one part of the population. There is a mirror image effort underway in other circles. I’m not claiming moral equivalency. It appears (and I’ll wait for a more thorough investigation to come to a firm conclusion) that Zimmerman either mistakenly or intentionally took advantage of a permissive law to shoot a representative of his personal paranoia.

Given the darkness at the time of the shooting and the death of one of the two direct witnesses, those few moments on the street will remain mostly a mystery. As such, I imagine that we will never reach a national consensus about it. There are a lot of issues like this.

I was just reading about a study on motivated reasoning. Some researchers presented information about climate change to two groups of people, both in what the researchers classified as the libertarian hierarchical part of the political spectrum. We might say conservative, but these particular researchers consider that two dimensional spectrum inadequate. One group was presented with the information and told that the problem required government intervention. The other group was told that the problem required more private investment in nuclear power. The nuclear group was more inclined to accept the information as valid.

This study is not unique. Drew Weston, in his excellent book “The Political Brain,” describes an experiment where he told people disturbing things about their favorite political candidates. He put his test subjects in a functional magnetic resonance imager, or fMRI, so he could see which parts of their brains were active. He told each subject about the candidate of choice being caught in an act of self-contradiction and then provided an excuse for that apparent contradiction. Michael Shermer provides a coherent summary in his Scientific American article:

The neuroimaging results, however, revealed that the part of the brain most associated with reasoning--the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--was quiescent. Most active were the orbital frontal cortex, which is involved in the processing of emotions; the anterior cingulate, which is associated with conflict resolution; the posterior cingulate, which is concerned with making judgments about moral accountability; and--once subjects had arrived at a conclusion that made them emotionally comfortable--the ventral striatum, which is related to reward and pleasure.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones," Westen said.  

A professor at Yale presented self-identified college age Republicans and Democrats with two welfare reform plans, one generous and one stringent. As one might imagine, the Dems preferred the generous one and the Repubs the stringent. However, when another two groups of partisans were presented with the same plans they were told that that 95% of Democrats supported the stringent plan and 95% of Republicans supported the generous one. The opinions of these two groups were reversed, with the Republicans supporting the generous plan and the Democrats the stringent one. Tribalism trumped prior opinion.

Do you want to change somebody’s mind? Apparently facts don’t work. Studies show that the more facts you present the more your erstwhile student will entrench in an existing position.

The science is stacking up. Politics is not a sphere of reason. It is a contest of tribes and emotionally satisfying doctrines. I used to say that people’s opinions on abortion and gun control were built into their DNA. A better description would be that people’s political opinions are the result of a lifetime of emotionally charged experiences, accreted like rust and barnacles on a ship’s hull. After a while the removal of the accumulated debris becomes a threat to the original structure and won’t be tolerated.

The exception to this is my set of political beliefs, of course. They were arrived at by the pure, cool reasoning of the calculating engine between my ears.

It brings me back to the quotation from Hume at the beginning of this essay. It also reminds me of the saying of a college friend: You are who you laugh at.