Only now, after running this operation for a third of a century, do we begin to doubt the wisdom of snatching back this newspaper from its previous operators.
It looked to be such fun: no corporate bosses censoring us, no timid advertisers inhibiting us—to the best of our meager abilities, we’d be free to write the news as it actually happens—a rare opportunity. That’s great, right?
Uh…have you heard what’s going on out there…? Things are so scary we’re tempted to reach for the Thesaurus in search of a few comforting euphemisms; but, we forbear.
[Cue the portenteous sound effects.] This fortnight finds the world in an existential crisis….
Yes—just like every other fortnight since the dawn of time. It’s just a little more obvious. Enough stalling—come, let us plunge together into the fetid sewer of current events. We’re hoping to get at least one more paper out before we’re shut down by a Russian cyberattack.
In a nutshell, the 77-year post-war struggle for dominance between the alpha capitalist state and its greatest ideological foe is now threatening to escalate into a direct standoff. President Biden is readying 8,500 U.S. troops for possible deployment in response to Vladimir Putin’s buildup of Russian forces around Ukraine. We can almost hear Kubrick’s Major T. J. “King” Kong warming up in the wings: “Well, boys, I reckon this is it—nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies.” Meanwhile, in D.C. neighborhoods favored by neocon talking heads, popcorn sales are through the roof. John Bolton was reportedly seen walking on air.
In theory—as the cartoon dog said as he sat at the table sipping coffee in a burning house—“this is fine.” In practice, we would be more optimistic about the efficacy of heavily-armed diplomacy if we could recall more instances in which it had worked.
Saddam Without the Hair
We can recall, however, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, each of which began with compliant media accepting as gospel an unhealthy percentage of what they were being fed: “Vladimir Putin—Saddam without the hair!”
To balance our readers’ news diet, let’s look at this issue from a different angle. It makes us uncomfortable to bring up a point that Tucker Carlson has mentioned, but, as the old adage says, even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while. Fortunately we can rely on a more authoritative source.
According to his own website, which appears to be legit, John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982.
He defines himself as “an international relations theorist. More specifically…a realist, which means that I believe that the great powers dominate the international system and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war.”
Mearsheimer’s article “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault” was published in Foreign Affairs in 2014. Judging from headlines everywhere, no one else in the media has read it. In it he employs an oft-overlooked technique to analyze the situation: recalling the facts of the matter.
“According to the prevailing wisdom in the West,” he begins, “the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression.” He dares to refute this, saying, “The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West.”
Elites in the United States and Europe, he says, hold the misguided view that “realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.…”
“U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.”
Mearsheimer goes on to detail the process by which the West has incrementally encroached on Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. It’s an open and shut case, which explains why our foreign policy muckety-mucks have had to play the Mighty Wurlitzer of corporate media with such a heavy hand. Their project is fortunate to have such an unsympathetic primary target: a smug, corrupt, ex-KGB goon with god knows how much blood on his hands.
Having, we hope, established that all this war talk is based on a dubious foundation, let’s consider whether it’s just possible that during the course of this military buildup something might not go exactly according to plan.
The Oops Factor
“Under the cover of an otherwise legitimate life-extension of the W76 warhead,” Hans M. Kristensen wrote in 2017, “the Navy has quietly added a new super-fuze to the warhead that dramatically increases the ability of the Navy to destroy hard targets in Russia and other adversaries.” Writing for the Federation of American Scientists {FAS], Kristensen says that “rather than simply being a stable retaliatory capability,” the U.S.’s nuke subs, “with the new super-fuze increasingly will be seen as a front-line, first-strike weapon that is likely to further fuel trigger-happy, worst-case planning in other nuclear-armed states.”
FAS’s Kristensen went on to report in 2020 that new W76-2 low-yield nukes have now been deployed in our Trident subs. He dryly notes that, according to Pentagon doctrine, “…Russian low-yield nuclear weapons lower the threshold making nuclear use more likely, [but] U.S. low-yield weapons instead ‘raise the nuclear threshold’ and make nuclear use less likely.”
Meanwhile, Back on Earth
Another fortnight of environmental degradation has passed, and for all practical purposes we Homo sapiens did bleep all about it. Antarctic glaciers are now x amount less stable. An unknown number of unknown species have gone extinct, taking with them an unknown variety of irreplaceable DNA.
Judging from the lack of effective action on these fronts, we could keep the paragraph above in boilerplate and run it in every issue—that is, until conditions deteriorate to the point where we can publish no more.
Small as this paper is, we can still find space to remember this sort of thing. It’s not so hard if you can just ignore some of the trivial matters which occupy more superficially-impressive “news” organizations. For example, to date we have not published a word about the phenomenon known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
Our ubiquitous corporate media, their schedules constantly demanding “content,” stand ever ready to latch onto any silly notion—provided of course that it doesn’t seriously threaten the existing power structure. In our present information ecosystem, mass media attention given to an idiotic novelty has an effect like feeding fertilizer to kudzu. As with a certain virus, even people who take effort to avoid knowing about tripe such as NFTs end up hearing about them anyway.
As we understand them, NFTs are reproducible digital images which are supposedly worth money because they come with a digital certificate claiming that they are the One True Dingbat. In other words, NFTs are Bitcoin by another name, but with some tedious wrinkle that makes them different enough to cause a certain sector of the population to experience the digital version of tumescence.
It was theorized once—and endlessly repeated—that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. We have our doubts about that, but we would argue that NFTs were produced by a finite number of geeks with poor social skills and too much time at the computer. How fitting, then, that we now see in our Twitter feed a clip in which a fawning Jimmy Fallon and a vivacious Paris Hilton banter about their recently purchased NFTs, which just happen to be images of cartoon monkeys.
Oh, excuse us. An article on cnet.com informs us they’re apes, not monkeys:
“The Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the most prestigious NFT collections in the world. A collection of 10,000 NFTs, each depicting an ape with different traits and visual attributes, Jimmy Fallon, Steph Curry and Post Malone are among their star-studded owners. Right now the price of entry is 52 ether, or $210,000.”
So…[punches calculator]…whoever dreamed up this scheme is now $2,100,000,000 to the good. Our editorial foot. Bitcoin is down 50 percent from a month ago. The “value” of NFTs is as substantial as the snow that just fell on Athens.
NFTs do serve one purpose: they provide further proof that our economic edifice—or artifice—is wobbling around like a inebriate trying to tap dance in someone else’s shoes.
But never mind the absurd state of that financial farago. All this folderol has merely been ground work for the real news about NFTs. Like their now old-fashioned cousin Bitcoin, NFTs consume amounts of electricity comparable to small nations. So, far from being harmless, this mindless amusement is holding a blowtorch to the Arctic ice caps.
So, better shut down the coal plants and fire up more nuclear power, right?
Not so fast….
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A week ago last Sunday our Wandering Photographer found himself in the parking lot of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, staring across Middle Road. At first he thought he was having an epiphany. That would have been out of character, though, regardless of the date and location. An hallucination, perhaps? Far more likely, but hallucinations don’t register on digital cameras. By Occam’s Razor—it must have been Cousin Eddy Johnson, from “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation,” emptying the septic tank of his RV, which had presumably rolled off somewhere.
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Nuclear Energy a Climate Solution? Total ‘Fiction’
by Jessica Corbett
As global scientists continue to warn of the urgent need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, a quartet of European and U.S. experts on Tuesday made a comprehensive case for why nuclear power should not be considered a solution to the climate crisis.
While the experts recognize in their joint statement that “the climate is running hot,” they push back forcefully against those who argue nuclear could be a “partial response to the threat of global heating.”
With four signatories—Paul Dorfman, former secretary of the U.K. government’s Committee Examining Radiation Risks of Internal Emitters; Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Bernard Laponche, former director general of France’s energy management agency; and Wolfgang Renneberg, former head of the reactor safety, radiation protection, and nuclear waste at Germany’s environmental ministry—the statement comes as a direct challenge to a nuclear industry trying to bill itself as a reliable part of the world’s transition to a more sustainable energy system.
“As key experts who have worked on the frontline of the nuclear issue,” their statement explains, “we consider it our collective responsibility to comment on the main issue: Whether nuclear could play a significant role as a strategy against climate change.”
“The central message, repeated again and again, that a new generation of nuclear will be clean, safe, smart and cheap, is fiction,” according to Dorfman, Jaczko, Laponche, and Renneberg. “The reality is nuclear is neither clean, safe, or smart; but a very complex technology with the potential to cause significant harm.”
“Nuclear isn’t cheap, but extremely costly,” the statement adds. “Perhaps most importantly nuclear is just not part of any feasible strategy that could counter climate change. To make a relevant contribution to global power generation, up to more than ten thousand new reactors would be required, depending on reactor design.”
Given concerns about economic viability, nuclear accidents, and dangerous waste, the former regulatory leaders conclude that nuclear energy is not only “too costly and risky” but also “too unwieldy and complex” to be a feasible strategy to combat the climate emergency.
Progressive climate groups and other critics have long warned against nuclear energy, dubbing it a “false solution” like gas and carbon capture technology, but policymakers around the globe continue to pursue it. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, there are 439 operational nuclear reactors worldwide and another 52 under construction.
In the United States, lawmakers who support climate action are divided on the issue. When running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—who now chairs the Senate Budget Committee—advocated for phasing out U.S. nuclear power.
A campaign spokesperson for Sanders told The Washington Post in 2019 that the senator “believes that solar, wind, geothermal power, and energy efficiency are proven and more cost-effective than nuclear—even without tax incentives—and that the toxic waste byproducts of nuclear plants are not worth the risks of the technology’s benefit. Especially in light of lessons learned from Japan’s Fukushima meltdown, we must ask why the federal government invests billions into federal subsidies for the nuclear industry.”
Despite such risks, nuclear provisions are included in the U.S. House-approved Build Back Better Act, a sweeping package that is backed by President Joe Biden but has stalled in the Senate due to a pair of corporate-backed right-wing Democrats.
Last year, hundreds of progressive groups urged top Democrats working on the package to “reject gas and other false climate solutions” such as nuclear power, asserting that “as we look to combat the climate emergency, it is crucial that we invest in solutions that support a just energy future.”
This work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
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Poor Ruth Blay. Just 31, and cut down—no, hanged!—at the prime of her life. And for what? Concealing the birth of a stillborn child. Was this child immaculately conceived? Far from it—despite its innocence, the babe was illegitimate. What, then, of the father? What of him, indeed; no need to trouble ourselves. Surely his maker meted out any requisite punishment. Injustice, you say? Mayhap. But this all happened long ago. Now we are more enlightened, are we not?