White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

CFS: To Suffering, Add Anger

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I’ve been walking on the sad side. My mailbox is jammed with dozens of heartrending e-mails from sufferers of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS); a terrible disease that is little understood, little researched and hard to diagnose.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis in many parts of the world, mostly strikes people in their thirties and forties. The disease begins with flu-like symptoms which are often a precursor to a full collapse, often after exercise.

The disease largely disables the immune system; and leads to joint and muscle pain, cognitive dissonance, memory loss, dysphasia and problems with simple math. Sufferers are often confined to bed for months, functioning at a substantially reduced capacity, where the simplest tasks become monumental.

CFS-afflicted authors describe taking years to finish projects that should have taken months. These include Hillary Johnson, whose book “Osler’s Web” is about CFS; Laura Hillenbrand, who wrote the bestseller “Sea Biscuit” while struggling with the disease; and Deborah Waroff, who is writing a book about the Jewish hero Sholom Schwartzbard, but who has found the task dragging on for years, working as she can between severe periods of disability, confined to bed.

The human suffering of both the afflicted and those close to them is incalculable in its awful impact. One woman who e-mailed me wrote: “When I became totally disabled seven years ago, because I had not announced my illness previously, nearly everyone I knew figured the illness was in my head. They were aided and abetted with this sort of reasoning based on how the majority of the medical establishment and media had treated CFS. Like many with CFS, I lost all of my companions and my spouse.”

One of the most hopeful of recent discoveries is also generating a collateral fear. The retrovirus XMRV has been found to be present in CFS patients and has led them to worry about transmitting the disease to family members. One woman who e-mailed me from Britain wrote that her husband contracted the disease after years of nursing her. Who, she asked, will look after them now?

A sufferer in Maryland wrote to me that she worries about her family. She and her husband decided to have a child. They were blessed with triplets – and the return of the mother’s disease. Now she worries for her husband and the three babies.

A man—one-third of victims are male, although the National Institutes of Health treats CFS as a woman’s disease–sums up the anger in the community towards the political establishment, and particularly the Centers for Disease Control which changed the name from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, in a controversial action.

He wrote: “Washington didn’t so much forget – they were never told. The CDC swept it under the carpet, despite the fact that their main raison d’être is to investigate and sort epidemics of new diseases before they take hold. Now, because of the CDC’s wrongdoings, there are more than 1 million people affected in the USA and possibly 17 million worldwide. Most of these people are too sick to stand up for themselves, to fight back.”

Breaking down the e-mails, I find these commonalities:

· Anger at the CDC and, to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health and government in general.

· Tremendous suffering and horrendous problems with affording treatment; frequent misdiagnosis, as doctors use a “dustbin” approach that discards all the possibilities until they get to CFS.

· Anger at the media and others for not taking CFS seriously enough.

· The knowledge, with a cure rate of between 4 and 8 percent, that they are awaiting the inevitable in huge discomfort. They are on medical death row.

· Sufferers describing themselves as “living corpses.” Alone with their suffering, many commit suicide.

I’m not a medical writer. Writing about medicine has never interested me. But in a career of writing for newspapers, spanning more than 50 years, I’ve never received so much mail that has so consumed the thought process and torn at the heart.

There is a ghastly disease out there that cries out to be taken seriously, to get proper attention in the medical world, and to be prioritized along with the other big diseases claiming research dollars.


The Awful Disease Washington Forgot

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In the end, as with so much else, the fight against disease leads to Washington. There are big diseases with big lobbies, like AIDS, Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes and heart. Their millions of sufferers have associations and lobbies to push for federal research money and to shape its expenditure. Most have their celebrity backers, like Elizabeth Taylor for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for muscular dystrophy, and Mary Tyler Moore for diabetes.

Big lobbies mean big federal dollars, the attention of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. If the disease is the kind for which a single or series of silver bullets can produce a cure, Big Pharma comes in with big funding, in the hope that it can develop a lucrative line of medicines, patentable for long-term profits.

Yet there is a vast archipelago of diseases as cruel in their impact, horrible to bear and crying out for research that is not sporadic, underfunded or, through ignorance, misdirected.

One such is Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), a name so gentle that it belies the ghastliness of this affliction. Sufferers accuse the U.S. government, abetted by other governments, of choosing this name over the older and more commanding name, myalgic encephalomyelitis.

CFS is not about a name game. It is about debilitation lasting decades, essentially from inception to death. It is about years of lost living, terrible joint pain and total collapse, as the immune system more or less shuts down. It is like some great constricting snake that denies its victims the final convulsion.

Enter Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). While he is not generally regarded as a man on a horse these days, to CFS sufferers he is a figure of hope. He has stood up for CFS research.

This is not because the Senate majority leader sought to know a lot about a hard-to-understand and terrible affliction, but because CFS was found in two clusters in his home state. The largest outbreak was at Incline Village, Nev. In New York state, there is a cluster too.

In the 1980s government scientists looked at these clusters, but refused to accord them the respect the suffering deserves. It was then that the name was changed; “fatigue” was less politically incendiary than myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Incline Village is significant because it shows that CFS is infectious, or that it has environmental causes. The thinking is that while clearly not having a strong transmission path, it does happen.

Recently a sufferer in England wrote to The Daily Mail, saying that her husband, who had cared for her for nearly 20 years, had become infected. This is particularly serious in England, where the medical establishment has insisted on treating the disease as a psychological disorder, despite recent research suggesting strongly that it is retrovirus XMRV.

Now, at last, two world-famous pathogen hunters, Anthony Fauci of NIH, previously seen as a debunker of CFS science, and Ian Lipkin, a celebrity pathogen hunter, are heading a major safari into the dark world of retroviruses.

For the first time, the loose global network of sufferers–nobody knows how many there are in the world, but in the United States there could be as many as 800,000—are beginning to apply political pressure.

Their plight is pitiable. The full horror of the disease is described in a paper by Deborah Waroff, a gifted New York writer who was stricken in July 1989. An energetic cyclist, skier, squash and tennis player, Waroff wrote in a paper for a Washington conference:

“My sickness began with a flu-like illness. After a week, thinking I was pretty much well, I went back to my ordinary activities, like tennis and my biking. A week later, I was sick again. This repeated several times that summer until I soon got to a point where I was never well again. I had classic symptoms. After a little activity I would just collapse, totally fold up. I also had symptoms like fevers, dizziness, upset tummy, swollen lymph glands and a new type of frequent headache. I had cognitive problems embarrassingly often, including dysphasia—putting the wrong words in sentences. I was often too weak to talk on the phone, or after five minutes of talking I would fold.”

In 2003, things got worse. But two years later, Waroff regained some of her life through the controversial treatment of ozone therapy. This treatment cannot be prescribed in most states. Allowed in New York, it is hard to come by and expensive. Some other countries, particularly Canada, have been more committed to fighting CFS and the use of ozone therapy.

Harry Reid, and others, there is more work to be done.

In Praise of the Four-Day Work Week

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Let us make the three-day weekend permanent.

What do you remember about Labor Day? My bet is you remember not the Monday holiday but the Sunday, because the middle day of a three-day weekend is a day of luxury. It begins in the blessed minutes after waking, when you lie there in a cocoon of warmth; an indulgent few minutes that will begin to slip away with the movement of an arm or the opening of eye.

If you are with someone you love, it is luxury redefined up; guiltless indulgence, secured by the knowledge that work and stress are at bay. The chores have been executed on the previous day and — wonder of wonders — work will not cloud the horizon until Tuesday.

That mounting anxiety, which creeps into Sunday as the evening approaches, will not arrive until late Monday. You wonder, as you creep from your place of reverie to keep a flexible appointment with coffee and the bathroom, why every weekend cannot contain one day without care, one day, as the French say, sans souci.

When I worked for the BBC in London many years ago, we worked three days and took three days off. Longer work days but fewer of them.

Having worked every shift in the book, I was convinced that for journalists at least this was the perfect setup. My colleagues were more productive than any other set of workers I have labored with and happier. Many turned down jobs outside of the BBC just to keep the shifts they loved. Long, hard days followed by the triple crown of three days off.

This showed. Several wrote books, one finished a play and all kinds of gardens flourished, along with hobbies and sports. You can get on a golf course more cheaply and more easily on a Tuesday than you can on an over-stretched Saturday.

Years later, when I was president of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, during contract negotiations I suggested the idea of longer work days but fewer of them. The Washington Post management was ecstatic; many of their staffing problems, particularly on weekends, would be solved along with the complexity of compensatory time for well-paid employees who did not get overtime.

Win-win, you say? Not so fast. When I asked the permission of the Newspaper Guild International to put the proposal formally in negotiations, the worthies in the union hierarchy exploded. We had a model contract, blessed in the 1930s by the great journalist Heywood Broun (actually, a reluctant unionist like so many in the Guild) and we were not going to depart from that contract. Moreover, the model contract called for shortening work days, not lengthening them.

Unions may be the most liberal part of the political spectrum, but internally they are incredibly conservative and change-averse. Journalists were not to have the quality of their lives improved and The Washington Post was not to improve its staffing situation.

Well, I am back at work. And working people are talking about resetting America.

So I say, let us look afresh at the four-day work week. First let us resolve the problems of physical work, where a longer day is a bigger burden. But for the great majority of America’s workers (the paper-pushers, if you will), the virtues of a four-day work week might fit with the resetting of so many things in our lives.

Everything else is changing; newspapers are struggling, information technology dominates our lives and our transportation infrastructure is overloaded.

Fewer, longer work days would ease the stress on so many services and improve the ratio of commuting time to work time. Employers would get a happier workforce and the quality of life in the working world would be so improved.

Please join me in my campaign to abolish Monday. We can win. It has no core constituency. It is vulnerable.

 

An Era of Emptiness Awaits Huge Change

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To understand empty in its physical enormity, fly over the Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia: thousands of square miles of sand, untrammeled by man or animal. Awesome.

To understand empty as a metaphor, look at this past week in Washington.

Glenn Beck summoned his flock to the Lincoln Memorial last Saturday and offered them quasi-religious platitudes with a strong dash of patriotism: God and country. Empty concepts without a purpose to back them up.

The tens of thousands, quite possibly hundreds of thousands, of Beck adherents who filled the Mall already have God and patriotism. They did not come to be converted: They are the faithful, even if Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate with awful clarity, described them as self-pitying white people.

But the emptiness was not confined to the disappointing words from Beck, once Rupert Murdoch’s Man on Earth, now employed, it would seem, as God’s man down here.

On Monday, President Barack Obama made a brief — so brief it was almost furtive — appearance in the White House Rose Garden to push for tax cuts for small business and to chastise the Republicans in the Senate for bottling them up. Nothing new here. More emptiness.

Come Tuesday, it was the withdrawal-from-Iraq prime time broadcast for the president. But it had no passion, no conviction, no phrase to savor.

On Wednesday, Obama was back in the Rose Garden, talking up Middle East peace. Reporters are getting so used to this frequent use of flower power in the Rose Garden that many prefer to listen to the president from the relative comfort of the seats in the press center. In the East Room, reporters heard more platitudes about the hard path ahead to achieve peace.

It has become pretty hard just to listen to this stuff as successive presidents have sought to catch the ultimate brass ring of diplomacy. The “peace process” has become itself an empty formulation.

There has been such emptiness in the political debate that partisans are busy inventing bogeymen to run against. The gun lobby, which sends out incessant e-mail, has a whole series of horrors it has minted for gun lovers to worry about. Would you believe that, according to the lobby, Obama is in league with the United Nations to confiscate American weapons?

Others of the right see creeping “European-style socialism” about to get us. Being an empty threat, we are not told what this perversion actually is and how we would be able to recognize it when it gets here. Will it make us like England or France or Germany? One trembles.

On the left, where the hopper of ideas is as empty as it is on the right, there is paranoia and betrayal. Paranoia that the right wing and its insuperable ally, the Fox News Channel, are going to sweep into power, winning the House and Senate in November and the presidency in 2012, after which all the good things of the 20th century, like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, mutual insurance companies and credit unions, will be privatized and handed over to the people who used to run Lehman Brothers. Reproductive rights, gay and lesbian rights, and maybe some civil rights legislation will be swept away as the country is ceded to a duopoly of oligarchs and fundamentalist Christians.

All this because these are empty times. These are empty years and an empty decade, where all the old ideas contend only because of the paucity of new ones.

This hollow sound and fury comes when, in really profound ways, the world, and especially our corner of it, is changing — or, to use the word of the day, being “reset.” Copper wire is being retired for wireless, paper for computer screens, oil for electricity. The global climate is changing. Europe has become China’s largest market. And the oldest currency of all, gold, is flourishing.

Only the desert is really empty and that, too, is an illusion — it is a live, moving thing with microbial life, shifting dunes and even fauna and flora that the inexperienced observer does not see.

Our political rhetoric is empty, vacuous and vapid, but things are happening. Profound, ignored changes are underway.

Washington on Vacation: From Martha’s Vineyard to the Political Vineyards

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That great sucking sound you hear is the annual evacuation of Washingtonians. Tired and weary, but nonetheless self-important, they snatch a little beach time and act like other people.

The upper tier — including President Obama and his family — flock to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. A few — most notably storied editor Ben Bradlee and his fabled party giving-wife, Sally Quinn — enjoy the delights of Long Island and the Hamptons. Alas, Washington incomes aren’t commensurate with Washington egos; hence the Hamptons are only for the few, and those with super-rich friends.

A little pity, please, for members of Congress at this time of year. While bureaucrats, senior civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have boardwalk splinters in their feet and spilled beer on their T-shirts, legislators have to face the voters. Ugh!

This year, that’s an especially nasty experience.

All the polls say only about 11 percent of the country approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s tough enough, but this year there are the unemployed–the same unemployed as last year, but now they are more bitter and angry.

Legislators have forgotten the platitudes used to calm the unemployed last year. But the unemployed have not; and worse, the local TV stations can pull up clips as fast as a member of Congress can say “my record shows.”

If you’ve made a point of denouncing the deficit, it’s hard to explain why you haven’t been more diligent in bringing home the bacon to your constituency. If it’s your summer boondoggle, it’s hard to explain that it’s an entitlement.

You get a holiday in an election year? Get off it. When comfortably re-elected, you can contemplate a little time with you feet up. Unless you want to join the unemployed, better campaign; and campaign some more when fatigue has gripped you by the soft parts. Hit the phones and beg for money.

To stay in Washington, you need to be able to denounce Washington in brutal terms, while yearning for the members’ dining room, the simpering of the staff, and the adulation of the cable television network that agrees with you.

Every day you must praise the wonders of America and your fabulous constituency, while you long for a congressional fact-finding trip to London, Paris or Rome. After all, you’ve been stuffed with barbecue since you got back to the voters: the God-fearing, family-loving, hard-working, ignorant pain-in-the-butt hicks.

What do voters know of the burden of office?

What do they know of you being cajoled in the White House while the TV cameras are lining the driveway, waiting just for you? What do they know of representing our country at dinner at 10 Downing Street or the Elysee Palace? Have they ever had an audience with the Pope?

What do the voters know of the thrill of dropping in on our troops in Afghanistan with a TV crew? If you do that, you can almost book yourself on a Sunday morning talk show. Heck you can feel thrilled on “Meet the Press,” even if David Gregory reads aloud an encyclopedic list of your gaffes, votes, and friends of the opposite sex.

Actually, the worker bees of the nation’s capital just hate to be away. If you are a member of Congress, you’re reminded that there are nasty people with clever advertising agencies, trying to get into Washington and make you part of that unemployment statistic.

Even those who don’t have to run for office feel the burden of free-floating anxiety. Who’s after my job? I make out to be the most important job in the most important city in the world, even if I know in my heart I’m a clerk.

 

Tea Party Inspires Memories of Another Time

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I should feel quite at home at the tea parties. I was present at the last round of them. It was another country and another time, but the anger was as genuine, the sense of betrayal by the political class was as real, and the idea of an endangered heritage was as painful.

Also, then as now, there was a certain disconnect from reality.

The place of these tea parties was throughout the dwindling British Empire. There, middle-aged people, who had spread the concept of British exceptionalism and borne the Second World War, felt everything they had built and fought for was slipping away.

What was seen as a terrible leftward drift was opposed virulently by a phalanx of patriotic organizations, but most notably the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954.

The Loyalists were good yeomen who loved the Britain they believed had existed and was endangered, along with the position of Britain as the world’s dominant power. They believed in Britain’s special writ to civilize the world, police it and sometimes settle it. Compared to the militarists of the 18th and 19th centuries, these were soft imperialists but believers nonetheless, held together in a loose federation throughout the British colonies and dominions.

In Britain, the Loyalists formed a political bloc on the far right of the Conservative Party. They were on the fringe in Britain, but they were taken seriously in the colonies as a legitimate expression of wide discontent with the decline of British traditions, British leadership in business and British moral authority.

Loyalists inside and outside Britain railed against politicians in London, much as today’s Tea Party activists rail against Washington.

In Britain, support for the Loyalists was limited because so much had already changed. The British public had already accepted the dissolution of the empire; after all, its jewel, India, was gone.

Although the Loyalists raged against non-white immigration into Britain, this had not yet been identified by most people as a society-changing occurrence. Mainline British Conservatives feared that the leader of the loyalists, Arthur Chesterton, had been a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s. Even though he had broken with the fascists and written a book about it, he was still suspect.

Where I was in Rhodesia, the Loyalists were seen as the hope for saving Britain, of returning her to greatness and somehow turning the clock back to “the good old days,” whenever they were imagined to have been. Many, including my parents, believed the Loyalists would bring about a glorious new Elizabethan era under the young Elizabeth II, who had been crowned a year before the founding of the League of Empire Loyalists.

For those outside of the British Isles, the league was back to the future. But in London and across Britain, the Loyalists were just a right-wing pressure group (known in Britain as a “ginger group”), claiming support from a handful of Conservative Members of Parliament but shunned by the Tory leadership. In the United Kingdom, they were sidelined as “Colonel Blimps,” a satirical comic figure who ridiculed the conservative middle class and had been enshrined in criticism by George Orwell.

The League of Empire Loyalists lasted 10 years, but its aspirations were sealed after six years with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “wind of change” speech. The league’s domestic issues — the fight against socialism, the uncontrolled flood of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean, and the growing power of the unions — were taken up by more sophisticated entities, like The Monday Club, operating inside the Conservative Party.

There is a limit to the analogy of the Tea Party movement to the Loyalist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. But the people are eerily the same. They share a decency, the sense of being let down and the feeling that something has to be done. In the British case, nothing was done until Margaret Thatcher much later addressed some of the concerns of the Loyalists (unions, state ownership, immigration and global stature). She did not bring back the empire, but she did make the Brits feel a lot better about not having it anymore.

Who will do that for the good people of the Tea Party movement?

Oil Industry’s Deep Well of Fear

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There is an open secret in the oil industry that dare not speak its name: peak oil.

Well, two did speak its name and gained no acclaim for it. One, M. King Hubbert, died years ago. The other and the more controversial, Matthew Simmons, died Aug. 8 at his Maine summer home.

The peak oil idea is simple: Oil is a finite commodity and one day we are going to use up all of it.

Hubbert, a geologist, began speculating on the effects of the gradual decline in worldwide production in the 1950s. He expressed this in a simple graph, known as “Hubbert’s pimple.”

He tended to draw the graph freehand, and it looked more like a Rubenesque breast than a pimple. It was so simple that he drew it over and over again to illustrate his points for journalists and politicians. Later, he would draw lines through the pimple to demonstrate where we had been and where we were going, based on the then-known reserves and rate of depletion.

For his scholarship, Hubbert was eased out at Shell Oil Co. in 1964. He took a job with the U.S. Geological Survey and continued his speculative research — until he was thrust into national prominence by the 1970s oil crisis.

Simmons, in contrast, was a much more apocalyptic predictor than Hubbert. His illustration is a stark tower of a graph, more like the Empire State Building. He saw all the oil on Earth savagely used up in just two centuries, the 20th and the 21st, resulting in international catastrophe probably by 2040.

In one television interview, Simmons sounded like a survivalist. He said he was stocking his home with all kinds of supplies to survive the food and fuel shortages that would accompany the decline in oil availability, and the impending international chaos and hostility.

In the energy industry, which has a definite aversion to bad news and hard questions, Simmons was an agent provocateur and an effective one — effective because he was of the industry, not outside it.

Simmons was an oil man and his firm, Simmons & Company International, was founded in Houston in 1974. It grew to be one of the world’s most influential energy investment banks, with offices in Houston, London, Aberdeen, Scotland and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It has been responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars of merger and acquisition activity.

The industry loved the deals Simmons made possible, but not his talk of doom and chaos.

In particular, Simmons distressed Saudi Arabia by analyzing production data and detailing what he concluded was a decline in the rate of drawdown on the Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest. This was the thrust of his book, “Twilight in the Desert,” and it incensed the Saudis and their oil company, Aramco. It also forced them to increase their field management efforts and make their operations more transparent.

Where Hubbert, who died in 1989, was a gentle seer of trouble ahead, Simmons was the knock on the door before dawn.

Ultimately, both have been betrayed by time and, in Hubbert’s case, technology. But their arguments have not been invalidated.

Hubbert did not foresee the enormous technological advances in exploration and drilling, including greater depths, horizontal wells and 3-D seismic.

Simmons saw all these things and concluded nonetheless that world demand for oil is so high that the end is near. He believed that once global production peaked and the 86 million barrels a day now consumed cannot be provided, oil will rise in price steadily to $200 a barrel and going as high as $500 a barrel as chaos and fear spread.

In recent months, Simmons became even more controversial. Correctly, he estimated that BP spillage in the Gulf of Mexico was many more times than what the company had first claimed. He was almost spot on. But he also said that BP would be forced into bankruptcy and that a nuclear device was the only way to stop the leak. BP responded by ending its relationship with Simmons’ bank. And Simmons ended his lingering involvement with it, as well.

Simmons was a perfect storm of a man, raging against the myths and self-satisfaction of the oil industry. In his absence, there will be a certain quietude in the petroleum clubs of Houston, Denver and Edmonton, Alberta, and elsewhere.

But in their hearts, they fear he was right.

Nuclear Blast from the Past Might Fix Oil Spill

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Steven Chu, the secretary in charge of the Department of Energy, needs to get the agency’s historian on the phone. Then he needs to have a word with the directors of the nation’s three top weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

A side call should go to the Department of Energy’s office at the Nevada Test Site.

If he had made those calls, Chu, a physicist, might have been less swift to reject the nuclear option on stemming the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. We do not know why the idea of nuclear intervention was rejected out of hand. Was it Chu’s choice or did word come down from the White House that there would be no nuclear blast under the gulf? My guess is that the White House made the call.

Although the Soviets claimed they used a nuclear blast to tame an out-of-control gas well that burned for three years, the real expertise in using nuclear detonations for civil engineering resides in the DOE.

From 1958-73, the Atomic Energy Commission—later subsumed into the DOE —had a very active civil engineering program called Operation Plowshare. The program grew out of the national exuberance for all things nuclear that prevailed in the 1950s and into the 1960s, when public opinion began to turn and enthusiasm for government science wilted.

Initially Operation Plowshare (named for the biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks) fathered some pretty radical ideas, like using controlled nuclear blasts to lower mountains. Others included widening the Panama Canal, building a new Central American canal though Nicaragua, and carving a new bay in Alaska. Finally, the project’s goal was narrowed to stimulating natural gas production.

In all there were 27 detonations, most of them at the nuclear test site in Nevada; but there were two in Colorado and two in New Mexico. Every test had its own name and the size of the charge ranged from 105 kilotons (code-named Flask) to 0.37 kilotons (code-named Templar).

The last and most ambitious test, which took place outside Rifle, Colo., and was code-named Rio Blanco, consisted of three linked detonations of 33 kilotons each. The technique mirrored conventional blasting with sequential charges. And the idea was that gas would be driven from cavity to cavity, concentrating it for extraction in the last cavity.

Radioactive contamination of the gas doomed the whole idea. But what worked were the detonations themselves.

A good deal is known, somewhere in the archives of the DOE and its laboratories, about how to detonate safely underground and what happens when you do.

Three things happen after a detonation: an area becomes vitrified, a much larger area is reduced to rubble, and there is a cavity into which much of the rubble falls. Sounds like what you want in the Gulf of Mexico, eh?

At the time of Operation Plowshare, most of the data was classified. Much of it has since been made available to an apathetic world.

Driven by a complex mixture of guilt over creating nuclear weapons and real enthusiasm for the science, there is no doubt that silly things were undertaken in the early days of civilian nuclear experimentation. But that does not mean that the devices did not work or that the science was deficient. Or that it cannot be used for better purposes today.

President Obama and BP have said that the best minds are working on engineering solutions to the Gulf disaster. So it seems strange that the truly high-tech one has received short shrift.

I covered the last three years of Operation Plowshare as a reporter, and I never heard a whisper that any of the 27 detonations failed. It was the mission that was in doubt.

As for lingering effects, the government has issued natural gas drilling licenses within three miles of some experiments, and in one case within a mile of where the nuclear blast took place years ago. Apparently, nothing to worry about.

Institutional memory is a terrible thing to waste. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Return of The Regulators

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Brace for the return of The Regulators.

Many Democrats and a few Republicans believe that the nation would have been saved many disasters — from the shenanigans of Enron, the financial crimes of Bernie Madoff and the subprime mortgage crisis to the explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico — if there had been more regulation, or more effective regulation.

A regulation may be passed, but its intent will be evaded unless it accords with the dynamics of the situation. The punishment has to fit the possible crime; otherwise an army of federal nitpickers will be unleashed on the commerce of the nation. The cost of doing business will go up and innovation will be stifled.

Worse, an industry of evasion will be created. The IRS de facto regulates much of the economy and our lives. It also has fathered a compliance/evasion industry that stretches from storefront tax preparers to corporations moving their headquarters to Bermuda and Panama.

When it comes to technical regulation, the result can be inhibiting of effort, stifling of innovation, and can be an excuse to do things in bad old ways because the regulator has blessed those ways. The problem with regulation is that pleasing the regulator becomes a goal in itself, if the regulator is strong and independent. If the regulator is weak, he will be rolled by the regulated, as happened with the U.S. Minerals Management Service.

It has been an act of faith for decades that federal agencies that promote an industry are unqualified to regulate it. The policeman and the criminal are the same person, the argument goes.

But this is worth reexamination.

The Federal Aviation Administration, for example, promotes flying and regulates it. Given that flying is inherently dangerous and yet very safe, it can be concluded that the air traffic control part of the FAA works incredibly well. The supervision of maintenance is more questionable.

Air traffic control deserves a second look. There are dynamics at work which are absent in the government’s control of other endeavors.

A call goes out from an FAA terminal controller like this: Sierra Two-Ninety-Three heavy; turn left, heading two-seven-zero; climb and maintain flight level twenty-two; expect higher in ten minutes.

A great airliner turns west and starts climbing. No questions. No argument.

The flight controller is often someone without a college degree or, nowadays, even a private pilot’s license. The airline captain has college degree, a better pay scale, more social standing and final responsibility for the safety of hundreds of passengers on board the aircraft. Yet the controller and the pilot, while the plane is in the controller’s airspace, dance a sacred tango.

The company would like the pilot to get as direct a routing as air traffic control will allow, and he may request route modification in flight. But economics are mercifully at bay in front of the radar screen and in the cockpit.

So are personalities. Air traffic controllers do not hang out with pilots. It is a perfect intimacy between strangers. One might add that there are no lawyers or consultants in the transaction; just simple purpose, an immaculate coupling.

On an oil rig or down a mine, the dynamic is very different. The regulator is captive to the expertise and veracity of the operator. The workers may resent the interference of an inspector. After all if you have done something safely many times, even if you have cut corners, why not do it again? It will please the chain of command and, on a rig, may hasten your return to shore. People who live in dangerous environments are inured to them.

The first step in safety regulation must be to introduce an ethic of safety as goal. That is easily done in aviation, where the danger is clear and present. When the danger is present but less clear, crafting a safety dynamic is hard. On the other hand, mandating viable cleanup plans should be easy and enforceable.

When it comes to financial regulation, only the statute equivalent of bricks- and-mortar regulation works — laws like the Public Utilities Holding Company Act of 1935 and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. You cannot ask regulators to regulate risk among people whose business is taking risk. Just mark off their sandbox.

The present hysteria for more regulation is a blueprint for strangulation. Get the dynamics right, before you unleash the bureaucrats. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

My Papa Done Told Me

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My friend Ken Ball and I have a something very special in common: Separately and continents apart, our fathers kept us out of deep mines.

My father was a mechanic, who worked in mine maintenance, mostly gold mines known as hard-rock mines, all over southern central Africa. Ken is the scion of a long line of coal miners in Pennsylvania.

Whenever there is a mine disaster, like the tragedy this week at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, Ken and I think of our fathers and thank them.

I dropped out of high school. Soon, I got a job in journalism, but journalism, then as now, can be a fickle business and the pay lousy.

After 18 glorious months of cub reporting, I found myself in Zambia getting by in construction work because my gig as a very junior foreign correspondent had gone south.

I was offered a job at fabulous money as a trainee miner in the Zambian copper mines. They paid what was called the “copper bonus” and it had, from the mine owners’ point of view, gotten out of hand.

The defense buildup in the United States had pushed the price of copper beyond all expectations. Copper capitalism was all the rage.

I was already spending the money in my head, bonding in that machismo way that miners have. The typewriter would be traded for a jack hammer. I’d be a man’s man with a pocket full of “copper bonus” money to prove it.

I wrote my father and told him that job insecurity and money woes would soon be over, I was “going down the mines.”

My father had a faltering grip on spelling and grammar, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t express himself elegantly. I believe that writing, like musicality, is innate.

If hard-mining is about the judicious use of dynamite, my father’s response letter was as explosive.

Its gist was: I’ve never stopped you in your folly, especially in leaving school. But for God’s sake, don’t go down a mine. Those places aren’t for human beings. I’ve been forced to work on them most of my life, and I can tell you that mines are no places for human beings. Please don’t do it.

Just about the same time, in the late 1950s, in faraway Pennsylvania, Ken Ball was getting about the same advice from his father. Ken finished his schooling and went on to a distinguished career in science and engineering. I went back to the newspaper trade.

The basic dynamic of mining is at odds with safety: It is to extract as much ore or coal as possible with as little cost. Safety is the usual casualty. Owners skirt the rules for profit. And miners skirt them for much the same reason: bonuses.

Because mines are almost always company towns, it’s hard for individual miners to blow the whistle on dangerous practices if everyone is winking at the regulations.

More government regulations are simply more rules to ignore. The most positive safety enhancement is an old one: an active union.

Upper Big Branch is a non-union mine and the worst accidents tend to be in non-union mines.

Unions are good at enforcing irksome work rules. Arguably, there may be no reason for teachers to unionize. There’s a good reason for having a third party in the mine: safety. Miners have no loyalty to government inspectors, but they do to their own union.

A safe mine is an oxymoron. The earth is as lethal as the sea. When you start moving it around, there is treachery down below.

Things are much better than they were years ago; better equipment and rules, which if implemented, help. But the history of King Coal is not pretty. In America alone, more than 100,000 men — until recently, it was men only — have died in the unforgiving earth to keep us warm and their families fed.

For the miners in Appalachia, it’s a special way of life: church, a mobile home, television, tattoos and close relations within small communities. It’s also a way of life, a culture and work that, in the age of keystrokes, makes a man feel, well, like a man.

As for my father, about three months after he cautioned me off the life below ground, he fell down a goldmine shaft and broke his back.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate