White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

AARP Is Alientating Me and Other Oldsters

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By Llewellyn King

The common law has a tort that allows an aggrieved party, a spouse or a lover, to sue for alienation of affections. Derived from English common law, it has been abolished in all but seven states.

The most obvious targets for lawsuits were lovers who had taken the loved one from a marriage and made away to some new love nest; there to pursue, well, you know.

But it wasn’t just the third party in a love triangle who could be sued. It could be a priest, a psychiatrist, or even a family member who had advised a change in the marriage or its equivalent.

Clearly, alienation of affections isn’t what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has in mind when it cries out for tort reform.

My interest in this kind of lawsuit is practical. I wonder if there is an obscure tort that would entitle me to damages from the AARP. I want millions of dollars from the giant nonprofit organization for making me old. That’s right, old!

The AARP is in the business, besides selling insurance of all types, of alienating us oldsters from our sense of well-being, of the sense of triumph that has brought us this far. It wants to deny us one of the great joys that all of us in our Viagra years should be entitled to enjoy: the pleasure of ridiculing the younger generations.

Ah, the rapture! How can the young’uns, with their eyes glued to cell phones, know the thrill of the chase in the good old days? How can they know, in the these days of the Internet, what it was like to pursue the blue passages of literature that led us to John Donne, Sir John Suckling and Frank Harris? They don’t know what spats were, or the pleasures that were to be found at a drive-in movie theater with the girl next door.

The AARP wants to take away the comfort of reminiscing; wants to rob us of the joy of old-age superiority, and the satisfaction that comes from of looking down on those who aren’t gifted with mileage of time. Damn the AARP! The elephantine organization seems to want to make us old so that it can sell us stuff: insurance, cell phones, walk-in tubs, and funeral packages.

For evidence, and at random, I bring you the latest edition of the AARP Bulletin, a publication which, in the good old days, would have been banned in Boston. It’s a sampling of how the AARP is out to disquiet me and everyone else who has reached the Age of Enlightenment, which lies somewhere north of 65.

The cover sets the tone of latest issue. It features brain health, or how you can find out if you are losing your marbles. Inside, it has a quiz that anyone over d’un certain age who takes it will be reminded that they can’t remember little things like where they put their car keys, or that they made “a doctor appointment for a check-up months ago but completely forgot it.” Clearly signs that one is on the slippery slope of dementia.

Oprah Winfrey is on the cover, which states, “Oprah Joins Americans Over 50 On a Search for Meaning.” Hell, if Oprah hasn’t found the meaning that abides in a glass of single malt whisky at her age, I doubt anyone can help the poor dear. But does she have to take us with her, tramping through the forests of “whys” and “what ifs”?

If all the philosophers, clerics and gurus who ever lived can’t answer these questions, can we trust Oprah to answer the Big Question? Take a cruise, lady. It works for most of us.

Also in the bulletin, the AARP wants us to worry about “the frightening prospect of cyberattacks” on the electric grid. Really, we care more that we can’t work the electric gizmos that we have charged up in the best of times.

As to the ads, they focus on terminal illness, immobility (Want a stairlift on Medicare?), money shortage, and are so depressing that you wonder why we don’t collectively drink the Kool Aid. The AARP will sell that to us, too, probably.

The AARP has upped my anxiety and alienated me from the fun of being old. I want to sue. –For InsideSources.com

 

The Riddle of the U.S. Snub of Jordan

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By Llewellyn King

The continued refusal of the Obama administration to sanction the sale of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) aircraft to Jordan provides a kind of window into the confusion and incoherence of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Next to Israel, little Jordan (population about 8 million) has been one of our best friends in the region. It has a peace treaty with Israel, and has been seen as a moderate force in the Arab world. Its royal family, Western-educated and bilingual in English, have been favorites, politically and socially, in London and Washington.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was educated in England and the United States, having attended tony prep schools in both countries before he attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (as did his father, King Hussein), the British equivalent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, in 1980. Commissioned into the British Army as a second lieutenant, he served for a year in 1981 as a troop commander in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars.

Abdullah took a few years off from the military in the 1980s, studying at Pembroke College, Oxford and Georgetown University. But before becoming king in 1999, he served in Jordan’s army, where he rose to the rank of major general, and air force, where he was trained to fly Cobra attack helicopters – his father was an avid and daring helicopter pilot.

My sources tell me that Abdullah is a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet when Jordan came a-knockin’, the administration barred the door. This with them knowing well that the Predator and the Reaper, which is a larger and more sophisticated model, are not the only UAVs on the market. Both Israel and China are vendors of unmanned surveillance aircraft, and Jordan is actively being courted by them. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice cried.

The administration, while declaring its affection for Jordan, may have in mind that Jordan has been more friend than ally: Jordan did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But why would that deter the Obama administration? It is because of the fight against ISIS that Jordan has requested permission to purchase unarmed Predators needed for surveillance, as well as armed ones.

The arguments for the sale, frequently championed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is that it is a win-win for the United States and Jordan. Jordan gets the best technology for surveillance that money can buy; the United States gets one more eye in the sky over Syria and Iraq, which share borders with Jordan.

Sources to the left and right of the foreign policy establishment in Washington tell me they are baffled by the administration’s reluctance. Policy wonks are wondering aloud, “What is the White House thinking? It will lose a sale and Jordan will buy inferior military hardware, while being shut out of a valuable source of surveillance intelligence. If China or Israel supply drones to Jordan, U.S. access to this intelligence may come with strings.”

It is easy to understand that the administration does not know what to do about Syria. What might have been done was not done. Four years ago, there might have been the diplomatic equivalent of a plea bargain with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, or we might have more effectively armed those rebelling against him, before those motivated by religious sectarianism became dominant.

But none of those missed opportunities justifies snubbing one of our only friends in the region, as chaos escalates beyond the wildest fears of many a Middle East Cassandra. The administration seems to have gone into a catatonic state in Middle East policy, feeling as though whatever it does will not work, and that its legacy will be written in failed states including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Hunter, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Damage has been done to U.S. relations with Jordan, but the simple act of approving drone exports would prevent further harm. If Jordanian policy, like President Obama’s, is to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ ISIS, why is the Obama administration refusing to provide an ally with the tools to do just that? ” — For InsideSources.com

How to Learn to Love Stoplights and Your Electric Car

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By Llewellyn King
 
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?  Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling point for your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your car a little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the supermarket.
 
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers like Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and notoriety, that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
 
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined Tesla or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are getting better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You wouldn’t want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you can plug in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to get you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
 
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars, some of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed them to very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles, called milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department store, used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving, use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at their homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that are still part of the mystique of Harrods.
 
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including some very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so far, is the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell phone or your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the electric component of hybrids like the Toyota Prius. 
 
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a range of about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265 miles. The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at the electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only way home is by tow truck. 
 
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things, are not on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market. Anyone want to make a business of car charging?
 
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without a direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You probably use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in a cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire: a car, or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a stoplight in the road and, miraculously, charging begins. 
 
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the technology already is in use for buses. The South Korean buses charge, among other places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading passengers, it is also fueling. Very cool.
 
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American genius who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing electricity without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of science’s biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
 
It’s fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as electric vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of wireless charging. — For InsideSources.com

 

Richardson Says We Should Honor Russia Plutonium Deal

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By Llewellyn King

Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.

He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”

In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.

At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.

The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.

But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.

The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.

The deal was signed by Vice President Al Gore with Russia back in 2000. The Russians, for their part, are burning their surplus plutonium in fast reactors, which we do not have in operation.

The back story may be not about lifetime cost, but about the deployment of federal dollars in the very near future. Nuclear industry insiders believe that the Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons and stockpiles them, wants to divert all available resources to its weapons refurbishment program and, in argot of the moment, kick the plutonium can down the road. New funds are harder to come by than re-purposing extant ones.

The department is floating the idea that the plutonium should be “down-blended,” meaning mixed with some secret ingredient that the department believes will render it safe for all time, and stored in a troubled existing facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

“I don’t believe this is a good course of action.” Richardson told reporters at the press club event. He said the WIPP facility was designed for low-level waste … there would be a lot of opposition in New Mexico.” He was involved in that project, too, when he was in government.

On sanctity of treaties, Richardson said, “I think that [closing down the MOX facility] would be a grave mistake across the board.”

Richardson said that he had negotiated with the Russians as U.N. ambassador and as Energy secretary. In the matter of plutonium disposal, he said the Russians have kept their side of the deal. There was plenty of tension over Ukraine and Syria, and “we don’t need any more tension.” He said, “This is one potential area of cooperation that should not be discarded, and it would be, should the MOX facility be discarded.”

If the MOX facility is shuttered, it will be one of many nuclear facilities across the country, paid for by taxpayers, which have been abandoned because of other priorities or political agendas. The price is high in enthusiasm, creativity and commitment from the workforce at facilities, like the MOX one.

The dollars spent have no legacy except a sad, new kind of national monument: structures that have been left forlorn and incomplete as politics have zigged and zagged. These abandoned structures range from the experimental Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford, Wash. to the Integrated Fast Reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho to the sad, $18-billion Yucca Mountain facility sitting unused in Nevada. There are many more.

As Richardson might tell, in a long life in public service, you have to defend the deal long after it was signed, sealed and delivered. Not so, perhaps, in real estate transactions. — For InsideSources.com

 


Vietnam Diary: Ho Chi Minh City

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By Linda Gasparello

In Ho Chi Minh City, the steeples of Notre Dame Cathedral and other French colonial-period churches no longer dominate the skyline. Tower cranes are everywhere as scores of high-rise buildings are going up in this city of 8 million, which is widely still called Saigon.

This city is a hive for the young – 60 percent of Vietnam’s population is under 30, and 85 percent is under 40. Educational attainment is rising fast. In Ho Chi Minh City, there are more than 80 universities.

“Young Vietnamese are eager to learn,” said Duc Anh, one of the city’s young entrepreneurs. And earn.

Wearing shiny helmets, cowl scarves pulled up to their noses, jackets and gloves, young Vietnamese swarm the streets on their motorbikes.

Mobile Mom. A young mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Mobile Mom. A mother, with a rattan high chair perched on her motor scooter, waits on tiptoes.

Those with dash and cash head, for example, to the Vincom Center, a twin-towered, glassy mega mall in District 1, the city’s center. They hang out in the district’s burgeoning home-grown coffee chains with European-cafe (the French introduced coffee to Vietnam in 1857) ambiance, including Phuc Long Coffee and Startup Coffee. And they club the night away.

But modernization hasn’t come to all of the city’s 24 districts (19 urban and five rural) at a high-octane rate. Traditional culture is parked everywhere from the streets lined with shops carrying just one type of product, to the pungent food stalls in the Binh Tay Market in Cholon, the city’s huge Chinatown, to The Jade Emperor Pagoda, a multi-faith temple, built by the Cantonese in 1909, where turtles swim in the fetid courtyard pools and people pray in a fog of incense smoke.

 

Sacred swimmers. Hundreds of turtles swim in a pool at the Jade Emperor Pagoda

Sacred swimmers. Hundreds of turtles swim in a pool at The Jade Emperor Pagoda.

This diary will meander from Ho Chi Minh City to Nha Trang, a buzzy seaside town, also the capital of Khanh Hoa Province, on the south central coast of Vietnam.

Landmark Meeting

In July, I traveled to Vietnam with my husband, Llewellyn King. It was our second trip to the country in six months, and in a year that marks two important anniversaries: the 40th of the end of the war with the United States, and the 20th of the normalization of diplomatic relations.

During our trip, a milestone in Vietnam-U.S. relations was in the making: Nguyen Phu Trong, general secretary of the Vietnam Communist Party, met with President Obama at the White House.

“As you heard, I got an invitation to Vietnam. And I think this is indicative of the remarkable progress that’s taken place in the relationship between our two countries over the last 20 years,” Obama told reporters in the Oval Office, following his meeting with Trong on July 7.

“Twenty years is a long period of one’s lifetime. Yet, it is merely a fleeting moment in the long history of relations between nations,” Pham Binh Minh, deputy prime minister and foreign minister, wrote for a news site of the state-run Vietnam News Agency. “Few people could have imagined that Vietnam and the United States would make such great strides in their bilateral ties after two decades of normalized relations.”

Since May 2014, when a fierce fight over sovereignty broke out between communist neighbors Vietnam and China, causing relations to plummet to their worst level in three decades, those strides have become more vigorous in defense. In October that year, the United States decided to partially lift its ban on lethal weapons sales to Vietnam. And three months ago, the two countries announced a Joint Vision Statement to increase defense ties, bolstering the comprehensive political and strategic partnership established in 2013.

Trade between the Vietnam and the United States has grown by leaps and bounds. “From a modest figure of $400 million in 1994, bilateral trade has increased 90-fold to $36.3 billion in 2014. With $30.6 billion in exports to the United States in 2014, Vietnam became ASEAN’s No. 1 exporter to the U.S. market: Vietnam even surpassed India and joined the list of top 10 net exporters to the world’s largest consumer market,” Minh wrote in his July 7 article.

Currently, the United States is the sixth-largest investor in Vietnam, with direct investment of $7 billion, reaching $9 billion with the addition of investment via a third country. In two or three years, the United States will become the top investor in Vietnam, a place now held by South Korea, predicts Matthew Daley, chairman of the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council. In early May, the council sponsored a group of 23 U.S. businesses on a visit to Vietnam – the largest-ever U.S. business group trip to the country.

It won’t be long before the “Made in China” labels in your clothes and other products will be replaced with “Made in Vietnam” labels. Not long at all: the Chico’s brand sweater I’m wearing has that label.

Crisp Currency

The Vietnamese don’t like creased or crumpled currency. I found this out when I tried to change a $20 bill at the Pullman Saigon Centre, a five-star hotel, in Ho Chi Minh City.

I handed Giang, a front desk clerk, a neatly folded $20 bill, and asked her to exchange it for dong. She handed it right back to me with two hands, saying, “We cannot change it; only new bills. It is a law since 2006.”

By new, she meant hot off the U.S. Mint presses. “Money is money; crisp or crumpled,” I protested.

“No,” she said, “In Vietnam it is not. And so many visitors here are sad when I cannot change their money.” And mad, too, I thought.

I’m not sure there is such a law, but there is a tradition of crisp currency in Vietnam.

“In general people prefer notes to be shiny, new, crisp and unfolded. Traditionally money is given in the New Year, at weddings and other family occasions. Fresh, new notes are considered ‘lucky,’ while grubby, crumpled, soggy notes are very much frowned upon,” according to Jonny Platt, a Briton who has lived a decade in Ho Chi Minh City and writes the Vietnam Travel blog.

“When paying for goods or services, it is polite to straighten the notes and to hand them to a vendor with two hands, making eye contact as you do so,” Platt advises in his blog.

Sweet Thy

When in Ho Chi Minh City, get a guide. That’s my advice.

Mind you, as a lifelong traveler, I love meandering in a city. But when I’ve toured a city with a good guide, it’s really paid off.

Hiring one can be a crapshoot, but my husband and I lucked out twice in this buzzy southern city.

We took two city tours, morning and afternoon, offered by Saigontourist, a state-owned holding company with investments in the hospitality (including the Pullman) and tourism industries. Small and medium-sized, independent tour operators are cropping up, but they’re up against a government giant: I was told, for example, that Saigontourist is one of two companies allowed to provide tours to the cruise ships making calls in Vietnam’s southern ports, which are becoming industry hot spots.

Both guides may have been government employees, but they were anything but dull, especially our afternoon guide, Anh Thy. Indeed, the booking agent said, “You were very lucky. She was a history teacher. She is famous in Saigon.”

During our four-hour tour with Miss Thy (pronounced “tea”), we learned that she was a gifted anthropologist and comedian. Our tour included a visit to the Ben Thanh market; The Jade Emperor Pagoda; the Reunification Palace; and a cyclo ride in Cholon, the Chinatown that dominates the western part of the city.

On one street, Miss Thy pointed out a Fruit Shake shop that sells nuoc ma, sugar cane juice. “We like that drink. So sweet, you don’t have to sweeten it,” she said, adding, “Sugar-cane juice in Fruit Shake with many flavors becomes a high-class beverage in Vietnam.” It’s also a refreshing drink sold all over the country in lowlier stalls and carts.

Miss Thy gave us this food and beverage rule of thumb: Hanoi, located in the North, hot and salty; Hue, in the central part of the country, hot and spicy; Saigon, cold and sweet.

As for coffee, Vietnam is the world’s largest producer of Robusta coffee, a bean variety that coffee experts consider inferior to the Arabica type. But the Vietnamese don’t give a hill of ’em about that, and brewed Robusta is a top drink thanks to Vietnamese ingenuity, which you’ll see everywhere from their agricultural practices to exquisite handicrafts to major engineering projects, to the way millions of motorcyclists know where to buy gas in Saigon, where there are few gas stations — Hint: Look for an upturned brick on a sidewalk, and you’ll find a man with a gas can.

In Ho Chi Minh City and elsewhere in Vietnam, coffee is prepared using a small, metal drip filter. “In the South, we like our coffee cold and sweet with [condensed] milk.” If you crave an Americano or a cappuccino, you can order one at the proliferating European-style coffee shops, like the local My Life Coffee, or the Australian chain, Gloria Jean’s. And they often come – thanks to Vietnam’s French colonial past and current culinary trends – a macaron.

French twist. Coffee is served at the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel with a macaron.

French twist. Coffee is served at the Pullman Saigon Centre Hotel with a macaron.

Another one of Miss Thy’s food and beverage rules of thumb: “We drink coffee in Saigon; in Hue, they drink coffee and tea; and in Hanoi, they drink tea, like the Chinese.”

 

The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

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By Llewellyn King

The market is a wondrous place. It ensures you can drink Scotch whisky in Cape Town and Moscow, or Washington and Tokyo, if you prefer. It distributes goods and services superbly, and it cannot be improved upon in seeking efficiency.

But it can’t think and it can’t plan; and it’s a cruel exterminator of the weak, the unready or, for that matter, the future.

Yet there are those who believe that the market has wisdom as well as efficiency. Not so.

If it were wise, or forward-looking, or sensitive, Mozart wouldn’t have died a pauper, and one of the greatest — if not the greatest architecturally — railway station ever built, Penn Station, wouldn’t have been demolished in 1963 to make way for the profit that could be squeezed out of the architectural deformity that replaced it: the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station horror in New York City.

End of the line

End of the line

Around Washington, Los Angeles and other cities are the traces of the tracks of the railroads and streetcar lines of yore. These were torn up when the market anointed the automobile as the uber-urban transport of the future. As Washington and Los Angeles drown in traffic, many wish the tracks — now mostly bike paths — were still there to carry the commuter trains and streetcars that are so badly needed in the most traffic-clogged cities.

Now the market, with its concentration on the present tense, is about to do another great mischief to the future. An abundance of natural gas is sending the market signals which threaten carbon-free nuclear plants before their life is run out, and before a time when nuclear electricity will again be cheaper than gas-generated electricity. World commodity prices are depressed at present, and no one believes that gas will always be the bargain it is today.

Two nuclear plants, Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. and Kewaunee in Carlton, Wisc., have already been shuttered, and three plants on the Exelon Corp. system in the Midwest are in jeopardy. They’ve won a temporary reprieve because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says the fact that they have round-the-clock reliability has to be taken into account against wind and solar, which don’t. In a twist, solar and wind have saved some nuclear for the while.

Natural gas, the market distorting fuel of the moment, is a greenhouse gas producer, although less so than coal. However gas, in the final analysis, could be as bad, or worse, than coal when you take into account the habitual losses of the stuff during extraction. Natural gas is almost pure methane. When this gets into the atmosphere, it’s a serious climate pollutant, maybe more so than carbon dioxide, which results when it is burned.

Taken together — methane leaks with the carbon dioxide emissions — and natural gas looks less and less friendly to the environment.

Whatever is said about nuclear, it’s the “Big Green” when it comes to the air. Unlike solar and wind, it’s available 24 hours a day, which is why three Midwest plants got their temporary reprieve by the FERC in August.

When President Obama goes to Paris to plead with the world for action on climate change in December, the market will be undercutting him at home, as more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas for no better reason than it’s cheap.

As with buying clothes or building with lumber, the cost of cheap is very high. The market says, “gas, gas, gas” because it’s cheap – now. The market isn’t responsible for the price tomorrow, or for the non-economic costs like climate change. 

But if you want a lot of electricity that disturbs very little of the world’s surface, and doesn’t put any carbon or methane into the air, the answer is nuclear: big, green nuclear. — For InsideSources.com

In Search of the Real Elizabeth Warren

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By Llewellyn King

I went to Boston this week in pursuit of the real Elizabeth Warren. You see, I don’t think the whole story of Warren comes across on television where she can seem overstated, too passionate about everyday things to be taken seriously.

Like others, I’ve wondered why the progressives are so enamored of her. Suffolk University, mostly known for its authoritative polls, gave her platform as part of an ongoing series of public events in conjunction with The Boston Globe. But whether the dearest hopes of the progressives will be fulfilled, or whether the senior senator from Massachusetts has reached her political apogee is unclear.

What I did find is that Warren has star power. She is a natural at the podium, and revels in it. At least she did at Suffolk, where the cognoscenti came out to roar their affirmation every time she threw them some red meat, which she did often.

Here’s a sampling:

On student loans: “The U.S. government is charging too much interest on student loans. It shouldn’t be making money on the backs of students.”

On the U.S. Senate: “It was rigged and is rigged [by lobbyists and money in politics]. The wind only blows in one direction in Washington … to make sure that the rich have power and remain in power.”

Warren’s questioner, Globe political reporter Joshua Miller, led her through the predictable obstacle course of whether she was angling to be the vice presidential candidate, if Joe Biden runs and becomes the Democratic nominee. She waffled on this question, as one expected, admitting to long talks about policy with Biden and declaring herself prepared to talk policy with anyone. She said the subject of the vice presidency might have come up.

Short answer, in my interpretation: She would join the ticket in a heartbeat. This isn’t only for reasons of ambition — of which she has demonstrated plenty, from her odyssey through law schools, until she found a perch at Harvard as a full professor — but also age.

Warren is 66 years old and although her demeanor and appearance are of a much younger woman, the math is awkward. There are those in the Democratic Party who say she needs a full term in the Senate to get some legislative experience and to fulfill the commitment of her first elected office. But eight years from now, she’ll probably be judged as too old to run for president.

Clearly Warren didn’t fancy the punishment, and probable futility, of a run against Hillary Clinton. But the vice presidency might suit her extraordinarily well, given Biden’s age of 72.

Warren has stage presence; she fills a room. She is funny, notwithstanding that you can be too witty in national politics, as with failed presidential aspirants Mo Udall and Bob Dole. She reminds me of those relentlessly upbeat mothers, who were always on-call to fix things in the children’s books of my youth.

Although Warren comes from a working-class background, years of success at the best schools has left her with the patina of someone from the comfortable classes; someone for whom things work out in life. She counters this by stressing the plight of the middle class, the decline in real wages and her won passion for fast food and beer — light beer, of course.

Warren’s father was janitor in Oklahoma who suffered from heart disease and her mother worked for the Sears catalog. The young Elizabeth did her bit for the family income by waitressing.

However, it’s hard to imagine her at home at a union fish fry. My feeling is  that she’d be more comfortable — the life of the party, in fact — at a yacht club.

Progressives yearn for Warren and she speaks to their issues: the lack of Wall Street regulation and federal medical research dollars, and the need for gun control, student loan reform, equal pay for equal work, and government contracting reform.

Less dour than Bernie Sanders, and less extreme, it’s no wonder they long for her to occupy high office; she’s a classic, untrammeled liberal.

All in all, I’d like to go to a party where Warren is the host: the kind where they serve more than light beer.  — For InsideSources.com.

The Stripping of Man: Hats, Ties, now Socks

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By Llewellyn King

Men’s hats bit the dust in the time of Jack Kennedy. Oh, sure, there are baseball caps and various ersatz chapeaux to keep the top of a man cool or warm. But they aren’t grand symbols of taste on the head: boaters, derbies, fedoras, homburgs, panamas, trilbies and — forgotten glory — silk top hats.

More recently, the bell has tolled for the necktie — that useless but delightful fashion option for men. Who ever complimented a man on his unadorned neck?

I blame Hollywood and the whole state of California for suppressing fashion by promoting the idea that casual dressing is superior. The Golden State has upended the decent order of all things sartorial for men; reduced us to looking like bums in shapeless clothes emblazoned with the manufacturer’s name.

What became of the well-fitting — bespoke, if possible — suit or blazer, craftily cut to minimize bulge around the waist and maximize size at the shoulder? What of the fine shirt in linen, poplin, French twill, silk or even broadcloth? What has replaced the sense of social perfection of a man showing his cuffs in a double-breasted Melton blazer?

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

This decline in the male wardrobe I’ve borne with fortitude. But I believe that wardrobe disassembling has hit its nadir: men wearing suits without socks. Enough, enough, enough!

A senior executive of a California company, of course, showed up sans socks for a taping of my television program. I’ll give the man his due: he wore a decent suit, a passable shirt and a power tie. His feet supported quality loafers. But why no socks? Does anyone admire the male ankle? Is it a thing of beauty? Have I missed out on the charm of this lovely body part?

That horror wasn’t an isolated event: Recently, I dined at a French restaurant in Boston with a distinguished citizen — an ambassador plenipotentiary to a European country, no less — who wasn’t wearing socks. Does the State Department know? Is there a protocol for ambassadorial dress? Can down-dressers be rebuked? Is this matter addressed in Hillary Clinton’s copious emails? We should be told in the president’s Saturday broadcast whether the nation is going to be allowed to go down the sartorial drain.

I’ve been checking out Chinese dignitaries. Every last one of them, as far as I can determine, wears socks. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin transgresses international standards of statesmanship only from the waist up. Shoes and socks prevail for this improbable Tarzan.

The passion to be casual is causing actual hardship. Nobody knows what to wear at important events. Some years ago, I participated in a U.S.-Japan business forum in Hawaii. The U.S. delegation head decided that polo shirts would be appropriate attire for men. But his dress decision didn’t reach the Japanese delegates, and they all wore suits. After lunch, though, the Japanese went casual and the Americans donned suits. Mutual red faces.

Does anyone really think a partner or associate in a big law firm feels good with his tummy rolls accentuated by a knit shirt advertising a crocodile? For women, this casual thing is a refined cruelty. You work like hell: law school, junior legal slave, and finally — hosanna — partner. Time for a fabulous Chanel suit, patent leather-toed slingbacks and heaps of pearls.

Not so fast. The managers have decreed it’s time to go casual, to bring out the jeans. The law-school look for work.

We have to make America look as if it cares again. Therefore, I won’t vote for any presidential aspirant who, if male, doesn’t wear a tie or plunges his feet into loafers without socks; or who, if female, wears flats and eschews leg and foot coverage. I’m saving my vote for a sartorially principled candidate. — For InsideSources.com

The Rare Promise of Thorium Reactors

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By Llewellyn King

If you want to design a new automobile, there are choices, but there are also parameters. For example, you would be advised to start with four wheels on the ground. You could design it with three, but the trade-offs are considerable.

When it comes to designing a new nuclear reactor for generating electricity, there are no such absolutes. A nuclear reactor only needs a safe nuclear reaction and the ability to harness the resulting heat. That means that nuclear reactors can be configured in all kinds of ways with considerable variety in the design of the fuel, the size of the reactor, the cooling system and the moderator (usually water).

Not only can the configuration of the fuel vary with differing results, but the fuel also can vary. It can be, for example, the intriguing metal thorium, which is plentiful in nature. It is fertile but not fissile, which means it takes uranium or plutonium to get a nuclear reaction going. When that happens, a thorium reactor appears to have advantages, from the availability of the fuel to the safety of the reactor.

Yet most of the world’s commercial civilian reactors – more than 400 — have just one basic design: uranium-fueled light water. The moderator is water.

Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, favored this technology. Recognizing that left to their own devices, nuclear engineers would come up with dozens of reactors, and would stymie the effort get industry off the ground, Rickover pushed light water. The admiral was a man who got what he wanted. So the light water reactor (LWR) became the world standard with some national exceptions.

Canada developed a very successful reactor that uses natural uranium, but requires heavy water: water with an extra hydrogen atom. Britain built two different reactor designs, the Magnox and the Advanced Gas Reactor, but finally has come around to the light water reactor. The Soviet Union went ahead with its own designs, including the disastrous Chernobyl design.

Although LWR construction steams ahead in China, and more hesitatingly elsewhere, there is a sense that it is time for change. Time to look at other designs and fuels.

In the United States, the Department of Energy has stimulated interest in a new generation of small modular reactorsand some ideas, which got pushed aside by light water technology, are doggedly holding on and even fighting back. Among these are various gas reactor concepts and fast reactors, where the neutron flux is not slowed down and which can do amazing things, including burning a certain proportion of nuclear waste.

The molten salt thorium reactor continues to have its advocates, although this technology is not included in DOE’s small modular reactor program. It is not a new idea, but it is one that has been given short shrift from the nuclear establishment in recent years. Promising work on it was done at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee in the 1960s, under the legendary scientist and laboratory director Alvin Weinberg. He died in 2006, and I was lucky to have known him. 

Proposed thorium molten salt research reactor. Source: Thorium Energy Alliance

Proposed thorium molten salt research reactor. Source: Thorium Energy Alliance

When I attended the Thorium Energy Alliance annual conference, held in Palo Alto, Calif., this year, I felt I had stumbled into an old-fashioned revival meeting. They are believers. Work on thorium-fueled reactors is ongoing in China, India and Russia.

But the best hope for thorium future may not lie in the nuclear sphere at all. It may rest with rare earths, and the global appetite for these in a high-tech world. A simple way to understand rare earths is that in technology they are great multipliers, making products in consumer electronics, computers and networks, communications, electricity generation, health care, advanced transportation, and across a wide range of defense materiel, more effective. With a small application, say to the turbine in a wind generator, the efficiency may increase several times.

Rare earths — which are not really rare at all — are found in conjunction with thorium, often in phosphate mining. When the world gets serious about the rare earths supply, it has to get serious about thorium, especially in the United States.The Thorium Energy Alliance would like to see thorium put into a national stockpile, so that it is available when the pendulum in reactor design swings to thorium, and that becomes the future. 

Can the 17 rare earth elements become the thorium reactor’s enabler? Some devoutly believe so. — For the InsideSources news service.

 

U.S. Loves Engineers, Treats Them Badly

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We need more engineers. Go forth and study engineering for the future of the nation. Math and engineering are the keys to maintaining our place in the world and keeping the Chinese, and a few others, at bay.

That is the urging of our political class, whether they are appointed public officials or elected politicians; or whether they are members of the thinking and writing class. Taken collectively, they might be called “the exhortationists.”

But there is a problem: We do not treat engineers very nicely — at least not those who are federal employees or contractors. The very politicians who lead in exhorting our young to become engineers are those who treat engineers as disposable workers.

The government starts many projects and finishes few. A change of administration, a shortage of money, or some other excuse and the government shelves the project.

The impact on engineers is devastating. They have often relocated their families to the site of the project and — wham! — it is canceled.

It is not only that this rough treatment has a huge impact on families – and engineers are not that well-paid (median income is $80,000, and petroleum engineers are the highest-paid) – but also the psychological damage is considerable.

Engineering a new project is exciting but also demanding. Men and women throw themselves into what is a giant creative undertaking, eating up years of lives, demanding the most extreme effort. It is shattering when there is a sudden political decision to cancel a project.

To look at a bridge or a locomotive and say, “I built that,” “I made a difference,” is much of the engineer’s reward. Marc Goldsmith, a fourth-generation engineer, who has worked on 16 projects in nuclear power which have been canceled, says that many engineers get so frustrated they leave the profession and go into law or finance, and never face a logarithm again. He says the government treats highly educated engineers like day laborers: expendable.

Goldsmith, a former president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, says the heartbreak of a canceled project to the engineers is terrible and destructive of the can-do engineering culture.

The hundreds of engineers involved in a big engineering project do not do their job just for the money, but for the satisfaction that they solved a problem and made a thing that worked, whether it was a mega-passenger aircraft, a spindly skyscraper or a flood-control gate.

We now live in a world of project ghosts, where public policy (politics) has said “go,” and has said later, with the same passion, “abandon.”

Clarence L. “Kelly” Johnson, the genius founder of the Lockheed secret division of engineers, dubbed Skunk Works, in Burbank, Calif., told me before he died in 1990 that some of the starts-and-stops and abrupt cancellations of military projects made him sick. The Skunk Works, which brought us such legends as the U-2 and the SR-71, to name a few, was also instructed by the government to eradicate any trace of other projects that were far along. “Not only were they canceled, but they had to be expunged,” he told me.

Nuclear has been especially hard hit by government policy perfidy. In today’s shame roster, Yucca Mountain, the nuclear waste repository and the pride of thousands of engineers, was abandoned by the incoming Obama administration in a deal with Harry Reid, the Democratic senator from Nevada and Senate majority leader. Good-bye to $15 billion in taxpayer money; good-bye to a nuclear waste option; and goodbye to all that intricate engineering inside a mountain.

Now the administration is taking its policy sledgehammer to another engineering project: one it supported until it didn’t support it anymore. It is trying to end the program to build a plant to blend surplus weapons-grade plutonium with uranium and burn it up in reactors as uranium oxide, or MOX, as it is known.

The contractor – a consortium of Chicago Bridge & Iron Company and Areva, the French firm – says the plant is 67-percent complete and employs 300 engineers, out of a total workforce of some 1,800, at the Department of Energy site near Aiken, S.C. Now this big engineering project, which is another way of dealing with nuclear waste, is in the government’s sights. — For the InsideSources news service