Mona Lisa

On some level I am Mona Lisa,… remember that song, Nat King Cole – the voice, just the chorus? Remember that painting? On some level, there we all are, Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa. She’s there (here) vibrating in a smile of being and if we’re not there with her we’re missing the profoundest experience our senses can deliver.

We are at the edge of an avalanche of events which pushes us into the future... all that came before affects us with its momentum... we can hardly pause to make choices yet that is all we do, make choices... we choose a story to explain our predicament, we choose an action based on the values we've chosen... moment to moment... our magnificent evolution story instills awe and wonder... convincing in it's anthropomorphism, attributing this goal-making, desirous emerging of consciousness as if it were already consciously choosing... at odds with the more or less random flux and scramble that evolution is usually portrayed as ... yet why not?... it HAS to be intelligent, it IS intelligence, so random is not a satisfying way to describe its groping proliferation. I have to ponder to accept that the trajectory is toward cooperation and consciousness but it's plain in multi-celled organisms and this conversation is an instance of the impulse towards cooperation as we, together, grope for a deeper glimpse of reality.

Being is an experience which is not intellectual,... words can only point at it, name it. It consists, pointing at it, of feeling, knowing ALL, ONE... the past, the future, the present, the physical, the metaphysical, vibrating strings, swirling atoms, dividing cells, slamming doors, devious plans, dancing weekends... distant galaxies, super-clusters and beyond, all simultaneously... the connection where you recognize, feel, your connection with everything else... that is enlightenment, that is beyond the fear that drives our culture. that is the mindshift that will divert us from extinction. As I write these words I shift my attention away from fantasies of future/past and paradoxically recognize
that it is mind-chatter, word-chatter that separates me from essential reality which is NOW, here... which is being.

Eckhart Tolle, and other teachers, suggest that we go to the wordless place, the place where the mind is still, NOT thinking... that is where we are connected to the intelligence of the universe and the place is NOW - some like to use the word God for that, being in the presence of God or Being or just being Present. These of course are just words that point at an experience, that experience is the real thing. As soon as we try to "understand it" - with words, it can fizzle and we are back in ego. Ego wants to be "right", only MY words are correct, your words are wrong... let's go to war! No, the only access to BEING, to GOD, is thru the wordless NOW... be here, now,... no words, no thoughts. Now I can hear you saying it is only thru JESUS that we come to GOD and Tolle suggests that that is the same thing, words pointing at the same experience... in fact he quotes from Jesus to support this view, that Jesus was saying this same thing... the kingdom of god is spread upon the face of the earth and we do not see it (because we're in our head thinking). How do we go to the wordless space? We simply become aware, we become the observer. instead of being the words in our head we observe the words and gradually realize we are the observer not the words. Some call this prayer but words are tricky and the mind-chatter habit is ingrained and powerful so we must be careful. I can accept that the word prayer refers to this state but I prefer the more direct word awareness, being, since they are less encumbered with baggage. Be in the moment. Don't judge, just observe.

Know Nukes

This post is abit long. Several posts just previous to this on the same subject are more succinct.

In 1952 the Paley Commission, appointed by the Truman Administration to study the energy situation, recommended that the U.S. build itself a solar future, predicting 15 million sun-heated homes by 1975. The Commission specifically warned against going nuclear, asserting the promise of renewable energy sources to be greater than that of nuclear power for meeting energy needs and preventing economic dislocations due to disruptions in foreign oil supply. Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program intervened the next year with its propaganda promises of energy "too cheap to meter". The program aimed to distract a population uneasy with nuclear weapons, providing a shield of commercial nuclear power behind which Dr. Strangelove could amass unhindered megatonnage. More than a trillion dollars has since been squandered, for which we now receive a paltry 20% of our electricity and the dubious "security" of thousands of nuclear devices. Each nuclear power plant, and its cooling pond (spent fuel exposed to air bursts into flames), is a pre-placed nuclear bomb to any determined terrorist wishing us harm.

If this were the whole story we could move on, an expensive lesson learned, a dangerous historical moment passed, its irrationality attributable to reckless youth. Unfortunately there is a legacy, in the form of radioactive waste already released into the environment, more waste in questionable containment with no where to go, warheads out the gazoo and the ever-youthful Dr. Strangelove and friends in the wings, forget wings - on stage!, panting for another trillion dollar go-round.

Let's look a little closer at some of the costs of ignoring the Paley Commission's findings:

A report released by Renewable Energy Policy Project (REPP) examines U.S. government spending on energy technologies. According to "Federal Energy Subsidies: Not All Technologies Are Created Equal" the U.S. government has spent approximately $150 billion on energy subsidies for wind, solar and nuclear power--96.3% of which has gone to nuclear power. There are 108 nuclear reactors currently operating in the U.S. To demonstrate just how modern and up-to-date they are, Japan has gone and built 51 while France did them several better, at 60. The nuclear industry promotes itself to third world nations by playing on modern vs. backwater self images.

The Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) estimates 430,000 "excess" cancer fatalities from atmospheric nuclear testing 1940 – 2000. Extrapolated to the entire period of time that global fall-out from atmospheric testing will remain results in a figure of 2.4 million excess cancer fatalities with incidence many times higher (p.110 Critical Condition: Human Health and the Environment MIT Press 1993).

It's not clear what impact on Soviet policies Paley's recommendations might have had but in 1957 an explosion in the Soviet Union made Chelyabinsk (Mayak) the most polluted place on earth. Chelyabinsk was the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapons production system throughout the Cold War. Three disasters with its nuclear waste--in 1946, 1957 and 1967-have caused cumulative damages comparable to, and probably worse than, the Chernobyl meltdown. Even today, some 100 million curies of radioactivity remain in Mayak's Lake Karachay. Scientists from the U.S.-based Natural Resources Defense Council say, " The groundwater is already contaminated, and the area is subject to Cyclones and earthquakes that could further spread the radioactivity."
Rivaling Chelyabinsk is the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, near the border with Norway. During the Cold War, the harbors of Kola were home to the Soviet Union's Northern Fleet, which dumped used submarine reactors, spent fuel and other nuclear debris into the sea with abandon. The waters now contain two-thirds of all the nuclear waste dumped into the world's oceans.

The Department of Energy (DOE) is proud possessor of 700,000 metric tons of nuclear materials, mostly depleted Uranium. This is perhaps 5% of the total when commercial reactor materials are added. In the 40s & 50s – 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquids were discharged into the ground at Hanford site in Washington State (enough for a lake 80' deep the size of Manhattan). There are 189 metric tons of HEU (highly enriched Uranium - 9,450 Hiroshima-sized bombs) at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, some sitting for 40 years, in facilities vulnerable to fire, in containers of questionable integrity, according to Robert Alvarez, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2000, Alvarez is a former DOE employee. He claims that the Rio Grande could have become a Chernobyl-sized disaster if the rains had come and washed contaminants into its waters after the May 2000 Los Alamos fire denuded vegetation retaining the waste.

Within a month of the Los Alamos fire another fire scorched nearly half the Hanford nuclear reservation and 20 homes as it crept within two miles of some of the most lethal nuclear waste on Earth, in 177 storage tanks buried six feet underground that could explode if a spark were introduced inside. In August 1984, 300,000 acres of the Hanford site was scorched in another fire.
Cleanup of the uranium enrichment plant at Paducah, Kentucky will take a decade and is expected to cost $1.3 billion, according to a report issued by DOE.
Nuclear facilities in La Hague, France and Sellafield in Scotland spill hundreds of millions of liters of radioactive waste into the sea annually. Contamination has been detected in sea life around the coasts of Scandinavia, Iceland and the Arctic. Sellafield officials seem to be reneging on a promise to stop the discharges by 2020.

Thousands of radioactive waste barrels are rusting away on the seabed in UK waters, environmentalists have warned. Greenpeace has released a film of the legacy of radioactive waste dumping at sea. It shows corroding, broken and disintegrated barrels of radioactive waste, remnants of some 28,500 barrels dumped by the UK between 1950 and 1963. Mike Townley of Greenpeace said: "Although dumping radioactive wastes at sea from ships is now banned, paradoxically the discharge of radioactive wastes into the sea via pipelines from land is not. "Such double standards are not maintained for technical or scientific reasons, but only because the operators of the nuclear reprocessing facilities in La Hague and Sellafield want to save money."

Forty countries have pledged US$370 million to clean up the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which killed an estimated 30,000 people during the world's worst nuclear disaster in 1986. Five months after the Chernobyl catastrophe, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s true believer, Dr. Morris Rosen said, "Even if there was this type of accident every year, I would consider nuclear power to be a valid source of energy".

A recent study shows infant death rates near five U.S. nuclear plants dropped immediately and dramatically after the reactors closed (Study by New York based Radiation and Public Health Project published in the spring 2000 issue of the scientific journal Environmental Epidemiology and Toxicology).
Smugglers, aiming to transport nearly nine pounds of uranium-containing metal rods into Afghanistan, were blocked by authorities in Kazakstan. Such rods are produced in Kazakstan, Russia and Ukraine.

The federal government announced in January 2000 that many workers who built U. S. nuclear weapons during the Cold War years are likely to become ill (if they haven't already) due to exposure to radiation or toxic chemicals. This marked a historic reversal by the government, which had always maintained there were no connections between work at the weapons plants and later illnesses. This belated, if limited, fessing up, occurred under the Clinton administration. Under Bush we have reinstituted a rigorous denial-as-usual.
Delays in the 30-year, $50 billion effort to clean up hazardous wastes at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are increasing risks at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, said an audit from the Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general. Tank leaks, plus billions of gallons of more diluted contaminants poured into the ground since 1945, "could reach the Columbia River in as little as 20 years and continue for the next 5,000 years," the report said. At least 25 tanks are estimated to be generating enough hydrogen gas to cause a devastating, radiation-spreading fire if ignited.

The suicide of the director of Chelyabinsk-70, one of Russia's leading nuclear labs, reportedly because lab personnel had not been paid their meager $50 salaries for months, raises serious questions regarding the proliferation of nuclear materials. At the Chelyabinsk nuclear weapons industrial facility more than 60,000 pounds of plutonium are stored in 12,000 stainless steel containers the size of thermos bottles. Two or three of them contain enough plutonium to make a nuclear bomb.

Thirty years ago, Alaska's Amchitka Island was the site of three large underground nuclear tests. Despite claims by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Pentagon that the test sites would safely contain the radiation released by the blasts for thousands of years, newly released documents from the DOE show that the Amchitka tests began to leak almost immediately. Highly radioactive elements and gasses poured out of the collapsed test shafts, leached into the groundwater and worked their way into ponds, creeks and the Bering Sea. At the same time, thousands of Amchitka laborers and Aleuts living on nearby islands were put in harm's way. Dozens have died of radiation-linked cancers. The response of the federal government to these disturbing findings has been almost as troublesome as the circumstances surrounding the tests themselves: a consistent pattern of indifference, denial and cover-up.

Russia has offered the US, in negotiations on START-III, warhead numbers as low as 1,500. However, the US in response has actually tried to persuade Russia to go for higher numbers of nuclear warheads. This again violates the legal commitment to the total and unequivocal elimination of nuclear arsenals required by the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).

Startling findings involving economic impacts of a severe accident: DOE, in one of its Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) on Yucca Mountain (a nuclear waste repository in Nevada now under construction – despite failure to meet DOE's own minimal requirements), mentions categories of economic impacts that could result from a severe nuclear transport accident but does not provide dollar amounts. Researchers Resnikoff and Lamb, using DOE's own model, did perform such calculations. What they found was shocking. A severe truck cask accident could result in $20 billion to $36 billion in cleanup costs for an accident in an urban area. A severe rail accident in an urban area could result in costs from $145 billion to $270 billion.

Several years ago, DOE estimated that a severe transport accident in a rural setting that released only a miniscule fraction of the cask's radioactive cargo would contaminate a 42 square mile area of land. The cleanup would cost $620 million and take one year and three months. The totally unlikely accident that recently closed part of Atlanta's I-285 for four weeks was a serious inconvenience. Consider the repercussions if that cargo had been nuclear waste instead of gasoline.

Fun Quotes

"Just one of our relatively invulnerable Poseidon submarines-less than 2% of our total nuclear force of submarines, aircraft, and land-based missiles - carries enough warheads to destroy every large and medium-sized city in the Soviet Union." - U.S. President Jimmy Carter, 1977, "You have survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you. That's the way you can have a winner." - U.S. Vice President George Bush, on how to win a nuclear war.
"Military strategists can claim that an intelligent U.S. offensive strategy, wedded to homeland defenses, should reduce U.S. casualties to approximately 20 million . . . a level compatible with national survival and recovery." - Colin Gray, U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
"Dig a hole, cover it with a couple doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It's the dirt that does it. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody's going to make it." - Thomas K. Jones, U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, Strategic and Theater Nuclear Forces, on surviving a nuclear war.
"If no new weapons are going to be built, what am I going to be doing?" - John Immele, Associate Director for Nuclear Weapons Technology at Los Alamos, 1993.

This mini-tour of a grimy and terrifying terrain, might lead a citizen to conclude that nuclear facilities, weapons and their deadly by-products are not good for young children, parents, old or young pets, pet owners (all ages), nor old mother earth. The credibility of those who have conducted this little charade is, to be kind, poor in the extreme. They have plans. They would like to build more nuclear power plants, "safe" of course. They expect the public to be responsible for the liability in case of an accident via the Price-Anderson Act. They would like to burn plutonium as fuel in some of these plants and they are just itching to reprocess nuclear waste, one of the dirtiest aspects of the whole business. They want to build more bombs and allocate lots of money for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) so as to maintain an old & cultivate a new generation of weapons designers. They want to build weapons in space under the guise of missile defense and, to demonstrate their profound regard for future generations, they are willing to divert funds earmarked for cleaning up the mess they've made over to their exciting new projects. What this situation calls for is a little, actually a lot, of citizen intervention. A good place to start:

Nuclear Information Resource Service www.nirs.org

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research www.ieer.org

www.nonukesyall.org Nuclear Watch South

Nukes Again...

Nuclear Watch South (formerly GANE)

We would like to highlight the following, issues which are not adequately addressed by the Department of Energy, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission nor the Nuclear Power industry.

the dangers of terrorism and insider sabotage at Nuclear sites:
• nuclear power plants have shown lax security in the past with 50% penetration in mock attacks, even when security KNEW the dates & times of infiltration.
• Cooling ponds are even more vulnerable than the reactors themselves. The spent fuel in these ponds would burst into flames if exposed to air, dispersing radioactivity widely.
• It is very doubtful whether a reactor could withstand impact from a 911 airliner attack
• It should be noted that wind and solar panels do not spread extremely long-lived toxins when blown up.


Water Usage:
• The two new reactors contemplated at Plant Vogtle would use the equivalent of the residential water use of Savannah, Augusta and Atlanta, an impact the NRC, during a time of severe drought, incredibly labels “small”.
• The water that is returned to the river will be at high temperatures, negatively impacting river habitat
• The water that is lost, 2/3, as vapor is a global warming gas.


It is ironic that the ideological sector most loudly worshipping at the alter of the “free market” is calling for taxpayer subsidies for an industry that cannot compete in that market.

In Brief, Nukes...

Nuclear Energy Issues:

• Expensive, not competitive with wind/solar, conservation
• Long-lived radioactive waste with NO storage solution after 50 years
• To terrorists a nuke plant is a pre-positioned nuclear device
• If nukes are safe why won’t the insurance companies cover them?
• Uses way too much water & creates thermal pollution
• Routinely releases toxins into soil, air and river and ground water

The apparently irresistible lobbying and campaign contributions that seduced national legislators into signing onto privatization and deregulation schemes over the past decades brought us to the economic melt-down we are now just beginning to enjoy.

The push for SB31 is more of the same. I hope you’ll consider that history and two other things in your deliberations:

Nuclear power is the wrong horse;

This bill is an industry fantasy and a consumer rip-off.
(comment to GA Legislative committee on a bill to encourage nukes)

Fundamentalist Ideology

The term fundamentalist ideology probably evokes Islamic fanaticism to many, Christian or Jewish extremists to others but rarely are the promoters of capitalism associated with the term. Yet there is clearly a similar level of intellectual dishonesty. Rush Limbo has been implying that the Gulf oil spill-disaster is caused by “whacko environmentalists” and though he is the hysterical end of capitalism you won’t find a lot of real analysis on the more respectable end either. Numerous pundits approvingly report on the “nuclear renaissance” without mentioning Chernobyl, indeed, scrupulously avoiding the New York Academy of Science’s recent claim that nearly a million people world-wide died as a result of that disaster. And my long unanswered question, if we truly have a free press providing a full range of views for an informed citizenry where are the socialist commentators? In my home town newspaper you get Bill O’reilly all the way over to Thomas Sowell. That’s probably true across the country. No commentator consistently pointing out the contradictions and corruption of capitalism and discussing an alternative need apply to any mainstream news outlet. I need not rehearse the corporate “ownership” of congress and the political process in the U.S. directly related to how campaigns are financed. The owners control policy and media debate and where this leads us is ominously illustrated in the oily waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

I sent this as a letter to the editor to the Atlanta Constitution Journal. Interesting to compare what i wrote to what they ran. It's almost an illustration of my point (what they cut in bold):

The term fundamentalist ideology probably evokes Islamic fanaticism to many, Christian or Jewish extremists to others but rarely are the promoters of capitalism associated with the term. Yet there is clearly a similar level of intellectual dishonesty.

Rush Limbo has been implying that the Gulf oil spill-disaster is caused by “whacko environmentalists” and though he is the hysterical end of capitalism you won’t find a lot of real analysis on the more respectable end either. Numerous pundits approvingly report on the “nuclear renaissance” without mentioning Chernobyl, indeed, scrupulously avoiding the New York Academy of Science’s recent claim that nearly a million people world-wide died as a result of that disaster.

And my long unanswered question, if we truly have a free press providing a full range of views for an informed citizenry where are the socialist commentators? In my home town newspaper you get Bill O’reilly all the way over to Thomas Sowell. That’s probably true across the country. No commentator consistently pointing out the contradictions and corruption of capitalism and discussing an alternative need apply to any mainstream news outlet. I need not rehearse the corporate “ownership” of congress and the political process in the U.S. directly related to how campaigns are financed. The owners control policy and media debate and where this leads us is ominously illustrated in the oily waters of the Gulf of Mexico.