White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Beware of the Loving Embrace of the Government

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By Llewellyn King

I am not a government-basher per se. As a reporter, I have covered it too long to say the bureaucracy is always incompetent and lazy. But I have also seen how the government wastes money, veers from one project to another, and is indifferent to any damage done by its autocratic ways.

The government, for better or worse, is the great risk-taker on new technologies. As such, it has added immeasurably to the wealth of the nation, from the creation of the technologies that led to the fracking boom and the Internet to the creative advances one now sees in airliners.

After the Pentagon, the Department of Energy (DOE) is the worst offender of the love-it-then-leave-it school of support for technology innovation.

The country is littered with the carcasses of abandoned projects, such as the Yucca Mountain nuclear spent-fuel repository, which was canceled by the Obama administration to please its political ally, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.). Price tag: more than $15 billion.

This cancellation has had two other damaging effects: the first is there is still no permanent place to store nuclear spent fuel, which is piling up in America; and the second is the demoralizing of talented engineers and scientists by the government’s vacillation. These effects may be as huge as the price tag.

Gifted people throw themselves into government projects and move their families across the country to the work sites. Then the government says, “Thanks for your work on the project, but we are canceling it. Now, shove off!” These contractor employees do not have government protections; they are subject to government caprice.

In South Carolina, for example, a huge project to build a plant to blend weapons-grade plutonium into nuclear fuel for civilian reactors is 70-percent completed and hanging by a thread. That is because after spending $5 billion, the DOE wants to do something else equally expensive, according to one consultant.

Or take Gen4 Energy, a small, Denver-based company that has been strung along by the DOE and now is preparing pink slips. Its plan is to build a small (25-MWe), advanced nuclear power plant for use at mining sites, military bases and remote places that need electricity, such as Alaskan villages and those in less-developed countries. These reactors would work for 10 years and then would be swapped out and replaced with a new, factory-built module.

Robert Prince, Gen4 Energy’s CEO, who came out of retirement to lead the advanced reactor project, says it is a unique, safe design using tested materials and concepts. The Gen4 advanced reactor design was in the running for development funding from the DOE.

The DOE uses a device called a “funding opportunity announcement”(FOA), to encourage technology developers. In 2013, it issued an FOA and handed out grants of $1 million each to four advanced reactor designers, including General Electric, General Atomics, Westinghouse and Gen4 Energy.

The DOE’s next step was to issue another FOA. This time, the department planned to split $80 million over 10 years for just two designs, provided the grantees came up with their own $10 million. Gen4 and the others prepared detailed proposals and waited.

In January, the DOE picked two rector designs: one from a consortium that includes Bill Gates and the Southern Company, and the other from technology entrepreneur Kam Ghaffarian. Neither were in the first round.

The DOE decision hit Gen4 Energy particularly hard, as it was the smallest contender and probably the one most in need of DOE help as it labored on its design, which had originated in the Los Alamos National Laboratory and was due for feasibility testing at the University of South Carolina, according to Prince. “We really thought we had a shot,” he said.

Not so. Love from the DOE is a sometime thing. Just ask Prince, who now must tell investors and staff that the $10 million or so they have already spent is gone and the business must pack up, technology abandoned, lives shattered, hope sunk.

Gen4 Energy is not alone in its disappointment. Other companies with exciting designs for reactors are also disappointed. Careers, brilliant ideas, and untold dollars are lost in the way the DOE seduces and abandons people and technologies. — For InsideSources


John T. Conway: A Remembrance

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By Llewellyn King

John T. Conway, who died on Feb. 12 at the age of 92, was a force. And he triumphed in many things — as a Navy engineer, an FBI special agent, an attorney, a congressional staffer, a presidential appointee, a utility executive, a husband and a father.

I am glad to say that John was my friend, and that I was the beneficiary of his joy and generosity.

I knew him for more than 40 years. And I knew him to be a man for whom everything was an adventure. He sought it and it sought him.

If you were lucky enough to know John, you were swept along in his adventure. I was swept along in the corridors of the Capitol, which he knew inside out from his days as a staffer on the storied Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. I was swept along in the labyrinth of offices at Consolidated Edison Company in New York, when he was executive assistant to the chairman. I was swept along into the arcane and essential work of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, when he became its first chairman, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, in 1989.

And I was swept along on K Street in Washington, when John was headed for a favorite watering hole. He was an Irishman from New York, where his father was a policeman for 30 years. John was Irish in the best sense of that: He enjoyed a drink and loved the companionship that went with it.

John was a raconteur who took time to ask questions. You always felt he knew a lot more than you did — and this was for the simple reason that he did. An evening in his company was a time to laugh, but also a time to learn.

A 42-page interview that FBI historians conducted with John in 2009, as part of an oral history of the agency, can be found online at http://www.nleomf.org/assets/pdfs/nlem/oral-histories/FBI_Conway_interview.pdf In this remarkable document, John discusses his attempts to see active duty in World War II and his extraordinary career at the FBI.

John had told me a lot about his life as an FBI special agent, including how close he had come to turning a Soviet spy. He said he felt cheated not to have closed the deal.

He was both an engineer and an attorney – with degrees from Tufts University and Columbia University School of Law — so he was well-suited to the nuclear business in Washington. From the 1950s, the nuclear world was populated with giants. John stood tall even among that august company.

He joined the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in 1958 as an assistant staff director, and became its executive director in 1968. It was the only joint committee of Congress that has ever had the power to introduce legislation — and as such, it was something of a law unto itself. It had very private offices in the Capitol, accessed by a discreet elevator that was almost under the dome.

All the committee members were there because of their devotion to nuclear energy. They sought their assignments because they believed in nuclear energy for defense, electricity generation and medicine. Democrat and Republican were as one where nuclear was concerned. The chairmanship switched between the House and Senate every two years, but the committee’s policy of collective aims never varied. Many of its members were national figures such as Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), Sen. John Pastore (D-R.I.), Sen. Clinton Anderson (D-N.M.), and John Anderson (R-Ill.), who ran for president as an Independent.

Because of the secrecy which surrounded it and the depth of knowledge among its members, Congress was usually swayed by the committee. In short, it got what it wanted.

Making sure that happened was John Conway. As staff director, his influence in Congress and in its vassal agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), was considerable. He was at the right hand of members during an expansion of nuclear power and in dangerous days of the Cold War. He circled the globe as the quiet man who smoothed things out — some critical, as in Moscow with Sen. Jackson, or in Rome with Sen. Pastore.

When Pastore was chairman of the committee, he took John with him on a trip to Rome. Now Pastore was a short man, and John was a tall, raw-boned one. They traveled together at a time when Europe was littered with what were called “counterpart funds.” This was local currency that had accumulated in U.S. embassies in payments, but could not be repatriated and converted into dollars.

At the U.S. Embassy in Rome, John was given a big roll of lira — a common practice at that time when congressmen visited European countries. With the roll in his jacket pocket, John accompanied Pastore for an audience with the Pope. Pastore was a devout Catholic, and John told me he thought this was the highest point of the senator’s life.

The audience began in curtained room in the Vatican, and involved Pastore, John, the Pope and his aide. Before they left the room, the Pope handed a glass-and-metal crucifix to Pastore, who clutched it to his chest, profoundly moved.

Then the Pope indicated that he and Pastore should go to another room where, presumably, the senator received a papal blessing. John and Pope’s aide stood looking at each other in the curtained room. He was so grateful for his boss’s audience with the Pope and the gift of the crucifix that he felt some reciprocation was needed. Having brought no presents, John handed the Pope’s aide the roll of lira.

Then the aide, who thought this generosity required major reciprocity, threw back the room’s curtain to reveal a great tub of identical crucifixes. He grabbed a bunch and handed them to John. Big problem. If Pastore had found out that they were given to all, he would be devastated. And if John declined the offer, there might be an international incident. So he stuffed them into his shirt and crossed his arms over his chest to keep them from clinking.

Soon, John was reunited with Pastore. The two left the Vatican — with John suffering painful pricking from his burden.

When they were back on a Roman street and Pastore was distracted, John unloaded his burden into a trash can. “Ask John. He will know what to do,” they used to say all over Washington. And he always did.

A truly great man has passed, paid up in full in the human club.

Llewellyn King, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS,” was the founder and publisher of “The Energy Daily” for 33 years.

America’s Year of Thinking Dangerously

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By Llewellyn King

If you accept that seminal means an event or moment after which things will never be the same again, then we are living through a seminal year.

In matters big and small, change is in the wind.

This wind blew through Iowa and New Hampshire, and is defining the 2016 presidential election. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are not so much the leaders of this time of change, but rather the products.

The product is something hard to pin down, but it is there nonetheless — a sense that it is time to turn the page, to read the next chapter; a yearning for something fresh.

The millennials, hunched over their cell phones, are looking for the future in their small screens. The rest of us are looking for it in new leaders, new lifestyles; and new thinking, sometimes about old ideas.

Societies go through periods when they feel the need to change up things. But they want a sped-up evolution rather than a full-fledged revolution. This is such a time.

Change is everywhere from the bold, new things television is doing — frontal nudity, gay coupling and interracial love — to the kind of car we favor.

While we grapple with change and yearn for the new, we are surprisingly open-minded. American values appear to be undergoing a recalibration: We are getting more socially tolerant. Social conservatives are a diminished force.

Young people do not have the same commitment their parents had to conventional employment, to be defined by where they work. This leads to a world where people are less concerned with appearances, and all that goes with appearances. The business suit and its essential accoutrement, the necktie, are on the way out – and in much of the country, they are now curiously out of date. Apartments are being favored over houses because of new social values.

My generation experienced the hopeful 1940s (just the tail end), the smug 1950s, the turbulent 1960s, the oil-shocked 1970s, and the computer-excited 1980s, which continued unabated until the dot-com bubble burst at the turn of the century – but re-inflated with new developments in Internet products like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

In recent times, the only new American billionaire outside of the Internet was Hamdi Ulukaya, who popularized Greek yogurt in country hungry for yogurt choices. That is a dumbfounding fact. It means that it will be harder to get investment in old-line businesses and start-ups. The smart money has become myopically obsessed with the cyberworld.

If you were to go to Wall Street today to raise money for a new nuclear reactor that put all doubts of the past to rest and offered income for 100 years — there are such machines on the drawing board – you would find it hard to raise money; easier for a new Internet messaging system. This when there is no shortage of Internet messages (too many, I cry each morning). We are leery of the hard and enamored of the soft.

We sense that the education system is not doing its job; that it is broken and needs fixing. But how, we are not sure. We are sure, though, that we are going to change it.

We sense that we had the dynamic wrong in foreign affairs; that change at home, like toppling a generation of political leadership, is desirable, while toppling leaders abroad is a fraught undertaking, as with Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

We feel less good about the wealthy, and we are less sure that there are secure places for us in the future. We watch cooking shows and order in pizza. We gave up smoking and started jogging. But we are, so to speak, deaf to the damage we are doing to our ears with incessant music piped to them by earbuds.

We are more nationalistic and less confident at the same time. We treasure our values more, and wonder about their long-term durability.

The largest contradiction that can easily be inspected is in the themes of Trump and Sanders: Trump has rehabilitated a kind of racism aimed at immigrants, while Sanders has made the taboo word “socialism” acceptable in political dialogue.

The desire for change has moved from a slight wish to a hard desire for a new alignment. It is everywhere, from what we eat to how we feel about the climate. But we do not agree on this new alignment, hence the huge gulf between Sanders followers and Trump adherents. — For InsideSources

Cancer ‘Moonshot’ Has Paltry Dollars, Losers

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By Llewellyn King

Whenever the government wants to be seen to be doing something huge, it invokes the Manhattan Project or the moon landing. So the new cancer initiative of the Obama administration is called the “moonshot.”

But it’s neither the equivalent of the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb during World War II, nor President Kennedy’s ambitious program to land a man on the moon, after the Russians appeared to have stolen a march with the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite in space.

Those programs succeeded because they were tremendous national commitments without regard to funding. The $1 billion in proposed funding for the “moonshot” cancer initiative is somewhere between modest and paltry. In the world of biomedical research, $1 billion simply doesn’t buy much.

The pharmaceutical industry estimates that it costs well over $1 billion to bring just one new drug to market. Cancer needs many drugs.

The lead agency in this new iteration of the war on cancer, declared in 1971, is the National Institutes of Health. It has an annual budget of $32 billion on which there are demands from many deserving fields of biomedical research besides cancer.

President Obama has asked Vice President Biden to lead the cancer moonshot effort. I’ve been with the vice president when he has talked about his commitment to the cause of cancer research and the death of his son, Beau, from brain cancer. His sincerity and his commitment to cancer research is palpable, but he won’t have the dollars to get the job done.

The biggest contribution to the research for a cancer cure may be the stimulation the moonshot will give to extant cancer efforts, but it’s not without a downside.

Many other diseases fear they may be undercut by the cancer initiative. In the world of biomedical research, there is finite funding and talent — and a new initiative tends to draw the best research minds. The top magnets for good biomedical researchers these days are cancer and AIDS, and many other deserving diseases lose out. Biomedical research requires stability, so that decades of a scientist’s life can be devoted to a single line of endeavor.

I follow one of the more obscure diseases, one that that has been pitiably starved of public and private funds: Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Compared to any other disease affecting a large number of people (1 million victims of ME/CFS in the United States, according to the Centers For Disease Control), it has been funded so little by the government as to amount willful neglect. It receives a miniscule $5 million a year in funding.

Last year, after public and media pressure that has been applied for years, NIH Director Francis Collins announced that things would be rectified. But he didn’t mention a dollar figure; not when he made the announcement in October and not to date. No moonshot here, not even a Fourth of July firework.

Yet the suffering of those with ME/CFS is truly awful. I’ve been in the sick rooms and interviewed the few doctors who specialize in the disease, and the situation is one of unabated misery. Those who are the most affected can’t tolerate light or sound, and must pass their days in the silent dark. For years, one poor young man has had to take refuge from the disease in a modified closet. Others suffer from a world in which they’re punished for doing everyday things: A dinner with friends can mean days in bed for recovery.

There seems to be no light at the end of the victim’s physical pain and mental fog, despite decades of pleading from advocates and caregivers that some serious research be funded by NIH.

While we’ve been the world’s powerhouse in research in all sciences, biomedical is now being starved of research dollars. Recently America’s most revered virus hunter, Dr. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, has had to resort to crowdfunding. He and his deputy, Dr. Mady Hornig, can be found on YouTube eating red-hot chili peppers in an attempt to raise money for their ME/CFS research.

Dollars in across-the-board biomedical research are falling when they should be rising. Recently, NIH’s budgets have been 25 percent smaller in constant dollars than they were in 2003.

Research pays. Most of it doesn’t yield dramatic stuff, like a moonshot, but rather solid, incremental gain. In science, incremental gain is the equivalent of compound interest. But it needs sustained funding. Not rhetoric. — For InsideSources


Nuclear Inventions Are Here, but not to Stay

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By Llewellyn King

In February, about 200 of the most gifted engineers and scientists you can squeeze into a single meeting room will be sharing PowerPoints at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, near Knoxville, Tenn.

They will not be rocket scientists, but they may as well be. They will be nuclear engineers, physicists, chemists and entrepreneurs advocating new designs for reactors that will make electricity and medical isotopes and burn up nuclear waste.

When you get away from the politics and other restraints that have so arrested traditional reactor deployment in the United States in recent years, wonderful ideas spring forth. Scientists, I assure you, when gathered together can generate as much enthusiasm as any other creative cohort for planning wondrous things for the future.

Creative people are not just those who work with paint, musical notes, and words, but also those who pour over complex calculations, look at the atomic nature of matter, and design wondrous machines that will make electricity, create medicines, clean the air and purify the water.

Invention is narcotic. Yes, call them mad scientists but new ideas, as yet untrammeled, are stimulative — and even aphrodisiacal.

That is why one of the most exciting places I will go to this year will be the Advanced Reactors Technical Summit III at Oak Ridge on Feb. 10-11. For several years, I have attended this conference, organized by the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council, in other places, including Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. I can report that nuclear engineers are as boyish in their enthusiasm for the possibilities of bending the atom to human need as college football coaches are when they survey the new recruits. Possibility lifts the spirits.

In Oak Ridge there will be schemes, dreams and some very creative engineering. There will be designs for fast reactors, that can burn nuclear waste as fuel; molten salt reactors, thorium reactors, and small modular reactors. Some will be incremental improvements on old ideas, others will be concepts created from whole cloth. All will strive for safety through design.

But the creators assembling in Oak Ridge do so against a background that is sorrowful for them and their industry.

The United States — the crucible of nuclear invention — looks to be losing its place as the leader in nuclear energy. American utilities are not lining up to build new nuclear plants, and old ones are likely to keep going out of service. Edward Davis, president of the Pegasus Group, talks about a “nuclear cliff” – a time around 2030, when most of the U.S. nuclear fleet will be retired. Then nuclear — which produces no carbon and has a life cycle of up to 80 years — will dwindle to a handful of reactors, just when our promises under the Paris COP21 climate conference agreement call for big reductions in carbon.

Brilliant men and women are designing reactors that may change everything to do with electricity generation and isotope production. But they doubt that their first-of-kind reactors will be built and licensed in the United States. Nuclear design is almost limitless; the parameters are very flexible and the future tantalizing.

These engineers, to a person, are looking overseas to build and demonstrate their machines – mostly in China, India and the United Arab Emirates. Even Bill Gates, who is supporting a revolutionary traveling wave reactor, is working with the Chinese.

That is a sadness and a bitterness that will also be present at the advanced reactor conference in Tennessee. — For InsideSources

 

The Sustaining Knock on the Door

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By Llewellyn King

For some Americans today, tomorrow and the day after, on and on, a knock on the door is the high point of a lonely life. They are the old, infirm and shut-in; and they are a growing part of our aging society. Even though many of them have children and grandchildren, if you live alone and you are old, you know what it is to be all by yourself and lonely.

I think of them as the Alone Generation: people who suffer the privations of age and the dark place of loneliness.

The daily knock on the door comes from a volunteer for Meals on Wheels, and means a meal and little companionship. It is a public-private partnership that works: food for needy people.

That knock on the door comes a million times a day as Meals on Wheels volunteers fan out in their communities to deliver food. Some drive great distances in rural areas, some around their own neighborhoods.

The meals are tailored for the elderly, and often for diabetics. Sometimes they are delivered hot and ready to eat. Sometimes they need to be heated in a conventional or microwave oven. Sometimes they reflect regional tastes. All the meals are manna to the recipients.

According to Ellie Hollander, CEO of Meals on Wheels America, based in Arlington, Va., the average recipient is 75 years old or older, is usually a woman, takes at least six medications a day, suffers some physical impairment, and wants to live independently.

About a third of the organization’s funding comes from the federal government, and the other two-thirds comes from state and local governments and charities. There is a lot of volunteer labor.

Hollander says the money spent on keeping people at home is a national bargain: It keeps them out of expensive nursing homes, hospitals and other pricey warehousing.

You do not have to plunge into the statistics about aging – but Pennsylvania alone has over 2 million seniors, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. Instead, just go to any rundown area of any town or city and you can see them asking grocery store employees about the price of everything, pulling wads of coupons out of their wallets before they hand over their money at the checkout, and struggling to carry their purchases.

My town in Rhode Island has an area called Arctic, which is home to a lot of old people. Their needs are palpable. I see them on the streets, in the drug stores and the grocery store. Some are bent over, nearly double. Others can walk only with canes and walkers. They stand in the cold without shelter, as they will this week, waiting for a bus that comes infrequently. Shopping is a burden without a car, and taxis are expensive. So my neighbors do things the hard way, the only way.

My neighbors are not derelicts. They have worked all their lives, many not in pensionable jobs. They live on Social Security and balance their spending between shelter, food, medicines, utilities and clothing. For them, and many millions of aged Americans, it is about staying alive.

There are studies and committees on the aging; the White House talks about it, Congress ruminates and appropriates a sliver of money. But the horrible truth is millions of old people, probably already undernourished and sick, choose daily between food and heat, food and medicine, food and rent or even clothes.

Retirement communities, assisted living centers, sunshine enclaves in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, are only part of the story of aging. Mostly age comes stealthily, creeping up on people in the communities where they have put down their roots.

I look at poor, old people everywhere and wonder what they were like when young; when they were full of love and joy and hope. I wonder how they make it now, staving off starving or freezing, or living with aching loneliness.

It is worth thinking about this when politicians attack “entitlements” and imply that those in need are there by choice.

The well-off avert their eyes and blame the old for not being better with money in their youth. Unfortunately, many never made enough money to save.

These winter days, as the snow piles up in much of America, fewer people will get that sustaining knock on the door.  -For InsideSources

The Future of Britain is on the Ballot

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By Llewellyn King

Long before our election in November, a much greater upheaval may hit Britain. Probably in late June, the country will vote on whether to stay in the European Union. Leaving is called “Brexit” in the British press.

While polls have consistently shown that voters favor Britain remaining a member of the 28-nation bloc, there are signs that things are changing. British business, which has until now seen its future as being in the EU, is beginning to rethink its support for British membership. A recent poll shows industry believing it could prosper out of the EU.

This is a big problem for British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has promised dramatic changes in Britain’s membership, which will be announced at the European summit next month.

Britain wants less-oppressive regulations and a change in immigration policy. It wants an end to what has been a fundamental part of the European structure: the freedom of movement between countries. In short: no more immigration to Britain from Europe.

It is a complex negotiation which Cameron believes he can win; particularly when Europe is in shaky shape after the economic crisis in Greece and from the surge of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Although Europe’s political elites may have to hold their refined noses, the chances are better today than ever that they would rather their unruly island neighbors stay in than further damage the European project by withdrawing.

Predictably some economists say that Britain will do just fine without Europe, while others see dire economic consequences.

When the referendum comes, it will be a free vote with about half of Cameron’s Conservative Party voting to withdraw. These are the rambunctious “Euroskeptics” that have bedeviled British elections for generations and have made the role of Conservative prime ministers particularly trying.

The opposition Labor Party is divided on a Brexit. But Labor has so imploded under the extreme leftist Jeremy Corbyn that it is likely to go along and lend its support — feeble though it is — to the forces wishing to stay in the EU.

The Scottish Nationalists will also support continued membership. They hope that if they break away from the United Kingdom, they will get succor from the EU.

But the forces for exiting the EU are powerful and articulate. They are emboldened by Europe’s problems and the fact that they will no longer be bound by the dictates of, as they say, “faceless bureaucrats in Brussels.”

The wild card in the referendum may be England’s wild man: Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Now finishing his term as mayor of London, Boris Johnson is a lovable version of Donald Trump. He has gone from scrape to scrape and has come out ahead of the game. For instance, three years after having won a seat in Parliament in 2001, Johnson was sacked by the Tory leader at the time, Michael Howard, for allegedly lying over an affair with journalist Petronella Wyatt. Johnson called newspaper stories about the affair “an inverted pyramid of piffle.” He was also sacked from his editorship of The Spectator, where the piffle took place.

But being elected to higher office is such a compensation, so Johnson, a bicycle-riding, tradition-loving maverick got himself elected mayor of London. In this office he saved the iconic double-decker buses, presided over the 2012 Summer Olympics, and endeared himself to an even wider audience.

The British revere Johnson’s eccentricity and voted him back into Parliament in the last election. Now people talk openly of him being Cameron’s successor after the referendum.

Johnson has hedged his bets on British membership in the EU. Just this week he declared that he will not lead the “Out” forces, but he does not totally endorse the “In” forces.

Here is the possible scenario: Cameron has to produce a deal that satisfies some of the Euroskeptics and set a date for referendum. Then the vote. Then the hangover, one way or another. Then Johnson makes his move – unless some schemer, like the current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, has not outmaneuvered the charming and brilliant Boris.

Cleverly Johnson has written a long political treatise comparing London to Athens, and leaving room for people to believe he has the qualities of Pericles, without actually claiming the great Greek’s mantle. Then, just to be safe, he has knocked off a highly laudatory biography of Churchill, which invites the idea that Johnson shares some of his hero’s traits.

This kind of effrontery makes British politics a perpetual night in the pub. Cheers! — For Inside Sources

Lament of the Airline Coach Passenger

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By Llewellyn King

The vice president for mollifying irate customers of one of the great airlines — there are only four left, and by the time you read this it may be down to three — has written me asking how I “enjoyed” my last flight. I wonder if this jokester even knows what that word enjoy means? Do they have access to dictionaries at Big Air? I couldn’t even get a second cup of coffee from a surly flight attendant, who only wanted to sit in the back of the plane and kvetch about the latest merger.

Definitely, asking you about the quality of your flight is in dubious taste: Have any Big Air executives ever walked back to coach, where we sit like rowers without oars in a trireme.

My missive from Big Air asks questions like, “How did you enjoy your reception at the check-in?” It said I should evaluate my level of experience from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied.”

How can you relate in those terms to a machine called a “kiosk”? As it so happens, my kiosk had serious socialization problems. It’s the seventh kiosk from the left at Washington Dulles International Airport, and it’s determined to prove its recalcitrance from the get-go. It rejected my credit card; it didn’t know my frequent flier number; it told me I wasn’t flying anywhere, as I didn’t exist because it couldn’t “get my record.”

It became quite civil, though, when trying to sell me a larger seat, take a fee for my baggage, and offering to sell me more frequent flier miles. What for? Does Kiosk No. 7 know they have 304 blackout days a year?

Having secured my ticket, I moved on to security — where some TSA worker any day now may be nabbed by a casting director for the archetypal role of a terrorist – which took a grim view of me. I stood bereft of shoes, belt, wallet and all identification so that I could put my hands in the air in a glass contraption. Another incipient movie bad guy examined the screen. Not good enough. I got wanded. Of course, if someone had made off with my plastic tray of possessions while this is going on, I’d have become stateless: undocumented, illegal.

Then I found that I was in Zone 4 for boarding. I’m always in Zone 4, no matter when I book my flight. I suppose I was pre-selected for Zone 4 on account of some library book I never returned. This means there wouldn’t be any room for my suitcase in the overhead compartment, and it’d be taken from me as though I’d been apprehended doing something I shouldn’t.

At least I’ve been saved sitting in a seat too small for its designed purpose for 20 minutes more than necessary. The seat that was too small for me, too small for smaller people, and very much too small for the enormous man who sat next to me.

Did you know they’ve got new seats now without a place to put your book or magazine? They have slim backs to reduce comfort and so more seats can be jammed in.

Then there was the toilet. You must use the one at the back because the people in first class – actually they’re not people, they’re corporate lawyers, a subset of homo sapiens — cannot be expected to share their spacious commode with the likes of coach travelers, who have a social disease: less money.

Here’s a tip you’ll appreciate if you’re a man: Decide which bodily function you plan to execute because there’s no room to turn around. No. 1, walk straight in; No. 2, back in. Women always have to back in.

The pilot came on. He sounded as though his last job was playing a trail boss on radio. You know, that special kind of speech that Easterners think Westerners actually speak: all about “critters” and “dudes,” and how we’re going to “canter over to LA.” 

It was going to be five bleak hours of discomfort.

But the good news is passengers won’t have to endure seats much longer. Coming to an airline near you: standing room only and meat hooks for safety belts. — For InsideSources

Busting Statues Is Like Burning Books

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By Llewellyn King

Messing with history is not a cool thing to do. But there is a lot of it going on; particularly, pulling down monuments or going after other people’s religious statues. This kind of heresy goes from the grotesque to the downright evil.

Topping my list of the grotesque is Nkotozo Qwabe, a young South African now studying as a Rhodes Scholar, who leads a movement to pull down the statue of Cecil John Rhodes at Oxford and, among other things, to ban the French flag from the campus. Compatriots of this ingrate have already removed a statue of Rhodes at South Africa’s University of Cape Town.

On the evil side is ISIS, and its ongoing destruction of antiquities in Iraq and Syria — most recently, the monumental ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. With it, as with their razing of Hatra, Nineveh and Nimrud and other archaeological sites in Iraq, ISIS has turned to dust a world heritage: a cultural heritage and artifacts so precious that they rise above religion.

ISIS and the anti-Rhodes activists are trying to adjust history to passing present values. Knocking down an ancient temple or a statue is, in its way, book burning. It is destroying the record in order to distort the record.

Universities, here and abroad, are vulnerable to the demands of minority groups. Oxford has already removed one Rhodes plaque. At Princeton, students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson’s name be expunged for his support, as they see it, of white supremacy.

Decent people and institutions accede to the inane and foolish wants of minorities to appear reasonable to the unreasonable. Princeton has already gone some way down that slippery slope.

At Oxford, Qwabe is not content with just demonizing Rhodes. He has denounced the French for their colonial and current activities, and compared the French flag to the Nazi flag. And he has criticized Oxford for being Eurocentric. Why would it be anything else? Founded in 1096, it is the second-oldest European university.

Qwabe would have us, and the people of Africa, believe that Rhodes was a villain of unspeakable proportions, practicing racism and genocide. In reality, by today’s standards, he did some bad things and some very good ones, which include funding Qwabe’s attendance at Oxford.

Qwabe’s history is about as shaky as his gratitude. Rhodes was a controversial figure who believed absolutely in British exceptionalism as epitomized in the British Empire. He went to South Africa from England for his health and made a fortune in diamond mining. He entered politics and became prime minister of Cape Colony, on the tip of South Africa. There he seemed very enlightened, establishing a franchise that was open — as open as any at the time — and was not to be matched in South Africa until the fall of apartheid.

Where Rhodes’s dealings get murky is when he financed the push into what is now Zimbabwe. Rhodes defrauded the king of the Matabele, Lobengula, in the south of the country, but saved the Shona tribe, in the east and central region, from certain extinction at the hands of the Matabele, a newly arrived offshoot of the Zulus in South Africa who conquered lesser tribes, killed the men and boys, and forced the women into polygamous marriages.

Another good thing that Rhodes did was to cut off a chunk of South Africa, then known as Bechuanaland, now Botswana, from control by the Afrikaner Boers in 1895.

Rhodes also lavished his wealth on universities, including his alma mater Oxford and South African universities, including Cape Town, located on his former estate, and Rhodes, the eponymous university.

Rhodes did some reprehensible things but he believed in the public good as saw it — that being a manifestation of the British way of life, justice and values. Obliterating Rhodes’s historical role, and the few statues that point to it, is to meddle with the truth.

This same poison is at work on U.S. campuses, where student radicals bar speakers they disagree with from appearing. Punishing the memory of the great figures of history because they fail the social acceptability tests of the present is a disturbing part of the current academic scene, where free speech is under attack and free ideas are doctored to fit the values and prejudices of the moment.

There is a linkage between the thinking that is destroying the precious monuments of pre-Islamic civilization and punishing the memory of Rhodes and Wilson. The difference is only in degree. — For InsideSources


Let’s Honor the ‘Thing’ of the Year

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By Llewellyn King

Many publications, following the lead of Time, name a “Person of the Year.” This year, Time chose German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

According to Time, the criteria to be chosen is “the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

So at this year’s end, I think it is time for those who make those choices to add a co-equal category: things. Things change everything. They have throughout history, but with increasing rapidity in the last 150 years. And they do it more dramatically now than ever before.

The magazine’s first “Person of the Year” (actually, back then it was “Man of the Year”) was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. He was hailed for his first solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21 that year.

Huge and brave as Lindbergh’s flight was, it was the airplane not the man, that changed aviation.

People change the way we live, but so do things. We now talk about the “Internet of Things,” where our home and work machines are all connected to the Internet. With this connectivity, a farmer will plow his fields from the local diner; and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, will have his drones ring the doorbell when they deposit parcels.

The unfolding political year will have much sound and fury. Candidates will promise that if elected, they will change the country for the better. Yet technology might change us more. Ergo, we should have a “Thing of the Year.”

I hereby declare the Internet as the “Thing of 2015.”

Why now? Because this was the first year we stopped being aghast at the changes the Internet is bringing about and simply accepted them as a reality — just as 100 years ago, the automobile went from being a novelty to being part of the fabric of life.

This Christmas was the “Internet Christmas.” We bought more from Web retailers than ever before, and did not marvel at it. It is just “the way we live now.”

For holiday greetings, the Internet began to beat out traditional cards sent in the mail. E-mailing your greetings is less labor intensive, and easier to personalize. Next year, expect more e-cards. If I worked at Hallmark, I would be pushing for additional electronic products before cards become another quaint piece of Americana on display at the Smithsonian, like rotary dial telephones.

I have not welcomed the Internet over the years. I like things the way they were. But this year was seminal for me: I decided the Internet, even the “Internet of Things,” was OK.

Particularly, I like the way the Internet reaches out to the sick, the shut-ins, the truly lonely and the homesick. I can send Christmas greetings to family and friends in Austria, England, South Africa and Vietnam, as I have, from a little device balanced on my lap. Wow!

Yes, with the Internet, you and I can fly across the Atlantic faster than Lindbergh could gun his throttle.

Here are some things that might change your life more than any political figure in the year ahead:

1. A prototype of a driverless car may zoom down a test track.

2. Home 3D printing will spread — so if you break something, you can make a new one.

3. All your appliances and gadgets will start speaking to each other: Using your cell phone, you will be able to defrost a steak in your home refrigerator while you are at work; or you will be able to get a diagnosis by taking a selfie of your inflamed eye.

4. Your electricity may be generated on the roof of your house, and a robot may make your bed.

5. A whole new generation of rockets will offer space rides,

6. New materials, only one-atom-thick, may enable you to fold up your television set and put it in your pocket.

Forget the politicians. Better ask the “things” what is in store; they are starting to talk to each other, and I do not want to be left out of the society of things. — For InsideSources