Barriers to understanding - by Richard... Friday, March 18, 2011

Barriers to understanding - by Richard... Friday, March 18, 2011

Two things have intervened in the media coverage of the Japanese nuclear plant crisis to make it misleading to the point of incomprehensible.

The one is the frequent use of the Chernobyl disaster as a comparator, where there are absolutely no comparisons with the incident at Fukushima. The second is the childish refrain of "meltdown" by scientifically and technically illiterate journalists, who seem to be incapable of understanding what is happening, yet seem determined to spread their own incomprehension far and wide.

Fortunately, a little clarity is beginning to emerge, although few press reports are without errors which could so easily mislead unless one already has a firm grasp of the basics.

Thus, I am in a position of eating humble pie, having assumed that the earthquake disaster was one which the MSM was best equipped to handle. On balance, as it has fallen prey to extravagant scaremongering, it has done an execrable job. One article worth reading is this one in the New York Times, and this one in the Guardian. Then, with very great caution, as it is littered with errors, they the Reuters report and then have a look at this one.

Culling the detail from these, it would appear that the crisis now rests not with the reactors per sebut with the "pools" in the reactor buildings used to store spent fuel rods. The storage pool in reactor 4, is said to be completely empty, and the Japanese workers are focused efforts on the storage pool at reactor 3, for reasons which do not seem to be entirely clear.

It is this pool, in reactor three, on which helicopter crews and teams of police officers in water cannon trucks, together with fire trucks, have been trying to direct water, in an attempt to "douse overheating fuel rods". Storage pools at reactors 5 and 6 are also said to be leaking.

Now, as to the dangers, "meltdown" is not an issue. The great danger is that the spent fuel - as the water evaporates or leaks away – will overheat to such an extent that they catch fire. The emission of combustion products could release huge amounts of high-level radiation into the air, which could spread a considerable distance. With over 1,000 tons of spent fuel stored, the potential for a serious event is high.

The effects of this, disastrous though they would be, are likely to be relatively local. We are not looking at a Chernobyl-type disaster, where an active reactor exploded, ejecting material into the upper atmosphere, which then spread thousands of miles.

Japanese authorities are, however, talking about the possibility of "recriticality" in the fuel rods, if they have become bunched up together in such a way that critical mass is achieved, and the nuclear reaction restarts. That, as they say, could have interesting consequences, as high volumes of decay products would be emitted to atmosphere.

At the moment, though, the worst case scenario would appear to be localised, high level emissions, sufficient to make the plant and the immediate area uninhabitable for some years, with dangerously high levels of radiation downwind of the reactor for tens and possibly even a hundred or so miles. With the wind in the wrong direction, residents of Tokyo could be at risk.

On the plus side, engineers have been reported as having reconnected the plant with an electrical supply, and are working on restoring on-site pumping facilities, which may take the edge off the crisis.

Altogether, then, we have a very serious crisis here, even if it is by no means as serious as some of the more lurid press reports would have us believe. Latest reports suggest that the efforts so far have been "somewhat effective" and it could be that the worst of the crisis is already over.

The media though, has not come out of this will. The lack of technical knowledge of so many of the writers, together with an obvious enthusiasm for disaster scenarios has so distorted the coverage that most journalism, rather than informing, has been a barrier to understanding.

It is unlikely that any lessons will be learned, and thus this period of exaggerated and inaccurate reporting marks another step in the decline and fall of a once great industry.

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End of the BNP? - by Richard... Thursday, March 17, 2011

This looks pretty serious for the party, and seems to spell the end for Nick Griffin. When or if the BNP implodes, there may then be room for a genuine nationalist party, without the taint and the baggage of the existing construct.

On the other hand, this may be an opportunity for UKIP, except that that party also has its stresses. It is in no better a position to offer a coherent message than the BNP. It seems to me, therefore, that the message must transcend party, and appeal directly to the electorate – then to have not one but all of the political parties embrace it as a survival stratagem. Political parties, as such, no longer seem to work. We need to introduce a new paradigm. The new media possibly affords the opportunity to make that happen.

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Ideas - by Richard...

Great minds discuss ideas; Average minds discuss events; Small minds discuss people.

Eleanor Roosevelt
US diplomat & reformer (1884 - 1962)

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"Leader" calls for "leadership" shock - by Richard...

While Euroslime Dave equivocates about a no-fly zone for Libya, we get Stephen Glover in The Mailask: "Has the democratic world ever been so weak and divided?" Actually, the phrasing of the headline is wrong - much of the world Glover describes has long ceased to be democratic in any meaningful sense. And that may well be why it is so weak and divided ... it has lost its spiritual core, its will to live. Instead of leadership, we get David Cameron - and Barak Obama.

We're actually used to the idea of Catastrophic Clegg forgetting who is in charge, but when Euroslime Dave seems to have same problem, we see a systemic fault that no mere wake-up call is going to solve. It was suggested to me that perhaps Dave thinks he's still in opposition. But there is more to it that that. With the Libyan situation now going totally belly-up – and with little Willie Hague discovering that Gaddafi hasn't gone to Venezuela for his hols, after all – we now have Dave urging the UN on to "show some leadership".

This is the very antithesis of leadership. The idea of a man pretending to be a British prime minister, holding hands with France, asking a corrupt bunch of time-servers in New York to do something, the capability for which it does not have – and which we no longer have – is positively embarrassing. The person who should be showing some leadership is our Dave himself.

When you think about it though, in asking the UN Security Council to back a "no-fly zone", that is precisely what he is likely to get. Everybody will commit absolutely not to fly over Libya, leaving the field totally clear for Gaddafi to slaughter his rebellious subjects.

We never actually thought it would come to a point when you felt positively embarrassed to be British, but you have to give it to Dave and Willie ... they've managed to chalk up another first.

In days gone by, one might turn to the weightier newspapers to see what they had to say about the issue, but with The Times retreating behind a paywall, it has become irrelevant. Looking at The Daily Telegraph in the newsagent, and its banner headlines, it suddenly struck me what has happened to it - it has become the first and only tabloid broadsheet - a tableet? It too has written itself out of the script.

That leaves the Daily Mirror to make some appropriate comments about Willie, and The Daily Mail to offer some comment about changing defence priorities. "Only five months have passed since the Coalition’s hastily-drafted strategic defence review," it says. "Yet already the world on which its assumptions were based has changed in the most dramatic way".

The paper then calls for the defence review to be re-opened. But the writer should look at the piece written by Glover. The western world has lost its bottle ... the defence review was a symptom, and as long as we have effeminate babies like Cameron in change, we're going nowhere but down the drain.

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Community relations - by Richard... Wednesday, March 16, 2011

We think we have problems, so it is quite instructive to read this in the St. Petersburg Times:

Artist Oleg Vorotnikov was recently released after spending several months in custody. In September he and other members of the non-conformist art group Voina, or War, overturned several police cars in a highly visible protest in St. Petersburg over a bill to reform the police that they have branded a sham.

After his arrest, some of Vorotnikov's possessions were impounded by the police. After his eventual release, he filed a formal request at the police station for the return of his items. It did not cut much ice with the officers. "The police officers tore up my letter in front of me", Vorotnikov said. "And then the boss said that he would piss over what I had in my hands if I didn't shut up and stop demanding my stuff".

Come to think of it, it's not a whole lot different from trying to make a complaint to West Yorkshire's finest. At least they are not as thick as the London Plod though – fitting up a "client" while wired for sound. You don't actually know which to be more worried about.

And then we have Manchester Police covering themselves in glory again. Says Chief Superintendent Rebekah Sutcliffe: "All reports of gunshots are taken very seriously and because of the potential threat to people's lives we have to take swift and appropriate action to deal with these very serious risks". Where do they get these people? Is there a special planet we don't know about?

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Not global warming? - by Richard...

Now that it is snowing heavily in northeastern Japan, why are the warmists not blaming global warming? After all, since it caused the original earthquake – and global warming caused all the storms in Europe and the UK - surely they can bring themselves to dump the blame for the snow on their favourite obsession.

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A loser's creed - by Richard...

It is rather appropriate that a newspaper that has become known to its former friends as The Daily Failygraph should give space to Mark Seddon to enunciate his failed ideas. Nevertheless, it is marginally interesting to see the author of his own inadequacies actually spell them out, which we see when Seddon offers us what he believes to be the USP of his meal ticket:

This new campaign breaks with tradition because it comes primarily from the Left, includes Labour MPs such as John Cryer and Kelvin Hopkins, trade unionists and Greens, such as Jenny Jones, the party's candidate for London Mayor. Authors and writers – Fay Weldon, John King and Virginia Ironside – have come on board as well. Of course, many of our supporters want a referendum in order to vote "no" to continued EU membership, while others, such as Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, and Keith Vaz, the former Europe minister, are enthusiasts for the European Union – but agree that there should be a referendum.

One could ask why one should begin to think that having these people on board is an inducement to join a campaign, but what really blows Seddon out of the water is his bland assertion that, "A Europe-wide free trade area has become a sprawling political union, drawing huge economic and social power to its centre ... ".

In discussing something that is not and never has been a "free trade area", that always was a customs union, and always intended to be a political union, this man is showing that he does not have the first idea of what he is talking about, and has never bothered to learn.

What saddens is the fact that the Failygraph prints such tosh, but then that is why it has become the Failygraph. One would like to think that, in days or yore, wise and knowledgeable sub-editors would have picked up these sorts of error – although I suspect I would have been disappointed.

However, Seddon has basically shot his bolt. Short of starting yet another campaign, he hasn't much more to offer – and certainly, on current form, has nothing to offer the Eurosceptic cause. This is a man who, in a debate, would be an embarrassment, although that probably assures him a long and profitable association with the BBC.

But then, if this is truly a man running an organisation whose website crashes on 20,000 hits in 48 hours (and is proud of it), then a truly glittering career awaits him in government service. He is wasted on mere Euroscepticism and it would be a shame to hold him back.